>, v^^' ,0 a .0 o^ '^C. vOo, V .f.^ %,^- ■x"^' % ;.. ,<^^ .<^ "^^ ' . « S ^ <0 OO ^^ >^ "^ ,^ o.-?- ,cV^^' ,, * ' " It 'p ^ , -:-___ 1 -p ■^^ / ., x«*o<, \; ''* 'J 0^^ /' ^'^ <^,. c^^ .0 O^ 4 "%. vO^. '^>, ^ ^ _ ,,•^- '"■, - '^b \. .,^^' r%/ '= o5 -^ ^. >0 o^ .•^ -n. ,>^% , .; ./ -f 'oO V- V v'f^ '^. .Oo. -^^S^ X^^' % ., '■.^)^''/ -.-^^ '^. aV^ oo^ ^y. .-^^ THE UNITED STATES AN OUTLINE OF POLITICAL HISTORY ,^><^m ./, M.^7^r\ ^VA^' ALASKA -•;J ^ T , ^ N/t^^?NA,,-SMKA G \ STATUTE MILES. •;o 180 fc.ni^tu JF ItrW e.l from 100 Grcrnwich 150 >00 2 00 400 102 Lont^itude Greenwich 82 THE UNITED STATES AN OUTLINE OF POLITICAL HISTORY 1492-1871 BY/ GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. " This will sometime hence be a vast Empire, the seat of power and lear?ting. Nature has refused it nothing, and there ivill groiv a people out of our little spot, England, that will fill this vast space and divide this por- tion of the globe with the Spaniards, who are possessed of the other half." — General Wolfe "/am not wanting in affection and love for America. I atn rather wanting in distrust and ingratitude towards Europe." — Dr. Roque Saenz Pkna, Speech at the Pan-American Conference at Washington, 1890 MACMILLAN AND CO. AND LONDON 1893 All rights reserved ■ <^^^\\-'^ Copyright, 1893, MACMILLAN AND CO. TCorfenotr 10rf«s ; S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. Boston, IVIass., U.S.A. PREFACE. To an Englishman, particnlnrly if he is visiting America, an outline of the political history of the United States may not be unwelcome. An American, being familiar with the main facts and the general relations of parties, would look for details. It is, therefore, for English rather than American readers that this sketch is intended. If it comes into the hands of an American, his liberality will make allowance for the position of an Englishman who regards the American Commonwealth as the great achieve- ment of his race, and looks forward to the voluntary reunion of the American branches of the race within its pale, yet desires to do justice to the mother country, and to render to her the meed of gratitude which will always be her due. Should this volume find acceptance it may be followed by a companion volume on the same scale, and treating, necessarily with the same succinctness, the recent history of parties, and the questions of the present day. A complete list of all the authorities consulted would be out of proportion to the book itself, but special obliga- tions should be acknowledged to Gordon's " History of the American Revolution," Bancroft's " History of the United States," Hildreth's "History of the United States," vi rUEFACE. Palfrey's " History of New England," Henry Adams's "•History of the United States," Schouler's "History of tlie United States,"' McMaster's " History of the People of the United States," Bryant's " Popular History of the United States," Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," Charles K. Adams's " Co- lumbus," Draper's " The Civil War in America," the "Epochs of American History" series, the "History of the Civil War in America " by the Comte de Paris, the " Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States History," the " American Statesmen " series, the works of Professor Fiske, Swinton's "Decisive Battles of the War," Sabine's " Loyalists of the American Revolu- tion," Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," Thomas Jones's "History of New York during the Revolutionary War," published by the New York Historical Society, and the " American Commonwealths " series, also Ban- croft's " History of the Constitution of the United States." The writer would be glad to think that his work had been instrumental in exciting the curiosity of English readers and leading them to resort to the sources of ampler infor- mation mentioned in this list. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. The Colonies. Discovery of a western continent by Columbus — Early adventurers — The landing of the Mayflower — The Plymouth pilgrims — Their allegiance to the old land — The founding of Massachusetts — The Puritan commonwealth — Early religious strifes — Political aspect of Puritanism — Puritan democracy — A federation formed — Puritan legislation — Social life — Slavery — Relations with the Indians — The new colonies and the Crown — Massachusetts reduced to a de- pendency — William III and Massachusetts — Decay of Puritanism — Witchcraft — Increase of wealth — Virginia — Virginian life and society — Slavery and slave laws — Politics, the church, and educa- tion—The founding of Maryland — Religious strifes and political changes — Georgia — The founding of Pennsylvania — New York and New Jersey — Characteristics of the Middle States — Restric- tions on colonial trade — Political embroilments — Benjamin Frank- lin Pages 1-63 CHAPTER II. Revolution, Independence, and Union. French hostilities in the new world — The quarrel with England — The colonial relationship — Cause of the revolt — Separation and the sep- arators — Samuel Adams — Patrick Henry — Irritation of Massachu- setts — Fomenting influences — Trade restrictions — The Stamp Act and the tea duty — Ebullition at Boston — Repression — The King's difficulties — Federation for defence — The Declaration of Independ- ence — Opening of the war — Lexington — Bunker's Hill — Evacua- tion of Boston — The loyalists — Canada attacked — New York vii CONTENTS. taken — ■Washington at Valley Forge — Character of Washington — Burgoyne's expedition — State of the country — Character of the troops — Financial disturbance — French aid — Arnold and Andre — British successes in the South — Capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown — Treatment of the loyalists — England and the separation — The col- onies after the revolt — Constitutional and other changes — Impotency of Congress — Discontent rife — The federal convention — The con- stitution — Provisions of the constitution . . . Pages 64-129 CHAPTER III. Kkpiblic. Washington president — Presidential etiquette and state — Success of the constitution — Birth of parties — Alexander Hamilton — His abil- ity, character, and principles — His Secretaryship of the Treasury — Thomas Jefferson — His character, theories, and political principles — Growth of the Republic — England and the new republic — George Ill's reception of John Adams — AVashington's second tenn — The French Revolution and American parties — The question of belliger ent rights — Jay's treaty — Retirement of Washington — The city of "Washington — John Adams President — His appearance and charac- ter — Resentment against France — The feeling quelled — Bitterness of party spirit — Jefferson President — His inaugural address — Ac- -quisition of Louisiana — Jefferson's first term — His second tei-m — International complications : neutral trade, belligerent rights, impress- ment of seamen — Action of the Leopard and Chesapeake — Jefferson places an embargo on trade — Madison President — Diplomatic em- broilments — Influence of Kentucky — Henry Clay — Motives leading to war — The war of 1812 — The treaty of Ghent — Battle of New Orleans — Results of the war — Boundaries m Maine and Oregon — Monroe President — The Monroe doctrine . . Pages 130-176 CHAPTER IV. Democracy and Slavp:ry. Monroe's Presidency — The era of good feeling — Geographical division between freedom and slavery — The Presidential fever and its effects — Reign of the " Machine " — Henry Clay — His character and prin- ciples — Daniel Webster — His character — His oratory — John C. Calhoun — His character and principles — Slavery and the Senate CONTENTS. ix debates — Benton — Kandolph — The tariff question — Free trade vs. protection — Webster ; Clay ; McDuffie — Public land and improve- ments — John Quincy Adams — His character and principles — Mili- tary renown as a political influence — Andrew Jackson's Presiden- tial campaign — Jackson's inauguration — The spoils go to the victor — A court quarrel — Jackson's despotism — The National Bank question — South Carolina rises against the tariff — The Force Bill — Effects of Jackson's policy — Demagogism — Van Buren — Party lines — The anti-Masons — William Harrison's Presidential campaign — Tyler President — Texas and Mexico — Clay's candida- ture — Polk President — War with Mexico — Texas annexed — Tay- lor President — Fillmore President — Close of Webster's career — Texas and slavery — End of the Whig party — Pierce President — The Knownothings — The Irish vote — Growth of the Republic — Progress westward — Development and expansion — Political and social democracy Pages 177-220 CHAPTER V. RtTPTr'KK AND Reconstruction. Slavery forced to the front — The question a thing of the past — It.s source — Ancient compared with American slavery — Fusion of races impos- sible — Emancipation discouraged — Slavery not elevating — Condi- tion of the negro — Sinister aspects and influences of slavery — Slave industry — Aggressive character of slavery — Apologies for the sys- tem — Possibilities of a peaceful solution — Dominance of slavery — Its adherents — Protests, political, philosophical, literary — William Lloyd Garrison — Wendell Phillips — Strong feeling in the South — Case of Anthony Burns — Stephen Douglas in politics — Squatter sovereignty — The Kansas- Nebraska Act — Case of Dred Scott — Free Sellers — Disorder in Kansas — Violent debates in Congress — The two parties, Republican and Democratic — John Brown — Abra- ham Lincoln — His early life — His appearance, capability, and char- acter — His political principles — His powers of debate — Elected President — South Carolina secedes — Other States follow — A Southern Confederacy formed — Slavery the cause of secession — The Confederate government — Buchanan's vacillation — Concessions offered by Congress — The crisis unexpected — Possibilities of peace- ful separation — State sovereignty — The struggle a regiilar war — Lincoln as President — His object the preservation of tlie Union — War breaks out by the capture of Fort Sumter — The military strength of North and Smitli muipared — Means adopted to obtain men and CONTENTS. money — England and the South — Neutrality of the Hritish govern nicnt — Capture of Messrs. Mason and Siidell — Foreign nations; and the war — Strategy of the North — Chief scene of war — Bull Run — Northern military organization — General McClellan placed in command — McClellan and Lincoln — Generals Lee and Jackson — Pope replaces McClellan — The.equipuient of the respective armies — Antietam — Lincoln proclaims emancipation — Enlistment of ne- groes — Fort Pillow — Burnside put in command — Battle of Fred- ericksburg — Hooker replaces Burnside — Is defeated — General Grant — Fort Donelson taken — General Sherman — Battle of Shiloh — Vicksburg — Farragut — New Orleans taken — Benjamin Butler's proclamation — Murf reesborough — Character of the battles — The Merrimack and the Monitor — Blockade running — Lee enters Penn- sylvania — Irish riot in New York — Battle of Gettysburg — Fall of Vicksburg — The South in straits — The army of the Potomac — Battle of the Wilderness — Cold Harbour — Early attacks Washing- ton — Sheridan desolates the Shenandoah Valley — Mechanical skill displayed in Sheridan's campaign — Hood replaces Johnston — At- lanta falls — Savannah and Charleston surrender — Nashville — Rich- mond evacuated — Lee surrenders at Appomattox — Lincoln re-elected — And murdered — Ilis statesmanship — Humanity on the two sides — The Sanitary Commission — Democracy and war — The war and the constitution — Little or no disturbance of life at the North — No military u.surpation — Finances — Effects on the South — Economical evils — War literature — Cost of the war — — Foreign questions — The Alabama question — Reconstruction — Lincoln's views — Amnesty — Andrew Johnson — The status of the negro Pages 221-301 CHAPTER I. THE COLONIES. T^OUR centuries ago, Christopher Columbus, one of the 1492. Italian mariners whom the decline of their own repub- lics had put at the service of the world and of adventure, seeking for Spain a westward passage to the Indies as a set-off against the achievements of Portuguese discoverers eastwards, lighted on America. The new continent was thus discovered by the man who had staked most on the belief that no such continent existed, and that the way to the Indies was open by sea. That the daring barques of the Northmen had long before found their way from Greenland to the coast of North America is likely, though not certain. What is certain is that nothing more came, or in that age could come, of their visit than of the visit of a flock of sea-gulls. The basement of an old mill at Newport, which fancy turned into a Norse fortress, the Dighton rock, on which fancy traced Norse runes, the dykes at Watertown, in Massachusetts, in which ' fancy still sees the defences of the Norse city of Norumbega, only attest the yearnings of a new nation for antiquity. Columbus sailed in the age of enterprise and discovery, of re-awakened intellect and revived learning, of universal curiosity and romantic aspiration. He was in every way a typical man of his generation. He displayed in the high- 2 THE UNITED STATES. chap. est degree that daring spirit of adventure which could put forth in a tiny caravel without chart, quadrant, or even a full acquaintance with the compass, over the wide and wild Atlantic to an unknown shore ; and a shore which, when found, might teem with perils and be the abode of mon- sters or of demons. Humanity, since that time, has ad- vanced in many ways; but it has hardly advanced in fortitude. Columbus was also a devotee of a religion with more in it of Rome and of the Crusades than of the Gos- pel, and with more of the forms of devotion than of the spirit. Morally he was a type of the age which came between the fall of the Catholic and the rise of the Prot- estant faith, and had for its head Alexander VI, the moral monster of the Papacy, whose hand signed the Bull which divided the new world between two Catholic powers. In his youth it seems he served on board a pirate fleet. He began his intercourse with the natives of America by kid- napping, and he gave the word for the opening of the slave trade. His dealings with his own companions were equivocal. He was always in greedy quest of gold, though he professed, and perhaps believed, that he meant to use the gold in a crusade. He became the father of a line of adventurers who, like himself, were gold-seekers or seekers of lucre, gilding their rapacity with the same profession of zeal for the extension of religion, who sacked Mexico and Peru, trampled to pieces there, under the hoofs of conquest, the highest development of Indian civilization, worked to death the soft inhabitants of the American islands, and replaced them by the importation of African slaves. None of these adventurers looked upon America 1565. as a new home, or thought of founding a nation. The Huguenots might have founded a nation in Florida had I. THE COLONIES. 3 they not been massacred by the Spaniards. Missionary enterprise, to some extent, accompanied and redeemed the gold-seeking. It founded the Jesuit utopia in Para- 1527 guay, and in the establishment of French Canada went 1550. hand in hand with that kingly thirst of dominion which, rather than colonization in the proper and beneficent sense, was the dominant motive of French enterprise in North America. But the aim of the Jesuit was not to found a nation. In the settlement of Virginia by Sir 1585 Walter Raleigh, and, when Raleigh's romantic enterprise 1537 had failed, by a company of commercial adventurers, lucre, if not gold-seeking, was still the predominant motive. Of a hundred and forty-three settlers sent out, a large proportion were broken-down gentlemen seeking to repair their fortunes ; a few only were labourers or mechanics ; the rest were servants. To show how faint was their pur- pose of settlement, they brought no women. The subse- quent reinforcements were of the same kind, with some goldsmiths and refiners to help in seeking for gold where no gold was. A ship went home laden with shining mica, which was mistaken for gold. Food these colonists had to beg or steal from the Indians. To the crew of vagabonds were afterwards added jail-birds. Convicts were offered their choice between the gallows and Virginia, and some, we are told, chose the gallows. Only by the personal force 1607. and genius of John Smith, the one true captain, who com- pelled gentlemen to wield the axe, telling them that if they would not work they should not eat, was the colony saved from dissolution. It had been started on the false principle of joint stock industry, which deprives labour of its mainspring. Its place, Jamestown, has long been deso- late, and only fragments of ruin mark the site. In these 4 THE UNITED STATES. cii.vr. days steam carries all the implements of husbandry, now brought to marvellous perfection, and all needful stores, with the emigrant into his field of settlement. In those days colonization was a death-struggle with nature. Some sustaining motive higher than gain was necessary to give man the victory and enable him to make for himself a new home in the wilderness, and to found a nation. Such a motive, together with the necessary habits of labour and powers of endurance, was present in the little train of emigrants who, after beating up and down for some days upon a bleak and wintry coast and receiving as their welcome to it a volley of Indian arrows, dis- embarked from the Mayflower on the 22nd of December, 1620. Their landing was on the shore to which John Smith, its first explorer, had given the name of New England, at a spot which they named Plymouth, after the English port of that name from which they had sailed. Setting rhetorical exaggeration aside, we need not doubt that in watching that sad yet hopeful proces- sion of men, women, and children, we are witnessing one of the great events and one of the heroic scenes of history. The story of these emigrants is well known. They were dissenters from the Established Church of England, with simple hearts full of the intense faith and zeal inspired in those days by the new revelation of the pure Gospel. They had fled from the emissaries of 1008. church law, first to Holland. There they had found themselves surrounded by a community highly commer- cial, whose manners their austere simplicity deemed corrupting, which did not strictly keep the Sabbath, and into whose worldliness their children were in danger of beinof drawn. They feared also the loss of their I. THE COLONIES. 5 nationality, to which, though persecuted in England, they clung. They had then determined to seek a home beyond the Atlantic where they might enjoy their religion uncontaminated and in peace. A chartered company, tiie usual organ of commercial venture in those days, formed the English basis of their enterprise and the source of needful supplies. The Plymouth pilgrims, landing in mid-winter on a grim coast, underwent the severest sufferings. They were ill sheltered ; they had no bread, and were reduced to shellfish for food. More than half their number died. At one time only seven of them were left strong enough to tend the sick. It seems that they were saved from the Indian tomahawk only by a distemper which happened to prevail among the Indians. To use their own words, '' all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both undertaken and con- firmed with answerable courages." " It is not," they had said, " with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage or small discontents cause to wish themselves home again." Their language is instinct with the simple heroism of their enterprise. " Let it not be grievous to you," said their friends in England, " that you have been instruments to break the ice for others ; the honour shall be yours to the world's end." To the world's end the honour is theirs. If Columbus discovered the new conti- nent, they discovered the new world. Before landing, the pilgrims, " seeing that some among them were not well affected to concord," had drawn up this voluntary compact : — " In the name of God, amen ; we, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign 6 THE UNITED STATES. chap. King James, . . . having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our King and country, a voyage to phmt the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid ; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony. Unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." It is true that this covenant was not a political mani- festo. It is not less true that it heralded a polity of self-government, and may thus rank among the great documents of history. It breathes good-will to the land which the pilgrims had left, though the rulers of that land had cast them out. The Puritan exile did not say " Farewell, Babylon," but " Farewell, dear England." Unhappily these, in common with other colonists of the period, retained not only their love of the old land, but their political tie to it. They deemed themselves still liegemen of a sovereign on the other side of the Atlantic. This created a relation false from the beginning. Herein lay the fatal seeds of misunderstanding, of encroach- ment on the side of the home government, of revolt on that of the growing colony, and ultimately of revolution. The Hellenic colonist had gone forth to make his home in a new land, taking with him the sacred fire from the altar-hearth of his native city, but free from any political tie. His only bond to his native cit}^ was that of filial I. THE COLONIES. 7 affection, gracefully expressed in honours paid to her representatives. The Hellenic colony was a colony in the true sense of the word, not a dependency. The English colony unhappily was a dependency, and when it grew strong enough to spurn dependence there was a bond to be broken which was not likely to be broken without violence and a breach of affection. Dependence was the result of two notions combined, that of the territorial right of discovery, and that of personal and indefeasible alle- giance. Let a mariner land and set up a flag on a strange shore, let him even sight that shore from his vessel, the whole region thenceforth, according to the European law of nations, belonged to his sovereign, and was that sov- ereign's to grant to whom he pleased. His Majesty of 1606. England by his charter granted North America, so far as it was then known, between certain degrees of latitude, in full property, with exclusive rights of jurisdiction, settle- ment, and traffic, to certain persons incorporated respec- tively as the London and Plymouth Companies. The Pope's pretension to divide the new world between Catho- lic powers was hardly more baseless. From the feudal system came down the idea of personal and indefeasible allegiance, with the lingering traces of which international law and diplomacy in our own day have had to deal. This was the beginning of woes, the full measure of which came in 1765. The foundation of New Plymouth was followed by that of Massachusetts, the great Puritan colony of all, and the leading shoot of American civilization, which presently drew to it New Plymouth, while it threw out from it, in different ways and partly by repulsion, the off-shoots which became Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ncav Hampshire, and 8 THE UNITED STATES. cii.vi-. Vermont. The founders of Massachusetts were not, when they came out, Independents, like the company of the Mayflower, but Puritans in the proper sense of the term, that is, members of the Church of England who desired to remahi within her pale, but to purify her from the vestiges of Rome, and at the same time to uplift her to a higher standard of Christian life. They even anxiously disclaimed any intention of separation. "• They esteemed it their hon- our," they said, " to call the Church of England their dear mother, and could not part from their native country, where she specially resided, without much sadness of heart and many tears in their eyes ; ever acknowledging that such hope and part as they had attained in the common salvation they had received in her bosom and sucked from her breasts." But practical divorce from the Anglican hierarchy and ordinances, together with the liberating air of the new world, soon made them, like the Plymouth 1G29. emigrants. Independents. From Charles I, who was no doubt glad to see the Puritan spirit carried off by emigra- tion, the Massachusetts Company received a liberal charter, which became the palladium of advancing independence. The colony was an object of fervent interest to the Puri- tans at home, and was recruited with some of their best 1633. blood. Hither the excellent Cotton led from Boston in Lincolnshire, and the fair church that rises over it, a part of his flock to a Boston which soon became, and has remained, the centre of New England and the focus of 1033. New England civilization. Hither came Hugh Peters, the chaplain that was to be of the regicide republic. 1633. Hither for a time came Henry Vane, as has been said, " young in years, but not yet in sage counsel old," for he brought with him a disquieting ambition. The first I. THE COLONIES. 9 ^()\ ernor was Wintlirop, a wealthy Sussex gentleman, who if It his manor house at the age of forty-two to help in planting a Gospel kingdom in the new world. He was a noble specimen of the Puritan character, uniting with its force the gentle grace which Mrs. Hutchinson has por- trayed in her picture of Colonel Hutchinson ; a wise coun- sellor, skilful as Hampden in the management of men, and in all distractions piously serene. Endicott and Dudley were Puritans of the sterner type. Besides Cotton, other clergymen came, highly educated at Oxford or Cambridge ; more from Cambridge than from Oxford, because Cambridge lay in the eastern coun- ties, the home of Cromwell and the Ironsides. The inflow of Puritan life did not cease till the rising of the English nation against Charles and Laud gave the party hope and work at home. In Massachusetts also the first settlers had their suffer- ings to undergo on that bleak coast, though not such suf- ferings as were undergone by the founders of Plymouth, the Massachusetts colony being better provided with funds and more assisted from home. Whatever was to be borne they bore. Like their precursors at Plymouth, they were bent on "laying some good foundation, or at least making some way thereto, for the propagating and advancing the Gospel and the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world ; yea, even though they should be but as stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a work." The Puritan commonwealth was a theocracy. It was mainly for the purpose of founding a Christian state that these men had given up all and gone forth into the wilderness. No one could be a citizen of Massachusetts 10 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai'. who was not in close communion with one of the churches. The churches were organized on the Con- gregational principle, forming a grou[), each member of which was independent of the rest and chose its own pastor. But they were bound together by complete sym- pathy, identity of doctrine and of system was preserved, and discipline was practically enforced by them in con- cert. Baptism was limited to the children of those who were in close communion, and only to those who were in close communion was the sacrament of the Lord's Supper administered. Every citizen was required to contribute to the maintenance of a church. Thus, not only was there a union of church and state, but church and state were one. This was still the religious ideal of the time, however far men might desire to carry church reform. It has been the ideal in our own day of such a liberal as Dr. Arnold. Puritan theocracy, though strict, and sure to melt away when the sun of freedom had mounted higher in the heaven, was not reactionary or obscurantist. It had for its rule the Bible, but the Bible interpreted by reason. It owed paramount allegiance not to authority but to truth. Robinson, the adored pastor of the Plymouth exiles, had charged them at part- ing, before God and all the angels, to "follow him no further than he followed Christ ; and if God should reveal anything to them by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it as ever they were to receive any truth by his ministry ; for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word." Of light and truth to break forth from nature read by science beyond God's word tlie Puritan pastor in those days could have no thought. THE COLONIES. 11 Reformers may wish to arrest reform at their own line, but they set in action the forces which will carry it turther. The clergy were the leaders, to a considerable extent they were the masters, of the Puritan society and commonwealth. But they were not mere priests. They were well educated ; some of them were very learned, {ind could not fail to have their share of the liberality of learning. Their ascendancy was moral and intellec- tual; it was not that of caste or of thaumaturgy. - Very early Massachusetts founded, out of her poverty i636. and in troublous times, the University of Harvard, which is now the glory of the literary republic. Harvard's 1700. present rival, Yale, was founded in New Haven later, yet at a date early as compared with the material progress of the colony. Massachusetts led the world in the institution of common schools, to which all citizens were required to contribute, and which all citizens were required to use. Common schools they were in the true sense of the term in that realm of equality, used as well as maintained by all. They would also be in the highest degree religious. The reason given for instituting them was that the children might be able to read the Scriptures aright, notwithstanding the wiles of Satan, whose favour- ite device was misinterpretation. But the effects of general education would not be limited by the ostensible purpose. Congregations were intelligent, and pastors could maintain their influence only by addressing them- selves to intelligence. A printing press, the first on the North American continent, was set up at Cambridge in 1640. Its first fruit was a metrical version of the Psalms by some New England pastors which, if it was not tune- ful, was new and showed literary activity, at least in the relio'ious line. 12 THE UNITED STATES. chap. When the more advanced or wilder sectaries, to whom an age of religious fermentation gave birth in swarms, intruded themselves into the theocracy of Massachusetts, they were driven out. In this there could hardly be said to be injustice so long as there was no cruelty. The Puritans had gone out into the wilderness to found a religious commonwealth after their own hearts ; in founding it they had undergone great sufferings, and many of them had perished. It was their homestead, and they had a right to keep it, as they had a right to keep their places of worship, to themselves. This they did ; at the Avorst they never were guilty of forcible con- version, nor did they rack conscience like the Inquisition. 1631. Of the intruders the most memorable was Roger Williams, a quick-witted, warm-hearted, and somewhat flighty Welshman, who came preaching absolute freedom of conscience, and denouncing theocratic government. A political as well as a religious innovator, he denied the right of the King to grant the land and thus impugned the titles of the colonists. In his zeal against idolatry he compromised the loyalty of the colony by persuading the governor to cut the cross, as a Popish emblem, out of 1636. the flag. He was expelled after much tribulation, and went to found Rhode Island on the principle of perfect religious freedom and complete separation of church from state of which, partl}^ perhaps schooled by persecution, he had become the memorable champion. His colony ma}- boast itself the first of all commonwealths in which libert} of conscience was the law. Its political disorders, the consequence of the motley enthusiasm which it drew to it, for a time furnished the theocracy against which its founder had revolted with a theme for warning against THE COLONIES. 13 religious anarchy. But the principle had been pro- claimed and Rhode Island was not long in showing the world that civil society could subsist and political order could be maintained without imposing shackles on spirit- ual life. Mrs. Ann Hutchinson also presented herself in Massa- 1034. chusetts. Her opinions appear to have been antinomian, certainly they were anti-clerical and anti-theocratic. From the active part which she took and the leadership to which she aspired, notwithstanding her sex, in theological agitation, she may be regarded as a harbinger of the "• revolt of woman." She had evidently great power of winning disciples. Vane, who was in New England at the time, was drawn to her ; and it seems to have been partly in this way that he was led into an antagonism to the ruling party in Massachusetts which, combined probably with the attractions of the larger field, sent him back to the old country. Mrs. Hutchinson also was 16.37. banished. Samuel Gorton was another eccentric spirit who could not brook theocratic rule. He held among other heresies that there was no such place as heaven or hell, a doctrine for which the time was not ripe. Disturb- ing the existing order and defying the rulers, he, with his followers, was convicted of blasphemy and with more cruelty expelled. He carried his complaint to England, wpa. as afterwards did other sufferers by the rigour of theo- cracy, compromising thereby the cherished independence of Massachusetts. Baptists also when they found their way into the colony were regarded and suffered as dis- turbers of religious order. They carried with them, however undeservedly, the taint of the social anarchy and war produced by the wild uprisings of the Ana- baptists in Europe. 14 THE UNITED STATES. chap. The worst case, and the shame of the theocracy, is wr^G that of the Quakers. Quakers were not at first harmless 1(500 pyoj)le of the inner light with a prim dress and a precise language of their own. They were sectaries of the wildest kind, and were sometimes guilty in their religious ecstasy of indecency and even of outrage. They railed against church authority; they forced themselves into places of worship and disturbed the service ; they went about naked to testify against sin.' A Quakeress in Massachusetts thrust herself upon a meeting house clad in sack cloth and with her face painted black to repre- sent the coming of the small-pox. Quakers were sternly bidden to depart ; laws making them liable to flogging and imprisonment, to the cropping of their ears, and the piercing of their tongues with hot irons, were passed and in some cases cruelly carried into execution. In defiance of these penalties they still came, till at last a law was passed banishing them on pain of death. They returned, eager for martyrdom, and four of them were hanged. But the touching demeanour of the sufferers moved the hearts of the people. Public sentiment re- volted. Public sentiment in Spain did not revolt against the autos-da-fe. The treatment of the Quakers by the Puritans is without defence or excuse, except such as the fallacies of the age, the fear that religion would perish in an anarchy of sects, and Quaker extravagance, which seemed to menace social as well as religious order, might afford. But it is wrong to say that the Puritans of Massachusetts left the mother country to assert the principle of liberty of conscience and then shamefully violated that principle by their own practice. They came out, not to assert liberty of conscience, a principle which THE COLONIES. 15 had not dawned on their minds, but to found a religious commonwealth on their own model and in it live the piritual life to which thej^ aspired. Rliode Island, how- ever, had now an opportunity of showing her loyalty to her new born principle of religious freedom. To the appeal of Massachusetts for co-operation in putting down the Quakers the people of Rhode Island replied " that they had no laAV among them whereby to punish any for only declaring by words their minds and understandings concerning the things and ways of God as to salvation and an eternal condition." They admitted that the doctrines of the Quakers tended "to very absolute cutting down and overturning relations and civil government among men," but said that experience taught them that " in those places where these people aforesaid, in this Colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments and discourse, there they the least of all desire to come," inasmuch as they delight "to be persecuted by civil powers, and when they are so they are like to gain more adherence by the conceit of their patient sufferings than by consent to their per- nicious sayings." In one respect the Rhode Islanders were mistaken ; the Quakers remained among them and added to the disturbance of their settlement. Perhaps Massachusetts as the school of political and social order, and Rhode Island as the school of freedom of opinion, were unconsciously supplements of each other till the fulness of time in which the harmony of the two prin- ciples should be revealed. On its political side Puritanism was everywhere in spirit republican, the tendency to political liberty going hand in hand with religious independence. The mon- 16 THE UNITED STATES. chap. archy, moreover, the court, and the aristocracy had been left on the other side of the Atlantic. Unlike the depen- dencies of Spain or France, Massachusetts was from the outset practically a republic, albeit retaining her alle- giance to the King of England, founding her rights upon his charter, included in his declarations of war and his treaties of peace, regarding his law as the basis of her own, and recognizing his privy council as her ultimate court of appeal. Her polity was based on the town- ship, that elementary cell and school of public life about which much has been said by De Tocqueville and other political philosophers. The townships were afterwards gathered into counties, forming another step in the ascending scale of self-government. At the centre was an elective and representative assembly. The execu- tive was an elective Governor. Representation went with taxation. But the republic was not at first demo- cratic. Its chiefs in fact repudiated democracy as not a fit government either for church or state. They asked, if the people were to govern, who was to be governed? Some of them would fain have had all offices held for life. Winthrop and Dudley did actually enjoy almost a life term. There was no idle aristocracy ; all alike were workers, but social distinctions were kept up. The order of gentlemen was recognized, it was exempted from corporal punishment, the title of Mr. was confined to it, " Goodman " being the title of a commoner. The principal families had the chief seats in church ; their sons ranked first among the students at Harvard. " Con- cerning liberty," said Governor Winthrop in a homily against democratic turbulence, " I observe a great mistake in the country. There is a twofold liberty, natural (1 THE COLONIES. 17 iu;iii as our nature is now corrupt) and civil, or federal. 11 K' first is common to man with beasts and other icatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man, imply hath liberty to do what he lists ; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least •estraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men to grow more evil, and, in time, to be worse than brute beasts : omnes 'sumus licentia deteriores — we all become worse by licence. That is the great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the laws of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal ; it may also be called moral in reference to the covenant between God and man in the moral law, and the political covenants and constitutions among men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it, and it is a liberty to that only which is just, good, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for at the hazard not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this is not authority, but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority ; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." Such, expressed by the highest Puritan authority, was the principle of the Puritan commonwealth. Authority was surrounded with as much state as the infant colony could afford. The Governor, it seems, was preceded by four halberdiers. When Lord Say-and-Sele, Lord Brooke, and other Puri- tan noblemen thought of coming out from England, they proposed that Massachusetts should institute an 18 THE UNITED STATES. chap. liereditary order of nobility forming an Upper House. But this the commonwealth respectfully declined. She answered by the hand of Cotton, " When God blesseth any branch of any noble or generous family with a spirit and gifts fit for government, it would be a taking of God's name in vain to put such a talent under a bushel, and a sin against the honour of magistracy to neglect such in our public elections. But if God should not delight to furnish some of their posterity with gifts fit for magis- tracy, we should expose them rather to reproach and prejudice, and the commonwealth with them, than exalt them to honour, if we should call them forth, when God doth not, to public authority." Thus gentl}'- but deci- sively did the new world break with hereditary govern- ment, and commit itself to the principle of election. But aristocracy, had it been planted in New England, could never have taken root. In the colony there were no great estates to support peerages. Of the equal comradeship of Saxon rovers English self-government was born ; in the equal partnership of religious colonists after a thou- sand years of monarchy and aristocracy it was renewed. 1627. The Company having been transferred from England to Massachusetts, no tie to England was left bu^; that of al- legiance to the king. Though the Puritan republic was not in its birth democratic, democracy was not long in raising its head and foreshadowing its destined empire. Town meetings were pretty certain to breed village poli- ticians, while the common schools would foster equality. Elections were by the democratic mode of ballot. We see the rudiment of a democratic caucus. Self-taxation is the political lever of democracy, and New Englanders jeal- ously refused to pay any taxes without representation. It I. THE COLONIES. 19 was a democratic spirit that demanded a written code of laws instead of Mosaic principles administered at the dis- cretion of the general court. It was a democratic spirit that successfully protested against life-tenure of office. A change in the constitution dividing the general court, which had been a single council, into two branches, one of which was popular, had its origin in a democratic agitation caused by what the people resented as an oligar- chical decision of the council in the great case of Mrs. Sherman's sow. We have here a glimmering of the conflict to come in after times between the " classes " and the " masses." " He," Mrs. Sherman's antagonist in the suit, " being accounted a rich man and she a poor woman, this so wrought with the people, as being blinded with unreasonable compassion, they could not see or would not allow justice her reasonable course." These are the words of a governor opposed to democracy, yet they are likely to have been true. A feeling of the deputies of the town- ships against the central power, likewise premonitor}'^ in its way, seems also to have played its part. To the learned and revered Cotton, who held that democracy was not a fit government for church or state, was opposed the learned and revered Thomas Hooker, who maintained that " the foundation of authority is laid in the free con- sent of the people, that the choice of the public magistrates belongs to the people of God's own allowance, and that they who have the power to appoint officers and magis- trates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them." These sentiments Hooker and his friends embodied in the constitution of Connecticut, a settlement which was in some measure a democratic secession from Massachusetts, 20 THE UNITED STATES. chap. and may thus claim to be the cradle of American demo- cracy as Rhode Islaiid may claim to be the cradle of liberty of conscience. The constitution of Connecticut has been pronounced the first written constitution known to history which created a government. This assertion may be a little hazardous with regard to ancient Greece and Rome, possibly with regard to the Italian republics ; it is certainly true with regard to America. It is true, and it is highly important. We have passed from the world of unwritten to that of written constitutions, from a world of govern- ment by usage, tradition, and chartered privileges wrested from kings, to a world of government by public reason embodied in codes of political law. In 1642 the federal principle appears on the scene where it was destined in the fulness of time to receive its grand- est application. A federation was formed of the four colonies then in existence ; Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. The motive was the same which has given birth to confederations in general, mutual defence against hostile force ; the hostile force in this case being that of the Dutch who pressed from the south, and that of the French Canadians who pressed from the north, while there was always danger from the Indians. In the instrument of federation the language used implied the possession by the contracting parties of independent and sovereign power, such as would enable them to make peace and war. The difficulties of the system were illustrated by the jealousies and disputes which arose notwithstanding the simple nature in this case of the federal functions and the strong inducement to unanimity afforded by common peril. Light was thrown, too, on the conditions requisite for federation, which seems to be ap- plicable only to a group of states, nearly equal or so I. THE COLONIES. 21 balanced as to preclude the domination of any one state and the jealousies which such domination or the appre- hension of it excites. Massachusetts, being much larger and stronger than her three sisters, and naturally claiming influence in proportion to her contribution, domineered, or was believed by her partners to domineer, and instead of harmonious action there was strife. The belief that the scriptures contained the rule of civil as well as that of spiritual life, coupled with the belief that the Old Testament was of equal authority with the New, could not fail to sit heavy on the Puritans of New England, as well as those of the mother country. Their legislation was tainted with Mosaism. Blasphemy, witch- craft, adultery, smiting or cursing parents, were treated as capital crimes, though we have no record of an inflic- tion of the death penalty for blasphemy, adultery, or filial rebellion. For death as the punishment in the case of adultery was afterwards substituted a milder penalty, a part of which was the wearing of the scarlet letter A as a mark of infamy. Sabbath-breaking was punished with extreme severity. It is the inherent tendency of theocracy to deal with sins as crimes. But in the framing of the code, with the spirit of Mosaism incarnate in Cotton and the ministers, a part was taken by tlie spirit of law-reform, embodied in Ward, a clergy- man who in England had been bred to the law. The code of Massachusetts and those of other New England colonies are on the whole a great improvement on those of the mother country in humanity and civilization. Their use of the death penalty is sparing indeed com- pared with the use of it in the code of the mother country, where at last there were a hundred and sixty capital 22 THE UNITED STATES. chap. offences. Cruelty to animals was forbidden. Though equality did not yet fully reign, there was enough of it to prevent aristocratic prodigality of the blood of the poor. Imprisonment for debt was discarded. The en- snaring technicalities of the pleading system were relaxed. A written code was framed, which being rational and intelligible, was an improvement upon the chaotic ped- antry of English jurisprudence, while the great under- lying principles of English justice, and with them the English right of trial by jury, were retained. The aristo- cratic right of primogeniture in succession to estates was reduced to a double shar3. Women were protected against the violence of their husbands, and a share of the husband's goods was secured to the widow. Such reforms Cromwell would probably have made in England had he been able to overcome the interested prejudices of his lawyers. The celebration of marriage, which the Puritan deemed no sacrament, was transferred from the clergyman to the magistrate. Barbarous punishments, such as flogging, setting in the stocks, tongue-boring, and ear-cropping, were still in vogue. Civilization had nowhere advanced beyond them. New Haven was some- what more Mosaic and sterner than Boston. It had been founded by men for whom Boston was too little Puritan, and who were called the Brahmins of the sect. Its chief rulers were styled " The Seven Pillars," and it rejected jury trial as unsanctioned by the scriptures. " Never elsewhere, I believe," says Dr. Bacon, " has the world seen magistrates who felt more deeply that they were God's ministers executing God's justice." God's justice must have been inquisitorial if it extended to misbehaviour on the part of servants, to keeping suspicious company on I. THE COLONIES. 23 the Lord's day, and to kissing. But it is not to be sup- posed that the scriptural ideal which these pious people embodied in their enactments could be literally carried into effect. The Blue Laws of Connecticut are at all events a fable. When no government was free from fallacy the fruits must be judged by comparison. Under the discipline of Puritan theocracy, combined with the training of industry and of bold seafaring, the foundations of a strong character were laid. The Puritan colonists had begun with the common ownership of land. They soon found that common owner- ship meant common neglect and hunger, as had the col- onists of Virginia till a leader by sheer force compelled them to work. They then divided the land into lots, after which industry became strenuous, and there was food enough. Some common land, however, was retained, and the lovely public gardens of Boston are a monument of the primitive system. An attempt was made to regu- late the rate of wages, and when the wage-earners com- plained of their reduced power of purchasing, an attempt was made to regulate prices also. Even under a theo- cracy both experiments failed. Thus these pioneers of trade and industry in their day " relegated political economy to Saturn," and found that it returned. A better measure was the enactment that no house should be built at more than a certain distance from a place of worship. If the primary object of this law was ecclesias- tical it brought with it the economical and moral advan- tages of close settlement, it favoured the growth of towns, and, therefore, of social and political life. Life was of course austere. Much in which Merry England delighted and might well delight was forbidden. 24 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai>. There were no May-poles nor Christmas pies. There was no theatre ; the acting even of " Comus " would not have been endured. There were no drinkings of healths, and of course no cards nor dice. On the other hand there was no bear-baiting, no cock-fighting, no cocking on Shrove Tuesday, no beastly drinking bout, no beating of watch- men, no outrage of aristocratic Mohocks. There were social meetings for the young, such as raising bees and sewing bees. There seems even to have been dancing. Neither in respect of food nor in respect of drink was Puritanism ascetic. Its preachers had their casks of rum or brandy. Thanksgiving Day, its chief festival in the new world, was probably kept with as good cheer as the prelatical Christmas. Frugality as well as religious prin- ciple would check excess of all kinds even when riches had increased, else denial of amusement is apt to lead to greater indulgence in the pleasures of the table. Gaiety of apparel was discouraged, but on the Sabbath all ap- peared in their best clothes. Military drill and muster, which the neighbourhood of the Indians and the hostile Dutch and French always enforced and to which all citi- zens were bound, besides keeping up manly vigour, would be a thread of variety and picturesqueness in the sad- coloured web of existence. Still, New England life must have been austere. Nor can the danger of moral reaction against over-strictness and formality have been absent. The religious exercises were such as would far surpass our powers of pious endurance. Could any but the liveliest faith have drunk in with delight the interminable sermon of a Calvinistic pastor in an unwarmed meeting house with temperature below zero? However, the faith of these men was the liveliest, and they did fully believe I. THE COLONIES. 25 that the world in whicli they practised this self-denial and patiently listened to these discourses was the threshold of a home prepared for the saints in heaven. /, New England was not free from the stain of slavery. The law of Massachusetts said, "There shall be no bond- slavery, villainage, or captivity amongst us unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us." This licences slavery and the slave trade, though the provision which grants to the slave " all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel," the Hebrew code having been merciful for its day, would render slavery in New England comparatively mild. Slavery was sanc- tioned by the Bible ; that was enough for the Puritan, who knew nothing about evolution or the education of the human race, and whose Christianity had not recog- nized the equal humanity of the heathen. Ships from New England took part in the slave trade, though the members of the religious commonwealth who made a murderous raid upon an African village on the Sabbath were brought to justice for their double crime. Fortunately for New England, she had no industry like that of cotton, tobacco, or rice, in which slave labour could be profitably employed. Slaves do not make good husbandmen or seamen. Relations with the aborigines are a sad page in the history of colonies. At the time of American secession the charge was revived against the New England Puri- tans of exterminating the natives on a hideous scale. The number of savages who wandered over those ex- panses seems to have been really small, nor were they exterminated, though they were decimated by war and, perhaps still more, by the contraction of their hunting- 1G61 26 THE UNITED STATES. chap. grounds and their adoption of white vices. Indian tribes were always carrying on wars of extermination against each other. In their conduct towards the savages with whom they came into contact, the Puritans may at least challenge comparison with the conduct of the Spanish Catholics towards the far more civilized people of the same race who were found in Mexico and South America. In their first advances the new-comers showed a wish for peace and justice. For the seed corn which they had taken from an Indian store they tendered fair compen- sation. Compensation of some sort was made for the lands taken from the natives, though while on the one hand mere roaming over a vast region could hardly make the Indian hunter its proprietor, on the other nothing could compensate the wandering hunter for the loss of the wilderness and the game. Nor did the settlers ever cease to recognize the Indian as a man having a right to justice against the Englishman. The missionary efforts of Eliot were fully as noble as those of Las Casas or the Jesuits, while they were not, like those of the Jesuits, tainted with an equivocal ambition. He could number several thousand Indian converts, some hundreds of whom had learned to read a language reduced by him to writing. His Indian Bible was an almost super- human monument of philanthropic labour. He strove to combine civilization with conversion, and aimed at making his converts men, not sheep. But the Red Indian in reality, though not in the romance of Fenimore Cooper, was of all savages the most irreclaimable. Wild virtues, notably fortitude, he had, as well as keenness of sense and power of endurance, but his life was full of slaughter and rapine, his cruelty was fiendish. In the Iroquois I. THE COLONIES. 27 the devilisli lust of blood and torture was so ingrained, and was combined with so much cunning and perfidy, that it was scarcely possible to deal with him otherwise than as with the most dangerous and untameable of wild beasts. On the border no one could sleep secure against the sudden onslaught of the savage with the tomahawk and the firebrand. While the congregation was in church, armed men stood guard at the door. The Puritan also had his cruel moods, and his notions about smiting the Canaanite in New England as well as in Ireland. He was in one of those moods when, in the 1637. Pequod war, he destroyed, in one holocaust, four hundred Indians, men, women, and children. Yet more terrible 1674-6. was the war in later days against the Indian chief called King Philip, who, as the colonists believed, had been forming a league to drive them out of the land. This war lasted for two years, during which nearly two-thirds of the eighty or ninety towns of Massachusetts were raided by the savages, ten or twelve were totally de- stroyed, and ten per cent of the men of military age were killed in fight or carried off to be tortured to death. Piteous is the tale of a matron who was led into captivity with her wounded child, A desperate heroism was bred by these struggles in the women as well as in the men. Hannah Dustin, being carried off with her nurse and a white boy, got the white boy to join her, rose in the night, killed the Indians with their own tomahawks, scalped them, and made her way back a hundred miles to her home. No wonder if disturbed fancy added its terrors to those of reality, if Indian bows were seen in the sky and scalps in the moon, if the aurora borealis was taken for a blood-red portent of coming war. No 28 THE UNITED STATES. chap. wonder if the Puritan conscience was alarmed and looked for causes of divine wrath in curled hair and ribbons, naked breasts and arms, swearing and tippling, suspicious ridings of youths and maidens to town under pretence of attending lectures, hurrying away from meeting before blessing asked, and toleration of Quakers. It is marvel- lous, and creditable to the Puritan religion that the humanity of the colonists did not altogether give way. A solution of the fatal problem by a mixture of the races was out of the question. The marriage of Poca- hontas with the Virginian Rolfe, hailed as auspicious at the time, had no sequel. Few were the inter-marriages between the whites and the Indians, though Indian blood, instead of being deemed, like negro blood, a disgrace, has been rather a subject of pride among Americans, and one of the most eminent of Virginian politicians was fond of reminding his hearers that it ran in his veins. The higher the race is, the less does it mingle with lower races. The Anglo-Saxon is to lower races a ruler, and in dealing with them his exclusiveness is at once his strength and his weakness. Massachusetts always professed allegiance to the British Crown, which, and not Parliament, it must be remem- bered, in those days was, or was taken to be, the real government ; in other respects she always bore herself as an independent and almost sovereign commonwealth. She made war and peace ; she formed a confederation ; she taxed herself, paying no tribute of any kind; she coined her own money, the pine-tree shilling ; she dealt freely with her own constitution ; she framed her own code of laws, including the law of capital punishment, though as a general basis the English common law pre- 1. THE COLONIES. 29 vailed. She framed her own treason Law, enacting that if any man sliould rebel or conspire against the common- wealth, or should attempt the alteration or subversion of her fundamental government, he should suffer death. This practically puts the commonwealth in the place of the king; had such been the treason law of England there would have been no difficulty in framing the in- dictment of Strafford. When there was any attempt on the part of the home government actually to enforce the obedience of the colony, the colonists met it with sage diplomacy, fortified by fasting and prayer. The distance from the imperial country favoured the tactics of delay. It furnished also a conclusive plea for military indepen- dence. "If we in America," said Winthrop, "should forbear to unite for offence and defence against a com- mon enemy till we have leave from England, our throats might be all cut before the messenger could be half seas through." The smaller Puritan colonies in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, pervaded by the same spirit as Massachusetts, like her were bent on enjoying practical independence. They, especially Rhode Island, had less difficulty in obtaining a large measure of it, since the Crown was inclined to make them its allies against Massachusetts, whose ambitious aspirations and hostility to Episcopalianism, the royal religion, combined with its power, gave special umbrage to the Crown. There is always the same strain upon the bond, false from the beginning, between the dependent colony and the mother country ; and the stronger and more self reliant is the colony, the greater is the strain. As Protestants militant the New Englanders were bound up with the fortunes of their cause in Europe. With 30 THE UNITED STATES. chap. eager eyes they had watched the victorious career of Gustavus Adolphus. With eyes still more eager would they watch the struggle in their mother country between high church despotism and protestant liberty. They tri- umphed in the victory of the Parliament. Yet they were careful in their relations with the Parliament not to com- promise their own independence. Presbyterianism, domi- nant for the time in England, and believing as firmly as did Popery or Anglicanism in its divine origin, would fain have extended its dominion to the colonies. A synod of the Massachusetts churches was held and the Westminster Confession was approved, but the Congregational theocracy of New England underwent no change. The policy of the Protector towards the colonists was large-minded and liberal. He offered them, instead of their niggard soil and chilly climate, the rich and sunny Jamaica. At another time he proposed to transplant them to Ireland. Happily they declined both offers. In Jamaica they would have sunk into slave-owners ; in Ireland they would have had to make room for themselves by smiting the Canaan- ites of that land with the edge of the sword. New Eng- land accepted the Restoration, but did not welcome it. After more than a year's delay Charles II was proclaimed at Boston, but to drink his health was not allowed; his Majesty himself having strictly forbidden it, as the rulers, by a X-)ious fiction, declared. The colony gave an asylum to the regicides Whalley, Goffe, and Dixon, who, hunted by royal emissaries, were sheltered by popular sympathy. A cave near New Haven is still shown as the refuge of Goffe and Whalley. Tradition makes Goffe suddenly appear on the scene to rally a party of colonists who were hard pressed in fight by Indians, and who took the mys- ,. THE COLONIES. 31 terious stranger for an angel sent to their rescue. Con- necticut and Rhode Ishmd were, as usual, more prompt in their submission than Massachusetts, and the royal coun- tenance beamed on them accordingly. By this time, however, a change had come over the spirit of Massachusetts herself. Trade had grown active, wealth had increased, and there had arisen a class more commercial than religious, which lusted after the flesh- pots, material and social, of the Royal and Anglican Egypt. Against austerity, often tainted with conceit and sometimes with hypocrisy, a reaction was sure to take place like that of the Restoration against the reign of the saints in England. The root of colonial Puritanism in the mother country was dead, for Puritanism of the genuine kind ended there with the Restoration, and nothing remained but the far less lofty and energetic spirit of political non-conformity. Trade had brought a mixed population. The theocratic burghers were a minority, according to the excluded a mere fraction of the commu- nity, and their political privileges had become an object of just jealousy and hatred to those who were excluded from the pale. Among the new-comers were members of the Anglican Church who demanded liberty for their re- ligion. It must not be left out of sight that in some sort religious liberty in Massachusetts looked to the English monarchy for protection and thus justified the interference of the home government. Ungodly wealth looked wist- fully at the pomp and trappings of British monarchy and aristocracy. Political and religious malcontents alike. Royalists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Quakers, turned their eyes to Westminster and there urged their com- plaints and carried on their intrigues. The germs of 32 TIIK UNITED STATES. chap. the Tory and Whig parties of the Revolution had been formed. This invited the despotic aggression of the later Stuarts. The colonial government seems to have felt its weakness, since upon the arrival of the news of the Res- toration and of the complaints lodged against it in Eng- land it sent to Charles II an apologetical address in which the colony was designated as " the King's poor Mephi- bosheth, by reason of lameness in respect of distance not until now appearing in his presence, kneeling with the rest of his subjects before His Majesty as her restored King." The pine-tree shilling being an offensive token of monetary independence, the pine was ingenuously passed off as the royal oak. But the storm was not averted by loyal language or by a condemnation of Eliot's republican treatise on the " Commonwealth," which, in some degree, reminds us of the tributes paid to monarchy in the condemnation of republican writings by loyal universities in England. The agents of Massachusetts brought back with them a royal missive demanding the repeal of all laws inconsistent with the King's authority, the administration of justice in his name, the renewal of the oath of allegiance, the substitution of property quali- fications for church membership as the title to the fran- chise and to office, and the admission of all people of honest views to baptism and the Lord's Supper; the two last articles importing nothing less than the abolition of theocracy. Thus in the colony, as in the mother country, the Romanizing Stuart figured in a sinister way as the patron of toleration. The Quakers, however, though the King at first gave ear to their complaints, obtained little relief in the end. They filled the Stuarts' own prisons. Permission was given to make a sharp law against them, I. THE COLONIES. 33 and the sharp law was executed on two young married Quakeresses, who walked naked through the streets in imitation of the prophet Ezekiel, as a sign of the naked- ness of the land. Royalty had in the colony its party arrayed against the zealous defenders of the theocracy, and headed by Joseph Dudley, son of the stern Puritan Governor, but himself a shifty politician, the counterpart of the Lauderdales and Shaftesburys of the mother coun- try. Besides the threatened change in her constitution, Massachusetts was menaced with a blow to her terri- torial ambition by a decision adverse to her aggrandize- ment in Maine, the proprietary colony of Sir Ferdinand© Gorges which she had been striving to appropriate. Relief from pressure was probably afforded to the colony by the reaction against the court in England consequent on the Popish Plot, which gave birth to the Exclusion Bill. But when the court had triumphed over the opposition, and was sending the Whig leaders to the scaffold, prayers, money — the effect of which upon the courtiers seems now to have been tried — and partial submission proved alike unavailing any longer to avert the impending blow. A quo warranto went forth ; the charter of Massachusetts, 1635. like the charters of the English municipalities, was an- nulled ; and, by a colourable process of law, for the later Stuarts did everything in form of law, the commonwealth was reduced to a dependency under the arbitrary power of the Crown, which by the same act became again lord of all the land, and had the title of every freeholder legally at its mercy. Under James II the colony narrowly escaped having the sanguinary Kirke as its Governor. Sir Ed- 1636. mund Andros came out in that capacity instinct with the spirit of his master. He appeared as Govern orof the 34 THE UNITED STATES. chap. wliole of New England, and appai'ently as destined Gov- ernor-General of all the colonies. Under him as president of the council was Joseph Dudley, playing Sunderland to the viceroy of James II. Andros, like his master, assumed the despot. He levied arbitrary taxes, he compelled freeholders to purchase new patents for their lands, and if they complained he told them, with the insolence of another Jeffreys, by the mouth of his deputy, that they had nothing left them except the privilege of not being sold as slaves. He killed liberty in its source by putting an end to the freedom of the press and making the obse- quious Dudley censor. He forcibly introduced the Church of England, seized a meeting house for its prelatical services, and caused the Anglican surplice to be dis- played before the eyes of the scandalized Puritans. He took away the celebration of marriages from the magis- trates and confined it to Episcopal clergymen, of whom there was only one in the colony. To bring Rhode Island under his despotism he went to Providence and demanded the surrender of the charter, but the discussion lasting into the night the lights were suddenly put out and in the darkness the precious document disappeared and was hidden in an oak which became sacred as the Chai-ter Oak. It seems wonderful that there was no serious resistance except in New Hampshire, where the people rose against arbitrary taxation, that capital grievance which, even under the Tudors, English blood would not endure. But the party of liberty in England was pros- trate ; the trade of the colony and its seaboard towns lay at the mercy of the royal fleet; nor was the king without partisans where, as at home, he could play, pend- ing the re-installation of his own persecuting religion, I. THE COLONIES. 35 the part of a protector against persecution. He could look also for some support to Connecticut and Rhode Island, always jealous of their too powerful sister ; while Rhode Island was mortally opposed to a theocracy such as still struggled for life in Massachusetts. One day, however, there sailed into Boston harbour an English ship bringing the glad tidings of the Revolution and the order to proclaim William and Mary. That order was joyfully obeyed. Andros fell like Jeffreys, and like Jeffreys had a narrow escape from popular vengeance. William III had saved the liberties of Europe from Louis XIV. But his own trade was to be a king, and he soon had a Tory Parliament. After some deliberation he 1692. restored the charter of Massachusetts, not, however, with- out serious changes. The governor was thenceforth to be appointed by the king, not elected by the people. Tol- eration was secured to all religions except the Roman Catholic. The qualification for the franchise was to be property, not church membership. This was the legal end of the theocracy, though practically the theocratic influ- ence still held its ground in the government, and moulded laws as well as manners, while the Congregational minis- try remained on something like the footing of an estab- lished clergy supported by general contributions. The press, without formal emancipation, slipped its neck out of the yoke of the censorship much as it did in England. That the counter revolution was not violent in the colony any more than in the mother country is shown by the re- tention of Dudley, the friend of prerogative, in office. Other foes of theocracy, however, more powerful than the legal enactments of the English king and parliament, were now at work. The system had served as the mould 36 THE UNITED STATES. ciiAr. of New England character and institutions. The Puritan- ism whicli was its informing spirit was now rapidly dying in the colon}^, as after the fall of the Commonwealth it had died in the mother country. Surviving forms of enthusiasm had become hollow ; people could no longer be brought to recount their spiritual experiences to their fellows. To meet the wants of citizens whose parents had contrived, against the strict rule, to have them baptized, but who did not inherit the zeal essential to a full partici- pation in church ordinances and life, " half-way com- munion " was, to the dismay of the saints, introduced. Of the saints themselves the more politic, including Cot- ton Mather, had at last to consent to the compromise. Trade brought immigrants of different religions who could not, like Roger Williams and the Quakers, be cast out. Wealth inclined to the doctrinal laxity and practical in- dulgence as well as to the liturgical pomp and aristocratic associations of the Episcopal church. The Baptists set up an altar against God's altar and would not allow it to be pulled down. Close at hand was Rhode Island, always proclaiming liberty of conscience ; and if her principle was somewhat discredited by political disorder, its enun- ciation could not fail to tell on free spirits. In Boston at this time, according to Dunton, a roving bookseller, there were thirteen bookstores, a formidable mine under the foundations of the theocratic edifice. The ministers were not field preachers ; they received a learned education at Harvard, and with learning the spirit of inquiry found its way. Latitudinarianism began to creep in. Presently Unitarianism raised its head, and in time possessed itself of the government of the University. Even Rationalism, or a tendency which the Calvinist would deem rational- I. THE COLONIES. 37 istic, to limit the domain of the supernatural, was gaining ground. Perception of the invisible world grew faint as interest in the visible world grew strong. Not that Cal- vinism died out ; many years afterwards it shot up with almost terrific force and under its grimmest aspect in the predestinarian writings of Jonathan Edwards and in the revival of which he was the chief. It was, perhaps, fear that the belief in the supernatural, and notably in the supernatural agency of the Evil One, was dying out which led Cotton Mather, a minister of prodigious though ill-digested learning and at the same time full of spiritual self-conceit, to countenance the hor- rible delusion of Salem witchcraft which has left a dark stain on New England history, as readers of Hawthorne's " House of the Seven Gables " know. Belief in witchcraft was an hallucination common to all the churches, and in all of them it had led to judicial murder. In the Church of Rome it had led to judicial murder on the largest scale. No one, not even Blackstone, who believed that the Pen- tateuch was literally inspired, could deny the reality of the crime. Salem, the chief scene of these horrors, was 1892. the original seat of the Massachusetts Bay colony, and over its quiet streets the spirit of. primitive Puritanism still broods. An epidemic of disease had predisposed the minds of the people to an epidemic of superstition. Nine- teen persons were put to death on charges as fantastic as a lunatic's visions, and chiefly on the evidence of wicked or perverted children whose cunning and persistency in their fabrications are not the least remarkable part of the episode. One man who was eighty years of age refusing to plead, that ]ie might save the inheritance of his chil- dren, suffered the penalty of the peine forte et dure, being 38 THE UNITED STATES. chap. pressed to death with heavy weights. Even to Harvard College the tide of delusion seems to have extended. Then came a revulsion of public feeling. The demeanour of some of the victims touched the feelings and shook the convictions of the people. Of the authors of the persecu- tion, some repented. Judge Sewall stood up in church while his declaration of contrition was read. Cotton Mather remained impenitent and probably was only con- firmed in his obduracy by the arguments of Calef, an unlearned but vigorous theologian who attacked the whole belief. Cotton Mather afterwards partly redeemed himself by countenancing, at a great sacrifice of his pop- ularity and at some risk of his life, the introduction of inoculation, which excited the ignorant fury of the mob. Even in him learning begot something of liberality. Judge Sewall also redeemed himself by taking up his parable against slavery. Godliness, even the strictest Puritan godliness, had not interfered with material progress. Through the tem- perance, industry, and frugality which it bred, the other things were added to it. The Canaan of the Puritan exiles was not a land flowing with milk and honey. Though the Virginian exaggerated who said that in New England you had to put in a herring head with every stalk of corn to make it grow, much of the soil was niggard. The American farmer is now deserting it for the fertile expanses of the West. The climate, too, was rigorous. That land may almost rank with the marshes of Holland and the lagoons of Venice as a stern nurse of the industrial virtues. Yet New England raised enough to supply with farm products not only herself but the West Indies. There was ship timber of the best. I I. THE COLONIES. 39 such as furnished the finest masts for the " tall amirals " of the royal fleet. There were abundant fisheries both of cod and whale. All these advantages the New Eng- landers improved to the utmost. They supplied England with timber and marine stores, grew rich and, at the same time, became hardy and adventurous seamen. Pop- ulation increased. Signs of opulence appeared. Houses with seven gables were built. An austere richness marked furniture and apparel. Highways were improved. Snug little inns were opened. The printing press was active, though chiefly in the theological line. There was as yet hardly a legal profession. The people had hitherto been judged not by men learned in the laws, but by the magistrate, as they had been in Israel. That there were physicians we know from an ordinance against quackery, though regular medicine was little better than regular quackery in those days. Meantime, far to the South and for some time separated from New England by a Dutch plantation, in a land and an air physically more genial, morally less happy, another group of communities had been growing up. These were colonies of the same mother country as New England, but widely different from her in religious, social, and political character, destined presently to be joined to her in an ill-starred union, then to come to an inevitable rup- ture with the confederation of which she was the soul, and after a desperate struggle to be subjugated and re-annexed. New England was the leading shoot, the moulding force, the prevailing spirit; but Virginia, the queen of the southern group, was the elder colony. 40 THE UNITED STATES. chap. 385-7. Virginia, as we have seen, had been saved when on the point of extinction by John Smith, a true Elizabethan hero and not the least bright star of the constellation, though, like Raleigh and the rest, he was probably not of the regular type of virtue, nor free from a boastfulness which scorned the limits of fact. This man knew what a colony was and how it differed from a gold-hunt. " Who," he asked, " can desire more content that hath small means, or but only his merits to advance his for- tunes, than to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life ? If he have but the taste of virtue and magnanimity, what to such a mind can be more pleasant than planting and building a founda- tion for his posterity, got from the rude earth by God's blessing and his own industry without prejudice to any ? " Smith departed under a cloud of sorrow, but he had triumphed. The Virginia Company sent out supplies and re-inforcements, above all a cargo of maids as wives for the settlers, and the colony struggled into permanent 1610. existence. Then came Lord Delaware as governor with a state rather beyond the needs and means of the colony, whereat rough settlers grumbled, but with power and will to put down misrule. He struck the key note for Virginian society by repairing the dilapidated church at Jamestown, giving it pews and a chancel of cedar, a communion table of black walnut, a lofty pulpit, and bells. Himself regularly attended in full dress with his officers and council, and a guard of fifty halberdiers in red cloaks, and sat in the choir in a green velvet chair with a velvet cushion to kneel on. Though no longer gold-seekers but real colonists, the men of Virginia were not such colonists as the Puritans. I. THE COLONIES. 41 They were more akin in character to the Spaniard on the south of them, who made the Indian work for him, than to the New Englander, who worked for himself. To work for them they had from the first a number of in- dentured servants, or bondsmen, jail-birds, many of them ; some kidnapped by press gangs in the streets of London, all of depraved character. Afterwards came in ever-in- creasing volume African slavery, the destined bane of Virginia and her ultimate ruin. Thus were formed the j three main orders of Virginian society: the planter oli- garchy ; the " poor whites," or as the negro dubbed them, "mean white trash"; and the negro slaves. Middle class, in the proper sense of the term, there could hardly be. The poor whites were destined, after two centuries of a barbarous and debased existence, to end in a blaze of glory as the heroic infantry of the South. Virginia was not like New England, cooped between mountains and the sea ; nor was the soil niggard, though it was rapidly exhausted by slave labour. The planters were far apart, taking each of them instead of the small lots of the New Englander, large tracts of land. Popu- lation instead of being condensed as in New England was I scattered, and life was isolated instead of being intensely ! social. There was nothing worthy of the name of a town, j much less of a city ; thougli Jamestown, and afterwards I Williamsburg, was the capital of politics, pleasure, and sport. There were no townships nor township politics. The divisions were shires or colossal parishes. The parish, as a designation at once ecclesiastical and administrative, was adopted from England. The country being inter- sected by rivers, each plantation could have, and prided itself on having a wharf of its own, at which, as a port 42 THE UNITED STATES. chap. of entry, ships could load and unload. As each planter dealt directly with the old country, there were no great seaports nor centres of distribution. Virginia's staple was tobacco, which could be well grown by slave labour, and required large estates because it was exhausting to the soil. This narcotic, the demand for which increased fast in Europe, was, as King James I thought, " the diabolical source" of Virginia's wealth and grandeur. An official personage, practically-minded, to whom a Virginian de- legation had commended a measure for the good of souls, replied, " Damn your souls, grow tobacco." An attempt was made to introduce silk-growing but it came to noth- ing. Industry of the higher kinds is shut out by slavery ; the population to which it gives birth would be socially and politically fatal, as well as economically alien, to a slave-owning community. It shows the crudity of Vir- ginian commerce that tobacco was not only the staple but the currency of the province, long after New England had discarded the use of wampum or bullets as money. Such was the birth of that famous planter-aristocracy which made so desperate a fight against democracy, first in the political arena, then on many a field of battle. It dwelt, save when it was debating, dancing, or racing at the capital, in lonely grandeur beside its broad rivers and private wharves, in mansions styled baronial, and in what it deemed manorial state, fed b}'^ the labour of slaves, and surrounded by the servility of poor whites. It rode in its coaches-and-six, the six horses being probably not more than enough to drag the family chariot over colonial roads. It had its trains of black lacqueys in brilliant liveries, which the}^ hustled on when a stranger approached. But in its life and abodes there Avere less of comfort and of real THE COLONIES. 43 elegance than of grandeur. It spent its time a little in politics, more in fox-hunting, racing, gambling, cock-figlit- ing, and general dissipation. It had plenty on its board, and commonly drank too much wine. It was hospitable, as rich men without neighbours and craving for company always are. It had something, and fancied that it had much of the grand manner, the social grace, the chivalrous sentiment, which marked the territorial aristocracies of Europe. It was no doubt brave and mettlesome, rode well, iwas good at field sports, had a quick sense of conventional honour, and was ready to fight duels. Of course, living by the sweat of other men's brows, it was free from any- thing that is sordid in the industrial or commercial char- acter. Not parsimony but prodigality was its fault, and while it was master of many slaves it was apt itself to be the slave of debt. Some of the planters had, among their English equipments, English books, and prided themselves on their acquaintance with the British classics ; but the average amount of culture among them was probably low, and their College of William and Mary was no mate for Harvard. The appearance of slavery on the scene when other slavery had almost disappeared from the face of the civil- ized world opened a new chapter of evil. It was the slavery of colour, indelible, without hope of fusion, ut- terly debased and debasing, and of all slaveries the most degraded. Its character was impressed on the slave law. The black," to use a phrase afterwards made memorable, "had no rights which the white man was bound to re- spect." A master was not answerable for the murder of his slave, the law assuming that he would not wantonly destroy his own property. A code of terror guarded the 44 THE UNITED STATES. chai-. master class. Fugitive slaves were hunted down like wild beasts and the fugitive might lawfully be shot by anyone on sight. To quiet all doubt it was expressly enacted that conversion to Christianity was no bar to slavery. In- termarriage between whites and blacks was forbidden as incest, so that the gulf between the races was impassable. If a woman bore children to a white man, she carried them with her into slavery, and an American historian tells us that the offspring of men of station might be seen in the slave mart. Emancipation was not encouraged, and the emancipated negro was treated as a suspected pariah. The edge of the law seems to have been sharpened in Virginia after a negro insurrection. It is not to be sup- posed that the picture which such legislation presents was that of a Virginian planter's household. In the household the relation between master and slave no doubt was often patriarchal and kind, though even there the slave can hardly have risen morally or intellectually to a higher condition than that of a well treated horse or dog. But on large plantations, such as were multiplied in after times, more in other slave States than in Virginia, there being no personal tie between master and slave, the slave was a beast of labour to be used up without mercy. No community which had such a code could be healthy, or fail at last to be brought into conflict with the advance of moral civilization. Even with regard to the indentured servants the law was harsh and degrading. They were liable to the penalty of branding, and their terms of ser- vice might for delinquencies real or pretended be pro- longed to perpetual servitude. Such social conditions might, like those under which the Roman aristocracy was formed, give birth to regicides, but they could scarcely crive birth to republicans of the true stamp. THE COLONIES. 45 The political development of the southern colonies, like their industrial and social development, presented a strong contrast to that of New England commonwealths. The industrial and social character of a community is sure, in spite of constitutional forms, to draw the political char- acter with it. The New England colonies were practical republics, owing a nominal allegiance and paying occa- sional homage to a monarchy on the other side of the Atlantic. Virginia, after some fluctuations between char- tered self-government and vice-regal rule, became a colonial monarchy after the English pattern, with a governor who was the delegate of the king and a little image of royal majesty, a council, nominated by the governor, which faintly represented the House of Lords, and a representa- tive assembly which stood in the place of the House of Commons. A governor wielded more personal power than was left to the king at home, and exercised his veto freely when that of the king had been virtually resigned. He also exercised freely his military powers and his powers of appointment. The assembly, however, retained the power of the purse. The suffrage was at one time general ; after- wards it was limited to property. But nominal freedom or limitation mattered little, since power was really in the hands of the planters on whom most of the poor whites were dependent. The planters of each shire administered local government and justice in conclaves like the English quarter sessions, and with more than the authority of the English squire. In oligarchical Virginia, taxation took the form of a poll-tax, whereas in republican New England people were taxed according to their means. The oligarchs were not the more inclined to submit to political slavery because they owned slaves. They were tenacious of their 46 THE UNITED STATES. chap. own constitutional rights as Englishmen. These they maintained proudly against the governor, as the Barons had maintained them against the English king, and so far they were in political training for the revolution. The Church of England was established, though in a loose and rather ragged way, without a hierarchy, as well as devoid of the cathedrals and the ancient churches which are the pillars of her ascendancy in her own land. Disper- sion of the population must have been much against church going, and in Virginia there was probably little of religious life. Such notices as we have of clerical habits lead us to think that there was at least one Parson TruUiber to every Parson Adams, perhaps to every Dr. Primrose. The parson, like everybody else in the primitive state of com- merce, was paid not in money but in tobacco. There were laws against papists as in England, and there was the same contumelious toleration of dissenters. In Western Virginia was a settlement of Presbyterians, driven by persecuting bishops from Ireland with hearts full of bitter feeling against the English church and government, as they were afterwards to show. Here there was religion, and the settlement was one day to give birth to a singular mixture of Old Testament piety with slavery militant, in the per- son of " Stonewall " Jackson. Saving the tinge of culture boasted by some of the plant- ers, there was no education or literature. A good royal governor could say in 1670, " I thank God there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience int( > the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of Governments : God keep us from both." In a slave state a system of free schools or general education on THE COLONIES. 47 any footing would not only have been uncongenial, it would have been dynamite. Schools even for the rich there were few, if any. Young planters were brought up at home under tutors who usually had not much to teach, and whose pupils were not likely to be docile. Of the wealthiest some went to the universities of the old land. Law and medicine must have been weak. Virginia had of all the colonies the best reputation at the English court. It was royalist to the core and thoroughly loyal. Of this its title " The Old Dominion " is a monu- ment. It denounced as impious the execution of Charles I and afforded an asylum to many of the defeated cavaliers, whose traditions could not fail to import a fresh strain of loyalty into the Virginian character. It bowed to the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, but exulted in the Restoration. There was, however, a Puritan section, which having raised its head under the Commonwealth, resisted the Absolutist and Anglican reaction and could only be put down by force. That was the time of Governor Berke- 1642. ley, who so frankly uttered his sentiments on the subject of free schools and printing. He was the model of a royalist governor, able and apparently beneficent in his way, but a devout believer in prerogative and an extermi- nator of Puritans and Republicans. His vigour brought on a rebellion which seems to have had its origin among the freemen of the poorer class and was headed by a Virginian Gracchus named Bacon. This for a moment convulsed the colony. Jamestown was razed to the ground by the insur- gents. But Bacon died suddenly in mid-career. His fol- 167(). lowing, drawn from a small and feeble section, at once broke up, and the governor held a Bloody Assize which is said to have brought on him a contemptuous ejaculation 48 THE UNITED STATES. chap. from Charles II, who was not a man of blood except when mercy would give more trouble. Bacon's rebellion seems to have been brought on partly by a suspicion that the governor had an underhand con- nection for commercial purposes with the Indians, and was disposed to protect them against the whites. The relations of the two races in the land of Pocahontas were pretty murderous, and could hardly fail to affect the character of the dominant race, but the Indians of the South were less ferocious and formidable than those whom the Puritan encountered in the North. 1633. Maryland, in its origin, was in two respects peculiar ; it was founded not by a chartered company but by a proprietor, and its projector was a Roman Catholic. Lord Baltimore, a statesman who had taken great interest in colonization and had convinced himself that companies failed through mismanagement and greed, obtained a grant of the territory from the crown. He was a convert to Roman Catholicism, and endowed the colony with toleration for the special benefit of a church which, else- where dominant and persecuting, was depressed and persecuted in England. Lord Baltimore dying, his son Cecil founded Maryland. Jesuits came out with the first colonists and began their missionary work among the Indians. Neither of the peculiar features, however, proved lasting. The proprietor, whose authority was hy his patent that of a prince palatine, found it necessary to compound with the English tendencies of the free settlers and allow himself to be reduced to the position of a con- stitutional ruler, with an assembly of the usual kind, in which was vested the all-important power of taxation. I. THE (.MJLONIES. 49 By the victory of Puritanism over Charles I in England, Puritanism in Maryland, where it formed an element of the motley population, Avas incited to strike for power, and it defeated the party of the Pope and the Proprietary in a little pitched battle at Providence. In that fight, as at Naseby and Worcester, according to the Puritan writer of "Babylon's Fall in England," " God did appear wonder- ful in the field and in the hearts of the people : all con- fessed Him to be the only worker of this victory and deliverance." With the Restoration returned the govern- jment of the Proprietary, well administered by Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, under whom religious quarrels were hushed, toleration reigned, tobacco was grown, and the province prospered. But the Revolution in England brought another rising of Protestants against toleration of the Catholics, and in the end Maryland was made a royal province, received a royal governor, and was settled politically on the regular model with a council and representative assembly. The ecclesiastical settle- ment was finally the same, in form at least, as that of England, the Church of England being established, though probably in little force, and Protestant dissenters being tolerated, while toleration was, at least legally, withheld from Catholics in the colony of their own foundation. The culture of tobacco led to the employ- ment of slave labour. Maryland was drawn within the fatal circle of the slave States, and became the do- main of a planter class like that of Virginia, but less oligarchical. Nothing in political physiology is more marked than the influence of tobacco, cotton, and rice on the social and political character of the Southern States. 50 THE UNITED STATES. chap. 1671 The Carolinas, like Maryland, were a proprietary colony 1700. founded by a group of leading men in England, to whom Charles II made a rather blind grant of a territory already in part occupied by settlers, and who appear not only to have been desirous of gain but ambitious of founding a model community. Among them was Shaftesburj^ whose hand we seem to trace in a special clause peculiar to this charter, which in consideration of the distance from home authorized the proprietaries to establish any religion they chose, a curious indication of the political character of the English State religion. For an ideal constitution the proprietaries applied to the wisdom of Locke, and the wisdom of Locke gave them a Grand Model which, especially considering that it was intended for the rough population of a new settlement, may be regarded as the most awful of warnings to political castle builders. It is an ineffable structure of the feudal type, with a hierarchy of hereditary land owners under the names of Landgraves and Caciques — the latter name being probably intended as a compliment to native sentiment — a division of the land into seignories, and, what seems incredible as a proposal of Locke, a race of hereditary tenants attached like villeins-regardant to the soil. To keep government in the hands of intelligence and property seems to have been the philosopher's aim. This scheme the proprie- taries actually tried to put in force. It could produce nothing but disgust, revolt, and confusion. The only thing in it worthy of Locke is complete religious tolera- tion. In the course of the political squabbles which inevi- tably ensued. South Carolina was severed from North Carolina and transferred from the proprietaries to a royal governor. Into North Carolina, attracted by toleration. I. THE COLONIES. 51 came Huguenots from France, persecuted Covenanters from Scotland and other religious refugees, whose char- acter, together with the climate and husbandry of an upland country, was the saving of North Carolina, so that though in the slave group she was scarcely of it. But of South Carolina the staple became partly the fatal tobacco, largely the yet more fatal staple of rice, grown on swampy tracts where white men could not work. The consequence was a large importation of negro slaves. South Carolina had also a sinister connection with the slave-owning and buccaneering West Indies. Corsairs such as Captain Kidd and Black Beard found shelter in her ports. In the upshot she became the typical slave state, the heart of slavery and the focus of all the ideas and all the ambitions connected with the sys- tem ; while Charleston, her social capital and seaport, became the paradise of planter society with its luxury, state, and pride. Her slave code transcended even that of Virginia in cruelty, and expressed still more vividly the terrors of a dominant race. Everyone who found a slave abroad without a pass was to flog him on the spot. All negro houses were to be searched once a fort- night for arms and for stolen goods. For the fourth lar- ceny a slave was to suffer death, and the kind of death was left to the discretion of the judge. For running away a fourth time the slave was to undergo mutilation. For punishing a slave so that he died, no one was to suffer any penalty. For the wilful murder of a slave the penalty was a fine of forty pounds. It need not be supposed igoo that the most revolting articles of the code were often j^^g put in force or that they represent the general relations between master and slave. 52 THE UNITED STATES. chap. 1733. Georgia was founded by the philanthropic General Oglethorpe, whose heart had been wi'ung with pity for the sufferings of debtors imprisoned under the barbarous law of those days. It was to be the refuge of the pauper and the bankrupt, and was to empty the workhouses of England. Another object was the erection of a bulwark against the Spaniards of Florida. Unluckily the settlers chosen, instead of being labourers, were men who had failed in trade and were good for nothing as husbandmen. 1734. Better elements of population came in, Highlanders, Moravians, Protestants of Salzburg expelled by their persecuting Prince Bishop. But the shiftless and lazy immigrants called at once for rum, which had been pro- hibited, and for slaves to do the work. By the workers the entrance of slavery was opposed, but the climate and the contagion of the neighbouring colonies prevailed. Slavery forced its entrance, and Georgia was numbered with the slave states. It is not on the government of the mother country that in this case the blame can be cast. 1736. In its earlier days the colony was the scene of an unfort- unate episode in the life of Wesley, who there, after a strange love affair, encountered an evil-speaking genera- tion ; and of the preaching of Whitefield, who kindled a flame of religion by his preaching, but pleaded for slav- ery, seeing in it an instrument of conversion. Whatever the special fancy of a founder might be, climate, soil, and natural circumstances generally, together with human nature, soon prevailed over his will. Model colonies are apt to come to nothing except as they may enlist settlers of high character, and thus lay a good social foundation. THE COLONIES. 53 The group of Middle States was formed round the Dela- ware, New York, and Chesapeake bays. Pennsylvania, as 1681. all know, was the philanthropic Utopia of the renowned and somewhat enigmatic character whose name it bears. Quakerism was by tliis time clothed and in its right mind. It had passed from George Fox to Barclay. It was be- coming commercial, even eminently commercial, and its political quietism, which in Penn assumed the form of an equivocal connection with the court, distinguished it fa- vourably from the political sects in the eyes of the Stuarts. Partly in satisfaction of a debt due from the crown to his estate, Penn was made lord of Pennsylvania with almost kingly powers, including those of peace and war, which he of course intended to exercise only in the interests of peace. His scheme of government was popu- lar. He renounced for himself and his successors any power of doing mischief, " that the will of one man might not hinder the good of the whole country." The other characteristics which he impressed upon his settlement were religious toleration, a mild criminal law with the reformation of the criminal in view, and good treatment of the Indians. Toleration was extended to all who be- lieved in God and would be good citizens, though Chris- tianity was recognized as the religion of the community by the enforced observance of Sunday. Murder was the only capital offence. There was a moral and social code of the Puritan type, but there was little of theocratic power to enforce it. To Penn's good treatment of the Indians his colony owed peace in that quarter and uninterruj^ted progress. Slavery was not excluded. That Penn himself once held slaves a will, though not his last, remains to show ; but he strove, though in vain, to secure for the 54 THE UNITED STATES. chap. slaves the right of legal marriage. The soil and climate, however, combined with the general character of the set- tlers, shut out the pest. To Pennsylvania presently came a large exodus of Germans, driven from their homes by war. They gave the province a body of laborious hus- bandmen, but rather bucolic citizens. Their descendants, who are called the Pennsylvania Dutch, have preserved the two-fold character as well as the traces of their an- cestral language. Penn, in spite of his philanthropy and liberalism, became embroiled like other governors and proprietaries with his lieges. His son, whom evil associa- tions had made a libertine, renounced Quakerism in wrath at the treatment of his father by the sect. Toleration made Pennsylvania a religious museum. In it, besides the Quakers, were Anglicans, Lutherans, Scotch Presby- terians, Palatines, Ridge Hermits, Dunkers, and Pietists. Roman Catholics alone were here, as elsewhere, under a ban of suspicion which the persecuting violence of Louis XIV and the Prince Bishop of Salzburg might partly excuse. Power, with a large share of the commerce and wealth of which Philadelphia became the seat, was in the hands of the Quakers, who as rulers were prudent, thrifty, and always averse from war. To war, however necessary, they would contribute only under the form which satisfied their own consciences, of a gift to the government, for the use of which the conscience of the government was to answer, or, as on one occasion they did, as a supply for the purchase of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain, the other grain being understood to be gunpowder. Their institu- tions sustained their reputation for philanthropy, and by them the first lunatic asylum in America was founded. 1614. New York, which its ample territory and the possession If I. THE COLONIES. 65 of the most magnificent of harbours have now made the lMii[)ire State and the seat of the commercial capital of the I 11 ion, was originally New Netherlands, a Dutch colony founded in the golden age of Holland's naval greatness. Delaware, the neighbouring state, was a colony of Sweden IGl'7. founded in the glorious days of Gustavus Adolphus. The butchman by his superior power mastered the Swede ; the Englishman mastered the Dutchman. Hardly could 10G4. the two groups of English colonies north and south have buffered a wedge of alien dominion to be thrust between ^hem. Dutch colonization seems to have been barely n a par with Dutch commerce and seamanship. New Netherlands was dominated by the patroons, magnates invested with vast grants of land, who exercised seignorial sway and lived in seignorial state. The ancient title is still cherished, and about half a century ago the claim of a patroon for services to be rendered by the tenants upon what liad once been his domain gave birth to a petty civil war. At Albany are still Dutch houses, Dutch faces, and families rejoicing in Dutch pedigrees. There is still a Dutch Reformed Church, and an old lady being told that " Dutch " was to be dropped in order that the char- acter of the church might be universal, replied that she did not want the church to be universal, it was the church of the old Dutch families of that state. After going through the usual political struggles and sufferings — a temporary suspension of her liberties under James II and his satrap Andros followed by a tragi-comic revolution in which Leisler, a patriot leader, mounted the scaffold of Russell and Algernon Sidney — New York settled down politically into the regular form of the English constitution adapted to the colonies, and with the usual constitutional 56 THE UNITED STATES. chai'. bickerings between the governor and the assembly, the quarrel being chiefly here as elsewhere about money. ir)G4. New Jersey was created by dismemberment from New York. It had a motley population and hardly any history distinct from that of the larger state. It became a coun- try of gentlemen farmers with a peasantry. It received, however, a colony of persecuted Covenanters which made it one of the chief seats of Presbyterianism and of which Princeton University may be regarded as a noble memorial. The population of the New England colonies was almost purely English, and reflected the virtues and faults of English character as seen in the Englishman of the middle class, though with Puritan and colonial modifications. The population of the Middle States was very mixed. It comprised, besides Englishmen, detachments or waifs of almost every protestant nation and church in Europe : Scotch Highlanders and Lowlanders, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, Germans from different parts of German}-. Moravians, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and a few Jews. But almost everywhere the English language prevailed. Every- where there was a constitution after the British model, with a governor representing the king or proprietary, and a representative assembly with two houses answering to the two Houses of Parliament. Local self-government in the Middle States was a mean between the intense local life of the New England townships and the political lan- guor of the Virginian shire. There were not generally any common schools or any regular provision for education, but there was education, there was learning, printing was free. Practical toleration prevailed, saving an occasional outbreak of intolerance against Roman Catholics, whose THE COLONIES. 57 church, it must be borne in mind, was always giving pro- vocation by persecuting wherever she had the power. The social code was far less strict than in Puritan New Eng- land. The keeping of the Sabbath was probably about the only Puritan law that was really enforced. Theatri- cals, sternly banished from New England, found reception in the Middle States. Slavery everywhere existed by law, but it was kept down by the ascendancy of free labour and by the nature of the products. That the negro in New York was a slave appeared with dire distinctness when, in consequence of a vague alarm of incendiarism in New York city, upon evidence utterly disreputable and 1741. without fair trial, thirteen negroes were burnt at the stake and eighteen were hanged. A Catholic priest, accused of instigating the negroes, was with them judicially murdered. With James II royal tyranny ceased, but parliamentary 1688. tyranny began. Parliament, now the supreme power, made itself the legislative organ of a commercial interest, ! animated by that blind and unscrupulous greed which has been the bane and disgrace of commerce and continues to animate the monopolist at the present day. By the Trade and Navigation Acts England sought to engross not only the carrying trade but the general trade of her colonies, and shut them out from the markets of the world. In doing this she only followed the practice of the time, and gave effect to the belief universally accepted, and endorsed even by Montesquieu, that colonies were planted for the commercial benefit of the imperial country. No one had yet learned to think of them as the germs of inde- pendent nations. The real interests even of the imperial 58 THE UNITED STATES. chap. country were sacrificed, as Adam Smith showed, to those of the merchants, who were the principal instigators of the poHcy. So far, however, from being the chiefest. Great Britain was the least of sinners in this respect, and Adam Smith might say with truth that her policy was less illib- eral and oppressive than that of any other nation. France strangled by monopoly the fur trade of Canada. Spain allowed her colonists to trade only with the single port of Cadiz. England, while she trammelled the trade of her colonies afforded them the best of markets ; especially did she afford the best of markets for the timber and marine stores of New England. More odious even than the re- straints upon colonial trade were the restraints upon colonial manufactures. The colonists were not allowed to make woollens, steel, hats, or any other articles by the manufacture of which they would compete with the mother country. This seemed no injustice to Chatham, who pro- claimed the right of the imperial country to restrain the colonies from manufacturing even a horseshoe or a hobnail. Royal claims to trees of a certain size, as the perquisite of the royal navy, had been at one time a just cause of discontent. If England crippled colonial trade with her restrictions she tried to foster it with bounties, while of the articles most important to colonial trade some were exempt from restrictions. The Navigation Act seems to have stimulated colonial ship-building which was very prosperous. Yet the system might have been intolerable had not the pressure of the commercial fetters been re- lieved by salutary smuggling. In fact the commercial restrictions seem to have been systematically disregarded. 1695. The Board of Trade, which had been called into existence by the growth of British commerce, acted as the guardian THE COLONIES. 59 power of British monopoly, having its sentinels in the colonial governors, on whose information it was always complaining of violations of the Trade and Navigation Acts. It had even the assurance to propose the abroga- tion of such colonial charters as remained, in order that the sweep of its action might be unconfined. After all, the gains of the imperial country itself from this wretched policy cannot liave anything like equalled the expense of defending the colonies. Certainly they did not counter- vail the indirect losses from the depression of the colonial trade, the benefit of which, had it been allowed free de- velopment, England more than any other nation would have enjoyed. : Wrangling between the governor as the organ of pre- rogative and the assembly as the trustee of liberty went on in almost all the colonies ; Virginia and Maryland almost alone enjoying, in their later days at least, some- thing like political peace. The executive, fitfully sup- j3orted by the home government, strove to make itself independent by means of fixed revenues and salaries, while the assembly strove to keep the executive depend- ent on it by a system of annual grants. Supplies for the colonial wars were another subject of contention, especially when the colony lay remote from the seat of war. Nor iWas there less of niggardliness and fractiousness on the side of the assemblies than there was of a disposition to encroach on the side of the representatives of the crown. These embroilments are recounted with glee by historians who deem them the training school of patriotism and pre- paratory to the struggle for independence. But such a view would seem to identify patriotism with resistance to government and to glorify revolution. The revolution in 60 THE UNITED STATES. chap. which these bickerings ended in fact did not a little to foster such sentiments. Anglo-Saxon love of liberty in I the colonies, strong from the beginning, needed no such u contentious training, and right reason will only deplore 1 ,a the retention of a tie of which strife was the inevitable I |l consequence, which was at last broken by civil war, and i has left a heritage of malignant memories behind. Revo- lution is the medicine not the bread of nations, and genu- ine patriotism in ordinary times is loyal co-operation with authority. Of the governors sent out from England, some were bad, being men appointed from corrupt motives in an era of political corruption, ruined retainers of a party who came to retrieve their fortunes, sometimes by illicit means, or Englishmen ignorant of colonial character and unsuited in temper for their work. But some, as Bellomont in New York, Spotswood in Virginia, Calvert in Maryland, Archdale and Blake in Carolina, were good ; and when the governor was good, it is not unlikely that for quiet citizens, for all to whom politics were not a trade or a game, his rule may have been as beneficent and as moral as any which this continent has seen or is likely soon to see. One good service the governors, and the home gov- ernment by which they were supported, certainly did, they repressed the general tendency of the colonies to raise the wind by the issue of paper money. Appointments to sub- ordinate offices in the colonies seem to have been abused and the evil probably extended to the judiciary. Such was sure, especially in bad times, to be the consequence of attempting to govern across an ocean a country greatly differing from the imperial country in circumstances and in the character of its people. Mutual ignorance was and always will be in itself fatal to transatlantic tutelage. t. THE COLONIES. 61 Another source of friction was the endeavour of the Church of England to establish itself in the colonies on the necks of those upon whom high churchmen looked down IS dissenters. The Societj^ for the Propagation of the Gos- pel did good work in improving the character of the colo- nial clergy, but it was a society for the propagation of spiscopacy at the same time. Episcopacy was backed by jhe court and the Tory party, ever faithful to the policy of jhe monarch who said "no Bishop, no King." The Rev. iMr. Miller, an episcopal clergyman, writing from New i^ork to the Bishop of London, gives a deplorable picture [)f colonial society in which he says : " God's grace having jeen withdrawn, the Evil One has it all his own way." 3f this the cause in Mr. Miller's opinion is that there are fio churches but only meeting houses with none but " pre- tended ministers," who, if thej^ have any orders at all, are Presbyterians or Independents and are slaves to the pleas- i-ire of their congregations. His specific is the importation Df a bishop as suffragan to the Bishop of London with a salary of £1,500 a year and the King's Farm for his palace. The " pretended ministers " would be sure to concur with j:he Evil One in objecting to the application of this remedy. JTo the Puritan of New England above all episcopacy was most hateful. Dread of its introduction disposed the puritan clergy to revolution. Added to all was the general tendency of the imperial people to bear themselves haughtily towards those of the iependencies and of the people of the dependencies to resent imperial haughtiness. This was an inevitable incident of the relation. Every citizen of the imperial country felt himself, as Franklin said, part of a sovereign ; and while the colonist acknowledged a superior his vanity smarted. In some measure it is so still. 62 THE UNITED STATES. chap. By this time the political press was bom, the New England Coiwant having appeared in 1722 and a political journal at New York having been brought out not long afterwards ; and, though the giant was yet in the cradle, journalism was not long in becoming an organ of democratic agitation. It appears that in 1765, when the fatal era was approaching, there were over forty newspapers in America. Unwillingness to submit to imperial control and nascent tendencies towards independence were already visible, and formed the burden of complaints transmitted by colonial governors or officers to the home government. Admiral Warren, who had been acting with New Englanders, describes them to the ministry as having " the highest notions of the rights and liberties of Englishmen and indeed as almost Levellers." A suspicion that the plantations were " not without thoughts of throwing off their depend- ence " prevailed in England, and the lieutenant governor of New York exhorted his lieges to allay it by a grant of a fixed revenue. It is true that in reply the members of the assembly took it upon themselves to vouch that not one person in the province had any such thought or desire, "for under what government could they be better protected or their liberties so well secured? " The colonists of Englandil did enjoy of political liberty a large, of personal liberty a full, measure. In spite of all the commercial restrictions the colonies greatly prospered, their population rapidly increased, and most favourable pictures of their condition and progress were drawn by observers at the time. 170G A characteristic as well as a memorable product of colo- jygo nial civilization at this epoch was Benjamin Franklin, by birth and education a New Englander, by adoption a Penn- sylvanian. He cannot be said to have been an offspring I. THE COLONIES. 63 of the theocracy, inasmuch as he was a latitudinarian in religion and had a natural son. But he was an offspring of New England Puritanism grown mellow. His commer- cial shrewdness, his practical inventiveness, his fundamental integrity, his public spirit, his passion for improvement, were native to his community in the phase which it had now reached, no less than were his " Poor Richard " phi- losophy of life and the absence in him of anything spiritual or romantic. He it was who in his boyhood had suggested to his father that much time might be saved by saying grace at once over the whole barrel of red herrings. He leads up the mighty army of American inventors. At the same time though no revolutionist by nature he was the destined harbinger of the Revolution. He had been the first projector of a general union of the colonies. His figure marks the transition to the revolutionary and national period which is now opening from that of the Puritan commonwealth. CHAPTER II. KEVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. TT cannot be too often repeated that the rehation between the imperial country and a colonial dependency was radically false. It became more manifestly false as tlie colony grew in strength and every conceivable need of tutelage passed away. Separation was sure to come. It was visibly approaching. But its arrival was delayed, the tie of affection between the mother country and her off- spring was for a time renewed, and the shadow on the dial which hastened towards the fatal hour was turned 1689 backward by the series of struggles in which Great jygg Britain and her colonies were together engaged with France, the long arm of whose ambition reaching from Quebec round to the valley of the Mississippi threatened, or seemed to threaten, not only the ascendancy but the security of Englishmen in the new world, while native savages under French Catholic instigation were always harassing the Protestant settlements of New England. The population of French Canada compared with that of the English colonies was very small, but all French Canadians of military age were fighting men. Their force was wielded by the single will of a military gov- ernor such as Frontenac or Montcalm, and with them were the regular troops of conquering France. The 64 CHAP. II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 65 Indian was mainly on the side of the Frenchman, who amalgamated with him more easily than the Englishman, nor did the Jesuit shrink from launching his savage con- vert with tomahawk and firebrand on the villages of the heretic. The English colonies had no sufficient bond apart from their common allegiance to the empire to unite them against a foe whose union was complete. Besides their disputes with the royal governors they had quarrels among themselves about boundaries, about relations with the Indians, about shares of responsibility for the cost of colonial wars. Even their commercial union was imperfect. It was difBcult to induce such of them as were remote from the point of danger to con- tribute to the common defence. An attempt was made to bring about a defensive union. It was earnestly sup- ported by Franklin who to his account of the loss of a fort added a picture of a rattle-snake cut into thirteen pieces with the motto " Join or Die." But the plan when framed pleased neither the colonists, who thought there was too much in it of royal supremacy, nor the crown, which thought there was too much in it of independence. In fact the colonies could not fully feel the necessity, so long as they were united under the imperial government and led by its commanders. Nor were English colonists piilitary like the French, but agricultural and commer- cial, though, as the stormy waters witnessed, they were strong and brave. Wolfe said of his North American Rangers that they were the worst soldiers in the universe, a censure which, however, must have referred more to lack of discipline than of valour and was inapplicable to bush-fighting with Indians, as the rout of Braddock's regulars and the protection of their retreat by Washing- 66 THE UNITED STATES. ( ton's Virginian Militia had shown. Ships of war the colonies had none. Hardly without the aid of British armies, fleets, and commanders would colonial prowess havi prevailed over the warlike bush rangers of Quebec with tb 1744. armies, fleets, and generals of France. A colonial expedi- tion took Louisbourg, the Gibraltar of North Americ; without the aid of British troops ; but the works of Lou bourg were then weak, the garrison was ill-provided am mutinous, the commandant was irresolute, and when his] supplies were cut off by a British fleet he surrendered Otherwise this famous enterprise, undertaken in a fit of enthusiasm, religious as well as military, and led by crusaders ignorant of war, would probably have failed. Better for the colonists than British protection against France, for which they paid by entanglement in European quarrels, would have been a compact of colonial neutral- ity, exempting the American colonies of European powers from wars between the imperial countries. Such a pro- ject had been framed and even embraced, but it proved abortive. As it was. New England might have been worsted in the struggle with New France had not the protecting arm of Old England been stretched over her. Though the war was European, it was in no merely British quarrel that British blood was poured out and British treasure lavished on the American field. Brad- dock may have been arrogant and blundering, but the facti remains that he and his soldiers were there at England's cost to defend her American children against the French and their Indian allies. Not for Great Britain alone, but for the British race and for its ascendancy on this con- tinent the red coats conquered on the heights of Abraham J7oO. i,nd Wolfe died. 11. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 67 That colonial loyalty was in a great measure fear of France and that the colonists, as soon as England had rid them of that fear, would break the tie, was the surmise of shrewd and cynical observers at the time. Yet Americans will hardly upbraid the mother country with blindness in not foreseeing that result. When the question arose whether Great Britain should retain Canada or take a sugar island which to herself would have been more valu- able, Franklin pressed on her the retention of Canada. Assuming his advice to have been sincere he must have trusted colonial gratitude. There was at all events a tran- sient renewal of love. ■ When Quebec fell the bonfires of 1759. loyalty were lighted. England and Chatham were in all colonial hearts. If only that happy moment could have been seized for parting in peace ! If when the British flag was run up on the great stronghold of France, the mother country could have said to the child, "I have done for you all that a parent could do, I have secured to you the dominion of the new world, you have outgrown my pro- tection and control, follow henceforth your own destiny, cultivate your magnificent heritage and be grateful to the arm which helped to win it for you ! " Had those unuttered words been spoken, how different might have been the his- Itory of our race, perhaps to the end of time ! It is needless and would be painful to recount to English- men the annals of a quarrel which fills a too familiar page in English history, and wretched as it was on both sides, went nearer through its European extension than even the domination of Louis XIV or the conquests of Napoleon to bringing the head of England low among the nations. Few require to be again told how when England was burdened by a heavy debt contracted in the war, George 68 THE UNITED STATES. Grenville in an evil hour bethought him of making tb colonies contribute to their own defence, while he enforcei at the same time with calamitous industry the fiscal la^ and the restrictions on trade ; how to raise revenue for 1704. colonial army he imposed the stamp duty ; how the coL nists resisted and Chatham applauded their resistance ; how by Rockingham with Burke at his side the stamp 1766. duty was repealed, while with the repealing act was un- happily coupled, to save imperial honour, a declaration of the power of Parliament to bind the colonies by its legislation in all cases; how peace and a measure of good feeling were thereby restored ; how Townshend usurping command of the government during an eclipse of Chatham madly re-opened the fatal issue by the im- 1767. position of a number of import duties ; how Parliament gave a careless assent to Townshend's proposal ; how colonial resistance was renewed; how while the other duties were repealed pride and obstinacy retained the tea duty as a proof of power ; how strife again broke out and ended only with the destruction of the unity of the British race. Nor would it be profitable to rehearse arguments which were mostly in the air, though they had too practi- cal an influence on the conduct of statesmen and of politi- cal assemblies. A sovereign power there must have been somewhere. Where could it be but in the Imperial Parlia- ment? Had not the colonists just acquiesced in an act declaring the power of Parliament to bind them in all cases ? Out of the jurisdiction of Parliament they could not pretend to be, since they had submitted to laws made by Parliament respecting navigation, trade, naturalization, and other imperial matters, not to mention the Habeas Corpus Act, or the common law which was recognized in II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. (59 the colonies, and must have had for its basis the legislative supremacy of the parliament of Great Britain. That there was an essential difference between internal and external taxation, as Chatham in the interest of peace and unity contended, few will now maintain. The sovereign power must include the power of taxation, and taxation is but an exercise of the legislative power in the form of a law enact- ing that the impost shall be paid. We rely for our judg- ment respecting these questions mainly on Burke. But Burke though of all rhetoricians the most philosophic was still a rhetorician and presented only one side of a case. Of this his essay on the French Revolution is the memo- rable and disastrous proof. , Though he goes deep into everything he seldom goes to the bottom. You cannot extract from him any definite theory of the colonial rela- tion, of the authority which an imperial country was entitled really to exercise over colonial dependencies, or of the use of such dependencies if authority really to be exercised there was none. Was Great Britain bound to defend the colonies and were the colonies not bound, unless they chose, to contribute to the defence? Was each colonial legislature in the case of a peril calling for common effort to be at liberty to renounce its share of the burden ? It is said that if England had then done by the American colonies as she has since done by her other colonies, the result would have been equally happ3^ The result is that she bears the whole burden of imperial defence and all other expenses of the Empire while the colonies lay protective duties on her goods. Of such an empire neither Burke nor anyone else at that time dreamed. They all, however indistinct their vision might be, had in their minds an empire of real power and solid gain. 70 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Would Chatham have thought of allowing the colonies to lay protective duties on British goods, he who talked of forbidding them even to make a nail for a horseshoe ? Wisdom spoke, albeit in a crabbed way, by the mouth of Dean Tucker, on whose mind, Tory as he was, the truth had dawned that colonial dependencies were of no real use commercially, inasmuch as you might trade with a colony just as well when it was independent, and of less than no use politically when they were in a chronic state of smoth- ered sedition and refused to contribute to the defence of the Empire. The Dean advised, if the colonies persisted in their refusal, to bid them begone in peace, an invitation which at that time they would almost certainly have declined. But the voice of wisdom was not recognized even by the philosophic Burke. On the other hand Burke was surely right in rejecting the plan countenanced by Adam Smith of colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament. The difficulty of distance would have been very great, that of the appointment of representatives still greater, especially as the House of Commons was then constituted ; that of a total want of community of interest between states on opposite sides of the Atlantic would have been the greatest of all. The plan of a federal union between the American colonies and Great Britain floated as some think before the mind of Chatham. Such a union might have lived with Chatham ; with Chatham it would have died. At the same time we must recognize the natural senti- ment of empire. When Chatham speaks with pride of that " ancient and most noble monarchy " which his genius had raised to the height of glory, and with anguish of its possible dismemberment, his emotion is surely not less generous than any that swelled the bosom of Samuel or 11. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 71 Jolni Adams, Patrick Henry, or Thomas Paine. It may L'\ I'll be said that the determination of George III to hold the colonies at whatever cost of blood and treasure, at whatever risk to his crown, was more complimentary to them, if it was less kind, than the proposal of Dean Tucker at once to show them the door.^ This controversy to Americans is dead. For England it will retain something of a living interest so long as the tie of colonial depend- ence, though attenuated, continues to exist with difficul- ties and liabilities redviced yet not annulled. That the cause of the revolt was not general oppression of the ^colonies by the mother country seems clear. We have seen that when a governor of New York charged his assembly with a tendency to independence, the assembly responded by a vehement protestation of attachment to the government under which they lived. Franklin de- clared that having travelled over the whole country and kept company with people of all sorts he had never heard from any person, drunk or sober, the expression of a wish jfor separation or a hint that such a thing could be advan- {tageous to America. John Adams said as late as March, I1775, of the people of Massachusetts itself, "that there are any that hunt after independence is the greatest slan- der on the province." Jefferson averred that before the Declaration of Independence he had never heard a whisper of disposition to separate from Great Britain. Washing- ton said in October, 1774, "I am well satisfied that no I such thing as independence is desired by any thinking man in all North America ; on the contrary that it is the ardent wish of th6 warmest advocates for liberty that peace and tranquillity on constitutional grounds will be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented." 72 THE UNITKI) STATES. ( The New York Congress, in an address to Washington] after his assumption of the command, declared that thej fondest wish of every American soul was an accommoda-! tion with the motlier country ; and Washington in hi reply recognized the re-establishment of peace and hai mony between the mother country and the colonies the ultimate object of his undertaking. New Hampshire,! Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, New Jersey, spoke in the same strain as New York. Massachusetts, the vei hotbed of revolution, in her address to the king, spoke the restoration of union and harmony between Gres Britain and her colonies as indispensable and necessai to the welfare and happiness of both. John Adams ws warned by his associates in the movement at Philadelphi that if he uttered the word independence he was undone for the idea was as unpopular in Pennsylvania and in al| the middle and southern states as the Stamp Act itseli He confesses that when he broached the idea he was avoided as a man infected with leprosy. Even years after he said, " For my own part there was not a moment during the revolution when I would not have given all I possessed for a restoration to the state of things that existed before the contest began, provided we could have a sufficient security for its continuance." If some of these professions were hollow, that only proves the strength of the general feeling which demanded the tribute. Did the authors of the revolution aim at independence, or did they not? If they did not, they could hardly have been groaning under systematic oppression ; nothing less than which, moderate men would say, can justify revolution and civil war. If they did, the British government ap- parently may claim to be absolved so far as they are II REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 73 loiiceriied, since what they sought was a thing which by their own showing the vast majority of their own people abhorred, as well as a thing which by its recognized duty the British government was bound to refuse. In fact the panegyrical historians stand not for two pages on the same foot ; in one page they applaud the patriot for aim- ing at independence, in the next they represent constitu- tional redress as his sole aim. Separation, again be it said, was inevitable. It was too likely that, the vision of statesmanship being clouded as it was . respecting the relation of colonies to the mother country, tlie separation would be angry and violent. Still it might conceivably have been amicable, and that dark page might possibly have been torn from the book of destiny. Woe, we must say, to them by whom the of- fence came and through whose immediate agency^ cul- pable in itself, the two great families of our race were made and to a deplorable extent have remained enemies instead of being friends, brethren, and fellow-workers in the advancement of their common civilization. Woe to the arbitrary and bigoted king whose best excuse is that he had not made himself a ruler instead of being what nature intended him to be, a ploughman. Woe to Gren- ville, who though not wicked or really bent on depriving the colonies of their rights, but on the. contrary most anxious after his fashion to promote their interests, was narrow, pedantic, overbearing, possessed with extravagant ideas of the authority of Parliament, and unstatesmanlike enough to insist on doing because it was technically law- ful that which the sagacity of Walpole had on the ground of practical expediency refused to do. Woe above all to 74 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Charles Townshend, who, with his vain brilliancy and his champagne speeches, repeated in the face of recent and de- cisive experience the perilous experiment and recklessly renewed the quarrel. Woe to Lord North, and all th( more because in stooping to do the will of the king b was sinning against the light of good nature and goo sense in himself. Woe even to Mansfield, whose supreme! legal intellect too ably upheld the letter of the law against' policy and the right. Woe to the Parliament — a parlia^ ment be it ever remembered of rotten boroughs and of nominees not of the nation — which carelessly or inso- lently supported the evil resolution of the ministry and the court. Woe to the Tory squires who shouted for the war, to the Tory parsons who preached for it, and to the Tory bishops who voted for it in the House of Lords. Woe to the pamphleteers of prerogative, such as Johnson,^ whose vituperative violence added fuel to the flame. But woe also to the agitators at Boston, who, with the design of independence unavowed and of which they themselves were perhaps but half conscious, did their utmost to push the quarrel to extremity and to quench the hope of reconciliation. Woe to the preachers of Boston, who whether from an exaggerated dread of prelacy or to win the favour of the people made themselves the trumpeters of discord and perverted the gospel into a message of civil war. Woe to contraband traders if there were any, who sought in fratricidal strife relief from trade restric- tions ; to debtors if there were any, who sought in it a sponge for debt. Woe to all on either side who under the influence of passion, interest, or selfish ambition fomented the quarrel which rent asunder the Englisli race. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 75 i Of the fomenters of the quarrel in New England the chief was Samuel Adams, who, we can scarcely doubt, whatever might be his professions, had set his heart on the achievement of independence ; had been laying his plans and enlisting his associates, such as the wealthy Hancock and the impetuous Otis, for that purpose ; had welcomed rather than dreaded the dispute, and preferred the mortal issue to a reconciliation. Tliis man had failed in business as a maltster and as a tax collector, but lie had succeeded as a political agitator and has found a shrine in American history as a patriot saint. Though an enthusiast, he was not wanting in the astuteness of the politician. The latest of his American biographers cannot help surmising that his Puritan conscience must have felt a twinge when in the very time at which he had devoted himself body and soul to breaking the link that bound America to Eng- land, he was coining for this or that body phrases full of reverence for the king and rejecting the thought of in- dependence. He had a paternal feud with Hutchinson, afterwards Governor of Massachusetts, a man whose repu- tation long lay buried under patriot vituperation, but who is now admitted by fair-minded writers to have been him- self a patriot, taking the line opposite to that of Samuel Adams, and seeking to the utmost of his power peace with justice. The chief fomenter of the quarrel in the South, not less glorified than Samuel Adams, was Patrick Henry. This man also had tried various ways of earning a livelihood, and had failed in all. He was a bankrupt at twenty-three, and lounged in thriftless idleness, till he found that though he could not live by industry, he could live by his eloquent tongue. The circle in which as a Virginian 76 THE UNITED STATES. OEJ not of the highest class he formed his statesmanship is described by an American biographer as " having com- prised an occasional clergyman, pedagogue, or legislator; small planters, and small traders ; sportsmen, loafers, slaves and the drivers of slaves, and more than all this the bucolic sons of old Virginia, the good-natured, illiterate, thriftless Caucasian consumers of tobacco and whiskey, who cordially consenting that all the hard work should be done by the children of Ham, were thus left free to com- mune together in endless debate in the tavern porch, or on the shady side of the country store." In Virginia admission to the legal profession might be gained without laborious study of the law. Henry's first exploit as a barrister was a successful defence of the spoliation of the clergy, an unpopular order, by an appeal to public passion against legal right. Civil discord brought him at once 1765. to the front. His famous speech against the tyranny of George HI. is often recited: — "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." When he said, " Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery," he stood, as an eyewitness has told us, in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom ; his form was bowed, his wrists were crossed, his manacles were almost visible as he stood like an embodiment of helplessness and agony. After a solemn pause he raised his eyes and chained hands towards heaven, and prayed in words and tones that thrilled every heart, "Forbid it. Almighty God." Men- tally struggling with the tyranny, he looked, the same REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 77 witness tells us, like " Laocoon in a death struggle with the coiling serpents." " The sound of his voice was like that of a Spartan psean on the field of Plataea, and as each syllable of the word ' Liberty ' echoed through the build- ing his fetters were shivered, his arms were pulled apart, and the links of his chain were scattered to the winds. He stood like a Roman Senator defying Csesar, while the unconquerable spirit of Cato of Utica flashed from every feature, and he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words, ' Or give me death,' which sounded with the awful cadence of a hero's dirge, fearless of death, and victorious in death ; and he suited the action to the word b}^ a blow upon the le'ft breast with the right hand, which seemed to drive the dagger to the patriot's heart." It is no wonder that Patrick Henry could so vividly portray to his audience the attitude of a slave. From the J beginning to the end of his life he was a slaveholder, he bought slaves, he sold slaves, and by his will, with his cattle, he bequeathed slaves. A eulogist says of him that he could buy or sell a horse or a negro as well as anybody. That he was in some degree conscious of the inconsist- ency does not alter the fact. Other patriot orators be- sides Patrick Henry, when they lavished the terms slave and slavery in their revolutionary harangues, might have reflected that they had only to look round them in order to see what real slaves and slavery were. Massachusetts, where the fire broke out, was in a specially inflammable state. John Adams in a paper embodied in his diary describes the multitude of taverns swarming with busy politicians, who he says were more in number than the people who attended to their own business. The constitutional sensitiveness and contentiousness called 78 THE UNITED STATES. chap. forth by the dispute about the Stamp Act had upou the repeal of that act calmed down but had not died out. By this time the legal profession was fully fledged. Lawyers had taken the lead in political life and they carried into it the spirit of litigation. A great many law suits were going on. Even the discourses on polemical theology which the people constantly heard from the pulpit would tend to make them argumentative and contentious. Pat- riotism of the classical type was fashionable in England, and the fashion had spread to the colony. Brutus and Cassius were the model patriots of the hour ; rhetoric was always conjuring with their names. Wilkesbarre, the name of a town in Pennsylvania, is a quaint memorial of the settlers* reverence for those two great tribunes of the people, Wilkes and Barr^, on the moral glories of the first of whom it is needless to dwell ; while the second, the author of a famous stroke of rhetoric against the false claim of the mother country to colonial gratitude, made his way through a career of fiery patriotism to the Clerk- ship of the Pells, one of the fattest sinecures of corruption. The Puritan clergy were angered by the concession of legal toleration to Roman Catholicism in Quebec and were always in dread of prelatic invasion. There was a daily source of irritation in the tightened pressure of commercial restrictions and the demeanour of royal officers engaged in enforcing them. The disputes about fixed salaries for governors and other crown officers were also in an angry state. The presence of a soldier}^ alien to a cit}^ of , Puritan merchants like Boston, filled up the measure of ' exasperation, for such a garrison was sure to bear itself ' liaughtily towards the people. When fortune frowns everything goes wrong. Of all M. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 79 tlic disasters the greatest was the eclipse of Chatham which left the political firmament to Townshend's malignant star. Next to this was the social catastrophe of Franklin, the one man who being revered in England as well as in America might have mediated with some chance of success, and to whose advice George Grenville had in fact resorted. The private letters of Governor Hutchinson were betrayed 1772 into his hands. He must have known and he did know that they had been stolen, or at least improperly obtained, and that he had no right to use them. When he sent them to Boston under the formal seal of confidence, he can hardly have failed to surmise that by the men to whom he sent them that seal would be broken. His plea that he acted in the interest of peace, hoping to convince his fel- low colonists that evil counsels came not from England but from their own quarter, cannot be seriously enter- tained. Its hollowness confirms his condemnation. That he believed himself to be doing good may be admitted, it cannot be admitted that he believed himself to be doing right. English gentlemen were licentious and some of them were politically corrupt, but they had a keen sense . of social honour. To complete the disaster, the duty of dealing with the case fell not to the lot of a man of char- acter and dignity but of Wedderburn, a low adventurer, branded at his death by the king himself as the greatest scoundrel in the realm, whose brutalities made of Franklin a deadly foe. Another piece of ill luck was the Opposition leadership of Fox, a debauchee in politics as in private life, whose reckless violence and revolting displays of sympathy with the Americans even when they had France for an ally, could only confirm the obstinacy of the king and his min- isters and identify their cause in the eyes of the nation 80 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai-. with that of the honour of the country. Sir Gilbert Elliot was probably right in saying that North might have fallen long before if he had not been propped by the unpatriotic behaviour of Fox. Burke, as Fox's partner, hardly escapes a share of the same censure. Fox behaved in the same way at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The restrictions upon colonial trade and manufactures were a cause for the most reasonable discontent. The restrictions on trade might be excused by the dominant fallacies of a protectionist era and palliated by the com- mercial privileges and bounties which the colonies enjoyed. Those on manufactures were without palliation or excuse, imposed solely in the interest of the selfish manufacturer at home. These grievances, if redress had been obstinately refused, would have justified revolt. But they are not put forward as a ground of revolt in the American Declaration of Independence. The Stamp Act having been repealed, all the duties except that on tea having been removed, and a pledge against their re-imposition having been given, the tea duty was the sole remaining issue. Was this a suffi- cient reason for overthrowing a government under which all admitted that general liberty was enjoyed, for shatter- ing an empire of the greatness of which all professed to be proud, and for bringing on a country the havoc, moral as well as material, of civil war ? It is true that in the case of the tea duty, as in that of Hampden's assessment to ship money, what was to be considered was the principle, not the amount. But ship money was not merely a wrongful impost, it was the entering wedge of unparliamentary taxa- tion destined to furnish the means of a S3'stem of govern- ment in church and state fatal to the political liberties and to the spiritual life of the nation. Not Grenville, not even II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. «1 Townshencl, not George III himself had conceived any such design ; though the arbitrary tendencies of the king at least Avere soon called forth by the conflict. There seems to be no reason for believing that either Grenville's or Town- shend's policy was originally inspired by the king. Nor was there ever a man less likely to play Strafford than Lord North. Would it not have been right before drawing the fratricidal sword to be sure that no hope of peaceful redress was left ? Why should not the tea duty have been repealed as the other duties and the Stamp Act had been repealed? Its retention was understood in America to have been carried in the cabinet by a bare majority. A circular from the Home Secretary assured the colonies that the duties would not be re-imposed, and if the ground assigned was that of mere commercial expediency and not that of constitutional principle, the assurance was not the less practically valid. Colonial right had powerful advo- cates in Parliament. It had Rockingham with Burke at his side. It had Chatham whenever he should emerge from the cloud. British merchants had thronged the lobbies of the House of Commons on the night of the repeal of the Stamp Act and hailed Conway, Avho moved the repeal, as a delivering angel. But what those who man- aged the populace of Boston at heart desired was not con- stitutional redress, it was independence. On the passing of the Stamp Act, among other excesses the Stamp Office at Boston was levelled, the house of the stamp distributor was wrecked, and he was compelled by the mob to resign his office and to swear beneath the tree upon which his effigy was hanged never to resume his post ; the houses of two officials connected with the Admiralty Court of the Custom House were rifled, the records of the Admiralty 82 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Court burnt; the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Hutch- inson was destroyed, his phite, his furniture, his pictures, and his fine library were plundered and burnt, and the owner scarcely escaped with his life. On the passing of the tea duty outrage was renewed. The custom house officers Avere assailed by parties armed with bludgeons and compelled to fly, officers were tarred and feathered, com- missioners were hung in effigy. The ^ Tories," as the friends of government were nicknamed, were everywhere pursued with insult by the Patriot party who borrowed from the party of the English Revolution the honoured name of Whigs. A reign of terror was directed against all the ministers of the law ; merchants who had imported goods from England were compelled by the populace to give them up to be destroyed or to be re-shipped. One who sold English goods was stoned through the streets. Sedition was preached from the popular pulpit. Under extraordinary provocation a party of soldiers fired, killing five rioters and wounding six. This was the " Boston Massacre," celebrated by mourning services in chapels hung with crape. Praise is claimed for the citizens because they forbore to hang the soldiers. But had they hanged a soldier, it was clear that to avenge his blood the last pow- der of the empire must have been burned ; and John Adams showed not less of policy than of chivalry in appearing for the defence. Presently a revenue cutter was fired, after shooting and badly wounding the com- 1773. mander. At last came the " Boston Tea Party " in which a cargo of tea, the property of merchants trading under the imperial flag, was thrown into the bay. A government thus bearded and insulted has its choice between abdica- tion and repression. In this case abdication would have 11. KEVOLUTION, IM)E1'I<:NDENCE, AND UNION. 8;] been the wiser course, but repression was tlie more natural. Americans at the present day would not applaud violence as their historians applaud the " Boston Tea Party." If the temper of the English Tory was tyrannical, neither that of the New England Puritan nor that of the Virgin- ian slaveholder was mild. In what order and degree the various causes of the catastrophe for which the government or the mother country was responsible — resentment at illegal taxation, soreness under commercial restraints, anger aroused by violent measures of repression, the galling presence of an unwelcome soldiery, and imperial arrogance — may have combined with republican aspiration on the part of colonial leaders and the spread of a revolutionary spirit, it is impossible to say. All that can be said is that the catastrophe was sure to come and sure to be disastrous. The measures of repression, in any view, deserve the censure which has been passed on them. They were passionate, indiscriminate, and insulting ; bolts of blind wrath launched across the Atlantic by men imperfectly informed as to the situation and ignorant of the character of the people, as transoceanic rulers must always be. By closing the port of Boston scores of traders faithful to the government were struck. By the abrogation of the char- ter of Massachusetts eyevj colony was made to feel its chartered rights imperilled. Worst of all was the revival 1774 of a law passed in the hateful reign of Henry VIII, under which subjects accused of treason anywhere could be transported to England for trial. This not only threatened all colonists with the loss of safeguards for personal liberty but outraged their self-respect. Shoot people if you must, but do not hurt their feelings. If 84 THE UNITED STATES. there was to be repression at all, troops enough should have been sent, and the law should have been enforced against] its violators at Boston without inflicting penalties on the innocent or menacing colonial liberties in general. Howl ever, no repression could have been final ; its temporal success would have been the beginning not the end of woes| In entering on his attempt at coercion the King Wc assured that there was a strong party in the colonies oi his side. There was without doubt a party opposed to revc lution, and at the outset it included a large portion of thi wealth and intelligence and pi'obably a large majority oi the entire people. But the adherence of much of if to the crown was rather passive than enthusiastic, thi commercial Quaker of Philadelphia desiring not to fighl on either side but to be at peace. It was unorganize( and when the royal governors had been expelled it wi without leaders. Still in the struggle which ensued many as twenty-five thousand loyalists at the lowest com- putation, according to the best authority, were in arms for the crown, a number sufficient to give the conflict the character of a civil war between the parties in America as well as between the British and American sections of the Anglo-Saxon race. By the unwise violence of the king's min- isters, and afterwards by the blundei's of his commanders and the excesses of his mercenary troops, the numbers of his party were much reduced. The military obstacles were great. The colonies were three thousand miles off, which in those days made supply, communication, and the direction of operations from a centre very difficult. They extended from north to south along nine hundred miles of country, woody for the most part and tangled, unfavour- able to regulars, favourable to a sharp-shooting militia. II. REVOLUTION, IxXDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 85 Those who said that the American militia would not stand before regulars had ground for what they said. In the open field the regulars won, generally with ease, but most of the fighting was not in open tield, it was in wooded country, and the Americans were excellent marksmen. The king had no general. Wolfe and Clive were gone, Moore was a boy, Wellington a child, and India claimed Eyre Coote. Cornwallis was energetic and enterprising, he reaped laurels afterwards in India. Had he or Sir Guy Carleton commanded in chief there might have been a different tale to tell. Howe, who did command in chief, though brave was torpid ; probably he was not only torpid but half-hearted. As a member of parliament he had pledged liimself to his constituents not to tight against the Americans, and he must have been fettered by that pledge. He was inspired also, it may be surmised, with the secret misgivings of North, whose conscience was all the time accusing him, and who sent forth his commander with a sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other, to the detriment alike of the olive branch and the sword. Nor had the king a war minister. The place of Chatham was filled by the narrow mind and bad temper of Lord George Germaine. Without a general or a war minister, the king was also without an .army. Unable to raise soldiers enough in England he had to buy Hessians, who, though good troops, well-commanded, and not devoid of a certain sympathy with the cause of a king against rebels, were foreigners torn by sordid masters from their homes, and, as aliens and hirelings, hateful to the people whose homes they were sent to destroy. Such a necessity, ignominious in any war, worse than ignominious in a war with his own subjects, ought to have shown him that 86 THE UNITED STATES. chap. though the pride of the nation might be stung by Boston- ian insult and its pugnacity aroused, the object for which he fought was not truly national nor was the heart of the nation with him. Never, not even under Newcastle, did ^ England make a worse show in the field. The court had also to contend with an opposition in parliament, weak at first in numbers but sure to be swelled by every reverse, and embittered enough by faction to strike at the ministry even through the honour of the country. It might have been known, too, that France and the other European enemies of England were watching the growing trouble with eager eyes. Yet events proved that success in the war, though unlikely, was not impossible. That which was impossible was to continue to rule thirteen British communities subjugated by arms on the other side of the Atlantic. The forces of one part of the empire would have been forever expended in holding down the other part. In this, to say nothing of the colonists, the people of Great Britain would never have acquiesced. Had the colonies been really dej^endencies and the king absolute he might, like a Spanish or French despot, have sent out a viceroy with sufficient power. But the colonies being free and British government having become parliamen- tary, dominion was at an end. War evidently impending, the colonies obeyed a mani- fest necessity in federating for the purposes of mutual defence. Thus the American Federation was born in the same way as the Achaean League, the Swiss Bund, and the United Netherlands. The powers which provincial jeal- ousy would allow the Congress under the articles of con- federation were insuflficient even for the limited object, since Congress had no authority itself to levy men or II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 87 impose taxes, but could ouly address requisitions to the several colonies without the means of enforcement. The voting was by states, and the assent of nine states was required, so that five states could paralyze action. The Federation in fact was little more than a league. Con- igress, however, assumed in a feeble way the character of a national government. It raised a continental army with officers bearing its commission and wearing its uniform of blue and buff. In time it unfuiied its flag, the stars and stripes, the harbinger of the tricolour. Advice was given by it to the several colonies to erect themselves into states on a republican footing. This advice they easily followed. Already their constitutions were essentially republican, already their political spirit was essentially republican, and they had only, where it was needed, to strike off the monarchical apex of the structure and substitute an elec- tive governor for the governor sent out by the crown. In a hall at Philadelphia, rendered sacred to all American hearts by the act, was signed a declaration of independence; it was signed with sorrow and reluctance at the time even by some of those who had been foremost in the constitu- tional fray, though descent from one of those who sub- scribed it is now a title of nobility. Colonial resolution had been screwed to the sticking point by Tom Paine, the stormy petrel of three countries, with his pamphlet " Com- mon Sense," issued in the nick of time, coarsely but forci- bly written and well spiced with rhetoric about the " royal brute." The Declaration of Independence, one of the 177(5 most famous documents in the muniment room of history, bespeaks the hand of the philosophic Jefferson. It opens with sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man at which political science now smiles, and which, as Amer- 88 THE UNITED STATES. chap. ican abolitionists did not fail to point out at a later day, might seem strange when framed for slave-holding com- munities by a publicist who himself held slaves. It pro- ceeds to recount in a highly rhetorical strain all the offen- sive acts of George III and his government, designating them as " a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object and evincing a design to reduce the colonists under absolute despotism " and asserting that " they all had as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny " — propositions which history cannot accept. It blinks the fact that many of the acts, styled steps of usurpation, were measures of repression which however unwise or excessive had been provoked by popu- lar outrage. It speaks of the patient sufferings of colonists who had sacked the houses and maltreated the persons of the king's officers, burnt his revenue cutter, and flung the goods of merchants trading under his flag into the sea. One count in the indictment is the Act declaring the Brit- ish Parliament invested with power to legislate for the col- onies in all cases. Yet in this Act, framed by Rockingham and Burke as a pendant to the repeal of the Stamp Act the colonists had certainly acquiesced. The archives of English Puritanism it seems had been searched for a pre- cedent, and the precedent adopted was probably the Grand Remonstrance. But the Grand Remonstrance was founded on fact, since the violent acts of Charles I, Strafford, and Laud were really steps in the execution of a plan for the establishment of arbitrary government. The autlior of the Declaration of Independence proposed to insert a clause denouncing George III as responsible for the slave trade, and accusing him of "thereby waging cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life RKVOLUTK^N, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 80 and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to more miserable death in the transportation thither." " This piratical warfare," so ran the clause, " the opprobrium of Infidel Powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain." But this was too much not only for the slave-owners of Vir- ginia but for the slave-traders of New England. Had George III framed the Virginian or Carolinian slave codes? Such checks as had been put by Virginia or as she had proposed to put on the importation of slaves are admitted by candid American historians to have had not a moral but an economical motive. Jefferson himself, though an opponent and doubtless a sincere opponent of slavery, never emancipated his own slaves. The war opened at Boston, where General Gage, now its military governor, lay with a small army of occupation and repression, and it opened in a way ominous of the final result and significant of the means by which the result was to be brought about. Gage sent out a detach- April ment to seize rebel stores at Lexington. The militia of 1775, the country, called Minute Men because they were always to be in readiness, excellent sharp-shooters, swarmed out, surrounded the detachment, and forced it to fall back with loss on Boston. The next engagement was more ominous still. The patriots occupied Breed's Hill (not Bunker's June Hill, but an adjoining height), which commanded Boston, ^775 and fortified it with a redoubt and breastwork. It seems that they might have been dislodged by manoeuvring. But the royal commander, in his pipe-clay pedantry and pride, chose to lead his men on a hot summer's day with heavy knapsacks on their backs up the front of the hill 90 THE UNITED HTATES. chap. against the breastwork. Thrice they mounted in face j of the fire of the sharp-shooters, who from under cover securely shot them down. The tliird charge took the posi- tion, and a captured gun stands on the citadel of Quebec as the trophy and proof of royalist victory ; but the loss . had been immense and the moral advantage was with the insurgents. Gage now gave place to Howe, and Howe found himself surrounded in Boston by swarms of Minute : Men who were presently under the command of a good . 1775. general. The appointment of Washington as commander- ■ in-chief of the Continental forces was a politic compliment ; to Virginia, but it was also by far the best appointment ; that could be made. Washington when a stripling had [ made a wonderful mark, not only as a soldier in border war against the Indians, but as a negotiator ; while in Braddock's disaster he had shown a fortitude and stead- fastness, in defeat which were to be inestimable in his pres-- ent place. Having suffered in military grade and ini feeling so as to be led to resign his position by the ■ exclusive precedence of the royal officers, he would not be unwilling to measure swords with them in the field. . He found an army undisciplined, impatient of control, , ill-equipped, unprovided with ammunition. But he man- aged to hold this army together, to present a front which i to his surprise his unenterprising enemy respected, and I at last on a dark night to seize and fortify an eminence • which commanded the place and rendered it no longer March tenable. Howe evacuated Boston, where redcoats never 1776. appeared more. In leaving Boston the royal fleet took with it, according; to Mr. Sabine, eleven hundred loyalists, including women i and children, the first instalment of a great loyalist migra- I. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 91 tion. The number included, of members of the Council xud officials, one hundred and two ; of clergymen, eighteen ; of inhabitants of country towns, one hundred and five ; of merchants and other residents in Boston, two hundred and thirteen ; of farmers, mechanics, and traders, three hundred and eighty-two. The case of these people is not to be settled, nor is the witness which they bore to their sause to be annulled, by designating them as Tories. Was it just that they should be outlawed, pillaged, driven from their homes, maltreated, condemned to the death of trai- tors by men who had but yesterday been conspirators, out- wardly professing allegiance to the government to which the loyalists adhered, and were still without any recognized government of their own ? Were not the loyalists Ameri- cans, and did not their wrongs exceed any of those done to Americans by the king ? On the eve of the civil war in England, Sir William Waller the Parliamentarian, wrote to Sir Ralph Hopton the Royalist : " My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot ^riolate my friendship to your person, but I must be true p the cause wherein I serve. The old limitation of usque ad aras holds still. . . . The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon war without an enemy. But I look upon it as opus donmii, and that is enough to silence all passion in me. The God of Peace in His good time send us peace, and in the mean- time fit us to receive it! We are both on the stage and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities." Such was the spirit of men mournfully obeying in a great cause the inevitable call of civil war. 92 THE UNITKU STATES. chai>. There was little of it on either side in the American Revolution. The loyalists retaliated when they could ; where they were strong they became the aggressors, and as their party included, with some of the chiefs of society, many of the lowest and wildest class, they rivalled and probably outvied their opponents in atrocity. The civil strife grew more murderous and viler as it went on. " The animosities between Whigs and Tories," wrote the worthy American General Greene, " render their situation truly deplorable. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way in this quarter and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be put to the massa- cres, the country will be depopulated in a few months, as neither Whig nor Tory can win." " The people of the South," says Chief Justice Marshall, " felt all the miseries which are inflicted by war in its most savage form. Being ; almost equally divided between the two contending parties, reciprocal injuries had gradually sharpened their resent- ment against each other and had aimed neighbour against! neighbour until it had become a war of extermination. As- the parties alternately triumphed, opportunity was alter- nately given for the exercise of their vindictive passions." Even in the Wars of the Roses, amidst the mutual butch- eries of the aristocratic factions the common people had been spared and had spared each other. Nor were the royal officers now behind in cruelty. They bombarded seaboard towns, and in their executions of relapsed rebels violated the humanities if not the laws of ordinary war. Between rebellion and belligerency there is a doubtful period during wliich the agents of government think II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 93 themselves licensed to give way to their passions under the name of crushing treason. Among the loyalists of the baser sort some exercised brigandage in the name of the crown. The devilry was completed by the introduction of Indians, whose ferocity no commander could restrain, though Carle ton and Burgoyne did their best. They had been enlisted first by the colonists, so that Chatham's tremendous invective was misplaced saving as such a policy might be more disgraceful to a government than to rebels. The horrors of Wyoming, painted both in verse and prose, were the work of Indians led on by a band of Tories who had themselves been driven from their homes. John Adams has given us an account of the doings at Philadelphia while the politicians were hatching the revo- lution. In the evening at Mr. Mifflin's there was " an elegant supper and we drank sentiments till eleven o'clock. Lee and Harrison were very high. Lee had dined with Mr. Dickenson and drank Burgundy the whole afternoon." From nine in the morning till three in the afternoon the delegates attended to business, " then they adjourned and went to dine with some of the nobles of Pennsylvania at four o'clock, and feasted upon ten thousand delicacies, and sat drinking Madeira, Claret, or Burgundy till six or seven, and then went home fatigued to death with business, company, and care." It is a pity that in such cases there cannot mingle with the flavour of the Claret and Burgundy a foretaste of the bitterness of civil war. But the politi- cians who quaff the wine too seldom drink of the other cup. Meantime the colonists had grasped at Canada, which they thought would fall into their arms. Among the charges originally levelled by New England against the 94 THE UNITED STATES. chap. king's government was that of having by the Quebec Act established in Canada Roman Catholicism, which New England stigmatized as a religion that had " drenched Great Britain in blood and disseminated impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through ever}^ part of the world." Afterwards the colonists, desiring to draw- Canada into their league, addressed her in a different strain, setting forth how under the blessed influence of republican liberty Roman Catholicism and Protestantism might dwell together in the sweetest peace. But the Canadian clergy, having both manifestoes before them, believed in the genuineness of the first, which was more in accordance with the practice and even with the laws of Massachusetts. They advised their people to adhere to Great Britain or at least to be neutral, and their influence was seconded by the conduct of Sir Guy Carleton, a wise, brave, and popular governor. The Americans finding honeyed words unavailing, invaded Canada and took Mon- treal, but they were repulsed in a daring attack to storm Quebec in which their general, Montgomery, fell and R^ii- Canada was lost to the Union. 1775. From Boston the scene of war shifted to New York, where royalism was strong, and neutrality still stronger, especially in the commercial class, while by occupying that position the confederacy might be cut in two. Washington had here concentrated his forces and fortified himself. On Aug. Long Island patriotism for the first time met discipline in the open field and was driven in flight before it. Had Howe followed up his victory there probably would have been an end of the Continental army, whatever local resistance might have survived. But Howe, there can be little doubt, was wavering as well as lethargic and instead 177G REVOLUTION, INDEPENDP:NCE, AND UNION. 95 of pressing his enemy he Avent to luncheon. New York was taken. Some of the patriots had proposed to burn it, " since," as General Greene said, " two-thirds of the prop- erty of the city and suburbs belonged to the Tories." It was fired, but was saved by the captors and remained the centre of royal operations to the end of the war. Howe's subsequent conduct seems to have been marked with a sluggishness and irresolution which the energy of his lieutenant, Cornwallis, could not redeem. Washington was allowed to pluck victory and reputation out of the jaws of defeat by surprising two battalions of Hessians who were sleeping off their Christmas debauch at Trenton, and overwhelming after a masterly movement two isolated iregiments at Princeton. All this restored the confidence of the revolutionists and raised their military character in Europe, notably in France, while the excesses of Howe's mercenaries turned the Jerseys back from royalism to rev- olution. At last Howe moved, and having defeated Wash- Sept. 1777. ington at the battle of the Brandywine entered Philadel- phia, the capital of the confederacy, where he was well received and passed a highly festive winter. Washington attempted a surprise but was again defeated, though not with ease, at the battle of Germantown. Notwithstanding Washington's reverses, with him remained the honours of the campaign. Howe, feeling, probably, that in spite of his successes in the field the attempt to subdue the colonists was a fail- ure, and having achieved as little by diplomatic offers of reconciliation as by force, went home and was succeeded by Sir Henry Clinton. Washington had taken up his quarters for the winter near his enemy, in an unassailable position among the hills at Valley Forge. This winter at 1778. 9d THE UNITED STATES. tiivr. Valley Forge is the most lieroic episode of the revolution. Washington's men, more tlie men of Washington than the men of the revolution or the Congress, were left without meat for days together, sometimes without bread ; without blankets, so that they had to sit up by their camp- fires to keep themselves warm ; and without shoes, so that the traces of their march over the snow were marked with blood. Yet they showed of what race they were by hold- ing together and making their foe beware of them. Dur- ing the winter they went through a course of drill under Steuben, a Prussian, and other foreign officers, which put them on a level with the king's soldiers, their natural qualities being the same. Washington was to the confederacy all in all. Without him it would have been ten times lost, and the names of the politicians who had drawn the country into the conflict would have gone down to posterity linked with defeat and shame. History has hardly a stronger case of an indispen- sable man. His form, like all other forms of the revolu- tion, has no doubt been seen through a golden haze of panegyric. We can hardly number among the greatest captains a general who acted on so small a scale and who, though he was the soul of the war, never won a battle. In that respect Carlyle, who threatened " to take George down a peg or two," might have made good his threat. But he could not have stripped Washington of any part of his credit for patriotism, wisdom, and courage ; for the union of enterprise with prudence ; for integrity and truth- fulness ; for simple dignity of character ; for tact and for- bearance in dealing with men ; above all for serene fortitude in the darkest hour of his cause and under trials from the perversity, insubordination, jealousy, and perfidy II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 97 of those around him severer than any defeat. Some Amer- ican writers seem anxious to prove that Washington's character is essentially different from that of an English gentleman. About this we need not dispute. The char- acter of an English gentleman is certainly devoid of any traits that might be derived either from a plantation or from war with Indians in the backwoods. Yet an Eng- lish gentleman sees in Washington his ideal as surely as he does not see it in Franklin, Samuel Adams, or Patrick Henry. It has been truly said that Washington and Well- ington have much in common. Wellington contending with Spanish perversity and ministerial incompetence reminds us by his calmness and self-control of Washington contending with the folly and dishonesty of Congress and the fractiousness of the state militia. They write in the same even, passionless, and somewhat formal style, the expression of a mind always master of itself. In both of them there was, though under control, the strong temper which is almost inseparable from force. Wellington might be more of an aristocrat than Washington, less of a democrat he could hardly be. Washington insisted that his officers should be gentlemen, not men fit to be shoe- blacks. He drew a most undemocratic distinction be- tween the officer and the private soldier. His notions about the private soldier are those of an old world discipli- rian. He says that the soldier should be satisfied to serve for his food, clothes, and pay, and complains that he cannot lay on the back of the insubordinate patriot more than one hundred lashes, holding that five hundred are not too many. The other army leaders, Gates and Lee, caballed against him and were abetted by politicians morbidly or perhaps selfishly jealous of military ascendancy. It appear;^ 98 THE UNITED STATES. chap. that both Samuel and John Adams, if they did not in- trigue, were unfriendly to Washington and would willingly have seen him superseded. Washington bore the attacks on liim magnanimously, never allowing his personal wrongs to interfere with his duty nor ever thinking of abandoning his post. Perhaps in the whole conflict tlie three noblest things are the character of Washington, the behaviour of his army at Valley Forge, and the devotion of the better class of loyalists. On Washington's death tlie flags of the Brit- ish fleet under Lord Bridport were half-masted. We owe the American Hildreth thanks for recording the fact. A plan had been formed by the British war office for a movement from Canada down the valley of the Mohawk upon the Hudson, so as to break the centre of the confed- eracy. Burgoyne, who seems to have been the originator of the plan, was put in command. He had won some distinction in war, but was more of a wit, a playwright, and a social star than a captain. Down the valley of the Mohawk he came with six or seven thousand regulars, British and German, some Canadian auxiliaries, and a train of Indians. The royal general at New York was to have moved out to meet him, but the despatch was not sent in time because, as tradition has it. Lord George Germaine had chosen to hurry off to his pleasures instead of waiting till the clerks had done their work. Burgoyne took a wrong course, lost himself in a tangled country, found no Clinton to meet him, was deserted by his Cana- dians and Indians, and was surrounded by the local militia, famous bush-fighters and riflemen, who poured out in defence of their own states. Here was seen the strength of the local resistance in contrast with the weakness of the confederation. Hemmed in by swarms of sharp- II. EEVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 99 shooters, whose number was four times his own, and unable to get open battle, Burgoyne was forced to surren- der. This he did under a convention providing that he Oct. and his troops should be sent to England under parole not to serve against America. It occurred to Congress that the troops, though they could not be used against America, might be used in setting other troops free for that service. On pretexts utterly frivolous and disowned by the American commander Congress broke the conven- tion, detained the troops, and against the laws of war tried to entice the men into its own service. It was a violation of public faith for which no real excuse has been offered. Nor did Congress stop here. It insisted that the sum which had been expended in provisions for the captured army in Continental paper should be repaid in gold three times the paper's worth, and this while it was treating the refusal of the paper as a crime. " Jay," ejaculated Gover- neur Morris thirty years afterwards, " what a set of d — d scoundrels we had in that second Congress ! " " Yes," said Jay, "we had," and he knocked the ashes from his pipe. It seems that when Congress had sunk into impo- tence and discredit some of the best men left it to employ their energies in their own states, probably the best of all were in the field. From Gates and from Schuyler of New York, to whom Burgoyne surrendered, he and his troops received chivalrous treatment. When they got to Boston there was a change. Madame de Riedesel, the wife of the German general, complains that she was cruelly insulted by the Boston women. In her memoir we are told that the wife and young daughter of Captain Fenton, a royalist absentee, were stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and paraded through the city. The Americans on their side 100 THE UNITED STATES. chap. had too much reason to complain of the cruel treatment of prisoners at New York by royal commanders at New York who had no pity for those whom they still deemed rebels, or Tory officials made merciless by the rage of faction. Sucli is civil war. There is no test of the humanity of a nation so trying as civil war. We have to wait till a later period to see that the test might be borne. Clinton presently evacuated Philadelphia and fell back '73 on New York, which remained in the king's hands to the last. On the march he fought a drawn battle with Wash- ington at Monmouth Court House, in which the improved drill of Washington's soldiers showed its effect. He took with him from Philadelphia three thousand loyalists who dared not fall into the hands of the Whigs. Of those who remained behind a number were condemned to death, but two Quakers only were hanged. The Netherlands, when they rose against Spain and the Inquisition, had a cause terribly great and showed spirit as great as their cause. The cause in which the Ameri- cans rose against the imperial government was not so great if it was not largely rhetorical, and the amount of spirit which they showed was proportional. When from drinking patriotic toasts, declaiming against tyranny, tarring and feathering Tories, and hanging stamp collec- tors in effigy, it came to paying war contributions and facing the shot, enthusiasm declined. Of this Washing- ton became sensible as soon as he had assumed the com- mand. From the lines before Boston, 28th November. 1775, he writes: "Such a dearth of public spirit and such want of virtue, such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another, in this great change of military arrangement, I never saw n. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 101 before, and pray God's mercy that 1 may never be witness to again." This wail runs through his letters, growing more and more mournful to the end of the war, or at least till the arrival of French aid. From Valley Forge in 1778 he writes : " Men are naturally fond of peace, and there are symptoms that may authorize an opinion that the people of America are pretty generally weary of the present war. It is doubtful whether many of our friends might not incline to an accommodation on the grounds held out, or which may be, rather than j)ersevere in a con- test for independence." From Philadelphia, 30th Decem- ber, 1778, he writes : "-If I were called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men from what I have seen, heard and in part know, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold of most of them ; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and almost of every order of men ; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; while the momentous concerns of the empire, a great and accumulating debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit which in its consequences is the want of everything, are but secondary considerations and postponed from day to day, from week to week, as if our affairs wore the most promising aspect." John Adams had oratorically decreed that the war should be violent and short, but oratory does not shorten war or make anything violent but passion. The eloquent opponents of the tea duty did not, like the opponent of ship-money, take the field. They were content with the part, to use a phrase adopted by Wash- ington, of chimney corner heroes. If John Adams could 102 THE UNITED STATES. chap. sigh as he said he did for things as they had been before the war, the people were not likely to feel that the change was worth much of their money or their blood. When the war came their way they would readily turn out, and fight well in their own sharp-shooting fashion in defence of their own states, but they would not readily turn out in the Continental cause even though the assembly of Virginia might offer to any patriot who would take arms to deliver the country from slavery three hundred acres of land and a healthy sound negro. If they did turn out it was for a fixed term, and at the end of that term they insisted upon taking their departure, notwithstanding it might be the eve of a battle, carrying with them their arms and ammunition, not assuredly because they lacked courage, but because they lacked zeal in the cause. " Sol- diers absent themselves from their duty in numbers, stay- ing at their homes, sometimes in the employment of their officers ; drawing pay, while they are working on their own plantations or for hire." The troops of Connecticut at one time were mostly on furlough, and Washington finds such a mercenary spirit pervading them that he could not be surprised at any disaster. Regiments are expected in vain, harvest and a thousand other excuses being given for delay. At a critical moment a militia is reduced from six thousand to less than two thousand. It takes all the exertion of the officers to induce a corps to stay six weeks on a bounty of ten dollars. Washington's army in short is always moulting ; there is not time to drill the men before they are gone, and discipline is impossible because if it was enforced they would go. Washington complains also of the want of patriotic feel- ing among the people. The conduct of the Jerseys, he 11, REVOLUTKJN, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 103 says, " is most infamous ; instead of aiding him they are making their submission as fast as they can. Pennsylva- nian militiamen, instead of responding to the summons of the Council of Safety, exult at the approach of the enemy and over the misfortunes of their own friends. The dis- affection of Pennsylvania is beyond conception. The people bring supplies as readily to the royal army as to their own ; more readily in fact, since the royal army pays not in paper but cash." Officers appropriate the money for the payment of the troops. Cabals and intrigues about appointments, jealousies between soldiers from dif- ferent states, selfish interests of all kinds are stronger than adherence to the cause. There was the pride too, though Washington does not mention it, of the Virginian gentlemen who looked down on the New England trader not less than the officers of the royal army had looked down on those of the colonial militia. All this goes far towards justifying the king's judgment and that of his informants as to the strength of the resistance and the chances of the war. The army, Washington says, was at one time losing more by desertion than it gained by recruiting. Deserters, defaulters, and malingerers, of whom there were also plenty, had every excuse that the failure of the commissariat and the arsenals could give. Two thousand men at one time were without firelocks, and the supplies of food and clothing seem to have been always most defective. That his men should be starving, shivering, and marking their marches over the snow with their blood, while forestallers, regraters, and monopolists are flourishing, stings Washington to the soul. The end of the dealings of Congress with the army was that the army became a skeleton, and there was at last a 104 THE UNITED STATES. chap. mutiny of the Pennsylvanian militia which was prevented from being fatal only by the personal ascendancy of the general. A sufficient force of regular troops, serving for adequate pay and pensions, was Washington's constant desire. Cromwell's insight taught him, after Edgehill, that instead of men serving only for pay he must form an army of men whose hearts Avere in the cause. Wash- ington's insight after a few months of command taught him that when enthusiasm had grown cold an army must be formed of men serving for good pay. " When men," he says, "are irritated and passion inflamed they fly hastily and cheerfully to arms ; but after the first emotions are over to expect the bulk of an army to be influenced by anything but self-interest is to look for what never did happen." Cromwell and Washington alike recognized the supremacy of discipline. " To lean on the militia," says Washington, " is to lean on a broken reed. Being familiar with the use of the musket they will fight under cover, but they will not attack or stand in the open field." States refused to tax themselves and Congress had no power to tax them. Its war budget was one of confisca- tions, forced requisitions, and paper money. From the printing press, its mint, issued ever increasing volumes of paper currency, the value of which as usual rapidly de- clined, and all the faster the more Congress and its parti- sans, like the French Jacobins after them, had recourse to violence to make bad money pass for good. A hotel bill of seven hundred pounds was paid with three pounds cash. The phrase came into vogue, " Not worth a continental." At last, as Washington said, there was almost a stagna- tion of purchase. There could not fail to ensue a fearful KEVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 105 stuibance of commerce and of commercial morality. ^ Debts contracted in good money were paid in worthless paper. Washington was himself thus defrauded while he was serving the countiy without pay, a wrong of which he speaks with his usual magnanimity. Gambling and specu- lation naturally followed. Fortunes were made by knaves and riotous living went on while the army suffered and dwindled to a shadow. Years afterwards Tom Paine, no straight-laced economist, seriously demanded that any one who proposed to return to paper money should be punished with death. The inestimable clause in the American con- stitution forbidding legislation which would impair the faith of contracts, may perhaps be regarded in part as a memorial of those evil times. A fleet. Congress can scarcely be said to have had. But what local assistance, independently of the armies of the central government, did on land, privateers manned by the hardy seamen of New England did at sea. A num- ber of English merchantmen were captured in American waters, and Paul Jones in his Bonhomme Richard made himself the terror of the English coasts. The royal navy however presently asserted its superior power, and Ameri- can commerce was swept from the sea. The surrender of Burgoyne proved decisive, as it brought France to the aid of the Americans. Ever since her loss of Canada she had been intriguing through her agents in the colonies. From the outset of the war she had been sending secret aid to the revolutionists, and lying when expostulations were addressed to her. The motive of her government was enmity to England. But there was a section of her aristocracy which had embraced political reform and even begun to dally with revolution, a 106 THE UNITED STATES. chap, i pastime for which the salons afterwards paid dear. A youthful scion of this section, Lafayette, fired at the sight of American revolt, had gone forth on a republican crusade Feb. and become the companion in arms of Washington. After ' ' ■ Burgoyne's surrender American envoys were able to per- suade the French government to make a treaty with the colonies and go to war with Great Britain, from whom 1779. France had received not the slightest provocation. Spain was afterwards drawn in, not by sympathy with the Ameri- cans whom she regarded as dangerous neighbours to her American dependencies, but by the hope of recovering 1780. Gibraltar; Holland by maritime jealousies and disputes. Thus England, in addition to her revolted colonists, had the greatest military power in Europe and the three great- est naval powers on her hands. She lost that command of the sea which had enabled her to crush the commerce of the colonists, to wear them out by pressure on the seaboard, and to choose her own point of attack. On the other hand her national spirit was aroused to do battle with her ancient foe. Chatham would have dropped the colonies and turned on France. Lord North, being no Chatham, sent out commissioners with overtures of reconciliation, offering the colonies representation in Parliament. Of course his attempt proved worse than vain. A great French fleet under d'Estaing soon appeared on the scene. A French army was to follow, and the French treasury supplied Congress with the hard cash of which it was by this time in the sorest need. Incompatibilities and mis- understandings between the French and their colonial allies put off the catastrophe, but the balance was decisively turned and the result was no longer in doubt. " To me," said Washington, August 20th, 1780, "it will appear II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 107 miraculous if our affairs can maintain themselves much longer." " If," he added, " the temper and resources of the country will not admit of alteration, we may be reduced to seeing the cause in America upheld by foreign arms." That time had now come. It was in the dark hour before the arrival of French aid that treason entered into the heart of Benedict Arnold, the commander of the all-important lines upon the Hudson. Arnold had been one of the best of the American com- manders, perhaps the most daring of them all. He had reason to complain of slights and wrongs, not at the hands of Washington who valued and trusted him, but at the hands of the politicians. He seems to have despaired of the revolutionary cause and to have shrunk from the French alliance, suspecting as did others that the French had designs on Canada, and to have made up his mind to play Monk. He opened clandestine negotiations with Clinton, whose adjutant and envoy was the ill-starred Andre, a young man of culture and sensibility. By Arnold's invi- 1780. tation Andr^ visited the American lines, and on his way back fell into the hands of the enemy while Arnold had just time to escape. Whether having been drawn into the American lines by their commander he was guilty of hav- ing acted as a spy must be decided by martial law, which has rules and a phraseology of its own. But it can hardly be said that he was tried. He was convicted and sentenced solely on his own statement, of which the incriminating part was taken, while to the exculpating part, his averment that he had been unwittingly drawn by Arnold within the lines, no weight was allowed, though the evidence for both was the same. Greene, who presided over the court, had written before the trial : " I wrote you a letter by the post 108 THE UNITED STATES, cha yesterday respecting General Arnold. Since writing that letter General Washington is arrived in camp and the British Adjutant General and Joshua Smith, both of whom are kept under strong guard. They are to be tried this day and doubtless will be hung to-morrow." It seems vain to cite the foreign officers who sat in the court of inquiry as impartial judges ; they were enemies of England and of 2d Englishmen. Andr^ was hanged with great parade, his 1790. prayer that he might be shot having been refused by Washington, and as his enemies denied him a soldier's death his country did right in giving him more than a soldier's tomb. It seems certainly to have been hinted to Sir Henry Clinton that Andre might be exchanged for Arnold. If the hint came from any important quarter a dark shade is cast upon the execution of Andre. 1779. After Burgoyne's disaster and the proof which the Northern States had on that occasion given of their spirit, the royal commanders turned to the South, which they might hope to detach and save for the king, even if the North was lost. In the South there was reason to believe that Koyalism was stronger than in the North. The people were not Puritan, they were more monarchical than those of New England, more simple-minded, and being not traders or manufacturers but husbandmen, they had been 13th less galled by the laws of trade. Clinton took Charleston, 1780.' t^^^ chief southern port and city, with a large garrison and great stores. Cornwallis, left in command while Clinton returned to New York, gained an easy and com- plete victory over very superior numbers at Camden in 16th South Carolina, the militia giving signal proof of the 1780. truth of Washington's saying that they would not stand against regulars in the open field. He afterwards gained II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 109 a victory less easy or complete over Greene, the best of Mar. I the American generals save Washington, at Guildford. Tarleton, a local royalist, also did wonders with his light horsemen, though he soon found his match in the Ameri- can Marion. But Tarleton, with a detachment of Corn- wallis' force under his command, attacking in his over confidence with weary troops, was defeated at the Cowpens ; Jan. the only battle, if an engagement on so small a scale can be called a battle, lost in open field by the king's troops during the war. The local loyalism, though fiery and too often cruel, proved not staunch, and the effect of the incursion was rather to let loose mutual massacre and plunder amongst the motley population of Dutch, Germans, Quakers, Irish Presbyterians, and Scotch Highlanders, than to bring the colonies back to their allegiance. A combined French and American attack on New York appearing imminent, Cornwallis, recalled by Clinton, . fell back into Virginia and intrenched himself on a neck of land at Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay, in a position which so long as his own fleet commanded the bay was a stronghold, but when the command of the sea was lost became a trap. The command of the sea was lost by the arrival of a French fleet under De Grasse, with which there was no British fleet to cope. Washington uniting his army to that of Rochambeau, they moved together on Yorktown, while some misunderstanding, as it appears, between Cornwallis and Clinton retarded Clinton's aid. Cornwallis, in a desperate position and beleaguered by an army four times outnumbering his effective force, after turning his eyes for some days to the sea in the vain hope of discerning Oct. British sails, was compelled to capitulate and march out, as the painting in the hall of the Capitol depicts him, 110 THE UNITED STATES. chap. between the lines of French and American troops. Wash- ington had the modesty and generosity to keep off specta- tors. This was the end. It would not have been the end if America had been a foreign enemy and the heart of the British nation had been really in the struggle. It was not the end of the contest with France, Spain, and Holland. But of the contest with the colonies it was the end. The American farmers might go home, hang up their muskets and follow the plough as they had in "the old colony days," which probably not one in a hundred of them re- garded with abhorrence and to which most of them, we may be pretty sure, had been looking back with regret. No conflict in history has made more noise than the Revolu- tionary War. It set flowing on every fourth of July a copious stream of panegyrical rhetoric which has only just begun to subside. Everything connected with it has been the object of a fond exaggeration. Skirmishes have been magnified into battles and every leader has been exalted into a hero. Yet the action and, with one grand exception, the actors were less than heroic, the ultimate conclusion was foregone, and the victory after all was due not to native valour but to foreign aid. Civil war as well as international war there will some- times be, but it ought always to be closed by amnesty. For amnesty Cromwell declared on the morrow of Worces- ter. Amnesty followed the second civil war in America. The first civil war was followed not by amnesty, but by an outpouring of the vengeance of the victors upon the fallen. Some royalists were put to death. Many others were despoiled of all they had and driven from their country. Several thousands left New York when it was evacuated by the king's troops. Those who remained underwent II. EEVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. Ill virulent persecution. Massachusetts banished by name three hundred and eight of her people, making death the penalty for a second return ; New Hampshire proscribed seventy-six ; Pennsylvania attainted nearly five hundred ; Delaware confiscated the property of forty-six ; North Car- olina of sixty-five and of four mercantile firms; Georgia also passed an act of confiscation ; that of Maryland was still more sweeping. South Carolina divided the loyalists into four classes inflicting a different punishment upon each. Of fifty-nine persons attainted by New York three were married women, guilty probably of nothing but adhering to their husbands, and members of the council or law officers who were bound in personal honour to be faithful to the crown. Upon the evacuation of Charleston, as a British officer who was upon the spot stated, the loy- alists were imprisoned, whipped, tarred and feathered, dragged through horse ponds, and carried about the town Avith " Tory " on their breasts. All of them were turned out of their houses and plundered, twenty-four of them were hanged upon a gallows facing the quay in sight of the British fleet with the army and refugees on board. Such was the statement of a British officer who was upon the spot, ashore and an eye witness to the whole. Some of these men, such as Johnson the guerrilla leader and Butler the author of the attack on Wyoming, had been guilty of crimes for which they might justly have suffered under the common law, though they could not have suf- fered more justly than some ruffians on the other side. But the mass had been guilty of nothing but fidelity to a lost cause. Honour, we will say with Mr. Sabine, to those who protested ; to General Greene, who said that it would be " the excess of intolerance to persecute men for 112 THE UNITED STATES. chap. opinions which twenty years before had been the universal belief of every class of society " ; to Alexander Hamilton, who nobly stood up against the torrent of hatred as the advocate of its victims in New York ; to John Jay, who said that he " had no desire to conceal the opinion that to involve the Tories in indiscriminate punishment and ruin would be an instance of unnecessary rigour and unmanly revenge without a parallel except in the annals of religious rage in the time of bigotry and blindness." The loyalist exiles peopled Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Upper Canada with enemies of the new Republic, and if a powei- hostile to the Republic should ever be formed under European influence in the north of the continent, the Americans will owe it to their ancestors who refused amnesty to the vanquished in civil war. 1783. By the treaty of peace, Great Britain not only recognized the independence of her colonies but gave them, what France was not very willing and Spain was very unwilling to give, unlimited extension to the westward over the territory which her arms had won from France. Canada, her bond of honour to the loyalists compelled her to retain. In the course of the negotiations the hollowness of the league of hatred between America and the European enemies of England appeared. France, as the American envoys thought, played America false, and the Americans were guilty towards France of what they admitted to be a breach of diplomatic courtesy while France called it by a harder name. " It is now substantially proved," says a recent American writer of eminence, "that the unmixed motive of the French cabinet in secretly encouraging the revolted colonies, before open war had broken out between France and England, had been only to weaken the power II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 113 and sap the permanent resources of the natural and appar- ently eternal eneni}^ of France." To seize the opportunity of crippling a powerful enemy was the avowed aim of Vergennes in urging his king to go to war. The conduct of negotiations on the British part fell at first to the lot of Shelburne, the most liberal statesman of his day, who had ardently desired re-union and who now, with young Pitt by his side, sought to make the settlement with the colonies a treaty not of peace only but of reconciliation, dividing the imperial heritage without destroying the moral unity of the race. Had Shelburne's policy prevailed, there would have been no war of 1812, there would have been no fisheries question, nor Behring Sea controversy. But Shelburne's government was overthrown by the factious ambition of Fox, with whom it is painful to say went Burke. A demand for compensation to the loyalists Con- gress, unable to deny its justice, put off with an ironical recommendation of compliance to the States, whose reso- lution it knew. England gave the loyalists more than three millions and a half sterling if we include the pen- sions and half pay, and new homes to those that chose them under her flag. The recognition of private debts was, thanks to the honesty and wisdom of John Adams, though not without great difficulty, obtained. The political separation of the colonies from the mother country, once more, was inevitable. Not even the most fervid imperialist can imagine the sixty-five millions of the United States remaining dependent on the thirty-five millions of the British Islands. No English statesman in the present day could think without shuddering of such a task as that of governing New England across the Atlantic. But by right-minded men the violence of the separation 114 THE UNITED 8TATES. chap. must ever be deplored. The least part of the evil was the material havoc. Of this the larger share fell as usual upon the country which was the scene of war. England came out at last with her glory little tarnished. She had yielded not to America, but to America, France, Spain, and Holland combined. That tremendous coalition she had faced, the national spirit of her people which had not been thoroughly awakened by the war against her own colonists, rising to do battle with her foreign enemies ; and her flag floated in its pride once more over the waters which were the scene of Rodney's victory, and on that unconquered rock beneath which the Spaniard received his share of the profits of the league. While she was losing nominal empire in America, illustrious adventurers had enlarged her real empire in Hindustan. Of all the consequences, the worst to Great Britain was that the oligarchy which ruled in Ireland was enabled, by taking advantage of her peril, for a time to cast off imperial control and to set up an independence which ended in the catastrophe of '98. The loss of her colonial dependencies in itself was clear gain, political, military, and commercial. Their trade, her share of it, and her profit from it, increased after their political emancipation. She was thus repaid what she had expended in the war. But she lost what was more valuable than glory, empire, or the profits of trade, the love of her colonists, and in place of it incurred their intense and enduring, though unreasonable and unworthy, hatred. The colonists by their emancipation won commercial as well as fiscal freedom, and the still more precious freedom of development, political, social, and spiritual. They were fairly launched on the course of their own destiny, which diverged widely from that of a monarchical and aristocratic II, REVOLUTION, INi:)EPENDENCE, AND UNION. 115 realm of the old world. But their liberty was baptized in civil blood, it was cradled in confiscation and massacre, its natal hour was the hour of exile for thousands of worthy citizens whose conservatism, though its ascendancy was not desirable, might as all true liberals will allow have usefully leavened the republican mass. A fallacious ideal of political character was set up. Patriotism was identified with rebellion, and the young republic received a revolu- tionary bias, of the opposite of which it stood in need. The sequel of the Boston Tea Party was the firing on Fort Sumter. Another consequence was the severance of Canada from the United States and a schism of the English-speaking race on the North American continent, opening the way, which unity would have closed, for the introduction of international enmities, of a balance of power, and of war. Statesmanship is now labouring against an accumulation of difficulties to undo the evil work done a century ago by denial of amnesty to the vanquished in civil strife. France in gratifying her hatred of England became bankrupt. Bankruptcy brought revolution, and the French 1789. revolution brought a deluge of woe, not only on France but on mankind. Up to that time the spirit of philosophy, philanthropy, and reform had by a peaceful movement been gaining possession of the governments of Europe. An era of improvement without convulsions seemed to be dawning. Young Pitt when he came into power saw noth- 1784. ing before him but peace and reduction of taxes. He looked forward to the total abolition of customs and to free trade, within sight of which the world has never since come. The American revolution by the financial ruin which it brought on France, by the revolutionary spirit 116 TPIE UNITED STATES. chap. which it infused into her, and by the violence for which it gave the signal, changed the scene, and Jacobinism, terror- ism, reactionary despotism, militarism, incarnations of the same malignant spirit, were let loose upon a world which they still distract and ravage. Misfortune pursued even the persons of those most concerned. The French king, whose weakness had consented to the war, and his queen, whose folly had encouraged it, mounted the scaffold ])efore the unpitying eyes if not amid the plaudits of the Ameri- can democracy which they had saved. D'Estaing having helped the queen to her doom, himself followed her, and Lafayette, after dancing for a moment on the top of the revolutionary wave, was overturned by genuine revolution- ists and flung out into disappointment and impotence. The good effects of the American revolt on British politics have it would seem been overrated. Whatever Chatham or any one else might say in his oratoric mood, there was little danger of the enslavement of Britain by means of a colonial stamp act or a colonial duty on tea. For that the Whigs and the people were too strong. On the other hand, a few years after Yorktown the king was able to set his foot on the neck of the Whig party by his personal nomination of Pitt, and Toryism reigned thence- forth with hardly a break for forty years. England's colonial S3^stem also remained unchanged till with all the other parts of British government it felt the tide of return- ing Liberalism, which carried the Reform Bill. Li truth, defeat in anything like a British cause was not likely to entail on the monarch a forfeiture of British hearts, and it was in a British cause that Rodney and Eliot at all events had conquered, while it was before French arms that Corn- wallis had fallen. II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 117 Wliat is called the American revolution was not truly a revolution but a separation. The colonists had taken up arms as they averred for chartered right, not for constitu- tional change. Nevertheless a gradual revolution ensued. The colonists had broken away from monarchy, they had learned to hate it and everything connected with it, they had been steeped in republican sentiment ; they had ex- pelled the monarchical, aristocratic, and hierarchical ele- ments and tendencies of the community. So strong had the feeling already become against anything hereditary or aristocratic, that the foundation of " The Cincinnati," an hereditary brotherhood of the officers who had fought in the war and their descendants, brought on a storm. From the British Parliament supreme power had passed to the legislatures of the several States. The States had reor- ganized themselves in the cases where it was necessary on a republican footing. Their constitutions after some ex- perimental oscillations assumed in process of time nearly the same form, each having as its executive, in the place of a royal governor or the vice-regent of its proprietary, an elective governor with a veto not absolute like that of the crown but suspensive, and a legislature consisting of two houses, a Senate which succeeded to the old Council, and an Assembly; both houses being elective, but the con- ditions of election to the Senate and the tenure of seats in it being such as to render it rather a conservative and re- vising body, while the Assembly was the direct expression of the popular will. This was in fact the old English model as it was understood to be, with the omission of the hereditary element. In almost all the states there had been up to that time a property qualification of some sort for the franchise. Gradually in the succeeding years these 118 THE UNITED STATES. chap. qualifications were abolished and manhood suffrage pre- vailed. This, apart from deliberate policy, the bidding of politicians against each other for popular support was sure to bring to pass. The elective principle was unhappily ex- tended in time by most of the states to the judiciary, Georgia setting the bad example which Massachusetts was wise enough always to refuse to follow. The common law of England remained and still remains the basis of Ameri- can law. Even the technicalities of its pleading system have in some American states partly survived their aboli- tion in the old country. But the legal supports of terri- torial aristocracy, primogeniture and entail, disappeared. With them departed the last relics of the manorial system ; that of freehold farms — territorial democracy, as it has been called — everywhere prevailed, and New York ceased to pay homage, ultimately she ceased to pay quit-rents, to her patroons. The Church establishments, alike that of Congregationalism in Massachusetts and that of Angli- canism in the Southern and Middle States, passed away and gave place to religious equality, though a state profes- sion of Christianity with some legal safeguards for religion lingered on and lingers still, especially with regard to the observance of Sunday. Congregational establishment in the North somewhat survived Anglican establishment in the South, because the first was popular, the second aristocratic. Churches which had been established took up their position as free churches, a process in which the Church of England marked her singularly political charac- ter, for the English episcopate could consecrate no one as bishop who had not taken the oath to the crown, and for the consecration of an American bishop it was necessary to have recourse to the free Anglican episcopate of Scotland. II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. liy Apart from specific change, constitutional, legal, or ecclesiastical, there was a general change of ideas as to the origin, foundation, and authority of government. The court which had been paid to the king was henceforth to be paid to the sovereign people. To the sovereign people all loyalty was henceforth due. Against the sovereign people only could treason be committed. That treason could be committed against the sovereign people even more easily than against a king, was the opinion of Samuel Adams, who in opposing the extension of mercy to some convicted insurgents laid it down that in monarchies the crime of treason or rebellion might admit of being par- doned or lightly punished, but the man who dared to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death. The five years which followed the final separation of the colonies from the mother country have been justly called the critical period of American history. Imperial unity had departed, national unity had not taken its place. The bond of mutual danger, weak enough even while the danger lasted, had departed with the return of peace. Congress, originally the organ of a war league and invested only with war or diplomatic powers, was politically a shadow. Its army had been broken up, its currency had lost all value, to raise money it was driven to such expedi- ents as drawing on its foreign ministers and selling the drafts for cash. It was unable to keep its word to the scarred veterans who had fought for it. Its financier, the banker-statesman Robert Morris, struggled with its em- barrassments nobly but in vain. It had not the means of protecting the lives or property of its citizens on the high seas. A handful of mutineers turned it out of doors. Reduced to ignominious impotence at home it could not 120 THE UNITED STATES. chap.| command respect abroad, nor could England or any foreign nation be justly upbraided by Americans with slighting a government which Americans themselves almost spurned. Valid treaties could not be made with a government which had no means of punishing their infraction. Seeing the confusion, some of the army officers would have made Washington king, but he more decisively and sincerely than Ca3sar or Cromwell put away the crown. The States were scattered along nine hundred miles of coast, broken by many impediments to travel. They had little inter- communication. Their interests and feelings were still strongly local in spite of their partnership and the com- radeship of their soldiers during the war. Among the public men who had taken a leading part in the struggle for independence and among the Continental veterans there might be a community of sentiment, but on the whole the centrifugal forces prevailed and were gaining strength. State selfishness manifested itself with violence, especially in the case of New York. It was becoming fatal even to commercial unity. States fell foul of each other. There were disputes about territory, and in a con- test between Pennsylvania and Connecticut for the posses- 1784. sion of Wyoming that hapless settlement was a second time devastated, and with cruelty only less than that of the Indians and Tories. Such a dissolution and such a collapse of public spirit are not the usual sequel of a struggle for a great cause, the tendency of which on the contrary is to elevate, brace, and unite. Grievances and discontent were rife. Commerce, almost ruined by the maritime war, was now weltering in the slough of a debased paper currency into which individual States were wading deeper still. There was a heavy burden of private II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 121 as well as of public debt. Men were being dragged to debtors' prisons. The community was vexed by litigation and the enforcement of odious claims. Gambling specula- tion flourished, as it always does when the currency is deranged, and the people were incensed by the sight of its shameful gains. The spirit of repudiation was abroad. Scarcity appeared and food riots with it. At length law- loving Massachusetts became the scene of a dangerous rebellion of the indebted and suffering class under the leadership of Daniel Shays, formerly a captain in the 1787. Continental army, who in common probably with many of his comrades had been reduced to want by the failure of the public faith. Shays' rebellion gave a salutary shock. Anarchy was evidently at hand. To avert it a convention met to give the country a government by framing a constitution. 1787. The president of the convention was Washington, who, the war ended, had sought retirement and domestic happi- ness at Mount Vernon sincerely but in vain. Personal confidence in him it was in great measure that made the convention possible and enabled it to do its work. Once more and not for the last time he saved the state. When the servile dread of popular opinion which is the bane of popular government began to show itself, he rose from his chair and said, " It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work ? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and hon- est can repair ; the event is in the hand of God." " These words," says an eminent writer, "ought to be blazoned in letters of gold and posted on the wall of every American 122 THE UNITED STATES. chap. assembly that shall meet to nominate a candidate or declare a policy or pass a law, so long as the weakness of human nature shall endure." If it could only be shown how the politician is to act in this spirit, while to him the pleasure of the changeful multitude is life and its displeas- ure is death ! The leading minds of the convention were E'ranklin, Hamilton, Madison, Rufus King, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Pinckne}^ Oliver Ellsworth, Elbridgc Gerry, James Wilson, and Roger Sherman — sagacious and experienced men of business, like the men of whom the American Senate is now composed, and far unlike the men to whose lot it unhappily fell to frame a constitution for revolutionary France. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opinions were French and revolutionary and whose influence had he been present would have been great, was happily absent as ambassador at Paris. The tendency of the American statesmen was conservative, their mission being to avert dissolution. That their work proclaims their wisdom, the world declares. They founded, if not the first national republic, the first which was destined to endure. The republics of antiquity were cities, and Rome when she became more than a city ceased to be a republic. In the United Netherlands the Stadtholderate was a veiled monarchy. The Common- wealth of England lived but for an hour, though it left what may prove a valuable legacy in the Instrument of Government. The union of the Swiss Cantons was at this time not national but federal, in the strict sense of the term. It has since become national by approximation to the American model. The problem which the framers of the American consti- tution had to solve was that of reconciling a strong na- n. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 123 tional government, which was the aim of most of them, with the claims and susceptibilities of separate and in their own eyes sovereign states. The solution of that problem was a nation with a federal structure. The federal parts of the constitution are the recognition of the right of each state to self-government in regard to all ordinary matters of legislation or administration ; the equal representation of the states great and small in the Senate, which is placed beyond the power of amendment ; and the election of the president through state colleges, the verdict of which may not coincide with that of the majority of votes in the whole Union ; the last provision being however of little practical importance. It is also declared in the interest of state right that any power not expressly given to the fed- eral government is withheld and remains in the states or in the people. In the group of states with which the framers had to deal there were differences of size or importance which rendered federation on an equal footing a work of difficulty. Yet there was no towering predominance to excite the permanent jealousy of the rest, as there would be if England were federally united with Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Wliether the constitution was a compact, as parties to which the states retained their independent exist- ence, or an incorporating union in which the independent existence of the states was merged, was a question left by the framers to settle itself and which was ultimately decided by the sword. What is certain is that Congress was not made, like the British Parliament, a sovereign power. The sovereignty remained either in the states or in the united people. The national part of the constitution was not struck out at a heat as misdirected eulogy avers, but was framed like 124 THE UNITED STATES. chap. the constitutions of the several states on the English model, as the English model was in law and was still imagined in fact to be even by the English themselves, with an executive head and a legislature divided into two co-ordinate branches. The elective president was the republican substitute for the hereditary king, and was invested with the executive powers, political, diplomatic, and military, which the king was still supposed to possess. The military command however was to be direct only in the case of the standing army ; of the militia, the command- ers were to be the governors of the states, to whom the president's requisition was to be addressed. The Senate was the republican and elective House of Lords, and was like it restrained from originating money bills. The House of Representatives was the House of Commons, the direct expression of the popular will, as well as in this case, the organ of the nation, while the Senate was the organ of the states. The Senators were to be elected by the state legislatures for six years, the members of the. House of Representatives were to be elected by the people for only two years ; and the Senate was expected, both from the mode of its election and from the length of its term, to be like the upper house of the British Parliament a conserva- tive and revising body. The qualification for the national suffrage was to be the same as that required for electors of the most numerous branch of the legislature in each state, an enactment of which, leaders and parties bidding against each other for popular support, manhood suffrage was the certain offspring. The presidency, after much debate and many changes of mind, was made tenable for four years with the power of re-election, the exercise of which was presently limited by fixed custom to a double II. RI<:VOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 125 term. The election was not intended to be popular; it was vested in colleges of electors, sage citizens it was sup- posed they would be, one college for each state. But the election of these colleges for the special purpose inevitably became a mandate, and a presidential election practically by manhood suffrage is now the most extensive display of popular sovereignty in the world. The president was invested with a suspensive veto in place of the veto nomi- nally absolute of the British king, while a share was given to the Senate in the executive power by making its con- sent necessary to official appointments and to treaties. These were deviations from the revered but impracticable principle of Montesquieu, who had laid it down that the complete separation of the executive, legislative, and judi- cial powers from each other was the only sure pledge of freedom. On the other hand, whether in deference to Montesquieu or to the political purism which had given birth to place Bills in the old country, ministers of state were excluded from the legislature. Thus a turn was given to the parli- amentary system in America different from that which had been taken by the parliamentary system in England, though almost without the knowledge of Englishmen themselves. Cabinet government was precluded. Instead of a ministry responsible to the legislature, and dependent for existence on its vote, America has a ministry independent of the legislature and irremovable during its term of four j-ears. Instead of the control exercised over legislation by the ministers sitting in Parliament, America has controlling committees nominated in the House of Representatives by the Speaker, who is thus not merely the chairman but the party leader of the House. In the Senate there can hardly 126 THE UNITED STATES. chap. be said to be any initiative or control, except that of party organization or individual influence. Of government by party, in which their settlement was destined to result, the framers of the constitution appear not to have thought, though they had an example of it before them in the British Parliament. That organized party would be the dominant force acting under the forms of the institutions which they framed did not, so far as we can see, occur to their minds. In this most momentous respect their foresight failed. The states were prohibited from laying import or transit duties on each other's goods. Internal free trade was thus secured to the whole of the continent occupied by the United States. This was practically the greatest of all the measures of free trade in commercial histor3\ For the amendment of the constitution two processes were assigned, the initiative being given either to two-thirds of both Houses of Congress or to the legislatures of two- thirds of the states. Both processes are so difficult, espe- cially when the Union is divided into parties, as to carry conservatism almost to the length of immobility. There was no amendment during a period of sixty years. The interpretation and legal guardianship of the consti- tution were vested in a Supreme Court, the judges being appointed by the President with consent of the Senate. In the constitution, or in additions soon after made to it by way of amendment, are provisions which taken together constitute a republican Bill of Rights. A republican con- stitution is guaranteed to each of the states, no titles of nobility can be granted, no religion can be established, no religious tests for office can be imposed ; speech and the press are to be forever free, liberty of public meeting and II. REVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 127 of petition are secured, trial by jury is to be every man's right ; acts of attainder, ex post facto laws, or laws impair- ing the faith of contracts are not to be passed ; no private property is to be taken by the state without compensation ; that military usurpation may be rendered impossible, all freemen are permitted to carry arms. The adoption of a federal senate with a national house of representatives was a compromise for the sake of union between the claims of the states and those of the nation. The clauses of the constitution respecting slavery were a compromise for the sake of union between the freedom which prevailed in the North and the slavery which pre- vailed in the South. In the northern and central states since the revolution emancipation had been making rapid progress. Vermont led the way in legislative prohibition. Massachusetts judicially applied to the negro the principle of equal rights embodied in the Declaration of Indepen- dence, much as in England slavery had been judicially interdicted in the case of Somerset. Elsewhere liberal sentiment had practically prevailed. In the southern states there were politicians who saw the danger of slav- ery and philanthropists who condemned its iniquity. But the economical conditions which fostered it were too strong and were destined soon to be fatally reinforced. In the apportionment of representation the South was allowed by the Fathers of the constitution to count three- fifths of its slaves. A fugitive slave law was introduced and the Union is pledged to lend its forces for the suppres- sion of slave insurrection. The existence of the slave trade was secured for twenty j^ears. Soon after the adop- tion of the constitution, Kentucky was admitted as a slave state and two fugitive slaves were arrested at Boston. 128 THE UNITED STATES. chap. The names " slavery," " slave," and " slave-trade " are avoided ; those of " persons held to service or labour," " importation and migration " are used instead. But the veil of language betrays consciousness without hiding the guilt. Compromises of expediency may well be wise, com- promises of principle always fail. We know now of what upas tree the germ was planted here. This was the first of three great compromises with slavery for the sake of union. The convention sat with closed doors, as every assembly must if it means really to deliberate, not to talk to the gallery and the reporters. In this case it was most neces- sary that the debate should be perfectly free, and that the ■ work should come complete before the people. But the substance of the discussion has been preserved in authentic notes and nothing in political archives is more important. In overcoming the opposition, constitutional or arising from the local fears and jealousies of different states, there was abundant work for personal authority, statesmanship, address, and eloquence both of the tongue and pen. Among the opponents of union were Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, the latter of whom, if the evidence of his opponents is to be believed, appealed without scruple to all motives. Pamphleteering abounded on both sides and the controversy gave birth to one memorable work, " The Federalist," of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. Unluckily " The Federalist" is mainly taken up with allay- ing the fears, proved by the event to be groundless, of those who fancied that the power of government would be too great, while with the real dangers, democratic passion, demagogism, and factions, it omits to deal. Provision was made by the constitution for the govern- II. KEVOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, AND UNION. 129 ment. Provision for expansion had been made by a resolution of the old Continental Congress which de- clared that the demesne or territorial lands "should be disposed of for the common benefit of the United States, and be settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become members of the federal union, and have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and indepen- dence as the other states." Virginia and other states had conceded to the confederacy the vast tracts to which they laid claim between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, and for the settlement and political organization of these tracts an ordinance had been made in 1787 second in importance only to the constitution. The nomination of a governor by the president and the election of a rudi- mentary legislature formed the provisional process by which the territory was to be prepared for admission as a state to the Union by an Act of Congress when its popu- lation should have become sufficient, and provided Con- gress approved its constitution. By a memorable article j of the ordinance slavery was prohibited north of the Ohio. Thus marshalled by law and order, the host of settlement and civilization set forth on its westward march. Human- ity had advanced since the migrations of the Huns and Tartars, A system of dealing with the public lands which should treat them, in their primary aspect, not as a national estate of which a market was to be made, but as a field for settlement, and open them on the easiest terms to I the settler, was needed to complete the policy. In time it came. CHAPTER III. EEPUBLIC. TI^ASHINGTON became President by acclamation. At the end of his term of four years he with unfeigned reluctance consented to re-election. For eight years he was in power far more of a king than the crowned King of England; he not only reigned, but governed. He even kept something like royal state, he rode in a coach-and- four, at the opening of Congress in a coach-and-six. He treated admission to his levies and parties as a matter of etiquette, unlike his democratic successors, Mdio are com- pelled to receive all comers at all times and to allow the millions to take them by the hand. His birthday was kept like that of a king. His wife was called Lady Washington, the article in the constitution against titles of nobility notwithstanding. On state occasions he wore court dress. In all this, however, he was not indulging personal pride, but doing what he thought was incumbent on the head of the nation, for he was always a sincere republican, though of the aristocratic type. His state, though modest and certainly covering no designs of ag- grandizement, did not fail to give umbrage to jealous democracy, which took arms at once against the proposals to confer on the President such a title as " Highness," or to put his head on the coins. 130 CHAP. III. REPUBLIC. 131 To the character and authority of the head of the nation must hirgely be ascribed the success of the constitution, which at first had little hold upon the people. At the first session of Congress eight weeks elapsed after the appointed day before enough members arrived to form a quorum. Before the end of Washington's term the con- stitution had firmly taken root, the authority and dignity of Congress were assured, and it had drawn to it the ability, the ambition, and the political life of the nation. From the outset there was a full measure of practical sagacity in both houses. The Senate being the upper chamber and the tenure of its members being six years, while that of those of the House of Representatives was only two, it presently drew the higher statesmanship to itself. It was always more conservative and at first sat with closed doors. Washington's wisdom was that of judgment rather than that of forecast. He seems to have had no inkling of the course which, under the elective system, affairs would really take. Party, the power of the future, his own breast being absolutely free from it, he regarded as a pass- ing malady in others, and thought he could subdue it by uniting in his cabinet the leaders of the opposite schools of politics, Hamilton and Jefferson. But from the irrecon- cilable enmity of these two men, and the ultimate retire- ment of Jefferson, he might have seen what would come whenever his own supremacy was withdrawn. Each was the head of a party in course of formation ; Hamilton of the Federalists, the party of strong government and English leaning ; Jefferson of the democratic republicans, the party of closely circumscribed government, and of sympathy with France. 132 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasmy, by general consent, ranks first in ability of American statesmen, at least amongst those of the old school. It is to him that hostile critics of American statesmanship have special reference when they say that the transformation of Rome by Augustus has been reversed, and that what was at first an edifice of marble has been turned into an edi- fice of brick. He was not a native patriot, but had been transplanted to the colony of New York from a crown colony in the West Indies, the sentiments of which were essentially monarchical and aristocratic. At a New York dinner he replied to a democratic sentiment by striking his hand on the table and saying, " Your people, Sir, your people is a great beast." Though he meant beast no doubt in the Platonic sense the sentiment which he expressed was not worship of the people. Ambition, as he frankly admitted to himself, was his guiding star. At the open- ing of the revolution he seems to have chosen the path to which his star guided him, coolly and without fanaticism, while he showed his moderation as well as his generosity and courage by protecting a royalist against the fury of a revolutionary mob. Joining Washington's staff and be- coming military secretary, he displayed precocious ability as a negotiator in delicate affairs and as a writer of de- spatches, at the same time distinguishing himself in the field. As a witness of the military mal-administration of Congress and the consequent sufferings of the army, he must have had the need of a strong and capable govern- ment forcibly impressed upon his mind. The nobleness of his soul was shown in his sympathy with Andr^, and more practically when the war Avas over by declaring for amnesty and gallantly stemming the tide of vindictive III. REPUBLIC. 133 persecution in New York. When the time came for bringing order out of the political chaos which followed the revolution, his was the leading and informing spirit. He was the most zealous promoter of the constitutional union, and as the principal writer in " The Federalist," its foremost defender. Though New York was his state, not being a native of it he could rise above its narrow interests and be a citizen of the Union. To exalt the Union above the States and enlarge the authority of the central govern- ment was his steadfast aim. By his opponents he was accused of a design to introduce monarchy and aristocracy. He was a man of too much sense either to suppose this possible or to pursue a chimera. But though a loyal republican he was no democrat. He would have been more at home in the place of Turgot or Pitt than in the service of the multitude. His belief in the wisdom of the people was limited, and he detested mob rule. He had insight enough to discern, and frankness enough to avow his opinion, that something which was called corruption was almost inseparable from the working of parliamentary institutions. Becoming Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, he with wonderful ability got the finances, the state of which had seemed desperate, into order, averted bankruptcy and repudiation, induced Congress not only to meet the federal debt, but, what was much more difficult, to assume the war debts of the States, funded the entire debt and made provision for the pay- ment of the interest, restored the national credit, the soundness of the currency, and with them, commerce and prosperity. Stock-jobbing there could not fail to be in a great financial transition. " Scripo-phobia " raged for a season. But Hamilton did nothing to encourage it, and 134 THE UNITED STATES. chap. his own hands were clean. In Webster's words, for once florid, " he smote the rock of the national resources, he touched the dead corpse of the public credit which sprang upon its feet." "The fabled birth of Minerva from the brain of Jove was hardly more sudden or more perfect than that of the financial system of the United States from the conceptions of Alexander Hamilton." In doing all this he was called upon to display force of character and ascendancy over men not less than financial skill. Among his measures was the creation of a national bank, and in this, as in his whole policy, he had not only the immediate end but the strengthening of the government in view. His youthfulness at the time of his great success makes him almost a counterpart of Pitt. From the economical fallacies of his day he was not entirely free. His tariff was protectionist, though only to a moderate extent, and it practically affirmed, apparently without constitutional sanction, the power of Congress to impose taxes for the purpose of fostering particular trades as well as for that of raising a revenue. Otherwise his economical and finan- cial views were sound, and he owed their soundness mainly to his own genius. His powers of exposition were also of the highest order, though as a popular orator he did not attempt to shine. His purity was above suspicion ; the attempts of his enemies to impeach it totally failed. Equally above suspicion was his patriotism, and if in the fierce excitement of political conflict he once or twice did what could not be defended, these were but spots on a character otherwise stainless. Though not a learned 1804. lawyer he was a great constitutional jurist. He died before his hour, murdered under the form of a duel. But it is not likely that had he lived longer he would ever III. REPUBLIC. 135 have been head of the state. Great as was his ascendancy over the men of his own party, he was never popular. His memory never became dear to the multitude, and it was left to his own family at a late day to erect his statue. Jefferson, Washington's Secretary of State, was and still is a popular idol. This man's character is difficult to treat. There is something enigmatic about his portrait, which combines a body large and strong, fitted for horse- manship and athletic exercise, with a face somewhat fem- inine not to say feline. As governor of Virginia in the war he had shown lack of nerve if not of courage. Few will maintain that he was in an eminent degree truthful, straightforward, free from propensity to artifice and in- trigue. Few will contend that he would ever, like Hamil- ton, have braved unpopularity in defence of righteousness. His own Ana remain to confute any admirer who claims for him freedom from malice or greatness of soul. He had unbounded faith in the people, and never doubted the success of the great American experiment in democracy ; there lay his strength. The social current of the age was with him ; he knew it and steadfastly guided his course on the assumption that, whatever influences might prevail beneath the lingering shadow of the old dis- pensation, democracy would in the end prove victorious, and bear its votaries on to success. Intently he listened for the voice of the popular will, and surely he caught its every whisper. His political philosophy seems to have been summed up in the belief that all evils having been the work of government, the less of government there was the better. This, it has been said, stood him in the place of religion. Anarchy itself was, or he could fancy that it was, preferable to strong government. Shays' 136 THE UNITI<:D STATES. chap. rebellion in Massachusetts, which frightened the states into union, was by him regarded as a healthy exercise of freedom. " A little rebellion," he said on that occasion, "is a good thing and ought not to be too much discour- aged." It was a medicine necessary for the health of government. " God forbid," he cried, *■' that we should be twenty years without such a rebellion. . . . What signi- fied a few lives lost in a century or two. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants : it was its natural manure." He affected to believe that the Indians who had no govern- ment at all were happier than the people who lived under the European governments ; and of the three conditions, Indian anarchy, governments wherein every one had a just influence, and governments of force, it was not clear in liis mind that the first condition was not the best. He did not think it ridiculous to say that were it left to him to decide whether they sliould have a government without news- papers or newspapers without a government he should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. He embraced and exhorted a disciple to propagate a theory which he shrank from propagating himself, that no generation had power to bind its successors ; and that as nineteen years were a generation, national repudiation and bankruptcy would be lawful after that period. These were his transports, which in the actual field of politics were controlled by his good sense. Jefferson, however, was not one of the people, but a being of a higher order stooping to iden- tify himself with the people who, as they were not yet conscious of their power, were captivated by his conde- scension. He was literary, philosophic, scientific. His love and command of philosophic abstractions appears in III. REPUBLIC. 137 the most momentous and famous of his works, the Decla- ration of Independence. He planned the University of Virginia. He was in his day the cynosure of classical taste, and tlie father of that domestic architecture which presented the front of a Doric temple with family and culinary developments in the rear. His agriculture was scientific and experimental. In religion he was a free- thinker, and in his own State an ardent promotor of reli- gious liberty. To him Anglican establishment in Virginia owed its doom. He detested the clergy and by the clergy was detested. He hated England with intense bit- terness, was French to the core, and went all lengths in his sympathy with the French revolution. He could palliate the September massacre, rejoice that his friends at home were taking the name of Jacobins, and say that rather than the revolution should have failed he would have seen half the earth devastated ; that were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country things would be better than they were. The clergy, when he taunted them with fanaticism, might have retorted that fanaticism was not confined to religion. Had he been a fellow citi- zen of Robespierre he would have been in some danger with his enthusiasm, his sentimentalism, and his acquies- cence in philanthropic blood-shed, of doing as Robespierre and other sentimental philanthropists did. The danger would have been enhanced by his extreme suspiciousness ; for he lived in a perpetual tremor, spying " monocracy," the political demon of his fancy, not only in Hamilton and all Hamilton's associates, but in Washington himself, at whom he glanced in his political correspondence, though he could not directly assail the character of the hero. As to England, she was capable in his imagination of bribing 138 THE UNITED STATES. chap. the Algerines to prey upon American commerce. Another of his peculiarities was his tendency, derived perhaps from the mixed influences of a phuiting state, Rome, Sparta, and Rousseau, to dislike commerce and manufactures, and re- gard agriculture as the foster-mother of political and social virtue. Of the abolition of slavery he was a philosophic advocate, but never emancipated his own slaves. As a party leader he was a perfect artist in his way. But his way was not that of the modern politician, whose first requisite he lacked. He was no platform orator ; he was no orator at all. He seems to have wanted both flow of language and nerve. He did not even enter the lists as a public writer. He managed his party through its leading men, and its leading men by personal correspondence, which he carried on with boundless industry and consum- mate tact, always masking his restless and far-reaching am- bition beneath professions of devotion to private happiness and distaste for public life. He, however, used the press as his organ, and it is not easy to extricate him from the charge of having countenanced Freneau, a reptile journal- ist, in attacking the administration of which he was a member. His principal lieutenant was Madison, a man of cultivated mind, a political philosopher, one of the writers of " The Federalist," master of an Addisonian style, free from the extravagances of his leader while destitute of Jef- ferson's winning enthusiasm and genius for party manage- ment, well-meaning and incorruptible, though, as he was destined to show on a fatal occasion, morally weak. Of all American statesmen, hitherto, Jefferson has left the deepest impression on the character of his people. Their political ideas and hopes, their notions about their own destiny and the part which they are to play in the drama of humanity III. REPUBLIC. 139 have been his. That Jefferson, not Hamilton, rightly divined the tendency of society and the secret of the future is so far the verdict of events. It remains to be seen whether the belief in individual liberty, self-reliance, and self-help which formed his gospel is to give way as the creed of the party progress, to belief in socialistic regula- tion and the paternal action of the state. All that the patriotic appeals of a chief, himself serenely superior to personal rivalries, could do to hold these two men together in the public service was done by Washing- ton, but in vain. After explosions and explanations in which Jefferson failed to produce anything except vague suspicion artfully expressed against his rival, the Secretary of State retired from office to Monticello, his hermitage, as his fancy styles it, to farm, as he said in all his letters, and at the same time to spin a vast web of party connection by a correspondence full of personal and political allurement, while he listened for the footfall of advancing democracy whose advent was to be the signal for his own rise to power. Under Washington's reign and through Hamilton's measures of financial and administrative reform, the Re- public became responsible and respectable. America entered the community of nations. She showed it by bold dealing with the corsairs of Algiers to whom she sent men of war instead of tribute, laying thereby the foundation of her national navy. It was hard to expect that she should be treated as a nation before she had become one, by Eng- land or any other power. " Our country," wrote John Adams, " is grown, or at least has been, dishonest. She has broken her faith with the nations and with her own citizens, and parties are all about for continuing this dis- 140 THE UNITED STATES. chap. honourable course. She must become strictly honest and punctual before all the world, before she can recover the confidence of anybody abroad." The distinguishing quali- ties of the colonies and their government previously to the union have been described as " faction, jealousy, and discord, infirmity of purpose, feebleness in action, unblushing dis- honesty in finance, black ingratitude against the army, and a rapid acquisition of an ever-growing contempt on the part of the rest of mankind." These are the words of a recent American writer of mark. The conduct of the English government during the years of American anarchy has been harshly judged even by English writers. In the light of what followed it is seen that heartily to take the initiative in the restoration of amity would have been England's wisest as well as her most magnanimous course. But apart from the soreness of defeat upon which people who are themselves at all sensitive ought not to be severe, there was not a little to repel amicable advances. The Americans refused to pay their debts to their English creditors ; some of the States seemed determined to repu- diate. The treatment of the loyalists, which disgusted Hamilton, Greene, and Jay, could not fail to disgust still more those in whose cause the loyalists suffered, and the complaints of a number of these men who had migrated to England were ringing in English ears. Till the American government had power to enforce treaties, negotiation was bootless and the interchange of ambassadors would have been a farce. In the question of indemnity to loyalists the confederacy had avowed that it had no means of en- forcing the concurrence of the States. The north-western posts were held by England practically as a security for the payment of the debts. That the British Government or in. REPUBLIC. 141 anybody by its authority was intriguing with the Indians against the Americans is an assertion of which there ap- pears to be no proof. Simcoe, the Governor of Upper Canada^ having fallen under suspicion, though an excellent officer, was recalled. Of the narrow mind of George III it would have been vain to expect the magnanimity of greatness. He had suffered enough to be regarded with some indulgence. But he never was discourteous, and he made a manifest effort to be cordial. When John Adams, June, the first American ambassador, addressed him, the King, ^'^^^' as Adams tells us, was much affected, and answered with tremor. " Sir," he said, " the circumstances of this audi- ence are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have dis- covered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad the choice has fallen upon you to be their min- ister. I wish you, sir, to believe and that it may be under- stood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owe to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separa- tion; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. The moment I see such sentiments and language as yours prevail, and a disposition to give to this country the preference, that moment I shall say, let the circumstances of language, religion, and blood have their natural and full effect." The last sentence is not so good as the rest, but the King's emotion and his habitual want of command of language disarm strict criticism. 142 THE UNITED STATES. chap. We can hardly doubt that Pitt shared the desire of Shel- burne to restore family relations. On the other hand it seems not unlikely that Americans at the Court of St. James's sometimes put on a republican air. A rebuff ad- ministered by them to aristocracy and monarchy is re- counted by the biographer with a smile. There were even causes for mistrust. Gouverneur Morris takes offence at the coldness with which he is received by a British minister. By his own avowal he had just been instigating the French government to form a hostile confederacy against Great Britain and make a war on her which she had done nothing to provoke. It is not unlikely that the British minister had an inkling of this ; if he had his coldness was excusa- ble. The British statesmen of that day, when we repine at what we think their folly in failing to clap their padlock on the American heart, are entitled to the benefit of later experience. It seems that no harmony is so difficult to restore as that between two kindred nations which have once broken the tie. Government showed its new force in grappling with a foe nearer home. In the procession at Philadelphia on the ratification of the constitution were seen a citizen and an Indian chief seated together in an open carriage and smok- ing the calumet to personify peace on the frontiers. It was easier to personify peace than to install it. Washington had to deal with a formidable Indian war in the northwest. One of his generals, St. Clair, met with a defeat not less disastrous than that of Braddock, the disgrace of which is cast wholly on British officers and troops. But General Wayne restored the day, and by a great victory over the Indians practically closed the struggle with the tribes as a power, and the influence of that struggle on American his- III. REPUBLIC. 143 lory. Assimilation, however, never took place. The dis- placement of Indian tribes by advancing civilization con- tinued, though mitigated by a system of reservations. The s/rar desultory conflict between the Indian and the frontiersman, ^ with its savage features, steeping the frontier character in ' ferocity, continued in the far west, and is not extinct even at this day. Washington had also to deal with the local renewal of the anarchy created by the civil war and by the absence of a national government in the interval between the war and the union. A part of Hamilton's financial policy was an excise. Against this an insurrection broke out among the 1792. restive population of Western Pennsylvania. By Wash- ington's firmness and wisdom the revolt was put down and law was enforced without bloodshed. Washington's re-election, like his election, was unani- 1792. mous. He might have wavered more between the call of public duty and his yearning for private happiness had he foreseen the storm that was to rage during his second term. The mine in France to which American revolt had set the match had now exploded and the French revolution had been launched on its mad career. At first all Americans hailed the dawn of French liberty. But when to the dawn of liberty a day of confusion, massacre, blasphemy, anar- chy, and public lunacy succeeded, the educated, wealthy, and religious classes for the most part recoiled. The law- loving Englishman awoke in them and they began to sympathize with England as the power of ordered liberty against the frenzy of the Jacobins. Yet the sympathy of the masses remained with France and seemed to be intensi- fied, instead of being diminished, by her extravagances and crimes. It rose to the pitch of delirium when France 144 THE UNITED STATES. chap. declared war against England. A French envoy, Genet, was welcomed with transports of popular enthusiasm. He was young, ardent, imbued with a piratical diplomacy of the philanthropic Republic. He proceeded with Jacobin energy to treat the United States as a satrapy of revolu- tionary France, to use its territory as the base of a maritime war against England, to fit out in its ports privateers which, manned with American seamen, preyed upon British com- merce, and even to set up courts of admiralty for the con- demnation of his prizes. By the privateers in conjunction with two French frigates fifty British vessels were captured, some of them in American waters. He appealed to privi- leges which the United States had by treaty accorded to France, but which, even assuming that the regicide Republic was the heir of the monarchy, could not, any more than treaty arrangements of the ordinary kind, override inter- national obligations. In all his outrages. Genet was wildly applauded by the Republican masses. When his piratical frigate sailed into Philadelphia flaunting the English colours reversed with the French flag over them, the whole population of what was then the political capital of the Republic turned out to display its sympathy. The 4th of July, we are told, seemed more like a French than an American demonstration. Could Louis XVI have looked down in spirit upon the scene, he, who had saved the Americans from sure disaster, might have beheld a civic banquet given in honour of the regicide emissary and graced by the presence of the governor of an American State at which after singing " The Marseillaise " the head of a pig was handed round and stabbed by the knife of each of the guests in turn with appropriate maledictions. Those who blame the British statesmen of that day for in. IIEPUBLIC. 145 showing coldness towards the American Republic are bound to remember that England received from an American party, not on account of her misdeeds but on account of her monarchical character, demonstrations not of coldness, but of frenzied hatred. Washington, faithful to interna- tional duty, issued a proclamation of neutrality and enforced 1793. it with vigour, as he alone could have done. Jefferson, thoroughly sharing the popular feeling, no doubt winced under the necessity of doing his duty as Secretary of State ; yet he did it. His sagacity taught him that Genet's extravagance would be ruinous to his cause in the end. So it proved, when Genet, utterly losing his head, appealed from Washington's government to the people. His recall was then demanded and was granted the more readily as in the swift phantasmagoria of the revolution the ascen- dancy of his faction had passed away. Washington had also to restrain the sympathies of his own envoy at Paris, Monroe, who, losing the ambassador in the enthusiast, allowed himself to be publicly welcomed by the convention as the representative of a revolutionary republic having a common cause with Jacobin France, and to receive from the President that hug of fraternity in which confiding nations died. There can be no doubt that the crimes and orgies of the revolution were hateful to Washington, who was not only a political conservative, but believed, and in his farewell address declared, that religion was the indis- pensable basis of public morality. But he restrained his feelings and amidst the storm of party passion raging around him kept morally as well as legally the path of strict neutrality. The Jacobin press of America, including the reputed organ of his own Secretary of State, assailed him, especially when he had denounced the Jacobin clubs i 146 THE UNITED STATES. chap. which had been founded in the United States on the French model. He was stung sometimes to the heart, but his resolution was not moved. Washington's authority was put to the severest test by his treaty with Great Britain. Relations with that power were extremely strained. On both sides some of the articles of the treaty made at the close of the American revolution remained unfulfilled, and in addition there were questions touching liberty of commerce, the exercise of belligerent rights by Great Britain against the traders of America as a neutral power, and the impressment of British seamen found in American vessels. To effect a settlement and avertfvar Washington determined to send an envoy to England and his choice fell upon the Chief Justice, John Jay, of whom Webster said, that the ermine — the English emblem still clinging to American imagina- tion — touched nothing less pure than itself when it fell upon Jay. The envoy was no doubt English in mental frame and political sentiment, but there is not the slightest reason for believing that he failed in his mission to do his best for his country. His treaty, as it restored amity with England, was sure to displease the French party. Wash- ington kept it secret for some time. When it was dis- closed a furious storm arose ; Jay was accused of having sold his country. It was doubtful whether the treaty would pass the Senate. The scale was turned in its favour by a speech which ranks among the masterpieces of Ameri- can oratory from Fisher Ames, who, supposing himself to be in the last stage of disease, addressed the assembly with the pathetic force of a dying man. Ames said that there was little use in combating the particular objections to the treaty ; that whatever the terms might be no agree- III. REPUBLIC. 147 ment with Great Britain would satisfy those who urged against the ambassador that he was not ardent enough in his hatred of her, who declared that no treaty ought to be made with an enemy of France, that England was a den of sea-robbers, that her people deserved to be extir- pated, and that it would be well for mankind if she were sunk in the sea. He no doubt represented truly enough the feelings and language of the French party. The in- fluence of the father of his country was tried to the utmost in the ratification of Jay's treaty, but it prevailed, and peace, if not friendship, was for the time secured. Nothing would induce Washington to accept a third term. He was growing old and deaf. He longed for peace and his farm. The attacks of the Aurora, the fiercely democratic and anti-British journal of Duane, an Irish refugee, and other organs of the republican press, despicable as they were in themselves, being taken as the utterances of a large party sometimes drew from him passionate outbursts of grief, especially when the purity of his motives was impugned, and he, the most disinterested of men, was charged with designs against the liberty of his country. He retired, a genuine Cincinnatus, to Mount Vernon. At his departure he issued a farewell address, 1796. which ranks amongst the sacred documents of American history. In this he solemnly exhorted his fellow citizens to unity and love of their country, warning them against geographical divisions, against the excesses of party, and, most emphatically, against entanglements with European politics, and the indulgence of inveterate antipathies to particular nations and passionate attachments to others, which, as he said, made a nation a slave to its antipathies and attachments, and in both cases equally led it astray 148 THE UNITED STATES. chap. from the path of its duties and its interests. Excellent advice, loudly applauded and little observed ! The para- graph dwelling on the value of religion as one of the pillars of national prosperity and cautioning against tlie supposition that without it morality could be maintained, can hardly have failed to be construed as a thrust at the Jacobins and at the free-thinking Jefferson. Addresses of profuse gratitude and veneration were voted by Congress. A few murmurs of dissent were heard. One notably from Andrew Jackson, the Congressman from Tennessee, of gaunt frame and grim aspect, with elf locks hanging over his face and his hair tied behind in an eel skin, and so hot in temper that when he tried to speak his utterance was choked by passion. Nor could the Aiirora and its republican consorts in the press be silent. In the Aurora appeared an article ascribed to a young pupil and favour- ite of Jefferson, who hailed the day of Washington's de- parture as the day of salvation, rejoiced that he who had been the source of all the misfortunes of the country was at length brought down to the level of his fellow citizens, that he could no longer by his name give cur- rency to political iniquity or afford support to suspicious projects, and that the designs which he had formed against the very existence of public liberty were now at an end. " If ever a nation," said the Aurora editorially, " was debauched by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington. Let his conduct then be an example to future ages. Let it serve to be a warning that no man may be an idol. Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind that the mask of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberty of the people." Rather let these words III. REPUBLIC. 149 serve as a warning against the blind frenzy of parti- sanship and the inherent evils of party government. Upon Washington's name were also poured the vials of hatred by Thomas Paine, on whose behalf, when he had become a French citizen, sat in the Convention, and fallen into the fangs of the terrorists, Washington de- clined to interpose. In truth Washington did belong in political and social sentiment to a departing age and to a different sphere. His spirit, as well as the man himself, was passing o& the scene. What would be his feelings if he could now see a presidential election ? Washington's renown is always present in the name of the national capital, the site of which after its temporary sojourn at Philadelphia was, in accordance with his wish, finally fixed on the Potomac, where it might seem to link the North and South together. Hamilton had induced Jefferson to consent to the assumption of the State debts by the Union on condition that the national capital should be placed on the Potomac. This is the first case of log- rolling in the history of Congress. It seems to have been a complex case, the South consenting against its financial interest to the assumption of the State debts on the tacit understanding that Congress should turn a deaf ear to petitions against slavery. Washington thought that the city on the Potomac would become an important mart. It never did ; nor did it, till very recent times, become anything but a political and administrative capital in the wilderness, with but little of general society to temper the roughness of the legislators and mitigate the violence of party conflict. The presence of slavery was not conducive either to good manners or to virtue. No wonder if politics at Washington were somewhat rude, if affrays and duels 150 THE UNITED STATES. chap. were not uncommon, if the dullness of senatorial boarding houses was too often relieved by drinking or gambling, and their lack of domestic happiness by connections to which slavery everywhere opens the door. The error of placing the seat of the legislature away from the social centres has been repeated by almost all the States and by the Canadian confederation. Parties were by this time distinctly formed. Their ma- chinery had been set on foot though not brought to modern perfection. The weakness of the elective system, the in- ability of electors unknown to each other to concur in a choice, had been revealed, and the party ticket had taken the place of a really popular election. Federal parties ex- tended, as they ever have, to State politics, the party in each State being a sort of donkey-engine to the great federal machine. By Washington's retirement the con- trolling hand which suspended their conflict had been with- drawn. Of the Federalist party Hamilton was the soul but not the head, its Achilles but not its Agamemnon. Between John Adams, who had been Vice-President under Washington, as the Federalist, and Jefferson, as the Re- publican candidate, the election for the Presidency lay. John Adams was elected. The voting betrayed the politi- cal division between North and South which Washington might deplore but could not blot out, since its line was traced by the hand of nature. There is nothing in a rational republic to forbid the existence of great political houses, and the family of Adams is the nearest approach to such a house which the American republic has seen. John Adams was a high Federalist and an admirer of the British con- stitution, on the purified principles of which he desired that American institutions should rej^ose. But he was HI. liEPUBLIC, 151 one of the sires of the revolution and, as an American, thoroughly loyal to the republic. Moreover, as envoy to St. James's he had come in contact with British society in an unpropitious hour, and being personally sensitive was far from friendly to Great Britain. (^By a recent American historian he is described in familiar^language as " a burly, round-faced, bald-headed, irascible man with a tough fibre, who was little understood by the j)eople and to whom Con- gressional debates had been a sealed book." In integrity he was an ancient Roman. He had more force than play of character, and though his experience was wide, for he had been ambassador as well as statesman, more knowledge of books than of men. He was somewhat dogmatic, some- what pedantic, and from his childhood too self-conscious and too laboriously self-trained, as his methodical diary shows. He had soon to deal, like his predecessor, with the overbearing violence of revolutionary France, now flushed with victory, governed by a Directory composed of the unscrupulous and rapacious men who are thrown to the top by revolution, and having for its foreign minister Talleyrand, imbued, after a brief sojourn in the United States, with a low notion of American power. Under colour of belligerent rights the French preyed on Ameri- can commerce in both hemispheres, two of their cruisers being commanded by Barney, an American, while as the price of forbearance and an amicable treaty they insisted in effect that the United States should take part with them as a vassal ally against Great Britain in the war. Adams sent three envoys to Paris. Talleyrand, through his reptile agents, gave them to understand that the American Republic, if it would escape the displeasure of the Directory and obtain a treaty, must, like other com- Oct. 1797. 152 THE UNITED STATES. chap. monwealths which France had taken to her bosom, pay her tribute and, in addition, a hxrge sum as a bribe to the Directors and himself. His sagacity for once had failed him. The publication of the papers called the " X. Y. Z. Correspondence" because Talleyrand's agents were denoted by those ciphers, kindled in America a fierce flame of re- sentment, and for a moment hatred of England was lost in indignation at the insolent tyranny of France. Federalists were exultant, Republicans were downcast. Jefferson quaked and watched the storm with close-reefed sails. Popular feeling swelled high. French emblems disap- peared. The black cockade of the American revolution replaced the tri-colour. " Hail Columbia " was composed to oust the " Marseillaise." " Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute," was the cry. Talleyrand was burnt in effigy, and President Adams found himself the object of an enthusiasm which personally he could never have excited. Preparations for war were made by land and sea. Washington was called upon to take once more the command of the army and consented in words which showed his deep sense of French outrage. War had in fact commenced by sea, and a French frigate had been captured by an American, when the President, who had taken the strongest ground of national dignity, to the sur- prise and dismay of his party, appointed a minister pleni- potentiary to France. By this time the battle of the Nile and the turn of fortune in Italy had tempered the pride of the Directory and a treaty was made. It cost Adams the attachment of the more vehement members of his party, but whether he was perfectly right or not in his treatment of his political friends, it cannot be doubted that he was right in avoiding war. III. REPUBLIC. 15.S On this occasion Adams did not consult his cabinet, a name given to the great heads of departments, the Secre- tary of State, or Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Secreta- ries of the Treasury, War, the Navy, and the Interior, the Post Master General, and the Attorney General, whom the President usually takes into his counsel, though their offices strictly speaking are merely departmental and they exercise no collective function, like that exercised by the British Cabinet, of initiating and controlling legislation. The Federalists still had the upper hand, but they threw away their advantage by using it to excess. They passed two acts called the Alien and Sedition Acts, menacing 1798. to liberty. The United States were full of political refugees from Europe, most of them revolutionists, some of them agitators by profession, who had got the political press largely into their hands. Against these was pointed the Alien Act giving the government power of expulsion. The Sedition Act, even in the form in which it passed and which was milder than the original Bill, did not well observe the line between lawful criticism or constitutional resistance and sedition. A violent revulsion of public feeling ensued. Jefferson welcomed the rising gale. He was indeed carried out of his usual prudence and reserve. QJe drew up a manifesto for the use of his party in Ken- tucky designating the Union as a compact among States, claiming for the States severally the right of resisting any breach of the compact, and pronouncing that for a legis- lative encroachment on the part of the federal government the remedy of a State was nullification. This doctrine took no effect at the time, but it did not die. With the Alien and Sedition Acts was passed a Naturalization Act, 1798. increasing the term of necessary residence from five to 154 THE UNITED STATES. chap. fourteen years. This measure betrayed the alarm of native Americans caused by the influx of a motley tide of immigrants, including a number of Irishmen, most of whom were exiles through discontent and infected with revolutionary fever. The Act was repealed a few years afterwards and the old term of five years was restored in 1802. In those days anything like a closing of the door of the universal asylum seemed impolitic as well as inhospi- table, whatever national interest may prescribe now. These political struggles, over which no baton of impar- tial command was waved any more, enhanced the intensity and bitterness of party. Right-minded men deplored the effect on social relations. The party press grew in volume, the number of political journals mounting from forty to a hundred, in power since each party journal had the minds of its readers to itself, and at the same time in slanderous virulence. Callender, a vagabond whose pen Jefferson had stooped to employ, and who afterwards turned against him and libelled him, was a type of the class. Attacks were made on the personal characters of statesmen, and Hamilton, assailed with a baseless charge of corruption, was compelled in his defence to confess that he had been guilty of an adulterous amour. Congress saw its halls profaned by a brutal affray between two of its members. The State politics of New York and in a less degree those of Pennsylvania, full of cabal and corruption from the beginning, mingled with the current of federal politics and deepened the darkness of its tide. In the choice of candidates at the next Presidential election there was on the side of the Federalists a good deal of intrigue, scope for which at that time was given by the mode of election, each elector voting for two men III. REPUBLIC. 155 as President or Vice-President, without saying which of the two he preferred for the Presidency, so that the ulti- mate choice was left to the House of Representatives. John Adams, the natural candidate of the Federalists, received an ugly thrust from Hamilton, whom he had incensed by his conduct in the affair with France. Hamilton himself soon after fell in a quarrel arising out July of New York politics by the pistol of Aaron Burr, a local ^^^^' Catiline whose unscrupulous ambition he had crossed, falling a victim to a false code of honour which survived when other relics of feudalism had passed away. His work, or as much of it as was practicable, was done. To keep the Republic out of the hands of the democracy and in the hands of the chosen few was impossible, but Hamil- ton had succeeded in making it national, and in giving it a strong central government. In this his policy received the powerful and timely aid of Marshall, the great Chief Justice of the United States, who by a series of judgments on constitutional questions upheld and enlarged the power of the federal government. The clause of the constitution authorizing Congress to make all laws which should be necessary and projjer for carrying into execution its enumerated powers afforded scope for a liberal interpre- tation of which the Chief Justice took full advantage. His decision in favour of the creation of a federal bank was a notable instance. It is allowed that he might with equal reason have decided the other way. The result was that the seed which Jefferson had for years been assiduously sowing bore its fruit. He became 1801. President and with power to give his policy full effect. In him the Republican party completely triumphed, while the Federalist party sank to rise again no more in that form or 156 THE UNITED STATES. chap. under that name. Adams, stung to the heart by the elec- tion of Jefferson, refused to witness the hateful spectacle of his successor's inauguration. He spent his last hours in filling up vacancies to place patronage out of Jefferson's reach ; then he departed, the old order in his person giving place with a frown and a shudder to the new. Adams did not hate monarchy, he thought that for England it was good. In the eyes of Jefferson monarchy was the incarnate spirit of evil and to rid mankind of it by example was the mission of the American Republic. Every vestige of the half monarchical state which Washington had retained was now banished from the President's mansion and life. No more coaches-and-six, no more court dress, no more levies. Although Jefferson did not, as legend says, ride to his inauguration and tie his horse to the fence, he was inaugurated with as little ceremony as possible. He received an ambassador in slippers down at the heel, and in the arrangement of his dinner parties was so defiant of the rules of etiquette as to breed trouble in the diplomatic circle. Yet with all his outward simplicity the Virginian magnate and man of letters, though he might be a Republican, could not in himself be a true embodiment of democracy. He was the friend of the people, but not one of them. From him to the rough warrior of Tennessee, the hard-cider drinking pioneer of Ohio, and the rail-splitter of Illinois, there was still a long road to be travelled. Nor had Jefferson any- thing in common with Jacobins who guillotined Lavoisier saying that the Republic had no need of chemists ; for among the cherished objects of his government was the encouragement of science. The desired day had come when the philosopher Avas to III. REPUBLIC. 157 govern. The words of the address which Jefferson, unlike the demagogic sons of thunder in the present day, read in a very low voice, are the expression by its great master and archetype of the republican idea which has hitherto reigned supreme in the mind of the American people. These words are monumental, " Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political ; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none ; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies, the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet-anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad ; a jealous care of the right of election by the People ; a mild and safe correction of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unpro- vided ; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which there is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism ; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first movements in war, till regulars may relieve them ; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labour may be lightly burdened ; the honest payment of our debts, and sacred preservation of the public faith ; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid, the diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason ; freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corjjus, and trial b}'^ jurors impartially selected ; — these principles form the 158 THE UNITED STATES. chap. bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation." Jefferson's wand was the pen. Yet he is strangely apt to fall into mixed metaphors and even into platitudes. This address has not escaped criticism. A constellation goes before the people and guides their steps. In the sequel the constellation becomes a creed, a text, a touchstone, and should the people wander from the " touchstone," they are conjured to " retrace their steps and regain the road." In the genius of a man who made so vast an impression on such a nation we must believe, yet it is sometimes an exer- cise of faith to believe in the genius of Jefferson for any- thing but party management and personal fascination. Politicians out of power are apt to be opposed to strong government ; in power, they feel that a reasonably strong government is necessary to the execution of beneficent designs. There are few more illustrious cases of incon- sistency than that of Jefferson, the austere champion of strict construction, when he nobly stretched or rather broke the constitution to enlarge his country's heritage by the purchase of Louisiana. It was a principal aim of Bonaparte's policy to give France a colonial empire; he had wrested from the weakness of Spain the retrocession of Louisiana, but after the brief and hollow peace of Amiens war again impending with the power which remained mis- tress of the seas, as he saw that his transatlantic prize must infallibly be lost, he resolved to put it beyond the grasp of Great Britain and replenish his military chest at the same time by selling Louisiana to the United States ; privately promising himself, we can hardly doubt, to enforce another retrocession when he was left master of the world. The constitution clearly gave the government III. REPUBLIC. 159 HO power of acquiring foreign territory, and had Washing- ton or Adams been President, Jefferson would have de- nounced the assumption of such power as usurpation and as evidence of monarchical designs. Being himself Presi- dent, he over-rode the law, looking for indemnity to a national authority, the existence of which it would have been hard for him to reconcile with the doctrine of the compact of the States promulgated by him in the Kentucky manifesto. Thus a vast and fruitful territory with the mouth of the Mississippi was added to the domain of the United States. A population alien in race, language, character, and religion, was at the same time incorporated. But the digestive power of the vVmerican Republic proved sufficient for political assimilation, and of French Louisiana there presently remained only traces prized by the lover of the social picturesque. A large section of the new world was thus liberated from the control of the old world and annexed to the realm of the American experiment. Un- happily there was also a great extension of the realm of slavery. The example of Bonaparte in its turn fired American 1805-7. fancy. Aaron Burr, the assassin of Hamilton, a true scion of New York politics as they then were, a showy and rest- less adventurer with revolutionary morals and a gift of misleading youth, and by grace of factious cabal Vice- President of the United States, formed a design of sever- ing Louisiana from the Republic and carving out for him- self a Napoleonic empire in central America. But his plot, after creating some noise and confusion, ended in a farcical catastrophe. Jefferson's first term was benign and prosperous. It 1801-4. was an era of financial success, reduction of debt, public 160 THE UNITED STATES. cii.vr. frugality, expansion of trade and manufactures, sound pro- gress, general prosperity and contentment, a felicity which it owed to the firm government, unlike Jefferson's ideal, by which it had been preceded. The accession of Louisi- ana made it even glorious. It could disappoint only those whom Jefferson's jeremiads over the encroachments and corruptions of monocracy under the first two Presidents, had led to expect a new heaven and a new earth. On his advent to power the President had proclaimed that there was to be no more party ; all were Republicans, all were Federalists. The pledge implied in these loving words he qualified by removing some Federalist office holders and putting Republicans in their places, and he has been branded as the author of the spoils system. But his removals were not wholesale nor very numerous, and he did not cease to pay homage to the better principle ; he had an excuse in the natural claims of his friends, whom he found up to that time totally excluded from the public service, and a less respectable excuse in the importunities of partisans, for politics had now become a trade and office seekers began to swarm. His apology, however, raised a laugh. "If a due participation of office," he said, "is a matter of right, how are the vacancies to be obtained ? Those by death are few, by resignation none. Can any other method than that of removal be proposed?" Jefferson was disposed, as some other popular leaders have been, to show jealousy of the judiciary, as a power independent of the people and its chiefs. Under his administration the Circuit Court Act, extending the action of the supreme judiciary and the number of judges appointed for life was summarily repealed. On the power of the Supreme Court, then filled with judges appointed III. REPUBLIC. 161 by the opposite party, he could not fail to look with a jealous eye. The impeachment of Justice Chase for par- 1803. tisanship on the bench had, no doubt, his sympathy, though he was too cautious to show his hand. The collapse of the impeachmejfft left the Supreme Court more indepen- dent than QY&f. But in the Union generally, from the ten- dency to make the judges elective and their tenure not during good behaviour but for a term of years, the depres- sion of the judiciary in the period succeeding this was the rule, y In Jefferson's second term fate was unkind to him. The 1805-9. philanthropist was called upon to deal with a question of peace or war between his government and those of France and Great Britain. Europe had become the scene of a vast and mortal struggle between the Napoleonic empire and the independence of nations, in which at length the British navy remained the sole stay of independence. Napoleon's only law was his will. His will was that there should be no neutrals. It was declared in his Berlin and Milan decrees, and was carried into effect by the ruth- less confiscation of American ships and goods. Great Britain on her side exercised with a high hand against neutral trade belligerent rights which the policy of nations has since discarded. As the French Emperor treated her islands so she treated the French Empire as in a state of legal blockade, and intercepted American commerce with its members. The situation, regarded even from our point of view, was highly complicated, and allowance must be made for the difficulties of those who had to deal with it on either side. The Americans might claim the right of neutral trade. But in this case the right could not be exercised without practically taking part in the war, since 162 THE UNITED STxVTES. chap. Great Britain, the land being entirely in the power of the enemy, had nothing left her but to press him by sea, which she could do only by cutting off his trade. To British apprehension the neutral trade was war in dis- guise. It was carrying supplies to a place besieged. John Randolph of Virginia, no Anglomaniac, painted the char- acter of the trade with eccentric frankness. Supposing the choice of a British statesman to lie between the two evils, it might have been hard to say which was worse, open war with the United States, or the aid which their neutral trade would lend to France. You may have a right to traffic on a battle-field; but you will have diffi- culty in exercising it, especially if the battle-field is one in which nations are fighting for their lives. By keep- ing off the scene of conflict while the conflict raged, at the same time closing her own ports against combatants, America might have avoided collision ; she could hardly avoid it in any other way. With Great Britain there was another cause of quarrel, the impressment of British seamen found on board Ameri- can vessels. Here Great Britain was clearly in the wrong. She ought to have kept her seamen by increas- ing their pay and putting an end to the grievances which produced the mutiny of the Nore. In heartlessly neglect- ing to render the service just to the common sailor, and at the same time making a brutal use of impressment, aristo- cratic government showed its dark side. It is true that impressment was conscription in a coarse form, and that the extreme notion of indefeasible allegiance still pre- vailed. But the practice, however lawful, was intolerable, and its offensiveness was sure to be aggravated by the conduct of British commanders full of the naval pride of III. RErUBLIC. 163 their nation and perhaps irritated by the loss of their (lews ; for it is not denied that many British seamen were seduced from the service and that the American marine, both mercantile and national, was largely manned in this way. We hear of a British captain having his whole crew spirited away without redress, and of a dozen British ships detained at once by loss of hands. The attack of the Brit- ish Leopard on the American Chesapeake for the purpose 1807. of enforcing impressment was a flagrant outrage, and though apology was made and satisfaction was tendered by the British government, this was not done in a way to pluck the thorn out of the American bosom. It was unfortunate that England's foreign minister was at this time the surpassingly brilliant but not so wise, too often sarcastic, and sometimes insolent Canning. Feeling was embittered by the disclosure of a pretended j)lot on the part of the British government to sow dissension among 1809 the American States through Henry, a low adventurer, -^^^ with whom Sir James Craik, the Governor of Canada, had been betrayed into imprudent relations, and who to ground a claim on the government for money had been tampering with malcontents in New England. What might have been done by courteous explanations and friendly appeals to avert the quarrel was unhappily not done. Meantime the neutral trade in spite of all obstructions and aggressions was very gainful, commerce adjusted itself to the risks, British cruisers protected American merchant- men against French and Spanish privateers. The Ameri- can merchants though they grumbled were willing to sub- mit ; not from them came the demand for war. " Our passion," said Jefferson, " is peace." He not only recoiled as a philanthropist from bloodshed, but as a 164 THE UNITED STATES. cii.vr. politician he with reason dreaded military propensities and sabre sway. Such preparations for war as he could be induced to make were scrupulously defensive, and his fleet of gun-boats for the protection of the coast to be launched when the invader should appear excited a smile. Alone among all statesmen he tried to make war without bloodshed by means of an embargo on trade. American vessels were forbidden to leave port, foreign vessels were obliged to sail in ballast, and coasting vessels were pro- hibited from landing their cargo at any but American ports. Total denial of trade would, Jefferson thought, bring the belligerents, especially commercial England, to reason. By his great majority in Congress and his personal ascendancy he was enabled to carry this extraordinary measure and to enforce observance with a high hand and in language towards recalcitrants almost autocratic. An extraordinary measure it was and more easily defensible perhaps as an exercise of the war powers of the central government than as an exercise of the power given it by the constitution to regulate commerce, since total prohibi- tion, whatever the courts of law might say, could hardly be called regulation. On the part of Jefferson such a stretch of authority was startling ; but he had left his anarchical theories on the steps of power, and had begun to boast of the strength of republican government. Commerce ceased. The ships lay idle at the wharves, and the seafaring pop- ulation lost its employment. The people suffered greatly b}^ the withdrawal of the profitable though hazardous trade. The measure of their loss was given by the crowd of ves- sels which, when the embargo was lifted, put to sea. New England was to some extent indemnified by the develop- ment of her manufactures under the stringent protection III. KEPUBLIC. 165 afforded by the embargo. But on Virginia the effect was ruinous. Yet the respect of the people for the central authority was on the whole to a wonderful extent dis- played by their submission to the law. At this the spirit of Alexander Hamilton might have rejoiced. But Jef- ferson's government became the object of hatred and his vast popularity waned. England remained obdurate ; her situation was too desperate, her passions too highly inflamed for concession ; her strong aristocratic government was not easily to be turned from its purpose by the suffer- ings of trade or industry, while her shipping interest gained by relief from American competition. After resorting to measures of enforcement which on the part of a mono- crat he would have deemed flagrant tyranny, Jefferson was at last compelled to give up the embargo. Weari- ness and despondency overcame him. He let fall the reins of government before the term of his Presidency had expired, and he went into philosophic retirement at Monticello whence he returned no more. It is not the highest of his titles to fame in the eyes of his countrymen, but it may be not the lowest in the court of humanity, that he sacrificed his popularity in the attempt to find a bloodless substitute for war. His memory recovered from the shock and his reign over American opinion endured. Jefferson's successor was his shield-bearer, Madison, an- other of the Virginians whom wealth and leisure enabled to devote themselves to politics and to supply the young Republic with statesmen. He had been at first a Federal- ist and a fellow worker of Hamilton and Jay, but he had been afterwards attracted to Jefferson and had perhaps recognized in Republican principles the passport to power. By American writers he is invested with tlie highest 166 THE UNITED STATES. chap. mental gifts. Yet the impression which he makes on the ordinary reader is rather that of a cultivated and some- what prim mediocrity, though combined with a clear understanding, a scientific knowledge of politics, states- manlike training, and a surefooted ambition. At his right hand was Gallatin, a Swiss, a man whose standing was, owing to his foreign origin, below his ability, once revolutionary enough to bear an equivocal part in the Whiskey Insurrection, now grown more moderate and the great financier of the Republic. The event of Madison's Presidency is the war with England. Few things are more repulsive or less profitable than the study of the diplomatic embroilment in which the government of the United States was for years in- volved with those of England and France and which issued in a disastrous war. It is scarcely disputed by American historians that the injuries received by American com- merce at the hands of France were fully as great as those received at the hands of England. Napoleon had confis- cated American shipping and goods to an immense amount and coolly reckoned on the fruits of his violence as reve- nue. He seized a hundred and fifty ships in one year alone. His Rambouillet decree was a barefaced proclamation of rapine to which effect was at once given by a sweeping confiscation of American vessels. Not only was his will liis sole law, but he pretended submission to no other, whereas England at all events recognized international law, and held herself ready to atone for a breach of it. But England was hated, France was not, and as an Amer- ican historian says, insults and injuries which, coming from Great Britain, would have set the whole country on fire, were submitted to with patience and even with the in. REPUBLIC. 167 pleasure with which a lover sometimes allows himself to be trampled on and plundered by an imperious and profli- gate mistress. Napoleon, it is true, did his best by false- hood and subterfuge to lead the American government to believe that he had withdrawn his decrees and that the British Orders in Council alone stood in the way of the recognition of neutral rights. But the American govern- ment was, to say the least, not unwilling to be deceived. A new influence, making for war, had come upon the scene of American politics. Settlement having now crossed the whole line of the AUeghanies, the West, fast becoming the great West, was added, and the union from being an Atlantic was becoming a continental confedera- tion. In Kentucky, the population drawn mainly from the slave States, was a picturesque but formidable mixture of the slave owner and the pioneer. The character of the Kentuckian was that of the hunter and the frontiersman with an imported strain of the slave owner, and he was always engaged in murderous war with Indians. His food was salt pork without vegetables ; whiskey he drank from morning till night. That he should be quarrelsome natu- rally followed. His amusements were horse-racing, cock- fighting, betting, and gambling, to the last of which he was much given. He was always fighting, and in fighting he kicked, tore, bit, and gouged. In all his proceedings he showed a lawless vigour which might prove the wild stock of civilized virtue. In the financial field he pres- ently distinguished himself by wild-cat banking, by the delirium of paper money, and consequent repudiation. Removed from the sea, he and the western people gener- ally had not, like New England, a commerce to be ruined by war, and of the English tradition and sentiment which still lingered at Boston he was utterly devoid. 168 THE UNITED STATES. chap. As were the people, so were the leaders of their choice, and of these the foremost was Henry Clay, a highly refined Kentuckian, yet a Kentuckian, as his taste for gambling, among other characteristics, showed. Clay put himself at the head of a set of young politicians who were bent on forcing the government into war. Calhoun, from South Carolina, the future champion of the slave power, was of the same set. But Clay was the most fiery, as well as the most fascinating. Not only did he want a war with England, but he looked forward to a series of wars to be carried on till one of the nations should be crushed, and the war of 1812 was among the achievements which he wished to be inscribed on his tomb. The President did not want war, but he wanted re-election, and he was made to feel that to be re-elected he must declare war. The fact is recorded without disguise. We have come down from Washington to Madison. When Napoleon, to turn the scale against England, feigned a withdrawal of his decrees, Madison affected to believe him ; it seems not certain that he did. England had given no special provocation at this junc- ture. On the contrary she was showing a disposition to make concessions. In fact the Orders in Council which stood first among the ostensible causes of quarrel had been withdrawn when war was declared. Clay then said that war must be waged against impressment, though he after- wards, as a commissioner treating for peace, was content to let that issue drop, and he was so far from being inflexible as to the principle concerned that, as Secretary of State at an after day, he offered Great Britain to surrender deserters from her military and naval service and from her mercantile marine, if she would surrender fugitive III. REPUBLIC. 169 slaves who had taken refuge under her flag. For what cause he cared little ; war he would have. The fingers of the Kentuckian were twined in the locks of hated England and would not let go because the special ground of quarrel happened to be withdrawn. England was sorely pressed in the struggle with Napoleon, Of her allies none were left but the Spanish people and Russia, which Napoleon was preparing to invade. The opportunity for striking her was tempting, and Canada seemed an easy prey. The prospect of sharing Napoleon's victories would also have its attrac- tion, nor is there anything in the violence of a brilliant tyranny uncongenial to the violence of such democracy as that of young Clay. These probably were the real motives of the war which was made by Kentucky and the slave owners, and against which New England protested from the outset, not on commei'cial grounds alone, though on her commerce the heaviest blows were sure to fall, but because it would bring the Republic into unnatural alliance with the universal tyrant against the independence of nations and the rights of man. On the independence of nations and the rights of man Kentucky and the slave owners probably set little store. But had Napoleon won, the turn of America would have come. Nothing seems more certain than that he would have stretched his arm across the At- lantic, reduced the United States to vassalage, and enforced the retrocession of Louisiana. Of all things, what he hated most was a republic. That the conquest was practicable, the events of the war with England proved. It was unlucky that Erskine, the young British envoy at Wash- ington, in his eagerness to preserve peace, promised conces- sions which exceeded his instructions and was disowned by the evil genius of Canning in a manner which inflamed 170 THE UNITED STATES. chap. the quarrel. The war was not national ; it was made by the war-hawks, as Clay and his party were called. In the House of Representatives, the great organ of popular sen- timent, the declaration received a majority of only thirty votes, far less than the normal majority of the Democratic party, fifteen Republicans voting in the minority, and it passed the Senate with difficulty and only by the close vote of nineteen to thirteen, six Republicans voting against war. The division was geographical, the North being in a majority of two to one against the war. At Baltimore the mob seconded the party of violence by riot and massacre. The war of 1812 while it rekindled the fires of unnatural hatred, and renewed the schism of the Anglo-Saxon race, was to both combatants barren of profit and honour. Only the " war-hawk " politicians who did not shed their own blood gained in political advancement, and perhaps by the exer- cise of war patronage. Clay and Calhoun had confidently promised the Americans the conquest of Canada. The militia of Kentucky, Clay said, would of itself suffice for the achievement. Instead of this, the forces the Republic i)ut forth in the invasion were repelled by a small body of British troops aided, not as appears at the outset zealously, by the local militia, and Michigan was lost. As the war went on the Americans learned discipline, were better led, and were more successful, but Clay's boast remained unfulfilled. The French Canadians were kept true to Great Britain by the same influences as before, and helped to gain more than one brilliant victory in her cause. At sea the Americans had better fortune. The British, confident in their naval prowess, not considering that the Americans were as good seamen as themselves, better shipbuilders, and more expert as gunners forgetting, too, the exploits of III. REPUBLIC. 171 Paul Jones, ventured on frigate duels with inferior arma- ments and lost three frigates, one of which was carried into an American port. The shock was far greater than the loss, and was but half counteracted by a victory in a duel on equal terms between the Shannon and the Chesa- 1813. peaJce. On the other hand five thousand British regulars under Ross, landing on the American coast, paraded the country at their ease, scattered before them the militia which was drawn out to meet them at Bladensburg and 1814. took Washington, giving thereby one more proof of the ascendancy of discipline in war. The public buildings at Washington were burned, an act of folly and vandalism which no plea of retaliation for American ravages in Canada could warrant. The object of war is a good peace, and the fewer thorns are left in the heart of the enemy the better the peace will be. Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Southern fire-eaters were hot for the war, but elsewhere there was luke-warmness or worse. The ranks of the army were unfilled, the finances were exhausted, specie payments were suspended, the military administration had disgracefully broken down. Roused by the loss of the three frigates, Great Britain put forth her naval power, and the American ports underwent strict blockade. Privateering, though destructive, was un- remunerative and even cried out for government bounties to keep it on foot. In New England discontent approached the point of secession, and a convention of New England States at Hartford not only protested against the war but demanded an organic change in confederation. Mean- time the fortunes of Napoleon sank at Moscow, at Leipsic, at Vittotia. England's fleets and armies, released from the struggle with him, were set free for action in America. 172 THE UNITED STATES. chap. The war party then gave way and envoys were sent to Ghent to treat for peace. It was a peace which showed that there ought to have been no war, for no question was settled, nor was anything surrendered on either side. The questions of belligerent rights and of impressment, about which America had ostensibly gone to war, were simply allowed to drop. Mr. Clay was one of the American envoys. He did his best to make the negotiations mis- carry, but at last he set his hand to the treaty. There were those in England who desired that she should con- tinue the war, bringing her full force, now at liberty, to bear, and send Wellington to America. But if the result had been an extension of her American territories with a deeper entanglement in American affairs, the gain would have been a loss. That there was no real object to be at- tained was Wellington's own judgment. Peace was wel- come to all except the farmers on the northern frontier of the United States who had been growing rich by selling supplies to the British troops. There was no ocean cable in those days. Peace had already been made at Ghent, when at New Orleans General Pakenham, possessed apparently with the same blind con- fidence which had been shown by the British commander 1815. at Bunker's Hill, led his troops to the attack of the impreg- nable and almost unapproachable breastworks with which the city had been protected by the skill and energy of General Andrew Jackson, who appearing on the scene at a decisive moment, showed his extraordinary powers of command. The British soldiers, formed by the pedantry of their commander in close column and unable to reach their enemy, fell helplessly under the fire poured upon them in perfect security by the riflemen who swarmed be- III. REPUBLIC. 173 hind the breastworks. The death of the British Com- mander-in-Chief, by causing confusion, enhanced the disaster. At the single point where the veterans did encounter their enemy, he, as Jackson himself frankly said, fled before them. The American loss in killed and wounded was thirteen. Such was the battle of New Orleans. It would have been almost as much of a battle and a victory had the British army been overwhelmed by the Mississippi. But the affair had important results, for it made General Jackson the idol of the American people, and the auto- cratic President of the United States. The war is sometimes justified on account of its sup- posed effect in consolidating American union. To make war for such a purpose would surely be a satanic policy. Instead of consolidation, the war nearly produced seces- sion, to the very verge of which it drove New England. The true instruments of consolidation were, not the war, but the improved means of intercommunication, the national roads, the canals, the steamships, the railways, to which the period following the war gave birth, as well as the growing activity of the press, and the other intellectual agencies which overcome geographical distance. The fruit of moral or political effort is not to be won by violence. A second war of independence the war of 1812 has been called, but how could America be made politically more independent of the mother country, and how could war sever the historical bond or weaken the influences which a mother country will always exercise over a colony, let the political relation be what it will? Mental independ- ence was promoted, not by the war, but by migration westward which left old world ideas and sentiments behind. Violent antipathies like passionate attachments, 174 THE UNITED STATES. chap. as Washington said, do not emancipate but enslave. The schism in the Anglo-Saxon race had been renewed, and Canada, instead of being annexed, had been estranged. On industry and commerce and the wealth of the nation the effects of war are always the same. Such is the debt of gratitude due to the " war-hawks." It will not be much increased if to the material results of the conflict we add an inflation of military pride which there was nothing in the balance of victory and defeat to warrant, but which nevertheless ensued. Twenty years afterwards the eyes of American politi- cians desirous of aggrandizement were once more turned toward the British dominions in North America by a Cana- dian rebellion which stretched out its arms for aid to the republicanism of the United States. But national ambition was not aroused. Sympathy was confined to filibustering along the border. A bubble of war Avhich the burning of the Caroline, an American armed vessel, by Canadians had blown, burst after an international altercation without harm. There still remained between Great Britain and America dangerous questions about boundaries in Maine and Oregon. The Oregon question at one time assumed an angry form, and in the United States democratic mobs and " war-hawks " were shouting " fifty-four forty or fight," while their British counterparts, such as Palmerston, Avere or affected to be not less eager for the fray. But diplo- macy, under the auspices of such statesmen as Peel and Webster, brought about a peaceful settlement, Canada per- haps receiving in both cases less than her due, but as much as could be expected by a dependency which leaned upon the arm of the Imperial country, itself contributing nothing to the armaments of the empire. The settlement was made III. REPUBLIC. 175 easier by the indifference of the southern fire-eaters to ex- tensions of territory in the north which would turn the political balance in favour of freedom. War and serious danger of war being at an end, American hatred of England might have subsided had not Irish immigrants brought with them their inveterate feud and imposed their senti- ment on the politicians and press of the United States. After Madison came Monroe, the last of the Virginian 1817. line, who was elected with ease and re-elected virtually by acclamation. Since the day of his Jacobin accolade he had become a sober and commonplace statesman. Wash- ington was his model, and something like the state of the Washington period reigned again at the White House. Monroe's title to renown is the doctrine, stamped with 'his name, which proclaims the new world independent of the old. The American dependencies of Spain had now risen in revolt against the Imperial country, while in Spain herself the Holy Alliance dominating over Europe had by the hand of the restored Bourbons of France crushed parliamentary government and reinstalled absolute mon- archy. There was reason to fear that the Alliance meant to extend its policy of reaction to South America and perhaps to place a Bourbon on the throne of a South American Empire. It was to close the door against any- thing of this kind that Monroe put forth his manifesto, which warns the European powers that the western hemi- sphere is no longer a field either for their colonization or for their political interference. Any attempt on the part of a European power to control the destiny of an Amer- ican community the American President declares will be viewed as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposi- tion towards the United States ; implying thereby, be it 176 THE UNITED STATES. chap. hi. observed, that the United States are the guardian power of the hemisphere. It may be that Monroe was not the sole or the first promulgator of the doctrine. But by him it was propounded most clearly and at a juncture which gave it practical force. Great Britain and the United States were now acting in union. For Great Britain, whose function it has always been to preserve the balance of tendencies as well as of power in Europe, was opposed to the domination of the Holy Alliance as she had been to that of Napoleon, and Canning, as her foreign minister, was beginning to show his liberal side. Clay's ardent spirit would have led him at once to give the embrace of fraternity to the new-born Republics of South America. More cautious counsels prevailed and confined the action of the government to the promulgation of the Monroe doctrine and a prompt recognition of South American independence. It soon appeared even to Clay himself what sort of embrace that of the South American Republics would have been. He had been transported with the glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free. He soon had reason to confess that the result of bursting chains, in the case of those who are unfit for freedom, is not freedom but a change of chain. Webster may have meant to cap Clay as well as to show his cultivated feeling for the parent of literature and art when in a grand oration he proposed to send a commissioner as an envoy of sympathy to insurgent Greece. Here the Washingtonian tradition of non-interference in European affairs prevailed. Indeed if the Monroe doctrine was to be respected and Europe was to keep her hands off America, it was necessary that America should keep her hands off Europe. CHAPTER IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. rpHE eight years of Monroe's Presidency were a halcyon period after the storm of war ; they were years of re- vived commerce, of return to specie payments, of renewed immigration, of the continued expansion westward which was not only enlarging the area of equalized wealth and the field of the great political experiment, but shifting the centre of power from New England and Virginia towards the west. There was a general absence, during these years, of great party questions and a lull in party strife which caused Monroe's Presidency to be called the era of good feeling. The calm, however, was broken by one blast which, though it died away for the time, was the premonitory gust of a tremendous storm. Free and slave States had so far been admitted to the Union in pairs, one slave State and one free, so that the political balance between the two interests was presei-ved, not in the House of Representatives, where the representation was by popu- lation, but in the Senate, where each State, large or small, had two members. The demand of Missouri, a part of the Louisiana purchase, over which slavery prevailed, to be admitted as a State, threatened to upset the balance, and awakened the dormant but mortal antagonism between slavery and freedom. Conscience, indeed, though drugged 177 178 THE UNITED STATES. chap. by policy had never entirely slumbered. Among the Qua- kers of Pennsylvania it had remained awake. The oppo- nents of slavery moved for its exclusion from Missouri as a condition of her admission to the Union. The struggle between them and the friends of slavery was long and angry. It brought the national House into collision with the federal Senate. When apparently composed, it broke out again in a new form. But at length fear for the sta- bility of the Union, which by this time had become an object of general worship, prevailed, and a compromise was effected by which all north of the latitude thirty-six, thirty, saving territory included in Missouri, was secured for free- dom, and all south of that line was given up to slavery. The political balance was preserved by the simultaneous admission of Maine. The truce thus obtained lasted, so far as the national parties were concerned, for twenty years, proving by its duration the paramount importance attached by the American people to their Union. But three omi- nous results of the struggle still remained. In the first place the geographical line had been drawn between the domain, social and political, of slavery and that of freedom. In the second place it had been shown that whatever pains might be taken to designate slavery as a purely domestic institution over which the national government had no jurisdiction, and with which the national conscience was unconcerned, the fact was that the question was national and one with which the national government would in the end be compelled to deal. In the third place slavery had shown itself no longer as a vanishing relic of the past, but as a permanent interest and power. Whitney's invention of the cotton gin had enormously increased the production of cotton, and with it the value of slave labour and the addiction of the South to the system. IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 179 The lull of party was no lull of personal ambition or of personal contests for the Presidency. Now we see in full force the Presidential fever and its effects on the character and conduct of public men. Soon in place of the Congressional caucus, through which the politicians of each party had hitherto nominated candidates for the Presidency, comes the popular convention, at first local and then national, with the grand campaign of party with its sinister accessories such as we have it at the present day. Now culminates the reign of the " machine," with its retinue of office-seeking workers, first perfected in New York by DeWitt Clinton and Van Buren, with their Albany Regency and their " Bucktails." Foremost in the arena were Henry Clay the Kentuckian, Daniel Webster the New Englander, and John C. Calhoun of South Caro- lina. Clay was perhaps the first consummate party leader of the Congressional and platform type, Jefferson having worked, not on the platform, but in the closet and through the press. He was a paragon of the personal fascination now styled magnetism. Magnetic, indeed, his manner and voice must have been if they could make the speeches that he has left us pass for the most cogent reasoning and the highest eloquence. Yet multitudes came from distances, in those days immense, to hear him. A cynical critic said that Clay could get more people to listen to him and fewer people to vote for him than any other man in the Union. He however did get many votes though never quite enough. His power of winning the hearts of men was unique. When at last he missed his prize by losing the election for the Presidency his partisans wept like children ; one of them is said to have died of grief. He was ardently patriotic, after the war-hawk fashion, but the Presidency was always 180 THE UKITED STATES. ciiai-. ill his thoughts and its attraction accounts for the per- turbations of his political orbit. He said that he would rather be right than be President ; but it has been too truly remarked that even at the moment of that memorable utterance he was thinking more of being President than of being right. His policy and sentiments were intensely American and by the cosmopolitans would now be desig- nated as jingo. He was a protectionist on what he deemed patriotic grounds, and the chief author of a system to which Hamilton had only moderately inclined. He was for national expenditure on public works, for national grants of money to the States, for everything that could magnify the nation. The Union, as the palladium of national greatness, was his idol, and his proudest achievements as a statesman were compromises by which the Union was saved for a time when it had been imperilled by collision between the slave States and the free. Over each of these com- promises he drew the brilliant rainbow of complacent elo- quence, which, however, proved no guarantee against the flood. A native of the great slave State of Virginia, settled in Kentucky where slavery existed though it did not predominate, he seems at least to have felt the evils of the system, and he had done himself credit by opposition to it in his earlier days. But the highest and the absorb- ing object of his affection was national greatness embodied in the Union. As Henry Clay was a genuine, though adopted, son of Kentucky, so Daniel Webster was a genuine son of New England. His character was cast in the Puritan mould, and formed by the New England school system under which he had been a teacher as well as a pupil. He was grave, staid, and in the cast of his character moral and IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 181 devout. In his later years he was given to running care- lessly into debt and like many other men of his day too fond of wine. As an orator of reason he has no superior if he has an equal in the English language. It is difficult at least to say what political speech can vie in logical force and impressiveness with his speech defending the Union in reply to the southern separatist Hayne, or what forensic speech excels in the same qualities his speech for the prose- cution in the murder case of White. By the speech in 1830. reply to Hayne he produced a great and permanent effect on the political sentiment of the American jjeople. — "While the union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day at least, that curtain may not rise. God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind. When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured fragments of a once glorious union ; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent ; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it may be in frater- nal blood ! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honoured throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interroga- tory as What is all this worth? nor those other words of delusion and folly Liberty first, and Union afterwards, but everywhere spread all over in characters of living light blazing in all its ample folds as they float over the sea and over the land and in every wind under the whole heavens 182 THE UNITED STATES. chap. that other sentiment dear to every true American heart — Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." These words thrilled through all American hearts at the time, remained engraved in all American hearts forever. We must bear in mind their influence and the force of the sentiment to which they appealed when we find the Ameri- can people wavering between morality and the Union. Webster's economical and financial speeches are also first rate of their kind. His style has been compared to the strokes of a trip hammer, which his sentences resembled in measured force but not in monotony. The majesty of intellect sat on his beetling brow and he had the look and port of Jove. He was and felt himself a king. It is told of him that when one of his notes had fallen due, he majes- tically waved his hand and said " Let it be paid." All men bowed down to him ; all men crowded to hear him. He swayed the opinions of all men ; but he did not, like Clay, win their hearts. He never was a great party leader, nor was he ever a hopeful candidate for the Presidency. It must be added that his moral strength was not equal to his power of mind. In regard to the great moral question of slavery, his desire of the Presidency at last overcame his principle. In his general sentiments and opinions he was a descendant of the old Federalist party, a republican without being a democrat, a believer in property as a quali- fication for political power, an upholder both in his State and in the federation of the conservative parts of the con- stitution, as well as devoutly loyal to the Union. A figure in some respects more striking than that of either Clay or Webster, and one to which a melancholy interest attaches, is that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun was a man of Scotch-Irish origin, with n. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 183 the fervent but sombre energy characteristic of that race. By temper he was a political Calvinist, while South Caro- lina gave him for a creed slavery, of which she was the centre and the soul. As a speaker he impressed, not by anything that appealed to the imagination, but by intense earnestness and logical force. On his face and character there was a shade of sadness which deepened as his career took a more tragic turn. No one questioned his purity or sincerity, yet in his course also the effect of the Presiden- tial fever may be traced. He set out with Clay as one of the war party of 1812, devoted to national greatness. He walked at first in the trodden path of ambition ; was Vice-President, was Secretary of State, and had the Presi- dency in view. But a cloud came over his prospects and he was gradually led to fall back on slavery as his peculiar platform, to identify himself with the institution, to be- come not only its defender but its propagator, and, in its interest, the upholder of State right. He was the first statesman who, discarding not only the philosophic con- demnation of slavery fashionable among the old republi- cans of the South but the apologies of its moderate uphold- ers, proclaimed that slavery was a positive good, that it was the onl}^ relation possible between the white and black races, and even that the system of society based on it was the best and alone stable, while the system based on free- dom and equality was unstable and anarchic. " Many in the South," he said, " had once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. But that folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." He was even ready to maintain that it gave the labourer more than was given him by free labour, while it 184 THE UNITED STATES. chap. exempted society from the disorders and dangers arising out of the conflict between hibour and capital. Calhoun became the idol and the guiding star of the slave-owning aristocracy, above all of the hot Southern youth. When he died there was laid over his grave at Charleston, a great slab of marble inscribed with the single word " Calhoun " as the sufficient epitaph of his greatness. He was one of the men who are born to bring questions to an issue. He distinctly saw that on the two sides of the geographical line which separated freedom from slavery there were two communities opposed to each other in social and political structure, in character, sentiment, and interest, which though yoked together by the union were not united. His proposal of two Presidents, one for the free States, the other for the slave States, each with a veto on all national legislation, was impracticable and grotesque, but it pointed true to the nature of the problem. Oratory and orators ruled the hour. The chief scene of the great debates of this period was the Senate, always attractive of the highest ability. Its number was less than fifty, but the audience, though small, was of the choicest, and on grand occasions the galleries were crowded by people not only from Washington but from distant cities. Of the struggle between freedom and slavery the Senate was the natural arena, because there, representation being by States, the forces were evenly balanced, whereas in the House of Representatives, the population of the free States, increasing faster than that of the slave States, had a great preponderance notwithstanding the constitutional compromise which gave slavery two votes for every three slaves. Thus, in regard to the two groups of States, the Senate was the safeguard of the federal against the national IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 185 principle. Nor were Clay, Webster, and Calhoun the only Senators of mark. Not far beneath them was Benton from Missouri, which was a western and semi-slave State, apt to breed statesmen neutral or wavering on the ques- tion of slavery and caring most for the Union. Benton was for twenty years a Senator. He was of coarse mould compared with the other three, but of great power, gigan- tic industry, and possessed of an extensive knowledge of politics, which he sometimes grotesquely displayed ; perhaps the first thorough specimen of a politician, with a virtue genuine but not adamantine, and a patriotism which yielded only to the strong exigencies of party, it might be in the sincere belief that the party was the country. Hardly to be named with these men was John Randolph, a Virginian of high family, with more than the arrogance of his class, who used to come into the Senate in his hunt- ing dress with his hunting whip in his hand, and behave as if he were in his kennel ; a man of natural ability, with- out good sense or power of self-control, firmly attached to no party or even opinion, keen and reckless in in- vective, the terror of those at whom his lean finger was pointed in debate, at last a political wreck and almost a maniac. Randolph sometimes told wholesome truths in a pungent way. Apart from slavery the great question was the tariff. Before the war New England had been commercial, and as such in favour of free trade. The war, suspending her commerce turned her to manufactures to which it afforded strict protection. Peace bringing an influx of British goods made New England manufacturers crave for a protective tariff. Clay on patriotic grounds was the ardent advocate of what he styled the American system. 186 THE UNITED STATES. chap. though he was reminded by Webster that the system, by his own showing, had not been American but European. " This favourite American policy, sir," said Webster, " is what America has never tried, and this odious foreign policy is what we are told foreign States have never pur- sued. Sir, that is the truest American policy which shall most usefully employ American capital and American labour, and best sustain the whole population. With me it is a fundamental axiom that is interwoven with all my opinions that the great interests of the country are united and inseparable, that agriculture, commerce, and manu- factures will prosper together or languish together, and that all legislation is dangerous which proposes to benefit one of these without looking to consequences which may fall on the others." Webster at first opposed protection, and upheld with admirable breadth, clearness, and cogency the doctrine of Adam Smith. There is nothing better on the side of free trade than his speeches. He crushed the fallacy of the balance of trade, showing by a familiar example that if the excess in value of imports over ex- ports proved the trader to be a loser, the fruits of the most gainful voyage might be set down as a loss. He ex- pounded the true nature of commerce as being not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others, not tending to impoverish one of the parties to it while it enriched the other, but making all parties gain, all parties alike jDrofit, all parties grow rich. He showed that in buying foreign articles we do not en- courage foreign labour to the prejudice of our own, since every such article, being earned by our own labour, is as much the product of our own labour as if we had manu- factured it ourselves. " I know," he said, " it would be TV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 187 very easy to promote manufactures, at least for a time, but probably only for a short time. If we might act in dis- regard of other interests we could cause a sudden transfer of capital and a violent change in the pursuits of men. We could exceedingly benefit some classes by these means ; what then would become of the interests of others?" If Adam Smith had been before him in all this, he gave it new force by his eloquence and put on it the stamp of practical statesmanship. Webster's arguments have lost none of their weight though he afterwards showed his want of moral stability by striking his flag to protection and rather lamely defending his inconsistency on the plea that, though his principles remained unchanged, protection having then become the established system, there was nothing for him but to accept it and look to the interests of his own constituents. The great speech of Clay on American industry is a declamation based throughout on the assumption that protection is patriotic, as though any economical measure could be patriotic which was not pro- ductive of wealth to the whole nation. Clay's knowledge of economical history and of history in general may be measured by his reference to Spain as a nation which had declined owing to her lack of a protectionist system. His clearness of economic vision may be measured by his dic- tum, uttered in defence of protectionism, that " the great desideratum in political economy is the same as in private pursuits ; that is, what is the best application of the aggregate industry of a nation that can be made honestly to produce the largest sum of national wealth ? " He could not have stated more clearly the main argument of his opponents. With more reason might Clay point to the practice of other nations and notably to that of England 188 THE UNITED STATES. cuap. which still had and was destined for many years longer to have her corn laws and Navigation Act. It must also be remembered in justice to Clay and others who were trying to force manufactures that the evils of the factory system had not then been seen on a large scale. Further it must be said that Clay regarded protection as temporary, and perhaps could hardly have been expected to foresee that what was granted as temporary would, by the com- bined force of the favoured interests, be made eternal. Some demurred, apparently with reason, to the assump- tion by Congress of a power of imposing taxes for any purpose but that of revenue. The constitution gave Con- gress power to regulate commerce, but not to regulate industry or to force the people to leave one industry for another. The vices of protectionism soon appeared. In 1828 a conjunction of sinister interests carried by log- rolling for their own benefit a tariff which was justly styled the tariff of abominations. We are told that members of Congress voted for the bill at the bidding of their con- stituents while they were opposed to its objects, foresee- ing the abuses which it entailed, and that it offered the means of wide-spread bribery in the elections. We see incidentally that the elective system had disclosed another of its fatal liabilities, and that the representative instead of being a man of superior lights, picked out for the great work of legislation, was becoming a mere delegate and the mouth-piece of his consistency without free judgment or conscience of his own. With reference to this tariff of 1828 Benton in his "History of the Senate " says, "tariff bills each exceeding the other in its degree of protection have become a regular appendage of our Presidential elections, coming round in IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 189 every cycle of four years with that returning event." McDuffie, from South Carolina, raised with an apocalyp- tic vehemence the veil of the future. "Sir, when I con- sider that by a single Act like the present from five to ten millions of dollars may be transferred annually from one part of the community to another, when I consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate ambition may perpetrate such an act of injustice and political prostitution, I cannot hesi- tate for a moment to pronounce this very system of indi- rect bounties the most stupendous instrument of corruption ever placed in the hands of public functionaries. It brings ambition and avarice and wealth into a combination which it is fearful to contemplate, because it is almost impossible to resist. Do we not perceive at this very moment the extraordinary and melancholy spectacle of less than one hundred thousand capitalists by means of this unhallowed combination exercising an absolute and despotic control over the opinions of eight millions of free citizens and the fortunes and destinies of ten millions? Sir, I will not anticipate or forbode evil. I will not permit myself to believe that the Presidency of the United States will ever be bought and sold by this system of bounties and pro- hibitions ; but I must say that there are certain quarters of this Union in which, if a candidate for the Presidency were to come forward with the Harrisburg tariff in his hand, nothing could resist his pretensions if his adversary were opposed to this unjust system of oppression. Yes, sir, that bill would be a talisman which could give a charmed existence to the candidate who would pledge him- self to support it ; and although he were covered with all the ' multiplying villanies of nature,' the most immaculate 190 THE UNITED STATES. chap. patriot and profound statesman in the nation could hold no competition with him if he should refuse to grant this new species of imperial donative." Mr. McDuffie, coming from the South which exported and did not manufacture, was perhaps enlightened, as his opponents were blinded, by local interest. In the economical firmament it was still early dawn. To Clay and his friends the policy of foster- ing native industries till they were able to stand alone might well seem wise. Experience had not yet shown that the protection once given would never be willingly resigned, and that a combination of privileged interests log-rolling for each other would be sure to prevail over the public good. But it may surely be said that for a nation so active, so intelligent, so inventive, perfect indus- trial liberty would always have been best. Not unconnected with the question between free trade and protection was that of the sale of public lands. Should they be regarded as a national property out of which profit was to be made by the federal government, or should they be thrown open freely to the settler ? The protectionists generally leant to the former, free traders to the latter and more liberal side. The effect of throwing freely open all the lands of the west to settlement was to diminish the value of the lands in the east and by drawing away labour westwards to enhance its price to the eastern employer. After a temporary obstruction of settlement and some gambling and speculation in public lands the higher interest prevailed. National expenditure on improvements, such as the great Cumberland road, was an issue on which those who championed a strong nationality and a liberal interpreta- tion of the constitution in favour of the central government rv. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 191 were pitted against the jealous upholders of strict right and strict construction. In this case also the opponents of the policy might have pointed to the dangers of corruption. For the succession to Monroe there were four competi- 1824. tors : John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, the first President; Crawford, a powerful and crafty politician, who showed the tenacity of the Presidential fever by re- maining a candidate when he had been stricken with paralysis ; and Andrew Jackson, whose blood-red star was now rising above the political horizon and threatening with extinction those of the politicians who had evoked the war spirit for the purposes of their own ambition. Jackson had ninety electoral votes, Adams eighty-four, Crawford forty-one, and Clay thirty-seven. No one hav- ing a clear majority the election was thrown by the article of the constitution providing for the case into the House of Representatives, while the decision was thrown into the hands of Clay, who though out of the pale of election himself, as the choice of the House was confined to the three having the highest number of votes, commanded followers enough to turn the scale. Clay decided in favour of Adams. The Jacksonians contended that their man having the largest number of votes was the choice of the people, whose fiat the House ought to have registered. To which the answer was, first, that there was nothing to show that in a contest between Jackson and Adams by themselves Jackson would have had the majority, and in the second place that to make a plurality decisive would be to abrogate an article of the constitution. Clay, per- haps too conscious of rectitude, ventured to accept the Secretaryship of State from the man whom his influence had made President. The Jacksonians cried out that he 192 THE UNITED STATES. chap. had been bought and the calumny systematically and unscrupulously worked by his enemies pursued him to his grave. Monroe was the last President of the Virginian line, John Quincy Adams the last from New England. The centre of power was passing from the east to the west. Adams was a genuine New Englander of the Puritan stock, austerely moral, from his boyhood laboriously self-trained, not only staid but solemn in his teens, in- tensely self-conscious, ever engaged in self-examination, the punctual keeper of a voluminous diary, an invariably early riser, a daily reader of the Bible even in the White House, scrupulously methodical and strictly upright in all his ways ; but testy, unconciliatory, unsympathetic, abso- lutely destitute of all the arts by which popularity is won. His election does the highest credit to the respect of the electors for public virtue unadorned. The peculiar features of his father's character were so intensified in him that he may be deemed the typical figure rather than his father. In opinions he was a Federalist who having broken with his party on the question of foreign relations and the embargo had been put out of its pale but had retained its general mould. As he was about the last President chosen for merit not for availability, so he was about the last whose only rule was not party but the public service. So strictly did he observe the principle of permanency and purity in the Civil Service, that he refused to dismiss from office a Postmaster-General whom he knew to be intriguing against him. The demagogic era had come but he would not recognize its coming. Pie absolutely refused to go on the stump, to conciliate the press, to do anything for the purpose of courting popularity and making himself a IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 193 party. His obstinacy was fatal to his ambition but is not dishonourable to his memory. Adams was a candidate for the usual second term. But 1828. he stood no chance against Jackson whose candidacy had commenced on the morrow of the last election. Nobody stands much chance against a successful soldier in a country where military glory is rare. In the United States there have been, if we include Washington, five distinct soldier Presidents, while a military record has contributed to other elections and nominations. In Eng- land, an old war power, but one man can be said to have been made prime minister by glory in war, and the Duke of Wellington was not merely a soldier, since besides having been in Parliament as a young man and Irish Secretary, he was almost the chief political adviser of monarchical and aristocratic Europe. Military glory more- over is outside the pale of ordinary rivalries and escapes the envy which in all democracies has great force. Jack- son, though he had once been in Congress, as we have seen, and had vented his jealous spleen on Washington, was a fighter, with an iron will and great powers of com- mand, ill educated, destitute of the knowledge and the habits of a statesman, with an uncontrolled temper and almost as much swayed by passion as any Indian chief, though, like many an Indian chief, he could bear himself when he pleased with dignity and even with grace. That he had beaten the British at New Orleans was his title to the headship of the nation, and he had not lessened his popularity by the lawless execution of two Englishmen, Ambrister and Arbuthnot, or by some acts of equally lawless aggression on Spanish territory ; outrages against which a moral minority in Congress had protested in vain, 194 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai'. while John Qiiincy Adams, swayed probably by his dislike of England, had for once deviated from his moral course and helped to whitewash the man who was destined to oust him from the Presidential chair. But a greater force even than that of military renown was bearing on Andrew Jackson to the Presidency. Hitherto the Republic had not been democratic. The common people had been con- tent with their votes and had left government to an aris- tocracy of intellect drawn largely from the bar. But now they desired to govern. The3^ were beginning to suspect that they were fooled by intellect and to wish to see one of themselves in power. Andrew Jackson was one of themselves ; he was not only the old hero but " Old Hick- ory," a plain honest man who would govern by a good homely rule, sweep away abuses, and see that no more tricks were played by superior cunning upon the people. To rule, a multitude must be incarnate in a man, and the American multitude was incarnate in Andrew Jackson. The old hero's transcendent availability drew around his standard a host of machine politicians, office-seekers, and journalists, to blow his trumpet and organize the cam- paign in his favour. Jackson Committees were formed all over the country to carry on the crusade, and were aided by a partisan press inspired from a centre. This was perhaps the first regularly organized campaign. Feeling was red hot and calumny was rife. Adams was charged with monarchism, with aristocracy, with corrup- tion, with libel, with odious wealth, with insolvency, with greediness of public money, with being wrong in his public accounts, with charging for fictitious journeys, with using government servants to electioneer for him, with corrupt- ing the civil service, with employing the federal patronage IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 195 to influence elections, with charging the public for a billiard table which he put in the White House, with patronizing duelling (while Jackson was a desperate duellist), with having quarrelled with his father, with acting as procurer to the Emperor of Russia, with having married an Englishwoman. On the other hand aspersions were cast on Jackson's somewhat irregular marriage, which goaded him to fury. The result was that Jackson got 178 electoral votes to 83 for Adams. The difference in the popular vote was not so large, Adams having 508,064 to Jackson's 648,273. Jackson, and " triumphant democracy " in his train, 1829. made their victorious entry into Washington with an enormous crowd largely composed of office-seekers who had worked for them in the campaign. An eye-witness has described the sight as very like the inundation of Rome by the northern barbarians, except that in this case the tumultuous tide, instead of coming from the north, came from the west and the south. " Strange faces," says the same narrator, "filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear defiance on its brow." The city as well as the lobby swarmed with Jacksonian editors. On the morning of the inauguration the neighbourhood of the capitol was an agitated sea of heads, and it was necessary to repress the surging crowd by stretching a ship's cable across the flight of steps. After the inauguration came a reception. There was orange punch by the barrelful, but as the waiters opened the door a rush was made, the glasses were broken, the pails of liquor were upset and the semblance of order could be restored only by carrying tubs of punch into the garden to draw off the crowd from the rooms. Men stood in muddy boots on the damask 196 THE UNITED STATES. chap. covered chairs to get a sight of the President. " The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant," says Judge Story, who was glad to escape from the scene. The seat of government having been stormed by Gen- eral Jackson and his train was at once given up to pillage. " To the victors belong the spoils," was the saying of Marcy, a New York manager, not of Jackson ; but the sequel of Jackson's victory was its first memorable illustra- tion. A ruthless proscription swept the Civil Service to make places for Jackson's political soldiery. Jefferson, not without excuse, made removals by tens ; Jackson made them by hundreds and without excuse since he followed a President who in his dealings with the Civil Service was not pure only but a purist. Webster tells that the num- ber of dismissals was reckoned at not less than 2,000. There was a reign of terror in Washington, no civil ser- vant feeling sure for a day of his head ; a whisper killed, and perfidy was sometimes added to the cruelty of turning an innocent ofiicial, perhaps in advanced age, upon the street. No merit or record would save you. Major Mel- ville was a veteran of the revolution and had been one of the Boston Tea-Party, yet he was turned out of a place in the Custom House which he had held for many years. Those who could get access, to Jackson had a chance of escaping by appeals to his vanity. One official is said to have saved his head by begging for the old hero's old pipe. Thus was inaugurated the spoils system together with the trade of place-hunting by a President who came probably with a sincere desire of clearing government from corruption and of making simple honesty the rule, and of whom it must in justice be said that his own hands were perfectly clean. IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 197 The new court was soon convulsed by a court quarrel. Eaton, a member of Jackson's Cabinet, had married a widow who before her marriage had lived in Washington as Peggy O'Neil, and whose reputation under her maiden name had been doubtful. The wives of other cabinet ministers and the great ladies of Washington refused to visit Mrs. Eaton. Jackson made it a personal quarrel and threw himself into it with his usual fury. He is supposed to have been fired by the recollection of the aspersions cast at the time of the election on his own marriage to a wife to whom he was tenderly attached. Mr. Van Buren, being a widower and having no female fastidiousness to combat, was able to call on Mrs. Eaton and thereby to establish himself firmly in Jackson's favour. But other ministers failed to overcome the virtuous pride of their ladies and a Cabinet crisis was the result. The Dutch ambassador was threatened with a demand for his recall, because his wife had refused to sit by the side of Mrs. Eaton. Whatever may have been Mrs. Eaton's real char- acter, and whether the scruples of those who declined her society were overstrained or not, thanks may be due to the Washington ladies who in the catastrophe of public principle stood out for the purity of domestic life. Van Buren, a sagacious, smooth, and wily manager of New York politics, was the chief of Jackson's regular counsellors and no doubt knew how to play upon his temper. But to his regular counsellors Jackson preferred a set of familiars who were called his Kitchen Cabinet. These men, experts in wire-pulling, used their arts to keep alive the sentiment which had carried their chief to power, inspired his partisan press, and traduced his enemies through its organs. 198 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Jackson i-egarded himself as the only direct and genuine representative of the people. The authority of Congress and of the Supreme Court he seemed to think unaccred- ited by the popular will and almost usurped. He tram- pled on the Senate, the dignity of which made it the special object of his aversion ; he flouted the judiciary, and would have trampled on it if he had dared. Congenial to his policy was the doctrine that members of Congress were delegates, bound to deliver the mandate of the people whose opinions and passions the autocrat could control. Whatever was eminent and independent was, in the eyes of Jackson, as in those of other demagogic despots, an offence, and his instinctive tendency was to level it to the ground. This feeling probably entered largely into the war which he waged against the National Bank. The Bank, created by Hamilton in the interest of central government as well as in that of finance, had been abolished by the Jeffersonian party whose motive likewise was probably political. But another Bank had been founded to meet the financial difficulties entailed by the war and restore the soundness of the paper currency. The time for the renewal of the charter was now not far off, and no opposition was ex- pected. The Bank had given the nation a sound currency, it had been honourably managed and enjoyed the confi- dence of commerce. A Congressional Committee of enquiry reported that the government deposits were safe in its keeping. Nor does the National Bank appear to have meddled with politics, while it seems certain that the private banks did. But the suspicion that its political influence had been used on the wrong side was breathed by its enemies into Jackson's ear, and he, who was totally ignorant of finance, inserted words of threatening import IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 199 into a message to Congress. Clay, now in fierce opposi- tion, unwisely took up the gauntlet in the name of the Bank and made the renewal of the charter a political issue. In doing this he stood himself on weak ground since in his fervidly democratic youth he had taken part in the abolition of the former Bank. Jackson welcomed the war, which was waged with the utmost fury on both sides. He and his staff denounced the Bank as a mono- poly, as a money power, as a political engine of the enemies of the people, as an ally of the rich against the poor. By this time he had no doubt talked himself into a belief that all this was true. At length the President directed his Secretary of the Treasury, Duane, to remove the govern- ment deposits from the Bank, probably against the law ; and when that minister refused, he was dismissed, and Taney, more compliant and afterwards notorious in another way, was put in his room. The renewal of the charter i832. was vetoed by the President, and Clay's party not having a two-thirds' majority in the Senate to carry the Bill over the veto, the Bank fell. The government deposits were distributed, not of course without political favouritism, amongst State Banks, where they furnished the means and stimulus for reckless speculation, notably in the public lands. Wild-cat banks multiplied, especially in the ad- venturous West, and flooded the countrj'- with their de- lusive paper. Alarmed at the inflation Jackson put forth an edict that nothing but gold or silver should be taken in payment of taxes or other debts to government. The sud- denness of the check brought on a crash, and there fol- lowed the tremendous financial crisis of 1837, with the universal suspension of cash payments, and general wreck of commerce and industry ; the suffering falling chiefly, 200 THE UNITED STATES. chap. as it always does, on those poorer classes whose champion against the plutocratic tyranny of the Bank Jackson averred and no doubt believed himself to be. By the mouths of Clay and Webster reason, sound finance, and justice protested in vain. The popularity of the old hero swept away all opposition. His ignorance of finance was taken by his masses as a pledge of his probity and good sense. On his freedom from personal corruption they might with justice rely. Nor was it difficult for him to raise a mob against a corporation which could be de- nounced as a political and social organ of the money power, though as a matter of fact a large proportion of the stock was held by people of small incomes or by charitable institutions. In the course of the struggle Jackson's autocratic notions were fully developed. He laid it down that in the inter- pretation of the constitution, including those articles of it which defined the extent of his own powers, his guide was to be his own conscience, an assumption which would have put him above law. When the Senate passed a resolution of censure on his dictatorial proceedings he took them sharply to task for presuming to arraign his conduct, which he said they had no right to do except in the form of im- peachment. Nor was his revenge slaked till his party hav- ing ultimately gained a majority in the Senate under his henchman and successor in the Presidency, he made that hated assembly taste the cup of humiliation to the dregs by the erasure of the resolution from their journal, in mani- fest defiance of the article in the constitution which re- quires a record of proceedings to be kept. His fury in this battle was inflamed by his personal hatred of Clay and Calhoun ; of Clay, who had deprived, and as he swore, cor- IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 201 ruptly defrauded him of the Presidency on the occasion when Adams was elected ; of Calhoun, who, as Jackson learned from a malicious informant, had as a member of Adams' Cabinet condemned his outrages in Florida and his execution of Ambrister and Arbuthnot. With Calhoun as the representative of South Carolina and her unhappy interests Jackson was brought into colli- sion in a better cause, and one in which his force of character served the Republic well. The protectionist tariff while it enriched or was supposed to enrich the manufacturing cities of New England, impoverished the South, which manufac- tured nothing, and being, like all slave-owning communi- ties, poor in the midst of apparent wealth, could ill bear the addition of fiscal burdens. South Carolina, the land of slavery Hotspurs, rose against the tariff, planted her feet on State right, assumed a menacing attitude, and pro- ceeded to carry into effect the doctrine laid down by Jefferson in his draft of the Kentucky resolutions by a nullification of the federal law. Secession and civil war seemed imminent, but Jackson proclaimed in tones of thunder that the Union must be preserved, and at once prepared, if the law was resisted by South Carolina, to execute it by arms. He is said even to have threatened to hang Calhoun, though he would have found the sum- mary execution of a United States senator under the shadow of the Capitol a more dangerous operation than the summary execution of two helpless Englishmen on a lonely strand. The sages of the Senate, with Clay at their head, in the end brought about one of those compro- mises of which Clay was the grand artificer. A Force Bill, which empowered the President to put down resistance in South Carolina by arms was coupled in its passage with a 202 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Bill reducing the obnoxious tariff. It is doubtful whether South Carolina, having extorted this concession, did not really come out victorious after all. Webster and others thought that she did, and were for bringing her to her knees before any concession was made. Jackson's heart was with slavery, as on other occasions he plainly showed, though above all things he was for the Union. In the case of Georgia and the Creek Indians, where the State, in the process of improving the Indians off the face of the earth, had set at nought a treaty made with them by the federal government, Jackson failed to assert the authority of the nation. But he probably regarded a treaty with the Indians and the claims of the weaker race to justice as things of small account. The force which never failed Jackson was again shown with honour and advantage to his country in exacting from France the indemnity due for former aggressions on Ameri- can commerce which the French Chambers were unwilling to pay. A private hint which the French government gave him to strengthen its hand in dealing with the Chambers, by the use of a little energetic language was taken, as it was sure to be, with a vengeance. But neither this service nor any firmness which Jackson may have shown in uphold- ing the Union against nullification, could make up for the terrible and lasting mischief done to public life and charac- ter by the ascendancy of such a man, by the spoils system which he introduced, by the practices and examples of the agents whom he brought forward, by the personal press and the machinery of slander which were employed in his interests, by the venom which he infused into party con- tests, and by his contempt of constitutional right. His equestrian statue, prancing in front of the White House, IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 203 seems to beat down the constitution under its hoofs. Not the least among the evils of his reign was the systematic corruption of the press. It degraded, as Webster said, the press and the government at once. Fifty or sixty editors of leading journals, if Webster may be believed, were ap- pointed to offices, and the propagation of opinions favour- able to the government through the press had, according to the same grave authority, become the main administra- tive duty. From Jackson and his circle a spirit of vio- lence seemed to have gone out over the whole land. Rowdyism, rioting, duelling, and lynch law were never so rife. Outrages were committed in the streets of Washing- ton and if the victim was Jackson's political opponent pro- tection was sought in vain. Fraud and violence became common in elections. A race in which courage is not rare, which has proved its valour in many scenes, surely does itself wrong by worshipping mere courage, even when allied with strength of will, in such a character as Andrew Jackson. The Jacksonian era was naturally the era of people- V worship, and of application to the multitude of language apyplied in the Bible to the Almighty ; as though ignorance and passion millions of times multiplied could be divine ; as though the will of any man or of any number of men, apart from reason and conscience, could constitute right or absolve from guilt those who in bowing to it did wrong. Jefferson had gone far in this direction, but he had still been loyal to public reason, or what he took for it, and had^- not paid slavish homage to mere will. " Mr. President," i832. said Webster in his speech on the message sent down by Jackson with his veto on the chartering of the Bank, " we have arrived at a new epoch. We are entering on experi- 204 THE UNITED STATES. vnw. ments with the government and the constitution of the country hitherto untried and of fearful and appalling aspect. This message calls us to the contemplation of a future which little resembles the past. Its principles are at war with all that public opinion has sustained and all which the experience of the government has sanctioned. It denies first principles ; it contradicts truths hitherto received as indisputable. It denies to the judiciary the interpretation of law and demands to divide with Congress the origination of statutes. It extends the grasp of execu- tive pretension over every power of the government. But this is not all. It presents the chief magistrate of the Union in the attitude of arguing away the powers of that government over which he had been chosen to preside, and adopting for this purpose modes of reasoning which even under the influence of all proper feeling towards high official station, it is difficult to regard as respectable. It appeals to every prejudice which may betray men into a mistakfin view of their own interests, and to every passion which may lead them to disobey the impulses of their understanding. It urges all the specious topics of State rights and national encroachment against that which a great majority of the States have affirmed to be rightful and in which all of them have acquiesced. It sows, in an unsparing manner, the seeds of jealousy and ill-will against that government of which its author is the official head. It raises a cry that liberty is in danger at the very moment when it puts forth claims to powers heretofore unknown or unheard of. It affects alarm for the public freedom when nothing endangers that freedom so much as its own unpar- alleled pretences. This even is not all. It manifestly seeks to inflame the poor against the rich, it wantonly attacks IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 205 whole classes of the people for the purpose of turning against them the prejudices and resentments of other, classes. It is a State paper which finds no topic too excit- ing for its use, no passion too inflammable for its address and its solicitation. Such is this message. It remains now for the people of the United States to choose between the principles here avowed and their Government. These cannot subsist together. The one or the other must be rejected. If the sentiments of the message shall receive general approbation the constitution will have perished even earlier than the moment which its enemies origi- nally allowed for the termination of its existence. It will not have survived to its fiftieth year." In a community so full of political life and of self-preserving power as the American Republic no man can seriously meditate usurpa- tion. But if any man could meditate usurpation he would act as Jackson acted ; he would stretch his power under pretence of asserting popular right ; he would give himself out as the embodiment of the popular will ; he would de- grade constitutional assemblies and the judiciary ; he would ostentatiously appeal from their judgment to that of the people ; he would corrupt the public press ; and he would stir up the hatred of the poor against the rich. Andrew Jackson, however, was able to do what no other President has done, he was able to bequeath the succession. His devisee was his faithful lieutenant Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was presiding over the Senate when Clay thundered out an awful warning to the usurping execu- tive and rhetorically charged Van Buren to repeat it to Jackson. Van Buren listened with an air of simplicity, 1834. as though he were treasuring up every word for repetition to the President, and when Clay had finished, left the 206 THE UNITED STATES. chap. chair, crossed over to the orator, and asked him for a pinch of his famous snuff. This incident depicts the man. Van Buren was arch-engineer of the political machine in his own State, the secret of which he had brought with him to Jackson's councils. He was a man of great tact and address, and had early recognized in the political sky the star of Andrew Jackson. Except under the stress of party he was patriotic as well as sagacious, nor was he a bad President. But on his head fell the conse- quences of his master's dealings with the Bank and the deposits. He was overwhelmed by the financial crisis of 1837, when commercial ruin and repudiation filled the land ; and though the President showed no want of cool- ness or resource, nothing could avert the effects of public calamity on the reputation of the government and the party in power. Party lines had now been drawn again. On one side was the Democratic party, of which Jackson had been the head and which partook of the character of its chief. On the other side was the party which by this time had assumed the name of Whig, having for its head Clay, holding with him for protectionism, expenditure of national money on internal improvements, a broad construction of the constitution in favour of the central government, and a national bank, at the same time maintaining the consti- tutional authority of Congress and the judiciary against stretches of the executive power such as Jackson had essayed. The Democrats were for strict construction, State right, and economy. The spirit of the old Federal- ists had migrated into the Whig party, that of the Jeffer- sonian Republicans into its rival. The Whigs, like the Fedei'alists, were stronger in the North than elsewhere, IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 207 they had the men of intellect and the most substantial farmers on their side, while the Democrats had the populace of the great cities. On both sides the poli- ticians, whose religion was the Union, would fain have kept the question of slavery out of sight, but though it might not be made a party issue, to keep it out of sight was impossible. State right, the old Democratic doctrine, served a new purpose as the bulwark of slav- ery against the nation, and " dough faces " or North- ern men with Southern principles became eligible as candidates. A curious current had for a time been running across the main stream of party. The catastrophe of a Free- mason, named Morgan, who after betraying his intention of revealing the secrets of the order had disappeared and was supposed to have been murdered, produced an out- break of popular fear and wrath against Freemasonry, which spreading over a great part of the Union, gave birth to the ephemeral party of Anti-Masons. This irregular 1832. movement, while it lasted, rent the webs and perplexed the souls of the regular politicians, but having its origin in a panic it could not last long. Van Buren's term at an end, the natural candidate of 1840. the Whigs for President was Clay, the head, the author, and the pride of their party. But Jackson's success had taught the wire-pullers the value of availability. They cunningly burked Clay's candidature, while they looked around for an available man. An available man they found and a counter-charm in all respects to the " Old Hero " and "• Old Hickory " in " Old Tippecanoe," the name which most happily for electioneering purposes they gave to William Harrison, a worthy old country gentle- 208 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai-. man in Ohio, who in a combat at Tippecanoe gained a victory over the Indians. Harrison was presented to the people as equal or superior to Jackson in homeliness and simplicity, living in a log cabin garnished with coon skins and drinking hard cider. For him the wire-pullers, in their own phrase, "set the ball rolling," and gloriously it rolled. There ensued a campaign of enthusiasm, almost of delirium. Railroads, now extending over the country, gave facilities for large gatherings. The whole population was excited and set in motion. Men laid aside their occupations. Monster meetings were held. At a meeting in Ohio where Harrison appeared it was said that a hun- dred thousand people were present. Processions five miles long chanted " Tippecanoe and Tyler too," Tyler being the candidate for the Vice-Presidency. The ball which had been set rolling and the emblems of Harrison's bucolic virtue, the log cabin and the coon skins, were everywhere displayed. Men of intellect like Webster stooped to exert their eloquence in a coon skin campaign and to drink the health of the Presidential candidate with forced enthusiasm in hard cider. The results were a complete victory of the Whigs and the ascendancy of availability over other qualifications and claims in the choice of candidates for the Presidency. It is probable however that availability would in any case have ulti- mately prevailed. What the Harrisonian frenzy denotes in its relation to American character it is not easy to sa.j. Had the American people traversed in half a century the whole distance between the phlegmatic Englishman and the wild shouter for Tippecanoe, or was this strange outburst of political poetry a recoil from a too prosaic life? IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 209 " Tippecanoe " vacated life and the Presidency a month 1841. after his inauguration. The cause of his death seems to liave been the; buzzing swarm of office seekers which had followed him to Washington as much as an accidental malady. Tyler his Vice-President stepped into his place. Tyler had been put on the ticket to propitiate the Southern wing. By his conduct as President he read his party a lesson which Americans have hardly yet laid to heart on the expediency of being careful in the selection of a candi- date for the second place, and not using that nomination as a sop. He turned against his party ; vetoed their pet measure, the erection of a national bank ; and tried to form a party of his own with a view to re-election, of which however he had no chance. His excommunication by the party could not deprive him of his veto power. It only illustrated the difference between British and American forms of government. Had Tyler been a British Prime Minister deserted by his party he must have at once fallen. A more serious question than that of the Bank soon loomed up. Houston, an American filibuster and an old comrade of Jackson, with a body of intrusive Americans had planted himself in Texas, which belonged to the Republic of Mexico, and when the Mexicans took arms to put him down and recover their province, had defeated them at the battle of San Jacinto. He now, probably in pursuance of 1841. a scheme preconcerted with Jackson, threw himself into the arms of the American Republic, which could not receive him without going to war with Mexico, whose accession to the sisterhood of freedom had recently been the subject of jubilation. The South was for the annexa- tion, which opened a vast vista of extension for slavery ever hungering not only for new political domains but for 210 THE UNITED STATES. ciivr. fresh fields to till, since slave culture, especially the culture of tobacco, was exhausting to the soil. The Northern spirit was opposed to annexation for the same reasons. Tyler entered with alacrity into the intrigue ; he was ready for the annexation of Texas or for anything which could gain him re-election. When the time came he was contemptu- ously swept aside, but he had opened the question on which the election turned and which proved fatal to the chief of his enemies. Annexation of Texas with slavery behind it was the de- cisive issue in the next Presidential campaign between the Whigs whose candidate was the brilliant Clay and the Democrats whose candidate was the far from brilliant but highly available J. K. Polk. Van Buren, to his credit, had been laid aside on account of his unwillingness to embrace annexation. Each party had still a southern as well as a northern wing, but the strength of the Whigs lay in the north, that of the Democrats in the south, and their respective affinities to freedom and slavery were seen through the veil which the politicians laboured to keep spread. The Democrats taxed the Whigs with anti-slavery leanings, and the Whigs could not retort the reproach. Clay, striving to balance himself between annexation and opposition to annexation, that he might hold his southern without losing his northern wing, fell as the political acrobat is apt to fall. His great achievements as a states- man were compromises. But as a candidate he found a compromise between opposite policies too much for his address. A letter in which dallying with annexation he used an expression plainer than he intended, set him fatally at odds with a third party which would listen to no compromise, and which though small was large enou^^i IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 211 to turn the scale. This was the Anti-slavery party, or the Liberty party, as the political section of the abolitionists styled itself, now coming as an organized force upon the scene. Naturally these men would have preferred Clay, who was half with them, to Polk, who was entirely against them ; but exasperated at Clay's trimming letter, which seemed to them a wound received in the house of a friend, they left his side and threw away their votes on Birney a candidate of their own. Clay thus lost New York and the election. Loud were the lamentations which arose from all his followers. Even the victors were almost ashamed of their victory. The wail has been prolonged in history. Unquestionably the election of Polk against Clay was the preference of mediocrity to distinction. But such is the law of democracies, and after all Clay was a dazzling and fascinating but artful politician who owed his fall to a false step in the practice of his own art. Nor was his fate unretributive. As the chief of the war-hawks he had called forth that military spirit which, embodied in Jackson, crossed and ruined his own career. Polk as President did that which he had been elected to 1845. do. He pushed the quarrel with Mexico, which formed as striking an illustration as history can furnish of the quarrel between the wolf and the lamb, and which no American historian of character mentions without pain. To add the disgrace of private covetousness to that of public rapine it seems that some of the chief promoters of the aggression were speculators in Texan securities. The use of the phrase re-annexation instead of annexation, having no warrant in fact, did not cover the wrong. Mexico was at last pressed and goaded into doing what by a hypocritical fiction was pronounced an act of war, and was invaded by 212 THE UNITED STATES. chap. an American army. The Mexicans, poorly armed and ill commanded as well as people of a weaker race, notwith- standing their numbers were as sheep to the butcher. They were defeated by Generals Taylor and Scott in a series of engagements, and the invader marched into their capital. That they fought as well as they could against over-mastering wrong must always be recorded to their honour. It forms a bright spot in the dark and sordid pages of their history. The immense expanse of Texas was ceded to the conqueror, annexed to the United States and re-annexed to slavery, which had been abolished under the Mexican constitution. Nor did annexation end there, but was extended to New Mexico and Arizona. At the same time the golden California was seized against the will of its few inhabitants on the pretext, for which there was not the slightest foundation, that Great Britain had designs upon it. All this was done, be it remembered, by the slave power then dominant and its political retainers. Northern morality protested, as the readers of the " Biglow Papers " know. The next President could be no other than Taylor, the victorious general of the war, although Taylor neither was nor pretended to be anything of a statesman. A tolerably shrewd candidate he was, and in this respect Clay might have envied his tact. During the canvass he received a letter from a planter running thus : — " Sir, I have worked hard and been frugal all my life, and the results of my in- dustry have mainly taken the form of slaves, of whom I own about a hundred. Before I vote for President I want to see that the candidate I support will not so act as to divest me of my property." The general replied : " Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I too have been all my life in- IV. DEMOCKACY AND SLAVEllY. 213 dustrious and frugal, and that the fruits thereof are mainly in slaves, of whom I own three hundred." Taylor turned out a plain, honest man, not a bigot or henchman of slavery, in spite of his three hundred slaves, and showed no tendency to play Jackson. He died in the White House and his place was taken by Vice-President Fillmore, who i850 left no mark. The election that followed was the last chance of Daniel Webster's ambition, and his desperate attempt to grasp it was a sad example of the influence of that dazzling prize upon the characters of public men. He who had been the stately champion of freedom, of liberty of opinion, and of right, now, to attract south- ern votes, stood forth as the defender of slavery, of the fugitive slave law, and the gag. He derided the anti-slavery doctrine as a ghostly abstraction, and descended almost to buffoonery in ridiculing the idea of a law higher than that which ordained the hunting down of fugitive bondsmen. His character, to which friends of freedom in the North had long looked up, fell with a crash like that of a mighty tree, of a lofty pillar, of a rock that for ages had breasted the waves. Some minds willing to be misled he still drew after him, but the best of his friends turned from him - and his life ended in gloom. Mexico was avenged on her spoiler, for the acquisition of Texas re-opened the fatal controversy between slavery and freedom which the Missouri compromise had put to sleep in Congress for thirty years. Texas being large enough to make four States, the North was threatened with a formid- able extension of the slave power. A proviso was moved by Wilmot excluding slavery from Texas. Thereupon a desperate struggle began in CongressT Webster and Clay, the statesmen and the hierophants of Union, appeared with 214 THE UNITED STATES. chap. a parting splendour on the scene of their achievements, and Calhoun, a dying man, sat in the Senate while a col- league read his last speech. Passion was so fiercely excited that a revolver was drawn in the hall of the serene Senate. Not Texas only but New Mexico and Arizona which went with Texas, and California into which there had been a rush of gold-seekers and which ui'gently demanded political organization, seemed to be breaking out, when Clay once more came forward as an angel of mediation with a com- promise in his hand. Texas was consigned to slavery but was left a single State. ^ New Mexico and Arizona were also consigned to slavery against which however they were practically guarded by nature, being unsuited for slave labour. California was admitted as a free State. At the same time a fugitive slave law of a more stringent kind was passed, a concession vital and fatal to the South. How conscience in passing this law struggled with policy was seen when thirty-three Northern members paired, stayed away, or dodged the vote. This was the third and the last compromise. The Whig party which had striven to keep the slavery question out of the political arena and to build its platform of such planks as a protective tariff, a national bank, internal improvements, the cultivation of national spirit, and devotion to the Union, combined with the opposition to Jacksonian violence and encroachment, lost the foundation of its existence ; in fact it was buried in the grave of Clay, to whom in a great measure it owed its life. It faded away like a dissolving view, while in its place appeared the linea- ments, first of a Free Soil, then of a National Republican, or in brief, a Republican party formed on the grand issue and destined to try with slavery, first at the ballot and after- IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 215 wards on the battlefield, the inevitable question whether the country was to be wholly slave or wholly free. Slavery was confident and aggressive. After Polk it 1853. made Pierce, another of its satellites, President. Under Pierce it planned the annexation of Cuba to which it feared emancipation, now triumphant in Great Britain and Europe, might be extended. Three American ambassadors to 1854. European Courts, Buchanan, Mason, and Soul^, met at Ostend and put forth a manifesto the effrontery of which startled Europe, intimating that Spain must be compelled to sell or give up Cuba to the United States. Lopez, a filibuster, made an attempt, with the sympathy of the South, to seize the island, but perished with his band. Walker, another filibuster, also with the sympathy of the South, invaded Nicaragua, made himself dictator, and was pre- paring to introduce negro slavery, when he also met his doom. A revival even of the African slave trade was in the air ; a contraband trade in African negroes went on upon a large scale with the connivance even of the Federal authorities at the South. As Great Britain was now lead- ing a crusade against slavery she became the object of diplo- matic enmity to the slave-owners who were in power at Washington and whose discourtesies, set down to the ac- count of the whole American nation, had a bad effect upon British opinion at a later day. The last act of the struggle between the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs was complicated by the com- mencement of another sudden tornado of opinion sweeping like the Anti-Masonism, from an independent quarter across the field of the regular parties, and for the moment con- fusing their lines. This was the movement of the American party, or as it was nicknamed, the party of the Knowno- 216 THE UNITED STATES. chap. things. That they " knew of nothing illegal or disloyal " being the regular answer with which they parried curious inquiry. The American party was called into transitory ex- istence by dislike and dread of the foreign element, now in- creasing in volume and influence, and especially of the Irish Roman Catholics. The Irish Roman Catholics, always to be distinguished from the Scotch-Irish of the Protestant North, were now pouring from their famine-stricken country into the United States and were fast becoming that dread power, the Irish vote, henceforth a serious factor in Ameri- can politics, though perhaps from a nervous sense of the present situation even historians seem to shrink from the mention of its name. These people of a hapless land and a sad history, ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, nurtured in squalid poverty, untrained in constitutional government, trained only in conspiracy and insurrection, were a useful addition to the labour of their adopted country ; of its poli- tics they could only be the bane. Clannish still in their instincts, herding clannishly together in the great cities and blindly following leaders whom they accepted as chiefs, and in choosing whom they were led more by blatant energy than by merit, they were soon trained to the pursuit of political spoils and filled elections with turbulence, fraud, and corrup- tion. Through the connivance of a judiciary elected largely by their own votes they were permitted to set the naturaliza- tion law at defiance, and fresh from the seat of their native wretchedness to assume and misuse the powers of American citizens. Their numbers and cohesion soon enabled them to influence the balance of parties. But as a body they went into the Democratic party and there remained, attracted at first perhaps by its name and confirmed in their adherence to it as the party of slavery, which it ultimately became, by their IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 217 bitter antipathy to the negro, who might compete with them in the labour market and whose degradation alone saved them from being at the bottom of the social scale. Their influence could not fail thenceforth to intensify the Anti- British sentiment in American politics, and to envenom all disputes between America and the mother country. Know- nothingism presently passed away, its object being lost in the more pressing issue. But the cause of it did not pass away. Meantime in ways more important than politics, and in spite of political factions, the country had been advancing with mighty strides. Since the Union the number of the States had more than doubled. Population had rapidly multiplied and had been swollen by a great immigration, not Irish only but German and Scandinavian which sought happier homes and brighter prospects than those of the peasantry in the old countries of Europe. At the time of the Union settlements still clung to the Atlantic seaboard. It had now passed the Alleghanies in force, entered the valley of the Mississippi, and was turning what had once been merely a mental horizon and afterwards a boundary- line into a central waterway. At last to the Atlantic the Pacific coast, with its sunny shores and half tropical wealth, had been added. Humanity had staked out the vast field on which the great experiment of democracy was to be tried. Intercommunication had been vastly improved by enter- prise and invention. The great Cumberland Road had opened a broad higliway for civilization from Maryland across the Alleghanies. Clinton had turned from the fac- tions and corrupt politics of New York to the construction of the Erie Canal, which in its magnitude rivals and by its utility shames the works of the Pharaohs. Steam liad 218 THE UNITED STATES. chap. begun to open a new era. Steamboats plied on the water- ways and the railway took the place of the crawling stage. A railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific was already planned. Thus not only were the States of the Union bound together and one mind diffused through the whole frame, but the appliances of agriculture and civiliza- tion were brought, with the march of settlement, into the virgin wilderness. The mineral resources of the country were being opened. Spinning-jennies and power-looms, the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, were imported. Manufactures on a large scale had grown up in the North- eastern States and had superseded the spinning-wheel- Civilization moving westward had a ragged edge of roving and lawless adventure, at least where it moved from the quarter of slavery. With the commercial expansion attend- ant on the rapid development of new resources inevitably went gambling speculation with its wild-cat banks, frauds, bankruptcy, and crashes, the effect however of which was limited and transient, commerce like industry rising elastic from its fall and wealth with all its accompaniments, moral and social as well as material, advancing by leaps and bounds. Nor had the distribution of wealth yet ceased to be equal, at all events in comparison with its distribution in the old world. The last church establishment, that of Connecticut, had fallen, and religious equality everywhere, reigned. The people were still religious ; Christianity generally, and in all cases theism, remained the basis and sanction of their morality. But orthodoxy was giving way and philosophy was gaining ground. Emerson had come out of the church and was teaching morality without a creed. Religion with- out a creed found an eloquent preacher in Theodore Parker. In the ferment of progress Utopian schemes of society be- IV. DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 219 gan to abound. Some of the social Utopias, as that of the Shakers and that of the Perfectionists, took a religious form, and Revivalism made its wild protest in favour of the spiritual interests of man. Intelligence was mainly engrossed by the pursuit of wealth, practical science and invention were active, while of literature there was as yet but little, and that little was not native in character but European. Denial of copyright to English writers, by causing their works to be pirated and sold in cheap editions, discouraged American authorship and thus kept American intellect in thraldom to Europe. An international copyright law would have done more to emancipate from British influence than any war with Great Britain. Oratory, both political and forensic, on the other hand ' had been carried to a high point, and if in the hot and ex- citable youth of the nation it was often bombastic, some- times, as in Webster and Choate, it was not. The national debates on slavery and other momentous questions stimu- lated eloquence among the leaders and habits of poli- tical thought among the people. The political press drew to it a large share of ability and had become a great power ; with power, irresponsible so long as the circulation can be sustained, came the inherent danger of abuse. ^ Political democracy was now full grown in the Northern States and at Washington, so far as the Northern spirit pre- vailed there ; all officers were elective, all office-holders were in the fullest sense servants of the people, every man's tenure was precarious and dependent on popular favour, rotation in office was the rule. Even the judiciary had become elective in most of the States. To the people and its will everybody had bowed, as once everybody had bowed THE UNITED STATES. CHAP. IV. to royalty and to the will of kings. Property qualification for the franchise had generally disappeared. Manhood suf- frage was the rule. With the good of the system came its inevitable evil, the machinery of party and electioneering, demagogic arts and strategy, factions, passion, and vitu- peration, the reign of the caucus and the boss, and where the foreign element, especially the Irish, prevailed, ballot-stuff- ing, repeating, rioting, and corruption. Only in the slave- owning South oligarchy still held power. Social democracy also was in outward forms and manners complete ; in sub- stance it was much more advanced than it was in the old world, though nothing could efface the social lines drawn by wealth and personal superiority. Labour and lowly birth instead of being a disparagement were a boast and a title to political preferment. A nation which had been at school and which read paid a homage to intellect perhaps greater than that which it paid to commercial success. CHAPTER V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. rpHE question of slavery, in spite of all the attempts to elbow it out of politics and prevent it from breaking the beloved Union, had now forced itself to the front, and the "irrepressible conflict " was at hand. Slavery is dead, and the Southerners would not revive it if they could. They have wisely accepted its abolition, as they have magnanimously accepted defeat by the greater power. Denouncing it now seems like trampling on a grave. It was the offspring of soil and climate rather than of character, though morally it was more alien to republican and Puritan New England than to Anglican and monarchical Virginia, while by the Quaker of Phila- delphia it was always condemned. But its extinction was entirely to be desired. Ancient slavery may have been a step forward in evolution. In the age of tribal wars it was an improvement on extermination. It ended in emancipation, and ultimately in the fusion of the races. But American slavery was not a step forward in evo- lution ; it was a long step backwards ; it was a winter fallen into the lap of spring. Its sole source was the desire of Europeans in a languid climate to have the work done for them instead of doing it themselves. Fusion in the case of negro slavery was fatally precluded 222 THE UNITED STATES. ciiai-. by colour. There could be no intermingling except that which arose from the abuse of the negro woman by her white master. Emancipation was greatly discouraged. The emancipated slave was a suspected pariah. He was trampled on more than a slave, because in him the race of the bondsman seemed to pretend to equality. To talk of the system as gradually elevating the negro was idle when permanent marriage and domestic ties, the first elements of moral civilization, were denied him, when it was penal to teach him to read and write, when the chance of raising himself above the coarsest manual labour, even by petty trades, was withheld. Not less idle was the pretence of making him a Christian, which the South- ern clergy, religious henchmen of the system, were fain to put forward. How make a man a Christian without the domestic morality and affections essential to the for- mation of a Christian character, and when Christianity in his master was always presenting itself to him as a religion of wrong? Calhoun brought himself to believe that the Southern family was superior to the Northern family as having a third relation, that of master and slave, in addi- tion to those of husband and wdfe, parent and child. But what became of the family of the negro? Household slavery, no doubt, was often, perhaps generally, mild ; but the cruelty of plantation slavery, at least on the large plantations, is too well proved. The negro there was abandoned to the driver, a man of a low and generally disreputable class, whose sole object was to raise the largest crop of cotton, and who used up the slave like a beast of burden. Not only was the plantation slave overworked and tortured with the lash, he was sometimes murdered, and with impunity, as negro evidence was not V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 223 admitted against whites. If the slave was happy, why those fetters, those bloodhounds, that hideous slave code? If he was contented, why those laws forbidding him to hold meetings, to move freely about, rendering him liable to summary arrest and to scourging if he was found wan- dering without a master ? Why was Southern legislation a code of terror? The Southerners and their wives lived in constant dread of slave insurrection. They took every alarm as an announcement of it. At Charleston, though summer evenings were sweet, the city was shut up early and handed over to the patrol. This is the answer to Calhoun's boast that slavery excluded angry and dan- gerous questions between the employer and the employed. Most revolting, if not most cruel of all, were the auction, at which husband and wife, parent and child, were sold apart, the sight of droves of human cattle on their way to it, and the advertisements of human flesh, especially of girls nearly white. Negro quarters on a plantation were hovels ; the negro's clothes were rags ; his food was coarse ; his life was foul. That he was happier than he would have been in his African hamlet was more easily asserted than proved. His happiness at best was that of swine. In his African hamlet, too, he had the chance, if he had any capacity, of one day rising in the scale of civili- zation. Against the negro in America the gate of the future was inexorably barred. The general effect upon the character of the slave-owner could not be doubtful. Brave, frank, hospitable, free-handed, courteous to his equals, a first-rate rider and sportsman he might be ; his wife might be soft, elegant, and charming, though there was an element in her character of a different kind, which civil war disclosed : but it is not in the exercise of 224 THE UNITED STATES. chap. domestic despotism, with passion and language unre- strained, amidst whips, manacles, and blood hounds, that the character of a true gentleman can be formed. The temper of the boys was spoiled and their minds were tainted by familiarity with slaves. With slavery always goes lust. The number of half-breeds was large. White fathers might even sell their half-breed children as slaves, and a Southern lady was heard to complain that she was but the head of a harem. If, as some desperate advocates of slavery contended, the negro was not a man, what were all those half-breeds to be called? The great planters were prodigal, many of them were in debt, and in their mansions luxury and ostentation, rather than comfort, reigned. The table was profusely spread; there was a number of servants in livery, but broken windows re- mained unmended, and doors would not shut. The num- ber, however, of the owners of many slaves was small, that of the owners of any slaves not very large, compared with that of the " mean whites," who, disdaining industry as the lot of the slave, and full of insensate pride of colour, though the very negroes despised them, lived a half vaga- bond life as parasites of the slave system, farming but little and very poorly, slave-driving, slave-hunting, loung- ing and drinking, sponging on the great planters, whose dependents, socially and politically, they were. Nothing is better attested than the inferiority of Southern to North- ern life in comfort, thrift, cleanliness, and all the elements of civilization. Slavery at Athens and Rome had supported an intellectual community. In the slave States of America there was no literature or science. Culture was confined to a few of the richest men. There was not mechan- ical invention. The inventor of the cotton-gin himself was V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 225 a native of Massachusetts. Poor were the universities, and the schools were poorer still. Young Southern gentle- men were sent to the universities of the North. Some jurists were produced by the practical need of law. The clergy were not only inferior in education but degraded by the necessity of cringing to slavery, and of perverting Scripture and paltering with conscience in that interest. What sort of pastor was that Methodist clergyman of Tennessee, who, when a negro had been burned alive, defended the act in print as one of necessary self-defence, avowed that he should have been glad to take part, and expressed his wish that, instead of being merely burned, the victim had been torn with red-hot pincers and his limbs cut off one by one ? Politics were an oligarchy of planters, the single aim of whose statesmanship was exten- sion and perpetuation of slavery. Nor was the economical aspect of the system better than the rest. Slave labour was unwilling, stupid, and sluggish ; it lacked intelligence for variety of production and unvaried crops exhausted the soil. In Virginia, old tobacco fields were covered by forests of pine. Larger crops of cotton have been raised by free labour under all the disadvantages of recent emancipation. The slave, having no interest in thrift, was wasteful. The ownership of infancy and decrepitude was unprofit- able. High industries, being socially and politically an- tagonistic, as well as economically alien to the system, could flourish only in a few of the larger cities. On the eve of Secession, Mr. Olmsted, a very fair-minded inquirer, made a tour of observation through the South. His "Cotton Kingdom " depicts general barbarism thinly veiled and barely relieved by a few seats of commerce or mansions of private wealth. In the house of civilization are many man- 226 THP: united states. chap. sions, and very peculiar institutions may serve humanity in their way, but in no way could humanity be served by American slavery. On the other hand, American slavery threatened humanity with aggression. Hunger of land as well as craving for political power and the needed bar- riers against the advance of emancipation drove it on. It had shown its tendencies in buccaneering attacks on South American republics and on Cuba, as well as in the conquest of Texas. It had its eye on the West Indies and Hayti. It was looking to the reopening of the slave trade, which would have brought it into collision with Great Britain as an emancipating power. In the absence of the slave trade, the demand for more negroes, bred by the increasing value of cotton, Avas met by the conver- sion of Virginia, which had exhausted much of its own land, into a breeding State, a shameful end for the mother of Presidents and the Old Dominion. The plea put into the mouth of a good slave owner no doubt has force ; he might feel that he was doing his duty to his slaves ; he might complacently contrast his peaceful household with the labour wars of the North, his gentle wife and daughters with its female agitators, his politi- cal calm with its democratic turmoil. But for the system, the only valid apology was the supreme difficulty of say- ing in what relation other than slavery the two races brought together under an evil star, and, as it seemed, radically unequal in capacity, could be placed towards each other. That problem has hardly yet been solved. Could that knot have been untied instead of being cut by the sword of civil war? Only, it would seem, by peaceful separation. Compensated emancipation, like that which freed the slaves in the West Indies, would have V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 227 cost but a fraction of the price which in the end was paid. But the slave-owner, even if he would have sold his slaves, would hardly have sold his pride or his power. Nor, the white dominating at the South, and swaying by his com- pact force the policy of the Union, would there have been strong security against the practical re-enslavement of the negro. Such changes can hardly be brought about peace- fully by anything but superior power, such as that of the British Parliament, which emancipated the slaves in the West Indies, or that of an autocracy such as emancipated the serfs in Russia. We cannot say what might have happened had the colonies not parted violently from the mother country. They might have gone with her in emancipation. They might have fallen into two groups, one free, the other slave ; and in that case freedom, by its moral and industrial superiority might have ultimately prevailed. The philosophic abolitionism of Jefferson and his com- peers had long since died out. It grew faint after the in- vention of the cotton-gin, which made cotton the immensely profitable staple of the South, and it received its death stroke in the slave insurrection of 1832. Nothing was left of it but a colonization society for transporting free negroes to Africa, and there forming them into a com- munity to be the germ of a negro civilization. 'But this was at best a plan for ladling out the sea, and was sus- pected by abolitionists of being a scheme for getting rid of black citizens. Slavery was now dominant in the United States. It elected the Presidents, it filled the offices, it swayed the Senate, it cowed the House of Representatives and the nation generally by threats of breaking up the Union, the idol of an American heart. Its leaders in 228 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Congress were in their way statesmen, holding their seats, unlike the representatives of popular constituencies, by a sure tenure, devoted through life to politics, accustomed to command. It held the Northern merchants by the bonds of a vast commercial interest and a great debt due to them as providers of its capital. A New York trader would tell abolitionists plainly that he knew as well as they did that slavery was wrong, but New York commerce was bound up with it, and abolitionists must be put down. Over the mercantile society of the North, especially over its wealthy chiefs, the South threw the unfailing spell of aristocracy. The Irishman was the faithful liegeman of the political power which enabled him to keep his foot on the neck of the negro, and O'Connell's denunciations of slavery were forgotten or disregarded. The genius of Roman Catholi- cism and of High Church Anglicanism, was, to say the least, not intolerant of slavery. The Protestant churches were fearful of a rupture with tlieir Southern wings. Their clergy, moreover, had commercial pewholders and trustees. All, or almost all of them, in proclaiming the wrath of heaven against sins, left out one fashionable sin ; all, or almost all of them, preached submission to the law. Submission to the law, in fact, seemed a paramount duty to the mass of a law-abiding people ; the people were in their consciences persuaded that they were indefeasibly bound by the covenant made with slavery in the constitution. Popular literature bowed to the yoke, and even missionary works were expurgated in deference to slavery. Foreign lights of freedom and philanthropy, brought into this atmosphere, burned dim. Kossuth, when he visited the United States, excused himself from touching the question as it was not one of national independence, and Father V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 229 Matliew could not remember that he had signed an anti- slavery manifesto. The slave owner was master of opinion as well as of Congress. Still there were protests. There were political protests against the aggrandizement of the slave power. Opposition had been made on that ground to the acquisition of Texas, and a compromise had been enforced. There had been a series of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the federal District of Columbia, over which Congress had undoubted power. The Southerners in Congress had tried to impose the gag by decreeing that no petition relating to slavery should be received. This called forth a doughty champion of the right of petition in the person of Quincy Adams, who when he had failed at the election for the Presidency, instead of returning to ex-presidential nullity, went into the House of Representatives, and there, without avowing himself an abolitionist, waged a long and memorable war against the gag. One day the old man announced that he held in his hand a petition signed by slaves. A tornado of Southern wrath ensued. Waiting till it was spent Adams announced that the petition was in favour of slavery. Sew- ard's brilliant star now glittered in the anti-slavery quarter above the political horizon. By him were uttered the fate- ful words, " irrepressible conflict." Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, stood forth as an open and passionate enemy not only of slavery, but of the slave-owners. Chase, Ham- ilton, Fish, Wade, and Foot were strenuous on the same side. The slave trade in Columbia at least had been stopped, and the droves no longer passed by the portals of the Capitol of liberty. Nor were morality and religion mute though their voices were low. Emerson assailed slavery with philosophy, the 230 THE UNITED STATES. chap. author of the " Biglow Papers " with ridicule. Channing pronounced on it a condemnation measured and wary, going, however, so far as to say that, rather than give up Texas to it he would see the Union repealed. Theodore Parker denounced it more fearlessly, and his sermon on the death of Webster, the great apostate, is the flower of anti- slavery eloquence. Even in the orthodox churches there were searchings of heart and as to the lawfulness of slave- holding, which in one case brought on schism between the Northern and Southern wings. Nor could the Christian doctrine of brotherhood be preached without pricking con- science on the forbidden theme. Mrs. Beecher Stowe by her " Uncle Tom's Cabin," which swept Europe as well as America, did as much for the anti-slavery cause as could be done for any cause by a work of fiction, which everybody reads with a feeling of its unreality. But slavery had more ardent and uncompromising foes. Lundy, a mechanic, who had lived on one of the highways of the home slave trade, and had seen the coffles go by, went forth on a humble cru- sade, lecturing even in a Southern State, where his gentle- ness seems to have been his protection, and afterwards publishing a little anti-slavery journal. He was presently joined by William Lloyd Garrison, a young journalist of T)romise, who devoted his life to the cause. At Baltimore, a port of the slave trade, Garrison denounced in his journal a New England merchant who, false to New England prin- ciple, was lending his ship to the trade. He was convicted of libel and suffered imprisonment, which he underwent with a light heart, drawing from it fresh devotion. In face of an adverse world he brought out The Liberator, an anti-slavery journal on the humblest scale, at Boston, print- ings as well as writing it with his own hands, and living in V. RUPTUKE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 231 apostolic poverty, in the meanest lodging on the scantiest fare. For thirty-five years he continued tliis work. It brought him no money but it brought him disciples. His doctrine was thorough-going. He denounced slavery not only as an evil but as a crime and the sum of all crimes. He was for nothing less than immediate, unconditional, and uncompensated abolition, so that between him and the slave-owner there was internecine war. At the North, if there was not slavery, there was prejudice of colour the most intense. The negro was worse than servile, he was unclean. No white would eat with him, share a public conveyance with him, kneel beside him in church. Fellow- ship with him would have been social ruin, intermarriage as bad as incest. The slightest taint of negro blood was hopeless degradation. On this prejudice Garrison trampled, openly consorting with blacks, and carrying about with him as his fellow crusader, the eloquent Douglas. Frankly acknowledging that the constitution established slavery, he blasphemed that idol, calling it an agreement with hell and a covenant with death, and at last publicly burned it before a multitude on the fourth of July. One stormy night, in a back street of Boston where negroes dwelt. Garrison, with eleven friends, founded the first anti-slavery society, which presently became the mother of hundreds, the cause find- ing its way to the hearts of simple people who did not hold Southern securities and were not politicians. Wendell Phillips, a scion of Boston aristocracy, the finest platform speaker of his day, joined the movement and became the most fiery of its champions. His language, that of The Liberator, and of the abolitionists generally, was cutting, not unfrequently too cutting, and was fiercely resented. The South boiled with fury, threatened the agitators with 232 THE UNITED STATES. chap. personal vengeance, rifled the mails which contained their tracts. Commercial interest, political timidity, and colour feeling at the North, responded to the angrj^^ call of the South. Abolitionists were mobbed and insulted, they were dragged before magistrates who knew no justice, their meetings were broken up, one of their halls was burned, one of them, defending himself and his party, was slain. A school which a lady had opened for negro girls was broken up, and she was driven away with insult ; and this in moral and orderly Connecticut. Garrison himself was assailed at Boston by a mob of " highly respectable citi- zens," dragged through the streets with a rope round him, and found shelter from worse violence only in a gaol. Public exasperation had been inflamed to the utmost by the importation of Thompson, a famous anti-slavery lec- turer from England, whose country was unbeloved, and whose interference was taken as an affront to the nation. Abolition societies nevertheless multiplied. They multi- plied notwithstanding divisions in their camp, contests for leadership, the extravagances of wild enthusiasts who had fastened themselves on the cause, and the identification of the movement by its leader with other movements of which an era teeming with change was full, but to which it had no relation, such as opposition to bibliolatry or Sab- batarianism, and theories of government, or rather of spirit- ual emancipation from temporal government, which, in the world as it was, must have led to despotism or anarchy. Garrison's sole aim was to awaken the conscience of the people. Political action and even the use of the suffrage he renounced, dreading nothing so much as that his cru- sade should become a political party with party ambition and venality. There was another abolitionist movement ^. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 233 led by Birney, a man of admirable character, a slave owner who had freed his own slaves, and underwent much perse- cution for the cause. This movement was political. It sought, hopelessly enough, the abolition of slavery by con- stitutional action, and its vote in a New York election had taken the Presidency from the waverer Clay. The North generally, though not true to morality on the subject of slavery, remained true to the principles of a republican constitution. It resented the interference with the right of petition, it resented the aggression on the freedom of speech and of the press. The Southern slave was far away ; his wail hardly reached the Northern ear. But when, under the new fugitive slave law, the Northern people saw with their own eyes the slave-hunter plying his trade in tlieir cities, and beheld innocent men and women dragged from their asylum and borne off to chains, when they witnessed tragic, and sometimes murderous struggles between the negro and his captor, their hearts were moved. When the negro Anthony Burns was carried off from Boston, the hearth of freedom, there was an uprising of the citizens. A life was lost in the fray. It was necessary to call out troops, and the slave was led away with great military parade amidst the execrations of the multitude and along streets hung with black. The love of excite- ment blending with philanthropy, an " underground rail- way " was organized to forward slaves to Canada where they were safe under the British flag. Some of the States passed Liberty Bills, giving those claimed as slaves secu- rities for justice which the fugitive slave law denied them ; and these were treated by the South, not without some reason, as breaches of the constitution and acts of dis- union. To the mine thus charged, the match was applied 234 THE UNITED STATES. chap. by Stephen Douglas, a Western politician, and the type of his class. He was about the first notable instance of the power of voice in politics, which the increasing size of audiences has enhanced, and is still enhancing. His force as a speaker contrasted with the smallness of his stature caused him to be nicknamed " The Little Giant." His eloquence was of the most Boanergic kind. In the midst of his thundering, says an eye-witness, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbut- toned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half- naked pugilist. He was able, prompt, and unscrupulous in debate. It occurred to him that the quiver of the Demo- cratic party, to which he belonged, was spent. To replenish it he invented or revived the doctrine of squatter sover- eignty, according to which the settlers in any Territory were to decide for themselves in framing their constitution whether they would admit slavery or not. This upset the Missouri compromise, geographical compromise altogether, and its tendency was to make slavery national instead of sec- tional. The principle of squatter sovereignty was presently applied on the motion of Douglas by the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Territory of Kansas, a portion of the Louisi- ana purchase. As if in concert with Douglas's move, Taney, who had been rewarded for his service to Andrew Jackson in the destruction of the bank, with the chief jus- ticeship of the Supreme Court, went out of his way in the case of a claim to liberty on the part of a negro, Dred Scott, which came before him, to rule that Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in the Territories, and that the Missouri compromise was unconstitutional. At the same time, he laid it down that the negro was not included by the framers of the constitution in the designation of " man " V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 235 or as having any rights against the white, though it appeared that at the time when the constitution was framed, some freed negroes were enjoying civil rights in Massachusetts, and had been in arms for colonial freedom. The Chief Jus- tice did not say whether if the negro had no rights against the white man, the white man had any rights against the negro, or whether the negro was morally at liberty to kill or rob the white man. By this presentation of the ini- quity, naked and in its most repulsive form, Taney did no small harm to the party which he intended to aid. It has been said that slavery plucked ruin on its own head by its aggressive violence. It could not help showing its native temper, nor could it help feeding its hunger of land, insisting on the restoration of its runaways, or demanding a foreign policy such as would fend off the approach of emancipation. But Taney's judgment was a gratuitous aggression and an insult to humanity at the same time, for which, supposing that the Southern leaders inspired it, they paid dear. If the slave was mere property, his owner might be entitled to take him anywhere, and thus slavery might be made national. The boast of a daring partisan of slavery might be fulfilled, that the day would come when men might be bought and sold in Boston as freely as any other goods. The issue, which all the politicians had striven to keep out of sight, was presented in its most startling and shocking form. The Kansas-Nebraska Act having passed, Kansas be- came the prize and theatre of a struggle between slavery and the Free Soilers, which was the prelude of civil war. From the adjoining slave State of Missouri, the vanguard of slavery came in to occupy the ground ; but it was soon encountered by Free Soil men, who poured in from the 236 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Northern States under the auspices of the abolition socie- ties, and well armed b}^ them with Sharp's rifles, even the clergy being carried away by the moral movement and going so far as to open their churches to meetings for the purpose. In the not unbloody conflict which followed, the use of the rifle, the bowie-knife, and the torch, was curiously combined with that of political trickery under con- stitutional forms, the American citizen preserving in the hurly of the fight his formal respect for public law. The slavery men outran their opponents in fraudulently fram- ing a constitution with slavery, called the Lecompton constitution, the acceptance of which was pressed on Con- gress by a pro-slavery President. The Free Soilers framed a constitution without slavery at Topeka. Victory in the end remained with the Free Soilers, while the slavery men from Missouri were mere raiders. Nature, too, through the soil and climate, had laid her ban upon slavery in Kansas. In Congress meantime the heat was extreme ; debate was always on the verge of violence. Members went to the Capitol armed. Sumner having made a speech some- what more than scathing and extremely personal, on what he called the crime against Kansas, Brooks, a Southern fire-eater, was so stung that under the sacred roof of the Senate he fell on Sumner and beat him within an inch of his life. The North thrilled with indignation. The South applauded, and presented Brooks with a compli- mentary cane. The political hosts, the Free Soil, or as it presently called itself, the Republican party on one side, and that of slavery and its friends, styled Democratic, on the other, were now drawn out for battle. The Democrats still V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 237 bore on their banner the okl Jeffersonian motto of State right, opposed to federal centralization. But State right had now come to mean the safeguard of slavery against national interference. In the period of flux during the process of formation, the Knownothing party acquired a momentary accession of strength by giving refuge to old Whigs who shrank from abolition. But this was soon over, and Knownothingism left the scene. At the next presidential election, the Republicans put up Fremont, who was available as the Path Finder, having distin- guished himself in California as an adventurous explorer and a pioneer. They were beaten, and Buchanan, one of 1856. the framers of the Ostend manifesto, became the last slavery President. But the Republicans showed a strength which was an earnest of future victory. John Brown, a zealot of the Covenanting or Crom- wellian stamp, had fought against slavery in Kansas ruth- lessly, perhaps more than ruthlessly, though some Mis- sourian ruffians instead of shooting, he forced at the point of the rifle for the first time probablj'- in their lives, to kneel and pray. One of Brown's sons was shot by a cleri- cal champion of slavery from Missouri. Exalted by his anti-slavery enthusiasm almost to the pitch of madness, he afterwards entered Virginia with two sons and a small band, seized Harper's Ferry, where there was a Federal isoO. arsenal, and called the slaves to freedom. No slaves answered his call. He was soon surrounded, with his party; his two sons were shot, and he, fighting with the coolest intrepidity, was wounded and overpowered. He was hanged with military parade and met his fate with more than martyr calmness and courage. His bearing impressed his enemies. The consolations of religion ten- 238 THE UNITED STATES. chap. dered him by a pro-slavery clergyman, he declined, remem- bering perhaps the clerical filibuster in Kansas. Virginia Avas filled with panic and rage. At the North there was much sympathy for John Brown, disguising itself under faint disapprobation. In the war which ensued, his figure was glorified, and his soul, marching on in the battle hymn, led the hosts of emancij^ation against the slave power. Y^n 1861 came the catastrophe. By this time the spirit of secession was rife among the leaders of the South. On the nomination of Presidential candidates the Demo- cratic party split. The thorough-going adherents of slavery nominated Breckinridge, the party of the union with slavery including the majority of the Northern Demo- crats, nominated Stephen Douglas. A third section, styl- ing itself Constitutional, and vainly hoping to shut out the question of slavery and save the constitution, nominated Bell for President and for Vice-President Everett, the model orator, who at this crisis essayed to pour oil on the raging waters by going round and lecturing on the character of Washington. The Republican convention was held at Chicago, and moral as was the cause in which it met, there was the usual display of electioneering arts, the usual bargaining, and the usual uproar. Seward was the most eminent man of the party and its natural candidate. For that very reason he was set aside, eminence being always dogged by rivalries and jealousies. The choice fell on Abraham Lincoln, a man whose eminence was not yet such as to give umbrage, a citizen of the powerful State in which the convention was held, and available as a rail-splitter. Rails said to have been made by him were carried about the convention. Abraham Lincoln is V. KUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 239 assuredly one of the marvels of history. No land but America has produced his like. This destined chief of a nation in its most perilous hour was the son of a thrift- less and wandering settler, bred in the most sordid poverty, lie had received only the rudiments of education, and iliough he afterwards read eagerly such works as were within his reach, it is wonderful that he should have attained as a speaker and writer a mastery of language, and a pure as well as effective style. He could look back smiling on the day when his long shanks appeared bare below the shrunken leather breeches which were his only nether garment. His frame was gaunt and grotesque but mighty. He stood six feet four, and was said to have lifted a cask full of beer and to have drunk out of the bunghole. This made him a hero with the Clary Grove boys. He had a strong and eminently fair understanding, with great powers of patient thought which he cultivated by the study of Euclid. In all his views there was a simplicity which had its source in the simplicity of his character. His local popularity was due largely to his humour, and the stock of good stories, always pointed, though not always delicate, which through life it was his delight to collect and repeat. At the same time he was melancholy, touched with the pathos of human life, fond of mournful poetry, religious though not orthodox, with a strong sense of an overruling Providence which when he was out of spirits sometimes took the shape of fatalism. His melancholy was probably deepened by his gloomy surroundings and by misadventures in love. Like his father he was without habits of settled industry. He tried boating, he tried store-keeping, he tried surveying, he tried soldiering in an Indian war, though he never came 240 THE UNITED STATES. chap. under fire. At last lie became a lawj'^er, or rather an advocate. This suited him better and he pleaded success- fully in rude courts. But for his roving spirit politics was the trade. Those who knew him best thought him intensely ambitious, and he was probably the more dis- posed to public life, when his domestic happiness had been marred by marriage with a woman, his love of whom was so doubtful that he once shirked the wedding, after losing by death a woman whom he certainly loved. He was elected, one of a group called " the long nine," to the Legislature of his State. As a politician he played the game ; he jumped out of window to break a quorum, and conspired in wrecking a hostile journal by the furtive insertion of a ruinous editorial. Still his character was at bottom thoroughly sound. Both as an advocate and as a politician he was " honest Abe." As an advocate he would throw up his brief when he knew that his case was bad. He equipped himself for politics by a careful study of, constitutional law, while from his early life he drew an inestimable knowledge of the minds and hearts of those whom he called the plain people. The sight of slavery in his early wanderings, and still more perhaps the natural love of justice which was strong in him, had made him a Free Soiler. But his abolitionism was temperate. In op- posing slavery he never reviled the slave-owners, nor was he blind to the inferiority of the negro. He held the negro to be the white man's equal only in certain inalien- able rights, in the right, above all, to eat the bread which his own hands had earned. He had been made known to fame by a series of platform tournaments with the redoubt- able Stephen Douglas, in which his powers of reasoning fairly as well as closely, and of telling statement, were V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 241 displayed. In one of his speeches he had uttered words not less memorable than Seward's " irrepressible conflict." " A house," he said, '•'• divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved ; I do not expect the house to fall ; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new. North as well as South." After his campaign in Illinois, he had been brought to speak at New York, and, in spite of his ungainly figure and quaint costume, had made a deep impression. But it was mainly to cabal against Seward that Lincoln owed the Republican nomination. He was elected President after a campaign of 1860. intense excitement, commerce struggling hard to escape from the yawning gulf by the election of Douglas as a con- servative. But the votes cast for him fell short by a million of those cast for Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell together, and his support came almost entirely from the North. There could be no mistake about the significance of the election by Northern votes of a President who looked for- ward to seeing slavery " put where the people would be satisfied that it was in course of ultimate extinction." As a Southern Senator said. Republicans did not mean to cut down the tree of slavery, but they meant to gird it about and make it die. Southern fire-eaters welcomed the event. From South Carolina, the centre of slavery, went up the ^^<^- signal rocket of Secession amidst transports of enthusiasm, 18G0. 242 THE UNITED STATES. chap. which the women frantically shared, unconscious of the coming doom. It was answered in rapid succession by the other States of the group, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia, though in Georgia not without a strong spasm of reluctance. Afterwards followed the more Northern group, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Old Dominion was conservative, and, as the slave-breeding State, had no interest in the renewal of the slave trade. Unionism made a stand in East Tennes- see, Western Virginia, and the uplands of North Carolina, hill districts from which nature had repelled slavery. The border States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, in which slavery existed but was not dominant, wavered and remained debatable, the two last nearly to the end, though all three were kept formally in the Union. Otherwise secession swept the South, though more or less of violence no doubt was everywhere used to crush dissent or hesita- tion, and the revolution was the work of a thorough-going minority, as revolutions usually are. The ordinances by which the States had severally entered the Union were repealed, a congress was held, and a Southern confederacy was formed, with a constitution modelled in general after that of the United States, but distinctly recognizing State sovereignty and proclaiming negro-slavery as the founda- tion of the new commonwealth. Changes of detail, per- haps improvements, were made, such as the lengthening of the Presidential term, with the abolition of the power of re-election, and the admission of ministers of state to Con- gress ; but it is needless to dwell on them, as they were still-born. Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President, said, " The negro, by nature and by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for the condition he occupies in our system. An V. KUPTUKE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 243 architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the founda- tion with the proper material, the granite ; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by ex- perience we know that it is the best not only for the superior, but for the inferior, race that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes He has made one race to differ from another as He has made one ' star to differ from another star in glory.' The great objects of humanity are best attained when conformed to His laws, in the constitution of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon a strict conformity with these laws. The stone which was rejected by the first builders is become the chief stone of the cor- ner in our new edifice." After such an avowal, and in face of the fact that the line of political cleavage exactly coincided with that of slavery, following its windings both generally and in the exceptional cases of Tennessee, Vir- ginia, and North Carolina, while the border States, which were half slave, remained politically waverers, who could doubt that slavery was the cause of secession ? The ques- tion between free trade and protection, which the emissa- ries of the South in free trade England sought to present as the real cause, had, indeed, always divided the agricul- tural South from the manufacturing North, and had in Calhoun's time given rise to Nullification. But it was derivative, and its influence was secondary. The Confed- eracy was in its essence a slave-power, and as such boldly flaunted its banner in the face of humanity. Jefferson Davis, a man after the Southern heart, able, impetuous. 244 THE UNITED STATES. chap. and overbearing, was elected President. His government was recognized and obeyed over a compact territory larger than France, Spain, Portugal, and the British Islands put together, with a population greater than that of the old thirteen colonies, and with many times their wealth. A new flag, or rather the old flag with a secessionist varia- tion, was unfurled, and the slave power took its place for four years among the nations. Richmond, a new capital, confronted Washington. Under whatever constitutional forms the Confederate government might be set up, the South, when the war had commenced, had no constitution but that of a beleaguered city. Its President became a commandant ; its Congress sat in secret, mutely register- ing his decrees ; all safeguards for personal liberty were suspended ; the government assumed absolute mastery not only of the property but also of the persons of all citizens for the purposes of the war ; the press became a sounding-board. The revolution which had given birth to such liberties could not fail to provoke the mockery of the North, but it was invasion which made the government of the South despotic, and laws must sleep when a nation is struggling for its life. It was true, however, that the spirit of the slave-owner ruled at Richmond, and showed its pitiless and masterful temper beyond even the necessi- ties of war. As the States seceded, their representatives withdrew from Congress with farewells more or less defiant. Had Jackson been President, instead of being suffered to de- part, they might have been laid by the heels, and their plot might have been disconcerted for the time. But Buchanan, besides being the nominee of the slave-owners, was a weak man, and his position was weaker still. He was V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 245 an outgoing President, about to be replaced by a President- elect of the opposite party. These intervals, during which government is severed from power, are a weak point in the American constitution, and are one of the proofs that its framers failed to foresee the ascendancy of party, and the situations which would thereby be created. Buchanan first, in a double-faced manifesto, pronounced that seces- sion was unconstitutional, but coercion was illegal. After- wards, Southerners having left his Cabinet, and being replaced by Unionist Democrats, he somewhat altered his tone, while one of his ministers. General Dix, sent the telegram, "If any man attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot " ; to which the spirit of the North gave a response which might have been a warning to the South. But Buchanan's sole desire was to be gone, and cast the burden on his successor. His conduct could not be less resolute and brave than that of Congress, which, in truth, was an ominous lesson on the character of the politician trained in the caucus and upon the platform. Congress, finding that disunion, beneath the threat of which it had long cowered, had really come, fell on its knees, and offered the slave owners boundless concessions. It was ready to give slavery new guarantees and extension, to sharpen still more the fugitive slave law, to deprive the negro claimed as a slave of the last shred of legal protection, to call upon the States to repeal all their personal liberty bills, to extend the Missouri com- promise line to the Pacific, and admit New Mexico, includ- ing Arizona, with a slave code, to satisfy the prejudice of race by disqualifying all men of negro blood for civil office. It even offered to place slavery beyond the reach of constitutional amendment, and make it, so far as law 246 THE UNITED STATES. chap. could make it, eternal. A resolution to this effect passed the House by a vote of 133 to 65, and the Senate by 24 to 12, just the requisite two-thirds. It would, as Mr. Blaine says, "have entrenched slavery securely in the organic law of the land, and elevated the privilege of the slave-owner beyond that of the owner of any other species of property." This resolution received the vote of a large number of prom- inent Republicans, and if the Southern members of Con- gress would have stooped to vote instead of seceding they might have riveted their political yoke on the neck of the American nation forever. Even pronounced enemies of slavery, such as Mr. Seward and Mr. Sumner, seem to have trembled in silence. Nor did Congress much mis- represent its constituents. In spite of all the signs in the political sky, nobody had believed that the deluge was coming ; everybody had trusted the providence which watched over the American Union. When the crisis arrived a cold shudder ran through the nation. Local elections began to go against the Republicans. The Re- publican party, Mr. Blaine says, was utterly demoralized. Its great organ in New York conceded the right of with- drawing from the Union, declared against all coercive measures, and even said that the South had as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain. Democratic organs went further, and declared the election of Lincoln a greater provocation than that which the American colonies had received from the mother country. Those who spoke of secession as rebellion were met with cries of dissent. Abolitionist orators and lecturers were refused a hearing. Wendell Phillips, after reviling Lincoln as a trimmer, would himself have yielded to secession. " Here," he V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 247 said, " are a series of States, girding the Gulf, who think that their peculiar institutions require a separate govern- ment. They have a right to settle that question without appealing to you or me." General Scott, the head of the Federal army, was so far carried away by the tide of panic as to propose the division of the Union into four separate confederations. Men clung to the hope that the trouble would blow over, and commerce prayed for peace at any price. It need not, however, be assumed that because the North did not take arms against slavery, nor was entitled to the sympathy of the world on tliat account, it had no mo- tive for making war except the vulgar desire of territorial aggrandizement. Northern men might, and no doubt did, believe that they were fighting for a violated constitution, for a compact which had been faithlessly broken, for the vindication of law, reverence for which had been deeply planted in their hearts, and even for the political fortunes of humanity, which, according to American belief, were embarked in the ship of the Union. Had the Confederates played their game warily, had they spoken the North fair, pleaded the hopeless incom- patibility of the two systems, and promised friendship and fidelity to commercial engagements, they might have been let part in peace. But wariness was not Southern. Seeing the North thus cling to the Union, the Southern gentlemen thought tlmt the " greasy mechanic " would not fight, and they dared him to smell Southern powder and taste Southern steel. They were fatally mistaken. The greasy mechanic was of their own race, and though he clung to the Union, he would fight. Tliere is little use in renewing the bottomless contro- 248 THE UNITED STATES. chap. versy about the State sovereignty and the right of seces- sion. The constitution was on this point a Delphic oracle. Its framers had blinked the question of State sovereignty, as they had compromised on that of slavery. They could not have ventured to avow that the States were disclaim- ing their sovereignty in accepting the constitution. They trusted to time, and liad slavery been out of the way, time would have done the work. In sentiment, the allegiance of the Northern heart Avas to the Union. The Northern people were imbued with Webster's sentiment. Moreover, the new States, which now outnumbered the old thirteen, were the offspring of the nation, and of their people many were immigrants from Europe, strangers to any original compact. Thus California, on the far Pacific Coast, being a child of the nation, stood steadily by the cause of the Union. The allegiance of the Southerner, more home- keeping than the man of the North, and with a narrower range of vision, was to his State, which, moreover, he regarded with reason as the bulwark of his peculiar insti- tution. Many people of the South, who had no personal interest in slavery, and were opposed to secession, thought it was their duty to go with their State, and their sense of their duty grew stronger when their State was invaded by Northern arms. Lincoln himself had said, " Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing govern- ment may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize and make their own of V. KUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 249 SO much of the territory as they inhabit." So had thought the American people, and, therefore, they had sympathized with revolt all over the world. Southern revolution could not have asked for a clearer sanction. But it was not necessary to invoke formally the right of revolution. Wendell Phillips hit the mark. Two communities, radi- cally differing in social structure, and, therefore, in politi- cal requirements, had been clamped together in ill-assorted, uneasy, contentious and immoral union. At length, in the course of nature, they fell asunder and formed two sepa- rate nations, the stronger of which proceeded to attack, conquer, and reannex the weaker. This was the simple fact. It was natural that the mind of the North should be possessed by the ideas of union and the constitution ; that it should regard secession as treason and rebellion. But those names were really out of place, as the North itself was fain practically to confess. Not for a moment, or in a single instance, did it treat the Southerners as traitors or rebels. From the very outset it treated them as combatants in a regular war, and accepted the same treatment at their hands. The threat of dealing with the crew of a Confederate privateer as pirates, being met by a threat of reprisal, was instantly withdrawn. Foreign powers saw this, and with good reason at once recognized the South as a belligerent. Even the term civil war is hardly correct, since this was not a struggle between two parties for the same land, like that between the League and the Huguenots in France, or that between the Cava- liers and Roundheads in England, but between two com- munities, territorially separate, for the land of one of them which the other had taken arms to reannex. Only in the border States, in each of which two parties were struggling for ascendancy, could it be strictly called a civil war. 250 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Lincoln stole by night into the capital. His life had been threatened on his journey by that same mob at Baltimore, the Plug-uglies as they were called, which had risen and massacred in favour of the war of 1812. When he reached Washington, and had been inaugurated under military protection, his situation was one which might well have made his heart sink. Before him was secession. Behind him were fear and fainting of hearts. Around him was treachery. He was a minority President. That he had been raised to power by a party, not by the nation, he was reminded by the swarm of partisan office- seekers, which surrounded and distracted him even in this supreme hour. He had hardly a good adviser, for even Seward, the Secretary of State, had for the time lost his head, and talked wildly about sinking the slavery question in a spirited foreign policy, and challenging the powers of Europe to war. His greatest encouragement came, perhaps, from Stephen Douglas, who, though an advocate of squat- ter sovereignty and slavery, was a patriot and true to the Union. Those who had manoeuvred the rail-splitter into the nomination, and had voted him into the Presidency, must have quaked. But they had chosen much better than they knew. Lincoln stood firmly on his own feet, and faced the peril with a calmness and a wisdom drawn largely from his moral character and his trust in Provi- dence ; for fear is generally selfish, and Lincoln could have no selfish fears. He presented himself as the servant and guardian of the constitution, naturally failing to see that nature had torn up that compromise. He disavowed any purpose of interfering directly or indirectly with slavery in the States where it existed, declaring that he had neither the right nor the inclination so to do ; " not V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 251 to save slavery or any minor matter" would he permit "the wreck of government, country, and constitution." The preservation of the Union, with or without slavery, he proclaimed as his paramount duty. The Union, he maintained, was perpetual, a government, not a mere association of the States, and all resolves and ordinances to the contrary were invalid. He announced his intention of holding all the property, exercising the authority, and performing the functions of government in the Southern States, but of doing this without violence or bloodshed, unless they were forced upon him by the South. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow country- men," he said, "is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors." He appealed to the principle of government by majorities, arguing that if it was to be disregarded the end would be anarchy. He appealed to fraternal affection, and challenged the malcontents to point out an instance in which the constitution had been plainly violated. Their answer would have been that the constitution was a com- pact, to which the election of a President holding that slavery was to be placed where the people would know that it was in the course of ultimate extinction, had morally put an end. But Lincoln thus kept the weather gage of opinion, and his language, moderate, calm, and conciliatory, presented a favourable contrast to the violent and somewhat blustering manifestos of his Confederate rival. His repeated disavowals of any intention of inter- fering with slavery inevitably estranged thorough-going abolitionists. Commissioners from the South, coming to treat in the name of an independent power, he refused 252 THE UNITED STATES. chap. to receive, though Seward was inclined to dally with their overtures. His caution kept him in touch with general opinion. Horace Greeley goes so far as to assert, reckon- ing by the votes cast in the Presidential election, that three-fifths of the entire American people, exclusive of the blacks, "sympathized with rebellion in so far as its animating purpose was the fortification, diffusion, and aggrandizement of slavery." To be kept in touch with general opinion was Lincoln's statesmanship. His special object, in his dealing with the slaver}^ question, was the retention in the Union of the border States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, the scenes of a fierce struggle between the Unionist and Disunionist parties, which were preserved probably in great measure by Lincoln's policy from secession. It was to propitiate these States that, even when the war was far advanced, he put forth a plan for abolition with compensation. He had also to consider the military men, without whom an army could not be formed, and who for the most part inclined to the side of slavery. He at the same time necessarily renounced his claim to the sympathy of foreign nations, especially of England, who could not be expected to regard the in- vasion of the South by the North as a crusade against slavery when the President declared it was nothing of the kind. The Southern Confederacy was avowedly founded with slavery as its corner-stone. It was, therefore, under the ban of humanity. This Avas the reason for desiring its fall, whatever might be the motives of its assailant. For the unity and aggrandizement of the American Republic many men in England and other nations cared, because they looked with hope to the great experiment of American democracy; but nobody was morally bound to V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 253 care. The South had been politic enough to pay homage to the opinion of the world, especially of the British people, and perhaps, at the same time, to propitiate the slave-breeding State, by inserting into its constitution a renunciation of the African slave trade, though it was pretty certain that had the slave power triumphed this article would have had little effect. War broke out in the natural quarter, at Charleston, the fiery heart of slavery, the memorial shrine of Calhoun. Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, was held by its com- mander for the Union. The government at Washington proceeded to revictual it, thereby perhaps committing, as the South contended, the first formal act of war. The ^P"^ Confederates bombarded and took the fort. The effect was 1861. magical. At the outrage on the flag the North, of late so cold and quaking, burst into a general flame of patriotic wrath. Lincoln's call for volunteers was answered with enthusiasm, and the " irrepressible conflict " began. The second shot was fired in the streets of Baltimore where the Plug-uglies rose for slavery, and attacked volunteers on their march to Washington. The Northern whites outnumbered Southern whites by three to one, but the Southern whites had their negroes to feed them. The military qualities of the race on both sides were the same, or rather the Northern and Western farmer, when brought under discipline, was superior in steady valour to the " poor white " of the South, though his onset was not so furious as that of the "Louisiana Tigers," nor his yell so loud. Both sides were untrained to war ; but the rough life of the poor white had been the better preparation for the camp, and he was more accus- tomed to the endurance of hardship, as well as a rifleman 254 THE UNITED STATES. chap. well fitted for forest war, and he marched well. The Southern gentleman was a horseman, while the people at the North used not the saddle-horse but the buggy. Not that cavalry were much used for battle in this war ; the country was too tangled for their charges and even for their formation ; tliey were used chiefly for reconnaisances and raids. The South also had over the North at first the advantage which tlie Cavaliers had over the Roundheads ; the gentry were accustomed to command, and the common people to obey. It took time to make the Northern Demo- crat submit to discipline. Lincoln, when he went out with a corps against the Indians, had heard the first word of command given by an officer to a private answered with an oath. Discipline, however, came in time and was then combined with greater intelligence. In intelligence no army, except perhaps the Athenian, can have ever equalled or approached that of the North. Most of the soldiers carried books and writing materials in their knapsacks, and mail bags heavily weighted with letters were sent from every cantonment. Such privates would sometimes reason instead of obeying, and they would see errors of their com- manders to which they had better have been blind. But on the whole, in a war in which much was thrown upon the individual soldier, intelligence was likely to prevail. In wealth, in the means of providing the weapons and ammu- nitions of war, the North had an immense advantage, which, combined with that of numbers, could not fail, if, to use Lincoln's homely phrase, it " pegged away," to tell in the end. It was also vastly superior in mechanical invention, which was destined to play a great part, and in mechanical skill ; almost every Yankee regiment was full of mechanics, some of whom could devise as well as execute. In artillery V. RUPTURE AND RECONS PRUC TION. 255 and engineering the North took the lead from the first, having many civil engineers, whose conversion into military civil engineers was easy. The South, to begin with, had the contents of Federal arsenals and armouries, which had been well stocked by the provident treason of Buchanan's Minister of War. The Federal navy yard at Norfolk, with twelve ships, also fell into its hands. But when these resources were exhausted, replacement was difficult, the blockade having been established, though extraordinary efforts in the way of military manufacture were made. To the wealthy North, besides its own factories, Avere opened the markets of England and the world. Of the small regular army the Confederacy had carried off a share, with nearly half the regular officers. The South had the advan- tage of the defensive, which, with long-range muskets and in a difficult country, was reckoned in battle as five to two. The South had the superiority of the unity, force, and secrecy which autocracy lends to the operations of war. On the side of the North these were comparatively want- ing. Party divisions continued, the war being openly opposed, and sympathy with secession almost openly avowed by the Copperheads, as they were called, from a reptile which waits on the rattlesnake, the rattlesnake being emblematic of the South. The North, on the other hand, had the advantage of the unforced efforts and sacri- fice which free patriotism makes ; and, as the struggle went on, power was spontaneously entrusted to the govern- ment, which received during the greater part of the con- flict the hearty and almost unquestioning support of a majority in Congress so large as to produce practical unity of counsels. Among its supporters were many of the Democratic party, who under the name of War Democrats 256 THE UNITED STATES. chap. followed the patriotic example of Stephen Douglas. The evils of political influence were felt in the choice of gen- erals and in the conduct of the war, but perhaps not more than those of favouritism on the other side. The press, if it gave trouble to the government, did not, like the slave press of the South, mislead the people by publishing, at the bidding of the war office, false news of successes which exalted for the moment, but led to depression when the truth was known. At the North the supply of volunteers was at first abundant and from all classes, patriotic enthusiasm being general. After experience of the grim reality volunteer- ing declined, and desertion, if the Comte de Paris may be trusted, became immense. It was necessary to resort to bounties, which led to bounty-jumping, that is desertion and re-enlistment for the purpose of getting the bounty paid over again, and at last to the draft with the paying of substitutes, in whose persons, as the jesters said, a man might leave his bones on the field of honour, and think of it with patriotic pride as he sipped his wine at home. Under the bounty, draft, and substitute system the quality of the enlistments could not fail to fall off, while recruiting agents would pick up all the waifs, native or foreign, whom they could find. But the bulk of the army to the end was native, though it included many Germans, British, and Irish, who had been naturalized, or who had settled in the United States, and could not fairly be set down as mer- cenaries. The South, almost from the first, resorted to conscription, ruthlessly enforced with the severest penal- ties for evasion or desertion, from which Northern demo- cracy shrank. Guards pressed men in the streets, and conscripts were seen going to Lee's army in chains. It V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 257 was complained that the slave-owners by various subter- fuges escaped while they thrust the poor under fire. ' The finance of the South in like manner soon became requisition and confiscation, the inconvertible bank bills f which it issued in vast volumes having speedily lost all ' value, so that its soldiers waived the farce of being paid in them. It found purchasers for its bonds among its European friends, who sacrificed to their sympathy with its cause. At the North a war taxation, heav}'- an"d search- ing, was cheerfully borne. To meet further demands bonds were issued, and an immense debt was contracted. The North also unhappily resorted to the issue of an inconvertible paper currency which in effect was a forced loan, raised in a manner which impaired the faith of con- tracts, and disturbed industry and trade. The Supreme Court, for reasons which must be deemed rather political than judicial, afterwards sanctioned the exercise of a power not given to the Federal Government by the constitution, and denied, apparently for a reason universally applica- ble, to the States. A depreciation of sixty per cent was the result. The South looked for help from England where it believed that cotton was king. The free-trade argument, early and skilfully urged, prevailed at Liverpool where cotton indeed was king, and in other commercial centres where the same interest prevailed. Politically Great Britain was divided like the United States themselves. On the side of the South was the aristocratic party, which had always been taught to believe that the success of the American Republic would be its doom. The journals of that party, eminent as well as violent, poured the gall of insult into the American heart in the hour of 258 TIIK I'MTEI) STATES. niAP. peril and adversity when feelings are most keen. Ameri- can hatred of England, and the former attitude of the Washington government, had left their sting. For the attitude of the Washington government the slave-owners, who had long held power, were chiefly to blame, but of this the English people were not conscious. English friends of the Republic not a few deprecated the war, thinking that it would be wiser to part in peace, and were unjustly confounded by the North with enemies. But as soon as it was discovered, that, in spite of the disclaimers of the American Congress and President, the struggle was practically one between freedom and slavery, the hearts of the mass of the Iilnglish people were with the North. Nor did the partisans of the slave power in the British Parliament ever venture on a serious movement in its favour. The dearth of cotton, though severely felt, was borne. The government throughout observed neutrality, refusing to recognize the Confederacy, or receive its ambas- sadors, even when victory seemed to have assured to it a place among the nations. Steady refusal met the over- tures of the French emperor who, always striving to tread in the footsteps of the first Napoleon, and seeking to re- establish for France a colonial empire in America, urged a joint intervention which when the fortunes of the North were low could scarcely have failed to have been decisive. For a moment it seemed that the power of Great Britain would, in her own despite, be thrown into the Southern Nov. scale by the rash act of the American Captain Wilkes, " who, having confused his mind with the study of inter- national law, took the Confederate envoys. Mason and Sli- dell, out of a British ship. The act being at first approved by the American Secretary for the Navy, and applauded V. RUPTURE AND RFX'ONSTRUCTION. 259 by the people, the British demand for redress was peremp- tory. Perhaps the temper of Lord Palmerston, who was given to bluster, made it even more peremptory than was needful. But wisdom prevailed and the envoys were given up. Among the British people, kinsmen of the Americans and speaking the same language, as w^ell as connected by commerce, the war was a home question, and the excitement was intense. By the other nations of Europe far less interest was shown. To them the Ameri- can Republic was entirely foreign ; and the idea that upon its success or failure hung the fate of democracy and of human progress had not found place in their minds. Even in France, while the government was scheming, the people were almost indifferent. Russia, while with the rest of the powers she recognized the belligerency of the of the South, assumed a politic attitude of benevolent neutrality towards the North. The spheres of Russia and the United States were wide apart, the difference between the governments in character was too extreme for political jealousy ; perhaps even as extremes they met and at that time they had a common hatred. The strategical objects at which Northern invasion aimed were the Mississippi, by regaining the mastery of which Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and whatever the South had of Missouri, would be cut off; Chattanooga, and other positions in Tennessee, which commanded the lines of rail- way binding the Confederate territory together from east to west, together with the entrance into the heart of the confederation ; and the coast, by blockading which the South was to be debarred from the sale of its cotton, on which its finance depended, and from receiving supplies from Europe. The political object was Richmond, in 260 THE UNITED STATES. chai-. choosing which for their capital, placed as it was on the northern edge of their territory, and near the centre of the enemy's force, the Confederates had propitiated Vir- ginia at the expense of their military strength, though they no doubt hoped that Richmond in the end would not be a border city, since their territory would in tlie end embrace Missouri and Kentucky. The section of country between the two capitals, traversed by the Potomac, the Rappahannock, Rapidan, North Anna, and Pamunkey Rivers, thus became the grand scene of war. Above all, the object was to beat and destroy the armies of the South which gathered round Richmond. There went on a strug- gle, generally of the guerrilla kind, for Kentucky and Mis- souri. The South began by striking at Washington, the fall of which, though not a military, would have been a political, blow, and might have had an effect upon Europe. From the vast fortress in which it was beleaguered, its armies at times sallied forth to grasp the border States, to sweep off supplies, of which its need was always increas- ing, to turn opinion at the North, and make the assailant loosen his hold. Otherwise, it waged only a defensive war. " On to Richmond " was the cry of the North. On, in spite of military warnings, the raw militia with a handful July of regulars went. At the stream of Bull Run they met the ■ Confederates under Beauregard. A confused engagement, the counterpart of Edgehill, ensued. A fresh Confederate force, coming up by rail, decided the day. Obstruction at a bridge turned panic flight into a rout, and the Confed- erates, had they pursued, might have entered Washington. But the victors were in little better plight than the van- quished. Aristocratic journals in Europe scoffed and jeered. Yet the list of killed and wounded on both sides V. KUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 261 was au earnest of a bloody war, and in the midst of the panic Connecticut artisans had proved the pith of their order by the steadiness with which they bore off their guns. The South crowed loudly, but the North, instead of being discouraged, was spurred to effort and measured its task. With their native versatility, the American people turned from the works of peace to those of war, took to drilling and learning to ride, to the manufacture of cannon and rifles, to the building of ships, or the con- version of merchantmen and ferryboats into vessels of war, to the organization of the commissariat and trans- port, for which hotel-keeping and railway-managing had well fitted them ; or of the medical department, for the service of which steamboats and railway carriages were turned into field-hospitals. Politicians changed the sphere of their ambition from the Senate to the camp, not with much success, for no civilian commander attained more than a secondary reputation. There was a general rush to arms, a general outpouring of patriotic gifts and tender of patriotic services. Congress voted men and money with- out stint, and the call for troops was promptly answered by the States. The force of spontaneous zeal in contrast to the iron despotism which grasped the resources of the South was seen, and the only question was whether it would last. In the west, the Federals had gained some advantages by which the public eye was turned on General McClellan, whom national fancy now exalted into a young Napoleon, and called to the command of the army with the amplest powers and the most lavish supplies. He proved to be an organizer rather than a general. It was said of him by a railway president, who had employed him as a civil engi- 262 THE UNITED STATES. cuai-. neer, that he would build the best of bridges, but would never go on it himself. A great organizer he was. He drilled to perfection an army of 150,000 men, yet having drilled it, he did not advance, but lay in his camp near Washington, still drilling and reviewing wliile weeks of good weather went by. His policy seems to have been to create an overwhelming force, bind the Confederate armies to the stake at Richmond, destroy them there, and thus end secession at a blow, perhaps without prejudice to slavery, to which, as a Democrat, he was no enem3\ In the controversy which ensued between him and Lincoln, the President wrote always with temper and forbearance, while McClellan was sometimes arrogant ; but the presump- tion is against a civilian who meddles with war, and Lin- coln's excessive fear for the safety of the capital is allowed to have led him into dictating at least one false move. That he felt political jealousy of McClellan as a Democrat, or a possible rival for the Presidency, is not to be believed, whatever may have been the feelings of party politicians April around him. At last McClellan moved on Richmond. ■ He saw the spires of the Confederate capital, but his movements were tentative and irresolute, while his tone was always despondent. After a series of blind and bloody engagements, in a wooded and swampy country, he led back an army not conquered, though severely liandled, in the field and decimated by malaria and straggling as well as by the bullet. It had been the good fortune of the Confederates to find at once a great general in Robert E. Lee, a Virginian aristocrat, and an officer of the regular army, who, though a Unionist, when his State left the Union felt bound to go with his State. He had been joined by Jackson, nicknamed from his steadfastness on V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 263 a field of general panic Stonewall, a striking figure, a Calvinist of the Scotch-Irish breed, deeply religious, a believer in the destiny of the children of Ham, and a soldier of extraordinary energy, valour, daring, and ac- tivity, the idol of his men. Lee was henceforth the head, Jackson the right arm, of Confederate war. McClellan having lost the confidence of his government though not of his men was replaced by Pope who put forth a gasconading manifesto, was outgeneralled by Lee and Jackson, and defeated in a great battle. Emboldened by victory the Confederate generals sallied into Maryland in the hope of her rising, which though her heart was with them she disappointed. She waited for the guarantee of victory, perhaps also she shrank from her tattered and squalid deliverers. A secondary object of the movement was need of supplies. No armies were ever so lavishly supplied as those of the North. The length of their waggon trains was prodigious. A wealthy democracy is sure to care well for all its citizens. But the Southern soldiers were called upon to endure great hardships. We find them left for days with no food but a little flour. We find them ragged, barefooted, and without hats, fain to bind old hats on their feet for shoes ; we find them without blankets, and piteous appeals are made by their commanders for something to cover the defenders of the country who were keeping guard amidst sleet and snow. There must also have been terrible suffering in their ill- provided hospitals, especially when the stern policy of war refused to let medicines pass. Pay they had none. Few of these men were slave-owners, and they were fighting for what to them was their country. Lee, however, suf- fered much from straggling. 264 THE UNITED STATES. chap. To face the storm which threatened Washington Sept. McClellan was rephiced in command. On the Antietam ■ he met Lee with superior forces, and fought a bloody battle which though indecisive was followed by the retreat of Lee. Bloody the battle was, enough to satisfy all critics of American valour. A visitor to the field saw the bodies lying in swathes. In the length of five hundred feet he counted two hundred dead. A lane was filled with a battalion of them. The field where he stood was black with corpses ; he was told that the field beyond was equally crowded, but he had supped as full of horrors as he could bear. Antietam, though a drawn battle, was for a momentous purpose made to do duty as a victory. Lincoln had aV-length decided to strike slavery, which by this time must have been seen to be the great enemy, and against which in fact Congress had entered the national verdict by abolishing it in the District of Columbia. He had hesitated long, fearing to outrun opinion, his constant guide, his index of that " will of (Tod,'" conformity to which he always made his aim, and to estrange the border States. Meantime he had been checking his generals of both parties, enemies of slavery who set the negroes free within their command, and friends of slavery who gave back fugitive slaves to their owners. A shrewd move had been made towards emancipation, and a cue had been given to the President by Benjamin Butler, a sharp lawyer turned soldier, who pronounced the negro, as he helped the enemy on military works, contraband of war, and confiscated him to freedom. But now the President thought that the hour had come, and that something must be done to put new life into the cause. He Availed only V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 2G5 , for a victory that hLs act might not seem one of despair. He made a solemn vow before God that if General Lee were driven back from Maryland, he would set the slaves free. After Antietam he announced his intention of issu- ing, and on the first of January, 1863, he issued, a memo- rable proclamation, setting free by his military authority all the slaves in rebel States. He still founded his action on policy and the constitution. Later on his moral feel- ings found free utterance. " If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God ascribe to Him ? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ' the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " There presently followed the enlistment of negroes as soldiers, for which the country was more ready as its industry was losing many hands ; and the black 54th Massachusetts, under its devoted white colonel, Shaw, May marched out to glory through the streets of Boston amidst great demonstrations of public sympathy. There was a throb of race feeling by which the negro soldiers were at 266 THE UNITED STATES. chap. first disrated. This was overcome ; yet it cannot be said that they were ever received by their white fellow soldiers, or have since been acknowledged, as brethren in arms. They fought not ill, being docile, though not dashing ; but the half of manhood which. Homer says, slavery takes from a man cannot be restored by merely putting on him the cap of liberty. By the sight of negro soldiers the evil passion of the slave-owner was fearfully aroused. At the April taking of Fort Pillow by the Confederates, the negroes of ' the garrison were shot down after surrender, some were nailed to logs and burned, some were buried alive, and even whites taken with the negroes shared the same fate. The evidence for this seems conclusive. Why should we reject it when at this day negroes in the South are being burned alive ? The slaves never rose. They continued to till the soil, supplied their masters with food, and faithfully took care of the planter's wife and daughters. The slave-owners are entitled to the benefit of this fact. But the negroes were children of habit, and ill-informed of events. The proclamation of freedom would scarcely reach their ears. They welcomed the Northern armies, gave them all the information in their power, and, it was said, never de- ceived them. The tide, however, had not yet turned. McClellan received orders from Washington to follow Lee. He stood still, was removed from command, and replaced by Burnside, a brave and loyal but hapless officer, in the selection of whom Lincoln's judgment strangely failed him. Burnside sent his troops to storm a strong position Dec. in which Lee had entrenched himself on the heights of ■ Fredericksburg between Washington and Richmond. V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 2(57 The issue was a ruinous defeat followed by still more ruinous demoralization. Irregularity of pay conspired with the influence of defeat. More than 80,000 soldiers and nearly 3000 officers were absent from the standards, and more than one-half of them without regular leave. The service of the outposts was neglected; the bonds of dis- cipline were being loosened. " Gloom, home-sickness, and a disposition to criticise," says the Comte de Paris, " were becoming daily more prevalent among that large body of troops, lying torpid amid the mire and rime in the clayish slopes of Stafford County." Deserters were aided by their relatives, who sent them citizens' clothes. The keener the soldier's perception of the incompetence of his gen- erals, the greater was his discouragement under defeat. Burnside lost control over his lieutenants ; he demanded a holocaust of insubordi nates ; but the government preferred to remove him, and Hooker, called Fighting Joe, took his jan. place. Hooker formed a dashing and, it appears, a good ^^^^' plan for throwing himself across the Rappahannock, cut- ting off Lee from Richmond, and overwhelming him. But in the execution his nerve or his head failed him. He stopped short, and instead of attacking allowed himself to be thrown on the defensive, and was out-generalled by Lee, who daringly presumed on his irresolution. Stone- wall Jackson, after prayer in his tent, made a bold move- ment through the woods, which brought him on Hooker's May flank, and by a sudden attack rolled up a division of the Federal army. Hooker, who had proclaimed to his sol- diers that they had got Lee where he must fly or be destroyed, fell back across the Rappahannock, covering his disgrace with a bombastic order of the day. This was the nadir of Federal fortunes. The friends of the North 268 THE UNITED STATES. chap. ill Europe desponded, and Confederate bonds sold well. Yet the Confederates had bought their victory dear, since it cost them Stonewall Jackson, who was killed by the fire of his own men. On the board between Washington and Richmond the eyes of the world were fixed, and by the turns of the balance on it the chances on it of the combatants were measured. But in the western and central zones fortune had been far more favourable to the North. There fought the western husbandmen, never so perfectly drilled as the army of the east, but strong, brave, hardy, and heartily loyal to the cause ; for the notion that the West was hanging b.ick and was being dragged on by the East, thougli prevalent in Europe, was wholly untrue ; the same spirit pervaded all the States which had remained in the Union, extending without abatement even to far-distant California. In the West appeared Ulysses Grant, a sledge hammer of war, a man of unconquerable resolution, and unsparing of blood enough to fight on the principle that the North would gain by the sacrifice of two men for one. Feb. The capture b}^ Grant of Fort Donelson on the Cumber- ■ land River, the great bastion of Confederate defence in the west, with a large garrison, was the first bright gleam of Federal victory; it, at the same time, revealed the commander whose tenacity had snatched success out of the jaws of defeat. Another general, the most skilful of Northern strategists, Sherman, destined at last to deal the death blow, also showed himself on that scene. Again the Federal army of the West conquered, though after narrowly escaping destruction, at Pittsburgh Landing on April the Tennessee River, in a battle, perhaps the most des- * perate of the war, named from the old church of Shiloh, V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 269 round which for two days it raged. Grant and Sherman, with part of the Federal army, lay carelessly encamped on the river bank waiting for the rest under Buell to come up. In the dusk of dawn a Confederate army, which had stolen upon them by forced marches, awakened their sleeping camp with the yells of Southern onset. A day of most murderous bush fighting ensued. The Federals were overpowered and swept out of their camps ; the river bank was crowded with their flying soldiers. Noth- ing saved them from utter defeat but the rugged and wooded character of the ground, and the hunger which made thousands of the enemy break their lines to pil- lage the camp. But the Confederates were exhausted; their leader fell. Buell having come up, they were over- powered by numbers and compelled to retire. An eye- witness of the retreat says that in a ride of twelve miles he saw more of human agony than he trusted he should ever again be called to witness. Along a narrow and almost impassable road wound a long line of waggons loaded with wounded, groaning and cursing, and piled in like bags of grain, while the mules plunged on in mud and water belly deep, the water sometimes coming into the waggons. Next came a straggling regiment of infantry, pressing on past the train. Then were seen soldiers with arms broken and hanging down, or other wounds. At night-fall a cold drizzling rain set in, which turned to pitiless hail, from which the wounded and dying had not a blanket to shield them. Three hundred men died in the retreat, and their bodies were thrown out to make room for others, who though wounded had struggled on, hoping to find shelter, rest, and medical care. One after another the forts of the South on the Missis- 5J70 THE UNITED STATES. chap. sippi fell, and tlie Confederacy thus lost its western terri- tory, which though it sent not many men, sent large supplies of cattle. To complete the opening of the great water-way, the capture of Vicksburg, the Confederate Gibraltar, alone remained. The work to that point was done from above by flotillas in concert with the Federal army of Grant and Sherman. From below it was done by Farragut, the Nelson, or rather as his chief exploits were attacks of forts by ships, the Blake of the American navy. A sailor of the old school, Farragut, fought in wooden ships, and when desired to shift his flag to an ironclad, replied that he did not want to go to hell in a tea-kettle. With extraordinary daring he ran, with his wooden fleet, the gauntlet of the forts of New Orleans amidst a "hell" of fire-ships, and in the face of a formidable steam-ram, still delivering his broadsides when the fire was high up April the mast of his ship, and captured the great commercial *" city of the South together with the southern entrance to the Mississippi. The prize and the blow were immense. Benjamin Butler, the lawyer soldier, became commandant. He played the sedile also, gave the city a strong police, cleansed it, and saved it for that season from yellow fever. A coarse proclamation, which he put forth against women who insulted his soldiers in the streets, being misread or misrepresented, raised a storm of indignation on both sides of the Atlantic. But if the temper of the male slave- owner was fiery, that of his help-mate was not less so, and Butler's proclamation might have been necessary, though its coarseness was not. A worse charge was that of connivance at illicit dealings, particularly in cotton, by which, if the commandant himself did not gain, there was reason to believe that those about him did. V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 271 In the central zone, where the Federals sought to reach the heart of the Confederate territory through middle and eastern Tennessee, there was hard fighting without deci- sive result. A typical battle was that fought at Christ- mas, 1862, in the cedar brakes of Murfreesborough between the Federals under Rosecrans and the Confederates under Bragg. The two armies were nearly balanced in numbers, equipment, discipline, and experience. The two generals had formed the same plan of attack each upon the other, and moved against each other at the same time. Each was foiled by the other's movement. The evergreen cedar thickets prevented a general's eye from ranging over the field. For three days, with breaks for rectification of position, reorganization, and refreshment of men and ani- mals, the eighty thousand combatants struggled for the barren honours of a field in different parts of which each lost and won. The carnage was great. The killed and wounded were thirty per cent of the numbers engaged, and dreadful were the sufferings of the wounded through the cold winter nights. In the end the Confederate gen- eral withdrew to a better position. There followed a pause of eight months, after which the armies grappled on another indecisive field of slaughter, both generals being swept away by routed portions of their own forces. In reading the history of this war, the tangled character of the country must always be borne in mind • it made the hand- ling of troops difficult, disconcerted plans, and rendered battles indecisive, since the vanquished withdrew into the woods, and there could be no charges of cavalry to gather the fruits of victory. The horse were, in fact, as a rule, not cavalry, but mounted rifles. General Meade, Avho had gone through the whole war, said he had only twice seen 272 THE UNITED STATES. chap. a large mass of the enemy. Battles were vast bush-fights, and a large proportion of the Avounds were in the head and shoulders, which in taking aim protruded from behind the tree. On the coast, the Federals were successful in their ope- rations. With marvellous energy and ingenuity in adap- tation, they had improvised a navy sufficient to blockade three thousand miles of coast much indented and masked with islands. The Confederates had the ships taken with the Federal Navy Yard at Norfolk. One of these, the Merrimack^ they turned into an ironclad. Sallying forth, she sank the unarmoured ships opposed to her, and seemed likely to sweep the waters and break the blockade. But in mid-career of devastation she was met by the Mo7i- March/^o/% the turret^ship of Ericsson, who had with difficulty 1862 . ' persuaded the government to make trial of his invention. The Monitor conquered. The ironclad monster limped back to her lair, and in a moment the navies of the world were disrated, and naval tactics were changed. Blockade- running went on with ships low-built and painted grey to elude the Federal cruisers. Some cotton, precious in the dearth, was run out, and some munitions of war were run in. But these were driblets of relief to the South. More effectual, though somewhat piratical, was the enterprise of a few cruisers, which the Confederates, partl}^ by viola- tions of British neutrality, had contrived to launch, and which cut up Federal commerce. Notable above all for her ravages was the Alabama^ commanded by the daring Semmes, who displayed a collection of the chronometers of the Federal vessels which he had captured, and, having no port into which to take them for condemnation as prizes, had burned at sea, in contravention of the law of V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 273 nations as was loudly protested on the other side. Two steam rams were being built for the Confederates at Liver- pool, but an embargo was laid on them by the British government. The stress of calamity and danger in the West, the need of supplies, and the hope of producing a political effect, by shaking Federal resolution and impressing Europe, probably all combined in determining Lee, after his magnificent success at Chancellorsville, once more to assume the offensive. He entered Pennsylvania with his seventy-five thousand victorious veterans, but now with no Stonewall Jackson. Amid the rich farms he refreshed his hungry troops, while he threatened Baltimore, Phila- delphia, and Washington. But no political effect was pro- duced, unless it were at New York, where the Irish rose against the draft and the negro, maltreated and mur- dered negroes with their usual fury, wrecked property, and filled the city, then destitute of defenders, with riot and panic till the arrival of troops, when the insurrection was at once quenched in the blood of a thousand of the insurgents. Hooker, counter-manoeuvring Lee, it seems with skill, was nevertheless removed from command, and replaced by Meade, a trustworthy, though not a great commander. With an army superior in numbers, but in- ferior in spirit and confidence, Meade approached his enemy. At Gettysburg, in a rolling district, the two moving hosts were brought into collision. During two July days of detached encounters among the ridges, in one of which there was a charge of cavalry and the sabre was used, the advantage rested with the Confederates. On the third and decisive day, the Federal army was concentrated in a good defensive position on the Cemetery Hill of 274 THE UNITED STATES. chap. •Tuly Gettysburg, while the army of Lee confronted it in cres- 18G3. cent shape along a semi-circle of wooded slopes. After a furious but ineffective cannonade, which exhausted the Confederate ammunition, Lee, agahist the advice of Long- street, the most renowned of his lieutenants, launched his infantry in column across an open space of three-quarters of a mile against an army strongly posted, and with a powerful artillery, which after a deceptive lull again opened its full fire. The column, though its veteran valour carried it up to and into the Federal lines, was destroyed after a struggle more intense than that with the Old Guard at Waterloo, and when its remnants drifted back in disarray, Lee must have felt that the Confederate cause Avas lost. Defeated, but still terrible, he was allowed to fall back into Virginia unmolested, and to carry off the booty which he had swept from Pennsylvanian fields. He even in a defensive position again offered battle, which Meade was too prudent, the exulting North thought too timid, to accept. July On the day after Gettysburg, Vicksburg, the last and 18G3. most redoubtable stronghold of the Confederates on the Mississippi, fell, after a long siege and much outpouring of Federal blood, before the indomitable energy of Grant, which afterwards turned the wavering balance decisively in favour of the Federals on the battle ground of middle Tennessee. When the next campaign opened the re- sources of the South were running low. She had begun to think of enlisting negroes, thus setting the liouse on fire to save it. Her conscription had drawn her last able- bodied man ; it had come to the old men and the boys, robbing, as Grant said, the cradle and the grave. Her railroads were worn out; the sea was inexorably closed V. KUrTUKE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 275 to her; her paper money had lost all value. There remained to her only the army of Lee, Lee himself, and another army commanded by Joseph Johnston, which lay between the invader's force, gathering for attack in Ten- nessee, and Atlanta in Georgia, the great Confederate place of arms. Now, too. Federal operations, which hitherto had lacked unity, the armies moving, as Grant said, like a team of balky horses without reference to each other, and had been marred by political interference, were combined under Grant, who, placed in supreme com- Mar. mand with the title of Lieutenant-General, grasped the ^^^'^' whole war in his single hand, thrust political meddling aside, formed his own plans, kept his own counsels, and proceeded unsparingly to apply his principle of attrition, wearing down by incessant battle what remained of the Southern force. The plan was that Grant should move on Richmond, or rather on Lee who covered it, taking Richmond if he could ; at all events, holding Lee there and exhausting him, while Sherman from Chattanooga moved on Atlanta, piercing the Confederacy to the heart. Grant crossed the Rappahannock with an army greatly superior in number to that of his enemy, though reduced in quality by the substitution of the draft for volunteering. In the Wilderness, a gloomy tract covered with a dense growth of scraggy pine, scrub oak, dwarf chestnut, and hazel, a tract where the general could not see the length of a May. brigade, was fought during two days the first battle of a series, all equally blind and bloody, which is stated to have cost Grant on the whole 64,000 men, while the loss of his opponent also was heavy and could not, like Grant's, be repaired. If carnage can ennoble war, war was 1864, 276 THE UNITED STATES. chap. ennobled here. From dawn to dusk, we are told, the roar of the guns was ceaseless. A tempest of shells shrieked through the forest and ploughed the fields. When night came, in the angle of the works where the fire had been hottest, men in hundreds killed and wounded were piled in heaps, some bodies that had lain for hours under the concentric fire being perforated with wounds, while the masses of slaughter were at times moved by the writhing of the wounded. At the battle of the Wilderness the woods caught fire and the wounded were burned. Bul- lets came in such a stream that a tree eighteen inches in diameter was cut in two by them. It is wonderful that humanity should not be extinguished on such scenes; that, on the contrary, brave soldiers should be generally humane. So dense was the wood that when abatis were being made on both sides only two hundred yards apart, while the ringing of the axe could be lieard, neither side could see a man of the other. In this war, fighting always in woods, or broken ground, the men learned not only to seek cover but to make it. Whenever they were in position they threw up earthworks. With their wood-craft they easily constructed abatis, and battles were fought with the axe and trenching tool as well as with the musket. Lee, while vastly outnumbered, had the advantages of perfect knowledge of the country, of the defensive, and of the interior line. With these, and his superior general- ship, he held his own, presenting everywhere a front strengthened by works to his pertinacious foe. At Cold Harbour, where in the course of their wrestle the comba- tants were brought close to Richmond, Grant delivered a desperate assault upon Lee's defences, which was repulsed V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 277 in half an hour with the loss of 7000 men. After the battle of the Wilderness, he had proclaimed his intention of "fighting it out on that line, if it took all summer." But he found himself baffled everywhere by the moving rampart. Trying to turn that which he was unable to pierce, he worked round to Petersburg on the south of Richmond, before which, after an unsuccessful assault, he was set fast, and had to resign himself to a regular invest- ment. By this movement he uncovered Washington, the constant object of Lincoln's excessive solicitude, showing thereby that the control of the war had really passed from the White House to the camp. Upon Washington the Confederate general. Early, swooped from the Shenandoah Valley, filling the city with alarm. To close that sally- port, and punish the zeal of the people of the Shenandoah, the rich and smiling valley was ravaged by Sheridan " so that a crow flying down it would have to carry his own rations." Two thousand barns filled with wheat and hay and farming implements, and seventy mills filled with flour and wheat, were among the things destroyed. Sheridan, the hardest of hitters, having run a swift career of victory, had nobler achievements to record. ^ When it is asked, of what use was all this slaughter in the Wilderness, the answer sometimes given is, that public opinion called for action. Grant, however, had applied with effect his strategy of attrition. Lee's army had been worn down. It had also been held fast while the other part of the plan of campaign was being executed by Sherman. Advancing from Chattanooga, Sherman pushed before him, by manoeuvres, the Confederate army under John- ston, a first-rate strategist, who, with far inferior forces, played the game of chess with stubbornness and skill, 278 THE UNITED STATES. chap. maintaining himself in successive positions, and when he was attacked in one of them, gaining a victory. In the campaign of Sherman were most fully displayed the military mechanics in which this war, made by the most mechanical of nations, and by armies fuller than other armies ever were of skilled workmen, transcended every other war. Sherman bears his testimony to the management of the railroads. " No matter when or where a breach has been made, the repair train seemed on tlie spot, and the damage was repaired generally before I knew of the break. Bridges have been built with surprising rapidity, and the locomotive whistle was heard in an advanced camp almost before the echoes of the skirmish-fire had ceased. Some of the bridges, those of the Oostanaula, the Etowah, and Chattahoochee, are fine, substantial structures, and were built in an inconceivably short time, almost out of material improvised on the spot." The trestle bridge across the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta was 780 feet in length, and 90 feet in height, and was reconstructed in four and a half days. The Potomac Creek bridge, 414 feet long and 82 feet high, was repaired in forty hours. The Aquia Creek Railroad on the Potomac, thirteen miles in length, was opened in five days after the order to begin the work was given. The Federal hosts were acting in a country where war would not support war, and could not have moved without railroads to supply them. The tele- graph marched everywhere with the armies, and must, on the whole, have greatly aided operations, though it might sometimes have been the instrument of unwise interfer- ence with commanders. In the waggon trains, and in every mechanical department, American ingenuity introduced improvements which the skilled meclianics in the ranks V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 279 knew how to use and repair. Wonderful feats of trans- portation were performed. An army corps was transported fourteen hundred miles, equally divided between land and water, in eleven days along rivers obstructed by snow and ice and over mountains amidst violent snow storms with- out the least loss. A division, including a brigade of artillery, and comprising 17,314 men, 1038 horses, 2371 mules, 351 Avaggons, and 83 ambulances, was embarked on the Tennessee and sent to New Orleans, 1330 miles in thirteen days. Thus it was that Sherman's movement was rendered possible. When Johnston, retreating, and Sherman, following, approached Atlanta, the Confederate President, never, like Lincoln, master of himself, lost patience, and from the wary Johnston transferred the command to the im- petuous Hood. Hood at once fought a battle in which Nov. he was defeated. Atlanta fell and was made desolate, all its store-houses, d^p8t-buildings, and factories of arras going up together in a vast flame. Sherman, now disembarrassed, could venture to leave his base, and with safe temerity march through Georgia, foraging on the country, and destroying as he went everything that could serve the purposes of war. The rich city of Dec. Savannah, with its forts and stores and its facilities for blockade-running, surrendered to him. The defences of Mobile, the military port of the Confederates, liad been Aue:. 1864 forced and the flotilla, which they protected, had been destroyed by the valour of Farragut. Charleston surren- Feb. dered without a blow, fired, in destroying the stores, by the ^' retreating army of the Confederates, and Garrison stood tri- umphant beside the great marble slab of Calhoun. Mean- time, Hood, with what remained of his army, attempting to 280 THE UNITED STATES. chap. Dec. strike northwards, had been annihilated at Nashville by ■ Thomas. The Confederacy, now become a hollow shell, collapsed on every side. Lee at last, overwhelming forces gathering round him, was compelled to fly. One Sunday the Confederate President, sitting in church, where he was a regular attendant, received a dispatch which caused him to turn pale, rise, and depart. It was from Lee, saying that April, Richmond must be evacuated. The evacuation was a scene '^' of the widest disorder and woe, fire being set to the military stores and spreading to the city. Lee was soon overtaken in his retreat, overpowered, and compelled to April surrender to Grant. At Appomattox Court House was jg^'. enacted the closing scene. The victor behaved with generosity to the vanquished, paroled their arni}^, and bade the privates of the cavalry as well as the officers take away their horses, saying that they might need them for the spring ploughing and other farm work. His good nature was the earnest of a reconciliation, which after a conflict so desperate seemed to the world to be hopeless. " Men ! we have fought through this war together ; I have done the best I could for you," was Lee's parting address to his army ; it might have served for Hannibal, as well as for Lee. The last victim was Lincoln. He had been re-elected President, and by an overwhelming majority. General McClellan was the Democratic, and the only other candi- date, for Fremont who had been nominated by the radicals was withdrawn. A plank in the Democratic platform denounced the war as a failure, but was belied by victor}', and repudiated ])y McClellan. Greater effect was prob- V. EUrTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 281 ably produced by the denunciation of arbitrary arrests, and other strong measures, to which the government had deemed it necessary to resort, and wliich offended the American sense of personal liberty. Party, as an organized interest and force, was not extinct, and the Irish vote was always Democratic. But the nation agreed with Lincoln that it was dangerous "to swap horses when crossing a stream," and few would desire another in- terregnum like the last days of Buchanan. Lincoln was now digesting his plan of reconstruction, which was sure to be inspired by good sense and mercy. This tyrant, as his enemies styled him, had always neglected to surround himself with guards, though threats of assas- sination Avere in the air. He was relieving his over- April wrought brain in the theatre, when he was shot in his 18(35 box by Wilkes Booth, a Virginian, and a ranting actor of melodrama, who then vaulted upon the stage, and brandishing a blood}^ dagger with which he had struck one of Lincoln's suite, shouted sic semper tyrannis, the motto of the tyrannicide republicanism of the Virginian slave-owner. Booth was hunted down and slain by his pursuers ; happily, since evil passions might have been awakened by his trial. Lincoln was borne to the grave amidst an immense outburst of public sorrow, admiration, and gratitude. Admiration has risen to worship, and Lincoln has, in the minds of some of his eulogists, become the greatest statesman and the master spirit of his age. He has even become a great strategist, though it seems almost certain that he did harm by interfering, or allowing his military counsellors at Washington to interfere, with the conduct of the war. He said himself that he had not controlled events, but had been guided by them. To 282 THE UNITED STATES. chap. know How to be guided by events, however, if it is not imperial genius, is practical wisdom. Lincoln's goodness of heart, his sense of duty, his unselfishness, his freedom from vanity, his longsuffering, his simplicity, were never distui-bed either by power or by opposition. The habit which he retained through all the dark days of his Presi- dency, of throwing his thoughts into the form of pithy stories and apologues, caused him to be charged with levity. To the charge of levity no man could be less open. Though he trusted in Providence, care for the public and sorrow for the public calamities filled his heart and sat visibly upon his brow. His State papers are excellent, not only as political documents, but as compositions, and are distinguished by their depth of human feeling and tenderness from those of other statesmen. He spoke always from his own heart to the heart of the people. His brief funeral oration over the graves of those who had fallen in the war is one of the gems of the language. The death of Lincoln on the eve of reconstruction was an irreparable loss, especially to the vanquished. With good reason General Sherman, when he received the news, told a Confederate general that the worst of all disasters had befallen the Confederate cause. That the war had really been international, not civil, was felt by the victors, though not recognized. To the official theory that secession had been rebellion and treason, a nominal deference was paid by the imprison- ment and indictment of Jefferson Davis, who, when Lincoln would have desired his escape, had been caught rather farcically disguised in woman's clothes. But no blood was shed on the scaffold, nor, saving the abolition of slavery, was there any confiscation. The abolition of V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 283 slavery in itself was a heavy punishment to the slave- owning authors of secession ; it stripped them at once of their property and of their social grandeur. Of the planter aristocracy and of the " first families of Virginia " this was the grave. They had staked all, and all was lost. It is due, however, to the people of the North to say that among them generally there never had been any thought of vengeance, not even while the conflict was still raging, though the feelings excited were not much less intense than those excited by a really civil war. All but the fiercest fanatics said that the object sought was the restoration of the Union, and that the South would find mercy if it would only submit to the law. Good- nature and humanity not only survived, but reigned. Care was taken of Confederate as well as of Federal wounded. Confederate prisoners were well fed, and in the prison camps seemed to suffer no hardships but those which were inseparable from their lot ; if many of them died, it was because the caged eagle dies. Prisoners in hospital were well tended, and in a prison hospital the table of the inmates was seen on Thanksgiving Day spread with the good things of the season. This was the more notable, because the accounts which reached the North of the sufferings of its soldiers in Southern prisons were heartrending, and were too true ; they were, in fact, at- tested by the arrival of living skeletons, who had been exchanged. For scantily feeding their prisoners the Southerners might plead the excuse that they had little bread themselves ; but such atrocities as those of the prison camp at Andersonville nothing could excuse, noth- ing except the temper bred of slave-owning could explain. Of that camp even the Confederate Inspector-General 284 THE UNITED STATES. chap. spoke as a place of horrors beyond description. There, in a stockaded field, 1540 feet long by 750 feet wide, were confined at last 31,693 prisoners of war. There was no protection from the sun or rain ; the rations were of the worst quality, sometimes uncooked, and were barely enough to support life, while if one of a squad of prisoners was missing the rest were deprived of rations for the day. Into the brook, from which all drank, flowed the filth and excrements from the whole camp; its banks were covered with ordure and alive with maggots. When the rain set in the ground was covered with slush a foot deep, and the whole surface was like a cesspool, which when the heat came bred pestilence. In it wandered about, pushing each other, the crowd of shoeless, hatless, famished captives, many of them with scarcely a tatter to cover them. In August and September there were more than 3000 sick, lying on the ground, partially naked ; some with broken limbs, some suffering from gangrene, scurvy, or diarrhoea, coated with vermin, and tortured by mosquitoes. The death rate reached eight and a half per hour. The dead were dragged to the outlet and hauled away by waggon loads. The stench we are told reached two miles. Hundreds went mad, and added moral to physical horrore. Whoever even put a hand over " the dead line " was shot ; not a few courted that fate in despair. Bloodhounds were kept to run down fugitives. Out of 44,882 prisoners in the course of thirteen months 12,462 died. Wirz, the gaoler of Andersonville, a foreign mercenary, was hanged by the North, not for rebellion, but for murder, a doom which the heads of the department, if they knew what was going on, deserved to share. Such was the exit of slavery from the civilized world. V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 285 A noble and consoling part of this most tragic drama was the Sanitary Commission of the Federals. This was the creation of spontaneous effort and voluntary contribu- tion, being merely recognized by the government. At its head was a clergyman, Dr. Bellows. It received contributions to the amount of three millions of dollars in money, and nine millions of dollars in supplies. Its organization extended over the whole scene of conflict, and shed a ray of mercy on every field of carnage. Its arrangements for removing the wounded from the field to field hospitals and for transfer to permanent hos- pitals, as well as its improvements in the construction of hospitals themselves, which were planned on the prin- ciple of isolation, formed a beneficent epoch in the history of military medicine. The Mower Hospital at Phila- delphia held four thousand patients. Great is the con- trast which this picture presents to the practices of the armies of the European monarchies such as Austria in the last century. Anaesthetics, too, the most merciful of inventions, were now lending the surgeon their blessed aid. Democracy might fairly say that in this case she had been justified of her children. The patriotic effort of a free community had shown well beside the force of the Southern oligarchy or despotism. The Republic had received a large measure of free-will offering and sacrifice. There had been a good deal of volunteering at the outset, and the army, though not volunteer, was in the main native to the last. Of the head boards on the graves of thirteen thousand soldiers of the Union at Washington, almost all bore the name of the dead man, although here and there was a board marked " unknown soldier." 286 THE UNITEi:) STATES. chap. That the men had homes for which to fight was proved by the constant return of corpses to those homes, and the activity of the embalmers' trade at Washington. The rich who, as a chxss, had least reason to be well affected to Democracy, and who in the United States had been too much shut out, or stood aloof from public life, showed themselves generally not wanting in attachment to the Republic, while some of them displayed the most devoted loyalty, pouring out freely not their wealth only, but their blood. Mr. Wadsworth, a wealthy landowner, left his mansion when he was past middle age to fight and fall in the Wilderness. He was the moral heir of the Sussex landowner, who also left his mansion in middle age to become the first Governor of Massachusetts. Not only was the war taxation, though heavy, grinding, and inquisitorial, cheerfully borne, but voluntary contributions were large, nor did the fountains of ordinary charity and munificence in the meantime cease to flow. To the surprise of the world the constitution, barring State right, came out of the ordeal unscathed. The idea of national union had definitively triumphed over that of a federal league or compact. The nation had been consolidated, and its spirit had been raised by community of effort and peril. Southern oligarchy, with its influence on the politics of the Union, was extinct. The negro had been emancipated, and his admission to citizenship was at hand. Otherwise there was no political change. The exceptional power with which the govern- ment had been practically invested for the conduct of the war was resigned, or ceased as soon as the war was over. Of temporary interference with personal liberty there had probably been not much more than the exigencies of the V. KUrTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 287 struggle required, cousidering that the South had many allies and the government many enemies at the North, while in the border States not only disaffection, but active liostility was rife. Habeas corpus was suspended, and a number of arbitrary arrests were made. Yet few, as it appeared, which were not warranted by the necessities of the war. A limit was sure to be imposed by the constitu- tional sensitiveness of the nation, nor could anything be more remote from the character of the President than arbitrary violence. The press appeared to enjoy reason- able freedom, and it criticised the acts of the govern- ment with little restraint, though it was necessary to forbid the preaching of sympathy with the enemy, or denunciation of the draft. A stranger, visiting the Republic at that time, saw -nothing like a reign of terror. At the second election of Lincoln, though passions were fiercely inflamed, the minority was allowed freely to exer- cise its political rights, and not only to put up its candi- date, frame a platform denouncing the war as a failure, and vote with perfect freedom, but to hold its public meetings, array its processions, and hang out its party banners in the street. Nor was any serious act of violence committed, or even apprehended, unless it were on the part of the foreign mob of New York. The current of life at the North flowed calmly on. A stranger would not have suspected that he was in a country engaged in a civil war. Engaged in a civil war indeed the country, properly speaking, was not. The war was one of invasion, and had the visitor been transported to the invaded country, to Georgia after the desolating march of Sher- man, or to the Shenandoah Valley when it had been ravaged by Sheridan, a different scene would have met 288 THE UNITED STATES. chap. his eye. Still it was remarkable how small the visible signs of disturbance at the North were, considering the perils of the times, and the number of citizens who were in the camp. Nor did the military force show any tendency to get the upper hand of civil government. When General Sherman, after his career of victory, encroached, probably without intention, on the sphere of civil authority, in offering terms to the vanquished, he was with ease recalled to his proper functions. Europe, judging from historical pre- cedents, had believed that the army would be left master of the nation and would not suffer itself to be dis- banded, but would raise its chief to supreme power. At the close of the war the army was a million strong, as well as flushed with victory. Yet it was disbanded with per- fect ease, at once returned to the trade and callings of peace, and mingled with the community at large. Not the slightest tendency to usurpation or sabre sway was shown by any of its chiefs. General Grant himself was not only guiltless of any such disposition, but was averse from military pomp and parade, disliking, it was said, the very sound of the drum. His camp equipment, his dress, and his habits were as simple as his character, more simple they could not be, and he showed, what an aspirant to dictatorship and empire could hardly afford to show, remarkable justice and generosity in his conduct towards his colleagues. The story was current that his most formidable rival having formally protested in writing at a council of war against Grant's plan of attack, and the attack having succeeded, Grant, instead of keeping the protest, or forwarding it to headquarters, handed it back to the author. Nor was the nation infected with military V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 289 fever. There was n© sign of it, saving a multiplication for the time of military titles as harmless as it was com- mon. In one respect the military character, at least that of the professional soldier, enhanced its claim to public confidence, for amidst all the changes and suspicions, true or false, of corruption, with which in that season of temp- tation the air was laden, none adhered to the honour of a graduate of West Point. One who, at the end of the war, predicted in European company, that the Americans would pay their debt, and redeem their paper currency, was apt to be met with derision. But, if he knew the American people, he replied with confidence, that, setting morality aside, they well understood the value of their credit, and were too wise to destroy it. The result is well known. Some demagogues there were who breathed repudiation into the national ear, but their evil promptings took no effect; the national faith was strictly kept ; specie payments were resumed, and the debt was reduced with a rapidity that astonished the world. Nor, looking to the amount of war taxation which had been borne, and that of the free contributions, could it be said that the generation which made the war had cast an excessive burden on posterity. Confederate bonds, of course, could not be paid, though they maintained, for some time, a spectral existence on the stock exchange. Their holders were thus fined for abet- ting, or at least confiding in a slave power. Industry, though it was for a time diverted from the increase of wealth to the work of slaughter and destruc- tion, lost nothing of its activity or thrift. Invention was stimulated, especially in the making of farm implements to supply the place of the labour withdrawn to the camp. 290 THE UNITED STATES. chap. In this way as well as in the way of medical and surgical improvement peace made a little profit out of war. When peace came American prosperity appeared to bound forward more vigorously than ever. An exception to this at first, and for some years to come, was the South, which lay wrecked and ruined. Yet even for the South a better time was coming. Emancipation was to prove an economical as well as a moral and social blessing. The negro was to become a better producer; cotton crops, instead of ceasing to be raised, were to increase ; the higher industries, no longer barred out, were to develop resources hitherto dormant, and from the blackened ruins of Atlanta was to rise a city far larger and wealthier than Atlanta had ever been. Evils, economical and moral, attended this as they attend all wars. Profuse expenditure leads to a violent displacement of wealth, opens the door to frauds, espe- cially in the dark region of contracts, and gives birth to fortunes of sudden growth, often ill made, and when ill made pretty sure to be ill spent. In this case the expenditure had been more than profuse, and, till the administration was organized, had been little controlled. Inconvertible paper had inevitably led to speculation in gold, and the Gold Room became a vast gambling hell, which left its trace on commercial character. Among the unhappy results of an economical kind freetraders will reckon the war tariff, imposed for the purpose of revenue, but continued when the war was over, at the instance of the industries wliich had profited by it, for the purpose of protection. Much the same thing had happened after 1812, when the protection which the war had given was renewed in the form of a tariff. The V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 291 political party, which had made and sustained the war, in fact, presently became the party of the tariff, and appeals to war memories and war feelings were made in the interest of protection. Resentment against England, which had been created by altercations with her govern- ment, and the escape of Confederate cruisers from her ports, aided the native manufacturer in what he was able to represent as the patriotic exclusion of British goods. A literary man may, perhaps, feel some disappointment at the failure of this mighty stirring of the national spirit to produce much literary fruit, especially in the way of poetry. There were poems, not a few martial and pa- triotic. But they read more like the laboured tributes of Laureates to the nation than like the offspring of inspira- tion, and none of them can be called great. Perhaps " John Brown," which became a sort of Marseillaise, and "Maryland, My Maryland," which breathed the yearning of a border State for peace, were the two most genuine expressions of sentiment among the poetic products of the time. We are still without a worthy history of the war. The materials abound, and include a number of memoirs written by the chief actors. Never were there so many soldiers who could use the pen as well as the sword. Marlborough could not spell. The cost of the war is incalculable. To a declared Federal debt of $2,757,000,000 are to be added five years of war taxation, the debts of the several States, and now a pension list of a hundred and forty millions of dollars a year, together with the loss of industry, the ruin of commerce, and the destruction of property, which at the South was immense, and fell ultimately on the restored Union. It is reckoned that between battle and disease 292 THE UNITED STATES. chap. a million of men lost their lives, or were crippled in the war. So much did it cost to abolish American slavery. In Russia the emancipation of the serfs was effected with- out the loss of life or money to the State. The slaves in the West Indies were emancipated peacefully at a cost of twenty millions sterling, or a hundred and fifty millions of dollars, little more than two-thirds of the amount of the pension list for one year. There are some things, though they may be few, which a supreme authority in good hands can do best. There were questions yet to be settled with foreign powers. The French emperor, having failed to lure the British government into an intervention, his secret aim in which probably was the recovery of Louisiana, had set up a Latin Empire in Mexico, of which he made the Austrian Prince Maximilian emperor, placing a French marshal at his side, and, no doubt, intending to treat him as a satrap. At the end of the American war the French emperor received from the Washington government notice to quit. He gave ear and withdrew his army. Maximilian, remaining behind out of chivalrous regard for his par- tisans in Mexico, was overpowered by the patriots, to whom American generals are believed privately to have supplied arms, taken prisoner, and shot. Of British neutrality both the contending parties, as was to be expected, had complained ; the South denouncing it as a veiled alliance with the North, because recognition was refused to the Confederacy, Confederate envoys were not received, and neutrality laws were enforced; the North denouncing it as a veiled alliance with the South because the neutrality laws were, in a few instances, successfully evaded by the Confederates. From the shipyards and V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 293 harbours of a nation, which, besides her own ports, has those of maritime dependencies all over the world, in the course of more than four years' war three Confed- erate privateers escaped. In one case, that of the Ala- bama^ the British government was open to the charge of culpable delay, the evidence of the vessel's character, furnished by the American ambassador, having been allowed to lie too long before the legal adviser of the Crown, who happened to be incapacitated by sickness. The vessel escaped from Liverpool when the order for her de- tention was on its way, under pretence of a trial trip, without a clearance and unarmed ; she took her armament on board at the Azores. That the British government desired or connived at any breach of its neutrality is abso- lutely untrue. There was understood to be only one member of the Cabinet who even wished success to the South, for Lord Palmerston, though he might not be a friend of the American Republic, was a zealous opponent of slavery. Some colour was perhaps given to the impu- tation of unfriendliness by the habitual haughtiness, it may be discourtesy, of Lord Russell. The North availed itself of the British market for the purchase of arms and munitions of war, while its agents recruited along the Canadian frontier, and the number of Canadians enlisted in its armies was reckoned by the Canadian government at many thousands. Nor did the Canadian government afford the slightest ground for the imputation that it fos- tered or failed to repress the machinations of Southerners who had gathered on its territory, and could not, without breach of law and hospitality, be expelled. For a raid which some of them organized it was in no way to blame. The ground for complaint in the case of the Alabama was 294 THE UNITED STATES. chap. not SO strong as that in the case of the French privateers fitted out from American ports under the Presidenc}'^ of Washington, whose honourable desire to preserve neutrality is beyond doubt. The Alabama, not being effectively pursued, did much damage to American com- merce. As compensation for this, and for the damage done by her two consorts, the Florida and Shenandoah, Great l^ritain paid, under the treaty of Washington, the sum of three million two hundred thousand pounds, whereof a part has remained in the hands of the American government for default of claims. Compen- sation was refused for the raid of the American-Irish community, called the Fenian raid, on Canada, and Great Britain was fain to pocket the refusal. She feared, and always fears, for her North American dependencies as well as for her trade. The principle of arbitration, however, gained a step. Now came the problem of reconstruction. There were two questions to be settled, the emancipation of the negro, and the re-annexation of the conquered States to the Union. Lincoln's proclamation, issued in exercise of his military power, had only set the slave free, and this only in the States with which the North was at war ; not in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which had re- mained in the Union. It was his earnest desire, and he made it the chief platform in his second campaign for the Presidency, that there should be a constitutional amend- ment abolishing slavery everywhere and forever. What his plan with regard to negro suffrage was, he seems not to have made known. He had shown himself aware of the V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 295 inferiority of the race, while ho recognized its human rights. He could liardly be blind to the warning example of negro self-government in Hayti, where it has been, and still is, a disastrous failure, even when all due allowance has been made for the evil training of slavery, and for the storm of frenzied and murderous revolution amidst which the Hayti an Republic had been born. Garrison himself, the preacher of emancipation immediate and uncondi- tional, had seemed to halt on the verge of negro enfran- chisement. Emancipation having been accomplished, he questioned whether the President could safely or advan- tageously enforce a rule touching the ballot which abol- ished distinctions of colour. Notliing, he thought, would be gained by forcible enfranchisement without a general preparation of sentiment, because as soon as the State was left to manage its own affairs, the whites would surely dominate, and would exclude the fiat voters from the poll. On the other hand, how was the personal freedom of the blacks to be guarded, unless the whites were con- trolled by political power vested in the negro, or by military force ? In fact no sooner did the whites in some of the Southern States recover a measure of self-govern- ment than they began to frame sharp vagrancy laws for the purpose of compelling the freed negroes to work. It was a problem, like emancipation itself, hardly capable of solution, except by a power supreme over both races, and able to hold the balance of policy and equity between them. The difficulty of blending two forms of society, radically antagonistic, into a single self-governing commu- nity, had survived Appomattox in a modified form. The other question, taken by itself, was somewhat less difficult, provided it could be seen in the true light and 296 THE UNITED STATES. chap. disembarrassed of the metaphysical controversies respect- ing the relations of subjugated rebel States to the Union, in which, seen in a false light, it is involved. The theory was that the North had put down a rebellion. The fact was that it had conquered, wrecked, and re-annexed a short-lived nation or group of communities, severed from it by a stroke of nature. Of this the trophies pre- served at the North are signs ; for civil war or suppressed rebellion has not trophies any more than it has triumphs. Military occupation of the conquered States would have been simple and feasible. Reconstruction on a republican footing could be effected only by the best men and the accepted leaders of the States themselves. This was seen by General Sherman. " I perceived," he said, " that we had the unbounded respect of our armed enemies, and that by some simple measures we could enlist them in one cause. By their instrumentality we could not only restore our whole government according to its written fabric, but could have in every vicinage men used to subordination and government, who would employ their influence to create civil order. I am sure that my own army, now disbanded, makes the best of citizens ; and I am also sure, that at the close of the civil war the Confederate army embraced the best governed, the best disj)0sed, the most reliable men in the South ; and I would have used them in reconstruction instead of driving them into a hopeless opposition." John A. Andrew also, the great war gov- ernor of Massachusetts, said in his valedictory of January the 4th, 1866, that the natural leaders of the South, who, by temporary policy and artificial rules, had been for a while disfranchised, would resume their influence and tlieir sway; that they would challenge the validity of public V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 297 acts done during their disfranchisement ; that for the Avork of reconstruction their co-operation ought to be secured, and that without it reorganization would be delu- sive. The politicians at the South, who had made the war, were discredited by defeat, and the leadership would have passed to the soldiers, in whose worth and honour confidence might have been placed. Lincoln seems to have been inclined, like Sherman and Andrew, to the liberal view. Indeed, he had adopted this policy, and had begun to carry it into effect, so far as the constitutional version of the case, teaching him that he was dealing with rebels and traitors, which necessarily had possession of his mind, would permit. In December, 1863, he had offered general amnesty to insurgents and disloyalists, special classes excepted, on condition of their taking and keeping an oath of allegiance to the Federal government. He also offered to recognize and protect any loyal govern- ment, in an insurgent State, set up by those who should take the amnesty oath, if they had been legal voters before the secession of their State and amounted in number to one-tenth of the votes cast in the Presidential election of 1860. He was further willing to aid in any other mode of reconstruction that might be adopted in any other State. The admission of representatives to Congress he left to Congress itself. Under this plan loyal governments were created and recognized in Arkansas and Louisiana. The enunciation of this policy, however, caused a revolt of the radical party in Congress, which formed a plan of its own, providing for a military governor invested with all the powers of government, till the rebellion should be over and the people return to Federal allegiance, when a new government and constitution should be framed by 298 THE UNITED STATES. chap. a convention, elected by popular vote, witli a sweeping exclusion of all who had held any kind of civil or military office under the "rebel usurpation," or had "voluntarily " borne arms against the Union. The plan also provided for the perpetual disfranchisement of all who held other than petty civil offices, or military grades above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, under rebel authority. This, as the result proved, was reconstruction by elimination of all that was most capable of governing or worthy to govern in each State. Lincoln was gone. Into his place stepped the Vice- April President, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, a strong man ' in his way, but a man of violent temper and coarse habits, who had been nominated for the Vice-Presidency in com- pliment to the Unionism of the South, with that want of foresight in regard to consequences, in case the Vice-Presi- dent should become President, which had been displayed and punished by the event in the case of Tyler. As a radical leader of humble birth, Andrew Johnson had writhed beneath the social pride of the slave-owning aristocrats of Tennessee. He longed to have them at his feet as condemned traitors, suing for his mercy; and he seems to have been ignorant enough of human nature to fancy that for his mercy they would owe him gratitude. But the negroes he loved little more than the other Southern whites of his class, and his heart was on the side of State right. His political sentiments, in short, were those of the Unionist and war-Democrat, not those of the Repub- lican party. On the subject of reconstruction, his policy was, in the main, that of Lincoln, and, before the meeting of Congress, he ventured to carry it into effect by recon- structing, under military authority, Republican govern- V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 299 ments in several States, and readmitting them, so far as was in his power, to the Union. But he had neither the influence nor the address of Lineohi. When Con- gress met with a strong Republican majority, it proceeded at once to take reconstruction, and, at length, so far as it could, government, out of his hands. A violent conflict between the executive and the legislature ensued. Under the Parliamentary system of Great Britain the struggle would at once have been brought to an end by the resig- nation of the minister who had not the confidence and support of Parliament. Under the American system there was no such mode of terminating the disagreement be- tween the two powers. Congress, at length, by an Act deprived the President of his prerogative of dismissing officers of the government, except with the same consent of the Senate which was required for appointment. The President resisted, and brought the question to a decisive issue by the dismissal of Stanton, Lincoln's great Secretary of War. Being a man of violent temper, he vented his wrath in unmeasured vituperation against Congress. He thus lost his few remaining supporters. Congress then proceeded to impeach him. He had done nothing really worthy of impeachment, and the measure was, in truth, a rough mode of forcing the executive into unison Avith the legislature, like impeachments of unpopular ministers in England before constitutional government was settled on its present footing. This was felt by moderate Repub- licans, and President Johnson was acquitted by a narrow vote. Reconstruction was now in the hands of the Republican party in Congress, which showed the usual temper of parties victorious after a desperate struggle by giving its 300 THE UNITED STATES. chap. principles a thorough-going application. By two amend- ments to the constitution, not only was slavery universally and forever abolished, but the negro was invested with the full rights and powers of a citizen. To guard him against vagrancy laws, and watch over his industrial liberty, a freedman's bureau was established. Political reconstruc- tion was carried out according to the plan of Congress, with a sweeping disfranchisement of all who had taken an active part in the rebellion, which for some years excluded the Southern whites from political power, and handed over legislation and government to the enfranchised blacks, who were the clients of the Republican party. Ostensibly the negro was master of the States ; but his utter igno- rance, incapacity, and credulity made him the dupe and tool of white adventurers from the North, nicknamed Carpet-baggers, who, in alliance with some apostate South- ern whites, nicknamed Scallywags, got the Southern govern- ments into their hands. There ensued a reign of roguery, jobbery, and peculation under the military protection of the party dominating the North. States were loaded with debt, and the money was stolen by the Carpet-baggers. In the appointment of judges and the administration of justice the same corruption prevailed. This was not the way to recon- cile races. To wreak vengeance for their wrongs and avenge their pride, thus wounded to the quick, the whites organized a secret society, called the Ku Klux Klan, parties from which were sent forth by night, and committed horrible atrocities on the negroes. Like secret societies in general, the Ku Klux Klan went beyond its original design, became the organ of private malice, and inaugurated a reign of terror. At last the scandal of the system grew insufferable, military protection was Avithdrawn from the carpet-bagging V. RUPTURE AND RECONSTRUCTION. 301 governments, which fell, and the whites were enabled to reinstate themselves in power. They did not fail practically to disfranchise the negro, either by driving him from the poll, or refusing to count his vote. So it is still. The negro at the South enjoys, as a rule, personal and industrial rights which the war won for him, but is excluded from political power. From social fusion and equality he is, if possible, further than ever, since con- cubinage has become rare, and there is an end of the kindly relations which sometimes subsisted between mas- ter and slave. Nor is there an entire equality even of personal right, since the negro is too often lynched where the white would have a fair trial. The soldiers of Meade and Lee, the soldiers of the blue and the soldiers of the gray, have met as brethren on the field of Gettysburg ; but the question between the races of the South still awaits solution. INDEX. Abolitionists, 232, 233. Adams, John, 71, 72, 77, 93, 101, 113, 139, 141 ; elected president, 150 ; his principles, 151; his character, 151, 156. Adams, John Quincy, 191, 192; his election to the Presidency, 191 ; liis character, 192 ; his political princi- ples, 192 ; attacks on, 194 ; his con- test for a second term, 194, 195. Adams, Quincy, 229. Adams, Samuel, 75, 119. Adultery, Puritan method of punish- ing, 21. Adventurers, the early, in America, 2, 3, Alabama secedes, 242. Alabama, the, 272, 293, 294. Albany Regency, 179. Alien and Sedition Acts, 153. Amendments to the Constitution, 126. American Party, the, 216. Ames, Fisher, 146. Amnesty, 297. Andersonville, prison camp at, 283, 284. Andre, Major, 107, 108. Andrew, John A., 296. Andros, Sir Edmund, 33, 34, 55. Anti-Mason Party, the, 207. Anti-Slavery Party. See Liberty Party. Antietam, battle on the, 264. Appomattox, 280. Aquia Creek Railroad, 278. Arizona annexed, 212, 214. Arkansas, 259, 297, Army, the Southern, in the Civil War, 263. Arnold, Benedict, 107, 108. Atlanta, fall of, 279. Aurora, the, 146, 148. Bacon's, Nathaniel, junior, rebellion, 47, 48. Baptists, 13. Baltimore, Lords, 48, 49. Battles of the Civil War, character of, 271, 272. Bell, 238. Belligerent rights exercised by Great Britain, 161 ; question of, 161, 162. Bellows, Rev. Dr., 285. Benton, Thomas Hart, 185 ; his char- acter, 185 ; on the tariff of 1828, 188, 189. Berkeley, Governor, 47. Birney, J. G., 211. Black Beard, 51. Bladensburg, fight at, 171. Blaine, J. G., 246. " Blue Laws " of Connecticut, 23. Blockade of the southern coast, the, 272. Blockade running, 272. Board of Trade, 58, 59. Booth, Wilkes, 281. Boston, Howe evacuates, 90. Boston massacre, 82 ; " tea party," 82. Bounties and bounty jumping, 256. Bragg, General, 271. Brandywine, battle of the, 95. Breed's Hill, fight on, 89. Brooke, Lord, 17. 304 INDEX. Brooks, 236. Brown, John, 237, 238. Buchanan, President, 237 ; his mani- festo on secession, 245. " Bucktails," 179. Buell, 209. Bull Run, fight at stream of, 2(50. Burgoyne's expedition, 1)8; his sur- render, 99. Burke, 68, 69, 81, 113. Burns, Anthony, 233. Burnside, General, 266. Burr, Aaron, 155. Butler, Benjamin, 264; at New Or- leans, 270. Calef, 34. Calhoun, J. C, 168, 170, 179, 182, 183; his character, 183 ; his political i^rin- ciples, 183 ; his advocacy of slavery, 183, 184, 201, 213. California annexed, 212, 214; stands by the Union, 248. Callender, 154. Camden, fight at, 108. Canada and the Maine and Oregon boundary questions, 174, 175 ; in the war of 1812, 169, 170; invasion of, 93, 94. Canadian rebellion of 1837, 174. Canadians in the Civil War, 293. Canals, 217. Canning, 163, 169. Carleton, Sir Guy, 94. Carolinas, the, 50; constitution of, 50; division of, 50. Caroline, the, 174. Carpet-baggers, 300. Cemetery Hill. See Gettysburg. Chancellorsville, battle at, 273. Channing, 230. Charles II and Massachusetts, 31, 32. Charleston, 51 ; taken by Clinton, 108 ; in the Civil War : surrenders, 275. Chase, Chief Justice, 161. Chatham, 68, 70, 79, 81, 93, 10(), 116. Chattahoochee, 278. Chattanooga, 259, Chesapeake, the, 163, 171. Church establishments after the Revo- lutionary War, 118. Church of England, in the colonies, 61. Church, the, in Maryland, 49; in Vir- ginia, 42. Churches in Massachusetts, 9, 10, 27. Clay, Henry, 168, 170, 172, 176, 179; his character, 179; his i)olitical prin- ciples, 180; his tariff policy, 185, 186, 187, 188 ; on American industry, 187, 190, 191, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206; a candidate for the presidency, 207 ; his unsuccessful compromise, 210, 211; his defeat, 211,213. 1 Clergy, the Puritan, 10, 11. Clinton, De Witt, 179. Clinton, Sir Henry, 95; evacuates Philadelphia, 100; takes Charles- ton, 108. Civil Service, the, under Jackson, 196. Civil War, 204, et sq. ; chief scene of, 260; cost of the, 291; histories of the, 291. Code of New England, 21, 22. Cold Harbour, 276. College of William and Mary, 43. Colonial relationships with Great Britain (IICA) , 68 et sq . Colony, the Hellenic, compared with the British, 6, 7. Columbia, District of, 264. Columbus discovers America, 1 ; typi- cal of his generation, 2: a devotee, 2; a type of the age, 2; his life and character, 2; his dealings with the natives, 2. Confederacy, the Southern, 243, 244; its Constitution, 244; its Congress, 244, 252. Congress, dealings of, with Bur- goyne's troops, 99; first session of, 131 ; character of, 124, 125 ; powers of, in 1775, m, 87, 104 ; weakness of, after the Civil War, 119; offers concessions to slavery, 245. Connecticut, 7; constitution of, 19,20 ; " blue laws" of, 23, INDEX. 305 Conscription in the South, 274. Constitution, the American, 123 et nq. Constitutions of the States after the Revolutionary War, 117 et sq. Convention, the (1787), 122 et sq. Conway, 81. Copperheads, 255. Cornwallis at Yorktown, 109. Cotton, John, 8; on an hereditary upper house, 18; on democracy, 10. Counmt, the New England, 62. Covvpens, fight at, 100. Craik, Sir James, 163. Crawford, William H., 191. Cromwell, policy of, towards the col- onists, 30. Cumberland Road, the, 190. Currency, paper, wholesale issue of (1775), 104; results of this, 105. Davis, Jefferson, 243, 244; captured and indicted, 282. Death penalty in New England, 21, 22. Declaration of Independence, 87 et .sq. Be Grasse, 109. Delaware, 55. Delaware, Lord, 40. Democracy, in Massachusetts, 18; political growth of, 219. Democratic Party, 206, 207, 236, 237. Democratic press, the, on secession, 246. D'Estaing, 106, 116. Development of the United States before the Civil War, 217 et sq. Dightoii Rock, 1. Dix, General, 245. Dixon, 30. Donelson, Fort, 268. Douglas, Stephen, 234, 2.38, 250. Duane, William, 147, 199. Dudley, Joseph, 33, .34. Dudley, Thomas, 9, 16. Dustin, Hannah, 27. Dutch, the, of New Netherlands, 55. Early, General, 277. Eaton, Mrs., 197. Eliot, John, 26. Ellsworth, Oliver, 122. Emancipation discouraged, 222; ef- fects of, 290. Embargo on trade placed by Jefferson, 1<)4 ; its effects, 164, 165. Emerson, 229. Emigrants to America, the first, 4 et sq. Endicott, 9. England's attitude during the Civil War, 257 ; towards the Soutli, 258; her treatment of America after the separation, 140. Ericsson, 272. Erskine, British Minister at Washing- ton, 169. Etowah, 278. Everett, 238. Excise, Hamilton's, Pennsylvania re- volts against, 143. Expansion, provision for, 129. Farragut, Admiral, 270, 279. Federal bank, 155, 159. Federal principle, the, 20. Federalist Party, 150, 153, 154. "Federalist, the," 128. Federation (1774), 86. Fenton, Captain, maltreatment of his wife and daughter, 99. Fillmore becomes President, 213. Finances in 1775, 104 ; during the Civil War, 257. Financial crisis of 1837, 199, 206. Florida, the, 294. Force Bill, 201. Fort Donelson. (See Donelson, Fort.) Fort Pillow. (See Pillowy Fort.) Fort Sumter. (See Sumter, Fort.) Fox, 80, 113. France aids America, 105, 106, 112; condition of in 1789, 115 ; preys on American commerce, 151. Franchise, the, 220. Franklin, Benjamin, 62, 63, 65, 67, 71, 79, 122. Fredericksburg, 266. 306 INDEX. Free Soil Party, 214, 235. Free trade, internal, 126. Fremont, 237. French Canada, 64; compared with the English colonies, 6o. French Canadians in the War of 1812, 170. French Revolution, American sym- pathy with, 14.'>. Frenean, Philip, l.'W. Friends. (See Quakers.) Fusion of the black and white races impossible, 221. Gage, General, 89. Gallatin, Albert, 166. Garrison, William Lloyd, 230, 231, 232; and negro enfranchisement, 295. George Ill's reception of John Adams, the first American Ambas- sador, 141. Georgia, founding of, 52; secedes, 242. Genet, 144, 145. Geneva award, 293, 294. Germaine, Lord George, 85, 89. Germantown, battle of, 95. Gerry, Elbridge, 122. Gettysburg, battle of, 273, 274. Ghent, treaty of, 172. Goffe, 30. Gold Room, the, 290. Gold-seeking in Virginia, 3. Gorges, Sir Ferdinaudo, 33. Gorton, Samuel, 13. Governors of colonies, 59, 60. Grand Remonstrance, the, as a pre- cedent, 88. Grant, General Ulysses, 268 et sq. ; put in command, 275 ; crosses the Rap- pahannock, 275; his simplicity, 288. Greeley, Horace, 252. Greene, General Nathaniel, 92, 107, 111. Greenland, discovery of, 1. Grenville, 67, 68, 73, 79, 81. Guildford, fight at, 109. Half-breeds, numerous, 224 ; their status, 224. Hamilton, Alex., 112, 122, 131; his political character, 132 ; his prin- ciples, 132, 133, 134; his financial skill, 134; his purity and patriot- ism, 134, 149 ; death of, 155. Hancock, 75. Harper's Ferry, 237. Harrison, Wm., his candidature, 208. Harvard, University of, 11. Hayti, 295. Henry, John, 163. Henry, Patrick, 75, 76 ; his associates, 76 ; his oratory, 76, 77, 128. Hessians, 85. Holland joins America against Eng- land (1780), 10(5. Hood, General, 279, 280. Hooker, General, 267, 273. Hooker, Thomas, 19. House of Representatives. (See Con- gress.) Houston, Samuel, in Texas, 209. Howe, General, 90, 94. Huguenots in Florida, 3. Hutchinson, Mrs. Ann, 13. Hutchinson, Governor, 75, 79, 82. Independence, colonial disavowals of, 71 et sq. Independents, 7, 8. Indians, early relations with, 25 et sq. Indians, employment of, in the war (1775-76), 93; defeat of, by St. Clair, 142. Imperial control, 59 et sq. Impressment of seamen, 162. Inter-marriages, 28. Irish immigrants, 175; influx, char- acter, and influence of, 216. Iroquois, the, 26, 27. Jackson, Andrew, 148, 172, 191, 193; his character, 193 ; his execution of Ambrister and Arl)uthnot, 193 ; his democratic tendencies, 194 ; his inauguration, 195, 196 ; his treatment INDEX. of the Senate, 198, 200 ; his influence on public life and character, 20'2, 203. Jackson, " Sloiiewall," 2(J2 ('t surn, 7.3. Wesley, John, 52. Whalley, 30. Whig Party, the, 200, 207 ; fades away, 214. Whigs, 82. Whitefield, 52. Wilderness, battle of the, 275, 276. Wilkes, Captain, 258. William III and Massachusetts, 35. Williams, Uoger, 12. Wilson, James, 122. Winthrop, 9, 16; on liberty, 16, 17. Wirz, Captain, 284. Witchcraft, 37 et sq. Wolfe, (■)5. Wyoming, 93. " X. Y. Z. Correspondence," 152. Yale, University of, 11. Yorktown, capitulation at, 109. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. CANADA AND THE CANADIAN QUESTION. With Map. Svo, $2.00. 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