THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY
It remained to be seen whether the forces bred in the Jacksonian time
were also spent and gone, with the passing from office of the men who
had personified them. It was difficult to reason upon cause and effect
amidst such scenes of change. Unquestionably a veritable revolution had
been wrought in American politics and social action while Jackson and his
partisans ruled in affairs; but who could say whether these men had been
products or causes of that revolution? No doubt there had been an air
of lawlessness in the headstrong action of the uncompromising, frontier
soldier who had been President. The fruit of his rough handling had
shown itself obviously enough during the mild reign of his lieutenant
and successor. And the country had seemed to take its cue from General
Jackson. Riot and brawling disorder had everywhere been thrust into
affairs with unexampled boldness, success, immunity from punishment.
Headstrong men sought everywhere to take the law into their own hands and
do what seemed best in their own eyes,—used force to win strikes against
their employers, to carry elections, to silence abolitionist agitators
and drive free negroes out of the cities, to destroy the power of the
Roman Catholics coming in at the ports, to punish offences which the
courts too slowly dealt with or let go by, to get food when prices rose
too high. Men fought in armed bands in city streets because they were of
opposite religious creeds or rival political factions or antagonistic
races, the native against the immigrant, the Protestant against the Roman
Catholic. On a memorable night in August, 1834, an Ursuline convent in
Charlestown, within sight of the rising shaft on Bunker Hill which
was to mark the dawn of liberty in America, had been sacked and put to
the torch, because of the rage of a Protestant mob against the growing
power of the Romish church, coming in with the Irish immigrants; and the
officers of the town had stood inactive by.
[Illustration: JOSEPH STORY]
No man could justly say that General Jackson stood for such things. He
kept the law, as he understood it, very punctiliously and with a fine
sense of honor, and made others keep it also. His challenge was only
to those who opposed him in matters of policy or in the application of
law, or sought to put upon him the too formal restraints of judicial
decision. Those who judged calmly of affairs saw alike in him and in the
uneasy disorders of the time only signs of one and the same thing. In
the new democracy which Jackson represented the mass of common men took
leave to assert themselves in all things, and use their own standards of
right; brushed law aside upon occasion to get at their object; sought to
rectify abuses by direct blows of force,—the force of voting numbers or
the force of arms. No doubt riots grew more common in Jackson’s second
term than they had been in his first, and seemed to keep pace with his
fight against the Bank, his arbitrary use of authority in reaching his
ends concerning it, his ruthless dealings with the credit of the country.
No doubt, too, his friends and partisans spoke too foolishly and too
much like demagogues of “the natural hatred of the poor to the rich.”
But great economic forces moved also with equal pace towards change and
disturbance. The relations of capital and labor were altered, whether
General Jackson acted or not; prices rose and wages shifted by laws he
did not understand. Railways changed the course and the speed of the
nation’s life; enterprise set men’s minds upon every bold adventure;
men of every kind flung conservatism off and became radical, reckless,
ungoverned in action. Cause and effect were not in such a day to be
easily distinguished. No one could say what was permanent, what merely
temporary and accidental in the new and novel order. One thing only was
evident, that a new and irregular fervor and a new standard of action had
been brought into affairs.
The Whigs themselves had conformed. They had come into power in
masquerade. Instead of putting one of their real leaders forward for
the presidency, they had nominated a western soldier, whose rugged
strength and simple claim upon the admiration of the country had made
him a popular favorite. They had themselves played the rôle of a
reforming Opposition merely, whose mission it was to turn a company of
sophisticated politicians out of office, with all their corrupt and
incapable following, and put a simple man of the people in,—a Whig
Jackson. Their campaign had been conducted without serious debate
or proposals of policy; had been a mere noisy round of torch-light
processions, merry-making barbecues, and boisterous neighborhood rallies.
Their emblem had been the frontier log cabin and a keg of hard cider,
the solacing drink of the frontiersman. It was a masquerade of pure
democracy, in the new taste, and they had played it out to perfection.
But when the election was over and they had won, the costumes of the
play were put by. At last they were assured of majorities in both houses
of Congress; small majorities, indeed,—in the House, twenty-five, in
the Senate, six,—an uncomfortable reminder of the narrow margin of
votes by which they had won; but a working majority, none the less; and
the real leaders of the party, once more free to speak their serious
purposes, came forward with the programme by which they meant to carry
the government back to the traditions which the Democrats had ruthlessly
broken.
That programme included the repeal of the Independent Treasury Act, the
establishment of a new national bank, the authorization of an immediate
loan for the relief of the Treasury, a system of new tariff duties to
supply the government with a permanent revenue, and the distribution
among the States of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. The
financial distress of the time had touched the government somewhat
sharply, and General Harrison’s first act was to summon Congress to meet
in extraordinary session on the last day of May, to consider measures of
relief.
But before it could assemble he was dead, and every plan at which he
was to have assisted had fallen into confusion. The excitement and the
fatigues of the campaign for the presidency, capped by the infinite worry
and exhaustion that came upon him like a flood when hordes of office
seekers and advisers began to crowd about him after his election and
induction into office, proved too much for his strength at sixty-eight.
He suddenly sickened, and exactly one month after his inauguration (April
4, 1841) was dead.
John Tyler was President, to whom no Whig had looked for leadership. He
was a southern Democrat; had been opposed to the Bank upon principles
of public policy, as General Jackson had been, but had held off from
his leader in the matter of the deposits and had disapproved his
reckless blows at credit, no less than his masterful attitude towards
Mr. Calhoun and the doctrines held in South Carolina; and had been named
Vice President with General Harrison only because Whigs of Mr. Clay’s
stamp knew that they had in their following many men who were not in all
matters of their way of thinking, and were uneasily aware that their
party was but a conglomerate party of opposition, to which the votes of
such discontented or independent southern Democrats as Mr. Tyler would
be very serviceable. And so the masquerade of the campaign had had a
touch of prophecy in it, after all: here were the triumphant Whigs with a
Democratic President!
[Illustration: CAMPAIGN SYMBOL OF 1840]
Their programme, of course, hopelessly miscarried. Mr. Tyler felt
very keenly the delicacy of his position, and the almost necessarily
compromising character of the middle course he felt bound to attempt.
Nature and habit forbade him the frank, straightforward, unhesitating
course which alone could have won him prestige and credit. He had
neither initiative nor audacity enough for leadership; tried soft-spoken
diplomacy where he should have used candid avowals of his real opinion;
courted compromise and accommodation only to reject them at last;
insisted upon his own views only after he had created the impression
that he would yield them; seemed false and insincere because he parleyed
so long before taking his stand; and pleased no one, not even himself.
He had been glad to see the Bank’s charter expire in 1836, and did not
wish to see the Bank re-established now; but the Whig leaders were his
advisers; he felt and showed a real desire to yield everything he could
that stood in the way of their plans. Conference followed conference in
the matter of the Bank, for upon that everything hinged; twice he seemed
about to meet their wishes; twice he failed them. A bill was drawn and
passed in which several features of the old charter were modified to suit
his views, but he vetoed it (August 16, 1842). Another bill was drawn and
passed which made concessions still more radical to his scruples, but
again he vetoed it (September 9th). Each time he hesitated; each time his
friends said that he would sign the bill; each time he fell back at the
moment of final action, as was his wont, upon his real convictions.
[Illustration: JOHN TYLER]
The Whigs in Congress were inexpressibly chagrined and exasperated;
publicly declared, with an unmistakable note of passion, that “all
political connection between them and John Tyler was at an end from
that day forth”; and sullenly saved such remnants of their programme
as they could. Even before the open breach came the leaders of the
party had drawn away from him, and he had been cut off from all real
intimacy of counsel with the men whom Congress heeded. General Harrison
had associated with himself a cabinet made up of men who were known to
be accredited spokesmen of the party, making Mr. Webster, whom half the
country regarded as the greatest of Whigs, his Secretary of State; and
Mr. Tyler, sincerely desirous of making as slight a break as possible
in the continuity of the party’s policy, had asked these gentlemen to
retain their places. But even before his final veto of the Bank bill
they had found it impossible to regard themselves as really in his
confidence. By the middle of September, 1841, all of them had withdrawn
except Mr. Webster, who remained only until important negotiations with
England touching the northeastern boundary should have been brought to a
successful issue. The Whigs had in effect withdrawn their hands from the
Executive. Not only was the President’s leadership gone, but the best
traditions the Whig leaders stood for, of a policy which joined Congress
and the Executive under a common leadership, were broken, and affairs
were set adrift to take the chance currents of politics.
The President signed the bill for the repeal of the Independent Treasury
Act, consented to the necessary loan and to the changes in the tariff
which had been planned, and agreed to the distribution among the States
of the moneys received from sales of the public lands. But, without the
bank, these measures lacked all constructive efficiency. The Independent
Treasury arrangements having been set aside, and no other fiscal agency
having been provided or authorized, the way in which the revenues should
be kept and handled was left entirely to the discretion of the Treasury,
without guidance or restraint of law, throughout all the rest of Mr.
Tyler’s administration.
[Illustration: THE HANCOCK HOUSE, BOSTON. FROM A SKETCH MADE IN 1833]
The Whig tariff Act was passed at the regular session of 1841-1842. It
incontinently upset the compromise arrangements of 1833. The Act of 1833
had provided for a progressive reduction in the rates of duty which
should be complete by the first of July, 1842, when the rates should have
reached a uniform level of twenty _per cent._ The Whigs suffered them to
stay at that level only two months. On and after the first of September
following, it was enacted, the rates were to be increased again, for the
sake of the revenue. Twice the President vetoed the bill, because of
provisions contained in it of which he did not approve. It was passed a
third time, without the provisions he objected to, and he signed it.
From the outset, so soon as the democratic masquerade with which they
had come in was over, opinion had run against the Whigs. So early as
the autumn of 1841 local elections had begun to go against them in
States which they had but just now carried for General Harrison; and the
mid-term elections of 1842 swept away their majority in the House of
Representatives. It had been but twenty-five; it was supplanted now by a
Democratic majority of sixty-one,—a loss of forty-three seats. The Senate
they still held by a narrow margin; but, without the House, they could do
nothing of consequence. Their dream of reconstructing the old régime from
which the Democrats had torn the country away was rudely dissipated.
The Whig leaders were now to find out what changes of politics had come
to stay. They had not perceived that what they had witnessed under
General Jackson was not a temporary madness of reaction against the
statesmanship and the ideals of the generation which had given the nation
its first form and policy, but a permanent shifting of points of view,
for men in office and out, a turning away once and for all from the old
to new questions that went with the making of the nation. Whether they
would or no, they were in the hands of the new democracy, their fortunes
as a party committed to the swift changes of the passing time. Important
as the matters were with which they dealt, their programme had been a
programme of old questions, not of new. Change worked too swiftly now to
make it any longer possible for any party, however led or constituted, to
hark back to the policy of a time twelve years gone by. There had been
transient humors, no doubt, as well as permanent alterations of fortune,
in Jackson’s day: things which came with the heady excitements of the
time and sank away again as affairs steadied to the new order. But,
though passions subsided and hasty errors fell away from men’s thoughts
as the air cooled and cleared, all things kept their new face, and the
reckonings of politics could no more be forced back to their old scale
than the reckonings of trade or the operations of credit. It was made
evident enough while Mr. Tyler sat out his unexpected presidency that
the questions which cried for settlement were no longer questions of
banking and currency, or even questions of tariff, but the fundamental
institutional choices of mere growth: the questions which went inevitably
with the setting up of every new State and the occupation of every new
piece of territory.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF ANTI-ABOLITION PAMPHLET]
It was this making and remaking of the country that had upset the old
order of politics and brought the untempered airs of the West into
all forecasts of the political weather. Half the economic questions
of that day of change took their magnitude and significance from the
westward expansion. It was in the new regions of the country, with their
undeveloped riches inflaming the imagination, that speculation ran its
reckless course with the most incorrigible hardihood. Railways outran
population and failed as investments because settlement spread rather
than compacted. Statesmen had always to be studying some law of growth,
checking or indulging some wild adventure of enterprise. And there was in
the midst of all a fundamental choice which did not alter like the rest.
The chief choice always to be made at every stage of the unhalting
westward movement was the choice concerning slavery: the choice which
had been debated very temperately at first when the great Ordinance for
the government of the Northwest Territory was adopted in the days of the
Confederation, but which had struck many a spark of passion out when
handled again at the admission of Missouri into the Union, and which
seemed every time it was touched more dangerous and disturbing than
before. Now it seemed to lie everywhere at the front of affairs,—not
the question of the abolition of slavery, but the question of its
territorial extension. The men who had formed the Anti-Slavery Society
were frank abolitionists; demanded much more than the mere limitation of
the area of slavery; set themselves to make sentiment for its absolute
destruction. But their ranks were sparsely filled, and their agitations
did little but offend a practical, law-abiding people. Every man who
knew aught of affairs knew the tenor of the constitution in that matter.
Slavery within the States which were already members of the Union was
an institution with which the federal government could have nothing to
do, which no opinion even could touch or alter save the opinion of the
States concerned: a question of domestic law in respect of which the
choice of each little commonwealth was sovereign and final. Had the full
roster of the States been made up, agitators in Congress would have found
themselves obliged to confine their attacks to the slave trade in the
District of Columbia and the commerce in slaves between the States. But
the full roster of the States was not made up: all the great Louisiana
purchase remained to be filled with them; and with the making of every
community there must come again this question of the freedom of labor or
the extension of slavery. The fateful choice was always making and to be
made.
The Whig leaders were profoundly disturbed to see it thrust forward in
very practical shape, made a thing to be faced squarely and at once,
by the President whom they had undesignedly put into office. In April,
1844, Mr. Tyler sent to the Senate a treaty of annexation which he had
negotiated with Texas. Secret negotiations, a piece of business privately
carried to completion and made public only when finished, suited well
with the President’s temper and way of action. A man naturally secretive,
naturally fond, not of concealments, but of quiet and subtile management,
not insincere, but indirect in his ways of approach, he relished
statecraft of this sort, and no doubt liked the Texan business all the
better because it seemed to demand, in its very nature, a delicate and
private handling. The Senate rejected the treaty by the very decisive
vote of 16 to 35, men of both parties alike deeply irritated that the
President should spring this weighty matter upon the country in such a
fashion, taking no counsel beforehand save such as he chose to take. But
the question, once put definitely forward, could not be thrust aside
again. It was too vitally connected with the mastery of the continent,
too plainly a thing which lay at the heart of western plans, to be put
aside by vote of the Senate. It had come to be fought out as a party
issue; and the Democrats were better prepared for it than the Whigs.
They were at least capable of exercising choice. The Whig party was too
curiously and too variously compounded to meet any new question without
painful hesitation and deep embarrassment.
[Illustration: BROADWAY, EAST SIDE, BETWEEN GRAND AND HOWARD STREETS, NEW
YORK, 1840]
Texas had sprung up, a young empire at the southwest, within a decade. No
doubt all the vast region which she claimed and dominated had in strict
right been a part of the broad, vague “Louisiana” which Mr. Jefferson
had purchased of France in 1803; but the United States had yielded their
claim to it in 1819, in order to secure all of Florida in the treaty
with Spain. Mr. Adams, then Secretary of State, New Englander though he
was, had wished to insist upon setting the southwestern boundary of the
United States forward to the Rio Grande del Norte; but Mr. Monroe, the
President, southerner though he was, had thought it best, as the rest
of his cabinet did,—Mr. Crawford, of Georgia, Mr. Calhoun, of South
Carolina, and Mr. Wirt, of Virginia, among them,—that the East should
not be so disquieted. “Having long known the repugnance with which the
Eastern portion of the Union have seen its aggrandizement to the West and
South,” wrote Mr. Monroe to General Jackson, “I have been decidedly of
the opinion that we ought to be content with Florida for the present.” He
had seen then that it was only “for the present”; and he had irritated
the South and West more than he had pleased the East. By abandoning a
full third of the Louisiana claim he had made the Missouri compromise
of the next year (1820) no settlement at all, but merely a new point of
departure in the struggle for the extension of slavery and the expansion
of the South. In the drawing of that line of compromise the southern men
had gained hardly so much as one-fourth of what had been conceded to the
northern interest, and the balance of power between the sections remained
still to be redressed.
Texas did not remain the property of Spain. While the treaty of 1819 lay
unconfirmed at the dilatory court of Madrid, the people of Mexico broke
away from their allegiance to the crown of Spain (1821) and established
their independence, sweeping Texas within their dominion. In 1825 Mr.
Adams offered Mexico a million dollars for the territory, but got nothing
for his offer but the jealous distrust of the new government. General
Jackson offered five millions for it, and only intensified the distrust.
In 1827 the “State of Coahuila and Texas” became a member of the Mexican
federal union.
At first, to get increase of strength in her struggle with Spain, Mexico
had encouraged immigration out of the United States. At first her law
permitted slavery. When she grew fearful of the too strong desire of the
United States for Texas she shut her doors, so far as law and ordinance
could shut them, against immigrants out of the East. To win favor with
the negroes of Hayti against Spain, she abolished slavery. But immigrants
were not to be gainsaid; that long border could neither be watched nor
guarded. Slaves came with their masters, too, and Mexican laws had to be
suspended for the benefit of the Americans, who would not heed them.
The masterful men who poured in across the long border came for the most
part from the southern States. They found Mexican rule a thing sore to
bear, arbitrary, inconstant, without principle, without stability of
power. As their numbers increased, therefore, they made bold to take
things into their own hands; framed a constitution for Texas which was
to their own liking; and, when they could not obtain the sanction of the
Mexican government for it, put it into operation without sanction (1833),
making a revolution out of the right of local self-government. In 1836,
the government of Mexico being overturned and Santa Anna, its President,
made dictator in his own behoof, they seceded, and made good their
independence in a battle (San Jacinto, April 21, 1836) which the usurper
was not likely to forget. With bowie knives and clubbed rifles, a little
army of seven hundred and forty-eight Texans, under the redoubtable Sam
Houston, fell in true frontier fashion upon the sixteen hundred Mexicans
Santa Anna had brought against them; left about six hundred of their
enemies dead upon the field; gave themselves more than two hundred
wounded Mexicans to take care of when the dreadful work was over; took
seven hundred and thirty prisoners; and had the dictator himself to show
for trophy. Of their own number but six were killed and twenty-five
wounded. “I was thirty years too soon!” cried Aaron Burr, when the news
was brought him in his solitude,—an aged man, ostracized, forgotten.
[Illustration: GENERAL SANTA ANNA]
The European states which coveted her trade recognized the independence
of Texas the next year (1837). General Jackson recognized it as promptly.
He took counsel, after his masterful fashion, neither with Congress nor
with any one except the friends of Texas herself. He was himself General
Houston’s friend, and had no doubt what countenance the Executive of the
United States should give the chief of the new state. Texas was her own
mistress in her own empire.
But the men who had peopled her out of the South had not taken possession
of her government to maintain themselves in independence. They had
taken possession in order to bring the fair territory into the Union to
which they conceived her properly to belong. Her broad expanses were
the natural growing ground of the South. The political advantages the
South would reap from the addition of Texas to the Union were palpable
and obvious,—so palpable and obvious that politicians in the East deemed
her virtual conquest by southern men a concerted scheme for southern
aggrandizement. Only by the addition of territory and the creation of
new states south of the line drawn by the Missouri compromise could the
South hope to preserve that equality between the sections in the Senate
upon which she instinctively felt her safety, the integrity and even
the continuance of her chosen ways of life, to depend. The vast area
of Texas, big enough for half a dozen states, would be a make-weight
indeed, and was a stake worth playing for. It looked to the rest of the
country as if the South had deliberately played for it, using lawless and
ambitious men as pieces in the game. It was said that General Houston
had gone from his home in Tennessee, a disappointed and discredited man,
expressly “to kindle an internal insurrection” out of the inflammable
material sent ahead of him, “and separate Texas from Mexico.” Like every
frontier, the country teemed with men come for adventure, and not too
squeamish of what sort it should be. Those who were suspicious felt sure
they had come for a particular adventure planned beforehand,—that Texas
had been garrisoned with conspirators to serve the ambition of the South.
She had in fact come by her settlers out of the States like any other
frontier. Her independence came as inevitably as the unpalatableness of
Mexican authority to the temper of the new comers. The proposal to bring
her into the Union came from men who had taken possession of her, not to
secure independence, but only a new home where they should be as free
as Americans within the border they had crossed. The matter had been
broached to Mr. Van Buren; but he had read the signs of the times and
had declined to have anything to do with it. Mr. Tyler took it up with a
certain eagerness. A southerner himself, bred to the southern point of
view, holding the constitutional doctrines of the South very absolutely
and in a form almost as radical and unqualified as that in which Mr.
Calhoun, now his Secretary of State, had uttered them, in defence of
nullification, and minded to maintain the old balances of the federal
system where he could, the annexation of Texas seemed to him a step which
every statesman should wish to take.
[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS]
Texas stood ready to accept a separate rôle should her overtures be
rejected. Should the jealousy of warring parties exclude her from the
Union, “a rival power will soon be built up,” said General Houston, “and
the Pacific as well as the Atlantic will be component parts of Texas in
thirty years.... All the powers which either envy or fear the United
States would use all reasonable exertions to build us up as the only
rival power that can exist on this continent.” The long coast of the
Pacific above her was open to be occupied: she could look forward to
having the Californias and New Mexico for the taking. “They must come,”
her confident leader declared; “it is impossible to look on the map of
North America and not perceive the rationale of the project.”
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF A CAMPAIGN PAMPHLET]
But she was not left to try the experiment. Though the treaty which he
submitted to the Senate failed when it came to the vote, in June, 1844,
Mr. Tyler had brought Texas in within less than a twelvemonth after its
rejection. The summer of 1844 had brought together again the nominating
conventions of the parties, to make ready for the next presidential
election; and the Senate had waited to vote as the Whig convention
should wish it to vote. The Whig convention had said nothing about the
annexation of Texas in its declaration of principles, but it had put
Mr. Clay in nomination for the presidency, and Mr. Clay, whom all the
party knew to be its real leader, had decided against any immediate step
towards annexation. The Democratic convention, more bold and candid than
the Whig, declared very flatly for “the reoccupation of Oregon and the
reannexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period” and made those
critical matters distinct as the real issues of the campaign. Unable
to agree upon any one of the recognized Democratic leaders for the
presidential nomination, it named Mr. James K. Polk, of Tennessee, as
the candidate of the party, a man long prominent in the Democratic ranks
in the House of Representatives, and an avowed advocate of annexation.
Mr. Clay shifted uncomfortably as the fight went forward; explained his
position overmuch; sought to conciliate opinion on both sides; and lost
support where he had seemed most likely to receive it. The abolitionists
had brought a “Liberty” party into existence, and now put a candidate of
their own into the field. They drew their strength more from the Whigs
than from the Democrats, and their ranks were swelled more and more as
Mr. Clay made doubting Whigs more and more uneasy. Their sixty thousand
votes decided the election. Mr. Polk spoke but one purpose, showed
himself a frank, unhesitating party man, held his followers to an open
path, and, by narrow majorities, won in fifteen out of the twenty-six
States.
It was when the campaign was over and the election decided that Mr.
Tyler had the satisfaction of himself bringing Texas into the Union. The
country had given its verdict; the houses, accepting the verdict, passed
a joint resolution in favor of the admission of Texas; and the President
signed the resolution on March 3, 1845, the day before Mr. Polk entered
upon the succession.
[Illustration: HENRY CLAY]
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF “THE CLAY SONGSTER”]
It remained for Mr. Polk to deal with the consequences. The programme
of his party seemed to have saddled two wars upon him. Mexico would
quite certainly contest the boundary claims of Texas at the south; and
the Democratic programme coupled “the reoccupation of Oregon” with “the
reannexation of Texas,”—a matter which very likely held at its heart a
war with England. Russia had seemed the rival claimant most to be feared
in the Oregon country in 1823, when Mr. Monroe, looking towards that
quarter as well as towards the south, uttered his significant warning
to the European powers against any aggression, whether in search of
territory or of sovereignty, in the Americas; but Russia had agreed with
England and the United States, in 1824 and 1825, to make no claim south
of 54° 40′ north latitude; and England and the United States, waiving
for the time their own rival pretensions, had maintained since that
settlement an informal joint occupation of the country. Latitude 42° had
been fixed, by the treaty of 1819 between the United States and Spain, as
the northern limit of the Spanish possessions upon the Pacific. From the
Lake of Woods to the doubtful Oregon country the northern boundary of the
United States followed the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude.
All things might have stood as they were had that distant coast remained
unused, unpeopled. But settlers and fur traders were moving there,
as everywhere upon the tempting continent. English trading companies
attempted to exercise exclusive rights there, the whole region through;
set up their trading posts north and south upon the rivers; and kept
American traders out. But not American settlers. Squatters came in,
indifferent what title they held if only they had that of actual
possession. Organized bands of settlers followed upon the heels of
isolated squatters and single families, and little settlements began to
be clustered here and there upon the rivers. The government at Washington
refused to give them any grants for their lands, remembering its covenant
of joint occupation with England; but the English could not exclude or
oust them; and men and families who came to stay and make homes for
themselves began presently to seem much more like actual owners of the
disputed country than mere traders could or the agents of fur companies.
Doubtful boundaries at the Pacific were fast becoming a distinct menace
to peace. There were men in Congress, too, like Mr. Benton, who sought
upon every opportunity to take the aggressive and force the government to
a final settlement with Great Britain.
Disputes with England seemed to dog the steps of almost every
Administration. It was but three years since Mr. Webster and Lord
Ashburton had settled the difficult matter of the northern boundary
of Maine by running a compromise line between Canadian and American
territory upon the Atlantic. The air of politics, moreover, had never
been quite still enough in America for dispassionate settlements by
treaty. A veritable storm of outspoken opinion beat about every matter
of controversy with foreign countries, if once it happened to catch the
ear of the heady democracy which presidents and cabinets had it as their
difficult task to lead. And that democracy was more confident, more
wilful, more headstrong now, since General Jackson had shown it its way
to supremacy, than it had ever been before. Presidents were no longer
likely to attempt to withstand it as General Washington had withstood
it in the day of its outcry against Mr. Jay’s treaty with England. Mr.
Polk was a man of his party; the question of the occupation of Oregon
had taken hold of the imagination and the passion of the country; the
convention which had nominated him had demanded that nothing less than
the whole of the disputed region be required of England, up to the very
line of the Russian claim; the cry of the campaign had been “Fifty-four
forty or fight.” England, on her part, pushed her claim southward to the
Columbia River, where her fur traders had set a station up. Only the
cooling processes of actual negotiation cleared the matter and brought
safer counsels in. Mr. Buchanan, the new Secretary of State, was not of
the fibre to insist in the face of emphatic refusal of what he demanded;
the English government looked with evident uneasiness upon the state of
opinion in the United States; a comparison of views brought concessions
on each side; and in 1846 the Senate consented to a treaty which
continued the line of the forty-ninth degree of north latitude to the
Georgian Straits as the definitive northern boundary of the Union.
[Illustration: JAMES K. POLK]
The Texan boundaries were another matter. Here the government dealt
with a rival and neighbor with whom no compromise was necessary. Texas
claimed, not only everything north and west of her that had been Spain’s
or Mexico’s all the way to latitude 42°, but also so much of the
territory of her one-time partner State, Coahuila, as lay between the
Nueces and the Rio Grande del Norte at the south; and Mr. Polk espoused
and acted upon her claims at the south even before her formal admission
into the Union was complete. He ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy
the western bank of the Nueces with a small force of United States
troops, and during the summer of 1845 sent him reinforcements which
raised his strength to nearly four thousand men. In December, 1845, Texas
became in full form a State of the Union; and early in the following year
the President ordered General Taylor to advance to the Rio Grande. His
presence there threatened the Mexican town of Matamoros, just beyond the
river, and the Mexican commander at Matamoros demanded his withdrawal to
the Nueces. General Taylor refused to withdraw. The Mexicans crossed the
river, and on April 23d ambushed a small body of American dragoons. Two
weeks later they attacked General Taylor in force and he repulsed them
(Palo Alto, May 8, 1846). The next day Taylor in his turn attacked, and
drove the Mexicans back across the river in disastrous rout. On the 18th
General Taylor himself passed the Rio Grande and occupied Matamoros.
“Mexico,” the President told Congress on the 11th of May, while yet he
had had no news except that of the ambush of the 23d of April, “Mexico
has passed the boundaries of the United States ... and shed American
blood upon American soil. War exists, and exists by the act of Mexico
herself.” He had not consulted Congress before he ordered General Taylor
forward to the Rio Grande and brought this momentous matter to a head,
though it had been in session when the order was issued. He had taken
full responsibility for that upon himself. War indeed existed,—but by
whose act Congress was no longer at liberty to inquire. There was nothing
for it but to vote supplies and an army; and a formal declaration of war
was resolved upon May 13, 1846, before news of the real fighting on the
Rio Grande had reached the capital.
[Illustration: ZACHARY TAYLOR]
Until autumn all things stood as they were between the belligerents
while an army was made ready; but late in August General Taylor moved
again, and within a month, by severe and dogged fighting (September
21-23), took the strongly fortified town of Monterey, a full hundred and
seventy miles to the west of Matamoros on the highway to the Mexican
capital. In November General Winfield Scott, the ranking officer of
the federal service, was given chief command, and in January, 1847,
General Taylor’s force was reduced to a scant five thousand to recruit
the immediate command of his superior, sent by sea to attack Vera Cruz.
On the 22d and 23d of February Santa Anna attacked him, with four times
his numbers, where he lay at defence on the broken plain of Buena Vista,
thinking to crush him while he was weak; and was repulsed. The Americans
were no longer raw militia, men and officers alike, as they had been
in the extemporized armies of 1812. Though they were for the more part
volunteers, their officers were professionals, and they were drilled and
handled with a skill and thoroughness that made veterans of them with a
single battle.
Their steadiness and prowess were put to full test with General Scott
in the south. There they had not only to take Vera Cruz by set siege
(March 9-29, 1847) in order to make good their landing, but had also to
scale the huge escarpments of the vast table-land upon which the Mexican
capital lay, two hundred miles away, more than seven thousand feet above
the sea, and to make their way across the broken, hilly plains beyond,
fighting everywhere as they went against an enemy who outnumbered them
and was secure against surprise within safe inner lines of communication.
And yet from the carrying of the pass at Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847) to
the storming of the high fortress of Chapultepec (September 13th) there
was no pause or miscarriage in the steady process of their victories.
The city of Mexico lay amidst guarding fortresses and was set about by
morasses crossed only by narrow causeways. But the Americans moved
everywhere with the businesslike certainty and precision of men well
handled, and their volunteer ranks seemed less in need of officers than
other armies did. Individual pluck and dash and resourceful daring
showed, irresistible, in all that they did. They fought men as brave
as themselves, a subtile, spirited race, tenacious to the last of all
that it could hold; they fought, also, against odds and moved everywhere
against fortified places; but they won undaunted at every onset. By the
15th of September they were in complete and formal possession of the
enemy’s capital and Mexico was in their hands, within but a little more
than six months of their landing.
[Illustration: WINFIELD SCOTT]
Meanwhile the government at Washington had broadened the scope and
meaning of the war beyond all expectation. During the summer of 1846 and
the winter of 1846-1847 it had seized, not merely the disputed territory
which Texas claimed, but also the whole country of the Pacific slope
beyond, from Oregon to the Gila River, to which the United States could
have no conceivable right except that of conquest. The thing was easily
accomplished. A fleet under Commodores Sloat and Stockton and a few
troops acting here and there under Colonel Kearney and Captain Frémont
moved almost as they pleased; and a territory of six hundred thousand
square miles was added to the United States.
The war, with all its inexcusable aggression and fine fighting, was
brought to its formal close by a treaty, signed at Guadeloupe Hidalgo
on the 2d of February, 1848, by which Mexico recognized the Rio Grande
as the southwestern boundary line of Texas and ceded New Mexico and
California, of which the United States had taken possession by force of
arms. For this territory, seized and ceded, the United States agreed to
pay Mexico fifteen million dollars.
[Illustration: THE DEPARTURE OF THE PHILADELPHIA VOLUNTEERS FROM
PHILADELPHIA
From a humorous drawing by F. O. C. Darley.]
It had been evident from the first what the outcome of the war must
be. When, in August, 1846, Congress had had under consideration an
additional money vote of two millions, “for the settlement of the
boundary question with Mexico,” there had been no doubt in the mind of
any candid or well informed man that the money was really to be spent for
the acquisition of territory as opportunity offered. Members of Congress
very well knew what question that opened again. Mr. David Wilmot, a
Democratic member of the House from Pennsylvania, therefore, promptly
offered as an amendment to the vote the _proviso_ that neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude should be permitted in any territory that might
be acquired from Mexico. The amendment passed the House with the money
vote, but miscarried in the Senate, with the money vote itself, because
it provoked debate and there was not time enough at the fag-end of a
session to push it past debate to its passage. It was necessary that
the matter of the proviso should be settled. The Missouri compromise
line ran only to the western boundary of the Louisiana purchase; the
war brought accessions of territory as extensive, almost, as Louisiana
itself; the question of the extension of slavery once more awaited debate
and settlement. Here were vast provinces greater than the entire area of
the original Union. Was slavery to be carried into them, and were slave
States to be erected along the mountains and by the Pacific which should
preserve the political balance of North and South in the Senate? The
“Wilmot proviso” must be adopted or rejected; its question could not be
put out of sight.
While the war lasted and the troublesome questions it bred were
yet in abeyance, the Democrats made good the programme of domestic
administration they had set themselves. By the elections of 1844 both
houses of Congress had become Democratic, and party measures could be
carried. In July, 1846, therefore, a new tariff Act was passed which
brought protective duties down almost to a strict revenue basis, and
considerably enlarged the free list. In August an Act was passed which
once more established the Independent Treasury, substantially as Mr. Van
Buren had planned it. The expenses of the war were met, so far as the
revenues fell short, by large issues of interest-bearing treasury notes.
The Democratic leaders were steadfast in their determination neither to
use the banks nor to increase the tariff in order to assist the Treasury.
[Illustration: CHARGE OF THE “PALMETTOS” AT CHURUBUSCO]
[Illustration: MAIN STREET IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, ABOUT 1845]
But their power came to an end with the first Congress of Mr. Polk’s
administration. The congressional elections of the autumn of 1846
transformed the majority in the House from Democratic to Whig again.
The Senate, more slow to change, remained Democratic. With the houses
no longer agreed, party plans fell into confusion. Congress was once
more disturbed by questions which lay deeper than politics and cut both
parties athwart with the lines of faction. The question of slavery had
returned again to plague it. The Democratic Senate wished to pass an
appropriation bill “for the settlement of the boundary question” in
which nothing should be said about the extension of slavery; the Whigs
of the House insisted upon Mr. Wilmot’s proviso. Oregon was drawn into
the controversy. The Senate would agree to no bill organizing Oregon as a
Territory which excluded slavery; the House would adopt no measure which
did not exclude it. The treaty of peace and cession found the houses
still unagreed. Not until August, 1848, could they agree even upon the
organization of Oregon. Then the Senate yielded and the Territory was
organized under a law which extended to her area the prohibitions of the
Ordinance of 1787. But in the matter of California and New Mexico the
dead-lock was unbroken. All measures failed, and the new territories were
left with no law but such as they had got from Mexico.
[Illustration: SALMON PORTLAND CHASE]
Democratic politicians, indeed, put forward a political doctrine in
the matter which, if accepted, would make it unnecessary for Congress
to act at all upon the chief question at issue. The introduction or
non-introduction of slavery into those territories, they said, was not
a thing to be determined beforehand or by federal authority: it must
be determined by circumstances and by the free choice of the people
who were to make their homes there. It ought to be their privilege to
choose their own institutions and economy of life, and Congress ought
not to attempt to dictate what their choice should be. They called this
a principle of democracy, that every community should determine its own
life; but it came too late to their lips to look like anything more
than a counsel of timidity and inaction, a makeshift party doctrine of
“squatter sovereignty”; and opinion was neither stayed nor satisfied by
the compromise it offered.
[Illustration: LEWIS CASS]
That year of dead-lock between the houses was the year also of a
presidential election; and no one who looked observantly upon the
incidents of that year doubted what significant changes were setting
in. The airs of opinion blew now out of this quarter and again out of
that, but their shifting currents foretold, to those who could read the
weather, the setting in of the trades, which should blow continuously and
with increasing volume out of one quarter a long season through. Both
Whigs and Democrats observed the signs of the times, and fell silent upon
the main issue that was in every man’s mind, awaiting steadier weather.
The Democrats, turning from Mr. Polk, nominated Mr. Lewis Cass, of
Michigan, for President, a man conspicuous among them for conservative
temper and liberal ways of thought, and spoke in their declaration of
principles only of old doctrines, deliberately excluding an avowal of
the doctrine of non-interference with the extension of slavery. The
Whigs, more cautious still, fell back again upon their tactics of 1840:
nominated for President General Zachary Taylor, no politician but a
frank soldier like General Harrison; for Vice President Mr. Millard
Fillmore, of New York; and made no declaration of principles at all. But
the issue was not obscured. A strong faction of Democrats in New York
drew off from their party in open protest against the programme it did
not avow, and in conjunction with men of their own mind out of four other
States nominated Mr. Van Buren, who had stood from the first in frank
opposition to the extension of slavery. Nor was that all. In August, at
Buffalo, still another convention came together, composed of delegates
out of eighteen States, to form an independent free soil party, pledged
neither to interfere with slavery in the States, whose laws Congress had
no power to change, nor to permit its introduction into the Territories,
whose laws Congress was empowered to make; and it also put Mr. Van Buren
in nomination.
[Illustration: THOMAS WILSON DORR]
The Democratic split in New York cost Mr. Cass the election. The
thirty-six votes of the State went to General Taylor; and thirty-six
was General Taylor’s majority in the electoral college. Mr. Van Buren
received nearly three hundred thousand votes. The “Free Soilers” had
drawn their strength rather from the Whigs than from the Democrats, it
turned out, except in New York, and were to hold the balance of power
in the next House, where neither Democrats nor Whigs could command a
majority without them. Only the Senate remained Democratic. A “free soil”
campaign had cut party lines sharply athwart, and no man could safely
forecast what was to come.
All things seemed touched with change. The country offered but a confused
and troubled stage upon which to order parties or make and execute plans
of action. The decade through new forces had seemed to gather head, and
old forces to be checked and altered (1840-1850). Rhode Island had found
herself obliged to enlarge her suffrage and make liberal changes in her
old-fashioned constitution, kept unaltered since old colony days, in
order to quiet actual rebellion, under one Thomas Dorr. The legislature
of New York had been obliged to secure fee simple titles for the men who
farmed the lands on the Hudson still leased, for a rent in kind, from
the heirs of the Dutch patroons; because they flatly refused to pay the
rents any longer, resisted the sheriff’s process with arms, and would
pay for nothing but absolute title. Six thousand miles of railway were
built while Mr. Tyler negotiated the annexation of Texas and Mr. Polk
thrust Mexico to the wall. The population of the country increased from
seventeen to twenty-three millions. Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin, as
well as Texas, were added to the roll of States. The electric telegraph,
spreading with the railways, whose administration it so much eased and
simplified, quickened also and gave sweep to the movements of trade and
of opinion.
[Illustration: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, IN 1848]
A great tide of immigration, moreover, began to pour in, such as the
country had never seen before. Until 1842 there had never been so many as
a hundred thousand immigrants in a single year; but in 1845 there were
one hundred and fourteen thousand, and by 1849 there were two hundred and
ninety-seven thousand coming in within a twelvemonth, the tide rising
steadily from year to year. These were years of deep distress over sea.
1846 and 1847 were the years of the terrible famine in Ireland; 1848 saw
European states shaken once again by revolution. Not only men out of
Ireland, looking for a land where there was food, but men also out of
the old monarchies of the continent, looking for a land where there was
liberty,—men of wholly foreign speech and habit, seeking a free place
for a new life, bent upon their own betterment, and thinking little of
aught that did not touch their own fortunes,—came crowding endlessly in.
They did not go into the South, where labor was not free, for they were
laborers. They crowded, rather, into the cities at the north, or pushed
on to the virgin West. Their coming, thousands upon thousands, their
ceaseless movement into the West, their stir as of an invading host,
subtly gave new impulse to the general movement and resettlement of the
population, already afoot of its own accord: to the opening of new lands,
the diversification of industry, the quick growth of a nation always
making and to be made. Until now the country had been developed for the
most part only by men out of the old homes of the first settlers and by
natural increase of its own people. Now there was added this power of
increase and subtle impulse of change from without. And the tide of men
from over sea, once set running, did not ebb or recede. Statesmen found
themselves obliged to accommodate affairs to a day of new forces, which
escaped them and dominated all that they did.
[Illustration: ENGLISH POWER LOOM FOR WEAVING COTTON, 1847]
Whether it came by immigration or by natural increase, growth of
population meant the augmentation, not of sectional, but of national
forces. The slave-holding States, though their number included Missouri
and Arkansas, which shared the growth of the frontier, showed, even with
Texas added, an increase of but little more than two millions in the
decade, while the rest of the country saw nearly four millions added to
its strength. Industry, too, moved with as quick a pace as population,
and invention bettered and facilitated its processes at every step. By
1846 a fully practicable sewing machine had been developed and patented.
In 1847 the rotary printing press was invented. The power loom was still
further varied and perfected. An age of machinery was pushing forward
every process of production, every means of communication, everything
that touched either thought or effort.
Though the southern politicians talked only of constitutional rights, and
seemed to fight only for the extension of slavery, southern merchants
held conventions to plan railways to the Pacific and debated measures for
linking their trade with the expanding West. Their thoughts ran eagerly
and with a certain enthusiasm upon the great future of the nation, in
which they wished to take their part. Their plans were made upon the
scale of the continent; they spoke in the spirit of the new age, and
sought their right rôle in the general development. And yet there was in
all that they said and urged an unmistakable note also of apprehension.
They wished to take part, and yet began to fear that they could not. They
spoke of the nation, and of their duty and their opportunity in it; but
the nation of their thought was not a nation which could easily be united
in joint efforts of business. It was a nation sectionalized and divided
by social and economic contrasts too gross and obvious to be overlooked;
a nation whose several regions showed interests diverse and separate,
hardly to be reconciled. This they saw, some vaguely, some with painful
clearness, and a deep uneasiness grew upon them more and more from year
to year. The spirit and the power of the time were turned against them.
[Illustration: CASTLE GARDEN, NEW YORK, IN 1850]
And the issues which made their place apart a fact, not of speculation
but of certainty, were mightily hastened by every force afoot in the life
of the country as it grew. It became evident almost at once that Congress
could not avoid or even postpone its choice with regard to slavery in
the new territories seized from Mexico. The very month the treaty of
Guadeloupe Hidalgo was signed (February, 1848) rich deposits of gold
were discovered in California; and before the politicians at Washington
were ready to organize the region as a Territory it had filled with an
aggressive population which was making ready to demand its admission into
the Union as a State. Before the census of 1850 was taken eighty thousand
settlers had made their way thither, eager for treasure. Some had
struggled across the interminable plains and over the mighty ridges of
the Rockies; some had taken ship and gone the long way round about Cape
Horn; some had crossed the isthmus of Central America and made their way
in such craft as offered up the Pacific coast. The plains were ere long
strewn with the bleaching bones of men and beasts, the coasts with frail
craft cast away upon the incautious, eager voyage; but the quest did not
cease or slacken. Thousands reached the faraway goal, found the golden
fleece, and set themselves to build a State. It was evident enough that,
with such things happening, Congress could not put action off.
[Illustration: EMIGRANT TRAIN CROSSING THE PLAINS]
The new President, too, forced the matter most uncomfortably. General
Taylor had no sooner become President than he acted upon the situation
in the West with a soldier’s practical, businesslike candor and
directness. He advised the settlers in California and New Mexico to
frame state constitutions and apply at once for admission to the Union
with institutions of their own choosing; and the Californians acted upon
his advice so promptly that by the time Congress met they had erected a
complete government, and he had ordered General Riley, the provisional
military governor of the territory, to withdraw. When the houses
assembled the frank soldier President advised them to admit the new State
at once, and to postpone action with regard to New Mexico until it also
should have completed its preparations for admission, then in progress.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL HOTEL IN THE MIDDLE MINES, CALIFORNIA, ABOUT
1850]
But the thing was not to be so easily and simply handled. A deep
excitement had spread through the country that eventful year. Again it
had come to seem as if the future of the Union hung upon this issue.
Very significant things had been said and threatened, which it was not
easy to forget or dismiss. So long ago as 1843 John Quincy Adams, who
thirty-five years before had left the Federalists because they talked of
dissolving the Union, had joined with other Whigs in declaring that the
addition of Texas to the South would bring about and justify disunion.
Mr. Garrison, the leader of the abolitionists, had proposed in 1845 that
Massachusetts should lead in a movement to withdraw from the Union, and
had won very hearty applause for the suggestion from an anti-annexation
convention. The masses of the people, it is true, did not heed these
things; the counsels of sober statesmen were not seriously affected by
them. But almost every northern State demanded, through its legislature,
the adoption of the Wilmot proviso, and every southern State protested
against it, in tones not to be mistaken. The southern men, to whose
demands Mr. Calhoun gave the touch of final definiteness which only words
of precision such as he used could give, now denied outright the power
of the federal government to exclude slaves, the legitimate property
of southern settlers, from the Territories of the United States, and
asserted the right of the people of the Territories “to act as they
pleased upon the subject of the status of the negro race amongst them,
as upon other subjects of internal policy, when they came to form their
constitutions.” The air was full of disquieting rumors as to what the
southerners meant to do should Congress set that principle aside: how
they meant to shut their ports against the North and turn all their arts
and all their power towards building up an alliance, at once political
and economic, with the West: how in the last resort they meant to secede
from the Union altogether.
It was not an air in which action was easy to be determined upon. Even
compromise seemed for a long time impossible. Mr. Clay, with the dignity
of old age upon him, once more came forward as mediator, with counsels
of accommodation for which he plead, not in his old tones of commanding
leadership, but in new tones almost of supplication which it was very
moving to hear. Mr. Webster ceased to speak of the constitution as an
instrument of authority; spoke of it, rather, as a thing to be maintained
by seeking ways of peace and compromise. But not until many anxious
months had gone by, full of bitter, estranging debate, within the houses
and without, could terms of agreement be hit upon. It was agreed at last,
in the closing months of 1850, that California should be admitted to the
Union as a free State, with the constitution she had herself formed;
that the rest of the Mexican cession should be left open to slavery,
should events and the movement of population out of the South establish
it there; that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of
Columbia; and that a stringent fugitive slave law should provide the
southerners with effective legal means of recovering runaway slaves.
Such was the bundle of measures that had to be got together to quiet all
parties.
[Illustration: SLUICE WASHING FOR GOLD IN THE MIDDLE MINES, CALIFORNIA,
ABOUT 1850]
Meanwhile Mr. Calhoun was dead (March 31, 1850), while compromise yet
hung doubtful,—and the President himself (July 9, 1850), of a sudden
fever; and Mr. Fillmore was President, a man more amenable to the control
of the leaders of Congress and of his party than the sturdy soldier had
been whom he succeeded. The face of affairs had changed again with the
settlement of the principles of compromise.
It meant more than the mere passing away of a notable figure that Mr.
Calhoun was dead at such a juncture,—a tall, spare old man, the lines
of whose striking face and haunting, deep-set eyes marked him as the
very embodiment of a single stern and watchful purpose, an ascetic
knight challenger set down in lonely guard to keep an ancient shrine of
doctrine. Eight years before he had told his friends upon what single
principle he had acted since 1825, and must ever act so long as he
remained upon the field of action. He had opposed Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay,
had first supported General Jackson and then turned from him, had acted
with the Whigs against Mr. Van Buren and with Mr. Tyler against the
Whigs always with this one hope and purpose, “to restore the old state
rights Republican doctrines of ’98; under the solemn belief that on their
restoration the existence of our free popular institutions depended.” He
came of the hard-willed, indomitable stuff of the north of Ireland, and
showed in all his strenuous course “the definite mind, the inflexible
purpose, the reserved, self-restrained, somewhat ungenial temper of the
Ulsterman.” When he went off the stage politics seemed bereft of some
force as of private and personal conviction, and left to the guidance of
men who looked for their opportunity, not for their day of justification.
[Illustration: OLD SPANISH FORT AT MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, IN 1848]
Our leading _general authorities_ are still George Tucker,
volume IV., Bryant and Gay, volume IV., James Schouler, volumes
IV. and V., and H. von Holst, volumes II.-VI. Here we begin to
have as guide Mr. James Ford Rhodes’s _History of the United
States from the Compromise of 1850_, volumes I. and II. We turn
also, as before, to Carl Schurz’s _Henry Clay_ and Theodore
Roosevelt’s _Thomas H. Benton_ in the _American Statesmen
Series_; Calvin Colton’s _Life and Speeches of Henry Clay_;
George Ticknor Curtis’s _Life of Daniel Webster_ and _Life of
James Buchanan_; Alexander Johnston’s _History of American
Politics_; Edward Stanwood’s _History of the Presidency_; and
A. W. Young’s _American Statesman_.
The list of _special authorities_ on particular topics or
individual aspects of the history of the time is very long. The
following may represent the whole. J. N. Larned’s _History for
Ready Reference_, which, under the title _United States_ and
under various special titles connected with the history of the
country, contains copious and admirably selected extracts from
the best writers; Lalor’s _Cyclopaedia of Political Science,
Political Economy, and United States History_; J. McK. Ormsby’s
_History of the Whig Party_; Henry A. Wise’s _Seven Decades of
the Union_; Alexander H. Stephens’s _Constitutional View of
the War between the States_; R. S. Ripley’s _War With Mexico_;
William Jay’s _The Mexican War_; A. M. Williams’s _Sam Houston
and the War of Independence in Texas_; C. E. Lester’s _Houston
and His Republic_; R. D. Hunt’s _Genesis of California’s First
Constitution_ in the thirteenth volume of the _Johns Hopkins
University Studies in Historical and Political Science_; D.
King’s _Thomas W. Dorr_, a Life of the leader of the rebellion
in Rhode Island; E. R. Potter’s _Considerations on Questions
on Rhode Island_; E. P. Cheyney’s _Anti-Rent Agitation in New
York_; James Russell Soley’s _Wars of the United States_, James
B. Angell’s _Diplomacy of the United States_, and Winsor and
Channing’s _Territorial Acquisitions and Divisions_ in the
seventh volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History
of America_; Albert Gallatin’s _Right of the United States
of America to the North Eastern Boundary_; William Barrows’s
_Oregon_ in the _American Commonwealth Series_.
Among the most useful _biographies_ are Lyon G. Tyler’s
_Letters and Times of the Tylers_; Josiah Quincy’s _Life of
John Quincy Adams_; W. W. Story’s _Life of Joseph Story_; E.
M. Shepard’s _Martin Van Buren_ in the _American Statesmen
Series_; F. W. Seward’s _Seward at Washington_ (1846-1861); E.
L. Pierce’s _Life of Charles Sumner_; Pleasant Stovall’s _Life
of Robert Toombs_; William P. Trent’s _Life of W. G. Simms_;
A. C. McLaughlin’s _Lewis Cass_ in the _American Statesmen
Series_; Nicolay and Hay’s _Life of Lincoln_; and Albert B.
Hart’s _Salmon P. Chase_ in the _American Statesmen Series_.
Among the innumerable _writings on slavery_ and the slavery
question which now begin to be useful the following may be
mentioned: Horace Greeley’s _American Conflict_ and _History of
the Struggle for Slavery Extension_; W. Goodell’s _Slavery and
Anti-Slavery_; the first volume of J. W. Draper’s _History of
the Civil War_; E. A. Pollard’s _Lost Cause_; Henry Wilson’s
_History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power_; Hodgson’s
_Cradle of the Confederacy_; George Lunt’s _Origin of the Late
War_; Marion G. McDougall’s _Fugitive Slaves_; W. P. and F. J.
Garrison’s _Life of William Lloyd Garrison_; W. H. Siebert’s
_Underground Railroad_; Thomas R. R. Cobb’s _Inquiry into the
Law of Negro Slavery_ and _Historical Sketch of Slavery_; J. C.
Hurd’s _Law of Freedom and Bondage_; Charles Francis Adams’s
_Life of Richard Henry Dana_; William Jay’s _Miscellaneous
Writings on Slavery_; Leverett W. Spring’s _Kansas_ in the
_American Commonwealth Series_; Eli Thayer’s _Kansas Crusade_.
Shosuke Sato’s _Land Question_, in the fourth volume of the
_Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political
Science_ treats of the system of public lands which underlay
the westward expansion; Mr. F. W. Taussig’s _Tariff History_
sketches the political and economic aspects of tariff
legislation; and Mr. David Kinley’s _Independent Treasury
System_ narrates the various vicissitudes through which Mr. Van
Buren’s favorite plans passed before their final acceptance by
Congress.
The chief _sources_ are the _Register of Debates_; the
_Congressional Documents_; the _Congressional Globe_; Thomas
H. Benton’s _Abridgment of the Debates of Congress_; _Niles’s
Register_, besides which the _National Era_ (Washington), the
_New York Times_, the _New York Tribune_, the New York _Evening
Post_ become available for contemporary matter; Thomas H.
Benton’s _Thirty Years’ View_; Nathan Sargent’s _Public Men
and Events_; John Quincy Adams’s _Memoirs_; Martin Van Buren’s
_Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Political Parties in
the United States_; Chevalier de Bacourt’s _Souvenirs of a
Diplomat_; Mrs. Chapman Coleman’s _Life of John J. Crittenden_;
Alexander Johnston’s _Representative American Orations_; Hugh
McCulloch’s _Men and Measures of Half a Century_; George
W. Curtis’s _Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley_; Amos
Kendall’s _Autobiography_; Thurlow Weed’s _Autobiography_;
Herndon’s _Life of Lincoln_; F. W. Seward’s _Seward: An
Autobiography_; Frederick Law Olmsted’s _Cotton Kingdom_;
Ben. Perley Poore’s _Perley’s Reminiscences_; W. Kennedy’s
_Rise and Prospects of Texas_; W. C. Crane’s _Life and Select
Literary Remains of Sam Houston_; Hinton R. Helper’s _The
Impending Crisis_; Susan D. Smedes’s _Memorials of a Southern
Planter_; Frances Anne Kemble’s _Journal of a Residence on
a Georgia Plantation_; the _Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S.
Grant_; the case of _Luther vs. Borden_, touching the relation
between the federal and state authorities in the matter of
the rebellion in Rhode Island, reported in the seventh volume
of Howard’s Supreme Court Reports, p. 1; the cases of _Prigg
vs. Pennsylvania_, 16 Peters’s Reports, 539, and _Ableman vs.
Booth_, 21 Howard, 506, touching upon the law with regard to
fugitive slaves; and the _Kansas Historical Collections_.