CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION

1. _The Formation of a National Government_.

It is of course impossible to understand the life of a politician in

another country without study of its conditions and its past. In the

case of America this study is especially necessary, not only because the

many points of comparison between that country and our own are apt to

conceal profound differences of customs and institutions, but because the

broader difference between a new country and an old is in many respects

more important than we conceive. But in the case of Lincoln there is

peculiar reason for carrying such a study far back. He himself appealed

unceasingly to a tradition of the past. In tracing the causes which up

to his time had tended to conjoin the United States more closely and the

cause which more recently had begun to threaten them with disruption, we

shall be examining the elements of the problem with which it was his work

in life to deal.

The "Thirteen United States of America" which in 1776 declared their

independence of Great Britain were so many distinct Colonies distributed

unevenly along 1,300 miles of the Atlantic coast. These thirteen

Colonies can easily be identified on the map when it is explained that

Maine in the extreme north was then an unsettled forest tract claimed by

the Colony of Massachusetts, that Florida in the extreme south belonged

to Spain, and that Vermont, which soon after asserted its separate

existence, was a part of the State of New York. Almost every one of

these Colonies had its marked peculiarities and its points of antagonism

as against its nearest neighbours; but they fell into three groups. We

may broadly contrast the five southernmost, which included those which

were the richest and of which in many ways the leading State was

Virginia, with the four (or later six) northernmost States known

collectively as New England. Both groups had at first been colonised by

the same class, the smaller landed gentry of England with a sprinkling of

well-to-do traders, though the South received later a larger number of

poor and shiftless immigrants than the North, and the North attracted a

larger number of artisans. The physical conditions of the South led to

the growth of large farms, or "plantations" as they were called, and of a

class of large proprietors; negro slaves thrived there and were useful in

the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, rice, and later of cotton. The North

continued to be a country of small farms, but its people turned also to

fishery and to commerce, and the sea carrying trade became early its

predominant interest, yielding place later on to manufacturing

industries. The South was attached in the main, though by no means

altogether, to the Church of England; New England owed its origin to

successive immigrations of Puritans often belonging to the Congregational

or Independent body; with the honourable exception of Rhode Island these

communities showed none of the liberal and tolerant Spirit which the

Independents of the old country often developed; they manifested,

however, the frequent virtues as well as the occasional defects of the

Puritan character. The middle group of Colonies were of more mixed

origin; New York and New Jersey had been Dutch possessions, Delaware was

partly Swedish, Pennsylvania had begun as a Quaker settlement but

included many different elements; in physical and economic conditions

they resembled on the whole New England, but they lacked, some of them

conspicuously, the Puritan discipline, and had a certain cosmopolitan

character. Though there were sharp antagonisms among the northern

settlements, and the southern settlements were kept distinct by the great

distances between them, the tendency of events was to soften these minor

differences. But it greatly intensified one broad distinction which

marked off the southern group from the middle and the northern groups

equally.

Nevertheless, before independence was thought of there were common

characteristics distinguishing Americans from English people. They are

the better worth an attempt to note them because, as a historian of

America wrote some years ago, "the typical American of 1900 is on the

whole more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman." In

all the Colonies alike the conditions of life encouraged personal

independence. In all alike they also encouraged a special kind of

ability which may be called practical rather than thorough--that of a

workman who must be competent at many tasks and has neither opportunity

nor inducement to become perfect at one; that of the scientific man

irresistibly drawn to inventions which shall make life less hard; that of

the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community's need of

lawyers and politicians.

On the other hand, many of the colonists' forefathers had come to their

new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life

than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that

Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in

England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions. This is a disposition

not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform. The

idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words,

which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets

down as insincere in others. Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent

with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America. New conditions

in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers

and bred a certain pride in novelty. An American economist has written

in a sanguine humour, "The process of transplanting removes many of the

shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older

countries. In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and

therefore they are probably done in the best way." But a new country is

always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still

has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the

continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main,

advance) in the old world. The conservatism which these causes tend to

produce has in any case been marked in America. Thus, as readers of

Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern

slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an

older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of

important literature, and still more of oratory, in America. Moreover,

as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that

has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once

necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed

as expressing the wisdom of the ages. An Englishman will quote Burke as

he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote

their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible. In like manner

political practices of accidental origin--for instance, that a

representative should be an inhabitant of the place he

represents--acquire in America something like the force of constitutional

law.

In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest

settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they

consequently brought with them. This heritage included a certain

aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the

rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the

Congregational Church system. It included also a great tenacity of the

subject's rights as against the State--the spirit of Hampden refusing

payment of ship-money--and a disposition to look on the law and the

Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government. But it did not

include--and this explains the real meaning of the War of

Independence--any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which

represented Great Britain only, and which had gained its position even in

Great Britain since the fathers of Virginia and Massachusetts left home.

Nor did it include--and this was of great importance in its influence on

the form of the Constitution--any real understanding of or any aptitude

for the English Parliamentary Government, under which the leaders of the

legislative body and the advisers of the Crown in its executive functions

are the same men, and under which the elected persons, presumed for the

moment to represent the people, are allowed for that moment an almost

unfettered supremacy.

Thus there was much that made it easy for the Colonies to combine in the

single act of repudiating British sovereignty, yet the characteristics

which may be ascribed to them in common were not such as inclined them or

fitted them to build up a great new unity.

The Colonies, however, backed up by the British Government with the

vigour which Chatham imparted to it, had acted together against a common

danger from the French. When the States, as we must now call them, acted

together against the British Government they did so in name as "United

States," and they shortly proceeded to draw up "Articles of Confederation

and Perpetual Union." But it was union of a feeble kind. The separate

government of each State, in its internal affairs, was easy to provide

for; representative institutions always existed, and no more change was

needed than to substitute elected officers for the Governors and

Councillors formerly appointed by the Crown. For the Union a Congress

was provided which was to represent all the States in dealings with the

outside world, but it was a Government with no effective powers except

such as each separate State might independently choose to lend it. It

might wage war with England, but it could not effectually control or

regularly pay the military service of its own citizens; it might make a

treaty of peace with England, but it could not enforce on its citizens

distasteful obligations of that treaty. Such an ill-devised machine

would have worked well enough for a time, if the Union Government could

have attached to itself popular sentiments of honour and loyalty. But

the sentiments were not there; and it worked badly.

When once we were reconciled to a defeat which proved good for us, it

became a tradition among English writers to venerate the American

Revolution. Later English historians have revolted from this

indiscriminate veneration. They insist on another side of the facts: on

the hopelessness of the American cause but for the commanding genius of

Washington and his moral authority, and for the command which France and

Spain obtained of the seas; on the petty quarrelsomeness with which the

rights of the Colonists were urged, and the meanly skilful agitation

which forced on the final rupture; on the lack of sustained patriotic

effort during the war; on the base cruelty and dishonesty with which the

loyal minority were persecuted and the private rights guaranteed by the

peace ignored. It does not concern us to ascertain the precise justice

in this displeasing picture; no man now regrets the main result of the

Revolution, and we know that a new country is a new country, and that

there was much in the circumstances of the war to encourage indiscipline

and ferocity. But the fact that there is cause for such an indictment

bears in two ways upon our present subject.

In the first place, there has been a tendency both in England and in

America to look at this history upside down. The epoch of the Revolution

and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age--wherein lived the

elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest--to be followed by

almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more

pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The

faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is

largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many

influences that favoured decay. The nobility of the Revolution in the

eighteenth century may be rated higher or lower, but in the Civil War, in

which the elder brothers of so many men now living bore their part, the

people of the North and of the South alike displayed far more heroic

qualities.

In the second place, the War of Independence and of the Revolution lacked

some of the characteristics of other national uprisings. It was not a

revolt against grievous oppression or against a wholly foreign

domination, but against a political system which the people mildly

resented and which only statesmen felt to be pernicious and found to be

past cure. The cause appealed to far-seeing political aspiration and

appealed also to turbulent and ambitious spirits and to whatever was

present of a merely revolutionary temper, but the ordinary law-abiding

man who minded his own business was not greatly moved one way or the

other in his heart.

The subsequent movement which, in a few years after independence was

secured, gave the United States a national and a working Constitution was

altogether the work of a few, to which popular movement contributed

nothing. Of popular aspiration for unity there was none. Statesmen knew

that the new nation or group of nations lay helpless between pressing

dangers from abroad and its own financial difficulties. They saw clearly

that they must create a Government of the Union which could exercise

directly upon the individual American citizen an authority like that of

the Government of his own State. They did this, but with a reluctant and

half-convinced public opinion behind them.

The makers of the Constitution earned in a manner the full praise that

has ever since been bestowed on them. But they did not, as it has often

been suggested they did, create a sort of archetype and pattern for all

Governments that may hereafter partake of a federal character. Nor has

the curious machine which they devised--with its balanced opposition

between two legislative chambers, between the whole Legislature and the

independent executive power of the President, between the governing power

of the moment and the permanent expression of the people's will embodied

in certain almost unalterable laws--worked conspicuously better than

other political constitutions. The American Constitution owes its

peculiarities partly to the form which the State Governments had

naturally taken, and partly to sheer misunderstanding of the British

Constitution, but much more to the want at the time of any strong sense

of national unity and to the existence of a good deal of dislike to all

government whatsoever. The sufficient merit of its founders was that of

patient and skilful diplomatists, who, undeterred by difficulties, found

out the most satisfactory settlement that had a chance of being accepted

by the States.

So the Colonies, which in 1776 had declared their independence of Great

Britain under the name of the United States of America, entered in 1789

into the possession of machinery of government under which their unity

and independence could be maintained.

It will be well at once to describe those features of the Constitution

which it will be necessary for us later to bear in mind. It is generally

known that the President of the United States is an elected

officer--elected by what operates, though intended to act otherwise, as a

popular vote. During the four years of his office he might roughly be

said to combine the functions of the King in this country and those of a

Prime Minister whose cabinet is in due subjection to him. But that

description needs one very important qualification. He wields, with

certain slight restrictions, the whole executive power of government, but

neither he nor any of his ministers can, like the ministers of our King,

sit or speak in the Legislature, nor can he, like our King, dissolve that

Legislature. He has indeed a veto on Acts of Congress, which can only be

overridden by a large majority in both Houses. But the executive and the

legislative powers in America were purposely so constituted as to be

independent of each other to a degree which is unknown in this country.

It is perhaps not very commonly understood that President and Congress

alike are as strictly fettered in their action by the Constitution as a

limited liability company is by its Memorandum of Association. This

Constitution, which defines both the form of government and certain

liberties of the subject, is not unalterable, but it can be altered only

by a process which requires both the consent of a great majority in

Congress or alternatively of a great majority of the legislatures of the

distinct States composing the Union, and also ratification of amendments

by three-fourths of the several States. Thus we shall have to notice

later that a "Constitutional Amendment" abolishing slavery became a

terror of the future to many people in the slave States, but remained all

the time an impossibility in the view of most people in the free States.

We have, above all things, to dismiss from our minds any idea that the

Legislature of a State is subordinate to the Congress of the United

States, or that a State Governor is an officer under the President. The

Constitution of the Union was the product of a half-developed sense of

nationality. Under it the State authority (in the American sense of

"State") and the Union or Federal authority go on side by side working in

separate spheres, each subject to Constitutional restrictions, but each

in its own sphere supreme. Thus the State authority is powerless to make

peace or war or to impose customs duties, for those are Federal matters.

But the Union authority is equally powerless, wherever a State authority

has been constituted, to punish ordinary crime, to promote education, or

to regulate factories. In particular, by the Constitution as it stood

till after the Civil War, the Union authority was able to prohibit the

importation of slaves from abroad after the end of 1807, but had no power

to abolish slavery itself in any of the States.

Further, Congress had to be constituted in such a manner as to be

agreeable to the smaller States which did not wish to enter into a Union

in which their influence would be swamped by their more populous

neighbours. Their interest was secured by providing that in the Senate

each State should have two members and no more, while in the House of

Representatives the people of the whole Union are represented according

to population. Thus legislation through Congress requires the

concurrence of two forces which may easily be opposed, that of the

majority of American citizens and that of the majority of the several

States. Of the two chambers, the Senate, whose members are elected for

six years, and to secure continuity do not all retire at the same time,

became as time went on, though not at first, attractive to statesmen of

position, and acquired therefore additional influence.

Lastly, the Union was and is still the possessor of Territories not

included in any State, and in the Territories, whatever subordinate

self-government they might be allowed, the Federal authority has always

been supreme and uncontrolled in all matters. But as these Territories

have become more settled and more populated, portions of them have

steadily from the first been organised as States and admitted to the

Union. It is for Congress to settle the time of their admission and to

make any conditions in regard to their Constitutions as States. But when

once admitted as States they have thenceforward the full rights of the

original States. Within all the Territories, while they remained under

its jurisdiction it lay with Congress to determine whether slavery should

be lawful or not, and, when any portion of them was ripe for admission to

the Union as a State, Congress could insist that the new State's

Constitution should or should not prohibit slavery. When the

Constitution of the Union was being settled, slavery was the subject of

most careful compromise; but in any union formed between slave States and

free, a bitter root of controversy must have remained, and the opening

through which controversy actually returned was provided by the

Territories.

On all other matters the makers of the Constitution had in the highest

temper of statesmanship found a way round seemingly insuperable

difficulties. The whole attitude of "the fathers" towards slavery is a

question of some consequence to a biographer of Lincoln, and we shall

return to it in a little while.

2. _Territorial Expansion_.

A machine of government had been created, and we are shortly to consider

how it was got to work. But the large dominion to be governed had to be

settled, and its area was about to undergo an enormous expansion. It

will be convenient at this point to mark the stages of this development.

The thirteen Colonies had, when they first revolted, definite western

boundaries, the westernmost of them reaching back from the sea-board to a

frontier in the Alleghany Mountains. But at the close of the war Great

Britain ceded to the United States the whole of the inland country up to

the Mississippi River. Virginia had in the meantime effectively

colonised Kentucky to the west of her, and for a time this was treated as

within her borders. In a similar way Tennessee had been settled from

North and South Carolina and was treated as part of the former. Virginia

had also established claims by conquest north of the Ohio River in what

was called the North-West Territory, but these claims and all similar

claims of particular States in unsettled or half-settled territory were

shortly before or shortly after the adoption of the Constitution ceded to

the Union Government. But the dominions of that Government soon received

a vast accession. In 1803, by a brave exercise of the Constitutional

powers which he was otherwise disposed to restrict jealously, President

Jefferson bought from Napoleon I. the great expanse of country west of

the Mississippi called Louisiana. This region in the extreme south was

no wider than the present State of Louisiana, but further north it

widened out so as to take in the whole watershed of the Missouri and its

tributaries, including in the extreme north nearly all the present State

of Montana. In 1819 Florida was purchased from Spain, and that country

at the same time abandoned its claims to a strip of coastland which now

forms the sea-board of Alabama and Mississippi.

Such was the extent of the United States when Lincoln began his political

life. In the movement of population by which this domain was being

settled up, different streams may be roughly distinguished. First, there

was from 1780 onwards a constant movement of the poorer class and of

younger sons of rich men from the great State of Virginia and to some

extent from the Carolinas into Kentucky and Tennessee, whence they often

shifted further north into Indiana and Illinois, or sometimes further

west into Missouri. It was mainly a movement of single families or

groups of families of adventurous pioneers, very sturdy, and very

turbulent. Then there came the expansion of the great plantation

interest in the further South, carrying with it as it spread, not

occasional slaves as in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the whole plantation

system. This movement went not only directly westward, but still more by

the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, into the State of Louisiana,

where a considerable French population had settled, the State of

Mississippi, and later into Missouri. Later still came the westward

movement from the Northern States. The energies of the people in these

States had at first been to great extent absorbed by sea-going pursuits

and the subjugation of their own rugged soil, so that they reached

western regions like Illinois rather later than did the settlers from

States further south. Ultimately, as their manufactures grew,

immigration from Europe began its steady flow to these States, and the

great westward stream, which continuing in our days has filled up the

rich lands of the far North-West, grew in volume. But want of natural

timber and other causes hindered the development of the fertile prairie

soil in the regions beyond the upper Mississippi, till the period of

railway development, which began about 1840, was far advanced. Illinois

was Far West in 1830, Iowa and Minnesota continued to be so in 1860. The

Northerners, when they began to move westward, came in comparatively

large numbers, bringing comparatively ordered habits and the full

machinery of outward civilisation with them. Thus a great social change

followed upon their arrival in the regions to which only scattered

pioneers such as the Lincolns had previously penetrated. In Illinois,

with which so much of our story is bound up, the rapidity of that change

may be estimated from the fact that the population of that State

multiplied sevenfold between the time when Lincoln settled there and the

day when he left it as President.

The concluding stages by which the dominions of the United States came to

be as we know them were: the annexation by agreement in 1846 of the

Republic of Texas, which had separated itself from Mexico and which

claimed besides the great State of Texas a considerable territory

reaching north-west to the upper portions of the Arkansas River; the

apportionment to the Union by a delimitation treaty with Great Britain in

1846 of the Oregon Territory, including roughly the State of that name

and the rest of the basin of the Columbia River up to the present

frontier--British Columbia being at the same time apportioned to Great

Britain; the conquest from Mexico in 1848 of California and a vast

mountainous tract at the back of it; the purchase from Mexico of a small

frontier strip in 1853; and the acquisition at several later times of

various outlying dependencies which will in no way concern us.

3. _The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government_.

We must turn back to the internal growth of the new united nation. When

the Constitution had been formed and the question of its acceptance by

the States had been at last settled, and when Washington had been

inaugurated as the first President under it, a wholly new conflict arose

between two parties, led by two Ministers in the President's Cabinet,

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Both were potent and remarkable

men, Hamilton in all senses a great man. These two men, for all their

antagonism, did services to their country, without which the vigorous

growth of the new nation would not have been possible.

The figure of Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury (ranked

by Talleyrand with Fox and Napoleon as one of the three great men he had

known), must fascinate any English student of the period. If his name is

not celebrated in the same way in the country which he so eminently

served, it is perhaps because in his ideas, as in his origin, he was not

strictly American. As a boy, half Scotch, half French Huguenot, from the

English West Indian island of Nevis, he had been at school in New York

when his speeches had some real effect in attaching that city to the

cause of Independence. He had served brilliantly in the war, on

Washington's staff and with his regiment. He had chivalrously defended,

as an advocate and in other ways, the Englishmen and loyalists against

whose cause he fought. He had induced the great central State of New

York to accept the Constitution, when the strongest local party would

have rejected it and made the Union impossible. As Washington's

Secretary of the Treasury he organised the machinery of government,

helped his chief to preserve a strong, upright and cautious foreign

policy at the critical point of the young Republic's infancy, and

performed perhaps the greatest and most difficult service of all in

setting the disordered finances of the country upon a sound footing. In

early middle age he ended a life, not flawless but admirable and lovable,

in a duel, murderously forced upon him by one Aaron Burr. This man, who

was an elegant profligate, with many graces but no public principle, was

a claimant to the Presidency in opposition to Hamilton's greatest

opponent, Jefferson; Hamilton knowingly incurred a feud which must at the

best have been dangerous to him, by unhesitatingly throwing his weight

upon the side of Jefferson, his own ungenerous rival. The details of his

policy do not concern us, but the United States could hardly have endured

for many years without the passionate sense of the need of government and

the genius for actual administration with which Hamilton set the new

nation on its way. Nevertheless--so do gifts differ--the general spirit

which has on the whole informed the American nation and held it together

was neither respected nor understood by him. His party, called the

Federalists, because they claimed to stand for a strong and an efficient

Federal Government, did not survive him long. It is of interest to us

here only because, with its early disappearance, there ceased for ever to

be in America any party whatsoever which in any sense represented

aristocratic principles or leanings.

The fate of Jefferson's party (at first called Republican but by no means

to be confused with the Republican party which will concern us later) was

far different, for the Democratic party, represented by the President of

the United States at this moment, claims to descend from it in unbroken

apostolic succession. But we need not pause to trace the connecting

thread between them, real as it is, for parties are not to be regarded as

individuals. Indeed the personality of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of

State in Washington's Cabinet, impressed itself, during his life and long

after, upon all America more than that of any other man. Democrats

to-day have described Lincoln, who by no means belonged to their party,

as Jefferson's spiritual heir; and Lincoln would have welcomed the

description.

No biographer has achieved an understanding presentment of Jefferson's

curious character, which as presented by unfriendly critics is an

unpleasing combination of contrasting elements. A tall and active

fellow, a good horseman and a good shot, living through seven years of

civil war, which he had himself heralded in, without the inclination to

strike a blow; a scholar, musician, and mathematician, without delicacy,

elevation, or precision of thought or language; a man of intense

ambition, without either administrative capacity or the courage to assert

himself in counsel or in debate; a dealer in philanthropic sentiment,

privately malignant and vindictive. This is not as a whole a credible

portrait; it cannot stand for the man as his friends knew him; but there

is evidence for each feature of it, and it remains impossible for a

foreigner to think of Jefferson and not compare him to his disadvantage

with the antagonist whom he eclipsed. By pertinacious industry, however,

working chiefly through private correspondence, he constructed a great

party, dominated a nation, and dominated it mainly for good. For the

rapid and complete triumph of Jefferson's party over its opponents

signifies a very definite and lasting conversion of the main stream of

American public opinion to what may be called the sane element in the

principles of the French Revolution. At the time when he set himself to

counterwork Hamilton, American statesmanship was likely to be directed

only to making Government strong and to ensuring the stability of the

business world; for reaction against the bloody absurdities that had

happened in France was strong in America, and in English thought, which

still had influence in America, it was all-powerful. Against this he

asserted an intense belief in the value of freedom, in the equal claim of

men of all conditions to the consideration of government, and in the

supreme importance to government of the consenting mind of the governed.

And he made this sense so definitely a part of the national stock of

ideas that, while the older-established principles of strong and sound

government were not lost to sight, they were consciously rated as

subordinate to the principles of liberty.

It must not be supposed that the ascendency thus early acquired by what

may be called liberal opinions in America was a matter merely of setting

some fine phrases in circulation, or of adopting, as was early done in

most States, a wide franchise and other external marks of democracy. We

may dwell a little longer on the unusual but curiously popular figure of

Jefferson, for it illustrates the spirit with which the commonwealth

became imbued under his leadership. He has sometimes been presented as a

man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary

between impracticable French "philosophes" and the ruffians and swindlers

that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all "children of liberty,"

and whose "boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their

bright home was in the Settin' Sun." He was nothing of the kind. His

judgment was probably unsound on the questions of foreign policy on which

as Secretary of State he differed from Washington, and he leaned, no

doubt, to a jealous and too narrow insistence upon the limits set by the

Constitution to the Government's power. But he and his party were

emphatically right in the resistance which they offered to certain

needless measures of coercion. As President, though he was not a great

President, he suffered the sensible course of administration originated

by his opponent to continue undisturbed, and America owed to one bold and

far-seeing act of his the greatest of the steps by which her territory

was enlarged. It is, however, in the field of domestic policy, which

rested with the States and with which a President has often little to do,

that the results of his principles must be sought. Jefferson was a man

who had worked unwearyingly in Virginia at sound, and what we should now

call conservative, reforms, establishing religious toleration, reforming

a preposterous land law, seeking to provide education for the poor,

striving unsuccessfully for a sensible scheme of gradual emancipation of

the slaves. In like manner his disciples after him, in their several

States, devoted themselves to the kind of work in removing manifest

abuses and providing for manifest new social needs in which English

reformers like Romilly and Bentham, and the leaders of the first reformed

Parliament, were to be successful somewhat later. The Americans who so

exasperated Dickens vainly supposed themselves to be far ahead of England

in much that we now consider essential to a well-ordered nation. But

there could have been no answer to Americans of Jefferson's generation if

they had made the same claim.

It is with this fact in mind that we should approach the famous words of

Jefferson which echoed so long with triumphant or reproachful sound in

the ears of Americans and to which long after Lincoln was to make a

memorable appeal. The propaganda which he carried on when the

Constitution had been adopted was on behalf of a principle which he had

enunciated as a younger man when he drafted the Declaration of

Independence. That document is mainly a rehearsal of the colonists'

grievances, and is as strictly lawyerlike and about as fair or unfair as

the arguments of a Parliamentarian under Charles I. But the

argumentation is prefaced with these sounding words: "We hold these

truths to be self-evident:--that all men are created equal; that they are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among

these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure

these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just

powers from the consent of the governed." Few propositions outside the

Bible have offered so easy a mark to the shafts of unintelligently clever

criticism.

Jefferson, when he said that "all men are created equal," and the Tory

Dr. Johnson, when he spoke of "the natural equality of man," used a

curious eighteenth century phrase, of which a Greek scholar can see the

origin; but it did not mean anything absurd, nor, on the other hand, did

it convey a mere platitude. It should not be necessary to explain, as

Lincoln did long after, that Jefferson did not suppose all men to be of

equal height or weight or equally wise or equally good. He did, however,

contend for a principle of which one elementary application is the law

which makes murder the same crime whatever be the relative positions of

the murderer and the murdered man. Such a law was indeed firmly rooted

in England before Jefferson talked of equality, but it amazed the rest of

Europe when the House of Lords hanged a peer for the murder of his

servant. There are indefinitely many further ways in which men who are

utterly unequal had best be treated as creatures equally entitled to the

consideration of government and of their neighbours. It is safer to

carry this principle too far than not to carry it far enough. If

Jefferson had expressed this and his cognate principle of liberty with

scientific precision, or with the full personal sincerity with which a

greater man like Lincoln expressed it, he would have said little from

which any Englishman to-day would dissent. None the less he would have

enunciated a doctrine which most Governments then existing set at naught

or proscribed, and for which Hamilton and the prosperous champions of

independence who supported him had no use.

The Declaration of Independence was not a very candid State paper, and

the popularity Jefferson afterwards created for its sentiments was not

wholly free from humbug. Many men were more ready to think themselves

the equals of Washington or Hamilton in the respects in which they were

not so, than to think a negro their own equal in the respects in which he

was. The boundless space and untrammelled conditions of the new world

made liberty and equality in some directions highly attainable ideals, so

much so that they seemed to demand little effort or discipline. The

patriotic orators under whom Lincoln sat in his youth would ascribe to

the political wisdom of their great democracy what was really the result

of geography. They would regard the extent of forest and prairie as

creditable to themselves, just as some few Englishmen have regarded our

location upon an island.

This does not, however, do away with the value of that tradition of the

new world which in its purest and sincerest form became part and parcel

of Lincoln's mind. Jefferson was a great American patriot. In his case

insistence on the rights of the several States sprang from no

half-hearted desire for a great American nation; he regarded these

provincial organisations as machinery by which government and the people

could be brought nearer together; and he contributed that which was most

needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life. He imparted to the

very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted

to its material conditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt

presence of a wholesome national ideal. The patriotism of an older

country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in

the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs

no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this

lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness--even its

national cant--with high aspiration, did--it may well be--more than any

strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which

should thereafter seem worth preserving.

4. _The Missouri Compromise_.

No sober critic, applying to the American statesmen of the first

generation the standards which he would apply to their English

contemporaries, can blame them in the least because they framed their

Constitution as best they could and were not deterred by the scruples

which they felt about slavery from effecting a Union between States

which, on all other grounds except their latent difference upon slavery,

seemed meant to be one. But many of these men had set their hands in the

Declaration of Independence to the most unqualified claim of liberty and

equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen

years' grace to "that most detestable sum of all villainies," as Wesley

called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which

thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped slaves to

captivity. "Why," Dr. Johnson had asked, "do the loudest yelps for

liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" We are forced to recognise,

upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the

Union otherwise than as they did; yet a doubt presents itself as to the

general soundness and sincerity of their boasted notions of liberty.

Now, later on we shall have to understand the policy as to slavery on

behalf of which Lincoln stepped forward as a leader. In his own

constantly reiterated words it was a return to the position of "the

fathers," and, though he was not a professional historian, it concerns us

to know that there was sincerity at least in his intensely historical

view of politics. We have, then, to see first how "the fathers"--that

is, the most considerable men among those who won Independence and made

the Constitution--set out with a very honest view on the subject of

slavery, but with a too comfortable hope of its approaching end, which

one or two lived to see frustrated; secondly, how the men who succeeded

them were led to abandon such hopes and content themselves with a

compromise as to slavery which they trusted would at least keep the

American nation in being.

Among those who signed the Declaration of Independence there were

presumably some of Dr. Johnson's "yelpers." It mattered more that there

were sturdy people who had no idea of giving up slavery and probably did

not relish having to join in protestations about equality. Men like

Jefferson ought to have known well that their associates in South

Carolina and Georgia in particular did not share their aspirations--the

people of Georgia indeed were recent and ardent converts to the slave

system. But these sincere and insincere believers in slavery were the

exceptions; their views did not then seem to prevail even in the greatest

of the slave States, Virginia. Broadly speaking, the American opinion on

this matter in 1775 or in 1789 had gone as far ahead of English opinion,

as English opinion had in turn gone ahead of American, when, in 1833, the

year after the first Reform Bill, the English people put its hand into

its pocket and bought out its own slave owners in the West Indies. The

British Government had forced several of the American Colonies to permit

slavery against their will, and only in 1769 it had vetoed, in the

interest of British trade, a Colonial enactment for suppressing the slave

trade. This was sincerely felt as a part, though a minor part, of the

grievance against the mother country. So far did such views prevail on

the surface that a Convention of all the Colonies in 1774 unanimously

voted that "the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of

desire in those Colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their

infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves in law,

it is necessary to exclude all further importation from Africa." It was

therefore very commonly assumed when, after an interval of war which

suspended such reforms, Independence was achieved, that slavery was a

doomed institution.

Those among the "fathers" whose names are best known in England,

Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton, were

all opponents of slavery. These include the first four Presidents, and

the leaders of very different schools of thought. Some of them,

Washington and Jefferson at least, had a few slaves of their own.

Washington's attitude to his slaves is illustrated by a letter which he

wrote to secure the return of a black attendant of Mrs. Washington's who

had run away (a thing which he had boasted could never occur in his

household); the runaway was to be brought back if she could be persuaded

to return; her master's legal power to compel her was not to be used.

She was in fact free, but had foolishly left a good place; and there is

no reason to suppose that it was otherwise with Jefferson's slaves.

Jefferson's theory was vehemently against slavery. In old age he gave up

hope in the matter and was more solicitous for union than for liberty,

but this was after the disappointment of many efforts. In these efforts

he had no illusory notion of equality; he wrote in 1791, when he had been

defeated in the attempt to carry a measure of gradual emancipation in

Virginia: "Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you

exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brothers talents equal to

those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of

them is owing mainly to the degraded condition of their existence, both

in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that nobody wishes more

ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of

their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of

their present existence and other circumstances, which cannot be

neglected, will permit."

When he felt at last that freedom was not making way, his letters, by

which his influence was chiefly exercised, abounded in passionate

regrets. "I tremble for my country," he wrote, "when I think of the

negro and remember that God is just." But if he is judged not by his

sentiments, or even by his efforts, but by what he accomplished, this

rhetorical champion of freedom did accomplish one great act, the first

link as it proved in the chain of events by which slavery was ultimately

abolished. In 1784 the North-West Territory, as it was called, was ceded

by Virginia to the old Congress of the days before the Union. Jefferson

then endeavoured to pass an Ordinance by which slavery should be excluded

from all territory that might ever belong to Congress. In this indeed he

failed, for in part of the territory likely to be acquired slavery was

already established, but the result was a famous Ordinance of 1787, by

which slavery was for ever excluded from the soil of the North-West

Territory itself, and thus, when they came into being, the States of

Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin found themselves

congenitally incapable of becoming slave States.

The further achievements of that generation in this matter were

considerable. It must of course be understood that the holding of slaves

and the slave trade from Africa were regarded as two distinct questions.

The new Congress abolished the slave trade on the first day on which the

Constitution allowed it to do so, that is, on January 1, 1808. The

mother country abolished it just about the same time. But already all

but three of the States had for themselves abolished the slave trade in

their own borders. As to slavery itself, seven of the original thirteen

States and Vermont, the first of the added States, had abolished that

before 1805. These indeed were Northern States, where slavery was not of

importance, but in Virginia there was, or had been till lately, a growing

opinion that slavery was not economical, and, with the ignorance common

in one part of a country of the true conditions in another part, it was

natural to look upon emancipation as a policy which would spread of

itself. At any rate it is certain fact that the chief among the men who

had made the Constitution had at that time so regarded it, and continued

to do so. Under this belief and in the presence of many pressing

subjects of interest the early movement for emancipation in America died

down with its work half finished.

But before this happy belief expired an economic event had happened which

riveted slavery upon the South. In 1793 Eli Whitney, a Yale student upon

a holiday in the South, invented the first machine for cleaning cotton of

its seeds. The export of cotton jumped from 192,000 lbs. in 1791 to

6,000,000 lbs. in 1795. Slave labour had been found, or was believed, to

be especially economical in cotton growing. Slavery therefore rapidly

became the mainstay of wealth and of the social system in South Carolina

and throughout the far South; and in a little while the baser sort of

planters in Virginia discovered that breeding slaves to sell down South

was a very profitable form of stock-raising.

We may pass to the year 1820, when an enactment was passed by Congress

which for thirty-four years thereafter might be regarded as hardly less

fundamental than the Constitution itself. Up till then nine new States

had been added to the original thirteen. It was repugnant to principles

still strong in the North that these States should be admitted to the

Union with State Constitutions which permitted slavery. On the other

hand, it was for two reasons important to the chief slave States, that

they should be. They would otherwise be closed to Southern planters who

wished to migrate to unexhausted soil carrying with them the methods of

industry and the ways of life which they understood. Furthermore, the

North was bound to have before long a great preponderance of population,

and if this were not neutralised by keeping the number of States on one

side and the other equal there would be a future political danger to

slavery. Up to a certain point the North could with good conscience

yield to the South in this matter, for the soil of four of the new slave

States had been ceded to the Union by old slave States and slave-holders

had settled freely upon it; and in a fifth, Louisiana, slavery had been

safeguarded by the express stipulations of the treaty with France, which

applied to that portion, though no other, of the territory then ceded.

Naturally, then, it had happened, though without any definite agreement,

that for years past slave States and free States had been admitted to the

Union in pairs. Now arose the question of a further portion of the old

French territory, the present State of Missouri. A few slave-holders

with their slaves had in fact settled there, but no distinct claims on

behalf of slavery could be alleged. The Northern Senators and members of

Congress demanded therefore that the Constitution of Missouri should

provide for the gradual extinction of slavery there. Naturally there

arose a controversy which sounded to the aged Jefferson like "a fire-bell

in the night" and revealed for the first time to all America a deep rift

in the Union. The Representatives of the South eventually carried their

main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as

the "Dough-faces," who all lost their seats at the next election.

Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a

free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the

territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful

north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, while by tacit agreement

permitted south of it.

This was the Missouri Compromise. The North regarded it at first as a

humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for

the Northern territories. The adoption of it marks a point from which it

became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal

American statesmen and the tacit object, of every party manager to keep

the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in

politics. The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in

the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.

5. _Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth_.

Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several

distinct movements in national life began or culminated. They link

themselves with several famous names.

The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of

allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long

political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great

men of their time. Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man. He

was always passed over for the Presidency. That was not so much because

of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character,

as because in days of artificial party issues, when vital questions are

dealt with by mere compromise, high office seems to belong of right to

men of less originality. If he was never quite so great as all America

took him to be, it was not for want of brains or of honesty, but because

his consuming passion for the Union at all costs led him into the path of

least apparent risk to it. Twice as Secretary of State (that is,

chiefly, Foreign Minister) he showed himself a statesman, but above all

he was an orator and one of those rare orators who accomplish a definite

task by their oratory. In his style he carried on the tradition of

English Parliamentary speaking, and developed its vices yet further; but

the massive force of argument behind gave him his real power. That power

he devoted to the education of the people in a feeling for the nation and

for its greatness. As an advocate he had appeared in great cases in the

Supreme Court. John Marshall, the Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835,

brought a great legal mind of the higher type to the settlement of

doubtful points in the Constitution, and his statesmanlike judgments did

much both to strengthen the United States Government and to gain public

confidence for it. It was a memorable work, for the power of the Union

Government, under its new Constitution, lay in the grip of the Courts.

The pleading of the young Webster contributed much to this. Later on

Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take "our

Elijah Pogram" to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which

Englishmen only suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their

patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good. His greatest

speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an

event. Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many

Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.

Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person. He was apparently

the first American public man whom his countrymen styled "magnetic," but

a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be

set down as an "impossible" candidate for the Presidency. As a dashing

young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second

war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps

insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is

probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America. As an

older man he was famed as an "architect of compromises," for though he

strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed of a

great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely

anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect

was typical of his generation. But about 1830 he was chiefly known as

the apostle of what was called the "American policy." This was a policy

which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the

development of the boundless resources of the country. Its methods

comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on

great public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might

chiefly operate to encourage promising but "infant" industries and to tax

the luxuries of the rich. Whatever may have been the merits of this

policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily

understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time

of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.

A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more

powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed

beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person.

Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases.

An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has described him as

"embodied intellect." He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative

tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the

public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is

more, kindly among his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with

an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be

difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But the

warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as "heartless, selfish, and a

physical coward," and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom

he really knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was

that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate

deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too,

who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the

vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense,

healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth. Such men have

disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to

avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which

could not otherwise earn them. A Northern soldier came back wounded in

1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun's monument

at Charleston. The other said: "What you saw is not the real monument,

but I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South. . . . That is

Calhoun's real monument."

This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his

Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular

catchwords of his own locality. He adored the Union, but it was to be a

Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional

Southern interest. He did not originate, but he secured the strength of

orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a

generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of the South.

Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously

exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp

division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many

planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with

their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents

under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were,

and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they

were perfect. But it is evident that in a widening circle of clever

young men in the South the claim of some peculiar virtue for Southern

institutions became habitual in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Their way of life was beautiful in their eyes. It rested upon slavery.

Therefore slavery was a good thing. It was wicked even to criticise it,

and it was weak to apologise for it or to pretend that it needed

reformation. It was easy and it became apparently universal for the

different Churches of the South to prostitute the Word of God in this

cause. Later on crude notions of evolution began to get about in a few

circles of advanced thought, and these lent themselves as easily to the

same purpose. Loose, floating thoughts of this kind might have mattered

little. Calhoun, as the recognised wise man of the old South,

concentrated them and fastened them upon its people as a creed.

Glorification of "our institution at the South" became the main principle

of Southern politicians, and any conception that there may ever have been

of a task for constructive statesmanship, in solving the negro problem,

passed into oblivion under the influence of his revered reasoning faculty.

But, of his dark and dangerous sort, Calhoun was an able man. He foresaw

early that the best weapon of the common interest of the slave States lay

in the rights which might be claimed for each individual State against

the Union. The idea that a discontented State might secede from the

Union was not novel--it had been mooted in New England, during the last

war against Great Britain, and, curiously enough, among the rump of the

old Federalist party, but it was generally discounted. Calhoun first

brought it into prominence, veiled in an elaborate form which some

previous South Carolinian had devised. The occasion had nothing to do

with slavery. It concerned Free Trade, a very respectable issue, but so

clearly a minor issue that to break up a great country upon it would have

gone beyond the limit of solemn frivolity, and Calhoun must be taken to

have been forging an implement with which his own section of the States

could claim and extort concessions from the Union. A protective tariff

had been passed in 1828. The Southern States, which would have to pay

the protective duties but did not profit by them, disliked it. Calhoun

and others took the intelligible but too refined point, that the powers

of Congress under the Constitution authorised a tariff for revenue but

not a tariff for a protective purpose. Every State, Calhoun declared,

must have the Constitutional right to protect itself against an Act of

Congress which it deemed unconstitutional. Let such a State, in special

Convention, "nullify" the Act of Congress. Let Congress then, unless it

compromised the matter, submit its Act to the people in the form of an

Amendment to the Constitution. It would then require a three-fourths

majority of all the States to pass the obnoxious Act. Last but not

least, if the Act was passed, the protesting State had, Calhoun claimed,

the right to secede from the Union.

Controversy over this tariff raged for fully four years, and had a

memorable issue. In the course of 1830 the doctrine of "nullification"

and "secession" was discussed in the Senate, and the view of Calhoun was

expounded by one Senator Hayne. Webster answered him in a speech which

he meant should become a popular classic, and which did become so. He

set forth his own doctrine of the Union and appealed to national against

State loyalty in the most influential oration that was perhaps ever made.

"His utterance," writes President Wilson, "sent a thrill through all the

East and North which was unmistakably a thrill of triumph. Men were glad

because of what he had said. He had touched the national

self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased it with a morning vision of

its great tasks and certain destiny." Later there came in the President,

the redoubtable Andrew Jackson, the most memorable President between

Jefferson and Lincoln. He said very little--only, on Jefferson's

birthday he gave the toast, "Our Federal Union; it must be preserved."

But when in 1832, in spite of concessions by Congress, a Convention was

summoned in South Carolina to "nullify" the tariff, he issued the

appropriate orders to the United States Army, in case such action was

carried out, and it is understood that he sent Calhoun private word that

he would be the first man to be hanged for treason. Nullification

quietly collapsed. The North was thrilled still more than by Webster's

oratory, and as not a single other State showed signs of backing South

Carolina, it became thenceforth the fixed belief of the North that the

Union was recognised as in law indissoluble, as Webster contended it was.

None the less the idea of secession had been planted, and planted in a

fertile soil.

General Andrew Jackson, whose other great achievements must now be told,

was not an intellectual person, but his ferocious and, in the literal

sense, shocking character is refreshing to the student of this period.

He had been in his day the typical product of the West--a far wilder West

than that from which Lincoln later came. Originally a lawyer, he had won

martial fame in fights with Indians and in the celebrated victory over

the British forces at New Orleans. He was a sincere Puritan; and he had

a courtly dignity of manner; but he was of arbitrary and passionate

temper, and he was a sanguinary duellist. His most savage duels, it

should be added, concerned the honour of a lady whom he married

chivalrously, and loved devotedly to the end. The case that can be made

for his many arbitrary acts shows them in some instances to have been

justifiable, and shows him in general to have been honest.

When in 1824 Jackson had expected to become President, and, owing to

proceedings which do not now matter, John Quincy Adams, son of a former

President, and himself a remarkable man, was made President instead of

him, Jackson resolved to overthrow the ruling class of Virginian country

gentlemen and Boston city magnates which seemed to him to control

Government, and to call into life a real democracy. To this end he

created a new party, against which of course an opposition party arose.

Neither of the new parties was in any sense either aristocratic or

democratic. "The Democracy," or Democratic party, has continued in

existence ever since, and through most of Lincoln's life ruled America.

In trying to fix the character of a party in a foreign country we cannot

hope to be exact in our portraiture. At the first start, however, this

party was engaged in combating certain tendencies to Government

interference in business. It was more especially hostile to a National

Bank, which Jackson himself regarded as a most dangerous form of alliance

between the administration and the richest class. Of the growth of what

may be called the money power in American politics he had an intense,

indeed prophetic, dread. Martin Van Buren, his friend and successor,

whatever else he may have been, was a sound economist of what is now

called the old school, and on a financial issue he did what few men in

his office have done, he deliberately sacrificed his popularity to his

principles. Beyond this the party was and has continued prone, in a

manner which we had better not too clearly define, to insist upon the

restrictions of the Constitution, whether in the interest of individual

liberty or of State rights. This tendency was disguised at the first by

the arbitrary action of Jackson's own proceedings, for Jackson alone

among Presidents displayed the sentiments of what may be called a popular

despot. Its insistence upon State rights, aided perhaps by its dislike

of Protection, attracted to it the leading politicians of the South, who

in the main dominated its counsels, though later on they liked to do it

through Northern instruments. But it must not in the least be imagined

that either party was Northern or Southern; for there were many Whigs in

the South, and very many Democrats in the North. Moreover, it should be

clearly grasped, though it is hard, that among Northern Democrats

insistence on State rights did not involve the faintest leaning towards

the doctrine of secession; on the contrary a typical Democrat would

believe that these limitations to the power of the Union were the very

things that gave it endurance and strength. Slavery, moreover, had

friends and foes in both parties. If we boldly attempted to define the

prevailing tone of the Democrats we might say that, while they and their

opponents expressed loyalty to the Union and the Constitution, the

Democrats would be prone to lay the emphasis upon the Constitution.

Whatever might be the case with an average Whig, a man like Lincoln would

be stirred in his heart by the general spirit of the country's

institutions, while the typical Democrat of that time would dwell

affectionately on the legal instruments and formal maxims in which that

spirit was embodied.

Of the Whigs it is a little harder to speak definitely, nor is it very

necessary, for in two only out of seven Presidential elections did they

elect their candidate, and in each case that candidate then died, and in

1854 they perished as a party utterly and for ever. Just for a time they

were identified with the "American policy" of Clay. When that passed out

of favour they never really attempted to formulate any platform, or to

take permanently any very definite stand. They nevertheless had the

adherence of the ablest men of the country, and, as an opposition party

to a party in power which furnished much ground for criticism, they

possessed an attraction for generous youth.

The Democrats at once, and the Whigs not long after them, created

elaborate party machines, on the need of which Jackson insisted as the

only means of really giving influence to the common people. The

prevailing system and habit of local self-government made such

organisation easy. Men of one party in a township or in a county

assembled, formulated their opinions, and sent delegates with

instructions, more or less precise, to party conventions for larger

areas, these would send delegates to the State Convention and these in

turn to the National Convention of the Party. The party candidates for

the Presidency, as well as for all other elective positions, were and are

thus chosen, and the party "platform" or declaration of policy was and is

thus formulated. Such machinery, which in England is likely always to

play a less important part, has acquired an evil name. At the best there

has always been a risk that a "platform" designed to detach voters from

the opposite party will be an insincere and eviscerated document, by

which active public opinion is rather muzzled than expressed. There has

been a risk too that the "available" candidate should be some blameless

nonentity, to whom no one objects, and whom therefore no one really

wants. But it must be observed that the rapidity with which such

organisation was taken up betokened the prevalence of a widespread and

keen interest in political affairs.

The days of really great moneyed interests and of corruption of the

gravest sort were as yet far distant, but one demoralising influence was

imposed upon the new party system by its author at its birth. Jackson,

in his perpetual fury, believed that office holders under the more or

less imaginary ruling clique that had held sway were a corrupt gang, and

he began to turn them out. He was encouraged to extend to the whole

country a system which had prevailed in New York and with which Van Buren

was too familiar. "To the victors belong the spoils," exclaimed a

certain respectable Mr. Marcy. A wholesale dismissal of office holders

large and small, and replacement of them by sound Democrats, soon took

place. Once started, the "spoils system" could hardly be stopped.

Thenceforward there was a standing danger that the party machine would be

in the hands of a crew of jobbers and dingy hunters after petty offices.

England, of course, has had and now has practices theoretically as

indefensible, but none possessing any such sinister importance. It is

hard, therefore, for us to conceive how little of really vicious intent

was necessary to set this disastrous influence going. There was no

trained Civil Service with its unpartisan traditions. In the case of

offices corresponding to those of our permanent heads of departments it

seemed reasonable that the official should, like his chief the Minister

concerned, be a person in harmony with the President. As to the smaller

offices--the thousands of village postmasterships and so forth--one man

was likely to do the work as well as another; the dispossessed official

could, in the then condition of the country, easily find another equally

lucrative employment; "turn and turn about" seemed to be the rule of fair

play.

There were now few genuine issues in politics. Compromise on vital

questions was understood to be the highest statesmanship. The

Constitution itself, with its curious system of checks and balances,

rendered it difficult to bring anything to pass. Added to this was a

party system with obvious natural weaknesses, infected from the first

with a dangerous malady. The political life, which lay on the surface of

the national life of America, thus began to assume an air of futility,

and, it must be added, of squalor. Only, Englishmen, recollecting the

feebleness and corruption which marked their aristocratic government

through a great part of the eighteenth century, must not enlarge their

phylacteries at the expense of American democracy. And it is yet more

important to remember that the fittest machinery for popular government,

the machinery through which the real judgment of the people will prevail,

can only by degrees and after many failures be devised. Popular

government was then young, and it is young still.

So much for the great world of politics in those days. But in or about

1830 a Quaker named Lundy had, as Quakers used to say, "a concern" to

walk 125 miles through the snow of a New England winter and speak his

mind to William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was a poor man who, like

Franklin, had raised himself as a working printer, and was now occupied

in philanthropy. Stirred up by Lundy, he succeeded after many painful

experiences, in gaol and among mobs, in publishing in Boston on January

1, 1831, the first number of the Liberator. In it he said: "I shall

strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave

population. I will be as hard as truth and as uncompromising as justice.

I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single

inch; and I will be heard." This was the beginning of the new

Abolitionist movement. The Abolitionists, in the main, were

impracticable people; Garrison in the end proved otherwise. Under the

existing Constitution, they had nothing to propose but that the free

States should withdraw from "their covenant with death and agreement with

hell"--in other words, from the Union,--whereby they would not have

liberated one slave. They included possibly too many of that sort who

would seek salvation by repenting of other men's sins. But even these

did not indulge this propensity at their ease, for by this time the

politicians, the polite world, the mass of the people, the churches (even

in Boston), not merely avoided the dangerous topic; they angrily

proscribed it. The Abolitionists took their lives in their hands, and

sometimes lost them. Only two men of standing helped them: Channing, the

great preacher, who sacrificed thereby a fashionable congregation; and

Adams, the sour, upright, able ex-President, the only ex-President who

ever made for himself an after-career in Congress. In 1852 a still more

potent ally came to their help, a poor lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who in

that year published "Uncle Tom's Cabin," often said to have influenced

opinion more than any other book of modern times. Broadly speaking, they

accomplished two things. If they did not gain love in quarters where

they might have looked for it, they gained the very valuable hatred of

their enemies; for they goaded Southern politicians to fury and madness,

of which the first symptom was their effort to suppress Abolitionist

petitions to Congress. But above all they educated in their labour of

thirty years a school of opinion, not entirely in agreement with them but

ready one day to revolt with decision from continued complicity in wrong.

6. _Slavery and Southern Society_.

In the midst of this growing America, a portion, by no means sharply

marked off, and accustomed to the end to think itself intensely American,

was distinguished by a peculiar institution. What was the character of

that institution as it presented itself in 1830 and onwards?

Granting, as many slave holders did, though their leaders always denied

it, that slavery originated in foul wrongs and rested legally upon a vile

principle, what did it look like in its practical working? Most of us

have received from two different sources two broad but vivid general

impressions on this subject, which seem hard to reconcile but which are

both in the main true. On the one hand, a visitor from England or the

North, coming on a visit to the South, or in earlier days to the British

West Indies, expecting perhaps to see all the horror of slavery at a

glance, would be, as a young British officer once wrote home, "most

agreeably undeceived as to the situation of these poor people." He would

discern at once that a Southern gentleman had no more notion of using his

legal privilege to be cruel to his slave than he himself had of

overdriving his old horse. He might easily on the contrary find quite

ordinary slave owners who had a very decided sense of responsibility in

regard to their human chattels. Around his host's house, where the

owner's children, petted by a black nurse, played with the little black

children or with some beloved old negro, he might see that pretty aspect

of "our institution at the South," which undoubtedly created in many

young Southerners as they grew up a certain amount of genuine sentiment

in favour of slavery. Riding wider afield he might be struck, as General

Sherman was, with the contentment of the negroes whom he met on the

plantations. On enquiry he would learn that the slave in old age was

sure of food and shelter and free from work, and that as he approached

old age his task was systematically diminished. As to excessive toil at

any time of life, he would perhaps conclude that it was no easy thing to

drive a gang of Africans really hard. He would be assured, quite

incorrectly, that the slave's food and comfort generally were greater

than those of factory workers in the North, and, perhaps only too truly,

that his privations were less than those of the English agricultural

labourer at that time. A wide and careful survey of the subject was made

by Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York farmer, who wrote what but for their

gloomy subject would be among the best books of travel. He presents to

us the picture of a prevailingly sullen, sapless, brutish life, but

certainly not of acute misery or habitual oppression. A Southerner old

enough to remember slavery would probably not question the accuracy of

his details, but would insist, very likely with truth, that there was

more human happiness there than an investigator on such a quest would

readily discover. Even on large plantations in the extreme South, where

the owner only lived part of the year, and most things had to be left to

an almost always unsatisfactory overseer, the verdict of the observer was

apt to be "not so bad as I expected."

On the other hand, many of us know Longfellow's grim poem of the Hunted

Negro. It is a true picture of the life led in the Dismal Swamps of

Virginia by numbers of skulking fugitives, till the industry of

negro-hunting, conducted with hounds of considerable value, ultimately

made their lairs untenable. The scenes in the auction room where,

perhaps on the death or failure of their owner, husbands and wives,

parents and children, were constantly being severed, and negresses were

habitually puffed as brood mares; the gentleman who had lately sold his

half-brother, to be sent far south, because he was impudent; the devilish

cruelty with which almost the only recorded slave insurrection was

stamped out; the chase and capture and return in fetters of slaves who

had escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the

advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which

described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave

breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple

industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the

restoration of the African slave trade--all these were realities. The

Southern people, in the phrase of President Wilson, "knew that their

lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their

responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote"; they

burned with indignation when the whole South was held responsible for the

occasional abuses of slavery. But the harsh philanthropist, who

denounced them indiscriminately, merely dwelt on those aspects of slavery

which came to his knowledge or which he actually saw on the border line.

And the occasional abuses, however occasional, were made by the

deliberate choice of Southern statesmanship an essential part of the

institution. Honourable and humane men in the South scorned exceedingly

the slave hunter and the slave dealer. A candid slave owner, discussing

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," found one detail flagrantly unfair; the ruined

master would have had to sell his slaves to the brute, Legree, but for

the world he would not have shaken hands with him. "Your children,"

exclaimed Lincoln, "may play with the little black children, but they

must not play with his"--the slave dealer's, or the slave driver's, or

the slave hunter's. By that fact alone, as he bitingly but unanswerably

insisted, the whole decent society of the South condemned the foundation

on which it rested.

It is needless to discuss just how dark or how fair American slavery in

its working should be painted. The moderate conclusions which are quite

sufficient for our purpose are uncontested. First, this much must

certainly be conceded to those who would defend the slave system, that in

the case of the average slave it was very doubtful whether his happiness

(apart from that of future generations) could be increased by suddenly

turning him into a free man working for a wage; justice would certainly

have demanded that the change should be accompanied by other provisions

for his benefit. But, secondly, on the refractory negro, more vicious,

or sometimes, one may suspect, more manly than his fellows, the system

was likely to act barbarously. Thirdly, every slave family was exposed

to the risk, on such occasions as the death or great impoverishment of

its owner, of being ruthlessly torn asunder, and the fact that negroes

often rebounded or seemed to rebound from sorrows of this sort with

surprising levity does not much lessen the horror of it. Fourthly, it is

inherent in slavery that its burden should be most felt precisely by the

best minds and strongest characters among the slaves. And, though the

capacity of the negroes for advancement could not then and cannot yet be

truly measured, yet it existed, and the policy of the South shut the door

upon it. Lastly, the system abounded in brutalising influences upon a

large number of white people who were accessory to it, and notoriously it

degraded the poor or "mean whites," for whom it left no industrial

opening, and among whom it caused work to be despised.

There is thus no escape from Lincoln's judgment: "If slavery is not

wrong, nothing is wrong." It does not follow that the way to right the

wrong was simple, or that instant and unmitigated emancipation was the

best way. But it does follow that, failing this, it was for the

statesmen of the South to devise a policy by which the most flagrant

evils should be stopped, and, however cautiously and experimentally, the

raising of the status of the slave should be proceeded with. It does not

follow that the people who, on one pretext or another, shut their eyes to

the evil of the system, while they tried to keep their personal dealing

humane, can be sweepingly condemned by any man. But it does follow that

a deliberate and sustained policy which, neglecting all reform, strove at

all costs to perpetuate the system and extend it to wider regions, was as

criminal a policy as ever lay at the door of any statesmen. And this, in

fact, became the policy of the South.

"The South" meant, for political purposes, the owners of land and slaves

in the greater part of the States in which slavery was lawful. The poor

whites never acquired the political importance of the working classes in

the North, and count for little in the story. Some of the more northerly

slave States partook in a greater degree of the conditions and ideas of

the North and were doubtfully to be reckoned with the South. Moreover,

there is a tract of mountainous country, lying between the Atlantic

sea-board and the basin of the Mississippi and extending southwards to

the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and

independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often

cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true

spirit of the Icelandic Sagas.

The South, excluding these districts, was predominantly Democratic in

politics, and its leaders owed some allegiance to the tradition of

Radicals like Jefferson. But it was none the less proud of its

aristocracy and of the permeating influence of aristocratic manners and

traditions. A very large number of Southerners felt themselves to be

ladies and gentlemen, and felt further that there were few or none like

them among the "Yankee" traders of the North. A claim of that sort is

likely to be aggressively made by those who have least title to make it,

and, as strife between North and South grew hotter, the gentility of the

latter infected with additional vulgarity the political controversy of

private life and even of Congress. But, as observant Northerners were

quite aware, these pretensions had a foundation of fact. An Englishman,

then or now, in chance meetings with Americans of either section, would

at once be aware of something indefinable in their bearing to which he

was a stranger; but in the case of the Southerner the strangeness would

often have a positive charm, such as may be found also among people of

the Old World under southern latitudes and relatively primitive

conditions. Newly-gotten and ill-carried wealth was in those days (Mr.

Olmsted, of New York State, assures us) as offensive in the more recently

developed and more prosperous parts of the South as in New York City

itself; and throughout the South sound instruction and intellectual

activity were markedly lacking--indeed, there is no serious Southern

literature by which we can check these impressions of his. Comparing the

masses of moderately well-to-do and educated people with whom he

associated in the North and in the South, he finds them both free from

the peculiar vulgarity which, we may be pained to know, he had discovered

among us in England; he finds honesty and dishonesty in serious matters

of conduct as prevalent in one section as in the other; he finds the

Northerner better taught and more alert in mind; but he ascribes to him

an objectionable quality of "smartness," a determination to show you that

he is a stirring and pushing fellow, from which the Southerner is wholly

free; and he finds that the Southerner has derived from home influences

and from boarding schools in which the influence of many similar homes is

concentrated, not indeed any great refinement, but a manner which is

"more true, more quiet, more modestly self-assured, more dignified." This

advantage, we are to understand, is diffused over a comparatively larger

class than in England. Beyond this he discerns in a few parts of the

South and notably in South Carolina a somewhat inaccessible, select

society, of which the nucleus is formed by a few (incredibly few) old

Colonial families which have not gone under, and which altogether is so

small that some old gentlewomen can enumerate all the members of it. Few

as they are, these form "unquestionably a wealthy and remarkably

generous, refined, and accomplished first class, clinging with some

pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the traditional

manners and customs of an established gentry."

No doubt the sense of high breeding, which was common in the South, went

beyond mere manners; it played its part in making the struggle of the

Southern population, including the "mean whites," in the Civil War one of

the most heroic, if one of the most mistaken, in which a whole population

has ever been engaged; it went along with integrity and a high average of

governing capacity among public men; and it fitted the gentry of the

South to contribute, when they should choose, an element of great value

to the common life of America. As it was, the South suffered to the full

the political degeneration which threatens every powerful class which,

with a distinct class interest of its own, is secluded from real contact

with competing classes with other interests and other ideas. It is not

to be assumed that all individual Southerners liked the policy which they

learnt to support in docile masses. But their very qualities of loyalty

made them the more ready, under accepted and respected leaders, to adopt

political aims and methods which no man now recalls without regret.

The connection between slavery and politics was this; as population

slowly grew in the South, and as the land in the older States became to

some extent exhausted, the desire for fresh territory in which

cultivation by slaves could flourish became stronger and stronger. This

was the reason for which the South became increasingly aware of a

sectional interest in politics. In all other respects the community of

public interests, of business dealings, and of general intercourse was as

great between North and South as between East and West. It is certain

that throughout the South, with the doubtful exception of South Carolina,

political instinct and patriotic pride would have made the idea of

separation intolerable upon any ground except that of slavery. In regard

to this matter of dispute a peculiar phenomenon is to be observed. The

quarrel grew not out of any steady opposition between North and South,

but out of the habitual domination of the country by the South and the

long-continued submission of the North to that domination.

For the North had its full share of blame for the long course of

proceedings which prepared the coming tragedy, and the most impassioned

writers on the side of the Union during the Civil War have put that blame

highest. The South became arrogant and wrong-headed, and no defence is

possible for the chief acts of Southern policy which will be recorded

later; but the North was abject. To its own best sons it seemed to have

lost both its conscience and its manhood, and to be stifled in the coils

of its own miserable political apparatus. Certainly the prevailing

attitude of the Northern to the Southern politicians was that of

truckling. And Southerners who went to Washington had a further reason

for acquiring a fatal sense of superiority to the North. The tradition

of popular government which maintained itself in the South caused men who

were respected, in private life, and were up to a point capable leaders,

who were, in short, representative, to be sent to Congress and to be kept

there. The childish perversion of popular government which took hold of

the newer and more unsettled population in the North led them to send to

Congress an ever-changing succession of unmeritable and sometimes shady

people. The eventual stirring of the mind of the North which so closely

concerns this biography was a thing hard to bring about, and to the South

it brought a great shock of surprise.

7. _Intellectual Development_.

No survey of the political movements of this period should conclude

without directing attention to something more important, which cannot be

examined here. In the years from 1830 till some time after the death of

Lincoln, America made those contributions to the literature of our common

language which, though neither her first nor her last, seemed likely to

be most permanently valued. The learning and literature of America at

that time centred round Boston and Harvard University in the adjacent

city of Cambridge, and no invidious comparison is intended or will be

felt if they, with their poets and historians and men of letters at that

time, with their peculiar atmosphere, instinct then and now with a life

athletic, learned, business-like and religious, are taken to show the

dawning capacities of the new nation. No places in the United States

exhibit more visibly the kinship of America with England, yet in none

certainly can a stranger see more readily that America is independent of

the Old World in something more than politics. Many of their streets and

buildings would in England seem redolent of the past, yet no cities of

the Eastern States played so large a part in the development, material

and mental, of the raw and vigorous West. The limitations of their

greatest writers are in a manner the sign of their achievement. It would

have been contrary to all human analogy if a country, in such an early

stage of creation out of such a chaos, had put forth books marked

strongly as its own and yet as the products of a mature national mind.

It would also have been surprising if since the Civil War the rush of

still more appalling and more complex practical problems had not

obstructed for a while the flow of imaginative or scientific production.

But the growth of those relatively early years was great. Boston had

been the home of a loveless Christianity; its insurrection in the War of

Independence had been soiled by shifty dealing and mere acidity; but

Boston from the days of Emerson to those of Phillips Brooks radiated a

temper and a mental force that was manly, tender, and clean. The man

among these writers about whose exact rank, neither low nor very high

among poets, there can be least dispute was Longfellow. He might seem

from his favourite subjects to be hardly American; it was his

deliberately chosen task to bring to the new country some savour of

things gentle and mellow caught from the literature of Europe. But, in

the first place, no writer could in the detail of his work have been more

racy of that New England countryside which lay round his home; and, in

the second place, no writer could have spoken more unerringly to the ear

of the whole wide America of which his home was a little part. It seems

strange to couple the name of this mild and scholarly man with the

thought of that crude Western world to which we must in a moment pass.

But the connection is real and vital. It is well shown in the

appreciation written of him and his fellows by the American writer who

most violently contrasts with him, Walt Whitman.

A student of American history may feel something like the experience

which is common among travellers in America. When they come home they

cannot tell their friends what really interested them. Ugly things and

very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of

American humorists. The general impression they convey is of something

tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous, and yet insufferably

monotonous. But that is not what they mean. They had better not seek to

express themselves by too definite instances. They will be understood

and believed when they say that to them America, with its vast spaces

from ocean to ocean, does present itself as one country, not less worthy

than any other of the love which it has actually inspired; a country

which is the home of distinctive types of manhood and womanhood, bringing

their own addition to the varying forms in which kindness and courage and

truth make themselves admirable to mankind. The soul of a single people

seems to be somewhere present in that great mass, no less than in some

tiny city State of antiquity. Only it has to struggle, submerged

evermore by a flood of newcomers, and defeated evermore by difficulties

quite unlike those of other lands; and it struggles seemingly with

undaunted and with rational hope.

Americans are fond of discussing Americanism. Very often they select as

a pattern of it Abraham Lincoln, the man who kept the North together but

has been pronounced to have been a Southerner in his inherited character.

Whether he was so typical or not, it is the central fact of this

biography that no man ever pondered more deeply in his own way, or

answered more firmly the question whether there was indeed an American

nationality worth preserving.