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A HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: _Russell & Sons photo_
CECIL CHESTERTON]
A HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES
BY
CECIL CHESTERTON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1919
_First published January 16, 1919_
_Second impression January 17, 1919_
_All rights reserved_
DEDICATED TO
MY COMRADE AND HOSPITAL MATE,
LANCE-CORPORAL WOOD,
OF THE KING'S OWN LIVERPOOLS,
CITIZEN OF MASSACHUSETTS,
WHO JOINED THE BRITISH ARMY IN
AUGUST, 1914.
" ... O more than my brother, how shall I thank thee for all?
Each of the heroes around us has fought for his house and his line,
But thou hast fought for a stranger in hate of a wrong not thine.
Happy are all free peoples too strong to be dispossessed,
But happiest those among nations that dare to be strong for the rest."
--ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
INTRODUCTION
The author of this book, my brother, died in a French military hospital
of the effects of exposure in the last fierce fighting that broke the
Prussian power over Christendom; fighting for which he had volunteered
after being invalided home. Any notes I can jot down about him must
necessarily seem jerky and incongruous; for in such a relation memory is
a medley of generalisation and detail, not to be uttered in words. One
thing at least may fitly be said here. Before he died he did at least
two things that he desired. One may seem much greater than the other;
but he would not have shrunk from naming them together. He saw the end
of an empire that was the nightmare of the nations; but I believe it
pleased him almost as much that he had been able, often in the intervals
of bitter warfare and by the aid of a brilliant memory, to put together
these pages on the history, so necessary and so strangely neglected, of
the great democracy which he never patronised, which he not only loved
but honoured.
Cecil Edward Chesterton was born on November 12, 1879; and there is a
special if a secondary sense in which we may use the phrase that he was
born a fighter. It may seem in some sad fashion a flippancy to say that
he argued from his very cradle. It is certainly, in the same sad
fashion, a comfort, to remember one truth about our relations: that we
perpetually argued and that we never quarrelled. In a sense it was the
psychological truth, I fancy, that we never quarrelled because we always
argued. His lucidity and love of truth kept things so much on the level
of logic, that the rest of our relations remained, thank God, in solid
sympathy; long before that later time when, in substance, our argument
had become an agreement. Nor, I think, was the process valueless; for
at least we learnt how to argue in defence of our agreement. But the
retrospect is only worth a thought now, because it illustrates a duality
which seemed to him, and is, very simple; but to many is baffling in its
very simplicity. When I say his weapon was logic, it will be currently
confused with formality or even frigidity: a silly superstition always
pictures the logician as a pale-faced prig. He was a living proof, a
very living proof, that the precise contrary is the case. In fact it is
generally the warmer and more sanguine sort of man who has an appetite
for abstract definitions and even abstract distinctions. He had all the
debating dexterity of a genial and generous man like Charles Fox. He
could command that more than legal clarity and closeness which really
marked the legal arguments of a genial and generous man like Danton. In
his wonderfully courageous public speaking, he rather preferred being a
debator to being an orator; in a sense he maintained that no man had a
right to be an orator without first being a debater. Eloquence, he said,
had its proper place when reason had proved a thing to be right, and it
was necessary to give men the courage to do what was right. I think he
never needed any man's eloquence to give him that. But the substitution
of sentiment for reason, in the proper place for reason, affected him
"as musicians are affected by a false note." It was the combination of
this intellectual integrity with extraordinary warmth and simplicity in
the affections that made the point of his personality. The snobs and
servile apologists of the _régime_ he resisted seem to think they can
atone for being hard-hearted by being soft-headed. He reversed, if ever
a man did, that relation in the organs. The opposite condition really
covers all that can be said of him in this brief study; it is the clue
not only to his character but to his career.
If rationalism meant being rational (which it hardly ever does) he might
at every stage of his life be called a red-hot rationalist. Thus, for
instance, he very early became a Socialist and joined the Fabian
Society, on the executive of which he played a prominent part for some
years. But he afterwards gave the explanation, very characteristic for
those who could understand it, that what he liked about the Fabian sort
of Socialism was its hardness. He meant intellectual hardness; the fact
that the society avoided sentimentalism, and dealt in affirmations and
not mere associations. He meant that upon the Fabian basis a Socialist
was bound to believe in Socialism, but not in sandals, free love,
bookbinding, and immediate disarmament. But he also added that, while he
liked their hardness, he disliked their moderation. In other words, when
he discovered, or believed that he discovered, that their intellectual
hardness was combined with moral hardness, or rather moral deadness, he
felt all the intellectual ice melted by a moral flame. He had, so to
speak, a reaction of emotional realism, in which he saw, as suddenly as
simple men can see simple truths, the potterers of Social Reform as the
plotters of the Servile State. He was himself, above all things, a
democrat as well as a Socialist; and in that intellectual sect he began
to feel as if he were the only Socialist who was also a democrat. His
dogmatic, democratic conviction would alone illustrate the falsity of
the contrast between logic and life. The idea of human equality existed
with extraordinary clarity in his brain, precisely because it existed
with extraordinary simplicity in his character. His popular sympathies,
unlike so many popular sentiments, could really survive any intimacy
with the populace; they followed the poor not only at public meetings
but to public houses. He was literally the only man I ever knew who was
not only never a snob, but apparently never tempted to be a snob. The
fact is almost more important than his wonderful lack of fear; for such
good causes, when they cannot be lost by fear, are often lost by favour.
Thus he came to suspect that Socialism was merely social reform, and
that social reform was merely slavery. But the point still is that
though his attitude to it was now one of revolt, it was anything but a
mere revulsion of feeling. He did, indeed, fall back on fundamental
things, on a fury at the oppression of the poor, on a pity for slaves,
and especially for contented slaves. But it is the mark of his type of
mind that he did not abandon Socialism without a rational case against
it, and a rational system to oppose to it. The theory he substituted
for Socialism is that which may for convenience be called
Distributivism; the theory that private property is proper to every
private citizen. This is no place for its exposition; but it will be
evident that such a conversion brings the convert into touch with much
older traditions of human freedom, as expressed in the family or the
guild. And it was about the same time that, having for some time held an
Anglo-Catholic position, he joined the Roman Catholic Church. It is
notable, in connection with the general argument, that while the deeper
reasons for such a change do not concern such a sketch as this, he was
again characteristically amused and annoyed with the sentimentalists,
sympathetic or hostile, who supposed he was attracted by ritual, music,
and emotional mysticism. He told such people, somewhat to their
bewilderment, that he had been converted because Rome alone could
satisfy the reason. In his case, of course, as in Newman's and
numberless others, well-meaning people conceived a thousand crooked or
complicated explanations, rather than suppose that an obviously honest
man believed a thing because he thought it was true. He was soon to give
a more dramatic manifestation of his strange taste for the truth.
The attack on political corruption, the next and perhaps the most
important passage in his life, still illustrates the same point,
touching reason and enthusiasm. Precisely because he did know what
Socialism is and what it is not, precisely because he had at least
learned that from the intellectual hardness of the Fabians, he saw the
spot where Fabian Socialism is not hard but soft. Socialism means the
assumption by the State of all the means of production, distribution,
and exchange. To quote (as he often quoted with a rational relish) the
words of Mr. Balfour, that is Socialism and nothing else is Socialism.
To such clear thinking, it is at once apparent that trusting a thing to
the State must always mean trusting it to the statesmen. He could defend
Socialism because he could define Socialism; and he was not helped or
hindered by the hazy associations of the sort of Socialists who
perpetually defended what they never defined. Such men might have a
vague vision of red flags and red ties waving in an everlasting riot
above the fall of top-hats and Union Jacks; but he knew that Socialism
established meant Socialism official, and conducted by some sort of
officials. All the primary forms of private property were to be given to
the government; and it occurred to him, as a natural precaution, to give
a glance at the government. He gave some attention to the actual types
and methods of that governing and official class, into whose power trams
and trades and shops and houses were already passing, amid loud Fabian
cheers for the progress of Socialism. He looked at modern parliamentary
government; he looked at it rationally and steadily and not without
reflection. And the consequence was that he was put in the dock, and
very nearly put in the lock-up, for calling it what it is.
In collaboration with Mr. Belloc he had written "The Party System," in
which the plutocratic and corrupt nature of our present polity is set
forth. And when Mr. Belloc founded the _Eye-Witness_, as a bold and
independent organ of the same sort of criticism, he served as the
energetic second in command. He subsequently became editor of the
_Eye-Witness_, which was renamed as the _New Witness_. It was during the
latter period that the great test case of political corruption occurred;
pretty well known in England, and unfortunately much better known in
Europe, as the Marconi scandal. To narrate its alternate secrecies and
sensations would be impossible here; but one fashionable fallacy about
it may be exploded with advantage. An extraordinary notion still exists
that the _New Witness_ denounced Ministers for gambling on the Stock
Exchange. It might be improper for Ministers to gamble; but gambling was
certainly not a misdemeanor that would have hardened with any special
horror so hearty an Anti-Puritan as the man of whom I write. The Marconi
case did not raise the difficult ethics of gambling, but the perfectly
plain ethics of secret commissions. The charge against the Ministers was
that, while a government contract was being considered, they tried to
make money out of a secret tip, given them by the very government
contractor with whom their government was supposed to be bargaining.
This was what their accuser asserted; but this was not what they
attempted to answer by a prosecution. He was prosecuted, not for what
he had said of the government, but for some secondary things he had said
of the government contractor. The latter, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, gained a
verdict for criminal libel; and the judge inflicted a fine of £100.
Readers may have chanced to note the subsequent incidents in the life of
Mr. Isaacs, but I am here only concerned with incidents in the life of a
more interesting person.
In any suggestion of his personality, indeed, the point does not lie in
what was done to him, but rather in what was not done. He was positively
assured, upon the very strongest and most converging legal authority,
that unless he offered certain excuses he would certainly go to prison
for several years. He did not offer those excuses; and I believe it
never occurred to him to do so. His freedom from fear of all kinds had
about it a sort of solid unconsciousness and even innocence. This
homogeneous quality in it has been admirably seized and summed up by Mr.
Belloc in a tribute of great truth and power. "His courage was heroic,
native, positive and equal: always at the highest potentiality of
courage. He never in his life checked an action or a word from a
consideration of personal caution, and that is more than can be said of
any other man of his time." After the more or less nominal fine,
however, his moral victory was proved in the one way in which a military
victory can ever be proved. It is the successful general who continues
his own plan of campaign. Whether a battle be ticketed in the history
books as lost or won, the test is which side can continue to strike. He
continued to strike, and to strike harder than ever, up to the very
moment of that yet greater experience which changed all such military
symbols into military facts. A man with instincts unspoiled and in that
sense almost untouched, he would have always answered quite naturally to
the autochthonous appeal of patriotism; but it is again characteristic
of him that he desired, in his own phrase, to "rationalize patriotism,"
which he did upon the principles of Rousseau, that contractual theory
which, in these pages, he connects with the great name of Jefferson. But
things even deeper than patriotism impelled him against Prussianism. His
enemy was the barbarian when he enslaves, as something more hellish
even than the barbarian when he slays. His was the spiritual instinct by
which Prussian order was worse than Prussian anarchy; and nothing was so
inhuman as an inhuman humanitarianism. If you had asked him for what he
fought and died amid the wasted fields of France and Flanders, he might
very probably have answered that it was to save the world from German
social reforms.
This note, necessarily so broken and bemused, must reach its useless
end. I have said nothing of numberless things that should be remembered
at the mention of his name; of his books, which were great pamphlets and
may yet be permanent pamphlets; of his journalistic exposures of other
evils besides the Marconi, exposures that have made a new political
atmosphere in the very election that is stirring around us; of his visit
to America, which initiated him into an international friendship which
is the foundation of this book. Least of all can I write of him apart
from his work; of that loss nothing can be said by those who do not
suffer it, and less still by those who do. And his experiences in life
and death were so much greater even than my experiences of him, that a
double incapacity makes me dumb. A portrait is impossible; as a friend
he is too near me, and as a hero too far away.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
I have taken advantage of a very brief respite from other, and in my
judgment more valuable, employment, to produce this short sketch of the
story of a great people, now our Ally. My motive has been mainly that I
do not think that any such sketch, concentrated enough to be readable by
the average layman who has other things to do (especially in these days)
than to study more elaborate and authoritative histories, at present
exists, and I have thought that in writing it I might perhaps be
discharging some little part of the heavy debt of gratitude which I owe
to America for the hospitality I received from her when I visited her
shores during the early months of the War.
This book is in another sense the product of that visit. What I then saw
and heard of contemporary America so fascinated me that--believing as I
do that the key to every people is in its past--I could not rest until I
had mastered all that I could of the history of my delightful hosts.
This I sought as much as possible from the original sources, reading
voraciously, and at the time merely for my pleasure, such records as I
could get of old debates and of the speech and correspondence of the
dead. The two existing histories, which I also read, and upon which I
have drawn most freely, are that of the present President of the United
States and that of Professor Rhodes, dealing with the period from 1850
to 1876. With the conclusions of the latter authority it will be obvious
that I am in many respects by no means at one; but I think it the more
necessary to say that without a careful study of his book I could
neither have formed my own conclusions nor ventured to challenge his.
The reading that I did at the time of which I speak is the foundation of
what I have now written. It will be well understood that a Private in
the British Army, even when invalided home for a season, has not very
great opportunities for research. I think it very likely that errors of
detail may be discovered in these pages; I am quite sure that I could
have made the book a better one if I had been able to give more time to
revising my studies. Yet I believe that the story told here is
substantially true; and I am very sure that it is worth the telling.
If I am asked why I think it desirable at this moment to attempt,
however inadequately, a history of our latest Ally, I answer that at
this moment the whole future of our civilization may depend upon a
thoroughly good understanding between those nations which are now joined
in battle for its defence, and that ignorance of each other's history is
perhaps the greatest menace to such an understanding. To take one
instance at random--how many English writers have censured, sometimes in
terms of friendly sorrow, sometimes in a manner somewhat pharisaical,
the treatment of Negroes in Southern States in all its phases, varying
from the provision of separate waiting-rooms to sporadic outbreaks of
lynching! How few ever mention, or seem to have even heard the word
"Reconstruction"--a word which, in its historical connotation, explains
all!
I should, perhaps, add a word to those Americans who may chance to read
this book. To them, of course, I must offer a somewhat different
apology. I believe that, with all my limitations, I can tell my
fellow-countrymen things about the history of America which they do not
know. It would be absurd effrontery to pretend that I can tell Americans
what they do not know. For them, whatever interest this book may possess
must depend upon the value of a foreigner's interpretation of the facts.
I know that I should be extraordinarily interested in an American's view
of the story of England since the Separation; and I can only hope that
some degree of such interest may attach to these pages in American eyes.
It will be obvious to Americans that in some respects my view of their
history is individual. For instance, I give Andrew Jackson both a
greater place in the development of American democracy and a higher meed
of personal praise than do most modern American historians and writers
whom I have read. I give my judgment for what it is worth. In my view,
the victory of Jackson over the Whigs was the turning-point of American
history and finally decided that the United States should be a democracy
and not a parliamentary oligarchy. And I am further of opinion that,
both as soldier and ruler, "Old Hickory" was a hero of whom any nation
might well be proud.
I am afraid that some offence may be given by my portrait of Charles
Sumner. I cannot help it. I do not think that between his admirers and
myself there is any real difference as to the kind of man he was. It is
a kind that some people revere. It is a kind that I detest--absolutely
leprous scoundrels excepted--more than I can bring myself to detest any
other of God's creatures.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE,
_May 1st, 1918._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE ENGLISH COLONIES 1
II. ARMS AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN 14
III. "WE, THE PEOPLE" 36
IV. THE MANTLE OF WASHINGTON 51
V. THE VIRGINIAN DYNASTY 65
VI. THE JACKSONIAN REVOLUTION 90
VII. THE SPOILS OF MEXICO 110
VIII. THE SLAVERY QUESTION 129
IX. SECESSION AND CIVIL WAR 156
X. "THE BLACK TERROR" 203
XI. THE NEW PROBLEMS 227
INDEX 241
A HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
CHAPTER I
THE ENGLISH COLONIES
In the year of Our Lord 1492, thirty-nine years after the taking of
Constantinople by the Turks and eighteen years after the establishment
of Caxton's printing press, one Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor,
set sail from Spain with the laudable object of converting the Khan of
Tartary to the Christian Faith, and on his way discovered the continent
of America. The islands on which Columbus first landed and the adjacent
stretch of mainland from Mexico to Patagonia which the Spaniards who
followed him colonized lay outside the territory which is now known as
the United States. Nevertheless the instinct of the American democracy
has always looked back to him as a sort of ancestor, and popular
American tradition conceives of him as in some shadowy fashion a
founder. And that instinct and tradition, like most such national
instincts and traditions, is sound.
In the epoch which most of us can remember pretty vividly--for it came
to an abrupt end less than five years ago--when people were anxious to
prove that everything important in human history had been done by
"Teutons," there was a great effort to show that Columbus was not really
the first European discoverer of America; that that honour belonged
properly to certain Scandinavian sea-captains who at some time in the
tenth or eleventh centuries paid a presumably piratical visit to the
coast of Greenland. It may be so, but the incident is quite irrelevant.
That one set of barbarians from the fjords of Norway came in their
wanderings in contact with another set of barbarians living in the
frozen lands north of Labrador is a fact, if it be a fact, of little or
no historical import. The Vikings had no more to teach the Esquimaux
than had the Esquimaux to teach the Vikings. Both were at that time
outside the real civilization of Europe.
Columbus, on the other hand, came from the very centre of European
civilization and that at a time when that civilization was approaching
the summit of one of its constantly recurrent periods of youth and
renewal. In the North, indeed, what strikes the eye in the fifteenth
century is rather the ugliness of a decaying order--the tortures, the
panic of persecution, the morbid obsession of the _danse macabre_--things
which many think of as Mediæval, but which belong really only to the
Middle Ages when old and near to death. But all the South was already
full of the new youth of the Renaissance. Boccaccio had lived, Leonardo
was at the height of his glory. In the fields of Touraine was already
playing with his fellows the boy that was to be Rabelais.
Such adventures as that of Columbus, despite his pious intentions with
regard to the Khan of Tartary, were a living part of the Renaissance and
were full of its spirit, and it is from the Renaissance that American
civilization dates. It is an important point to remember about America,
and especially about the English colonies which were to become the
United States, that they have had no memory of the Middle Ages. They had
and have, on the other hand, a real, formative memory of Pagan antiquity,
for the age in which the oldest of them were born was full of enthusiasm
for that memory, while it thought, as most Americans still think, of the
Middle Ages as a mere feudal barbarism.
Youth and adventurousness were not the only notes of the Renaissance,
nor the only ones which we shall see affecting the history of America.
Another note was pride, and with that pride in its reaction against the
old Christian civilization went a certain un-Christian scorn of poverty
and still more of the ugliness and ignorance which go with poverty; and
there reappeared--to an extent at least, and naturally most of all where
the old religion had been completely lost--that naked Pagan repugnance
which almost refused to recognize a human soul in the barbarian. It is
notable that in these new lands which the Renaissance had thrown open to
European men there at once reappears that institution which had once
been fundamental to Europe and which the Faith had slowly and with
difficulty undermined and dissolved--Slavery.
The English colonies in America owe their first origin partly to the
English instinct for wandering and especially for wandering on the sea,
which naturally seized on the adventurous element in the Renaissance as
that most congenial to the national temper, and partly to the secular
antagonism between England and Spain. Spain, whose sovereign then ruled
Portugal and therefore the Portuguese as well as Spanish colonies,
claimed the whole of the New World as part of her dominions, and her
practical authority extended unchallenged from Florida to Cape Horn. It
would have been hopeless for England to have attempted seriously to
challenge that authority where it existed in view of the relative
strength at that time of the two kingdoms; and in general the English
seamen confined themselves to hampering and annoying the Spanish
commerce by acts of privateering which the Spaniards naturally
designated as piracy. But to the bold and inventive mind of the great
Raleigh there occurred another conception. Spain, though she claimed the
whole American continent, had not in fact made herself mistress of all
its habitable parts. North of the rich lands which supplied gold and
silver to the Spanish exchequer, but still well within the temperate
zone of climate, lay great tracts bordering the Atlantic where no
Spanish soldier or ruler had ever set his foot. To found an English
colony in the region would not be an impossible task like the attempt to
seize any part of the Spanish empire, yet it would be a practical
challenge to the Spanish claim. Raleigh accordingly projected, and
others, entering into his plans, successfully planted, an English
settlement on the Atlantic seaboard to the south of Chesapeake Bay
which, in honour of the Queen, was named "Virginia."
In the subsequent history of the English colonies which became American
States we often find a curious and recurrent reflection of their origin.
Virginia was the first of those colonies to come into existence, and we
shall see her both as a colony and as a State long retaining a sort of
primacy amongst them. She also retained, in the incidents of her history
and in the characters of many of her great men, a colour which seems
partly Elizabethan. Her Jefferson, with his omnivorous culture, his love
of music and the arts, his proficiency at the same time in sports and
bodily exercises, suggests something of the graceful versatility of men
like Essex and Raleigh, and we shall see her in her last agony produce a
soldier about whose high chivalry and heroic and adventurous failure
there clings a light of romance that does not seem to belong to the
modern world.
If the external quarrels of England were the immediate cause of the
foundation of Virginia, the two colonies which next make their
appearance owe their origin to her internal divisions. James I. and his
son Charles I., though by conviction much more genuine Protestants than
Elizabeth, were politically more disposed to treat the Catholics with
leniency. The paradox is not, perhaps, difficult to explain. Being more
genuinely Protestant they were more interested in the internecine
quarrels of Protestants, and their enemies in those internecine
quarrels, the Puritans, now become a formidable party, were naturally
the fiercest enemies of the old religion. This fact probably led the two
first Stuarts to look upon that religion with more indulgence. They
dared not openly tolerate the Catholics, but they were not unwilling to
show them such favour as they could afford to give. Therefore when a
Catholic noble, Lord Baltimore, proposed to found a new plantation in
America where his co-religionists could practise their faith in peace
and security, the Stuart kings were willing enough to grant his request.
James approved the project, his son confirmed it, and, under a Royal
Charter from King Charles I., Lord Baltimore established his Catholic
colony, which he called "Maryland." The early history of this colony is
interesting because it affords probably the first example of full
religious liberty. It would doubtless have been suicidal for the
Catholics, situated as they were, to attempt anything like persecution,
but Baltimore and the Catholics of Maryland for many generations deserve
none the less honour for the consistency with which they pursued their
tolerant policy. So long as the Catholics remained in control all sects
were not only tolerated but placed on a footing of complete equality
before the law, and as a fact both the Nonconformist persecuted in
Virginia and the Episcopalian persecuted in New England frequently found
refuge and peace in Catholic Maryland. The English Revolution of 1689
produced a change. The new English Government was pledged against the
toleration of a Catholicism anywhere. The representative of the
Baltimore family was deposed from the Governorship and the control
transferred to the Protestants, who at once repealed the edicts of
toleration and forbade the practice of the Catholic religion. They did
not, however, succeed in extirpating it, and to this day many of the old
Maryland families are Catholic, as are also a considerable proportion of
the Negroes. It may further be noted that, though the experiment in
religious equality was suppressed by violence, the idea seems never to
have been effaced, and Maryland was one of the first colonies to
accompany its demand for freedom with a declaration in favour of
universal toleration.
At about the same time that the persecuted Catholics found a refuge in
Maryland, a similar refuge was sought by the persecuted Puritans. A
number of these, who had found a temporary home in Holland, sailed
thence for America in the celebrated _Mayflower_ and colonized New
England on the Atlantic coast far to the north of the plantations of
Raleigh and Baltimore. From this root sprang the colonies of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island, and later the
States of New Hampshire and Maine. It would be putting it with ironical
mildness to say that the Pilgrim Fathers did not imitate the tolerant
example of the Catholic refugees. Religious persecution had indeed been
practised by all parties in the quarrels of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; but for much of the early legislation of the
Puritan colonies one can find no parallel in the history of European
men. Calvinism, that strange fierce creed which Wesley so correctly
described as one that gave God the exact functions and attributes of the
devil, produced even in Europe a sufficiency of madness and horror; but
here was Calvinism cut off from its European roots and from the reaction
and influence of Christian civilization. Its records read like those of
a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their
keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the
Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart's tail for kissing
each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole
culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witchburning so
vividly described in one of the most brilliant of Mrs. Gaskell's
stories, "Lois the Witch." Of course, in time the fanaticism of the
first New England settlers cooled into something like sanity. But a
strong Puritan tradition remained and played a great part in American
history. Indeed, if Lee, the Virginian, has about him something of the
Cavalier, it is still more curious to note that nineteenth-century New
England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties,
suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of
soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a
murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth
century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the warriors of the
Covenant.
The colonies so far enumerated owe their foundation solely to English
enterprise and energy; but in the latter half of the seventeenth century
foreign war brought to England a batch of colonies ready made. At the
mouth of the Hudson River, between Maryland and the New England
colonies, lay the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. The first colonists
who had established themselves there had been Swedes, but from Sweden
its sovereignty had passed to Holland, and the issue of the Dutch wars
gave it to the English, by whom it was re-christened New York in honour
of the King's brother, afterwards James II. It would perhaps be
straining the suggestion already made of the persistent influences of
origins to see in the varied racial and national beginnings of New York
a presage of that cosmopolitan quality which still marks the greatest
of American cities, making much of it a patchwork of races and
languages, and giving to the electric stir of Broadway an air which
suggests a Continental rather than an English city, but it is more
plausible to note that New York had no original link with the Puritanism
of New England and of the North generally, and that in fact we shall
find the premier city continually isolated from the North, following a
tradition and a policy of its own.
With New Amsterdam was also ceded the small Dutch plantation of
Delaware, which lay between Maryland and the Atlantic, while England at
the same time established her claim to the disputed territory between
the two which became the colony of New Jersey.
Shortly after the cession of New Amsterdam William Penn obtained from
Charles II. a charter for the establishment of a colony to the north of
Maryland, between that settlement and the newly acquired territories of
New Jersey and New York. This plantation was designed especially as a
refuge for the religious sect to which Penn belonged, the Quakers, who
had been persecuted by all religious parties and especially savagely by
the Puritan colonists of New England. Penn, the most remarkable man that
ever professed the strange doctrines of that sect, was a favourite with
the King, who had a keen eye for character, and as the son of a
distinguished admiral he had a sort of hereditary claim upon the
gratitude of the Crown. He easily carried his point with Charles, and
himself supervised the foundations of the new commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Two surveyors were sent out by royal authority to fix the
boundary between Penn's concession and the existing colony of
Maryland--Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon by name. However elated these two
gentlemen may have been by their appointment to so responsible an
office, they probably little thought that their names would be
immortalized. Yet so it was to be. For the line they drew became the
famous "Mason-Dixon" line, and was to be in after years the frontier
between the Slave States and the Free.
In all that he did in the New World Penn showed himself not only a great
but a most just and wise man. He imitated, with happier issue, the
liberality of Baltimore in the matter of religious freedom, and to this
day the Catholics of Philadelphia boast of possessing the only Church in
the United States in which Mass has been said continuously since the
seventeenth century. But it is in his dealings with the natives that
Penn's humanity and honour stand out most conspicuously. None of the
other founders of English colonies had ever treated the Indians except
as vermin to be exterminated as quickly as possible. Penn treated them
as free contracting parties with full human rights. He bought of them
fairly the land he needed, and strictly observed every article of the
pact that he made with them. Anyone visiting to-day the city which he
founded will find in its centre a little strip of green, still unbuilt
upon, where, in theory, any passing Indians are at liberty to pitch
their camp--a monument and one of the clauses of Penn's celebrated
treaty.
In the same reign the settlement of the lands lying to the south of
Virginia had begun, under the charter granted by Charles II. to the Hyde
family, and the new plantations were called after the sovereign
"Carolina." But their importance dates from the next century, when they
received the main stream of a new tide of immigration due to political
and economic causes. England, having planted a Protestant Anglo-Scottish
colony in North-East Ireland, proceeded to ruin its own creation by a
long series of commercial laws directed to the protection of English
manufacturers against the competition of the colonists. Under the
pressure of this tyranny a great number of these colonists, largely
Scotch by original nationality and Presbyterian by religion, left Ulster
for America. They poured into the Carolinas, North and South, as well as
into Pennsylvania and Virginia, and overflowed into a new colony which
was established further west and named Georgia. It is important to note
this element in the colonization of the Southern States, because it is
too often loosely suggested that the later division of North and South
corresponded to the division of Cavalier and Puritan. It is not so.
Virginia and Maryland may be called Cavalier in their origin, but in the
Carolinas and Georgia there appears a Puritan tradition, not indeed as
fanatical as that of New England, but almost as persistent. Moreover
this Scotch-Irish stock, whose fathers, it may be supposed, left Ireland
in no very good temper with the rulers of Great Britain, afterwards
supplied the most military and the most determined element in
Washington's armies, and gave to the Republic some of its most striking
historical personalities: Patrick Henry and John Caldwell Calhoun,
Jackson, the great President, and his namesake the brilliant soldier of
the Confederacy.
The English colonies now formed a solid block extending from the coasts
of Maine--into which northernmost region the New England colonies had
overflown--to the borders of Florida. Florida was still a Spanish
possession, but Spain had ceased to be formidable as a rival or enemy of
England. By the persistence of a century in arms and diplomacy, the
French had worn down the Spanish power, and France was now easily the
strongest nation in Europe. France also had a foothold, or rather two
footholds, in North America. One of her colonies, Louisiana, lay beyond
Florida at the mouth of the Mississippi; the other, Canada, to the north
of the Maine, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. It was the aim of French
colonial ambition to extend both colonies inland into the unmapped heart
of the American continent until they should meet. This would necessarily
have had the effect of hemming in the English settlements on the
Atlantic seaboard and preventing their Western expansion. Throughout the
first half of the eighteenth century, therefore, the rivalry grew more
and more acute, and even when France and England were at peace the
French and English in America were almost constantly at war. Their
conflict was largely carried on under cover of alliances with the
warring Indian tribes, whose feuds kept the region of the Great Lakes in
a continual turmoil. The outbreak of the Seven Years' War and the
intervention of England as an ally of Prussia put an end to the
necessity for such pretexts, and a regular military campaign opened upon
which was staked the destiny of North America.
It is not necessary for the purposes of this book to follow that
campaign in detail. The issue was necessarily fought out in Canada, for
Louisiana lay remote from the English colonies and was separated from
them by the neutral territory of the Spanish Empire. England had
throughout the war the advantage of superiority at sea, which enabled
her to supply and reinforce her armies, while the French forces were
practically cut off from Europe. The French, on the other hand, had at
the beginning the advantage of superior numbers, at least so far as
regular troops were concerned, while for defensive purposes they
possessed an excellent chain of very strong fortresses carefully
prepared before the war. After the earlier operations, which cleared the
French invaders out of the English colonies, the gradual reduction of
these strongholds practically forms the essence of the campaign
undertaken by a succession of English generals under the political
direction of the elder Pitt. That campaign was virtually brought to a
close by the brilliant exploit of James Wolfe in 1759--the taking of
Quebec. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Canada was ceded to England.
Meanwhile Louisiana had been transferred to Spain in 1762 as part of the
price of a Spanish alliance, and France ceased to be a rival to England
on the American continent.
During the French war the excellent professional army which England was
able to maintain in the field was supported by levies raised from the
English colonies, which did good service in many engagements. Among the
officers commanding these levies one especially had attracted, by his
courage and skill, and notably by the part he bore in the clearing of
Pennsylvania, the notice of his superiors--George Washington of
Virginia.
England was now in a position to develop in peace the empire which her
sword had defended with such splendid success and glory. Before we
consider the causes which so suddenly shattered that empire, it is
necessary to take a brief survey of its geography and of its economic
conditions.
The colonies, as we have seen, were spread along the Atlantic seaboard
to an extent of well over a thousand miles, covering nearly twenty
degrees of latitude. The variations of climate were naturally great, and
involved marked differentiations in the character and products of
labour. The prosperity of the Southern colonies depended mainly upon two
great staple industries. Raleigh, in the course of his voyages, had
learned from the Indians the use of the tobacco plant and had introduced
that admirable discovery into Europe. As Europe learned (in spite of the
protests of James I.) to prize the glorious indulgence now offered to
it, the demand for tobacco grew, and its supply became the principal
business of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Further to the south
a yet more important and profitable industry was established. The
climate of the Carolinas and of Georgia and of the undeveloped country
west of these colonies, a climate at once warm and humid, was found to
be exactly suited to the cultivation of the cotton plant. This proved
the more important when the discoveries of Watt and Arkwright gave
Lancashire the start of all the world in the manipulation of the cotton
fabric. From that moment begins the triumphant progress of "King
Cotton," which was long to outlast the political connection between the
Carolinas and Lancashire, and was to give in the political balance of
America peculiar importance to the "Cotton States."
But at the time now under consideration these cotton-growing territories
were still under the British Crown, and were subject to the Navigation
Laws upon which England then mainly relied for the purpose of making her
colonies a source of profit to her. The main effect of these was to
forbid the colonies to trade with any neighbour save the mother country.
This condition, to which the colonists seem to have offered no
opposition, gave to the British manufacturers the immense advantage of
an unrestricted supply of raw material to which no foreigner had access.
It is among the curious ironies of history that the prosperity of
Lancashire, which was afterwards to be identified with Free Trade, was
originally founded upon this very drastic and successful form of
Protection.
The more northerly colonies had no such natural advantages. The bulk of
the population lived by ordinary farming, grew wheat and the hard
cereals and raised cattle. But during the eighteenth century England
herself was still an exporting country as regards these commodities, and
with other nations the colonists were forbidden to trade. The Northern
colonies had, therefore, no considerable export commerce, but on the
seaboard they gradually built up a considerable trade as carriers, and
Boston and New York merchant captains began to have a name on the
Atlantic for skill and enterprise. Much of the transoceanic trade passed
into their hands, and especially one most profitable if not very
honourable trade of which, by the Treaty of Utrecht, England had
obtained a virtual monopoly--the trade in Negro slaves.
The pioneer of this traffic had been Sir John Hawkins, one of the
boldest of the great Elizabethan sailors. He seems to have been the
first of the merchant adventurers to realize that it might prove
profitable to kidnap Negroes from the West Coast of Africa and sell them
into slavery in the American colonies. The cultivation of cotton and
tobacco in the Southern plantations, as of sugar in the West Indies,
offered a considerable demand for labour of a type suitable to the
Negro. The attempt to compel the native Indians to such labour had
failed; the Negro proved more tractable. By the time with which we are
dealing the whole industry of the Southern colonies already rested upon
servile coloured labour.
In the Northern colonies--that is, those north of Maryland--the Negro
slave existed, but only casually, and, as it were, as a sort of
accident. Slavery was legal in all the colonies--even in Pennsylvania,
whose great founder had been almost alone in that age in disapproving of
it. As for the New England Puritans, they had from the first been quite
enthusiastic about the traffic, in which indeed they were deeply
interested as middle-men; and Calvinist ministers of the purest
orthodoxy held services of thanksgiving to God for cargoes of poor
barbarians rescued from the darkness of heathendom and brought (though
forcibly) into the gospel light. But though the Northerners had no more
scruple about Slavery than the Southerners, they had far less practical
use for it. The Negro was of no value for the sort of labour in which
the New Englanders engaged; he died of it in the cold climate. Negro
slaves there were in all the Northern States, but mostly employed as
domestic servants or in casual occupations. They were a luxury, not a
necessity.
A final word must be said about the form of government under which the
colonists lived. In all the colonies, though there were, of course,
variations of detail, it was substantially the same. It was founded in
every case upon Royal Charters granted at some time or other to the
planters by the English king. In every case there was a Governor, who
was assisted by some sort of elective assembly. The Governor was the
representative of the King and was nominated by him. The legislature was
in some form or other elected by the free citizens. The mode of election
and the franchise varied from colony to colony--Massachusetts at one
time based hers upon pew rents--but it was generally in harmony with the
feeling and traditions of the colonists. It was seldom that any friction
occurred between the King's representative and the burgesses, as they
were generally called. While the relations between the colonies and the
mother country remained tranquil the Governor had every motive for
pursuing a conciliatory policy. His personal comfort depended upon his
being popular in the only society which he could frequent. His repute
with the Home Government, if he valued it, was equally served by the
tranquillity and contentment of the dominion he ruled.
In fact, the American colonists, during the eighteenth century, enjoyed
what a simple society left to itself almost always enjoys, under
whatever forms--the substance of democracy. That fact must be
emphasized, because without a recognition of it the flaming response
which met the first proclamation of theoretic democracy would be
unintelligible. It is explicable only when we remember that to the
unspoiled conscience of man as man democracy will ever be the most
self-evident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that
blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational
privilege as inevitable, and at last to see nothing strange in being
ruled by a class, whether of nobles or of mere parliamentarians. But the
man who looks at the world with the terrible eyes of his first innocence
can never see an unequal law as anything but an iniquity, or government
divorced from the general will as anything but usurpation.