THE END OF A CENTURY
Mr. Harrison entered office amidst signs of a new age. The Republican
party which had put him forward was not the Republican party of the
war and of reconstruction but the Republican party of the new day of
industrial revolution. Old questions had fallen out of sight or were
transformed by changes in the nation itself; new questions pressed for
solution which had in them no flavor of the older passion of party
politics. Mr. Cleveland’s four years of office had altered many things.
For the mass of voters they had altered the very principle of choice
between parties. That choice turned now once again upon questions of
the day, not upon the issues of a war long ago fought out or of a
reconstruction of southern society which politicians had touched only
to mar and embarrass. A full century had gone by since the government
of the nation was set up. Within that century, it now began to appear,
fundamental questions of governmental structure and political authority
had been settled and the country drawn together to a common life.
Henceforth matters were to be in debate which concerned the interests of
society everywhere, in one section as in another, questions which were
without geographical boundary, questions of the modern world, touching
nations no less than communities which fancied themselves to lie apart.
And yet a new sectionalism began to show itself, not political, but
economic. In 1890, for the first time, the census takers found it
impossible to trace upon their maps any line which marked the front of
settlement between the Mississippi and the rising heights of the Rockies.
Hitherto there had always been a “frontier” within the body of the
continent, a line along which ran the outposts of settlement, and beyond
that, between the newest settlements and the slopes of the Pacific, a
well defined space as yet unpeopled. But now such regions had lost their
definite outlines. Here and there were yet vacant spaces, some of them,
it might be, as extensive in area as a great State: some tract of desert,
some region which promised neither the fruits of the earth nor hidden
wealth of minerals; but for the rest population had diffused itself so
generally that frontiers had disappeared and the differences between
region and region seemed little more than differences in the density of
population. And yet there were lines of separation, none the less, which
no census taker could draw but to which statesmen of necessity gave heed,
which were as significant as anything the older maps had shown. The
careful student of economic conditions might almost have made a sketch
upon the map of the new divisions of the country,—divisions of interest:
those most fundamental of all differences, differences in the stage of
development. Any observant traveller might remark them as he moved from
the teeming eastern seaports into the West or South. From the Atlantic
seaboard to the Mississippi and the great lakes there stretched, north of
Mason and Dixon’s line, a region substantially homogeneous in all the
larger interests of trade and industry, not unlike European countries in
the development of its resources and the complex diversification of its
life; but beyond it, to the west and south, lay regions and communities
of another kind, at another stage of development, agricultural, for
the most part, up to the very ridges of the Rockies, or else set apart
to some special interest like that of mining or of cattle raising on
the great scale. Throughout all the vast continent, to the east of the
Mississippi as to the west, contrasts were, indeed, modulated; hardly
anywhere was the transition sharp from one set of social and economic
conditions to another. But, taken upon the large view, they were very
great, very radical, very significant, openly prophetic of differences of
opinion and of interest.
[Illustration: A PRAIRIE STOCK FARM]
Settlement had crossed the continent, but always with a thin and
scattered front, its masses neither homogeneous nor uniform, its
processes hasty, imperfect, crude until the third or fourth generation.
In many places settlers were yet but in the first generation. Line
after line to be found upon the decennial maps of the census office, to
mark the frontier of fixed settlement decade by decade, was still to be
traced in differences of habit and development between community and
community from east to west, not yet effaced by the feet of those who
had crossed them to make homes beyond. Communities were still making and
to be made. Conditions as if of a first day of settlement, conditions
such as had once existed upon the coast of the Atlantic in the far-away
days of the first colonies, conditions which had been shifted generation
by generation from east to west across the whole breadth of the great
continent, were still to be observed in hastily built towns at the far
West, upon broad cattle ranches, in rough mining villages, in new regions
upon the vast western plains where the plough had but just begun to break
the surface of the virgin land into fruitful furrows. The land itself, by
reason of its own infinite variety of character and resource, commanded
changes of life and diversity of occupation. There were broad tracts of
country which were entirely without cities or centres of population or
any industry which brought men together in intimate co-operative groups,
tracts given over by nature to the farmer and the grazier. There were
States where communities sharply contrasted in life and motive were set
side by side, to the sore perplexity of those who sought to make their
laws and reconcile their interests: placer mines which poured the refuse
of their operations down the slopes of the western mountains upon smiling
farms which they were like to ruin; towns perched high within the peaks
of the towering Rockies, where precious metals were to be found, which
yet lay within the same political boundaries with keepers of sheep and
cattle in the plains below; centres of trade and of manufacture, lying
upon some great watercourse or by the coasts of the western ocean, which
seemed hardly more than huge trading posts on the routes of commerce from
east to west, from west to east, so little intimate part did they have in
the life of the rural people amidst whose prairie farms or broad orchards
of fruit they were set.
It was these differences, this lack of homogeneity, this diversity of
habit, interest, and point of view which had begun to tell upon the
politics of the country with the ending of the war and of the processes
of reconstruction, and which now began to be decisive in the formulation
of party programmes. The South, with the passing away of slavery and
of the leadership of the greater landholders, bred in an elder school
of politics, had become like the newer regions of the West in motive
and opinion. It, too, was predominantly agricultural. Its farmers were
not the aristocratic planters of the elder society which the war had
destroyed, but were for the most part men of the class from which Andrew
Johnson had come: plain men who did not stand for the old traditions, who
had not themselves owned slaves and who had felt none of the _esprit_
of privilege that had ruled affairs in the days gone by; men as new in
politics, as new in political thinking and constructive purpose, as
much bound within the narrow limits of their own experience as the men
of the western farms. Any one who noted how the tenets of the Farmers’
Alliance and the new and radical heresies with regard to money took root
there could see how the South had in fact become itself a new region in
all that touched its social organization and its political thinking, a
region as it were of recent settlement and late development so far as
all the new order of the nation’s life was concerned. Errors of opinion
began to prevail there, as in the new regions of the West, like those
which had swept through the crude colonies in the unquiet days which
preceded and followed the War for Independence: hopes that the credit of
the government itself might in some manner be placed at the disposal of
the farmers in the handling and marketing of their crops, demands for a
“cheap” currency, of paper or of silver, which should be easier to get
and easier to pay debts with than the gold which lay so secure in the
vaults of the banks and of the federal Treasury. The communities from
which such demands came lay remote from the centres of trade where men
could see in the transactions of every day what the real laws of credit,
of value, and of exchange must always be, whether legislators would
have them so or not. Moreover, they felt profoundly, though vaguely,
the economic uneasiness of the time, the novel power of the railways to
determine markets and prices and margins of profit, the rising influence
of great aggregations of capital in the controlling industries of the
country, the providential oversight of banks and of those who made the
arrangements of credit and exchange. Every farmer, every rural shopkeeper
and trader, every man who attempted manufacture upon a small scale felt
at a cruel disadvantage, and, letting his thoughts run only upon his
own experience and observation, dreamed of bettering his chances by an
abundant issue of at least the cheaper of the two monetary metals by the
government itself, in order that bankers and capitalists might no longer
keep poor men in bondage.
It was the rise and spread of such opinions that the Republicans, now
once again in power, in Congress as in the presidency, had to face. There
was as good reason for the apostles of the new radicalism to hope to
establish themselves in the counsels of the Republican party as to hope
to control the action of the Democrats. Republican constituencies were
touched with the new heresies, in many parts of the country, as sharply
as Democratic constituencies, and the one party was not more expressly
committed than the other against the policies proposed. The Whigs, from
whom chiefly the Republicans took their political lineage, had stood
always for a sound and stable currency; but so also had the Democrats,
with their unbroken party history since the days of Mr. Jefferson
himself. The difference between them had been hardly more than this, that
the Whigs wished to use the instrumentality of a national bank in the
management of the public finances, while the Democrats, rejecting a bank,
had sought to make the Treasury in all things independent of private
business interests. The Democrats had sought to break all connection
between the federal government and the banks, but they had never thought
to touch the credit of the country with the hopeless demoralization of a
depreciated and fluctuating currency by any imprudent law of coinage or
by any substitution of a body of paper issues for the accepted monetary
metals. General Jackson had come perilously near to wrecking the whole
fabric of credit in order to put all payments to the government upon a
gold basis. No doubt it was the questionable decisions of the Supreme
Court of the United States in the legal tender cases which had opened
the minds of politicians to rash experiment in the field of financial
legislation. Those decisions justified the government in making its own
mere promises legal tender in the payment of both public and private
debts. The immense issues of the war time were made in their reasoning
to seem compatible with the ordinary processes of public finance.
Legislators got a novel and misleading sense of power in the creation of
values. The country was ready to believe that such measures as the Bland
Silver Bill of 1878, passed through Congress by votes drawn from both
parties, might come from either party, should the movement of opinion
in that direction but grow strong enough. The Democrats, it might be,
stood nearer to the mass of the people in such matters, and undoubtedly
drew their chief strength from the West and South, where the new opinions
showed themselves strongest and most aggressive; but the Republicans,
though they drew their support chiefly from the industrial and commercial
centres of the country, showed also an uneasy fear lest they should seem
to fail to meet popular doctrine half way. They were not loath, observers
began to remark, to play to the populace upon occasion.
That impression was not a little strengthened by the action of the new
Republican Congress. In midsummer, 1890, an Act was passed which put
the coinage of silver and its use as a medium of exchange on a new
footing, but which by no means reversed the policy of the government or
turned away from experiment. It in set terms repealed the Bland Act of
1878, and it put a limit of one year upon the continued coinage of the
silver bullion purchased by the Treasury; but it did not discontinue
the purchase of silver by the government. It provided that the Treasury
should each month purchase four and a half million ounces of silver at
its market price; that the bullion thus bought should be paid for in
Treasury notes of the United States; that after July 1, 1891, the silver
purchased should no longer be coined, except so far as might be necessary
in order to supply the Treasury with coin enough to redeem its notes;
that the notes issued in payment for the bullion should be legal tender
in the satisfaction of all debts; and that they should be redeemable in
either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury.
The Act declared it to be “the established policy of the United States
to maintain the two metals at a parity with each other” at a fixed
ratio determined by law. It was with a view to maintaining their parity
that the Secretary of the Treasury was bidden use his discretion in the
redemption of the notes, being expected to see to it that the one metal
was not suffered wholly to supplant the other, or that the one should
not be made more difficult to obtain than the other. Mr. John Sherman,
the honored senator from Ohio, a man whom business men the country over
looked upon as a careful student of affairs, and particularly of public
finance, had fathered the measure. It was a significant political sign
of the times that he should thus take part in an effort to give silver
an artificial value, despite the movement, the irresistible movement, of
the market. The ratio of value between gold and silver fixed by statute
was not the ratio fixed by the law of supply and demand. The price of
silver rose a little at first, under the influence of the Act, but it
could not be kept up. The law of supply and demand was not checked
in its operation. It governed the value of the metal as of all other
things bought and sold. The statutes of no single government could set
the efficacy of that law aside. The experience of the one-time monetary
union of the Latin countries of Europe seemed to make it unlikely that
even international agreement in matters of coinage could keep the values
of the two metals to a fixed and stable ratio. Mr. Sherman and his
colleagues both in House and Senate must have been conscious that they
were playing to the galleries.
[Illustration: JOHN SHERMAN]
All policy came, as in General Grant’s day, as in Johnson’s day, from
the leaders of Congress. Mr. Harrison did not possess the gifts of
leadership. A man of unquestionable character and gifted above most of
his predecessors with the power to think and speak clearly, impressively,
and to the point upon every public issue, a man of culture, thoughtfully
read in affairs and trained by long experience in the public service,
he utterly lacked personal charm and the power either to persuade or to
please the men about him. His manner was cold and distant; he seemed
neither to give nor to invite confidence. A cool air of orderly routine
seemed always to pervade the executive chambers of the White House. It
was not a place of intimate counsel where leaders conferred, but a place,
rather, where the public duties of the President were performed in a sort
of dignified seclusion. There was a pleasing independence in the way in
which Mr. Harrison showed his good conscience and careful diligence in
affairs, but no warm impulse came from him which the leaders in Congress
felt constrained to reckon with. The legislative acts of the majority
showed, consequently, no single informing purpose. Rank and file were
apparently looking for safe ground rather than framing systematic and
consistent policies.
The question of the tariff held the chief place of attention in debate.
Before the close of May, 1890, the House, under the leadership of Mr.
William McKinley, the chairman of its Committee of Ways and Means,
had passed a new tariff Act, considerably increasing the protective
duties, especially upon wool and woollen goods. The tariff had been the
chief issue upon which the elections of 1888 had turned, at which the
Republicans had won their majority. Mr. Cleveland had made the issue
by his unexpected, outspoken message of December, 1887. The Republican
leaders deemed their victory at the polls a sort of mandate not merely
to maintain but also to strengthen the system of protective duties; and
the Ways and Means Committee of the House had made it its first task to
prepare a bill which should satisfy the expectations of the country.
The House accepted the bill after but two weeks of debate. The Senate
kept it all summer under consideration and so altered it before finally
adopting it in September that a conference between the two houses
became necessary before an agreement could be reached; but by October 1
it had become law. It had passed by a strict party vote in each House.
Even members of the Republican majority had had uneasy misgivings as
they watched the movements of opinion out-of-doors. It was not certain
that they had not won in the elections as much because Mr. Cleveland
had disappointed some of his independent supporters by proving himself
more of a party man than they cared to be as because he had demanded a
revision of the tariff. There was at least candor and a definite party
purpose in what the new majority had done, however. Their party was once
more unequivocally committed upon one of the chief questions of the day.
It was growing from year to year more and more difficult to calculate,
more and more difficult to guide the movements of opinion. The new age
of growth which had followed the war showed a quickened pace of change.
The years 1889-1890 saw six new States added to the roster of the Union:
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming,
and thoughtful men perceived how significant a thing it was that but
five Territories remained in all the broad continent, with scattered
Reservations here and there in the farther West, set apart for the
redmen. In 1889 the government had purchased of the tribes even a part
of the Indian Territory which lay within the circle of Kansas, Arkansas,
and Texas, to be thrown open to white settlers,—the fairest portion of
it, Oklahoma, the Beautiful Land which lay almost at its heart; and all
the country had heard how mad a rush there had been across its borders
to secure its coveted acres. A host of settlers fifty thousand strong
had encamped upon its very boundary lines to await the signal to go in
and take possession. At noon on the 22d of April, 1889, at the sound
of a bugle blown to mark the hour set by the President’s proclamation,
the waiting multitude surged madly in, and the Territory was peopled
in a single day. It was the old, familiar process of first occupation
and settlement carried out as if in a play, the story of the nation’s
making in a brief epitome. Its suddenness, its eagerness, its resistless
movement of excited men marked in dramatic fashion the end of the day of
settlement. The best parts of the continent, save isolated Reservations
here and there, were taken up; and the stream of population was dammed
at their borders only by the barriers of law. When they were removed it
would spring forward like a flood.
[Illustration: THE RUSH OF SETTLERS INTO OKLAHOMA]
The census of 1890 showed the population of the country increased to
62,622,250, an addition of 12,466,467 within the decade. Immigrants
poured steadily in as before, but with an alteration of stock which
students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men
of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain
of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force
of the country, or else men of the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and
northern Italy; but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class
from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and
Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy
nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which
increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe
were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements
of their population, the men whose standards of life and of work were
such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto. The people of
the Pacific coast had clamored these many years against the admission of
immigrants out of China, and in May, 1892, got at last what they wanted,
a federal statute which practically excluded from the United States all
Chinese who had not already acquired the right of residence; and yet the
Chinese were more to be desired, as workmen if not as citizens, than most
of the coarse crew that came crowding in every year at the eastern ports.
They had, no doubt, many an unsavory habit, bred unwholesome squalor in
the crowded quarters where they most abounded in the western seaports,
and seemed separated by their very nature from the people among whom they
had come to live; but it was their skill, their intelligence, their hardy
power of labor, their knack at succeeding and driving duller rivals out,
rather than their alien habits, that made them feared and hated and led
to their exclusion at the prayer of the men they were likely to displace
should they multiply. The unlikely fellows who came in at the eastern
ports were tolerated because they usurped no place but the very lowest in
the scale of labor.
[Illustration: OKLAHOMA ON THE DAY OF OPENING]
The year of the McKinley tariff and of the Sherman Act for the purchase
of silver had brought fresh congressional elections, and after that there
had been no more important party legislation. The Chinese exclusion Act
had been no party measure, but a concession which both parties were
willing to make to the opinion of the Pacific coast. The elections of
1890 had created in the House, instead of the slender Republican majority
of a dozen votes, a Democratic majority of close upon one hundred and
fifty. The tide was beginning to run which in 1892 swept the Republicans
altogether from power. Once again, for the third time, when it came to
the nomination of presidential candidates, the Democrats nominated Mr.
Cleveland; for a second time the Republicans nominated Mr. Harrison; and
the result of the elections of 1888 was reversed. The popular vote for
Mr. Cleveland exceeded that for Mr. Harrison by less than three hundred
thousand in a total vote of more than twelve million, but the turning
about of opinion had been singularly widespread. Every State accounted
doubtful in its choice between parties had given its electoral vote to
Mr. Cleveland, and his minority of sixty-five in the electoral college of
1888 was turned into a majority of one hundred and ten. Colorado, Nevada,
Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, and Kansas had cast their votes for the
candidates of the People’s party. In most of those States the Democrats
had nominated no presidential electors; they had satisfied themselves
with supporting the growing People’s party, pleased if by any means they
might discomfit the Republicans and half inclined to accept the opinions
of their new allies in preference to the opinions of their own leaders.
[Illustration: OKLAHOMA FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE OPENING]
The People’s party, which the newspapers of the country promptly
dubbed “Populist,” had put forth a platform which demanded that the
federal government should itself acquire the ownership of all railways,
telegraphs, and telephones, that the free coinage of gold and silver at
the ratio of sixteen to one should be accorded by law, that a graduated
income tax should be established, postal savings banks created, and
all lands held by aliens, or by corporations in excess of their needs,
reclaimed,—a radical programme which jumped with the humor of hundreds of
thousands of workingmen and farmers the country over. It was noted how
universal a defection there was from the Republican ranks in the West.
Those who knew how opinion moved there said that even those who had voted
for the Republican electors and the Republican nominees for Congress had
done so rather out of habit or conservative temper or the hope that time
and the influences of opinion would bring their leaders to a creed and
policy like that of the advocates of free coinage and of governmental
restrictions upon the railways and upon organized capital than because
they still believed in the doctrines professed from of old by their party.
[Illustration: SAN FRANCISCO FROM THE BAY]
There was apparently no reason why they should not entertain the hope, at
least with regard to the coinage. The platforms of both the Republican
and the Democratic nominating conventions spoke very strongly for the
continued use of both gold and silver as money and for some arrangement
which should maintain them at an equality in value, and the language
which they held in the matter might without too much ingenuity be made
to square with almost any policy. The Republican platform spoke of the
use of both the metals “with such restrictions and under such provisions,
to be determined by legislation, as will secure the maintenance of
the parity of values of the two metals, so that the purchasing and
debt-paying power of the dollar, whether of silver, gold, or paper,
shall be at all times equal.” The Democratic platform spoke of making
the units of the coinage of the two metals “of equal intrinsic and
exchangeable value, adjusted through international agreement or by such
safeguards of legislation as shall ensure the maintenance of the parity
of the two metals and the equal power of every dollar at all times in the
markets and in the payment of debts.” No doubt experiment was in the air
and radical experimenters might, if they were but shrewd and persistent
enough, gain control of either party as opinion made head. After the
party conventions had met and spoken (July 1, 1892) the Republican Senate
passed a bill which provided for the free coinage of all silver brought
to the mints, the repeal of the Sherman Act, and the coinage of all the
bullion purchased under its terms. The Democratic House declined to
consider the bill, by a vote of 154 to 136, but rather, it was suspected,
because its leaders thought it prudent to await the result of the
presidential election than because there lacked advocates of free coinage
enough to pass it.
For the moment Democratic advocates of “free silver” stood embarrassed by
their candidate. Before the nominating conventions had met Mr. Cleveland
had spoken his mind very clearly, very positively, as was his wont, upon
the monetary question. He had given out for publication a brief letter
which spoke in terms which no one could possibly mistake against any such
tampering with the standards of value as the People’s party and their
secret partisans within the Democratic and Republican ranks desired. His
personal friends had wished him to make no public announcement of his
views, had begged him not unnecessarily to commit himself upon a question
upon which his nomination might turn; but he had rejected their counsel
with a sort of scorn and had uttered his conviction in the matter with
that fearless decision and that unequivocal way of speech which the
country most admired in him. He had been nominated, nevertheless, taken
upon his own terms, and the country’s knowledge of his conviction in that
critical matter had probably saved his party the discrediting suspicion
which the fusion of Democrats with Populists upon the Pacific coast might
have brought upon it.
[Illustration: INSIDE A TREASURY VAULT AT WASHINGTON. TAKING BAGS OF
SILVER OUT TO BE WEIGHED]
The country had never needed a man of his fibre more. It had reached a
sharp crisis of opinion, and crises in affairs followed fast which no man
without courage and steadfast character could have swung the government
clear of. The four years which followed Mr. Cleveland’s second election
were among the most remarkable years of peace the country had ever
seen. Disorders of the most serious character, alike in business and in
politics, had within that brief space their sharp culmination; foreign
questions of the most delicate and critical kind unexpectedly arose;
society itself seemed upheaved by forces which threatened it with lasting
injury; and amidst parties which seemed without leadership or cohesion
the President alone stood firm and spoke definite counsel.
[Illustration: MR. CLEVELAND AND HIS CABINET]
The Democrats had come into power again upon a definite issue, the issue
to which Mr. Cleveland had given such sharp definition in his famous
message of 1887, the issue of the tariff. Upon no other matter so much as
upon that had the voting turned; upon no other matter did the Democrats
bear so unmistakable a commission from the country. But Mr. Cleveland
saw that the matter which called first and most imperatively for action
was the financial situation of the government and of the country. The
financial experiments of the last fourteen years had begun to bear fruit
in abundance. There were outstanding some five hundred million currency
notes of the government which it was obliged upon demand to redeem in
gold; and yet even when once redeemed they were not cancelled. The law
directed that they should be issued again, to come back once more, if
their holders chose to present them, to be redeemed in gold. Gold was
constantly demanded, and in immense sums which seemed to grow ominously
from quarter to quarter, not only for profitable export and to pay
foreign balances, but also as a safe fund against what might happen when
the crash should come which every observant man feared to be at hand. The
government was obliged by the Sherman Act of 1890 to buy four and a half
million ounces of silver every month and pay for them in notes which the
Secretary of the Treasury knew that he must redeem in gold on demand if
he would keep panic off. So soon as the government ceased paying in gold
the artificial “parity” between gold and silver which the laws sought to
maintain would be destroyed; silver would, in effect, become the only
standard of values, the only medium of exchange; every piece of property
in the country, tangible or intangible, would lose half its value; and
credit would collapse. And yet how could the government keep itself
supplied with gold? Very few of its debtors were obliged to pay in that
coin; it could replenish its diminishing stock only by borrowing, and
could borrow only by the issue of bonds made payable “in coin” of which
lenders might well grow shy as they saw politicians grow less and less
firm in their resistance to the demands of the advocates of the free
coinage of silver.
[Illustration: A SILVER MINING TOWN, GEORGETOWN, COLORADO]
It was clear enough what Mr. Cleveland thought and intended, but it was
by no means clear that Congress would willingly lend him its aid. He led
a party in which silver advocates abounded, men who lived remote from
the seats of trade and knew nothing of its laws. It was not certain that
the Republicans were any stiffer in their resistance to the pressure of
radical opinion in the matter of the coinage. What might happen when it
came to actual legislation by Congress who could foresee? Early in June,
1893, Mr. Cleveland announced his purpose to call Congress together in
extraordinary session for the consideration of the finances. On the 26th
of June the authorities of India closed their mints to the free coinage
of silver, and the price of the metal dropped as it had never dropped
before. On the 30th of June the President summoned Congress to meet on
the 7th of August. The silver mines of the West were promptly closed,
and thousands of miners were thrown out of employment, to be taken care
of and become a serious menace to order in the nearby cities, into which
they crowded hungry and forlorn. The greatest excitement prevailed in the
West. Before Congress assembled conventions of the advocates of silver
had been held in Denver and Chicago which protested vehemently against
Mr. Cleveland’s evident intention to have the law which obliged the
Treasury to purchase silver set aside, and declared that he was acting
in concert with the eastern bankers to thrust silver altogether out of
use as money. They demanded that, should the Sherman Act be repealed, the
free coinage of silver should be substituted. When Congress assembled it
was noted that the ordinary party lines seemed for a little while almost
to disappear. The advocates of silver coinage acted together in both
houses without regard to their differences upon other subjects, and acted
with the ardor of men who serve a cause.
[Illustration: BULLION AT THE AMERICAN SMELTER, LEADVILLE, COLORADO]
Mr. Crisp, whom the House chose Speaker, was of the silver group within
his party, but felt bound, as the party’s official leader in matters of
legislation, to give the President all the support the authority of the
speakership could afford. Mr. Cleveland asked for a single, specific
act of relief, the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman Act
of 1890, and Mr. Crisp held together as he could the members who were
inclined to meet the crisis as the needs of the Treasury seemed to
demand. Public opinion out of doors pressed uncomfortably, too. Panic had
already come in the money market, and the business of the country was
suffering the consequences. A repealing bill was introduced on August
11th, and on the 28th was passed, by a vote of 240 to 110, so sensitively
did the House feel the airs of opinion and the necessity for acting
in good faith with the President for the relief of the Treasury. But
the Senate would make no such show of compliance. There the silver men
mustered so strong that it was not clear until the autumn had come that
a majority for repeal could be obtained at all, and every delay known
to the leisurely rules of the body was made use of to hold action off.
Meanwhile the country took the consequences. Credit collapsed; loans
could nowhere be obtained; the very currency seemed to disappear, being
hoarded and kept out of the currents of trade in such extraordinary
quantities that those who needs must have it were obliged to pay a
premium for its use and the banks used clearing house certificates in its
stead. Failure followed failure. The very processes of manufacture stood
still. Business men knew not what to do. The business of the country
was sound; its resources were untouched. There had been no speculative
flurries, no irregular operations that could justify panic or impair
confidence. Nothing was awry except the public finances: men could not be
sure of the value of the money they handled. It was not certain that the
government would not put all exchanges upon the silver basis. The worst
was over before the Senate acted. Business of sheer necessity recovered
its tone; and when at last, at the very end of October, the repeal became
law, trade and manufacture began to stir again with reassuring evidences
of returning life.
But the results of panic and failure were not stayed. A Treasury report
of the 19th of October showed a falling off in the revenues, as compared
with the estimates, during the preceding three months, which would
mean, if continued, a deficit of $50,000,000 for the fiscal year. Every
industry was slackened, imports had fallen off, foreign capitalists
were withdrawing their investments. It was hardly a propitious time at
which to undertake a revision of the tariff. The Democrats were pledged,
nevertheless, to undertake it. That was the only reform to which they
were explicitly pledged; they had majorities in both houses, and Mr.
Cleveland was President. The financial legislation most immediately and
imperatively needed was out of the way, and the field was apparently
clear before them. They could not face the country again upon the tariff
issue should they fail to redeem their promises in the matter of the
reduction of the duties. The House Committee on Ways and Means had begun
the preparation of a tariff bill during the special session at which the
battle against the purchase of silver had been fought out, and before
the time set for the regular session of December had made public the
terms of the measure they meant to propose. In the House there was little
difficulty in pressing it to its passage. Reported early in January, it
had passed by the 1st of February, together with an internal revenue bill
meant to make good the estimated reductions in the receipts at the ports.
It was a genuine measure of reform. It proceeded upon the principle that
the raw materials of manufacture ought for the most part to be entirely
freed from duty; that there should be throughout the whole list of
dutiable articles as considerable a reduction of duties as a prudent
regard for vested interests would permit; and that duties should be _ad
valorem_ rather than specific in order that the burden of the consumer
might in every case be clearly calculable. Coal, iron ore, and sugar
were put upon the free list. The internal revenue bill associated with
the revision embodied, as its chief features, a tax upon incomes and an
increased excise on distilled spirits.
The trouble came, as before, in the Senate. There the disintegration of
the Democratic party was evident as it was not evident in the House.
Senators allowed themselves to be attached to particular interests, put
party pledges aside very lightly, acted like men who had forgot the
compulsions of political principle and played each for his own benefit.
Before the measure got out of their hands they had altered it almost
beyond recognition. They had put in once more an elaborate schedule of
duties on sugar, had taken coal and iron ore from the free list, had
changed _ad valorem_ duties to specific, and had all through the bill
made alterations which increased the rates of duty proposed by the House,
each senator exerting himself, as it seemed, to secure protection or
advantage for the industries of his own State. The average rate of duty
under the McKinley Act had been about 50 _per cent._; the House bill
had reduced it to about 35½; the changes made in the Senate increased
it to about 37. It was not the general increase of rates effected in
the Senate that held the attention of the country so much as the very
noticeable activity of a group of senators in the interest of the sugar
manufacturers and dealers. There was manifestly no thought of either
party interest or public duty in what they did; they were acting in some
private interest, it was to be feared upon some private motive,—were
heeding, not their party leaders, but the representatives of a particular
industry who had obtained a hold upon them which could not be shaken.
Their headstrong, stubborn rejection of political obligations wrecked
the Democratic programme and utterly discredited their party. The House,
in despair of getting anything better, accepted the mutilated bill which
came from their hands (August 13, 1894), and the President suffered it to
become law without his signature.
[Illustration: DON M. DICKINSON]
The internal revenue Act, with its provision for an income tax, had
gone through both houses as a part of the tariff measure; but it stood
as law only nine months. The income tax was at once challenged in the
federal courts, test cases were hurried to a conclusion, and on the
20th of May, 1895, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. It
was a reversal of former decisions. A tax upon incomes had been among
the innumerable taxes adopted to support the war for the Union, and
the court had then deemed the tax permissible. But it now took another
position. The tax was, it said, a direct tax; the constitution provided
that direct taxes should be apportioned among the several States in
proportion to their population; and, inasmuch as this tax was not so
apportioned, it was unconstitutional. Without the income tax the deficit
caused by the reductions of duty just effected could not be made good,
and the financial position of the government became more difficult than
ever. There was not likely to be revenue enough to meet the expenditures,
which Congress had voted as lavishly as if the Treasury were full to
overflowing.
[Illustration: THOMAS FRANCIS BAYARD]
The repeal of the silver purchasing clause of the Sherman Act had only
in small part relieved the embarrassments of the Treasury. There was
still the unending difficulty of maintaining the gold reserve, the
“endless chain” of Treasury notes coming in to be redeemed in gold and
immediately paid out again to be presented at their holders’ pleasure
for more gold, always being paid for and yet never redeemed. The
President, in a special message of the 28th of January, 1895, very
earnestly requested Congress to authorize the Secretary of the Treasury
to sell bonds for the replenishment of the gold reserve which should be
explicitly payable in gold at their maturity and therefore sure of sale
at a handsome premium, and also to authorize the retirement of the notes,
instead of their re-issue, upon redemption, in order to stop in part at
least the inroads upon the reserve. But the houses would do nothing.
The advocates of silver coinage were strong enough in both houses to
block what legislation they chose, and regarded Mr. Cleveland as their
arch opponent. They would allow nothing to be done to relieve the
embarrassments of the administration.
[Illustration: WILLIAM FREEMAN VILAS]
For the first time since the war for the Union, for the first time
in thirty-two years, the Democrats controlled both houses and the
presidency; and yet Mr. Cleveland seemed like a President without
a party. Some attributed it to his lack of tact, his aggressive
independence in action, his too confident initiative, his way of using
his power as if he were under no obligation to his party associates
to consult or consider them. He did, in fact, hold upon occasion very
strictly to the literary theory of the constitution, the theory which
the makers of the constitution had accepted from M. Montesquieu. He
regarded the legislative and executive departments of the government as
by intention set apart from each other and meant each to exercise an
independent judgment and discretion in the performance of the duties
which fell to it, co-operating, indeed, but not compounding, not parts
of a party system, ministry and majority, but the balanced checks of a
carefully devised mechanism of legal action. He had never had the point
of view with regard to executive functions which is natural to a member
of a legislative body. As mayor, as governor, and as President, he had
always conceived it his function to check legislative action rather than
guide it, had thought of himself always as an administrative officer,
not as a party leader. It was noticeable that he made up his cabinets
upon that theory. In his first cabinet there had been men like Mr. Thomas
F. Bayard, of Delaware, Mr. Lucius Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, Mr.
William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin, and Mr. Don M. Dickinson, of Michigan,
who had been chosen in accordance with well recognized precedents in such
matters: because of their service in party counsels; but the rest were
men, so far as might be, of his own personal selection, whom he chose,
not for their influence among politicians or in political canvass,
but because he knew their efficiency as men of business. In his second
cabinet the element of personal choice was still more noticeable. The
Secretary of State had been a distinguished federal judge, and had been
in the cabinet of Mr. Arthur,—had but the other day turned from his
former Republican associates to support Mr. Cleveland, a fresh recruit
in the Democratic ranks. The Secretary of War had in his previous
administration been Mr. Cleveland’s private secretary. The Postmaster
General had been his partner in Buffalo in the practice of law. The
Attorney General was one of the leaders of the bar of Massachusetts, no
politician, a great lawyer merely. The President’s object was to surround
himself, not with a party council, but with capable heads of departments.
No doubt he seemed to members of his party in Congress a trifle too
separate and absolute. He did not seem to regard it as any part of his
constitutional business to be forever arranging agreements between the
Executive and the houses. He held to a very strict principle of duty
in every matter upon which he was approached, deeming his connection
with his party in some sense broken or suspended so long as he was
President, in order that he might serve the country as a whole without
any too sensitive scruples as to the effect of his decisions upon coming
elections. It was inevitable, since he held himself so and swung free of
party advice when he pleased, that he should seem to put his own judgment
above that of the congressmen who approached him. Sometimes he would
patiently confer, persuade, and come to terms of agreement; but at other
times he would decline with a noticeable touch of impatience to take any
part in the arrangement of legislative plans, and in effect bid members
of the houses go their own way while he went his.
[Illustration: L. Q. C. LAMAR]
But his action in such matters grew out of the situation in which he
found himself as much as out of his theory with regard to his office and
his natural temperament in dealing with men who did not act upon fixed
conviction, as he did, but rather upon considerations of political or
personal expediency. His party was in fact going to pieces and turning
away from him, under the compulsion of forces over which he had no
control. The business of the country had fallen dull and inactive because
of the financial disquietude of the time. A great poverty and depression
had come upon the western mining regions and upon the agricultural
regions of the West and South. Prices had fallen; crops had failed.
Drought swept the western plains clean of their golden harvests. Farmers
in the districts most stricken could not so much as buy clothes for
their backs, and went clad in the sacks into which they would have put
their grain had they had any, their feet wrapped about with pieces of
coarse sackcloth for lack of shoes. Men of the poorer sort were idle
everywhere, and filled with a sort of despair. All the large cities and
manufacturing towns teemed with unemployed workingmen who were with the
utmost difficulty kept from starvation by the systematic efforts of
organized charity. In many cities public works were undertaken upon an
extensive scale to give them employment. In the spring of 1894 “armies of
the unemployed” began to gather in the western country for the purpose
of marching upon Washington, like mendicant hosts, to make known to the
government itself, face to face, the wants of the people. The dramatic
plan seems to have been originated by one Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio,
who announced that he would lead an “Army of the Commonweal of Christ”
to Washington to propose that the government issue $500,000,000 in
greenbacks to be paid out for work upon the public roads, in order that
the country might at one and the same time be supplied with serviceable
highways and abundant money. On the 25th of March he actually set out,
and by the 1st of May was at the capital. A hundred men began the journey
with him, and their ranks had swelled to three hundred and fifty by the
time they entered Washington. They made no disturbance. Most of the
towns and villages on their way supplied them with food, partly out of
charitable good humor, partly in order to speed them on their way and
be quit of them, lest they should linger or grow ugly in temper; good
natured sympathizers and men who wished to see the comedy played out
subscribed funds for their most urgent needs. The painful farce was soon
over. Their errand of course came to nothing. They reached Washington to
find that there was nothing that they could do, and dispersed. But their
example was imitated with less harmless results. Other “armies” gathered,
in more sullen mood, to take their turn at marching and living upon
the country as they went. Some started from the far-away coasts of the
Pacific. Railway trains were seized to afford them transportation across
the mountains and across the long plains where marching would be most
painful, tedious, and unprofitable. Country-sides experienced a sort
of panic at their approach. It began to seem as if there were no law or
order in the land. Society itself seemed demoralized, upset.
[Illustration: COXEY AND HIS ARMY APPROACHING WASHINGTON]
[Illustration: COXEY BEING ESCORTED FROM THE CAPITOL]
It was in such an atmosphere that political opinion altered, that parties
dissolved and were reconstituted with many a novel purpose of reform.
And yet the President moved in all matters which it fell to him to act
upon with a vigor and initiative which made the years memorable. Strikes
had been added to the other disturbances of the time. From April until
June, 1894, a strike of the bituminous coal miners, two hundred thousand
strong, threatened to embarrass the industries of the whole country. Many
manufacturing establishments were obliged to close for lack of fuel.
Some of the railways seized the coal which they were carrying as freight
for use in feeding the fires of their locomotives. On the 11th of May a
strike of the employees of the Pullman Car Company, of Chicago, began
which presently became a very formidable affair. The strikers and their
sympathizers mustered in dangerous numbers and made concerted effort to
prevent the use of the cars of the Pullman Company by any of the railways
running out of Chicago. Their violence seemed about to stop all traffic
on the western roads, and Mr. Cleveland intervened. The governor of
Illinois had not asked for his aid, had not even called out the militia
of the State to maintain order and protect property,—sympathized,
indeed, with the strikers and resented interference. Neither had the
federal courts acted or asked for assistance in the execution of their
writs. Mr. Cleveland deliberately took the initiative and assumed the
responsibility, on the ground that the strikers were preventing the
movement of the mails and blocking the course of interstate commerce, and
that the carrying of the mails and the protection of commerce between the
States were indisputable duties of the federal government. He ordered
federal troops to the points of greatest violence and danger, and, when
their mere presence and mere action as armed police did not suffice to
check the mobs that aided the strikers, he issued a proclamation which
practically declared the disturbed regions in a state of insurrection
and threatened merciless action against all rioters as against public
enemies. Order was restored and the law prevailed again.
[Illustration: GEORGE M. PULLMAN]
[Illustration: THOMAS BRACKETT REED]
In foreign affairs Mr. Cleveland exhibited the same firmness and
decision, and had given the country a touch of his quality at the very
outset of his term of office. One of his very first acts had been to
withdraw from the docket of the Senate the treaty which Mr. Harrison
had submitted to it for the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the
United States. That treaty was the culminating transaction of a singular
revolution. The Hawaiian Islands were subject to a sovereign queen
whose power had been reduced by constitutional changes to the merely
administrative function of executing the laws passed by a representative
chamber, to which, and not to herself, her ministers were responsible.
Property and political power in the Islands had, by processes which
seemed to change the very character of the kingdom, come chiefly into
the hands of foreigners; and in January, 1893, the queen determined to
promulgate, upon her own sole authority, a new constitution which should
deprive them of the suffrage and bring the legislature again under the
control of the crown. The foreigners at Honolulu, the capital, chiefly
Americans, at once bestirred themselves to defeat her purpose and get the
government into their own hands, and the resident minister of the United
States lent them his open aid. Marines and pieces of artillery were
ordered on shore from a United States man-of-war lying in the harbor;
under their protection a revolutionary provisional government was set up
which thrust the queen aside “until terms of union with the United States
had been negotiated and agreed upon”; and on the 16th of February, 1893,
but a little more than two weeks before the expiration of his term as
President, Mr. Harrison hurried a message to the Senate submitting an
annexation treaty and recommending its ratification. Meantime, on the
9th of February, the minister of the United States at Honolulu, acting
without instructions, had proclaimed a protectorate of the United States
over the Islands.
[Illustration: LILIUOKALANI, QUEEN OF HAWAIIAN ISLANDS]
On the 4th of March Mr. Cleveland assumed the presidency, and promptly
withdrew the treaty. A commissioner was at once despatched to Hawaii
to ascertain the full facts of the extraordinary transaction, and on
the 18th of December, 1893, the President submitted his report to
Congress, accompanied by a message in which he emphatically repudiated
and condemned what the minister of the United States had taken it upon
himself to do in the name of his government to put the revolution afoot.
Had the displaced queen consented to a general amnesty and security of
rights as the condition of her restoration, as Mr. Cleveland proposed,
he would have undertaken to undo what the minister had done; but she
would consent to no terms whatever, and all things stood as they were,
in the hands of the provisional government, self-constituted and born of
revolution.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. HONOLULU]
[Illustration: SETTING OUT FOR A DAY’S FISHING, HAWAII]
Eighteen months elapsed, the country saw the anxious summer of
1894, another winter brought the Treasury of the United States once
again within sight of an exhaustion of its supply of gold, and then
(July-December, 1895) a question of foreign policy came under the
President’s hand which might have embroiled two kindred nations in a
great war. Once more the singular energy and decision of Mr. Cleveland’s
character were made evident, and the country was thrilled. For year
after year through a long generation the English government had
disputed with the government of Venezuela the western boundary line
of British Guiana. From stage to stage of the controversy the line of
the British claims had been pushed forward. Again and again, through
one administration after another, the government of the United States
had used its good offices to bring the controversy to a pacific and
satisfactory conclusion. Ever since the famous declaration of Mr. Monroe,
in 1823, it had been understood that the government of the United States
would make it its business to see to it that no European power extended
its dominion or acquired fresh territory in the Americas. It had not
undertaken to maintain an actual formal protectorate over the South
American states, but it did frankly undertake to act as their nearest
friend in the settlement of controversies with European nations, and no
President, whether Republican or Democratic, had hesitated since this
critical dispute concerning the boundaries of British Guiana arose to
urge its settlement upon terms favorable to Venezuela. The government
at London had put settlement off, had frequently shifted its ground in
the controversy, had always spoken of moderation, and yet had conceded
nothing, had refused arbitration and yet had proposed no terms which it
was possible for the Venezuelan government to accept. Endless irritation
had led to no issue, and the matter seemed without term or solution
when Mr. Cleveland uttered the word that concluded it. Earnest and
repeated representations to Lord Salisbury having proved of no avail, Mr.
Cleveland sent to Congress on the 17th of December, 1895, a message in
which he set forth in unmistakable language what he believed to be the
duty of the United States in the protection of Venezuelan rights. He had
urged arbitration upon Lord Salisbury, as the most equitable, indeed the
only possible, means of settling so old and so tangled a controversy;
Lord Salisbury had declined arbitration and every settlement except that
which conceded the full claims of England; it was necessary, therefore,
the President declared, that the government of the United States should
ascertain for itself the merits of the controversy, and, having reached a
conclusion, insist upon its acceptance at whatever cost.
[Illustration: THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY]
A thrill of intense excitement and enthusiasm shot through the country.
Neither house of Congress was any longer of the President’s party. The
autumn elections of 1894 had replaced the heavy Democratic majority of
1892 by a Republican majority of one hundred and forty in the House of
Representatives, and radical reversals of the majorities in the States
had given the Senate also once more into the hands of the Republicans.
But the houses forgot party differences in their eager and instant
response to the President’s Venezuelan message. Within three days after
its receipt money had been voted for the commission of inquiry for
which he asked, and all the world was apprised how ready the Congress
was to support the President to the very utmost in his new and vigorous
assertion of the Monroe doctrine. Thoughtful men knew very well how
grievous a thing it would be to see the two kindred nations which stood
so hopefully together at the front of the world’s progress come to the
awful grapple of war; no right-minded man in his senses wished to see
so signal a catastrophe, least of all the President himself. He was a
man of peace; but he deemed peace to be rooted in justice and feared it
to be impossible with a nation which rejected the friendly offices of
arbitration in a case like this that had arisen. He had in mind, too,
the peculiar relations which the government over which he presided had
always borne to the states of South America in respect of their dealings
with the nations of Europe, and knew that he could not in fidelity
relax the rigor of the principle upon which it had these seventy years
been its avowed policy to act. It was that, his assertion of the Monroe
doctrine in a new aspect, with a new dignity, even if with a new rigor,
that caught the almost passionate enthusiasm of the country, and made
war unnecessary. Lord Salisbury yielded; the dispute was submitted to
arbitration; and Mr. Cleveland had a great triumph. He had exposed a
hidden question to the public opinion of two nations, and that opinion
had supported him and rebuked Lord Salisbury.
Mr. Cleveland pushed his belief in arbitration far beyond the individual
instance. In the spring of 1895, Mr. Gresham, then Secretary of State,
had suggested to Her Majesty’s government a general treaty of arbitration
in which the two governments should pledge themselves to submit all
serious matters of dispute that might arise between them to settlement
by an impartial outside tribunal; the sudden heat of the Venezuelan
controversy quickened the desire on both sides of the water to carry the
plan into execution; and on the 11th of January, 1897, the President had
the satisfaction of seeing such a treaty completed and signed. But the
Senate rejected it. Mr. Cleveland’s term of office came to an end within
two months after the exchange of signatures, and a Republican President
succeeded him while the treaty pended. The new President urged the treaty
upon the Senate as he had urged it, but it was rejected, notwithstanding.
The Senate would not bind the government to submit its interests in all
cases to the decisions of an outside tribunal, and the careful diplomatic
work of two governments went for nothing.
[Illustration: WALTER QUINTON GRESHAM]
Those closing days of the Democratic administration were darkened by
perplexities of foreign policy essentially more serious and difficult
to handle than any that were likely to arise between the governments
of the United States and Great Britain. The difficulties of Spanish
rule in Cuba were growing intolerable. Sharp insurrection had broken
forth there in the spring of 1895. It was but seventeen years since the
last uprising in the island, which had lasted the ten years 1868-1878,
and which had been brought to a conclusion only by promises of radical
reform in the Spanish administration. Those promises had not been kept.
The reforms instituted had proved delusive. The island was taxed to the
uttermost farthing for the support of the army and navy and of the host
of Spanish officials who throve as placemen in the innumerable offices of
administration. The suffrage that had been granted the native inhabitants
and the privileges of self-government which had been accorded them
were effectually offset by laws which really put their affairs at the
disposal of the Captain General who was their governor; and men who were
not within the circles of official influence complained that they could
get no privilege, enforce no right, even, which they did not pay for in
hard cash. A mere petty fraction of the intolerable taxes they paid was
expended upon the public works of the island itself. There seemed no way
of reform except by revolution, and no hope even in revolution unless
its object were absolute independence. The Spanish government met the
insurrection with savage measures of suppression. In January, 1896, Don
Valeriano Weyler was made governor and Captain General of the island,
and proceeded to take measures of repression which shocked the humane
sense of all civilized peoples looking on. Finding that it made no end
of resistance merely to harry the country with its fastnesses of forest,
swamp, and mountain, he began to destroy every village and habitation
of the insurrectionary districts and to drive the women and children
who inhabited them into camps of “concentration,” where they might be
kept under guard and surveillance and held off from giving succor or
intelligence to the insurgents, in order that the country might be empty
and without homely shelter; and he did not take the precautions of
mere prudence and mercy which were necessary to keep fatal diseases and
pitiful starvation out of the camps, but let the poor creatures huddled
there live for the most part as they could.
[Illustration: DON VALERIANO WEYLER]
Opinion moved very uneasily in the United States at sight of such things
and the President had no mind to ignore them. No one could pretend that
it was, or that it ought to be, a thing indifferent to the United States
to have chronic rebellion and suffering thus perpetuated from year to
year in a populous island lying at their very doors, to which their
people were closely bound by trade and all the intimate intercourse of
neighbors. Fatal fevers had again and again crossed the narrow waters out
of Cuba to the southern ports of the United States because the Spaniards
would not look to the proper sanitation of the great towns which lay
by the island’s harbors, and these distempers of revolution seemed as
ill to take the wind of as the fevers themselves. Mr. Cleveland spoke
very gravely in his annual message of December, 1896, of the necessity
of bringing affairs in Cuba to a final pacification and adjustment. “It
cannot be reasonably assumed,” he said, “that the hitherto expectant
attitude of the United States will be indefinitely maintained. While
we are anxious to accord all due respect to the sovereignty of Spain,
we cannot view the pending conflict in all its features and properly
apprehend our inevitably close relations to it, and its possible results,
without considering that by the course of events we may be drawn into
such an unusual and unprecedented condition as will fix a limit to our
patient waiting for Spain to end the contest, either alone and in her own
way, or with our friendly co-operation.” The phrases were guarded but the
meaning was plain. Spain must come to some terms of accommodation with
her Cuban subjects or the United States must intervene. Every private
effort of negotiation had been made to bring peace and concession; the
government’s words of protest began now to be spoken aloud and before the
world.
It was not yet time to act, and the guidance of action, should action
become necessary, must fall to other men. The end of Mr. Cleveland’s
anxious term was at hand. He left his great office as if with a sense
of relief. His party had turned away from him. For two years he had
carried the burdens of the government alone. The Republican houses
elected in 1894 would do nothing more to make his tasks possible than
the Democratic houses had done. Again and again he had asked their
assistance in the relief of the Treasury, to protect the gold reserve
and steady the business of the country. Plan after plan had been matured
by the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Carlisle, and the President had
sought by every possible means to serve thoughtful opinion and right
purposes of reform with regard to the finances. But Congress would accept
nothing that he proposed. He had been left to come to what agreements
he could with the great bankers of Wall Street for the protection and
replenishment of the gold reserve, they alone being able, without
legislation, to assist him in that matter. He was obliged to bargain with
them like any other borrower to obtain the gold the Treasury needed and
control the draughts the banks in their turn made upon it. The strain
of the responsibility had been grievous to bear: the whole fabric of
credit seemed to rest upon the foundations which he kept so laboriously
in repair, and the months seemed very long while the doubtful work went
on. When the end came he felt that he had earned his rest and quiet
retirement.
The elections of 1896 had shown, in a fashion the country was not likely
to forget, the volcanic forces which had been kept but just beneath the
surface while he was President. The issue which had dominated all the
rest was the question of the coinage. But that question did not stand
alone. It seemed, indeed, but a single item in the agitated thought of
the time. Opinion everywhere seemed to have broken from its old moorings.
There had been real distress in the country, long continued, hopeless,
as if the springs of wealth and prosperity were dried up. The distress
was most marked and apparently most hopeless in the great agricultural
areas of the South and West. The prices of agricultural products had
fallen so low that universal bankruptcy seemed to the farmers to be
but a little way off. There was a marked depression in all kinds of
business, as if enterprise were out of heart and money nowhere to be
had except among a few great capitalists in Wall Street. Men’s minds
anxiously sought the cause, and each man reasoned upon it in the light
of his own observation and experience, taking his views of matters which
lay beyond his own life from the politicians who spoke most plausibly
of public affairs. Every established relationship of law and of society
fell under question. Did not the law too much favor the combinations
of capital by which small dealers and producers were shut out of the
markets? Were the courts not on the side of those who had privilege, and
against those who had none? Were not the railways the real masters of the
producer everywhere, able to make or to unmake him by their charges and
discriminations? Was not money scarce because the government would issue
none that was not kept to the standard of gold, itself too scarce, too
artificially costly to be made the universal medium of exchange?
The money question was but one of the innumerable questions that crowded
into men’s minds in that time of agitation, but it seemed the question
which lay at the centre of all the rest, and it more than any other
gathered passion about it. Men do not think with cool detachment about
the financial questions which touch their very means of subsistence.
They were easily persuaded that money would be more plentiful, for the
individual as for the nation, if scarce gold were abandoned as the
exclusive standard of value and abundant silver substituted, so that
there should be metal currency enough for all; and they were easily
beguiled to dream what a blessed age should come when the thing should
have been done. They were not studious of the laws of value. They knew
that the resources of the country were abundant, that its prosperity came
from its own skill and its own wealth of rich material, and that it was
getting a certain predominance in the markets of the world. They could
not see why it should not be sufficient unto itself, why its standards
of value should not be its own, irrespective of the practice of other
countries, why its credit should be affected by the basis upon which the
currency of other countries rested, or why international trade should
dominate its domestic transactions. All the world had in fact become at
last a single commercial community. No nation, least of all a nation
which lived by trade and manufacture, could stand aloof and insist that
an ounce of gold should not be considered more valuable than sixteen
ounces of silver when mere fact was against it and the free law of supply
and demand worked its will despite the statutes of legislatures. But
very few men who did not actually handle the trade of the world saw the
inexorable laws of value as they existed in fact. It went naturally with
the vast extent of the continent that most men were shut off from a sight
of the international forces which governed their economic interests, and
a very passion of belief had got abroad that all the economic stagnation
of the times could be relieved by the free coinage of both gold and
silver at the ratio of sixteen to one.
It was no ordinary political opinion such as might in any election year
come forward to dominate men’s votes. It set men’s minds on fire, filled
them with an eager ardor like that of religious conviction, impelled
them to break old associations and seek new comradeships in affairs.
Party lines were cut athwart. The Republicans no doubt had their chief
strength in the central and eastern States of the Union, where trade and
manufacture moved strongest and men were most apt to understand the wide
foundations of their business; the Democrats drew their support, rather,
from the South and West, where disturbing changes of opinion had long
been in progress and where radical programmes of relief were most apt to
be looked upon with favor; and yet it was by no means certain that these
new opinions upon the money question had not touched Republican voters
too deeply to make it prudent for their leaders to take high ground of
opposition against them. An extraordinary campaign of propaganda had
been begun before the year of the presidential election came on. The
advocates of the free coinage of silver were early afoot, with the ardor
and irresistible zeal of veritable crusaders, to overcome dissent in both
parties alike and force the country to a common view. A great national
conference of silver advocates had been convened at Washington in March,
1895, and had marked the beginning of an organized movement which was
carried forward with extraordinary vigor and effect, to control the
action of the party conventions. As the year of the elections lengthened
towards summer State after State in the South and West declared
unequivocally for free coinage, and conservative men everywhere waited
with a deep uneasiness to see what the leaders of the national parties
would do.
The Republican convention met first, and in it the advocates of the
gold standard won. The convention declared itself “unalterably opposed
to every measure calculated to debase our currency or impair the credit
of our country, and therefore opposed to the free coinage of silver
except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of
the world.” Its choice of a candidate for the presidency was not quite
so definite an evidence of its purpose with regard to the currency as
the words of its platform. It nominated Mr. William McKinley, recently
governor of Ohio, and known to all the country for his long service in
the House of Representatives, especially as chairman of the Committee
of Ways and Means which had formulated the tariff of 1890 against which
the Democrats had won at the polls in 1892. Mr. McKinley had more than
once spoken and voted on the silver question, and had not shown himself
unwilling to consider very seriously the claims of the advocates of the
cheaper metal as a standard of value. They had accounted him, if not
a friend, at least no determined opponent, at any rate of some of the
measures upon which they had set their hearts. But there was no doubt of
his great credit with his party as a man and a leader, and his explicit
acquiescence in the principles of the platform upon which he had been
nominated satisfied the country of his good faith and conservative
purpose. The issue was definitively made up.
Three weeks later the Democratic convention demanded “the free and
unlimited coinage of both gold and silver at the present legal ratio
of sixteen to one, without waiting for the aid or consent of any other
nation,” and nominated Mr. William Jennings Bryan, of Nebraska, for the
presidency. It acted with singular excitement and swung sharply away
from conservative influences. It denounced what Mr. Cleveland had done
to save the gold reserve and to check the riots at Chicago as hotly as
any Republican policy; spoke of the decisions of the Supreme Court of
the United States against the income tax as if it advocated a change
in the very character of the court, should power come to the party it
represented; and uttered radical doctrines of reform which sounded like
sentences taken from the platforms of the People’s party. Its nomination
for the presidency was significant of its temper and excitement. Mr.
Bland, of Missouri, one of the older leaders of the party, and a man
whose name all the country knew to stand for the advanced doctrines
of free coinage, had at first led in the balloting. Mr. Bryan, though
he had been a member of Congress and had spoken in the House upon the
coinage question, had made no place of leadership for himself hitherto,
was unknown to the country at large and even to the great mass of his
fellow partisans, and had come to the convention with the delegation from
Nebraska unheralded, unremarked. A single speech made from the platform
of the convention had won him the nomination, a speech wrought, not of
argument, but of fire, and uttered in the full tones of a voice which
rang clear and passionate in the authentic key of the assembly’s own
mood of vehemence and revolt. It was a thing for thoughtful men to note
how a mere stroke of telling declamation might make an unknown, untested
man the nominee of a great party for the highest office in the land, a
popular assembly being the instrument of choice.
[Illustration: WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN]
The People’s party also accepted Mr. Bryan as its candidate. It uttered
in its platform some radical purposes which the new Democratic leaders
had not adopted, but it did not require its candidate himself to accept
them. It recognized the coinage issue as the chief question of the
moment, and was willing that he should be its spokesman in that. Parties
were singularly confused and broken. Two weeks after the Democratic
convention a considerable body of Republicans, advocates of the free
coinage of silver, rejected in the counsels of their own party, assembled
in convention at St. Louis, calling themselves the National Silver
party, and there in their turn endorsed the candidacy and the views of
Mr. Bryan. Early in September an influential body of men out of the
Democratic ranks came together in convention at Indianapolis, calling
themselves the National Democratic party, and formulated once more what
conservative men believed to be the true traditional doctrines of the
Democratic party upon questions of taxation, revenue, and coinage. Men of
strong party faith hardly knew which way to turn. The great deep seemed
broken up, old landmarks swept away, parties merged, confused, dispersed.
Only the Republican party preserved its full historical identity. Its
opponents were united in novel, uncertain, motley assembly; it was at
least compact and definite.
The money issue seemed the only issue of the campaign. Party orators
spoke often of other things, but upon that they grappled in close,
stubborn, impassioned argument. The country had never seen such a
struggle to rule opinion. Such excitement, such a stirring of the
moral and intellectual forces of the country, on the one side as if to
regenerate society, on the other as if to save it from disruption, had
never before marked a political campaign. The election even of 1860 had
been preceded by no such fever of agitation. The Democrats and their
allies had the dramatic advantage. Their candidate made a gallant figure
wherever he moved, and went up and down the country, as no presidential
candidate before him had ever done, to give the people his own striking
version of the doctrines he preached. To the excited crowds which pressed
about him he seemed a sort of knight errant going about to redress the
wrongs of a nation. There could be no mistaking his earnestness or his
conviction or the deep power of the motives to which he appealed. His
gifts were those of the practised orator, his qualities those of the
genuine man of the people. His strong, musical voice carried his message
to the utmost limits of any throng, and rang in a tone which warmed men’s
blood. There could be no doubting the forces of conviction which lay back
of him. Very likely there were many charlatans in the convention which
nominated him, and men who acted upon mere expediency, but the crowding
ranks in that hall had been made up for the most part of men who deeply
believed every word of the radical programme they put forth; and the
great throngs out-of-doors who cheered the sentences of that platform
with full-throated ardor cheered because they also believed. No one could
deny that the country had fallen upon evil times, that the poor man found
it harder than ever to live, and that many a law needed to be looked into
which put the poor at a disadvantage. The country teemed with men who
found themselves handicapped in all they tried to do,—they could but
conjecture why. It was no new thing that multitudes, and multitudes of
sensible men at that, should think that the remedy lay in making new laws
of coinage and exchange. The battle was to be won by argument, not by
ridicule or terror or mere stubbornness of vested interest.
It was won by argument. The country had never seen such a flood of
pamphlets, such a rush of every man who could speak to the platform, of
every man who could write into the columns of the newspapers and the
pages of the magazines. It was in the last analysis a contest between the
radical and the conservative forces of the country, and the conservative
forces won. The election day, the 3d of November, saw more than fourteen
million votes cast, and of these more than six and a half million
were cast for Mr. Bryan. Mr. McKinley received 7,111,607. Every State
north of the Ohio and the Potomac and east of the Mississippi gave its
electoral votes to the Republican candidate, some of them, like New York
and New Jersey, by unprecedented majorities. West of the Mississippi
the Republicans carried Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, Oregon, and
California, and south of the Ohio and Potomac West Virginia and Kentucky.
Even in North Carolina and Tennessee the Republican vote leaped up in
significant strength. Nowhere did the tide of Democratic votes run as
the tide of Republican votes ran in the States where opinion rallied
strong to maintain the established foundations of business. Republican
majorities were returned again, also, to both houses of Congress; and no
one could doubt the verdict of the country.
It was a singular thing how the excitement subsided when the sharp
contest was over and the result known. Never before, perhaps, had there
been occasion to witness so noteworthy an illustration of the peaceable
fruits of untrammelled self-government, the cheerful, immediate, hearty
acquiescence of a self-governing people in the processes of its own
political life. Not a tone of revolt was to be heard. The defeated party
was content to await another election and abide by the slow processes
of argument and conviction, and affairs went forward almost as if with
a sense of relief on both sides that the fight had been fought out and
settled. Business took heart again. Whatever might be said for or against
the free coinage of the two money metals at a ratio which was not the
actual ratio of their real relative values, definite assurance as to the
policy to be pursued was an indispensable prerequisite to the confident
carrying forward of business enterprises; and the verdict of the country
had at last been given so decisively that capitalists need, it seemed,
have no uneasy misgivings even with regard to the next election, when
another four years should have gone by.
And yet the air had not cleared entirely; the task of the party now
restored to full power was not simplified by the mere vote of the people.
Questions of internal war and peace were, indeed, past, forgotten.
In March, 1896, the houses, Republican though they were, had taken
from the statute book the only fragment that remained of confederate
disabilities, enacting “That section twelve hundred and eighteen of the
Revised Statutes of the United States, as amended by chapter forty-six
of the laws of 1884, which section is as follows: ‘No person who held
a commission in the Army or Navy of the United States at the beginning
of the late rebellion, and afterwards served in any capacity in the
military, naval, or civil service of the so-called Confederate States,
or of either of the States in insurrection during the late rebellion,
shall be appointed to any position in the Army or Navy of the United
States,’ be, and the same is hereby, repealed.” It was the final “Act of
Oblivion”; affairs would never again turn back to that day of bitterness
and strife. It might be that even the deep agitation with regard to the
money question was quieted. But no one could think that the influences
which had stirred that troublesome question to such a heat had been set
aside by the mere suffrages of the voters.
[Illustration: WILLIAM McKINLEY]
Obviously the business world, the whole world of industry, was in process
of revolution. America, in particular, had come to the crisis and turning
point of her development. Until now she had been struggling to release
and organize her resources, to win her true economic place in the world.
Hitherto she had been always a debtor nation, her instruments of industry
making and to be made, her means of transportation, the vast systems of
steel highways which were to connect her fields and factories with the
markets of the world, as yet only in course of construction. At the close
of the civil war there were but thirty-five thousand miles of railway
upon all the vast spaces of the continent; there were one hundred and
fifty thousand more to add before its products and manufactures could
be handled, freely in the world’s exchanges, and for that vast increase
foreign as well as domestic capital had to be borrowed by the hundreds
of millions. Except what her fields produced, the country had as yet
but little with which to pay the interest and the capital of her debts:
her fields were in some sense the granary of the world. As agricultural
prices fell it required more and more food stuffs to pay her balances. In
those fatal years of depression, 1893-1896, when business threatened to
stand still because of the state of the currency and the crops fetched
little more than would pay for their carriage, it was necessary to pay
huge foreign balances in coin, and $87,000,000 in gold had had to be
shipped over sea to the country’s creditors in a single twelvemonth
(1893). It was that extraordinary drain that made Mr. Cleveland’s task
next to impossible, to keep the Treasury reserve unexhausted and yet
sustain the currency with gold payments. Not until the very year 1897,
when the new Republican administration came in, did the crisis seem to be
past. The country had at last built its railway and manufacturing systems
up, had at last got ready to come out of its debts, command foreign
markets with something more than its food stuffs, and make for itself
a place of mastery. The turning point seemed to be marked by a notable
transaction which took place the very month Mr. McKinley was inaugurated.
In March, 1897, a great consolidation of iron-mining properties,
foundries, steel mills, railroads, and steamship lines was effected
which brought the country’s chief supplies of iron, its chief steel
producing plants, and its chief means of transporting steel products to
the markets of the continent and of the world under a single organization
and management, and reduced the cost of steel to a figure which put
American steel factories beyond fear of competition. Steel had become the
structural stuff of the modern world. Commanding its manufacture, America
might command the economic fortunes of the world.
It was this new aspect of industry that disclosed the problems Republican
and Democratic statesmen were to face for the coming generation. The
concentration of capital was no new thing; but the new scale upon which
it now began to be effected made it seem a thing novel and unexpected.
The control now of this industry and again of that by small groups of
capitalists, the growth of monopolies, the union of producers in each
line of manufacture for the purpose of regulating prices to their own
liking and profit, had been familiar circumstances, familiar signs of
the times, these twenty years. The farmers had seen them and had formed
their granges, their Alliances, their People’s party to protect their
own interests, by combination and political agitation, against the
huge corporate powers that seemed to be gathering for the conquest of
fortune. The industrial workingmen had seen them and had widened their
organizations to meet the threat of subjection. The great strikes which
followed one another, summer by summer, with such significant regularity
were but the reflex of what was taking place in Wall Street, where huge
combinations of capital were being arranged; at the manufacturing centres
of the country, where the interests of producers were being pooled;
at railway centres, where great systems of transportation were being
drawn together under a single management. Mines, factories, railways,
steamships were now, it appeared, to be brought into one corporate union
as a single business. It was the culmination of the process, and seemed
to put a new face on all that had gone before, on all that was to follow.
No wonder thoughtful men, as well as mere labor agitators, grew uneasy
and looked about them to see what control the law could exercise.
No doubt there was risk of deeply serious consequence in these vast
aggregations of capital, these combinations of all the processes of a
great industry in the hands of a single “Trust.” No doubt they did give
to a few men a control over the economic life of the country which they
might abuse to the undoing of millions of men, it might even be to the
permanent demoralization of society itself and of the government which
was the instrument of society in the conduct of its united interests.
The programmes of socialists and extremists proposed a remedy which was
but a completion of the process: the virtual control of all industry and
of all the means of transportation by the government itself. The leaders
of the People’s party, though they professed no socialistic doctrine,
demanded government ownership of the railway and telegraph lines of
the country, and their expressed desire with regard to the control of
“Trusts” smacked of the extremest purposes of experiment in the field of
legislation. The Interstate Commerce Act had been a beginning, a very
conservative beginning, in the carrying out of what they wished to see
undertaken. Neither the leaders of the Republican party nor the leaders
of the Democratic party felt that such impulses of reform, such counsels
of restriction could be entirely ignored; but neither party saw as yet
the prudent and practicable lines of action. It would not do to check the
processes which were adding so enormously to the economy and efficiency
of the nation’s productive work and promising to give her now at last
that first place in wealth and power in the world which every son who
loved her had predicted she should some day have; and yet it would not
do to leave the economic liberty of the individual or the freedom and
self-respect of the workingman unprotected.
The first steps taken by the new administration for the relief of the
economic situation were not of the new order, but of the old. Mr.
McKinley at once summoned Congress to meet in extraordinary session on
the 15th of March, in order to provide the government with additional
revenue. He interpreted the elections which had brought him into office
to mean that the country desired not only to avoid the free coinage of
silver but also to return to the protective system of duties exemplified
in the tariff of 1890. The Ways and Means Committee of the House had
prepared a tariff bill during the last session, while they waited for the
change of administration. Upon the convening of Congress in extraordinary
session, Mr. Dingley, their chairman, reported it at once, and by the
end of the month it had passed the House and been sent to the Senate.
It lingered close upon four months in the Senate and in the conference
committee which sat to adjust the differences between the two houses;
and when it became law, on the 24th of July, contained no systematic
scheme of taxation at all, but merely a miscellany of taxes on the
innumerable imports which were to be expected every year out of foreign
ports. Its rates, upon the average, rose even above those of 1890. Some
articles, like raw hides, which had been on the free list for a quarter
of a century, were again subjected to duty; the sugar men again got what
they desired; some duties, like that on flax, were imposed to please the
farmers; some, like that on lead and lead ores, to placate the senators
who were of the silver interest of the western mining country. Here and
there, noticeably in the metal schedules, the rates were left as they
had stood since 1894; the duty on steel rails was even slightly reduced,
as if the great steel industry at least were counted on to take care
of itself. The net result was a return to the highest principles of
protection, or, if no principle could be discovered in the Act, at least
to its most extreme practices. A year later (June 18, 1898) an Act was
passed which created an Industrial Commission whose function it was to
be to collate information and to consider and recommend legislation with
regard to the many complicated problems presented by labor, agriculture,
and the industrial use of capital. An Act had preceded it by some
two weeks (June 1, 1898) which made provision for the arbitration of
labor disputes between common carriers and their employees engaged in
interstate commerce, to avoid, if possible, the difficulties which Mr.
Cleveland had been obliged to settle by the use of federal troops. But as
yet protective tariffs, inquiry into economic conditions, and provision
for arbitration were all that the leaders of the houses had to offer
towards the solution of the questions out of which the silver agitation
had sprung.
The attention of the country was for the time being drawn off to other
things. There had come a day, the day to which Mr. Cleveland had looked
forward and of whose approach he had warned the government of Spain,
when the patience of the country with regard to the situation in Cuba
was exhausted. Much as the pitiful process of subjugation still dragged,
moving as was the spectacle of a fair country devastated to bring,
not healing peace, but mere submission, opinion might for a little
while longer have been held off from dangerous heat in the matter had
not a sudden, startling incident, tragical and full of every element
calculated to stir passion, sent a final thrill of excitement through the
country. On the evening of the 14th of February, 1898, Saint Valentine’s
Day, the United States battleship _Maine_, lying in Havana harbor upon
a visit of courtesy, was blown to pieces, and two of her officers, two
hundred and fifty-eight of her crew, killed upon the instant. The most
careful investigation failed to disclose the origin of the explosion; but
an examination of the twisted wreck made it plain that it had come from
no accident within the ship itself. The explosives which had destroyed
her had lain beneath her at the bottom of the harbor where she had her
anchorage. Within two months Spain and the United States were at war,—not
because a vessel of the American navy had been destroyed in a port of
Spain, but because opinion leaped upon the provocation of that tragic
incident from quiet inquiry to hot impatience with regard to all the ugly
Cuban business. There was no evidence whatever that any one connected
with the exercise of Spanish authority in Cuba had had so much as guilty
knowledge of the plans made to destroy the _Maine_; but that unhappy
explosion had changed the whole air of opinion the country through.
[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES BATTLESHIP MAINE AT ANCHOR IN HAVANA
HARBOR]
There was no calculating the forces of excitement that were abroad;
there was no determining their origin or their real power. No doubt
influences were at work which did not wait upon opinion, which made
opinion their covert merely and means of justification. Sensational
newspapers exaggerated every phase of the disturbing incidents of the
time, to make news and increase their sales; men who saw personal gain
in store for them amidst the risks of war bestirred themselves to make
interest against Spain in the houses at Washington; politicians were
quick to say and do what they hoped would enhance their credit and the
influence of their party with the country; personal ambitions were not
neglected in the eagerness of Congress to make some stroke in behalf
of Cuba and for the aggrandizement of the power of the United States
in the West Indies. Mr. McKinley had no such mastery as could hold the
impulses of members in check. He had spent fourteen years on the floor
of the House of Representatives. His point of view with regard to the
exercise of his constitutional powers was not that which Mr. Cleveland
had exemplified. He did not act as an independent, originative force in
the determination of policy, but rather as a power intimately associated
with the law-making branch of the government. He was not only sensitive
to opinion out-of-doors but also to the intimations of purpose which came
to him from the leaders of the houses. The fine quality of the man was
evident to all who approached him: his sense of duty, his devotion to the
principles which he conceived to be the principles of right action, his
kindliness, his modesty, his Christian self-forgetfulness. His unfailing
tact seemed to take the sting from the sharpest differences of opinion
or of purpose upon whatever matter, and men did not draw off from him
because he refused them what they asked or dissented from them in what
they thought. But he seemed to stand like a leader who received his
ideas, not from his own individual examination of affairs or the action
of his own originative powers upon the subject matter of public policy,
but from the men about him whom he most trusted, from the subtle airs
of opinion abroad out-of-doors, from those who brought him the counsels
of Congress and the news of events. There was no impression of weakness
to be got in dealing with him, but an impression of sober sensibility,
rather, and of sanguine confidence in the movements of opinion.
He had diligently pressed upon the Spanish government every argument
for peace with its Cuban subjects, for accommodation, for friendly
intervention by the United States, for reform and concession in the
government of the island that diplomatic usage and international courtesy
permitted, and yet the end of the Cuban trouble seemed no nearer
than before. He quickened his pace in the business as he saw opinion
advance and the houses grow impatient,—quickened it very much when the
destruction of the _Maine_ put a touch of fever into men’s thoughts.
Congress was the war-making power: it very soon became evident that it
could not much longer be restrained from radical action. Distressing
reports poured in every day of the sufferings of the Cuban people,
especially in the camps of concentration. The island was nearby: news
came fresh from the very scenes of war and desolation. Members of
Congress themselves visited the concentration camps and the parts of the
island where the insurrection had its chief seats, and told from their
places on the floor what they had seen and heard. The President wished
to keep the reins in his own hands, but feared every week to see the
restive houses break from his control. Fast as negotiation had moved on
the heels of the excitement that followed that fatal explosion in Havana
harbor it had not moved fast enough to please the impatient spirits who
pressed the leaders of Congress for action. Towards the last it had
begun to look as if the Spanish government were ready, rather than let
the war feeling in the United States put things beyond all possibility
of a peaceful solution, to make very substantial concessions to the
Cuban insurgents and bring the troubles of the island to an end. But Mr.
McKinley doubted the good faith of the concessions offered, found them
guarded by proposed processes of execution which might take perilously
long in the carrying out, believed that opinion in the country would not
justify him in taking any further risks of disappointment, and made a
sudden end of negotiation. On the 11th of April, 1898, he asked Congress
for authority to put an end to the hostilities in Cuba, and on the 18th
Congress declared the Cuban people free and independent and authorized
the President to use the military and naval forces of the United States
to compel the government of Spain to relinquish its authority and
government in the island. The Spanish minister at Washington of course
asked for his passports, all diplomatic relations between the two
governments were broken off, and on the 25th of April formal declaration
of war was made. The resolutions agreed to by the houses in authorizing
the President to drive Spain from the island had concluded with this
solemn statement of the purposes of the United States: “The United States
hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty,
jurisdiction, or control over said island, except for the pacification
thereof, and asserts its determination when that is accomplished to leave
the government and control of the island to its people.” Intervention had
come, not for the material aggrandizement of the United States, but for
the assertion of the right of the government to succor those who seemed
hopelessly oppressed, to recover the peace and order of its coasts, to
free its trade from the trammels put upon it by a war to which there
seemed no end, to quiet the thoughts of its own people in order that they
might turn again without distraction to their own affairs.
[Illustration: WEST INDIES, 1902.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
It was a war of impulse, as any one might see who noted how unprepared
the country was for what it had suddenly undertaken. The regular army
of the United States numbered but 28,000, officers and men. It fell to
volunteers as much as to regular troops to assume the burdens of the
field, as in the war for the Union and the war against Mexico fifty years
ago. The regular army was increased to more than 42,000 before the month
of May was out; but the new men were, of course, mere recruits, and the
volunteers mustered faster than the regulars. Before the end of May,
in response to the proclamations of the President, more than 118,000
men and six thousand officers had been mustered into the volunteer
service, chiefly from the militia of the States, and had been equipped
and distributed among the various camps of preparation in which they
were to be made ready and await their orders. Congress authorized the
increase of the regular army to 65,000 men, and by the close of August
more than 56,000 had been mustered in. The volunteer forces had by that
time grown to 216,256, men crowding into the ranks from every quarter of
the country. It was noted how eagerly the southerners pressed forward for
service. Elderly men who had been officers in the armies of the southern
Confederacy asked for commands, and got them, under the Act of indemnity
passed but two years before. The country was thrilled with a new sense
of union and of enthusiasm for a common cause. There was no longer any
thought of differences between section and section when the flag was in
the field. Those days together in camp and battle set the war between the
States another full generation back, into a past now left at last for
historians, not politicians, to take care of.
Before the first season of enthusiasm had gone by the war was over.
It was ended before the ranks were full. July was not out before the
American troops had had their will in Cuba and Porto Rico, and Spain
had proposed terms of peace. By the middle of August Manila, in the far
Philippines, had been taken; no Spanish force anywhere resisted the
arms of the United States; only the full terms of peace remained to be
agreed upon. The navy of the United States had been the first to give the
Spaniard a taste of its quality. There had been no question of making
it ready for war. It was outnumbered by many of the great navies of the
world, but its officers were professional experts trained to proficiency
by as thorough a schooling and experience in arms as if war were always
at hand; and their ships were of the most modern type and equipment,
built where the best steel and the best machinists of the world were to
be had. Every stroke that they made told. On the 1st of May, in the grey
of the early morning, Commodore Dewey, commanding the squadron of the
United States in eastern waters, attacked the Spanish fleet in the bay
of Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, and by noon had utterly
destroyed it, his own fleet suffering little damage, and without the
loss of a single life on his ships. He had entered the great bay under
cover of the preceding night, steaming past the batteries which stood
guard there upon Corregidor Island and through the long channels where
he had been told torpedoes had been set, as he had steamed when a boy
with Commodore Farragut past the batteries and the torpedoes at the
mouths of the Mississippi. The force of his guns was greater than that
of the inferior pieces on the Spanish ships, and but few of their shots
took effect; the marksmanship of his gunners made their fire precise
and terrible; he led his ships slowly back and forth along the line
of the Spaniards’ anchorage until the whole fleet he had been bidden
destroy lay sunken, burning, and abandoned. That done, the city, with its
old-fashioned walls and ancient defences, was at his mercy. It had been a
gallant exploit gallantly undertaken, against unknown risks and dangers
which he could only guess, against a force whose real power and equipment
were not known, and executed with a businesslike thoroughness which
caught the imagination of every man who loved thoroughbred service and
daring. Congress sent the Commodore increase of rank with its thanks, and
troops were hurried aboard the transports at San Francisco to act with
him in the capture and occupation of Manila.
[Illustration: CITY OF SAN JUAN, PORTO RICO]
[Illustration: PASCUAL CERVERA]
The tasks of the fleets mustered to invest the Cuban ports and convey
the troops of the United States to their attack upon the island were by
no means so simple. The coasts of the long island had many ports; it was
presently known that a Spanish squadron of four armored cruisers and
three torpedo-boat destroyers, under Admiral Pascual Cervera, had left
the Cape Verde Islands for the West Indies; it was possible to do little
more than guess what port they would make for. There were not vessels
enough to watch all the coasts of Cuba and Porto Rico. It might be that
the Spanish admiral would first make some demonstration against a port
of the United States, and it gave the authorities at Washington and all
who thought upon the matter no small concern to think how little had been
done to supply the open coast of the continent with adequate defences. As
it turned out, Admiral Cervera ran straight into Santiago de Cuba, the
southern port of the island, which lay nearest the open seas by which he
had approached. The Caribbean Sea was wide; the American commanders got
word first that he had touched at Martinique, then that he had touched at
Curaçoa, close by the Gulf of Venezuela; there was no making his course
out from that, and he slipped unobserved into Santiago while the American
commander-in-chief searched for him off the harbors of Porto Rico. At
Santiago he lay almost a full fortnight before his whereabouts was
discovered by the anxious American sailors. High hills shut the closed
harbor in, and a narrow, winding channel served it for entrance; no ship
at sea, no one who did not stand upon the very hills that overlooked the
harbor, could discover what craft lay within the hidden bay. But by the
29th of May a flying squadron of the American fleet, under Commodore
Schley, had established a blockade of the port, reasonably assured that
the Spanish squadron was within, and by the 1st of June acting Rear
Admiral Sampson, the commander-in-chief, had arrived, to add his heavier
ships to the blockading force and take command.
[Illustration: WILLIAM R. SHAFTER]
The whereabouts of the Spanish fleet determined the point of attack for
the army as well as for the men-of-war. General Shafter, commanding
the troops assembled at Tampa, in Florida, was ordered to take some
sixteen thousand men under convoy to Santiago, 14,000 regulars and 2,500
volunteers, in order that the town with its garrison and the fleet
lying in its bay might be taken together, by the joint action of the
land and naval forces. There were not sufficient railway facilities for
sending the troops to their place of embarkation; there were not harbor
facilities enough for the difficult work of embarking the troops where
the transports lay; no one in chief command seemed ever to have seriously
studied the handling of men and stores upon the great scale; there was
infinite delay and confusion and blundering before the expedition was
ready to sail. It took an entire week to effect the embarkation, and the
ships were held yet another week at their anchorage after the troops were
aboard before they finally put to sea, because of false rumors of Spanish
cruisers on the coasts they were to approach. But by the 14th of June
they were under weigh, and by the morning of the 20th were off the coasts
where they were to be put ashore. On the 22d, 23d, and 24th they were
landed at Daiquiri and Siboney, some twelve to fifteen miles east of the
town of Santiago, and their painful work began. The country through which
they had to pass was broken into abrupt and difficult hills; the roads
were hardly more than bridle paths, and ran through thick tangles of
tropical undergrowth. The flooding rains of the region were likely at any
time to render them impassable and cut the troops off as they advanced
alike from further movement upon their objective and from communication
with their base of supplies at the rear where the transports lay. The
distempers of the unfamiliar climate took immediate hold upon them, and
sapped their strength. There were not surgeons or nurses or medical
stores enough, and the lack of organized and efficient means and methods
of transportation worked an injury there worse by far than it had worked
at Tampa. At Tampa the blundering and mismanagement had been stupid,
irritating; here they were deeply tragical. It was pitiful what rank
and file alike had to endure, with stores unpacked, untouched at the
rear, and medicines left where they could be of no service. But pluck
and intelligence carried the regiments forward to the overcoming of
difficulties and the winning of battles there as they had carried the men
like them who went with General Scott to the conquest of Mexico fifty
years before. Division commanders proved more efficient and resourceful
than their superiors in command; privates knew their duty without orders,
shifted for themselves in camp, at mess, and on the march like men who
did not need to be cared for, endured what came to them without murmur or
discouragement, and moved like those who act confidently without command,
carried forward by their own wits and courage and habits of concerted
action.
[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF THE BLOCK HOUSE AT SAN JUAN]
By the morning of the 1st of July the decisive movements of the attack
were planned and begun and by the evening of that day an advantage had
been gained which made it certain what the end must be. The town of El
Caney and the strong hill of San Juan had been stormed and taken, the
one commanding the road to Guantanamo, by which the garrison of the city
might expect succor, and whence they could threaten the flank of any
force that moved direct upon Santiago, the other commanding the straight
approaches to the city itself. El Caney lay in a position of natural
strength and was protected by strong block houses, a stone fort, a stone
church, itself a sort of fort loopholed for rifles, and long lines of
trenches cut in the solid rock. The hill of San Juan stood steep and
guarded, crowned with a block fort set about with a maze of barbed wire
entanglements. The American troops, in whatever direction they moved, had
either to block one another’s way massed in the narrow miry roads or else
to deploy as best they could in the tangled undergrowth of the tropical
forests; and came into the open close by the enemy’s position only to
expose themselves to a galling fire from foes lying unseen and protected.
They had no support from artillery; each position they attacked had to
be taken by cool, dogged assault; but the thing was congenial to their
spirits, and was done with the steadfast pluck and the unfaltering
audacity of men who did not know how to fail or turn back. The general
officers who planned and ordered the movements knew, it presently turned
out, neither the topography of the country nor the exact position and
strength of the enemy; but the men and their immediate commanders made
all mistakes good and took what they found. On the 2d the American
lines were still further advanced, and an assault by the Spaniards was
repulsed. On the 3d General Shafter summoned the commander of the town to
surrender; but General Toral had received reinforcements from the east
and refused.
[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF EL CANEY]
That same day the Spanish admiral, fearing himself trapped where he
lay, put suddenly to sea, hoping by forcing his craft to their speed to
run down the coast to the westward and show the American commander his
heels before the blockading fleet could close upon him. But the first
glimpse of his smoking funnels in the channel brought the fleet in the
offing to the chase. The commander-in-chief was for the moment away, in
his flagship, upon an errand to the eastward; Commodore Schley was in
immediate command of the blockade. It was Sunday morning a little before
ten o’clock, and the men were at quarters for inspection. They sprang
to the work of chase and battle with a cheer, and within eight minutes
the ships within range had opened fire. Hardly a signal was needed. The
Spaniards swung in order down the coast; the American ships followed from
their places in instant succession, each captain selecting the Spaniard
he could most speedily get within range of for target. The foremost and
fleetest of the Spanish vessels was overhauled and forced ashore upon
the rocky coast within four hours of its exit from the port; the vessels
which followed her had been destroyed before the fight was two hours old.
The American gunners, pouring in a fire constant, precise, overwhelming,
had cut the fire mains or ignited the ready ammunition or sent destroying
heat and ruin to the machinery of the craft they chased, and they were
one after the other run aground, burning fiercely fore and aft. It took
as gallant work to get their crews off and succor them in their desperate
peril as it had taken to bring them to their sudden fate. Six hundred
Spanish officers and men lost their lives, killed or drowned; more
than seventeen hundred were taken off the burned and ruined vessels as
prisoners.
[Illustration: WILLIAM T. SAMPSON]
[Illustration: WINFIELD SCOTT SCHLEY]
Two weeks more and Santiago, with all the eastern posts and districts
of Cuba, was in the hands of the Americans. Reinforcements came in to
General Shafter which swelled his numbers to 21,000, and a complete
line of investment was drawn around the city. His guns had at last
come up. Eighteen thousand women, children, and foreign residents were
allowed to pass through his lines before he opened siege fire; but when
the bombardment did begin it came at intervals from the heavy guns of
the fleet as well as from the batteries on the hills, and the end was
inevitable. Negotiations for surrender were opened on the 12th, and
on the 17th not only the town itself but also all the eastern posts
were rendered up. On the 21st of July Major General Miles sailed from
Guantanamo Bay with a small force for Porto Rico. There he was joined by
reinforcements out of the United States, and the southern and western
portions of the island were taken possession of without opposition, the
inhabitants even receiving the American troops with open enthusiasm.
News of the arrangement of preliminaries of peace stopped all hostile
movements before the occupation could be completed. On the 26th of July
overtures of peace had been addressed by the Spanish government to the
government of the United States through M. Cambon, the French minister at
Washington; and on the 30th definite terms of peace were proposed from
the same source. In August most of the troops in Cuba were hurried back
to the United States to arrest the alarming progress of malarial fever,
dysentery, and yellow fever among them; and the war seemed over,—except
in the Philippines. On the 12th of August a peace protocol was signed at
Washington.
[Illustration: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, 1902.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: GEORGE DEWEY]
In the Philippines Admiral Dewey had waited until troops should be sent
which could capture Manila and take military possession of the islands.
But he had not waited without armed allies. The Philippines, like Cuba,
had been the scene of frequent rebellions against Spanish rule. Peace
was, indeed, but a little more than four months old when Commodore Dewey
received his orders from Washington to attack the Spanish naval force
in eastern waters, and Emilio Aguinaldo, the one-time chief of the
insurgents, was at hand, in Singapore, should the American commander wish
to avail himself of his advice and aid. Commodore Dewey sent Aguinaldo
word to follow him to Manila with all possible despatch, and he was given
passage from Hong Kong on the American gunboat _McCulloch_. His influence
with the people of the island of Luzon was well known. Young man though
he was, scarcely turned of twenty-nine, they were his to command, so
strong a hold had his frank manners, engaging interest in reform, and
subtile power to turn men to his way of action taken upon them; and,
for lack of troops from over sea, the American commander was willing
to supply him with arms and ammunition and put the men whom he should
muster in a position to hold the country round about the city until the
transports should come out of America and all things should be ready.
To make such an arrangement was to play with fire. It was not clear, it
could not be clear, what was to be done with the insurgent army thus set
afoot again by American aid when the troops of the United States should
arrive and the conquest of the islands be finally made.
[Illustration: WESLEY MERRITT]
Moreover, judicious lookers on wondered not a little to see the plans of
the war so widened. Commodore Dewey had been commanded to destroy the
Spanish fleet in the East; but he had not, so far as any one had heard,
been told to take Manila and set an insurrection afoot in Luzon. It was
significant that troops were at once hurried aboard the transports at San
Francisco,—significant of the broadened scope and purpose of the war as
viewed from Washington. It was not to stop with the relief of the Cubans.
Troops were to be sent to the Philippines to take military possession of
them. General Miles had been ordered from Cuba to Porto Rico. The power
of the United States, once afield, was sweeping the island possessions
of Spain into its sudden empire on both sides of the world. By the 13th
of August, the day after the peace protocol was signed at Washington,
all things were ready for the hostile movement at Manila and the place
was easily taken by the American troops, Aguinaldo’s forces looking on
and doubting their part in the venture. When the peace commissioners
met at Paris in the autumn to frame their final agreements, the United
States demanded and got all that their arms had touched: Cuba for the
Cubans, Porto Rico and the Philippines, and the tiny island of Guam by
the way, for their own possession. While the armies of the United States
still lay with their lines drawn about Santiago (July 6, 1898) a joint
resolution had passed the two houses of Congress which provided for the
annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States and consummated
the revolutionary process to which Mr. Cleveland had for a little while
given pause.
[Illustration: THE BOMBARDMENT OF SAN JUAN, PORTO RICO]
[Illustration: FORT AND EARTHWORKS, CAVITÉ, SILENCED AND CAPTURED BY
ADMIRAL DEWEY]
[Illustration: EMILIO AGUINALDO]
Of a sudden, as it seemed, and without premeditation, the United States
had turned away from their long-time, deliberate absorption in their
own domestic development, from the policy professed by every generation
of their statesmen from the first, of separation from the embarrassing
entanglements of foreign affairs; had given themselves a colonial empire,
and taken their place of power in the field of international politics.
No one who justly studied the courses of their life could reasonably
wonder at the thing that had happened. No doubt it had come about without
premeditation. There had been no thought, when this war came, of sweeping
the Spanish islands of far-away seas within the sovereignty of the United
States. But Spain’s empire had proved a house of cards. When the American
power touched it it fell to pieces. The government of Spain’s colonies
had everywhere failed and gone to hopeless decay. It would have been
impossible, it would have been intolerable, to set it up again where it
had collapsed. A quick instinct apprised American statesmen that they
had come to a turning point in the progress of the nation, which would
have disclosed itself in some other way if not in this, had the war for
Cuba not made it plain. It had turned from developing its own resources
to make conquest of the markets of the world. The great East was the
market all the world coveted now, the market for which statesmen as well
as merchants must plan and play their game of competition, the market to
which diplomacy, and if need be power, must make an open way. The United
States could not easily have dispensed with that foothold in the East
which the possession of the Philippines so unexpectedly afforded them.
The dream of their own poet had been fulfilled,
“See, vast trackless spaces,
As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch upon them,
They are now covered with people, arts, institutions.”
The spaces of their own continent were occupied and reduced to the uses
of civilization; they had no frontiers wherewith “to satisfy the feet
of the young men”: these new frontiers in the Indies and in the far
Pacific came to them as if out of the very necessity of the new career
set before them. It was significant how uncritically the people accepted
the unlooked for consequences of the war, with what naïve enthusiasm they
hailed the conquests of their fleets and armies. It was the experience of
the Mexican war repeated.
[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES, 1902.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: TWO-STORY TENT OF COLORADO TROOPS, CAMP DEWEY, LUZON,
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS]
What they claimed was not, indeed, yet theirs in fact. A sullen dismay
and discontent had come upon the men who served with Aguinaldo outside
the American lines at Manila, and who did not clearly know whether they
were allies or subjects. They had not taken up arms, they said, merely
to make the Americans their masters instead of the Spaniards, but to
make themselves free, and had deemed the Americans their allies in that
undertaking. The American commanders had made them no promises, but they
had seemed tacitly to accord them the place of allies, and their own
hopes had drawn the inference. When they found that those hopes were
to be denied them they took their cause into their own hands and set
up the government as if of an independent republic with Aguinaldo as
their president (September 29, 1898). In February, 1899, a dogged war of
resistance began which it was to take the troops of the United States,
recruited from season to season till their numbers reached quite 70,000
men, more than three years to bring to an end. But the end was visible
from the beginning. As the presidential election of 1900 approached the
Democratic party made as if it would stake its fortunes on an opposition
to the “imperial” policy of the administration; but it found that the
thoughts of the people did not run with it, and turned the force of its
effort again, as four years before, to the silver question. Mr. Bryan was
again made its candidate, against Mr. McKinley, whom the Republicans had
renominated as of course, and it once more demanded in its platform the
free coinage of gold and silver at the ratio of sixteen to one. But no
one feared now that it would win upon that issue. The hopes and energies
of the country were turned in another direction, and Mr. McKinley was
elected without difficulty.
[Illustration: THE U. S. S. OLYMPIA ON THE MORNING SHE LEFT MANILA WITH
ADMIRAL DEWEY ON BOARD]
It was interesting to note with how changed an aspect the government
stood upon the threshold of a new century. The President seemed again
to be always in the foreground, as if the first days of the government
were to be repeated,—that first quarter of a century in which it was
making good its right to exist and to act as an independent power among
the nations of the world. Now, full grown, it was to take a place of
leadership. The closing year of the century (1900) witnessed a great
upheaval of revolutionary forces in China. Insurgent bands filled the
country, the very capital itself, in protest against the presence and
the growing influence of the foreigner, and particularly the occupation
of new ports of entry by Russia, England, and Germany,—the dowager
empress, the real mistress of the kingdom, acting as their ally. The very
legations at Peking were invested in deadly siege by the insurgents; and
America, with the other nations whose representatives were threatened,
sent troops to their relief. America played her new part with conspicuous
success. Her voice told for peace, conciliation, justice, and yet
for a firm vindication of sovereign rights, at every turn of the
difficult business; her troops were among the first to withdraw, to the
Philippines, when their presence became unnecessary; the world noted a
calm poise of judgment, a steady confidence as if of conscious power in
the utterances of the American Secretary of State; the new functions of
America in the East were plain enough for all to see. The old landmarks
of politics within the United States themselves seemed, meanwhile,
submerged. The southern States were readjusting their elective suffrage
so as to exclude the illiterate negroes and so in part undo the mischief
of reconstruction; and yet the rest of the country withheld its hand from
interference. Sections began to draw together with a new understanding
of one another. Parties were turning to the new days to come and to the
common efforts of peace. Statesmen knew that it was to be their task
to release the energies of the country for the great day of trade and
of manufacture which was to change the face of the world: to ease the
processes of labor, govern capital in the interest of those who were its
indispensable servants in pushing the great industries of the country to
their final value and perfection, and make law the instrument, not of
justice merely, but also of social progress.
INDEX
Abercrombie, James, ii. 91.
Abolitionists, the, iv. 101.
Acadia, French colonies in, i. 19, 207; ii. 35;
renamed Nova Scotia, ii. 37.
Act of Congress providing for counting electoral votes, v. 182-184.
Act of Congress providing for succession to the Presidency, v. 181,
182.
Act of Oblivion, the, v. 263, 264.
Acts of Navigation, i. 222, 228, 229, 258.
Adams, Charles Francis, Minister to England, v. 69.
Adams, John:
As delegate to Congress (1774), ii. 194-196;
as commissioner from Congress, ii. 254;
as commissioner to France (1783), iii. 16-18;
his impatience with Washington, iii. 22;
his writing and speeches, iii. 89;
as Vice-President, iii. 104;
elected President, iii. 143-145;
his breach with Hamilton, iii. 158-161;
end of his administration, iii. 166.
Adams, John Quincy:
His advice to Jefferson, iii. 198, 199;
as Secretary of State, iii. 245;
his treaty with England (1818), iii. 259;
his fear of Russia, iii. 265;
elected President, iii. 269;
coalition with Clay, iii. 274-276;
his administration, iii. 278-283;
his view of Jackson’s appointments, iv. 10;
as member of the House (1831), iv. 78.
Adams, Samuel:
As leader of Assembly, ii. 160;
demands withdrawal of troops, ii. 164;
plans revolution, ii. 174, 180, 209;
his plan for Committees of Correspondence, ii. 183, 184;
member of Colonial Congress, ii. 194-196; iii. 22, 67.
Address of Returned Citizens of New York, iii. 44, 45.
Adet, M., the French Minister, iii. 145.
Age of the Stuarts, the, i. 34.
Aguinaldo, Emilio, leader of the Filipinos, v. 290-292;
President of the Philippine Republic, v. 297.
Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, ii. 73.
Alabama, admitted to the Union, iii. 238;
secedes, iv. 200;
readmitted to the Union (1868), v. 46.
_Alabama_, the, Confederate ship, v. 69.
_Alabama_ claims, the, v. 70-72.
Alaska, fur trade of, iii. 265;
purchase of, by the United States (1867), v. 42-44.
Albany, origin of name, i. 241.
Albany Regents, the, iv. 7.
Albemarle, settlement of, i. 251, 252, 292;
government of, i. 252, 253;
rebellion in, i. 272.
Alexandria, Va., conference at, (1755), ii. 85, 87;
commissioners meet at (1785), iii. 61.
Algiers, Dey of, iii. 259.
Alien Act, the, iii. 153, 337, 338, 344, 346, 348.
Alleghanies, the, ii. 9, 43.
Allen, Ethan, ii. 226.
Allison, William B., v. 147.
Altamaha River, ii. 65.
Ambrister, Robert, iii. 257.
America:
Character of age of English settlement in, i. 1;
ideas of Columbus concerning, i. 1, 2;
early hopes of discovery in, i. 2;
character of age of discovery of, i. 2 ff.;
character of northern continent of, i. 13-16:
English and French compete for, i. 22;
the first colonizers of, i. 28;
condition of, in latter part of sixteenth century, i. 32;
first representative assembly in, i. 86-89;
Pilgrims in, i. 86-89;
Puritans in, i. 104-106;
Cavaliers in, i. 215, 216, 217;
effect of the Restoration on, i. 238;
English and French population in (1689), ii. 4;
Revolutionary War in, _see_ War of Independence;
peace in (1782), iii. 12;
development of literature in, iii. 82, 83, 94;
alliance of, with France, iii. 205, 206, 216;
factory system of, iii. 241;
reformed penitentiary system of, iv. 76;
slavery in, iv. 76, 77, 78, 192-198;
ship-building in iv. 239, 240;
Indians in, _see_ Indian tribes;
crisis and development in, v. 264, 265;
sends troops to China, v. 299;
her power in the East, v. 299.
American Federation of Labor, the, v. 187.
American flag, the, ii. 328.
Amherst, Jeffrey, ii. 92.
Anarchy, beginnings of, v. 186, 187.
André, John, ii. 312.
Andros, Edmund, i. 296, 298, 315, 316, 322, 324, 326, 328, 329, 348,
350.
Annapolis, i. 339; iii. 42.
Anne, Queen, ii. 28, 49.
Antietam, battle of, iv. 229.
Anti-Nebraska Men, iv. 170, 172.
Anti-Slavery Society, iv. 76, 78, 101.
Apalache Bay, i. 13.
Apalachees, the, ii. 33.
Apalachicola, iii. 296.
Appalachian Mountains, the, v. 116.
Appomattox Court-house, iv. 258.
Arbitration, court of (1872), v. 70-72.
Arbitration, treaty of (1897), v. 248.
Arbuthnot, Alexander, iii. 257.
Argall, Samuel, i. 55.
Arizona, ruins of, i. 16.
Arkansas, secedes from Union, iv. 208;
readmitted, v. 46.
Armada, the Great, i. 8, 22.
Armed Neutrality, the, iii. 4.
Army of the Potomac, the, iv. 224, 225, 229, 240, 249.
Arnold, Benedict, ii. 237, 256, 277, 311-313, 327.
Arthur, Chester A., elected Vice-President, v. 154;
becomes President, v. 156;
his character and administration, v. 162, 163, 169.
Articles of Confederation of the New England Colonies, ii. 331.
Articles of Confederation of the United States of America, ii. 357;
iii. 18, 20, 71.
Ashburton, Lord, iv. 115.
Ashley River, origin of name, i. 254.
Association in Arms in Maryland, i. 339.
Atlantis, i. 7.
Audubon, John J., iv. 80.
Australia, method of balloting in, v. 195.
Ayllon, Vasques de, i. 38.
Bacon, Nathaniel, i. 266, 267, 269, 271.
Bacon’s Rebellion, i. 267, 269.
Balboa crossed the Isthmus, i. 10.
Baltimore, Lord, _see_ Calvert.
Bancroft, George, iv. 80.
Bank of the United States, iii. 219; iv. 19, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48,
51, 52, 53, 56, 94.
Banks, General Nathaniel P., iv. 243.
Barré, Isaac, ii. 133, 213.
Bayard, Thomas, v. 233.
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin de, ii. 282.
Beaumont, Auguste, iv. 76.
Beauregard, General Gustave, iv. 211, 222.
Beauséjour, ii. 87, 89.
Belknap, William W., v. 95.
Bellomont, Lord, ii. 23, 24, 25, 30.
Bennett, Richard, i. 213.
Bennington, ii. 270.
Benton, Thomas H., iii. 272, 274; iv. 68.
Berkeley, Lord William, i. 183, 185, 190, 213, 214, 239, 246, 248,
252, 256, 257, 262, 264, 266, 269, 271, 272; ii. 17.
Beverly, Robert, i. 206; iii. 86.
Biddle, Nicholas, iv. 49, 50, 51.
Biloxi, French at, ii. 59.
“Black Friday” (1869), v. 65, 66.
Black Hills, the, gold discovered in, v. 102.
Blackbeard, the pirate, ii. 47.
Blaine, James G., his political record, v. 174, 175;
nominated for President, v. 174;
his opinion of reformers, v. 178.
Blair, James, i. 348-350.
Blair, John, iii. 68.
Blake, Admiral Robert, i. 227.
Bland, Richard, ii. 148, 194; iii. 89.
Bland, Richard P., v. 146, 258.
Bland silver bill, the, v. 146, 147, 205;
repeal of, v. 206.
Blockade-running in Civil War, iv. 240.
Blomaert, Samuel, i. 168.
Board of Trade and Plantations, ii. 3.
_Bon Homme Richard_, ship, ii. 303.
Bonaparte, Napoleon, iii. 206, 207, 216, 220, 221.
Bonnet, Stede, ii. 47.
Booth, John Wilkes, iv. 259.
Boston, England, i. 157.
Boston, Mass.:
Settled, i. 108;
small-pox in, ii. 34;
first Presbyterian church in, ii. 52;
stamp-act riot in, ii. 136;
resistance to duties in, ii. 160;
massacre in (1770), ii. 162-164;
protest against landing of tea in, ii. 167, 168;
the Boston Tea-party, ii. 185;
port of, closed (1774), ii. 187;
town meeting of, ii. 194;
military rule in, ii. 206;
British forces in, ii. 236;
British evacuate, ii. 239.
Boucher, Jonathan, iii. 93.
Bouquet, Henry, ii. 128, 131.
Bowdoin, James, iii. 58, 62.
Boycott, use of the, v. 168.
Braddock, Edward, ii. 85, 87, 88, 89.
Braddock’s defeat, ii. 87-89.
Bradford, William, i. 89, 97, 99; iii. 83.
Bradley, Justice Joseph P., v. 111.
Bradstreet, Anne, iii. 83.
Bradstreet, John, ii. 92.
Bragg, General Braxton, iv. 243, 248.
Brandywine, the, ii. 280.
Brant, Joseph, ii. 275, 292, 293.
Bread riots in New York, iv. 67.
Breckinridge, John C., iv. 174, 188.
Brethren of the Coast, ii. 21, 23.
Brewster, William, i. 83, 84, 86, 109.
British army, the, ii. 266.
Brodhead, Colonel, ii. 300.
Brooke, H., iii. 345.
Brooke, Lord, i. 147.
Brown, Benjamin Gratz, governor of Missouri, v. 84;
nominated for Vice-President, v. 84, 85.
Brown, Governor of Georgia, iv. 304.
Brown, John, his raid at Harper’s Ferry, iv. 185, 186.
Brown University, ii. 112.
Bryan, William J., nominated for President (1896), v. 258;
his campaign speeches, v. 261.
Buccaneers, ii. 15, 20, 21, 22, 23.
Buchanan, James, as Secretary of State, iv. 117;
as commissioner to Ostend, iv. 172;
elected President, iv. 174;
favors admission of Kansas iv. 180, 181;
his administration, iv. 203, 204.
Buell, General Carlos, iv. 220, 243.
Buena Vista, battle of, iv. 120.
Bull Run, battle of, iv. 211.
Bullock, Edmund, iii. 342.
Bunker Hill, battle of, ii. 229.
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (1865), v. 17, 18;
effect in Southern States of the, v. 22, 23;
enlarged powers of (1866), v. 26, 33.
Burgesses, House of, ii. 166, 176, 181, 183, 185, 192; iii. 62.
Burgoyne, John, ii. 229, 268, 270, 278.
Burke, Edmund, i. 305; ii. 105, 106, 123, 124, 153, 211, 213, 215,
217.
Burnside, General Ambrose E., iv. 229.
Burr, Aaron, elected Vice-President, iii. 161;
his duel with Hamilton, iii. 178;
his downfall and trial for treason, iii. 203, 204;
his remarks on the Mexican War, iv. 107.
Butler, General Benjamin, at New Orleans, iv. 224.
Butler, John, ii. 292.
Butler, Walter, ii. 292.
Byrd, William, ii. 100.
Cabot, George, iii. 186, 187.
California, ceded to United States, iv. 122;
gold discovered in, iv. 135;
government formed in, iv. 136;
admitted to Union, iv. 140.
Calvert, Cecilius, Second Lord Baltimore, i. 128, 130, 131, 133, 134,
135, 136.
Calvert, Charles, Third Lord Baltimore, i. 288, 339.
Calvert, George, First Lord Baltimore, i. 128, 131.
Calvert, Leonard, i. 188.
Cambridge platform, the, i. 198.
Camden, S. C., ii. 308.
Campbell, John, iii. 342.
Canada, Fenian raid in, v. 29, 30;
fisheries of, v. 70.
Canals, iii. 243, 244, 266.
Canning, George, iii. 263.
Cape Cod, i. 86, 89.
Cape Fear, pirates at, ii. 44, 47.
Cape Henry, iv. 80.
Carleton, General Guy, ii. 256; iii. 15, 26.
Carlisle, John G., Secretary of Treasury, v. 189, 253.
Carolina:
Land grant of, i. 246;
population (1663), i. 247;
government of, i. 249-252;
new charter of, i. 250;
attacks Spanish at Florida, ii. 33.
“Carpet baggers” in the South, v. 46.
Carr, Dabney, ii. 183.
Carr, Robert, i. 226, 236.
Cartagena, attack on, ii. 71, 72.
Carteret, George, i. 239, 296, 298.
Carteret, Philip, first governor of New Jersey, i. 240, 242, 244,
295, 296, 298.
Cartier, Jacques, penetrates St. Lawrence, i. 18;
fortifies Quebec, i. 19; ii. 6.
Cartwright, George, i. 226, 236.
Cass, Lewis, iv. 128.
Cathay, Columbus seeks, i. 2, 6.
Cavaliers in Virginia, i. 215, 216, 217.
Cedar Mountain, battle of, iv. 229.
Census, first of United States (1790), iii. 125;
(1800), iii. 172;
(1820), iii. 246;
(1850), iv. 135;
(1870), v. 66, 67;
(1880), v. 166, 167;
(1890), v. 199, 212.
Centennial Exhibition (1776), v. 120, 122.
Central Pacific Railway, completion of, v. 89.
Cerro Gordo, iv. 120.
Cervera, Admiral Pascual, commanding Spanish fleet at Santiago, v.
278.
Champlain, Samuel de, ii. 6, 8, 9.
Chapultepec, iv. 120.
Charles I., i. 100, 122, 124, 128, 173, 174, 175.
Charles II., proclaimed King in Virginia and New England, i. 213, 215;
his letter to Massachusetts agents, i. 226;
sends royal commissioners to Massachusetts, i. 226;
gives New Netherlands to Duke of York, i. 229, 232.
Charles V., his empire and power, i. 20.
Charleston, S. C., settlement of, i. 254, 293;
its social life, ii. 52, 54;
negro slaves in, ii. 54;
British troops withdraw from, iii. 15;
Genet at, iii. 131.
Charlestown, Mass., British at, ii. 233;
Ursuline convent sacked at, iv. 89.
Cherokee Indians, iv. 14, 15, 16.
_Chesapeake_, the American frigate, iii. 191, 192.
Cheves, Langdon, iii. 212.
Chicago, anarchist riot in (1886), v. 187.
Chichely, Henry, i. 285.
China refuses to check emigration of Chinese, v. 186;
war in, v. 299.
Chinese, act of Congress excluding the, v. 184, 185, 214;
immigration of, v. 185.
Chowan, i. 246, 249.
Church, Colonel Benjamin, ii. 35.
Churchill, John, _see_ Marlborough.
Cibola, seven fabled cities of, i. 16.
Cincinnati, mob rule in, v. 169.
Cincinnati, Society of, iii. 17.
Civil rights bill, v. 28, 97, 98.
Civil service, v. 82;
act for reform of, v. 88;
system of appointment in, v. 158, 159;
the Pendleton bill on, v. 160, 162.
Civil Service Reform League, the National, v. 160.
Civil War, _see_ War of Secession.
Clarendon, Earl of, i. 223, 224, 237, 238, 246, 292.
Clark, George Rogers, ii. 293, 295, 296.
Clay, Henry, member of Congress, iii. 210, 211;
nominated for President, iii. 268; iv. 35, 110;
as party leader, iii. 272, 276; iv. 2, 38, 138, 148;
as Speaker of the House, v. 132, 133.
Clayborne, W., i. 133, 134, 188, 190.
Cleveland, Grover:
His antecedents and character, v. 171;
as mayor and governor, v. 172;
elected President (1884), v. 177;
his policy and administration, v. 178, 181;
his veto of pension bill, v. 181;
his tariff message (1887), v. 191, 192, 209;
his defeat for re-election (1888), v. 194;
his second election as President (1892), v. 214;
his free-silver declaration, v. 218, 219;
his second Cabinet and administration, v. 232-234;
withdraws annexation treaty of Hawaii, v. 242;
his Venezuelan message (1896), v. 252;
end of his administration, v. 253.
Clinton, De Witt, iii. 234.
Clinton, George, iii. 200.
Clinton, Sir Henry, ii. 229, 249, 278, 297, 306; iii. 2.
Coahuila and Texas, State of, iv. 105.
Coal, used to produce steam, v. 1-6;
in Appalachian mountains, v. 116;
strikes of miners in (1894), v. 238.
Cobb, Thomas R. R., iv. 282, 284.
Colfax, Schuyler, v. 90, 134.
Colleges:
Harvard (1638), i. 181;
William and Mary (1692), i. 349, 350;
Yale (1701), ii. 28;
Princeton (1746), ii. 112;
Kings (1754), ii. 112;
Brown (1764), ii. 112.
Colonial government, i. 121, 122;
changes in (1722-1742), i. 150;
relations to King and Parliament of, ii. 150, 151;
Congress of Committees of, ii. 193, 201;
Continental Congress of, ii. 240.
Colonies:
At Jamestown, i. 37;
at Quebec, i. 69;
at Newfoundland, i. 69;
at New Plymouth, i. 69, 90, 92, 95, 98;
at Salem, i. 104;
in Virginia, i. 110, 116;
in Maryland, i. 131, 136;
in Massachusetts, i. 138;
in Connecticut, i. 138;
on Long Island, i. 138;
in North Carolina, i. 292;
in South Carolina, i. 293, 294;
in Pennsylvania, i. 304;
in Savannah, ii. 64-67;
effect of civil wars in England on, i. 171-181;
restrictions on commerce of, i. 219-222;
ship-building in, i. 221, 222;
restrictions on trade in, i. 258, 261;
government in, i. 290;
conference of 1690 in, ii. 12;
make war on New France, ii. 13;
woollen manufactures in, ii. 19;
effect of “Queen Anne’s War” on, ii. 30;
changes in 1721-1742, ii. 49-51;
Scots-Irish settle in, ii. 51;
party movements in, ii. 55, 56;
English and French views of, ii. 101, 104;
effect of Stamp Act on, ii. 134, 136, 137, 139.
Columbus, sets out to find Cathay, i. 1, 2;
annotations in handwriting of, i. 3;
seeks Asia and kingdom of Tartars, i. 4.
Commerce:
Between Southampton and Brazil, i. 32;
Dutch, i. 70;
Spanish, i. 70;
English restrictions on colonial, i. 219-222; ii. 144.
Committee of correspondence, ii. 174, 175, 176, 178, 187.
Committee of inquiry on condition of the South (1871), v. 74, 76.
_Common Sense_ pamphlet by Paine, iii. 91.
Commonwealth, the effect of, in Virginia, i. 215.
Comptroller of the Currency, the, iv. 252.
Concord, fight at, ii. 223, 225.
Confederacy, the Southern:
Beginnings of, iv. 199, 200, 271;
States of, iv. 200, 208;
capitol of, at Richmond, iv. 210;
boundaries of, iv. 212;
population of, iv. 249;
social orders in, iv. 269, 270;
organization of government of, iv. 271;
provisional government of, iv. 272, 273;
politics of, iv. 274;
love for the Union in, iv. 276-278;
constitution of, iv. 284;
powers of President of, iv. 286;
hopes of the leaders of, iv. 288;
difference of opinions in States of, iv. 289;
resources of, iv. 289, 290;
scarcity of specie in, iv. 291, 292;
paper money of, iv. 292;
crops of, iv. 292;
food and clothing in, iv. 293, 294;
transportation in, iv. 295, 296;
arms and munitions of army of, iv. 296-298;
the army of, iv. 298-300;
government of, iv. 301-306;
conscription laws in, iv. 298, 304;
financial measures of, iv. 304, 305;
prisons of, iv. 307;
dissolution of, iv. 311, 312;
States of, after the war, v. 2-6.
Confederate privateers, iv. 240.
Congress, First, of United States, iii. 104, 106, 107, 108.
Congress of Committees, ii. 192, 193, 201.
Congress of Confederation, iii. 38, 48.
Conkling, Roscoe, v. 156, 158.
Connecticut:
First settlers in, i. 162, 163;
joins United Colonies, i. 170;
charter grant of, i. 233;
boundaries of, i. 233, 234;
charter annulled, i. 326;
charter restored, i. 341.
Connecticut River, i. 74;
settlements on, i. 144, 232.
Considerations on the propriety of imposing taxes on British
colonies, iii. 88.
Constantinople, effect of capture of, i. 4.
Constitution of the United States, iii. 71, 72, 76, 311;
division of opinion concerning, iii. 79, 80, 82;
amendments to, iii. 327-333;
thirteenth amendment to, v. 7;
fourteenth amendment to, v. 28, 74;
fifteenth amendment to, v. 57, 74.
Constitutional government, ii. 211.
Constitutional Union, party of, iv. 188.
Constitutional Union Guards, the, v. 62.
Continental Congress, first, ii. 193-201;
second, ii. 221;
third, ii. 2.
Continental money, ii. 310, 316.
Convention at Annapolis (1786), ii. 62.
Conway, Henry Seymour, iii. 8.
Coode, John, i. 339.
Cooke, Jay, v. 93.
Coote, Richard, _see_ Bellomont.
Copley, Sir Lionel, i. 346.
Corinth, Miss., siege of, iv. 222.
Cornbury, Lord, ii. 41.
Cornwallis, Earl, ii. 249, 308, 314, 328; iii. 1.
Coronado explores sources of Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, i. 16.
Corporation and Test Acts of England, iv. 76.
Corregidor Islands, v. 276.
Cortez finds ancient kingdoms in South America, i. 2.
Cotton:
Early cultivation of, iii. 124;
gin invented for, iii. 73, 240;
slave labor for, iii. 252;
value of (1829), iii. 285;
monopoly of, in Southern States, iv. 290;
value of (1860-1862), iv. 291;
blockade of, in Civil War, iv. 249;
as legal tender, iv. 306.
Cotton, John, i. 141, 142, 204, 208; iii. 85.
Council for New England, the, i. 95, 96, 104.
Council of Safety, the, ii. 254.
Coxey’s Army, v. 236-238.
Craven, Lord, i. 246.
Crawford, William, iii. 212, 245, 267, 277.
Crédit Mobilier, the, v. 89, 90-92.
Creek Indians, iv. 14, 15.
Crisp, Charles F., v. 225.
Cromwell, Oliver:
At Marston Moor and Naseby, i. 174;
leader of the Independents, i. 175, 176;
as Lord Protector, i. 195;
makes conquest of Acadia, i. 207;
demands fur trade in West Indies, i. 208;
his attitude towards America, i. 209, 229.
Crown Point, ii. 226.
Cuba:
First proposition to buy, iv. 72;
Spanish rule in, v. 248-250;
concentration camps in, v. 273;
independence of, declared, v. 274.
Culpeper, Lord, i. 285; ii. 2.
Cumberland Gap, iii. 243, 244.
Curfew, the, in Southern States, v. 20.
Currency, demand for cheap, v. 203.
Curtis, George William, as leader of Mugwumps, v. 176.
Custer, General George Armstrong, v. 102, 103.
Daiquiri, Cuba, U. S. troops landed at, v. 282.
Dakota, v. 102.
Dale, Sir Thomas, i. 52, 54, 55, 60.
Davenport, John, leads settlers to New Haven, i. 161, 162;
forms government, i. 163;
goes to Boston, i. 244.
Davis, a Maryland rebel, i. 288.
Davis, Jefferson, chosen President of Southern Confederacy, iv. 200;
calls for volunteers, iv. 210;
character of, iv. 310.
Davison, William, i. 84.
De Lancy, James, ii. 35.
Debtors, prisons, ii. 62, 63.
Decatur, Commodore Stephen, iii. 259.
Declaration of Independence, ii. 242;
original draft of, ii. 244-247;
signed by delegates, ii. 258.
Declaratory Act, the, ii. 156.
Deerfield attacked by French and Indians, ii. 35.
Delaware Indians, i. 312.
Delaware, Lord, i. 50, 52;
his _Relation_, i. 53.
Delaware River, i. 72, 73.
Delaware, State of, ratifies Constitution, iii. 76.
_Democracy in America_, De Tocqueville’s, iv. 76.
Democrats, political party of, iii. 278, 280, 289; iv. 1, 30, 64, 65,
81, 85, 102, 110, 124, 127, 159, 168, 187; v. 104-112, 170, 189,
206, 220, 256, 257.
Devonshire, her seamen, position, and people, i. 25, 26, 28.
Dewey, Commodore George, takes Manila, v. 276, 277, 292;
conference with Aguinaldo, v. 290, 292.
Dickinson, Don M., v. 233.
Dickinson, John, ii. 137, 158, 194; iii. 89.
Dieskau, Ludwig August, ii. 89, 90.
Digges, Edward, i. 213.
Dingley bill, the, v. 268.
Dinwiddie, Robert, ii. 77, 79, 84, 85.
_Discovery_, the ship, i. 35, 36.
Dissenters, freedom of, in New York, ii. 41.
District of Columbia, seat of government established in, iii. 164;
slavery abolished in, iv. 140.
Dixwell, John, i. 226.
Dorchester, Mass., settled, i. 108;
fortified by provincials, ii. 239.
Dougan, Thomas, i. 315, 317, 326, 333; ii. 10.
Douglas, Stephen A., iv. 165, 166, 167, 180, 188.
Downing, George, i. 219.
Draft Act, the (1863), iv. 236.
Draft riots, iv. 236.
Drake, Francis, turned buccaneer, i. 8;
first voyage around the world, i. 10.
Dred Scott case, the, iv. 176, 177.
Drummond, William, i. 239, 272.
Duane, William J., iv. 53, 54.
Dudley, Joseph, i. 322, 323, 324; ii. 41.
Dudley, Thomas, i. 106.
Duke’s Laws, the, i. 231, 241, 242.
Dulany, Daniel, his pamphlet on taxation, iii. 88.
Dunmore, Earl of, ii. 181, 192, 219, 229.
Dunning, John, iii. 7.
Duquesne, Marquis, ii. 76, 77, 99.
Durant, George, i. 247.
Dutch, the, commerce of, i. 69, 70, 71;
sea-power of, i. 72;
war of Spain with, i. 72;
East India Company of, i. 72;
emigration to England of, i. 76, 77;
on Hudson River, i. 96, 227;
on Connecticut River, i. 144, 145, 146;
power of, in America, i. 226;
Long Island Sound, i. 227;
in New York (1672), i. 294.
Dutch East India Co., i. 72, 116.
Duties on Imports, v. 118-120.
Duxbury, i. 165.
Dwight, Timothy, iii. 94.
East Florida, iii. 256, 257.
East India Co., Dutch, i. 40, 72.
East India Co., English, i. 72; ii. 167, 168, 172.
East Jersey, i. 298-299, 340; ii. 27.