BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN
The hill-range which forms the back-bone of Long Island, and upon
whose slopes Walt Whitman was born, terminates on the west in Brooklyn
Heights, which overlook the busy bay and crowded city of New York.
The heights recall Washington's masterly retreat; and the hint is
enough to remind the shame-faced English visitor that the American is
not without cause for a certain coolness in the very genuine affection
which he manifests for the mother country. 'Seventy-six and the six
years that followed, with all their legacy of bitter thoughts, was
succeeded by 1814 and the burning of the Capitol. In this later war it
was Virginia, not New England, that took the initiative; Massachusetts
and Connecticut even opposed it, and it may have been none too popular
in adjacent Long Island.
It is doubtful whether Major van Velsor or his sons actually took
the field against the British. But this second and last of the
Anglo-American wars was still a bitter and vivid memory when in May,
1823,[29] towards Walt's fourth birthday, his father, the old major's
son-in-law, left the farm, removing with his family to Front Street,
Brooklyn, near the wharves and water-side.
Though but a country town with great elm-trees still shading its main
thoroughfare,[30] Brooklyn was growing, and its trade was brisk. It is
likely that the carpenter, Whitman, framed more than one of the hundred
and fifty houses which were added to it during the year.
In the meantime, Walt took advantage of his improved situation to study
men and manners in a sea-port town. He watched the ferry-boats that
for the last ninety years had plied to and fro, binding Brooklyn to
its big neighbour opposite upon Manhattan Island. For another sixty
years their decks provided the only roadway across the East River,
and they still go back and forward loaded heavily, in spite of the
two huge but graceful bridges which now span the grey waters. The boy
gazed wondering at the patient horse in the round house on deck, which,
turning like a mule at a wheel-pump, provided the propelling power for
the ferry-boat till Fulton replaced him by steam.
The boy in frocks must have wondered, too, at the great shows and
pageants of 1824 and 1825 which filled New York with holiday-making
crowds. For in August of the former year, came the old hero of two
Republics, General Lafayette, to be received with every demonstration
of admiring gratitude by the people of America. Some scintilla of the
glory of those days--pale reflection, as it was, of the far-away tragic
radiance that lighted up the world at the awakening of Justice and of
Liberty on both sides of the sea--fell upon the child. For when the old
soldier visited Brooklyn to lay the corner-stone of a library there, he
found the youngster in harm's way and lifted him, with a hearty kiss,
on to a coign of vantage.[31] Thus, at six years old, Walt felt himself
already famous.
Again, a few months later, the city was all ablaze with lights and
colour and congratulations on the opening of the Erie Canal, which
connected New York with Ohio and promised to break the monopoly of
Western commerce held hitherto by the queen city of the Mississippi.
* * * * *
By this time, the family counted four children; two brothers, Jesse
and Walt, and two little girls, Mary and Hannah, all born within six
years. Of the children, Walt and Hannah appear to have been special
friends, but we have little record of this period. As they grew old
enough, they attended the Brooklyn public school and went duly to
Sunday school as well.[32] In the summers they spent many a long
holiday in the fields and lanes about West Hills.
A reminiscence of those times is enshrined in one of the best known
of the _Leaves of Grass_,[33] written more than a quarter of a
century later, a memory of the May days when the boy discovered
a mocking-birds' nest containing four pale green eggs, among the
briars by the beach, and watched over them there from day to day till
presently the mother-bird disappeared; and then of those September
nights when, escaping from his bed, he ran barefoot down on to the
shore through the windy moonlight, flung himself upon the sand, and
listened to the desolate singing of the widowed he-bird close beside
the surf. There, in the night, with the sea and the wind, he lay
utterly absorbed in the sweet, sad singing of that passion, some
mystic response awakening in his soul; till in an ecstasy of tears
which flooded his young cheeks, he felt, rather than understood, the
world-meaning hidden in the thought of death.[34]
This self-revealing reminiscence, even if it should prove to diverge
from historic incident and to take some colour from later thought,
illumines the obscurity which covers the inner life of his childhood.
Elsewhere we can dimly see him as his mother's favourite; towards her
he was always affectionate. But with his father he showed himself
wayward, idle, self-willed and independent, altogether a difficult
lad for that kindly but taciturn and determined man to manage. Walt
retained these qualities, and they caused endless trouble to every
ill-advised person who afterwards attempted the task in which worthy
Walter Whitman failed.
Among his young companions, though he was not exactly imperious, Walt
seems to have played the part of a born leader; he was a clever boy; he
always had ideas, and he always had a following. And as a rule he was
delightful to be with, for he had an unflagging capacity for enjoyment
and adventure.
But there must have been times when he was moody and reserved. The
passionate element in his nature which the song of the mocking-bird
aroused belongs rather to night solitudes than to perpetual society
and sunshine. As he grew older, and, perhaps, somewhat overgrew his
physical strength,[35] he was often unhappy in himself. There was
something tempestuous in him which no one understood, he himself
least of any. Probably his wise and very human mother came nearest to
understanding; and her heart was with him as he fought out his lonely
battles with that strange enemy of Youth's peace, the soul.
* * * * *
Little brothers were added from time to time to the family group;
Andrew, George and Jeff, and last of all poor under-witted Ted, born
when Walt was a lad of sixteen, to be the life-long object of his
mother's affectionate care. The names of Andrew and Jeff reflect
their father's political sentiments; the latter recalling the founder
of the old Jeffersonian Republicanism; and the former being called
after Andrew Jackson, the popular and successful candidate for the
presidency, in the year of the boy's birth, who afterwards reorganised
his party, creating the "Democratic" machine to take the place of what
had hitherto been the "Republican" caucus. Thus Republicanism changed
its name, and the title did not reappear in party politics for a
generation.
As Walter Whitman built, mortgaged and eventually sold his
frame-houses, the family would often move from one into another: we
can trace at least five migrations[36] during the ten years that they
remained in Brooklyn. He was a busy, but never a prosperous man; with
his large family, the fluctuations of trade must have affected him
seriously; and scattered through his son's story, there are fast-days
and seasons of privation. Walter Whitman was, in short, a working man
upon the borders of the middle-class: thrifty, shrewd, industrious,
but dependent upon his earnings; mixing at times with people of good
education, but of little himself; a master-workman, the son of a
well-read and thoughtful mother, living in the free and natural social
order which at that time prevailed in Brooklyn and New York.
He was not outwardly religious; he was never a church-goer; even
his wife, who called herself a Baptist, only went irregularly,[37]
and then, with an easy tolerance, to various places of worship--the
working mother of eight children has her hands full on Sundays. In
the household there was no form of family prayers. But when old Elias
Hicks[38] preached in the neighbourhood, they went to hear him, tending
more towards a sort of liberal Quakerism than to anything else.
[Illustration: WALTER WHITMAN, SENIOR]
The Whitmans were not an irreligious family--Walt was, for instance,
fairly well-grounded in the Scriptures--but they thought for
themselves, they disliked anything that savoured of exclusion, and
their religion consisted principally in right living and in kindliness.
Their devotion to the old Quaker minister is interesting. Hicks was
a remarkable man and a most powerful and moving preacher. He was
large and liberal-minded; too liberal, it would seem, for some of
his hearers. His utterances had however passed unchallenged till an
evangelical movement, fostered by some English Friends among their
American brethren, made further acquiescence seem impossible.
That which complacently calls itself orthodoxy is naturally intolerant,
it can, indeed, hardly even admit tolerance to a place among the
virtues; and the evangelical propaganda must be very pure if it is to
be unaccompanied by the spirit of exclusion. It may seem strange that
such a spirit should enter into a Society which gathers its members
under the name of "Friends," a name which seems to indicate some
basis broader than the creeds, some spiritual unity which could dare
to welcome the greatest diversity of view because it would cultivate
mutual understanding. But the broader the basis and the more spiritual
the bond of fellowship, the more disastrous is the advent of the spirit
of schism masking itself under some title of expediency, and here this
spirit had forced an entrance.
Between Hicks--who himself appears to have been somewhat intolerant of
opposition, a strong-willed man, frankly hostile to the evangelical
dogmatics--and the narrower sort of evangelicals, relations became
more and more strained, until, in 1828, the octogenarian minister was
disowned by the official body of Quakers, after some painful scenes. He
was however followed into his exile by a multitude of his hearers and
others who foresaw and dreaded the crystallisation of Quakerism under
some creed.
Soon after the crisis, and only three months before his death, Elias
Hicks preached in the ball-room of Morrison's Hotel on Brooklyn
Heights. Among the mixed company who listened on that November evening
to the old man's mystical and prophetic utterance, was the ten-year old
boy, accompanying his parents.
Hicks sprang from the peasant-farming class to which the
Whitmans belonged; and, as a lad, had been intimate with Walt's
great-grandfather, and with his son after him. It was then, with a
sort of hereditary reverence, that the boy beheld that intense face,
with its high-seamed forehead, the smooth hair parted in the middle
and curling quaintly over the collar behind; the hawk nose, the high
cheek bones, the repression of the mouth, and the curiously Indian
aspect of the tall commanding figure, clad in the high vest and coat
of Quaker cut. The scene was one he never forgot. The finely-fitted and
fashionable place of dancing, the officers and gay ladies in that mixed
and crowded assembly, the lights, the colours and all the associations,
both of the faces and of the place, presenting so singular a contrast
with the plain, ancient Friends seated upon the platform, their
broad-brims on their heads, their eyes closed; with the silence, long
continued and becoming oppressive; and most of all, with the tall,
prophetic figure that rose at length to break it.
With grave emphasis he pronounced his text: "What is the chief end
of man?" and with fiery and eloquent eyes, in a strong, vibrating,
and still musical voice, he commenced to deliver his soul-awakening
message. The fire of his fervour kindled as he spoke of the purpose of
human life; his broad-brim was dashed from his forehead on to one of
the seats behind him. With the power of intense conviction his whole
presence became an overwhelming persuasion, melting those who sat
before him into tears and into one heart of wonder and humility under
his high and simple words.
The sermon itself has not come down to us. In his _Journal_,[39] Hicks
has described the meeting as a "large and very favoured season." It
seems to have been devoid of those painful incidents of opposition
which saddened so many similar occasions during these last years of his
ministry.
The old man had been accused of Deism, as though he were a second Tom
Paine and devotee of "Reason": in reality his message was somewhat
conservative and essentially mystical. A hostile writer[40] asserts
truly that the root of his heresy--if heresy we should call it--lay in
his setting up of the Light Within as the primary rule of faith and
practice. He always viewed the Bible writings as a secondary standard
of truth or guide to action; as a book, though the best among books.
And as a book, it was the "letter" only: the "spirit that giveth life"
even to the letter, was in the hearts of men.
In his attitude toward the idea of Christ, he distinguished, like
many other mystics, between the figure of the historic Jesus of
Nazareth and that indwelling Christ of universal mystical experience,
wherewith according to his teaching, Jesus identified himself through
the deepening of his human consciousness into that of Deity. In the
mystical view, this God-consciousness is in some measure the common
inheritance of all the saints, and underlies the everyday life of
men. And to it, as a submerged but present element in the life of
their hearers, Fox and the characteristic Quaker preachers have always
directed their appeal, seeking to bring it up into consciousness. Once
evoked and recognised, this divine element must direct and control all
the faculties of the individual. It is the new humanity coming into the
world.
Hicks recognised in Jesus the most perfect of initiates into this
new life; and as such, he accorded a special authority to the Gospel
teachings, but demanded that they should be construed by the reader
according to the Christ-spirit in his own heart. Properly understood,
the doctrine of the Inner Light is not, as many have supposed it to be,
the _reductio ad absurdum_ of individual eccentricity. On the contrary
it tends to a transcendental unity; for the spirit whose irruption
into the individual consciousness it seeks and supposes, is that
spirit and light wherein all things are united and in harmony. In this
sense, the Quaker preacher was appealing to the essence of all social
consciousness--that realisation of an organic fellowship-in-communion
which the sacraments of the churches are designed to cultivate.
However dark his great subject may appear to the trained gaze of
philosophy, the old man's words brought illumination to the little boy.
The sense of human dignity was deepened in him; he breathed an air of
solemnity and inspiration.
Hicks died early in the new year, and with him there probably fell
away the last strong link which held the Whitmans to Quakerism. But the
seed of the ultimate Quaker faith--that faith by which alone a quaint
little society rises out of a merely historic and sectarian interest
to become a symbol of the eternal truths which underlie Society as
a whole, a faith which declares of its own experience that Deity is
immanent in the heart of Man--this seed of faith was sown in the lad's
mind to become the central principle around which all his after thought
revolved.
* * * * *
Although, as these incidents make evident, Walt's nature was strongly
emotional, he never went through the process known as conversion.
Religion came to him naturally. Responsive from his childhood to the
emotional influence of that ultimate reality which we call "God" or
"the spiritual," he can never have had the overwhelming sense of
inward disease and degradation which conversion seems to presuppose.
Well-born and surrounded by wholesome influences, it is probable that
the higher elements of his nature were always dominant. The idea of
abject unworthiness would hardly be suggested to his young mind. He was
not ignorant of evil, insensible to temptation, or innocent of those
struggles for self-mastery which increase with the years of youth. We
have reason to believe that he was wilful and passionate; though he was
too affectionate and too well-balanced to be ill-natured. Harmonious
natures are not insensitive to their own discordant notes, and the
harmony of Whitman held many discords in solution.
He had then in his own experience, even as a child, material sufficient
for a genuine sense of sin. But this sense, never, so far as we know,
became acute enough to cause a crisis in his life, never created in his
mind any feeling of an irreparable disaster, or any discord which he
despaired of ultimately resolving. He had not been taught to regard God
as a severe judge, of incredible blindness to the complexity of human
nature;[41] and perhaps partly in consequence of this, he was ever a
rebel against the Divine Justice.
There is, it may be said, another kind of conversion, a turning of the
eyes of the soul to discover the actual presence and power of God at
hand: the sequel may show whether Whitman felt himself to be ignorant
of this change.
* * * * *
Honest, upright and self-respecting, his parents never took an ascetic
view of morality. They did not share in that puritanical hostility
to art and to amusements which too long distorted the image of truth
in the mirror of Quakerism. Even as a lad, Walt discovered those
provinces of the world of romance which lie across the footlights,
and in the dazzling pages of the _Arabian Nights_;[42] and, as a
youth, he followed the wizard of Waverley through all his stories and
poems, becoming, soon after Sir Walter's death, the happy possessor of
Lockhart's complete edition, in a solid octavo volume of 1,000 pages.
From this time forward he was an insatiable novel-reader, especially
devoted to Fenimore Cooper, who was then delighting the younger
generation with stories of pioneer life.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the boy's life at this
time was all amusement. At eleven years of age he was in a lawyer's
office,[43] proud in the possession of a desk and window-corner of his
own. The master found him a bright boy and was kind to him, forwarding
his limited education a step further. He also subscribed on his behalf
to a circulating library which supplied the lad with a continuous
series of tales. But for whatever reason--one fears it was not
unconnected with those stories--Walt soon found himself running errands
for another master.
In his thirteenth year he was put to the printing trade, and ceased, at
least for a while, to live under his father's roof.[44] The mother was
out of health for a long time, during the period of the youngest son's
birth and infancy, and when in 1832 the town was visited by a severe
epidemic of cholera, the Whitman family removed into the country. But
Walt stayed behind, boarding with the other apprentices of the Brooklyn
postmaster and printer. Mr. Clements and his family were good to the
lad while he was with them, and some effusions of his--for like other
clever boys he was writing verses--appear to have found their way into
the _Long Island Patriot_.
From the _Patriot_ he soon removed to the _Star_, another local weekly,
whose proprietor, Mr. Alden J. Spooner, was a principal figure in
the Brooklyn of those days, and who long retained a vivid memory of
a certain idle lad who worked in his shop. If he had been stricken
with fever and ague, he used to say laughing, the boy would have been
too lazy to shake.[45] At thirteen, Walt was too much interested in
watching things to take kindly to work; most of his time was spent in
learning what the world had to teach him; but in the end he learnt his
trade as well.
No place could have been better chosen to awake his interest in the
many-sided life around him than a printing office, the centre of all
the local news. Here he developed fast in every way, shot up long
and stalky, scribbled for the press as well as learning his proper
business, and became a very young man about town. Already, he felt the
attraction of the great island city of Mannahatta, where, according to
its earliest name, for ever "gaily dash the coming, going, hurrying
sea-waves."[46]
* * * * *
New York had for a time been crippled by the collapse of American trade
which followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in Europe,[47] but had
recovered again, and was now growing rapidly--a city of perhaps 200,000
inhabitants, the English element predominating in its curiously mixed
population. Though it was prosperous, it had its share of misfortune.
Serious riots--racial, religious and political--were not infrequent.
Epidemics of cholera swept through it; and in December, 1835, thirteen
acres of its buildings were burnt out in a three days' conflagration.
In spite of these disasters the town grew and extended, and means
of locomotion multiplied. The stages were running on Broadway from
Bowling Green to Bleecker Street, that is about half-way to Central
Park, and the great thoroughfare was crowded with traffic, presenting a
scene busier even and certainly more picturesque than that of to-day.
Fashionable folk still lived "down town" below the present City Hall,
in a district now given up as exclusively to offices and warehouses as
is the City of London. Ladies took their children down to play upon
the open space of the Battery, looking down the beautiful bay; and did
their shopping at the various Broadway stores. Upon their door-steps,
on either side of the street, citizens still sat out with their
families through the summer evenings; they condescended to drink at
the city pumps, and to buy hot-corn and ices from the wayside vendors,
while the height of diversion was to run with the engine to some fire.
In a word, New York life was still natural and democratic; palaces
and slums were as unknown to the democracy of the metropolis as the
sky-scrapers which render the approach to-day, in spite of its wooded
hills, its ships and islands, among the least beautiful of the great
sea-ports of the world.
Of diversions the citizens had no lack, for the population was now
sufficient to support a good native stage and to attract foreign
artists. The year 1825 saw the advent of Italian opera at the Old Park
theatre, which stood not far from the present Post Office; and Garcia
and Malibran appeared in the "Barber of Seville".[48] It was here that
Edwin Forrest was first seen by a New York audience; while fashionable
English actors like Macready and the Kembles were among its visitors.
But even more interest centred in the Bowery, the great popular
theatre built to seat 3,000, where the elder Booth and Forrest played
night after night before enthusiastic houses of young and middle-aged
artisans and mechanics capable of thunderstorms of applause.
There were other theatres, too, such as Niblo's and Richmond Hill, and
to all of these young Whitman presently found his way armed with a
pressman's pass. He must have spent many an evening in the city while
he was still working for Mr. Spooner, and one unforgettable night, when
he was fifteen or so, he was present at a great benefit in the Bowery
when Booth played "Richard III."[49] Fifty years later, the scene of
that evening remained as clear before his eyes as when he sat in the
front of the pit, hanging on every word and gesture of that consummate
actor. Inflated and stagy his manner might be; but he revealed to
the lad, watching his studied abandonment to passion, a new world of
expression. For the first time, he understood how far gestures, and a
presence more powerful than words, can express the heights and depths
of emotion.
On that night in the Bowery, as upon those memorable nights on the
Long Island Beach, and in Morrison's Ballroom, Walt came face to face
with one of the supreme mysteries. On these occasions it had been the
mystery of Death, which alone brings peace to the heart of passionate
love, and the mystery of the Immanent Deity; now it was that other
equal mystery, the mystery of Expression, the utterance of the soul
in living words and acts and vivid presence. Love and Religion were
already significant to him; he had now been shown the meaning of Art.
* * * * *
In the meantime he had begun, as boys will, to take an interest in
politics. And before going further, we must glance at the outstanding
events and tendencies of the period.
Those two famous documents, _The Declaration of Independence_ and the
_Constitution of the United States_, are associated respectively with
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton,[50] and represent two currents
of political theory which beat against one another through subsequent
years. Jefferson was saturated with the political idealism of the
school of Rousseau, which sums itself up in the demand for individual
liberty and rights, the declaration of individual independence, and
freedom from interference.
Hamilton on the other hand--who was by temper an aristocrat, and once
at a New York dinner described the people as "a great beast,"[51]--was
possessed by the idea of the Nation; he dwelt upon the duty of each
member to the whole, promulgating doctrines of solidarity and unity
in the cause of a common freedom. The two views are, of course,
complementary; their antagonism, if it gave the victory to either,
would be fatal to both; and their reconciliation is essential to the
life of the Republic. But between their supporters, antagonism has
naturally existed.
The ideal of the Jeffersonian Republicans became associated with
popular or "Democratic" sentiment,[52] standing as it did in opposition
to the more conservative and constitutional position of the Hamiltonian
Federalists. For a time the two parties dwelt together in such amity
that the Federalists were actually merged with the Republicans; but
the uncontested election of Monroe was a signal for the outbreak of
the old contest. At the next election,[53] an Adams of Massachusetts
was returned to the White House; and Jackson of Tennessee, one of the
defeated candidates, built up a Democratic party of opposition whose
organising centre was New York. On the other side, the followers of
Adams and his secretary, Henry Clay, came eventually to be known as
Whigs, "Republican" ceasing for a quarter of a century to be a party
label.
The titles of the parties serve approximately to indicate their
different tendencies; though it must be remembered that the Whiggery
of Adams was coloured by New England idealism, while the material
interests of the South turned their energies to capture the naturally
idealistic Democracy of Jackson. Eventually the division became almost
a geographical one; though certain of her interests and perhaps her
jealous antipathy to New England, gave New York's sympathies to the
South.
In 1832, when Walt was studying the world through the keen eyes of
thirteen, and the windows of a Brooklyn printing shop, Democratic South
Carolina was offering a stubborn resistance to the Federal tariff.
Theoretically, and one may add ethically, any tariff was contrary to
the Jeffersonian doctrine of universal freedom; and practically, it was
disastrous to the special interests of the South. Carolina, under the
poetic fire and genius of Calhoun, was the Southern champion against
Northern, or, let us say, Federal aggression. She stood out for the
rights of a minority so far as to propose secession. The South was
aggrieved by the tariff, for, roughly speaking, its States were cotton
plantations, whose interests lay in easy foreign exchange; they grew no
corn, they made no machinery, they neither fed nor clothed themselves.
The North on the other hand was industrial, anxious to guard its infant
manufactures against the competition of Great Britain. The West was
agricultural, demanding roads and public works which required the funds
provided by a tariff. Now even these public works, these high roads and
canals, were calculated directly to benefit the Northern manufacturers
rather than the planters of the South whose highway to the West was
the great river which had formerly given them all the Western trade to
handle, and whose cheapest market for machinery and manufactured goods
lay over the high sea whither its own staple was continually going.
The tariff imposed for the benefit of the Northern section was, then,
opposed by the South on grounds of industrial necessity as well as of
political theory. And it may be noted the argument of the Southerner
was equally the argument of many an artisan in the metropolis, who saw
in free trade the sole guarantee of cheap living.
* * * * *
Thus there was a certain antagonism between the interests of the two
geographical sections of the American nation; and this was emphasised
by another cause for hostility. Every statesman knew that, although
unacknowledged, it was really the question of slavery which was already
dividing America into "North" and "South". And recognising it as beyond
his powers of solution, he sought by maintaining a compromise to
conceal it from the public mind.
The "Sovereign States," momentarily united for defence against a
domineering king, had at the same hour been swept by Tom Paine's and
Jefferson's versions of the French Republicanism, and North and South
alike adhered to a doctrinaire equality. The negro, they were willing
to agree, should be voluntarily and gradually emancipated.
But the hold of this policy on the South was soon afterwards undermined
by the economic development which followed the introduction of the
cotton-gin. The new and rapidly growing prosperity of the planter
depended on the permanence of the "institution". And from this time
forward the Southern policy becomes hard to distinguish from the vested
interests of the slave-owner. The prosperity of the South seemed to
depend upon the extension of the cotton industry: the cotton industry,
again, upon slave-labour; thus it was argued, the institution of
slavery was necessary to the prosperity of the South. The North, so the
Southerner supposed, had its own interests to serve, and only regarded
the South as a market. It was, he felt, jealous of the dominance of
Southern statesmanship in the Union; and its desire to destroy "the
institution" was denounced as the sectional jealousy of small-minded,
shop-keeping bigots, of inferior antecedents. By the brute force of
increasing numbers, by a vulgar love of trade, and the accidents of
climate and of mineral resources, the North was beginning to establish
its hold upon Congress, and arrogating to itself the Federal power.
Hitherto, with the exception of the Adamses and of Jackson, every
President had been of Virginian birth, bred, the Southerner declared,
in the broader views of statesmanship. But the North was now
predominant in the House of Representatives, and a balance could only
be preserved in the Senate, where each State appoints two members, by
constant watchfulness. Thus the rapid settling of the middle West by
Northerners must be balanced by the annexation of new cotton-growing
regions in the South-west. The famous Missouri Compromise of 1821 fixed
the frontier between future free-soil and slave States at the line of
the southern boundary of Missouri, while admitting that State itself
into the Union as a member of the latter class. Hence it was only in
the South-west that slavery could develop, and extension by conquest of
cotton territory became henceforward an object of Southern politicians.
While, then, it was the aggression of the South which finally drove
the nation into civil war, the South for many years had viewed itself
as an aggrieved partner in the inter-State compact, victimised in the
interests of the majority. It felt, perhaps not unjustly, that it was
being overridden, and that the Federation was becoming what Jefferson
described as "a foreign yoke".[54] It became excessively sensitive to
hostility: every rumour of the spread of Abolition sentiment in the
North--a sentiment which favoured a new attitude towards the Federal
power, and would give control to it over the domestic affairs of what
hitherto had literally been "Sovereign States"--raised a storm of
indignation and evoked new threats of secession.
* * * * *
But while slavery was already playing its part in American politics
it had not yet become the main line of party cleavage. Although the
party of free trade and of State rights was the party of the South,
it was not yet the party of slavery. It was still throughout America
the "people's party," and the slave power was the last to desire that
it should cease to hold that title, especially in the North. For many
a year to come there would be stout Abolitionists who could call
themselves Democrats; while "dough-faces," or politicians who served
the party of slavery, were always to be found amongst the Whigs.
Even while party feeling ran high, the increase of the means of
communication and the introduction of steam transport, both on land and
water, favoured the larger Federal sentiment and quickened the national
consciousness. Talk of secession had been heard in New England as well
as in South Carolina; but actual secession became more difficult as
the manufacturers of the East, the cotton-growers of the South, and
the farmers of the Mississippi basin had tangible evidence of the many
interests and privileges which were common to them, and beheld more
and more clearly the future upon which America was entering. Year by
year the idea of the Union gained in vitality; and in spite of party
feeling, President Jackson had a nation behind him when he refused to
yield to South Carolina's threat of secession.
A compromise was effected, and Carolina submitted to the collection
of duties under a somewhat mitigated tariff: the relation of the
constituent States to the Federal power remaining still undefined,
waiting, for a generation to come, upon the growth of national
sentiment on the one hand, and the accumulation of resentment upon the
other.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] _Comp. Prose_; Bucke; MSS. Harned.
[30] Descriptions of Brooklyn at this time in _Mem. Hist. N.Y._;
Roosevelt; Thompson, 179 n.; Furman's _Brooklyn_; Furman's _Antiq._,
390-97; Burroughs; _Comp. Prose_, 10 n., 510, etc.
[31] _Comp. Prose_, 9 n.
[32] _W. W.'s Diary in Canada_, 5.
[33] _L. of G._, 196.
[34] _Cf._ especially:--
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
[35] _Comp. Prose_, 10; Grace Gilchrist in _Temple Bar_, cxiii., 200.
[36] MSS. Harned; _Comp. Prose_, 9.
[37] _In re_, 38.
[38] _Comp. Prose_, 9, 457-474; E. Hicks' _Journal_, under 1829; _The
Friend_ (Philadelphia), _or Advocate of Truth_, i., 216 (1828).
[39] 3rd ed., 438.
[40] _The Beacon_, 145.
[41] Bucke, 61.
[42] _Comp. Prose_, 9; _L. of G._, 440.
[43] Bucke; MSS. Harned.
[44] _Comp. Prose_, 9, 10; MSS. Harned.
[45] MSS. Johnston, paper by Chandos Fulton.
[46] _L. of G._, 385; Kennedy, 64.
[47] For New York see esp. _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, and Roosevelt.
[48] _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iv., 171, 477.
[49] _Comp. Prose_, 13, 14, 426-431.
[50] _Camb. Mod. Hist._; Bryce, i., 1-31.
[51] Goldwin Smith, _The United States_ (1893), 132.
[52] _En. Brit. Suppt._, and G. Smith.
[53] 1824-25.
[54] _Cf._ _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 375, 376.