{ ^ v*^ ^^ '-5-. < .v^' " IIIE MINUTE MKN Ol'' J HE l;i; VOI.U 1 lU.N . " He detirmine to die or he free." Act l>. The " canoes with wings " The landing of Columbus The young Columbus Amerigo Vespucci . De Soto .... In sight of Me.xico . .\ Conquistadore . Coronado's march . .Sir Francis Drake . Sir Walter Raleigh " Elbowing off " . James I. . . . Queen Elizabeth . Disputing for possession Captain John Smith Powhatan Prince Charles William Penn, the Younger A palisaded fort Suspicious of Indians Dutch windmill in old New York 13 14 15 iS 19 20 21 28 30 3' 32 35 36 3S 39 40 41 43 44 45 45 4S 49 5° Settlers from Holland approaching New Amsterdam Cavalier and Puritan La Salle Longing for the old home An old landmark . Going to school in 1700 . The whirring spinning-wheel Stopping the pnst-rider . In the chimney-corner The clearing . On the watch . "I would rather be carried out dead! said Stuyvesant Champlain and the Iroquois In treaty with the Iroquois " A witch "... A fight with pirates New York in 1690 . One of King James' advisers . In the cabin of the Mayflower One of the villagers A lesson in liberty . King James II. In Leisler's times . The people and the Royal governoi A smuggler ..... Guarding the port . The right of search The hated stamps .... Preparing for " homespun " clothes 51 53 55 57 58 59 62 62 63 65 65 66 67 69 73 73 75 75 76 7S 79 St 82 «3 S5 S5 86 S7 S9 LIHT OF 1LLU:<,TRATWNS. Unwelcome lodgers .... A weak-kneed patriot and her sly cup of tea ...... Samuel Adams .... Paul Revere's ride .... The bridge at Concord . The British are coming I " It rained rebels "... Ethan Allen " The rebels are fortifying ISunker lli General George Washington . A " Continental " . One of the French soldiers Anthony Wayne .... John Paul Jones .... French's statue of the Minute Man Dr. Benjamin Franklin . John Adams prophesying " the glorious Fourth " The Liberty I'.ell .... In Marion's camp .... The Boston Boys and General Gage Threats of resistance to ta.xation . Inkstand used in signing the Constitution Ale.\ander Hamilton George Washington The inauguration of President Wash ington ..... George Rogers Clarke . " Borrowing fire " in old days " King Cotton " . . . . The stage coach .... Martha Washington Daniel Boone .... The new home in the Ohio country Washington's home at Mount Vernon Training recruits for war with France John Adams ..... Thomas Jefferson .... Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon 90 9- 93 94 96 97 99 loi 102 105 io5 106 107 108 109 no I \z 114 "5 118 120 121 123 127 129 'j' '32 '35 '36 ■37 141 142 '43 145 146 The sale of Louisiana The falling flag James Madison Tecumseh, chief of the Shawnees The battle of Tippecanoe Andrew Jackson The ruined White House Keeping the old flag afloat Jackson's sharpshooters at New Orleans Ambushed in the Indian country The Conastoga wagon . The mail boat on the Ohio An old-time Louisiana sugar mill James Monroe Ashland, the home of Henry Clav Discussing the tariff in 182S . A Western flat-boat John Quincy -Adams I)e Witt Clinton . The railway coach of our grandfathers When every man was his own cobljlcr Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper Daniel Webster .... The traveling schoolmaster . Andrew Jackson .... Martin Van Buren .... William Henry Harrison John Tyler .'\nti-renters, disguised as Indians, am bushing the sheriff . James K. Polk At Buena Vista .... Zachary Taylor .... .Millard Fillmore .... Franklin Pierce .... James Buchanan .... Uinah Morris's ccrtificat. of freedom Among the sugar cane . Great seal of the " Confederacy " . 147 150 15' 153 ■54 ■55 156 ■57 ■59 160 162 ■63 166 168 170 ■73 ■74 ■75 ■77 178 ■79 iSo 181 182 ■83 184 186 187 1 88 191 ■93 ■95 ■97 19S ■99 200 203 205 207 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Abraham Lincoln .... Seal of the United States Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor A Louisiana tiger .... In the enlistment office . Charge of the Union troops at Gettysburg The turret of the Monitor Working for the soldiers The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln Home again ..... Andrew Johnson .... The Capitol of the United States . Ulysses Simpson Grant . Old French market, New Orleans . 209 Rutherford Ijirchard Hayes 22S 21 1 The Art Gallery . 229 212 Machinery Hall 230 214 Sitkn, the capital of Alaska -3- 215 " The new way to India " -11, g ::i7 At the cotton loom 234 220 Ralph Waldo Emerson 235 221 William H. Prescott 236 222 Henry W. Longfellow 237 223 Peter Cooper . 238 224 James A. Garfield . 241 225 Chester .\. Arthur . 242 226 Grover Cleveland . 243 227 Benjamin Harrison =44 THE STORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CHAPTER I. II' \/I m 'm^Mk n^V>k, dSSJ^J tup: new WOItLD THAT WAS OLD. ANY hundreds of years ago there Uved in ancient Greece a certain wise man whose name was Pythagoras. As a hoy he liad been brought up beside the blue JEgean Sea. lie learned to observe carefully. He became a traveler and a teacher and from the closest study of all the things around him — the earth and sky, the sun and stnrs, the rise and fall of tides, the changes of the seasons and all the every-day happenings of this wonderful world of ours — he announced as his belief a theory that men called ridiculous but which, to-day, every boy and girl beginning the study of geography accepts with- out question. "The earth," said Pythagoras to diis pupils, "is spherical and inhabited all over." That was fully twenty-five hundred years ago and yet, after nearly two thousand years had passed, a certain Italian sailor whose name was Christopher Columbus and who believed as did the old Grecian scholar, made the same statement before a council of the most learned men of Spain and was laughed to scorn. " This Italian is crazy," they said. •' Why, if the earth is round the people 10 THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD. oil the other side would be walking about with their heels above their heads ; all the trees would grow upside down and the shijis must sail up hill. It is absurd. All the world knows that the earth is flat." But tills Italian sailor was per- sistent ; better still, he was pa- tient. His life had been full of adventure. From his boyhood he had been a sailor and a sol- dier, a fighter and a traveler in many lands and upon many seas. He loved the study of geogra- phy ; he was an expert map- drawer ; he had noticed much and thought more. Believing in the theory of Pythagoras, famil- iar to Italian scholars, that this earth was a globe, he also be- lieved that by sailing westward he could at last reach India — or Cathay, as all the East was called. For in those days, four hundred years ago, Eastern Asia was a new land to Western Europe. It was supposed to be the home of wealth and luxury. From it came the gold and spices and all the rare things that Europe most desired but which were only to be pro- cured by long and dangerous journeys overland. To the man who, would find a sea-way to India great honors and greater riches were sure to C11I;I^101■I1KR COH'MBUS. ■J.k«^J;^ ^jl^ come. So ill! lulventurous minds were bent upon discovering a new way to tiie P^ast. A DREAM OK CATHAY- TUE NE^Y WORLD THAT WAH OLD. 11 Christopher Columbus solved the problcn. The surest and safest way to the East, he said, is to sail west. This really sounded so ridiculous that, as we have seen, men called him crazy and for a long time would have nothing to do with hhn or his schemes. But iiii; i.Ari:i;\ I IAN i:(ii Ks OP THE Ai' he jiersisted ; he gained friends ; he talked so confidently of success, so eloquently of spreading the knowledge of the Christian religion among the heathen folk of Asia, so attractively of getting, from these same heathen folk, their trade, their gold and their spices that at last the king and queen of Spain were won over to his side, 12 THE NEW WORLI) THAT WAS OLD. and on the third ul' August, 14'J2, with throe .ships and one humh-td and twenty ^nen, Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos in southwestern Spain and steered straight out into what people called the dreadful Sea of Darkness in seai'ch of a new way to India across the western Avaters. But though Columbus was right in his theories and though, by traveling westward he could at last reach India and the East something that he Ivucw noiliing of lay in his path to stop his sailing westward. What was it ? Upon the western half of the earth's surface, stretching its ten thousand miles of length almost from pole to pole, lay a mighty continent — twin countries, each three thousand miles wide and joined by a narrow strip of land. Known now to us as North and South America this western continent contains three tenths of all the dry land on the surface of the glebe. It is nearly fifteen million square miles in extent, is four times as large as Europe, five times the size of Australia, one third larger than Africa and not quite as vast as Asia. And this was what stopped the way as Columbus sailed westward to the East. But though it w'as a new and all unknown land to the great navigator it is the oldest land in the world. The region from the Adirondack forests northward to and beyond the St. Lawrence River, and known as the Laurentian rocks, is .said by thCse students of the rocks, the geologists, to have been the very first land that showed itself above the receding waters that once covered the whole globe. And all along the hills and valleys of Noi-tli Am- erica to the soutli as far as the Alleghanies and the Ohio the great ice-sheet that once overspread the earth and that was driven by the advancing heat nearer and nearer to the North pole, uncovered a land so early in the history of this western world that it was old when Europe and Asia were new. This old, old land, how^ever, is commonly called the New World. That is because it Avas new to the Europeans four hundred years ago. But long before their day there had been people li\ing THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD. 13 within what is now the United States. Away back in what is known to geologists as the "pleistocene period" — that is the "most new" or "deposit" age — when the ice was slipping noi'th- ward and dirt was being deposited on the bare rocks ; when the verdure and vegetation that make hillside and valley so beautiful to-day were just beginning to tinge the earth with green ; when the great hairy elephant bathed in the Hudson and the woollv ■ WHEN iMONSTUO US-TOED BIRDS WADED IN THE CHARLES." rhinoceros wallowed in the prairie lakes ; when the daggei-toothed tiger prowled through the forests of Pennsylvania and the giant sloth browsed on the tree tops from Maine to Georgia ; when the curved-tusked mastodon ranged through the Carolinas and mon- strous-toed birds waded in the Charles — there appeared, also, by lake-side, river and seashore a naked, low-browed, uncouth race of savages, chipping the flint stones of the Trenton gravel bnnks into knives and spear heads and disputing with the great birds and beasts whose trails and tracks they crossed for the very caves and holes in which they lived. These were the first Americans. 14 THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD. Till' luurc people mix with e;ich other, yon know, the more friendly they becjme. In ^<;lvage lands, to-day, tribes that are furious fighters again.st hostile tribes are linked together by some bond of family ties and held by some sort of internal government. So it was with the early Americans. As soon as they had risen above the first brutal desire for eating and sleeping, they learned the difference between fighting for food and fighting for power: they saw that the skins of the animals they killed could be wrapped about them for shelter and that a sharpened stone was a better weapon than one that was simply flung at their enemy or their game. From fighting with the beasts and with each other they began to l^and together for protection ; then, those who lived in the more favored portions of the land grew a little more mindful of one another's Avants ; they made of themselves little communities in which fishing and hunting were the chief pur- suits, but where those who had the time and inclination began to fashion things of stone or chiy to meet their needs. Bowls and mortars, knives and arrow-heads were followed in time by bracelets and binds, vases and pipe-bowls. Still they progres.sed. The com- munities became tribes; some of them began to build houses, to make cloth, to do something more than simply to eat and fight and sleep. To-day all o\er the middle portion of the United States, from New York to Missouri, there are found great heaps of earth which wise men who have studied them say are the remains of the towns and villages, the fort* and temples, the homes and trading-places of tli^ most civilized portion of the American peojile of two or three thousand years ago, and known for want of a b^'tter name under the term " mound-builders." In the far Western plains and river courses, in Arizona and New Mexico and along the banks of the AX KAltLY AiMERICiN-. THE RED AMERICANS. The men did the luintiny, fishing and fighting.' THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD. 17 mighty Colorado there exist remains of great houses covering large sections or perched away up in the crevices of mighty cliffs. These were occupied in the early days by races now called, for con- venience, the pueblo or house-builders and the clitt'-dwellers. All these home-building people were, however, of the same race as the fierce and homeless savages who still hunted and slaughtered in the forests of the East or on the prairies of the West. All were Americans coming from the same " parent stock." Some of them, being brighter, more ambitious or more helpful than others, simply made the most of their opportunities and grew, even, into a rude kind of civilization. But while these advanced, the others stood still. Here in the old American home-land 'was fought the fight that all the world has known — the conflict between ignorance and intelligence. The good and the bad, the workers and the drones, the wise ones and the wild ones here struggled for the mastery, a certain attempt at civilization which .some had made went down in blood and conquest and so, gradually, out of the strife came those red-men of America that our ancestors, the discoverers and colonists from across the sea, found and fought witli four centuries ago. Hunters require vast tracts of land to support them in anything approaching comfort ; wars and tribal hostilities prevent rapid growth and tliere were, probably, never more than five or six Inuidred thousand of the red-men of North America living within the territory now occupied b}' the United States. They were of all classes, ranging from the lowest depths of savagene.ss to the higher forms of barbarism ; some were wild and some were wise ; some were brutes and some were statesmen ; some were as low in the social scale as the tramps and roughs of to-day; some as high (from the red-man's standpoint) as are your own fathers and mothers seen from }'our standpoint to-day. The half-million red-men who owned and occupied our United States four hundred years ago. though scattered oxev a 'vast area, 18 THE NEW won LI) THAT WAS OLD. speaking different languages an 1 varying, according to location, in customs, costume, manners, laws and life, were still brothers, springing from the same original family and having, in -whatever section of the land they lived, certain things alike ; they all had the same straight, black hair ; they all used in their talk the same sort of many-syllabled words — "bunch words" as they are called; and they were all what we know as couununists — that is, they lield their laml, their homes and their pro])- erty in coninion. A red American's village was like one large family. All its life, all its in- terests and all its desires being shared jointly by all' its inmates. Just as if to-day, the people of Natick, or Catskill, or Zanesville or Pasadena .should agree to live together in one big house with little compartments for each family, eat- ing togctiier from the same soup-kettle and dividing all they raised and all thev found equally between all the inmates of the one big house. The men did the hunting and fishing and fighting; the women attended to the home- work and the field labor. The boys and girls learned early to do their share and in the home the woman of the house was supreme. Even the greatest war-chief when once within his house dared not disobey the women of his house. The red-men had but a dim idea of God and heaven. They were superstitious and full of fancies and imaginings. They wor- shiped the winds, the thunder and the sun, and were terribly afraid of whatever they could not luiderstand. They liad good spirits and bad — those that helpwl them in seed time and harvest. in woodcraft and the chase, and those, also, that baffled and annoyed them wdien arrows failed to sti'ike, traps to catch or crops to grow. // ,■ lit'-: .'I'tf Iji ;, •'•:,?^:'''^'v?j COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL. I'J In other words, the red-men of North America were but as little children wlio have not yet learned and cannot, therefore, under- stand the reasons and the causes of the daily happenings that make uj? life. CHAPTER II. COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL. N a beautiful October morning in the year 1492, as one of the red Americans belonging to the island tribes that then lived on what we know as the Bahama group, southeast of the Florida coast, parted the heavy foliage that ran almost down to the sea on his island home of Guanahani, he saw a sight that very nearly took his bi-eath away. Just what it was he could not at first make out, but he thought either that three terrible sea-monsters had come up from the Avater to destroy his land and people or that three great canoes with wings had dropped from the sky bringing, perhaps, to the folks of Guanahani some marvelous message from the spirits of the air of whom they stood in so much awe. Gazing upon the startling vision until he had recovered from his first surprise he wheeled about and dashed into his village to arouse his friends and neighbors. His loud calls quickly summoned them and out from the forest and through the hastily parted foliage they rushed to the water's edge. But as they the "canoes with wings.' 20 C0LU3IBUS THE ADMIIiAL. gained the low and level beach they too f^tood mute with terror and surprise. For, from each of the monster canoes, other canoes put off. In them were strange beings clothed in glittering metal or gaily colored lobes. Their faces were pale in color ; their hair was curly and sunny in hue. And in the foremost canoe grasping in one hand a long pole from which streamed a gorgeous banner and with the other outstretched as if in greeting stood a figuie upon whom tlie Americans looked with wonder, reverence and awe. It was a tall and commanding figure, noble in aspect and brilliant in costume and as the islanders marked the marvelous face and form of this scarlet-clad leader they bent in reverence and cried aloud " Tvrey ; turey ; they are turey!'' (Heaven-sent.) On came the canoes filled with a glittering company and gay with fluttering flags. But as the first boat grounded on the beach and the tall chief in scarlet, his gray head yet imcovered, the flaming banner still clasped in his hand, leaped into the water followed by his men the terrified natives thought the spirits of the air were come to take vengeance upon them and, turning, they fled to the security of thicket and tree- trunk. But led back by cin'iosity they looked again upon these strange new-comers, and behold! they were all kneeling, bare- headed, upon the sand, kissing tlie earth and lifting their eyes toward the skies. Then the scarlet-mantled leadei- rising from the ground, ])]anted the great standard in tlie sand and drawinyf a Ion"- and shinins sword he spoke loud and solenm words in a language the wonder- intr islanders could not understand, while those marvelous fio-ures in glittering metal and gleaming cloth knelt about him as if in THE LANDING OF COLIMBUS. THE YOUXG COLUMBUS. •' n ,.as the realimion of a Ufe-lono dream, .first elimly conceived I., hir„ in kts boyhood days at tienoa." COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL. 23 ^vol•(^hip. They kissed their chieft;un'.s liaiids, they embraced his feet and raised such loud and joyous shouts that the simple islanders puzzled yet over-awed supposed all they saw to be signs of the devoutest adoration. '^ Turey ; turey T' they cried again. " He is heaven-sent." And then they, too, prostrated themselves in adoration. Who were these pale-faced visitors who had come in such a startling way across the eastern sea ? Not for years could the red Americans into whose lands they came understand who they were or why they had visited them, although they learned, all too soon, that there was little about the new comers that was godlike or heavenly. The pale-faced strangers deceived and ill-treated the simple natives from the first and for four hundred years the red- men of America have known little but bad faith and ill-treatment at the hands of the white. But we who have heard the story again and again know who were these white visitors to Guanahani and from whence they came. For the leader of that brilliant throng that knelt in thank- fulness upon the Bahama sand — this chieftain, whose followers clustered about him and raised applauding shouts while he took possession of the new-found land in the name and by the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella, king and queen of Spain — this scarlet- mantled captain whom the wondering natives worshiped as a god, was that Christopher Columbus, the wool-comber's son, the enthusiast whom men had laughed at as a madman and a " crank," the patient, persistent Italian adventurer who was now because of his great discovery owner of one tenth part of all the riches he should find. Lord Admiral of all the waters into which he should sail and viceroy of all the lands of this New Spain upon whose sunny shores he had .set foot. " I have found Cathay," he cried. It was a glorious ending to long years of toil and struggle. It was the realization of a life-long dream, first dimly conceived by him in his boyhood days at Genoa. With firm and unwavering 24 COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL. I'aith ('()luinl)iis had overcome all otlils. He had been des^^i^ed ami litliculed, tlireatened and cast aside; hu had gone from court to court ill Europe vaiulv seeking aid for his enterprise ; and -when, at last, this was cautiously given, he had braved the terrors of an luikuown sea with three crazy little vessels and an umvilling com- pany of a hundred and tAventy men. For days and da3's he had sailed westward seeing nothing, finding nothing, while his men sneered and grumbled and plainly showed that, if they dared, they would gladly have flung their captain overboard and turned about for home. At last signs of land ])egan to appear — vagrant seaweed and floating drift wood, land birds blown off the shore and warm Ihvczl's that almost smelled of field and forest. And then, one day, at midnight the admiral saw a moving light that told of life near by and finally in the early morning the cry of Land ! from the watchful lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor on board the Nina, told that the end of the long waiting at last had come and that Cathay was found. It w:as on the morning of Friday the twelfth of October. 1492, that Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani and solemnly named the island '• San Salvador." The rich vegetation, the dark- skinned natives, the rude Init glittering ornaments in their ears and on their arms alike strengthened his belief that his plans were all successful and that he had found the land of gold and spices he had sailed away to seek. He had promised to find the Indies and because by sailing westward he had come upon what he supposed to be certain rich islands off tlie India coast these islands were called and have e\er since been known as the West Indies, while the red natives who inhabited both the islands and the vast conti- nent beyond Jiave ever since been called by the name the Spanish discoverers gave them — Indians. It Avas all a mistake. Columbus had sailed westward to find India and had found a new world instead, a world that was to pro\e of greater value to mankind than ever India would or could. But COLUMBUS THE A V JURAL. 26 to the day of his death Columbus believed he had found the land he sought for. " I have gone to the Indies from Spain by travers- ing the ocean westwardly," were almost his last words. And although he made four voyages across the Atlantic, each time dis- covering new lands and seeing new joeople, he still believed that he was only touching new and hitherto unknown islands off the eastern coast of Asia. And so for a while all the world believed. No conqueror ever received a more glorious reception on his home-coming than did Columbus, the admiral. He entered the city of Barcelona, where the king and queen waited to receive him, in a sort of triumphal procession. Flags streamed and trumpets blew ; great crowds came out to meet him or lined the ways and shouted their welcome and enthusiasm as he rode along. Captive Indians, gaily colored birds, and other trophies from the new-found land were displayed in the procession and in a richly deco- rated pavilion, surrounded by their glittering court, King- Ferdinand and Isabella the queen received the admiral, bid- ding him sit beside them and tell his wonderful story. Honoi's and privileges were conferred upon him. He was called Don, he rode at the king's bridle and was served and saluted as a grandee of Spain. Columbus, as has been said, made four voyages to America. But after the second voyage men began to understand that he had failed to find India. The riches and trade that he promised did not come to Spain and many an adventurer who had risked all for the greed of gold and the return he hoped to make became a beggar through failure and hated the great admiral through whom he expected to win mighty riches. Enemies were raised up against him ; he was sent back from his third voyage a prisoner in disgi\ace and chains, and from his fourth voyage he came home to die. But neither failure nor disgrace could take away the glory from what he had accomplished. Gradually men learned to iniderstand 26 THE NAMING OF A3IERICA. the greatness of his achievement, the virtue of his marvelous perseverance, the strength and nobiUty of his character. After his death the peopk^ of Spain discovered that he had opened for them the way to riches and honor; by the wealth of "the Indies" that Columbus brought to their feet their struggling land was made one of the most powerful nations of the earth ; and though some people have said that Columbus did not discover America, but that French fishermen or Norwegian pirates were the real discoverers, we all know that, until Columbus sailed across the sea, America was im- known to Europe and that, for all practical pvn-poses, his faith and his alone gave to the restless people of Europe a new world. America was better than Cathay, for it has proved the home of freedom, hope and progress. CHAPTER IIT. THE NAMING OF AMERICA. OLUMBUS, as you have heard, did not knoAv that he had dis(>o\ered a new world. He thought he had merely touched some of the great islands off the eastern coast of Asia. Even when, in the month of August, 1498, he first saw the mainland of America, at the mouth of the river Orinoco, he did not imngine that he had found a new continent, but believed that he had discovered that fabled river of the East into which, .so men said, flowed the four great rivers of the world — the Ganges, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile. [ THE NAMING OF AMERICA. 27 •JM^ ^,iiMF^-ngr>_^ But his succe."^.'' set other men to thinking, and after his wonder- ful voyage in 1492 many expeditions were sent westward for pur- poses of discovery and exploration. After he had found " Cathay" every man, he declared, wanted to become a disco\erer. There is an old saying you may have heard that tells us "nothing succeeds like success." And the success of Columbus sent m;iny adventurers sailing westward. They, too, wished to share in the great riches that were to be found in "• the lands where the spices grow," and they believed they could do this quite as well as the great admiral. Once at a dinner given to Columbus a certain envious Spaniai'd declared that he was tired of hearing the admiral praised so highly for what any one else could have done. " Why," said he, " if the admiral had not discovered the Indies, do you think there are not other men in Spain who might have done this ? " Columbus made no replv to the jealous Don, but took an eg-cj from its dish. "Can any of you stand this egg on end?" he risked. One after another of the company tried it and failed, whereupon the admiral struck it smartly on the table and stood it upright on its broken part. "Any of you can do it now," he said, "and any of you can find the Indies, now that I have shown you the way." So every great king in Europe desired to possess new principalities beyond the sea. Spain, Portugal, France, England alike sent out voyages of discovery westward — '• trying to set the egg on end." Of all these discoverers two other Italians, foUowino- where Columbus had led, are worthy of special note — John Cabot, sent out by King Henry the Seventh of England in 1497, and Amerigo or Alberigo Vespucci, who is said to have sailed westward with a Spanish expedition in the same year. Both of 28 THE NAMING OF AMERICA. those men, it is asserted, saw the iiiainlaiid of America before Cohmibus did, and Enghmd founded her claim-: to possession in North America and fouglit many bloody wars to maintain them because Jolm Cabot in 1497 "first made the American continent" and set up the flag of England on a Canada;m headland. In that same year of 1497 Cabot sailed along the North American coast from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson ; and Vespucci, although tliis is doubted by many, sailed in the same year along the southern coast from Florida to North Caro- lina. In 1499 Ve.spucci really did touch the South American coast, and in 1503 he built the first fort on the mainland near the present city of Eio de Janeiro. Both these Italian navigators thought at first, as did Columbus, that they had found the direct way to the Indies, and each one earnestly declared himself to have been the first to discover tlie main- land. At any rate Vespucci could talk and write tlie best and he had many friends among the scholars of his day. When, therefore, it really dawned upon men that the land across the seas to which the genius of Columbus had led them wa.'-: not India or " Cathay" but a new contirient, then it was that the man who had the most to say about it obtained the greatest glory — that of giving it a name. Wise men who have studied the matter dee])ly are greatly puz- zled just how to decide whether the continent of America took its name from Amerigo Vespucci or whether Vespucci took his name from America. Those who hold to the first c(uot(' from a very old AMKRIGO VESPUCCI. SPAIN AND HER IIIVALS. 'ien told in a beautiful poem by Longfellow ; Captain John Davis, w horn 3'ou know in geography as the brave mariner for whom Davis' Straits were named ; and Sir Walter Raleigh who gave the knowledge of tobacco to the world and made the first Ena;lish settlement in North America in 1587. silt IKA.NCl.S DHAKE. 36 A7MAV AND IFER HTVALS. But, before Raleigh, settlements hiul nlready hccu made in what is now the region known as the United States. John IJihault and Rene dc Laudonniere, French Protestants both, in the years 15G2 and 1564 settled French colonies in Florida only to be horribly killed by the Spaniards who claimed the sole right of occu])ation of that beautiful sunnner land. In 15G5 the Sjianiards founded St. Augustine and in 1570 tried to make a settlement on the Potomac River, but failed. The Spaniards even penetrated into the country as far north as Cen- tral New York, but all their colonies north of Florida were failures. In 1540 a Spanisli captain named Coronado, set out from Mexico to find a won- derful land of gold known as the "Seven Cities of Cibola." He led a most remarkable march across the western territory of the United States almost as far north as the present city of Omaha. But he failed to find the seven faiiy cities he sought or even the gold he hoped to bring away ; though, had he but known it, his march across New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado Avas evermore gold than he ever dreamed of — but it was sunk deep down in mines l)cneath the earth. So, all through the sixteenth century, from 1500 to 1600, went on the fight between S]iain and France and England for the possession of the western world. PiX(H')it in the far south, in Mexico and the We.st Indies, in Brazil and Pern, few settlements were made. It SlU WALTER KALEIGH. HOMES IN THE NEW WOULD. 37 was simply a gold-hunt for a hundred years. At length Europeiins began to understand that the riches of the New World were in its splendid climate and its fertile soil, and learned to know that future success was to be found only by those who made homes within its borders. Then it was that the gold-hunt ceased and the explorers were followed by the colonizers. _^>ri CHAPTER V. HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD. • I HAVE seen bo}s and girls — have not you ? — who, when I ;dl had equal chances, would rush to the best strawberry- J. patch, or the fullest blackberry-bush, or the best place for a sight of some passing procession and cry out, " Ali-ha ! it's mine. I got here first ! " Such a display of selfishness is certain to make their companions angry, especially if the finders refuse to share their o-ood fortune. Well — there was a certain wise old poet (Dryden, his name was) who after studA'iiio- the wa^■s of the world declared that ■ JJfii are but cliildrcii of a larircr ;ri''>utli," 38 HOMES IX THE NEW WORLD. and the sottlcment ot" America is good proof of this. For each nation as it found a footing in the new world cried out to the rest of Europe, just like selfish children : •• It's mine. I got here first!" And it does seem as though for fully a hundred and fifty years — from 1000 to 1750 — the European settlers in North America spent a good portion of their time in trj'ing to push one another off the little spots of earth on which they stood, shoving and elbowing each other and growling out : " Get off ; this is my ground ! " or: ''Get off', yourself; I've as much rio'ht here as you ! " The Spaniards pushed away the French and the Enti'lish elbowed off the Dutch and the Dutch crowde ;'t Gi0l2}^ riiynX colonv throuo;h the dark days of its be2;iniiina:s. But he did braii; terril)ly. The Indians of Virginia were at first friendly to the settlers. But they soon learned to dis- trust and dislike them, and l^ut for the watchfulness of Captain John Smith and the good-will of a 'little Indian girl whose name was Ma-ta-oka, sometimes called Pocahontas, the settlement at Jamestown would soon have been utterly destroyed. Pocahontas, r^-'t'icAS tliia art Vi'riais, :j^^' 44 HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD. who was the daiij^liter of the Indian chief Powhatan, proved her- self in many ways the friend of the white people, and it is sad to think that after her friend Captain Smith had left the colony, the settlers repaid her kindness by trying to kidnap the Indian girl so as to force food and corn from ^m ->^ f V .X' — \, ■ ' '"\ ■ <,/ >^ .■ FT^ i -.^r: (■ > her father. Powhatan the chief was very angry, and threatened to destroy the colony, bnt jnst then a certain English gentleman wliose name was Rolfe, fell in love with Pocahontas and mar- ried her, and, at her request, Powhatan made a lasting peace with the white men. It is said that two presidents of the United States, William Henry Harrison and his grandson Benjamin Har- rison, are descended from this Indian girl who married the En<2-lishman. Captain John Smith was so deeply interested in America that he wrote and talked about it a great deal. He made a map of what he called New England, and the young English prince Ch^jrles (afterwards the king who lost his head) dotted it all over witli make- believe towns to which he gave the names of well-known tov>ns in England. Captain Smith told another English captain whose name was Henry Hudson, some of his ideas, and in 1609 Captain Hudson, sailing in the service of Holland, remembered some of Captain Smith's words and hunted up and explored the beautiful river that now bears his nnnio — Hudson River. At the mouth of this river Il<)ME,S IN THE NE^y WORLD. 45 PRINCE CHARLES in 1G14 the Dutch, as the people of Holland are called, made a settlement which they named New Amstcrdinn. The colonists were sent out by a rich corporation in Holland called the Dutch West India Company, formed like the London and Plymouth Companies for the purpose of trade. They were sent to the Hudson River country to purchase furs from the Indians. This little fur post war; the beginning of the great city of New York. Captain Smith's favorable report of the New England coast and that of other explorers who had sailed from Maine to Long Island Sound, turned the attention of settlers in that direction, but the first real settlement was made in 1620 by a body of English exiles known to us as " the Pilgrims." Driven first to Holland by religious perse- cution, they sailed from Delft Haven in the Mayflower under arrangements with the London or Virginia Company, as it was sometimes called, intending to settle some- Avhere near the Hudson River. By some mistake they did not reach Virginia but striking to the northward, landed first at Cape Cod and, afterward — on the twenty- second of December in the year 1620, stepped ashore on the gray bowlder fa- mous as Plymouth Rock, on the Massa- chusetts coast, and there, in the bleak winter of 1620-21, founded a sorry littW settlement that was the besjinnina; of New Enu'land. Within the next fifty years other settlements were made along the Atlantic coast by emigrants from Europe — most of them from WILLIAM I'EXX THE YOUNGER. 46 noME6 IX THE NEW WORLD. Eno-land — who desired to hiiilil for tliemselves Iioiiies in the New Worl(L In 1023 Cnptaiii .lolin Mason made two settlements on the Piscataijua River in New Hampshire — one at Dover and one at Portsmouth. In 1634 certain English lioman Catholics seeking relief from persecution, settled on the Potomac River in Maryland. In 1G35 people from the Plymouth Colony settled at the mouth of the Connecticut River, and in 1G36 Roger Williams, a good but out- spoken man who could not agree on matters of religion with his Massachusetts brethren, was driven from the colony and with some of his followers founded Providence in Rhode Island. In 1G38 a company of emigrants from Sweden settled on the shores of Dela- ware Ba'i' ; in 1G40 certain Virginia colonists who could not agree on religious matters with their neighbors, set up for themselves at Albemarle in North Carolina ; in 1670 William .Sayle brouglit a company of English settlers across the sea and founded Charleston in South Carolina; in 1GG4 a settlement was made at a place called Elizabeth in New Jersey; in 1082 William Penn the younger, a famous English Quaker, witli one hundred of his associates settled in Pennsyhania where now stands the great city of Philadelphia ; and, years after, in 1730. the English soldier General Oglethor]ie ■with one hundred and twenty colonists, settled in Georgia on the •site of the present city of Savannah. These thirteen settlements along the Atlantic coast were the be- ginnings of the United States of America. As you see they were for the most part made by people who were not satisfied because things at home did not suit them ; and they were, in most case.s. backed by the capital of rich men who saw in the new land an opportunity to make money and. at the same time, hel]i the poor or the persecuted folks who were anxious to escape from their home troubles. They occupied but a narrow stri]) on the ragged sea-border of a vast and unexplored continent; tlu'ir l)eginnings were full of di-;- appointment and disaster ; their future was uncertain and yet these THE FIEST COLONISTS. 47 thirteen struggling settlements were in time to be reckoned by England as among the most important and at the same time the most troublesome of all her possessions in foreign lands. =-'^"PlSr= CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST COLONISTS. HEN we remember how many kinds of people go off to set- tle in new countries and the reasons that draw them there, we shall not be at all surprised to learn that the settlers along the Atlantic border of North America tAvo hundred and fifty years ago, did not have the easiest sort of life or the pleasantest of times as they tried to make homes for themselves in the midst of all that wilderness. Even though we try to do so, we can scarcely picture to ourselves the three thousand miles of coast line from Maine to Georgia as it looked in those early days. For, try as we may, we shall not be able to think of it other than as it exists to-day — cleared of its woodland, studded with noble cities and alive with a crowding and busy throng of men and women, boys and girls. Then, in all New Eng- land, the forests ran down to the sea ; behind the white sands of the New Jersey and Carolina beaches, the land Avas dark with monstrous pines, while over all the land prowled the wolf and the bear, the buffalo and the elk, and all manner of wild wood beasts that we can now only find in menageries, if at all. Not a horse or a cow lived in all North America ; those now here are descendants of the stock brought over by the European settlers. 1 \ 48 THE FIRST COLONISTS. Here and there, throughout the land, were scattered Indian vil- lages in which lived a jx'ople that no white man dared to trust, be- cause no white man could understand their manner of thought and life, while roving bands in the hunting and fishing season came into tlie settlements to exchange their ])eltrv for the wonderful laboi- saving tools the white man had brought with him, or to pry about and make husband and housewife suspicious and uncomfortable. All about the little settlements rose the uncleared forests in wiiosa depths and shadows lurked they knew not Avliat dangers. The woodman's axe had made but small openings as yet, and near at hand stood wooden block-house, clumsy fort or picketed palisades as the sole protection against lurking Indians or the still more savage foemen of France or Spain. Neither store nor. shop, wareroom lun' manufactory were to be '^^ A PALIS vi)i:i> rouT. found when food ran short or household stuffs were needed, and all who lacked must go without or starve until such time as the su]iply ship, braving storm and wreck, came sailing over-sea. But, more than all this, the greatest danger to the struggling settlements lay in the colonists themselves. Here were ])eople of THE FIRST COLOXISTS. 49 all sorts and conditions — the poor and the proud, the sick and the well, the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the wise and the foolish, the worker and the drone, the dissatisfied and the indif- ferent, the over-particular and the careless, every class and every kind of men, women and children whom poverty, discontent, poli- tics, persecution, restlessness, greed, love and ambition had sent across the sea to stru^'g-le in a new world for the homes or the ad- vantages they had lost in the land of their birth. Quarreling and jealousies over rights and privi- leges ; privation and distress from lack of sufficient food or proper home surroundings ; disease, sick- ness and death — all these sprung up in or visited each little settle- ment, cutting down its numbers, stirring up discontent and strife or hindering its growth when most it needed gentle influences, sturdy workers and healthy and honest lives. And yet in spite of all draw- backs the settlement slowly grew. Along that narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, from Maine to Georgia, were planted in the years between 1620 and 1700 the seeds from which has sprung a mighty nation of free- men. Before 1620, twelve hundred and sixty-one persons had been sent to the various " plantations " of the Virginia Company ; by 1634 the Massachusetts colonists had grown to between three and four thousand in number, distributed in sixteen towns. There were frequent disputes at fir:st as to the ownership of the land and just SUSPICIOU.-? OK INDIANS. 50 THE FIRST COLOXISTS. ^vIl;lt the (lilkTcnt coinpaiiies or proprietors had the ability to promise or tlie rig'ht to give away, but these gradually grew less, uutil at length the only bar to the complete English possession of the Atlantic coast from Pematiuid to Charleston, was the little Dutch settlement at the mouth of the Hudson River. Three hundred years ago there were two c^uestions that more than any other perplexed people. These were : where and how to live and where and how to go to church. The Old World was so full of struggle be- tween kings and princes, lords and ladies, as to just who had the strongest arm and just who slu)uld l)e the ruler, tliat the peo- })Ie who were not of high rank w-ere looked upon as fit only to fight for this side or for that. Their trade or occupa- tion was interfered with and following this or that ])arty might make a man a pauper in a day or cost him his life on the battle-field or his head on the scaffold. When, therefore, the settlement of a new land far away from all this strife and risk, offered opportunity for whosoever had pluck enough or ambition enough to try for fortune in fresh fields, those who loved money, those who loved ease, those who loved freedom and those who loved life, hastened to make the most of the opportunity and sailed to ll.e Virginia Plantations, or the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hud- son. Trade in tobacco and trade in furs speedily made both these sections centers of business, and the Virginia planters and the New Netherland '• factors " built up a steadily growing trade with the home markets in England and Holland. The question as to where and how to go . to cluu'ch was equally I>rnil WINDMILLS IX OLD XliW VOUK. THE FIRST COLONISTS. £3 important. When Martin Lnther in Germany and King Henry the Eighth in England broke away from tlie Roman Catholic Clmrcli, men began to think tor themselves more and more, and new sects and new opinions sprnng np in the churches. This led to what is called freedom of thought, but it led also to discussions, quarreling, persecution and death. People who held certain religious opinions CAVALIEI! AND PUIHTAN. were very firm in their new faith ; the people who believed other- wise were equally firm, and so it came to pass that they could not live together in peace and charity. Upon this those who were of the weaker or persecuted party looked aln'oad for some place where they could live as they chose, going to the church of their choice and mingliuLj with those who believed as thev did. These too 54 THE I'lllsT CO LOS 1ST S. hailed Americ;i as tlio [)lafe tlr/y sought, aii;l thus was Massachu- setts settled by the Pilgrims auil th ■ Puritans, Maryland by the Koniaii Catholics, Virginia by tln' Ei)iscopalians and Pennsylvania by the Quakers. But even in the new land all was not peace. For the colonists had not brought across the sea that brotherly kindness that is called the spirit of toleration. That was to be gained only as the onto-rowth of American life and American freedom. So, from Maine to Georsria the different church sects were iealons of one another; thev argued and quarreled, refu.sed to live together in nnity and showed the self-same spirit of intolerance and the same inclinaticni toward persecution that they had tied from in England, France or Holland. But in spite of religion-! differences and political jealonsies, of oppo.sition to trade and neglect by tho-ie at home who had {)romised them support and succor, the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic bor- der slowly exteniU'd their clearings and enlarged their lunnbers. The date of the Hr.st permanent settlements along the seaboard — not counting the Spanish at St. Augustine — were the French at Port Ro3'al in Nova Scotia in 1G05, the English at Jamestown in Virginia in 1007, the French at Quebec in Canada in l(l(l8. the Dutch at New Amsterdam (afterward New York) in J(ilM and the English at Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620. The French settlement of Canada does not properly fall within our plan of this story any more th;m does the Spanish settlement of Mexico, for neither Canada nor Mexico have yet become parts of the United States, but the enterprise and energy with which the priests and .soldiers, the lords and ladies, the traders and pea.sants of France sought to found a vast colony among the lakes, the rivers and the forests of the North, ai'e woi'tliy of remend)rance. Here Cartier had made discoveries; here Champlain. ])ravest and most un- tiring of Frenchmen, rightly named '• the Father of New France," hid founded and fought; here Marcjuette the missionary and La THE FIRST COLONISTS. 55 Salle the trader lived and labored, and, becoming pioneers, flushed westward, discovering the Ohio and the Mis.sissippi Rivers and, by right of this discovery, establishing the claim of France to all the wide western country beyond the AUeghanies. But all this vast section, as we shall see, from Canada to Louisiana, was finally secured from France by the power of England or the wisdom of the United States. The beginnings of home-life in tlie New World which we have already noticed as the "first permanent settlements," soon led to other attempts at colonization. The founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1(J07 was followed by that of Henrico and Bermuda in 1(311 and of other " plantation" settlements in 161(1. In New England the struggling Plymouth colony of IGliO was followed by the settlements at Little Harbor (or Portsmouth) in New Hamp- shire in 1G23, at Pemaquid near the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine in 1G25, at Salem in Massachusetts in 1(J2S, at Boston in 1(330, at Providence in Rhode Island in 1636, and at Hartford and New Haven in Connecticut in 1635 and 1638. The Dutch settlements at New Amsterdam (New York) and at Renselaerswyck (Albany) in 1623 and at the Wallabout (Brooklyn) were the principal centers of Dutch life, while at Philadelphia in 1682, at Port jRoyal and Charleston in South Carolina in 1670 and 1680 the Europeans broke ground for homes in a new and untried land. From these as cen- ters other towns were started and in 1700 the population of the Atlantic coast settlements extending from Pemaquid in Maine to Port Royal in South Carolina had reached upwards of two luuidred thousand. During all these early years the colonists had but little in common ; their life and labor were largely confined to the places in which they had come to make their liomes, and a journey from [a^Jla 56 NOW THEY LIVED IX COLONIAL DAYS. Now York to Boston wa'^ almost as nnooininon as is to-da_y a trip to Central Africa or a voyage to the Friendly Isles. Their forms of government, too. for these first years were dilTer- ent. One hv one, however, tlie colonies were taken out of the hands of the Companies and Lord Pr()])rietors by whom they had originidly l)een planted and were made royal provinces of Engliuid ; and, in 1700, the word of tlie King of England was law throughout all the thirteen colonies of the English Crown. ^^=— CHAPTER VII. now THEv ;,ivi;i) ix colonial day.s. HERE are few boj's and girls to-da}^, however tenderly brought up, who do not enjoy getting away from tiieir ';'-~^ comfortable homes for a few days in the summer and "roughing it" in some out-of-the-way " camp " by river, lake or sea. But, after a while, this summer •• roughino- " g:rows disaii'reeable and the longing comes for the nice things and modern conveniences of home. Life in the thirteen colonies in America two hundred and fifty 3"ears ago was the hardest kind of '' ronghing it." Con- veniences there were none, and even necessities were few. Many of the new settlers could not stand the life. Some returned across the sea to the homes they had left ; some, iniable to endure the jM'ivations they had to undergo, sickened and died in their new houu's ; but those who did siu'vive or who could stand the home- sickness, the dangers and tlie diseases which all alike must face and now THEY LIVED IX COLONIAL DAYS. 57 sharo, toughened under hardship, grew f^trong and sturdy and self- reliant, and became the ancestors of that hardy race which has built up into prosperity these United State* of ours. As you have learned from the previous chapter, the eai'ly colonists, alone and in a strange land, had to depend upon themselves for almost every thing they needed to support life or give them the few LONGING FOK THE OLD IlOMi;. necessities and fewer comforts they must have. The ground had to be cleared of its forests, broken and ploughed and prepared for grain and grass, for vegetables and fruits. Many a time did those first comers suffer for food. The '^starving time" of 1610 in Virginia, and the famine of 1623 in the Plymouth colony, were hardships that 58 now rilKY LIVED IX COLONIAL UAYH. ver}- nearly destroyed the feeble settlements ; often the people of Phmoutli in those first days had nothinj:: hut clams to eat and water to drink. And yet one of their faithful ministers, Elder Brewster, could in the midst of such a terrililc lack of food thank God that "they were permitted tu suck of the abundance of the seas and of the treasures hid in the sand." Was not tiiat an heroic patience ? The first houses were the roughest of shelters — holes dug in the ground and hastily roofed over; then, flimsy bark huts or rudely- made log cabins ; houses of hewed logs or of planks, hand-split or hand-sawed from .selected forest logs. Finally, as wealthier people came to the settlements more substantial houses of wood or stone were built. Sometimes, the •' finishing touches," the doors and win- dows, even the very bricks themselves of which the gabk' ends of the houses were built, were brought across the sea from Enuland or Holland ^?sr> f; AN ol.l) i.AM)>rAi;K. for the adornment of thesu more pretentious houses. Certain of these olil land- marks may now and then be found to-day, standing, still strong, though gray and w^eather-b eaten. I recall one such in which I have spent many a happy hoin-, a mile or so l)ack from the Hudson River, just across the New Jersey line — its ends built of little Dutch bricks brought across from Holland, its quaint and startling mantel of pictured tiles descriptive of Old Testament history, its floor of still solid hand-hewed pl;ud\s, its massive rafters dark with smoke and age, and over the Dutch half-door the date of building set in burned brick in the front of field stone. And in the old Jackson house at Andover, in Massacduisetts, the chimney was so huge that two or three mischievous fellows, fastening a rope about one of their innnber, lowered him down the chimney until he reached the spot where hung a " fine fat turkey set aside for the now TUEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYH. 01 wedding dinner of Master Jackson's daughter." Then tliief and booty were ahke pulled up the chimney, and of the wedding turkey a stolen feast was made. Within the house the rooms were few, but the kitchen, with its huge fireplace, supplied with seats and settles, was at once kitchen, dining and living room ; it was the center of the home life ; its rough but strong home-made furniture, its wooden table-dishes and clumsy " kitchen-things " would be deemed by us of to-day as suited only to the hardest kind of " roughing it." There were, of course, finer houses built as the years went by and the people prospered, but even the finest mansions had but few of what we now call con- veniences — few indeed of what we hold as necessities — and even the most highly-favored children of those early days endured privations that the boys and girls of our day would grumble at as unbearable. Porridge for breakfast, mush or hasty pudding for supper, with a dinner of vegetables and but little meat at any time were the daily meals of oiu' ancestors. Life in all the colonies was rough and simple, and though we of to-day who expect so much would find in it much to complain of, it does not seem to have been altogether uncomfortable as the settlements grew and the fields became more productive, the crops more plentiful and the larder more bountifully supplied. Except in the cities — such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where English manners and English fashions gradually crept into the wealthier families — the wardrobes of parents and children were scanty and plain. Thev were usually of homespun stuff, for the whirring spinning-wheel was the best-used belonging of every household. Leather breeches and homespun jackets were worn by father and son, but on Sunday or at times of festivity and holiday, there was a display of lace ruffles and silver buckles and a certain amount of style and finery. The windmills ground the corn that the fertile farms produced ; the post^rider galloped from town to town with news or messages ; the roads were poor ; the streets in the few towns were poorly paved and illy lighted ; the field work 62 now TIIEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS. was the gront thing to bo done, and strict attendance at church on Sunday witli two-hour sermons to occupy the time was tlie main privilege of joung and okl. Scliools were rare and never long-continuing. In the South little was done toward the general education of the children, and many of the boys and girls in the early days grew to manhood and womanhood unable to write their names. But as time went on more attention, in the Northern colonies, was devoted to the children's schooling. The instruction given was slight, ,. and " book-learning " was con- '■ - fined to a study of the cate- .-^ ;s chism and of " the ' / 'ritin', and 'rithme- and the birch rod the school- THE WHIRRING SPINNING-WHEEI,. three R's " (" reading, tic "), Avhile the ferule played an important part in master's duties. There were few Avagons for hauling stuff or carriao;es for riding. Pack horses were the only expresses on land ; boats and small coasting schooners — ketches and snows, as they were called — carried the heavier freights and merchandise along the coast or up and down the rivers. Indian corn in the North and tobacco in the South were the principal things raised and cultivated. Farming tools and utensils were clumsy and unhandy as compared with those of to-day, and it was a long time be- fore the new farm lands were cleared of stumps and rocks. Many of the New England settlers were fishermen, and as the years went STOPPING THE POST-RIDKR. HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS. 63 so big and •well-ni2;li on they built many vessels for use in the ocean fisheries. Ship- building, in fact, soon grew to be an important industry along the Atlantic coast, and only six years after the settlement of New Anisterdam (New York), a " mighty ship " of eight hundred tons was built and christened the " Nieuw Netherlands ; " but it pi'oved cost so much that it g,.^ ruined the enterprising Dutchmen who built it and not for two hundred years after was so great a vessel attempted in America. Where there was so much work to be done and so few ways of mak- ing it easy there was not much time for rest or sport. People went to bed early so as to be up early in the morning ; but the men and boys when they could find the time en- joyed themselves hunting and fish- ing, while many of them grew to be hunters by occupation. Deer and wild turkeys were plenty in the woods ; wild geese and fish swarmed in lake and river ; foxes and wolves, bears and panthers were sometimes far too plenty for the farmer's comfort and .a constant war was kept up against them with trap and gun and fire. Life was rougher and harder then than now and the boys and girls were not allowed to be wasteful of time or food or clothes. The beadle and the tithing-man, the town-crier and the rattle-watch made things unpleasant for mischievous young people, and there was little of that freedom of association between parents and chil- dren that is one of the pleasantest features of the home and family life of to-day. In every village. North and South alike, the stocks I.N THIC CHIMNEY-COliNER. C4 FOES WITHOUT AN J) WITH IK and pillory, tho whipping-post and ducking-stool stood in plain \ie\v as u warning to all ott'enders, and as a result people were hardened to the sight of piuiishnient and boys and girls would even stand by and make sport while some poor law-breaker was held hand and foot in the pillory or some scolding w'oman was doused and drenched on the ducking stool. Yes, it was a hard life, judged by our standards, Avhen every one had to " rough it " in those early colonial days. But though we may not feel that the ''good old times" we read about could really have been so very enjoyable, after all, as we understand " good times," we do know that to the struggles and trials, the privations and efforts, the labors and results of two hundred and fifty years ago are due the pluck and perseverance, the strength and glory that made America " the land of the free and th'j home of the brave." EE :g?z^: "s^sm CHAPTER VIII. FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. F unploughed land and unfelled forests had been the only obstacles with which the early colonists had to contend, if wolf and bear and panther had been the only living ene- mies against Avhich they had to struggle, then would the settlement of America have been as easy a task as is to-day the .starting of new towns in Dakota or Washington, or the cultivation of the reclaimed lands of Arizona and Idaho. But every step of the path toward prosperity had almost to be fought for asainst foes without and foes within. FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIJST. G5 THE CLKAHING. The dread of Indian attack was an ever-present terror, and for this no one was to bhime save the white men themselves. From the ver}' first day of discovery the red men and the white had failed to mulerstand one another. Had Spaniard and Englishmen bnt met the Indians in the spirit of friendship, of justice and of helpfulness much blood and sorrow might have been avoided. But from the very first the In- dians learned to distrust the Europeans. The white man's greed for gold and for land made him careless of the red man's rights and more brutal even than the wild natives of the American forests ; it made him mean and base and cruel and quickly turned the wonder and reverence of the Indian to hatred and the desire for revenge. When the Frenchmen came a second time to Florida they found the pillar which they had set up to display the arms of France garlanded with flowers and made an object of Indian reverence ; when the Pilgrims huddled, half-famished, upon the Plymouth shore Samoset the Abneki walked in among them with his greeting " Welcome, Eng- lishmen ! " and found for them food and friends ; when Maqua-comen, chief of the Paw-tux-ents, helped the Marjdand colo- nists of 1634 to found a home he said: •' I love the English so well, that if they should go about to kill me, if I had so much breath as to speak I would command my people not to revenge my death, for I know that they would do no such a thing except it were through my own fault." But this early loving-kindness was shortr lived. The red and white races could not mingle peaceably when the white man wanted all that he could get and the red man loved, ON THE WATCH. 66 FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. so strong'ly, the land of liis fathers. From Maine to Fh)rida the war-whoop took the place of welcome and the deadly arrow quickly followed the gift of corn and fruit. Block-house and palisaded fort alike became the object of Indian attack and of stubboi'n defense, and the hardy troopers and "train-band men" of the '1 WOULD It.VTIlKK BK CAUniED OUT DBAD ! " SAID STUYVESAXT. colonies repaid the horrors of Indian ambush and massacre with the eqnal horrors of hurnino- wifjwams, the hunt with l)loodhounds and the relentless slaughter of chieftain, squaw and child. Added to the terror of Indian hostilities was the dread of " for- eign " invasion. With France and Spain alike claiming the right of occupation, the English colonists could never rest in peace, while, for the same reason, the Dutch settlements in the New Netherlands (a section extending from the Connecticut to the Mohawk and from Lake George to Delaware Bay) were in constant fear of attack l)v England. For the New Netherlands this came at last. When in 1064 an English fleet sailed through the Narrows and (h-oppcd FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 67 anchor before the Htt.le fort at New Amsterdam, the stout and stern Dutch governor Stuyvesant had no choice but to surrender to a superior force. " I would rather be carried out dead ! " he cried passionately when he saw his duty. But resistance was useless. New Amsterdam lowered the flag of Holland ; the English colors waved above its ramparts and the New Netherlands became " the Province of New York." Every war in Europe had its effect in America. The quarrels of the kings were fought out in the forests and on the shores of the New World and the wiser treatment of the Indians by the French- men of Canada always gave to France the terrible ad- vantage of Indian allies. The only exception to this was the steadfast friendship toward the English of the powerful Indian republic known as the Iroquois, or "Five Nations" of Central New York. Their real In- dian name was Ho-de-no-sau- nee or " people of the long- house," so called because of the great buildings in which they lived. The French cap- tain and explorer Champlain, had foolishly quarreled with them in the early days of European occupation, and these warlike tribes had never forgiven France, but remained such firm friends, first of the Dutch and then of the English occupants of New York State, that they were for years the strongest bar against the French conquest and occupation of England's colonies. CllAJIPLAlN AND TUB IKOQUOIS. 68 FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. Ill the Old World across the sea Franco and England had always quarreled, ever since they had become France and England ; in America they quarreled just the same. France said that by the rio;ht of discovery all the land between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains belonged to her ; England asserted that the land she had taken on the Atlantic seaboard extended westward to the Pacific and belonged to her. So they quarreled about the land. Then France was Roman Catholic while England was Protestant, and in those days Catholic and Protestant were bitter enemies. So thev quarreled about religion. But, most of all, France wanted to control the fisheries of the American coast ; so did England. France was determined to " monopolize " (as we say now) the fur-trade of North America ; so was England. So they quarreled about trade. And when men quai'rel with one another over land, religion and trade, it becomes a pretty serious matter in which neither side will ij-ive in until one or the other is defeated for good and all. This struggle with France really extended from the first capture of Quebec by the English on the nineteenth of July. 1629, to its final capture on the thirteenth of Septeiuber, 1759 — a period of one hundred and thirty 3^ears. The treaty of peace between France and England, signed in 1763, gave to England all the French pos- sessions in America east of the Mississippi River, and the bloody quarrel as to who owned the land came to an end. The most famous of the Indian wars of colonial times were what are known as the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philip's War in 1675. They were dreadful times of massacre and blood and held all New England in tenor. But the colonLsts finall}^ prevailed. The Pequot War was brought to a close by the terrible assault on the \illage of Sassacus, the Pequot chief, by Captain John Mason and his men ; King Philip's War w'as ended by the fearless methods of Cap- tain Benjamin Church, a famous Indian fighter, and the treacherous murder of the chieftain Metacomet, whom the white men called '■ King Philip." 1 i FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 71 The dates to be especially remembered in the wars with France are the burning of Schenectady in the province of New York by the French and Indians in 1690, the capture of Port Royal in Nova Scotia by the English in 1710, the capture of the great fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island in 1745, General Braddock's de- feat by the French and Indians on July 9, 1755, the surrender of Fort William Henry to the French on August 9, 1758, the capture of Fort Duquesne by the English on November 25, 1758, and the decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 in which both the rival generals, Montcalm the Frenchman and Wolfe the English- man, were killed and the victory for England closed the hundred years of war. Distressing to the colonists as must have been these foes without, even more disheartening must have been the foes within. For troubles in the home are the hardest of all to bear. And almost from the first days of settlement, such troubles had to be faced. As we have seen, all sorts of people came over the sea to America, expecting to be at once successful or rich or at the head of affairs; disappointed ambition or unsuccessful endeavors made them cross and jealous and angry with those who fared better than themselves and those who were the most discontented, because of their own shortcomings, were always ready to stir up trouble. Then there were the questions of ownership and the disputes between colonies as to how far their limits of possession reached ; and, quite as hotly contested as any, were the religious quarrels in which the most earnest and most conscientious were also the most bigoted and vin- dictive, answering questions with persecution and arguments with banishment. Thus was Roger Williams, who differed with the min- isters of Boston, driven out in 1G35, but, undismayed, settled in the Rhode Island wilderness and founded the city of Providence ; thus was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the earliest of women reformers, also driven out from Boston to meet her death from Indian arrows in the dreadful New York massacre of 1643. Thus were over-zealous 72 FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. Quiikors whipped "at the cart's tail" by the Dutch rulers of New Amstenlain and hanged on Boston Conunon by the Puritan rulers of Massachusetts Bay; from this cause the "Papists" as the Roman Catholics were called, were imprisoned in New York ; the Baptists were mobbed in Virginia ; Puritans and Papists came to open Avarfare in Maryland, and "Dissenters" and " Churrhnien " broke into fierce conflict in the Carolinas. From all this yon can see that people in those old days were not as high-minded, as open-hearted, as liberal or as " kindly-aifectioned one to another" — as the Bible has it — as are people to-day. Educa- tion, freedom and xmion have made us brothers at last. And, when people are bigoted and narrow- minded, they are apt to be superstitious and cruel. Our ancestors of two centuries ago were full of the oddest imaginations as to good and bad luck ; their fathers had been so before them. They especially feared the influence of witches. If anything went wrong an evil spirit, they said, had " bewitched " things and at once they hunted about, not to see why things went wrong, but what witch had made them ""o wrono"' Now so many things went Avrong in the early colonial days, that the poor settlers begun to think the witches had followed them across the sea, and when one or two of their ministers — in whom they had perfect confidence — said that this was so, of course everybody believed it and the hunt for the It was a dreadful time. In almost all the colonies innocent people were persecuted or put to death luuler the suppo.si- tion that they were w^itches and had worked their evil " spells " upon other people, or iipon cattle, crops and homes. But, harshest of all. was the time in New Eno-land when, from KiSS to 1092, witches l)eo;an. FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN. the famous " Salem witchcraft " persecution terrified all the peo- ple and led to some dreadful tragedies. Twenty persons were put to death as " witches " in Salem Ijefore the end came, and the people slowly recovered from what was a disease of the mind almost as universal as was " the grip " in 1890. And besides all these troubles of mind smd body that faced our forefathers, were others equally hard to bear. Pirates infested the coast, robbing and killing, making travel by sea unsafe and business ventures risky, while — so it was asserted — men of wenlth and prominence among the colonists were partners in joiracy with such freebooters as Bonnet and Worley in the Carolinas, Teach or ''Blackbeard " in Philadel- phia and Captain Kidd in New York. Debts and taxes oppressed the colo- nists as the cost of Indian wars and the exactions of the home government ; while, as cruel as anything in the eyes of a people who were learning to live alone in a great land, the tyrannical measures of their English rulers, who deprived them of the i-ights already granted them by charter and sought to make them simply money-getters for England, wrought them to the highest pitch of indignation and set them to thinking seriously as to some means of relief. But hard knocks and rough ways, often, we say, '■'■ make a man " of the young fellow who has to undergo them. And so it proved with the thirteen colonies of England in North America. The struo;";le with foes without and foes within made them at last strong, determined, self-reliant and self-helpful. Bigotry and per- secution, jealousy and selfishness in time gave way to the more neighborly feelings that the necessity for mutual jn'otection and A KIGIIT WITH riHATES. 74 WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY. the growth of inutiml desires create, the wisdom of a union of in- terests became more apparent and year by year the colonies came nearer and nearer togetlier in hopes, in aspiration and in action. T^ CHAPTER IX. WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY. T is the restless people who have pushed the world along. If every one had been satisfied with his lot or had been willing to put up with things as they were no progress would have been possible. Some one must "start things." And, to do this, he who tries to " start things " must be dissatisfied with his surroun(hngs or his prospects ; he must be indignant over oppression or injustice or indifference (for not to take care of people is sometimes fully as bad as to bully and distress them) ; he must be ambitious to advance himself or his fellow men and determined to better things if he possibly can. There were numbers of such people who came over to America ; there were still more born and brought up here amid all the influences toward liberty of thought and action that a new land creates. They and their fathers had left a world where titles were esteemed of more worth than character and where there was. as yet, too little belief in the truth that an English poet of our day has put into verse : " Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets. And simple faith than Norman blood." WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY. 75 y^. NEW YORK IN 1690. the land they had left b-ehind. When boys get away from home and men from the restraints of government they are very apt to want to strike out for themselves and they object more than ever to any attempt of the far-away '•powers that be" to tell them what they must do amid their new surroundings or how they must do it. So, at an early day, men in America began to think about freedom and to plan for a nobler living than was possible in For, when active, earnest people are really thrown upon their own resources they are bound to think and act for themselves. One of the first of such acts was the Virginia Charter of 1618 — " the beginning of free government in America." This charter was a paper secured by the Virginia colonists giving them the privi- lege of dividing the lands they had come to settle into farms which each man could own and work for himself. It also gave them a voice in making their own laws and permitted them to say who should speak for, or represent them in the " General Assembly " of the colon3^ To us who have never known anything different this does not seem like a great conces- sion : but it was in those days, when no man was really free. And King James, like the crabbed old tyrant he was, was very angry at what he called the presumption of the people. So in 1624, with the help and at the sug- gestion of some of his very wise but very stupid advisers, he took away all these rights and made the colony a kingly " province." But the ideas of personal liberty that the wise framers of the Virginia Charter had put into that early paper lived and became, in later years, the basis for the Constitution and the Government of the United States of America. OXE OF KIXG JAMKS ADVISERS. 76 WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY. The next step toward liberty was a remarkable paper or " com- pact " drawn up and signed in the cabin of the Mayliower by the Plymouth colonists who, because of their wanderings, have been called •• tlie Pilgrims." We call it remarkable because it was a bold thing to do in those days when the people had so little to say about their own governing. As the httle vessel lay tossing off Cape Cod on the eleventh of IN THE CAJJIN OF THE MAYFLOWER. November, 1G20, the forty-one men who represented the different families united in the enterprise of colonization, set their signatures to the following compact which is said to have been " the first in- strument of civil o-overnment e\'er subscribed to as the act of the WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY. 11 whole people." Here it is for you to study out in all its curious old-time wording, spelling and capitals : " In y^ Name of God, Avien. We whose names are underwriten, the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by y® Grace of God, of Great Britaine, France & Ireland King, Defender of y^ Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for y" Glorie of God, and ad- vancemente of y" Christian Faith and Honour of our King and coun- trie, a Voyage to plant y'' first Colonic in y" Northerne part of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in y'' Pres- ence of God, and of one another, Covenant & Combine ourselves togeather into a Civill body Politick, for our better Ordering & Preservation & Furtherance of y'' ends aforesaid ; and by Vertue hearof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equall lawes, ordinances. Acts, Constitutions & Offices, from Time to Time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for y" generall good of y^ Colonic, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnes whereof we have hereunder subscribed our Names at Cap. Codd y'' 11 of November, in y** year of y" Raigne of our Soveraigne Lord King James, of England, France & Ireland y^ eighteenth, and of Scotland y^ fiftie fourth, ano : Dom. 1(320." Nineteen years later — on the fourteenth of January, 1639 — the "freemen" of the three river towns of Connecticut (Windsor, Hart- ford and Wethersfield) met at Hartford and drew up what is said to be the first written constitution in the world. This paper did not recognize the right of any king or parliament to direct the actions of the people of Connecticut, but held all persons who were allowed a share in the affairs of the colony to be freemen. Under the arti- cles of this constitution the people of Connecticut lived for nearly two hundred years. The forms of government gradually adopted by the several col- onies taught men to stand alone and think for themselves. In Virginia, as we have seen, it was a " General Assembly," or " House 78 WOJiKIXa TOWARD LIBERTY of Burgesses," as it was more frequently called, elected by tlu; people. In New England it was what is known as a "township" government in which the people of the various towns taxed and governed themselves upon a basis settled once a year by the grown men of the colonies in a coming together called the '' town-meeting." The town-meeting also elected to office the men who were to manage public affairs during the year. In South Carolina a popnlar election in the several " parishes "' or church divisions of the colony selected the minister and ves- trymen of the church and the representatives to the colonial assembly. In Mar3'land and Delaware the people of the diffei'cnt sections, or "hundreds" as they were called — (from the old Roman word for a brotherhood, curia, whence came century, hundred) assembled in " hundred-meetino-s," enacted bv-laws, levied taxes, appointed committees and helped to govern themselves. In Pennsylvaiaia the officers of each local division or "county" were elected by the people. In New York the old system of village assemblies estab- lished by the early Dutch settlers was con- tinued by their English successors ; this, by direct vote of the people in a sort of town- meeting, selected the governing body of the town for the coming year. So, you see, the colonist ■; almost from the start learned to govern themselves and were taught the lessGn of freedom. But. above the people, as the direct representative of the English king, stood the Koyal Govei'nor. He was generally a favorite or " pet " of the king ; he was as a rule good for nothing as a man and worse as a governor ; and he was sent over to keep the people " u]i to the mark" in thi' service of a king three thousand miles away. The king and his OXK 01" Tin; vir.i.Ar.ERS. A LESSOR l.\ I.IBEETY. ■ They began to think and talk and act." WOEKING TOWARD LIBERTY. 81 governor were certain to have ideas and methods altogether differ- ent from those held by the people, who knew their own needs and were not slow to speak up for them. The Royal Governor was, in the opinion of the colonists, forever interfering in matters which he could not understand and in which they were deeply interested. There was, therefore, a. continual quarrel going on between the gov- ernor appointed by the king and the people he had been sent over the sea to govern. This quarrel dated from the early years of colonization, and some- times led to popular uprisings, to blows and Ijlood. When royal commissioners were dispatched to Virginia in 1024 to take away the liberties granted by the "charter," the "Bui-gesses" boldly withstood them, and, when the commissioners bribed the clerk of the Burgesses to give up the records, the tempted clerk was put into the pillory by his associates and had his ear cut off. In 1638, and again in 1645, William Clayborne in Maryland headed an armed protest against Governor Calvert and Lord Baltimore ; in 1676 the plucky Vir- ginia colonist, Nathaniel Bacon, stood out boldly against the obstinate and tyrannical Governor Berkeley, and, in what is known as " Bacon's Rebellion," forced the governor to terms, but died before victory was fully attained, the first popular leader in America. In North Carolina, in 1678, John Culpepper headed a rising against the high-handed rep- resentative of the absent Royal Governor, who denied the people's "free right of election;" in 1688 the enraged colonists of the Caro- linas rose against their governor, Seth Sothel, took aAvay his author- ity and banished him for a year. In 1G87 and 1689 the colonists in Massachusetts and New York broke into open revolt against the tyranny of the king's representatives, imprisoning Governor Andros KlXti JAMKS II. 82 WOllKING TOWAIil) LIBERTY. ill Miissiicliusetts and frigliti'iiiiig away the ]ieutenant- HER SLY CUP Ol' lliA. come! " cried Patrick Henry in Virginia in that famous speech which every American boy, and, 1 hope, every American girl knows by heart. The war was inevitable. It had come at last. THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM. 93 CHAPTER XI. THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM. EBELLION is the open or armed resistance to lawful au- thority. When that resistance is successful it is Revolu- tion. You see, now, why we call our war for independence the American Revolution. It was a successful rebellion against English authority, and completely changed — or " revolutionized" — tlie government of the people of America. There were many dark and bitter daj's before the rebellion became a revolution, but the story of the struggle is full of interest. You have already seen how the trouble grew, as, passing from objection to protest and from protest to insubordination, it developed at last into open defiance, resistance and war. When Samuel Adams of Boston (the " prophet of independence " as he has been called) declared in the Old South Cliurch •' this meeting can do nothing more to save the country " and cheered on the make-believe In- dians to the " Boston Tea Party," the American Revolution began. From Maine to Georgia people began to talk of war, and when the English Par- liament rejected the proposals of the Continental Congress of 1774, the spirit of rebellion was ready to burst into a flame. It takes ]jut a spark to set the tinder ablaze, and the spark came at last. The cabinet of King George declared as " traitors and rebels " all who were disloyal to the king; war-ships and soldiers were dispatched to Boston which was declared to bo '' the hot bed of rebellion;" SA.MUEL ADAMS. yj THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM. and the Royal Governor, General Gage, was ordered to seize or destroy all munitions of war held by the colonists and to tire upon the people should he deem it necessary. Acting under these orders General Gage seized the arms and powder stored in the old powder house on Quarry Hill (in the pres- ent city of Somerville) three miles • -' ^ /; from Boston and took secret meas- ures to seize the stores at Salem and at Concord. Now as these stores and munitions of war were the property of the ])rovince of Massachusetts it was held that the king had no right to take them and after the seizure at Somer- \ ille the provincial congress — as the •• rebel " legislature of the province called itself — determined to save these stores for its own need. A mob of indignant patriots frightened away the small force sent to Salem and .some one* told the Americans of the secret designs upon the stores at Concord and the two signal lanterns hung in the belfry of the Old North Church of Boston gave warning of the plans of the British. Then it was that Paul Revere made his famous night ride from Boston to Concord to arouse the farmers against the British designs. Of course you all know Mr. Longfellow's splendid poem '• Paul Revere's Ride," telling how this brave " scout of liberty " spread the news. Just read it again, right here, to refresh your memory and then you wall understand how excited the people were and how the " minute men " from all the country- round caught up their PAUI. KICVKIUCS lilDI', * It is tiuiil that Ihis " some one " was no less a person than Mrs. Ga^e, the wife of tlie Royal (iovernor. She was an American woman and said to be " friendly to liberty." THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREED 031. 95 arms and hurried to the highway that led from Boston to Concord. These "minute men" were colonial militia men pledged to be in readiness for any call to arms, and prepared to march when the warning came — "at a minute's notice." They came ; and on Lex- ington Common and by the North Bridge at Concord they struck the first blow for liberty. " Vou know the rest. In the l)Ook.s you have read How the Britisli Regulars tired and tied; How the farmers gave them ball for ball From behind each fence and farm-yard wall, Chasing the red-coats down the lane, Then crossing the fields to emerge again Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to lire and load." Eight hundred " red-coats," as the Britisli soldiers were called, marched from Boston on the eighteenth of Api'il, 1775. When they reached Lexington Common half an hour before sunrise on the nineteenth of April between sixty and seventy minute men were drawn up " just north of the meeting-house " to resist their advance. " Disperse, ye villains ! ye rebels, disperse ! lay down your arms ! Wh}' don't you lay down your arms and disperse?" called out Major Pitcairn, the leader of the British advance. The minute men of Lexington were sixty against eight hundred. But they were not there to disperse. " Too few to resist, too brave to fly," as Mr. Bancroft says of them, they simply stood their ground. "Fire!" shouted Pitcairn, and under the deadlv discharo-e of British muskets seven of the "rebels" fell dead and nine were wounded. Then the British marched on to Concord. But their leader Colonel Smith saw that the country was roused and that he should have to fight his way back. He sent at once to 96 THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM. Boston for reinforcements and nearly two tliirds of all the " red- coats " in the town were hurried off to the help of their comrades. Meanwhile these comrades had marched on to Concord. There they found but few of the " stores" they had been sent to destroy. Two cannons were spiked in the tavern yard ; sixty barrels of Hour were broken in pieces; five hundred pounds of ball were thrown into the mill pond ; the liberty pole was cut down and some private houses were broken into. That was all. A hundred or more sol- diers were sent to guard the North Bridge across the Concord. River and. while there, tlie minute men of Acton, led on by the school- master, marched down the hill to the bridge. The British soldiers, seeing the colonists coming on, be- gan to tear uj) the planks of the bridge ; the Americans broke into a run ; the British fired and the schoolmaster fell dead. Then Major Buttrick of Concord cried out, "Fii'e, fellow soldiers!" and "Fire, fire, fire ! " echoed his men. They fired ; two of the British fell ; the rest turning ran toward the main body of the " invaders " and the minute men held the bridge. That was the battle of Concord ! For the first time the long-suffer- ing American colonists had turned upon their tormentors and there, bj the flowing Concord River, as Mr. Emerson says, they TIIK BKI1)(;K at CON'COUK. I''ired the shot litanl roiiiKl tlic world." Colonel Smith and his eight hundi'ed red-coats turned toward home. From every point the minute men hurried to the highway ?> a THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREED 031. 99 " Yankee Doodle " in changed their tune," II- KAINEU lUCUHLS. to " chase them back." At Lexington, nearly worn, out, they met Lord Percy's reinforcement, twelve hundred strong. He and his men had marched from Boston to the tune of contempt of the colonists. But they soon '• and when they turned for home the march back to Boston was but a sorry race for life. The whole country round was now fully roused. Minute men came from every direction. Lin- ing the highway they fired " from fence and farm-yard wall," while the very clouds, so the bewildered British declared, " seemed to rain I'ebels." Back hurried the rod- coats defeated, dispirited, beset. Like bull-dogs the aroused farmers with flint-lock musket and old " king's arm " followed up tlie re- treat, barking and biting to the last, imtil, just after sunset, the straggling red-coats escaped across Charlestown Neck and were safe beneath the protecting batteries of Boston town. It had been a dreadful day for them. Two hundred and seventy- three men were either killed, wounded or missing ; of the Ameri- cans eighty-eight had been killed or wounded. But, greater than the loss in men had been the fatal mistake of the troops of the king. The war had come at last ; they were the aggressors ; they, too, had been the chief sufferers. All hope of avoiding a bloody quar- rel was now past. The news of the " Battle of Lexington," as it has ever since been called, spread like a prairie fire. From all New England militia and minute men hastened to the aid of their countrymen. The people rose in war, and before the first of May, 1775, the king's soldiers were securely shut up in Boston by an army of nearly twenty thousaii,d " rebels." 100 THE A MERIVAN RE \ 'OL IT ION. The first blow for liberty had been a decisive one. " We determine to die or be free," the Massachusetts Congress wrote, after the day of Lexington, to the people of England. And when swift ridei-s carried the news of the fight north, west and south, the patriot col- onists from the Green Mountains to the Carolina rivers and the Kentucky borders sprang to arms and echoed the stern words of Massachusetts : '• We determine to die t)r be free." CHAPTER XII. THK AMERICAN REVOLUTIOX. HE colonists could now take no backward step. And there seemed to be no desire to. They were in earnest and they acted as if they were. The news of the fight at Concord and Lexington roused the patriots in other parts of the land. People began to talk of separation from England ; they began to plan for independence. And yet the leaders mo\ed cautiously. They did not know their own strength ; they only knew that the people seemed determined not to be bullied by England. So they summoned another Congress to determine on peace or war. It would be an unequal contest. On one side was England with all the power and all the advantage of a trained and unconquered army ; on the other Avas a handfid of feeble settlements, without army, money, standing or preparation for war, strung along an un- defended stretch of broken coast line, the deep sea to the east and to the Avest only the trackless forests and hordes of hostile Indians. But men will dare to do much in defense of their ricrhts. Lex- ington strengthened their arm. Following fast upon the battle of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. lUl Lexington came the bold move by which on the tentli of May, 1775, Ethan Allen and his one hundred Green Mountain Boys captured the British post of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, demand- infr the surrender of the fortress " in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress ; " and from that day the war fever grew greatly. Around the beleaguered British in Boston lay the patriot army, really without a leader, but determined to hold the regulars at bay or drive them into the sea. Reinforce- ments came to the army of the king and now, twelve thousand strong, its otiicers and sympathizers (called '• tories ") de- clared that the rebels were but a pack of blusterers and would not fight. Would they not ? This question was speedily answered. On the morning of the seventeenth of June, 1775, the British s-enerals finding that the " Yankee Doodles " w^ere fortifying one of the Charlestown hills, sent t^ree thousand red-coats across the Mystic with orders to drive off the rebels. They did, but at what a cost. Three times they charged up the hill to where Colonel Prescott and his thousand men awaited the attack. Twice were they sent reeling down the slope, baffled b}' the deadly fire of the Americans. With the third volley the ammunition of the Americans gave out and the British troops finally carried the hill after a stubborn hand-to-hand fight. The Battle of Bunker Hill was won. But ten lumdi^d and fifty-four in killed and wounded was the cost to the British of that doubtful victory, and it proved to all the world that the Americans would fight. From that day the British troops never cared to storm a " rebel " earthwork. Ul'i THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. All that the Americans now needed was a leader. And he was speedily forthcoming. The North had opened the Revolution ; the South should give it a leader. On the very day of the Battle of Bunker Hill — the seventeenth of June. 1775 — the Second Conti- llIU l;i;iiELS AHIi I'OKTII-VIXG liLXKEK UILL. nental Congress, in session at Philadelphia, voted to raise and equip an army of twenty thousand men, and elected Colonel George Washington of Virginia as " generalissimo " or commander-in-chief. In all the land no better choice could have been found. George Wasliington had been trained from early youtli to leadership and direction. He was as strong of character as he was noble of soul ; THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 103 he was patient, persistent, fair-minded, generous and brave ; his streno-th of will Avas inspiring, his power of self-control remarkable, and he was absolutely truthful. He was a natural leader. As a boy he was captain of the company of small Virginians he drilled and marshaled. At sixteen he was a surveyor and " roughed it " in the Indian country ; at twenty he was a major in the king's ser- vice ; at twenty-five he was commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces. It was he who fired the first shot in the French wars of 1754, led the attack at Great Meadows, and by his valor, alone, saved the terrible defeat of the English general Braddock from be- coming a massacre. He kneAV the weakness as well as the strength, the endurance as well as the independence of the colonial soldier, and no man was better suited to lead the troops of revolution to victory, to guide them in skillful retreat or to save them from the disgrace of surrender. Other generals in the Revolutionary army were as brave, others as self-sacrificing, others as skillful as he, but not one combined all the excellencies that go toward making a great soldier except George Washington. His record as a leader alike in victory and defeat, was such that students of the art of war accord to General Washington the rank of a " great commander." On the third of July, 1775, Washington assumed command of the American army drawn up to receive him on tlie Commons of Cam- bridge, and his headquarters were in the old Craigie House, still standing, and equally cherished by all Americans as the military home of Washington the soldier, and the peaceful home of Long- fellow the poet. He declined to receive any pay for his services, went at once to work to organize his army of fourteen thousand un- disciplined militia men and kept General Gage and his red-coats so tightly locked up in Boston town, that they were at last forced to run away from the city by sea. This they did on the seventeenth of March, 1776. Washington and the victoiious Continental troops marched into the city and Boston's long slavery was over. On the first of January, 1776, the new flag of the Revolution was 104 THE AMERICAN' REVOLUTION. r.iised ovor the American camp on Prospect Hill ; and on the fourth t)f July, 1770, the Continental Congress assembled in Independence Ihdl in the city of Philadelphia declared the thirteen United Col- onies to be " free and independent States'" — that they were " ab- solved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all politi- cal coiniection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved." This was the immortal " Declaration of Independence." and ever since that memorable act the fourth of July has been celebrated as the birthday of the United States of America. But to declare a thing is not always to do it. The Declaration was but the first step toward independence. Much was to be at- tempted, much suffered, much lost and won before the United States were really free and independent. For nearly seven A^ears, from the nineteenth of April, 1775, to the nineteenth of October, 1781 — from the first blood at Lexington to the last blood at Yorktown — did the unequal conflict rage before the King of England, his coun- cilors and his people wo;dd acknowledge themselves beaten by the spirit of liberty that had grown up across the sea. Then at last they reluctantly gave in. A treaty of peace with the new " nation " was signed at Paris on the third of September, 178-3, and on the twenty-fifth of November following, the British soldiers evacuated the city of New York and Liberty triumphed. It had been a stubborn fight between determined men. When once the war was really entered upon and the evacuation of Boston showed the King of England and his ad\isers that it was to be fought in earnest, the British leaders sought by every means to secure success. They sent large armies to America, swelling their ranks by hiring for money thousands of European troops called Hessians ; they tried in every way to frighten and overawe the steadfast " rebels," and 2:ave honors and rcAvard to those Americans who remained loyal to the king and who were called " tories." They .sought to occupy the chief centers of popidation North and THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 105 Soutli and to achieve the coiique.st o£ the country from these points. But all to no purpose. With a less number of troops, poorly armed, poorly fed and scantily clothed, and -with all the chances of war GENEHAI. GEOKGE WASHINGTON. against him. General Washington so planned and fought that, inch by inch, he won the disputed territory from the over-confident red-coats, and brought victory at last to the Continental forces. IOC) THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. After its beginning :it Boston, the Revolutionary War may be di- viiled into three periods of fighting : the struggle for the Hudson, the struggle for the Delaware and the struggle for the AVnsliing- Carolinas. Defeated at the Battle of Long Island, ton retreated through New Jersey and won the battle of Trenton ; defeated at Germantown he retreated into the gloom of that sorry winter of Valley Forge, coming out in the spring to fight and win the Battle of Monmouth. He drove the British from Boston; he forced them from Philadelphia ; his planning relieved Charleston and the Carolinas, and finally brought about the British surrender at Yorktown. It was Washington's persistent refusal to stay beaten but to come up again and again to what seemed a useless fight that drew to his side the gallant young French- man the Marquis de Lafayette, and won for the new United States the alliance and aid of France. On the thirteenth of January, 1778, a treaty of alliance with France was signed, and from that date the success of the revolt was never doubtful. The dark days of the war were the defeats at Quebec, where the gallant Montgomery was slain while storming the British citadel ; at Long Island and White Plains, where the raw troops of Washington were no match for the British regu- lars; at Brandywine and Germantown which lost Philadelphia to the Americans ; and at Charleston and Camden which for a time " wiped out " the south- ern army of the patriots. Darker still were the dreary days at Valley Forge when all seemed lost indeed; the hateful treason of Benedict Arnold, one of Washington's trusted generals, and the days, when by the sel- fish combination of enemies in the army and in the Congress (in 'COXTIXKNTAI,. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 107 what is known as "the Conway Cabal"), General Washington was very nearly forced from his position as commander of the American army. But the bright days are what we most thankfully remember ; they were what gave strength to American endeavor and made for the cause of liberty friends across the sea. As Lexington and Con- cord and Bunker Hill are names to be forever cherished so, too, are the names of Trenton Avhere through icy perils the patriots pushed on to victory ; of Princeton which saved New Jersey ; of Saratoga whicli saw the surrender of the j^ompous and boast- ful British general Burgoyne who had declared that with ten thousand men he would " promenade through America ; " of Stony Point where, borne on the shoulders of his men, the wounded leader, dear to all Americans as "Mad Anthony Wayne," charged into the British fort and won it at the point of the bayonet ; of Fort Sullivan in Charleston Har- boj" where the brave General Moultrie " held the fort," and Sergeant Jasper, in the face of the enemy, rescued the fallen flag and hoisted it again over the battered ramparts ; and, last of all, of Yorktown where on the nineteenth of October, 1781, Cornwallis and the British army surrendered as prisoners of war to Washington the American and the Frenchman Rochambeau. And in this record of the fight for libert}- we must not forget the struggle on the sea. The American colonies had no navy, but they had many plucky sailors and men wlio loved salt water. Early in the struggle privateers were sent out — that is, small vessels fitted out by private persons but authorized by the Congress to anno\- and capture British ships and supplies. Soon the privateers were followed by men-of-war and the names of Captains Biddle and Manly, Mugford and Read, Weeks and Conyngham and Whipple are worthy to stand in memory beside the heroes of Tjcxington and ANTHONY WAYNE. 108 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Bunker Hill, ol Stony Point and Valley Forgo. But, cliiof of all the Revolutionary sea-figlitors, is John Paul Jones, the eaptain of the Bonhoiniiie liichard and conqueror of the British mau-of-war Serapis. Lashed together, the two ships waged a fearful struggle for hours; when the British eaptain thought the "Yankee pirate" was conquered he shouted across to him : " The Richard ahoy ! Have you struck your colors ? " and back came the valiant answer of the plucky " Yankee pirate," '' I have not yet begun to fight." Then he really did begin and did not stop luitil the Serapis struck her colors. The American Revolution was a stubborn and gallant fight against tyranny ; it was the answer of those who would be free men to those who sought to keep them slaves. From it we may all, young and old alike, learn why we should persevere if we feel that we are right even when the times seem darkest and things are going wrong ; and, more than all, by it we are taught that whatever is worth having is worth striving for. Liberty could not have come to America without the struggle and blood of our forefathers ; and their endeavors and their sacrifices preached the noblest of sermons and showed to a watching world the real worth of lihertv. JOUX PALL JONES. THE MEN OF THE liE VOLUTION. 1U9 CHAPTER XIII. THE MEN OF THE KEVOLUTIOX. HEN you Avatcli a base-ball game what is it that interests you most through it all — the players or the result of their play ? Do you not soon forget this or that boy in whose good work you place so much confidence and think more of the score that is being made or wonder whether the great playing of your favorite nine is really going to give them the vic- tory ? It is so in life. Acts are more than actors ; principles are more then men. What a city, a State or a nation is striving for is of more importance than the leaders in the struggle or the great men whose names we reverence and applaud. And yet we are all hero-worshipers and love to linger over the names and deeds of those who have contrib- uted to the success of great principles, the results of noble deeds. For this reason it is well for us, at this point, to look over the years of struggle that led the thirteen English Colonies of North America " through night to light " and laid the foundation of the United States of America. They Avere of three classes : the agitators, the organ- izers, the fighters. The agitators, or those who pre- pared the minds of the people for the struggle, began their work years and years before Lexington or the Declaration of Independence were thought of. These were the men who saw that kingly power and the peo- ple's will would not work together and who resisted, by word or dcied, the attempts of king or governor to cut away the rights of the FRFXCH'S STATUE Olj' THK JIINUTE M.lis". 110 THE MEX OF THE REVOLUTIOX. people. Such men were Nathaniel Bacon, and John Culpepper and Jaeoh Leislcr. wiiose "rebellions" have been referred to in earlier chapters ; such, too. were John Wise, the minister of Ipswich in Massachusetts who, a hundred years before the Revolution, Ijoldly preached against '■ taxation without representation " ; and Peter Zenger, the New York printer, who in his newspaper, in 1733, boldly stood ont against king and governor ; and Andrew Hamilton, the Philadelphia lawyer who, defending Zenger, spoke so eloquently for what we now call " the liberty of the press," that the printer was acquitted and the o-overnor dared not again accuse him. These are but a few among the " fore- runners of freedom " wliose names should be held in remembrance ; to them, and to others like them who left their mark upon our colonial history, Avas due much of that manly and outspoken desire to be self- supporting that led to the later struggle for independence — a desire founded upon that noble utterance which is believed to have been made by Dr. Benjamin Frank- lin : '• Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Of this remarkable man Americans have ever been ])roud. And well they may be. Benjamin Franklin was a poor Boston boy, born in 1706, who educated himself, learned the printer's trade and. when seventeen years old, w^ent to Philadelphia where he gradually rose to posi- tion, influence and fame. An editor, an author, a ])hilosopher, an inventor, a statesman and a ])atriot, Franklin made the title of " an American " knowi\ and honored in Europe, and, by his wisdom, his eloquence and his influence, stood foremost among those great men of the Revolution to whom we give the name of the organ- m;. lir.NjA.Mix franklin. THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION. Ill izers. Largely through his exertions was the king of Enghnid brought to repeal the hiited " Stamp Act ; " he was one of the com- mittee to draft the Declaration of Independence ; he Avas sent as Ambassador to France and gained the French aid that helped the Revolution to final success ; he was one of the makers of the treaty of peace with England and one of the framers of the Constitution of the United States. The young '•'■ tramp-printer," wdio in 1723 entered Philadelphia, poor, friendless, hungry and hopeful, died in that city in 1790 at the age of eiglity-four, its most honored citizen and the one American who, to-day, shares in all the world the glory and renown of Washington. Washington and Franklin have, indeed, been the two names that from the days of Revolution, have been associated as the greatest leaders in that historic struggle. But even Franklin's fame halts far beneath that of George Washington. In the minds of men as well as of boys the successful fighter is a much greater hero than the agitator or the organizer. We like to see a man who never knows when he is whipped ; who has what we call " grit ; " who accepts defeat without a murmur, but rather as a spur to new effort. But Washington had far more than this. He was as strong of character as he w\as of arm ; as noble of soul as he was firm of purpose. His abilities as a soldier were equalled by his qualities as a statesman ; and from the day when, beneath the historic elm on Cambridge Common, he took command of the Continental army to the day when he rode into New York at the heels of the last departs ing British regiment, he never faltered in his fidelity to the cause of freedom, or lost faith in its final and complete success. But though the names of Washington and Franklin lead all others in the story of the Men of the Revolution there are those linked with them to whom equal honor and equal praise are due. On this roll we read the name of James Otis, who made the first eloquent appeal for liberty and was branded by the king's men as " the great incendiary of New England ; " Samuel Adams — called " the last of 112 THE MEN OF THE llEVOLLTION. the Puritans," — wlio, poor l)ut iiicornij)til)lc', '-aimed stcadilv at the good of Iiis country and tlie best iuterests of iiiaukiud " and did more than any one else to " put the revolution in motion ; " Patrick Henry, the " man of the people," whose fiery elocjuenee and daunt- less courage roused Virginia to stand side by side with Massachusetts ,I()1IX AIlAMS ritol'MICSYINc; 1 i!i; i,ijii:ii >i ,-, I, in the struggle for freedom : " I know not what course others may take," he cried, "but as for me. give me liberty or give me death;" John Adams, wise, far-seeing, statesmanlike, the inspirer of our "Fourth of July" celebrations, who, years before the Revolution, * " It will be celebrated by siieoeeding gcncratioos," snid Jolni Ad:uii«, " from nnc end of (be continent to the other, ;i5 the great anniver-»ary festival." THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION. \Vi believed in the great mission of America and in the early days of the struggle, replied to a friend who warned him against brav- ing the power of England : " swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country is my unalterable determination ; " John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, proscribed as a traitor by George the Third — dignified, impartial, quick in action, determined in purpose, who urged the people of Boston, '•' Not only pray, but act ; if necessar}^ fight and even die for the prosperity of our Jerusalem," and who, when he put his bold signature to the Declaration of Independence, said, laughingly : " There ; John Bull can read my name without spectacles. Now let him douljle the price on my head, for this is my defiance ; " Christopher Gadsden, the boldest in denouncing British oppression, the first to speak for American independence, "whose unselfish love of country," sa^-s Mr. Bancroft, " was a constant encouragement to his countrymen never to yield ; " Thomas Jefferson, the greatest Democrat, the sworn foe to aristocracy and kingly power, the author of the Dec- laration of Independence, and through that immoi-tal paper, " the beginner of a new age of the world;" John Jay, a statesman and a patriot of elevated motives, and the purest character who, before the struggle begun, took a bold stand for America's rights and w^rote in his address to tlie British people : " Know, then, that we consider ourselves, and do insist that we are and ought to be, as free as our fellow-subjects in Great Britain and that no power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent;" Roger Sherman, a farmer and a shoemaker, a jurist and a statesman, signer of the Declaration and " one of the great men of his time," who set the bells of New Haven a-ringing as he declared that '' the parliament of Great Britain can rightfully make laws for America in no case whatever;" Robert Morris, the "moneyed man" and financier of the Revolution, who, in 1777, declared that "Washington was " the greatest man on earth," and whft. throufrh faith in Washins-ton's abilitv as Avell as in the cause 114 THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION. of freedoiii, when hope was lowest and Aniericaii credit was dead, pledged his own fortune and, on the promise of his own name, borrowed the money to carry on the war; Richard Henry Lee, who, quickly rei)enting his application for the post of collector under the hated Stamp Act, became instead that Act's most vehe- ment foeman, introduced into the Continental Congress the first reso- lution looking toward independence, and wrote in the address to the British people : " On the sword, tlierefore, we are compelled to rely for protection. Of this at least we are assured, that our struggle will be glorious, our suc- cess certain ; since even in death we shall find that freedom which in life you forbid us to enjoy ; " Henry Laurens, the incorruptible, in whose Charleston office boys were trained to habits of honesty, integrity and industry in l:)usiness, and who, kept a strict prisoner in the Tower of London, resisted all attempts of the British govern- ment to shake his fortitude or purchase his patriotism ; and, not to extend the list. Peyton Ran- dolph, who, though attorney-general for the king, when he '' saw the rif!;ht," resio-ned his office and its rewards and stood out boldlv for justice, for resistance and for independence. These were among the leaders in council and congress. And in the field were others equally worthy remembrance — Joseph War- ren, "who fell at Bunker Hill," and who, though president of the Provincial Cont^ress of j\Iassachusetts. refused the command of its arm}' of minute men and continentals at that famous battle, pre- IllF. I.IliEUTY HULL. (^Vu(t Ui Indtpi'iuhnce Uall, r/iiluihtj>hiu.J IN MAKION S CAMP. •• Frauds Marion called by the baffled British the ' Sinmj, Fox." THE MEN OF TUB REVOLUTIOM. 117 ferring to serve as a volunteer and saying to one who warned him to be cautious : " I know that I may fall, but where is the man who does not tliink it glorious and delightful to die for his country ? " Richard Montgomery, the intrepid leader of a forlorn hope, but for whose death in the very front of his assaulting line, the " rebel de- feat " at Quebec might have proved an important victory ; Nathan Hale, the " martyr," j'oung. brilliant, enthusiastic, who, condemned to die as a spy by his British captors, only regretted that he had but one life to lose for his country ; Alexander Hamilton, the boy captain, the friend aird aide-de-camp of Washington, the fiery young ad\oeate of liberty, who replied to the taunt of the tories that the colonists would soon quarrel and disagree : "• I please myself with the flattering prospect that they will, ere long, unite in one indis- soluble chain ; " Nathaniel Greene, '' the victorious," who saved the South by his able generalship and crippled his own estate to feed and clothe his soldiers ; Francis Marion, the borderer, called by the buffled British " the Swamp Fox," whose name is revered by all Americans as that of " one of the purest men, the truest patriot, and the most adroit general that American history can boast;" Philip Schuyler, the general who could be true even luider unjust suspicion, the real conqueror of Burg03'ne, the unselfish soldier of whom Daniel Webster declared that he stood scarcely below Wash- ington in the services he rendered his country. But where can we stop ? The list' of American heroes in camp and council is long enough to fill a volume, while those who fought in the ranks and those who suffered for the cause at home — un- known heroes Avhose glorious deeds have never been recorded — could their names but be collected, would make a roll of heroism, limited only by the number of American patriots. For all were heroes then. Though some at times were timid and some at times lost faith ; though traitors like Benedict Arnold and jealous self- seekers like Charles Lee well-nigh wrecked the cause of liberty and made the heart of its great leader to bleed and smart; though sec- 118 THE ^lEN OF THE REVOLUTION. tion.s at times were ''inad" with sections and iiicii '-put out" with men, so that tiu' ])rogress of revoluiioii was ahiiost stopped l)y jeal- ousies and (Usputes ; though money ran K)w and credit gave out cand suffering and privation led to weakness and to loss ; though defeat dulled the zeal of patriots and the cruelties of war tried the courage of the bravest; yet still, through it all, the spirit of persevering lllE UO.STON liUVS AND GICXKItAL GAGK. patriotism swayed alike tlie men and the women, the boys and the girls of the Revolution. The indignation that led the Bo.ston boys to protest to General Gage against the petty tyranny of liis soldiers who had trampled down their cherished " .slides " was the same spirit that animated their fathers to fight against British tyranny even to the bitter end and that brought in at last that success that STARTING OUT IN LIFE. Ill) so many had prayed for, so many had worked for, so many had fonght for, throngli seven long years of struggle and disaster, of defeat and loss, of hope and faith and a glorious persistence. CHAPTER XIV. STARTING OUT IN LIFE. HEN any prize is won, when any desired end is reached, when any thing that one has hoped, or worked, or fought for is at last obtained, the world, looking on, asks concern- ing him who has secured the prize : " What will he do with it ?" From the boy in Franklin's wise old story who "paid too dear for his whistle " to the young man who has reached his " freedom," the girl who has received her diploma, the man or woman who has attained fame or wealth or position — the same question applies to all : " What will he do with it ? " The thirteen revolted colonies, assuming the sounding title of '' The United States of America " had won independence. What would they do with it? There were plenty to ask the question. The world looked on to scorn, to criticise, to sneer; for liberty was not yet accepted as the l)irthright of every man, and king-cursed Europe had but little faith in the success of the republic-experiment across the western sea. And, in fact, many in the newly-delivered land itself doubted and hesitated, beset with gloomy fears. There Avas talk of giving up the idea of a republic and establishing a monarchy ; there w^as even a foolish movement started (at which none was angrier than the great patriot himself) to proclaim Washington as king and for a 120 STAKTIXG OUT IX LIFE. time people were "• all at sea " just what to do witli the liberty they had secured. During the Revolution the colonies — or States as they were now (.Jelled — had been held together in some sort of government b}' the Continental Congress and the paper its members had drawn up, called the "Articles of Confederation." But this was really ac- THRKATS OF RESISTANCE TO TAXATION. cepted as a government only because of the desperate needs of war. The Continental Congress merely governed by general consent ; it had no authority to govern. It agreed, in 1778, upon certain rights and powers which were called the '• Articles of Confederation " and which stated that the thirteen united colonies, thereafter to be knoAvn as the United States of America, did by these articles "enter into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defense, the security of their liberties and their mutual and g-eneral welfare." This was well enough for a time of war. But it was not govern- ment. And now peace had come. Many clear-headed men in STARTING OUT IN LIFE. 121 America speedily saw that neither the Continental Congress nor its Articles of Confederation were of any further use. Liberty had been won, but it was liberty without union. The country was weak and exhausted from the wounds of war; prosperity that the people had looked for as one of the first results of freedom did not come ; the States, relieved from the strain of war, began to quarrel with one another over boundaries and trade ; the talk of taxation led to angry threats of resistance ; bloodshed was feared and State after State threatened unless this or that was done to "secede" from " the confederation." Congress had no authority ; people obeyed or disobeyed its commands as they saw fit ; the State governments had more real power than had the congre.ss, and young Alexander Hamilton perplexed by the way things looked said sadly: "A na- tion without a national government is an awful spectacle." And it was from such men as this young Alexander Hamilton that relief at last came. From the very first he had seen that only in union was there strength. Before the close of the Revolution, in the year 1780, he had written to his friend the con- gressman James Duane : " We must have a vigorous confederation if we mean to succeed in the contest and be happy thereafter." And in that very letter this remarkable young man of twenty-three outlined many of the provisions that, later, found a place in the Constitution of the United States. For this is what came in due time — a paper drawn up and signed by the representatives of the people and accepted by each and all of the several States, by the agree- ments in which the United States of America were to be guided and governed. This is known as the Constitution of the United States. It was adopted in the year 1787, at a meeting together in the city INKSTAND USED IV! SIGNING THE CONSTITUTION. 12-2 UTAH TING OUT IN LIFE. of Philadelphia of forty-fne delegates from the thirteen States of the new union and which is known in history as the Federal Convention of 1787. This Federal Convention of 1787 has been rightly called "one of the most remarkable deliberative bodies known to history." George Washington was its presiding officer. Among its members werei such men as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madi- son. Robert Morris, William Livingston, Rufus King, Roger Sher- man and others whose love for liberty was great, whose foresight was clear and whose chief desire was to present to their fellow- citizens a document that should enable them to live together in peace and unity. From the fourteenth of May to the seventeenth of Sep- tember, 1787, the Convention discussed, debated, modified, amended and resolved. Then the great paper, duly signed, was jiresented to the people as the best their representatives could do. A year of discussion succeeded ; one by one the thirteen States said " all right" — that is, accepted or ratified the document; and on the thir- teenth of September, 1788, the Constitution of the United States of America was officially declared to be " the law of the land." Let us remember these few " personalities " of the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton originated it ; Gouveneur Morris planned its construction ; James Madison put it into shape ; George Washing- ton was its first signer ; Benjamin Franklin was its oldest signer, at the age of eighty-one ; Nicholas Gilman was its youngest signer, at the age of twenty-five. By the Constitution the name of the government created " for and by the people " was the " United States of America." It pro- vided for a general government whose authority was to be supreme on all matters of national interest and union ; this was to be divided into three departments: the legislative, the executive, the judiciary. The legislative department, called the congress, was to make the laws ; the executive department, consisting of the President of the United States and the officers selected by him, was to carry out and iijs^^j ^ia^^>f 't^''-~''°^'*'*''"^*^"~ -rrni'f— i-- "Hi lil^'liiari-niYT-Tii-f-rrT' " The fiUhtr cfihf. Const Untlnn of the UniUd ^Veople looked with the greatest respect and confidence, supported it heartily and were among the chiefs of the Federalists. When, however, the office of president was to be filled one man alone was the choice of the people, and when the sixty-nine electors sent in their votes for president the sixty-nine ballots were all for George Washington of Virginia. John Adams of Massachusetts Avas elected vice-president. The city of New York was selected as the capital of the United States, and on the fourth of March, 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall (now the site of the Sub-Treasury in Wall Street) in the city of New York, George Washington took the oath to support the Constitution as the supreme law of the land ; and amid the shouts and flag-waving and booming of cannon that fol- lowed the jjroclamation of Chancellor Livingstone who had admin- istered the oath : " Long live George Washington, President of the United States ! " the man who had led the armies of his land to vie- first president of flip Uuitfd Stntes. STARTING OUT IN LIFE. 129 torj and guided its wisdom in determining upon its form of govern- ment now began his career as the official liead of the new nation — the President of the United States. President Washington selected as his chief advisers and assistants Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, Alexander Hamilton as TIIK INAlKiUIiATION f)l'' I'llK.SI DKNT \VAS11INGT(IN. secretary of the treasury, Henry Knox as secretary of war, and Edmund Randolph as attorney-general. These men were to help him in the conduct of affairs that came within his duties as the chief executive officer of the new nation. Congress assembled in the Federal Building, with Vice-President John Adams of Massachu- 130 " THE AMERICANS,." sotts as tlic ]ir('si(lin;r ofKcor or " president " of tlic Seiinfc, and F. A. MuIdcnhiMg of Pennsylvania as tlie presiding officer or *• Speaker " of tlie House of Representatives; tlie " inaeliinery of government" Avas ])ut in motion and the new nation started out to try the experiment — deemed so doubtful by all the world — of government by the people. For one hundred and seventy years had tlie American peojile been preparing for this very experiment. It had been a long and hard .schooling. They had secured their liberty; and now this was what the}- were going to try to do with it : to govern themselves — or, in the words of the constitution which they had just adopted : " We, the Peojyle of the United States, in order to form a more ])er- fect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and seciu-e the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." CHAPTER XA'. "THE A M K i;i C AXS ." HE new repnl)lic of the United States of America started out in life as a nation in 1789, with a population of nearly four millions (the actual figures of the first census in 1790, were 3.929,214). Of these four millions Viruinia claimed the most and led the order of the States as num- ber one with a population of 747,610 ; Pennsylvania was number two with a population of 434,373 ; North Carolina number three with a population of 393,751 ; and, following after, as fourth in order " THE AMERICANS. " 131 came Massachusetts with 378,787; New York as fifth with 340,120 ; Maryhind sixth with 319,728; South CaroHna seventh Avith 249,073 ; Connecticut eighth with 237,496; New Jersey ninth witli 184,139; New Hampshire tenth with 141,885 ; Maine eleventh with 96,540; Vermont twelfth with 85,425; Georgia thirteenth with 82,548; Kentucky fourteenth with 73,677; Rhode Island fifteenth with 68.825; Delaware sixteenth with 59,096 and Tennessee seventeenth with 35,691. Of these, at that time, four were not yet admitted as States : Maine was a part of tlie State of Massachusetts, Vermont was a part of New York, Kentucky of Virginia and Ten- nessee of the Carolinas. Already emigrants were crossing the Alleghanies and peopling the West- ern wilderness as Kentucky, Tennessee and the lands about the Ohio were called. Indeed, dur- ing the Revolution, a brave American borderer, named General George Rogers Clarke, had capt- ured from the British the distant outposts in the territory of the Illinois, along the Mississippi River, and had thus established a footing for American frontiersmen and given the United States a claim to the territory north of the Ohio River when the treaty of peace was signed. But nearly all of the four millions of Americans above classified were settled along the Atlantic coast line. The western wilderness had, as yet, too many terrors. The sea was their main highway ; the sailing-packets their principal means of travel. Lumbering stages did, indeed, run between the leading cities, butMt took quite as many days by land as by water, for roads were bad, bridges few and ferries clumsy and dangerous. Philadelphia was the chief town of the United States. It had in 1790, a population of 42,520, while New York had but 33,131, Bos- ton but 18,038 and there Avas no Chicago at all ! Trade with th ^ interior was by six-horse wagons, by pack-horse or flat-boat; Avh: t GEOr.GK l!OGt;i!S CLARICE. 132 " THE AML'UICANS." little mails tluTO wrre could Ije carried by the post^riders ; news- papers were few and dull ; schools were poor in instruction and cruel in discipline; tallow candles, <>;rease "dips" or pitch pine were the only light ■;; wood was the only fuel ; coal and stoves were unknown ; farming was rough and far from thorough and fully one seventh of the four million Americans were negro slaves. The buving and selling of black people for use in the farm labor and housework of America dated from the days of the Spanish con- fjnisi((dores who, as early as 1508, when they found that the con- quered Indians could not stand the killing work forced upon them by their cruel task-masters, brought into the Spanish Main negroes from Africa to take their places. In 1G19 a Dutch captain ventr ured with a cargo of nineteen African .slaves to Virginia ; and from their .'jale to the planters along the James River dates the two hundred and fifty years of negro slavery in North America. At the close of the Revolution slavery existed in all the States, though Massachusetts had already declared it illegal. It was not, however, suited to the peculiar climate of the Northern connnon- wealths whose methods of farmino; were widely different from those employed in the rice and tobacco plantations of the South. So it came about that nearly seven eighths of all the slaves in the United States were in Maryland, Virginia and North and South Carolina which were also, as we have seen, the richest and most populous of the thirteen States. New York owned the largest number of anv Northern State — fully twenty thousand. But, even then, clear-headed and right- minded men saw the evil of slavery and warned their countrymen of the risks of continuini>: it. The founders of the srovernnuMit — - DOliROWING KIKE IN OLD DAY.S. « THE AMERICANS:' 133 >^/-, Washington and Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton — opposed the degrading system as nnsnited to a land of liberty, and earnestly desired its abolition. But in 1793 a Connecticut man who was teachino; school in Georgia, Eli Whitney by name, invented a machine for clean- ing cotton. This was called the cotton-gin. With it a slave who, before that time, could not clean over five pounds of cotton a day, could easily clean a thousand pounds a day. At once the cultiva- tion of cotton became the chief industry of the South ; the value of slave labor was greatly increased ; the warn- ings of the fathers of the re- public were disregarded and the fight for the keeping up and extension of the hateful system continued for nearly seventy years. With only sailing vessels or horses as means of connnuni- cation between the different sections, travel was not very general and visiting was not ' KIXG COTTOX. greatly indulged in. Neighborhoods kept to tliemselves, for when it took six days to go from Boston to New York and three from New York to Philadelphia the roads were never crowded. Presi- dent Washington rode in his private coach all the way from Mount Vernon to New Y^ork to be inaugurated, and the journey occupied 134 " THE AMERIVANS." seven days, so filli'd was it with receptions, greetings, processions and enthusiasm. The adoption of the Constitution and the inauguration of the new governuK'nt made men and women intensely American. The}^ lllL M.VUt. LUACU. remembered that in the early days of opposition to Great Britain they had been able to do without the manufactures of the mother country and they saw no reason why they should not now depend upon American productions, and develop home resources. '■'THE AMERICAN a.'' 135 So, all over the land the people combined to use as far as possible American materials only. Rich and poor alike wore plain clothes of strong home stuff ; the ladies met in " spinning-bees " where each one tried to out-do the other in the work accomplished ; " American broadcloth " became the fashion ; and both President Washington and Vice-President Adams took the oatli of otfica dressed from head to foot in home-spun garments " whose material was the product of American soil." The Revolution, however, had not altogether destroyed that very obiectiouable feeling of " I am better than yon," that royalty and aristoci'acy are responsible for and that is so hard for people to get rid of. The Declaration of Independence had told the world thiit " all men are created free and equal," but for many people, even in free America, it was hard to admit the equality. So, in the little cities and in the neiii'hbtjrhood centers of the United States there existed for years that unwi.se feeling of superiority that we call aristocracy, due to the wealth or posi- tion of certain favored families. Even when Wash- ington was to be inaugurated the Congress was perplexed what title to give him. Some, with the remembrance of the old titles of royalty still in mind wished to address him as "High Mightiness ; " some wished to speak of him as " His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of their Libei'ty ; " "Your Grace" and " His Excellency," were both proposed ; but good common sense won the day and it was resolved that the address should be simply " the President of the United States." And " To the President " or " By the President " have been the address and signature pertaining to the office to this day. But though aristocratic and high-flown manners and feeling", iound place in certain sections, and though the dear and noble- MAnniA WASIIIXOTOX, will' Of TIIH PUHSIDKXT. 136 ^'TllE AMERICANS.'' uiiiKU'd wife of tlio Presidoiii was ridiculously styled by many " Lady Washington," while men and women aped the display and costume and fashionable lollies of the rotten old courts and king- doms across the sea, the great mass of the Americans were plain, sensible, hard-working men and women, wlio huighed at all such pretended " style " and farmed and fished and bought and sold in the proud knowledge that all men were equal Ijefore the law as well as in the sight of the good God who had created them. More and more, as population increased, the young men of the homes Ijy the sea went west to seek their fortiuie and to occupy new lands in the far-off Indian country, where for years the forests and valleys of Kentucky and Ten- nessee and the Ohio region had been first the hunting ground and then the homes of hardy frontiersmen and hopeful settlers. The Indians who had hunted and fought in this fertile section for generations, fiercely resisted the coming of the white man ; but it was to no purpose. In spite of arrow and tomahawk and scalping-knife such mighty hunters as Daniel Boone cleared the pathway in what was called " the dark and bloody ground," for settlement and civiliza- tion ; population increased; and, in 1792, Kentucky was admitted into the union of States, while Tennessee followed in 1796. To the northeast A^ermont, which after years of dispute as to whether it belonged to New IIami)shire or New York had set up for itself during the Revolution, was in 17i)l admitted into the Union as the fourteenth State. By the treaty of Paris, which established peace between the United States and Great Britain after the Revolutionary War, the boundaries of the United States were acknowledged to be Canada on the north, the Mississippi River on the west, and Florida (ex- tending in a narrow strip to the Mississippi) on the south. The .:-t a!'''i'!Ri::iv»i:i3:j'i:i?:'-f.'i!,".i;rt:i"..;.r,.,s..;. '■'''■'''-"'■ ''''I" ''■'''"'''■' 3,nd2[:fe J' ■TiTiil virttli THE NEW HOME IN THK OHIO COUNTRY. '•It ^oas fertile, fair and en-rij wiuj attractive." " THE AMERICANS." 13'J vast territorv extending from the Ohio River to the Great Lakes was culled the Northwest Territory and into this section settlers speedily fonnd their way. It was fertile, fair and every way attract- ive, and promised a better outlook for pleasant homes and produc- tive fanning than did the rocky shores and stex'ile hill-slopes of New England. As colonists, the people of America had experienced such bitter days with England that when their own people went west to settle in the new lands beyond the Ohio they dealt with them justly and kindly, and the "Ordinance of 1787" which provided for the government of the Northwest Territory "svas one of the broadest and most generous agreements known to history. Daniel Webster said of it : '' We are accustomed to praise the lawgivers of an- tiquity ; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus ; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked and lasting character than the ordinance of 1787." By this "ordinance" slavery was forbidden ; the inhabitants were assured religious freedom, trial by jury and equal rights; conmon schools were to be supported and, as soon as the population was large enough, five new States were to be formed from the territory admitted to the Union and were to be governed by the people themselves. This ordinance and this territory developed in time into the great and prosperous States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, with the new life and the mighty inspiration that libert}^ and the privilege of self-government brought, the new American re- public started toward progress. All was not smooth at first. There were disputes between sections and jealousies between law-makers ; there Avere struggles for place and power; there were protests against what some deemed the " tyranny of the majority ; " the debts incurred hy the years of war were heavy and needed to be met by that very taxation that so many Amei'icans had learned to detest and, from this last cause, two " rebellions" sprung — Shay's insurrection in Massachusetts in 1786, and the whiskey insurrection 140 " THE AMERICANS:' ill Pennsylvania in 1794, both of wliich needod to he pnt down hy force of arms. The exciting days of the French Revolution in 1789, when, profiting by the example of America, the French people threw off the yoke of the kings (in a much more bloody and brutrl fashion, however, than it was done in America), very nearly dragged the American republic into war ; but Washington's firm hand on the helm guided the ship of state safely through the troubled waters of a dangerous sympathy. The wars on the frontier into which the settlement of the Ohio country provoked the Indians, begun, in 1790, in defeat under General St. Clair, ended, in 1794, in victory under General Wayne. These secured from the red owners the rights to possession forever in the present State of Ohio. Further rights in the Northwest, and the settlement of disputed questions as to who had the " say" on the northern border, were secured by a new treaty with England, concluded by John Jay in 1795. In spite, however, of debt and jealousies and questions of rights and privileges, in spite of angry uprisings, misunderstandings and rumors of war, the new nation speedily began to prosper and under the two terms which George Washington served as president, bore itself with dignity and showed the world its ability to live in good order and to maintain a successful government. Europe still looked on doubtfully, pointing to the terrible times in France as one of the first fruits of American independence and prophesying similar anarchy and final downfall for America. But, unmoved by this, the United States held on the course resolved upon ; commerce increased ; the money of the United States, first coined in 1793, was placed in circulation ; enterprising sea-captains displayed the American flng in foreign waters, and in 1790 carried it around the world on the good ship Columbia of Boston; turn-pike roads were built; canals were dug ; colleges were founded. Thus American enterprise was born ; and, as the stormy seventeenth century drew to its close, the United States of America began to challenge the attention and admiration of the world. UNSETTLED DAYS. 141 CHAPTER XYI. UNSETTLED DAYS. N 1796 Gsorge "VYa-shington declined to serve as president for a third term of four years. Issuing a remarkable " Farewell Address to the American People," he retired to private life and settled down to enjoy the rest he had earned after forty-five years of public service. The home in which he lived and died, at Mount Vernon on the Potomac River, has continued to this day an honored place of pilgrimage for all Americans. Upon the retirement of Washington people realized that some other man must be found to serve as president and they at once began to say what they wanted done and who they wisliod to do it. Discussion ran hot and high ; the Federalists took as their can- didate for president, Washington's vice-president, John Adams of Massachusetts ; the anti-Federal- ists supported Washington's first Secretary of State, Thomas Jeffer- son of Virginia. Adams was elected and, under the law as it then ex- isted, Jefferson, the defeated candi- date for president, became vice- president. Even before this was concluded the country was plunged into dis- putes with France. Washington had kept America from making promises to France, and the revolutionists then in power in that WASHINGTON S IID.MK AT MOUNT VEKNON. 142 UNSETTLE]) DA YS. disturbed land declared that, if the United States desired peace with France, peace must be paid for. So they set to work to annoy their old ally. The American minister was driven fi-oiu the country; American commerce was danuiged by unjust laws; American ships and cargoes were preyed upon ; and American envoys, when sent across the sea to protest, were told they must pay or suti'er. But Americans had proved that they Avere able to def}- injustice. " Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," was the 1' . />^^.„A lUAl.MXCi KKCltl'Il'S I'OH WAU \\ ITU KliANCK. faniou-; answer thi-y made in reply to the French demands, and at once they prepared for war. Washington came from his quiet home at Mount Vernon to once UNSETTLED DA VS. 143 JOHN ADAMS. Second prenidfint of the United States. again take his place at the liead of the army : the bhiok cookncle, worn as the symbol of patriotism, was seen in every hat ; old Con- tinental nniforms that had seen service in the Revolntion were hunted out of chest and closet; and, on many a village common, the raw recruits, in all sorts of funny costumes, drilled and marched and ''trained" with all the fervor and enthusiasm of the old fight- 144 UNSETTLED DAYS. ing diiys of " twenty years ago." Tlie navy was increased, and several sea-fights had taivcn place — notahly one off the Island of St. Kitt's where Conunodore Truxton in the war-ship Constellation •^ought and captured the French frigate L'Insurgente ; the song '•' Hail, CoUunbia ! " was npon every one's lips and then, even before war had been declared, Napoleon Bona})arte, who had put himself at the head of French affairs, made peace with the United States in 1799, and the war cloud passed over. Whenever there is danger of war people become greatly excited and sometimes do very foolish things. And so it happened that, when war with France seemed probable, the law-makers assembled in Congress, of whom x\vd majority belonged to the Federalist party, passed certain laws that proved to be both stupid and hurtful to the best interests of the country. They feared " foreign influence " and they wished to show the world the " power " of the United States ; so they made a law by which the president could arrest and exile ;inv foreigner or "alien" who was thought to l)e dangerous. Thi.s was called the "Alien Law." Another measure punished any person who dared say a word in public against the government ; this was called the " Sedition Law." At once the opponents of the Federalists who called them.selves Republicans cried out " For shame ! " The Alien Law, they said, took away the right to a trial bv jurv ; the Sedition Law was a blow at free speech. The American people had learned to value these rights for wdiich they had fought too highly to permit them to be abused. Popular opinion sided with the Republicans, and at the Presidential election of 1800, amid great excitement. President John Adams and the Federalists were defeated. But the success of the Republican ticket gave Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr an e(|unl number of votes. The Constitution declared that tlie person receiving' the highest number of votes should be president, and the one receiving the next highest number should be vice-president. So here was a problem : which should be UNSETTLED DA YS. 145 the president, Jefferson or Burr ? The decision was referred to the House of Representatives and, there also, it resulted in a" tie-vote." There was a great deal of delay and much angry talk, but finally the struggle came to an end and Jefferson was chosen president with Burr as vice-president. But this sliowed one weak spot in the Constitution ; it would not do to have such a struggle repeated and the Constitution was changed or " amended," so far as to direct the presidential electors to vote for but one man for presi- dent and to make a separate bal- lot for the vice-president. And this method has continued to this day. In December, 1799, George Washington died. The news came like a shock to the whole country; the world mourned a great man gone ; England low- ered her flag to half-mast ; France draped in black her standards and her flags and America, from north to south, sorrowed for the loss of her greatest and wisest man. Firm, prudent, sagacious, just, courageous, patient, true and good, tlii^ illustrious man is now revered by all Americans as truly the " father of his country " ; his birthday is a national festival ; his memory is dear to all, and now, almost a century after his death, there is not an American but repeats with deepest faith the eulogy pronounced upon George Washington by John Marshall when making before the Congress public announcement of this good man's death : " First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." TIIIIMAS .Jl-,Ml'-,l;SI)X. Third preftideut of the Ctiitfd Stated. 116 UN^E TILED DA VS. Washin(!;ton's irivatost inoiiuuK'iit is the iiR'iiiory of his spotless name ; l)ut as a n()l)le iiioiuinieiit. also, may Ije regarded ■• the Federal City," whieh, selected by him, was built upon land given to the general o-overnment bv the States of Maryland and Virginia, and set apart as the District of Cohunbia. After his death the new city received the name of Washington and was made the capital of the United States. In 1800 the government was removed there ; President Jeffer- son was there inaugurated ; and to-day the straggling forest settle- ment of 1800 has developed into one of the most beautiful of cities, one of the most imposing of capitals. Thomas Jefferson, as has been said, was the greatest of Democrats. The success of his party Avas tli3 success of new men and new manners. The old colonial ideas that birth and blood were meant to lead were done away with, even as the wigs and cues, tlu' short clothes and buckles, the frills and patches and pow- der of the eighteenth cen- tury gave place to modern manners and a less theat- rical dress. The nine- teenth century meant pro- gress and, even from its earliest years, progress was the order of the day. Pi'ofitiug by the wars by which Europe was almost torn asunder, America's commerce grew to great proportions; her debt^ were speedily settled, her ships were seen in every (|uarter of the globe, and her territory was very largely increased. In 1803 Napoleon seeing that the American possessions of France ,''f^---1-'^' W.iSIIINT.TON S TOAIH AT MOUNT VEnXON. THE SALE OF LOUISIANA. " Napoleon sold the vast Ivrrilorij for jifltcn millions of dollars." UNSETTLED DAYS. 149 ■would be in danger from the hostile anus oi Enghxnd, sold to the United States for fifteen millions of dollars, the vast territory lyino- between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and known as Louisiana. This more than doubled the possessions of the United States, and from this land purchase of 1803 have since been made the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana and the Indian Territorv. It also included goodly portions of the present States of Minnesota, Colorado and Wyoming. The new republic was fast growing into a successful and ambi- tious young giant, but, like many ambitious young men, it boasted and assumed too much and frequently got into trouble. Fired by the success of the Louisiana purchase in 1803, it stretched out toward the Pacific and, by virtue of an exploring expedition conducted into the far northwestern region by Lewis and Clarke in 1804, it laid claim to what was known as the Oregon country — a claim that was disputed by England for nearly forty years. In 1800 the population of the United States had increased to 5,308,483 ; in 1810 it had grown to 7,239,881. Discovery and in- vention, though weak and imsatisfactory, were just beginnino- to open people's eyes, and were giving a new push to American enter- prise. Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, and by his success made the great rivers of the United States more valurble than ever before as highways for commerce. Coal was discove.ed in Pennsylvania, but no one knew iust how to use it to advanta<"c. Dissatisfied people were beginning to find fault with their circum- stances and their surroundings, and no less a personage than the vice-president of the LTnited States, Aaron Burr, smarting under what he considered ill-treatment by the Government and having wickedly killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, hatched up a treason- able scheme to found a government of his own in the new western country, but was arrested, tried, acquitted, disgraced and forgotten. The people of the United States might be uneasy and ambitious, b^it 150 UNSETTLED DAYS. they wore loyal to the g-overninent the}' had wt up, and such schemes of treason as was this of Burr found neither favoi' nor support auiony; them. But in Europe things were hecoming worse and worse, as Napoleon Bonaparte, declaring himself emperor of France, found himself at war with the world. France with the most powerful army in the world, and England with the inost formidable navy, made things decidedly unpleasant for each other and the rest of the world. England declared a blockade of all European jjorts against France — that is, refused to allow the vessels of any nation to enter the harbors of France or her allies ; France retaliated by forbidding all vessels to sail into English harbors. As American ships at that time did most of the carrying trade these decrees of France and England most deeply affected American commerce. Congress would, had it dared, have gone to war to redress this outrage ; it had in 1801 declared war against the Mohanunedan pirates of the Barbary states in North Africa, and had punished them severely in what has been known as the War with Tripoli ; but to fight Tripoli and to fight Great Britain were quite different aff'airs and the United States could not hope to beat Great Britain on the seas. So, instead. Congress tried to punish both the great powers by refusing to trade with them and passed in 1807 a measure known as the " Embargo Act," which forbade the sailing of American vessels to any foreign port. But this was almost suicide. American ships lay rotting at their docks ; Ameri- can commerce was very nearly destroyed ; New York and New England protested loudly and some particularly unpatriotic people *>')ifw/«iim) *'' THK FALLING FLAG. War with Tripoli. UNSETTLED DAYS. 151 i'.i ilie Eastern States, when they saw their bnsiness ruined and their connnerce dead began to talk, very forcibly, of " seceding" from the Union. Tlie Embargo Act proved so unpopular and hurtful that Congress soon repealed it and in 1809 jjassed, in its place, what was known as the " Non - Intercourse Act." This permitted American vessels to trade with all countries except France and England. But it was too late to save the lost popularity of President Jefferson. He had served two terms as president, but the Embargo Act was the means of defeating his re- nomination and his party (which was now often called the Democratic party) was oblio-ed in 1808 to take another man as candidate. This was James IMadison of Virginia, who had been a member of the historic Continental Congress and had served as Secretary of State under Jefferson. The Non-Intercourse Act was repealed in 1810 and the new admin- istration of President Madison found itself face to face with a prob- lem that must be solved at once if pi'osperity was to be regained for those sections of the country which had been the principal sufferers JAMF.S MM>[S>ht or fall. CHAPTER XVII. A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. T i-i very hard to forget. When you have been wronged or worried by any of your companions you may learn to forgive them, but the memory of the wrong that has been done vou lasts a long time. It was so with the United States and England. The bitterness of the strife that brought on the Revolution, the ill-feeliu"' that accompanied those seven years of war continued as unpleasant memories long after the treaty of peace was signed. And the boast- ing about success assumed by Americans was as distasteful to Englishmen as was English contempt of America exasperating to Americans. When in 1809 the "Non-Intercourse Act" was repealed the Congress of the United States said to France and Great Britain : " If one of you will recall the laws yon have made that are so hard on American commerce, we will trade with you only and will ' boy- cott' the other nation." To which Napoleon at once responded: "All right; I will." He didn't, but he said he would, and on the strength of bis false ])romise the United States at once cut off its trade with England, am] began to boast about it, too. For, you see, the old hatred still lived. A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. 153 Great Britain, oonfitlent of her strength upon the seas, treated America with more contempt than ever. Slie cUximed the rio-ht to search American ships and take out any sailors that might seem to be of EngHsh or Irish birth. Of course the British searchers were not over-scrupulous and many American citizens were seized as British sailors, and forced to serve in English war-ships. British men-of-war sailed up and down the American coast, attackino- and capturing American merchant ves.sels, while, in the West, agents of the British govern- ment stirred vip the Indians to hostility against American set- tlers, furnished them arms and ;inHnunition,and backing up the Indian leader Tecumseh, chief of the Shawnees, brought about at last in 1811 an Indian war. This war was, however, speed- ily ended by General William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, who, marchinij a2;ainst Tecumseh, utterly defeated the Indians at the famous battle of Tippe- canoe. All these signs of Eno-lish hostility and hatred had their effect at last upon America. Instead of calmly talking things over and tiying to arrange the difficulty America "got mad" with England. All talk of peace ceased. Patience was exhausted, self-respect could not longer sub- mit, the old '' sj>irit of '70 " was renewed, and though New England objected to the war as unwise and wrong, popular opinion forced TKCUMSKII, CllIRF OF Till! .STIAWNKES. 154 A M'liFSTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. Congress into action and on the eighteenth of June, 1812, President Madison loiimdly declared war against Great Britain. The country Avas altogether unprepared for such a conflict. Ent;l.uid had a tliousand war-.ships ; the United States had but THE BATTLE OK TIPPECANOE. twelve ; England's army was a victorious force of disciplined soldiers ; America liad no army; the country was poor; the jiresident had been forced into war contrary to his own judgment ; the generals in command of the raw and nndi-;ci])lined soldiers were veterans '"left over" from the Revolution, t'-.) old to be of real service and Great A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. 155 Britain ff !t that it would be but an easy task to whip the young nation that thirty years before had caused her so much shame. From first to last the land battles of the War of 1812 were a series of defeats, brightened by only a few victories. The soldiers had no confidence in their generals, until generals had really been made by the bitter experience of defeat. For the most part it was a " leaderless war." The names of Winfield Scott and Andrew Jackson, with perhaps that of William Henry Harrison, ai'o almost the only ones that come down to us as those of successful leaders. The war was mismanaged from the start. Many of the people were opposed to it ; the Government was absolutely incapable of directing it ; the troops lacked discipline ; the generals knew nothing of how to handle or how to lead their men ; the Canadian frontier, then almost a wilderness, was foolishly crossed and recrossed for tlie impossible invasion of Canada ; posts that should have been held at all hazards were surrendered or abandoned, and important centers that should have been de- fended Avere left at the mercy of the enemy. Thus was Detroit on the northwestern l:)order sui-rendered by General Hull and all the territory beyond the Ohio country lost to the Americans ; the territory of Maine was seized and lield by the British ; and in August, 1814, five thousand British soldiers marched through Vir- ginia and Maryland, drove the militia before them again and again, entered Washington from which the inefficient government had fled, burned the Capitol, the White House (as the home of the presi- dent was called) and most of the public buildings, and then sailed to attack the city of Baltimore. With the exception of such engagements as the Battle of the Thames and of Chippewa Plains and the wonderful victory at New Orleans — a needless battle fought after peace had been agreed upon — the history of the land 156 A WnESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. battles of th? War of ISll^ i-:, as Mr. Roosevelt says, "not cheerful readin^r for an American." One result, however, these unsuccessful battles had. Even out of defeat they brought discipline. They made fighters out of the raw recruits, and, as one historian tells us, '• two 3ears of warfare gave us soldiers who could stand against the best men of Britain." l>ut it was a schooling dearly bought. The grapple on land with which the old foemen again tried their strength was dreary and dis- heartening enough in its results to the Americans ; dissatisfaction at the conduct of the war became so strong in certain sections tliat the opponents of the government met in convention at Hartford in 1814, and threatened to set up a separate government for New England which, so it was claimed, the government had left to take care of it- self; the treasury was bankrupt ; the leaders were incompetent ; and, after the burning of Washington, the situation appeared .so desperate that the Ent!;lish lookers-on exultantlv declared that "the ill-org-an- ized association is on the eve of dissolution and the world is speedily to be delivered of the mischievous example of the existence of a government founded on demo- cratic rebellion." But all this while the uncxpect'- ed was happening. The Ameri- can navy from which nothing had been anticipated, and which, at the opening of the war, it was proposed to keep in port to save it from destruction In' the formidable British fleets of war, took up the challenge that England had so contemptuously flung at America, sailed boldly out against the stoutest and most invincible British war-ships, swelled its force by swift-sailing privateers, and showed so much pluck and courage that it succeeded in doing more damage to British shipping and commerce than any nation had ever acconi- plislicd. Out of eighteen lake and ocean (hiels the American men- ^ "^'^^b^'jS' THE ULTINICD WHITE HOUSE. A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. 157 of-war won fifteen. The deeds of Hull and Macdonough, of Lawrence and Perry, of Decatur and Biddle and Bainbridge, of Warrington, Stewart and Porter, of Jones and Burrows and Reid — American captains all — very nearly cause us to forget the defeats and discour- agements of the war on land and make us agree with Mr. Roosevelt when he says " it must be but a poor- spirited American whose veins do not tin- gle with pride when he reads of the cruises and fights of the sea-captains and their grim prowess, which kept the old Yankee flag floating over the waters of the Atlantic for three years, in the teeth of the mighti- est naval power the world has ever seen." Most wars are like boyish quarrels — altogether unnecessary and easily to be avoided if but the quarrelers will soften their hearts instead of doubling up their fists. But when bullying or stupidity bring on either a quarrel or a Avar then resistance is right and valor is manliness. " Beware," says Shakespeare, KEEPING TUB OLD I'LAG ATLOAT. " Of entrance to a qiLirrel ; but, being in, Bear it that the opposed may beware of thee." The War of 1812 was an unnecessary quarrel. Had England been less insolent and America better gxuded, the war could easily have been avoided ; or had there entered into the early dispute the more friendly spirit of what we to-day call " arbitration " no shot from fort or ship" need have been fired. But the war did come ; and, as we look back upon it, we are proud to know that American pluck and bravery carried the struggle through, despite poor leadership on the land and heavier force on the water. " Don't give up the ship," cried the brave Captain Lawrence as he fell on the blood- 158 A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. stained deck of the Chesapeake. That appeal was the battle cry throughout the war; with it nailed to the mast of Commodore Perry's flag-ship in the famous Battle of Lake Eric, the blue jack- ets stuck to its commands so well that Perry broke the British line, captured the whole fleet, and sent off his famous announcement of victory : " We have met the enemy, and they are ours." The war began with the disgraceful surrender of Detroit ; it closed Avith the marvelous victory at New Orleans. There, on the eighth of January, 1815, Sir Edward Pakenham with twelve thousand British regulars — men who had met and conquered the veteran troops of Napoleon — assaulted the hastily constructed earthworks behind which General Jackson with six thousand undisciplined sol- diers awaited the attack. Within half an hour the whole British army was in full retreat, beaten back by Jackson's stubborn resist- ance. Pakenham and more than twenty-five hundred of his men were killed; the Americans lost but eight killed and thirteen wounded. " Few victories in history," says Mr. Johnson, " have been so complete ; and this one enabled the United States to forget many of the early faikn-es." It was a victory of leadership. The war at last had developed one great general — Andrew Jackson of Tennessee who, says Mr. Roosevelt, " with his cool head and quick eye, his stout heart and strong hand, stands out in history as the ablest general the United States produced from the outbreak of the Revolution down to the beginning of the great Rebellion." Had there been known such a thing as an ocean telegraph this battle need not have been fought, for a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent in Belgium on the twenty-foin'th of December, 1814. Peace was joyfully welcomed. It was greatly needed. Busi- ness was at a standstill ; commerce was nearly destroyed ; money was scarce, and distress and poverty were felt in every section. The war had cost the country nearly eighty millions of dollars, and people were weary of the struggle. A WMESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. 159 But it had settled several things which, though not mentioned in the treaty of peace, were most important to America. The victory of General Harrison at the River Tliames, closed the long; struffsle for possession in the west, for there the frontiersmen of the Ohio JACKSON'S SIIARPSHOOTICIIS AT NEW OUI.KANS. broke down the barrier to settlement that Indians, Frenchmen and Britishers had sought to maintain, and settled it forever that the west was to be American. The long series of ocean victories proved the power of America on the sea, and never again did Great Britain 160 A WEESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. attempt to enforce that insolent " right of search " that had been one of the causes of the Revolution, and brought on the War of 1812. In spite of the dissatisfaction at the course of the government and its weakness in the hour of danger the Democratic-Republican party, while the war was be- ing waged, was strong enough to re-elect Madison as presi- dent in 1813. In fact the old Federalist party that had started the government in 1789, came to an end during the war-time. The younger men of the country who hotly supported the war with Eng- land, had no patience with a party that opposed it ; the Hartford Convention of 1814 that talked so foolishly of separation from the Union, was largely the work of Fed- eralists and was their last act. For peace and the Ameri- can victories showed the real strength of the United States, and its citizens had no use for a party that seemed to be only the party of submission and grum- bling. The Hartford Convention and Jackson's victory gave the death biow to the Federalist party, and with the close of the war but one remained — and to this day this has been known as the Democratic Party. AMBL'SIIKD IX TUK INDIAN COUNTUY. STATE-MAKING. 161 CHAPTER XVIII. STATE-MAKING. pIIE lirst f^iiit of clothes is speedily outgrown. Legs lengthen ; arms stretch out ; and tucks must either be let down, pieces added or new suits cut and made if the grow- ing girl or boy is to be considered as properly clothed. They must have more growing room. The first suit of the United States made of thirteen well-matched pieces, was speedily outgrown. Even before the Revolution the first feelers had been stretched out toward the distant west, and when peace was declared, svich statesmen as Thomas Jefferson began to cut and carve the western territory obtained from England, so as to make at least seventeen States. Mr. Jefferson had even selected names for his new States that were to spring up in prairie-land. They were a combination of Latin, Greek and American-Indian names, and odd enough they sound to us. Here are ten of them as they were proposed to Congress : Sylvania, Cherronesus, Michi- gania, Assenisipi, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia. But neither the divisions nor the names of the suggested new States found favor with the Congress ; while the code of laws that was proposed for their government was also rejected, though it contained two provisions that were indicative of the principles of so strong a Democrat as Jefferson : one was the abolition of slavery after 1800 ; the other, that no one holding an hereditary title should be admitted to citizenship. We have already seen that soon after the Revolution three new States were added to the original thirteen, namely : Vermont in 1791, Kentucky in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796. These were the 162 STA TE-MAKING. result of a settlement of the disputes ;iw to Ijoundarie.s and owner- ship of land between New Hampshire and New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut. Virginia and the two Carolinas. These once adjusted, and the new States formed, the settlers who, after the Revolution, with well-loaded pack-horse and clumsy Conastoga wagon, with wives and children, cattle and scanty household goods and farming imple- ments, had migrated by thousands into the farther west, soon de- . f THE CONASTOGA WAGON. sired citizenship. The opening up of the Ohio country in 1787, the purchase of the vast territory of Louisiana from France in 1803, and Spain's sale of its territory of Florida in 1819 added an immense amount of unsettled land to the United States possessions, and emi- grants from Europe or restless residents of the eastern States were constantly on the move west. In 1815 General Jackson in a series of rapid fights defeated the restless Creek Indians in Alabama and opened the southwest to American occupation, and the use of steam- THE MAIL BOAT ON THE OHIO. ^Before the days of railroads and steamboats." STATE-MAKING. 165 boats for navigation and trade on the Mississippi and other western rivers hastened the growth of westei'n settlement. For Fulton's in- vention of the steamboat had — after the first doubts were over — been quickly made use of by progressive Americans. Before 1812 steamboats were running on the Hudson, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, Raritan and Delaware rivers ; steam ferry-boats crossed and re- crossed the East River, between New York and Brooklyn ; and in 181 G a steamboat ploughed its way up the Mississippi and into the Ohio to Louisville. The settlers of the west found an easier land to prepare and cultivate than did their ancestors of two centuries before, but they had frequent and desperate hostilities with the former Indian owners of the land (who never could understand that to sell or give a piece of land deprived them of all rights to such land) and the question of slavery in the new sections was already causing much ques- tioning and dispute. The successful close of the War of 1812 brought many new people across the sea to settle in and become citizens of the growing West- ern Republic. The west began to fill up ; in the northwestern and southwestern territories population gradually centered about certain available points and, out of the territories, a number of States were formed. Ohio had been admitted to the Union in 1802 and Louisi- ana in 1812. After the war, others followed. Indiana was admitted in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818 and Alabama in 1819 ; Maine (outgrowing the care of Massachusetts of which it had been a part for fully two hundred years) came in as a new State in 1820, and Missouri was admitted in 1821. So you see that by the year 1820 all the territory east of the Mississippi River, except that wild northern lake region now occu- pied by Michigan and Wisconsin, had been cut up into States. They had been admitted also alternately — first a northern and then a southern one, for the question of slavery was from the first a puz- zling one to settle. Really the United States of America held by IGG STA TE-MAKING. the teachings of the Doclaration of Iiulependence and did not be- lieve in shvvery. In 1808 the bringing in-^or importation — of negro slaves was forbidden \ty the United States government ; be- fore 1820 the keeping of slaves had almost entirel}- disappeared in all the States north of Virginia; by the ordinance of 1787 slavery Avns forbidden nortli of the Ohio Kiver. But slave labor was con- sidered a necessity in the South ; the planters of the vast fields of cotton, tobacco and rice, thought they could not get along unless they had unpaid labor on their great plantations ; and so, though disliked by many, slavery at length became what is known as " an institution " through- out the South. The question of slavery therefore, gradu- ally grew in importance and became a national matter. Congress tried to suit both sections by keeping the bal- ance even and adding a new State first to the North and then to the South — first a free State and then a slave State. But when Missouri came knocking at the door of the Union asking admission tlie question as to how it should come in caused a liot discussion. The section had belonged to the old French territory of Louisiana, a slave-holding land ; the ordinance of 1787 which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio did not affect it, because the Ohio did not touch it. But the people of the north argued that if Missouri came in as a slave State it would open all the territory west of the Mississippi to slaveholders ; the people of the South said AN OLU-TIMi; LOUISIANA SUGAU ;MILL. STATE-MAKING. 107 that the Constitution left the slavery question to the States ; that Missouri was a slave section and that Congress had nothing to sny in the matter. So the question grew into a hot and bitter dis- pute that at one time even threatened to break up the Union ; but at last each side " gave in " a little ; a line was drawn at the southern bovmdary of Missouii ; it was agreed that Missouri should be admitted into the Union as a slave State, but that slavery should be forever prohibited north of that line — the land occu- pied by the new State of Missouri only excepted. This famous agreement was known as " the Missouri Compromise," and, under it, Missouri was admitted into the Union in 1821 as the twenty- fourth State. This season of State-making had almost doubled the original " old thirteen ;" it had treljled the population. There were in 1821 fully ten millions of people in the United States as against the three millions that brought the land out of successful revolution in 1783. With the exception of the slavery dispute there was but little to disturb the peace and prosperity of the land. With the close of the War of 1812, business grew brisk again and commerce began to re- vive. The farmers readily " moved " their crops; money became more plentiful and people speedily forgot the worries of the war- days and remembered only the glories. In 1816 President Madison was succeeded by James Monroe, of Virginia, the nominee of the Republican party. The successful ending of the war with Great Britain had destroyed the last rem- nant of the old Federalist party which had opposed and hindered the carrying on of the war. In the election of 1816 the Federalist candidates received but thirty-four of the two hundred and twenty- one electoral votes ; and in 1820 so satisfied were the people with President Monroe and his way of " running things," so contented were they with the condition of the country, the prospects of business and the steady progress of national growth and wealth that this period of American history is often called " the Era of 168 STA Th:-MAKING. Good Feeling:."' Monroe was re-elected president in 1820 almost withont a dissenting voice. In fact no opposing candidate was nominated and when the electoral votes were cast only one was given against Monroe, this being thrown so that no president save Washington might ever be said to have re- ceived the unanimous vote. One of the measures that came out of this " Era of Good Feeling," where every one was proud to be an American and was anx- ious to see all America re- pul^lican was the statement of what has since been known as " the Monroe Doctrine." The Spanish colonies in Central and South Americii, imitating the United States, had thrown off the Spanish yoke and secured their in- dependence. But it was feared that some of the other monarchies of flu- rope would either help Spain to conquer her re- volted colonies or step in themselves and possess the land. Americans could not submit to such an interference ; and, in 1823, President Monroe in the message to Congress which each president makes once a year, declared that, while the United States had no intention of interfering in any European quarrel J.VMKS MONROE. Fifth preshlent of the United States. STA TE-MAKING. 161, or war, due notice was given tliiit no more European colonies should be planted in America, and that the United States woidd not permit " an attempt by any nation of Europe to redu(;e an inde- pendent nation of North or South America to the condition of a colony." It is said that this outspoken language (which has ever since been the firm stand of the United States) was placed in the president's message by John Quinc}^ Adams, President Monroe's Secretary of State and the next succeeding president of the United States. President James Monroe was the fifth president of the United States and the fourth Virginian to fill that high office. A soldier of the Revolution and a member of the Continental Congress, he was the last of the men of the Revolution to be elected president. He was the third president to die on the Fourth of July. Two of those who preceded him, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died within a few hours of each other on the Fourth of Jul}', 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independ- ence, on which paper both their names appear. Monroe died on the Fourth of July, 1831. He was sometimes called the "Last Cocked Hat," as he was the last of the Revolutionaiy Presidents and one of the last Americans to wear the quaint old cocked hat of that glorious period. 170 CITIZENS AND PARTIES. CHAPTER XIX. CITIZENS AND PARTIES. HE '■ Era of Good Feeling " of course could not long con- tinue. C)p]M)sition is really necessary to progress and growth, as. if we all thought alike, there would be no one to push things ahead. So when the time for a new election came around, to- ward the close of President Monroe's second term, the era of good feeling became almost an era of confusion, because people were not united as to just who they wished to select as their new president. Everybody was " Republican," but their choice was by no means the same. At last, four candidates were decided upon. These were : John Quincy Adams, who had been Monroe's Secretary of State, Andrew Jackson, '-the hero of New Orleans," Wil- liam H. Crawford, who had been secretary -of the treas- ury, and Henry Clay, the '' great Kentuckian," speaker of the House of Representa- tives. So many candidates, as elections were then carried on, split up the electoral vote completely ; no one candi- date had a majority — that is, a large enough proportion of the entire electoral vote — and tiie matter had to go tor ashland, thk home of hknky clay- CITIZENS AND PARTIES. 171 decision to the House of Representatives. There, only the three highest names were voted upon ; the friends of Henry Chiy cast their votes for John Quincy Adams and he was, accordingly, de- clared elected. This confusing election was at that time called " the scrub-race for the presidency," and a " scrub-race," you know, is a race between " scrubs " — that is, untrained and unpracticed horses, boys or men. There was, of course, a good deal of " back-talk " and hard feel- ings over so mixed a contest ; and, as a result, new parties were formed. At first they called themselves " Adams men," or " Jack- son men." Then the DemocratrRepublican party which had started in Jefferson's time took to itself the name of the Democratic Party, by which it has ever since been known, and its opponents called themselves, first, National-Republicans and afterwards Whigs. John Quincy Adams was the son of a president — stout old John Adams, the champion of Revolution and the successor of Washington as President of the United States. Like his father, John Quincy Adams was able, honest, uncompromising, independent and firm. His administration was a success ; money was plenty and the people were prosperous, but the president's firmness as to his own opinions and his unwillingness to " give in " to the plans of others made for him many enemies — especially among politicians, who, as a rule, are quick haters. So, like his father, he was defeated when nominated for a second term as president ; but, with the good of his country at heart, he went into congress again as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts and there had a re- markable career of seventeen years — the stout and merciless op- ponent of whatever seemed to him unjust, tyrannical or wrong. He was known both to friends and foes as tlie " Old Man Elo- quent " ; of him it was said that he actually "died in harness," for in the Capitol at Washington is still pointed out the spot where he fell, stricken down by paralysis in February, 1848, while attending the debates of Congress. And in the Capitol ht, died 172 CITIZENS AND PARTIES. It was during the adniiiiistration of John Quincy Adams that two important questions arose, impclHug people to mucli heated and wordy discussion. These were the Taiiff and Internal Improve- ments. They were what the people of that day called " burning ques- tions" and one of them — the Tariff — has not got through " burn- ing" yet, in 1891. The tariff" — which, by the way, is an old, old question and comes away back from the Arabic verb arufa, to inform — was originally a system of payments demanded by a government on the goods sent away from or sent into its bor- ders. In Great Britain and America this system of payments or " duties " is demanded only on goods brought in from foreign countries — ''imports," as they are called. Early in the history of the United States this question of the tariff' led to a dift'er- ence of opinion. Some people thought that American industries would prosper only by " protection " — that is, by placing a high tariff or duty on tiie same things that came in from other coun- tries so that Americans could only afford to buy American-made goods or products. Other people held that this was unjust — that Americans ought to be allowed to buy the best they can get, whether it was of American or foreign production and if Ameri- can manufacturers wished American trade they must simply make the best goods ; these people held that the tariff should affect the things imported into America only so far as to help raise the money needed to carry on the government ; this is what is still called " a tariff' for revenue only." High tariff', or protection, was advocated by presidents Monroe and Adams ; the money thus obtained was to be expended by the government upon making roads and canals ami dredging harbors. This was called Internal Improvements and the tariff' and internal improvements, together, made up what was known as the "American System." But many people did not believe in this protection or the " American System," as it was called. Especially in the South was it disliked. There the people were farmers and not manufacturers, CITIZENS AND PARTIES. 173 DISCUSSING THE TARIl'F IN 1828. and they objected to paying high prices on foreign goods simply, so they claimed, to "protect" the Northern manufactnrer. During President Adams' term, in 1828, the tariff was still further increased and the South declared that this act was contrary to the Constitu- tion. This question of the tariff really split the old Eepublican 174 CITIZENS AND PARTIES. party in two and -was tlio origin of the later opposing parties — the Democrats and the Whigs. The question of Internal Improvements was however settled for- ever by the coming of the railroad, the telegraph and the other Avonderful things that were speedily to take the place of post roads and canals ; for, being carried on by private enterprise and not by Government, these new " improvements" took away the need of paying out the Government's money for such purposes. For these inventions were to bring about immense changes alike in the lives, the habits and the characters of the peo- ple. Up to 1825 the citizens of the United States had been satisfied to live in the ways of their fathers. They went from place to place over poor I'oads, afoot or on horse- back, in clumsy wagon, lumbering stage- coach or heavy carriage. Goods and freight passed slowly from city to city on sailing vessel, lazy flat-boat or creak- ing wagon, and one of the chief obstacles to the rapid development of the western country was to be found in the length of time, the labor, the risks and the expense of getting from one point to another. Fulton's invention and the first steamboats to which it led partly solved this question, for it made travel upon ocean, lake and river quicker and easier. But still it took too much time and trouble to get from the seashore to the lakes and rivers of the west. Enter- prise, however, has ever been one of the chief points in the Ameri- can character, and enterprise soon solved this problem. A public spirited and popular American statesman, De Witt Clinton, gov- ernor of New York, advocated, worked for, and finally secured the construction of a great canal that should join the lakes to the sea A WESTERN FLAT-BOAT. JOIIX QUINCY ADAMS. SUlh president of the United States. CITIZENS AND PARTIES. i7lr by stretching across New York State from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. This " big ditcli," as some people called it, was eight years in building and Avas opened to the public on the fourth of November, 182-3, when Governor Clinton, having sailed its entire length from Buffalo to Sandy Hook — a nine days' trip — poured into the Atlantic from a gilded k the Witter from Lake Erie and declared the great canal "open." The act was significant. It marked a new day of American progress and, by establishing a direct and easy trade commimication with the West, it made New York the metropolis of America. About the same time a great " National Road " for inland com- munication was laid out and constructed. It stretched from Mary- land to Indiana and was intended for wagon travel. It was a wise piece of work and would have been a great and most important one had not the railroad soon come in to conquer distance and to get the best of time. In 1828 the new parties had their first strong grapple. Adams was overthrown and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee was elected president. New ideas were taking the place of old ones ; the approach of a certain overturn in life and manners v.^as " in the air," and as Mr. Johnston says, " the government was changed because the people had changed." Jackson's own story was proof of this. He was what is called a " self-made man." He was the first president to come directly from the ranks of " the peo- ple." The son of a poor North Carolina borderer, he was born into the very air of rebellion to tyranny and early imbibed a love of liberty. The boy of fourteen who dared to refuse to black the boots of his British captor was the same unyielding jxitriot who, behind his crazy earthworks at New Orleans, grimly awaited that DE WITT CLINfO.V. 178 CITIZENS AND PARTIES. splcMitlid Britisli advance that he was to crush and hurl hack into defeat, the same loyal American who, Avhen the South Carolina " nullifiers " of 1832 threatened insurrection, could hurst out hotly: THE RAILWAY COACH OF OUH GliAXDFATHKRS. " By the Eternal ! the Union must and shall he preserved. Send for General Scott ! " The country was wonderfully prosperous when Jackson came into office in 1829. The census of 1830 showed a popidation of nearly thirteen millions ; East and West were alike growing rapidly in wealth and nund)ers ; manufactures were increasing ; new indus- CITIZEN c> AND PARTIES. 179 Vv Ken everj^^,ma,n. vxyd^^l Kir Co LUer, tries were springing up ; there were eighty-five hundred post-offices in tlie country, and the sale of its western lands to the new settlers brought into the national treasury fully twenty-five millions of dol- lars a year. Before the close of Jackson's first administration the locomotive engine of Stephenson had been introduced into America and Yankee ingenuity was quick to adapt the idea to the needs of the land. The first passenger train in America was run on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad in 1830 ; the first successful American locomotive Avas built in 1833 ; before 1835 nineteen rail- roads were being built or were in operation, and before 1837 fifteen hundred miles of rail- way were in use in the land. The railroad changed every thing. Quicker communication meant a busier and more pro- ductive life for the nation ; and this quickly came. Steamships began to cross and re-cross the ocean ; gas was introduced in cities to take the place of lamp and candle ; the reaping machine hastened and enlarged farm work ; coal was used as fuel ; the revolving pistol did away with the old style of fire-arms ; fric- tion matches took the place of flint and steel ; Morse was feeling his way toward the tele- graph ; education, books and newspapers were increasing and improving everywhere, and the United States of America seemed on the highroad to an unexampled prosperity. 180 CHANGING DAYS. CHAPTER XX. CHANGING DAYS. F President Jackson's administration was the threshold of change in American life and manners, politics and pojnila- tion, it also led men and women into a broader room for action and advancement. The railroad and the telegraph were not the only improvements that widened American The arm of the Yankee had thus far been stout to hew, to clear and build, to drain and dig ; but new were forming ; people influence. chop and cities were growing; new neighborhoods were coming closer together, as canal and railroad took the place of stage and saddle ; men began to think, to desire, to invent; the brain of the Yankee was now to help the arm. A new era in American think- ing dates from " the thirties." The contemptuous query of the famous English critic, Sydney Smith: "Who ever reads an American book ? " was soon to be answered : " The world." For, following the work of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Halleck and Drake, of Noah Webster and Lindley Murray, of Wilson and Audubon, came, -/i'i;/Vi' WASniNGTOX IRVING. CHANGING BAYS. 181 soon after 1830, the first works of our modern Americnn writers — the poems of Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes, the romances of Hawthorne, the historical work of Bancroft and Prescott, the ■ tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Then, too, the greatest of American orators — Daniel Web- ster and Henry Clay — were in their prime, stirring their fellow- men by their power and their elo- quence, while, among lawyers, the Americans Marshall, Kent and Story were not surpassed on either side of the Atlantic. As men began to think their consciences were aroused to ques- tion the worth of everything that was degrading or hurtful to their fellowmen. Drunkenness, common to all America, the neglect of convicts in the pris- ons, and negro slavery, debas- ing both to master and man, were attacked by those earnest men and women that we now call " reformers," but who were then called " fanatics," and the way toward real Americaii lib- erty was widened by these pioneers of virtue. From that time, too (the days of President Jackson), dates the public school — that system of free education that has been the uplifting and strengthening of America. As the railroads ran deeper into the land, settlement reached out still further into the new sections ; the " frontier " shifted almost with each year, and the pathfinder and the emigrant made more J'/^ crty or~0 C\ ■0('/ 182 CHANGING BAYS. and yet more roadways for civilization. In " the thirties " were incorporated such new cities as Buifah), Chicago, Cleveland, Colum- bus, Memphis, Rochester and Toledo — centers of a growing trade that, before the coming of canal or railroad, had been but frontier, posts, hard to reach and seemingly scarce worth settling. On the rolling prairie, by the shore of the great lakes or on the banks of some flowing western river the log cabin of the j^ioneer and the rouuh clearino; of the settler showed the beginnings of a new home ; the traveling schoolmaster carried his knowledge from district to district ; the cross-roads store or tavern was the meeting place for discussion, and the exchange of news and opinions ; the circuit- rider or traveling minister, counted his congregation not bv numbers but by miles as, jogging along from place to place, he carried in his saddle-bags his theological library — his Bible and hymn book, "Pil- grim's Progress " and '• Paradise Lost " — and stopped to preach, to talk, to marry or to bury, as his services were needed ; np and down the tow path of an Ohio canal trudged ji little fellow who, in after years, was to be general, college professor and president of the United States; and. typical of Western advance, in 1833 there was no Chicago — in 1839 it was a flourishing town with splendid steamers running to its docks and with its store of merchandise going south, west and north. The administration of Jackson was an exciting time ; besides the li-VMii, \\ i:!'.--! 1.];. CHANGING DAYS. 183 new movements in thought and Hfe that were making " tlie thirties " ,1 time of changing days, the pohtical questions and official acts, that came to disturb men's minds and rouse them to fervid support or violent opposition, were many. Jackson was a man of strong opinions, likes and dislikes ; absolutely honest and with an unfalter- ing will he loved his friends and hated his foes ; his administration was a strong one and by its firmness made the country respected abroad ; but it was filled with political quarrels and party strifes ; people in office who opposed the president were ruthlessly turned out to make room for his friends and supporters and a New York senator, defending the president's system of removals made the insolent announce- ment that has since grown famous : " to the victor belong the spoils." In the forty years between Washington and Jack- son there had been but seventy-four re- movals from office ; during the first year of Jackson's administration two thousand office holders were " turned out " to make room for the president's " supporters." For years the money that belonged to the United States had been deposited in what was known as the United States Bank. President Jackson believed that this was not so beneficial to the people as if the money was scattered around among the banks in the different States. So he made war on the United States Bank and finally destroyed it. Jackson also objected strongly to the " American system," of which I told you in the last chapter. The Government, he said, had no right to tax the people for making roads, digging canals and dredging harbors. So he declared war on " internal improvements " and again came out victoi'ioiis. Jackson, too, believed in the government of the United States. It was, he claimed, the one authority to which all the States must 184 UIIANGING BAYS. ANDREW JACKSON. Seventh presidtnt of the United States. give obedience. Some of the Southern leaders, especially John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, believed that the States were superior to the general government and were at liberty to stay in the Union or go out of it as they chose. He believed, also, that if Congress made a law that was objectionable to any State, that State had the right to refuse to obe}' it; in other words, it could "nullify" or CHANGING DAYS. 185 make of no avail an act of Congress. In 1832, South Carolina took this step, declaring the taritt" law of Congress " null and void " and prepared to resist its enforcement. President Jackson acted promptly.* He warned South Carolina that she must obey the law ; he prepared to force the State to submit and he would certainl_y have done so had not South Carolina yielded to the president. So many stormy scenes nuist, of course, have made strong friends and bitter foes for the stern soldier-president — "Old Hickory," his friends loved to call him. When the time for the new election came, in 1832, party differences ran hot and high ; but Jackson was too firmly fixed in the hearts of the people, who admire pluck and courage joined to honesty and firmness, and the president received two hundred and nineteen out of the two hundred and eighty-eight electoral votes and entered upon his second term. But, though de- feated, the anti-Jackson men clung to their principles. They cnlled themselves Whigs, because the Whigs among their English ances- tors had been those who resisted tyranny and they held that Presi- dent Jackson was a tyrant. So the voters of the land were divided into Jackson men and anti-Jackson men — into Democrats and Whigs. The Democrats opposed the United States Bank ; the Whigs desired its re-establishment. The Democrats opposed taxing the people for " internal improvements ; " the Whigs wished the government to foster these and pay for them by taxation. The Democrats were believers in the rio;hts of the States : the Whigs said the General Government should be the supreme power. When President Jackson's second term drew to a close he de- clined a renomination and retired to his Tennessee farm, the only president, so it has been said, who "went out of office far more popular than he was when he entered." But if he was popnlar with the masses, he had bitter enemies. The Whigs did their best to elect an anti-Jackson man ; but their * Prp«iflciit Jackson whs really a holicver in tlie " States-rights" theory; but he u-as president of the whole Union and was brave enough to do his duty as president. 186 CHANGING DAYS. councils were divided; dift'orent loaders among them had their strong partisans, and in the confusion into which their stuhhornness threw them they made no nomination and President Jackson's choice, Martin Van Buren of New York, was elected president, re- ceiving one hundred and seventy electoral votes. President Van Buren had been the strong and unfaltering sup- porter of Jackson, whose Secretary of kState he had been for two years. But Jackson's good fortune did not follow his successor. The prosperity of the country had led people into unsafe and unwise speculations. Out of the fight which ended in the over- throw of the United States bank had come the formation throughout the country of small and unreliable banks which lent money and issued their own bills, and traded in public lands. When forced to meet the bills they had issued they had not gold and silver enough to pay them and, '* fail- ing," let the loss fall on the people. These irresponsible institutions were called '■ wild-cat banks " and their methods brousrht much distress on the country. Too late for the pub- lic safety the Government interfered and only made things worse by refusing to receive the notes of any banks. Business was thrown into confusion ; prices fell ; crojjs were poor ; workmen lost their places and, in 1837, came the crash. " The Panic of 1837," as this time of disaster was called, affected the whole country ; rich men became poor ; bank notes were good for nothing ; distress and ruin threatened many homes ; MAltnX VAX uritKX. Eighth preshltnt of the United States. CHANGING DAYS. 187 the United States government itself suffered in revenue ; the State governments that had been drawn into the trouble " repudiated " — that is, refused to pay — their debts and every thing was in confusion. A special session of Congress was called and after much discussion the trouble was ended by the establish- ment of what are known as sub-treasuries in which the money of the govern- ment has ever since been kept above the risk of bank failures. A country Avitli the re- sources and opportunities of the United States could not long be set back by such a disaster as was the "panic of '37." Business was conducted upon a safer basis, people took up the work again at bench and plough and desk, resolved to deal squarely and honest- ly with one another and trade soon revived. But President Van Bu- ren was not forgiven the disaster that was really no fault of his. People, how- ever, are apt to blame the man at the helm when the ship goes toward the rocks and Van Buren, they said, was an unsafe pilot. At all events a change, they declared, would be a good thing, and so, in 18-iU, after a campaign tliat was full of enthusiasm from WILLIAM HENUV HARRISON. yinth president of the United States. 188 CHANGING DAYS. OIK' I'lid of tlu' liiiid to tlie other, General William Henry Harri- son, the •■ liero of Tippecanoe," was elected president. It was a complete overtnrn in politics. The Democrats were defeated. The Whiii-s secured for their candidate two hundred and thirty- four out of the two hundred and ninety-four electoral votes and . amid the most unbounded rejoicings, William Henry Harrison was^ inaugurated as rlie ninth president of the United States. The rejoicing, however, was short lived. Within a month from his inauguration President Harri- son died suddenly, and, in accord- ance with the Constitution, the Vice-President, John Tyler of Vir- ginia, succeeded to the vacant chair as president. The succession proved disas- trous to the Whigs. Tyler was not in sympathy with the party that had elected him ; he had been nominated " to draw the Southern vote " and before he had been long in office he showed that his sympathies were really against the Whigs. Politics " tumbled " again. Pai- ties were divided and the very men who in 1840 had gone about in procession and parade singing out the party chorus : " We'll Imrl little Van from his station And elevate Tippeeanoe," JOHN TYLEK. Tenth president of the United States. now were sorry enough at what they had done and were hot and bitter against the president they had placed in power. One of their THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. 18& party cries had been " Tippecanoe and Tyler, too ! " They had got " Tyler, too," now and still they were not happy. In 184U the population of the United States had grown to over seventeen millions. Two new States, Arkansas and Michigan, had been admitted to the Union and the *' old thirteen " were now twenty-six. A treaty with Great Britain in 1842 pledged each country to send back for trial any criminal who had escaped from justice ; it also settled the northern boundary of the United States, which in 1839 had almost brought on a war between Maine and New Brunswick. In 18.37 Samuel F. B. Morse took out a patent for his electric telegraph, and in 1844 the first telegraph line wa.s constructed, connecting Baltimore and Washington. -«=^ CHAPTER XXI. THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. HE greatest man of this nineteenth century — Abraham Lincoln the American — said, years ago : " I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." What had gone before, what followed later, alike were proofs of this. When Pinzon the Spaniard brought his negro slaves into Cuba in 1508 ; when the Dutch sea- captain ran the first cargo of stolen Africans into the James River in 1619 ; when Eli Whitney made cotton the " king " by his dis- astrous invention of the cotton-gin in 1793 ; — and Avlien, on the other hand, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620 ; when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the equality of all men in 1776; when the stream of emigration bore 190 THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. the love of liberty into western wilderness and prairie, the causes that led to what one statesman declared to be "an irrepressible con- flict" were established. When two boys who have been companions and bosom-friends from infancy "get mad" with one another — as boys (and girls, too), sometimes w411 — the trouble grows greater as the cause of the first pout or the first hasty word is dwelt upon and made to lead to others. It was so with the two sections of the American Union. Almost from the start they disagreed as to the extension of negro slavery ; across that imaginary boundary, which the sur- veyors appointed by William Penn and Lord Baltimore drew in 1763, and which has ever since been known as " Mason and Dixon's line," the pout and shrug and hasty word were flung ; the question as to whicii had the most " right," which w^as " sovereign," the State or the nation, was argued, discussed and quarreled over ; minor questions as to just what the constitution meant when it said this or that, and numerous differences of opinion on matters of na- tional or sectional importance caused the boy at the south of Mason and Dixon's line to say harsh words to the boy at the north ; and the boy at the north, though too often willing to " give in " if only he could keep on unmolested at his work of accumulating, some- times flung back harsh words in reply to the boy at the south ; and so, little by little, the shadow of discord grew broader and blacker and matters slowly ripened for a real " getting mad " between these two close comrades and fast friends. In 1844 the United States of America were at peace with the world ; apparently they were at peace among themselves. With the exception of certain local quarrels such as that in regard to who should vote in the State of Rhode Island (which led to what is known as the " Dorr Rebellion " of 1844) and as to who should pay rent for the land in New York (which led to "the Anti-rent War" of 1844) there w^as nothing to disturb people or lead their thoughts away from successful farming or manufacjturing or money-getting. THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. 191 But in 1844, Texas asked to come into the United States ; and this brought about a renewal of the angry talk, while the shadow of discord grew denser. Texas (from the old Indian word telias or tejas, "friends") was a part of old Mexico. But when Mexico revolted from Spanish rule and set up as a republic, many Americans, who had settled in its ANTI-RENTEKS, DISGUISED AS INDIANS, AMllUslllNli THE SIIEltlEK. northern section, were led into disputes with the new republic as to the ownership of the land ; the Mexican government was unjust and ugly in its decisions, and the American element in Northern Mexico forced that section into revolt in 1835. Under the lead of a gallant fighter, known as General Sam Houston, the Republic of 192 THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. Texas was proclaimed. The new republic was avast territory larger than all of France, and when in 1844 it expressed a desire to join the great northern republic as one of the United States the Southern .States rejoiced exceedingly, for this would bring on great increase of power to the slave States ; .on the other hand the North opposed i^uch an action both as giving too much power to the slave States and as a breach of friendship with Mexico, which had not yet ac- knowledged the independence of Texas. But the Southern leaders were determined to have Texas if they could. The presidential election of 1844 turned on the question of its imnexation ; Henry Clay, the Whig candidate for president, was not sufficiently emphatic in his objection to the " Texas scheme " to please a certain section of the anti-slavery men at the North who called themselves the Liberty party ; their hostility lost Clay the iState of New York, and the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, was elected president by a vote of one hundred and seventy of the two hundred and seventy-five electoral votes. Of course Texas was annexed; and in December, 1845, she was admitted to the Union. Florida came in just before her, in March, 1845, and it so happened that the vast southwestern commonwealth was the last slave State to be admitted to the Union. For from that day the shadow of discord grew heavier and blacker. President Polk's administration witnessed many signs of prog- ress in the land. In 1846, Elias Howe invented the sewing-machine ; in 1847, Richard M. Hoe invented his cylinder printing press; in 1846, Dr. Morton discovered the use of ether, and thus were house- hold labor, the spreading of news and the bearing of pain made lighter and easier. But the administration of President Polk also plunged the country into war. It presented also the example of the strong punishing the weak — never a pleasant spectacle and one that is apt to lead to the question with which so many boys are familiar : " Say, why don't you take one of your size?" For in May, 1846, the re- THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. 193 public of the United States declared war against the republic of Mexico. To be sure Mexico was ugly and quarrelsome. She held a grudge against the United States for helping and taking Texas ; she owed American citizens money and refused to pay her debts ; she growled in most emphatic Spanish about the boundary lines the United States demanded ; she threatened all sorts of things. But it was largely talk. Mexico had no wish to fight the United States ; she was ready to consider a peaceful settling of the matter ; but. all too hastily, in April. 184G, President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to take possession of the disputed strip of land on the boundary ; there was a meeting be- tween American and Mexican sol- diers ; shots were fired ; men were killed, and the war was begun. It was not difficult at the outset to tell what the end would be. Mexico was torn by quarrels and feuds ; her soldiers were untrained ; her war materials poor ; her treas- ury almost empty ; her leaders ig- noi'ant and inefficient. The United States troops were well officered and maneuvered, and thougli the Mexican soldiers were brave fighters and repeatedly outnumbered the Americans — sometimes five to one — the superiority of Ameri- can drill and American leadership always won the day. From first to last the war was a series of victories and, though we question the justice of the quarrel and deplore the quite unnecessary fight, we cannot but swing our caps over tlie pluck, the persistence and the JA.ME6 li. roLlC. Mleoenih president of the United States. 194 THE SHADOW OF DISVORD. valor of the American soldiers and their leaders. In a hostile and unknown land, against the odds of heavier numbers, stubborn resist- ance, miserable roads, lack of supplies and an unhealthy coiuitry, the American soldiers fought their way to victory and made the names of Palo Alto and I5uena Vista, of Cerro Gordo and Contreras, of Cheru- busco and Chapultepec glorious in the annals of bravery, while the names of such generals as Taylor and Kearney, Scott and Worth do but lead the roll of the daring and heroic men who followed them to the end. By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which put an end to this two years' war, the territory of the United States was greatly increased. The immense section now occupied by Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California, nearly a million square miles in extent, was added to the republic ; fifteen millions of dollars were paid to Mexico for the territory thus given up ; peace was declared jind the victorious Americans returned to their homes in the North. But if the war had been an unjust one on the part of the United States, it brought about trouble enough in the end and deepened the shadow of discord into a dense and overhanging cloud. At once, after the new territory had been secured, the South demanded that it be made slave soil; the North as strongly objected and de- manded that slavery should be therein forbidden. Again it looked iis if the boy at the south and the boy at the north of Mason and Dixon's line would come to blows; but they decided finally to leave the question to those who should settle on the new lands, and thus an uncertain condition of affairs was brought about. This, because it was in the hands of those who hurriedly settled (or "squatted") on the vacant lands, was known as " squatter sovereignty," and the black looks across the line still continued. In 1848, General Zachary Taylor, "the hero of Buena Vista," was elected president of the United States. There was a feeling through- out the country that " old Rough and Ready," as he was called, had jiot been well-treated by the Government during the war. and tiie i^' AT UUii.NA VlbTA. Tlie American soldiers fowjht their way to victory.'' THE SHADOW OF DIUCOIll). 197 opponents of the party in power eagerly took him as their candidate. The result was a victory for the Whigs, but their soldier-president did not long survive his last victory, for he died after only a year and four months of office. The vice-president, Millard Fillmore, succeeded to the vacant found himself by important chair and confronted questions. In 1846, the long-stand- ing dispute with England as to the northern lioundary of the United States ended in a treaty which gave to the United States all the country south of that de- gree of latitude marked on the maps as forty-nine. The United States hehl out some time for possession as far as fifty-four degrees and forty minutes north lati- tude, and some were even ready to go to war over it, with their battle-cry of " Fifty-four Forty or Fight ! " but better councils prevailed and the treaty of 1844 settled the dispute. The United States now owned the Pacific coast from the head of the Gulf of California to the shores of Puget Sound. It was a noble empire, but little was known of it in the East, save as the land of Indians, fur-trader.; and cattle-raisers. But suddenly, in 1849, came the news : " There ZACHAltV TAVl.Ol!. Twelfth president of the Vnited States. 198 THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. is gold in California ! " The precious metal had been discovered in the Sacramento River country ; it was said that no such gold mines had ever before been found and at once there was a great rusli to " the diggings." The news spread ; the " finds "proved richer and richer; the rush to the Pacific; broke into a regular '' gold fever " that attacked the world; all classes caught it; around " the Horn," across the isthmus, over the jilains the gold seekers hurried, and into the old half-Spanish quiet of California came the excitement, the fever, the haste, the selfishness, the greed and the danger that always accompany the mad race for wealth. Within two years a hundred thou- sand people had gone into California ; San Francisco grew into a city of twenty thousand inhabitants and, wher- ever gold Avas found, there men risked all for fortune ; but while some ol>- tained the prize they sought, many others found only failure, loss, ruin and death. But the majority of the gold hunters of '49, though absorbed in their search for wealth, were still Americans; they soon realized the need of a strong government and some higher authority than the self-appointed " committees " of cabin, camp and settlement. In 1849, they set up a state government of their own and asked for admittance into the Union. Then there was trouble at once. The constitution of the newly-formed State prohil)ited slavery; part of its territory lay south of the line marked out at the time of the Missouri Compromise, and the South demanded that slavery be MIl.I.vr.L) riLLMOKE. Thirteenth president o/ the Cnited States THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. 109 allowed in the new State. Other troubles arose. Texas claimed a part of New Mexico, which had been ceded to the United States ; the South demanded that its runaway slave* who escaped to the North should be returned to their masters; the North demanded that the buyiug and selling of negro slaves in the capital of the nation be stopped. So the shadow was growing denser, when Henry Clay endeavored to suggest a "compromise" that should "fix things" all right. This was called the " Omnibus Bill" or the "Compromise of 1850," be- cause it undertook to settle all the disputes, and to hold, as does an omni- bus, all that can be crowded into it. By this compromise it was agreed to admit California into the Union with- out slavery; the buying and sell- iuf of slaves were to be prohibited !i the District of Columbia, but slavery itself was not prohibited there ; ten million dollars were paid Texas to give up her claim to New Mexico ; in the territories formed of the new lands slavery was neither forbidden nor allowed, and a Fugitive Slave Law was passed. But the " Compromise of 1850 " did , ,, . mi „.. FRANKLIN PIEKCIS. not settle thmgs. There was, es- . , „ .,. , ,1 Fourteenth preaUlentof the i lilted states. pecially, a fierce opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law which made the United States officers slave- catchers. But when the election of 1852 came around the opposition was divided. The Southern Whigs and the Northern Whigs had a falling out ; the Liberty party now calling itself the Free-soil party, denounced the Fugitive Slave Law ; a good many men refused to 200 THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. vote at, all because tliey did not like any of the things offered them, and Franklin Pierce, the Democratic candidate, was elected president with two hundred and fifty-four electoral votes. Tiien came four years more of talk and trouble. Anti-slavery feeling grew in the North ; the boastings about the supreme rights of the States increased in the South. In 1854 the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, west of the Missouri River, were set apart, and the question of the admission of slavery therein was left to the de- cision of the settlers themselves — a case of "squatter sovereignty" again. When this measure, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, w'as in- troduced into Congress, there was a great stir. By the Missouri Com- promise of 1820 which, you remem- ber, prohibited slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri, the new territories by right were to be forever " free soil." But the leaders of the majority in Congress, to gain their purpose, voted to repeal the Missouri Compromise and to let the people who entered the new terri- tory make it slave or free as they preferred. This led to a terrible time. People poured into the new territo- ries. The free-state people and the slave-state people alike sought to obtain the mastery ; tliere were mobs and fightings and feuds of the most bitter and bloody kind. But the free-soil people at last prevailed and in the very heat of the struggle came the election of 1856. JA.MES BUCHANAN. Fifteenth president 0/ the United States. THE SHADOW OF DISCORD. 201 By this time the Whig party was broken in pieces. Out of it came those who opposed the stupid repeal of the Missouri Compro- mise, who objected to the Fugitive Slave Law and who sided with the free-state people in the Kansas trouble. These joined with the Free-soil party and formed what has ever since been known as the Republican party. They selected as their candidate for president, Colonel John C. Fremont, " the Pathfinder," who had blazed a path across the Rocky Mountains, conquered California and led the way westward for settlement and civilization. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan of Pennsylvania who had been President Polk's Secretary of State ; while a third party, which opposed giving place or office to foreigners, and which was called the American or " Know Nothing " party re-nominated President Fillmore. The struggle was bitter ; but Buchanan was elected president by one hundred and seventy-four of the two hundred and ninety-six electoral votes. Fremont, however, carried nearly all the free States with an electoral vote of one hundred and fourteen, and when the South saw this sure and steady growth of anti-slavery feeling, her leaders realized that their power was slipping away and the shadow of discord, now grown into the blackest of clouds, seemed ready to burst upon the heads of the people. 202 Jt'OB UNION. CHAPTER XXII. FOR UNIOX. N 1860, in spite of the increasing danger of their poUtical troubles, the United States of America were wonderfully prosperous. Population had grown to more than thirty- one millions ; the roll of States now numbered thirty-three — Iowa having been admitted to the Union in 1846, Wis- consin in ISIS, California in 1850, Minnesota in 1858 and Oregon in 1859 ; there were over thirty thousand miles of railroad in opera- tion and thousands of miles of telegraph ; American commerce occupied the second place in the world; American agriculture stood first.; coal and gold, silver and copper were dis- covered in productive mines, and in Penn- sylvania the finding of peti'oleum beds in 1859, led to almost as much excitement as the dis- covery of gold in California ten years before. The public schools now numbered over a hun- dred thousand, while four hundred colleges cared for the advanced education of the young. Machinery was finding entrance into almost every occupation of life, from farming to shoe making and sugar refining ; the cities were improving alike in size and in comforts ; the police and fire departments were organized into almost military discipline ; the laying of a tel- __ egraph line beneath the ocean to England was attempted in 1857, and the United States were believed to be worth in property and money fully sixteen billions of dollars. FOli UNION. 203 But money is not everything in the upbuilding of a nation. Principle and character are of first importance. Beneath all this prosperity were dissatisfaction and discord. The advance in wealth and facilities liad been confined to the North ; in tliis great pros- perity the "Soutli did not seem to be a sharer. A few wise ones at the South saw that this condition was due to slavery ; but the people had not yet learned that slave labor can never build a suc- cessful State, and they tried all the harder to win in a losing fight. DINAH MOKUIS S CliltTIFICATE OF KHEEDO.M. In the North since first in 1777, Dinah Morris, the Vermont slave, was given her " freedom papers," slavery had dwindled and died away ; in the South it had grown steadily. In the North everybody had to work to live ; in the South work was considered as " low ; " and so tliere came to be, at the South, three classes — the rich whites, the poor whites and the negro slaves. The free States were growing in the North ; there was but little 'J04 FOR UNION. chance for the introduction of slavery in the new Territories ; the plan to purchase Cuba had fallen through ; the slave power in Congress was fast being outnumbered by the free-soil supporters; the three hundred and iifty thousand slaveholders of the South saw that they would soon be no match in politics or power for the freeholders of the North; soon the South must submit to the will of the majority. Feeling as they did ; believing, as they had always been taught to believe, in the supreme right of the State to say what it wanted and what it would have ; seeing the power slipping away from them and thinking that without slave labor ruin was certain to come upon them, it is scarcely to l)e wondered at that the leaders in the South tried first to force things in their favor, and, failing in this, threatened to withdraw from the Union whenever they saw fit. For years their hold upon the Government, aided by the selfish desire of people in the North to avoid all trouble and annoyance had given the Southern leaders " the say " in national affairs. It was these le.aders who had brought about the purchase of the vast territory of Louisiana in 1803 ; they had insisted on the slavery line in the Missouri Compromise in 1820 ; they had demanded the annexation of Texas in 1845; they had put into effect the cruel Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 ; they had forced the unwilling and fatal '• squatter sovereignty " clause into the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 185-4 ; they had attempted to bring about the acquisition of Cuba in 1854 ; they had forced from the Supreme Court the decision that it was the duty of Congress to protect slavery in the territories (known as the " Dred Scott Decision" of 1856); they had sought, as a desperate measure of safety, to reintroduce the horrible African Slave Trade in 1859, and, as a final move, they had asserted in 1860 their determination to leave the Union — to " secede " — unless they obtained their " rights." But the leaders of the North were growing each year more and more determined. To be sure the people did not pay very much attention to all this talk ; they were too busy about their own FOR UNION. 205 affairs. But those who did look into things declared that it was time to put an end to Southern presumption. To the Southern leaders they said : You can regulate the slave question so far as yowx ow^n section is concerned, but you must not try to force the North and West into slavery. You have broken the agreement of 1820, a:m(iN(: the 8T'Gar cane. known as the Missouri Compromise, but we will make Kansas a free State in spite of you ; you have compelled the courts to say that Congress must protect slavery in the territories, but this we will never consent to ; you have showm a desire to make slavery a national institution, but that you shall never do ; and we warn you that the Constitution does not admit the right of an}' State to 206 FOR UNION. say just what it shall do or how it sliall act, and that no State has a rii;lit to leave the Union of its own aecord. The breach was widening. The United States of America were becoming sectional — that is, slavery, believed in by the Sonth, ab- horred by the North, was setting North and South at euTnity. To- day slavery is dead, and North and South can never again ha arrayed against one another ; but in 1860 slavery tinged everything. The love of it led to the brutal assault upon Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and beat him from his chair in the Senate in 1856; the hatred of it led to the armed attack in Virginia in 1859 precipitated by a free-soil partisan and known as " John Brown's raid," and both the attack on Sumner and the " raid " of John Brown, though both were the result of a fiery fanaticism and though neither of them were due to the pl5ttings of rival parties, were still fastened upon the sections from which the actors came, and increased the growing anger that was showing itself North and South. It was in the midst of this growing discord that the presidential election of 186U came as, what we call, the climax. The Democratic party split in two and made separate nominations ; the Republican party raised the cry of " No extension of slavery ! " and by a total of one hundred and eighty electoral votes carried the day, and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected president. The hottest and most determined of the Southern States was South Carolina. From the days of President Andrew Jack.son and the " Nullifiers," it had always maintained its right to leave the Union, and the election of Lincoln gave it the opportunity it sought. A Northern president, backed by the Northern people, means the downfall of the South, said South Carolina. I shall leave the Union, and you, my comrades of the Cotton States, if you know Avhat is best for you, will go out too. The State Convention of South Carolina at once assembled and on the twentieth of December, 1860, passed an " ordinance of secession," wiped out the act by which the State had so many years before de- FOR UNION. 207 clared its acceptance of the Constitution of tlie United States, and declared that " the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America " was dissolved. Led on by the bold step of South Carolina the other " Cotton States" followed suit, and in January and February, 1861, similar ordinances of secession were passed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Acting quickly, the secession element in the seven rebellious States at once proceeded to " force the issue." They sent delegates to a general convention held at Montgomery in Alabama, set ujd a government under the name of the Confederate States of America, adopted a constitution (that was almost exactly the same as the Constitution of the United States, with slavery and State sovereignty added), elected Jefferson Davis as president, established " depart- ments" of state, war, the treasury, the navy, etc., decided upon a great seal and flag (popu- larly called the '• stars and bars," as against the "stars and stripes"), and prepared to defend their action by war if need be. But, they all declared, that will scarcely be necessary ; the North will not fight. And, at first, it did look as though the North would not fight. President Buchanan did nothing ; he said he did not see how he could ' prevent a State from seceding if it really desired or attempted to ; the politicians said : 0, the trouble will be fixed up with another compromise ; the chief associates of the president were really in sympathy with the secessionists, and when Congress adjourned in March, 1861, no step had been taken to secure the protection or uphold the dignity of the United States of America. Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president of the United States on the fourth of March, 1861. At once he found himself GREAT SKAI, Ol' THE FEDERACV." 208 FOR UNION. face to face witli the greatest dilHculties. lie was the head of ii new party, without experience and without standing. He was con- fronted by seven States in open rebellion to the constituted authority of the National Government. The men from whose hands he received the reins of power were hostile to Iiis party and his prin- ciples and had helped rather than hindered the efforts of the ' " State's Rights rebels." Forts, arsenals, mints, custom houses, ship 3'ards, naval stores and other public properties of the United States had been deliberately seized by the States within whose borders they were located, and transferred to the new " Confederate " government. The little army of the United States had been scattered and forced to surrender to the rebels. Officers of the army and navy, representatives and senators in Congress and officials in the service and pay of the United States, declared that they must " follow their State," resigned their stations or offices and went to their homes. In the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Sumter, one of the very few forts still held by the United States troops, was surrounded and besieged by the South Carolina forces, and. of the navy of the United States, only two insignificant vessels were ready for service along the whole Atlantic coast. To such a pass had Southern scheming and the sympathy or stupidity of the party in power brought the dignity and the ability of the United States. Abraham Lincoln was clear-headed and far-sighted. He felt that the new administration stood on dangerous ground. One hasty move, one tyrannical act might turn the tide against the Union — and with him the preservation of the Union Avas the leading desire. His inaugural address, now held bv critics to be one of the great- est state papers in histor}', while full of the hope of peace, was still firm and unfaltering in its purpose to maintain the Union, whatever happened. " The Union is unbroken," he said ; '" and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Sixteenth jwesident of the United Stdtes. FOR uNioisr. 211 upon me, that the hiws of the Union be faithfnlly executed in all the States." And then, placing the responsibility where it rightly belonged — upon those who struck the first blow — he said : " In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. You can have no conflict Avithout being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." There is an old, old proverb that declares : Wliom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The destruction of slavery was ordained ; but its supporters were surely mad- dened and blinded by passion or they would have heeded, before it was too late, the tender appeal to their memories with which this first inaugural of President Lincoln concluded : " We are not enemies," he said, " l)ut friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretch- ing from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better anu'els of our nature." But kind words and brotherly appeals were of no avail. The leaders of the South were determined. And when, in April, President Lincoln ordered a fleet to sail to Charleston with supplies to the starving garrison of Fort Sumter, the fiery cry for action came from the chiefs of the rebellion. " You must sprinkle blood in the face of the people ! " one of them declared. South Carolina, as she had led the revolt, fired the first shot. On the twelfth of April, 1861, the Confederate batteries in Charleston Harbor opened fire upon Fort Sumter which, for thirty-si.\ hours, the commandant. Major SBAL OF THE U.NITED STATES. Die of I SSo. 212 FOR UNION. Rol)ert Anderson, held in the face of a fierce bombardment. Then with annnunition exhausted, provisions gone and the building on fire, Major Anderson surrendered. The Hag of the Union gave place to the Hag of rebellion and the first victory of secession was won. But it was a victory that proved defeat. The South had struck the first blow and that settled the question in the North. The word ^* Sumter has been fired on," flew from city to city and from town FORT SUMTER IN CIIAKLKSTOX HARBOR. to town. There w%as but one response : The Union shall be preserved! The North which — so the Southern leaders had de- clared — would be torn and rent by feud ;ind dispute if civil war was threatened, became, instead, imited in an instant. Men who had bitterly opposed one another in polities now joined hands in defense of an imperiled Union. From school-house and court-house, from church and railway station, from hotel, from A FIGHT FOR LIFE. 213 public building and from private house, the flag of the Union was tlung to tlie breeze ; and when, the day after Sumter, Presi- dent Lincoln declared the Southern States in rebellion, and called gfor volunteers to put it down, the struggle for life or death was ■ at hand. CHAPTER XXITI. A FIGHT FOR LIFE. HAT shot at Sumter, as has been shown, roused the North to action. " Why, this is open rebellion ! " everybody cried, and at once without regard to party the men of the North — Republicans and Democrats alike — sprang to arms. President Lincoln, on the fifteenth of April, called for seventy-five thousand men " to put down the rebellion " ; four times as many responded ; militia regiments hur- ried to the defense of Washington ; old soldiers ^^^^^^£Sl who had seen service were in demand as officers ; yff^r-iy'^^^^f.m" \ money for war purposes was voted by States and cities ; the '' war gover- nors " were patriotic, active and alert ; new regiments were speedily formed or " recruited " in evei'y Northern Stat and though the city of Washington lay on the border of the Southern land it was soon so circled with Union troops that its safety was speedily assured. But the " war-fever " was not confined i % ^^•H& V yitoi. ^1 ^ 214 A FIGHT FOR LIFE. to tlie Nortli. Tho conflict was to be a struggle between Ameri- can citizens, and when once the American spirit of resistance is aroused, enthusiasm and determination know no section. Tlie South, led into war by the efforts of its leaders, was bound to follow the lead of South Carolina. The attack on Sumter and tlic rising in the North were followed by quite as much ex- citement and enthusiasm in the South ; one after another the seceding States wheeled into line ; the Confederate Government called for thirty-five thousand volunteers, and, as in the North, four times as many offered their services. Men enlist to light for various reasons. Love of excitement, hope of reward, desire for glory, love of country — these are the principal causes, and in the war between the States, from 1861 to 1865, these reasons led many yoimg men to leave their comfortable homes, their studies, their occupations, their pleasures and their gains, and with sword at side or gun at shoulder to march South or North to fight for a principle dear alike to each. From the attack on Sumter on the twelfth of Ajiril, 1861, and the first blood at Baltimore on the nineteenth of April following, down to the surrender of General Lee, the chief of the Confederate forces, on the ninth of April, 1865 — almost four years to a day — the fight for life, for Union, for supremacy, went fiercely on. All too soon the people. North and South, awoke to the sad truth that this was an American war — a '' duel to the death," a strife between equally brave and equally determined foemen. The seventy-five thousand volunteers first called for in the North grew to an army of three million men before the end came ; the thirty-five thousand volunteers of the South grew to a million and a half. Li 1863 when the strife was at its height and the struggle was the fiercest, the North had nearly a million men in the field ; the South had A FIGHT FOR LIFE. •215 seven hundred thousand. The North, as the defenders of the Union, operating in a hostile country, had need for a hirger force than the South ; conquered territory must be garrisoned ; Unes of conimimication needed to be kept open and defended, and a stretch of battle front reaching from the Mississippi to the sea de- manded constant watching to prevent invasion, raid or occupation. IN THE ENLISTMENT OIFICE. Steadily, year by year, the power of the Union was more and more displayed. The South fought bravely, stubbornly, heroically, but from the first the result of the struggle could be foreseen. The North had the stronger arm and this at last must win the dav. But 216 A FIGHT FOR LIFE. ■when that clay came the cost of the fearful fight had been six hun- dred thousand Northern and Southern lives laid down for a principle and six thousand millions of dollars spent. This it had cost to destroy the doctrine of the sovereign power of the State as opposed to the supremacy of the nation, to do away forever with slavery on Ameri- can soil and to make of the United States a real nation ; this it had cost to make the republic a unit, to secure perpetual peace and a lasting union to all Americans forever. The war was a stubborn strife, not because of any hatred between Nortli and South — for this there really was not — i)ut because of the determination of both contesting sides to win. From 1861 to 1863 the government at Washington was busied in surrounding the confederacy in its encircling grasp; from I860 to 1865 this grasp was gradually closed and tightened until it held within it the armies and the cities of the South. The battle of Getty.sburg in the East and the capture of Vicksburg in the West, on or about the fourth of July, 1863, naarked the turning point of the war. Even in the first year of the war, although the Union army lost its first great battle (Bull Run, July 21, 1861), and in the West found itself defeated at Wilson's Creek (August 10, 1861), it still advanced its lines into the southern territory and narrowed the limits of the Confederacy. In the second year, still more territory was cap- tured ; but, within its lessening territory, the Confederate army stood firm and confident, undismayed by its defeat at Antietam in the East (September 17, 1862) and Pittsburgh Landing in the West (April 7, 1862). In the third year both sides being now trained to war, clinched for a decisive grapple. General Lee and his splen- didly disciplined army in the East made a wonderful attempt to break through the Union lines and invade the North, but fell back, bailled and defeated, at Gettysburg (July 3, 1863). Lookout Moun- tain gave the victory to the Union army in the West, and the grapple of 1863 ended in a loss of strength and confidence for the South. In the fourth year the fight raged about Richmond, now A FIGHT FOR LIFE. 219 the Confederate capital, where Lee, proving himself a great soldier, was at last pitted against a greater — General U. S. Grant. There it became the fight of the giants, while at the West General Sher- man utterly crushed out the Confederate army and making his bold and remarkable "march to the sea," hurried northward to o-ive his help to Grant. In the fifth year the Union grasp tightened ; the forces of the Confederacy lay now within the hand of the Federal government ; its territory had shrunk to the narrow sea strip be- tween Richmond and Charleston ; Sherman drew nearer to Grant ; in April the end came ; the grasp closed around the encircled Confed- erates and the surrender of General Lee on the ninth of April, 1865, with the consequent surrender of General Johnston on April 26 closed the stubborn strife, and ended the possibility of Americans ever again meeting in the shock and struggle of civil war. The war between the States had been fought for a principle, and by its results that principle was forever assured — the Union was established, the nation was supreme. ''My paramount object," said President Lincoln, "is: to save the Union." He did save it; and Americans can never cease to revere the unfaltering faith in his cause that sustained the great president, nor need they ever regret the cost in blood and treasure at which the American Union was saved from destruction. But the war settled other questions than that of national suprem- acy. Especially did it end forever on American soil the curse of human slavery. From the first, men saw — more and more clearly as the days went by — that slavery was doomed. The war was not fought to abolish slavery, but slavery was abolished because of the war. The conflict, however, had been raging a year and a half ; twenty thousand men had laid down their lives ; eighty thousand had been maimed or crippled in battle and many other thousands had been stricken down by sickness and disease before the stern necessity that men knew existed but that the Government hesitated to ac- knowledge was made into an absolute deed — emancipation. But 220 A FIGHT FOR LIFE. (/turret V, -^ _, I °f Tt\e ■} the step was taken at last. Five da^'s after the battle of Antietani — on the twenty-second of September, 18G2 — President Lincoln made the greatest move of the war and issued a j)roclamation de- claring that on iiiid after the first day of Jannary, 1863, " all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be thenceforward and forever free." On the first of January, 1863, the official procLiniation of emancipation was issued. "And tluis." says Mr. Schurz, '' Abraham Lincoln wrote his name upon the books of histor}" with the title dearest to his heart — the liberator of the 'slave." Fighting is a bloody and brutal ex- pedient — a course always to be avoided if in justice and honor it can be avoided. But when war comes it must be made effective by every possible means. The abolition of slavery was one of these means ; the abolition of wooden war-ships was another. The war led thinking people to suggest and invent manj" improvements in firearms, camp equipage and the mu- nitions of war, but the cunning brain of Captain John Ericsson revo- lutionized the navies of the world and showed that iron could float and fight on the water. The story of his little ironclad vessel, the Monitor, is as simple as it is stirring. The Confederates had taken the captured frigate, Merrimac, fitted her with an iron overcoat and sent her to destroy the Union war-ships around Fortress Monroe. This she did and was about starting out on a voyage of destruction among the sea-coast cities of the North, when on the morning of the ninth of March, 1862, the little Monitor (" a cheese-box on a raft," so the Confederates called her ), appeared on the scene, fought the A FIGHT FOR LIFE. 221 Merrimac for four hours and drove her back to cover. From that day wooden war-ves.sels were doomed. Ironclads were built by all the nations as the only safe and sure kind of sea-figliters ; and " the white squadron" of 1891 is the natural result in the navy of the United States of Ericsson's plucky little Monitor. The war, tliough terrible and blood}-, really helped to make men and women gentler and more tlioughtful. It taught the people to look after those who were fighting their Ijattles for them. Societies were formed for the careful protection of the soldiers' interests : to help them as they marched to battle, to help them as they lived in camp, to help tliem as they fell wounded on the field, to help them as they lay sick or maimed in hospital, to help them as they returned disabled to their homes. The greatest of the societies, the United States Sanitary Commission, expended millions of dollars in thus helping the soldiers. And, last but not least, the humanity that was a result of this long and bitter war was one of its most blessed influences. The war was in fact an armed rebellion against national authority. Such uprisings, before and since, have always, when unsuccessful, been attended by punishment for treason inflicted by the victorious government. The American civil war resulted in the triumph of the national government, and yet not one " rebel " was punished for his treason; not one of the -leaders of the revolt was made to suffer the historic penalty of his action. The war had been in progress for iiiore than three years when in November, 1864, a presidential election was held. The minority party — those timid Northerners who declared that the war was a failure and ought to cease — rallying imder the Democratic banner. WORKING FOR THH 80LUIERS. 222 A FIOHT FOR LIFE. T nominated for president, General Georf^e B. MeClellan, one of the brilliant but unsuccessful Union generals — a remarkable organizer of forces, but not a successful leader of troops ; the Republicans (including very many " war Democrats " ) re-nominated Abraham Lincoln, and the result proved their wisdom. Mr. Lincoln was re- elected by two hundred and twelve out of the two hundred and thirty-three electoral votes and, under his guidance, the war was fought out to the end that was, even then, in sight. But, when that end came, the great president, through whose wisdom and patience it had been reached, fell suddenly — the chief martyr of the great conflict, done to death by the bullet of an obscure assassin, from no other reason than a de.sire for that notoriety that Americans, it is hoped, will never grant. Abraham Lincoln may well be called the great American. Springing from the people, reared in poverty, struggling against hardship, attractive neither in form nor feature, with everything against him, he yet conquered every obstacle and rose from the obscurity of a backwoods " railsplitter " to be presi- dent of the United States, preserver and savior of the Union and the greatest, the best and the most honored of modern Americans. !\e iie.ky)- .JTresicient "Jumcom . A REUNITED NATION. •223 CHAPTER XXIV. A REUNITED NATION. ^ Gyw- "BRAHAM LINCOLN died on the fifteenth of April, 1864. > / \ Amid the tremendons excitement that followed the intelli- gence of the dastardly deed and aroused all the vindictive passions of startled men and women, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, elected as vice-president, took the oath of office and became president of the United States. The war was over. The veteran soldiers of Generals Grant and Sherman marched in final review before the officers of the government they had saved. The tattered armies of the Con- federacv, surrendering to foemen who worked in the spirit of the dead presi- dent's o;randest words : " With malice toward none, with charity for all," re- turned to their homes, and two million Northern and Southern fighters became again law-abiding citizens, honest, hard- workina;, ambitious Americans. The war was over; but now came the hardest part of the work — to reunite and put into running order the affairs of the whole nation. The seceding States had seen fit, solemnly and offici- ally, to break away from their consti- tutional associations and " go out " of the Union. Now they must come back. noMt; ag.un. 224 A liMUNITED NATION. But how ? It was a question to puzzle the clearest mind ; it led to grave and coiiHictiiig actions in the White House and the Capitol. President Johnson was an honest hut obstinate man. He was a Unionist and a War Democrat. IJut he also believed in certain ritfhtsof the States and was unwilling that the seceded States should be ''kept out" of the Union. He said : " They are all in the Union, rebel and Unionist alike." But Congress decreed otherwise. W^hen the war began the North held that no State could break up the Union and that those that had withdrawn must be forced to come back without an^- change of con- ditions. But the war had destroyed slavery. The Thirteenth Amend- ment to the Constitution of the United States forever abolishing slavery had been accepted by three fourths of all the States, and was declared a part of the Constitution in December, 1865. Nearly four millions of negroes ('' freedmen," as they were called) were emanci- pated by this Amendment. If the States came back again they must accept this change in the Constitu- tion. It was clear that the Governments of the seceding States must, to a certain extent, be made over again — that is, '' reconstructed." And so the six or seven years succeeding the war are known as years of reconstruction. Almost from the start there had been a disagreement as to methods between President Johnson and Congress. Of course the return of peace found things in a very confused con- dition in the South. The leading men of the Southern States had AXDKHW JOHNSON. /Seventeenth president of the United States- A REUNITED NATION. 225 been in rebellion against the National Government, and Congress did not propose to at once allow them a voice in the direction of affairs ; the relations between the black people and the white were full of uncertainty and trouble and the unsettled state of certain sections of the southern country led to all sorts of disturbances and worries. President Johnson, it seemed to the Republican Congress, THE CAPITOL OF THE UNITED STATES. was too ready to take the side of the white people of the South, who had not yet shown themselves repentant for their part in the war ; and Congress, so it seemed to President Johnson, was bent on keeping the former leaders of the South out of ]iower and giving too much •' protection " to the ignorant f reedmen. There was 226 A nEVNITET) NATIOX. ULYSSES SIMPSON CHANT. Eighteenth president of the United States. justice on botli sides, but this always makes a dispute all the more bitter and so there was a fierce qiiarrel between the President and Congress Avhich led at last to the impeachment of President Johnson Avhen, in 1867, he disobo^'-ed one of the orders of Congress. This " impeachment " declared that the President was guilty of disol)ey- ing the laws. He was tried by the Senate, according to the direction A REUNITED NATION. 227 of the Constitution, but in order to remove him from office, it re- quired that two thirds of the senators should vote that lie was guilty. The vote stood : " Guilty " — thirty-five ; " Not guilty " — nineteen. This was not a two thirds vote and the President was acquitted. In the midst of this " reconstruction " trouble and when all the States, excepting Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, had (on their acceptance of the conditions imposed by Congress) been restored to their old place in the Union, President Johnson's term of office expired. It had been a stormy time, but even through all the dif- ferences of opinion, the people of the North and South were coming nearer together, though yet sore and stubborn over many things. The result of the Presidential election of 18G8 endorsed the position taken by the Republican Congress. The most popular man in the country was selected as candidate by the Eepublicans. His success was assured from the start, and General U. S. Grant, tlie invincible leader of the Union armies, was elected president by two hundred and fourteen out of the two hundred and ninety-fovu' electoral votes. Little by little affairs improved in the South. The Fourteenth Amend- ment to the Constitution which decreed '' equal rights " to all men — white and black — and the. Fifteenth Amend- ment, which decreed universal suffrage to all, were accepted, or ratified, by three fourths of the States ; and though at first the results were full of danger in the South where unprincipled white men sought to use to their own in- terest the new voting power that had been given to the negroes, this evil in time righted itself, and year by year the scars of war were healed in the South ; the spirit of progress entered in and OLD FRKNCH MARKET, NF,\V OHLI'.ANS. 228 A REUNITED NATION. the "carpet bajrpjer" and the " scahawag," the "Ku-Khix Klan " and the other viok>nt ek^iients in Southern society gave place to quiet, prosperous and h)yal Americans. But the real and final end to all these troubles did not come for years. In 1872 the presidential election still turned upon Southern affairs ; s o m e even of the Republicans were dissatisfied with the course of their representa- tives in Congress and, join- ing with the Democrats, nominated for president an old-time anti-slavery Republican and the greatr est of American newspaper editors, Horace Greeley of New York. But the bulk of the Republican i^arty remained loyal to Con- gress ; the Democrats, as a mass, could not bring themselves to support their old antaijonist, Greelev ; many of them abstained from voting and President Grant, who had been re- nominated by the Repub- licans, was ti'iumphantly re-elected by two hundred and eighty-six of the three hundred and sixty-six electoral votes. By this time the Southern States were fully restored to all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the entire Union ; a free pardon nUTIIEKl'OIID lilltCIIARD HAYES. Nineteenth president of the United States. A REVNITED NATION. 229 had been given to all who had taken part in the Civil War ; and the principles of nniversal suffrage existed throughout the nation. But the quiet determination of the white people in the South to secure control of political affairs, resulted finally in the retirement of the negroes from their temporary power and for years the negro voters were " terrorized," as it was called, by the white leaders who gradually gained the power they desired and simply kept the black vote "under control." In 1876 nearly all the Soutliern States were Democratic again and the presidential election of that year was so close because of THE ART GALLERY — CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION OF 187G. the changed condition of political affairs that it very nearly resulted in serious trouble. The Republican candidate for President, Ruther- ford B. Hayes of Ohio, and the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden of New York, received an equal number of electoral votes, while both parties claimed to have carried the States of Florida and Louisiana. There was much excitement over this result ; the 230 A REUNITED NATION. question was referred to Congress which was also antagonistic — the Senate being Republican and the House Democratic. It was finally referred to a special committee of fifteen, called the " Eli'ctoral Commission." After a careful examination into all MAT \0" TO KOVemBCR 10 - 1876 -=- Miii-e^aSIieMa' Inl^ilL the disputed ])oints, this Commission finally decided that the Re- publican candidate had been elected, and Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated as the nineteenth president of the United States. It was now the year 1876. One hundred years had passed since the Declaration of Independence had been signed in the city of Philadelphia and the republic of the United States had grown from thirteen straggling and struggling colonies into a nation of thirty- eight great and prosperous States. The wounds and worries of the fearful war days were almost healed and forgotten ; South and North were both advancing ra])idly toward wealth and strength and, from a population of three millions in 1776, the Republic had grown to more than forty-two millions. Invention, education, intelligence, wealth and productive power had correspondingly increased and it seemed wise to the reunited country to show the whole world Avhat these hundred years of national existence and growth had made of AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. 231 the imcertcin experiment of republican government which so many people had disbelieved in when the new nation started out in life. So, in the year 1876, in the city of Philadelphia, where independ- ence had been proclaimed, the states and teriitories of the United States of America held a great exhibition of its manufactures, in- ventions, materials and products and to this " Centennial Exhibition " all the rest of the world brought over the best they had, to add to the great display. It was a fitting and peaceful celebration of one hundred years of progress. From ocean to ocean the land w\as free, united and pros- perous and could proudly proclaim to all the world the successful working: out, throus-h vears of struggle and worrv. of obstacle and war, of persistent effort and unyielding will, of the problem of uni- versal liberty for the first time in the history of the world. CHAPTER XXV. AFTER AN HUNDRED TEARS. HEN President Hayes took the oath of office on the fourth of March. 1877. the United States entered upon a wel- come season of calm. Peace had come at last; the sec- tional disputes and feuds brought about by slavery, that had filled the land with worry and anxiety for over seventy years, Avere stilled forever ; no great political question was uppermost to disturb the minds of men and women and all the energies of America were devoted to the upbuilding of the re- united nation, the payment of the vast debt brought about by the war, and the development of all the mighty resources of the land. 232 AFTER AX HCXDRED YEARS. This national debt at tlio close of (lie war. in ISIj."). was ncai'ly throe thousand millions of dollars. In less than a year over seventy millions of this great debt had been paid ; each succeeding year has reduced it more and more, and the United States has proved the wisdom of that old proverb that is as true of nations as of men and boys: Out of debt is out of danger.* Between the years 1801 and 187(> live new States Avere admitted to the Union. These were: Kansas in 1861, West Virginia (made of the loyal portion of the old State of Virginia) in 1863, Nevada in r:^^ SITirv, TriF. CAPITAL OF ALASKA. 1864, Nebraska in 1867 and Colorado in 1876. In 1867 the terri- tory of Alaska, at the extreme northwestern corner of the North American continent, was purchased from Russia at a cost of over seven millions of dollars and the United States had grown in 1876 from its original area of 827,844 square miles to a territory embrac- ing 3,603,884 square miles. As more and more people went west, drawn l)y the hope of find- *" In twenty year^," say^ Mr. .Johnston, "tlic United Stnte?; Iiiis paiil iibont twelve Imndrcd millions of its debt, and only stops now because its creditors will not consent to be paid any furtlier at present." AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. 233 "THIC M;\V way to INDIA. ing gold in California or by the hope of successful farming and cattle-raising in other sections, men saw the need of a quicker and safer mode of traveling overland than the slow-going emigrant trains, the rattling stage-coach or tlie galloping pony express. The dangers of travel across the plains from hostile Indians, highway robbers, lack of water, and, sometimes, starvation and death kept many from going into the new lands, but still the number grew year by year. It was evi- dent that quicker methods were demanded, and in 18G2, with the assistance of Con- gress, a company of railroad men bescan the buildino; of the Central Pacific Railroad, to run from Omaha in Ne- braska to San Francisco in California. Across the plains and over the Kocky Mountains the iron trail was stretched and in 1869 the great enterprise was completed and the continent was spanned. The Old World speedily learned the value of this new system of rapid transportation. Fast steamers across the Atlantic were connected by this railroad with fast steamers across the Pacific, and the life-work of Columbus to find " the new way to India " was at last realized in a manner never dreamed of by the great admiral. But even before the iron rails had been stretched across the continent, another marvelous connection had been formed when, in I806. the telegraph wires of the Atlantic Cable were successfully laid at the bottom of the ocean, thus joining Europe and America by an electric bond. The cable and the rail wa vs. the successful endino; of the Civil War, the development of the rich farming and mining lanus of the far west attracted the attention of the world to Amei'ica, and each •Sd-l AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. i^;Ll I r-i>-.-— in^ — y if .'»^?«j>iiiii«r*t'T,C year broii:::lit liosts of eniigrunts from over-crowded and over-worried Europe to find and found homes in the great repul)lic. These, too, lu'lped to people and improve the unoccupied lands of the west, and the growth of the nation in po})ulation and prosperity sliowed a large yearly increase. The methods and habits of life in the America of ISTC were vastly different from those of 1776. If such remarkable inventions as the steam engine and the telegraph had revolutionized the ways of people, the advance made in intelligence and education had an equal effect upon the minds and manners of men. Two thirds of all the boys and girls of America were being taught in llie puljlic schools ; academies and colleges were increasing in nundjers and ad- vantages ; invention was astonishing the world with its marvels of construction ; science was enlarging opportunity with its wonders of discovery; intellect was ))roadening knowledge with its fruits of tliought, and more and more Americans were using their brains for the enlight- ening, the improving and the uplifting of their fellow^uen. The century of America's existence as a nation that had bearun with Wash- ington and Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, Hamilton and Madison, had de- veloped such statesmen as Webster and Clay and Calhoun and Sumner ; such soldiers as Jackson and Scott and Grant and Sherman and Lee ; such sailors as Lawrence and Perry and Farragut and Porter ; svich inventors as Whitney and Fulton and Morse and How^e and McCormick, and Ericsson and Hoe j such explorers and path- AT TIIIC COTTON LOOM. AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. 235 finders as Wilkes and Fremont and Kane ; such writers and j)oets and thinkers as Emerson and Bancroft, Prescott and Motley, Long- fellow and Lowell, Whittier and Holmes, Agassiz and Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe; such orators and teachers as Everett and Beecher and Horace Mann ; such a philan- thropist as Peter Cooper ; such a leader as Abraham Lincoln. That first century had fought out to a victorious conclusion the ffreat \mt- tie of human rights and national supremacy ; it had established public schools and popular edu- cation ; it had reformed the habits and the ;■ thought of men ; it had extended the borders of the United States of America from a strag- gling line of coastwise colonies to a land that stretched from ocean to ocean and covered an area equal to the whole of Europe — and this comparison w^ould leave out all of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and both the Virginias, for the United States, at the close of its first century, found itself nineteen times larger than France, twenty times larger than Spain and seventy- eight times larger than England. The American Republic had successfully fought a terrible civil war in order to maintain its authority and preserve its union ; but liALPH WALDO KMRRSON. 236 AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. during those years of war it had also held its position among the nations of the earth, some of Avhom ha.ted and many of whom were jealous of it, because of its prosperity and its establislniient of republican ideas. Even when that struggle was at its height, its old ally. France, souu:ht to take advantau;e of its stress and of Mexico's weakness ; it defied the American declaration of " The Monroe Doctrine " and aimed to establish a monarchy in Mexico, upheld by French bayonets and ruled over by an Austrian jjrince. Thereupon thb Government of the United States spoke out boldly, demanding the with- drawal of the French soldiers from Mexican soil ; troops were moved toward the Mexican bor- der ; the French Emperor, Na- poleon the Third, taking the hint in time, withdrew his soldiers ; the Austrian prince was shot as a nsiu'per by Mexican patriots and the attempt at a foreign monarchy in Mexico closed in utter failure. The United States also de- manded justice and payment from Great Britain because of England's assistance to Confedei-ate priva- teers during the war. England long resisted the claim, but the great republic was equiiily determined and, as a result, instead of stupidly going to war over the question, as had been the custom in earlier days, it was decided to let certain calm-minded and clear-headed outsiders decide the rights in the case. So the " Alabama Claims," as they wei-e called (because the chief of the rebel '' commerce- WILLIAM U. AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. 237 HENTiY W. LONGFELLOW. destroyers " was the privateer Alabama), were submitted for discus- sion to five men appointed by Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Brazil. These men met in 1872 at Geneva, in Switzerland ; they talked the whole matter ovor, decided that Great Britain had done wrong and ordered that she should pay to 238 AvTER AN HUNDRED YEARS. the United States as " damages " the sum of fifteen millions of dollars. From this important event dates the emplo^inent of what is known as " arbitration " in settling disputes between nations. This is so much better and juster and nobler than war that it looks as if, in time, it will be adopted in the world's quarrels, and that sword and cannon will only be used as a sign of jjower or as the very last resort. Thus it was, that, with popular tion growing steadily, with a ]M()sperity that was almost con- tinuous and with new wealth flow- ing into its treasuries and the pockets of its people, with gold and silver, coal and oil and nat^ iiral gas being constantly dis- covered in new and rich sections, with manufactures growing and improving, and production in every branch of industry becom- ing each year larger and more far-reaching, the United States of America closed its first hun- dred years of life. The nation was at peace. The South, re- covering from its \ears of war. with a load of poverty and debt that was almost crushing and with the new and conflicting social elements that must come from the downfall of slavery, still stood up manfully to its task ; slowly it made good its losses and its set- backs ; capital and energy both came to its aid ; the former slave worked to better advantage as a free man, and the " New South," PRTKU COOl'KR. GROWING INTO GREATNESS. 239 as it Avas called, blessed by free labor and the noble exertions of its people, began at last to take its part in the development of the nation and, together. North and South entered upon America's second century in peace, in prosperity, in union and in a mutual desire for self-helping and for national growth. CHAPTER XXVI. GROWING INTO GREATNESS. HERE is a saying — probably familiar to you all — that " notliing succeeds like success." The advance made by the United States of America in material prosperity since the year 1876 is but a fresh proof of the truth of this well-known adage. Before 1880 began fifty millions of people lived in the land. Railroads and telegraphs zigzagged across it in every direction and the wonderful discoveries in electricity led the way toward the triumph of the telephone, the phonograph, the arc and incandescent lights that to-day, in 1891, make you all so far ahead of the boys and girls who hailed the close of the War of the Rebellion. Truly, the last half of the nineteenth century has been a great time in which to live, even though the boys and girls of to-day — who are indeed the heirs of all the ages of thought and work that went before them — do not appreciate their advantages. Think of the things that make life comfortable to-day that your grandfathers and grandmothers knew but little or nothing of in their early youth. Gas instead of dip and candle ; electric lights instead of flint anV .r. "■^V, A^^ -^' \' .^^ \<- '=«:, A'* ■'^,, v*^ "■^j ^^^ 1-:^' ^o< > f,. 4- -^^ o>- \^