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THE UNITED STATES 
 OF AMERICA 
 
 I 
 
 THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY, PH.D. 
 
 -&- 
 
 BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY 
 
 GINN AND COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO LONDON 
 ATLANTA - DALLAS COLUMBUS SAN FRANCISCO 
 
7f 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY 
 
 ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 tilNN AND COMPANY PRO- 
 PRIETORS BOSTON 'U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book is intended primarily for college students. It aims 
 at something beyond that mere chronicling of the facts of the 
 past in fuller detail which often makes the "advanced" history 
 text only the elementary book "writ large." In other branches 
 of study there is progression. The writer on calculus or me- 
 chanical engineering does not feel it incumbent upon him to 
 restate and explain simple mathematical processes, like factor- 
 ing or the extraction of cube root. He takes the knowledge of 
 these things for granted. But historians are often content to 
 repeat over and over again the same succession of names and 
 dates, instead of attempting to interpret their meaning to ma- 
 turing minds. This is what gives so many students the impres- 
 sion that history is a discipline of memory of past events, and 
 the content of history a museum of wax figures in no vital rela- 
 tion to the society of today. Obviously, unless the historian 
 can show that the men and institutions of the past have that 
 inevitable parental relation to present social and political struc- 
 tures which the biologist, for example, traces in the develop- 
 ment of physical life, history will continue to be remote, unreal, 
 and unrelated. 
 
 As a succession of happenings the past, even the most recent 
 past, is forever gone. It is as far beyond our reach as the 
 moons of Jupiter. It is behind our back, too. The entire and 
 increasing work of our life is the unceasing creation of a future 
 with our present materials as in the case of the traveler who 
 lays the corduroy road ahead of him log by log. Because our 
 present material is the heritage of the long past, that past has 
 eternal significance in determining the direction of the road 
 which we lay. 
 
 Such is the spirit in which this book has been written. Its 
 subject is the development of the American ideal of democracy, 
 
THE UNITED STATES OF 
 AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 
 
 / shall yet live to see it an Inglishe Nation. SIR WALTER RALEIGH 
 
 THE SETTLEMENTS 
 
 In the fourscore and six years that elapsed between the cere- 
 monious advent of the first James Stuart to the English throne 
 and the unceremonious departure therefrom of his grandson, 
 the second James Stuart, a number of English settlements 
 were planted on the Atlantic coast of North America from the 
 Penobscot River in Maine to the Ashley and Cooper Rivers 
 in South Carolina. Only along the New England shore was 
 the border of settlements continuous, comprising near the 
 close of the seventeenth century some 75,000 inhabitants, a 
 third of the population of the colonies. Below the harbor of 
 New York the coast was still a wilderness of forest, dune, and 
 swamp, except for a few scattered families where Delaware and 
 Chesapeake Bays joined the ocean, an ill-nourished colony of 
 Virginian malcontents who had drifted down the shore of Albe- 
 marle Sound to the mouth of the Roanoke, and a group of late- 
 comers three hundred miles further to the south around the 
 pleasant waters of Charleston's rivers and bay. New York, 
 New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and 
 the Carolinas, so far as these names represented actual com- 
 munities of settlers and not vast and indeterminate tracts of 
 Indian wilderness granted by the Stuarts, consisted of less than 
 150,000 people living at forts and trading-posts, on plantations, 
 
2 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 or in flourishing commercial towns along the easily navigable 
 Hudson and the lower courses of the rivers emptying into the 
 two great bays of the middle Atlantic coast. 
 
 The overwhelming majority of the settlers, practically all in 
 the colonies founded before the Stuart Restoration of 1660 
 (Virginia, New England, Maryland), were Englishmen. Still, 
 the process had already begun which was to make America the 
 melting-pot of the nations. Almost at the same moment that he 
 granted the Virginia charters James I started the Plantation of 
 Ulster in northern Ireland (1611), a scheme for replacing the 
 Roman Catholic natives by Protestant tenants under the pro- 
 prietorship of absentee nobles and London merchants. The 
 tenants were recruited chiefly from the Presbyterians of the 
 Lowlands of Scotland, whose industry and thrift built a colony 
 of a million or more inhabitants in Ulster before the close of the 
 seventeenth century. But their prosperity and their Presby- 
 terianism alike became an offense in the eyes of the Stuarts. 
 They were persecuted for their nonconformity to the Anglican 
 Church, and their exports of cattle, wool, and linen were sub- 
 jected to heavy duties to protect English merchants and manu- 
 facturers. Suffering under these burdens, the Scotch-Irish 
 began to emigrate to the new land of promise. At first only 
 a few hundred came to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the 
 Carolinas; but with the eighteenth century the migration 
 quickened, and the Scotch-Irish poured into the valleys of the 
 Appalachian range from Pennsylvania to Georgia, forming the 
 sturdy advance guard of the American pioneers our first 
 frontiersmen. No other non-English stock furnished so large 
 a quota to our colonial immigration or exercised so powerful 
 an influence on the development of our national life as these 
 exiled exiles from the northern counties of Ireland. Their sons 
 founded our first states west of the Alleghenies. The roll call 
 of their descendants includes the names of Stark, Knox, 
 McClellan, McKinley, Greeley, Motley, Rutledge, Jackson, 
 and Calhoun. 
 
 From the continent of Europe also came settlers to enrich 
 and diversify American life. Dutchmen and Swedes were 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 3 
 
 established on the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware 
 several decades before those streams became the North River 
 and the South River respectively of the Duke of York's 
 province (1664). The religious wars and persecutions of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Germany, France, and 
 the 'Netherlands led to considerable displacement of population 
 and resulted in voluntary or enforced migrations whose waves 
 reached even the shores of the New World. From Germany, 
 Bohemia, and Hungary came Anabaptists, the radicals of the 
 Protestant Reformation, who carried religious dissent to its 
 logical conclusion in pure individualism, rebelling against the 
 authority of a Protestant magistrate no less than against that 
 of a Catholic bishop, rejecting all forms and ceremonies in 
 worship, and insisting on personal holiness of life pledged 
 in adult baptism as the irremissible condition of member- 
 ship in the church of Christ. From the Rhenish Palatinate 
 came Calvinists, driven from their homes by the merciless 
 devastations of that fairest of the provinces of Germany by the 
 generals of Louis XIV, the inexorable Turenne and the brutal 
 Louvois (1674, 1689). From France came Huguenots, mem- 
 bers of the valuable industrial groups of ironworkers, paper- 
 makers, tanners, and silk-weavers whom Louis XIV's dragoons 
 hunted out of the cities in the enforcement of the culminat- 
 ing folly of his reign, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
 (1685). These, with a few Welshmen, Jews, Finns, and Poles, 
 infused a strain of foreign blood into all the colonies, though 
 they were most numerous in Pennsylvania, the Jerseys, and 
 the Carolinas, where the proprietors were anxious to secure 
 settlers. William Penn even advertised his colony widely on the 
 continent by translations into Dutch and German of a prospec- 
 tus entitled "Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania 
 made Publick for the information of such as are or may be 
 disposed to transport Themselves or Servants into those Parts" 
 (1681). He had his returns in the sale of 15,000 acres of land 
 to a group of Frankfort Pietists, and the foundation two years 
 later by German mechanics and weavers of the new "city of 
 Germantown or Germanopolis." 
 
d on map In Channing's 
 History of the United Sta 
 
 COLONIAL GRANTS AND ACTUAL SETTLEMENTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH 
 
 CENTURY 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 5 
 
 Naturally these Scotch-Irish, German, and French settlers, 
 seeking an asylum from religious and political persecution in 
 the Old World, would furnish little encouragement in the New 
 World to schemes for the imposition of an autocratic govern- 
 ment or an orthodox faith upon the colonists. Their contribu- 
 tion to liberty and democracy in America was consistent and 
 constant. They were readily assimilated to the English settlers, 
 because an essential identity of interest brought them here. 
 America was for them, as it has been for the millions of immi- 
 grants who have followed them, the land of opportunity in 
 industry, of immunity from persecution, of community of 
 political life. 
 
 Foreign immigrants, however, formed but a small fraction of 
 the colonial life of America. It was English institutions not 
 German, French, or Dutch that were permanently trans- 
 planted to the New World : English language, law, administra- 
 tion, letters, customs, and liberties. To the mother country, 
 then, which sent out its tens of thousands to the new land, we 
 must look for the motives and conditions that determined the 
 early American settlements. To analyze these motives and 
 conditions fully would be to write the history of England in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a part of England 
 that came to America, a part determined both by England's 
 relations to the continent of Europe and by the interplay of 
 classes, parties, and sects within England itself. Let us pass 
 in review some of the more conspicuous of the motives and 
 circumstances of colonial migration: commercial rivalry with 
 Spain, industrial conditions in England, opposition to the polit- 
 ical system of the Stuarts, and the desire for liberty of belief 
 and worship. 
 
 One of the most significant features of that slow change from 
 the medieval and feudal Europe of the fourteenth century to 
 the modern and nationalistic Europe of the sixteenth century 
 which is generally miscalled a "renaissance" was the shift- 
 ing of the routes of trade from the Mediterranean and the in- 
 land cities of Europe to the Atlantic littoral. Venice, Genoa, 
 Amain, Augsburg, Cologne, Marseilles, Lyons, and Ghent were 
 
6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 succeeded as marts of trade by Cadiz, Lisbon, Dieppe, London, 
 Bristol, and Antwerp. The third stage of water-borne com- 
 merce was at hand. As the age of classical antiquity was 
 ushered in 'by the substitution of landlocked sea commerce for 
 the old river commerce of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Eu- 
 phrates, so the modern age dawned with the widening of com- 
 merce to the great oceans. The three navigable oceans of the 
 world were all crossed for the first time by European explorers 
 in the single generation between 1492 and 1522. 
 
 The happy position of Spain and Portugal at the junction of 
 the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and their 
 proximity to the coast of Africa, along which the earliest lines 
 of oceanic traffic ran, gave to the countries of the Iberian 
 peninsula an early start in the new field of distant discovery 
 and exploration. That they were not slow to seize that advan- 
 tage is shown by their arbitrary division of the whole unex- 
 plored world between them at the close of the fifteenth century. 
 The next century, however, saw the rapid rise of England and 
 Holland as commercial powers in sharp rivalry with Spain and 
 Portugal. The Elizabethan seamen who chased Spanish treas- 
 ure ships among the islands of the West Indies and even into 
 the very harbors of Spain were doubtless obeying the impulse 
 of the buccaneer, but they were none the less laying the founda- 
 tions of England's colonial empire. The earliest settlers who 
 came to Jamestown and scores of the New England immigrants 
 of the following decades had shared in the jubilation over the 
 defeat of the Spanish Armada, which "ennobled many coasts 
 with the wrecks of noble ships" (1588). They remembered 
 from their boyhood days how gorgeous Queen Elizabeth had 
 knighted Francis Drake on the quarter-deck of his brave ship, 
 the Golden Hind, just returned from a voyage round the world, 
 laden with the priceless treasures of plundered Spanish galleons 
 (1580) ; or even recalled the storm of mingled dismay and in- 
 dignation which swept over England when the Pope at the 
 solicitation of the Spanish court launched his bull of deposition 
 against their queen ( 1 570) . The Elizabethan seamen had the rare 
 opportunity of serving both God and mammon by despoiling 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 7 
 
 what they called "the papistical Spaniard." The Virginia 
 settlement of 1607 was not only a commercial venture but a 
 blow at Spain's power, as was amply proved by the behavior 
 of the latter country. On more than one occasion she sent ships 
 into the James River, hoping to break up the settlement. 
 A Spanish captain seized the John and Mary on her way to 
 Virginia in 1620, loaded with colonists and supplies. And the 
 Spanish ambassador in London was busy in season and out of 
 season sowing discord among the members of the Virginia Com- 
 pany and poisoning the mind of King James against them with 
 hints of "seditious" practices. 
 
 Less romantic, but no less compelling, were the economic 
 motives which led to the English migrations of the seventeenth 
 century. The national states which rose on the ruins of feu- 
 dalism needed money above everything else. Political adminis- 
 tration, commercial regulation, military defense, broadened out 
 from municipal and local limits to a national scale ; and with 
 the process grew the need for a large civil service, for judicial 
 and financial departments of state, for armies and fleets. The 
 national treasuries were taxed to the utmost. Credit and fund- 
 ing systems were not yet in operation, the banks of Amsterdam 
 and London not yet in existence. Actual money gold and 
 silver was indispensable for running the state. Great quan- 
 tities of the precious metals were taken from the mines of 
 America by the Spaniards, and England diverted as much as 
 possible of this treasure to her own coffers, either by the direct 
 method of seizing the Spanish ships or by the indirect method 
 of multiplying the output of her industries for the Spanish 
 market. 
 
 The increase of gold and silver in the realm brought with it 
 a rise in prices and rents which bore hard on the workingman 
 and the farmer. Severe statutes held the laborer to work at 
 wages fixed by the justices of the peace, under penalty of im- 
 prisonment or forced service if he refused. The harsh poor- 
 laws and vagrancy laws of Elizabeth's reign show that the 
 land was filled with "valiant rogues and sturdy beggars." As 
 the farms were turned into sheep pastures, under the double 
 
8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 impetus of mounting rents and a widening wool market, the 
 peasant class had to bear the poverty and distress that always 
 accompanies an economic readjustment. The hands that had 
 guided the plow were often idle a long time before they learned 
 to operate the loom. Besides, with the closing of the monas- 
 teries, and the appropriation of their lands to endow the new 
 nobility of Henry VIII, the mildest landlords in the kingdom 
 had been dispossessed, and the chief comfort, charity, and 
 asylum for the poor had been withdrawn. 
 
 When historians speak of the "overpopulation" of England 
 in the seventeenth century as one of the causes of the colonizing 
 movement, it is this economic condition that they really mean. 
 It seems ridiculous to call the England of James I overpopu- 
 lated, when the whole realm contained little more than half the 
 number of inhabitants that the city of London does today. The 
 distress arose not from England's crowding but from a radical 
 disturbance in the scale of values. Luxury and extravagance, 
 of which we begin to hear much in the "spacious days of great 
 Elizabeth," brought their inevitable complement of poverty and 
 squalor. "This land grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man 
 is heer of less price among us than a horse or a sheep," wrote 
 John Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan migration to Massa- 
 chusetts in 1630; and he continues, "We stand here striving 
 for space of habitation . . . and in ye mean tyme suffer a 
 whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man 
 to waste without any improvement." Shall we wonder 'that 
 hundreds of able-bodied men preferred the hold of the emigrant 
 ship, with freedom and opportunity at the end of the voyage, 
 to a foul cell in a debtor's prison with renewed misery on 
 their release ! 
 
 When the prospectus of a colonizing company or the induce- 
 ments of the shippers' agents failed to secure enough emigrants 
 to people the colony, the government came to the aid of the 
 proprietors by granting them permission to seize vagabonds, 
 paupers, and criminals to take out to the plantations. King 
 James I wrote a letter to the treasurer and council of the Vir- 
 ginia Company in 1619, commanding them to send to Virginia 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 9 
 
 a hundred "dissolute persons which the knight-marshall should 
 deliver to them." A commission was appointed in 1633 to res- 
 cue from the clutches of the jailer persons convicted of certain 
 crimes and to "bestow them to be used in the discoveries and 
 other foreign employment." Soon after the restoration of 
 Charles II (1660) transportation to the colonies was made the 
 legal penalty for some crimes. Even as late as 1722 we find the 
 Virginia legislature vainly striving to stop the importation of 
 criminals. But the deleterious effect on the colonies of this 
 migration of the "scum of England" has been much exagger- 
 ated. Comparatively few jailbirds and paupers came, and of 
 those few the greater part were made over into diligent and self- 
 respecting farmers and laborers by their strenuous life in the 
 New World. 1 
 
 The urge of adventure, commercial rivalry, and economic 
 pressure were general stimulants to colonial migration, but the 
 steady trend of the Stuart government toward political abso- 
 lutism and religious coercion gave that migration its peculiar 
 character of self-reliance. The Stuart absolutism was the at- 
 tempt to extend a medieval system of government into an age 
 which was rapidly becoming modern, an age in which there was 
 emerging a bourgeois, or middle, class, enriched by manufac- 
 ture, farming, and trade, which broke up the old social frame- 
 work of noble, priest, and peasant. History from the days of 
 Solon to the days of Disraeli has demonstrated the truth that a 
 share in political power cannot be permanently denied to a class 
 that has acquired wealth. But the Stuart kings had little re- 
 gard for the lessons of history. They proclaimed themselves 
 "God's lieutenants on earth" and declared their prerogative 
 "a mystery of state" and "a transcendant matter." They held 
 themselves in no wise responsible to the people of England for 
 the exercise of their powers. The Parliament they regarded as 
 
 *A peculiar form of colonial immigrant was the "indentured servant," or 
 " redemptioner," who, in order to pay for his passage to America, sold his serv- 
 ices for a term of years (often seven) and so became a sort of temporary slave. 
 Professor John R. Commons reckons that half the English who came to the col- 
 onies were redemptioners. 
 
10 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a group of committees, only meeting when the sovereign gra- 
 ciously deigned to summon them, and dispersing at his order. 
 The sovereign undoubtedly had the weight of tradition on his 
 side, for the crown was the power around which the institutions 
 of England had grown. It antedated the House of Commons by 
 centuries. But already before the death of Queen Elizabeth 
 the Commons were growing restive under strict royal patronage 
 and tutelage. They dared to speak their minds openly, while 
 the queen scolded them with tears of rage in her eyes, "Ye 
 durst not have treated my royal father so ! " With chivalrous 
 memory of the great things their queen had done for England, 
 the Commons forebore to press the quarrel. 
 
 But when the half-foreign dynasty of the Stuarts came to the 
 throne the quarrel broke out. Danger from the Spaniard was 
 past. Commercial wealth was multiplying wonderfully in the 
 land. The extravagance of the court made increasing demands 
 on the national purse. The Commons, recruited more and more 
 from the representatives of the new prosperity, resented the 
 thinly veiled tone of contempt in which the king addressed them, 
 criticized him for his subserviency to a worthless set of courtiers, 
 and made their grants of money contingent on the guarantee of 
 privileges which they claimed were as old as Magna Carta. 
 After a quarter of a century of wrangling over taxes and privi- 
 leges, during which seven Parliaments were called in desperation 
 and dismissed in anger, the king decided to do without a Parlia- 
 ment altogether. For eleven years ( 1 629-1 640) Charles I ruled 
 England with the advice and support of his courtiers alone, 
 squeezing the necessary revenues from a reluctant people by 
 every device discoverable by ingenious lawyers and servile offi- 
 cials, improvising fines for new offenses, reviving feudal dues 
 long obsolete, and even confiscating the private property of his 
 subjects under the fiction of a loan to the state. 
 
 It was exactly during the years from the opening of James I's 
 quarrel with Parliament to the close of Charles I's experi- 
 ment in personal government (1604-1640) that the foundations 
 of the American nation were laid. In those years the two colo- 
 nies of Virginia and Massachusetts, which in a large measure 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND II 
 
 established political and social precedents for all the later settle- 
 ments, were planted and took on a character which was to dis- 
 tinguish them down to the American Revolution. By 1640 these 
 colonies had each received about 15,000 emigrants from the 
 homeland, not landed nobles, royal judges, courtiers, and offi- 
 cials, who were the natural champions of the Stuart prerogative, 
 but men of the middle class, enterprising, inquiring, innovating 
 people, to whom the spectacle of a rich and developing state 
 serving the whim of an irresponsible monarch seemed an anach- 
 ronism. They were the political misfits of England. 
 
 They were religious misfits also. Puritanism and " independ- 
 ency," religious and political dissent, went hand in hand. It 
 was impossible that the children of the Reformation should re- 
 ject the authority of Pope and prelate without questioning that 
 of king and lord. Protestants who had fled from England during 
 the persecutions of Mary the Catholic, in the middle of the six- 
 teenth century, returned from Frankfort, Basel, Strassburg, and 
 Geneva under Elizabeth's milder rule, imbued with the indi- 
 vidualism of Calvin's theology. The habit of dissent from es- 
 tablished forms of religion grew, in spite of acts of uniformity 
 and threats of persecution. Under Elizabeth the Puritan lay- 
 men and lesser ministers were not seriously disturbed, but when 
 James Stuart began his reign by rejecting their petition for 
 freedom of worship and declaring that he would make them con- 
 form to the Anglican Church "or harry them out of the land," 
 the emigration began. 1 It became an exodus during the decade 
 of the personal government of Charles I, when Archbishop Laud 
 of Canterbury, with relentless diligence, exacted conformity in 
 faith and ritual, conceiving the Church, as Gardiner says, "not 
 as the temple of the Holy Ghost, but as the palace of an invisible' 
 king." Twenty thousand Puritans came to New England in the 
 "great migration" of those years, while Roman Catholics sought 
 
 a Even Virginia, which was founded as a commercial venture, and which is gen- 
 erally contrasted with the New England settlements for conscience' sake, narrowly 
 missed being a refuge for Puritans. Only a year after its foundation a number 
 of Puritans preparing to migrate thither were, through Archbishop Bancroft's 
 influence, forbidden by King James to leave the realm without his permission. 
 
12 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 refuge in Lord Baltimore's new colony. We have already 
 seen how the religious persecutions on the Continent in the 
 seventeenth century sent French Huguenots, German Pietists, 
 and Moravian brethren from the devastated Palatinate of the 
 Rhine. to add their strain of nonconforming blood to the popu- 
 lation of the proprietary colonies of New York, New Jersey, 
 Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. 
 
 It is impossible, of course, to say in exactly what proportion 
 the motives of commercial adventure, economic pressure, polit- 
 ical protest, and religious dissent were mixed in the emigrants 
 of the seventeenth century. The same John Winthrop who 
 thought it a shame "to suffer a whole continent to lie waste with- 
 out any improvement," and was himself "soe shortened" in his 
 estate as not to be able "to keep sail with his equals," and who 
 saw in the arbitrary sway of Charles I a sign that God 
 would "bring some heavye Affliction upon this land and that 
 speedy lye," asserted that the chief reason for going to New 
 England was to carry the gospel into America and "erect a bul- 
 wark against the kingdom of Anti-Christ." It is evident, how- 
 ever, that any of these motives singly or all together would 
 produce a society in which courage, endurance, self-reliance, 
 equality of opportunity, and jealousy of privilege would be 
 conspicuous traits ; and these traits, inherent in the very nature 
 of the emigrants from the Old World, would only be brought 
 into clearer relief by transplantation to the new home, where 
 life was arduous, dangerous, unvaried, and singularly exposed 
 to the inquisitorial judgment of one's neighbor. 
 
 Much has been written about the social and political contrasts 
 between the colonial groups: the Puritan self-governing com- 
 munities of New England, with the town as the unit of political 
 organization, with Church and school the outstanding social 
 institutions, and petty farming and extensive commerce the chief 
 industrial pursuits ; the Cavalier population of the South, with 
 its broad tobacco plantations, its Episcopalian aristocracy, and 
 its constant social commerce with England ; the middle group 
 of colonies, cosmopolitan in blood, varied in religion, contentious 
 in government, and keen for trade. These contrasts doubtless 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 13 
 
 existed and played an important part in the development of 
 the colonies. But far more important than the contrasts were the 
 similar tendencies and common conditions of colonial life. The 
 distance of the settlements from England, their virtual inde- 
 pendence of continuous control by the home government, the 
 need of finding their own resources for the development of the 
 new land and often for defense against the Indians, all served 
 to intensify in the whole body of colonists the radical traits of 
 the original settlers. 1 Radicalism in England was a mere epi- 
 sode in the turbulent history of the seventeenth century; in 
 America it rapidly became a tradition. Even Oliver Crom- 
 well condemned the " leveling politics" and religious anarchy 
 of Rhode Island. 
 
 The things in which the colonists agreed, then, were far more 
 significant than the things in which they differed. They spoke 
 the same language, they preserved and adapted to their own 
 use the same common law, 2 they brought the same traditions of 
 political evolution Magna Carta, the control of the purse, 
 Habeas Corpus, and the criticism of royal ministers. It was not 
 alone in Massachusetts, whose entire colonial history was an 
 apprenticeship in the art of independence, that the birthright of 
 Englishmen was cherished. Virginia began soon after its foun- 
 dation to concern itself with the preservation of its freedom. 
 The last House of Burgesses that met before the surrender of 
 the charter to the king (1624) decreed that no tax should be 
 laid on the colony without its consent, nor money spent without 
 
 1 The English government never made the colonies a paternal concern, as did 
 the European states. The king granted rights, but left to the corporations and 
 proprietors the expense of exploration and settlement. There were no English 
 fleets, like the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish, to convey colonial commerce ; 
 and even the English officials appointed by the crown to the colonies depended 
 for their salaries, with few exceptions, on freely elected assemblies. 
 
 2 Not only during the colonial period but even far down into our national 
 history it was recognized that the English common law was in force in America. 
 "Let an Englishman go where he will," said an English authority in 1720, "he 
 carries as much of law and liberty with him as the nature of things will bear." 
 And in 1815 Justice Story, of the United States Supreme Court, wrote, "We 
 take it to be a clear principle that the common law in force at the emigration 
 of our ancestors is deemed the birthright of the colonies." 
 
14 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 its authorization. A few years later (1635) the Virginians 
 deposed the king's governor, John Harvey, and sent him back to 
 England, an act called by Charles II "an assumption of royal 
 power." A few years later still (1652), when Oliver Cromwell 
 had sent over a warship to demand the surrender of the province 
 to Parliament, the Burgesses drew up a "treaty" with him in 
 which they declared that their submission was "voluntary," and 
 demanded a guarantee of free speech, free trade, and exemption 
 from all taxes not granted by their own body. If the Virginians 
 of the Restoration and the Hanoverian period were attached to 
 their king, their aristocracy, and their church, that attachment 
 never meant servility. When it came to the choice between their 
 interests and their attachment they were ready to sacrifice the 
 latter. The early history of the relations of the proprietors to 
 their settlers in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the 
 Carolinas furnishes many examples of the same spirit of jeal- 
 ousy of executive encroachments. "Among other detestable 
 ills," wrote George Chalmers of London, in 1780, "the American 
 climate seems always to have begotten a propensity to dis- 
 obedience." Edmund Burke had said five years before in 
 Parliament that the Americans were animated by a "fierce spirit 
 of liberty." 
 
 The economic and social life of the colonists was that of a 
 frontier community. They were a sparse population in a wide 
 land and a poor population on a virgin land. The forest and the 
 Indian, the rocky soil of the New England coast, and the 
 swamps and jungles of the South were the obstacles against 
 which they had to contend. The early years in most of the 
 colonies were a time of great hardship and privation, establish- 
 ing the tradition that it was a sifted people, "picked out. by a 
 strange contrivance of God," who were the founders of the 
 American nation. There were no manufactures to gather the 
 people into cities, for land was abundant and cheap, while labor 
 was scarce and dear. Boston, the largest town of the seven- 
 teenth century, was a fishing-port and a mart of trade with the 
 West Indies and the Old World. In New England generally the 
 people were gathered in little communities seldom reaching a 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 15 
 
 thousand souls. The land was divided among the farmers in 
 small holdings, and community life, as it centered in the town 
 meeting and the church, was intensely vigorous and critical. 
 In Virginia the early devotion of the colony to the growing of 
 tobacco, in spite of the efforts of the king and the company to 
 foster a more wholesome and varied production, led to the 
 occupation of large tracts of land by the planters and made im- 
 possible the establishment of the town, with its local democratic 
 features of meetinghouse and public school. On "court days" 
 the squires would ride from miles around to the county seat and 
 make a holiday with races, games, and flights of electioneering 
 oratory. But a continuous round of meetings and classes was 
 impossible in a region where one's neighbor's house was visible 
 only through a field glass. The Virginia holdings averaged 450 
 acres in the middle of the seventeenth century and over 900 
 acres at the end of it, while patents of 20,000, 30,000, or even 
 40,000 acres were not unknown. At the close of the Stuart 
 period a few thousand planters in Virginia had title to lands 
 equal in area to the whole of England. These estates descended 
 from father to eldest son by right of primogeniture until the time 
 of the American Revolution, and naturally engendered an aris- 
 tocracy of untitled squires. The middle colonies, except for the 
 great patroonships along the Hudson, corresponded more closely 
 in economic structure to New England than to the Southern 
 colonies. There was little tobacco culture ; the soil was glaci- 
 ated ; farming was the common occupation of the mixed popu- 
 lation, while the Hudson opened an artery for the valuable fur 
 trade. The beaver became the emblem of New York, as the 
 "sacred codfish" did of Boston. 
 
 The Puritan settlers of New England were keen for popular 
 education. Harvard College was established six years after 
 Winthrop's company landed, and a law of the Bay Colony, 
 passed in 1649, provided that every town of fifty householders 
 must furnish a teacher of reading and writing, and every town 
 of one hundred families a grammar school preparing for the 
 college, "to the end that Learning may not be buried in the 
 graves of our fore Fathers in Church and Commonwealth, 
 
1 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the Lord assisting our Endeavors." But "learning" for the New 
 England Puritan was synonymous with theology. Intense as his 
 intellectual life was, it was not so broad as that of the educated 
 man of the Southern provinces. The explosive remark of an 
 irritable old governor of Virginia, "I thank God there are no 
 free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them in 
 a hundred years," has been quoted again and again to prove that 
 the Old Dominion was illiterate. But in spite of Governor 
 Berkeley's deplorable piety of ignorance, William and Mary 
 College was established in 1693, from whose halls have come 
 four of the presidents of the United States. Addison, Pope, Con- 
 greve, Steele, Beaumont, and Shakespeare graced the shelves of 
 private libraries, which, like Colonel Byrd's of Westover, some- 
 times ran into the thousands of volumes. Our French visitor 
 the Duke of Rochefoucauld in 1795 thought that "a taste for 
 reading was more prevalent among the gentlemen of the first 
 class in Virginia than in any other part of America." The 
 Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg, where 
 many of the early acts of the Revolution were planned, may 
 share with Faneuil Hall of Boston the claim to be the "cradle 
 of American liberty." Still, the public-school system, which 
 spread from New England to the middle colonies, did not touch 
 the region south of Mason and Dixon's line. 1 It is only since 
 the Civil War that the Southern states have grappled seriously 
 with the problems of the free public school. 
 
 Although the usual seventeenth-century idea of a Church 
 established and maintained by the authority of the state pre- 
 vailed in all of the colonies except Rhode Island and Pennsyl- 
 vania, it was only in Massachusetts and Connecticut that 
 religion was cherished with persecuting ardor and that the clergy 
 became autocrats not only in questions of doctrine and morals 
 but in practical politics as well. Perhaps the most deplorable 
 
 1 The last royal governor of North Carolina (Martin) said that there were but 
 two public schools in the colony in his day. The more prosperous colony of South 
 Carolina had only three grammar schools in the eighteenth century. Noah 
 Webster asserts that in 1785 Connecticut alone had a greater output of news- 
 papers than all the states south of Mason and Dixon's line. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 17 
 
 chapters in our colonial annals are the grim but fascinating 
 pictures of Puritan intolerance, in which the common human 
 passions and affections struggle to pierce the cold mists of a 
 repellent Calvinism, like the veiled sun on a late November 
 afternoon. The "saints" of Massachusetts had nothing to learn 
 from Archbishop Laud in " keeping the Lord's temple unde- 
 filed." In a convention held at Newtown (Cambridge) only 
 seven years after Winthrop's company arrived, they found 
 eighty-two "damnable errors and heresies" in the colony, which 
 were punished with suitable whippings, fines, and imprison- 
 ments. They banished clergymen who attempted to use the 
 prayer book like bishops, "those biting beasts and whelps of the 
 Roman litter, those knobs and wens and bunchy Popish flesh." 
 They drove Roger Williams out into the snows of a New Eng- 
 land winter to find a refuge among the more merciful Indians. 
 They hanged Quakers on Boston Common and yielded to a 
 perfect panic of persecuting zeal when a few poor old toothless, 
 mumbling women were convicted of being the agents of Satan 
 in bewitching the senses of the people of God. Nineteen persons 
 were hanged and one old man was crushed to death under 
 weights before the enormity of the witchcraft delusion was 
 exorcised from the minds of the Massachusetts magistrates 
 (1692). To understand the typical Puritan of seventeenth- 
 century Boston one should read the diary of Judge Samuel 
 Sewall, prominent in the witchcraft hunt though later repent- 
 ing, and see him at his "awful but pleasing Christmas diversion" 
 of arranging the coffins in the family vault, or deliberately 
 driving his careless young son, by "strong representations of 
 hell," into a terrified conviction of original sin, or pressing his 
 third courtship with a slyly amorous pomposity. 
 
 The Church of England was generally established in the 
 colonies of the South, but religion was rather an amenity than 
 a stern duty in those regions. The intense speculation and dog- 
 matic interest and the inquisitorial guardianship of society 
 which characterized Puritan New England were lacking. The 
 Episcopal Church of Virginia and the Carolinas has been called 
 with kindly humor "a gentlemen's club with a faint interest in 
 
1 8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 religion." The middle colonies showed a mingling of types in 
 religion as in political and industrial life. Anglicanism came as 
 far north as New York ; Puritanism went as far south as Mary- 
 land. The two colonies which remained under the government 
 of proprietors until the American Revolution (Maryland and 
 Pennsylvania-Delaware) were founded as refuges for the two 
 extreme forms of religious faith and worship: Maryland for 
 the Roman Catholics, Pennsylvania for the Quakers. But the 
 leveling influences of British trade and a varied immigration 
 soon showed themselves in these colonies. Lord Baltimore had 
 invited people of all religious faiths to come to his colony, forbid- 
 ding only "unreasonable disputations on points of religion tend- 
 ing to the disturbance of the public peace" ; and before the end 
 of the seventeenth century the Catholics in his province were 
 outnumbered by the Protestants more than two to one. Penn 
 was forbidden by his charter to exclude Episcopalians from 
 his province. But the prohibition was unnecessary, for the 
 Quaker proprietor welcomed good men of every creed and prac- 
 tice in religion. Even Roman Catholics, who were excluded 
 from the colonies quite generally, 1 were allowed in Pennsyl- 
 vania, although the officials were scolded by the proprietor for 
 "suffering the scandal of the mass to be publickly celebrated." 
 A visitor traveling through the colonies at the close of the 
 seventeenth century would cross miles of wilderness by rude 
 roads between little groups of settlements which formed the 
 nuclei of our states. He would meet few fellow travelers, as 
 his horse brushed the branches of encroaching maples or waded 
 the muddy creeks, for such intercolonial trade as there was went 
 by the coast waters. He would find a fairly homogeneous 
 population of farmers, growing poorer and sparser as they 
 pushed the first feeble wave of what was destined to be a mighty 
 
 ifiesides Maryland the only colonies that tolerated the Catholics were Rhode 
 Island and Pennsylvania. The reason was political rather than dogmatic. The 
 Catholics quite generally refused to take the oath to support the Protestant 
 throne in England, against which the Pope had launched his anathema in the 
 sixteenth century. The oath called for a disavowal of the Pope's act, which a 
 good Catholic could not make. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 19 
 
 flood of westward migration against the foothills of the Alle- 
 ghenies. He would discover that the pioneers of the "back 
 country" were already of a somewhat hostile disposition to the 
 richer merchants and planters of the coast region, who lent them 
 money at high rates of interest and seemed singularly unrespon- 
 sive to their efforts to extend the colony's territory. Still, the 
 wide chasm that yawns in our present-day civilization between 
 rich and poor he would not find. The slum-dweller and the 
 multimillionaire were alike unknown to the seventeenth century, 
 for the great industrial age which has gathered our people into 
 the cities where the slums are bred and our capital into the hands 
 of promoters of industry on a world scale had not yet dawned. 
 He might see a "common scold" gagged and set in her own door- 
 way as a warning to passers-by, or a youth having his tongue 
 bored through with a hot skewer for swearing, or a criminal on 
 the scaffold being terrorized by the minister's vivid description 
 of the everlasting torture into which he would presently be 
 launched as the noose tightened around his neck. For the age 
 was not delicate in act or speech. In most of the colonies a score 
 and more of crimes and sins were punishable by death, while the 
 stocks, public whippings, brandings, and mutilations were the 
 edifying chastisements for minor offenses. 
 
 We look back on these early settlers of America as the found- 
 ers of a nation, viewing their struggles and hardships, their first 
 steps in self-government, their courageous challenge to the wil- 
 derness, in the light of subsequent events which made us a free, 
 united, democratic people. But if the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence and the Constitution of the United States were latent in the 
 Virginia assembly and the New England town meetings, the col- 
 onists could not know it. They came to these shores with a much 
 more modest purpose than the establishment of a mighty repub- 
 lic. They were groups of refugees seeking an asylum from 
 religious coercion, or business adventurers seeking first the gold, 
 gems, and silks of the Orient and falling into contentment with 
 the more prosaic products of furs, fish, tobacco, lumber, and 
 rice. They were the first Americans, but they were already 
 Englishmen of the seventeenth century ; and in spite of all their 
 
20 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 quarrel with the religious and political establishments of that 
 century, they breathed its economic and social atmosphere. 
 They were not liberal, tolerant, or humane*, as we understand 
 those words. Even in the colony in which Puritanism reigned 
 supreme the logical results of Puritanism political and social 
 equality were far from being realized. During the first half- 
 century of its existence the Massachusetts colony admitted 
 only about one in five of its adult males to the political privi- 
 leges of "freemen." Governor John Winthrop spoke of the 
 "commons" and the "meaner sort" much as an English lord 
 might have done, and John Cotton said that he did "not con- 
 ceive that God did ordain democracy as a fit government either 
 for Church or Commonwealth." 1 
 
 But the fathers builded better than they knew. Separated by 
 the wide ocean from the autocracies and aristocracies of the Old 
 World, from its imposing ecclesiastical establishments and its 
 incessant political rivalries, confronted with the stern practical 
 tasks of building their new homes, of providing defense against 
 the Indians, of devising forms of government and justice, of de- 
 veloping lines of commerce, of assimilating newcomers of varied 
 race and faith, the colonists learned gradually to lay aside the 
 stiffness of manner and theory that characterized the English- 
 man of the seventeenth century and became democratic, in- 
 ventive, quick-witted, confident. They ceased to be Englishmen 
 and became Americans. 
 
 BRITISH CONTROL IN THE COLONIES 
 
 Because the American colonies broke away from the mother 
 country by armed revolution in the last quarter of the eighteenth 
 century, it has been too common a practice among historians 
 to regard the whole colonial period in the light of that event, 
 representing England as a kind of stepmother endeavoring to 
 
 1 Winthrop wrote to Thomas Hooker, the founder of the Connecticut colony, 
 in 1638 advising against consulting the people at large in the government, " quia 
 the best part is always the least and of that best part the wiser part is always the 
 lesser." Cotton found sanction in the Bible for life tenure for higher magistrates. 
 The great mass of the inhabitants of Massachusetts, says Osgood, were " mutes." 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 21 
 
 impose her harsh will on her reluctant adolescent children. This 
 is an entire misconception of the situation. The colonies were 
 part and parcel of the English state. Their settlers were in 
 overwhelming majority English subjects, who carried with them 
 the language, law, institutions, and traditions of England. If 
 the colonies are called "foreign plantations" in the official lan- 
 guage of the time, the adjective in the phrase is used in its literal 
 sense of "distant," and not at all as a synonym of "alien." They 
 were not conquered provinces on whose inhabitants England 
 was seeking to put the imprint of her civilization (as we are 
 attempting to do in the Philippines, for example), but rather 
 outlying parts of a nation that had just become very conscious 
 of its unity. That the union between the colonies and the 
 mother country was severed was due neither to deliberate op- 
 pression nor to willful provocation on England's part, but rather 
 to certain features in the government of England ; namely, jth& 
 lack of developed organs of colonial administration, the stormy 
 political history of the Stuart dynasty, and the prevalence of the 
 so-called mercantile theory of trade. As the failure of England 
 to secure and maintain effective control of the colonies is the 
 basic fact of American history, we may profitably examine the 
 causes of that failure. 
 
 In accordance with the accepted doctrine of the age of dis- 
 covery, mariners and explorers were in the king's service, and 
 the lands which they might find were taken possession of in the 
 name and for the use of the sovereign. So John Cabot's discovery 
 of Labrador in 1497 constituted the title of the English crown to 
 the whole continent of America. 1 During the seventeenth 
 
 lf This was a principle on which the English acted consistently throughout 
 our colonial history. In 1623 they complained of the Dutch established on the 
 Hudson as "interlopers." The charter of Charles II to the Duke of York in 1664 
 granted as "unoccupied territory" land that had been settled by the Dutch for 
 fifty years. The French governor of Canada, anticipated by Dongan in the 
 occupation of the upper Hudson, complained that "the king of England did 
 grasp at all America." And Washington, in his embassy to the French com- 
 manders in the wilderness of what is now western Pennsylvania (1753), was 
 ordered by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to warn them off of territory "so 
 notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great Britain." 
 
22 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 century the Stuart kings parceled out the American coast to va- 
 rious chartered companies or individual proprietors or boards of 
 proprietors, granting them not only the right to the soil but also 
 various powers of government. The king never meant that 
 either soil or inhabitants should pass out of the control of the 
 crown. Companies and proprietors exercised only a delegated 
 authority. We have constant examples in the early history o.f 
 the colonies of the interposition of the will of the king. IJe 
 stopped emigrant vessels in the Thames, requiring the pas- 
 sengers to take the oath of allegiance before sailing for America. 
 He repeatedly sent commissioners to the colonies to carry his 
 royal commands and to conduct investigations of the govern- 
 ment. He ordered his law officers to bring action in the English 
 courts to annul the charters of Virginia and Massachusetts, and 
 even without the formality of a legal process resumed the 
 powers of government which he had granted to Lord Baltimore 
 and William Penn. 1 
 
 But if the theory of the king's sovereignty in the colonies was 
 complete, the exercise of it was far from perfect. Organs of 
 administration were lacking both in the colonies and in England 
 to maintain the authority of the crown. For fifty years and 
 more after the settlement of Jamestown there was no permanent 
 ' body or committee in the English state whose business it was 
 to supervise the colonies; neither was there during that same 
 half-century a single colony on the mainland of America (with 
 the exception of Virginia after 1624) in which there was a single 
 official appointed by the English crown and directly responsible 
 thereto. From time to time under the early Stuarts (1603- 
 1649) an d the Interregnum (1649-1660) committees or boards 
 of privy councilors, merchants or members of Parliament, were 
 charged with colonial business. For example, a Council of Trade 
 was appointed by James I in 1622 "to see how our laws do now 
 
 1 William III, because of "great neglect and miscarriage in the government" 
 of Pennsylvania, exposing the colony to danger from the French, put Penn's 
 colony under the governor of New York for two years (1692-1694). Maryland, 
 taken by the crown in 1690, was not restored until the fifth Lord Baltimore 
 turned Protestant (1715). 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 23 
 
 stand in force for prohibiting of merchandise to be carried in 
 forraine bottoms." A commission of twelve privy councilors 
 was created by Charles I in 1634 with most extensive "power 
 of protection and government" over the colonies, including even 
 the right to remove colonial governors and visit offenses against 
 the king with the death penalty. A board of six lords and 
 twelve commoners (including the great names of John Pym 
 and Oliver Cromwell) was appointed by the Long Parlia- 
 ment in 1643, with power to remove colonial officials. But 
 the actual interference of these boards and committees with 
 the affairs of the colonies was slight. Immersed in the tur- 
 bulent stream of English politics, separated by the ocean 
 from the American colonies, the councilors generally took the 
 view expressed by an eighteenth-century writer that the " plan- 
 tations were but inconsiderable and distant parcels" of the 
 British domain. It was only on the eve of the American Revo-| 
 lution that a special department of state was created to deal! 
 with colonial affairs and Lord Hillsborough was placed at its 
 head (1768). 
 
 Parliament counted for next to nothing in the government of 
 the colonies in the seventeenth century. For a full half of the 
 time between James I's accession and the civil war it was not in 
 session, and even when it was in session it was fully occupied in 
 endeavoring to assert its rights against the Stuart prerogative. 
 On the one or two occasions on which Parliament showed any 
 inclination to interfere in colonial questions (for example, the 
 control of the American fisheries in 1621 or the investigation of 
 the charges brought against Virginia in 1624) it was rebuked 
 by the king and told that such matters were reserved exclusively 
 for his privy council. The civil war brought the famous Long 
 Parliament to the top for a few years, when an ambitious plan 
 of colonial control was announced. But political and religious 
 faction was so rife that Cromwell extinguished the liberties 
 of Parliament as completely as either of his Stuart predeces- 
 sors had done. With the Restoration of 1660 Parliament be- 
 came an almost continuous body and began in earnest to enact 
 laws for the regulation of colonial trade and to recommend 
 
24 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 investigations of colonial administration. But by that time the 
 political habits of the colonies were fixed. 
 
 During the whole of the seventeenth century the conflicting 
 authorities of crown and Parliament, of royal prerogative and 
 representative legislation, of government by divine will and 
 government by the will of the nation, were engaged in a bitter 
 struggle in England. It is not surprising, then, that there was 
 no effective assertion of either of these types of authority in the 
 colonies. Every time that the king set out to assert his authority 
 in the colonies he was thwarted by the turn of political events in 
 England. Charles I came to the throne proclaiming his "full 
 resolution that there be one uniform Course of Government in 
 and through our whole Monarchic." The careful instructions 
 to his royal governor in Virginia (1628), the appointment of a 
 commission of privy councilors on colonial affairs (1634), the 
 proceedings instituted to deprive Massachusetts of her charter 
 (1635), and the appointment of a special customs officer in 
 Virginia (1636) all point to a policy of royal control. But at the 
 critical moment the outbreak of the Scottish rebellion diverted 
 Charles from his purpose and involved him in a civil war which 
 was to end only with his execution. The Interregnum was a 
 period of such instability that Cromwell, in spite of a sincere 
 interest in the colonies, was unable to develop any consistent 
 policy of dealing with them in his short tenure of power. Of 
 course, as a Puritan, his sympathies were with New England, 
 where the powerful colony of Massachusetts Bay needed no 
 lessons in " independency" from the master of the English 
 Independents. 1 
 
 A very vigorous policy of colonial regulation was initiated at 
 the accession of Charles II. Standing councils for trade and 
 plantations were created, in order that "so many remote colonies 
 
 X A curious attempt at the exercise of dictatorial power in the colonies was 
 made by Cromwell when he tried to remove the entire population of Massa- 
 chusetts to the island of Jamaica, which he had conquered from Spain (1655). 
 He had to reduce Virginia to obedience by show of force, Governor Berkeley 
 calling the parliamentary leaders "bloody tyrants" and declaring that Virginia 
 did not "conceive allegiance due to every faction which might possess itself of 
 Westminster Hall." 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 25 
 
 and governments, so many ways considerable to our crown and 
 dignity, should be collected and brought under such a uniform 
 inspection and conduct that we may better supply our royal 
 counsells to their future regulation, securitie, and improve- 
 ment." At the same time Parliament began to legislate for 
 colonial trade by the famous Navigation Acts (which we shall 
 notice presently), passed in 1660 and 1663. Furthermore, in 
 the first four years of his reign Charles II gave charters to 
 Connecticut and Rhode Island, conferred the vast grant of 
 Carolina on a board of eight proprietors, granted the land be- 
 tween the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers to his brother, the 
 Duke of York, and sent a commission of four men to the north- 
 ern colonies (which Lord Clarendon declared were already 
 "hardening into republics") to inquire into their religious, 
 political, and economic condition and to make them understand 
 once for all that the king's authority must be respected. "The 
 King did not grant away his Soveraigntie over you when he made 
 you a corporation," said the commissioners to the Massachusetts 
 magistrates. 
 
 But again European events intervened to postpone the exe- 
 cution of this vigorous colonial policy of the early years of 
 Charles II. Lord Clarendon fell from power in 1667 and Eng- 
 land joined Holland and Sweden in the Triple Alliance against 
 Louis XIV. A tumultuous period followed, filled with Dutch 
 wars, Exclusion Bills, and Popish Plots, with fears of France 
 and Rome, and factions of Whig and Tory. When order was 
 restored and the succession to the throne assured to the Duke 
 of York, the policy of colonial regulation was again resumed. 
 The Massachusetts charter was taken away by Charles II in 
 1684, and his brother James, who came to the throne the next 
 year, proceeded to confiscate the other charters and to unite the 
 northern colonies from Mount Desert to Delaware Bay in a 
 single great viceroyalty under Sir Edmund Andros. 
 
 The career of Andros (1686-1689), who was not an "odious 
 tyrant" but an able and conscientious servant, is one of the best- 
 known and most important episodes in all our colonial history. 
 It marks the climax of the Stuart policy in America. Had this 
 
26 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 most ambitious plan of colonial control in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury succeeded, every charter in the colonies would have been 
 annulled, royal officials would have taken the place of elected 
 officers, the courts would have been only inferior jurisdictions 
 with appeal to England, the viceroyal council would have framed 
 and promulgated all the laws, English "redcoats" (sixty of, 
 whom had come over in the man-of-war with Andros) would 
 have formed the nucleus of a mixed army in the colonies, Eng- 
 lish men-of-war would have patrolled the American coast, the 
 Anglican Church would have been established in the stronghold 
 of Puritanism, taxes would have been arbitrarily levied by order 
 of the governor and council, the ungranted land of the province 
 would have been resumed by the crown, and quitrents would 
 have been collected from the occupied portions as a sign and 
 symbol of English sovereignty. 1 But the structure of abso- 
 lutism reared by Andros in the colonies went down with the col- 
 lapse of Stuart despotism in England. Under the new king, 
 William III, defender of Parliament and Protestantism, of 
 Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, every American colony 
 was assured of its legislative assembly, its free tenure of 
 land, its unimpeded administration of justice, and its liberty of 
 worship. 
 
 1 The quitrent was a small land tax paid to the crown in England. As the 
 name implies, it was a commutation or relief, to be "quit" of the feudal dues 
 of the medieval period. The king generally made over to the proprietors of the 
 American provinces this right of collecting quitrents, but as the colonists 
 repudiated all feudal obligations as barbarous and outgrown, they saw no 
 reason why they should be taxed for their commutation. The quitrent, there- 
 fore, was resisted successfully in all the colonies except Maryland. In England 
 the quitrent might be in the nature of a relief, but in America it looked like a 
 plain tax. There was no sign of the quitrent in New England, and when Andros 
 revived the doctrine that the soil belonged to the crown and called the Indian 
 signatures to deeds to be of no more account than "a scratch of a bear's paw," 
 the Reverend John Higginson of Salem replied for the men of the colony, "We 
 received only the right and power of Government from the King's Charter . . . 
 but the right of the Land and Soil we received from God according to his 
 Grand Charter to the Sons of Adam and Noah, and with the consent of 
 the Native Inhabitants." This supernal charter could hardly hold good in 
 English law. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 27 
 
 Thus, four times in the seventeenth century in the decades 
 beginning with the years 1631, 1651, 1661, 1681 England 
 entered on a more or less vigorous colonial policy, and four 
 times political exigencies thwarted her plans. 1 Meantime, while 
 England blew hot and cold, the colonies were steadily develop- 
 ing from what were originally trading companies or bands of 
 refugees into political communities, more and more conscious 
 of their social and economic interests, more and more jealous 
 of the rights of their popular assemblies, more and more 
 thoroughly equipped with both the organs and the habits of 
 self-government. 
 
 Whether this development could have been hindered, had the 
 English government consistently realized it (as did a few men 
 in England, like Gorges, Mason, and Randolph), is a question 
 that it is useless to discuss. The fact is that the English govern- 
 ment did not realize it. England persisted in viewing the colo- 
 nies primarily as areas of production and marts of trade, and to 
 this view she subordinated all her theories of political control. 
 This misconception of the true nature of colonies was not due 
 to caprice or deliberate oppression on England's part. It was 
 the generally accepted idea of overseas colonies, fitting the 
 prevalent " mercantile theory" in economics, which held that 
 a nation's prosperity was measured by the amount of precious 
 metals that it could amass by favorable trade balances. To sell 
 abroad, therefore, as much as possible for money, and to buy 
 abroad with its own manufactures such raw materials or such 
 indispensable supplies for its navy or food for its people as 
 it could not produce at home, was every country's ideal of 
 commerce. And the value of colonies was that they furnished 
 at the same time both the raw materials, foodstuffs, and sup- 
 plies that the home country needed and the market for her 
 
 ir That England's policy, however, stiffened in this period is shown by a com- 
 parison of the charters granted to Lord Baltimore (1632) and William Penn 
 (1680). Baltimore was given virtually unlimited powers in his province, while 
 Penn was obliged to keep an agent in London, to admit Anglicans to his colony, 
 and to submit to the right of the king to veto his laws and of Parliament to 
 tax his people. 
 
28 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 manufactured goods. Scholars have called the policy which tried 
 to realize this ideal of commerce the "Old Colonial System." 
 From the day when James I prohibited the planters of Virginia 
 and the Somers Islands from sending their tobacco to any coun- 
 try but England (1621) down to the outbreak of the American 
 Revolution a century and a half later, the trade of the colonies 
 was regulated by various Orders in Council and statutes of 
 Parliament. The most important of these regulations are con- 
 tained in the Navigation Acts, or Acts of Trade, of the second 
 half of the seventeenth century. They laid the basis of the Old 
 Colonial System and were, in the clauses which applied to 
 America, briefly as follows : 
 
 1. An act of 1651, forbidding the products of Asia, Africa, and 
 America to be carried to ports within the dominion of England except 
 in vessels owned and in major part manned by English subjects ; and 
 forbidding the goods of Europe to be brought to such ports except in 
 English ships or ships belonging to the country in which the goods 
 were produced or to the ports from which they were usually shipped. 1 
 
 2. An act of 1660, reenacting the provisions of the act of 1651, and 
 also specifying certain important products of the plantations, called 
 "enumerated commodities," including tobacco, sugar, cotton, wool, 
 indigo, ginger, and dyes, which could be exported from the colonies 
 only to England or to other colonies of England. Ships leaving an 
 English port for the American colonies had to give a bond with the 
 chief customs officer of the port that if they loaded in the colonies 
 with any of the enumerated articles, they would bring them back 
 directly to England ; and ships from Europe visiting the colonies had 
 to deposit a similar bond with the governor of the colony in whose 
 port they were lading. 2 
 
 act, aimed against the carrying trade of the Dutch, did not hinder the 
 colonies from buying or selling where they pleased in Europe if the vessels they 
 traded in were British built, owned, and manned. 
 
 2 This important act determined not only the kind of vessels in which colonial 
 goods should be carried but also the destination of certain of these goods. The 
 student will note, however, that with the exception of tobacco the enumerated 
 articles of 1660 are all products of the West Indies rather than of the American 
 mainland. They were articles which did nbt compete with English production, 
 henqe they had a favored market in the mother country. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 29 
 
 3. An act of 1663, providing that all goods imported into the Amer- 
 ican colonies (except salt for the fisheries, provisions, horses and servants 
 from Ireland and Scotland, and wines from Madeira and the Azores) 
 must first be brought into English ports and there be reshipped. 1 
 
 4. An act of 1672, providing that specified duties should be col- 
 lected in the colonies on all enumerated articles loaded on ships whose 
 masters did not give *the bond required by the act of 1660. Those 
 duties should be paid in the colonies, at such places and to such 
 officers as the commissioners of customs in England might designate. 2 
 
 5. An act of 1696, reaffirming the acts of Charles II's reign and 
 containing stringent clauses for securing the responsibility of revenue 
 officers, with penalties for smuggling or false registry ; and authoriz- 
 ing collectors and inspectors to visit and search ships, wharves, or 
 warehouses to seize unlawful merchandise. 3 
 
 Now these measures of the Old Colonial System were enacted 
 not at all for the purpose of injuring the colonies, but rather of 
 mutually benefiting the trade of the colonies and the mother 
 country. They even contained liberal concessions to America 
 in the way of drawbacks, bounties, and prohibition of Euro- 
 pean competition in the British markets. But for all that, they 
 proved burdensome to the Americans from the outset. The 
 English market became less and less adequate to absorb the 
 colonial tobacco crop. 4 The duties collected on the enumerated 
 
 i-This act made England the "staple" for colonial trade. The duties collected 
 in English ports on European goods destined for the colonies protected the Brit- 
 ish merchants from competition. On articles which did not compete with British 
 production the duties were generally remitted, on reshipment to the colonies, by 
 a system of "drawbacks." 
 
 2 This was the first act imposing duties to be collected in the colonies by 
 revenue officials appointed in England. Such officials were actually designated 
 in Virginia, the Carolinas, New York, and Massachusetts. 
 
 3 This severe act of 1696, says Professor Edward Channing, "added the 
 finishing touch to the colonial system so far as shipping was concerned. . . . 
 All further shipping laws were in the nature of detailed regulations" to carry 
 out the law of 1696. The text of the acts above tabulated may be found most 
 conveniently in Professor William MacDonald's "Select Charters Illustrative of 
 American History, 1606-1775," Nos. 22, 23, 28, 34, 43. 
 
 4 The 20,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco exported in 1619 grew to 28,000,000 
 pounds (Virginia and Maryland) by the close of the century. The colonists 
 were not allowed to sell an ounce of this to Europe; but England, after 
 
30 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 articles in England were high, and it was both a nuisance and 
 an expense for vessels carrying nonenumerated goods from the 
 colonies direct to Europe (as they had a right to do) to be 
 obliged to bring their return cargoes home by way of England 
 (act of 1663) and to suffer all the delay and damage incident 
 to transshipment. Worst of all, enforcement of the acts would 
 inevitably mean a stricter political control of the colonies, 
 a closer relationship between the governors and the crown, 
 the multiplication of royal officials in the colonies, and perhaps 
 even the presence of English warships in American waters. 
 
 "It was far more easy/' says a historian of the eighteenth 
 century, "to enact these various laws than to enforce their 
 punctual execution. Even the best-affected colonies, Barba- 
 dos, Virginia, Maryland, considering them as inconsistent 
 with their privileges and destructive of their infant commerce, 
 hesitated to obey or eluded their provisions." As for the 
 worse-affected colonies of New England, "which trafficked 
 without restraint wherever hope of gain attracted their navi- 
 gators," and which, according to a petition of English mer- 
 chants to Parliament, were diverting annually 60,000 of 
 revenue from the treasury by their infractions of the Naviga- 
 tion Acts, it is enough to read the angry complaint of Edward 
 Randolph, who was appointed the first collector of customs in 
 Massachusetts (1680) : "I am received at Boston more like a 
 spy than one of his Majesty's servants. ... It is in every 
 man's mouth that they, are not subject to the laws of England, 
 nor are they of any force in Massachusetts until confirmed by 
 them, and that yore Maty had nothing to do with them, they 
 were a free people." 1 The Navigation Acts were proclaimed 
 with beat of drum in the market place at Boston, but they were 
 
 collecting the duty on it, reexported 17,580,000 pounds, or over 60 per cent of 
 the crop, to Europe. 
 
 !R. N. Toppan, "Edward Randolph," Vol. Ill, pp. 54-64. A curious confirma- 
 tion comes from another source in the same year. Patoulet, a French intendant 
 in the West Indies, wrote to Colbert, "The English who dwell near Boston will 
 not worry themselves about the prohibitions which the King of England may 
 issue, because they hardly recognise his authority" (George Louis Beer, "The 
 Old Colonial System," Pt. I, Vol. II, p. 310). 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 3! 
 
 not heeded. King Charles seized the charter of Massachusetts, 
 and King James sent Andros to make Boston the capital of a 
 viceroyal province in America ; but it was all of no avail. The 
 New England colonies were already, in the despairing phrase 
 of Lord Clarendon, " hardening into republics." 
 
 Thus we have seen that neither the political nor the economic 
 control of the American colonies by England was realized in 
 the seventeenth century. They should have reenforced each 
 other in an efficient system. As early as 1623 a member of the 
 Virginia Company urged a stricter regulation of the colony's 
 trade by the crown, "mutual commerce being the strongest 
 bond that will unite Virginia to this state." Again, under the 
 Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1656) an influential mer- 
 chant named Povey presented an " Overture" to the Council 
 of State, with the purpose of consolidating the economic re- 
 sources of the realm in its war with Spain: "to reduce all 
 Collonies and Plantations to a more certaine civill and uniforme 
 waie of Government and distribution of publick justice . . . 
 that our shipping may be increased, our poore here employed, 
 and our manufactures encouraged . . . and by generall con- 
 sequences hereof a considerable Revenue may be raised to his 
 Highness." As it became evident that the Acts of Trade, so far 
 from bringing the colonies into closer political dependence on 
 England, needed themselves just that condition of colonial 
 dependence in order to be effective, the English government 
 set itself seriously to work in the latter half of the seventeenth 
 century to supply the deficiency. But the colonies were already 
 in a sense beyond English control. Self-direction was growing 
 into a habit with them, not so much from any deliberate plan 
 as from the simple facts of their situation and settlement. For 
 we must remember that the colonies were separated by three 
 thousand miles of ocean from the homeland, and that even 
 under the most favorable conditions it took three months 
 for a communication and answer to pass between them ; x and, 
 
 see how this delay encouraged the "passive resistance" of the colonies 
 to unwelcome orders of the king. The commissioners sent out in 1664 report 
 the men of Massachusetts as saying that "they can easily spin out seven years 
 
32 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 furthermore, that the American colonies of England were not, 
 like the distant colonies of the continental nations, founded, 
 maintained, and garrisoned at public expense, but were adven- 
 tures of private initiative, bound to the king by allegiance but 
 not beholden to him for support. 1 
 
 Again, the colonists brought with them the habit of local 
 government in seventeenth-century England : its county courts, 
 its parish vestries, its municipal mayors and aldermen, its jus- 
 tices of the peace, its constables, wardens, and tithingmen. 
 This all engendered a political alertness which was in striking 
 contrast to the leveling and lulling despotism of the French 
 and Spanish colonial administration. Being used to manage 
 so much of their own business, in local meetings or provincial 
 assemblies, the colonists naturally wished to manage all their 
 own business. They developed much farther in the direction 
 of independent statehood than any English county could, be- 
 cause large powers of government were granted by the king's 
 charters to the companies or proprietors that founded them, 
 and the royal officials in the colonies were very few until the 
 appointment of customs officers to enforce the Navigation Act 
 of 1672. 
 
 Finally, even such delegated authority of the crown as there 
 was in the colonies was wholly executive in character, whereas 
 the colonists looked to their elected assemblies as the directive 
 institution in their political life. Governors, councils, judges, 
 treasurers, collectors, surveyors all were there to carry out the 
 will of the people. We find this theory of government advanced 
 not only in " republican" New England but also in proprietary 
 
 in writing, and before that time a change may come." Charles II informed 
 them that "his Majesty did not think of treating with his own subjects as with 
 strangers." But geographically they were strangers, nevertheless, and they 
 maintained their "diplomatic attitude" with striking success. 
 
 1 Sandys of the Virginia Company protested as early as 1623 against the 
 British monopoly of Virginia tobacco: "Our Plantations were both settled and 
 supported by the charge of private adventurers." The Massachusetts Assistants, 
 in 1649, declared that their duty to England was acquitted with the payment of 
 one fifth of the gold and silver mined in the colony and with prayers for 
 England's welfare ! 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 33 
 
 Maryland and royal Virginia. The English Parliament had 
 to wage a long and bitter fight in the seventeenth century to 
 defend certain fundamental liberties against the encroachment 
 of the royal prerogative. The American colonies, in a remote 
 and virgin land, were relieved of the weight of that prerogative. 
 With royal and proprietary appointees dependent on the grants 
 of their assemblies for their very bread, with a trade rapidly 
 outgrowing and successfully defying the restraints put upon 
 it by the home government, with increasing neglect and con- 
 tempt of acts of Parliament strictly worded but laxly enforced, 
 the colonies came to regard the lawful intervention of the king 
 in their affairs like the unwarranted intrusion of a tyrant. 
 
 Today colonies in civilized lands are bound to the mother 
 country generally by a rather loose federation, their allegiance 
 depending less on any explicit political pact than on a sentiment 
 of pride in the common glory of the empire. But the theory of 
 colonial control prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries involved, as we have seen, the strict regulation of 
 colonial commerce in the interests of national dominion, and 
 the responsibility of colonial political authorities for the main- 
 tenance of the commercial system. To have put this theory 
 into successful operation in the American colonies would have 
 required one of two things : either a complete unity of interests 
 between the colonies and the mother country (such as was 
 assumed again and again in the affable proclamations of Eng- 
 lish monarchs from Charles I to George III) or the utter 
 subserviency of the colonies to the English crown and Parlia- 
 ment. The first of these alternatives the colonies knew was 
 a fiction; the second they felt was an insult. Here, then, in 
 the failure of British control in the colonies of the seven- 
 teenth century, is the germ of the American Revolution. The 
 eighteenth century will only furnish the cumulative evidence 
 of the failure of the policy of the seventeenth, and in the end 
 will dissolve those bonds which it is hardly an exaggeration to 
 say were never formed. 
 
34 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH 
 
 From the accession of William of Orange to the English 
 throne, in 1689, to the fall of Quebec, seventy years later, the 
 one constant factor in the history of the English colonies in 
 America was the presence and pressure of the French on their 
 northern and western borders "the Gallic peril." Estab- 
 lished in permanent settlements on the shores of the Bay of 
 Fundy and the banks of the St. Lawrence at about the same 
 time that the English colonies were started in Virginia and 
 New England, 1 the French had had a very different history 
 and development. The rapidly growing English colonies had 
 expended their energy intensively in economic and political 
 activities, cultivating their tobacco, wheat, and rice for export, 
 building up their commercial ports, exploiting the forests and 
 fisheries near their coasts, and developing their organs of local 
 government in assemblies, courts, vestries, and town meetings. 
 The French in Canada, on the other hand, forbidden the 
 least exercise of self-government by the despotic authority of 
 Louis XIV, scantily supplied with capital for the cultivation 
 of the unremunerative glacial soil of the St. Lawrence valley, 
 themselves but a handful of men in a vast wilderness, found an 
 outlet for their restless spirits in ambitious schemes for winning 
 a continent for the glory of France and its savage tribes for 
 the Church of Rome. The story, in all its thrilling details of 
 courage and pathos, of cruelty and persecution, can be read in 
 Francis Parkman's unrivaled volumes on the French in Amer- 
 ica. Before the close of the Stuart period the French adven- 
 turers and missionaries, the fur-traders and wood-rangers 
 (coureurs de bois), had gone up the St. Lawrence and the Great 
 Lakes, established their forts and missions as far west as the 
 point of Lake Superior, crossed the portages from Lakes Erie 
 
 iPort Royal, Acadia, was founded in 1604, Jamestown in 1607, Quebec in 
 1608, Plymouth in 1620, Maryland in 1632, Montreal in 1642. An interesting 
 anticipation of the long rivalry between France and England in America was 
 Samuel Argall's attack on Port Royal in 1613, on the ground that the settle- 
 ment was within the limits of the Virginia grant of 1606. 
 
G U 
 
 of French and Indian War 
 
 r 
 
 93 Longitude 89 West 86" from 81" Greenwich 
 
 THE ENCIRCLING FRENCH 
 
36 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 and Michigan to the headwaters of the Ohio basin, ascended 
 the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony (Minneapolis and 
 St. Paul), and finally, in the person of the intrepid Cavelier 
 de La Salle, followed the Father of Waters down to its mouth 
 and planted the lilies of France on the shores of the Gulf of 
 Mexico. So the French power extended, with its sparse cordon 
 of forts, missions, and fur posts, in a huge arc of twenty-five 
 hundred miles, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the 
 mouth of the Mississippi completely enveloping the English 
 colonies on the Atlantic coast. f 
 
 The English began to realize the "Gallic peril" in the fateful 
 decade that saw the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. Thomas 
 Dongan, the Duke of York's able governor, arriving in his 
 American province of New York the year after La Salle had 
 reached the mouth of the Mississippi (1683), found the prov- 
 ince in dire danger. Count Frontenac, governor of New France, 
 had just completed a ten-year period of vigorous rule at 
 Quebec. He had labored without ceasing to extend the bounds 
 of New France, to increase its military efficiency, and to unite 
 its inhabitants in enthusiasm for the maintenance of the power 
 of Louis XIV on the American continent. He was especially 
 concerned to win the confidence of the Seneca Indians, so 
 that he might gain access to the Ohio valley through their 
 lands to the south of Lake Ontario. 1 He even entertained the 
 hope of weaning the Iroquois tribes from their attachment to 
 the English and of descending the valley of the Hudson with 
 his French troops and Indian allies to drive the Duke of York's 
 governor from his capital. Thus he would sever the New Eng- 
 land colonies from their southern sisters and secure for the king 
 
 1 The Senecas were the westernmost and largest tribe of the Iroquois Con- 
 federacy, a league of five semicivilized tribes extending across the central part 
 of New York from Lake Erie to the lower Mohawk valley. In 1609 Champlain, 
 by joining the Algonquins in a battle against the Iroquois, had inspired in the 
 latter a fierce hatred against the French, which devoted Jesuit missionaries and 
 successive governors at Quebec labored in vain to remove. The friendship of 
 the Iroquois proved of inestimable advantage to the English on the Hudson. 
 The Indians acted as a buffer against the French and kept them from reaching 
 the Mississippi Valley by the easy route south of the Great Lakes. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 37 
 
 of France the finest harbor on the Atlantic coast for the ter- 
 minal of the important fur trade of the vast interior. 
 
 Dongan's spirited correspondence with Frontenac's succes- 
 sors, La Barre and Denonville, is the first clear note of defiance 
 sounded by the English against the encroachments of the 
 French. 1 Dongan was in the midst of his ardent epistolary 
 altercation with Denonville when Governor Andros arrived in 
 Boston (December 20, 1686) to fuse the colonies of New 
 England, with New York and New Jersey, into a single royal 
 province. 
 
 We have already noticed the mission of Andros as the last 
 attempt of the Stuarts to secure recognition of their authority 
 and obedience to their commercial regulation in the American 
 colonies (see page 25). But the Andros government has 
 another aspect quite as important. It was not only the cul- 
 mination of the Stuart policy of the seventeenth century but 
 also the foreshadowing of the Hanoverian policy of the eight- 
 eenth; namely, the consolidation of the colonies to meet the 
 threat of the French and Indians on their borders. Andros 
 brought a few British redcoats to Boston and made plans for 
 the chastisement of the Indians, who, under French provoca- 
 tion, were threatening the settlements in Maine and New 
 Hampshire. But he had no support from the colonies. In 
 their eyes he was a greater danger even than the Indians, for 
 he was an enemy to their chartered rights, an Anglican infected 
 with "prelatical corruption," and the devoted servant of a 
 "popish" king. Instead of trusting him to defend them against 
 
 *A few years before Dongan's arrival the intendant of New France at Quebec 
 wrote to Paris that a "grand future" was before the French in Canada and 
 that "the colonies of foreign nations (England) so long settled on the seaboard 
 [were] trembling with fright" in view of what Louis XIV had accomplished. 
 But Dongan's letters give little hint of fear. The bluff old Irishman spared 
 neither vituperation nor sarcasm. He wrote Denonville to know whether "a 
 few loose fellows rambling among the Indians to keep from starving gave 
 France a right to the country," or the fact that " some rivers or rivuletts run out 
 into the great river of Canada." "O just God !" he exclaimed, "what new farre- 
 fetched and unheard-of pretense is this for the title to a country ! The French 
 King may have as good a pretense to all those countreys that drink clarette and 
 brandy!" 
 
3 8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the danger from Canada, the Puritan leaders in Massachusetts 
 entertained the fear that his plan was to betray their province 
 to the Catholics of New France. What else could be the mean- 
 ing of his insolent reminder that "the privileges of Englishmen 
 would not follow them to the end of the world ! " x 
 
 The Stuart plan of a consolidated military province in 
 America, therefore, failed at just the moment when it was most 
 needed. The plan was not renewed when William of Orange's 
 accession to the throne relieved both the mother country and 
 the colonies of the fear of a Catholic and absolutist reaction. 
 For, in the first place, William, involved in a tremendous 
 struggle with Louis XIV on the Continent, had to divert his 
 attention for a while from the colonies; and, in the second 
 place, as the Whig champion of parliamentary rule, he could 
 hardly with good grace confiscate colonial charters and sup- 
 press colonial assemblies. A compromise was therefore reached. 
 Connecticut and Rhode Island were allowed to resume govern- 
 ment under their old charters, and Massachusetts received a 
 new one, providing for a royal governor. New York was given 
 an assembly. Governors no longer brought royal troops with 
 them to their provinces, as Andros had done, but, at the same 
 time, instructions to royal officials in America to maintain the 
 prerogatives of the crown began to grow long and explicit, 
 and the Navigation Act of 1696 (see page 29) placed in 
 the colonies a number of collectors, naval officers, surveyors, 
 and admiralty judges the first considerable body of English 
 officials in America. 
 
 In the generation immediately following the expulsion of 
 the Stuarts there were many measures taken by the crown for 
 tightening royal control in the colonies without invading char- 
 tered rights or traditional liberties. The royal veto was freely 
 
 1 The "Gentlemen, Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston" declared in a mani- 
 festo of April 18, 1689, "We have seized upon these few ill men which have been 
 (next to our sins) the grand authors of our misery . . . lest ere we are aware 
 we find ourselves to be given away to a Forreign Power." So also Jacob Leisler 
 seized power in New York in 1689 to prevent the province from being betrayed 
 to the French by the governor's councilors, whom he calls "Popishly affected 
 Dogs and Rogues." 
 
Longitude 81 West from 77 Greenwich I Longitude 81 West from 77 Greenwich 
 
 DRIFT TOWARD ROYAL CONTROL IN THE COLONIES, 1682-1752 
 
40 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 exercised over acts of the colonial legislatures (though it was 
 abandoned over acts of Parliament in 1707) ; right of appeal 
 to the king's Privy Council was extended to private individuals 
 in the colonies ; Parliament passed laws establishing a colonial 
 post office and regulating colonial currency ; the same man was 
 often made governor over two or more colonies; and, finally, 
 the crown was prompt to convert the proprietary provinces 
 into the royal type on the least provocation. The Jerseys were 
 taken under royal control in 1702, and the rights of the Carolina 
 proprietors were purchased by the crown in 1729. Even 
 Pennsylvania and Maryland did not escape passing under royal 
 control for a brief season. The Tories in England, supported 
 by the Anglicans in the colonies, urged that the king confiscate 
 all the American charters and make an end of Quakers, 
 Puritans, and Independents in the colonies. Bills introduced 
 into Parliament for this purpose in 1701, 1706, 1715, and 1722 
 were defeated by the Whigs. Yet the process went far. In 
 1682 Virginia and New Hampshire were the only royal colonies 
 on the mainland of America. Fifty years later the New England 
 colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island and the proprietary 
 provinces of Penn and Baltimore were the only ones not under 
 direct royal government. 
 
 The whole burden of American history in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury is the demonstration of the unworkable character of this 
 compromise in colonial government arrived at by the victorious 
 Whigs of the English Revolution. The machinery of it creaked 
 in every joint. It was inconsistent to overthrow Stuart pre- 
 tensions in England and maintain them in the colonies by re- 
 fusing to extend the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus to 
 Englishmen across the Atlantic. It was foolish, when insist- 
 ing on the subjection of the executive to the legislature in 
 England, to think that the colonists (who had taken their part 
 too in the Revolution) would gracefully submit to an increasing 
 domination by executive officials appointed by the crown. It 
 was inconsistent to insist on the royal veto in the colonies just at 
 the moment when it was dropped in England, and to demand a 
 share in financial legislation for the king's appointed councils in 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 41 
 
 America while at home the Commons alone held the purse 
 strings with a jealous tenacity. Finally, it was a mockery to 
 leave'the assemblies standing in the colonies and yet expect them 
 to abandon their functions by accepting the king's instructions 
 to royal governors as the law of the land. Benjamin Franklin 
 reports that the president of the Privy Council told him baldly 
 in 1757 that "the king is the legislative of the colonies." 
 
 We have long been accustomed to lay the blame for the 
 American Revolution on the stubbornness and stupidity of 
 George III and his Tory ministers during the fifteen years pre- 
 ceding the outbreak of the war and they deserve their full 
 share of blame. At the same time, however, we must remember 
 the failure of the Whig lords during their long tenure of power 
 in the eighteenth century (1714-1760) to extend the prin- 
 ciples and privileges of the great English Revolution of 1689 
 to the colonies. The English Revolution was a turning-point in 
 colonial history. It was the auspicious moment for the estab- 
 lishment of a federation between the colonies and the mother 
 country, based on mutual confidence and the enjoyment of the 
 same fundamental rights. The opportunity was lost, and, what 
 is worse, from that time down to the American Revolution there 
 seems to have been but a single important British official having 
 to do with colonial affairs who realized that an opportunity had 
 been lost and labored to redeem it the incomparable William 
 Pitt. That Pitt's suggestions for conciliation were scornfully 
 rejected by the English government as "falling in with the 
 ideas of America in almost every particular" is a sufficient com- 
 mentary on the disastrous policy of alienation of the American 
 colonies entered upon by the victorious Whig aristocracy two 
 generations before the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party. 
 
 Nowhere were the defects of this policy more conspicuous 
 than in the strained relations between the colonial assemblies 
 and the royal governors. The governors were instructed to 
 maintain the prerogative of the crown undiminished, as in the 
 Stuart period ; while the assemblies, seeing the king limited by 
 his Parliament in England, thought it only a fair conclusion 
 that the king's servants should be limited by his legislature in 
 
42 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the colonies. If Parliament was the guardian of the liberties 
 of England, no less were the colonial assemblies the guardians 
 of the liberties of America. The colonies, growing rapidly in 
 numbers and wealth, 1 chafed under the galling yoke that was 
 intended to keep them in "a limited economic freedom and a 
 subordinate political status." They thought they should have 
 done hearing the language of Andros, that they "were either 
 subjects or rebels." They were English freemen, protected 
 in their rights by royal charters and beholden only to them- 
 selves and to their fathers for their planting and growth in the 
 New World. 2 Their spokesmen, then, in their elected assemblies 
 held the royal governors in check at every point. In Massa- 
 chusetts the assembly refused to vote the governor a permanent 
 salary, but made him yearly or half-yearly grants. In New 
 York governor and assembly clashed on the right of royal ap- 
 pointees to interfere with the levy of taxes and the sessions of 
 the legislature. In New England and South Carolina they 
 wrangled over coast defenses* in Pennsylvania, over the ex- 
 emption of the proprietor's lands from taxation ; in Maryland, 
 over the collection of quitrents ; in the Jerseys, over the author- 
 ity of the royal judges ; in almost every colony, over the issue 
 of paper money and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade. It 
 seemed not only to the vexed governors themselves but to 
 disinterested observers as well that the colonies regarded them- 
 selves as little free states. "The New York assembly," wrote 
 Peter Kalm, a visitor from Sweden, in 1750, "may be looked 
 upon as a Parliament or a Diet in miniature." Four years later 
 the Privy Council complained of the same body to King 
 
 *The 225,000 colonists of 1689 had grown to 1,500,000 by 1760. Their exports 
 in the same period increased from 390,000 to 1,763,000. They imported in 1760 
 merchandise from England alone to the value of 2,000,000. Down to the Han- 
 overian succession (1714) British trade with the West Indies was more important 
 than that with the mainland, but by 1760 the exports from England to North 
 America were more than double those to the West Indies. Instructive tables are 
 printed in Channing's "History of the United States," Vol. II, pp. 524-526. 
 
 2 It was not till the surrender of the colony of Georgia to the crown in 1752 
 that Parliament made any grant of money for administration in America. Great 
 Britain expected every colony to stand on its own feet. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 43 
 
 George II, that they "had taken to themselves not only the 
 management and disposal of the public money, but also wrested 
 from your Majesty's governor the nomination of all officers of 
 government, the custody and direction of all military stores, 
 the mustering and regulating of the troops raised for your 
 Majesty's service, and in short almost every other executive 
 part of government." The "independency" which Massachu- 
 setts had shown under the Stuart kings was infectious. "The 
 example and spirit of the Boston people," wrote Governor 
 Cosby of New York, in 1734, "begins to spread among these 
 colonies in a most prodigious manner." 
 
 The situation was the more trying for the governors because 
 they could not rely for support on the home government. In 
 fact, they hardly knew to whom to look for such support. 
 In the Stuart period the royal governor was the king's servant 
 alone, knowing where to carry his complaints and whence to 
 take his orders. But after 1689 there was great confusion in 
 colonial administration. Parliament, the Privy Council, and 
 the Board of Trade all took a hand in it, each rebuking the 
 other for trespassing on its field, but none assuming the con- 
 tinuous and enlightened responsibility necessary for the build- 
 ing of a stable colonial empire. 
 
 Moreover, the duty laid upon them to enforce the unpopu- 
 lar Navigation Acts still further embarrassed the colonial 
 governors. The act of 1696 bound them by oath to secure 
 obedience to the laws, under pain of a fine of 1000, but at the 
 same time gave them no adequate weapons of enforcement. It 
 would have taken a fleet of warships on the coast and a regi- 
 ment of redcoats in every colony to enforce the acts. James 
 Otis, at the close of the period, said that "if the King of Eng- 
 land were encamped on Boston Common with 20,000 men, he 
 could not execute these laws." The great merchants, like John 
 Hancock and Peter Faneuil, throve on illicit trade. As early 
 as 1721 a Boston trader named Amory wrote, "If you have a 
 captain you can confide in, you will find it easy to import all 
 kinds of goods from the Streights, France, and Spain, although 
 prohibited." 
 
44 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 It became more and more evident, as the population and 
 wealth of the colonies increased, that the attempt to treat them 
 solely as a nation of customers of Great Britain was a stupid 
 piece of business. The mother country no longer furnished a 
 sufficient market for their tobacco and other " enumerated 
 commodities/' 1 while the liberty to carry the rest of their 
 products where they would was small comfort when the return 
 cargo had to be carried to an English port for inspection and 
 perhaps taxation. Only one important addition was made to 
 the Navigation Acts in the eighteenth century, to be sure, but 
 that one was the most damaging of them all. It was the famous 
 Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733, which, in order to protect 
 the plantation-owners in the British West Indies, imposed the 
 prohibitive duties of gd. a gallon on rum, 6d. a gallon on 
 molasses, and 55. a hundredweight on sugar imported into 
 the American colonies from the Spanish, French, and Dutch 
 islands. As the British West Indies could not begin to furnish 
 either the amount of molasses required for the distilleries of 
 New England, or the market to take the flour, fish, lumber, and 
 wheat exported from the mainland, the act of 1733, if enforced, 
 would have utterly ruined the trade of New England and the 
 middle colonies. 
 
 Thus political custom and commercial interests in the col- 
 onies both ran counter to the British policy of uniformity in 
 control just when that policy seemed most necessary for the 
 frustration of the French designs. "His Majesty has subjects 
 enough in America," wrote the Board of Trade in 1696, "to 
 drive out the French from Canada, but they are so crumbled 
 into little governments and so disunited that they have hitherto 
 
 1 Molasses and rice had been put on the list of enumerated goods in 1705, 
 and later (1722) naval stores, copper, beaver, and furs were added. The pro- 
 duction of tobacco had so increased by the year 1700 that about two thirds of 
 the crop sent to England from Virginia and Maryland was reexported to the con- 
 tinent of Europe, with a rebate to the colonists of 75 per cent of the duties. But 
 even with this rebate, the rehandling of the cargo, the warehousing, and the double 
 freight charges made it impossible for the cheaper grades of American tobacco 
 (if sent lawfully via England) to compete with the European product. American 
 tobacco was often burned at the English docks as a drug on the market. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 45 
 
 afforded but little assistance to each other, and now seem in 
 a much worse disposition to do it for the future." The gover- 
 nors took the imperial view of the case: all minor matters, 
 like budgets, taxes, appeals, should yield to the supreme duty 
 of guarding the British Empire in America against the en- 
 croachments of the French. But the assemblies insisted first 
 and foremost on their privileges as English freemen. Where 
 they were most uncompromisingly true to English tradition, 
 there they seemed most disloyal to England's interests in 
 America. "Such a wrong-headed people I thank God I have 
 never had to deal with before," exclaimed Governor Dinwiddie 
 to the Virginia Burgesses. He found them " obstinate, self- 
 conceited, and in too much of a republican way of thinking." 
 It was reported that the Pennsylvania assembly told their 
 governor in plain terms that they "had rather the French 
 should conquer them than give up their privileges." 
 
 The governors of New France were plagued by no such 
 trials. Their colonists were few, but their authority was un- 
 questioned. Canada since 1663 was a unified royal province, 
 ruled by the king's governor from his rock-citadel at Quebec. 
 Louis XIV did not parley with his subjects in America: he 
 commanded them. Charles of England sent a civil commission 
 to New York and New England in 1664 to investigate alleged 
 breaches of his authority; but Louis of France at the same 
 moment sent to Canada the crack Carignan-Sallieres regiment 
 of a thousand men. The English governors had permanent 
 provincial assemblies to deal with, but the French court would 
 not even let the Estates of Canada gather in the cathedral at 
 Quebec to grace the governor's inauguration (1672). This 
 same governor, Frontenac ; was warned by the great minister 
 Colbert "never to give corporate form to the inhabitants of 
 Canada." It was not alone two races, then, or two territorial 
 rivals that clashed in the mighty conflict between France and 
 England for the North American continent. It was two ideals 
 of government: on the one side, a paternal absolutism sup- 
 ported by military force; on the other, a jealous tenacity of 
 individual rights five centuries old. 
 
46 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 So long as the Stuarts ruled in England, their governors in 
 America, even though chafing (like Dongan and Andros) under 
 the threats of the French and the Indians, were obliged to 
 preserve an appearance of civility in dealing with the servants 
 of the "good royal cousin" at Versailles, who furnished money 
 to Charles and James to enable them to dispense with an 
 inquisitive Parliament. The accession of William of Orange 
 cleared the air. France and England became open foes and 
 grappled in the first battles of a struggle of a century and a 
 quarter, which was to determine the mastery of the seas, the 
 primacy of commercial power, and the scepter of empire. 1 
 The fight for colonial supremacy in America was but one act 
 in the drama. The names of Louisburg, Ticonderoga, Pitts- 
 burgh, and Quebec stand engraved on the same tablets with 
 La Hogue, Blenheim, Dettingen, and Plassey, to commemorate 
 the triumph of British Imperialism. 
 
 Until the middle of the eighteenth century the war in 
 America was sporadic and unorganized. Indian raids on the 
 border settlements of New England and New York, accom- 
 panied by the horrors of massacre at Schenectady (1690), 
 Deerfield (1704), and Haverhill (1708), filled the colonies 
 with dismay, but failed to unite them in defense. They were, 
 says Governor Fletcher of New York (1693), " as much divided 
 as Christian and Turk." Ambitious counterexpeditions of the 
 English against Quebec were wrecked on the divided counsels 
 of the colonies (1690) or on the rocks of the St. Lawrence 
 (1711). The merchants and planters of the Atlantic coast, 
 far from the scenes of frontier massacres and absorbed in their 
 trade with Europe and the Indies, were indifferent to their 
 governors' pleas for defense. They even spoke of the regiments 
 which England sent over to protect them as "alien garrisons." 
 Although the English outnumbered the French in America 
 
 !In the one hundred and twenty-six years from the accession of William of 
 Orange to the overthrow of Napoleon (1815) England and France fought seven 
 wars, filling fifty-seven years, during which France lost her colonial empire and 
 her dictatorial position in European cabinets. England emerged the strongest 
 of the Old World nations. 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 47 
 
 sixteen to one (1,300,000 to 80,000) they had not, after two 
 generations of covert or open hostility, gained a single point 
 of vantage. Intercolonial conferences were called, but not 
 attended. Plans of union were proposed, but not accepted. 
 It would be impossible to imagine a more dilapidated state of 
 public opinion than that in which the English colonies faced 
 what proved to be their final struggle with France. 
 
 It was a moment fraught with tremendous consequences for 
 the future of America when a young major of militia from 
 Virginia, just come of age, tall and straight, with a command- 
 ing steel-blue eye and a countenance open as the dawn, was 
 ushered into the presence of the officers of the French Fort Le 
 Bosuf in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The envoy 
 was George Washington, and the message that he brought from 
 Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia was a warning to the French 
 to keep off the land "so notoriously known to be the property 
 of the crown of Great Britain." Washington was courteously 
 received and informed that his message would be. transmitted 
 to the governor at Quebec. Then he set out on his perilous 
 journey through the wilderness back to the frontier settlements, 
 doubtless turning over in his mind the boastful oath which he 
 had heard the French officers at Venango swear in their cups, 
 that their design was to take possession of the Ohio, and "by 
 God ! we will do it." 
 
 The possession of the Ohio was the bone of contention. At 
 almost the same moment French and English expeditions 
 moved down its rich valley the French under Celeron de 
 Bienville 1 (1749) nailing signs to the trees and sinking leaden 
 plates under the river banks to claim the land for Louis XV, 
 and Christopher Gist (1750) prospecting for the new Ohio Com- 
 pany (formed by Virginian and English capitalists) and deter- 
 mined "to go quite down to the Mississippi rather than take 
 mean and broken land." The Indians along the river banks 
 listened in turn to the blandishments of the French and the 
 threats of the English, drank their brandy and rum and ac- 
 cepted their gifts of wampum with impartial stolidity, little 
 
 1 Some scholars spell this name Blainville. 
 
48 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 dreaming that they were the dusky chorus in the opening 
 of a tragedy of war that was to be played on the stage of 
 three continents. 
 
 The first two years of the war brought only disaster to Eng- 
 lish arms. It seemed as though the punishment of half a 
 century of incompetence and wrangling, of divided councils 
 and dissipated resources, were being visited on the colonies. 
 Expeditions planned in boastful leisure were abandoned in 
 panic. Neglected garrisons were exposed to massacre at the 
 hands of the uncontrollable savage allies of the French. Rival- 
 ries and insubordination were rife. Governors and assemblies, 
 king's troops and provincial levies, were all trying to shift to 
 the other's shoulders the blame for the disasters. A royal 
 order of May, 1756, reduced all the higher colonial officers to 
 the rank of captain when they were serving in the same army 
 with officers of the king's commission, and the American sol- 
 diers, though they often saved the day by their rude efficiency, 
 had to hear themselves called "greenhorns," "ragamuffins," and 
 "rabble" by the trained but incompetent commanders who were 
 sent over to lead them. Braddock's defeat (1755) exposed the 
 frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to the fury 
 of the Indians along a line of three hundred and fifty miles, 
 which the heroic Washington, with only 1500 ill-equipped and 
 ill-assorted troops, labored in anguish of soul to defend. 1 
 
 1 We hear already from the young colonel of twenty-five the language of 
 bitter disillusionment which was to be so often in his mouth during the dark 
 days of the American Revolution and the trying days of his presidency. He 
 laments the hour that gave him a commission, and would "at any other time 
 than this of imminent danger resign without one hesitating moment a com- 
 mand" from which he never expects "to reap honor or benefit, while the murder 
 of helpless families may be laid to [his] account." How serious the situation 
 was, with the frontier from the Hudson to the James guarded by only thirty- 
 five blockhouses, can be judged from a letter of a French captain written home 
 in July, 1756: "We are making here a place that history will not forget. The 
 English colonies have ten times more people than ours, but these wretches have 
 not the least knowledge of war. . . . Not a week passes but the French send 
 them a band of 'hair-dressers' whom they would be very glad to dispense with. 
 It is incredible what a quantity of scalps they bring us. In Virginia they have 
 committed unheard-of cruelties, carried off families, burned a great many 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 49 
 
 Every effort for union among the colonies since the beginning 
 of the French wars (1690) had come to naught through mutual 
 mistrust. The last such attempt was the Albany Congress of 
 June, 1754, .where, in the very days when Washington was 
 fighting for the control of the Ohio, the assembled delegates 
 from the New England colonies, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and 
 New York, including some of the most distinguished persons 
 in America, had to listen to very plain and unpalatable truths 
 from the old Mohawk chief Hendrick: "Look about your 
 country and see ; you have no fortifications, no, not even in this 
 town. It is but a step from Canada hither, and the French may 
 come and turn you out of doors. You desire us to speak from 
 the bottom of our heart and we will do it. Look at the French : 
 they are men. They are fortifying everywhere. But you are 
 like women, bare and open, without fortifications." After two 
 years of uninterrupted disaster the elegant Lord Chesterfield 
 confirmed the words of the old Indian chieftain : " We are un- 
 done both at home and abroad at home by our increasing debt 
 and expenses, abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are 
 no longer a nation ! " 
 
 Then fortune changed overnight. A man came to the helm 
 of the British government for the first time within the memory 
 of a generation a man incorruptible among a gang of thieves, 
 far-visioned amid a crowd of opportunists, energetic, confident, 
 generous, resourceful in a public service on which the blight of 
 fear and irresolution had settled. William Pitt appealed from 
 the narrow Whig aristocracy, which had controlled Parliament 
 and king for nearly half a century, to the British nation at large. 
 He called Scotchmen and Americans to the privilege of partner- 
 ship in the empire and accorded them the confidence of partners. 
 He turned the war in both hemispheres from a feeble and timor- 
 ous defensive into a bold and planful attack all along the line. 
 Defying the claims of birth and the clamor of placemen, he 
 chose his generals and admirals for valor and counsel alone. 
 
 houses, and killed an infinity of people. These miserable English are in the 
 extremity of distress, and repent too late of the unjust war they began against 
 us." (Quoted in Parkman's "Montcalm and Wolfe," Vol. I, p. 392.) 
 
50 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA . 
 
 A new tone pervaded the dispatches to America. The governors 
 of the crown were asked to win their assemblies and not to bully 
 them. The odious order of May, 1756, was revoked and 
 colonial officers took rank with the king's own. On the morn- 
 ing that the new order was read to the General Court at Boston 
 the colony of Massachusetts voted the entire number of men 
 that had been asked for from all New England. The American 
 colonies as a whole increased their contingents fivefold. Massa- 
 chusetts voted 172,000 for the war in the first two months of 
 1758, although her farming and fishing population was already 
 burdened with heavy taxes. New Hampshire sent one out of 
 three of her able-bodied men to the field of battle. Under able 
 and intrepid commanders like Amherst, Wolfe, Howe, and 
 Forbes, the British attack was delivered all along the line from 
 the grim fortress of Louisburg, which guarded the entrance of 
 the St. Lawrence, to Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio. 
 Louisburg surrendered to Amherst in July, 1758. In 
 November General Forbes drove the French from Fort 
 Duquesne and rebuilt the shattered walls under the name of 
 Fort Pitt. The next May, Bourlamaque withdrew from Crown 
 Point and Ticonderoga, opening to the English the lake whose 
 sapphire surface stretched like a broad pavement down to the 
 St. Lawrence valley and the outposts of Montreal. The sur- 
 render of Niagara to Amherst, in July, cut off the interior lake 
 posts of the French (Detroit, Mackinac, St. Joseph, Sault Ste. 
 Marie) and compelled them to abandon the forts of the upper 
 Ohio valley (Presqu'ile, Venango, Le Boeuf), flanked as they 
 were by the English at Niagara and Fort Pitt. The crowning ex- 
 ploit of the war came in September, 1759, when Wolfe, after 
 lying nearly three months with his fleet in the St. Lawrence 
 before the impregnable rock of Quebec, conceived and executed 
 the daring plan which set out his army in the early morning 
 mists in battle array on the Plains of Abraham and opened the 
 gates of the city to the brave soldiers whose shouts of triumph 
 fell on his dying ear. The capture of Quebec was the brightest 
 jewel in the crown of the wonderful year of 1759, the "year of 
 victory," when French arms were defeated at Minden beyond 
 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 51 
 
 the Rhine and French fleets destroyed at Quiberon on the coast 
 of Brittany and driven from Pondicherry on the coast of India. 
 That year was the imperishable tribute to the genius of William 
 Pitt. England's sorrow was changed to joy. "The bells of 
 London ring out for a new victory every morning," cried Horace 
 Walpole. The gloomy prediction of Chesterfield, made two years 
 earlier, was fulfilled, but little as he had dreamed. England 
 was, indeed, "no longer a nation" she was a world empire. 
 
 On September 8, 1760, after the fall of Montreal, the governor 
 of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, signed the capitu- 
 lation by which Canada with all its dependencies was trans- 
 ferred to the British crown. On October 24, 1760, George III 
 came to the English throne. The new king wished to rule as 
 well as to reign. He was a politician enamored of his own po- 
 litical sagacity. He was a high Tory and surrounded himself 
 with Tory henchmen. They plotted against the great minister, 
 and in October, 1761, William Pitt resigned the seals. It was 
 of momentous consequence to the American colonies that the 
 great statesman who is ranked with Washington as a builder of 
 our nation fell from power at just the moment when the French 
 were driven from this continent. For Pitt looked on the colonies 
 as more than an auxiliary of England for the humiliation of 
 France. He wished to see them bound in a close federation 
 with each other and with the motherland, proud of their place 
 in the empire, their local loyalties not lost but fortified in their 
 larger loyalty to Britain. Conciliation, not coercion, was his 
 watchword. He was, in the phrase of Hubert Hall, "the first 
 high almoner of statecraft to cast his bread on distant waters." 
 And had he maintained his tenure of power unbroken for a score 
 of years, as Walpole had before him, he might have made the 
 bonds between the men of English race on both sides of the 
 Atlantic strong and elastic enough to meet generations of 
 economic growth or political tension. 
 
 However, it is probable that even William Pitt, with all his 
 tact and conciliatoriness, could not have prevented the eventual 
 separation of the American colonies from England. For the 
 colonies during the eighteenth century were diverging more and 
 
52 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 more from the motherland. Though their population was still 
 chiefly of English stock, nevertheless, by incorporating the 
 Dutch of the Netherlands and absorbing large numbers of 
 French, Germans, and Scotch-Irish, they had introduced ele- 
 ments of population indifferent if not hostile to English institu- 
 tions. The presence of several hundred thousand negro slaves 
 still further complicated the social question. In political de- 
 velopment too the colonies had tended to grow away from the 
 mother country. The concentration of power in the hands of 
 Parliament, conducted by a ministry or cabinet, was opposed to 
 the colonial emphasis on local authorities in assembly, vestry, 
 or town meeting ; while the executive power in almost all of the 
 colonies was the rival and not the agent of the legislative. 
 Finally, as we have already seen, the commercial policy of the 
 Navigation Acts ran counter to the interests of America's de- 
 veloping trade and took on increasingly the aspect of exploita- 
 tion. If these social, political, and economic differences were 
 to be harmonized at all, it would have to be through the exercise 
 of an enlightened, generous, and conciliatory spirit. 
 
 The brief period of William Pitt's ministry looked like the 
 dawn of such a promise. The colonies seemed fused by the fires 
 of a victorious patriotism into an imperial unity. The triumphs 
 of Amherst and Wolfe were hailed with grateful joy from New 
 Hampshire to Georgia. The governor of Massachusetts pro- 
 claimed a day of thanksgiving, and the preachers vied with each 
 other in sermons of extravagant congratulation over the down- 
 fall of New France, "the North American Babylon," "the seat 
 of Satan and Indian idolatry." But in the midst of rejoicing 
 there were ominous signs and warnings. Report came to 
 America of the fall of the great minister and the abandonment 
 of his policy. The new young king was in the hands of the 
 Tories, insistent on his prerogative, determined to have obedi- 
 ence to the letter of his royal orders. Murmurs against 
 "arbitrary acts" of Parliament were rising in Boston and 
 Williamsburg in the very days in which the terms of the treaty 
 with France were being promulgated, and wise observers were 
 suggesting that it might be better for England to keep the rich 
 
NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF THE FRENCH WARS 
 
54 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 sugar island of Guadeloupe and let the French stay in Canada 
 as a wholesome check on the " republican" tendencies of the 
 colonies. "They will not fail to shake off their dependence," 
 said the French minister Choiseul, "the moment Canada is 
 ceded." Canada was ceded, however, by the Treaty of Paris 
 (1763), and the English flag waved over the North American 
 continent from Hudson's Straits to the Gulf of Mexico. The 
 stage was cleared for the opening act of our national drama. 
 "With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham," says 
 John Richard Green, "began the history of the United States." 
 In the prelude of a Wagnerian opera we hear anticipating 
 strains and fragments of the various themes which are worked 
 out in detail in the course of the tragic drama. Perhaps it 
 is not too fanciful to see in the colonial period of our history 
 a sort of prelude to the drama of our national life. Liberty, 
 Democracy, and Union are the ideals for which successive gen- 
 erations have wrought and fought in our land the generations 
 of Washington, of Jackson, and of Lincoln. Already these 
 ideals appear as "motifs" in our colonial history. The settlers 
 of the seventeenth century, breaking away from Old World 
 traditions, brought with them the habit of freedom. In the 
 increasing claims of the colonial representative assemblies and 
 in their resistance to political and commercial control by the 
 officers o.f the crown we see the foreshadowing of American 
 democracy. And, finally, the repeated attempts of the eight- 
 eenth century to secure union in the face of the foe on our 
 borders suggest the labors of Hamilton and Madison, of Web- 
 ster and Lincoln, to make a United States the common home 
 of our liberty and our democracy. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 The decree has gone forth . . . that a more equal liberty than has prevailed 
 in other parts of the world must be established in America. JOHN ADAMS 
 
 BRITISH PROVOCATION 
 
 Two facts of supreme importance summarize the colonial 
 period of our history: England established an empire in 
 America, and England lost an empire in America. The first of 
 these facts we have studied in the preceding chapter. We turn 
 now to the second fact, the separation of the American colonies 
 from England an event which Whitelaw Reid, former ambas- 
 sador to the court of St. James, spoke of, with pardonable 
 exaggeration, as the " greatest event in modern history." 
 
 All crises in history are the adjustment, often with the ex- 
 plosive violence of revolution, of forces that have been long 
 in preparation. The event is understood only in the causes 
 of the event. When a revolution becomes inevitable it means 
 simply that certain political, economic, or religious ideas have 
 developed to a point where, in order to find their expression, 
 they must burst asunder a political, economic, or religious 
 order which refuses to adapt itself to their accommodation. 
 The outbreak of revolution is not the beginning but the cul- 
 mination of the process. So it was with the American Revo- 
 lution. For a full century before the colonies threw off their 
 allegiance to England independence was preparing. "The bot- 
 tom of all the disorders," wrote Governor Hutchinson of 
 Massachusetts, "is the. opinion that every colony has a legis- 
 lature in itself, the acts and doings of which are not to be 
 controlled by Parliament." We have seen the colonies peti- 
 tioning, protesting, evading, threatening, apologizing, until it 
 seemed as if their connection with the mother country must 
 
 55 
 
56 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 be worn down to the slender thread of a sentimental attach- 
 ment. Before the middle of the eighteenth century they ap- 
 peared to an enlightened traveler from Sweden as "likely in 
 thirty or fifty years to form a state by themselves." 1 They 
 called themselves " jurisdictions/' and in the midst of protesta- 
 tions of loyalty virtually defied the sovereignty of England. 
 Had the officials of Charles II shown half the zeal in enforcing 
 his orders and punishing the recalcitrant "patriots" of Massa- 
 chusetts that George III showed in supporting the measures of 
 Grenville and Townshend, the issue of American independence 
 might have been settled an even century before the battle 
 of Lexington. 
 
 The triumph of Wolfe at Quebec brought a great change in 
 the relations between England and the colonies. For England 
 it meant the sudden acquisition of an enormous empire, with 
 the national debt doubled and the burdens for the defense of 
 dominions "on which the sun never set" multiplied many fold. 
 For America it meant the removal of the French danger on 
 the north and of the Spanish danger on the south. There was 
 no longer place for the fear so naively expressed by a farmer 
 of customs under Charles II (1664), that if the colonies did 
 not maintain the honor and reputation of his Majesty who 
 protected their trade and navigation, they "would be subject 
 to be devoured by strangers." Long before the expulsion of 
 the French from America astute political philosophers like 
 Montesquieu, d'Argenson, and Turgot had remarked on the 
 likelihood that the colonies would eventually separate from 
 England as the ripe fruit falls from the tree. But it was the 
 conquest of Canada that removed, with "the turbulent Gal- 
 licks," the only check on the prophetic destiny of America. 
 On hearing of the Peace of Paris, Vergennes, the French 
 ambassador at Constantinople, remarked that England would 
 repent of having put an end to French' rule in Canada. "The 
 colonies," he said, "stand no longer in need of England's pro- 
 tection. She will call on them to help contribute toward 
 
 1 Peter Kalm, "Travels in North America," Vol. T, p. 265. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 57 
 
 supporting the burden they have helped to bring on her, and 
 they will answer by striking off all dependence." 
 
 The cession of Canada, however, was not the cause of 
 America's rising. That cause was rather a change of behavior 
 on the part of England toward the colonies, which coincided 
 with and was partly occasioned by the cession of Canada. 
 George Grenville became prime minister two months after 
 the Treaty of Paris was signed (Arjril, 1763). He it was who 
 was chiefly responsible for the introduction of a new policy 
 in Parliament; namely, taxing the American colonies for the 
 sake of raising a revenue. Grenville did not invent the idea. 
 Many times during the eighteenth century English officials 
 at home and in America had suggested such a measure, but 
 neither Walpole nor Pitt had been willing to sanction it. 1 That 
 Grenville did so was due partly to a change in the English 
 government with the accession of George III and partly to a 
 change in the condition of the British Empire after the Peace 
 of Paris. 
 
 George III was a pedant. He was neither dull-witted nor 
 cruel-hearted, but opinionated and obstinate. He was often 
 called a tyrant by Patrick Henry and other ardent American 
 patriots, but he was rather a theorist than a tyrant. He had 
 " ideas" on kingship and they were a hundred years behind 
 the. times. He was an indefatigable politician, but the results 
 of his policy were always compromised by his serene confi- 
 dence in his own sagacity. He had no genius for conciliation, 
 resisting concession until it was too late to make it appear as 
 a gracious favor. His education was of the meanest sort, 
 acquired in the early surroundings of waiting-women's flattery 
 and indulgent chaperonage. Vaulting ambition dwelt in his 
 small mind. He would rule his realm as kings of old had 
 ruled. He demanded ministers loyal to the kingly prerogative 
 above all else: Butes and Grenvilles, Graf tons and Norths 
 
 *A customs officer at Boston proposed an elaborate plan of colonial taxation 
 in 1722, with stamp duties, land tax, excise on liquors, import duties, etc. When 
 Walpole was urged to adopt such a policy he replied that he had half of old Eng- 
 land against him and that he didn't care to add the enmity of the new England. 
 
58 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 obsequious, sententious, and vain. The large wisdom of Pitt, 
 Burke, or Fox appeared to him as only factious opposition 
 encouraging rebels in their folly. Descending to the commonest 
 levels of political jobbery, he distributed what he jocosely 
 called in a letter to Lord North his "gold pills" to secure seats 
 in Parliament for men who would blindly follow the royal 
 program and hoot or hiss down the repeated remonstrances 
 of real statesmen. "He spent a long life," says the English 
 historian Lecky, "in obstinately resisting measures which are 
 now almost universally admitted to be good, and in supporting 
 measures which are now as universally admitted to have been 
 bad." Thomas Jefferson was not wrong when he attributed 
 the accumulated grievances which led the American colonies to 
 declare their independence not to the ministers, the Parliament, 
 or the people of England, but to King George III. 
 
 Such a man it was England's ill fortune to have at the head 
 of the state at one of the most critical moments of her his- 
 tory. William Pitt had created an empire in two hemispheres. 
 George III obliged him to turn it over to himself. Infinite 
 tact was needed to integrate the parts of this empire, to recon- 
 cile habits of self-government in America with imperial alle- 
 giance, to distribute equally the burden of debt and defense, 
 to adopt commercial codes for the benefit of a trade spread 
 over three oceans. But George III and his obsequious ministers 
 proceeded to -handle the empire as if it were a medieval fief 
 or a royal demesne. 
 
 The plan of management for the American part of the em- 
 pire was announced by Grenville in various meetings of Par- 
 liament in the autumn of 1763 and the spring of 1764. It was 
 entirely after the heart of the king, who in proroguing Parlia- 
 ment on April 19, 1764, spoke enthusiastically of "the wise 
 regulations" which had been established "to augment the 
 public revenues, to unite the interests of the most distant 
 possessions of the crown, and to encourage their commerce 
 with Great Britain." That is just what the measures of Gren- 
 ville were meant to do. How well they succeeded, the events of 
 another nineteenth of April, eleven years later, tell. It was a 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION $0 
 
 threefold scheme that Grenville proposed : ( i ) to establish a 
 permanent military force in Arnerica ; ( 2 ) to stiffen and enforce 
 the Acts of Trade; (3) to raise a revenue in America by parlia- 
 mentary taxation. " These three measures," says Lecky, "pro- 
 duced the American Revolution." They were regarded by the 
 colonists as the beginning of their woes, for in all future prot- 
 estations their cry for relief was for a return to the state of 
 affairs existing before the Grenville legislation. Edmund Burke 
 said that prior to 1764 the attitude of the colonies was "one of 
 acquiescence." 1 
 
 Grenville 's measures were inspired by the condition of the 
 empire immediately following the triumph over the French. 
 An immense territory had been added to the British crown 
 and a double burden of debt to the British exchequer. 2 Quebec 
 on the north, and East and West Florida on the south (see map, 
 p. 53), were organized into royal provinces, but under absolute 
 governors, as the provinces had too few English inhabitants to 
 furnish assemblies. The great tract between the Alleghenies and 
 the Mississippi was to be kept for a while under control of the 
 crown as unorganized territory. The Indians in it had been 
 transferred by the Treaty of Paris from French to English 
 allegiance, but that did not hinder the French from fomenting 
 attacks by the Indians on their new masters. In the mid- 
 summer of 1763 the formidable Iroquois chieftain Pontiac 
 roused the redskins to the last desperate effort to recover the 
 lands of their fathers from the European intruders. He cap- 
 tured every fort between the Ohio and Lake Erie and laid siege 
 
 a lt is useless to seek the origin of the American Revolution in any single 
 event. James Otis in his speech at Boston on the Writs of Assistance, in 1761, 
 had declared that any act that violated the essential rights of British subjects 
 was void ; and Patrick Henry in his famous plea in tlie Parsons' Cause at 
 Williamsburg, in 1763, asserted that the king might forfeit his subjects' 
 obedience by breaking his part of the contract to defend their liberties. Henry 
 even spoke the word " tyrant " and heard murmurs of " treason ! " But these 
 were local quarrels, whereas Grenville's measures were the announcement of a 
 general colonial policy the first since the Stuart period. 
 
 2 The British debt between the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and Paris 
 (1763) increased from 72,000,000 to 139,000,000. In the same period the 
 expense of the American establishment grew from 70,000 to 350,000. 
 
60 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to Pittsburgh and Detroit. In order to have a free hand to 
 deal with the Indians and to prevent the colonies from a 
 rapid growth beyond his control by westward expansion, King 
 George, in October, 1763, issued a proclamation running a line 
 along the crest of the Alleghenies and ordered all colonists who 
 had " either willfully or inadvertently seated themselves" on 
 land west of this line "forthwith to remove themselves from 
 such settlements." 
 
 While the king was thus hemming in the colonists between 
 the Alleghenies and the Atlantic he thought it advisable to 
 place a garrison of 10,000 troops in America. The British 
 commanders had complained bitterly of the quality of the 
 American soldiers in the French war. Even General Wolfe, 
 on hearing of Abercrombie's defeat at Ticonderoga, called the 
 Americans "the dirtiest and most contemptible cowardly dogs 
 that you can conceive." Some colonies, like Connecticut and 
 Massachusetts, had given liberally and felt that they had done 
 more than their share in defense. 1 Others had refused to con- 
 tribute, because their borders were not threatened, or because 
 they were too busy baiting their governors to think of the 
 common danger to the empire. England had been in the habit 
 of making money grants to the colonies to recompense them 
 for military expenditures. In the years from 1759 to 1761 
 she had reimbursed the colonies to the extent of 200,000. 
 Would it not be better to replace this haphazard system of 
 requisitions and compensation by a regular army supported 
 by funds to which the colonies should contribute a certain 
 quota by a uniform system of taxation? Ireland, poor and 
 burdened as she was, supported an army of 1 2 ,000 for imperial 
 defense. Nothing was said in the Grenville acts of the deter- 
 rent effects of a regular military establishment in America on 
 
 1 For example, the war expenses of Massachusetts were 818,000, of which 
 160,000 remained in 1763 to be paid by provincial taxation? John Hancock, a 
 merchant of Boston, declared that he was taxed more heavily than any man in 
 England. Virginia had incurred in the war a debt of 385,000 ; Pennsylvania, of 
 313,000 ; New York, of 291,000 ; Connecticut, of 259,000 all sums far in 
 excess of what was remitted by the British Parliament. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 6l 
 
 the growth of the sentiment of "independency," but without 
 doubt that aspect of the plan was not entirely overlooked by 
 the ministry. Any scheme to increase the number of royal 
 officials in America would help to tighten the imperial bond. 
 
 But the chief of all agencies for tightening this bond would 
 be the vigorous enforcement of the Acts of Trade, which had 
 fallen into sad neglect. Two parts of the Old Colonial System 
 were fairly well observed, because they brought little incon- 
 venience to the American merchant. 1 But the act of 1663, 
 requiring European goods to be brought to the colonies only 
 via England, was constantly violated. One writer estimates 
 that goods to the value of 750,000 were smuggled into the 
 colonies directly from European ports in the year 1765. More- 
 over, the notorious Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733, designed 
 to ruin the trade of the colonies with the French and Dutch 
 West Indies, was a dead letter. Tens of thousands of hogs- 
 heads of molasses were imported into Massachusetts and Rhode 
 Island annually, and only the most trifling duties were col- 
 lected. 2 Of course, during the war with France such traffic was 
 not only illicit but treasonable. Admiral Hawkes testified to 
 the Board of Trade in 1750 that he "certainly would have 
 taken Martinique if it had not been for the provisions with 
 which North American vessels, to the knowledge of every 
 captain of his squadron, supplied the French island." In tha 
 next war (1755-1763) Admirals Hawkes and Boscawen found 
 that the illicit trade with the American mainland was all that 
 kept the French Indies from "utter collapse." William Pitt, 
 indignant that any part of the empire should view the French 
 as other than enemies, peremptorily ordered that the law of 
 1733 be enforced, even if the navy had to be employed. 
 
 1 Namely, the acts of 1651 and 1660, providing that the trade must be carried 
 on in ships built, owned, and manned by British subjects and that the " enumer- 
 ated" goods be senf'only to English ports. 
 
 2 The reports of the London customhouse show an average return of less 
 than 1000 a year for duties on molasses under the act of 1733, whereas Rhode 
 Island alone, had she paid the duty of 6d. a gallon prescribed by the act, would 
 have contributed 28,000 to the royal treasury. 
 
62 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The case seemed clear to the ministry, and they proceeded 
 j with confidence to formulate a plan for raising a revenue in 
 rtys America. In April, 1764, the Sugar" Act was passed. A duty of 
 $d. a gallon was kept on molasses enough to ruin New Eng- 
 land trade and force colonial capital into manufactures, which 
 had been forbidden by the English statutes of the eighteenth 
 century. Duties were also laid on wines, silks, cambrics, and 
 other articles. The drawbacks which had been paid on Eu- 
 ropean goods reexported from England to the colonies were 
 canceled. New duties were made collectible in America. This 
 last provision necessitated a corps of revenue officers in the 
 colonial ports, the multiplication of admiralty courts, and the 
 enlargement of naval operations on the American coast. Cer- 
 tificates were required from ship captains, describing accurately 
 the contents and destination of cargoes. Penalties for the 
 infringement of the law were severe. It was evident that Eng- 
 land had entered on a new policy of colonial control. Samuel 
 Adams in a Boston town meeting (May, 1764) instructed the 
 delegates to the Massachusetts General Court to rebuke that 
 assembly for not taking notice of "the intention of the British 
 ministry to burden us with new taxes." Two months later 
 James Otis, in his "Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and 
 Proved," invoked "the united application of all who feel ag- 
 grieved" to seek redress. That sentiment of common interest 
 among the colonies which the French war had not been able to 
 stir was roused by the Grenville policy. 
 
 It was estimated that the new taxes of 1764, with the saving 
 of the drawbacks, would net about 45,000 a year to the 
 British exchequer. But the cost of the military and fiscal 
 machinery in America would amount to some 360,000, of which 
 the colonies were to be asked to pay about a third. Grenville 
 decided that the most effective method for raising the major 
 part of the colonial revenue was the imposition of a stamp 
 tax, which had been recommended several times during the 
 eighteenth century. Still, he was willing to try any other method 
 which the colonies had to suggest. He therefore only announced 
 his intention of imposing a stamp tax and waited a full year 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 63 
 
 for the proposition of a substitute tax by the colonies. Pro- 
 tests from colonial agents against any kind of tax at all 
 were ruled out of order the British Parliament was not 
 in the habit of receiving petitions against revenue bills. In 
 February, 765, a listless and half-empty House of Commons, 
 by a vote of 205 to 49, and a still more listless and empty House 
 of Lords, without division or debate, passed the Stamp Act, 
 which, says Lecky, "if judged from its consequences, must 
 be deemed one of the most momentous legislative acts in the 
 history of mankind." 
 
 To the astonishment of king and ministry the passage of the 
 Stamp Act aroused a storm of opposition in America. Its en- 
 forcement would have meant the thrusting of the hand of the 
 taxgatherer into all the transactions of colonial business; for 
 by the terms of its sixty printed pages all pamphlets and news- 
 papers, all legal and commercial paper, bills, bonds, leases, 
 licenses, deeds, policies, diplomas, must bear the stamp 
 which certified that duties had been paid thereon. Ever since 
 1673 England had collected slight duties in America; but 
 these had been solely for the execution of the imperial com- 
 mercial system, 1 a right which the colonies never denied in 
 principle, although they often chafed under its application. 
 Even the duties of the Sugar Act of 1764, though manifestly 
 levied for the purpose of revenue, could still be classed under 
 the title " regulation of trade." At any rate, the duties would 
 be collected only in the ports of entry and would directly 
 affect only the mercantile class, which had long been accus- 
 tomed to its tiffs with collectors, naval officers, and admiralty 
 judges. But the new stamps would be distributed all over the 
 land. They would be in every court, shop, and printing-house. 
 They would pass from hand to hand as a constant reminder 
 of a tax imposed by a legislature three thousand miles distant 
 in which no American sat. 
 
 1 Small duties had been collected in American ports on tobacco, sugar, cotton, 
 and ginger exported from one colony to another, in order to prevent these 
 "enumerated" goods from evading the law of 1660 by reaching European ports 
 through a double shipment. 
 
64 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Long before the day arrived for the distribution of the 
 stamps (November i, 1765) the colonies were seething with 
 protest. Patrick Henry's resolutions in the Virginia assembly, 
 on May 29, sounded "the alarm-bell to the disaffected." "The 
 inhabitants of this colony," he said, "are not bound to yield 
 obedience to any law or ordinance imposing taxation upon 
 them without their consent," for such actions "have a mani- 
 fest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom." 
 In June, James Otis of Massachusetts proposed a meeting of 
 committees from the colonial assemblies to deal with "the 
 threatened invasion of the rights of men of English tradition." 
 In August, mobs in Boston hanged Lord Bute and Oliver (the 
 stamp distributor) in effigy and sacked the elegant mansion of 
 Chief Justice Hutchinson. In October, twenty-seven delegates 
 from nine of the colonies met in the Stamp Act Congress at 
 New York and joined in the first common protest of Americans 
 to the British king and Parliament, claiming all the "inherent 
 rights and liberties of the king's natural-born subjects." When 
 the first of November arrived not an agent was found in 
 America to distribute the stamps. They had all resigned. 
 
 Even King George now realized that mischief was afoot. 
 "I am more and more grieved," he wrote to Conway, "at the 
 action of the Americans. Where this spirit will end is not to 
 be said. It is undoubtedly the most serious matter that ever 
 came before Parliament." When Parliament met, on Decem- 
 ber 17, 1765, the enforcement of the Stamp Act became the 
 absorbing subject. Burke declared that "the great contests for 
 freedom in this country were from the earliest time chiefly on 
 the question of taxation," and hailed the Americans as the 
 descendants of the men who had withstood the illegal imposi- 
 tions of Norman, Plantagenet, and Stuart kings. Pitt, asserting 
 that the subject was the greatest that had ever engaged the 
 attention of Parliament, except for the revolution of 1688, 
 vindicated the resistance of America. "Taxation," he cried, 
 "is no part of the governing or legislative power. The taxes 
 are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. . . . The 
 Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 65 
 
 have ever had in their possession this constitutional right of 
 granting their own money. ... I rejoice that America has 
 resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings 
 of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have 
 been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest." The mer- 
 chants of England petitioned Parliament for the repeal of the 
 act. Benjamin Franklin, summoned to the bar of the House 
 of Commons, declared that there was not gold or silver enough 
 in the colonies to pay the tax for a single year. The Rocking- 
 ham cabinet, which had succeeded Grenville's, was opposed 
 to the coercion of the colonies, and in March, 1766, the Stamp 
 Act was repealed amid rejoicings "which Burke declared un- 
 precedented in the British Empire. The colonists voted statues 
 to Pitt and King George. But no offer was made to raise the 
 imperial funds; and Parliament coupled with the repeal a 
 Declaratory Act, asserting their "full power and authority to 
 make laws to bind the colonies and people of America ... in 
 all cases whatsoever." 
 
 The controversy over the Grenville legislation of 1764-1765 
 illustrates every principle of the quarrel between Great Britain 
 and the colonies. It revealed suddenly and sharply the diver- 
 gent economic interests and political ideals which had been 
 developing for a century and a half on both sides of the 
 Atlantic. The colony of Rhode Island remonstrated with 
 the Board of Trade against the act of 1764, declaring that the 
 annual excess of their imports over their exports in trade with 
 the mother country was 115,000, which balance they could 
 pay only through their molasses trade with the (French) West 
 Indies. But the English treasury officials called this trade 
 " stolen from the commerce of Great Britain, contrary to the 
 fundamental principle of colonisation, to every maxim of 
 policy, and to the express provisions of the law." The colonists 
 denied the right of Parliament to tax them or even to legislate 
 for them, since Parliament could not extend its power beyond 
 its constituents, the people of Great Britain. For England to 
 concede, however, that the colonial assemblies took the place 
 of Parliament would be practically to concede America's 
 
66 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 independence. The king could not be the bond of union, as the 
 colonists asserted that he was, because the king was not sover- 
 eign in England. Parliament was sovereign there, and, accord- 
 ing to the British view, the colonies as corporations were subject 
 to the sovereign power of Parliament, while the individual 
 inhabitants of the colonies enjoyed all the personal rights of 
 English freemen. These were radically conflicting ideas, and 
 it did not serve to clarify the situation when John Adams 
 and James Otis appealed from the power of Parliament to a 
 British " constitution" with which a law of Parliament might 
 be in conflict. The English government knew no such con- 
 stitution. It was the "higher law," or the inherent "rights of 
 man," that the colonists were setting up. 1 To follow that law 
 against the positive law of the realm could have only one 
 result revolution . 
 
 To the supporters of the ministry the arguments of the 
 colonists seemed only sophistry to justify their disobedience. 
 Their protestations of loyalty to the crown seemed only hy- 
 pocrisy when coupled with defiance of the Parliament to which 
 the crown itself was subordinate. "You say you are British 
 subjects," cried Hutchinson, "and yet you suppose that you are 
 constitutionally exempt from one of the obligations which 
 British subjects are under. But if you are exempt from one, 
 you are exempt from all, and so are not British subjects at all." 
 As to the colonists' argument that they were not represented 
 in Parliament, who gave them the right to dictate their own 
 provincial theories of representation to the sovereign body? 
 All the non-noble subjects of the British crown were repre- 
 sented in the House of Commons, wherever they lived. If 
 Philadelphia and New York had no delegates at Westminster, 
 neither had Manchester and Sheffield ! 
 
 a The Pennsylvania assembly was the first to voice the doctrine of "natural 
 rights," which became the main argument of Thomas Jefferson and other radi- 
 cals as the Revolution approached. The assembly declared that the government 
 of Pennsylvania was "founded on the natural rights of man and is or ought to 
 be perfectly free." It would be hard to find any justification for this language 
 in the charter of Pennsylvania, which, curiously enough, was the only Stuart 
 charter that expressly reserved to Parliament the right to tax the colony. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 67 
 
 The case seemed perfectly clear to George Ill's ministers. 
 They had imposed a reasonable tax on America, in a consider- 
 ate manner, through the sovereign body of the empire. The 
 case seemed equally clear to the American " patriots." They had 
 levied their own taxes in their assemblies since the earliest days. 
 They looked on this privilege as the chief guarantee of their 
 liberty. They had no members sitting in the British Parliament, 
 and hence no way of redress in case of unfair or oppressive 
 legislation. Here the matter rested, with the repeal of the Stamp 
 Act in 1766; and here it might have rested indefinitely if the 
 British ministry had stood by the repeal. The question was not 
 settled: it was deadlocked. 
 
 The agitation stirred in 1765 and the relief manifested in 
 1 766 would have convinced a wiser ministry and king that the 
 revenues anticipated from America by taxation were of trifling 
 value compared with the harmony of the empire. The British 
 ministry, however, was not willing to let the matter rest. The 
 alternate advance and retreat in the decade following the Gren- 
 ville legislation, the " blundering into a policy one day and 
 blundering out of it the next," as Burke called it in his famous 
 "Speech on Conciliation" in 17 74, represented the dogged vacil- 
 lation of the Tory ministers of George III. The repeal of the 
 Stamp Act marked the abandonment of the attempt to raise 
 a revenue in America by "internal taxation," leaving the 
 colonies apparently the victors "a fatal compliance," as 
 George III said a few years later. When Charles Townshend 
 returned to the charge in 1767, it was on the ground of "exter- 
 nal taxation," or imperial trade regulation, a right grudgingly 
 conceded by the colonies at the beginning of their fight on the 
 stamp duties. But that fight had raised in them a spirit of 
 protest against any kind of taxation by the British Parliament. 
 Townshend's duties on painters' colors, paper, glass, and tea 
 were resented only less defiantly than Grenville's stamps. 1 
 
 !The Townshend Acts were especially odious in that they authorized Writs 
 of Assistance to search men's private premises for smuggled goods and greatly 
 enlarged the personnel of the customs department in America. These measures 
 were only the belated execution of the Navigation Acts of 1672 and 1696, but 
 
68 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Nonimportation agreements, evasions, smuggling, and intim- 
 idation followed on protests in the colonies. Samuel Adams 
 of Massachusetts drew up a letter, in February, 1768, to be 
 communicated to the colonial assemblies, in which he advanced 
 the astonishing theory that "His Majesty's royal predecessors 
 were graciously pleased to form a subordinate legislature here, 
 that their subjects might enjoy the inalienable right of repre- 
 sentation." Imagine such a thought's having crossed the mind 
 of Charles I when he granted the Massachusetts charter of 
 1629 just at the moment when he dismissed his Parliament 
 in England and started on his eleven years of "personal rule" ! 
 When the Massachusetts assembly refused by a vote of 92 to 
 17 to withdraw the letter, two British regiments were sent to 
 Boston to awe the inhabitants into obedience. Roughs baited 
 the redcoats in the streets, pelting them with brickbats and 
 calling them "lobsters" and "bloody-backs." In the riot that 
 followed (March, 1770) five men were killed. The funeral of 
 these victims of the "Boston Massacre" was made the occa- 
 sion for a popular demonstration engineered by Samuel Adams ; 
 and each anniversary of the affray was celebrated in Boston 
 with incendiary speeches against British tyranny, until the 
 national fete of the Fourth of July furnished a nobler patriotic 
 holiday. After the "massacre" the troops were withdrawn and 
 the Townshend duties repealed (except for a trifling tax on 
 tea). Therewith the attempt of Parliament to raise a revenue 
 in America was abandoned. 
 
 For three years thereafter there was comparative calm. The 
 colonies were hardly mentioned in Parliament. Their trade 
 with England revived, imports rising from 1,634,000 in 1769 
 to 4,200,000 in 1771. In spite of the efforts of the radicals 
 to prevent the importation and sale of tea, a good deal of 
 that article found its way into, the houses of the colonial 
 dames. The British East India Company had 17,000,000 
 
 they were resisted as encouraging " a swarm of office-holders to live on the fruits 
 of colonial labor and industry." At the same moment (June, 1767) the assembly 
 of New York was suspended for refusing to obey a Quartering Act which was a 
 part of the Grenville legislation. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 69 
 
 pounds of tea stored in warehouses in England, on which they 
 would have to pay a duty of a shilling a pound before they 
 could dispose of it in Great Britain. The company was finan- 
 cially embarrassed, and the ministry proposed the wily scheme 
 of benefiting its shareholders in England and furnishing it 
 with customers in America by drawing back the shilling duty 
 and allowing the company to sell the tea in the colonies, subject 
 only to the duty of 3d. a pound in America. The revenue to 
 the crown would be trifling. The object was rather to tempt 
 the colonies to acknowledge the authority of the British Par- 
 liament to tax them. As Lord North bluntly confessed, "The 
 King meant to try the case in America." 1 The result of the 
 "trial" is well known. Not an ounce of the 2051 chests of 
 tea sent to America was received by the consignees. The ships 
 arriving at Philadelphia and New York were sent back with 
 their cargoes intact. The tea that was landed at Charleston 
 was seized by the authorities of the province and afterwards 
 sold at auction for the benefit of the American cause. The 
 people of Boston having failed to persuade Governor Hutch- 
 inson (two of whose sons were among the consignees) to 
 give clearance papers for the three tea ships anchored at 
 Griffin's wharf, a band of citizens disguised as Mohawk Indians 
 boarded the ships in the evening of December_i, 1773, and, : 
 ripping open 342 chests of tea, dumped the contents into Boston . 
 Harbor. 
 
 In this semitragic, semicomic act ended the Grenville policy 
 inaugurated a decade earlier. It had been contracted to nar- 
 rower and pettier lines by Townshend and Lord North, until it 
 dwindled down to a tricky attempt to enforce a three-penny 
 tax. The destruction of the tea drew down upon the people of 
 Massachusetts the first punitive measures of the British govern- 
 ment. The cup of the colony's offense was full to the brim. 
 The Otises, Warrens, Quincys, and, above all, the "brace of 
 Adamses" had aroused a spirit of rebellion and organized an 
 
 ir The king wrote to North in September, 1774, that he had "no inclination for 
 the present to lay fresh taxes," but that there "must always be one tax to keep 
 up the right." 
 
70 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 "invisible government" 1 which must be put down once for all. 
 A series of acts of Parliament in the spring of 1774 (called by 
 the colonists "the Intolerable Acts") sounded the challenge to 
 submission or defiance. The port of Boston was closed until 
 the colony should pay the East India Company for the tea 
 destroyed. The charter of 1691 was practically abrogated, 
 the choice of various executive officers being transferred from 
 the people to the royal governor. The town meeting was for- 
 bidden to assemble without the governor's permission, except 
 for the routine business of elections. A new Quartering Act 
 required the province to provide lodging and food for British 
 soldiers. Officers or magistrates charged with murder in sup- 
 pressing riots or executing revenue laws could be sent to Eng- 
 land for trial. Thomas Hutchinson, the ablest of the royal 
 governors of Massachusetts, left for England in June, 1774, 
 and was succeeded by General Gage, who declared that with 
 four regiments of soldiers he could quell the rebellious spirit of 
 the colony: "They will be lions while we are lambs, but if we 
 take the resolute part they will prove very meek." 
 
 The British government thought that it was punishing a prov- 
 ince, but found that it was declaring war on America. The 
 colonies, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, made the 
 cause of Massachusetts their own. Food and money were sent 
 to relieve the inhabitants of Boston from the distress caused 
 by the closing of her port. The Virginia Burgesses adopted 
 Jefferson's resolution appointing the day on which the Boston 
 port bill went into effect as a day of humiliation and prayer, 
 "to give us one heart and mind firmly to oppose every injury to 
 American rights ; and that the minds of his Majesty and par- 
 
 1 Samuel Adams had formed Committees of Correspondence among all the 
 towns of the province in 1772. They were unofficial groups of patriots to keep 
 alive the agitation against the British governors "when the flame of liberty 
 burned low." The Tory pamphleteer Daniel Leonard called these committees 
 "the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of 
 sedition." Thomas Jefferson, through whose influence the committees were made 
 intercolonial, wrote many years later (1818) to Governor Tyler of Virginia, "To 
 these little republics [of New England] we owe the vigor given to the Revolution 
 at its commencement in the eastern States." 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 71 
 
 liament may be inspired from above with wisdom, moderation, 
 and justice." For this impertinence the House of Burgesses 
 was promptly dissolved by the governor, but the members, 
 meeting informally at the Raleigh Tavern, sent out the call for 
 an annual congress of all the colonies. One after another the 
 colonies fell into line, until all but Georgia had chosen delegates. 
 On the fifth day of September, 1774, the fifty-five members of 
 the First Continental Congress met in Carpenter's Hall, at 
 Philadelphia. America was organized. From this time forth 
 there was a public body, representative of the common interests 
 of her colonies. The Continental Congress laid the foundation 
 of the American federal nation. 
 
 TtiE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 
 
 Protest, nullification, armed resistance, independence, these 
 are the steps in the reply of the colonies to what they deemed 
 British oppression. The stages are not sharply defined. There 
 were some colonial leaders, no doubt, who early became con- 
 vinced that they could never preserve their liberties in con- 
 nection with the British Empire ; and there were many who had 
 not advanced beyond the stage of protest when the majority 
 were ready for independence. There is no one of the leaders, 
 from the radical Patrick Henry to the conservative Dickinson 
 or Galloway, whose views we can call "typical" in the decade 
 succeeding the Stamp Act. The transactions of the First Con- 
 tinental Congress, however, were a long step toward the con- 
 solidation of public opinion in America ; for the common 
 statement of grievances there presented and the adoption of a 
 colony-wide plan for the boycott of British trade may be called 
 the first expression of the will of a united America. 
 
 The Congress was radical. Its members had been chosen by 
 Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Safety, or pro- 
 vincial mass meetings, and in only two instances (Massa- 
 chusetts and Pennsylvania) by colonial legislatures. On the 
 motion of Samuel Adams it forthwith indorsed the Suffolk 
 Resolves, in which the patriots of the county containing the 
 
72 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 rebellious town of Boston had declared that the Intolerable Acts 
 were void, had instructed the tax collectors not to pay the public 
 money over to the king's officers, and had even advised the in- 
 habitants of the town to train a militia force and to elect dele- 
 gates to a provincial congress to govern the colony in place of 
 the legislature under General Gage. This was a virtual decla- 
 ration of independence. James Galloway, a conservative dele- 
 gate from Pennsylvania, proposed a plan, which was approved 
 by the Earl of Chatham (Pitt) and several other leading Whigs 
 in England, for a permanent congress of the united colonies at 
 Philadelphia, with power to concur with Parliament in all 
 legislation affecting America. But Galloway's plan was rejected, 
 and even the report of it was expunged from the journals of 
 Congress. Instead, there was adopted a "Declaration of Rights 
 and Grievances," a kind of ultimatum to Great Britain, in which 
 the extreme claims of the colonies were put forward. It called 
 for the repeal of a dozen acts passed since the Grenville 
 ministry, especially the Intolerable Acts, which were character- 
 ized as "impolitick, unjust, cruel, and unconstitutional." The 
 colonists migrating from their mother country, it claimed, lost 
 none of their rights, which were based on "the immutable laws of 
 nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several 
 charters or compacts." 1 An agreement called the "Association," 
 boycotting both import and export trade with Great Britain, 
 a petition to the king, and addresses to the inhabitants of 
 the province of Quebec, 2 to the people of England, and to the 
 
 1 Note the order of the sources from which these rights are derived. Thomas 
 Jefferson sent to the Virginia convention which met in August, 1774, to choose 
 delegates to the Congress a paper containing a draft of instructions to the mem- 
 bers, which was printed under the title, "A Summary View of the Rights of Brit- 
 ish America." Next to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" the "Summary View" 
 was the most influential of all the Revolutionary pamphlets. It contains the first 
 clear statement in modern history of the doctrine of expatriation,, claiming that the 
 emigrants to the American colonies were released from all connection with Great 
 Britain except their voluntary allegiance to the crown. Parliament was as "for- 
 eign" a body for them as the Spanish cortes or the diet of the Holy Roman Em- 
 pire ! Jefferson called the Continental Congress "your great American Council." 
 
 2 The Congress exposed itself to not a little ridicule from the Tories for its in- 
 consistency in the addresses to the English people and to the Canadians. In the 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 73 
 
 American colonists completed the series of papers put forth by 
 the Congress. Chatham declared them unrivaled for "solidity 
 of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion." The 
 Congress adjourned in October, 1774, to meet again in the 
 following May in case their grievances were not redressed. 
 
 Before we study under what changed and exciting conditions 
 the Congress reconvened on May 10, 1775, it is well to examine 
 the theory which underlay the Declaration of Rights and 
 Grievances. It has often been remarked that the Americans 
 of the Revolutionary epoch were far closer to their ancestors 
 of the seventeenth century than to contemporary Englishmen. 
 Certain it is that Hooker's remark in the "Ecclesiastical Polity," 
 that "governments cannot be legitimate unless resting on the 
 consent of the governed," and John Locke's theory in the "Essay 
 on Civil Government," that "men naturally free, equal, and 
 independent form political societies in which they delegate to 
 a government certain restricted powers for securing the tran- 
 quillity, the safety and welfare of the people," seemed like 
 self-evident truths to the colonists. Their ancestors had left 
 the homeland in great numbers in the seventeenth century for 
 the sake of vindicating these truths. All their traditions were 
 those of compact between free and equal people, whether 
 associating in the commercial companies of Virginia and the 
 Carolinas or building the Congregational churches of the 
 Northern colonies, or laying the foundations for the little "body 
 politick" in the cabin of the Mayflower. They did not have 
 to learn the doctrine of government as a public service, because 
 they had never, from the days of Archbishop Laud to the days 
 of Lord North, allowed the practice of government as a divine 
 right to be established on these shores. 
 
 This sense of their dignity as English freemen, inherited from 
 their ancestors of the seventeenth century, was strengthened by 
 the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which taught the 
 
 former it raised the bogy of Roman Catholicism, accusing George III of trying 
 to fasten " popery " on all the colonies, as James II had tried to fasten it on Eng- 
 land ; while in the latter it cited the case of Switzerland to show how Protestant 
 and Catholic could dwell together in unity. 
 
74 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 natural, inalienable rights of the individual and his unlimited 
 perfectibility. Every act of authority outside the "natural" 
 sphere of parentage, guardianship, or such necessary personal 
 relationships verged toward tyranny. Political associations 
 arose out of the "social compact" and were simply the ex- 
 pression of the "nature and constitution of man in the relations 
 he has to the beings that surround him." Men ceased in this 
 doctrine to be the creatures of the state and became its creators. 
 "The sovereign," said Jefferson in 1774, "has had rights and 
 the people only privileges till now. This rule must be reversed. 
 It is the people who have all the rights and the sovereigns have 
 only very limited privileges." 
 
 The events of the ten years between the Grenville legislation 
 and the meeting of the Continental Congress revealed how far 
 apart were the men of English speech and blood on both sides 
 of the Atlantic. To the British government, and doubtless to 
 a great majority of the English people, 1 the behavior of the 
 colonists in that decade seemed like willful rebellion. English 
 statesmen knew nothing of that fictitious "constitution," above 
 Parliament and the king, which by conferring "natural rights" 
 on the colonists as men allowed them to slip out of their respon- 
 sibilities as subjects. It was a much more serious thing than 
 "mutual misunderstanding" between England and her colonies. 
 It was rather mutual despite for political ideals, which each 
 side cherished the more tenaciously under opposition, that led 
 to the break. The year 1774 had not closed before George III 
 had stiated the dilemma in a letter to Lord North: "We 
 must either master them or totally leave them to themselves 
 as aliens." 
 
 When the Continental Congress reconvened on May 10, 
 1775, it was confronted by "a condition and not a theory." 
 
 !We must not be deceived by the Whig orators in Parliament into believing 
 that they represented the English nation. Lord North was more popular than 
 Edmund Burke. Thomas Hutchinson, who returned from the governorship of 
 Massachusetts to England in the autumn of 1774, wrote back, "I am persuaded 
 that there never has been a time when the nation in general was so united 
 against the colonies." 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 75 
 
 The king had rejected the petition of 1774. Chatham, eulogiz- 
 ing the Congress and demanding the withdrawal of the British 
 troops from Boston, had secured but eighteen votes in the 
 House of Lords, while both branches of Parliament by large 
 majorities assured the king of their "support at all hazards 
 to put down rebellion." The Massachusetts "minutemen" had 
 already faced the British redcoats, musket in hand, on Lexing- 
 ton green and at Concord bridge. Sixteen thousand New 
 England farmers, armed with their old smooth-bores and 
 blunderbusses of the French and Indian wars, were closing in 
 upon Gage's regiments in Boston. On May 16 the provincial 
 congress of Massachusetts wrote to the Continental Congress 
 at Philadelphia, asking it to take command of the army around 
 Boston "for the general defence of the rights of America" and 
 to devise a government for the country. It was too late to 
 avoid bloodshed. Congress must either put itself at the head 
 of such union as there was in America or leave the colonies to 
 anarchy and New England to the vengeance of the British 
 troops. It did not hesitate in its choice. George Washington 
 was appointed commander of the "continental army" in June, 
 and on July 6 Congress issued a spirited "Declaration of Causes 
 for Taking up Arms." "We are reduced to the alternative of 
 chusing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritable 
 ministers or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We 
 have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dread- 
 ful as voluntary slavery. Our cause is just. Our union is 
 perfect. . . . We mean not to dissolve that union [between 
 England and the colonies] which has so long and so happily 
 existed and which we sincerely wish to see restored. Necessity 
 has not yet driven us to that desperate measure. ... In 
 defence of the freedom which is our birthright we have taken 
 up arms. We shall lay them down when hostility shall cease 
 on the part of our aggressors." 
 
 Some of the delegates had come to the second meeting of the 
 Continental Congress ready to follow Samuel Adams in declar- 
 ing immediate independence, seizing the king's officers, and 
 soliciting the aid of France and Spain. But the conservatives 
 
76 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 were numerous enough to persuade the Congress again to 
 "whine in the Style of humble petitioners" to the king. In a 
 dutiful memorial John Dickinson protested the attachment 
 of the colonists to "his Majesty's person, family, and govern- 
 ment," deplored the common misfortune to Englishmen on both 
 sides of the Atlantic should fratricidal strife divide them, and 
 begged George III by healing the dispute to transmit his name 
 to posterity "adorned with that signal and lasting glory that 
 has attended the memory of those illustrious personages whose 
 virtues and abilities have extricated states from dangerous 
 conditions, and by securing happiness to others have erected 
 the most noble and durable monuments to their own fame." 
 Dickinson mistook his man. It was not for George III but for 
 George Washington that this lofty service and this enduring 
 fame were reserved. 
 
 Every month of the session of Congress gave fresh proof 
 of the impossibility of effecting a reconciliation. The king 
 proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion, prohibited all 
 trade and intercourse with them, set fire to their towns, and 
 hired German soldiers to reduce them to obedience. Congress, 
 on the other hand, maintained an army in active opposition to 
 the royal governor of Massachusetts, appointed diplomatic 
 agents to approach the courts of Europe for aid, and recom- 
 mended the patriots of New Hampshire, South Carolina, and 
 Virginia to follow the lead of Massachusetts in establishing 
 such a form of government as would "best produce the hap- 
 piness of the people and secure peace and good order during the 
 continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and 
 the colonies." It is hard to imagine what further act of sover- 
 eignty the Congress could perform; and yet it deferred the 
 declaration of the independence of America a full year from 
 the day when it so confidently announced the justice of the 
 colonies' taking up arms against their king. 
 
 Was it fidelity, caution, fear, or calculation that postponed 
 so long the declaration of American independence? This 
 question cannot be answered in a word. Pages could be filled 
 with the protestations of loyalty uttered by leading Americans 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 77 
 
 in the decade preceding the battle of Lexington. 1 Hypocrisy 
 and lip service ! cry the Tory historians of the Revolution. But 
 we need not attribute hypocrisy to men like Washington and 
 Jefferson, Franklin and Adams, to explain their protestations 
 of loyalty to the British Empire in the midst of their resistance 
 to parliamentary legislation. The very empire, as they under- 
 stood it, was the guaranty of certain immemorial rights, and 
 in the invasion of those rights they saw the danger of the dis- 
 solution of the empire. Their case was like that of many 
 men of the South in the decade preceding the Civil War. 
 Alexander H. Stephens protested to the last, vigorously and 
 honestly, his love. for the Union so long as it should guarantee 
 what he considered to be the constitutional rights of the 
 American commonwealths. He became the vice president of 
 the Confederacy. 
 
 But aside from sentimental attachment to Great Britain, 
 there were certain very practical considerations which held the 
 colonies back from a final break. Until they should be prepared 
 to act in unison a proclamation of their independence would be 
 rash and premature. In spite of the brave words of July 6, 
 1775, the union of the colonies was not "perfect," however just 
 their cause. As late as January, 1776, New York, Pennsylvania, 
 Maryland, and New Jersey instructed their delegates in Con- 
 gress to vote against independence. Unless they all "hung 
 together," as Richard Penn remarked with grim humor, they 
 were all likely to "hang separately." To confess themselves 
 rebels would close the door to reconciliation. And to fail in their 
 
 1 Some of the most pronounced of these remarks are : " Independence, which 
 none but rebels, fools, or madmen will contend for" (James Otis, 1765) ; "I have 
 never heard in any conversation from any person drunk or sober the least 
 expression of a wish for separation from England" (Benjamin Franklin, 1774) ; 
 " That there are any who pant after independence is the greatest slander on the 
 province [of Massachusetts!]" (John Adams, 1775); "Until after the rejection 
 of the second petition of Congress, I never heard an American of any class or 
 description express a wish for independence" (John Jay) ; "It is well known 
 that in July, 1775, a separation from Great Britain and the establishment of a 
 Republican Government had not yet entered into any person's mind" (Thomas 
 Jefferson, 1782) ; "I am well satisfied that no such thing [as independence] is 
 desired by any thinking man in all North America "(George Washington, 1774). 
 
78 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 rebellion would be to offer their heads to the executioner. 
 "Congress gave signal proof of their indulgence/' wrote Jef- 
 ferson, "and of their great desire not to go too fast for any 
 respectable part of our body." 
 
 If some feared anarchy, others feared despotism. There was 
 a deep-seated apprehension among the people of the new states 
 that their liberties might be encroached on by Congress. 
 George Ill's government was offensive, to be sure; but might 
 not a victorious general here subdue the states to a submission 
 the more deplorable as it would be self-invited, and the more 
 intolerable as its agents would be near at hand? Was it not 
 better to correct the ills they had than to fly to others that they 
 knew not of? And might there not perhaps be some truth in 
 the contemptuous irony with which Dean Tucker of Gloucester 
 had dismissed the whole question: "Independence would be a 
 cheap and excellent punishment for the colonies"? 
 
 The natural reluctance of the commercial classes on both 
 sides of the Atlantic to have their profitable connection broken 
 was another deterrent from independence. In the debates on the 
 nonintercourse agreement, in September, 1774, Samuel Chase 
 of Maryland predicted that bankruptcy for England would re- 
 sult if the measure were adopted. "Two thirds of the Colonies," 
 he said, "are clothed in British manufactures." Richard Henry 
 Lee (who later proposed the motion for independence) thought 
 that the same ship that carried the nonimportation resolutions 
 to England would bring back the redress. George III and his 
 political allies had to be on the alert to combat the commercial 
 pacifists who rose in Parliament to present petitions from the 
 merchants of their towns and counties praying for an accom- 
 modation with the colonies for the salvation of their trade. 
 
 Finally, English politics complicated the question of 
 American independence. If the postponement of the decla- 
 ration tended to unite opinion in America, it also tended to 
 divide opinion in Great Britain. So long as the colonies held 
 to their allegiance they might hope to win sympathy across the 
 water. The Whig statesmen, from Burke to Barre, who ap- 
 proved America's resistance to Grenville's, Townshend's, and 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 79 
 
 North's legislation, were a unit in their condemnation of seces- 
 sion. "I rejoice that America has resisted! " cried Pitt in the 
 debate on the repeal of the Stamp Act; but still he asserted 
 in 1774 that if he believed the Americans entertained "the most 
 distant intention of throwing off the legislative supremacy of 
 Great Britain/' he would be the first to enforce British author- 
 ity "by every effort the country was capable of making." Some 
 unforeseen turn of affairs might at any moment overthrow the 
 Tory government in England and bring the friends of American 
 rights into power. It had happened in 1765, in the case of 
 Grenville and Rockingham, with the glorious result of the re- 
 peal of the Stamp Act. A successor to Lord North might 
 undo the Intolerable Acts. Anyway, it was better to wait. The 
 population and wealth of the colonies were growing rapidly. 
 If separation must come, the longer it was delayed the easier 
 its accomplishment would be. 
 
 Such considerations, added to the natural inertia of a pros- 
 pering people, 1 the lack of a definite and universal mandate to 
 Congress from the states, and the serious risk involved in openly 
 proclaiming themselves rebels, make it a wonder rather that 
 independence was declared at all than that it was declared so 
 late. We have abundant testimony from men who certainly 
 would not overrate the amount of British sympathy in the 
 colonies that during the whole of the war at least one third of 
 the people of America were opposed to the separation. In 
 New York and some of the Southern states the Tories were 
 probably in the majority. Lecky, in an oft-quoted sentence, 
 has summed up the situation admirably: "The American Rev- 
 olution, like most others, was the work of an energetic 
 minority who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctu- 
 ating majority to courses for which they had little love, and 
 leading them step by step to a position from which it was 
 impossible to recede." 
 
 lf rhe bishop of Derry (Ireland) in a curious letter to Lord Dartmouth, 
 May 23, 1775, declared that a large part of the revolutionary sentiment in the 
 colonies was due to the migration from Ireland, within a few years, of "over 
 30,000 fanatical and hungry republicans." 
 
8o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The die was cast on July 2, 1776, when Congress passed Lee's 
 motion that " these United Colonies are, and of right ought to 
 be, free and independent states ; that they are absolved from all 
 allegiance to the British crown; and that all political con- 
 nection betweeen them and the state of Great Britain is, and 
 ought to be, totally dissolved." Two days later, Thomas Jeffer- 
 son's draft of a "Declaration of Independence" was adopted. 1 
 It was based on the political doctrines that governments exist 
 by the consent of the governed, for the purpose of securing to 
 men their inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness; and that revolution is a sacred duty when 
 governments seek to destroy or invade those rights. It was an 
 apology, published out of "a decent respect for the opinions 
 of mankind," submitting to a candid world the proofs of a 
 "long train of abuses and usurpations" practiced by George 
 III with the invariable object of reducing the American 
 colonies to a state of "absolute despotism." It was a final and 
 curt repudiation of the authority of Great Britain, and a 
 mutual pledge of life, fortune, and honor to maintain the 
 commonwealths from New Hampshire to Georgia as free and 
 independent states. 
 
 The Declaration of Independence is the birth certificate of 
 the American nation. It would be hard to exaggerate its 
 
 1 The Declaration was immediately printed by order of Congress and sent out 
 to the various states, where it was received with public celebrations, speeches, 
 bonfires, and banquets. A copy was engrossed on parchment and signed by most 
 of the members of Congress on August 2, 1776. The clerk of Congress, in 
 making up his rough records for July 4, left a blank space into which there was 
 later pasted a copy of the engrossed document with the signatures appended, 
 and this was then written into the corrected minutes. It therefore looked as 
 though the Declaration had been adopted and signed on July 4, 1776. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, some men whose names appear on it were not in Congress on that 
 date. The engrossed parchment with original signatures, preserved for many 
 years in the building of the Department of State at Washington, was transferred 
 in 1921 by an Executive order to the Library of Congress. Until 1894 it was on 
 exhibition. But over a century's exposure to the light wrought such damage that 
 the cracked and faded document had to be inclosed in a steel case. In 1824 over 
 two hundred facsimiles were made, which are widely distributed. Several drafts 
 of the Declaration in Jefferson's handwriting are also preserved. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 81 
 
 influence on political thought throughout the civilized world 
 or its effect on the immediate situation in America and Eng- 
 land. First of all, it cleared the air. We may set side by side 
 the testimony of a patriot of Delaware and an alderman of 
 London. The former wrote on July 9: "Now we know what 
 to depend on. For my own part, I have been at a great stand. 
 I could hardly own the king and fight against him at the same 
 time. But now heart and hand shall move together. I do not 
 think there will be 5 Tories in our part of the country in 
 10 days. . . . We had great numbers who would do nothing till 
 we were declared a free State, who now are ready to spend 
 their lives and fortunes in defence of our country." Two 
 months later, William Lee wrote from London: "The Decla- 
 ration of Independence has totally changed the nature of the 
 contest. It is now on the part of Great Britain a scheme of 
 conquest, which few imagine can succeed. Independence has 
 totally altered the face of things here. The Tories . . . hang 
 their heads and keep a profound silence on the subject. The 
 Whigs do not say much, but rather seem to think the step a 
 wise one on the part of America, 1 and the inevitable conse- 
 quence of the measures taken by the British ministry." It 
 was certain that imperial unity could not exist with full liberty 
 as the terms "empire" and "liberty" were understood on either 
 side of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. In trying to 
 keep the one and gain the other the colonists exposed them- 
 selves to those charges of inconsistency and vacillation which 
 Thomas Paine so mercilessly pressed home in "Common 
 Sense." But now all ambiguity was at an end. Protest, ex- 
 postulation, and nullification were all merged in the single 
 aim of vindicating the glorious and rebellious Declaration on 
 the field of battle. 
 
 The Declaration also marked the sharp separation of the 
 Tories from the "patriots." Till now the former had been 
 
 a This is true only of the Rockingham Whigs. Fox declared that the "Ameri- 
 cans had done no more than the English did against James II." The great 
 majority of the Whigs, however, both the "old Whigs" of Burke and the "new 
 Whigs" of Chatham, severely reprobated the American drift toward independence. 
 
82 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 lagging brethren, diverging widely in their judgment as to how 
 much pressure should be brought to bear on the ministry in 
 London, but all agreed that it must stop short of rebellion. 
 They abhorred treason to the king ; but the Declaration made 
 them traitors to America. Had they been few or poor, they 
 might have been treated with contemptuous indifference, but 
 they were many and comprised a good part of the elite of the 
 land large proprietors, merchants, lawyers, college presidents 
 and graduates, ex-officers of the crown, and practically all the 
 Anglican clergy. The Tories who were not fortunate enough 
 to get away from Boston on Howe's ships, or to be under the 
 king's protection in the royal armies or in those seaports which 
 were held by British garrisons (Newport, New York, Phila- 
 delphia, Charleston, Savannah), fared very badly. They were 
 tarred and feathered, ridden on fence rails, robbed of their 
 property, and branded in the press as " parricides of their 
 country." Washington, from whose pen the last phrase came, 
 wondered why " persons who are preying on the vitals of their 
 country should be allowed to stalk at large, whilst we know 
 that they will do us every harm in their power." The desperate 
 state of the patriot cause during the six months following the 
 Declaration only seemed to justify the prophetic taunt of the 
 Tories that the American colonies had cut their own arteries 
 in severing themselves from the British Empire and would 
 soon repent the repudiation of a benevolent king. Bleeding 
 feet, tattered coats, and empty stomachs were poor agents of 
 reconciliation or moderation. The patriots who did not desert 
 under such trials were triply steeled in their determination to 
 confound all traitors. 
 
 Finally, the Declaration of Independence was important as 
 a stroke in diplomacy. So long as the Americans were fighting 
 to coerce Great Britain into granting concessions which would 
 make them by their own confession dutiful and loyal subjects 
 of King George, they could hardly expect the aid of European 
 countries. France, Spain, and Holland were not interested in 
 the reform of the British Empire they wanted its destruction. 
 When therefore the Congress at Philadelphia announced the 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 83 
 
 secession of the largest and richest part of the proud empire, 
 the announcement was received with joy at the courts of Europe. 
 The Declaration itself, to be sure, was not enough to tempt 
 France, verging as she was toward bankruptcy and revolu- 
 tion, to take the lead publicly in building up a coalition of 
 European rivals of Britain's imperial power. Another year and 
 a decided American victory in the field were necessary to bring 
 about that result. But from the moment of the Declaration 
 secret aid from France in money, arms, and clothing was 
 liberally supplied, with the connivance of the ministers of 
 Louis XVI. The French government allowed and even en- 
 couraged its officers to solicit commands in the American army. 
 When it issued orders to stop ships sailing for America with 
 contraband goods, it supplied supplementary instructions to 
 make their escape easy. It ostentatiously forbade the use of 
 French ports to American privateers while privately assuring 
 the American agents that the prize courts would not interfere 
 with "the enjoyment of the whole harvest of plunder upon 
 British commerce.' 7 And all the while, the French foreign 
 office was pledging to the British ambassador "the perfect neu- 
 trality and pacific intentions" of King Louis's government. 
 Whether or not the American army could have held together 
 without the aid of France we cannot tell, for we cannot set 
 a limit to the tenacious, patient courage of George Washington. 
 The judicious Lecky believed that most of the American states 
 would have abandoned the struggle without this help from 
 Europe, and that, although New England and Virginia might 
 have kept up a local warfare for a time, "the peace party 
 would have soon gained the ascendent and the colonies been 
 reunited to the mother country." 
 
 Washington's army, which had been transferred to New 
 York after the British evacuated Boston, heard the Declara- 
 tion read in what is now City Hall Square, on July 9, and hailed 
 it with joy. The leaden equestrian statue of George III was 
 thrown down to be melted into bullets, and the king's arms on 
 public buildings were torn down and burned in boisterous bon- 
 fires, all in the sight of General Howe's troops on Staten 
 
84 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Island. In the dark days of the autumn of 1776, when the 
 American hopes seemed to have faded like a summer's flower, 
 when Washington was reluctantly withdrawing his dwindling 
 army across the state of New Jersey and writing that the game 
 was "pretty well up," when no friendly foreign power had as 
 yet taken us by the hand, it is doubtful whether anything else 
 could have held the ill-kept soldiers and the despairing states- 
 men to their task than that pledge of their lives, their fortunes, 
 and their sacred honor to the cause of independence. 
 
 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 More than a year passed after the signing of the Declaration 
 of Independence before there was much likelihood that the 
 American states would succeed in assuming that " separate and 
 equal station among the powers of the earth" to which they 
 aspired. Next to their own indomitable leader, the patriot 
 army had the commander of the British forces to thank that 
 it was not annihilated in any one of a half dozen desperate 
 situations in which it found itself in the autumn and winter 
 of 1776-1777. Richard, Lord Howe, admiral in the British 
 navy, sailed into New York harbor a week after the Declara- 
 tion of Independence was adopted, bringing reinforcements 
 to his brother William, who was encamped on Staten Island. 
 When the forces of the Howes were joined by Sir Henry 
 Clinton's troops, returning from an unsuccessful attack on 
 Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, and by some 8000 German 
 mercenaries hired from the princes of Anhalt, Brunswick, and 
 Hesse, there were nearly 35,000 soldiers in the British ranks 
 the largest army gathered on American soil till the Civil War- 
 
 To oppose this formidable force Washington had nominally 
 about 18,000 men, but they were poorly equipped and ill 
 trained. General Israel Putnam with 8000 patriot troops forti- 
 fied Brooklyn Heights and tried to hold Long Island against 
 Howe ; but the British easily outflanked and defeated Putnam's 
 advance lines under Generals Hull and Stirling (August 27), 
 and Howe had the Americans completely at his mercy in their 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 85 
 
 trenches at Brooklyn. All he had to do was to send a warship 
 into the East River and shut off their retreat to the New York 
 side. The ferry was left open, however, and Washington col- 
 lected craft of all sorts along the shore and transported his 
 entire army to the Manhattan side under the cover of a heavy 
 fog. Howe's advance pickets arrived at the water's edge in 
 time to fire a few scattering volleys at the vanishing boats. 
 
 This amazing apathy of General Howe was of a piece with 
 his conduct for the next ten months. He followed Washing- 
 ton's army more like a detective shadowing a suspected crim- 
 inal than like a general with a vastly superior army seeking 
 his prey. When he got close enough to the patriot army to 
 bring it to bay, as at Harlem Heights or White Plains, he was 
 satisfied with inflicting a defeat and letting the Americans 
 continue their retreat. If he captured the garrisons at Forts 
 Washington and Lee, it was only after allowing the Americans 
 plenty of time to abandon the strongholds if they wished to. 
 When he was leisurely pursuing the dwindling army across the 
 state of New Jersey, he timed his march so that his advance 
 columns entered Trenton just as Washington had got his last 
 boatload of troops across the Delaware to the Pennsylvania 
 side. At any moment of the five months (January to May, 
 1777) during which Washington's army of never more than 
 4000 men lay at Morris town, New Jersey, in winter quarters, 
 a detachment from Howe's army at New York or Cornwallis's 
 at New Brunswick might have annihilated the patriots and 
 ended the war. Washington himself wrote in March: "If the 
 enemy do not move, it will be a miracle. Nothing but ignorance 
 of our numbers and situation can protect us." But Howe was 
 ignorant of neither, and yet he did not move. Desertions from 
 Washington's army were constant. The New Jersey farmers 
 who defended their cattle, chickens, and vegetables against the 
 patriot scouts, in order that they might sell them at high prices 
 in hard gold to the British in New York, could give -their 
 customers all the information they wished. 
 
 The plain fact is that the commander of King George's 
 forces in America did not wish to conquer the Americans by 
 
86 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the sword. He was a Whig, although the king's cousin, and he 
 had promised his constituents at Nottingham that he would not 
 fight to subdue the people whom Burke and Chatham lauded. 
 He was the brother of the valiant George Howe, who had fallen 
 in Abercrombie's ill-fated attack on Ticonderoga (1758) and 
 whose monument in Westminster Abbey had been built by the 
 grateful generosity of the colony of Massachusetts. He was 
 himself a veteran of the French wars in America, having com- 
 manded a regiment at Louisburg (1758) and climbed the steep 
 path of the Anse de Foulon in the vanguard of Wolfe's band 
 of volunteers for the surprise of the pickets at Quebec. He 
 and his brother Lord Richard bore the commission from the 
 king to pardon the Americans individually and collectively on 
 their return to allegiance to the crown. 1 This olive branch 
 Howe carried in his right hand, the sword in his left. He be- 
 lieved that the great majority of Americans were really loyal 
 to the king, but had been led astray by demagogues and fire- 
 brands. He thought, not without reason, that the patriot army 
 would disintegrate, composed as it was of shifting levies of 
 militia, while the people of New Jersey and the other central 
 states flocked in increasing numbers to the Tory camp. Some 
 3000 had accepted the royal proclamation of pardon in De- 
 cember, 1776, and were carrying the certificates of loyalty 
 snugly in their coat pockets to frighten off any British or 
 Hessian raiders. 
 
 Whether Howe's conduct is to be explained by his own 
 amiable indolence or by the complication of British politics, 
 it was of utmost service to the patriot cause. He spared Wash- 
 ington's army until the sentiment of independence had taken 
 deep root in America ; until the new state governments were 
 
 1 After the battle of Long Island, Lord Richard sent General Sullivan to Con- 
 gress to ask for a conference. Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge went to his head- 
 quarters on Staten Island and were regaled on his excellent mutton and claret, 
 but came to no terms. Howe expressed his regret that he had not arrived in 
 America before July 4. When he spoke of his reluctance to conquer the Ameri- 
 cans, Franklin replied, "We will do our utmost to save your lordship that 
 embarrassment." 
 
THE WAR IN 
 THE NORTH 
 
 69 1775-1776 
 
 HoweJs and Clinton's March, 1776-1778 
 Washington's March, 1776-1778 
 Sullivan's March, 1778 
 Burgoyne's March, 1777 
 St.Leger's March, 1777 
 
 80 Lonfiritude 
 
 THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN THE CENTRAL ATLANTIC STATES, 
 
 1776-1778 
 
88 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 established ; until Congress was converted to the raising of a 
 standing army and so confirmed in its confidence in the great 
 commander as to give him almost dictatorial power in the 
 appointment of officers and the management of the war ; until 
 our persistent solicitations resulted in secret gifts of clothing, 
 guns, and money from France. No wonder that the patriot 
 officers drank healths to General Howe ! And no wonder that 
 the American Tories (except those who profited by the favors 
 of his entourage) condemned him as the marplot who was 
 spreading rebellion in the delusion that he was encouraging rec- 
 onciliation. 1 The American army suffered many an anxious 
 hour and many a humiliating defeat after the amiable Howe 
 departed, but these defeats did not mean the collapse of the 
 American cause. Even among the snows of Valley Forge the 
 presence of Lafayette, Steuben, and Pulaski was a visible proof 
 that the cause of the American patriots was becoming the cause 
 of Europe. The moment for the British government to have 
 crushed the American Revolution was when the army of crude 
 militia levies was barely holding together in its long season of 
 retreats, when the distracted Congress had fled from its hall in 
 Philadelphia, and when the new states were still dallying with 
 " provisional" governments, only half convinced that the Decla- 
 ration of Independence was wholly wise. 2 That moment General 
 Howe let pass, and it never came again. 
 
 1 Howe was invested with the order of the Knights of the Bath in March, 1777, 
 for his sterile victory on Long Island the year before. Judge Jones, the Tory 
 historian of New York, with bitter sarcasm, called the decoration " the reward for 
 evacuating Boston, for lying indolent upon Staten Island for near two months, 
 for suffering the whole rebel army to escape from him on Long Island and again 
 at White Plains," etc. That Howe had some support in Parliament is beyond 
 doubt. Arthur Johnson of Canada, in his "Myths and Mythmakers of the 
 American Revolution," attributes the success of the Americans to the encourage- 
 ment which they received from the English Whigs. A few days before the fall 
 of Lord North (March, 1782) a Tory member of the Commons, named Onslow, 
 said in defense of the prime minister, "Why have we failed so miserably in this 
 war against America, if not from the support and countenance given to rebellion 
 in this very house ! " 
 
 2 The state governments formed by Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vir- 
 ginia before the Declaration was adopted were only temporary. New Jersey, 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 89 
 
 Only a single positive achievement broke the monotonous) 
 course of defeats and retreats for the patriot army in the year I 
 that followed the Declaration of Independence. After havingj 
 escaped from Howe on Long Island, Washington had been 
 forced to evacuate New York, which remained in the hands of 
 the British during the entire war. Four thousand prisoners of 
 war went with the city, and other thousands were captured 
 when the forts on the Hudson were forced to capitulate. Vainly 
 summoning the insubordinate Charles Lee from the Highlands 
 of the Hudson to reenforce his shrinking army, Washington 
 fell back across the state of New Jersey to a position behind the 
 Delaware, while Howe spread out his forces in a line of posts 
 reaching from Perth Amboy through Trenton and Bordentown. 
 Thousands of the inhabitants of New Jersey accepted the 
 certificates of loyalty eagerly distributed by the Howes. Con- 
 gress fled to Baltimore, and the people of Philadelphia awaited 
 with indifference the establishment of a British garrison. Then 
 Washington turned like a wounded animal at bay. While he 
 still had the remnants of an army, and before the river froze 
 solid to give the British access to the "capital city," he crossed 
 to the Jersey side late on Christmas night and fell upon the 
 Hessians at Trenton in the midst of their holiday revels. A com- 
 plete victory, a thousand prisoners, and the consternation of the 
 British line through New Jersey were the rewards of his ex- 
 ploit. Cornwallis, just about to embark for England, hastened 
 to repair the disaster. But Washington outwitted and eluded 
 him, defeated three British regiments at Princeton, and sent the 
 bewildered Cornwallis back in panic to protect his stores at 
 New Brunswick. In a ten days' campaign Washington had re- 
 covered the state of New Jersey. He led his soldiers into their 
 precarious winter quarters at Morristown with a glorious 
 
 on the very day of the vote in Congress on independence, published a constitu- 
 tion which was to be "provisional in case of reconciliation with Great Britain." 
 It was not till 1777 that state governments were established, with severe test 
 laws compelling their citizens to swear that the war with Great Britain was just 
 and necessary and to transfer their allegiance from King George to the new 
 state authorities. 
 
90 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 memory to sustain them in the midst of privation and hunger. 
 It was the most critical action of the war, for it meant life or 
 ((death to the American cause. It was also the one military 
 < achievement of Washington's that ranks him with the great 
 (masters of strategy. It won the praise of the greatest soldier 
 of the age, Frederick of Prussia, and it remained in the mind of 
 Lord Cornwallis to the end of the war. Five years later, when he 
 surrendered at Yorktown, Cornwallis gracefully complimented 
 Washington on his "unsurpassed" performance in New Jersey. 
 When Washington emerged from his quarters at Morristown 
 in May, 1777, with ranks swollen to some 11,000 by the spring 
 levies, the plan was already taking shape in the British councils 
 which was to decide the issue of the war. It was an involved 
 plan, complicated by a lively exchange of letters and orders 
 between the generals in America and the ministry in London ; 
 and it is still the subject of a voluminous literature of incrimi- 
 nation and justification. The upshot of it was that General 
 John Burgoyne with an army of 8000 men should come down 
 from Canada via Lake Champlain and the upper Hudson valley, 
 while St. Leger, operating from Lake Ontario via Fort Stanwix 
 (Rome) and the Mohawk, should join him at Albany, and 
 General Howe should proceed from New York up the Hudson 
 to receive these supporting armies. The British forces thus 
 concentrated, and in possession of the entire Hudson-Champlain 
 line, could turn east or south to crush the rebellion. As the 
 British already had control of the Hudson up to the Highlands, 
 it is difficult to see how Washington could have done more than 
 to follow Howe with such harassing rear attacks as he dared to 
 hazard. What was his surprise to learn, just as the messages 
 reached him that Burgoyne was well started .on his march, that 
 Howe's great fleet was sighted off the lower New Jersey coast, 
 bearing to the south. Howe had left only 6000 men behind in 
 New York under Sir Henry Clinton. 
 
 What Howe's motive was in thus "deserting" Burgoyne at 
 the critical moment we do not know. Only worse confusion 
 comes of reading the reports of the investigation of the con- 
 duct of both the generals at the bar of Parliament in 1779 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 91 
 
 an investigation suddenly stopped for political reasons. But 
 whether it was lack of definite instructions from England, or 
 the belief that Burgoyne's army was able to take care of itself, 
 or an exaggerated idea of the importance of taking the "rebel 
 capital" of Philadelphia, or the desire to end the war in the 
 Middle States before the Tory general, Burgoyne, should have 
 time to gather laurels, or a mixture of all these motives, that 
 determined Howe to go south instead of north, the result of his 
 move was the disruption of the British Empire in America. 
 Washington could not prevent Howe from occupying and hold- 
 ing Philadelphia, in spite of his brilliant resistance at Brandy- 
 wine Creek (September n) and his attack on German town 
 (October 4). But Howe's success was dearly paid for. Three 
 days after the battle of Germantown Burgoyne abandoned his 
 hope of reaching Albany. In the three months since he had left 
 Ticonderoga with his heavily equipped regulars and his elabo- 
 rate baggage trains he had covered only seventy -five miles of the 
 rough, wooded country of upper New York. The farmers from 
 all over New England had shouldered their flintlock muskets and 
 hastened to join the forces gathering on his flank. By the first 
 of September there were 10,000 troops with Schuyler, Gates, 
 and Arnold, and in another month the numbers had almost 
 doubled. "Wherever the king's forces point," wrote Burgoyne 
 in despair, "militia to the number of 3000 or 4000 assemble in 
 a few hours." He tried to beat them off by brave attacks be- 
 fore Saratoga and Stillwater, but they were too many for him. 
 On October 7 he was so roughly handled by Arnold and Morgan 
 at the battle of Freeman's Farm that he abandoned his forward 
 march. Ten days later, despairing of help from either Carleton 
 on the north or Clinton on the south, he surrendered to General 
 Gates the 5000 men that were left of his army. 
 
 The loss of an army, "surrendered to poltroons and cowards 
 incapable of fighting," as Burgoyne's British critics persisted 
 in calling the American militia, was the least of the calamities 
 that Saratoga spelled for the British cause. Burgoyne sur- 
 rendered in October. In November, Congress adopted the 
 Articles of Confederation a constitution binding the states 
 
92 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 together in "a perpetual union." In December the news of the 
 surrender reached France and induced the court to make a for- 
 mal treaty of alliance with the United States. It was signed 
 on February 6, 1778. In a desperate effort to prevent the con- 
 flict in America from widening into a European coalition, Lord 
 North had introduced into Parliament a Conciliatory Act, re- 
 pealing the tea tax of 1767 and the Intolerable Acts of 1774 
 and authorizing a commission to sail for America to negotiate 
 the return of the revolting colonies to the empire. The terms 
 to be offered removed every abuse against which the Americans 
 had protested since the Grenville legislation. 
 
 This simultaneous movement of France and Great Britain 
 toward a closer union with the rebel states across the ocean 
 was the most significant diplomatic event of the Revolution. It 
 put America in a favored position which her astute minister at 
 Paris, Benjamin Franklin, was not slow to improve. He could 
 speak with mock anxiety of the possibility that America might 
 be obliged to consider England's offer unless more help were 
 forthcoming from Europe, and could work on Vergennes's fears 
 that the success of the English commission would mean the 
 triumph of the Whigs, in whose eyes France and not America 
 was the great enemy. "The power that recognizes American 
 independence will gather all the fruits of this war," wrote Ver- 
 gennes. Great Britain was willing to concede everything but 
 independence. France outbid her, offering the aid necessary 
 to the establishment of complete independence and granting, 
 besides recognition, a favorable treaty of commerce. 1 
 
 America eagerly welcomed the alliance with France in spite 
 of Tory tales to the effect that the country would be overrun 
 with Roman priests and that rosaries, relics, racks, and thumb- 
 screws, with bales of "papistical tracts," were coming in the 
 
 1 On the basis of material lately discovered in the Paris archives Professor 
 Van Tyne has shown that French agents in London warned their government 
 that the American states were ready, in return for the acknowledgment of their 
 independence, to join with England in an attack on the French West Indies. It 
 was probably to frustrate such a move, he believes, that the French government 
 agreed to the treaty of alliance with the United States in February, 1778. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 93 
 
 holds of King Louis's ships. What did come was powder, lead, 
 and gold. All told, between 1778 and 1781 France furnished us 
 all our naval strength, half our land forces, and equipment and 
 stores of incalculable value. Her intervention in our behalf 
 cost her over 1,000,000,000 francs. In return we promised to 
 make no terms with Great Britain short of the recognition of 
 our independence and to continue the war against the British 
 Empire until our ally should be ready to make peace. It was the 
 only treaty of alliance that the United States ever made, and, 
 as the sequel will show, it cost us much embarrassment until 
 we were relieved of it by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801. A ro- 
 mantic interest attaches to the reception by Congress, on 
 August 6, 1778, of the first accredited foreign minister to the 
 United States, M. Gerard, bearing a letter from Louis XVI to 
 his "very dear great friends and allies." It was the formal 
 entrance of America into the family of nations. 
 
 The humiliation at Saratoga, the rejection of the Conciliatory 
 Acts, and the conclusion of the French alliance brought about 
 a decided change in the conduct of the war. England cast 
 aside the olive branch and transferred the sword from her left 
 hand to her right. Revolt against her authority was one thing, 
 but a treaty of alliance with her old enemy France was insult 
 added to injury and obstinacy. The punishment should be 
 swift and unsparing. Clinton and Cornwallis never had more 
 than a third of the splendid army which the Howes brought to 
 New York in the summer of 1776; but they now used their 
 troops as the Howes never did. They sent out detachments in 
 every direction to terrorize the country by savage raids. The 
 theater of the war was changed too. Until now (except for 
 Clinton's futile expedition against Charleston in 1776) all the 
 fighting had been in the Northern states, but after 1778 it was^ 
 all south of the Potomac. The British held Newport until late 
 in 1 779 and New York until the close of the war, while Washing- 
 ton lay with his army for three years strongly intrenched in the 
 Highlands of the Hudson. He never met Clinton in battle, 
 and in fact fought no important engagement at all between 
 Monmouth (June, 1778) and Yorktown (October, 1781). 
 
94 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 In transferring the seat of the war to the South the British 
 ministers and generals were making a fresh start. They would 
 crush the rebellion by detaching the great lower states one by 
 one from the Union, from Georgia up to Virginia. Savannah 
 was taken December 29, 1778, with all its ammunition, stores, 
 and shipping. The patriot officials were driven from the state of 
 Georgia along with the patriot militia. The old colonial govern- 
 ment was reestablished and Georgia was formally declared by 
 Parliament to be out of the rebellion. In May, 1780, the 
 British brought a fleet and army down from New York and 
 reduced Charleston, the richest seaport of the South. With 
 the town of Charleston, General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered 
 2500 colonial troops, practically the whole American army 
 south of the Potomac. Henceforth Cornwallis could move where 
 he would. He began his march through the interior of the 
 Carolinas, expecting the tens of thousands of Loyalists in those 
 states to flock to his banners, as the patriots of New York and 
 New England had flocked to the banners of Schuyler, Gates, 
 and Arnold at Saratoga. 
 
 But Cornwallis discovered what all the British commanders 
 learned, that while it was easy to hold the seaport towns with 
 the support of the British fleet, the inland and upland regions 
 escaped his control. It was not Tories but patriot farmers, 
 hunters, and wood-rangers from both sides of the Appalachian 
 Mountains who swarmed around Colonel Ferguson at King's 
 Mountain (October 7, 1780) and nearly exterminated his de- 
 tachment of Loyalist militia. The "affair" at King's Moun- 
 tain struck terror into the army of Cornwallis: " There is 
 scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and the Pedee who 
 is not in arms against us," he wrote. He tarried at Wilmington 
 to repair the morale of his troops, while fresh thousands joined 
 the guerrilla leaders of the patriots. After a year's hard cam- 
 paigning by detachments between the yellow rivers which slant 
 lazily across the Carolinas, Cornwallis found himself in the 
 summer of i78i.just where he had been in the summer of 1780 ; 
 namely, in control of the seaboard. Even the patriot governor 
 and legislature of Georgia had been restored. 
 
THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN THE WEST AND SOUTH, 1778-1781 
 
96 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Not that the American cause was in a flourishing state. The 
 same spring which was to open the last year of actual warfare 
 (1781) marked in some respects the epoch of deepest dejection 
 and gloom for the patriots. The brilliant Arnold, his vanity 
 wounded by the " ingratitude" of Congress and flattered by the 
 solicitations of Tory friends, had attempted to deliver over the 
 stronghold of West Point (and therewith the Hudson and 
 Washington's army) to General Clinton. Continental currency 
 was so worthless that unless some gold could be secured from 
 France, Congress would cease to be able to purchase any 
 supplies or even hire transportation for those which it com- 
 mandeered. The calls for enlistments in the continental army 
 went unheeded, and the regiments already enlisted began to 
 show signs of mutiny for lack of food and pay. The pathetic and 
 the humorous are strangely blended in the fortunes of the army 
 in those closing months of the war : Washington riding to Hart- 
 ford to meet Rochambeau for a ceremonious welcome to the 
 French troops in the summer of 1780 without money enough 
 to pay the tavern bills of his suite; Morgan capitalizing the 
 cowardice of the raw militia at Cowpens (January 17, 1781) 
 by ordering them to fire two volleys and run to the rear warn- 
 ing the regulars not to disturb them when they should see them 
 flying past; Greene's troops at Eutaw Springs (August, 1781) 
 literally in rags, and sometimes even in Adam's garb of foliage, 
 their distracted commanders writing, "Turn what way you 
 will . . . ruin is in every form and misery in every shape." 
 
 Yet in spite of suffering and poverty, the situation was not 
 so desperate as in 1776. Cornwallis might detach the states 
 south of Virginia, but the North was safe. The most England 
 could hope for was to limit independence to New England 
 and the Middle States. Furthermore, the maritime powers of 
 Europe were growing more and more determined that England 
 should not win the war. Spain had joined France in 1779, and 
 the next year Holland came into the coalition against "the 
 tyrant of the seas"; while Russia, Denmark, and Sweden 
 formed the league of "armed neutrality" to enforce the doc- 
 trine that "free ships make free goods." In India, in the 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 97 
 
 Mediterranean, in the West Indies, and on the high seas Eng- 
 lish soldiers and sailors were contending against the powers 
 of Europe. The Whigs in Parliament were clamoring to have 
 the war in America ended, in order that Great Britain might 
 concentrate her attack on her ancient enemies, France and 
 Spain. Finally, the French, whose military and naval aid had 
 thus far been unfruitful, 1 might at any moment furnish just 
 the help necessary to turn the scale and win the war. 
 
 In January, 1781, Congress, at Washington's request, sent 
 Colonel John Laurens as special envoy to France to represent 
 our deplorable situation and urge immediate aid. The appeal 
 was not in vain. King Louis sent over an army of 7000 men 
 with Admiral De Grasse, and 2,000,000 francs in gold. General 
 Rochambeau, who had been lying inactive at Newport for a 
 year, joined Washington at White Plains (July 6), and De 
 Grasse sent word from the West Indies that he could spare his 
 ships for a while to cooperate with the troops on the coast. It 
 was too good an offer to miss. At first Washington wanted to 
 attack New York, but a better opening presented itself. Corn- 
 wallis, whose plans grew more grandiose as his means dwindled, 
 had conceived the idea of reducing the rich and populous state 
 of Virginia by a series of raids like those conducted in the 
 Carolinas. He boasted that he would drive out "that boy" 
 Lafayette, who was in command of a small army in the state. 
 But Lafayette outmaneuvered him in Virginia as Green had 
 done in the Carolinas, and Cornwallis returned as usual to 
 the coast, establishing himself in the peninsula between the 
 York and the James Rivers, at Yorktown. The strategy was 
 excellent so long as he had the support of the British fleet, as at 
 
 1 The French fleet, on whose cooperation any hope of driving the British from 
 the coast towns depended, was ordered to operate in the West Indies and give 
 only its spare time to the American coast. The result was that there could be no 
 effective support of the land forces. D'Estaing happened always to arrive just 
 too late or to depart just too early to prevent the embarkation of Clinton's 
 troops or to intercept British transports bearing provisions and reinforcements. 
 The Virginia assembly petitioned in vain for French ships to guard the entrance 
 to Chesapeake Bay, for example, at the time of Arnold's raid on the state 
 (April, 1781). 
 
98 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Savannah and Charleston; but he had moved so far up the 
 coast that the only naval help that could reach him quickly 
 would have to come from Clinton at New York. Washington's 
 clear eye saw the situation at a glance. He sent a swift ship to 
 the West Indies to beg De Grasse to hasten to the capes of 
 Chesapeake Bay, while he and Rochambeau, after a feint on 
 New York to keep Clinton anxious, marched rapidly from the 
 Hudson to the head of Chesapeake Bay and there embarked 
 for the Yorktown peninsula. Du Barras brought the siege 
 artillery from Newport in another French fleet. All the difficult 
 maneuvers were executed with precision and success. When 
 the British admiral Graves arrived from New York, he found 
 the French in possession of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay 
 and his own fleet too weak to dislodge them. Cornwallis was 
 in the trap. The superior forces of Americans and French 
 drew their siege lines closer and closer about his position, and 
 on October 19, 1781, he surrendered his army of 7000 men. 
 
 Cornwallis's capitulation at Yorktown, like Burgoyne's at 
 Saratoga, was humiliating, but not irretrievable. It need not 
 have ended the war. In fact, neither the American commander 
 nor the British monarch thought that it would. Washington 
 began to lay his plans for an attack on New York or Charleston 
 when the British fleet should return from the Indies for its next 
 summer vacation on the American coast; and George III, in 
 his speech from the throne on the opening of Parliament 
 (November 27, 1781), talked confidently of continuing the 
 struggle. Still the W T hig motion to conclude peace with 
 America and turn the whole power of Britain against the 
 European coalition was lost only by the rather close vote of 
 179 to 220. A few weeks later, when the French had captured 
 the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies and the Spaniards 
 and French had taken Minorca in the Mediterranean, the same 
 motion was defeated by only a single voice in Parliament. On 
 March 20, 1782, Lord North, after a valiant but reluctant 
 struggle of twelve years to maintain the high Tory policy of 
 George III, resigned the British government into the hands of 
 the Marquis of Rockingham. Clinton was immediately recalled 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 99 
 
 from New York, and his place taken by Sir Guy Carleton, a 
 friend of conciliation like the Howes. Emissaries were sent 
 to both Vergennes and Franklin in Paris to sound them on 
 terms of peace. 
 
 The British ministry tried hard especially after the death 
 of Rockingham, in July, 1782, brought to the premiership Lord 
 Shelburne of the imperial school of Chatham to arrange a 
 peace without granting American independence. They were 
 willing to give France concessions in India to detach her from 
 the American alliance, and to grant the Americans everything 
 that they had asked of Parliament since 1763. But it was in 
 vain. Neither Vergennes nor Franklin, neither the American 
 Congress nor any of the states, would agree to the terms. Even 
 Holland, which had recognized us as a nation in April, 1782, 
 and received our envoy John Adams as minister at The Hague, 
 would not make a separate peace with England except on the 
 basis of American independence. When the British govern- 
 ment had finally conceded this main point, however, the 
 American commissioners (Franklin, Adams, and Jay) were 
 less scrupulous about carrying out to the letter another article 
 of our treaty of 1778 with France. We had promised not to 
 make peace until our ally should be ready, and the American 
 Congress instructed our commissioners to respect this promise. 
 But when it was evident that France was delaying the peace in 
 order to get advantages for her ally Spain which did not con- 
 cern us (Gibraltar and Florida), and which were entirely 
 foreign to the avowed object of the treaty of 1778, our com- 
 missioners matched subtlety against subtlety in proceeding 
 alone with the negotiations with Great Britain. It took a good 
 deal of apologetic flattery from Franklin 's suave pen to pla- 
 cate Vergennes; but the Americans had their way, and on 
 November 30, 1782, the preliminaries of peace were signed 
 at Paris. 1 
 
 x The American commissioners have received much censure for breaking the 
 letter of the treaty after all the aid that we had received from France; and it 
 took considerable persuasion on the part of John Jay (besides the breaking of the 
 famous clay pipe) to win Franklin over to the policy of a separate negotiation. 
 
100 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The wildest patriot enthusiast could not claim that we had 
 " beaten" Great Britain. We had checked her raids in the 
 interior of the states and contributed valuable strategic advice 
 and brave troops to the French forces which had compelled 
 Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown. The indispensable naval 
 contingent at Yorktown was entirely French, and a majority 
 of the besieging troops under Washington's supreme command 
 were also French. Yet the terms of peace which we obtained 
 could not have been more favorable if we had humbled the 
 British Empire to the dust. In addition to our independence, 
 we secured the Mississippi as our western boundary, 1 the 
 right to share in the fisheries of Newfoundland, and immunity 
 from further responsibility toward the thousands of Loyalists 
 whose property had been confiscated than a recommendation 
 by Congress that the states should put no obstacle in the way 
 of the recovery of such property through their courts. 
 
 The disproportionate success of our diplomacy and our arms 
 was due to several causes : the astuteness and firmness of our 
 commissioners at Paris, the bad situation of the British fleet 
 in the West Indies before the news of the victory of Rodney 
 
 But it must also be said that the French were attempting to break the treaty 
 in spirit by prolonging the war, to America's detriment, after the object of the 
 treaty, the independence of America, was secured. Spain was not our ally but 
 France's. We were not bound to jeopardize our fortunes for the sake of Spam's 
 ambitions, and we had no part in the promises made by France to Spain. 
 1 Some historians have attributed England's acceptance of the Mississippi 
 rather than the Alleghenies as our western boundary to George Rogers Clark's 
 wonderful conquest of the Northwest in 1778-1779. Certainly that feat deserved 
 the winning of an empire. But there is little evidence that it affected the negotia- 
 tions at Paris, nor does Clark's name even appear among the documents. 
 The simple fact ^ems to be that England, having given up the colonies, had 
 little interest in tjhe wilderness behind them. The story of Clark's deeds his 
 embassy to Governor Patrick Henry to secure aid for the recovery of Virginia's 
 chartered domain from the British and the removal of the Indian danger from 
 the frontier settlements ; his expedition down the Ohio and his surprise of the 
 forts on the Mississippi (Kaskaskia and Cahokia) with only a handful of men ; 
 his masterful dominion over the Indians and the half-breeds ; and finally his 
 march of over two hundred and thirty miles in the dead of winter (February, 
 1779) across the southern end of Illinois and through the icy waters, neck deep, 
 of the "drowned lands" of the Wabash valley, to surprise the British commander 
 at Vincennes is the most dramatic chapter of our Revolutionary history. 
 
Augustine 
 
 Boundary conceded by Great Britain 
 
 in 1783 
 Boundaries proposed by the French 
 
 Court in 1782 
 Fur posts held by English until 1796 
 
 THE UNITED STATES BY THE TREATY OF 1783 
 
102 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 over De Grasse in the spring of 1782 restored confidence in 
 London, and the anxiety of the new Whig ministry to keep 
 in power by a triumph over the European coalition against 
 Great Britain. The Whigs indulged America to an extent that 
 made England seem rather our ally against France than the 
 common enemy of France and us. "The English do not make 
 the peace, they buy it," cried Vergennes in amazement. A free 
 America the French wished to see as one of the fragments of 
 a dismembered Britain; a powerful America was no part of 
 their plan. Vergennes tried to confine the new United States 
 to a narrow strip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea 
 (see map, p. 101). He tried to balance concessions for his 
 ally Spain against America's demands for fishing-rights off 
 Newfoundland. He urged the British government to insist on 
 indemnification for the Tories. But it was all in vain. The 
 stars in their courses fought for America; and the French 
 were compelled to be even a greater help to us in the victory 
 of peace than in the stress of war. Vergennes might have antic- 
 ipated George Canning by forty years, and with greater truth 
 have exclaimed (but more in regret than in exultation), "I called 
 the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old." 
 On April 19, 1783, the eighth anniversary of the battle of 
 Lexington, Washington read to his troops the proclamation 
 of Congress ordering the cessation of hostilities; and the "em- 
 battled farmers" returned to their homes, often begging their 
 bread on the way, to hang their rude weapons over the kitchen 
 mantle as souvenirs for their prosperous grandchildren to show 
 with pride and gratitude. The definitive treaty of peace was 
 signed September 3, 1783, and a few weeks later Carleton 
 sailed down the harbor of New York with the garrison which 
 had occupied the city for seven years. Washington took an 
 affectionate farewell of his officers at Fraunces' Tavern and 
 embarked at the Battery for the Jersey shore. He stopped 
 at Annapolis, Maryland, where about a score of the members 
 of Congress were assembled. In a simple speech he laid down 
 the command which he had borne with such skill and patience 
 through eight years of trial; then he returned to his beloved 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 103 
 
 acres at Mount Vernon. "I have retired from all public em- 
 ployments/' he wrote to his dear friend Lafayette, "and shall 
 tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. . . . 
 I shall move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with 
 my fathers." 
 
 So the second of the two unequal periods of our colonial 
 history came to an end. From 1607 to 1763 we were slowly 
 builded into the great British empire. In the score of years that 
 followed ( 1 763-1 783 ) we threw off our allegiance to this empire, 
 appealing from an England ill administered and inquisitorial to 
 the ideals of the commonwealth heralded by Milton, Sidney, and 
 Locke. This short period of our revolt against England has 
 been celebrated as the birth of the American nation. But it is 
 evident that the long century and a half of incubation under 
 English rule must have affected our national character far more 
 deeply than the comparatively brief hour of revolution. Even 
 to this day our law, in the absence of any positive statute, is 
 the common law of England; our government, local and 
 general, our judicial procedure and administration, even our 
 religious, philosophical, educational, and literary habits and 
 models, are still, in spite of influences exerted by an enormous 
 immigration from the continent of Europe, predominantly Eng- 
 lish. Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are the basis of Ameri- 
 can as well as of English liberties. Shakespeare, Newton, and 
 Chatham are in a far more intimate way ours than are Goethe, 
 Mirabeau, or Garibaldi. The Revolution was at bottom a civil 
 struggle between two political ideals that had torn the Eng- 
 lish race since the days of Queen Elizabeth prerogative 
 against democracy, or the inherited right of a family, a caste, 
 against the inherent right of the man and citizen. The success 
 of the American cause was the vindication (as salutary for 
 England as for us) of the more liberal ideal. It was the an- 
 nouncement, in the words of John Adams, "that a more equal 
 liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must 
 be established in America." Our national history has been 
 true to our national ideal and a blessing to the world so far, 
 and only so far, as it has vindicated this prophecy. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 
 
 That which man changeth not for the better, time changeth for the worse. 
 LORD BACON 
 
 THE CONFEDERATION 
 
 The United States of America, whose entrance into the 
 family of nations was formally recognized by the treaty of 
 1783, contained a population of about three and a quarter 
 millions, divided almost equally by Mason and Dixon's line. 1 
 Although the Mississippi was the western boundary of the 
 country, all but a very small and venturesome fraction of 
 the American people lived in the commercial towns along the 
 Atlantic coast or on farm lands and plantations accessible 
 by the rivers which cut the shore line at frequent intervals from 
 the Penobscot to the Savannah. Behind the Appalachian ridge 
 the forests of hickory, oak, and sycamore, which shaded the 
 rich soil of the eastern Mississippi basin, were only just waking 
 to other sounds than the bellowing of the buffalo bull and the 
 scream of the wild turkey to the ring of the frontiersman's 
 ax on the edge of the clearing and the crack of his rifle bring- 
 ing down the buck at the salt lick or the stealthy Indian 
 his cabin door. A few thousand men had followed Boone, 
 der, Robertson, and Harrod across the mountains into the 
 (wilderness, where clusters of huts marked the sites, but gave 
 Kttle promise of the growth, of the great cities of the West 
 
 census of the United States, taken in 1790, shows some interest- 
 ing figures. "Virginia leads the list of states, with a population (747,610) almost 
 double that of her nearest rival, Pennsylvania (434,373). Then follow North 
 Carolina ( !) with 397,751, Massachusetts with 378,789, New York with 340,120, 
 Maryland with 319,728, and South Carolina with 240,073. These first seven 
 states of 1790 rank in the census of 1920 respectively: 20, 2, 14, 6, i, 28, 26. 
 
 104 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 105 
 
 Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Nashville. Be- 
 yond the Mississippi Spain's title began, but the land was as 
 strange as the fairy kingdoms in her tales. "Now and then," 
 says McMaster, "some weather-beaten trapper came from it 
 to the frontiers of the states with stories of great plains level 
 as a floor, where the grass grew higher than the waist, where 
 the flowers were more beautiful than the best-kept garden, 
 where trees were never seen, and where the Indians still looked 
 on the white man as a god." Florida too was Spanish, with 
 the whole shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Great Britain arbi- 
 trarily held the important fur posts on the southern shores of 
 the Great Lakes as pledges for the debts which American 
 customers owed to her merchants. The new United States, 
 then, was practically a strip seldom more than two hundred 
 miles wide along the Atlantic border from Maine to Georgia. 
 A generation was to pass, filled with struggles with England, 
 France, and Spain for the security of our "natural borders" 
 and the freedom of our trade, before Americans could turn with 
 absorbing seriousness to the extension of their population, their 
 capital, and their government into the great domain which 
 they had acquired with their independence. 
 
 An overwhelming majority of the people were cultivators 
 of the soil. They had the manners, morals, and social outlook 
 of the farmer. Their needs were simple and self-supplied, 
 their horizon narrow, their virtues homely, and their character 
 robust. The refinements of life art, letters, music, learn- 
 ing were rare, as they are in every community whose surplus 
 of leisure and wealth is small. Benjamin Franklin, to be sure, 
 wrote at the founding of the American Philosophical Society 
 in 1743, "The first drudgery of settling the new colonies is 
 pretty well over, and there are many in every colony in cir- 
 cumstances which set them at ease to cultivate the finer arts 
 and improve the common stock of knowledge." But these are 
 the optimistic words of an exceptional scholar in exceptional 
 surroundings of his own creation. The Revolutionary War 
 stimulated industry, making imperative the casting of cannon, 
 the manufacture of powder, the weaving of cloth for blankets, 
 
io6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 uniforms, and sails, the construction of wagons and gun- 
 carriages ; but all this was forced and premature. Laborers were 
 as yet too few and capital was too scanty (even when encour- 
 aged by bounties from the states) to exploit the wealth of raw 
 material in field, mine, and forest on which our later prosperity 
 was based. Consequently, there were no great and teeming 
 industrial centers to draw our people apart to the poles of 
 luxury and want. If wealth was modest it was also fairly 
 evenly distributed. Our foreign visitors in the later years of 
 the eighteenth century testify almost unanimously to the gen- 
 eral diffusion of a modest well-being through the states. 
 
 Nor should the destitution of Washington's army at Valley 
 Forge or the wailings of a poverty-stricken Congress mislead 
 us as to the degree of that well-being. A rich country may 
 refuse to support its government, as France did on the eve of 
 its great revolution ; and, conversely, a government may revel 
 in wealth squeezed from its millions of poor subjects, as in a 
 Turkey or a Persia. There never was a doubt in Washington's 
 mind of the ability of the states to support an army many 
 times the size of the one which he commanded. He complained 
 over and over again of the lack of public spirit, of the jealousy 
 of each state and each section of the country for its own safety 
 and prosperity, of the greed of the farmers who sold their 
 abundant crops to the British invader while the patriot army 
 starved, of the absorption of the merchants in their unwonted 
 profits from privateering, of the speculators who were " preying 
 on the vitals of this great country." After the first few months 
 of the war New England was virtually free from British moles- 
 tation, as were the Middle States after 1 778. The Carolinas were 
 not seriously disturbed until the end of 1779, nor was Virginia 
 until the beginning of 1781. This desultory character of the 
 British attack gave ample chance for most of the sections of 
 our seaboard to enjoy a flourishing commerce with the ports 
 of Europe, to which Congress opened our harbors on the out- 
 break of hostilities. To be sure, British cruisers were lurking 
 off the New England coast and Chesapeake Bay, but the 
 Yankee skippers ran the "blockade" with daring and success. 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 107 
 
 Moreover, French and British gold was brought to America 
 in such quantities as to swell the currency beyond anything 
 known in the colonial period ; and, with the new commerce, this 
 created the beginnings of that merchant power in the North 
 and planter aristocracy in the South whose influence in the 
 new government was to be felt presently. 
 
 If we ask why the moderate but sufficient resources of our 
 country were not put at the disposal of the general government 
 during the war and the years immediately following, the answer 
 is that the general government had neither the authority nor 
 the respect to command those resources. The Continental Con- 
 gress was not a sovereign body, but only a group of delegates 
 sent from the colony-states as a central committee of safety, 
 a kind of " steering committee" for the war. It did not enact 
 laws, but only made recommendations which the states might 
 enact into laws. It suggested military plans and requested con- 
 tributions from the states for the support of the army and the 
 maintenance of diplomatic agents. It even acted on the in- 
 struction of the colonies in introducing the Declaration of 
 Independence. The war was virtually over before Congress 
 had any legal standing or defined powers; that is, before it 
 was formally made a " government" by the thirteen states 
 (March i, 1781). 
 
 Union is now an ideal as precious to us as its companion 
 ideals in our political trinity Liberty and Democracy. Con- 
 sequently, it is a tempting theory to see in the Continental Con- 
 gress what Professor Burgess has called "the first organization 
 of the American state," and to attribute to it authority over the 
 state governments, as Webster and Lincoln did. But the men 
 of the Revolutionary era did not regard Congress in this light. 
 When allegiance to Great Britain was severed, even though 
 that action was proclaimed by Congress and not by the several 
 states, it was nevertheless to the states and not to Congress 
 that the new allegiance was thought to be due. James Madison, 
 in 1782, declared that it was "extravagant" to maintain that 
 "the rights of the British crown devolved on the Continental 
 Congress." The states exercised various acts of sovereignty 
 
io8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 during the war and for some time after. They coined money 
 and issued bills of credit ; they built navies and raised armies ; 
 they sought to negotiate loans with foreign powers; they con- 
 sulted Congress as a kind of advisory board only and rejected 
 its recommendations without any thought of " rebellion." When 
 New Hampshire refused to let her militia serve outside her 
 borders, when Connecticut designated herself "a free and in- 
 dependent state," when Virginia ratified the treaty of 1778 
 with France and discussed with Spain the desirability of their 
 providing for a joint protection of their trade by the establish- 
 ment of a fort on the Virginia border, when South Carolina 
 explicitly conferred on her government the right to make war 
 and negotiate treaties, when all the states levied tariffs, laid em- 
 bargoes, paid or refused to pay their assessments by Congress 
 at will, it is evident that there was no "national state" but only 
 thirteen states with a common "diplomatic body" at Philadel- 
 phia, and that "Union meant for the time being only a prudent 
 intercolonial cooperation." 1 
 
 But if there was no national state during the Revolutionary 
 period, there was nevertheless an American nationality. The 
 political machinery lagged behind the conscious unity of pur- 
 pose. A common language and law, a common republican form 
 of government, a common grievance all tended toward a 
 formal union. The protest against the Stamp Act, the sympathy 
 for Massachusetts under the Intolerable Acts, the petitions and 
 apologies sent to the king and Parliament, the Declaration 
 of Independence, were all the work of united, not separate, 
 colonies. When Patrick Henry exclaimed in the first Continen- 
 tal Congress, "I am not a Virginian, I am an American ! " and 
 when John Adams said in 1778, "The Confederacy is to make 
 us one individual only," they were speaking under the spell of 
 the new nationality. A few men from the beginning saw the 
 promise of a new national state to emerge from the common 
 
 1 The phrase is Professor Van Tyne's in "The American Revolution" (Ameri- 
 can Nation Series), p. 182. It was John Adams who called the Continental Con- 
 gress a "diplomatic body." Thomas Jefferson, in his "Summary View" (1774), 
 called the Congress about to assemble the king's "great American Council." 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 109 
 
 struggle and the common aim, but it took the bitter experience 
 of years of confusion, impotence, and anarchy under the old 
 Confederation, after the war was over, to convince even a 
 moderate majority of the voters of the United States of the 
 desirability of a real national state. 
 
 Various suggestions of colonial union had been made in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the primary pur- 
 pose of defense against the Indians and the French. The 
 British government, however, had frowned upon such plans, 
 seeing in them a danger to the authority of the royal governors. 
 Immediately after the Revolutionary War broke out, and a year 
 before independence was declared, Ttpnjftrpin Franklin 
 
 posed to Congress a plan of intercolonial union, not unlike his 
 Albany Plan of 1754, except, of course, that the executive power 
 was not to be vested in an English governor-general. The colo- 
 nies were to form a "league of friendship for the common de- 
 fense and general welfare." They were to elect annually 
 congress which was to have authority to declare and conduct 
 war, to make appointments to all general offices, to settle dis- 
 putes between the colonies, to regulate commerce and the cur- 
 rency. It was just at the moment when the colonies were being 
 transformed into states, and they were not ready to commit 
 themselves to it. Franklin did not urge the plan further. 
 
 However, the necessity for some kind of legal authority in 
 the central government grew as the war progressed. When Lord 
 North sought to conciliate the colonies separately in the spring 
 of 1775, Jefferson, in behalf of the Virginia assembly, addressed 
 Governor Dunmore as follows: "We are now represented in a 
 general Congress by members approved by the House, where 
 the former union [of 1774] it is hoped will be so strongly 
 cemented, that no partial application can produce the slightest 
 departure from the common cause. We consider ourselves as 
 bound in honor as well as interest to share one general fate with 
 our sister Colonies, and we should hold ourselves to be base 
 deserters of that union to which we have acceded, were we to 
 agree to any measures distinct and separate from them." John 
 Adams confessed a little later that the states could not exist 
 
no THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 alone, but must "raise an empire of permanent duration." The 
 words " union" and " empire" are doubtless used in a very 
 general sense in these passages ; they do not necessarily imply 
 either an elaborate constitution or a highly centralized author- 
 ity. But they do show how necessary some sort of central 
 authority was in the eyes of leading statesmen. Certainly, after 
 the war as well as during the war, nobody expected or wished 
 to see the "general government" disappear. It was only a 
 question of what share of power should be given to it and what 
 share retained by the states. In other words, it was the old 
 problem of reconciling local, inherited, and jealously guarded 
 power with a new and delegated authority whose scope could 
 not easily be forecast. 
 
 The proposal for union was revived with the agitation for 
 independence. Lee's famous motion of June 7, 1776, not 
 only declared that "these colonies are, and of right ought to 
 be, free and independent states" but also proposed that a 
 Confederation be formed "to bind the colonies more closely 
 together." A committee of thirteen (one from each of the 
 colonies) was chosen to draft articles of union. The com- 
 mittee was too large, and except for a few men (Dickinson, 
 Sherman, Samuel Adams, Rutledge) it was far inferior to the 
 contemporaneous committee of five elected to prepare the Decla- 
 ration of Independence. The strenuous business of keeping 
 the army together for the first two years of the war prevented 
 Congress from giving very serious consideration to the articles 
 drafted by Dickinson. "They were debated from time to time," 
 says Jefferson in his "Autobiography." On November 17, 1777, 
 Congress, taking advantage of the enthusiasm of the country 
 over Burgoyne's surrender, submitted the Articles of Confeder- 
 ation to the states for ratification. A translation into French 
 was made in order to help win the alliance for which we had 
 been striving since the beginning of the war. Ten of the states 
 had ratified the Articles by the midsummer of 177.8, New Jersey 
 and Delaware following within a few months. But Maryland, 
 for reasons which we shall notice presently, withheld her con- 
 sent until March 1,1781. Since the consent of all the states was 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT in 
 
 necessary to put the Articles intg operation, we had no general 
 government based on a written constitution until thirty-three 
 weeks before the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. 
 
 It is customary for historians to dwell on the weaknes 
 the Arfolps of rnr)fpHpra,t,i nn : the absence of any national exec- 
 utive to act directly on the people of the states, the failure to 
 secure to Congress the taxing-power and the regulation of com- 
 merce, the lack of a permanent national judiciary extending to 
 all parts of the country, the impossibility of commanding the 
 respect of the countries abroad when disobedience and defiance 
 marked the conduct of the states at home. The decade oj 
 anarchy and impotence in the national government which 
 elapsed between the drafting of the Articles and the summons 
 of the Constitutional Convention only too amply illustrated 
 those faults. But for all that, the Articles were a very decided 
 step toward unity. The Confederation which they established, 
 despite its defects, was the closest and most uniform that the 
 world had ever seen. Many of the provisions of the Articles 
 were taken over bodily into the Constitution of the United 
 States. Those which were most constructive were the pledge 
 of a common defense (Art. Ill) ; the complete exchange of 
 privileges and immunities between the free inhabitants of all the 
 states (Art. IV) ; the restrictions on the sovereignty of the 
 states, requiring the consent of Congress for alliances, limiting 
 armaments, and prohibiting legislation in conflict with the 
 treaties made by Congress (Art. VI) ; the grant of definite and 
 very considerable powers to Congress, such as the declaration of 
 war, the borrowing of money, the settlement of interstate dis- 
 putes, the regulation of currency and of weights and measures, 
 the administration of Indian affairs and the post office, etc. 
 (Art. IX) ; the assumption of all obligations for paper money 
 issued and of all debts contracted by the Continental Con- 
 gress. So formidable, in fact, did these powers seem to the 
 statesmen of the time that they feared that the states would 
 be swallowed up in the national government. "If the plan 
 now proposed should be adopted," wrote Edward Rutledge 
 of South Carolina, "nothing less than the ruin of some of the 
 
H2 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 colonies will be the consequence. ... I am resolved to vest 
 the Congress with no more power than is absolutely necessary, 
 and, to use a familiar expression, to keep the staff in our own 
 hands." Governor Cooke of Rhode Island, for fear the state 
 should be considered to have surrendered any of its sovereignty, 
 significantly called the Articles "the Treaty of the Confeder- 
 ation." With such sentiments abroad, the wonder is that the 
 Articles, even with their concession of an equal vote to each 
 state, of the immunity of commerce from the central control, 
 and of requisitions on the states in place of taxation for raising 
 national funds, 1 were ratified at all. 
 
 Only eight years after their adoption the Articles of Con- 
 federation were superseded by the Constitution of the United 
 States. From the point of view of constitutional history, there- 
 fore, their importance is slight. How much their very existence 
 contribute^, however, to the peaceful evolution of the Consti- 
 tution, which reconciled the clashing interests of the states 
 instead of "leaving their correction to insurrection and civil 
 war," we cannot tell. One supreme service the Articles did for 
 the cause of the Union : they secured the immense tract of land 
 between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi as a national do- 
 main. As the chief factor in the consolidation of our federal 
 government, from New York's cession of her Western claims to 
 Congress in 1780 down to Panama's cession of the canal strip 
 in 1904, has been the extension of the national authority over 
 our new territories or colonies, it is worth while to dwell briefly 
 on the origin of our national domain. 
 
 The charters of the colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, Con- 
 necticut, Carolina, and Georgia granted them indefinite west- 
 ward extension, in profound ignorance of the width of the 
 
 student will note that the struggle between the advocates of a central 
 government and the champions of states' rights was a repetition of the struggle 
 between the colonists and the British government which led to the Revolution. 
 In the eyes of the states'-rights men like Rutledge, Patrick Henry, Mason, 
 and Gerry, the whole process of centralization in our government, which ended 
 in the Constitution and the ten-year rule of the Federalist party, was a work 
 of "imperial organization" quite parallel to that pursued by the ministers of 
 George III from Grenville to Lord North. 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 113 
 
 American continent. The other colonies were less fortunate. 
 Either their western boundary was specified in their charter 
 (Pennsylvania, Maryland) or they were backed against another 
 colony to the west (Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware). 
 After the middle of the eighteenth century the British govern- 
 ment sought to silence these claims of the "sea to sea" charters 
 of the Stuart period. The Board of Trade prompted the dele- 
 gates to the Albany Congress of 1754 to propose that "the 
 bounds of those colonies which extend to the South Sea be 
 contracted and limited by the Alleghany or Appalachian moun- 
 tains"; and Benjamin Franklin admitted that those colonies 
 ought to be reduced "to dimensions more convenient for the 
 common purposes of government." Immediately on the close of 
 the French wars, King George by royal proclamation forbada 
 the colonists to extend their settlements beyond the ridge of the] 
 Alleghenies (October 7, 1763). The proclamation was non 
 obeyed, for the adventurous frontiersmen of the back countryj 
 of Virginia and the Carolinas were little minded to abandon the 
 fine hunting-grounds of the West to the Indians. Before a 
 decade had elapsed Daniel Boone and James Robertson were 
 piloting their bands through the rich lands south of the Ohio. 
 All the Western territory north of the Ohio, in which Virginia, 
 New York^ Massachusetts, and Connecticut had claims, was 
 incorporated into the province of Quebec by an act of Parlia- 
 ment (1774) which was denounced by the rst Continental 
 Congress as "impolitic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconsti- 
 tutional and most dangerous and destructive of American 
 rights." 
 
 The Revolutionary War wiped out the Proclamation Line 
 of isjL&g^md the Quebec Act of 1 774, but left the vexing question 
 of who inherited the extinguished British sovereignty between 
 the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. Did that authority re- 
 vert to the states by their old "sea to sea" charters? If so, 
 Virginia would become half a continent, with lands and wealth 
 ample to pay her war debts, whereas the states without west- 
 ward extension would 'have to resort to heavy .taxation. It 
 seemed unfair, when the cause for which they had fought the 
 
114 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 war was a common cause. Yet Congress had to insist on the 
 charter claims when dealing with England, because to relin- 
 quish them would be to acknowledge England's right to dispose 
 of the back lands in the peace negotiations. On the other hand, 
 to say, after the peace was made, that the authority of England 
 in the West devolved upon the Congress would give to that body 
 a power that very few men in America were ready to accord at 
 that time. 
 
 The debates in Congress on this dilemma were lively. Chase 
 of Maryland said: "No colony has a right to go to the South 
 Sea : ... It would not be safe for the rest." But the Virginia 
 delegates replied: "What security have we that Congress will 
 not curtail the present settlements of the States? . . . Vir- 
 ginia owns to the South Sea ; you shall not pare away the colony 
 [sic!] of Virginia. ... A right does not cease to be a right 
 because it is large." A motion in Congress in October, 1777, 
 giving that body the right to fix the western boundaries of the 
 states and to form new states from time to time out of the land 
 beyond an act important as the first suggestion of the control 
 of Congress over the territories got the affirmative vote of 
 Maryland alone. In December, 1778, the Maryland delegates 
 in Congress were instructed not to ratify the Articles of Con- 
 federation until the obnoxious clause in Article IX, "No state 
 shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United 
 States," should be repealed. 
 
 There was but one way to break the deadlock between the 
 landed and the landless states, and that was for the former vol- 
 untarily to surrender their Western claims. New York, whose 
 claims were based not on charter rights but on numerous 
 treaties with the Iroquois Indians concluded between 1684 and 
 1752, led the way by an act of her legislature in February, 
 1780. Within the next decade all the states with Western 
 claims had followed except Georgia, whose final action was 
 delayed (on account of Indian dangers) until 1802. On the 
 day of the execution of New York's deed of cession in 
 Congress (March i, 1781) Maryland' signed the Articles of 
 Confederation. 
 
SURRENDER OF 
 
 WESTERN CLAIMS 
 
 BY THE STATES 
 
 1780-1802 
 
 SCALE OF MILES 
 

 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 115 
 
 Though Maryiaitfkdeserves gratitude for insisting on this 
 great principle of equity among the states, the chief credit for 
 the transaction must be given fro Virginia Her claim alone was 
 well founded. If the Stuart charters were to be pleaded, hers 
 was the oldest, and in its form of 1609 was inclusive of the 
 territory claimed by all the states north of her. If the charters 
 were to be disregarded, Virginia could point to her splendid 
 conquest of the Northwest during the Revolution. Moreover, 
 the attitude of the authorities of Virginia was reasonable and 
 conciliatory. No language could be nobler than Jefferson's 'in 
 his proposal to the convention of Pennsylvania for the adjust- 
 ment of a disputed boundary west of Fort Pitt (July, 1776) : 
 "We can assure you that the colony of Virginia does not enter- 
 tain a wish that one inch should be added to theirs from the 
 territory of a sister colony, and we have perfect confidence that 
 the same just sentiment prevails in your House. . . . The 
 decision, whatever it be, will not annihilate the lands. They 
 will remain to be occupied by Americans, and whether these be 
 counted in the number of this or that of the United States will 
 be thought a matter of little moment." And in transmitting to 
 Congress the resolution of January 2, 1781, by which Virginia 
 agreed to cede its lands in the Northwest on condition that all 
 the states accept the Articles, Jefferson, then governor of the 
 state, wrote, "I shall be rendered very happy if the other states 
 of the Union, equally impressed with the necessity of that im- 
 portant Convention [the Articles], shall be willing to sacrifice 
 equally to its completion." After language and example of this 
 sort the other states could hardly with decency refuse to sur- 
 render their shadowy claims. 
 
 March i, i TSx^jeserves to rank with April 19, 1775, July 4, 
 1776, and April 30, 1789, among the birtH3ays of the American 
 nation. The first blow struck in arms for liberty, the decla- 
 ration of our independence, the inauguration of our first presi- 
 dent, are events which have received their full measure of 
 attention from historians. But none of these events was fraught 
 with more importance than the signature of the Maryland dele- 
 gates to the Articles of Confederation and the acceptance by 
 
Ii6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Congress of New York's cession of Western land claims. By 
 the first of these events the United States found itself for the 
 first time a legally constituted government with its powers set 
 down in black on white, its "perpetual union and league of 
 friendship" witnessed by the hands of delegates from each of 
 the thirteen states. By the second the United States was in- 
 vested with the beginnings of a national domain, destined to 
 extend to the Pacific, whose stewardship was to prove the 
 greatest source of our national wealth and whose governance 
 was to invite the chief enlargement of our federal power. 
 
 ANARCHY IMMINENT 
 
 In the same year that the Articles of Confederation were 
 adopted, Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, an acrimonious but 
 observant critic of American affairs, wrote to Louis XVTs fa- 
 mous finance minister Necker in the following terms : "As to the 
 future Grandeur of America and its being a rising Empire under 
 one head, whether Republican or Monarchical, it is one of the 
 idlest and most visionary Notions that was ever conceived by 
 the writers of Romance. For there is nothing in the Genius of 
 the People, the Situation of their Country, or the nature of 
 their different Climates which tends to countenance such a 
 Supposition. On the contrary, every Prognostic that can be 
 formed from a Contemplation of their mutual Antipathies and 
 clashing Interests, their Difference of Governments, Habitudes, 
 and Manners, plainly indicates that the Americans will have 
 no Center of Union among them, and no common Interest to 
 pursue, when the Power and Government of England are 
 finally removed." 
 
 This dismal prophecy came dangerously near fulfillment in 
 the six or seven years succeeding the surrender at Yorktown. 
 Serious financial, economic, and diplomatic problems, some 
 caused by the war and some by the cessation of the war, called 
 for a firm government just at the time when the mutual jeal- 
 ousies and tenacious local attachments of the states prevented 
 them from entering into a more effective union than that of the 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 117 
 
 "Treaty of the Confederation." It took the bitter experience 
 of humiliation abroad and anarchy at home, of poverty, demor- 
 alization, and even threatened dissolution of the Confederation, 
 to bring the states to a reluctant consent to the establishment of 
 a real federal government. Some of the leaders were despondent 
 in 1786-1787. John Marshall wrote, "They have truth on their i 
 side who say that mankind is incapable of governing himself."l 
 John Jay confided to Washington that he was more fearful of the 
 American cause than at any time during the war. And Washing- 
 ton replied to Jay : "Your sentiment that our affairs are drawing 
 rapidly to a crisis accords with my own. What the event will be 
 is also beyond the reach of my foresight. We have errors to cor- 
 rect. We have probably had too good an opinion of human 
 nature in forming our confederation. Experience has taught us 
 that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures best 
 calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coer- 
 cive power. I do not conceive that we can exist long as a nation 
 without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade 
 the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of 
 the state governments extends over the several states." 
 
 So long as the war lasted the inadequacy of the loose league 
 of the states was not wholly apparent. There was actually 
 a firmer union during the hostilities, without the Articles, than 
 there was with them after peace came. For several consider- 
 ations urged the states to hold together and show some respect 
 for their central steering committee of Congress. They were 
 waging war as a confederation and not as single states; they 
 needed to present a united front against Great Britain; they 
 could expect aid from France and Holland only as a nation, 
 and only as a nation could they secure the recognition of their 
 independence. Moreover, each state, under the apprehension 
 of invasion, found comfort in the possibility of an appeal to 
 the continental army to supplement its militia. But when the 
 war was over and independence won, it seemed to many that 
 the union had accomplished its purpose. The "general govern- 
 ment" might remain, to be sure, to carry out the will of the 
 states in those matters on which it was desirable to act in 
 
n8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 unison, foreign war, diplomacy, interstate controversies, the 
 disposition of national territory, and the like, but in all these 
 things it should still be the servant and agent of the states. It 
 could not levy taxes or control commerce or compel a state to 
 pay its quota for the general expenses, for it had no executive 
 or judicial organs for enforcing its laws. It was, as Gouver- 
 neur Morris said, "a government by supplication." Being poor 
 and subservient at home, it naturallfy could not speak with 
 authority abroad. When Rhode Island defied Congress, Great 
 Britain could hardly be expected to respect that body. 
 
 Yet it would be hard to find a period in our history when a 
 strong, efficient government was more needed than at the close 
 of the Revolutionary War. Our debt, foreign and domestic, 
 amounted to $43,000,000, of which nearly $8,000,000 had been 
 borrowed in Europe. 1 The interest on this debt could be paid 
 only by a vigorous system of taxation. The people of the United 
 States were, as Robert Morris wrote to Franklin, "undoubtedly 
 able to pay." They were spending freely at the close of the war. 
 " Extravagant luxury/' " insatiable thirst for riches," "specula- 
 tion and peculation," "an alarming spirit of venality," are some 
 of the phrases which sober men like Washington, Franklin, and 
 Adams used to characterize the age. Pelatiah Webster, a dis- 
 tinguished political essayist of the time, wrote, "Tho' the public 
 treasury was so distressed, yet the states were really overrun 
 with an abundance of cash : the French and English armies, our 
 foreign loans, Havannah trade, etc. had filled the country with 
 money." The control of this money, however, the states deter- 
 mined to keep in their own hands. By a false and foolish 
 analogy they extended their hatred of general taxation to their 
 own central government, declaring against the "tyranny" of 
 "King Congress" as fervently as they had against that of King 
 George. They had fought the war to escape taxation by any 
 power except that of their own legislatures. Let Congress "ask" 
 for the money, and the legislatures would grant it. 
 
 1 During the war France had lent us $6,500,000; Holland, $1,300,000; and 
 Spain, $200,000. After the war the Dutch lent us $2,000,000 more. About one fifth 
 of what we borrowed abroad was used to pay the interest on our domestic debt. 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 119 
 
 The way in which the states honored the request of Congress 
 for money must have made persons whose memory reached 
 back twenty years somewhat lenient in their judgment of Great 
 Britain's refusal to rely on requisitions from the colonies in- 
 stead of taxation. During the entire period of the Confeder- 
 ation, Congress got only $6,000,000 of the $16,000,000 assessed 
 on the states. In the two years after the surrender at Yorktown, 
 Congress asked for $10,000,000. By June, 1784, $1,486,511 
 had been paid in. New Hampshire paid $3000 of her quota of 
 $450,000; Massachusetts, $247,000 of her $1,600,000; New 
 York, $39,000 of her $465,000; Virginia, $115,000 of her 
 $1,590,000 ; and so on down the line. Delaware, North Carolina, 
 and Georgia paid absolutely nothing. No state except South 
 Carolina paid more than 2 5 per cent of its assessment. The result 
 was more borrowing and a piling up of the interest charges 
 until they came to overbalance the total receipts. The arrears 
 of interest on the domestic debt grew from $3,000,000 to 
 $11,000,000 in the five years preceding Washington's inaugu- 
 ration. Robert Morris, the superintendent of the finances, 
 resigned because it did not consist with his ideas of integrity 
 "to increase our debts while the prospect of paying them 
 diminished." 
 
 From this intolerable situation Congress sought relief in vain. 
 In February, 1781, it asked for the power to levy an import 
 duty of 5 per cent solely for the purpose of paying the interest 
 and principal of debts contracted on the faith of the United 
 States. But Rhode Island refused her consent, and Virginia, 
 after granting it, withdrew it on the ground that her sover- 
 eignty would be impaired and her liberty endangered. Again, 
 in April, 1783, Congress asked the right to levy a small import 
 duty for a period of twenty-five years ; but after a delay of 
 three years, only nine states had been persuaded to a grudging 
 consent. Governor Clinton of New York, when finally the 
 consent of his state alone was needed to put the duty into 
 effect, refused to call the legislature, on the ground that he had 
 power to do so only on " extraordinary occasions." Apparently 
 the impending bankruptcy of the United States was not an 
 
 
120 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 extraordinary affair! Robert Morris declared that exhorting 
 the states to tax their inhabitants for the support of the Union 
 was like "preaching to the dead." 
 
 To add to the distress of the Treasury, there was dire con- 
 fusion in the currency. When the war broke out, Congress, 
 having no money and no source of income, had to resort to bor- 
 rowing. The colonies, being largely agricultural communities, 
 had little accumulated capital to lend, while the interruption of 
 our commerce with the British ports deprived the farmers of 
 the currency with which to pay their taxes. Foreign loans could 
 be expected only when there was good promise of the success 
 of the American cause. Congress, therefore, had to resort to 
 forced loans in the shape of issues of paper money. Unsecured 
 paper money is like a poison in the currency system of a state. 
 If the dose is small and the financial health of the country is 
 vigorous, the harm is not great the poison is absorbed. But as 
 the dose becomes larger and the health of the country weaker, 
 disastrous results follow. The value of the paper falls with a 
 rapidity proportional to the waning confidence of the people 
 in the ability of the government to redeem it in gold and silver. 
 The government then tries to recoup its loss by new issues of 
 paper or to cure the evil by increasing it. So, beginning 
 with a modest issue of $2,000,000 in 1776, Congress had multi- 
 plied the continental paper currency a hundredfold by the 
 autumn of 1 779. Twenty dollars in paper were required to pay 
 for merchandise which one dollar of silver would buy. A hat 
 cost $40, a barrel of flour Si 50. A year later the paper had sunk 
 to one fortieth of its nominal value in silver ; and still another 
 year and a half later, shortly after the adoption of the Articles 
 of Confederation, the continental paper ceased to be used as 
 currency, but was bought and sold by speculators at prices 
 ranging all the way from a mill to a quarter of a cent on a 
 dollar (May 30, 1781). 
 
 While the Continental Congress was learning the truth of 
 Thomas Paine's remark that "money is money and paper is 
 paper, and all the inventions of man cannot make it otherwise," 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 12 1 
 
 while it saw its "fiat" dollars becoming so cheap that a barber 
 papered his shop with them and a wag feathered his tarred 
 dog with them, the British and French soldiers and the new 
 trade with the French and Spanish Indies were bringing coin 
 into the country in amounts to encourage extravagance. But 
 when the war was over, our specie began to be drained away 
 with startling rapidity. The balance of trade ran strongly 
 against us. For the year 1784 our imports from Great Britain 
 amounted to $18,500,000, a figure swollen somewhat by Eng- 
 land's determination to glut the American market and destroy 
 the manufactures which had -been begun during the war. Our 
 exports to British ports in the same year were only $3,750,000. 
 The war had turned us from colonies of Great Britain into a 
 foreign nation, and therewith the Navigation Acts automat- 
 ically excluded us from a trade with the British which, though 
 hampered by exasperating regulations, had nevertheless been 
 highly profitable to us before the Revolution. To be sure, as an 
 independent nation we were now free to make such commercial 
 treaties as we pleased with foreign powers, to secure our share 
 of the trade of the world. But the lack of authority in Con- 
 gress to regulate our commerce by uniform restrictions on the 
 states stood in the way of such treaties. As for getting better 
 terms with England, we were in the position of suppliants who 
 had but yesterday been rebels. John Adams, presented as our 
 first minister at the court of St. James, in May, 1785, endeavored 
 in several interviews with Lord Carmarthen and William Pitt to 
 secure some privileges for American trade in the British Empire. 
 But the ministry assumed the attitude of beati possidentes. 
 They already had the lion's share of America's patronage, and 
 saw no need of raising up a rival to their export trade across 
 the Atlantic by opening the West Indian ports to American 
 vessels. With Congress unable to force the states to adopt a 
 general navigation act, Great Britain had nothing to fear in the 
 way of retaliation or reprisals from America. Pitt smiled 
 urbanely while Adams pleaded. And Adams, consumed with 
 chagrin, wrote to Jefferson (who was having his own difficulties 
 
122 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 in Paris, trying to get our wheat, tobacco, and whale oil admit- 
 ted to the French ports), "In short, sir, I am likely to be as 
 insignificant here as you can imagine." 
 
 So the drain of specie continued. The bark Mary Br dinar d, 
 sailing from Boston in the autumn of 1786, carried back to 
 London nearly $50,000 in Spanish, French, and British coins, 
 while the farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts were 
 toiling to scrape together a few silver pieces to pay their taxes 
 and to still the demands of private creditors who were filling the 
 courts with suits against them. The precious metals were going 
 out of the country to buy luxuries and " British gewgaws." 
 The "embattled farmers," who had left their plows to take their 
 rifles, had a fine reward for their years of sacrifice : suffering, 
 hunger, and rags in the service ; a discharge without a farthing 
 in their pockets; a return to acres burdened with debt, with 
 eviction or imprisonment threatening, and the taxgatherer 
 abroad in the land. The usurer reaped his accustomed harvest 
 of plunder from the poor. When the farmer received conti- 
 nental loan certificates for his services in war or his produce in 
 peace, he was obliged to part with them at a discount for 
 ready cash, and speculators accumulated for trifling sums the 
 paper obligations which the government redeemed a few years 
 later at their full face value. 
 
 Everywhere, naturally, in this stress of poverty the debtor 
 class demanded the issue of paper money by the state to replace 
 the specie which was being drained out of the country. In 
 Rhode Island the paper-money men got control of the legisla- 
 ture and paralyzed business by forcing the creditor to accept the 
 depreciated scrip at its face value. In Massachusetts, where the 
 hard-money men kept control of the government, the debtors 
 of the western counties rose in revolt under Captain Daniel 
 Shays, forcibly closed the courts at Concord and Worcester, 
 attacked the arsenal at Springfield, and kept the state in terror 
 for five months, until dispersed by the militia in a pitched battle 
 at Petersham (February, 1787). Add to such scenes as these 
 the vain appeals of Congress for authority to raise a revenue 
 by import duties or to control commerce by a navigation act, 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 123 
 
 the selfish disregard of each state for the economic welfare of 
 its neighbors, 1 tariff wars and boundary disputes between the 
 states, 2 the refusal of the states to pay their assessed quotas for 
 the support of the general government, 3 and it is little wonder 
 that the United States under the Confederation, without an 
 executive department, without an army or navy, without money, 
 credit, or authority, failed to win the respect even of the semi- 
 barbarous states of Morocco and Tripoli. 
 
 Important diplomatic questions were pending in the years 
 immediately following the war, which needed the backing of a 
 strong and united government. We did not yet enjoy that 
 splendid isolation from European entanglements which Wash- 
 ington counseled in his " Farewell Address" of 1796, and which 
 became a fact at the close of our second war with England, in 
 1815. Aside from our money obligations to France, Holland, 
 and Spain, we were involved in the commercial and political 
 rivalries of the Old World. Our entry into the family of nations 
 had been a European event. The Declaration of Independence 
 was an apology for our behavior, submitted to a "candid world." 
 One of the earliest committees of the Continental Congress was 
 appointed for the purpose of seeking European alliances and 
 loans. The treaty of peace of 1783 made a web of European 
 complications and left us difficult problems to settle, especially 
 with Great Britain and Spain, our vexatious neighbors on the 
 north, west, and south. 
 
 The British claimed indemnification for the Tories whose 
 property had been confiscated, and full payment of the debts 
 
 x ln a debate in the Virginia assembly in 1786, on the proposition to give 
 Congress the control of foreign trade, Charles Thurston said that it was "very 
 doubtful whether it would not be better to encourage the British rather than 
 the eastern (New England, New York, Philadelphia) marine." 
 
 2 New York taxed firewood from Connecticut and farm truck from New Jersey 
 landing at its docks. New Jersey replied with a tax on a lighthouse which New 
 York had built on Jersey soil (Sandy Hook) , and the Connecticut farmers formed 
 a nonexportation association to starve New York into brotherly conduct. 
 
 3 In February, 1786, the legislature of New Jersey complained that her quota 
 was too high ($166,000) and refused to pay. A committee of Congress visited 
 Trenton and implored the state not to fail the Union in so critical a time. The 
 legislature rescinded the vote, but waited five months before paying the money. 
 
124 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 due to British merchants, with the interest accrued during the 
 war. For security they held on to several rich fur-trading posts 
 along the southern shores of the Great Lakes in territory ceded 
 to the United States by the treaty of 1783 (see map, p. 101). 
 We put in the counterclaim of the theft of negro slaves after the 
 war and the seizure by British cruisers of a large part of the very 
 merchandise for which the British merchants were asking pay- 
 ment. We demanded the evacuation of the fur posts. The letters 
 of all our public men who dealt with the British government in 
 these critical years are filled with complaints of the animosity of 
 the ministry, the Parliament, and the press against the new re- 
 public. Benjamin Franklin, writing from Paris to the president 
 of Congress on Christmas Day, 1783, says of the British court: 
 "We should, I think, be constantly on our guard and impress 
 strongly on our minds that, though it has made peace with us, 
 it is not in truth reconciled either to us or to its loss of us. ... 
 It is easy to see by the general tone of the ministerial news- 
 papers and by the malignant improvement their ministers make 
 in all the foreign courts of every little accident or dissension 
 among us, ... all which are exaggerated to represent our 
 governments as so many anarchies of which the people them- 
 selves are weary, . . . that they bear us no good will, and that 
 they wish the reality of what they are pleased to imagine." 1 
 For eight years after the treaty of peace the British govern- 
 ment refused to send a minister to the United States, Lord 
 Carmarthen hinting to Adams with malicious sarcasm that 
 thirteen ministers would be necessary for diplomatic business 
 with America. 
 
 With Spain we were engaged in a diplomatic struggle per- 
 haps the most important in our history, for it brought the first 
 test of the fidelity of the sections of our country to the Union 
 and put in jeopardy the allegiance of the vast region between the 
 Alleghenies and the Mississippi. The flag of Spain has now dis- 
 appeared from both the continents and the islands of the 
 Western world, and we find it difficult to realize how vast was 
 
 1 For confirmation of this feeling see Jefferson's letter from Paris to John 
 Page, May 4, 1786 (P. L. Ford, " Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Vol. IV, p. 214). 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 125 
 
 her colonial empire on these shores at the close of the American 
 Revolution. The Gulf of Mexico was then a Spanish lake: 
 every mile of its shore from the tip of Florida to the tip of 
 Yucatan was under Spain's flag. Holding the mouth of the 
 Mississippi, she controlled the commerce of the great river 
 basin. All the country west of the Mississippi to the Pacific 
 coast was acknowledged Spanish domain by the treaty of 1763. 
 Spain had hesitatingly joined France in the war against Eng- 
 land in 1779 solely for the purpose of recovering Gibraltar, 
 Minorca, and Florida, which she had been forced to give to 
 England in the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Paris (1763). 
 Spain did not, like France, become an ally of the United States. 
 She had no sympathy with revolting colonies in America, and 
 she did not acknowledge our independence until England 
 had conceded it. She opposed our negotiations for peace in 
 1782, because she had not yet got her coveted spoils of war. 
 When the peace was concluded she refused to agree to the 
 eighth article, which declared that the navigation of the Missis- 
 sippi should be free to both nations. She was determined to 
 keep the new United States from becoming a strong rival power 
 in America. It was her ambassador in Paris, Count Aranda, who 
 proposed to Vergennes the plan of hemming in the new nation 
 between the Alleghenies and the sea, leaving the back country 
 as Indian territory. When that plan failed and the American 
 pioneers swarmed across the mountains to the fertile valleys 
 of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, Spain sealed 
 up the mouth of the great trunk river to their commerce. 1 
 
 These pioneers were a hardy race of men, who, in their own 
 language in a memorial to Congress, had " inherited the highest 
 and most extensive ideas of liberty." The lure of adventure, 
 the appeal of the virgin soil, the chance of escape from the 
 taxgatherer and the inquisitive lawyer, were potent motives for 
 
 1 Spain's resentment against the United States was heightened, but the situa- 
 tion was not materially changed, by the discovery in 1784 of a secret clause in 
 the treaty between England and the United States, according to which we were 
 to accept the parallel of 32 30' as our southern boundary from the Mississippi to 
 the Chattahoochee in case England retained Florida, but should come down to 
 31 if Florida should be restored to Spain as it was in fact (see map, p. 101). 
 
126 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 migration. The pioneers, like the early settlers of Plymouth 
 and the Connecticut valley, carried with them a simple political 
 philosophy. The land was God's earth, and whoever wished 
 might settle where he would. There were no distinctions of 
 birth or wealth in the little clearing " edged by the primeval 
 forest.' 7 The men formed associations to punish thieving, re- 
 strain lawlessness, and guard their settlements from becoming 
 "asylums for fugitives from justice and their just debts." They 
 organized themselves into military companies, the Kentuckians 
 offering "a respectable body of prime riflemen" to aid George 
 Rogers Clark in his campaign of 1778. The existence of these 
 pioneer settlements was one of the chief factors in the surrender 
 to Congress of the Western land claims of the states and the 
 Jcreation of that national domain which, as we have seen, was 
 (one of the greatest sources of strength and authority to the 
 Xlnion. 
 
 The Western settlers naturally wanted the free use of the 
 Mississippi. As early as 1780 they prayed Congress that "the 
 trade on the western waters" might be opened for their relief; 
 and John Jay, the Secretary of Congress, was soon afterward 
 laboring in Madrid to secure this boon. But the Spanish 
 minister Florida-Blanca told Jay that his master the king re- 
 garded the exclusion of all foreigners from the Mississippi as 
 far more important even than the recovery of Gibraltar. Jay 
 left Madrid in 1782 to take part in the peace negotiations at 
 Paris, but on the arrival at Philadelphia of Gardoqui, the first 
 Spanish minister to the United States, Jay, then Secretary for 
 Foreign Affairs, resumed the diplomatic negotiations. The 
 Eastern states wanted a commercial treaty with Spain which 
 should admit their lumber, wheat, whale oil, fish, indigo, and 
 naval stores into the Spanish ports, bringing in return much 
 needed specie into the United States. Such a treaty would also 
 influence France, Portugal, and the Mediterranean powers to 
 make favorable terms for our shipping. As an offset to these 
 advantages the right of a few thousand back countrymen to 
 carry their hogs and tobacco to the Spanish ports on the lower 
 Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico seemed trifling. Why 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 127 
 
 should the settlement of the West be encouraged anyway? It 
 only drained off men needed for the industries at home and 
 brought the new clearings into competition with the unoccupied 
 areas in the old states, making labor dearer and land cheaper. 
 The Southern states, with larger patriotic vision, supported 
 the claims of the Western settlers and warned Congress that 
 if it abandoned them to the pitiless Spanish policy of exclusion 
 they might throw off their allegiance. Spanish agents were 
 already busy sowing gold and discontent among the settlers 
 and gold looked attractive to men who were reduced to paying 
 their taxes in grain, skins, and whisky. 
 
 Jay, after endless haggling with Gardoqui, negotiated a com- 
 promise treaty in 17,85, by which Spain was to make certain 
 concessions to our Atlantic trade, but to keep the Mississippi 
 closed to American boats for twenty-five years. The new West 
 was in an uproar. An American trader's goods were confiscated 
 at Natchez, and in return the Spanish stores at Vincennes were 
 plundered. The new state of Franklin offered to raise 1500 
 men "to thrust the perfidious Castilian into a better conduct 
 towards the people of the United States." A letter to Jay, pur- 
 porting to come from a gentleman at the falls of the Ohio, 
 declared that "to make us vassals to the Spaniards is a griev- 
 ance not to be borne." "Twenty thousand troops," he contin- 
 ued, "can easily be raised west of the Alleghanies to drive the 
 Spaniards from their settlements at the mouth of the river. If 
 this is not countenanced in the east, we will throw off our 
 allegiance and look elsewhere for help. Nor will we seek in 
 vain, for even now Great Britain stands with open arms to 
 receive us." Washington declared that the West stood upon 
 a pivot "the touch of a feather will turn them any way." 
 Loyal as the men of the West were to the Union, the prospect 
 of being condemned to a quarter of a century of economic 
 stagnation for the benefit of the merchant princes of Boston 
 and New York was enough to shake their allegiance ; and the 
 brutally frank assertion of Gorham of Massachusetts that it 
 would be a good thing for the Atlantic states to have the Mis- 
 sissippi closed for twenty-five years drew from Madison a 
 
128 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 stinging rebuke for selfish sectional feeling. The Jay-Gardoqui 
 treaty failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states 
 (nine), but the lesson of it was plain. Jefferson wrote from 
 Paris in December, 1786, that the disposition to shut up the 
 Mississippi gave him "serious apprehensions of the severance 
 of the Eastern and Western parts of our Confederacy." 
 
 Although the important diplomatic controversies were with 
 England and Spain, our foreign ministers everywhere felt their 
 insignificance under the weak government of the Confederation. 
 "We are the lowest and most obscure of the whole diplomatic 
 tribe," wrote Jefferson in bitterness from Paris. France was 
 our ally, but she opened only four of her home ports to our 
 ships and revoked the complete freedom of trade which she 
 had given us in the Indies during the war with England. Jef- 
 ferson could make no head against the corrupt ring of tax- 
 farmers who controlled the tobacco trade in France. The 
 ministers of Louis XVI told him plainly that they could not 
 recognize the American Congress as a "government." The 
 Dutch bankers were anxious about their loans to the new 
 republic and kept writing to Paris to be assured that repudia- 
 tion and bankruptcy were not imminent. The pirates of the 
 Barbary States seized our vessels in the Mediterranean, holding 
 American seamen for ransom. An "ambassador" from Tripoli 
 visited John Adams in London and demanded 30,000 guineas 
 for each of the four Barbary powers (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, 
 and Tripoli) as the price of a commercial treaty. As 120,000 
 guineas was half again as much as the total receipts of Congress, 
 there was little temptation to yield to this blackmailing invi- 
 tation. Jefferson wrote home urging that the United States 
 "begin a navy and decide on a war with these pyrates," adding 
 that Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy 
 their commerce. "Be assured," he says, "that the present dis- 
 respect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring us 
 insults which must involve us in war : a coward is much more 
 exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit." 
 
 Some influential men even despaired of republican govern- 
 ment at all. "The late turbulent scenes in Massachusetts 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 129 
 
 [Shays's Rebellion] and infamous ones in Rhode Island," wrote 
 Madison early in 1787, "have done inexpressible injury to the 
 republican character in that part of the United States ; and a 
 propensity towards monarchy is said to have been produced by 
 it in some leading minds." Jay also, in a letter to Washington, 
 expressed the fear that "if faction should long bear down law 
 and government . . . the more sober part of the people may 
 even think of a king." That some not only thought of a king 
 but even made serious advances in seeking a candidate for the 
 American throne is proved beyond a doubt by a letter dis- 
 covered in the Prussian Hausarchiv at Charlottenburg (Berlin) 
 and published in the American Historical Review for October, 
 1911. The letter was written by Prince Henry of Prussia, 
 brother-in-law of Frederick the Great, to Baron Steuben, who 
 made his home in New York after the American Revolution. 
 It contains a respectful but firm declination to attempt to make 
 good in the office in which George III had so recently failed. 1 
 
 Of course, these evils, foreign and domestic, were not the 
 fault of the Articles of Confederation. They were in part the 
 heritage of the war and in part due to social and political 
 causes reaching far back into the colonial period. The rivalry 
 between the debtor communities on the inland farms and the 
 wealthy merchants and bankers of the coast regions, who lent 
 them money at high rates of interest and bought up the best 
 lands of the West at a few cents an acre ; 2 the reluctance in a 
 
 1 Many years later (December, 1816) James Monroe, then president-elect, in 
 a letter to Andrew Jackson, declared that some of the leaders in 1786-1787 "en- 
 tertained principles unfriendly to our system of government" and meant to make 
 a change in it ; and that they were disappointed in not getting the assent of 
 George Washington (see Monroe, "Works," ed. Hamilton, Vol. V, p. 343). 
 
 2 "In 1784 Washington traveled through the mountains to the Kanawha, and 
 returning wrote several interesting and important letters on the subject of the 
 Western lands. He declared that such was the rage for speculating in and 
 forestalling lands that scarce a valuable spot within easy reach of the Ohio 
 was left without a claimant. Men talked of 50,000 acres or even 500,000 with 
 as much facility as a gentleman formerly did of 1000" (Edward Channing, 
 "History of the United States," Vol. Ill, p. 530). Washington's own holdings 
 of Western land, according to his will, were 41,136 acres, exclusive of his lands 
 in the settled parts of Virginia. 
 
130 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 time of economic depression to pay taxes to be sent to a remote 
 treasury and spent for objects of dubious benefit; the harsh 
 effects of the British Navigation Acts and the jealous Spanish 
 policy of closing the Mississippi, all would have existed even 
 if the strongest kind of federal government had been devised 
 in 1780. Proof of this is the fact that these evils did not dis- 
 appear until long after the Constitution was adopted. But 
 these problems revealed more clearly every year the inadequacy 
 of the Articles to keep the Union together. By 1786 the great 
 majority of influential men had been converted to the position 
 which a few like Hamilton, Washington, and Madison had 
 reached before the treaty of peace was signed; namely, that 
 more power must be lodged with Congress if we were to vindi- 
 cate our independence before the nations of the world. "To 
 be more exposed in the eyes of the world and more contemptible 
 than we are already," wrote Washington, "is hardly possible. 
 . . . The Confederation appears to me to be little more than 
 a shadow without a substance. . . . We are fast verging to 
 anarchy and confusion." 
 
 The tendency of our historical writing has been to do full 
 justice to the "anarchy and confusion" under the Articles, in 
 order that they may serve as a foil against which the almost 
 supernatural virtues of the Constitution shall shine with an 
 added brilliancy. But in spite of the deserved disparagement 
 of the Articles, several important positive contributions to 
 nationalism were made under them and by them in the trying 
 years of our critical period. The Union was actually held 
 together and Union sentiment was undoubtedly stronger in 
 1787 than at the close of the war. Sectionalism was rebuked 
 and even hissed on the floor of Congress. The great back coun- 
 try was rapidly settled by men who looked to the national 
 government for protection and petitioned Congress for state- 
 hood. Through the voluntary surrender of their Western claims 
 by several of the states an immense national domain was ac- 
 quired, whose sale held the promise (when the Indians should 
 be subjugated and the quarrel with Spain settled) of extinguish- 
 ing the whole domestic debt. Our diplomacy, if not successful, 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 131 
 
 was able and dignified in the hands of Adams, Jay, and Jeffer- 
 son. Treaties of commerce were concluded with Prussia and 
 some of the minor states of Europe, and by 1789 such a mitiga- 
 tion of the commercial policy of England, France, and Spain 
 had been secured that our trade with the West Indies was con- 
 siderably improved. 1 In addition, we had opened new routes 
 of trade to China and the East Indies. The Empress, sailing 
 from New York on Washington's birthday, 1784, returned from 
 the Orient in May, 1785, loaded with silks, tea, ivory, and 
 spices the first American vessel to visit the Celestial Empire. 
 Four years later eighteen American ships were reported in the 
 harbor of Canton. These were no mean accomplishments in 
 the midst of the financial distress and political impotence under 
 which our government was laboring. 
 
 Finally, Congress in its last will and testament under the 
 Articles of Confederation accomplished a work of great national 
 importance in the organization of the territory north of the 
 Ohio River. The influence of the frontier on the development 
 of American nationality has been so constant and so potent, its 
 contribution to the American ideals of liberty, democracy, and 
 union so incalculable, that the first effective plan for the 
 organization of the Western territory, the Northwest Ordinance, 
 deserves special emphasis. It laid the foundation of our colo- 
 nial policy that process by which we pushed our settlements 
 westward, subduing the Indian wilderness to civilized life, until 
 our frontier vanished beyond the sunsets of the Golden Gate, 
 and an unbroken band of states reached from ocean to ocean. 
 The Ordinaa~Q|jL787 provided for territorial gnvprnments in 
 the Northwest with "admission to a share in federal councils 
 on an equal footing with the original thirteen states at as early 
 
 1 British exports to the United States in 1789 and 1790 were 2,525,298 
 and 3,431,775 respectively, as against 1,603,465 in 1786. "It is safe to say," 
 writes Professor Channing, "that in the year of the ratification of the Con- 
 stitution of the United States [1788] the foreign commerce [interrupted by the 
 war] had been reestablished." So Professor Callender: "Economic conditions 
 changed from extreme depression to almost normal prosperity before the new 
 government came into existence in the spring of 1789 and before any of its 
 measures had time to produce an effect." 
 
132 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 periods as may be consistent with the general interests." It 
 pledged the states made from this territory to perpetual ad- 
 herence to the Union. It guaranteed a political and social 
 democracy by prohibiting the entail of property and the intro- 
 duction of slavery. It secured full liberty of conscience and 
 worship. It made provision for public education and extended 
 the privilege of Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, due process of 
 law, and the sanctity of contracts to the new region. In a word. 
 it made the territories of the United States not subject lands but 
 sistej*Jajicls, educated from their first settlement to take their 
 place eventually as full members in the family of states. Daniel 
 Webster said in the United States Senate forty years after the 
 passage of the Ordinance, "I doubt whether any single law of 
 any lawgiver ancient or modern has produced effects of more 
 distinct and lasting character." And Senator George F. Hoar, 
 in his address on the centennial anniversary of the first settle- 
 ment made in this territory (at Marietta, 1788), declared that 
 the Ordinance of 1787 "belongs with the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and the Constitution as one of the three title deeds 
 of American constitutional liberty." 
 
 The economist Tench Coxe read a paper on the reform of 
 our commercial system before a group of publicists and scholars 
 gathered at Benjamin Franklin's house in Philadelphia just a 
 fortnight before the delegates from a quorum of the states 
 arrived in that city for the opening of the Constitutional 
 Convention. "The foundations of national wealth and con- 
 sequence," he said, "are so firmly laid in the United States, 
 that no foreign power can undermine or destroy them. But 
 the enjoyment of these substantial blessings is rendered pre- 
 carious by domestic circumstances. Scarcely held together by 
 a weak and half-formed federal constitution, the powers of our 
 national government are unequal to the complete execution 
 of any salutary purpose, foreign or domestic. . . . We must 
 immediately remedy this defect or suffer exceedingly. ... If 
 we are to continue one people, a system which will promote the 
 general interests with the smallest injury to the particular ones 
 has become indispensably necessary." The day of remedy was 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 133 
 
 at hand. Even as Coxe was speaking the members were gather- 
 ing for that immortal summer's work, from May to September, 
 1787, which produced the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 Five generations of Americans have lived under the Consti- 
 tution of the United States. They have seen the area of our 
 country more than trebled, with distant tropical islands added 
 as colonies. They have seen our population increase twenty- 
 fivefold and our wealth over sixtyfold. They have seen 
 millions of the poor and oppressed, swept from the dusty 
 corners of Europe, seeking on these shores the freedom and 
 opportunity denied to them at home. Orators, statesmen, and 
 historians have celebrated the Constitution as the source of 
 these political blessings, in terms so extravagant that some- 
 thing like a cult arose to put the document " among those things 
 which a nation with loving reverence has determined to place 
 beyond all question." Gladstone spoke of it as a kind of sudden 
 inspiration or revelation "the most wonderful work ever 
 struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." 
 John Marshall, for thirty years chief justice of the Supreme 
 Court, spoke of the Constitution as "an expression of the clear 
 and deliberate will of the whole people." 
 
 It is no disparagement to the Constitution that a newer school 
 of political writers, intent on studying the wonderful document 
 in its social and economic origins, have shown such statements 
 as Gladstone's and Marshall's to be quite far from the truth. 
 The Constitution was not a sudden inspiration but a most 
 laborious achievement. Every clause of it grew out of the pro- 
 blems with which the Confederation was confronted. So far 
 from being the expression of "the clear and deliberate will of 
 the whole people," it was the work of a very small and select 
 class. 1 It was formulated by a convention of fifty-five men 
 
 *In the sixth volume of his "History of the United States" (p. 450), 
 George Bancroft says, "The people of the States demanded a federal convention 
 to form the Constitution, . . the Federal Congress offered that Constitution 
 
134 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 chosen by the state legislatures, which were all restricted to the 
 representatives of property interests. It was debated in secret 
 sessions, with sentinels posted at the door of the hall. It was 
 accepted by great states like Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and 
 Virginia only after bitter conflicts in the ratifying conventions. 
 New York adopted it by a margin of only three votes. It was 
 "extorted," as John Adams said, "from a reluctant people by 
 grinding necessity." It was bitterly fought over, clause by 
 clause, by the representatives of the opposing interests of the 
 large and the small states, the Eastern merchants and the South- 
 ern planters, until it seemed likely to the sanest mind in the 
 Convention that the members would disperse without reaching 
 any agreement. 1 
 
 In our study of the rise and development of the American 
 nation the formation of the Constitution is a topic of the first 
 importance. The Declaration of Independence announced, and 
 the treaty of 1783 confirmed, the existence nf the new Cation. 
 But as yet we were a nation without a state, like the Saxon 
 tribes in England before Alfred the Great, or the principalities 
 of Germany and Italy before the work of Bismarck and Ca- 
 vour. A nation without a state is like a spirit without a body, 
 an idea without form. The Constitution furnished that body 
 and form. It provided an effective government to hold freedom 
 in the check of law, and it has proved, on the whole, the most 
 successful attempt ever made in the world's history to reconcile 
 the conflicting forces of liberty and authority. With very few 
 amendments it has been adapted to the needs of a country 
 whose rapid growth has been one of the marvels of modern 
 history, and it is today the oldest written constitution in force 
 among the nations of Christendom. 
 
 severally to the people of each State, and by their united voice ... it was 
 made the binding form, of government." Every clause of this passage is erroneous. 
 1 Washington wrote to Hamilton, July 10, 1787, in the midst of the deliber- 
 ations of the Convention : " I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue, and do 
 therefore repent having had any agency in the business. The men who oppose a 
 strong and energetic government are, in my opinion, narrow-minded politicians 
 or else under the influence of local views. . . . The crisis is equally important 
 and alarming." 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 135 
 
 In September, 1780, six months before the Articles of Con- 
 federation went into effect, the prescient genius of Alexander 
 Hamilton detected the causes of the weakness of Congress, and 
 in a letter to Madison he suggested the immediate summons of a 
 convention of all the states "with full authority to conclude 
 finally on a form of general Confederation ... to give Con- 
 gress complete sovereignty in all that relates to war, peace, 
 trade, finance, and management of foreign affairs," and "to pro- 
 vide certain perpetual revenues . . . which together with the 
 duties on trade and the unlocated [unsurveyed] lands, would 
 give Congress a substantial existence and a stable foundation." 
 Every year that passed revealed more clearly the wisdom of 
 Hamilton's recommendations and increased the number of dis- 
 tinguished voices demanding an adequate government. Pages 
 could be filled with quotations from Washington's letters from 
 1781 on, urging reform. In 1783 he addressed a circular letter 
 to all the governors of the states from his headquarters at New- 
 burgh, where he had just stifled an incipient mutiny: "There is 
 an option still left to the United States. This is the moment to 
 establish or ruiri their national character forever. ... It is yet 
 to be decided whether the Revolution must be considered a bless- 
 ing or a curse." And three years later, when the evils of the 
 Confederation had reduced us to "scarce the appearance of a 
 government," he wrote, "I do not conceive that we can exist long 
 as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will 
 pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the 
 authority of the State governments extends over the several 
 States." 
 
 Thomas Jefferson is generally cited as the advocate of large 
 local powers against a central federal authority. Yet he wrote 
 from Paris to Madison in 1786, "The policies of Europe render 
 it indispensibly necessary that with respect to everything exter- 
 nal we be one nation only, firmly hooped together" ; and to 
 Monroe a few months later, "There will be no money in the 
 treasury until the Confederacy shows its teeth ; the states must 
 see the rod, and perhaps it must be felt by some of them." 
 With respect to things internal too this same disastrous year 
 
136 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of 1786 was revealing the need of a nation "firmly hooped 
 together." The East and the South were nearly ready to part 
 company on the Mississippi question. War was imminent 
 between several states over disputed boundaries and land 
 claims. Civil war was actually ablaze in Massachusetts in 
 Shays's Rebellion. A group of "Hartford wits," in verse lugu- 
 brious enough to match the situation, celebrated the reign of 
 anarchy in the mock epic "The Anarchiad": 
 
 Thy Constitution, Chaos, is restored. 
 
 Law sinks before thy uncreating Word. 
 
 Thy hand unbars th' unfathomed gulf of fate, 
 
 And in deep darkness 'whelms the new-born state. 
 
 To the Virginia legislature, and especially to James Madison, 
 is due the credit for starting the negotiations which led directly 
 to the new Constitution. Maryland and^Virprinia had a long- 
 standing dispute over the navigation of the Potomac and the 
 waters of Chesapeake Bay" On the last day of the session of 
 1784 Madison got the Virginia legislature to appoint a com- 
 mittee to treat with Maryland, and the latter state, well dis- 
 posed to her powerful neighbor on account of Virginia's recent 
 cession of her lands in the West, responded heartily. The 
 committees met at Alexandria, March 28, 1785, and soon ad- 
 journed, by Washington's invitation, to Mount Vernon, where 
 the conference widened into a general discussion of commerce 
 among the Middle States. It was felt that Delaware and 
 Pennsylvania should participate, and Maryland then made the 
 suggestion that delegates from all the states meet to confer on 
 commerce and navigation. In January, 1786, the Virginia 
 legislatm^Jssud__a-call for such a meeting to be held at 
 Annapolis, Maryland, "to take into consideration th_Jrad&. 
 of the UnitedJStates . . . and to consider how far a uniform 
 system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to 
 their common interests and their permanent harmony." Only 
 five states were represented at Annapolis in September, 1786, 
 though four more had appointed delegates. They were too few 
 to attempt any alterations in the form of government, but they 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 137 
 
 adopted a report by Alexander Hamilton, calling for a conven- 
 tion of all the states "to meet at Philadelphia, on the second 
 Monday of May [1787], to consider the situation of the United 
 States and devise such further provisions as should appear 
 necessary to render the constitution of the federal government 
 adequate to the exigencies of the Union." 
 
 The movement for a new national government was fairly 
 launched. Virginia appointed a group of distinguished dele- 
 gates to the convention, with George Washington a t their head 
 Other states followed suit, and Congress simply recognized an 
 accomplished fact when it resolved that "on the second Mon- 
 day of May next a convention of delegates shall be held in 
 Philadelphia, for the sole purpose of revising the Articles 
 of Confederation." 
 
 The student should note the revolutionary character of these 
 proceedings. The call of the state legislatures and the resolves 
 of self-summoned conventions reminds one of the Committees 
 of Safety and of Correspondence in the early Revolutionary 
 days. The regular Congress of the United States, its legal 
 government, sitting in New York from 1785 to 1789, was not 
 the source from which the movement for a new Constitution 
 came. That impotent body had tried in vain to get the states 
 to grant it powers of taxation and commercial regulation ; and 
 now the leaders (Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Jay) turned 
 to other ways. 1 That many of them were determined to make 
 the commercial reforms only the entering wedge for the com- 
 plete abolition of the Articles of Confederation we know from 
 their correspondence. "I consider the convention at Annapolis 
 the most important aera in our affairs," wrote Monroe to Madi- 
 son; "the Eastern men, be assured, mean it as leading further 
 than the object [commerce] originally comprehended." Madi- 
 son, writing to Jefferson in Paris, August 17, 1786, confesses 
 his sympathy with "many Gentlemen both within and without 
 Congress" who wished to use the Annapolis meeting to bring 
 
 Professor Burgess goes so far as to use the phrase coup d'etat (a sudden 
 change of government by revolutionary conspiracy) to designate the Annapolis 
 meeting. 
 
138 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 about an amendment of the Articles; but he despairs, in the 
 present crisis, of "anything beyond a commercial reform." 
 
 The character of the statesmen chosen as delegates to the 
 Constitutional Convention, the tone of alarm in the letters of 
 the chief men of the period, and the prevalence of public writ- 
 ings urging the need for drastic measures, all point to the 
 momentous significance of the Philadelphia meeting of 1787. 
 The men who assembled in the hall of the statehouse where 
 some of them, eleven years earlier, had signed the Declaration 
 of Independence 1 fully realized the solemnity of the situation. 
 "America has certainly upon this occasion drawn forth her 
 first characters," wrote George Mason to his son; "the eyes 
 of the United States are turned upon this assembly, and their 
 expectations raised to a very anxious degree. May God grant 
 we may be able to gratify them by establishing a wise and 
 just government." 
 
 The moment the Convention had finished its preliminary 
 
 work of organization Governor Randolph of Virginia presented 
 
 fifteen resolutions, designed ostensibly for the correction and 
 
 enlargement of the Articles of Confederation, but in reality 
 
 demanding a new Constitution (May 29). They provided for 
 
 ) a national legislature of two branches, for a national executive 
 
 / to be chosen by the legislature, and for a national judiciary, also 
 
 I chosen by the legislature, to hold office during good behavior. 
 
 iMost significant of all, they provided for the extension of the 
 
 new authority over the whole Union by the resolution (No. 14) 
 
 that the various officers "within the several states ought to be 
 
 bound by oath to support the articles of union." The Virginia 
 
 resolutions were carried point by point in the first two weeks 
 
 of the debate, and it looked as though a Constitution not 
 
 differing much from the one under which we live might be the 
 
 rapid and peaceful result of the labors of the Convention, until 
 
 the resolution was reached which provided that representation 
 
 in the second branch of tfre legislature (the Senate) should be 
 
 1 These were Roger Sherman of Connecticut, George Read of Delaware, Benja- 
 min Franklin, Robert Morris, George Clymer, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, 
 and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gerry refused to sign the Constitution. 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 139 
 
 proportioned to population, as in the first branch (the House). 
 The smaller states New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Del- 
 aware, Maryland rebelled against this provision and pre- 
 sented through Patterson of New Jersey a counter plan "for 
 revising, correcting, and enlarging the Articles of Confeder- 
 ation" without giving up their essential feature, the equality 
 of the states. The New Jersey plan approved the creation of 
 executive and legislative departments ; it gave Congress powers 
 of taxation ; it even allowed the central government to call 
 on the forces of the confederated states to coerce any recal- 
 citrant state or persons in a state into obedience to national 
 legislation. But it clung tenaciously to the Jederal as opposed 
 to the national form of government. Congress must still con- 
 sist of representatives of the states, not of the people ; and each 
 state in Congress must have a single and equal vote. '"We 
 would sooner submit to a foreign power," said John Dickinson 
 of Delaware to Madison, "than submit to be deprived in both 
 branches of the legislature of equality of suffrage, and thereby 
 be thrown under the dominion of the larger states." 
 
 This, then, was the crucial question of the Convention : How 
 can power be reconciled with liberty ? For the larger states the 
 only promise of vigor in the government was in its direct action 
 on the people of the land; for the smaller states the only 
 guarantee of liberty was in the maintenance of an absolute 
 equality of each state in the federal council of the nation. "If 
 New Jersey will not part with her sovereignty," said James 
 Wilson of Pennsylvania, "it is vain to talk of government. . . . 
 We must forget our local habits and attachments, lay aside 
 our state connections, and act for the general good of the 
 whole." Ellsworth of Connecticut was immediately on his feet 
 in behalf of the small-state men to urge "the necessity of main- 
 taining the existence and agency of the states," in order to 
 preserve a republican government over so large a country. 
 
 It looked as though the Convention would go to pieces over 
 this question. Martin of Maryland reported, on June 28, that 
 it was on the verge of dissolution, "scarce held together by 
 the strength of a hair," and Franklin, little inclined to seek 
 
140 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 divine aid until every human resource had been tried, proposed 
 that the sessions should be opened with prayer. The serious- 
 ness of the secession of the group of small states on the middle 
 Atlantic seaboard, with their invaluable harbor of New York, 
 can be seen at a glance. Gunning Bedford of Delaware de- 
 clared openly that the small states would turn to foreign powers 
 "who were ready to take them by the hand," rather than unite 
 on the purely national plan advocated by Morris, King, and 
 Wilson. The Convention appointed a committee of thirteen, 
 one member from each state, to effect a compromise and ad- 
 journed over the Fourth of July. On the next day the com- 
 mittee recommended that representation be proportional to 
 the population in the House and equal (two members from 
 each state) in the Senate. The lower House, as the popular 
 body, was to have the exclusive right to initiate revenue bills. 
 After ten days of bitter debate this great compromise of the 
 Constitution was adopted (July 16) by a vote of five states 
 to four. Thus the fundamental character of our government 
 was determined partly national, partly federal. 
 
 Conflicts of interest on the part of sections or of economic 
 classes were settled, or at least quieted, by further compromises. 
 The slaves, whom the Southerners wished to have counted as 
 population, but who, of course, had no political or civil rights, 
 
 | . were finally reckoned at three fifths of their actual number in 
 computing the federal ratio for representation in the House ; so 
 that a state which had a population of 200,000 white and 100,000 
 blacks would send to Congress representatives for 260,000 
 inhabitants. The regulation of commerce, which the agricul- 
 tural class wished to have determined by a two-thirds vote in 
 Congress, lest excessive taxes be levied under the form of cus- 
 toms duties, was left to a simple majority vote, but at the 
 same time the producers were favored by a clause forbidding 
 
 U Congress to lay duties on exports. On July 26 the Convention 
 referred twenty-three resolutions, the practical embodiment of 
 the Virginia plan, to a committee of detail, consisting of Rut- 
 ledge, Wilson, Ellsworth, Gorham, and Randolph. With the 
 resolutions went the New Jersey plan and a plan of Thomas 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 141 
 
 Pinckney of South Carolina. 1 The committee reported two 
 weeks later, laying a rough copy of a constitution in " broad- 
 sides" on the desk of each member. For another month the 
 clauses were debated. On September 12 the Constitution in its 
 present form (save for the amendments) was returned from 
 the committee on style, with the evidence of Gouverneur 
 Morris's handiwork in its clear and succinct phraseology. On 
 the seventeenth the engrossed copy was signed by 39 of the 42 
 members present at the Convention and was transmitted to 
 Congress to be sent to the states for ratification. 
 
 Opposition to the new Constitution was immediate and 
 widespread. The framers, said the critics, were representatives 
 of the propertied classes alone and had deliberated like an 
 aristocratic assembly behind closed doors. They had gone 
 beyond their powers in writing a totally new Constitution in- 
 stead of amending the Articles, and they had added presump- 
 tion to disobedience by declaring that when nine states ratified 
 the Constitution it should go into effect for those states. Was 
 not that to invite nine states to " secede' 7 from the Union 
 since amendments to the Articles could be adopted only by the 
 unanimous consent of the states? Men who had been in the 
 forefront of the struggle with Great Britain opposed the new 
 Constitution, because they believed that it threatened our 
 hard-earned liberty by the powers that it granted to the presi- 
 dent and the federal courts. Patrick Henry wrote that he could 
 
 1 The Pinckney plan has been the subject of much controversy. Madison had 
 no copy of it, nor was it contained in the meager journals of the Convention 
 published in 1818. John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, wrote to Pinckney 
 in 1818, asking him for a copy of his plan, and in return received from Pinckney 
 a manuscript so like the "broadside" which had been submitted to the members 
 of the Convention by the reporting committee (August 6) that historians have 
 been inclined to accuse Pinckney of deliberate forgery. However, the existence 
 of a Pinckney plan is undoubted. Many sections occur in the report of August 6 
 that were not in the twenty-three resolutions ; and the source of these sections 
 was a mystery until Professor J. Franklin Jameson, in 1902, discovered a leaf 
 of the Pinckney plan inserted in a manuscript of James Wilson one of the 
 members of the committee. It is likely that Pinckney's plan was used as the 
 basis for the "broadside" of August 6, and the disappearance of the manuscript 
 may have been due to the fact that it was sent to the printer as "copy." 
 
142 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 not bring his mind to accord with Washington's letter of in- 
 dorsement of the document. Richard Henry Lee wrote the 
 " Letters from a Federal Farmer" to expose the dangers of 
 consolidated power which he saw in the Constitution. He called 
 the proposed government "an elective despotism." Benjamin 
 Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, saw 
 only "the seeds of discord" in the "unlimited powers of tax- 
 ation, the regulation of trade, and the jurisdictions that are 
 to be established in every state altogether independent of their 
 laws." He thought that "the states south of the Potomac 
 would be little more than appendages to those north of it" if 
 Congress by a bare majority could control commerce and 
 taxation at will. Scrupulous democrats demanded a Bill of 
 Rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and press, religious 
 liberty, the right of petition, and trial by jury. Jealous states'- 
 rights men saw in the Constitution a threat of absorption by 
 the central government, since the members of Congress, paid 
 from the national Treasury, would be absolved of responsibility 
 to their state, and their oath of allegiance to the federal govern- 
 ment would nullify their allegiance to their sovereign state. 
 
 In the face of this varied and determined opposition the 
 campaign for ratification was waged. The defense of the 
 Constitution in the ratifying conventions called by the legis- 
 latures of the states fell chiefy on the shoulders of a few men 
 who had been members of the Constitutional Convention- 
 Wilson and the Morrises in Pennsylvania, Sherman and Ells- 
 worth in Connecticut, King and Strong in Massachusetts, 
 Rutledge and the Pinckneys in South Carolina, Madison in 
 Virginia, and Hamilton in New York. Washington, though 
 not in the Virginia ratifying convention, was the most influen- 
 tial man in the country in securing the adoption of the Consti- 
 tution. His prestige was enormous and his efforts were untiring. 
 He won over Governor Randolph, who had refused to sign the 
 Constitution at Philadelphia. Mr. Dpnald, who visited Wash- 
 ington at Mount Vernon in the summer of 1788, wrote, "I 
 never in my life saw him so keen for anything as he is for 
 the adoption of the new Constitution." Even the closeness of 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 143 
 
 the vote on ratification (187 to 168 in Massachusetts, 89 to 79 
 in Virginia, 30 to 27 in New York) can give no idea of the 
 strenuousness of the campaign a campaign fought with all 
 the characteristic weapons of eighteenth-century political con- 
 troversy: personal vituperation, venomous pamphlets, turgid 
 oratory, hangings and burnings in effigy, billingsgate, bonfires, 
 barbecues, and bad verses. 
 
 Out of the mass of ephemeral literature, however, there 
 emerged one work of lasting worth. Alexander Hamilton, in 
 his fight for ratification in New York, invited Madison and 
 Jay to collaborate with him in a series of articles explaining 
 the need, the nature, and the anticipated operation of the new 
 Constitution. The articles appeared in the winter and spring of 
 1787-1788 in various New York papers, over the signature 
 of "Publius." Jay wrote five of them, explaining the function 
 of the proposed Constitution in foreign relations. Madison's 
 twenty-nine papers dealt chiefly with the nature of the double 
 government of state and nation, with the relation of the execu- 
 tive, legislative, and judicial departments to one another, and 
 the fortunes of federal systems in the world's history. Hamil- 
 ton contributed fifty-one papers, emphasizing our dire need 
 for a worthy and respected central government, the security to 
 all interests, foreign and domestic, which would result from the 
 application of just laws impartially enforced, and the benefits 
 to our trade and our Treasury which would inure from the new 
 Constitution. The articles, gathered into a volume under the 
 title of "The Federalist," have been considered the ablest expo- 
 sition of the principles underlying our Constitution, and one of 
 the ablest works of political science in the world's literature. 
 
 Submitted to a general popular vote, the Constitution would 
 probably have been defeated. Its supporters, the propertied 
 classes, were far outnumbered by the disfranchised farmers and 
 the industrial workers in the cities. Even among the voting 
 population itself the opposition was so strong that only the 
 specter of disunion could overcome it. 1 However, by the end 
 
 1 So John Marshall, an ardent supporter of the Constitution in the Virginia 
 ratifying convention, testifies in his "Life of Washington" (Vol. II, p. 127). 
 
144 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of June, 1788, nine state conventions had ratified the docu- 
 ment, and the Constitution went into effect for those states. 
 Only North Carolina and Rhode Island refused to join the new 
 government before the inauguration, the following April, of its 
 first president, George Washington.' 
 
 When we analyze the motives for calling the Constitutional 
 Convention, the method of election of the members, and the 
 printed records of the debates, it is impossible to resist the con- 
 clusion that the Constitution was framed primarily to guarantee 
 the interests of property against the dangers of anarchy, re- 
 pudiation, and bankruptcy. 1 Washington confessed that we 
 might as well continue under the old Confederation if the 
 new instrument failed "to do justice to the public creditors and 
 retrieve the national character." So aristocratic, indeed, did the 
 new Constitution appear to many, with its life tenure for judges, 
 its small and powerful Senate, its executive unhampered by a 
 responsible cabinet or council, its complete control of commerce 
 and currency, its machinery for the prompt suppression of 
 popular disaffection, that it seemed rather an instrument for re- 
 straining than for expressing the popular will. "Its advocates," 
 wrote John Adams, "received the active and steady cooper- 
 ation of all that was left in America of attachment to the 
 mother country, as well as of the moneyed interest, which 
 ever points to strong government as surely as the needle 
 to the pole." Mellen Chamberlain calls the Constitution "the 
 triumph of the legitimate successors of the anti-Revolutionary 
 party of 1775." 
 
 However, all discontent seemed to vanish in the general 
 rejoicing which attended the final ratification of the Consti- 
 tution. The "federal roof" was up at last. Pageants and pro- 
 cessions, feasting and oratory, were the order of the day. 
 Allegory was called in to supplement sober statement. "The 
 good ship Constitution" was safe in port. "The sloop Anarchy" 
 
 ir This was the view of John Adams and many other "aristocratically minded" 
 men at the time, and a view that has been developed by some modern scholars, 
 notably by Professor Charles A. Beard in his "Economic Interpretation of the 
 Constitution" (1914). 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 145 
 
 had "gone ashore on the Union rock," and "the old scow 
 Confederacy, Imbecility master," had "gone off to sea." But 
 opposition only slumbered a little while. to waken again, as 
 we shall see, in Washington's administration, against the 
 "monocrats" and the "Anglophiles," the merchants and the 
 bondholders, who were accused of degrading the government 
 from the servant of the whole people to the slave of the 
 moneyed classes. 
 
 The Constitution is brief, clear, and simple. Its unique 
 virtue from the point of view of political science is the device 
 by which it secured the supremacy of the new federal govern- 
 ment without destroying or absorbing the state governments. 
 Under the Confederation a state could ignore or defy the meas- 
 ures of Congress with impunity. A remedy for this chronic nul- 
 lification of national laws was a prime requisite in a new 
 constitution. Various remedies were proposed: to have the 
 governor of each state appointed under the authority of the 
 United States; to give the national executive the right to veto 
 state laws "under regulations prescribed by the United States" ; 
 to give Congress the right to coerce a disobedient state. But 
 instead of interfering directly with the officers or the laws of the 
 states, or coercing a state by force of arms (which, as Madison 
 urged, "would look more like a declaration of war than an in- 
 fliction of punishment"), the Convention devised the happy 
 expedient of enlisting the state authorities themselves in the 
 support of the national government. The members of state 
 legislatures and all the executive and judicial officers of a state 
 were bound by oath to support the Constitution of the United 
 States (Art. VI, sect. 3), and the state courts were pledged to 
 recognize the Constitution and the laws and treaties made under 
 it as "the supreme law of the land, . . . anything in the Consti- 
 tution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding" 
 (Art. VI, sect. 2). No defiance was hurled at the states; no 
 direct orders were given to them ; only a few prohibitions were 
 enjoined upon them ; and no threat of military punishment was 
 held over them. Still, the citizens of every state were brought 
 individually and severally under the authority of the United 
 
146 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 States through the federal courts; and the laws of any state 
 might be set aside at any time as unconstitutional by a decision 
 of the Supreme Court, which was the final court of appeal in all 
 cases involving the interpretation of the Constitution (Art. Ill, 
 sects, i, 2). 
 
 Because the guardian of our American system of government 
 y Jias been the federal judiciary, rather than the military arm or 
 an executive with the power of issuing administrative decrees, 
 the courts have often been attacked in America as the strong- 
 holds of conservatism, and "judge-made law" has been branded 
 as a usurpation of the rights of the popularly elected legislatures. 
 Undoubtedly, the danger of some admixture of politics in our 
 theoretically independent judiciary js the price we have to pay 
 for the maintenance of the law of the land ; but it is a small 
 price, after all, to pay for freedom from subjection to a military 
 police or to an arrogant group of minister-courtiers around a 
 king by divine right. It is hard to imagine any agency or power 
 that could have more justly performed the difficult task of 
 adapting the Constitution to the various needs of a rapidly 
 growing democracy than the federal judiciary, secured as it is 
 by appointment and tenure from the undue influence of tempo- 
 rary or local legislation and yet truly national in character from 
 its diffusion through all the states of the Union. 
 
 Many extraconstitutional features have developed in the 
 actual application of the Constitution. A stranger reading the 
 document would be well informed on such formal matters 
 as the qualifications of officers, the powers of Congress, the proc- 
 \ ess of amendment; but of the actual forces which move the 
 government in state and nation he would be ignorant. He would 
 find nothing in the Constitution about political parties, con- 
 ventions, platforms, and " machines." He would have no sus- 
 picion of the immense power of the Senate through its control 
 of patronage. He would not know what departments make 
 up the president's cabinet or how many members there are in 
 the Supreme Court. He would know nothing of the complicated 
 process by which hundreds of bills become laws in every session 
 of Congress. He would think that our president is still selected 
 
FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 147 
 
 by a little group of " electors" meeting quietly in their respec- 
 tive states and balloting for a man of their own choice. 
 
 Although March 4, 1789, was the day set by the expiring 
 Congress of the Confederation for the inauguration of the new 
 government, it was well into April before the arrival of a 
 majority of Congress in New York enabled the Houses to 
 organize and count the electoral vote. George Washington's 
 name was written first on every one of the sixty-nine ballots. 
 The next highest vote (34) was for John Adams, who was de- 
 clared vice president. On April 30 Washington took the oath 
 of office on the balcony of Federal Hall, New York, while the 
 great throng that filled the street below shouted, "God bless 
 our Washington ! Long live our beloved President ! " The 
 event marked the end of an era. That same April day fifteen 
 years before, the British Parliament had been deliberating the 
 first set of measures framed for the coercion and punishment of 
 the recalcitrant American colonies. The victory of the men of 
 1 775 in the war insured us a free field to work out the experiment 
 of American democracy ; the victory of the men of 1 787 in peace 
 secured a government strong enough to preserve that democracy 
 from degeneration into factional groups despised in the eyes of 
 Europe and distracted by petty rivalries at home. The burden of 
 responsibility borne by the leaders who had labored for victory 
 in war and order in peace during this critical decade and a half 
 had been heavy. Their letters are filled with a courageous 
 anxiety which bears witness to the strain they had been under. 
 The adoption of the Constitution filled them with a kind of aw- 
 ful misgiving, for they knew at what a price they had won the 
 opportunity to prove their faith in their political destiny. It 
 is no wonder that the man who had borne the greatest burden 
 of responsibility in both war and peace spoke in a voice "a 
 little tremulous" in his inaugural address to the members of 
 the first Congress of the United States under the Constitution : 
 "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny 
 of the republican model of government are justly considered 
 as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted 
 to the hands of the American People." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 
 
 The establishment of a republican government on a safe and solid basis is 
 the wish of every honest man in the United States, and is an object of all others 
 the nearest and most dear to my own heart. ALEXANDER HAMILTON 
 
 THE HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM 
 
 Six days-before the electors met in their ten 1 respective states 
 to cast a unanimous vote for George Washington as first presi- 
 dent of the United States, the man thus honored had written to 
 General Pinckney, "For my own part, I am entirely per- 
 suaded that the present general government will endeavor to 
 lay the foundations for its proceedings in national justice, faith, 
 and honor." Called himself a few weeks later to take the oath 
 of office as chief magistrate of the new "general government," 
 he fulfilled this prophetic pledge with the utmost fidelity. 
 Justice, faith, and honor were the ideals which inspired George 
 Washington his life long, and firmness, diligence, and the long 
 patience which is akin to genius were the qualities of character 
 which those ideals produced. Far less creative than Hamilton 
 and far less learned than Jefferson, without Franklin's wit or 
 Henry's eloquence, Washington was still the acknowledged 
 master of them all in the superb balance of deed and thought, 
 of reason and action, with which he pursued his even way in 
 all vicissitudes of fortune. Most men as courageous would 
 have been precipitate in action ; most men as deliberate would 
 have been vacillating in counsel. But Washington was equally 
 removed from exaltation and despair. "Of all the great men 
 in history," says Lecky, "he was the most invariably judicious." 
 
 iNorth Carolina did not enter the Union until November, 1789, and Rhode 
 Island until the following May. In New York a deadlock between the senate 
 and the assembly prevented the choice of presidential electors in 1789. 
 
 148 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 149 
 
 His ambitions were all weighted with a sense of the responsibil- 
 ities which they brought, and his labors lightened by the quiet, 
 constant faith that they were contributing to the eventual 
 success of the newly founded democracy, "the last great experi- 
 ment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable compact 
 in civil society." His aims were all his country's. 1 
 
 When Washington read his inaugural speech before the 
 members of the first Congress in Federal Hall, New York, the 
 total government of the United States was represented there. 
 The departments, jurisdictions, courts, and embassies which 
 were necessary for the execution of the powers conferred on the 
 president and Congress by the Constitution had to be created 
 by law and manned by secretaries, judges, marshals, collectors 
 of customs, postmasters, military officers, territorial governors, 
 Indian commissioners, foreign ministers and consuls, and a host 
 of minor officials and clerks. The dissolution of the old Con- 
 gress had put an end to all its feeble organs of government. 
 The requisitions on the states ceased, leaving the new govern- 
 ment without a penny of income. The only bequest from the 
 Confederation was a debt, which the new Constitution assumed 
 in full. 
 
 The most imperative need of the new government was a 
 revenue; and on the very day after the first Congress was 
 organized, without waiting even for the inauguration of the 
 president, the House of Representatives proceeded to the dis- 
 cussion of a tariff. James Madison of Virginia, the leading 
 member of the House, brought in a bill imposing moderate 
 duties (averaging about 8 per cent) on sugar, molasses, tea, 
 coffee, wine, salt, glass, nails, and other imports. Although the 
 bill was described in the preamble as "An Act for the en- 
 couragement and protection of Manufactures," the protective 
 
 !The finest delineation of Washington's character in brief compass is a letter 
 written by Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones in January, 1814. It is the 
 more remarkable as the tribute of a man whose political tenets were opposed 
 to Washington's and whose personal relations during the later years of Wash- 
 ington's life were not the most cordial. The letter may be found in H. S. Ran- 
 dall's "Life of Thomas Jefferson," Vol. Ill, p. 641, or in P. L. Ford's edition of 
 "Writings of Jefferson," Vol. IX, p. 446. 
 
150 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 elements in it were only slight. It was the need of revenue which 
 Madison urged in his speech, to meet our financial obligations 
 and to revive among us "the dormant principles of our honor 
 and honesty." There was no recourse in the debate on the 
 bill to the stock arguments of the protectionist: high wages 
 and the American standard of living. But one kind of protec- 
 tion the bill effected immediately. Importers of large consign- 
 ments of goods from Europe secured the postponement of the 
 operation of the. act until their cargoes should have landed, and 
 at the same time put up the prices of the goods to accord with 
 the tariff. The consumers paid the bill. In spite of the recom- 
 mendations of our first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander 
 Hamilton, for a high protective duty, in his Report on Manu- 
 factures, of December, 1791, the tariff remained low until the 
 need of extraordinary revenue for war raised it to protective 
 levels. 
 
 The three executive departments of State (foreign affairs), 
 Treasury, and War were organized in the summer months of 
 1789, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry 
 Knox were appointed as the respective incumbents. Edmund 
 Randolph of Virginia was named Attorney-General and took 
 part with the executive secretaries in the cabinet meetings, 
 though the Department of Justice was not organized by Con- 
 gress until 1870. The heads of departments did not form a 
 "cabinet" in the true sense of the word. They were not, like 
 European ministries, an executive committee, drawn from the 
 legislature, and responsible to the legislature in the shaping of 
 national policy, nor were they recognized in any corporate 
 capacity by Congress or the Constitution. The president, ac- 
 cording to the Constitution, might "require their opinion in 
 writing . . . upon any subject relating to the duties of their 
 respective offices," but he was not obliged to consult them in 
 a body. Washington did often ask opinions of his secretaries 
 privately and separately, but under Jefferson the habit became 
 fixed of assembling the cabinet at stated times for joint deliber- 
 ation and advice on the policies of the administration. It was 
 not until the middle of President Roosevelt's second term 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 151 
 
 (1907) that the cabinet received official recognition as a part 
 of our constitutional machinery. 
 
 A Judiciary Act, prepared mainly by Oliver Ellsworth of Con- 
 necticut and passed September 24, 1789, organized the Supreme 
 Court and erected federal district and circuit courts. Washing- 
 ton designated John Jay of New York as Chief Justice of the 
 Supreme Court and named among the five associate justices 
 such distinguished men as James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John 
 Rutledge of South Carolina, and James Blair of Virginia. In 
 accordance with the clause of the Constitution (Art. Ill, sect. 2, 
 par. 2) which gives Congress power to regulate the appellate 
 jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Act conferred 
 on the court the enormous power of reviewing the decisions 
 of state courts as to the constitutionality of statutes a power 
 which Senator McClay declared was designed "to swallow by 
 degrees all the state .judiciaries." From this famous twenty- 
 fifth clause of the Judiciary Act has been developed the practice 
 of the Supreme Court (the "guardian of the Constitution") in 
 declaring null and void acts of the state legislatures and Con- 
 gress which conflict with the Constitution. The review of state 
 laws and decisions by the Supreme Court led to many contro- 
 versies, in our earlier history especially, between the advocates 
 of states' rights and the champions of national sovereignty. 
 
 A multitude of minor matters were adjusted in the busy 
 summer session of the first Congress. Hundreds of offices were 
 created in connection with the great departments. The salaries 
 of congressmen and executive officials were fixed. The location 
 of the new capital was discussed. The president (but only by 
 the casting vote of Vice President Adams in the Senate) was 
 given the power to remove heads of departments and other ap- 
 pointive officers at his own discretion. The hundred and more 
 amendments to the Constitution suggested by the states in their 
 ratifying conventions were boiled down to twelve and passed 
 by Congress. Ten of these twelve were ratified by the necessary 
 three fourths of the states and appear as the first ten amend- 
 ments of our Constitution. On September 29, 1789, Congress 
 adjourned until the following January. 
 
152 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Quite as important as formal acts of Congress in determining 
 the character of our government were a number of precedents 
 established in the opening days of our national history. The 
 French minister, the count of Moustier, tried to get Washing- 
 ton's ear for a private audience, but the president with firm 
 and kindly tact held the minister to the custom of civilized 
 nations of communicating their business in writing and through 
 the proper channel of the foreign office. Congress too asserted 
 its independence of the executive. Jealous of its constitutional 
 right of initiating revenue measures, the House limited the 
 Secretary of the Treasury to the preparation of reports to be 
 presented for its consideration. It refused to allow Hamilton 
 to appear on the floor in person to recommend his measures, 
 since he was not a member of Congress nor amenable to its 
 control except through the extreme and unusual process of 
 impeachment. Hamilton's friends, who wanted to see him play 
 the part of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, were not 
 a little nettled at this democratic opposition. Even Washing- 
 ton's presence at the side of Secretary Knox in the Senate, 
 where they had come to explain an Indian treaty, failed to 
 secure a favorable reception for the Secretary of War. Both 
 Washington and Knox withdrew from the Senate chamber in 
 considerable embarrassment. A few years later Fisher Ames 
 complained that the heads of administrative departments, in- 
 stead of forming a real ministry, which might "impart a kind 
 of momentum to the operation of the laws," were only "chief 
 clerks." Whether it was wiser or not for Congress to keep the 
 executive officers at arm's length is a question on which critics 
 differ. It is the feature which differentiates our constitutional 
 system most sharply from those of the responsible governments 
 of Europe. 
 
 Congress assembled for its second session on January 4, 1790. 
 Ten days later it listened to Alexander Hamilton's First Report 
 on the Public Credit. Hamilton was a financial genius of the 
 first order, endowed with "a powerful imagination for facts." 
 To the capacity for sustained and close thinking inherited from 
 his Scotch father he added his French mother's vivacity, 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 153 
 
 amiability, and charm. He had come to New York at the age of 
 fifteen from his birthplace in the British West Indian island 
 of Nevis to enter King's College (Columbia), and forthwith 
 he devoted his precocious talents as a writer and speaker to the 
 cause of the American colonies, which was then rapidly moving 
 to its crisis. His services in the field and the council chamber 
 during the American Revolution were considerable. In the 
 later years of the war and during the critical period that 
 followed he was assiduous in the study of finance and tireless 
 in the recommendation of measures to strengthen the govern- 
 ment and revive its languishing credit. In 1780, at the age of 
 twenty-three, he wrote a long letter to our leading financier, 
 Robert Morris, on the need for the establishment of a national 
 bank. In the same year, in a remarkable letter to James 
 Duane, he analyzed the causes of the weakness of the Con- 
 federation and proposed as a remedy a scheme of national 
 government in which many of the features of the Constitution 
 of 1787 were anticipated. He was chairman of a committee 
 of Congress to report on an impost duty in 1782, and a few 
 years later in the legislature of New York he fought valiantly 
 to persuade the state to surrender to the Union sources of 
 revenue sufficient to enable it to discharge its obligations. " For 
 how," said he, "can our national character be preserved with- 
 out paying our debts, or our Union continue to exist without 
 revenues ? " It was as no tyro in finance, then, but as a master 
 that the young Secretary of the Treasury came forward in 
 January, 1790, with his program for the establishment of our 
 national credit. 
 
 "There is probably," says Henry Cabot Lodge, "no single 
 state paper in the history of the United States, with the excep- 
 tion of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was of such 
 immense importance and produced such wide and far-reaching 
 results as Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit." 
 The long document 1 may be divided into two main parts: 
 
 ir The Report is printed in full in H. C. Lodge's Federal edition of the "Works 
 of Alexander Hamilton," Vol. II, pp. 227-289. 
 
154 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 What are the obligations of the United States ? and How shall 
 those obligations be met? In dealing with the first question 
 the Secretary showed the grandeur and courage of his convic- 
 tions, and in dealing with the second he showed the resourceful- 
 ness and ingenuity of his imagination. We owed $11,710,378 
 to foreign creditors. Nobody doubted that this part of our 
 debt " ought to be provided for according to the precise terms 
 of the contracts relating to it." The domestic debt, with arrears 
 of interest equal to half the principal, amounted to $40,414,085. 
 The interest-bearing certificates- representing this part of the 
 debt had so depreciated in value, as the embarrassments of the 
 government thickened, that they sold on the speculative market 
 of 1 789 for only a quarter of their face value. Hamilton insisted 
 that the Treasury redeem these certificates at their full value. 
 The United States had pledged itself to pay the amount written 
 on the note and must pay that amount to the penny, no matter 
 who held the note. If this enriched the speculator who had 
 bought the certificates for 25 per cent of their par value, that 
 was the punishment of the original holders who had had so little 
 faith in their government as to sell its securities cheap. They 
 must learn once for all that the new government of the United 
 States would not start out with a policy of repudiation. The 
 Constitution (Art. VI, sect, i) declared that "all debts con- 
 tracted and engagements entered into" before its adoption 
 should be as "valid against the United States under this Consti- 
 tution as under the Confederation." Congress was forbidden, 
 then, by the fundamental law of the land to pay less than the 
 full value of its debt. As for the plan, urged by Madison and 
 others, that the government pay the present holders what the 
 certificates had cost them plus the accrued interest from the 
 date of purchase, and pay the balance to the original holders, 
 Hamilton found it impolitic and "replete with absurd as well 
 as inequitable consequences." Even if the original holders 
 could be traced, how could it be proved whether they had actu- 
 ally profited or lost by realizing a certain amount on their 
 securities at a certain time. Perhaps the money was worth 
 more to them then than the full value of the certificates would 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 155 
 
 be now. In short, the matter was so complicated that the 
 government could never hope to adjust it equitably. With 
 buyers and sellers in the security market it could not pretend 
 to deal. All it could or should do was to pay its debt as pledged. 
 But this policy seemed to Hamilton's opponents to put a pre- 
 mium on speculation in the public funds, to make the Treasury 
 the ally of the capitalist, and still further to enrich, at public 
 expense, the rich man who had taken advantage of the need of 
 the poor to " filch away" their substance for a pittance. 
 
 The next proposition of the Secretary was even more start- 
 ling. Owing to the inability of the old Congress to command 
 the resources of the country through taxation, the several states 
 had been obliged to incur debts during the Revolution for 
 the defense of their territory. These debts, amounting to 
 $18,271,786, Hamilton proposed should be "assumed by the 
 Union" on the grounds, of "sound policy and substantial 
 justice." The justice of the policy of assumption lay in the fact 
 that the debts had been incurred by the states for the common 
 cause of the Union ; the sound policy of the measure was con- 
 tained in the assurance that "if the public creditors receive 
 their dues from one source, distributed with an equal hand, . . . 
 they will unite in the fiscal arrangements of the government." 
 If the states retained their debts they would have to compete 
 with the central government in raising large annual revenues. 
 This would lead to "mutual jealousy and opposition" and seem 
 to put a double burden of taxation on the people. Moreover, 
 the Constitution having taken from the states the most abun- 
 dant source of revenue in the tariff duties (Art. I, sect. 10, 
 par. 2), it was only fair that the general government should 
 relieve them from the burden of their debt. 
 
 In the second half of his Report Hamilton set forth his plan 
 for meeting the debt. Annual interest charges at the current 
 rates of 4^ and 5 per cent on the foreign debt and 6 per cent on 
 the domestic debt would amount to $4,587,444. This amount 
 Hamilton reduced to $2,239,163 by his funding operations, a 
 complicated set of measures based on the expectation that 
 within five years the credit of the United States would enable 
 
156 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 it to borrow at 5 per cent and within twenty years at 4 per cent. 
 The holders of the old loan certificates could exchange them at 
 the Treasury for various options, including annuities, grants of 
 public land, bonds bearing interest from date, and "deferred 
 stock" paying interest after the year 1800. For meeting the 
 current expenses of the government and interest on the debt 
 Hamilton proposed to add to the existing duties on imports and 
 tonnage additional taxes on wines, liquors, tea, and coffee which 
 would yield over $1,500,000. In closing he urged upon the 
 House the great importance of making provision to meet our 
 obligations without delay, in order "to give a better impression 
 of the good faith of the country, to bring earlier relief to the 
 creditors, and to prevent the further depreciation of the gov- 
 ernment stock through speculation," by which "millions would 
 probably be lost to the United States." 
 
 The contest in the House over Hamilton's Report was a bitter 
 one, centering chiefly in the project for the assumption of the 
 state debts. States with heavy obligations (Massachusetts. 
 South Carolina, Connecticut) naturally favored assumption, 
 while those which either had never contracted a large debt or 
 had succeeded in paying off most of their debt (New Hampshire, 
 Maryland, Georgia, Virginia) were against the measure. The 
 Secretary's solicitude for the relief of the states, said his oppo- 
 nents, was only a hypocritical pretext to cover his real purpose ; 
 namely, the addition of another $20,000,000 to the already in- 
 flated debt of $54,000,000, to make doubly sure the perpet- 
 ual alliance of the federal government with the men of wealth 
 who would absorb its enormous issues of securities. And, in- 
 deed, Hamilton had put himself on record again and again as 
 an advocate of such an alliance. "The only plan," he wrote to 
 Robert Morris in 1780, "that can preserve the country is one 
 that will make it the immediate interest of the moneyed men to 
 cooperate with the government in its support." And again, in 
 the famous letter of the same year to Duane: "The only 
 certain manner to obtain a permanent paper credit is to en- 
 gage the moneyed interests immediately on it, by making them 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 157 
 
 contribute the whole or part of the stock and giving them the 
 whole or part of the profits." Furthermore, Hamilton wished 
 the debt to be perpetual, since he would allow Congress to 
 redeem but 2 per cent of it in any year. A perpetual debt 
 meant a perpetual control of the government by the capitalists. 
 It was the introduction of the British system of finance. 
 
 The assumption measure seemed lost when the North 
 Carolina delegates, who arrived on the floor of Congress in 
 April, 1790, cast their votes against it. But Hamilton, always 
 fertile in resource, found a way out. Thomas Jefferson had 
 lately arrived in New York to take up his duties as Secretary 
 of State. Hamilton waylaid him one morning on the way to an 
 interview with Washington, and walked him "backwards and 
 forwards before the president's door for a half an hour," pathet- 
 ically " painting the temper into which the legislature had been 
 wrought, the disgust of those who were called the creditor states, 
 and the danger of the secession of their members and the sepa- 
 ration of the states." Jefferson, flattered at being sought as an 
 arbiter on the threshold of his cabinet career, invited Hamilton 
 and a few influential friends to dinner, and a bargain was struck 
 over the wine, by which the Secretary of State agreed to secure 
 some Southern votes for assumption in return for Hamilton's 
 influence in getting the national capital established on the banks 
 of the Potomac. Jefferson realized later, to his horror, that he 
 had contributed to the policy of fixing the "octopus" of the 
 money power on the government, and complained that he had 
 been "duped" by Hamilton before he had had time to grasp the 
 importance of the measure. But as Jefferson had been in the 
 country since the preceding Christmas and was an exceptionally 
 close student of political affairs, it seems as though he might 
 have divined the purport of the assumption bill before the end 
 of May. On July 26, 1790, assumption was carried through 
 the House by a vote of 32 to 29, and the end of the summer 
 saw the realization of the whole program of Hamilton's Report. 
 It was perhaps the most fateful legislation in our history until 
 the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 
158 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Three other important reports to Congress complete the 
 Hamiltonian system. On December 13, 1790, a second Report 
 on the Public Credit was submitted, which, discussed means of 
 increasing the revenue and recommended an elaborate system 
 of excise duties on wines and spirits. At the same time the 
 famous report advocating the establishment of a National 
 Bank was presented. At the opening of the second Congress 
 (December, 1791) a Report on Manufactures was sent in, rec- 
 ommending a protective tariff. The Report on Manufactures 
 was not adopted, but the excise and the Bank were put through 
 Congress. 1 
 
 A National Bank in some shape or other, which should unite 
 private and public funds "to erect a mass of credit that would 
 supply the defect of moneyed capital and answer all the pur- 
 poses of cash," had been for a decade a project of Hamilton's. 
 The Bank, he urged, would effect the augmentation of active 
 capital in a country in which such capital was needed for the 
 development of the land and the encouragement of manu- 
 factures. It would mean the extension of credit and would 
 facilitate the payment of taxes by increasing the currency, for 
 its bills and notes would circulate as cash. It would stimulate 
 business. It would act as a kind of central exchange office for 
 investment opportunities, keeping in constant circulation capi- 
 tal which private individuals would be likely to hold in their 
 strong-boxes for lack of a timely offer of investment or of a 
 thorough confidence in the stability of the currency. It would 
 furnish the government with a convenient fiscal agent for the 
 negotiation of loans, the payment of the interest on the public 
 debt, and the deposit of the Treasury balances. Hamilton pro- 
 posed that the Bank should be incorporated by Congress for a 
 period of twenty years with a capital of $10,000,000. Its shares 
 of $400 each should be offered for public subscription, one 
 fourth being paid for in specie (gold or silver) and three fourths 
 
 1 Subsidiary measures of the Hamiltonian system were the creation of a sink- 
 ing fund and the establishment of a mint. Hamilton wanted to have the Presi- 
 dent's head stamped on the coins of the United States ; but the House thought 
 that this smacked too much of royalty, and substituted the figure of Liberty. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 
 
 159 
 
 in the stock of the public debt bearing interest at 6 per cent. Its 
 bills and notes were to be receivable for all dues to the United 
 States. The government might subscribe for one fifth of the 
 stock ($2,000,000) and borrow the money back from the Bank 
 forthwith. The Bank was to have a monopoly in transacting 
 the government's financial business, but was forbidden to buy 
 any of the public debt in the market; that is, to speculate 
 in government securities. The Treasury Department was to 
 have the right to inspect the Bank's accounts and to demand 
 reports as often as once a week on the amount of its stock out- 
 standing, its debts, deposits, notes in circulation, and cash 
 in hand. 
 
 The Bank bill was passed in February, 1791, and sent to the 
 President for his signature. Washington, as was his custom in 
 weighty matters, asked for written opinions on the bill from 
 the members of his cabinet. Both Randolph and Jefferson 
 advised the President to veto it. The Attorney-General raised 
 the objection that the Constitution did not give Congress the 
 power to create corporations; and Jefferson, with his innate 
 jealousy of the extension of the authority of the central govern- 
 ment, argued further that the Bank was neither "necessary" 
 nor "proper" for carrying out the powers granted to Congress. 
 Once depart from the strict letter of the Constitution, and a 
 clear road to despotism would be opened. Washington sent the 
 opinions of Randolph and Jefferson to Hamilton in confidence, 
 with the request for a speedy reply. In an elaborate argument, 
 submitted to the President on February 23, 1791, Hamilton 
 answered the objections of his colleagues in the cabinet, insist- 
 ing on the sovereignty of the national government and showing 
 how the BankjKQuld be both a necessary and a proper agency 
 in such important federal duties as the laying and collecting of 
 taxes, the borrowing of money, the regulation of currency and 
 trade, and the national defense. His arguments prevailed, and 
 Washington signed the bill. Hamilton's opinion on the Bank 
 was a momentous document, for it was the first exposition of 
 the "implied powers" of Congress, deducible from the general 
 tenor and purport of the Constitution, the first tentative 
 
160 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 stretching of the "elastic clause" (Art. I, sect. 8, par. 18) which 
 has been kept pretty taut ever since. 1 
 
 Historians have been quite unanimous in attributing to 
 Hamilton's financial measures the establishment of the public 
 credit of the United States. Daniel Webster's tribute to the 
 first Secretary of the Treasury has become classic: "He smote 
 the rock of national resources and abundant streams of revenue 
 gushed forth ; he touched the dead corpse of publio credit and 
 it sprang upon its feet." Certain it is that the growth of our 
 economic prosperity was rapid in the years following the 
 adoption of the Hamiltonian system. Our exports increased to 
 $20,000,000 a year. Our shipping extended literally around 
 the world. 2 The total Bank stock was taken up within two 
 hours after the subscription books were opened, and in a few 
 months it was selling at a premium of 40 per cent. Foreign 
 capital sought investment in America, while the European wars 
 kindled by the French Revolution stimulated our manufactures 
 and commerce. 3 At the same time, there is evidence enough 
 that our general economic fortunes were on the rise before 
 Hamilton's measures went into effect. European exports to 
 the United States increased from $9,400,000 in 1788 to $12, 
 600,000 in 1789 and $17,100,000 in 1790. Hamilton himself 
 
 *In 1819 the famous case of McCulloch vs. Maryland tested the constitution- 
 ality of the Bank before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall's decision 
 completely upheld the legislation of 1791. It is interesting to see how closely 
 the reasoning of Marshall (United States Reports, 4 Wheat. 3i6ff.) follows 
 Hamilton's cabinet opinion (Works (Federal edition), Vol. Ill, pp. 445-493). 
 Though the first Bank failed of recharter by a single vote in both Houses of 
 Congress in 1811, and the second Bank was overthrown by the election of 1832, 
 the most important features of Hamilton's scheme a banking-system under the 
 supervision of the government, and a national currency were revived in the 
 stress of the Civil War and have remained a part of our policy ever since. 
 
 2 On August 10, 1790, Captain Gray, in the ship Columbia, arrived in Boston 
 Harbor with a cargo of tea from China, after carrying the American flag for the 
 first time around the world. On his next voyage, to repeat the exploit, Gray 
 discovered the great river on our western coast and named it after his ship 
 (1792). This discovery constituted one of our strongest claims to the vast 
 Oregon region in later years. 
 
 3 European investors held 17,000 of the 25,000 shares of the stock when the 
 Bank was disestablished in 1811. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 161 
 
 spoke, in his Report on Manufactures, of the "many factories 
 of leather, iron, copper, flax, fur, wool, brick, soap, carriages, 
 etc." as " having attained to a considerable degree of maturity." 
 Washington believed that we were on the up-grade in 1788. 
 He wrote to Jefferson in Paris, on August 3 1 of that year, that 
 the American people were " emerging from the gulf of dissipa- 
 tion and debt into which they had precipitated themselves at 
 the close of the war," and that " economy and industry were 
 evidently gaining ground." To Lafayette he had written a 
 few weeks earlier, "I really believe that there never was so 
 much labor and economy to be found in the country as at the 
 present moment" ; and he predicted that when the new govern- 
 ment should go into effect many blessings would be attributed to 
 it which were already "taking their rise from industry and 
 frugality." Hamilton was able to take advantage of this turn 
 in the tide of prosperity. 1 
 
 But whether Hamilton's measures inaugurated our prosper- 
 ity or only hastened its march, they divided the country at large, 
 as they did the cabinet, into two irreconcilable parties and fur- 
 nished the program for a concerted opposition to the admin- 
 istration of Washington. Not that they created either the 
 economic conditions or the social disposition out of which the 
 parties came. Otto, the secretary of the French legation at 
 New York, wrote home to Vergennes in October, 1786, "Al- 
 though there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men, 
 denominated gentlemen, who by reason of their wealth, their 
 talents, and their education, their families or the offices which 
 they hold, aspire to a preeminence which the common people 
 
 ^'The Constitution was floated on a wave of commercial prosperity" (Far- 
 rand, "The Development of the United States," p. 75). G. S. Callender remarks 
 in his "Economic History of the United States" (p. 182), "One may well 
 wonder what would have been the fate of Hamilton's brilliant projects ... if 
 they had been tried on the country during the economic gloom of 1785-1786." 
 A curious testimony to reviving prosperity is found in a squib in the Pennsyl- 
 vania Packet of July 4, 1788, reporting the ratification of the Constitution: 
 " Ship news extra ! Arrived safely in port the Ship Federal Constitution, Per- 
 petual Union commander. In her came passengers Flourishing Commerce, Pub- 
 lic Faith, Confidence, Justice." 
 
1 62 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 refuses to grant them . . . and moreover, they are creditors, 
 and therefore interested in strengthening the government and 
 watching over the execution of the laws." Hamilton himself, in 
 the speech in which he recommended to the convention at 
 Philadelphia his plan for an " aristocratic" constitution, said: 
 "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. 
 The few are the rich and well born, the other, the mass of the 
 populace. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they 
 seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first 
 class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They 
 will check the boisterousness of the second." It was this " first 
 class" the solid men of wealth, birth, and position, the large 
 merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists, the holders of the 
 public securities, the clergy and the lawyers, the advocates of 
 energy and full competency in the national government who 
 rallied to the support of Hamilton's program. They were 
 called Federalists. They were a small minority of the total 
 population, but common interests bound them into a com- 
 pact, alert body. They had the offices of the government in 
 their hands. 
 
 On the other side were the mass of the people the debt- 
 burdened farmers of the interior counties; the manufacturers 
 and apprentices, spinning, carding, and weaving their wool, 
 hammering out their iron nails, bending over their lapstones 
 to shape the rude leather soles; the hardy pioneers who ever 
 since the war had been crossing the mountains into the rich 
 valleys of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. These 
 people had little need for a strong central government. They 
 had fought for their liberty and wished now to enjoy it. They 
 had no capital to worry about and were little concerned with 
 the credit of the United States. They had no money to spare 
 and looked with distrust on the grant of unlimited powers of 
 taxation to Congress. The opposition to the Constitution in 
 1787-1788, as an aristocratic document " squinting towards 
 monarchy," had come chiefly from the agricultural debtor class. 
 They were called Anti-Federalists then, while the men who 
 supported the Constitution were called Federalists. The new 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 163 
 
 Federalists of 1791, Hamilton's party, were essentially the same 
 people as the Federalists of 1787, since thewery considerations 
 which urged men to change the ineffective Articles of Confeder- 
 ation for a vigorous Constitution namely, the security of the 
 national debt, the regulation of commerce, a dependable cur- 
 rency, and an adequate national revenue assessed and collected 
 by national authority led them also to support the vigorous 
 measures of Alexander Hamilton which were aimed at securing 
 those desirable ends. 1 
 
 The opponents of the Hamiltonian system took the name 
 of Democratic-Republicans, 2 as a protest against the aristo- 
 cratic conception of a republic governed by "the rich, the well- 
 born, and the able." They maintained in their debates in 
 Congress and in their newspapers and pamphlets that the great 
 augmentation of the public debt, resting as it must on a basis 
 of increased taxation, meant the ruin of agriculture and an 
 intolerable burden to the debtor class. For the labor of the 
 farmer and the mechanic must eventually pay all these public 
 charges. "Every atom of funded debt," said Mercer of Mary- 
 land in a debate in the House in 1792, "is so much taken from 
 the value of the land . . . and so much diminished from the 
 value of labor. . . . The effect of stocks 3 is to transfer the 
 fruits and labor of the many . . . into the hands of the opu- 
 lent few, who exchange them for foreign luxuries and con- 
 sume in an hour the labor of industrious families for years. 
 It prevents a general diffusion of wealth by drawing it to a 
 
 1 Professor Charles A. Beard has demonstrated in his "Economic Origins of 
 Jeffersonian Democracy" the substantial identity of the Federalists of 1787 
 with the Federalists of 1791. The men who made the Constitution had a very 
 large share in putting it into effect, 26 out of the 39 signers being among the 
 personnel of the first administration as members of Congress, judges, customs 
 officials, etc. The few conspicuous men, like Madison and Patrick Henry, who 
 changed from old Federalists into new Republicans or from old Anti-Federalists 
 into new Federalists, were only the exceptions that prove the rule. 
 
 2 The name was abbreviated into Democrats or Republicans, the latter used 
 almost exclusively by the members of the party itself, and the former by their 
 adversaries, often with the adjectives "vile," "wild," or "Jacobinical" prefixed. 
 
 3 Meaning the 6 per cent bonds of the government issued in 1790 to take 
 up the old certificates of debt, and the $10,000,000 of Bank stock issued in 1791. 
 
1 64 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 center, and saps the foundations of Republican Government." 
 Furthermore, the Republicans maintained that the Hamiltonian 
 measures were sectional, favoring the mercantile-manufacturing 
 interests of the North against the agricultural interests of the 
 South. How well founded this charge was can be judged from 
 the fact that only three votes in favor of the Bank bill came 
 from the district south of the Potomac and only one vote against 
 it from the region north of the Potomac. A correspondent wrote 
 to Hamilton in 1792 from Virginia, "There is no considerable 
 mercantile circulating capital and there are but few moneyed 
 men in the country [the state of Virginia]". Georgia and 
 the Carolinas (except for the city of Charleston) held very 
 little of the public debt. It had been bought up by specu- 
 lators from the great commercial centers of the North. Of 
 manufactures there were practically none south of the Potomac 
 in 1790. Funding, assumption, the Bank, the tariff, were all 
 measures calculated to benefit that half of our country which 
 lies north of Mason and Dixon's line. 
 
 The issue between Federalists and Republicans was far more 
 serious than a mere question of political policy or economic 
 expediency, such as the curtailment of states' rights or the im- 
 position of a high tariff. It was, in the honest opinion of the 
 protagonists on both sides, a question of the very existence of 
 the government itself. Hence the violence of party strife, the 
 vituperative language on the floor of Congress, the vehement 
 quarrels in the cabinet, the venom of the press. To the Feder- 
 alists all the fine rhetoric about freedom, in prose and verse, 
 with which Philip Freneau filled the columns of the National 
 Gazette when he had space to spare after vilifying the " mo- 
 narchical" administration from Washington down was only a 
 flimsy pretext to hide the real motives of the Republicans. 
 They objected to the laws that were passed, said the Federalists, 
 because they did not want to obey any laws at all ; they opposed 
 the assumption of the debts because they did not want to 
 pay their debts. Their vaunted " liberty" had already led to 
 anarchy, and anarchy to national bankruptcy and impotence. 
 Their "democracy" meant the rule of the mob the "people" 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 165 
 
 whom Hamilton in a fit of impatient disgust called "a great 
 beast/' and who John Adams declared were "the worst con- 
 ceivable keepers of their own liberty," since they could "neither 
 judge, nor think, nor will as a political body." "There never 
 was a democracy," he continued, "that did not commit suicide." 
 If our new republic was destined to survive, he thought, it would 
 be because security, energy, and good faith marked its adminis- 
 tration in the hands of the competent and responsible few, and 
 not because we were all "leveled to an equality with French 
 barbers." 
 
 The Republicans were equally convinced that the preservation 
 of the new American state depended on the maintenance of 
 their theory of democratic government. We were "galloping 
 into monarchy," said Jefferson. To what end the sacrifices of 
 1775-1781 if another England were to be established on these 
 shores, with its executive officers distributing the patronage and 
 marshaling the factions in the legislature, with its Bank and 
 its huge funded debt, with its aristocracy of finance and com- 
 merce in league with the beneficent administration with every- 
 thing, in short, but the actual titles of nobility! Was the 
 American Revolution the vindication of the natural and inde- 
 feasible rights of man, as its great charter proclaimed, or was 
 it only the vindication of the usurped and partial rights of "the 
 rich, the well-born, and the able"? Jefferson confessed that he 
 was not of those "who fear the rule of the people." He was not 
 dismayed at the thought of occasional revolutions : they cleared 
 the political atmosphere. He insisted on absolute freedom of 
 speech and press. Better newspapers without a government 
 than a government without newspapers, he said. Even the 
 venerated name of Washington failed to weigh against this con- 
 viction of the sacredness of democracy. The President's sense 
 of propriety was shocked and his temper sorely tried by the 
 attacks made on him and his administration in Freneau's 
 Gazette. He let Jefferson, who was Freneau's patron, know of 
 his chagrin, but the Secretary of State refused to dismiss 
 Freneau from his modest position in the department or to in- 
 tercede with him privately for the suppression of his diatribes. 
 
1 66 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Valuing the personal friendship and the political services of 
 both Jefferson and Hamilton, the President bore their quarrels 
 in the cabinet with extraordinary patience and tried his best 
 to reconcile their views. He wrote them each a personal letter 
 in the summer of 1792, expressing his appreciation of their 
 services and begging them to work together in harmony. The 
 reply of each of the Secretaries showed deference to their chief, 
 but no sign of sympathy for each other. Both were ready to 
 resign from the cabinet, but neither was willing to modify his 
 policy. Each threw the blame on the other. Every month 
 strengthened the opposition to the Hamiltonian system. Spec- 
 ulation forced the Bank shares to inflated levels and precipitated 
 a financial panic in 1792. The excise law, exceedingly unpopular 
 in the back counties of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Caro- 
 linas, where the moonshine stills furnished the farmers the most 
 convenient currency in the form of whisky, was already pro- 
 voking the resistance which culminated in the famous Whisky 
 Rebellion of 1794.* And, finally, Jefferson was busy in season 
 and out of season with tireless pen and inexhaustible resources 
 of appeal and encouragement in organizing the inarticulate 
 democracy of the common people into a party which should be 
 able to contend with the compact group led by Hamilton and 
 his " corrupt squadron" 2 in Congress. 
 
 The first real trial of strength between the parties came in the 
 election of 1792, when the Hamiltonian system went before 
 the country for indorsement. It was an anxious moment for the 
 Federalists. Besides the financial panic and the resistance to the 
 
 a See page 186. 
 
 2 This was the name by which Jefferson stigmatized the members of Congress 
 who held the public securities or "funds" of the United States. These men 
 were doubly "corrupt" in Jefferson's view, first because they had "niched" the 
 certificates of debt from the poor, and, second, because they voted in a body for 
 the Hamiltonian policies which protected their financial interests. Hamilton, in 
 a long letter to Washington in 1792, sought to disprove the charge of collusion 
 between the Treasury and the members of Congress ; but Professor Beard has 
 furnished the figures to justify Jefferson's assertion that had those actually in- 
 terested in the outcome of the funding process refrained from voting on Hamil- 
 ton's proposals not a single one of them would have been carried ("Economic 
 Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy," p. 194) . 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 167 
 
 excise tax referred to in the last paragraph the administration 
 was suffering under the disgrace of the murderous defeat of Gen- 
 eral Arthur St. Clair's army of 1500 men by the Indians of the 
 Northwest Territory (November 4, 1791). Jefferson counted 
 on the farmers of the South, the malcontents of Pennsylvania, 
 and the anti-Hamiltonians in New York, skillfully led by 
 Clinton and Burr, to turn the tide of Federalism. Unless they 
 should be buttressed by the strength of Washington's great 
 name, the Federalists saw defeat looming. The "supercilious 
 superiority" of John Adams, who would be the logical candidate 
 of the party if Washington persevered in his intention to retire 
 to his estate at Mount Vernon, would oppose too feeble a dike 
 to the rising tide of Republicanism. Hamilton, by dint of much 
 argument, prevailed upon the President to serve another term, 
 and Jefferson, with equal sincerity but less anxiety, joined in 
 the general prayer. Washington again received the vote of 
 every elector, but the second honor on the ballot, instead of 
 being distributed among eleven names as it had been in the 
 election of 1 789, was contested between the Federalist and the 
 Republican candidate, with none too large a margin in favor of 
 the former. 1 The Republicans elected a majority to the new 
 House of Representatives. 
 
 FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS 
 
 According to Washington's own confession, it was not solici- 
 tude for the Federalist party that persuaded him in 1792 to 
 postpone his anticipated retirement to Mount Vernon, but the 
 "perplexed and critical posture of our affairs with foreign 
 nations." It is difficult for us today, with our secure and well- 
 defined borders, with our closely welded and tested Union, 
 with our long and popular tradition (but lately disturbed) of 
 indifference to the quarrels of the Old World, to realize how 
 
 1 Adams carried New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Mary- 
 land, and South Carolina (77 votes). Clinton carried New York, Virginia, 
 North Carolina, and Georgia (50 votes). The new state of Kentucky (1792) 
 gave its four votes to Jefferson. 
 
1 68 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 dangerously exposed we were in the earliest years of the repub- 
 lic to the storms of European politics. The Revolution, al- 
 though it secured our political independence, did not make us 
 economically independent of Europe. After the war, as before 
 it, our prosperity depended on our foreign commerce. Manu- 
 factures were in their infancy. Laborers were scarce and land 
 was abundant. Our enormous surplus of foodstuffs, forest prod- 
 ucts, fish, salt, and tobacco had to be exchanged abroad for 
 the luxuries, and even for some of the bare necessities, of 
 civilized life. We were vitally concerned, therefore, in the 
 commercial policy of the European maritime and colonial 
 powers France, Spain, Holland, and Great Britain. Further- 
 more, the land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi was 
 a vast " arena of friction." Indian tribes and confederacies 
 still harassed our settlements as they spread northward from 
 the Ohio and southward from the Cumberland, while the agents 
 of England and Spain, our neighbors on the north and south, 
 were busy with a disavowed but rather obvious propaganda to 
 encourage the Indians in their resistance to the establishment 
 of our authority in the lands which had been ceded to us by the 
 Treaty of Paris. England even retained garrisons in half a 
 dozen fur posts strung along the lakes from Dutchman's Point 
 on Lake Champlain to Mackinaw on Lake Michigan all in 
 the territory of the United States (see map, p. 101). 
 
 Our diplomatic relations also were highly unsatisfactory. With 
 Spain, who had been the ally of our ally France in the Revolu- 
 tion, we had made no treaty at all in 1783, nor were we able 
 to conclude one in the critical years that followed ; although 
 Spanish control of the Mississippi and Spanish possession of 
 Florida (lying all along our southern border) made an agree- 
 ment concerning the navigation of the river and the policing of 
 the hostile tribes of Creeks and Cherokees an imperative neces- 
 sity. With France we had a treaty, the earliest in our national 
 history, dating from the dark days of the American Revolution 
 (1778). But as this treaty was in the form of an alliance, 
 pledging us under certain conditions to fight by the side of 
 France for the protection of her American (West Indian) 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 169 
 
 possessions, and giving her the privilege of using our ports for 
 her prizes of war, it proved eventually to be more of an em- 
 barrassment to us than the lack of a treaty with Spain. As to 
 England, there was, of course, the famous treaty of 1783. But 
 instead of settling old disputes, this treaty only opened new 
 ones. Every article in it, except the first, which recognized the 
 independence of the United States, led to contention and mutual 
 charges of bad faith. 
 
 To deal with the delicate diplomatic situation we should 
 have had a well-organized department of foreign affairs, with 
 the tradition of a firm and consistent policy, backed by the 
 strength of the united nation. Instead of that, when Jefferson 
 assumed the office of Secretary of State, in the spring of 1 790, 
 he inherited a legacy of mistrust and contempt bequeathed by 
 the weak government of the critical period. It was certain, 
 under these conditions, that the first serious strife among the 
 maritime nations of Europe would be the signal for trouble in 
 America. And, indeed, it looked as if that trouble were at 
 hand in the very first year of Washington's government, when 
 Great Britain threatened to go to war with Spain over the 
 seizure of British ships attempting to establish a trading-post 
 on the western coast of America at Nootka Sound. In case of 
 war the British would probably march across our territory 
 from Canada to attack the Spaniards on the Mississippi. They 
 would kindle war in Florida and Louisiana and rouse the Indian 
 tribes on our borders. Fortunately, the war cloud blew over 
 and our country was left in an apprehensive state of peace 
 during Washington's first administration, to establish the federal 
 government and put into operation the Hamiltonian fiscal 
 system, which we have studied in the preceding section. 
 
 Hardly was Washington seated in office for a second time, 
 however, when the storm burst. In the first days of April, 1 793, 
 a British packet sailed into New York bearing ominous news. 
 The French Republic, whose baptismal victory over the Prus- 
 sians at Valmy the Americans had celebrated with civic feasts 
 and processions, with bell-ringings and banquets, only a few 
 weeks before, had fallen into the hands of the radicals, who had 
 
170 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 guillotined their king, hurled defiance against all the thrones 
 of Europe, and added England, Holland, and Sardinia to the 
 list of their enemies in arms. A few days after the arrival of 
 this news Citizen Edmond Genet, the minister from the French 
 Republic to the United States, landed in Charleston "with the 
 smell of blood on his ambassadorial garments." Genet was 
 enthusiastic, vain, rash, and emotional. He came not as a 
 diplomat but as the agent of the French Republic. Even before 
 his credentials were presented at Philadelphia he began to 
 violate the principles of international courtesy and law, equip- 
 ping vessels in our ports to fight the British, enlisting our 
 seamen, establishing courts for the condemnation of prizes, 
 ordering French consuls to carry out his belligerent plans, de- 
 manding an advance payment of the interest on the French 
 loan for the purchase of war supplies. 
 
 As Genet was making a triumphal progress up to Phila- 
 delphia, feted by the Francophile Republicans of the Southern 
 states, the President summoned his cabinet for advice as to how 
 to treat the new envoy. Should he be officially received and the 
 Republic which sent him recognized? If so, what would be 
 the effect on our relations with those maritime countries with 
 which the French Republic was at war and with which our trade 
 was flourishing ? There was the embarrassing treaty of alliance 
 of 1778 with France, pledging us to fight her battles and open- 
 ing our ports to her prizes. Was there occasion now for France 
 to demand fulfillment of the pledge and so involve us in a 
 war with Great Britain ? The cabinet agreed unanimously that 
 Genet should be received, but that, at the same time, a proc- 
 lamation should be issued forbidding our citizens "to take part 
 in any hostilities on land or sea with any of the belligerent 
 powers" or to carry contraband goods to their ports. Washing- 
 ton published the proclamation on the very day that Genet 
 entered the capital (April 22, 1793). 
 
 If the Proclamation of Neutrality gave umbrage to the friends 
 of France, their objections were speedily overcome by the folly 
 of Genet himself. In defiance of the warnings of Governor 
 Mifflin of Pennsylvania, and in spite of his own promise to 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 171 
 
 Secretary Jefferson, he allowed the prize brig Le Petit Demo- 
 crate, armed and manned at Philadelphia, to sail out of the 
 Delaware River to cooperate with a force raised in our Western 
 territory for an attack on Spanish New Orleans. He used the 
 columns of the Republican press to inveigh against the govern- 
 ment's " cowardly abandonment" of its friends, threatened to 
 appeal to the nation over the head of President Washington, 
 scolded the cabinet, and finally declared that the French "were 
 punished for having believed that the American nation had a 
 flag, that it had some respect for its laws [treaties], some con- 
 viction of its force, and some sentiment of its dignity." This 
 was more than even the stanchest friends of France could en- 
 dure. Jefferson joined with Hamilton in asking for the recall 
 of the obnoxious envoy. 1 
 
 On June 5, 1794, Congress supplemented Washington's proc- 
 lamation by passing ^jie^trality _act, which has been the basis 
 of our policy toward belligerents ever since. It was framed on 
 the twin principles developed by the learned Jefferson in his 
 negotiations with Genet; namely, "the right of every nation to 
 prohibit acts of sovereignty from being exercised by any other 
 nation within its limits" and "the duty of every neutral nation 
 to prohibit such acts as would injure one of the warring powers." 
 
 The ablest exposition and defense of the Proclamation of Neu- 
 trality was made by Alexander Hamilton in a series of seven 
 papers published in the Gazette of the United States over the 
 signature "Pacificus." In them he answered the objections of 
 the Republicans ( i ) that the President had exceeded his powers 
 
 1 Genet never returned to France. During his mission to the United States 
 the party of the Girondists, to which he belonged, was overthrown by the 
 Jacobins, and Robespierre was waiting to send Genet to the guillotine. Our 
 government magnanimously refused to give him up. He married a daughter 
 of Governor Clinton and lived in New York to a ripe old age. In 1870 the poet 
 William Cullen Bryant described him as he had seen him more than forty years 
 before: "A tall man with a reddish wig and a full round voice, speaking 
 English in a sort of oratorical manner, like a man making a speech, but very 
 well for a Frenchman. He was a dreamer in some respects, and, I remember, 
 had a plan for navigating the air in balloons . . . shaped like a fish and pro- 
 pelled by sails and guided by a rudder." 
 
172 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 in taking out of the hands of Congress the question of deciding 
 war, (2) that we were repudiating our just debt of gratitude to 
 France, and (3) that the proclamation was a "sop to England," 
 since we had not issued any such paper when France went to 
 war with Prussia and Austria nearly a year before. Hamilton 
 had little difficulty in showing the difference between declaring 
 war (which lay in the power of Congress) and denning our 
 status of peace (which was the province of the executive), or in 
 proving that the entrance of maritime nations like England and 
 Holland into the war had a significance for the United States 
 far different from that of the purely continental conflict between 
 France and the Germanic powers. As to our debt of gratitude, 
 it was to the government of Louis XVI that we owed it, not 
 to the violent and unstable faction that had overthrown his 
 dynasty and shed his blood. Finally, the treaty of 1778 pledged 
 us to aid a France attacked in its American possessions, not a 
 France proclaiming war against the thrones of Europe. 1 
 
 The immediate result of the war between France and Eng- 
 land was to bring our strained relations with the latter power 
 almost to the breaking-point. For nine years following the 
 peace of 1783 we had been trying in vain to secure the fair 
 execution of the treaty the evacuation of the fur posts on the 
 Great Lakes, compensation for the slaves carried off on British 
 ships, and admission to privileges of trade with the British 
 colonies. Great Britain did not deign to send us a minister 
 till 1791; and when the minister, Mr. Hammond, came, our 
 Secretary of State made little progress with him. England's 
 part, Jefferson claimed, was simple. She had but to show a sign 
 of her good faith by evacuating the fur posts. The United 
 States had already advised the states to compel the payment 
 of the debts which their citizens owed to British merchants; 
 
 1 Hamilton's argument would have been strengthened by citing the attitude 
 of the French revolutionary government itself toward treaties concluded under 
 the old regime. In 1789 the National Assembly decided that it would not abide 
 by the "Family Compact" of 1761 with Spain and help that nation if it went 
 to war with England over the Nootka Sound controversy. In 1792 the Legisla- 
 tive Assembly asserted the right of determining which of the prerevolutionary 
 treaties it would accept or reject. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 173 
 
 but as this required "the action of thirteen independent states 
 scattered over a continent," it demanded "time, temper, and 
 tact in its attainment." Hammond made no reply to Jefferson's 
 able and temperate note. 
 
 Such was the critical state of our relations with England 
 when the European war broke out. The French Republic im- 
 mediately threw open its West Indian ports to American trade. 
 Great Britain, invoking the Rule of 1756, which forbade a 
 country at war to open to neutrals ports that were closed to 
 them in time of peace, began to seize our ships trading with the 
 French islands. On June 8, 1793, a British order declared that 
 "all vessels loaded wholly or in part with corn [grain], flour, 
 or meal, bound to any port in France, should be stopped and 
 brought into convenient harbors, and the foodstuffs on board 
 should be sold perforce to his Majesty's government." This 
 was followed in November by orders to seize all ships carrying 
 the products of French colonies or carrying food supplies to 
 the ports of French colonies. 1 
 
 In the early months of 1 794 it looked as if war were inevitable. 
 The measure of England's offense seemed full. The news came 
 in March of the confiscation orders of November, and with it 
 came stories of the seizure of our ships, the condemnation of our 
 cargoes, and the impressment of our sailors into the British serv- 
 ice. Lord Dorchester, the governor of Canada, was reported to 
 have made a speech to the Indians of our Northwest to the effect 
 that war would probably break out between England and the 
 United States within a year. A sudden treaty of peace between 
 Portugal and Algiers, negotiated by the British consul at Lisbon 
 in 1793, had led to the withdrawal of the Portuguese fleet from 
 the Mediterranean, leaving American merchantmen there in the 
 lurch. Before we could get frigates built to protect our Medi- 
 terranean commerce the Algerian pirates had multiplied their 
 
 1 Of course, it was not to encourage American trade that France opened her 
 West Indian ports to us, but to save the islands from starvation when England's 
 mighty sea power should shut off their commerce with Europe. Still it was a 
 great opening for our ambitious merchants, and soon after the proclamation 
 hundreds of American ships were sailing into the rich harbors of Martinique, 
 Antigua, and Santo Domingo. 
 
174 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 captures of American sailors tenfold. In spite of Lord Gren- 
 ville's assurance of good will it was impossible, in the heated 
 state of affairs, for Americans to believe that the withdrawal of 
 the Portuguese fleet was "not in the least intended to injure" us. 
 A temporary embargo was laid on commerce with Great Britain 
 (March 26), and a nonintercourse bill failed to pass the Senate 
 only by the casting vote of Vice President Adams. Bills were 
 put through Congress to fortify our harbors, to build new 
 frigates, to strengthen our artillery service, and to sanction the 
 call of 80,000 militia from the states. Dayton of New Jersey 
 proposed a virtual declaration of war in a motion to sequester 
 money owed by our merchants to creditors in England, as a 
 compensation for the seizure of our vessels by British cruisers. 
 Men were beginning to drill in our seaports. "There is a 
 panic," wrote John Adams, "lest peace should prevail." 
 
 War with England in 1794 would have been a national 
 calamity. We were just recovering from the ravages of the 
 Revolution and the critical period which had followed. We had 
 no navy to defend our commerce. Our borders were vexed by 
 constant raids of hostile Indians. A pioneer wrote to Secre- 
 tary Knox in 1 790 that 1 500 persons had been killed by Indians 
 in Kentucky or on the way thither. In the Ohio region they 
 had inflicted a terrible defeat on General St. Clair in 1791 a 
 defeat still unrepaired when the European war broke out. The 
 discontent of the back-country farmers of Pennsylvania with 
 the excise was gathering in the storm that burst in the Whisky 
 Rebellion of 1794. We needed peace to set our house in order. 
 Furthermore, a war with England would have had disastrous 
 economic effects. In December, 1793, Jefferson sent to Congress 
 an elaborate report of our foreign trade. The figures for the 
 four leading commercial countries of Europe were as follows : 
 
 
 EXPORTS TO 
 
 IMPORTS FROM 
 
 TOTAL 
 
 Great Britain . . 
 
 $Q / ?6"? Aid 
 
 *T r 28? A">& 
 
 &2/1 6^.8 844 
 
 France 
 
 A 608 7 1 ^ 
 
 2 268 348 
 
 6 967,083 
 
 Holland 
 
 I 963 880 
 
 I 172 6<D ' 
 
 31 "?6 ^72 
 
 Spain 
 
 
 
 >* J^O/ * 
 2 -JAI OI7 
 
 
 
 JJJ' 1 1U 
 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 
 
 To go to war with England in the face of these figures would 
 be to quarrel with our bread and butter. England furnished us 
 with more than three fourths of the dutiable goods from which 
 our national revenue was collected. 9 
 
 Finally, war with England might have meant the dissolution 
 of the republic. Our people were divided into hostile factions, 
 for the cleft between Federalists and Republicans opened by 
 Hamilton's financial program was widened by foreign partisan- 
 ship. The Federalists admired the stability of the British con- 
 stitution and were inclined by political conviction, by social 
 instinct, and by economic interest to an alliance between the 
 government and "the rich, the well-born, and the able." They 
 hated the "horrid principles of Jacobinism, which proceeding 
 from one excess to another had made France a theatre of 
 blood." They believed that, in spite of England's nonfulfill- 
 ment of the treaty of 1 783, we must keep on good terms with the 
 nation which furnished the bulk of our commerce. On the other 
 side, the Republicans, disdaining the argument of the pocket- 
 book, appealed to the sentiments of generosity and gratitude 
 in America. France had sent us men, ships, and money to 
 help secure our independence. France was our ally now, and 
 England a surly neutral. France was a republic, proclaiming 
 the end of the reign of despots and of the privileges of aristocrats 
 in the Old World as we had proclaimed it in the New World. 
 France had thrown open her ports to us, while England forbade 
 us to use them. Should we treat our enemy better than our 
 ally? We had dismissed Genet for overstepping the bounds 
 of propriety, but we tamely allowed England to retain our fur 
 posts, to seize our ships, and to impress our sailors. If the 
 French faction did not want war with England, at least they 
 
 were willing to go to the very verge of war. 
 But Washington was determined to have peace. In April, 
 1794, he appointed John Jay, Chief Justice of the Supreme / 
 Court, as special envoy to Great Britain to negotiate a treaty. 
 Jay labored several months with Lord Grenville before he could 
 bring back even the moderate terms contained in the treaty 
 which bears his name. The British agreed to give up the fur 
 
1 76 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 >sts by June, 1796. The claims of England on account of the 
 lebts whose collection had been interfered with by the states, 
 
 id the claims of the United States for damages arising from 
 violation of their neutral rights, were both to be referred to 
 'commissions of arbitration. Trade with the East Indies was 
 freely opened to the United States, but only meager concessions 
 were granted in the West Indian trade. Our ships could not be 
 above seventy tons' burden and they might not carry any 
 molasses, sugar, coffee, or cotton from the islands or from the 
 mainland to any foreign port. On the question of stolen slaves, 
 the stoppage and search of our vessels, and the impressment 
 of American sailors the treaty was silent. 
 
 Jay brought home the treaty in the spring of 1795, and the 
 Senate in extra session ratified it (except for the objectionable 
 Article XII on the West Indian trade) by the bare two-thirds 
 majority necessary. When this "treaty of amity, commerce, 
 and navigation" was published, it raised a storm of protest in 
 the country. John Jay, a statesman "as pure as the ermine 
 of the judicial robe which clothed his shoulders," was accused 
 of having sold his country to England. He was burned in 
 effigy from Boston to Charleston. The merchants of the North 
 were indignant over the commercial clauses, and the planters of 
 the South over the failure to secure compensation for the slaves, 
 the provisions for the settlement of their debts to British mer- 
 chants, and the inclusion of cotton in the list of commodities 
 which could not be exported to Europe. 1 Hamilton was stoned 
 in the streets of New York for defending Jay's integrity in the 
 face of an angry crowd. Washington was vilified by the Re- 
 publican press in such terms as he said "could scarcely be 
 applied to a Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common 
 pickpocket." 
 
 ^t is one of the curious coincidences of history that in the very days when 
 Jay's Treaty was being negotiated Eli Whitney was securing the patent for his 
 cotton gin the invention which was destined to make cotton the most im- 
 portant of our exports for more than half a century. As most of the debt to 
 British creditors was owed by the South (Jefferson thought that "Virginia owed 
 near as much as all the rest of the states together"), the significance of the pro- 
 hibition of the export of cotton to British ports can be readily seen. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 177 
 
 Nevertheless, the Jay Treaty, as an alternative to war, was 
 a wise and statesmanlike measure. It was also the harbinger of 
 good news from other quarters. While Jay was in the midst of 
 his negotiations with Grenville, "Mad Anthony" Wayne had 
 completely routed the Indians under "Little Turtle" and Te- 
 cumseh at the battle of the Fallen Timbers near the eastern 
 end of Lake Erie (August 20, 1794), and so wiped out the dis- 
 grace of St. Clair's defeat three years before. The treaty of 
 Grenville followed a year later, by which the Indians gave up 
 all claim to the rich bounty lands and company grants which 
 composed over half the present state of Ohio. A treaty with the 
 Creeks and Cherokees in the South (October, 1795) brought 
 peace from one end of the frontier to the other for the first time 
 since Pontiac's great conspiracy of 1763. 
 
 This same eventful year of 1795 saw also the danger of the 
 secession of our Western territory averted by the conclusion of 
 a treaty with Spain. Thomas Pinckney, our minister to London, 
 was sent as special envoy to the court of Madrid, to take up 
 negotiations over the navigation of the Mississippi and the 
 boundaries of the Floridas at the point where Jay and Gardoqui 
 had left them a decade before (see page 126). Pinckney ar- 
 rived at Madrid at a favorable moment. Don Manuel de Godoy, 
 the all-powerful minister, had just concluded a treaty with the 
 French Republic which won him the title of "Prince of Peace" 
 and which exposed his country to the danger of a war with Eng- 
 land a danger which he saw enhanced by "the treaty which 
 unknown to us the English cabinet has negotiated with the 
 United States of America" (the Jay Treaty). To insure our 
 neutrality, therefore, and to flatter still further his own inordi- 
 nate vanity, Godoy signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo with 
 Pinckney (October 27, 1795). Spain recognized the thirty-first 
 parallel of north latitude as the boundary between the United 
 States and Florida, promised to restrain the Indians from at- 
 tacking our borders, and gave us full and free right to navigate 
 the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, with the privilege of 
 transshipping from river boats to ocean-going vessels at New 
 Orleans (or some other port of deposit) free of duty. It was 
 
178 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the concession of every point that we had demanded of Spain 
 since the Revolution. 
 
 The only European nation with which our relations grew 
 worse instead of better during the closing years of Washington's 
 administration was our old ally France. It seemed as if an evil 
 genius intervened between the two republics in the last decade 
 of the eighteenth century, to sow misunderstanding, suspicion, 
 and discord. Gouverneur Morris, Washington's first minister 
 to France, was as little acceptable to the radical leaders in Paris 
 as their minister Genet was to us. Morris was a high Feder- 
 alist, an intimate in the circles of the court and the aristocracy, 
 and a personal friend of King Louis XVI. From time to time 
 rumors reached our shores that he had been seized by the 
 Jacobins and guillotined. His recall was demanded as an offset 
 to Genet's (1794), and Washington sent in his stead James 
 Monroe of Virginia, with instructions to "show our confidence 
 in the French Republic without betraying the most remote mark 
 of undue complaisance." Monroe was as pronounced a Repub- 
 lican as Morris was a Federalist. At his reception by the Con- 
 vention, instead of presenting his credentials with the customary 
 expressions of polite formality, he made a warm speech com- 
 plimenting the republican army on its recent victories and 
 praising the Jacobin government. He was embraced by the 
 president of the Convention with the fraternal kiss amid 
 thunders of applause. 
 
 John Jay was busy across the channel negotiating his treaty 
 with Lord Grenville when Monroe arrived in Paris. With more 
 zeal than discretion Monroe assured the French government 
 that Jay's business was only to settle the disputes over the fur 
 posts and the stolen negroes ; that there would be no commercial 
 treaty made between the firm ally and the bitter enemy of the 
 French Republic. 1 W T hen, therefore, the terms of the Jay Treaty 
 
 x lt seems as though Monroe was justified in holding this belief, however 
 unwise he may have been in expressing it. For Jay in his instructions had been 
 warned against "allowing the British government to detach us from France or 
 to derogate from our treaties and engagements with that nation." More- 
 over, Monroe's own instructions contained such sentences as these : " You may 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 179 
 
 were known at Paris, indignation was intense. Monroe, cha- 
 grined, tried to hold back the French government from "ungen- 
 tle remonstrances." The treaty, though ratified by the Senate, 
 might still be made inoperative by the refusal of the House, in 
 which there was a Republican majority, to appropriate the 
 money to establish the joint tribunals which the treaty called 
 for. 2 The Directory (as the executive board of five men at the 
 head of the French Republic was called) informed Monroe 
 bluntly that the moment the Jay Treaty should have the sanc- 
 tion of Congress the alliance with America was at an end. True 
 to its word, the Directory issued a decree in July, 1796, that the 
 Republic would "treat neutral vessels [American] in the same 
 manner as they suffer the English to treat them." Although the 
 French minister Adet remained in this country, his government 
 suspended relations with us until the United States should 
 "return to sentiments and measures more conformable to the 
 interests of the alliance and sworn friendship between the 
 two nations." 
 
 Meanwhile Monroe wa's recalled for disobeying his explicit 
 but difficult instructions to explain our relations with England 
 in a way satisfactory to the French Directory, and returned 
 home to pour out his complaint against the Federalist admin- 
 istration in a labored but not very convincing apology of over 
 five hundred pages. His successor, Charles C. Pinckney, a 
 Federalist from South Carolina, was not only not recognized by 
 the Directory but was not even given the "card of hospitality" 
 which would allow him to remain on French soil. He retired to 
 Amsterdam (February, 1797). When the news reached America 
 that her regularly appointed minister to the foremost power of 
 continental Europe had been treated like a common spy, John 
 
 declare the motives of that mission [Jay's] to be to obtain immediate compen- 
 sation for our plundered property and restitution of the posts," and "You will 
 be amply justified in repelling with firmness any imputation of the most distant 
 intention to sacrifice our connection with France to any connection with 
 England." 
 
 2 It was not until April, 1796, that the appropriation was actually carried 
 through the House by the narrow vote of 51 to 48, after a most eloquent plea 
 by Fisher Ames of Massachusetts. 
 
i8o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Adams, who had just succeeded Washington in the presidency, 
 called a special session of Congress and in his opening speech 
 declared that France had "treated us neither as allies nor as 
 friends nor as a sovereign state " and that we must convince her 
 and the world that "we are not a degraded people humiliated 
 under a colonial spirit of fear." But still Adams decided, and 
 both houses of Congress agreed, to try a fresh attempt at nego- 
 tiation "on terms compatible with the rights, duties, interests, 
 and honor of the nation." He appointed John Marshall, a 
 Federalist of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry, a Republican of 
 Massachusetts, to join minister Pinckney in Paris, where 
 they were all courteously received by the foreign minister 
 Talleyrand (October 8, 1797). 
 
 But presently the three envoys were subjected to the most 
 outrageous treatment. Certain gentlemen called on them in an 
 unofficial capacity, yet giving them to understand that they 
 represented the views of the French government. These visitors, 
 who were undoubtedly the secret envoys of Talleyrand, de- 
 manded three things as a preliminary to the opening of the 
 negotiations: first, some passages in President Adams's speech 
 to Congress must be apologized for ; second, the United States 
 must extend a loan to the French Republic, which it might do by 
 buying up at par certain Dutch obligations to France which 
 were selling at a discount of 50 per cent ; third, a little matter of 
 $2 50,000 must be quietly slipped into the hands of the Directors. 
 The American commissioners at first hardly grasped the mean- 
 ing of these preposterous propositions ; but when the envoys said 
 plainly, "You must pay money," they replied as plainly, "No 1 
 not a penny ! " After waiting three months in vain for any move 
 on the part of the French government, the Americans asked 
 to be allowed to return home. Talleyrand prevailed by some 
 flattery on the Republican member, Gerry, to stay for further 
 negotiations, and Gerry consented to stay and be fooled for a 
 few months longer by that prince of diplomatic liars and bul- 
 lies. Marshall returned immediately to the United States, 
 and Pinckney was allowed to take his sick daughter to the 
 south of France. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 181 
 
 When President Adams sent the dispatches of the French 
 commissioners to Congress (April 3, 1798) and published them 
 to the nation/ Republicans united with Federalists in a policy 
 of preparation for the war which the folly of the French 
 Directory seemed determined to precipitate. Harbors were for- 
 tified, a Navy Department was created (with Benjamin Stod- 
 dard of Maryland as its first secretary), new frigates were 
 built, the army was enlarged, and Washington was called to the 
 chief command, with Hamilton as his ranking major general 
 and commander in the field. A new tax on dwellings and slaves 
 was levied to yield $2,000,000, while a loan for $5,000,000 more 
 was authorized, for which our straitened government had to 
 pay 8 per cent. The French treaties of 1778 and the consular 
 convention of 1788 were abrogated. American privateers were 
 authorized to seize French prizes on the high seas. War was 
 not actually declared, but a state of war existed. Before we 
 finally came to terms with the French Republic our com- 
 manders Decatur, Barry, Truxton, Bainbridge, Porter, and 
 Hull had captured over eighty armed vessels flying the tricolor. 
 In the midst of our war preparations in the midsummer of 1 798 
 John Marshall returned from France with the first verbatim 
 report of the indignities to which the commission had been sub- 
 jected. He was feted at dinners where Joseph Hopkinson's new 
 song "Hail, Columbia" was shouted and the toast "Millions for 
 defense, but not one cent for tribute" was greeted with cheers. 
 Adams forwarded Marshall's papers to Congress with the 
 spirited message, "I will never send another minister to France 
 without the assurance that he will be received, respected, and 
 honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and 
 independent nation." 
 
 The French Republic did not want war with the United 
 States. Our trade was too valuable to her West Indian islands, 
 which, cut off from European commerce by the British fleet 
 and given over wholly to the production of sugar and coffee, 
 
 a ln the dispatches as published by Secretary of State Pickering the names 
 of the French envoys were suppressed, and the men were designated simply as 
 Messrs. X, Y, and Z. Hence the incident is called "the XYZ Affair." 
 
1 82 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 had to be fed by the United States. Talleyrand wanted only to 
 levy blackmail on our government and bully us out of our 
 treaty with England. When he saw the effect of his behavior, 
 this political chameleon quickly changed his color. He feigned 
 surprise and indignation at the conduct of the agents whom he 
 had sent (doubtless with his own instructions) to the American 
 commissioners. He repudiated them and all their works. He 
 sent word to William Vans Murray, our minister at The Hague, 
 that he was anxious to treat with America on an amicable basis, 
 and gave assurances in Adams's own words that any minister 
 sent by the United States would be treated "as the representa- 
 tive of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation." 
 
 President Adams wanted war no more than Talleyrand. 
 Apart from seeing his personal rival Alexander Hamilton lead- 
 ing the armies of the United States, there were public reasons 
 of great weight. Spain had made her treaty with France, but 
 was dilatory in carrying out her treaty with us (see page 177). 
 War with France would probably involve us in war with Spain, 
 and war with Spain would mean the reopening of the whole 
 question of the allegiance of our Western country. How pre- 
 carious the situation was can be seen from a letter written 
 by Fisher Ames to Hamilton in January, 1797: "The western 
 country scarcely calls itself dependent on the Union. France is 
 ready to hold Louisiana. The thread of connection is slender, 
 and that event I fear would break it." We should have to 
 invoke the aid of Great Britain as the only country able to 
 protect our shipping against France and Spain, and so we 
 should be plunged into the midst of the European wars and 
 become a pawn in the game of the European peace. 
 
 It took courage in John Adams, when the country was ring- 
 ing with preparations for war, to choose peace. Hamilton, the 
 powerful head of a faction opposed to the President, and the 
 real master of the two chief cabinet officers, Pickering and 
 Walcott, wanted war. 1 Adams, therefore, without consulting 
 
 1 Hamilton planned to cooperate with a Venezuelan adventurer by the name 
 of Miranda in freeing the Spanish colonies in South America and bringing them 
 under Anglo-American influence to balance the power of France. Hamilton 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 183 
 
 his cabinet (as, indeed, he was not legally bound to do), sent 
 to the Senate for confirmation, on February 18, 1799, the name 
 of William Vans Murray as minister to the French Republic. 
 In order to get the Senate's sanction he was obliged to substi- 
 tute a commission for the single minister. He named Oliver 
 Ellsworth, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and William 
 Da vies of North Carolina (after Patrick Henry had declined) 
 to join Murray at the French capital. Secretary Pickering, 
 "shocked and grieved" at this sudden assertion of the presi- 
 dential prerogative, was able to delay instructions to the new 
 commission until Adams came down in person to Philadelphia, 
 from his summer vacation in Massachusetts, to see the matter 
 through. The envoys sailed early in November, 1799. 
 
 They were but four days out from port when one of the 
 most dramatic scenes of modern history was enacted at Paris. 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, returning from Egypt with the aureole 
 of victory about his head, overthrew the corrupt Directory and 
 drove the protesting deputies of the French Assembly out of 
 their chamber at the point of the bayonet. This famous coup 
 d'etat made Napoleon master of France. He took the title 
 of First Consul. It was to the "man of destiny," then, and not 
 to the "five-headed monster of anarchy" (the Directory), that 
 the American commissioners were presented early in April, 
 1 800. Their task was not hard, for Napoleon was well dis- 
 posed. He was not concerned with the intrigues of the party 
 in Paris which, ever since the mission of Genet, had been 
 attempting to nourish a French faction in the United States. 
 He wanted to inaugurate his usurped regime with splendid . 
 military victories and generous diplomatic triumphs. On Sep- 
 tember 30, 1800, a convention was signed providing for the 
 exchange of consuls and the regulation of maritime relations 
 
 wrote to Miranda in August, 1798: "The plan, in my opinion, ought to be a 
 fleet of Great Britain and an army of the United States, and a government for 
 the liberated territory agreeable to both the cooperators, about which there will 
 be no difficulty. To arrange the plan a competent authority from Great Britain 
 to some person here is the best expedient. Your presence here in that .case will 
 be extremely essential. We are raising an army of about 12,000 men." 
 
1 84 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 between the two nations. The -First Consul did not insist on 
 the renewal of the treaties of alliance and commerce of 1778, 
 but, as an offset, he refused to entertain claims for damages 
 done to our shipping by French cruisers in the Franco-British 
 wars. It was a fair bargain. It saved us from a war with 
 France, and by making us friends with the victor of Marengo 
 it undoubtedly contributed to our peaceful acquisition of the 
 vast Louisiana territory three years later. The credit for the 
 treaty is due to John Adams, who dared to use his authority 
 for the most unpopular act that an executive can perform; 
 namely, to hold in peace a nation that is set on war. He ap- 
 praised his public services rightly when he asked that this one 
 alone should be engraved on his tombstone. 
 
 So the century closed with the United States at peace with 
 all the three great powers whose interests and possessions in 
 the New World and whose wars and rivalries in the Old World 
 threatened to reduce our country to the condition of a mere 
 make-weight in the balance of European politics. Factions at 
 home had thrown us now into the arms of France and now into 
 the arms of England, while Spanish intrigue threatened to dis- 
 rupt the Union by the severance of our Western states. Two of 
 the treaties made in this decade of Federalist power (the Jay 
 Treaty of 1794 and the French treaty of 1800) saved us from 
 imminent war. A third (the Pinckney treaty of 1795) secured 
 us the use of the Mississippi and so opened our trans- Allegheny 
 region to world commerce. To the remarkable abilities and 
 patient labors of the diplomats of Washington's and Adams's 
 administrations Morris, Marshall, Murray, Jay, Ellsworth, 
 and the Pinckneys America owes a debt of deepest gratitude. 
 They did a large part in bringing the country safely and hon- 
 orably through the most difficult and dangerous decade, with 
 one exception, in all its history since the adoption of the federal 
 Constitution. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 185 
 
 THE DOWNFALL OF FEDERALISM 
 
 Before Governor Da vies returned from Paris with the Napo- 
 leonic convention which settled the long dispute with France 
 and enabled us to enter the new century at peace with the 
 world, a troubled peace which was to last until our second 
 war with England, an event of prime importance had hap- 
 pened at home in the triumph of the Republican party at the 
 polls. The election of 1800 was, with the exception of Abraham 
 Lincoln's victory in 1860, the most important in our history. 
 It was not only the first party revolution in America ; it was also 
 the culmination of a ten years' struggle of the agricultural class, 
 the small traders, and the artisans, under the leadership of 
 Thomas Jefferson, against the monopoly of public office and the 
 direction of national policy by the aristocratic followers of 
 Hamilton, Washington, and Adams. In the last section we 
 carried the history of our foreign diplomacy down to the close 
 of John Adams's administration. We must now turn back to 
 complete the story of our domestic affairs in the last decade of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 So long as Washington was at the head of the government 
 universal reverence for the Father of his Country kept the fires 
 of political passion from bursting into flame, although, as 
 Fisher Ames said, "they glowed beneath the surface like a 
 burning coal pit." Every measure adopted for the establish- 
 ment of the Hamiltonian policy of national concentration, every 
 move in the diplomatic game with Great Britain and France, 
 intensified the antagonism between the Federalists and the 
 Republicans, the "Anglomen" and the "Jacobins." The Feder- 
 alists were firmly intrenched in the administration, while the 
 Republican opposition, though widespread, was unorganized. 
 "Are the people in your quarter as well contented with the 
 proceedings of our government as their representatives say they 
 are?" wrote Jefferson to Richard H. Lee in 1791 ; "there is a 
 vast mass of discontent gathered in the South, and when and 
 how it will break God knows." 
 
1 86 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 At the close of the year 1793 Jefferson resigned from the 
 cabinet. He professed to have done with politics and talked 
 of planting his cabbages in peace at Monticello. But even if 
 his own restless political mind had allowed him to abjure 
 politics, he was too thoroughly committed to the leadership of 
 the Republican cause to withdraw. He began forthwith an 
 ardent campaign to organize the "vast mass of discontent," not 
 only in the South but all over the land, into a political party. 
 "Almost never," says Professor Channing, "has a party been 
 so efficiently and so secretly marshalled and led." Jefferson 
 kept up an enormous correspondence with his coworkers from 
 Massachusetts to Georgia. He pursued his patient propaganda, 
 making a gain of one hundred Republican votes in this county 
 or half a dozen Republican seats in that legislature. He did not 
 himself write for the public, but he laid the pens of able pam- 
 phleteers like Madison, Monroe, Giles, and John Taylor under 
 contribution, while he encouraged journalists and hack writers 
 to attack the Federalist doctrines and the Federalist leaders 
 with little scruple for the niceties of language. As leader of the 
 opposition, he watched the march of the administration with 
 jealous scrutiny, discovering the cloven hoof of the "monocrat" 
 at every step. 
 
 A few months after Jefferson's resignation the farmers of 
 western Pennsylvania broke into open revolt against the tax- 
 gatherers sent to collect the excise on their whisky. 1 It was the 
 first instance of forcible resistance to the new federal govern- 
 ment, and both Washington and Hamilton were determined to 
 crush it with exemplary severity. The President called out 
 15,000 militia from the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New 
 Jersey, and Virginia and marched with them himself as far as 
 the town of Bedford, Pennsylvania, leaving Hamilton in com- 
 mand. "No citizen of the United States," wrote Washington 
 on quitting the expedition, "can ever be engaged in a service 
 
 1 Currency in the form of either specie or bank paper was as scarce as grain 
 was plentiful in the back counties. It cost so much to transport the grain over 
 the poor roads to the East that the farmers found it more profitable to distill 
 their corn and rye and use the liquor as currency. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 187 
 
 more important to their country. It is nothing less than to con- 
 solidate and preserve the blessings of that Revolution which at 
 much expense of blood and treasure constituted us a free and 
 independent nation." The insurgents broke up when they heard 
 that a force three times as large as they could hope to resist was 
 marching on them. Some of the ringleaders of the " rebellion" 
 were arrested and tried, and two were condemned to death for 
 treason. Washington pardoned them; but in his speech to Con- 
 gress a few weeks later he threw the blame for the uprising on 
 the " self -created societies" of Democrats which had multiplied 
 rapidly in the country since the visit of Citizen Genet. 
 
 The Republicans under Jefferson's lead attacked the policy 
 of the government in the Whisky Rebellion at every point. In 
 the first place, the excise was an "infernal tax," imposed on the 
 farmers for the benefit of the capitalists and unnecessary were 
 it not for the swollen interest charges with which the fictitious 
 debt had burdened the people. Furthermore, it was disgraceful 
 for a government founded on the will of the people to send 
 thousands of armed troops against a few hundred of its own 
 discontented citizens and to magnify a local "riot" into a civil 
 war, in order to allow Alexander Hamilton to parade his "janis- 
 saries." Finally, where was our boasted freedom, if men were 
 to be condemned for meeting in "self-created societies" to 
 criticize freely the acts of the public servants whom they had 
 elected? Democracy itself was a "self-created society." It 
 would be at an end when the people were reduced to silence 
 under the censorship of an autocratic, capitalistic, and military 
 regime. "It is wonderful," wrote Jefferson, "that the President 
 should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack 
 on our fundamental liberties." Had he forgotten the "self- 
 created societies" of patriots who had met at Faneuil Hall and 
 the Raleigh Tavern? 
 
 The treaty which Jay brought back from England in the 
 spring of 1795 (see page 175) furnished further political capi- 
 tal for the Republicans. They had been accused of obsequious- 
 ness to France at the time of the Genet mission ; now they could 
 visit a like reproach on the heads of their opponents. "Mr. Jay 
 
1 88 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 has not presented his country's injuries in a firm style," wrote 
 a Republican lawyer of Virginia to Madison, "but has suppli- 
 cated the benevolence of his Britannic Majesty for relief." 
 The treaty, said Jefferson, was "an execrable thing," and really 
 nothing less than "an alliance between England and the Anglo- 
 men of this country against the legislature 1 and the people of 
 the United States." In their fight to prevent the ratification 
 of the treaty and the appropriation of funds needed to carry 
 it into effect, the Republicans abused the people of Great 
 Britain in unmeasured terms and charged the government of 
 Great Britain with perfidy and violence. In the single year 
 following the ratification of the treaty, the Republican press 
 asserted, British cruisers had seized 300 American vessels and 
 impressed 1000 American sailors. The only result of the mono- 
 crats' toadying to Great Britain had been to alienate our only 
 friend (France) without conciliating our most dangerous enemy 
 (England). 
 
 When the House finally appropriated the money for the 
 execution of the Jay Treaty (April 30, 1796), men's minds were 
 already turning to the presidential election. Washington re- 
 fiised to serve a third term. It is not likely that he would have 
 again received the unanimous indorsement of the country 
 if he had stood. For with the resignation of the Republican 
 members of the cabinet (Jefferson and Randolph) he had 
 become a strict Federalist, declaring to General Knox in 1795 
 that it would be "suicidal" to the administration to appoint 
 to office any man who was out of sympathy with its policies. 
 He published a Farewell 'Address (September 17, 1796), in 
 which, speaking out of the bitter experience of the last four 
 years, he warned his fellow countrymen "to steer clear of 
 permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" 
 and to shun the destructive effects of the spirit of faction at 
 home. But the latter counsel fell on unheeding ears. The 
 
 1 Jefferson is here referring to the bill for nonintercourse with Great Britain 
 which was passed in the House of Representatives (the legislature) in the spring 
 of 1794, but was defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of Vice-President 
 Adams. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 189 
 
 Republican press rejoiced openly that at last the name of 
 Washington was to " cease to give currency to political 
 iniquity" in covering the nefarious policies of Federalism with 
 its aegis ; and certain Republican members of Congress, includ- 
 ing Andrew Jackson, refused to vote the usual complimentary 
 reply to the President's annual message. The Federalists were 
 still strong enough to carry the election of 1796, although their 
 candidate, John Adams, had but a single vote beyond the bare 
 majority in the electoral college. Thomas Pinckney of South 
 Carolina was put forward by the Federalists for vice president, 
 but, as several of the New England electors refused to write 
 his name on their ballots with Adams's, his*vote fell behind Jef- 
 ferson's. The figures were Adams 71, Jefferson 68, Pinckney 59. 
 As the Constitution then stood (Art. I, sect. 2, par. 2), the 
 Federalist Adams became president and the Republican Jef- 
 ferson vice president. 1 
 
 John Adams was in his sixty-first year robust, rotund, 
 learned, consequential, and fully conscious of his merits, which 
 were great. Coming into prominence as one of the earliest 
 advocates of the independence of the colonies in the Conti- 
 nental Congress, he had labored for a quarter of a century in 
 public station for the establishment of the American Republic, 
 serving on dozens of committees in Congress, a member of the 
 peace commission of 1783 at Paris, and the first minister of 
 the new republic at the courts of the Netherlands and Great 
 Britain. He had nominated George Washington for com- 
 mander of the continental army and recommended Thomas 
 Jefferson as draftsman of the Declaration of Independence. 
 In his "Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the 
 United States," written while he was at the court of St. James, 
 he had furnished European political students with the first 
 elaborate and scholarly description of the "mixed" form of 
 
 lf The New England electors "scratched" Pinckney because of a rumor that 
 Alexander Hamilton, who was hostile to Adams, would influence a few Federalist 
 electors in the South to "scratch" Adams and thus allow Pinckney to be re- 
 turned as president. Thus Hamilton's little trick to keep Adams out of the 
 presidency resulted only in putting Jefferson into the vice presidency. 
 
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 government in the American democracy. John Adams's patri- 
 otism, rectitude, and courage were beyond question, but he was 
 pompous, intractable, and vain. His mind, open wide to the 
 learned discussion of political theory, narrowed to an un- 
 deviating, rectilinear obstinacy in the execution of political 
 authority. The large receptivity and sustained power of bal- 
 anced judgment which characterized George Washington were 
 lacking in Adams. A " republican" after the pattern of his 
 great masters Milton, Sidney, Locke, and Harrington, he was 
 a convinced believer in government by the "natural aris- 
 tocracy," "the rich, the well-born, and the able," the men who 
 had property and reputation at stake. He feared the tyranny 
 of the masses as much as he abhorred the tyranny of the despot. 
 The "people," he believed, are the very worst guardians of 
 their own interests, being ignorant, fickle, and easily led by 
 clever demagogues. Hence "simple democracy" (untempered 
 by the aristocratic element) was to him the "most ignoble, un- 
 just, and detestable form of government, its only excellence 
 being that it soon passes away." A certain ungraciousness of 
 manner, running into querulous suspicion when he was thwarted, 
 made it difficult for Adams to command the best services of 
 his subordinates even reluctant at times to care to com- 
 mand them. Preoccupied with his own rectitude, he sought less 
 and less to reconcile and harmonize conflicting views in his 
 cabinet, his Congresses, and his party. He ended by glorying 
 in his independence of them all. 
 
 The difficulties which confronted John Adams on his inau- 
 guration in the spring of 1797 were enough to try a man of 
 consummate tact and patience. Now that criticism 'of Fed- 
 eralist policies could no longer be interpreted as slanders on 
 the Father of his Country, political passions broke loose in 
 a storm of abuse. Men who had known each other for years, 
 wrote Jefferson, crossed the street to avoid saluting each other. 
 Statesmen of high reputation rivaled the scurrilous hack writers 
 of the yellow press in the vehemence of their language; "fire 
 eating salamanders," "poison sucking toads," "venomous ser- 
 pents," were some of the choice epithets which Fisher Ames 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 191 
 
 bestowed on his Republican opponents. There was faction, too, 
 within the ranks of the Federalists. Hamilton, although re- 
 tired to private life, aspired to be "the power behind the 
 throne." He wielded enormous influence over the chief cabinet 
 officers, the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War (Picker- 
 ing, Walcott, and McHenry), whom Adams, perhaps out of 
 filial respect for Washington, unwisely retained until near the 
 close of his term. These men antagonized the President, be- 
 trayed cabinet secrets, and almost openly took their orders from 
 Hamilton. "Either nothing will be done," wrote Walcott to 
 Hamilton on the occasion of an important conference on foreign 
 policy, "or your opinion will prevail." Pickering actually apolo- 
 gized to Hamilton for measures taken by the President which 
 the cabinet were not able to prevent. Hamilton disliked Adams 
 on personal grounds for his puritanism and pretentiousness. He 
 also knew that Adams was no friend of the funding measures, 
 being neither a stockholder nor a speculator in government se- 
 curities, and that he disliked a commercial and financial plutoc- 
 racy as much as he did a "simple democracy." But most of all 
 he resented the President's standing in the way of his military 
 ambitions, when it appeared certain that war with France 
 would give him the opportunity of joining the American army 
 with the British fleet in wresting the South American republics 
 and the region of the Gulf of Mexico from Spanish rule and 
 posing as the patron of a government consolidated in an im- 
 perialistic policy. 1 
 
 When our indignation with France over the X Y Z Affair was 
 at its height in the summer of 1798 and we were increasing 
 our appropriations for fortifications, arms, and ships, the Fed- 
 eralist Congress passed a number of acts which historians have 
 unanimously condemned as vindictive, rash, arbitrary, and 
 futile. Since most of the immigrants who came to our shores 
 were radicals who swelled the ranks of the Republican party, a 
 Naturalization Act was passed (June 18) requiring all aliens who 
 had come over since 1795 to live in this country fourteen years 
 before they could obtain citizenship, to which must be added 
 
 1 For Hamilton's scheme, see page 182, note. 
 
192 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the seven or nine years prescribed by the Constitution before 
 they could be eligible for Congress. A few days later (June 25, 
 July 6) came Alien Acts: one giving the president power at 
 his discretion for a period of two years to remove from the 
 country any alien whom he judged dangerous to our security, 
 and to punish with imprisonment those who remained or /re- 
 turned in defiance of his decree ; the other empowering him to 
 arrest or deport enemy aliens in time of war. Finally, a Sedition 
 Act (July 14), to run to the end of Adams's term, punished 
 with heavy fines and long imprisonment any person found 
 guilty by the federal courts of "combining and conspiring to 
 oppose the execution of the laws, or publishing false or mali- 
 cious writings against the President, Congress, or the govern- 
 ment of the United States." Harsh as these acts were, they 
 did not satisfy the extreme Federalists. Harper of South Caro- 
 lina, the administration leader in the House, would have shut 
 the door to American citizenship in the face of the alien. "It 
 is high time," he said, "to recover from the mistake with which 
 we set out under the Constitution of admitting foreigners to 
 citizenship, for nothing but birth should entitle a man -to this 
 privilege." The Sedition Act, as first introduced into the Senate 
 by James Lloyd of Maryland, declared that every Frenchman 
 was an enemy of the United States, and that to give a French- 
 man aid or comfort was treason punishable with death. To such 
 folly can panic lead ! * 
 
 It is true that England and France both had severe repressive 
 laws at this time. England had suspended the Habeas Corpus 
 Act, forbidding seditious meetings, and prosecuted a number 
 of "agitators" who invoked their "natural right" of free 
 speech. The French Republic would not allow an alien to 
 remain within' its borders without the sanction of the author- 
 
 a lt is only fair to say that the two great Federalist leaders Hamilton and 
 Marshall opposed this extreme legislation. Hamilton wrote to Walcott (June 29) , 
 "Let us not establish tyranny; energy is a very different thing from violence." 
 Yet Hamilton was in favor of having libels, when leveled at the officers of the 
 United States, cognizable by the federal courts, so that the reputation of the 
 officers of the general government "might not be left to the cool and reluctant 
 protection of the state courts, always temporizing and sometimes disaffected." 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 193 
 
 ities (see the case of Pinckney, p. 179). But there was no need 
 for such measures in America. We were at peace when the 
 offensive acts were passed. We were thousands of miles re- 
 moved from the storm centers of Europe. There was as 
 little danger of seeing a French army on our shores, President 
 Adams remarked testily to Secretary McHenry, as there was 
 of seeing one in heaven. The Republican leaders like Jeffer- 
 son, Madison, Gallatin, and Mason were no more connected 
 with French plots or Jacobinical intrigues to ruin our country 
 than were their Federalist opponents. All were sincere patriots, 
 differing only (even if differing boisterously) on measures of 
 American policy domestic and foreign. 1 
 
 The Alien and Sedition Acts met with instant condemnation 
 by the Republicans. In the House, Livingston protested that 
 "they would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity," and 
 Gallatin reminded the Federalists of the consecrated principle 
 of English liberty from Milton to Burke, that "error can be 
 successfully opposed by truth with argument as the weapon." 
 Jefferson, who from his point of vantage in the vice presidency 
 kept his party lieutenants informed of the temper of the ad- 
 ministration, wrote to Stephen Mason that he believed the acts 
 to be "merely an experiment on the American mind to see how 
 far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution." If 
 they should be accepted by the American people, he thought, 
 they would be followed by acts making the presidency a life 
 tenure and finally a hereditary dignity like the British crown. 
 "I fancy," he added, "that some of the State legislatures will 
 take strong ground on this occasion." Yet when John Taylor 
 of Virginia, an ardent Republican pamphleteer, suggested the 
 secession of Virginia and North Carolina from the Union, 
 Jefferson rebuked him in language that would have done credit 
 to a Webster or a Lincoln. 
 
 1 President Adams, much to the disgust of the ultra-Federalists, declined to 
 make a single arrest or deportation under the Alien Acts. Ten Republican editors 
 were punished by the federal courts under the Sedition Act. The results of this 
 policy of panic were entirely incommensurate with the excitement aroused. "In 
 pursuing the offending bee the Federalists knocked over the hive." 
 
194 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Jefferson prepared a set of resolutions against the acts for 
 the legislature of North Carolina, but when unexpected Fed- 
 eralist strength developed in that state in the autumn of 1 798, 
 he transferred them to the legislature of Kentucky, where they 
 were introduced by John Breckinridge on November 10 and 
 immediately adopted. The Kentucky Resolutions, nine in num- 
 ber, declared that our federal government had been created by 
 a rnrnjj^rt betwee.n_the states and was not the exclusive or final 
 judge of the extentof the autHority delegated to it, since "that 
 would have made its discretion and not the Constitution the 
 measure of its powers." The general government having been 
 given no power to define or punish common-law offenses, but 
 only those crimes defined under the Constitution, the legislation 
 of the summer of 1798 was usurped in principle and "altogether 
 void and of no effect." Furthermore, it contravened several 
 positive provisions of the Constitution, such as the guarantee 
 of free speech and a free press (Amendment I), the protection 
 against deprivation of life, liberty, or property without "due 
 process of law" (Amendment V), trial by jury (Art. Ill, sect. 2, 
 par. 3), and the prohibition of Congress to interfere before the 
 year 1808 with "the migration or importation of such persons 
 as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" 
 (Art. I, sect. 9, par. i). The legislature of Kentucky called 
 upon the legislatures of the "co-states" to concur in declaring 
 the offensive acts "void and of no effect" and in uniting with 
 her "in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress." 
 A few weeks later Madison introduced resolutions of the same 
 tenor into the Virginia legislature. Without actually pronounc- 
 ing the acts "void," Madison's resolutions contended that when 
 the government exercised powers not granted in the compact, 
 the states "have the right and are in duty bound to interpose 
 for arresting the progress of the evil." Whether the "inter- 
 position" should take the form of petitions to Congress or 
 processes in the courts or an amendment to the Constitution 
 or forcible resistance to the execution of the acts, the Virginia 
 Resolutions did not say. But many years afterwards Madison 
 denied that there had been any idea of forcible resistance in 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 195 
 
 either his or Jefferson's mind. " The Resolutions were for politi- 
 cal effect," he said, " intended as a party platform to arouse the 
 Republican sentiment throughout the country and secure a 
 general condemnation of the Federalist centralization." When 
 all the states north of the Potomac sent unfavorable replies 
 to the invitation of the Kentucky legislature, and the states 
 south of the Potomac sent none at all, the legislature contented 
 itself with reaffirming its protest (November, 1799), this time 
 declaring explicitly that llnullifiGation^ by state sovereignties" 
 of all unauthorized acts of Congress was "the rightful remedy." 
 
 The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions furnished fine cam- 
 paign material for the Republicans in the election of 1800, as 
 the astute Jefferson had foreseen. Their principles were widely 
 disseminated and gave rise to reports by several state legisla- 
 tures. Vermont repudiated the "compact theory" in an elabo- 
 rate argument. A committee of the Maryland House of 
 Delegates denied the competence of a state legislature to declare 
 an act of Congress void. The Federalist pamphleteer Cobbett 
 lamented "the imbecillity of our form of government," which 
 was "a jingling and chaotic confusion of federal and state 
 governments." On the other hand, the Republicans maintained 
 that if the states had no right to judge when the Constitution 
 was violated by an act of Congress, they were reduced to mere 
 provinces in a consolidated empire and might as well cease to 
 elect and pay their legislatures. They would soon become, as 
 Taylor said, only "speculative commonwealths to be read for 
 amusement, like Harrington's 'Oceana' or More's ' Utopia.'" 
 
 As the presidential campaign of 1800 approached, it was 
 evident that the election would be bitterly contested. The 
 Federalists had a large majority in Congress, elected during the 
 war fever of 1798. The offices, of course, were in their hands. 
 But, on the other side, the Republicans were no longer the 
 unorganized mass of farmers and artisans that they had been 
 when Jefferson resigned from the cabinet. The tireless prop- 
 aganda of the vice president and his party managers had 
 begun to bear fruit. A strong Republican organization flour- 
 ished in New York, in spite of the factional quarrels of the 
 
1 96 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Livingstons, the Burrs, and the Clintons. Thomas McLean 
 carried the state of Pennsylvania against his Federalist opponent 
 Ross by a sweeping majority in the election of 1797. Even the 
 sacred citadel of Federalism, New England, was rudely invaded 
 by the " Jacobins." "A considerable change is working in the 
 minds of the people to the Eastward," wrote Jefferson to 
 Madison. In Massachusetts the vote for the Republican candi- 
 date for governor rose from 8000 in 1 797 to over 1 7,000 in 1800, 
 and the Federalists were obliged for the first time to issue 
 election addresses to the " friends of society, religion, and good 
 order" to support the administration. The Federalist majority 
 in the legislature of Vermont was reduced in the election of 1800 
 from over 100 to 34. New England still remained in the Feder- 
 alist column, but the grip of the old aristocracy was loosened. 
 There was an enormous increase in electioneering and popular 
 meetings. The vote for governor in Massachusetts increased 
 over 80 per cent in the years 1798-1800. 
 
 The Federalists labored under severe difficulties. As the 
 danger of a serious conflict with France waned, prosecutions 
 under the odious Sedition Act took the form of persecutions. 
 In the exciting days of 1798 Congress had authorized a direct 
 tax of $2,000,000 on lands, dwellings, and slaves, supplemented 
 by new stamp duties and a loan of $5,000,000. When Congress 
 met in the autumn of 1799, the military ardor of the previous 
 year had cooled. The loan was reduced to $3,500,000. But 
 falling import duties had reduced the revenue by $1,000,000, 
 while the expenses of government mounted from $6,000,000 in 
 1797 to $9,300,000 in 1799. The effect of the direct taxes was 
 already beginning to be felt. John Fries, an auctioneer in 
 Pennsylvania, led a riot against federal officers who came to 
 assess the window tax. The farmers shot the officers in the 
 legs, and women poured scalding water down on their heads. 
 Order was not restored until the militia was called out. The 
 Republicans made capital out of the economic situation. "The 
 physician for the country's ills is already at hand in the person 
 of the tax gatherer," wrote Jefferson. Monroe scored the admin- 
 istration for "preparing for a war which does not exist, and 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 197 
 
 expending millions which will have no other effect than bringing 
 war upon us." Their position was strengthened when the offers 
 of conciliation came from France and Adams appointed his 
 second commission (see page 183). In February, 1800, en- 
 listments were suspended, and the next month the army was 
 disbanded. Nothing that the Federalist Congress could have 
 done would have contributed more to the success of the Re- 
 publicans than these acts. By them, as Professor Bassett well 
 says, "the campaign of 1800 was robbed of that warlike front 
 behind which the Federalists for two years had found it so 
 profitable to hide." 
 
 But the most serious handicap under which the Federalists 
 entered on the election of 1800 was the disaffection in their 
 own ranks. President Adams had shown his patriotism in his 
 firm stand against the insults of the French Directory and his 
 wisdom in accepting their tardy advances on return to better 
 sense. He had shown his independence in preserving his coun- 
 try's peace at the expense of selfish military ambitions, and his 
 moderation in refusing to inaugurate a reign of terror in 
 America by the wholesale arrest of aliens and the hanging of 
 rustic rioters. For these virtues he was cursed by the men of 
 his own party, who had hectored and thwarted him since 
 the beginning of his administration. These malcontents first 
 thought of trying to persuade Washington to run for president 
 again, but the great man died on December 14, 1799. When 
 it was clear that Adams was the choice of the majority of the 
 party, and the caucus had named General C. C. Pinckney as his 
 running-mate, the malcontents still tried to repeat the trick 
 of 1796 (see page 189) by getting the electors of South 
 Carolina to vote for Pinckney and Jefferson. But Pinckney 
 honorably refused to be a partner to any such deal, even though 
 it would bring him the presidency. Hamilton, disappointed in 
 his military ambitions and incensed by the dismissal of his 
 satellites Pickering and McHenry from the cabinet, foolishly 
 indulged his pique by writing a long and bitter pamphlet against 
 Adams and wound up by advising the electors to vote for 
 him nevertheless! 
 
198 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Jefferson was the unanimous choice of the Republican cau- 
 cus, with Aaron Burr of New York for vice president. The 
 Republican platform is well summed up in a letter which 
 Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry early in 1799: 
 
 An inviolable preservation of our present federal Constitution in 
 the true sense in which it was adopted by the states, ... a govern- 
 ment vigorous, frugal, and simple, applying all possible savings of 
 revenue to the discharge of the public debt, . . . reliance for our 
 internal defense on our militia solely until actual invasion, . . . free 
 commerce with all nations, political connections with none, and little 
 or no diplomatic establishment, . . . freedom of religion and the 
 press, . . . and an end of all violations of the Constitution to silence 
 by force the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens 
 against the conduct of their agents. 
 
 Behind these specific points of policy was the great basic 
 principle of Republicanism the interests of the agrarian de- 
 mocracy, supported by state and local governments, against 
 the capitalistic aristocracy in control of the federal machinery. 
 The campaign was violent and slanderous. Jefferson was 
 accused of having robbed a widow and her children of trust 
 funds, of having vituperated George Washington and ridiculed 
 the Christian religion. The Federalist editors predicted dire 
 consequences if he should be elected. Our country would be 
 turned over to a Jacobinical mob, and every sacred institution 
 overturned. The government's obligations would be repudiated, 
 and all honest citizens would be involved in "one common, cer- 
 tain, and not far distant ruin." The restraints of civilization 
 would be cast off, and "every decent man would have to go 
 about armed to defend his property, his wife, and his children 
 from his Jacobin neighbor." The Reverend Timothy Dwight, 
 president of Yale College, prophesied that in the event of 
 Jefferson's election "the Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our 
 holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our 
 wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into 
 the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat." The 
 Republican warnings, if less ludicrous, were no less earnest. 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 199 
 
 The triumph of the Federalists, they said, would mean the 
 disappearance of the last guarantee of democratic government ; 
 the state would be absorbed into a tyrannical oligarchy at 
 Washington, in disgraceful vassalage to Great Britain. A titled 
 nobility and a hereditary monarchy would be the eventual 
 outcome. 
 
 Political intrigue was added to frenzied electioneering. Penn- 
 sylvania was a Republican state, but the Federalists, who 
 had a majority in the upper House, refused to concur in the 
 choice of electors by joint ballot until they were assured of 
 seven of the fifteen electoral votes of the state. In New York 
 Aaron Burr, by the cleverest arts of the political manager, had 
 secured the election of a Republican delegation from New York 
 City to the legislature in the spring of 1800. This insured a 
 majority in the new legislature (which was to choose the presi- 
 dential electors) for Jefferson and Burr. Hamilton then wrote 
 a letter to Governor Jay, begging him to reconvene the old 
 legislature and have it hastily pass a law providing for the 
 choice of the New York electors by districts, so that at least 
 four or five of its electoral votes might be saved for the 
 Federalists. "No scruples of delicacy and propriety," wrote 
 Hamilton, "ought to hinder the taking of a legal and constitu- 
 tional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in 
 politics from getting possession of the helm of state." The 
 honorable governor filed the letter away with the simple in- 
 dorsement, "Proposing a measure for party purposes which 
 it would not become me to adopt." New York's vote went to 
 Jefferson, and with it the election. Adams carried New Eng- 
 land, the stronghold of the financial interests, 1 with New Jersey, 
 Delaware, and parts of Maryland and North Carolina. He 
 had sixty-five votes to seventy-three for Jefferson. 
 
 1 The four original New England states received $440,800 in the interest and 
 capital disbursements on the public debt in 1795, out of a total of $1,180,909. 
 Massachusetts alone received in interest one third more than all the states 
 south of the Potomac. "The thrifty Yankees of Connecticut held more of the 
 public debt than did all the creditors in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia" 
 (C. A. Beard, "The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy," p. 393). 
 
200 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 As every one of the Republican electors had voted for Burr 
 as well as for Jefferson, the two men were tied for first place 
 and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. 1 
 Every Republican elector, of course, had intended that Jeffer- 
 son should be president. Had Burr been an honorable man, 
 he would have immediately acquiesced. But Burr was not 
 an honorable man. Ambition led him to contest the election in 
 the House and to lower his dignity by accepting the support 
 of the Federalists, who used him only that they might defeat 
 Jefferson. The balloting began on February n, 1801. On the 
 first ballot Jefferson carried eight states out of the sixteen, just 
 one short of the necessary majority. Burr carried six, while 
 two* (Maryland and Vermont) were equally divided and lost 
 their vote. Thirty-five ballots were taken in the next five days 
 without any change in the vote. The Federalists knew that 
 they could not elect Burr, but they planned to maintain the 
 deadlock until after inauguration day and then have a new 
 election declared. On the other hand, McKean and Monroe, 
 the Republican governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, began 
 to threaten to call out their militia to seat Jefferson in the White 
 House by force. Hamilton too used his powerful influence in 
 favor of Jefferson as the lesser of two evils. "As to Burr," he 
 wrote, " there is nothing in his favor. He is truly the Catiline 
 of America"; whereas Jefferson, with all his faults and fanati- 
 cisms, was "neither depraved nor desperate." If elected he 
 would probably "pursue a temporizing rather than a violent 
 system." The wisest course for the Federalists to follow, 
 thought Hamilton, was to withdraw their opposition to Jeffer- 
 son after securing from him assurances on some cardinal points 
 of policy, such as the preservation of the fiscal system, the 
 maintenance of the army and navy, and the promise of no 
 general proscription of Federalist officials. These assurances 
 gained, the Federalists of Vermont, Maryland, Delaware, and 
 
 1 Provision was made against the repetition of this anomaly by the Twelfth 
 Amendment, in 1804, which prescribed that the electors "name in their ballots 
 the person voted for as president and in distinct ballots the person voted for as 
 vice president." 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 201 
 
 South Carolina cast blank ballots on the thirty-sixth vote 
 (February 17), and Jefferson was elected by ten states to four. 1 
 The Federalists, defeated in the presidency and both Houses 
 of Congress, made an effort in the last days of their power to 
 secure the judicial branch of the government. While the ballot- 
 ing for Jefferson and Burr was going on, the expiring House 
 passed a Judiciary Act (February 13), creating several new 
 federal districts and grouping the district courts into six cir- 
 cuits, for which sixteen new judges were to be appointed, with 
 marshals, attorneys, and clerks to match. The measure had 
 been planned over a year before, partly to provide for the grow- 
 ing business of the federal courts and partly to relieve the 
 justices of the Supreme Court from continual traveling on 
 circuit. But it was interpreted by the Republicans as simply 
 a trick of the Federalists to fortify themselves in the one 
 branch of the government which was beyond the reach of 
 popular elections. President Adams hastened to make the 
 appointments to the new judgeships before his successor should 
 come into office. He was still signing their commissions at nine 
 o'clock of the evening before inauguration day. At dawn he 
 entered his carriage and drove away from the White House. 2 
 
 lf The four old New England states held doggedly to Burr to the end. The 
 casting of blank ballots by the Federalist representatives from Vermont and 
 Maryland released those states to the Republican column. As there were no 
 Republican representatives from Delaware and South Carolina, the final vote 
 of those states was null. Not a single Federalist, therefore, actually voted for 
 Jefferson. Much controversy arose over the pledges given by Jefferson. It seems 
 probable that he did not give them in person, but let it be known through 
 friends that he would respect the Federalist establishments. For the whole 
 controversy the student may see C. A. Beard's " The Economic Origins of Jeffer- 
 sonian Democracy," pp. 410 ff . 
 
 2 Two stories have been current touching the close of Adams's administration : 
 one that he was signing the commissions up to midnight of March the third, when 
 Levi Lincoln, Jefferson's designated Attorney- General, stood over him, watch in 
 hand, and ordered him to desist; the other, that Adams drove away from the 
 White House early to show his disrespect for Jefferson. Both these stories are 
 pure fables. The reason why Adams left the White House in such haste was 
 the sudden death of his son Charles in New York. He entertained no ill feeling 
 toward Jefferson. A few days after the inauguration he wrote his successor, 
 "heartily wishing" him "a quiet and prosperous administration." 
 
202 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The immense significance of the election of 1800 in our his- 
 tory has often been overlooked. Because the Republicans on 
 coming into power did not destroy the fiscal system which the 
 Federalists had set up or propose sweeping amendments to 
 the Constitution curtailing the federal power, historians have 
 spoken of the "meagre results of the Jeffersonian revolution." 
 But that is to miss the point by too great absorption in insti- 
 tutional history, to the neglect of social and ethical currents. 
 The triumph of Jefferson at the polls was the indorsement of 
 a process of political education which had been going on, under 
 his chief leadership, for a decade an education in democracy. 
 The Federalists were without faith in the people. For them 
 government belonged by right to "the rich, the well-born, and 
 the able," whom the people were to "venerate." The suffrage 
 was narrowed by property qualifications and religious tests. In 
 New England "magistrates were often chosen by one twentieth 
 of the legal voters." The few families who assumed leadership 
 during the Revolution had acquired "an unrepublican ascend- 
 ency," which made them "regard any opposition as actual re- 
 bellion against the reigning powers." They refused to recognize 
 the Republicans as a legitimate party, calling them "insur- 
 gents," "factional Jacobins," "unprincipled, disorderly, am- 
 bitious, disaffected, morose men," who were tempted by vile 
 newspapers "to talk on political subjects and to wish to manage 
 the affairs of the nation," instead of submitting themselves to 
 those who were "over them in the Lord." As against this 
 debasing doctrine of tutelage the Republicans vindicated the 
 principles of the Declaration of Independence. "There was a 
 time in this country," wrote a Republican journalist, "when 
 God had created all men equal and had given to each certain 
 unalienable rights, but the new creation of Federalism has 
 thrown into confusion the first creation. It has created four 
 or five hundred gentlemen having entire right to rule and reign." 
 
 The Jeffersonian doctrine of "the cherishment of the people" 
 conceived of the government not as a power outside of and 
 above the people but as the people itself acting in its politi- 
 cal capacity. It necessitated the greatest possible diffusion of 
 
WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 203 
 
 power among a progressively educated body of citizens, so that 
 the evils inevitably arising in a democracy might be slowly 
 purified out through the aeration of public opinion. Instead 
 of abandoning "the detestable practice of electioneering," and 
 passively " venerating the men of their former choice," as they 
 were bidden to do by the Federalists, the people should be 
 roused to "an universal attention to the duty of election." 
 A jealous watch on their rulers was their only guarantee of free- 
 dom. Their liberties were too precious to delegate to an aristoc- 
 racy. The propagation of this democracy was the Jeffersonian 
 campaign, and the election of 1800 was but its culmination. 
 The enormous growth of the vote even in New England, out 
 of all proportion to the increase in population, was a witness to 
 the progress of the Jeffersonian ideal, for the figures show that 
 the Republican vote was not taken away from the Federalists 
 but was rather added to theirs. Politics were popularized. 
 Addresses, platforms, pledges, discussions, multiplied. The 
 people woke to their privileges and responsibilities. "Now the 
 Revolution of 1776 is complete," said the Aurora on the morn- 
 ing after the election. Since 1800 no political party in our 
 land, Whig or Democrat, Republican or Socialist, Prohibitionist 
 or Populist, has made its appeal to any less comprehensive ari 
 electorate than the whole body of American freemen. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 
 
 A just and solid republican government maintained here will be a standing mon- 
 ument and example for the aim and imitation of the people of other countries; 
 and I join with you in the hope and belief that they will see from our example 
 that a free government is of all others the most majestic. THOMAS JEFFERSON 
 
 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 
 
 Thomas Jefferson was nearing the closing of his fifty-eighth 
 year when he was inaugurated in the new federal city of Wash- 
 ington. Both the place and the man were suggestive of a new 
 chapter in our history. Swamp land and forest formed the 
 lonely environs of the few residences, boarding-houses, and 
 shops that were scattered among the rising public buildings. 
 The stately Pennsylvania Avenue of today was " scarcely more 
 than a footpath cut through the bushes and briars/ 7 with gravel 
 and chipped freestone dumped on the spongy patches left by 
 the Tiber Creek, which ran hard by. The contrast with the 
 lively city of Philadelphia, the center of the colonial aristoc- 
 racy, was striking. "We need nothing here," wrote Gouverneur 
 Morris in humorous vein, "but houses, men, women, and other 
 little trifles to make our city perfect." The new president, who 
 had never felt at home in the aristocratic circles of New York 
 and Philadelphia, left the pomp and ceremony of the Federalist 
 regime behind him. Instead of driving with coach and six to 
 the inaugural, he walked. In the place of the speech to Con- 
 gress, so reminiscent of an address from the throne, he sent a 
 written message. The stiff weekly levees were superseded by 
 receptions to which everyone was welcome to come pele-mele to 
 shake the President's hand. The British minister Merry was 
 scandalized when Jefferson received him in negligee with slip- 
 pers run down at the heels, and Merry's secretary said that the 
 
 204 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 205 
 
 President reminded him of "a tall large-boned farmer" a 
 characterization which Jefferson would probably have felt to 
 be flattering. 
 
 Jefferson's political views were well known through the pub- 
 licity of his long struggle against the Federalists, and they were 
 concisely summed up at the close of his inaugural address: 
 equal and exact justice to men of every shade of political and 
 religious opinion; peace and friendship with all nations, alli- 
 ances with none; respect for the rights of the state govern- 
 ments, together with the preservation of the powers of the 
 national government in strict accord with the provisions of the 
 Constitution; free elections, free speech, and a free press, but 
 obedience to the law as expressed in the will of the majority; 
 reliance on a disciplined militia rather than on a regular army 
 for our defense ; public economy, honest payment of our debts, 
 encouragement of agriculture and commerce, preservation of 
 the sacred rights of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury ; trust in 
 persuasion rather than in force to right abuses and win policies, 
 since " error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left 
 free to combat it." Political enemies were astonished at the 
 President's conciliatory tone when he declared that differences 
 of opinion were not always differences of principle, and that all 
 were brethren in their common devotion to the Union : " We are 
 all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Did he mean that he 
 hoped that all the Federalists were about to become Repub- 
 licans, or that in the hands of a Republican administration the 
 measures established by the Federalists could be safely oper- 
 ated ? His whole administration goes to prove, at any rate, that 
 he considered the government safe in the hands of the friends 
 of the people, even if they took as great liberties with the letter 
 of the Constitution as did the "monocrats." 
 
 If followers hoped or opponents feared that Jefferson would 
 make any drastic change in the institutions of the Federalists, 
 they were mistaken. Hamilton had correctly estimated the 
 new president as more revolutionary in theory than in action. 
 The Bank and the public funds remained undisturbed. The 
 military and naval establishments, while diminished, were not 
 
206 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 abolished. One might have expected the author of the Kentucky 
 Resolutions to initiate some measures for the curtailment of 
 the powers of the "general government," but instead Jefferson 
 announced in his inaugural address and supported in his policy 
 "the preservation of the general government in its whole Consti- 
 tutional vigor as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and of 
 our safety abroad." One might have thought that so bitter a 
 critic of the "dangerous" power of the federal judiciary would 
 have suggested to his Republican Congress (which he controlled 
 with a mastery equaled by few of our presidents) the passage 
 of an amendment limiting the tenure or the power of the justices 
 of the Supreme Court; but he made no such move. The sum 
 total of his assault on the institutions of his Federalist predeces- 
 sors was the abolition of the internal revenue duties, the reduc- 
 tion of the military establishment, and the repeal of the Judiciary 
 Act of the closing days of John Adams's administration. 
 
 For the two chief portfolios of State and Treasury, Jefferson 
 selected James Madison of Virginia and Albert Gallatin of 
 Pennsylvania, both men of long and influential experience in 
 Congress. Henry Dearborn and Levi Lincoln, both of Massa- 
 chusetts, were made Secretary of War and Attorney-General 
 respectively, and Gideon Granger of Connecticut was put at 
 the head of the post office. The Navy Department was given 
 to Robert Smith of Maryland. Thus the heads of half the 
 executive departments were chosen from New England, the 
 stronghold of Federalism, whose electors had cast but a single 
 vote for Jefferson in the February balloting. Madison was 
 the only member of the cabinet from the states south of the 
 Potomac, and even he, according to the simon-pure Republicans 
 of Virginia and the Carolinas, was somewhat tainted with 
 heresy from his former association with Hamilton in the author- 
 ship of "The Federalist." If Jefferson meant by this recog- 
 nition of the North in his choice of advisers to discourage the 
 idea that the Republicans were a sectional party, it remained , 
 none the less true that with the coming of his administration 
 political leadership passed to the South. Samuel Smith of 
 Maryland, Randolph and Giles of Virginia, and Macon of 
 

 THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 207 
 
 North Carolina dominated the House, where the Republicans 
 had a majority of over two to one. The Northern states saw 
 measure after measure passed which they believed prejudicial 
 to their political prestige and their economic interests, and more 
 than once during this period of Southern control (in 1804, 
 1808, and 1814) they mooted separation from the states beyond 
 the Delaware. 
 
 In the closing month of his term President Adams had sent 
 over two hundred nominations to the Senate. This attempt to 
 saddle on the incoming administration a host of Federalist 
 officeholders by " midnight" appointments Jefferson considered 
 positively indecent. He spoke of Adams's "dead clutch on the 
 patronage," and sent word to the officers whose commissions 
 had not yet been delivered to consider their appointments as 
 never having been made. A certain William Marbury, who was 
 one of the forty-two justices of the peace appointed for a five- 
 year term in the District of Columbia, sued the Secretary of 
 State for the delivery of his commission. When the case of 
 Marbury vs. Madison came before the Supreme Court in its 
 February session of 1803, it brought a momentous decision 
 from Chief Justice Marshall. The court refused to issue the 
 mandamus compelling the delivery of the commission, and de- 
 clared that that part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 which con- 
 ferred upon it this power was unconstitutional and hence null 
 and void. It was the first instance of the annulment by the 
 Supreme Court of an act of Congress, the first assumption of the 
 power, nowhere granted to the court by the Constitution, of 
 declaring acts of Congress unconstitutional. This precedent, 
 followed ever since, has made the Supreme Court, which was 
 established as a judicial tribunal, one of the most powerful 
 political influences in our history. For example, in 1895, by 
 the majority of a single vote, it declared the income-tax clause 
 of the Wilson-Gorman tariff bill unconstitutional and deprived 
 the government of millions of dollars of revenue. The new 
 circuit judgeships which had been created by the Judiciary Act 
 of February 13, 1801, and which, according to John Randolph's 
 sarcastic comment, were provided in order to make the judicial 
 
20$ THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 department "a hospital for decayed politicians," were abolished 
 by the repeal of the act. 
 
 Economy was the chief policy of the new administration, and 
 to this policy Jefferson was impelled by both political and 
 economic principles. The collection and disbursement of large 
 sums of money tempted the central government to enlarge its 
 powers, to compete with European nations in world politics, 
 and to encroach on the resources which the states needed for 
 their local development. The central government should con- 
 fine itself to provision for defense against invasion and should 
 reduce its connection with foreign countries to the lowest terms 
 possible. Two or three foreign ministers only were necessary 
 (to England, France, and Spain, with whom we unfortunately 
 still had unsettled relations), but diplomatic establishments in 
 Holland, Portugal, and Prussia were a needless extravagance 
 and were forthwith suppressed. Again, as champion of the 
 agricultural interests, Jefferson saw that the burden of taxation, 
 on which the credit of the public funds was based, fell largely 
 upon the farmers. Not only must these chief producers of the 
 country's wealth not be further burdened by additions to the 
 public debt but even that burden which was upon them must 
 be lightened as soon as possible by the discharge of the debt. 
 
 Secretary Gallatin was even more enamored of economy 
 than was the President. Coming from Switzerland, he had 
 found a home as a naturalized American citizen among the 
 farmers of western Pennsylvania, whose cause he had espoused 
 in the Whisky Rebellion. He was gifted with an orderly mind, 
 considerable powers of persuasion, and a prodigious capacity 
 for work. He has generally been rated as second only to 
 Alexander Hamilton in the skillful management of our coun- 
 try's finances. His special merit, perhaps, was the introduction 
 of strict accountability into our finances by the budget system 
 of specific appropriations against which only funds pertinent 
 to the appropriations could be drawn. Gallatin outlined his 
 policy in his first report. Retrenchment in army, navy, and 
 the diplomatic service, together with various economies in the 
 civil service, were calculated to reduce the expenditures of the 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 209 
 
 government from $7,000,000 to $3,000,000, exclusive of interest 
 on the public debt. The revenue had grown, as a result of our 
 prosperous foreign commerce in the midst of the European 
 wars, from less than $4,000,000 in 1792 to over $10,000,000 in 
 1 80 1. Gallatin far too modestly estimated the revenue for the 
 next ensuing years at $10,600,000. Thus there would be an 
 annual surplus of over $7,000,000 for application to the interest 
 and principal of the public debt. On the basis of these figures 
 the debt would be entirely wiped out by the year 1817. Gal- 
 latin's plans were rudely interrupted by the distress of our 
 commerce and the outbreak of our second war with England 
 before the year 1817, but they progressed so well during the 
 first decade that by 1810 the debt was reduced by $27,500,000, 
 in spite of the purchase of Louisiana from France and the 
 expense of four years of warfare against the African pirates 
 in the Mediterranean. 
 
 Gallatin was compelled reluctantly to sacrifice important 
 sources of revenue. The excise tax was particularly odious to 
 the Republicans. It had an ugly name among the advocates 
 of states' rights. It had caused the Whisky Rebellion and the 
 first " armed invasion" of a state by the national power. It 
 had provoked the Fries riot. It was inquisitorial and bore hard 
 on the farmer distiller. Besides, it cost about 20 per cent for 
 collection as against 3 per cent for customs duties. Jefferson 
 was determined that it should be abolished; and abolished it 
 was, in April, 1802, with a loss of a million dollars to the 
 Treasury. The repeal of the excise was a genuine self-denying 
 ordinance, for it cut down the patronage of the administration 
 nearly 50 per cent. 
 
 Gallatin was obliged also to give up the anticipated retrench- 
 ments in the Navy Department. The army, to be sure, was 
 reduced after the passing of the war scare of 1798 to its meager 
 footing in Washington's day, and a beginning was made in the 
 curtailment of the navy by stopping the work on six " seventy- 
 fours" which had been authorized by Adams's Congress and 
 selling off all the warships but thirteen. The remnant of our 
 navy Jefferson would have laid up in the eastern branch of 
 
210 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the Potomac, where they could be looked after "by one set of 
 plunderers." But the administration was only a few weeks old 
 when the bashaw of Tripoli declared war on the American 
 republic. It was the culmination of a sordid business in the 
 Mediterranean which had disgraced our government since the 
 days of the Confederation. The rulers of the Barbary States 
 of the northern African coast Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, arid 
 Tripoli had long been in the habit of seizing the ships of 
 Christian nations in the Mediterranean and holding the crews 
 for heavy ransom. It was a more convenient way of raising 
 revenue than the precarious dependence on a corrupt tax- 
 gatherer, and it had the further advantage of harrying the 
 enemies of Allah. The European nations, even including Eng- 
 land, the mistress of the seas, paid tribute to these Moham- 
 medan pirates as a cheap substitute for war. Jefferson, in the 
 days of his mission to Paris (1785-1789), had tried to induce 
 the governments of Europe to create a joint naval force to 
 police the Mediterranean, and again as Secretary of State he 
 had advocated punishing the pirates. But our government fol- 
 lowed the example of Europe and sent presents and tribute to 
 the deys and bashaws to buy our right to travel on the high 
 seas. Under Washington and Adams the tribute we paid to 
 the Mediterranean pirates amounted to $2,000,000. But when 
 the dey of Algiers compelled the very vessel which was bring- 
 ing him tribute (her name was the George Washington \ ) to 
 raise the Algerian flag at her masthead and sail on an errand 
 to the Sultan of Turkey, and the bashaw of Tripoli, unsatisfied 
 with his meager $80,000 of tribute money, declared war on the 
 United States, our patience was exhausted. 
 
 Jefferson sent successive squadrons under Commodores Dale, 
 Morris, Preble, and Barron to chastise the Barbary corsairs. 
 Devoted as he was to peace and economy, he had always 
 advocated a naval force in the Mediterranean as both the most 
 humane and the cheapest way of dealing with the pirates, 
 writing in 1802 that " preserving an erect and independent 
 attitude" was even more important than peace. Gallatin hated 
 to spare the money for the naval war, but' the imposition of 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 211 
 
 a 2^ per cent import duty to create a special "Mediterranean 
 fund" relieved the Treasury and emphasized the temporary 
 character of the expense. Our sailors in the Mediterranean 
 added fresh laurels to the fame of the American navy. No deed 
 of John Paul Jones in the American Revolution was more 
 glorious or daring than the exploit of Lieutenant Stephen 
 Decatur, who with a few men ran into the harbor of Tripoli 
 in the night of February 16, 1804, boarded the frigate Phila- 
 delphia, which had fallen into the hands of the corsairs, over- 
 powered her crew, set fire to her hull, and rowed back to his 
 ship in the light of the conflagration and of a murderous fire 
 from the Tripolitan batteries. The Barbary wars lasted through 
 the first administration of Jefferson. But when our government 
 finally made peace with Tripoli, on January 3, 1805, "on more 
 honorable terms," as Preble said, "than any other nation had 
 ever been able to command," the sacrifices which we had made 
 appeared fully justified. We had not only vindicated the right 
 of our vessels to sail the high seas without molestation, but 
 incidentally we had rendered the maritime nations of Europe a 
 service which they ought long before to have performed for 
 themselves, in clearing the pirates out of the Mediterranean. 
 While these things were going on abroad the Republicans at 
 home were delivering an assault on what they called "the 
 stronghold of Federalism," namely, the judiciary. A number of 
 federal judges were impeached in Pennsylvania. John Picker- 
 ing, a judge of a federal district court in New Hampshire, was 
 condemned and removed by the Senate on charges of gross 
 misconduct, although it was shown that he. was suffering from 
 insanity and thus not responsible for his behavior. He should 
 have been quietly dismissed. On the same day that Pickering 
 was condemned the House brought impeachment charges 
 against Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court. Chase 
 was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a hero of 
 the Revolution. He had been appointed to the Supreme Court 
 by Washington in 1796. He was an ardent Federalist and had 
 presided with more zeal than prudence over the cases of Re- 
 publican editors prosecuted under the Sedition law. He was 
 
212 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 even guilty of having turned his charges to juries into intem- 
 perate political harangues against Republicanism as the gov- 
 ernment of the mob, which would soon bring ruin upon our 
 institutions. These were grave lapses from dignity in a judge 
 of the Supreme Court, but they could hardly be classed with 
 "high crimes and misdemeanors" (like treason or corruption) 
 which the Constitution declares a basis for the impeachment 
 of federal officers. After an exciting trial, in which John 
 Randolph outdid himself in violence and vituperation to secure 
 the condemnation which President Jefferson desired as much as 
 he, the Senate acquitted Chase, on March i, 1805, and impeach- 
 ment of judges for political reasons came to an end. 
 
 However, it was not for its political reforms or financial 
 economies, not for the victory over the pirates or the contests 
 with Federalists at home, that Jefferson's first administration 
 was chiefly distinguished, but for its extension of our national 
 domain. Jefferson was an expansionist. His interest in the 
 country west of the Alleghenies, and even in the great wilder- 
 ness beyond the Mississippi, was constant from the earliest 
 days of the republic. It was he who had drafted the Ordinance 
 of 1784 for the government of the Western territory, and by 
 the adoption of many of his ideas three years later in the famous 
 Northwest Ordinance, had set the impress of his genius on a 
 policy of territorial government which was to endure for a 
 century. When he was on the Paris mission (1785-1789) he 
 had encouraged a New England traveler named Ledyard to 
 cross Siberia and the Pacific and return to the United States 
 through the vast unexplored territory of the Spaniards to the 
 west of the Mississippi. When the Nootka Sound controversy 
 arose between England and Spain in 1790 (see page 169) he 
 showed himself the most anxious member of Washington's 
 cabinet for the safeguarding of our interests in the West. He 
 regarded the English settlements on the Atlantic coast as "the 
 nest from which America north and south was to be peopled" 
 and foresaw a republic of a hundred million in the great western 
 continent. He had not been in the presidency ten weeks before 
 news came from our minister in London, Rufus King, of a 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 213 
 
 transaction in Europe that was destined to have an incalculable 
 influence on our history. Napoleon Bonaparte, on the day after 
 he had concluded the convention of peace with the United 
 States (see page 183), had compelled the king of Spain to sign 
 the treaty of San Ildefonso ceding to him the entire province 
 of Louisiana (October i, 1800). " Spain is ceding Louisiana 
 to France/' wrote Jefferson to Robert Livingston at Paris, "an 
 inauspicious circumstance to us." 
 
 The circumstance was inauspicious for several reasons. It 
 meant the establishment of the strongest and richest of the 
 European countries as a colonial power on our borders, and 
 perhaps in control of the Gulf of Mexico and the islands com- 
 manding its entrance. It meant the substitution of the restless 
 and unpredictable ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte in the 
 Western Hemisphere for the supine and dilatory policy of the 
 court of Spain. It meant the control of the Mississippi, through 
 the possession of New Orleans, by a power no more friendly 
 than Spain to the United States, but infinitely more able to 
 paralyze our commerce on the great river. Since the few thou- 
 sands of pioneers had followed Boone, Sevier, Harrod, and 
 Robertson across the mountains in the days of the Confeder- 
 ation, our Western settlements had grown apace. The opening 
 of the nineteenth century saw some 50,000 farmers established 
 in the rich bottom lands along the Ohio River and its northern 
 tributaries. A hundred thousand immigrants had beaten the 
 buffalo paths and Indian trails of Tennessee into pack roads 
 and begun clearing the hickory and sycamore forests for their 
 corn and tobacco, their hogs and cattle. Over 200,000 had 
 gone into Kentucky. The outlet for the increasing products 
 of all this "back country" was the great river. "The Missis- 
 sippi is everything to them," wrote Madison in 1802 ; "it is 
 the Hudson, the Potomac, the Delaware, and all the navigable 
 rivers of the Atlantic coast formed into one." After a dozen 
 years of tedious negotiation with the Spanish court we had, in 
 1795, obtained a treaty giving us the right of deposit and 
 transshipment at New Orleans. The customhouse books of 
 1802 showed exports from the port of New Orleans of over 
 
214 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 $3,000,000 of sugar, $1,000,000 of cotton, 200,000 Ib. of 
 tobacco, nearly 10,000 bbl. of flour, besides large amounts 
 of cordage, cider, apples, bacon, pork, and lead. Most of the 
 articles, except the sugar and cotton, came from the settle- 
 ments up the river, Kentucky and Tennessee alone sending over 
 $1,600,000 of produce through the port. Out of 267 vessels 
 clearing from New Orleans in the year 1802 there were 158 
 American as against 104 Spanish. Seagoing ships had even 
 begun to be built at Pittsburgh and had successfully made 
 the trip from the upper Ohio to Liverpool. The attachment of 
 the Western states to the Union depended on the guarantee 
 of their commerce, and this guarantee depended on the control 
 of the Mississippi. If the river was not in our hands, at least 
 it must be in the hands of a power with whom we could deal 
 on equal terms. Jefferson recognized this when he declared 
 that New Orleans was the one point on the American continent 
 whose possession was of vital importance to the United States 
 and wrote to our minister in Paris that the moment France 
 should take possession of the port "we must marry ourselves 
 to the British fleet and nation." 
 
 While we were anxiously awaiting developments in Louisiana, 
 and Napoleon, now firmly fixed on the throne of France and 
 for the first and only moment of his meteoric career at peace 
 with all the nations of Europe, was preparing to launch his 
 colonial enterprise in earnest, an event occurred which made 
 decided action on our part necessary. On October 16, 1802, 
 acting on orders from Madrid, Morales, the Spanish intendant 
 at New Orleans, withdrew the right of deposit granted in the 
 treaty of 1795 and thus closed the Mississippi to a trade that 
 already amounted to 40 per cent of our exports. Whether or 
 not this hostile decree was promulgated at the behest of Napo- 
 leon, coming as it did on the eve of his preparation to take 
 possession of Louisiana, it was a sinister evidence of the amount 
 of consideration that our river trade might expect from the 
 despot of France. It was clear that we must make every effort 
 to get possession of the island of New Orleans. Jefferson asked 
 Congress for $2,000,000 to be used at the discretion of the 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 215 
 
 executive for negotiations with Napoleon. He nominated James 
 Monroe as envoy extraordinary to act with our ministers, 
 Robert R. Livingston at Paris and Charles Pinckney at Madrid, 
 in securing the interests of the United States in Louisiana. 1 
 Monroe's instructions were vague, hardly more than an expres- 
 sion of unlimited confidence in his discretion; but in letters 
 both to him and to Livingston Jefferson emphasized the tre- 
 mendous importance of the mission: "The future destinies of 
 our country hang upon the event of this negotiation," he 
 wrote. Monroe sailed for France in the middle of January, 
 1803, while the Federalists in Congress were trying to embar- 
 rass Jefferson and outbid the administration in popularity with 
 the Western settlers by advocating the immediate seizure of 
 Louisiana by force. 
 
 But relief in the tense situation came neither from Living- 
 ston's entreaties nor from Monroe's inducements, but from 
 Napoleon himself. The peace of Amiens with England was 
 wearing thin. The destiny of the First Consul was war and 
 not peace. "My fate is to be ever in arms," he said to the 
 Austrian minister Metternich. The prospect of building a dis- 
 tant colonial empire suddenly lost its charms. The advance 
 guard of 12,000 soldiers whom he had sent under his brother- 
 in-law, General Leclerc, for the conquest of Santo Domingo 
 had succumbed to the attack of Toussaint L'Ouverture's ne- 
 groes and to the deadlier attack of the yellow fever. Napo- 
 leon abandoned the Louisiana project as abruptly as he had 
 conceived it. On the very day that Monroe landed at Havre 
 the First Consul ordered his minister of finance, Barbe-Marbois, 
 to offer Livingston not New Orleans alone but the entire prov- 
 ince of Louisiana for 50,000,000 francs. Livingston, who had 
 been trying in vain to persuade Napoleon to sell a part of 
 
 1 Even Jefferson was cured of any idea of French sympathy for us when 
 Napoleon, in the summer of 1802, assumed the robe of monarchy under the title 
 of Consul for life and began to abolish all signs of republicanism. Jefferson 
 wrote to Livingston in October, "We stand completely corrected of the error 
 that either the government or the nation of France has any remains of friend- 
 ship for us." 
 
216 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Louisiana, was dumfounded by this offer of the whole. 1 He 
 and Monroe discussed the matter with Marbois (who set the 
 price at 100,000,000 francs instead of 50,000,000 as he had 
 been ordered), and after some haggling they agreed on the 
 figure of 60,000,000, together with the assumption of claims 
 by the United States to an amount not exceeding 20,000,000 
 francs, making the total price 80,000,000 francs, or some 
 $14,500,000. The three negotiators set their names to the 
 treaty on May 2, i8o3, 2 and as they rose to shake hands Living- 
 ston remarked: "We have lived long, but this is the noblest 
 work of our whole lives. From this day the United States take 
 their place among the powers of the first rank." 
 
 When the Louisiana treaty reached Washington in mid- 
 summer, it was Jefferson's turn to be surprised. He had sent 
 Monroe to purchase New Orleans, with West Florida if pos- 
 sible, for not more than $10,000,000. Now came a bill half 
 again as large for the whole of Louisiana a tract which 
 doubled the area of the United States. There was no doubt 
 that it was an excellent bargain ; but aside from the charge im- 
 posed on the government (a charge exceeding our total annual 
 revenue), there were points in the treaty to give an advocate 
 of strict construction much uneasiness. There was no provi- 
 sion of the Constitution authorizing the executive to purchase 
 foreign territory and to covenant that the inhabitants of such 
 territory should be brought into the Union and admitted to 
 the enjoyment of all the rights of American citizens. Jefferson 
 himself was the first to admit that he had "done an act beyond 
 the Constitution." He prepared an amendment to submit to 
 
 a The astute Talleyrand, who for some reason had not been intrusted by 
 Napoleon with the negotiations for the sale of Louisiana, nevertheless knew of 
 the First Consul's intention and in a private capacity anticipated Marbois in 
 asking Livingston (before Monroe's arrival in Paris) how much the United 
 States would give for the whole of Louisiana. Jefferson apparently had little 
 hope that Napoleon would part with any of Louisiana. It is a queer coinci- 
 dence that on the very day on which the treaty of cession was dated (April 30, 
 1803) he wrote to John Bacon that he was "not sanguine in obtaining a cession 
 of New Orleans for money." 
 
 2 The treaty was dated back to April 30, 1803. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 217 
 
 Congress, so that the states might ratify the purchase through 
 their legislatures or conventions. But before the meeting of 
 Congress, Monroe advised him from Paris that Napoleon might 
 change his mind if there were any delay in the ratification of 
 the treaty and the appropriation of the purchase money by 
 Congress. So, comforted by the assurances of his friend 
 Nicholas that the treaty-making power of the executive and 
 the Senate was unlimited and that new states could be admitted 
 out of newly acquired territory as well as out of the existing 
 territory of the United States, Jefferson cast the proposed 
 amendment behind him, asking Congress at the same time to 
 cast "metaphysical subtleties" behind them and to support 
 him in his actiqn as they would support a guardian who had 
 acted beyond his authority for the good of his ward. The 
 author of the Kentucky Resolutions appealed to the good sense 
 of the nation, and the nation was with him. The Federalist 
 minority in Congress objected to the treaty from every point 
 of view : it contravened the Constitution by giving the port of 
 New Orleans advantages not shared by other ports of the 
 country ; it usurped the power of Congress by regulating trade ; 
 ' the payment of so large a sum of money to a belligerent nation 
 was virtually a breach of neutrality ; the title of France to the 
 province of Louisiana was not clear ; and all that we had bought 
 at this huge price was "the authority to make war on Spain." 
 But opposition was unavailing. The Senate immediately rati- 
 fied the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7, and a few weeks later the 
 House voted the funds in the form of an issue of $11,250,000 
 in 6 per cent stock (89 to 23). There was no doubt of the 
 popularity of the Louisiana Purchase. 
 
 There were grave irregularities in the transaction. Napoleon 
 had not yet fulfilled his part of the Treaty of San Ildefonso 
 with Spain when he sold us Louisiana, and the Spanish authori- 
 ties were still in command at New Orleans. Moreover, Napoleon 
 had promised Spain never to transfer the province to a foreign 
 power, and the French Constitution forbade the First Consul 
 to alienate any of the land of the Republic. In short, in buying 
 Louisiana from Napoleon we were, as Professor Channing says, 
 
 
2i8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 acting as "the accomplices of the greatest highwayman of the 
 age." But we took the ground that the delinquencies of France 
 toward Spain could not invalidate the good faith of our dealing 
 with France; and Spain, after a first violent protest, acqui- 
 esced in the transaction with her own interpretation of the 
 boundaries of Louisiana. 
 
 These boundaries, even in the limited form finally fixed by 
 the treaty of 1819 with Spain, inclosed a magnificent domain 
 extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and 
 from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Fourteen states or parts 
 of states have been made from that domain, in which the value 
 of the farm lands alone a century after the purchase was more 
 than a thousand times as great as the price paid for the whole 
 province. The white inhabitants of this domain increased from 
 50,000 in 1804 to 20,000,000 in 1914. In abundance and 
 variety of products it is the richest developed area in the world. 
 And the original cost of its 875,000 square miles was about 
 three cents an acre! 1 On November 30, 1803, Louisiana was 
 finally handed over to the French intendant Laussat by the 
 Spanish authorities at New Orleans, and twenty days later the 
 French tricolor was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes 
 were raised in its place. 
 
 If the Constitution was strained in the purchase of Louisiana, 
 the Declaration of Independence was violated in its govern- 
 ment. By a law of March 26, 1804, Congress separated the 
 more densely populated part of the province, south of latitude 
 33, as the territory of Orleans and handed over its admin- 
 istration completely to President Jefferson. He was to appoint 
 the governor, the legislative council, and the judges. He simply 
 
 *It is interesting to compare this with the price paid for other portions of 
 our public domain. The Mexican cession cost 4^ cents an acre and Florida 
 17 cents an acre both in addition to the expense of wars. We paid Texas 
 26 cents an acre for the land surrendered to the United States in 1850, and 
 three years later we gave Mexico 34 cents an acre for the Gadsden Purchase. 
 Altogether, the average cost of our public lands (including surveys and the 
 extinction of Indian titles) has been 17^ cents an acre, and we have sold them 
 (exclusive of millions of acres given to railroads, educational institutions, and 
 homesteaders) at prices ranging from 66| cents to $5 an acre. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 219 
 
 "stepped into the place of King Charles of Spain" as the 
 absolute ruler of the province? Such principles as government 
 by the consent of the governed, popular control over officials, 
 trial by jury, no taxation without representation, were ignored. 
 Edward Livingston, a younger brother of the minister at Paris, 
 had moved to the province immediately after the purchase, to 
 engage in the practice of law. He wrote a petition for the 
 "planters, merchants, and other inhabitants of Louisiana," 
 protesting against the law of March 26, and demanding "the 
 rights and privileges of American citizens" promised in the 
 treaty. "Were the patriots who composed your councils [in 
 the days of the Revolution] mistaken in their political prin- 
 ciples?" he pertinently asks. "Do political axioms on the 
 Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the 
 Mississippi ? . . . Many of us are native citizens of the United 
 States. . . . For our love of order and submission to the laws 
 we can confidently appeal to the whole history of our settle- 
 ment. . . . Annexed to your country by political events, it 
 depends on you to determine whether we shall pay the cold 
 homage of reluctant subjects or render the free allegiance of 
 citizens." Livingston's petition induced Congress to amend the 
 law by empowering the governor of the territory to convene a 
 legislative assembly of twenty-five members and allowing the 
 territory to send a delegate to Congress. It was not, however, 
 until the admission of the territory of Orleans into the Union 
 as the state of Louisiana in 1812 that its inhabitants received 
 the full rights and immunities of American citizens which had 
 been promised to them in the treaty. 
 
 The Louisiana Purchase gave rise to a boundary dispute 
 which was settled by the diplomatists in 1819, but which has not 
 yet ceased to be a subject for controversy among the historians. 
 We took Louisiana from France "with the same extent that it 
 now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France 
 possessed it, and such as it should be after the treaties subse- 
 quently entered into between Spain and the other states." But 
 this was anything but clear. "When France possessed it" (that 
 is, down to 1763) Louisiana included West Florida eastward 
 
220 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to the Perdido River, but all of Florida had been ceded to Eng- 
 land by the treaty of 1763 and had remained English for twenty 
 years. When Spain got it back, therefore, by the treaty of 
 1783, it was from England and not from France that she re- 
 ceived it. It hardly seems, therefore, that West Florida could 
 have been fairly comprised in the Louisiana "retroceded" by 
 Spain to France in 1800. Moreover, neither Napoleon who 
 sold, nor Monroe and Livingston who bought, Louisiana believed 
 that it included Florida. Napoleon was still trying in 1802 to 
 persuade King Charles IV to add the Floridas to the bargain of 
 San Ildefonso, and Monroe was on the point of starting for 
 Madrid after the purchase of 1803 to buy the Floridas from 
 Spain for an additional million or two, when the French court 
 dissuaded him. On the other hand, the French authorities 
 claimed that the whole of Texas was included in Louisiana. 
 General Victor, who was preparing to sail from Dunkirk in the 
 spring of 1803, was instructed to take possession as far west and 
 south as the Rio Grande, and Talleyrand wrote to the minister 
 of the marine that "the Rio Bravo [Rio Grande] from its mouth 
 to the 3oth degree" was the "line of demarkation." Laussat, the 
 French intendant at New Orleans, wrote explicitly to Madison 
 that Louisiana "did not comprehend any part of West Florida," 
 but that it extended "westwardly to the Rio Bravo, otherwise 
 called the Rio del Norte." In spite of all this testimony, Jef- 
 ferson was bound to have West Florida. He persuaded himself 
 by researches in the history of Louisiana during the summer of 
 1803 at Monticello that West Florida was rightly ours, and the 
 next year he got Congress, in spite of angry protests from the 
 Spanish minister at Washington, to erect the shores and waters 
 of Mobile Bay into a United States customs district. To the 
 end of his administration he was laboring with Napoleon to 
 bring pressure to bear on Spain to recognize the "rightful 
 boundaries" of Louisiana. 
 
 Besides doubling the area of our country by an immensely 
 valuable domain and giving rise to many important political 
 and diplomatic questions, the Louisiana Purchase had the 
 further effect of stimulating our interest in the great Western 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 221 
 
 wilderness which stretched two thousand miles from the Mis- 
 sissippi to the Pacific coast. Jefferson was, as we have seen, an 
 enthusiastic advocate of expansion. In 1783 he had suggested 
 to George Rogers Clark, the hero of Vincennes, that he form a 
 party "to explore the country from the Mississippi to Califor- 
 nia." Now, twenty years later, he asked Congress for an appro- 
 priation of $2500 "to send intelligent officers with ten or twelve 
 men to explore even to the western ocean" and to study the 
 Indian tribes, the botany, geology, and zoology of the country. 
 To be sure, the expedition would pass through territory belong- 
 ing to the king of Spain, but it might be represented as "a 
 literary pursuit" ( ! ) and would- give no offense on account of 
 "the expiring state of the Spanish interests there." The appro- 
 priation was made, and Jefferson selected his private secretary, 
 Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition, with William Clark, 
 the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, for his lieutenant. 
 Before the expedition started, in the spring of 1804, from the 
 mouth of the Missouri River, Louisiana had become our prop- 
 erty ; but the land beyond the Rockies still belonged to Spain 
 up to the forty-second parallel of latitude, and north of that 
 was claimed by both England and the United States. The Lewis 
 and Clark expedition, as described in the diaries of several of 
 the men who participated in it, is one of the most fascinating 
 chapters of our early history. The company ascended the 
 Missouri River to its source, then, crossing the "great divide," 
 struck the upper waters of the Columbia River and reached the 
 "roaring ocean" in the summer of 1805. Wintering at the 
 mouth of the Columbia, they returned by practically the same 
 route as they had gone out, and reached St. Louis in September, 
 1806. The expedition established our best claim to the Oregon 
 region in our later dispute with England. 1 
 
 a Our earlier claim to the region was based on the discovery of the Columbia 
 River by Captain Gray in 1792. While Lewis and Clark were on their travels 
 Captain Zebulon Pike, seeking the sources of the Mississippi, explored to a point 
 several miles above the Falls of St. Anthony, when he was hindered by deep 
 snows. The following year he explored the Southwest from the Arkansas River 
 to the Spanish settlements on the Rio Grande, Pikes Peak in Colorado is 
 his monument. 
 
222 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Meanwhile Jefferson had been triumphantly reflected over 
 his Federalist opponent C. C. Pinckney. The irreconcilable 
 Federalists of New England, led by Pickering, Griswold, and 
 Sedgwick, were ready, in their opposition to the "lordlings of 
 the South," to break up the Union. The addition of Louisiana, 
 with the promise of incorporation into the Union, meant the 
 end of New England's aristocratic leadership in Congress 
 and eventual domination by the Southern planters, supported 
 by "creoles and half breeds" from the " western Scythia." Burr 
 was sounded with the purpose of bringing New York into 
 a projected Western confederacy, and the unprincipled Vice 
 President, whom Jefferson had refused to honor in the distribu- 
 tion of the patronage, joined the plot and accepted Federalist 
 support in his candidacy for the governorship of New York in 
 the spring of 1804. But Burr was defeated in 1804, as he had 
 been in 1801, by the efforts of Alexander Hamilton. Repub- 
 lican electors were chosen in every state of the Union except 
 Connecticut and Delaware, and the Jeffersonian policies were in- 
 dorsed by an electoral majority of 162 votes to 14. The only 
 result of the Federalist plot of disunion was the loss of their most 
 distinguished leader, Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr slew in 
 revenge in a duel on Weehawken Heights (July n, 1804). 
 
 The first administration of Thomas Jefferson was successful 
 in every respect. Our foreign commerce grew so rapidly that 
 Gallatin's estimates of customs receipts were far outstripped. 
 Except for what Jefferson called "bickerings with Spain," our 
 relations with foreign countries were satisfactory. The great 
 Louisiana bargain seemed to have cemented a lasting friend- 
 ship with France. The commissioners under the Jay Treaty 
 satisfied the British merchants by awarding them $2,664,000 
 in payment of the long-standing debts from American citizens. 
 The English government was so well pleased to see Napoleon's 
 colonial design defeated in the western continent that they 
 allowed Baring Brothers to advance cash on the Louisiana stock 
 voted by Congress. Our Western country was beginning to 
 fill up. Nearly 10,000 emigrants had gone into the new Missis- 
 sippi Territory established in 1798. Ohio, with a population 
 
THE JEFFERSON! AN POLICIES 223 
 
 of 55,000, was admitted to the Union as the seventeenth 
 state in November, 1802. In January, 1805, the territory of 
 Michigan was set off from the Indian Territory. 
 
 By an act of March 10, 1800, Congress had established land 
 offices on the Ohio frontier for the sale of public lands in small 
 parcels to the emigrant at two dollars an acre with liberal 
 credit a sure sign that the small farmer was beginning to re- 
 place the hunter, the ranger, and the speculator on our frontier. 
 Emigrants already began to swarm on the main routes to the 
 Western country across the Massachusetts and Connecticut 
 Berkshires, up the Mohawk valley to the frontier trading-post at 
 Buffalo, through the Wyoming valley of Pennsylvania to Pitts- 
 burgh and thence down the Ohio, from Baltimore via the 
 Potomac and Braddock's road to the Monongahela, from Vir- 
 ginia and the Carolinas through the Cumberland Gap to the 
 rich lands of Kentucky and Tennessee, or far to the south, past 
 the dwindling hills of the Appalachian range, into the fertile 
 territory finally ceded to the government by the state of Georgia 
 in 1802. Although we had little as yet to boast of in arts and 
 letters, the democratic revolution was preparing the stage for 
 a distinctly American type of genius as compared with the 
 Anglo-American of the colonial days. Newspapers were multi- 
 plying rapidly, and, although our people were still so interested 
 in politics and so vociferous in their discussions that Salmagundi 
 called the government of the United States "a logocracy," still 
 the scurrility that disgraced our press in the days of Washington 
 and Adams had largely disappeared. The New York Evening 
 Post and the National Intelligencer of Washington were most 
 respectable substitutes for Freneau's and Fenno's Gazettes. 
 Peace, prosperity, political harmony, and unbounded prospects 
 of expansion in wealth and numbers were the happy auguries 
 for our country when Jefferson took the oath of office for the 
 second time, on March 4, 1805. He could trul Y congratulate his 
 fellow countrymen that "not a cloud appeared on the horizon." 
 
224 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 THE STRUGGLE FOR NEUTRALITY 
 
 John Randolph of Roanoke, with his inimitable gift for 
 epigram, once likened the four years of Jefferson's second 
 administration to the seven lean kine in Pharaoh's dream, which 
 rose from the river and devoured their seven fat predecessors. 
 The simile was apt. From the spring day of 1805 when Jefferson 
 delivered his second inaugural address congratulating the coun- 
 try and his party on the blessings of prosperity, troubles began 
 to brew : schism in the ranks of the Republicans, conspiracies in 
 the West, and the massing of new war clouds in Europe, which 
 spread their sinister shadow westward across the ocean until 
 they reached our shores. The President believed in 1805 that 
 the storms which marked his first accession to office were all 
 past. He wrote to General Heath in December in a strain of 
 rejoicing: "The new century opened itself by committing us 
 on a boisterous ocean, but all is now subsiding. Peace is 
 smoothing our path at home and abroad." Four years later 
 he left office, his cherished policy of peaceful coercion defeated, 
 his hold on Congress lost, his party disrupted, and his country 
 on the verge of war, comforting himself with the gloomy solace 
 that "it would rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire 
 from this station [the presidency] with the reputation and 
 favor which bring him into it." 
 
 Quarrels among the Republicans of New York and Pennsyl- 
 vania had begun to appear during Jefferson's first term. The 
 Livingston and Clinton factions were always in rivalry for the 
 control of local offices and policy ; and Vice President Burr had 
 become so far alienated from the administration, through having 
 been denied what he considered a proper share of the patronage, 
 that he had lent himself, as we have seen, to the disunion schemes 
 of the New England Federalists. A veritable epidemic of im- 
 peachment of state judges in Pennsylvania, spread by the perse- 
 cuting zeal of William Duane of the Aurora, threw the great 
 Republican state of the North into a frenzy .of factional strife 
 which Jefferson tried in vain to allay. These local quarrels 
 proved but the prelude to schism and intrigue in the national 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 225 
 
 Congress, which shattered the harmonious relations between 
 the Executive and the Houses and reduced the latter to pitiable 
 weakness at just the moment when union and strength were nec- 
 essary to meet the encroachments of the European belligerents 
 on our commerce. 
 
 The man who introduced strife into Congress was John 
 Randolph. This highly gifted, but contentious and abusive, 
 son of Virginia, who boasted that the blood of Pocahontas ran 
 in his veins, had been displeased from the beginning of Jeffer- 
 son's administration with the consideration shown to the North- 
 ern states. Conciliation was no part of his political creed. The 
 Republicans, he thought, should conduct the government with 
 as complete regard to the interests of the agricultural South 
 as the Federalists had for the commercial North. There were 
 enough able men from Virginia and the Carolinas to advise 
 the President without his needing to have recourse to the 
 Lincolns and Dearborns and Crowninshields of Massachusetts. 
 Randolph conducted the prosecution in the impeachment of 
 Justice Chase at Jefferson's express request, and when Chase 
 was acquitted by a Senate in which sat 34 Republicans and 
 only 10 Federalists, it was proof enough to Randolph that he 
 had been left in the lurch by the administration. He was 
 through serving Thomas Jefferson. 
 
 Randolph's opportunity for revenge came with the opening 
 of Congress in December, 1805. Jefferson had two or three 
 political "hobbies" on which he insisted, in spite of opposition 
 from foes and advice from friends, with a persistence that was 
 strange in a man generally so shrewd in political compromise 
 and patient in the handling of expedients. One of those hobbies 
 was the acquisition of West Florida. He had committed himself 
 to the doctrine that the Perdido River was the eastern boundary 
 of the Louisiana Purchase, and for this he labored against the 
 flat refusal of Spain to surrender West Florida and the cynical 
 indifference of Napoleon to his entreaties to make Spain sur- 
 render it. There were matters of far more importance to the 
 United States than the possession of a few square miles between 
 the Iberville and the Perdido, yet Jefferson seemed even ready 
 
226 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to go to war with Spain over this territory. In his message of 
 December 2, 1805, he recommended the better defense of our 
 seaports, the reorganization of our militia, the preparation of 
 our troops on the Mississippi to resist Spanish " aggressions," 
 and even hinted at the desirability of building ships of the line. 
 Three days later he sent a confidential message to Congress, 
 suggesting an appropriation for the purchase of Florida. The 
 public message was intended for popular consumption at home 
 and abroad to exhibit the executive as a strong defender of 
 American rights and to frighten Spain to part with her province. 
 The secret message contained the real plan for getting West 
 Florida. Jefferson had worked this same ruse three years earlier 
 when, under the threat of " marrying ourselves to the British 
 fleet and nation," he had secured Louisiana from France for a 
 price. But the astute President overlooked some very important 
 differences in the two situations. We got Louisiana for money 
 in 1803 not because we either bullied or bribed Napoleon, but 
 simply because Napoleon himself suddenly determined to sell 
 Louisiana. The real offer came from him and not from us. But 
 in 1805 King Charles had no desire to sell West Florida, and 
 Napoleon had no disposition to compel him to do so. In fact, 
 on the very day that Jefferson sent his menacing message to 
 Congress, Napoleon won the tremendous victory of Austerlitz 
 against the combined armies of Austria and Russia and entered 
 on that course of conquest of the continent of Europe which 
 left him little interest in the disposal of a strip of land along the 
 Gulf of Mexico. From the year 1806 on, while Jefferson and 
 Madison were still flattering themselves that they could bring 
 " pressure" to bear on Napoleon by diplomacy or the threat of 
 commercial discrimination to secure us the " rightful bound- 
 aries" of Louisiana, Napoleon was only using Florida as a bait 
 to dangle before our eyes in order to keep us from looking too 
 favorably on his great rival England. 
 
 Randolph had been a party to the game of threat-and-purchase 
 in 1803, DUt n w he threw himself into violent opposition. 
 He was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. When 
 Jefferson's request for $2,000,000 to buy Florida was read to 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 227 
 
 the House, he declared that he would have no part in delivering 
 the public purse "to the first cutthroat who demanded it." The 
 inconsistency of appropriating money to buy a province which 
 we insisted that we had bought three years before furnished a 
 fine topic for his sarcasm. Although he had no more intention 
 of proceeding to war than Jefferson, he adopted the belligerent 
 tone of the first message and moved that troops should be raised 
 to protect our southern frontier. Jefferson had to choose be- 
 tween the rupture of his party in Congress and the abandon- 
 ment of his plan to purchase West Florida. He clung to his 
 hobby and got his $2 ,000,000. But the vote in the House, which 
 was composed of 1 1 2 Republicans and 2 7 Federalists, showed a 
 majority of only 22 for the bill, and the $2,000,000 remained 
 still untouched when Jefferson went out of office. Randolph's 
 faction called the " Quids" was not numerous. The Presi- 
 dent affected to ignore them, once calling them "3 or 4. in 
 number and all tongue" ; but, for all that, their brilliant leader 
 was a thorn in the side of the administration. The habit of 
 opposition grows by what it feeds on. It was enough hence- 
 forth for any measure to have the support of Thomas Jefferson 
 to insure its opposition by John Randolph. 
 
 Randolph had his hobby, too. The word " Yazoo" threw him 
 into a rage like King Henry's when he heard the name of 
 Mortimer. The state of Georgia claimed the land west to the 
 Mississippi River under its colonial charter. In 1795 the legis- 
 lature of Georgia sold 50,000,000 acres near the Mississippi and 
 Yazoo Rivers to the Yazoo land companies at an average price 
 of one and one-half cents an acre. It was a corrupt transaction 
 by a corrupt legislature most of whose members were in the 
 deal. The people of the state indignantly turned the legislature 
 out at the next election, and the bills of sale to the Yazoo com- 
 panies were rescinded. There was no provision made, how- 
 ever, for the innocent purchasers of land from the companies. 
 Both Adams and Jefferson were petitioned to secure redress 
 from the state of Georgia, but nothing was done until 1802, when 
 the state surrendered to the Union its Western claims. Then 
 the United States inherited the Yazoo controversy. Jefferson 
 
228 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 appointed three of his cabinet members Madison, Gallatin, 
 and Lincoln to devise an adjustment, and they recommended 
 the appropriation of 5,000,000 acres of public land in the terri- 
 tory of Mississippi to satisfy the bona fide claims of the pur- 
 chasers from the Yazoo companies. Randolph opposed the 
 measure with frantic violence every time that it came up in the 
 House. There was no epithet in his choice vocabulary of slander 
 that was too severe for a "Yazoo man." The innocent and the 
 guilty were condemned together. A blameless purchaser in 
 Pennsylvania or New England was an accomplice of the Yazoo 
 speculator. Year after year Randolph killed the bills for the 
 relief of Yazoo buyers, even after the Supreme Court, in 
 the decision of Fletcher vs. Peck (1810), had pronounced the 
 Georgia repealing act a violation of contract and hence null 
 and void. It was only when Randolph failed to be returned 
 from his congressional district in the election of I8I2 1 that the 
 settlement of the Yazoo claims was finally pushed through 
 Congress. 
 
 Another figure of ill omen for Jefferson's second term ap- 
 peared in the scene of March i, 1805, in the Senate chamber. 
 When the vote was announced clearing Justice Chase of the 
 impeachment charges, Aaron Burr rose from the president's 
 chair and with a smile and a bow conveyed his congratulations 
 to Jefferson's intended victim. Three days later Burr left the 
 vice presidency to engage on a career of treasonable adventure 
 which reads more like the romance of "Rupert of Hentzau" 
 than a chapter in the history of our infant West. Burr's politi- 
 cal ambition was great, and it was frustrated at every point. 
 Intrigues with the Federalists in 1801 and 1804 had ruined him 
 with the Republicans, and the slaying of the great Federalist 
 leader had made him an object of hatred not only to the follow- 
 ers of Hamilton but to all respectable Americans. He was a man 
 without a party and almost a man without a country. All that 
 
 a By a kind of "poetic justice" it was Jefferson's son-in-law, John Eppes, who 
 defeated Randolph in this election. The erratic Virginian was absent from Wash- 
 ington, however, for a single term only. He was returned to the House in the 
 election of 1814 and remained there fifteen years longer. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 229 
 
 remained to him was his restless spirit of selfish ambition. He 
 turned to the West to build up his fortunes anew: Just what he 
 intended to do in the Mississippi Valley we do not know, and it 
 is probable that Burr himself did not know. His plans shifted as 
 his prospects changed. Some historians believe that he plotted 
 the detachment of the trans-Allegheny country from the Union, 
 some that he aimed at the conquest of New Orleans as a capital 
 for a great Western state including Louisiana and Texas, some 
 that he dreamed of invading Spanish territory to the south and 
 setting up the empire of a new Montezuma in Mexico. How- 
 ever these grandiose schemes may have played through his 
 mind, one thing is certain: he collected men, money, and arms 
 beyond the mountains for use either against the United States 
 or against a friendly neighboring power. This was his treason. 
 Burr knew the dissatisfaction in Louisiana caused by the act 
 of Congress of 1804. He talked with the delegates who brought 
 Livingston's protesting petition to Washington in December 
 and was confirmed in his belief that Louisiana was ripe for 
 rebellion. In the summer of 1805 he approached the British 
 minister Anthony Merry with an appeal for $500,000 and a 
 supporting squadron in the Gulf of Mexico from England, in 
 return for which the parts of the new empire wrested from Spain 
 were to be opened to British trade. Failing to get a response 
 from England, he turned to Spain, representing to her minister 
 at Washington, d'Yrujo, the great advantage of creating a 
 strong state under friendly rule between Mexico and the hostile 
 republic of America. He got $10,000 out of d'Yrujo before 
 that gullible gentleman received word from Spain to have 
 nothing to do with his schemes. This threw Burr entirely on 
 such allies as he could find in the West, and by what must have 
 been rare powers of persuasion he enlisted the sympathy and 
 support of various persons the rich Irishman Blennerhassett 
 in his island "castle" on the Ohio; James Wilkinson, the 
 double-dyed traitor in command of the United States troops in 
 Louisiana; Andrew Jackson, major general of the militia of 
 Tennessee ; Daniel Clark, a wealthy merchant of New Orleans ; 
 and a number of less important persons. But there was too 
 
230 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 much talk and too little money for a successful conspiracy. 
 When Burr was finally ready to start down the Ohio from 
 Blennerhassett's island, in December, 1806, it was not as a 
 conqueror with an "army," as he had boasted, but as a fugitive 
 from justice with sixty or eighty followers hastily embarked in 
 a few boats. 
 
 For President Jefferson had at last heeded the rumors of 
 conspiracy which had been coming to him for over a year, and 
 on November 27, 1806, issued a proclamation for the arrest 
 of "sundry persons" who were "conspiring to set on foot 
 a military enterprise against the dominions of Spain." Burr 
 eluded the proclamation and kept on his way till he reached the 
 neighborhood of Natchez, on the lower Mississippi, where he 
 learned that Wilkinson had betrayed him. Giving up his case 
 as lost and sinking his arms in the river, he surrendered to the 
 governor of the territory of Mississippi ; then broke his parole 
 and, disguised as a woodman, struck across the territory for 
 the Spanish province of Florida. He was seized near Fort 
 Stodert (Alabama) and sent to Richmond for trial on the 
 charge of treason in levying war against the United States. 
 
 The eyes of the whole country were fixed on Richmond when 
 the trial commenced in August, 1807. Jefferson was eager for 
 Burr's condemnation. He wrote a dozen letters to George Hay, 
 the prosecuting attorney of the district of Virginia, spurring 
 him on to the assault. But the foes of Jefferson were in the 
 ascendant. Chief Justice Marshall presided as judge, and he 
 delegated as foreman of the jury another Virginian even more 
 hostile to the President; namely, John Randolph of Roanoke. 
 Marshall instructed the jury carefully as to what constituted 
 the "overt act" necessary to convict a person of treason, and 
 warned them against admitting "any testimony relative to the 
 conduct or the declarations of the prisoner elsewhere and 
 subsequent to the transactions on Blennerhassett's island," 
 which was equivalent to an instruction to bring in a verdict of 
 "not guilty." For there was no evidence to show that the men 
 collected on the island were there for the purpose of levying 
 war on the United States. The court summoned Jefferson to 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 231 
 
 appear as a witness, and when he indignantly refused to obey 
 the summons as inconsistent with the dignity of his office, the 
 lawyers for the defense proceeded to heckle his star witness, 
 General Wilkinson, until it seemed as though, instead of Aaron 
 Burr, he himself were on trial for treason. To Jefferson's great 
 humiliation and disgust the prisoner was discharged. The polit- 
 ical enemies of the administration had triumphed, and the re- 
 venge of John Randolph for the acquittal of Justice Chase was 
 complete. Freed from the halter which he richly deserved, Burr 
 made his way to France, where he soon gave further proof of 
 his treasonable nature ; 1 and a few years later he returned to 
 New York, where he lived in obscure indigence until his death 
 in 1836 at the age of eighty. 
 
 While the Burr trial was proceeding at Richmond, an event 
 - occurred off the Virginia coast which threw the country into a 
 state of excitement such as had not been experienced since the 
 shots were fired on Lexington Green. The United States frigate 
 Chesapeake, Captain Barron commanding, weighed anchor 
 from Norfolk in the early evening of June 22, bound for the 
 Mediterranean service. Her guns were still unmounted, and 
 her decks were littered with tackle. The British ship Leopard 
 overhauled her outside the capes and sent an officer aboard her 
 with orders from Admiral Berkeley, commanding the British 
 squadron in American waters, to come to and be searched for 
 British deserters in her crew. When Barron replied that he 
 had no deserters aboard, the Leopard came within close range 
 and poured a broadside of shot into the Chesapeake, killing or 
 wounding twenty-one men. Barron, unprepared to resist, struck 
 his colors after firing a single gun lighted by a coal brought 
 from the ship's galley. Then the British officers took four 
 alleged deserters off the American frigate and left her to crawl 
 
 a ln 1810, when Napoleon's insults to our shipping reached their climax in the 
 Rambouillet Decree, which confiscated all American vessels that had entered 
 French ports after May 20, 1809, Burr addressed a memoire to Napoleon's 
 minister of police, Fouche, declaring that "with 100,000 troops and a combined 
 attack from Canada and Louisiana, the destruction of the United States was 
 certain." 
 
232 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 back to Norfolk with her rigging torn and her hull riddled by 
 solid shot. To understand this wanton attack on an American 
 warship by a nation at peace with us, it is necessary to 
 review briefly the course of foreign affairs since Jefferson's 
 second inauguration. 
 
 Our relations with Great Britain during the decade following 
 Jay's Treaty were satisfactory, especially as the French revo- 
 lutionary wars died down with the close of the century. With 
 the advent of a general European peace in 1801 there was 
 promise that all our grievances would be adjusted. Rufus King, 
 our able minister in London, not only negotiated with the 
 friendly Addington ministry the settlement of the debts long 
 claimed by British merchants but also reported being well 
 on the way to the adjustment of our boundary disputes and even 
 of the vexed question of the impressment of American sailors 
 (1803). But Napoleon's aggressions in the neutral republics 
 of the Continent (Italy, Switzerland, Holland), whose inde- 
 pendence he had promised to respect, brought the rupture of 
 the Peace of Amiens and enkindled the war which was to last, 
 uninterrupted on the part of Great Britain, until the overthrow 
 of the upstart emperor of the French and his final exile to the 
 rock of St. Helena. The renewal of the war by England led to 
 the renewal of the depredations on our commerce and the de- 
 fiance of our rights as a neutral maritime power. Napoleon was 
 determined to starve England into submission, and England, 
 whose very existence depended on the control of the seas, was 
 equally determined to dictate the laws of maritime commerce 
 to the world. The severity of this struggle was the barometer 
 which marked the fortunes of the American marine. 
 
 At the very opening of Jefferson's second term came ominous 
 signs of the new policy of England toward neutrals. The ton- 
 nage of American vessels engaged in foreign trade had grown, 
 thanks to the constant disturbances in Europe, from 128,893 m 
 1789 to 922,298 in 1805. Our imports in the same period had 
 increased from $20,000,000 to $77,000,000, and our exports (a 
 large part of which consisted of imports from the West Indies 
 reexported to Europe) from $23,000,000 to $80,000,000. Nine 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 233 
 
 tenths of this extensive American commerce was carried on in 
 American ships. The English merchants viewed the enormous 
 expansion of the American carry ing- trade with jealous alarm 
 and brought pressure to bear on the ministry and Parliament to 
 check it. Acts of Parliament in 1804 and 1,805 opened ports 
 of the West Indies to enemy vessels carrying colonial cargoes, 
 and allowed even importation of colonial products from 
 the Spanish and French islands into England. In the mid- 
 summer of 1805 another severe blow was struck at the neu- 
 tral carrying-trade by the decision of Sir William Grant, Master 
 of the Rolls, in the Court of Appeals in Prize Cases, con- 
 demning the ship Essex, which had loaded with a cargo at 
 Barcelona, Spain, landed at Salem to pay duties, and then pro- 
 ceeded with its cargo to Havana, Cuba. Sir William maintained 
 that the landing and payment of duties in America did not 
 legalize the voyage, because the cargo was never intended for 
 American markets. The final destination of the cargo was the 
 only thing to be considered, and the Essex was clearly a neutral 
 ship carrying enemy goods to an enemy port. As half of our 
 export trade was carried on in these "broken voyages," now 
 declared illegal by the highest maritime court in the British 
 Empire, the dismay of the American merchants and shipowners 
 can be imagined. 1 British cruisers seized a large number of 
 American merchantmen as prizes, and the Admiralty Courts 
 
 1 Sir William's decision was all the harder to bear because in an earlier case, 
 that of the Polly (1801), Sir William Scott of the Admiralty Court had declared 
 that "landing the goods and paying duties in a neutral country broke the 
 continuity of the voyage and thus legalized the trade." But the case of the 
 Polly cannot be pleaded against the justice of the Essex decision ; nor is it 
 true, as practically every American historian has urged, that the British court 
 "reversed" itself in the Essex decision. For (i) the Court of Appeals was higher 
 than the Admiralty Court; (2) the Polly paid the duties in the American 
 port in good faith, while almost all the Essex's duties were refunded as draw- 
 backs; and (3) the Prize Court in 1802 condemned the Mercury for "attempting 
 to carry on a trade between Havana and Spain by way of Charleston." The 
 Americans were simply taking advantage of favorable circumstances to maintain 
 a trade which was contrary to the British Navigation Acts and to the. "Rule 
 of 1756," which forbade neutrals in time of war to trade with ports which 
 were closed to them in time of peace. 
 
234 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 condemned their cargoes. Insurance rates on American ships 
 jumped to high figures, and protests were loud in our commercial 
 centers against the arbitrary invasion of our neutral rights. 
 
 On October 21, 1805, Great Britain sealed her incontestable 
 authority over the control of the jea.-borne commerce of the 
 world by Lord Nelson's destruction of the combined fleets of 
 France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar. A few weeks later 
 (December 2) Napoleon won the mastery of the continent of 
 Europe by his victory over the allied armies of Austria and 
 Russia at Austerlitz. Henceforth it was a mighty duel between 
 "the tiger and the shark." Napoleon, without a fleet, still har- 
 assed British commerce by privateers and sought, by seizures 
 and confiscations in French and allied ports in Europe, to 
 frighten neutrals from trading with the British Isles. England, 
 mistress of the seas, prescribed the terms on which neutral com- 
 merce might be carried on, with the double purpose of enriching 
 the British merchants and monopolizing the colonial trade. 
 
 The first Congress of Jefferson's second term met on the 
 very day of Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz. So little did the 
 President divine the import of the events of the summer and 
 autumn of 1805 that he looked on the renewal of hostilities be- 
 tween England and France as a favorable omen for the United 
 States. Still harping on the acquisition of West Florida, he 
 thought that Napoleon's "embarrassment" with his continental 
 war made the fitting moment to bring pressure to bear on him to 
 force Spain to deliver the province (see page 220). Further- 
 more, he believed that our preeminent position as the great 
 neutral commerce-carrier of the world was so indispensable to 
 both Great Britain and France that by peaceful coercion we 
 could keep both the belligerents in the path of justice to America 
 simply by manifesting the most impartial justice to them. Our 
 merchants too, while not sharing the President's confidence in 
 the contagion of good intentions, still hoped that American trade 
 would not suffer materially through the restrictions of Napoleon 
 or Great Britain. They were indignant over the seizures made 
 under the Essex decision ; but, on the other hand, the risk of 
 seizure forced freight rates so high, and the price of American 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 235 
 
 and colonial products rose so rapidly, that the merchant made 
 a profit if only one in three of his swift vessels eluded the 
 British cruisers and landed her cargo safe in a European port. 
 Harking back to the policy of 1774, Jefferson's Congress at- 
 tempted to hold Great Britain to the path of justice by passing 
 a Nonintercourse Act in April ; 1806, excluding a number of 
 important articles of British manufacture from our -ports after 
 the fifteenth of the following November. The threat had no 
 effect on England's policy, every month that passed in the 
 intensifying struggle between Great Britain and Napoleon 
 showing more clearly that the rights of neutrals were swallowed 
 up in the voracious demand for victory. 
 
 A succession of Orders in Council of the English king and 
 Decrees of the Emperor Napoleon in the years 1806 and 1807 
 marked the course of the struggle. In April, 1806, just at the 
 moment when our Congress was passing the Nonintercourse 
 Act, the British prime minister, Charles James Fox, announced 
 a blockade of the coast, rivers, and ports of northern Europe 
 from the mouth of the Elbe River in Germany to the harbor of 
 Brest at the western extremity of Brittany a line of 750 miles. 
 Napoleon's opportunity for revenge came six months later, 
 when he crushed the German army at Jena and entered the 
 Prussian capital, Berlin. Thence he issued his famous Berlin 
 Decree (November 21, 1806) prohibiting all commerce and cor- 
 respondence with the British Isles, declaring every subject of 
 England found within the lands which his armies occupied a 
 prisoner of war, confiscating all property of English subjects in 
 these lands, and ordering the seizure of any vessels coming 
 from England or her colonies to the ports under his control. 
 This outrageous decree shows the bitterness of the struggle 
 between "-the tiger and the shark." England replied in 1807 
 (January 7 and November 1 1 ) with two Orders in Council for- 
 bidding coastwise trade between the ports in the power of 
 France or her allies, blockading all ports in Europe from which 
 the British flag was excluded, and forcing neutrals to trade with 
 Britain's enemies directly through British ports, paying duties on 
 certain "enumerated articles" (cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses, 
 
236 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 rice) which were brought to England for reexportation. Finally, 
 Napoleon answered by a Decree from Milan (December 17, 
 1807) declaring all ships that paid a tax to the British govern- 
 ment or allowed themselves to be searched by British cruisers 
 "denationalized" and "good prize." 
 
 These Orders and Decrees, if strictly enforced, would have 
 ruined our commerce with Europe, for they left only Russia, 
 Sweden, and Turkey open to our ships. Access to these countries 
 was controlled by Great Britain through the narrow ways of the 
 English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar. But the Orders and 
 Decrees could not in the nature of the case be strictly enforced. 
 The flags of all the maritime nations of the Continent had been 
 driven from the ocean, leaving America and England as virtu- 
 ally the only carriers of commerce. And not even the powerful 
 navy of Great Britain was able to keep our swift merchant 
 vessels from reaching the forbidden ports of the Continent, 
 where handsome profits awaited their successful docking. The 
 figures o! our foreign commerce for the year 1807, when 
 seizures and confiscations were most abundant, are sufficient 
 proof of this. Our exports for that year totaled $108,000,000 
 and our imports $138,000,000, being the largest volume of 
 foreign trade in our history until 1835. The customs revenue 
 from our trade in 1806 was $14,667,000, or three times that of 
 any year before 1800. The cargoes of American merchantmen 
 "filled the warehouses at Cadiz and Antwerp to overflowing; 
 they glutted the markets of Embden and Lisbon, of Hamburg 
 and Copenhagen, with the produce of the West Indies and the 
 fabrics of the East, and, bringing back the products of the looms 
 and forges of Germany to the new world, drove out the manu- 
 factures of Yorkshire, Manchester, and Birmingham." The 
 134 richly laden American vessels which Napoleon seized by 
 the Rambouillet Decree (May 23, 1810) show how little able 
 the European antagonists were to ruin our commerce by proc- 
 lamations. Indeed, had there been only true economic griev- 
 ance of the seizure of our ships and the confiscations of our 
 cargoes to exasperate us, we might well have continued to 
 protest and profit during the entire war. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 237 
 
 But political offenses accompanied the economic aggression. 
 The British merchants besieged Parliament to use every weapon 
 to put an end to the competition of our neutral commerce. 
 Having swept the navies of France and Spain from the seas, 
 the British could not allow those countries still to receive the 
 products of their colonies in American bottoms. The British 
 navy, hard pressed for men, saw their sailors deserting to the 
 decks of American merchantmen, drawn by the attractions 
 of higher pay, better food, and milder discipline. Adopting 
 the principle that commerce under a neutral flag was "war in 
 disguise," England redoubled her efforts to paralyze our ship- 
 ping. Her cruisers hovered off the coasts from Eastport to the 
 St. Marys River, often coming within the three-mile limit and 
 even within the capes that guarded our bays and rivers. They 
 stopped our vessels, searched our crews, and carried off hun- 
 dreds of seamen to serve on British men-of-war. It availed a 
 man nothing to show his easily procured certificate of Ameri- 
 can naturalization, for the British government did not recog- 
 nize the right of one of its citizens to transfer his allegiance 
 to another country. The British subjects in the American 
 colonies were naturally absolved from their allegiance to the 
 crown by the treaty of 1783, and those bona fide American 
 citizens the impressment officers were instructed to respect. 
 But the officers frequently erred, and naturally never in the 
 direction of mistaking a British subject for an American 
 citizen. Just how many American citizens were impressed be- 
 fore we went to war with Great Britain it is impossible to say. 
 But shortly before the outbreak of the war President Madison 
 laid before Congress a very detailed report on the subject, show- 
 ing 6057 cases of American seamen who had been " impressed 
 and held in bondage" during the three preceding years. 1 
 
 1 The sufferings of the impressed sailors appear in plaints which have come 
 down to us. A youth named Pindell, held on board the British ship Bellona, 
 writes to his father begging for release and saying that he would rather "drown 
 himself" than endure his present condition. A veteran of the Revolution, David 
 Rumsey, whose son was impressed on a British ship, wrote to the Speaker of 
 the House, "If this is all the liberty I have gained, to be bereaved of my 
 children in that form and they made slaves, I had rather be without it." 
 
238 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The first sinister effect on American politics of the renewed 
 struggle in Europe appeared at the close of the year 1 806. In the 
 summer of that year James Monroe and William Pinkney had 
 been negotiating with the friendly Whig ministry of Fox a 
 treaty to replace the Jay Treaty of 1795, which had expired. 
 Their instructions were to secure the abandonment of impress- 
 ment, reparation for captures made under the Essex ruling, and 
 a restoration of our West Indian trade to the status of 1801. 
 They had so far modified these instructions as to agree to a 
 treaty securing the reopening of the trade, when the news of 
 Napoleon's Berlin Decree reached London. Then the British 
 negotiators announced that their government would observe 
 the treaty only if the United States would pledge themselves to 
 resist the execution of the Decree. In other words, we were 
 offered a meager and mutilated treaty with Great Britain 
 virtually on the condition that we should provoke a war with 
 Napoleon. "How Monroe and Pinkney could have signed the 
 treaty after the communication of this note," says Channing, 
 "is one of the mysteries of American history: that his action 
 did not put an end to James Monroe's political career is equally 
 hard to understand." President Jefferson refused even to lay 
 the treaty before the Senate, when it arrived in March, 1807, 
 sending back word to the commissioners in London to enter on 
 fresh negotiations. 
 
 But long before this mild rebuke reached Monroe and Pink- 
 ney all hopes of better terms had vanished. In April, 1807, 
 the general elections returned a majority of 200 Tory squires 
 to Parliament. George Canning, brilliant, overbearing, sar- 
 castic, opinionated, and implacable, became the Secretary of 
 State for Foreign Affairs. The press of England soon took its 
 tone from the new government. America was denounced as 
 "an insignificant and puny power," which must not be allowed 
 "to mutilate Britain's proud sovereignty of the ocean." Britan- 
 nia ruled the waves, and there should be no neutrals! "From 
 the moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power," says 
 Henry Adams, "the fate of Mr. Jefferson's administration was 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 239 
 
 sealed. . . . England was determined to recover her commerce 
 and take back her seamen, and America had no alternative but 
 submission or war, . . . equally fatal to Mr. Jefferson's admin- 
 istration. Canning cared little which course she took, but he 
 believed she would submit." The cabinet was already planning 
 the Order in Council which was to close most of the ports of 
 Europe to American trade. 
 
 Such was the unpromising state of our relations with England 
 when the attack on the Chesapeake occurred, on the same day 
 that the new Tory Parliament met at Westminster. War seemed 
 inevitable. Even from New England, where there was always 
 the most ready disposition to put a favorable interpretation on 
 the acts of the British ministry, came threatening words. John 
 Quincy Adams believed that " Downing Street had decided on 
 hostilities." Jefferson issued a proclamation excluding British 
 warships from the waters of the United States, and began to 
 make arrangements for the disposition of gunboats to protect 
 our ports and to call out militia for the defense of the Canadian 
 border. He dispatched the armed schooner Revenge to England 
 with orders to Monroe to demand an apology and reparation for 
 the attack on the Chesapeake, and called Congress to meet on 
 October 26, when time had been given for passions to cool and 
 for a reply to be received from Canning. In his private corre- 
 spondence, which was often a vent for the strong feelings which 
 he hesitated to express in his public writings, the President 
 sounded a note of defiance against " English tyranny bearing 
 us down in every point of either honor or interest." He was 
 for war "unless England did us ample justice in the Chesa- 
 peake affair," trusting to the "chapter, of accidents" for what 
 Napoleon might do to us. His fellow Virginian Nicholson wrote 
 to Gallatin that forbearance now would be as degrading as 
 unqualified submission: "But one feeling pervades the nation. 
 All distinctions of Federalists and Republicans have vanished. 
 The people are ready to submit to any deprivation, and if we 
 withdraw within our own shell and turn loose some thousands of 
 privateers, we shall obtain in a little time an absolute renunci- 
 
240 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ation of the right of search for the purpose of impressment. 1 
 A parley will prove fatal. ... I trust in God that the Revenge 
 is going out to bring Monroe and Pinkney home." 
 
 Contrary winds kept westward-bound vessels in European 
 ports, and it was not until long after Congress had met and 
 listened to a rather belligerent message from the President that 
 news came from the other side. Then, toward the middle 
 of December, a fleet of ships landed in rapid succession at 
 New York, Norfolk, and Boston bringing a batch of ill news. 
 Canning, while ready to discuss the Chesapeake case, haughtily 
 refused to abate one jot or tittle of his contention as to the right 
 of impressment. Napoleon had begun to enforce the Berlin 
 Decree by seizing the American ship Horizon, driven on the 
 French coast in a voyage from England. A new British Order 
 in Council (November n, 1807) had practically closed the 
 European continent to our trade. And as an earnest of the way 
 in which Great Britain might treat weaker nations which should 
 show deference to the will of Napoleon, British warships had 
 laid Copenhagen in ruins and carried the whole Danish fleet 
 into an English port as a " hostage." The moment had come 
 to adopt a policy. Submission and war were equally distasteful 
 to Jefferson, and, fortified by his persistent belief that our com- 
 merce was indispensable to both belligerents, he recommended 
 that the United States bring them to terms by cutting off that 
 commerce altogether. Every member of his cabinet agreed with 
 him. On December 17, 1807, he sent a message to Congress 
 urging an embargo on all the foreign commerce of the United 
 States. The Senate immediately passed the bill by a vote of 
 22 to 6, and four days later the House concurred by a vote of 
 82 to 44. Most of the state legislatures too approved the em- 
 bargo. In January Congress appropriated $1,000,000 for the 
 defenses of ports and harbors; in March it empowered the 
 President to call on 100,000 militia to serve six months; in 
 
 a lt is interesting to note that this suggestion of withdrawing our merchant 
 marine from trade (the embargo policy) was made six months before Jefferson 
 actually set it in motion. The figure of "withdrawing within our own shell " fur- 
 nished the opponents of the embargo with the nickname of " the terrapin policy." 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 241 
 
 April it increased the regular army by 6000 men. Altogether 
 the military expenses reached about $4,000,000. 
 
 What the political and economic effects of the embargo would 
 have been if it had been strictly enforced we cannot say. That 
 it was not strictly enforced, in spite of supplementary acts ex- 
 tending the authority of the President to the control of practi- 
 cally all our coastwise and internal commerce by land and sea, 
 is proved by the figures of Gallatin's Treasury reports. Our 
 imports and exports, though falling far below the banner year 
 of 1807, still totaled $78,000,000 during the embargo year of 
 1808, and the receipts into our Treasury for the twelve months 
 ending September 30, 1808, were $10,000,000. Pinkney wrote 
 to Madison from London that England was feeling the effects 
 of the embargo, but that her people did not believe that we 
 were sufficiently " capable of persevering in self-denial" to 
 maintain the policy. How correct this opinion was is shown by 
 the rising spirit of protest in our country as the severe measures 
 for the enforcement of the embargo succeeded one another 
 without bringing the hoped-for concessions from Canning or 
 Napoleon. The ultra-Federalists of New England of course 
 made political capital of the embargo, which they represented as 
 a diabolical scheme of Jefferson and the " Virginia lordlings" to 
 ruin the prosperity of their section of the country. They rejoiced 
 at the embarrassments of the administration in trying to stop 
 the smuggling of beef, flour, pork, potash, and lumber across the 
 Canadian frontier. They kept their merchantmen abroad earn- 
 ing high freights in the European colonial and coasting trade 
 under British licenses. When the President resorted to force to 
 carry out the law, ordering Governor Tompkins of New York to 
 suppress the smuggling by the militia, they taunted him with the 
 practice of that executive tyranny which he had always professed 
 to abhor. Worst of all, they made open and boastful profession 
 of their attachment to England and their hatred for France. 
 Senator Pickering, still their chief, assured Canning's special 
 envoy, George Rose, that the embargo could not be enforced, 
 that it would soon ruin the party in power, and that the 
 Federalists, the friends of England, would soon be in the 
 
242 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 saddle again. Plans were on foot, as in 1804, for the separation 
 of New England from the " tyrannous" government of the 
 Southern states. 
 
 After a year's experiment with the embargo the farmers were 
 everywhere feeling the distress of falling prices, and the re- 
 solves of the town meetings were " shaking the ground" beneath 
 Jefferson's feet. It was evident that further insistence on 
 the policy would mean civil strife. Furthermore, England had 
 entered the Peninsular War, had freed Portugal from the 
 clutches of Napoleon, and, supporting the revolt of the Span- 
 iards against the emperor's insane tyranny, had opened to her 
 trade the rich markets of the Spanish colonies in America. 
 Jefferson yielded, reluctant and unconvinced, to the pressure 
 of circumstances. 1 On March i, 1809, the Embargo Act was 
 repealed, and in its place was substituted a Nonintercourse Act 
 with England and France. The President was authorized, in 
 case either Great Britain or France ceased to violate the neu- 
 tral commerce of the United States, to declare the same by a 
 proclamation, after which trade might be renewed with the 
 compliant nation. This was the beginning of the end of the 
 policy of " peaceful coercion." Three days later, smarting under 
 the first defeat at the hands of a Congress which he had 
 dominated for eight years as no other president in our history 
 has done, Jefferson resigned the reins of government to his 
 successor, James Madison, and retired to Monticello. 
 
 Jefferson has been rather severely handled by American 
 historians. In spite of their recognition of his invaluable serv- 
 ices for the cause of our independence, of his correct and vigor- 
 ous diplomatic conduct in the French mission and the office of 
 Secretary of State, of his magnificent courage in sweeping 
 away the political and ecclesiastical survivals in the law code of 
 Virginia, of his skill and constancy in the building of a truly 
 
 a year later he wrote to Henry Dearborn that the Federalists in Con- 
 gress became panic-stricken and defeated the only policy that could bring Eng- 
 land to terms: "They believed in the alternative of repeal or civil war, and 
 produced the fatal measure of repeal. This is the immediate parent of all our 
 present evils, and has reduced us to a low standing in the eyes of the world." 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 243 
 
 democratic party in the decade of Federalism, they still call 
 him "weak," "vacillating," "insincere," "tricky," and hold him 
 responsible for the unpreparedness of our country for the War 
 of 1812 and for the general low tone of our public adminis- 
 tration in the period from 1807 to the close of our second war 
 with England. This is not the place to enter into a detailed 
 defense of Thomas Jefferson's public policy. We may concede 
 that he had faults. He clung to hobbies (like the desire for 
 West Florida and the belief in gunboats) with an unfortunate 
 tenacity. He was often indirect in his methods and dangerously 
 near to duplicity in his words. He undoubtedly assumed a 
 "war posture" for the sake of coercion when he had no idea of 
 fighting. Yet he was in advance of his Congress in the matter 
 of national defense and preparedness. He constantly asked for 
 the increase of the militia, with improvements in its classifi- 
 cation and mobilization, for fortifications and seaport defenses, 
 which Congress refused to grant. 1 The embargo was not a 
 capricious invention of Jefferson's to escape from the dilemma 
 of war or submission, but a policy suggested by Cary Nicholson 
 (see page 240, note), approved by the entire cabinet, passed 
 by large majorities in both branches of Congress, and still 
 supported, a full year after its passage, by a vote of 64 to 49 in 
 the House. And as to a "spineless" foreign policy, it was Jef- 
 ferson's bitterest enemy, John Randolph, who moved in Con- 
 gress that it was "inexpedient to resort to war with Great 
 Britain" and ridiculed Madison's statement of the depredations 
 of that nation upon our commerce as "a shilling pamphlet 
 launched against 800 vessels of war." Whether we could have 
 avoided the War of 1812 if Jefferson had not been replaced in 
 the White House by the less forceful and less judicious Madison, 
 it is impossible to say. But at any rate it was fortunate that the 
 war did not come in 1807, when Napoleon was sweeping to the 
 climax of his career, but in 1812, when his power was already 
 breaking against the rock of Spanish and Russian resistance. 
 
 x ln a letter written October 16, 1814, he attributed the embarrassments of the 
 War of 1812 to the failure of Congress to adopt his recommendations. 
 
244 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 No one could have foreseen the sinister events of the year 
 1807, and the United States could not have been "prepared" 
 against them except by the utter abandonment of the policy 
 long adopted by all our political leaders. It is pathetic, in the 
 light of these events, to read Jefferson's message sent to Con- 
 gress in December, 1806, and Gallatin's report of a few months 
 later. Our debt had been reduced by $33,580,000, and would 
 be wiped out in the course of three years. Then handsome 
 surpluses would begin to accrue to the Treasury, which could 
 be used for great schemes of national development, "to open new 
 channels of communication between the states . . . and to 
 cement their union by new and indissoluble ties." Our coasts 
 should be surveyed and fortified, a great system of canals should 
 connect the Eastern rivers, and roads should be built joining 
 them to the navigable headwaters of the Mississippi Basin. The 
 first appropriations for the national Cumberland Road were 
 actually made. A national university was planned, "to supply 
 those sciences which contribute to the improvement of the coun- 
 try and some of them to its preservation." These promising 
 plans, which show how far Jefferson had advanced on the path 
 of nationalism, were rudely interrupted by the alarums of war. 
 It was not Jefferson's fault but his misfortune that for the rest 
 of his term he had to meet the threats of war with the weapons 
 of peace. One crumb of comfort he had in these last distressing 
 years of his administration. On the first of January, 1808, the 
 law went into effect prohibiting the importation of African slaves 
 into the United States. 
 
 James Madison, who was Jefferson's own choice for his suc- 
 cessor, was elected over his Federalist opponent, C. C. Pinckney, 
 in the embargo year by a vote of 122 to 47. Madison was 
 a master of ideas, but not of men. Power slipped from the hands 
 of the executive and was contended for by factions in Congress. 
 Disaffection entered the cabinet, and confused counsels. Gal- 
 latin, the ablest man of the administration, was opposed by the 
 inefficient Secretary of State, Robert Smith of Maryland, who 
 was supported by a cabal in Congress headed by his wealthy 
 
THE UNITED STATES 
 
 At the Close of 
 JEFFERSON'S ADMINISTRATION 
 
 Natural Western Boundary Route of Lewis and Clark 
 
 of Louisiana Purchase 1804-1806 
 
 -- Boundary fixed by Treaty Route of Zebulon Pike 
 with Spain in 1819 
 
 o o oooBoundary fixed by Treaty Route of Zebulon Pike 
 
 with Great Britain in 1818 1806-1808 
 
 SCALE OF MILES 
 
 100 200 300 400 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 245 
 
 merchant brother, Senator Samuel Smith. Two years passed 
 before Madison summoned the courage and vigor to put an end 
 to the strife by replacing Smith with James Monroe. All New 
 England except Vermont reverted to the Federalist column. 
 The Republican majority was still large in both branches of 
 Congress (95 to 46 and 24 to 10), but it was no longer guided 
 by the will of Thomas Jefferson. 
 
 For a brief moment at the beginning of Madison's adminis- 
 tration, it looked as though our battle for neutrality through 
 diplomatic negotiations might be successful. Whether because 
 of the distress to British manufacturers and merchants which 
 the embargo brought, or because more compliance was hoped 
 for from a president who was suspected by even some of his own 
 party of not being wholly purged of the old leaven of Feder- 
 alism, Canning actually proposed a settlement of differences at 
 the opening of the year 1809. He instructed David Erskine, the 
 British minister at Washington, to offer the withdrawal of 
 the Orders in Council on three conditions : (i) that we should 
 restore commercial intercourse with England while still retain- 
 ing the Nonintercourse Act against France 5(2) that we should 
 accept the "Rule of 1756," against which we had contended 
 ever since the beginning of the war between England and 
 France; (3) that we should permit the British navy to seize 
 American ships trading with countries which obeyed Napoleon's 
 .Decrees. Had Erskine communicated the instructions to Robert 
 Smith and Madison in extenso, as he was ordered to do by 
 Canning, they would have been rejected at once. But Erskine 
 was a liberal Whig with an American wife, and in his anxiety 
 to restore unity between the two great English-speaking peoples 
 he " modified" his instructions, representing to Madison merely 
 that the Orders would be withdrawn if we reopened intercourse 
 with England and refused to do so with France. Madison, 
 fully as anxious as Erskine to come to terms, accepted the 
 British minister's advances without asking to see his instruc- 
 tions, and on April 19, 1809, proclaimed that trade with Great 
 Britain might be renewed on the tenth of the following June. 
 
246 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Our shippers were jubilant, and Madison was praised as a 
 statesman by the men who had blamed Jefferson as a bungler. 1 
 Without waiting for the tenth of June American ships sailed by 
 scores to British ports, loaded with cotton, lumber, grain, and 
 tobacco. Then came the reckoning. The moment he heard 
 that Erskine had exceeded his instructions Canning recalled him 
 and disavowed his arrangement, though honorably exempting 
 from seizure the American ships that had already sailed on his 
 false encouragement. Nothing was left for Madison to do but 
 to issue a second proclamation, restoring the Nonintercourse 
 Act against Great Britain. The Erskine fiasco left our relations 
 with England in a worse state than ever. Nor were matters 
 improved when Madison, taking offense at the language of 
 Erskine's successor Jackson (which he construed as a charge 
 that the American government really knew the contents of 
 Erskine's instructions, but persuaded him to violate them), 
 notified the British minister that further conversation with him 
 would be futile. 
 
 The Nonintercourse Act of March i, 1809, was to expire by 
 limitation at the close of the actual session of Congress. With 
 the new year (1810) our confused and exasperated legislators 
 abruptly changed their tactics. The Treasury report showed 
 for the first time a deficit. Our shippers, exalted by the brief 
 renewal of commerce, were loath to obey the new restrictions. 
 Embargo and nonintercourse had not brought Napoleon and 
 Canning to just respect for neutral rights, though they had 
 injured our trade and impoverished our Treasury. As John 
 Randolph not very elegantly remarked, it was like cutting off 
 the toes to cure the corns. A new policy was framed substitut- 
 ing enticement for pressure. After much wrangling the House 
 agreed, on the first of May, 1810, on Macon's Bill No. 2, which 
 opened commerce again with all the world but authorized 
 Madison, in case either France or Great Britain should modify 
 
 1 John Randolph compared "the sound and healthy body of the present ad- 
 ministration" to "the dead corpse of the last." Jefferson, though sincerely glad 
 to see results of peaceful coercion, was suspicious and warned Madison that the 
 terms seemed too good to be true. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 247 
 
 their edicts before March 3, 1811, in such way "as to cease to 
 violate the neutral commerce of the United States," to revive 
 nonintercourse against the other power. In other words, as 
 Schouler says, " American influence was put up at auction." 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte was too shrewd to let the opportunity 
 pass without a bid. He had wished since the beginning of hostil- 
 ities to embroil England and America. If he could not provoke 
 the United States to war, he wanted at least the kind of neu- 
 trality which would deprive the English fleet of its commerce. 
 The embargo was welcome to him for this reason. The Non- 
 intercourse Act was less welcome, because by freeing American 
 shipping to the ports not under his control it put that shipping 
 at the mercy of the British cruisers. The Macon Bill, finally, 
 by restoring American commerce to its status before the em- 
 bargo, was hardly less in his eyes than an alliance between the 
 United States and England. Without an American fleet to 
 protect that commerce or a French fleet to interrupt it, Eng- 
 land was again restored to the command of the seas. In this 
 extremity he resorted to the trump card of his diplomacy a 
 lie. His foreign minister, the Due de Cadore, addressed a letter 
 to our minister at Paris (August 5, 1810) declaring that "the 
 decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after No- 
 vember they will cease to have effect it being understood that 
 in consequence of this declaration the English are to revoke 
 their Orders in Council ... or that the United States cause 
 their rights to be respected by the English." The letter was 
 smeared with honeyed words: "His Majesty loves the Amer- 
 icans ; their prosperity and commerce are within the scope of 
 his policy [ ! ] The independence of America is one of the prin- 
 cipal titles of glory to France. Since that epoch the Emperor 
 is pleased in aggrandizing the United States." The conduct of 
 Napoleon since the seizure of the Horizon in 1807 should have 
 been sufficient warning to Madison that his promise was as 
 empty as his flattery was insulting. By the Bayonne Decree of 
 April 17, 1808, he had sequestered all American vessels in his 
 ports on the cynical plea that they must be Englishmen in 
 disguise, because the embargo forbade American vessels to 
 
248 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 sail from home! By the Rambouillet Decree of March 23, 
 1810, he ordered all American ships that had entered his ports 
 since the previous May to be seized and sold. These confis- 
 cations had brought the imperial treasury between $8,000,000 
 and $10,000,000, and they were not yet at an end. For on the 
 same day that Cadore wrote the letter announcing the with- 
 drawal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees Napoleon ordered 
 further seizures by the secret Trianon Decree, and spoke of the 
 Berlin and Milan Decrees as "permanent laws of the Empire." 1 
 It was in vain that the marquis of Wellesley, who had suc- 
 ceeded Canning in the foreign office, warned Pinkney that 
 Napoleon's promise in the Cadore letter was no promise at all, 
 but only a ruse to tempt England to relax her Orders before 
 November i. Madison jumped at every offer, from whatever 
 source it came, to secure the freedom of our commerce by 
 peaceful coercion. With the same precipitate confidence with 
 which he had renewed intercourse with England in 1809 
 on Erskine's garbled representation, he prohibited intercourse 
 with England in 1810 on Napoleon's flimsy promise. On No- 
 vember 2 he issued a proclamation declaring that the French 
 Decrees had been revoked and that nonintercourse with Great 
 Britain should be revived unless her Orders were repealed 
 before February 2, 1811. Our commerce was increasing rap- 
 idly under the Macon Bill. A tonnage of 127,000 was added to 
 our merchant marine in the year 1810. Our exports rose in that 
 year from $52,000,000 to $67,000,000, and our customs receipts 
 from $7,000,000 to $12,750,000. As more than half of our 
 foreign trade was carried on with Great Britain and her de- 
 pendencies, the chances seemed good that the British ministry 
 would recede from its position. But Downing Street knew 
 Napoleon better than Washington did. The ministry refused 
 to fall into his trap. The second of February, 1811, passed 
 
 1 This double dealing was discovered by Gallatin, our minister to France, in 
 1821 and called by him "a glaring act of combined injustice, bad faith, and 
 meanness." Twenty years after the overthrow of Napoleon we recovered some 
 $5,000,000 damages, called the "French claims," for these depredations on 
 our shipping. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 249 
 
 without any modification of the Orders, and one month later 
 Congress sanctioned the revival of nonintercourse with Great 
 Britain by a large majority. 
 
 Public sentiment in America was setting strongly toward 
 war. It was felt that we should have done with protests and 
 expedients, with shifting policies that waited on Napoleon's 
 whims or Wellesley's pride, and manfully assert our rights as 
 a free people. The congressional election of 1810, sweeping 
 out nearly half the members of the House, returned a group of 
 new men, mostly from the South and West, who represented the 
 rising generation. Henry Clay of Kentucky was their leader, 
 and with him were associated John C. Calhoun, Langdon 
 Cheves, and William Lowndes of South Carolina, Felix Grundy 
 of Tennessee, Peter Porter of New York, and Richard Johnson 
 of Kentucky. They were aggressive, confident, and intensely 
 patriotic. They were all under forty. They had no pa- 
 tience with the tortuous diplomatic policy of European 
 courts, no lingering memories of the evolution from colonies 
 into states, no scruples lest the rights of the states should be 
 infringed by too vigorous a policy in Congress. They were 
 of a different generation from the Jeffersons, the Madisons, 
 and the Macons. John Randolph heaped his sarcasm on "the 
 boys" and dubbed them "war hawks," but their spirit bore 
 down all opposition and made further hope of reconciliation 
 with England vain. 
 
 Before the "war hawks" took their seat in the new Congress, 
 which Madison convened on November 4, 1811, important 
 events had occurred to widen the breach between England 
 and the United States. At the end of February William 
 Pinkney, tired of fruitless conversations with Wellesley, had 
 asked for his audience of leave, and "for the first time in the 
 history of our country an American minister quitted London in 
 a hostile and threatening manner." In April Robert Smith 
 had been replaced in the State Department by James Monroe, 
 whose experience in Paris, Madrid, and London had disabused 
 him of confidence in the favor of any of the chancelleries of 
 Europe for the cause of American rights. On May 16 the 
 
250 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 United States frigate President, Commodore Rodgers command- 
 ing, while patrolling our shores to protect merchantmen against 
 the impressments which Great Britain had resumed after the 
 revival of the Nonintercourse Act against her, fell in with the 
 British sloop of war Little Belt and in a brisk battle forced her 
 to strike her colors. Rodgers's victory was hailed with joy as a 
 tardy but complete revenge for the Chesapeake humiliation in 
 the same waters four years earlier. And when the new British 
 minister, Foster, arrived in Washington, authorized at last to 
 settle the Chesapeake affair by restoring the two surviving 
 sailors to the deck from which they had been taken, he found 
 the Americans already fully satisfied by Rodgers's victory and 
 talking of the invasion of Canada rather than the punishment 
 of Berkeley. 
 
 Just after Congress had assembled, news came from our 
 Western frontier calculated still further to exasperate our feel- 
 ings against Great Britain. The Indians in the territory beyond 
 Ohio were disturbed by the constant westward pressure of 
 our pioneers. Some of the tribes united under the formidable 
 chieftain Tecumseh to resist further encroachment on the land 
 which the Great Spirit had given them for their hunting- 
 grounds. Tecumseh and his twin brother, "the Prophet," or 
 medicine man, established their headquarters on the Wabash 
 near Tippecanoe Creek, to bid defiance to William Henry 
 Harrison, the governor of the Indian Territory. On Novem- 
 ber 7, 1811, while Tecumseh was absent in the South stirring 
 up the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees to join in the con- 
 federacy, the Prophet made an attack on Harrison's force. 
 The Indians were driven off, and the next day they abandoned 
 their village, which Harrison entered and burned. Tecumseh 
 went over to the British in Canada, who had long been seeking 
 to sow discord between the Indians and their " white brothers" 
 south of the lakes. Harrison confirmed the belief of our Western 
 pioneers that England was putting arms into the hands of the 
 Indians, by reporting the capture of quantities of English gun- 
 powder and rifles on the battlefield of Tippecanoe, apparently 
 purchased from the king's stores at Maiden. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 251 
 
 President Madison was already yielding to the popular pres- 
 sure for war. He recounted our grievances at length in his 
 message of November 5, 1811, asking Congress to "put the 
 country into an attitude demanded by the crisis." Congress 
 came to his support. It voted to increase the regular army by 
 25,000 soldiers, permitted the President to accept 50,000 new 
 volunteers, ordered the refitting of the frigates Adams, Constel- 
 lation, and Chesapeake, appropriated $200,000 annually for 
 three years for further naval repairs, authorized a loan of 
 $11,000,000 in 6 per cent bonds, and sanctioned the levy of taxes 
 on salt, whisky, slaves, and carriages in case war should come. 
 "The period has arrived," said Porter in his report from the 
 Committee on Foreign Relations, "when it is the sacred duty of 
 Congress to call for the patriotism and resources of the coun- 
 try." On May 19, 1812, the sloop Hornet arrived, bringing a 
 dispatch from the British foreign office which Madison many 
 years later called "the more immediate impulse to the war." 
 It declared that Great Britain could make no change in her 
 Orders in Council until Napoleon had absolutely and uncon- 
 ditionally rescinded his Decrees, and spoke of America's accept- 
 ance of Napoleon's treacherous proffer as "utterly subversive 
 of the most important and indisputable maritime rights of 
 the British Empire." 
 
 Forced to choose, as he said, between war and degradation, 
 Madison, on June i, 1812, sent in to Congress the single vig- 
 orous message of his administration. In it he reviewed the 
 long list of outrages on our maritime rights as a neutral since 
 the renewal of the European war in 1803: the illegal "paper 
 blockade"; the violation of the American flag on the great 
 highway of nations by the seizure of persons sailing under it; 
 the hovering of British cruisers on our very coast, harassing our 
 ships as they went and came, and even "wantonly shedding 
 the blood of our citizens." "Such is the spectacle of injuries 
 and indignities which have been heaped upon our country, and 
 such the crisis which its unexampled forebearance and con- 
 ciliatory efforts have not been able to avert. . . . Whether 
 the United States shall continue passive under these accumulat- 
 
252 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ing wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defence of their 
 natural rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the 
 Almighty Dispenser of events, ... is a solemn question which 
 the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department 
 of the government. In recommending it to their early delib- 
 erations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will 
 be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, 
 a free, and a powerful nation." The hand was Madison's, but 
 the voice was Henry Clay's. Congress by a vote of 79 to 49 
 in the House and 19 to 13 in the Senate declared for war, 1 
 and on June 18 Madison signed the fateful bill. "I flung 
 forward the flag of the country," said the aged Madison in 
 a conversation with George Bancroft a quarter of a century 
 later, "sure that the people would press onward and defend it." 
 
 THE WAR OF 1812 
 
 The War of 1812 was a blunder. It was unnecessary, im- 
 politic, untimely, and rash. Not that our grievances against 
 Great Britain had not been serious enough for several years 
 past to justify war. The indictment of Madison's message 
 of June i was not exaggerated. But those grievances were 
 less acute in the summer of 1812 than at any other moment 
 since the attack on the Chesapeake five years before. A wise 
 and statesmanlike view at Washington must have seen in the 
 situation both in England and on the continent of Europe, in 
 the twelve months past, fair promise that the grievances would 
 cease at no very distant date. We had been patient in the 
 years of great trial ; we lost our patience in the days of relief. 
 We allowed Napoleon Bonaparte, by a promise whose hollow- 
 ness was evident to every statesman of judgment on both sides 
 of the ocean the day after it was given, to force us into a war 
 with England at the moment when he was leading his grand 
 
 vote shows a good deal of opposition as compared with the votes 
 committing us to our other foreign wars. On the Mexican War the vote was 
 174 to 14 in the House and 40 to 2 in the Senate ; we entered the World War 
 by a vote of 373 to 50 in the House and 86 to 6 in the Senate. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 253 
 
 army into Russia to destroy the last state on the Continent 
 that dared to brave his despotic will. The Decrees of Napoleon 
 and the British Orders in Council were admittedly the basic 
 causes for the war. 1 If our State Department had heeded and 
 understood the admirable dispatches from our minister John 
 Quincy Adams at St. Petersburg, it would have read, in the 
 refusal of the Czar to shut the Baltic Sea to American com- 
 merce at the behest of Napoleon, the beginning of the downfall 
 of the Continental System. If our able minister William Pinkney 
 had been ordered to remain at London instead of leaving in a 
 huff in the spring of 1811, he would have noted beneath all the 
 stiff pride of Wellesley and Spencer Perceval the growing de- 
 mand in Parliament for concessions, which actually resulted in 
 the announcement of the total repeal of the Orders in Coun- 
 cil two days before our Congress declared war. If General 
 Armstrong had remained at Paris, he would not have allowed 
 Napoleon's foreign minister, Maret, to palm off on him a docu- 
 ment antedated by a year, which repeated the lie of the revoca- 
 tion of the Berlin and Milan Decrees as applied to America. 
 But we abandoned diplomacy at the very moment when we 
 needed it most. In the summer of 1811, when the war spirit 
 was rising in the country, and the Congress which the war 
 hawks were to dominate was already called in early session, 
 we had no minister at the court of England or France. A 
 few months more of patient diplomacy would have averted 
 the war. 
 
 If, however, national honor demanded that we should 
 fight in 1812, it is by no means clear that England was the 
 nation with which we should have fought. So far as it lay within 
 his power, Napoleon was as contemptuous of American rights 
 as was Great Britain. True, his cruisers did not hover on 
 our coasts for he had no cruisers to hover ; he did not impress 
 American sailors for he had no fleet to man with them. But 
 
 1 To be sure, the impressment issue was constant, but as Henry Adams points 
 out, it had never been made a casus belli. Great Britain's attitude was generally 
 one of willingness to adjust it. It became a waning issue after England's com- 
 plete defeat of Napoleon on the sea (1805). 
 
254 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 he treacherously confiscated millions of dollars' worth of Amer- 
 ican shipping in the ports of France, Denmark, Holland, Spain, 
 and Naples and appropriated the receipts to the imperial treas- 
 ury. A table contributed to Congress by Madison in July, 1812, 
 showed that the French had seized 558 American vessels and 
 the British 389 during the five preceding years. John Rus- 
 sell, our charge d'affaires at Paris, wrote repeatedly in 1811 to 
 warn Madison that "the great object of Napoleon's policy" 
 was to " entangle us in a war with England," and that the French 
 emperor refused to give any clear evidence of the repeal of the 
 Decrees, "test it should induce the extinction of the British Or- 
 ders and thereby appease our irritation" against Great Britain. 
 Even Madison himself naively agreed in a letter to Jefferson 
 (March, 1811) that it was "difficult to understand the meaning 
 of Bonaparte towards us," and attempted to excuse him for his 
 "obvious folly" on the score of his "ignorance of commerce." 
 Furthermore, the British ministers were not using threats, 
 cajolery, and ruse to drive us into a war with France. If 
 Canning was brutal and Wellesley haughty, they were at least 
 frank. Neither of them used sickening words of flattery to us 
 and lied in his throat. Finally, it was Napoleon and not Eng- 
 land that was the enemy of the human race. Our declaration 
 of war on the power that most consistently and effectively stood 
 between Napoleon and an enslaved Europe seemed to many 
 in our country little less than striking an alliance with the 
 Corsican plunderer. 
 
 Yet it is not hard to see why England was the worse enemy 
 in the popular mind. Aside from the general considerations 
 that the whole leaning of the party which had been in power 
 since the beginning of the century was toward France and 
 that England was our "traditional enemy," the specific acts 
 of British provocation were much more exasperating than any- 
 thing Napoleon could do to us. American seamen had actually 
 been killed by British cannon balls on the high seas. American 
 sailors had actually been pressed into the crews of British men- 
 of-war to endure the brutal treatment, the starvation rations, 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 2 5 5 
 
 and the noisome quarters of their floating prisons/ In the 
 South and West, where the war fever was intense, both eco- 
 nomic and political interests were anti-British. The South, not 
 yet bound to England by the ties of cotton, still preserved the 
 Jeffersonian prejudice in favor of agriculture against shipping. 
 The West, ardent for expansion, found England and not France 
 athwart the path. It was British agents in Canada who, from 
 St. Clair's defeat in 1791 to Harrison's victory in 1811, had) v 
 encouraged the Indians to resist our advance into the North- < 
 west, which Great Britain had ceded to us in the treaty of 1783. 
 It was the British minister at Washington who protested ' 
 against Madison's occupation of West Florida. 2 And since the 
 union of England and Spain against Napoleon in 1808, Great 
 Britain supplanted France as the strong power which would 
 prevent our flag from flying over the fortresses of the Gulf 
 shore. Napoleon's diplomatic policy might be treacherous, 
 and his confiscations (chiefly at the expense of New England 
 merchants) exasperating. But Napoleon was remote, and Eng- 
 land was provokingly near. 
 
 Yet England did not want war with us any more than we 
 wanted war with her. She was laboring under great economic 
 and political distress. The burden of the Napoleonic wars had 
 driven her debt up to nearly $4,000,000,000. Her exports had 
 declined 33 per cent in the year 1811. In the autumn of the 
 same year, after a winter of bitter cold and a summer of rain 
 and fog, the price of wheat rose. to about $4 a bushel. Riots 
 broke out in several counties. George III had become hope- 
 
 a ln January, 1812, Madison sent to Congress a most detailed report of Mon- 
 roe's on cases of impressment which had come under notice. They amount to 
 no less than 6057, a number which an investigating committee of the Massachu- 
 setts legislature found "three or four times too large." 
 
 2 Madison, in full accord with the Jeffersonian theory that we had purchased 
 West Florida in the Louisiana treaty of 1803, issued a proclamation, Octo- 
 ber 27, 1810, joining that region to the territory of Orleans, and even secured 
 from Congress, in 1811, authorization to occupy East Florida, to which we 
 had never pretended to have a claim. The part of West Florida west of the 
 Pearl River was incorporated into the new state of Louisiana in 1812. 
 
256 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 lessly insane, and in the interval which preceded the establish- 
 ment of -the regency Spencer Perceval, the ultra-Tory minister, 
 carried on the government with a high hand. From the as- 
 sembling of Parliament, in January, 1812, it was evident that 
 the Perceval government was doomed. The marquis of Lands- 
 downe in the Lords and Henry Brougham in the Commons 
 attacked the Orders in Council and pleaded for the concessions 
 necessary for the reopening of the trade with the United States, 
 which was worth $60,000,000 a year to England. Even Canning 
 was won to the policy of relaxation and voted with the 144 
 members who supported Brougham. In April Castlereagh 
 offered to stop issuing licenses and put an end to paper block- 
 ades if the United States would restore commercial intercourse. 
 A few days later the regent offered to declare the Orders in 
 Council revoked as soon as Napoleon should give convincing 
 evidence of the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. All 
 this pointed in one direction, as a man of Pinkney's sagacity 
 must have seen if he had been at his post at the court of St. 
 James. Then came Perceval's assassination by a lunatic in the 
 lobby of Parliament, on May 1 1 ; and in the confusion of the 
 hour, ere the literal downfall of the chief was known in America, 
 President Madison sent his war message to Congress. 
 
 The United States was woefully unprepared for war, though 
 in a flourishing condition for times of peace. Our wealth and 
 population were growing rapidly. The census of 1810 showed 
 a population of 7,240,000, an increase of 35 per cent over the 
 number at the time of Jefferson's first inauguration. In spite of 
 the reestablishment of nonintercourse with Great Britain, our 
 foreign commerce for the year 1811 was still well over $100,- 
 000,000, 93 per cent of which was carried on in American ships. 
 Secretary Gallatin's report to Congress in November presented 
 the pleasing prospect of a surplus of $5,000,000 for the next 
 fiscal year. We were an agricultural country, our exports con- 
 sisting chiefly of cotton, tobacco, rice, flour, potatoes, and 
 grain. But Jefferson's commercial policy had already caused 
 the diversion of considerable capital from shipping to manufac- 
 tures. By 1812 about a hundred cotton mills in the country 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 257 
 
 were using 3,600,000 pounds of raw cotton, and the manufac- 
 tures of wool, flax, leather, wood, and iron were mounting to a 
 total of some $50,000,000. The beginning of the Cumberland 
 Road in 1807 (to run from Cumberland, Maryland, through 
 Pennsylvania and Ohio to the West), the elaborate plans of 
 Jefferson and Gallatin for the devotion of national income to 
 schemes of internal improvement, the opening of the North- 
 west through Harrison's victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe, 
 and the placing of the steamboat on the Western waters all gave 
 promise of an era of expansion and prosperity. 
 
 But none of this wealth and opportunity was mobilized for 
 war. The regular army consisted of ten half-filled regiments 
 of untrained and ill-equipped men, dispersed in petty garrison 
 squads along our extended frontier and in our chief coast forts. 
 From the Wabash and Maumee Rivers westward the country 
 was unprotected, except for garrisons of about 100 men 
 each in Forts Dearborn (Chicago) at the foot and Mackinaw 
 at the head of Lake Michigan, with some 125 soldiers at the 
 important post of Detroit. Congress had appropriated barely 
 $3,000,000 for the army in 1811. The old officers were de- 
 scribed by Winfield Scott as "generally sunk in either sloth, 
 ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking . . . Swaggerers, 
 dependents, decayed gentlemen . . . utterly unfit for any mili- 
 tary purpose whatever." The new appointments of 1812 were 
 little better. Henry Dearborn, Jefferson's old Secretary of War 
 and later customs officer at Boston, was named senior major 
 general. He was without counsel in the camp or experience 
 in the field. Thomas Pinckney, the junior major general, had 
 made an enviable record in diplomacy at the courts of Madrid 
 and London, but his military education had ceased thirty 
 years before, with the defense of the Carolinas against Corn- 
 wallis and Tarleton. Of the half dozen brigadier generals ap- 
 pointed, including the notorious James Wilkinson, not a single 
 one had served in the regular army, and only William Hull, 
 governor of the Michigan Territory, had actually led a regiment 
 in battle. The generals were all between fifty-five and sixty- 
 seven years of age. The navy which we had to oppose to Great 
 
258 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Britain's 800 ships consisted of 16 frigates, brigs, and sloops 
 of war, running from 150 to 1500 tons, and only 3 carrying 
 more than 40 guns. The 165 gunboats, so dear to Jefferson's 
 heart, were of some little use in defending the coast in still 
 waters, but in a heavy sea they were in danger of careening 
 under the weight of their single gun! "A few fir-built frig- 
 ates manned by bastards and outlaws" was a London journal's 
 contemptuous summary of our navy. Yet, insignificant as our 
 naval force was in comparison with Great Britain's, it was com- 
 manded by young, enterprising, and intrepid officers like Bain- 
 bridge, Isaac Hull, Decatur, Lawrence, and Rodgers, most of 
 whom had seen service in the Mediterranean wars. 
 
 Military unpreparedness, however, was only one of the hand- 
 icaps under which we entered the war with England. Lack 
 of roads, canals, bridges, causeways, and dredges made com- 
 munication between the Atlantic seaboard and the trans- 
 Allegheny region costly and difficult. Munitions and supplies 
 had to be laboriously transported across rivers, swamps, and 
 wilderness. Officers were distressed to keep up a semblance 
 of morale in their meager armies, half mutinous from hunger 
 and cold. The factious Congress of 1811, chiefly to vent its 
 spite on Gallatin, had refused to recharter the National Bank 
 and had thus deprived the government of its fiscal agent at 
 just the moment when it needed it most. Forced to depend on 
 the state banks, with their unregulated issues of paper and the 
 varying credit of their notes in the different sections of the 
 country, Gallatin found great difficulty in placing the loan of 
 $11,000,000 which Congress had been induced to authorize in 
 March, 1812. When the harassed secretary asked for the 
 levy of internal taxes, the House rebuked him for proposing 
 "unrepublican measures." 
 
 Most serious of all the handicaps of the administration was 
 the lack of that national spirit of cooperation which would 
 easily have produced men and money in abundance to win the 
 war. Not only were the vast majority of our people apathetic, 
 but whole sections, notably New England, were bitterly opposed 
 to the war. When the declaration was voted, thirty-four con- 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 259 
 
 gressmen signed a vigorous protest which was circulated all 
 over the country. The Federalists asserted that the war was 
 precipitated by the "Virginia cabal" and the "madmen of 
 Kentucky and Tennessee," for the sake of conquering Canada 
 and ruining the flourishing commerce of the United States. It 
 was nothing less than a base alliance with the tyrant Napoleon 
 for shattering the British Empire. Two of their leaders called 
 on the British minister Foster to suggest a plan for commercial 
 cooperation and said openly that their sole hope from the war 
 was that it would "turn out the administration" and leave 
 the Federalists to "make a solid peace with Great Britain." The 
 New Englanders hung their flags at half-mast and tolled the 
 bells in their churches when war was declared. The governors 
 of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut refused to 
 heed the President's call for militia, on the ground that the 
 conditions, as prescribed by the Constitution, under which the 
 militia could be called out did not exist. 1 With more than half 
 the specie of the country in her bank vaults, New England 
 subscribed for less than $1,000,000 of the $11,000,000 
 loan of 1812, and during the entire war contributed less than 
 $3,000,000 of the $41,000,000 paid into the Treasury. In 
 addition to this negative policy of obstruction, the Northern 
 and Eastern states were guilty of positively treasonable inter- 
 course with the enemy across the border. "Two-thirds of the 
 army in Canada," wrote the British commissioner Sir George 
 Provost to his superior in London, in August, 1814, "are at 
 this moment eating beef provided by the American contractors, 
 drawn principally from the states of Vermont and New York ; 
 '. . . large droves are daily crossing the lines, coming into 
 Lower Canada." 
 
 1 Under the Constitution (Art. I, sect. 8, par. 15) Congress has power "to 
 provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress 
 insurrections, and repel invasions." As if the declaration of war, passed by 
 both Houses of Congress and signed by the President, were not a "law of the 
 Union"! The governors, supported by their legislatures, assumed to judge 
 for themselves when the state of the country (or at least their part of it) 
 needed defending. A decision of the Supreme Court in 1827 settled the question 
 by confirming this right of judgment to the President. 
 
260 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 In spite of an enrolled militia of nearly 700,000 men in the 
 states, less than 10 per cent of the 50,000 whom Congress 
 authorized the President to call out responded at the beginning 
 of the war. In spite of increased pay and bounties in land and 
 money, less than one third of the soldiers provided for by the 
 regular-army bill were recruited in the summer of 1812. We 
 had over 1,000,000 male white citizens of military age, yet the 
 War Department could never put an army of more than 10,000 
 or 12,000 men in the field at one time. From the close of 
 1813 to the end of the war the effective strength of our forces 
 varied between 30,000 and 35,000 men. Scanty as these forces 
 were, they were generally superior to the number of Canadians 
 and Indians who could be marshaled to oppose them on the 
 Lakes and the St. Lawrence. If our troops had had proper 
 commissariat and conveyance, above all if they had had wise 
 and brave leaders, they would easily have carried out the plan 
 of campaign, which was to drive the British from Upper Canada, 
 blockade the St. Lawrence, and capture Montreal. The Repub- 
 lican politicians, young and old, had no doubt of the speedy 
 triumph of our arms on land, though they conceded that the 
 British navy would sweep our ships from the ocean. Clay 
 boasted that the riflemen of Kentucky alone would conquer 
 Canada, and Thomas Jefferson declared that the advance to 
 Montreal was "only a question of marching." 
 
 The attack on Canada was to be delivered at four points: 
 from Detroit at the western end of Lake Erie, along the Niagara 
 River at the eastern end, at Kingston (where Lake Ontario 
 narrows into the St. Lawrence), and from Lake Champlain down 
 to Montreal. The movement of the American armies was to be 
 from west to east, across Upper Canada and down the river. The 
 plan failed at every point. General Hull was making a laborious 
 march with some 2000 men through the forests and swamps of 
 western Ohio to reach the important fort of Detroit, when he 
 learned that war had been declared. The British in Canada had 
 received the news before him and had captured a schooner on 
 Lake Erie in which Hull had risked sending ahead his baggage 
 and hospital stores, together with a trunk containing papers 
 
THE WAR OF 1812 ON THE CANADIAN BORDER 
 
262 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 relating to his plan of campaign and the rolls of his troops. 
 Soon after his arrival at Detroit, Hull got orders from Wash- 
 ington to invade Canada (July 9), and three days later he 
 crossed the Detroit River, with a pompous and threatening 
 proclamation, to lay siege to the British post of Maiden. But 
 the march through the Ohio wilderness seems to have exhausted 
 Hull's energy. He pottered around Maiden, while his own 
 soldiers grew disgusted and his adversary, General Isaac Brock, 
 collected reinforcements on the northern shore of Lake Erie. As 
 the British controlled the lake, Hull's only hope lay in a rapid and 
 complete victory over the garrison at Maiden before help could 
 arrive. Without support from the American armies to the east- 
 ward, and separated by two hundred miles from a base of sup- 
 plies to the southward, he was in a trap. When he heard that the 
 American garrison at Mackinaw had surrendered and that Brit- 
 ish reinforcements were on the way to Maiden from the east, he 
 hastily abandoned the siege and recrossed the river to Detroit. 
 Even when back in the fort with plenty of ammunition and over 
 1000 effective defenders, Hull failed to regain his courage. He 
 sank into a mood of apathy and dejection, brooding over the 
 imaginary picture of Indian hordes descending on Detroit with 
 torch and tomahawk. When Brock, with only 700 men, crossed 
 over to the American side of the Detroit River (August 16) and 
 prepared to assault the fort, he was astonished to see a mes- 
 senger approaching his lines with a white flag. Hull surren- 
 dered the fort and his entire army without striking a blow. 
 The fall of Detroit meant the loss of the entire Northwest. 1 
 The American military frontier receded at once from the Missis- 
 sippi to the Wabash, and the American army marched through 
 Upper Canada as prisoners of war and not as conquering heroes. 
 General Hull was tried by court-martial, found guilty of cow- 
 ardice, and condemned to be shot. But President Madison 
 pardoned him on account of his services in the Revolution 
 and his gray hairs. 
 
 1 The day before Hull's surrender, and by his order, Fort Dearborn at the 
 foot of Lake Michigan was evacuated. The garrison was massacred by the 
 Indians in the process. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 263 
 
 The success of the plan for the invasion of Canada depended 
 on the cooperation of the armies at both ends of Lake Erie 
 and on the St. Lawrence. But there was no agreement between 
 the administration at Washington and the senior major general. 
 Dearborn, who should have been operating at Niagara to sup- 
 port Hull by preventing the British from transporting reen- 
 forcements up Lake Erie to Maiden, was at Boston on the day 
 of Hull's surrender, debating with himself whether he had better 
 stay on the Atlantic seaboard or go to the Lakes. He had 
 ordered a suspension of hostilities in order that a plan of armi- 
 stice, suggested by the British when the news of the repeal of 
 the Orders in Council reached America, might be discussed. 
 When operations were renewed on the Niagara River, Hull's 
 fate was already sealed, and Brock's forces were released for 
 service at the eastern end of Lake Erie. There General Stephen 
 Van Rensselaer of the New York militia and General Alexander 
 Smythe of the regular army, instead of joining cordially for an 
 effective attack, quarreled as to the time, the place, and the 
 method of gaining the Canadian shore. Van Rensselaer led a 
 little body of regulars across the river (October 13) and seized 
 Queenstown Heights, but the New York militia refused to leave 
 the state and complacently watched the rout of the regulars 
 by a superior Canadian force. Smythe then took his turn, very 
 fierce in proclamation and very tame in action. Aside from a 
 morning raid off Black' Rock, in which he captured a few 
 British guns and partially destroyed a bridge, all his bluster 
 resulted in nothing. Whenever he considered an embarkment, 
 the inadequacy of his force appalled him. Early in December 
 he decided to go into winter quarters. Peter B. Porter publicly 
 accused Smythe of cowardice, and the men fought a duel after 
 their seconds had taken the balls out of the pistols. It was 
 in accordance with the general opera bouffe on the Niagara. 
 Out of 4000 American troops gathered there in the autumn of 
 1812, not 1000 could be persuaded to cross the river. 
 
 Dearborn himself, with a force as large as Hull's and 
 Smythe's combined, was in command on Lake Champlain, in- 
 tending to march down on Montreal as Smythe attacked at 
 
264 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Niagara. On November 19 he marched to the Canadian line, 
 which his militia refused to cross, and four days later he 
 marched back to Plattsburg. Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smythe 
 had at least set some soldiers on Canadian soil, but the senior 
 major general could only march his army twenty miles and 
 back, like the King of France in the jingle. "He was laughed 
 at," wrote George Hay, "by both Federalists and Republicans, 
 and should have gone the way to retirement along with Hull 
 and Smythe, to make room for better men." But it took more 
 than a calamity to nerve Madison to make a dismissal. 
 
 A pleasing contrast to this dismal record of our armies on the 
 Canadian frontier was furnished by the exploits of our little 
 navy in the first six months of the war. Three days after his 
 uncle had disgracefully surrendered Detroit (August 19) Cap- 
 tain Isaac Hull, in the 44-gun frigate Constitution, met the 
 British brig Guerriere (38 guns) in the north Atlantic, and in 
 a spirited battle of half an hour reduced her to a floating hulk 
 of wreckage. When the news of Hull's victory reached Boston 
 it sent a wave of enthusiasm through the country. It mattered 
 little that the American frigate was superior in every way to 
 her adversary ; the important thing was that a British warship, 
 whose captain had been active in impressing sailors from our 
 merchantmen and had spread on the log of his plundered vic- 
 tims a taunting challenge to any American frigate, had struck 
 its colors. The days of John Paul Jones had returned. Our 
 captains hastened to sea to emulate the deed of Hull. In 
 October the i8-gun sloop Wasp made prize of the equally 
 matched Frolic, convoying -a British West Indian fleet, 600 
 miles east of Norfolk. A few days later the United States, 
 commanded by Decatur, defeated the Macedonian off the 
 Azores and brought her into New London the only British 
 warship ever brought into an American port as a prize. In 
 December Captain Bainbridge, in the Constitution, destroyed 
 the Java off the coast of Brazil, the British and American 
 frigates being equally matched in size, guns, and crew. In six 
 months the Americans had forced three British frigates and 
 two sloops of war to strike their colors, while they themselves 
 
lllllllllllll 
 
266 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 had lost nothing larger than the i8-gun Wasp. 1 Our privateers 
 had taken over 300 British merchantmen in seven months. Of 
 course, the loss of four or five warships was of small conse- 
 quence to the great British navy; but the American victories 
 had the moral effect of stimulating our flagging zeal and the 
 practical effect of keeping the British cruisers away from our 
 ports just when the large fleet of merchantmen which had sailed 
 from England on the repeal of the Orders in Council, and before 
 the news of the declaration of war had reached Europe, were 
 bringing millions of dollars' worth of imports to strengthen our 
 impoverished treasury. 
 
 The news of these victories did not arrive in time to affect the 
 election of 1812, in which Madison defeated his rival, De Witt 
 Clinton, by the not very ample margin of 128 votes to 89. 
 The Federalists made large gains in New England and New 
 York, electing double the number of representatives that they 
 had sent to the famous Twelfth Congress. The new Congress, 
 called in extra session in May, 1813, was obliged by the press- 
 ing needs of the war to put behind it the whole Jeffersonian 
 policy of the abolition of internal taxes and to levy duties on car- 
 riages, auction sales, sugar, salt, wines, and liquors, besides 
 apportioning a direct tax of $3,000,000 among the states and 
 imposing a stamp tax on notes and bills of exchange. The 
 expenses of the government had mounted to $16,000,000 for 
 the six months preceding the call of Congress, and it was esti- 
 mated that $27,000,000 more would be needed to see the year 
 1813 through. To supplement the revenue from tariff and 
 internal taxes, Congress authorized a loan of $7,500,000. All 
 these financial measures had been carefully prepared by Gal- 
 latin before he sailed for Europe on a mission which we shall 
 notice presently, and were passed by respectable majorities. 
 The government was obliged to struggle on, as best it could, 
 with loans and taxes and the emission of Treasury notes, while 
 our import trade sank, under the increasing severity of the 
 
 *A few hours after the Wasp's victory over the Frolic the 74-gun British ship 
 Poictiers had hove in sight and taken both the victor and her prize into 
 Bermuda. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 267 
 
 British blockade, from $77,000,000 in 1812 to $22,000,000 in 
 1813 and $13,000,000 in 1814. 
 
 The military campaigns of the spring and summer of 1813 
 showed no more cause for congratulation than those of the 
 year before. There was the same tale of dilatoriness, discord, 
 and disaster. A detachment of Kentuckians, foolishly pushing 
 ahead of General Harrison's army, were defeated at French- 
 town, a few miles south of Detroit, January 22, 1813, and their 
 wounded, left behind by the British general Procter without 
 a guard, were horribly massacred in the night by a band of 
 drunken Indians. James Wilkinson and Wade Hampton re- 
 placed Van Rensselaer and Smythe at the Niagara front, whik 
 General Dearborn went into retirement. But Wilkinson and 
 Hampton, who regarded each other with a mixture of jealousy 
 and contempt, failed as signally as Dearborn to make any ad- 
 vance on Montreal, and went into winter quarters with nothing 
 to show but wasted time and mutual recriminations for their 
 so-called campaigns. The general gloom was deepened by a 
 calamity which checked the victorious career of our frigates. 
 On June i Captain Lawrence, in the ill-fated Chesafiake, met 
 the British frigate Shannon (Captain Brook) outside Boston 
 Harbor. In an engagement of fifteen minutes the Chesapeake 
 suffered the fate of the Guerriere, and Lawrence was carried be- 
 low decks mortally wounded and vainly pleading with his dying 
 breath, " Don't give up the ship!" 
 
 New British cruisers arrived off our coast, drawing a strin- 
 gent blockade from New London southward. The frigates 
 United States, Constellation, Macedonian, and Adams were 
 penned up in our ports, the Constitution was undergoing repairs, 
 the President and the Essex were at sea, the Congress was con- 
 demned, and all our brigs except the Enterprise were captured. 
 By the autumn of 1813 we had not a single ship patrolling our 
 coast, and the British landed where they would. Exports from 
 New York fell from over $12,000,000 in 1811 to $200,000 
 in 1814, and those of Virginia from $4,800,000 to $17,500. 
 From Long Island Sound to the Savannah River foreign trade 
 virtually ceased. 
 
268 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The one redeeming exploit of American arms in the year 
 1813 was the recovery of the Northwest. Hull's surrender of 
 Detroit had shamed and frightened the Western states into an 
 unwonted display of energy, as it let loose the Indian menace 
 and brought the scalping parties to within thirty miles of 
 Louisville. The Kentuckians raised over 10,000 volunteers. 
 The governor of the state appointed the hero of Tippecanoe 
 the major general of its militia. Only twelve days after the fall 
 of Detroit, Harrison started northward from Cincinnati, with 
 the largest army ever mustered in the United States west of the 
 Alleghenies, to recapture the fort. The Navy Department, now 
 at last fully awake to the importance of controlling Lake Erie, 
 set Commodore Chauncey at work to construct a fleet at 
 Presqu'ile (Erie). Here he was joined at the end of March, 
 1813, by Captain Oliver H. Perry of Newport, a young veteran 
 of the French war of 1798 and the Tripolitan war of 1803. By 
 midsummer Perry had built and launched five ships at Pres- 
 qu'ile, sending as far as Buffalo and Pittsburgh for material and 
 equipment, and had dexterously conveyed to the same port five 
 other vessels, which had been penned up in the Niagara River 
 by the British guns at Fort Erie. On August 5 Perry got his 
 squadron across the bar in front of the harbor of Presqu'ile 
 and sailed up the lake to a point off the mouth of the Sandusky 
 River, on which Harrison was encamped. His shortage in men 
 was remedied by the dispatch of 100 Kentuckians from 
 Harrison's army to serve on the fleet. He had two brigs of 20 
 tons each, the flagship Lawrence, and the Niagara, while his 
 smaller craft carried from i to 4 guns each. His opponent, 
 Captain Barclay, who had served with Nelson at Trafalgar, had 
 six vessels, carrying altogether 63 guns to Perry's 57. But the 
 American guns were much heavier, throwing a broadside of 
 900 Ib. of metal to 500 for the British. The two fleets met 
 in Put-in-Bay, September 10, 1813, and after a furious fight 
 of three hours every one of the British ships had struck her 
 colors. The battle was decided by as brave a deed as is written 
 in the annals of our navy. When Perry's flagship, the Lawrence, 
 bearing the brunt of the British attack, was reduced to a total 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 269 
 
 wreck, Perry went over her side into a small boat and, bearing 
 the blue flag inscribed with the immortal words "Don't give up 
 the ship," was rowed, under the fire of the British guns, to the 
 Niagara, which had been fighting at long range on the edge of 
 the battle. Perry brought the Niagara into the midst of the 
 fight and, passing between the British ships, swept them with 
 both broadsides at once until they struck. Before the smoke 
 of battle had cleared away, Perry sent the good news to 
 Harrison in the famous dispatch, "We have met the enemy 
 and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and 
 one sloop." 
 
 Perry's victory compelled the British general Procter to 
 abandon Detroit and Maiden and fall back toward the eastern 
 end of the lake, to the great disgust of Tecumseh and his 
 Indians. Harrison's troops, conveyed across the lake to the 
 Canadian side, entered Maiden only three days after Procter 
 had abandoned it. They pursued the British eastward along the 
 road to Lake Ontario, overtaking them at Moravian Town on 
 the Thames. There Richard M. Johnson's mounted Ken- 
 tuckians drove through the British ranks along the river road, 
 while the rest cleared the Indians out of the swamp and forest 
 lands on the flank. Procter barely escaped capture 'after a 
 precipitous flight, and the great Tecumseh was among the slain. 
 The battle of the Thames, with Perry's victory on Lake Erie, 
 restored the province lost by Hull. Detroit was again in Amer- 
 ican hands; the British army abandoned Upper Canada be- 
 tween the Lakes; the Indian menace on our borders was 
 removed; and the country west of the Niagara River was 
 undisturbed for the remainder of the war. 
 
 In the spring of 1814 Hampton and Wilkinson followed Hull, 
 Smythe, Van Rensselaer, and Dearborn into retirement, and 
 the northern theater of war was cleared of all the incompetent, 
 swaggering, wrangling generals to make room for a group of 
 energetic and able commanders. George Izard, a highly trained 
 engineer, and Jacob Brown, a Quaker but the best fighter of 
 the war except Andrew Jackson, were appointed major gen- 
 erals, with Winfield Scott and Peter B. Porter among the six 
 
270 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 new brigadiers. The effects of the change were soon visible. 
 Brown's army of 5500 crossed the Niagara on July 3, and, on 
 the fifth, Scott's brigade in a splendid action at Chippewa drove 
 the superior British force from the field. Three weeks later 
 Brown waged a furious battle from mid-afternoon till far into 
 the night a few miles down the river, at Lundy's Lane, driving 
 the British again and again from their guns. Darkness and the 
 exhaustion of his troops finally forced Brown to retire from 
 the field, leaving the British technically the victors. But the 
 losses in Drummond's army of 3000 were heavier than those 
 of Brown's 2000; and when, after a period of recuperation, 
 Drummond marched up the river to assault Fort Erie, he met 
 the same stubborn resistance from officers and soldiers, for 
 whom at last the British troops began to have an awesome 
 respect. Four times within six weeks the Americans with in- 
 ferior numbers beat off his attacks. He was in full retreat 
 toward Chippewa when the Americans finally blew up the works 
 at Fort Erie and retired to their own side of the river (Novem- 
 ber 5, 1814). The actual results achieved by Brown's campaign 
 were not great, but the moral effect on the country of a com- 
 mander who could train and inspire American troops was 
 immense especially as it came at a time of deep discourage- 
 ment, when our Treasury was nearly empty, our ports block- 
 aded, our ships penned up, our shores ravaged, our Capitol 
 burned, and our Union in imminent danger of letting its power 
 revert by default to the states which had created it. 
 
 Nor was Brown's heroic campaign the only redeeming fea- 
 ture of the year 1814. While the Americans were crossing the 
 Niagara to Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, large reinforcements 
 from Wellington's army in the Spanish peninsula were on their 
 way to Canada. 1 Sir George Prevost, with a larger and finer 
 army than Burgoyne had commanded, crossed the Canadian 
 
 1 Napoleon had been driven back to the French side of the Rhine by his 
 crushing defeat at Leipzig (October 16-19, 1813), and his armies expelled from 
 Spain by Wellington's victory at Vitoria (June 21, 1813). Over 10,000 trained 
 British troops, released from service against the Corsican, were dispatched to 
 America to finish up the war. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 271 
 
 frontier early in September and set out toward Lake Champlain 
 to repeat with better success Burgoyne's march of 1777. So 
 confident was Prevost that he never broke his columns to de- 
 ploy. The few American skirmishers who annoyed his march 
 he ignored. Arrived before the strong redoubts which Izard 
 had built just south of Plattsburg, he waited for the British 
 fleet on Lake Champlain to enter Plattsburg Bay and cooperate 
 in the assault. The British fleet was no less confident than the 
 army. Besides the Con fiance, of 37 guns and a crew of 300 
 men, the British had three brigs and twelve gunboats. The 
 American fleet, under Lieutenant MacDonough, a young man 
 of thirty but a veteran of the Tripolitan wars, was nearly equal 
 in the number of ships, but inferior in armament. To Mac- 
 Donough's 45 long-range guns, throwing a weight of 759 lb., 
 the British fleet could oppose 60 guns, with a broadside of 
 1128 lb. MacDonough placed his ships across the entrance 
 to the bay in such a way as to force the British to fight at close 
 range. When his flagship, the Saratoga, had been apparently 
 silenced by her powerful rival, the Confiance, MacDonough 
 swung her completely around by a clever device of springs 
 in her cables and brought her unused batteries to bear. The 
 Confiance struck her colors, and the three smaller ships were 
 soon obliged to follow suit. MacDonough's victory was com- 
 plete. The next day (September 12) Prevost, unable to pro- 
 ceed, with the Americans in command of the lake, led his 10,000 
 back to Canada. 
 
 MacDonough's victory on Lake Champlain was the most 
 timely stroke of good fortune in the war. When the incredible 
 news of it reached England in October, it dampened the ardor 
 with which the press had clamored all summer for the annihila- 
 tion of the "contemptible army" across the sea. When the 
 news reached Ghent, where the British and American com- 
 missioners had been trying to negotiate a peace since early 
 August, it heartened our envoys to stand by their demand for 
 a treaty which should not sacrifice a foot of American territory. 
 
 At home too the victory came as a solace in the midst of 
 humiliations; for the public buildings at Washington were in 
 
272 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ashes, and the British had "annexed" the coast of Maine from 
 Passamaquoddy Bay to the Penobscot, with the acquiescence 
 of the inhabitants. In June, 1814, Major General Ross had 
 landed, with 4000 troops from Wellington's peninsular army, to 
 cooperate with Admiral Cockburn, a coarse, vindictive officer, 
 whose landing parties for a year had been burning towns and 
 pillaging farms along our blockaded coast. As a culminating 
 act of their marauding expeditions, the British landed on the 
 west bank of the Patuxent River and marched unhindered to 
 Bladensburg, seven miles from Washington. The capital was 
 absolutely undefended. General Winder, the officer in com- 
 mand, was without council, courage, or resource. About 7000 
 green militia were hastily gathered to oppose the British 
 advance, but they broke and ran at the first attack of Ross's 
 troops at Bladensburg (August 24), only a few hundred marines 
 under Commodore Barney redeeming the honor of the Amer- 
 ican uniform by a brave but futile resistance. The disgraceful 
 affair was dubbed "the Bladensburg races." That evening the 
 British entered the city, after Madison had fled for refuge to 
 the Virginia woods, and set fire to the public buildings. Only 
 heavy thunderstorms which broke that night and the next day 
 saved the city from total destruction. 1 From Washington the 
 British sailed up Chesapeake Bay to repeat their depredations 
 on the important commercial town of Baltimore. But their 
 troops were repulsed before the redoubts of the town in a battle 
 in which General Ross lost his life, and their fleet, kept out of 
 range by sunken hulks, after vainly trying in an all-night bom- 
 bardment to lower the Star-Spangled Banner, which was float- 
 ing over Fort McHenry, headed down the bay for the capes 
 (September 14, 1814). This was two days after General 
 
 a This exhibition of vandalism in Washington was in retaliation for the burn- 
 ing, by an American raiding party, of the government buildings at York, Ontario. 
 But the latter act was perpetrated by an irresponsible mob, while the burning 
 of Washington was ordered by a vice admiral in the British navy. The prince 
 regent complimented Ross on this "enterprise so creditable to his Majesty's 
 arms and so well calculated to humble the presumption of the American govern- 
 ment . . . which has involved that country in an unnecessary and unjust war 
 against his Ma'ty." 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 273 
 
 Prevost had begun his retreat to Canada and three days before 
 General Drummond failed in his assault on Brown's garrison 
 at Fort Erie. 
 
 The same September of 1814 saw an important campaign in 
 the Southwest. Florida belonged to England's ally, Spain. Its 
 conquest was the object of the militia of Tennessee and Georgia, 
 just as the conquest of Canada was the aim of the Northern 
 armies. Soon after the war broke out, Andrew Jackson, a major 
 general of the Tennessee militia, set out with 2000 men against 
 "the lower country." The government at Washington, how- 
 ever, was not yet ready to precipitate war with Spain. To his 
 great disgust Jackson was recalled, and the next year our troops 
 were withdrawn from Amelia Island, a Spanish possession off 
 the coast of Florida, which General Matthews had seized in 
 March, 1812. The Tennesseeans and Georgians, however, only 
 awaited the opportunity to renew the attack on Florida, and that 
 opportunity was furnished by the behavior of the Creek Indians 
 in our Mississippi territory, who had been stirred up by English 
 and Spanish agents from Florida, and still more by a visit from 
 the great Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh. These "Red Sticks," 
 as the hostile Creeks were called, took up the hatchet in the 
 summer of 1813 and massacred 250 whites in Fort Mimms on 
 the lower Alabama. After a hard campaign of a year, in which 
 he had to contend with hunger and incipient mutiny in his own 
 ranks, as well as with the treacherous Indians, Jackson com- 
 pletely broke the power of the hostile Creeks and compelled 
 them to sign the treaty of Fort Jackson (August 9, 1814), by 
 which they relinquished to the United States two thirds of their 
 lands in Alabama. The Mississippi territory thus cleared of the 
 Indian danger, Jackson (who was promoted to a major general- 
 ship in the regular army and given command of the military 
 district of the Southwest) pushed on to drive the Spanish power 
 from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. He occupied Mobile 
 (August 15), and after repelling the attack of a British squad 
 on Fort Bowyer at the mouth of Mobile Bay, he marched across 
 the Perdido into East Florida and raised the American flag over 
 the fort at Pensacola (November 7). 
 
274 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 But Jackson was doomed to wait another three years before 
 completing his conquest of East Florida. Already while he was 
 at Mobile, Monroe, who had succeeded Armstrong in the War 
 Department after the raid on Washington, sent him word that 
 a formidable British expedition was preparing for an attack 
 at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was composed of Ross's 
 troops, summoned from Chesapeake Bay, fresh regiments from 
 the Peninsular Army, and West Indians and negroes, amount- 
 ing in all to some 10,000 men. The expedition was to rendez- 
 vous at Jamaica on November 20, under the command of 
 Wellington's brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham. Generous 
 provisions were made for Jackson in men and money, and he 
 was urged by repeated messages from Monroe that New Orleans 
 was the danger 'point. But Jackson's heart was set on the con- 
 quest of Florida. He tarried at Mobile until the eve of the 
 departure of the British expedition from Jamaica, and, turning 
 at last westward, reached New Orleans only twelve days before 
 Pakenham's advance troops entered Lake Borgne, captured the 
 American gunboats, and made possible a landing on the shores 
 of the lake only fifteen miles from the city. Not a breastwork 
 had been erected for the defense of New Orleans. Jackson's 
 troops were still unconcentrated. If the British had proceeded 
 immediately to the attack, New Orleans must have fallen. As 
 it was, Colonel Thornton advanced with 1600 men to within 
 seven miles of the helpless city. But his superior, General 
 Keane, decided to wait for Pakenham to arrive and assume 
 direction of the campaign. Jackson rose to the dangerous 
 situation with magnificent energy and courage. He concen- 
 trated his troops, constructed his lines of defense, located his 
 guns, and disposed his forces with a promptness and skill which 
 excited the admiration of his adversaries. He seemed to divine 
 every movement of the British and was alert to take advantage 
 of every weakness in their position. When Pakenham with 
 great difficulty had got his heavy guns transported across the 
 marshlands and set up against the American batteries, Jackson 
 silenced them in an artillery battle on New Year's Day, 1815, 
 in which he showed superior tactics and marksmanship. A week 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 275 
 
 later Pakenham threw his 5500 veterans against Jackson's 
 works in a frontal attack, only to see them mown down like 
 wheat by the unerring fire of the Kentucky and Tennessee 
 riflemen. The victors of Vitoria broke and ran. Pakenham was 
 killed by a grapeshot. Gibbs and Keane, the officers next in 
 command, were struck down. Only Lambert of the major 
 generals was left to conduct the retreat. The British losses on 
 that famous January 8, 1815, were 2036 men as against 71 
 for Jackson. The shattered British army reembarked on Lake 
 Borgne and sailed away to the eastward. Jackson entered the 
 city of New Orleans on the twenty-first, acclaimed by shouts of 
 triumph, which were echoed fourteen years later from the east 
 front of the White House, when the, "hero of New Orleans" was 
 inaugurated president of the United States. 
 
 Had the Atlantic cable been in existence then, the battle of 
 New Orleans would not have been fought, for the evening be- 
 fore Pakenham arrived to take command of the operations on 
 the Mississippi the British and American commissioners at 
 Ghent had signed a treaty of peace (December 24, 1814). 
 From the moment England repealed her Orders in Council 
 (five days after the declaration of war) there had been dis- 
 cussions of peace. Jonathan Russell, our charge d'affaires in 
 London, approached Lord Castlereagh, and at the same time 
 the British admiral Warren wrote from Halifax to Monroe on 
 the subject of an armistice in September, 1812. But Monroe 
 replied to Warren that an abandonment of the right of im- 
 pressment was an " indispensable condition" of peace, and 
 Castlereagh replied to Russell that England would never 
 abandon that "ancient and accustomed practice." Then Czar 
 Alexander of Russia, who had brought the wrath of Napoleon 
 down on his head by refusing to adhere to the Continental 
 System, intervened to secure the full cooperation of his new 
 ally England. .In September, 1812, his chancellor offered the 
 friendly mediation of Russia to our minister at St. Petersburg, 
 John Quincy Adams. Madison hastened to accept this offer 
 in the spring of 1813 and appointed Secretary Gallatin and 
 Senator Bayard of Delaware to join Adams in the negotiations 
 
276 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 at the Russian capital. They sailed in May. Castlereagh, 
 however, declined the Czar's offer of mediation, indicating his 
 willingness to treat directly with American commissioners at 
 London, or at Gothenburg, Sweden. Again Madison welcomed 
 the invitation and added the names of Henry Clay and Jonathan 
 Russell to the group of envoys (January 14, I8I4). 1 Our for- 
 tunes were very low in 1814. Our victories on the sea had 
 ceased, and our navy was fast disappearing from the ocean. 
 There was disharmony in the cabinet and great discontent in the 
 country. Our foreign trade was almost annihilated. The cur- 
 rency was in the gravest disorder. The country's specie was 
 rapidly accumulating in New England, where disaffection with 
 the war was at its height. TJie Treasury asked for $40,000,000, 
 a sum greater than the total issue of bank notes in the country. 
 No effort availed to raise the voluntary enlistments above 
 35,000 men, which seemed a petty number when compared 
 with the forces which England was preparing to send over on 
 the final defeat of Napoleon. When, therefore, the commis- 
 sioners met at Ghent, in the Netherlands, to begin negotiations 
 (August 8, 1814), the cards in the hands of our envoys were 
 pretty poor. In London, on the other hand, there was con- 
 fidence. The allies were in Paris. Napoleon had abdicated. 
 The British war office was preparing the expedition which was 
 to chastise the Americans into submission, and the English 
 press was heaping insults on the "despot" Madison, the "con- 
 temptible tool of Bonaparte." 
 
 The instructions to the British envoys at Ghent reflected the 
 spirit of the country. The Americans must cede land in Maine 
 and upper New York to give the British direct connections 
 between Halifax and Quebec and the control of both banks of 
 
 1 Gallatin, after his departure for St. Petersburg, was rejected by the Senate, on 
 the ground that he could not combine a cabinet office with a diplomatic mission, 
 though Jay in 1794 and Ellsworth in 1799 had served on foreign embassies while 
 in the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When Gallatin resigned the 
 Treasury portfolio, he was promptly confirmed. The delay caused his name to 
 be placed at the bottom of the list of envoys, but his experience and tact made 
 him the acknowledged leader in all the negotiations. 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 277 
 
 the St. Lawrence. The Lakes too were to be British, no Amer- 
 ican posts to be allowed on their shores or American ships on 
 their waters. From the Sandusky to the Mississippi the Western 
 territory, reclaimed by the victories of Perry and Harrison, was 
 to be formed into an Indian state. We were to be excluded 
 from the Newfoundland fisheries, on the ground that the war 
 had abrogated the treaty of 1783. No concessions were to be 
 made on the matters which occupied the main place in the 
 American instructions impressments, the blockade, and in- 
 demnity for maritime depredations. The American commis- 
 sioners, despairing of reaching any terms which we could 
 accept, were prepared to leave Ghent, when the scene changed 
 suddenly. Late in October the news of our victories reached 
 Europe: how Drummond had been repulsed on the banks of 
 the Niagara ; how MacDonough had destroyed the British fleet 
 on Lake Champlain; how Prevost had retreated from Platts- 
 burg; how Ross's army had failed before Baltimore and left 
 Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, the negotiations of the 
 great European congress at Vienna, which Castlereagh was 
 attending in person, took an alarming turn and threatened the 
 renewal of a general European war. Point by point the gov- 
 ernment at London receded from its high demands, while the 
 American cabinet dropped the impressment question as a sine 
 qua non of peace. 1 It still took weeks of patient negotiation, in 
 which Gallatin found the difficulty of reconciling the conflicting 
 interests of Adams and Clay in the Newfoundland fisheries 
 and in the navigation of the Mississippi even greater than 
 the difficulty of agreeing with the British envoys, before the 
 treaty was actually signed on .Christmas Eve. Its ten articles 
 
 ilt is still commonly taught in our schools that impressment was the chief 
 cause of the War of 1812. But in reality it was the failure of the British govern- 
 ment to revoke the Orders in Council that we made the casus belli. Af tier the war 
 was begun Madison continued it on the issue of impressment for the Orders 
 were repealed at the very outbreak of the war. The cabinet did not drop the ques- 
 tion of impressments (as a condition of peace or even of an armistice) until the end 
 of June, 1814. England maintained the right of impressment as long as she held to 
 the doctrine of "indefeasible allegiance." An act of Parliament reasserted the right 
 in 1835, and Daniel Webster was still discussing it with Lord Ashburton in 1842. 
 
278 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 provided for nothing more than the cessation of hostilities and 
 the return to the status before the war, leaving the questions 
 of boundaries ; fisheries, and the navigation of the Mississippi 
 open for future adjustment. Impressment was passed over in 
 silence. The treaty reached Washington on February 14 and 
 three days later was ratified by the unanimous vote of the 
 Senate. It was received with demonstrations of joy on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, for, except with a few extremists, the war 
 had not been popular in either country. The real cause of the 
 war was Napoleon Bonaparte, for he was the real enemy in both 
 hemispheres. With his fall fell the policies which had been 
 reared to resist his unholy ambition. Orders and Decrees, 
 embargoes and nonintercourse, blockades and impressments, 
 ceased. There was no reason for either England or America 
 to continue the war. For England it would have meant the 
 addition of tens of millions of pounds to her enormous war debt, 
 the continued exposure of her shipping to the American pri- 
 vateers which already virtually blockaded her home waters, 1 
 and the dispatch of expedition after expedition to a theater of 
 war three thousand miles distant, for the questionable satis- 
 faction of "punishing" a despised enemy or "rectifying" the 
 Canadian border. For America it would have meant the risk 
 of bankruptcy, or even the dissolution of the national govern- 
 ment, for the sake of forcing Great Britain to deny in principle 
 an abuse which had ceased in practice. 
 
 iQver 500 American privateers were sent out to prey on British commerce 
 during the war. These swift, daring vessels infested the shores of the British 
 Isles, sending insurance rates up to ruinous figures. A memorial of the Glasgow 
 merchants and shippers to the prince regent in September, 1814, shows how 
 serious the danger was : "In the short space of two years above 800 [ships] have 
 been taken by that power whose maritime strength we have hitherto held in 
 contempt. It is distressing, it is mortifying, that at a time when we are at peace 
 with all the rest of the world, when we have declared the whole American coast 
 under blockade, when we pay so heavy a tax for protection in the form of con- 
 voy duty, and our navy costs so great a sum, we cannot traverse our own Chan- 
 nel in safety nor effect insurance without excessive premiums, and that a horde 
 of American cruisers, unheeded, unresisted, unmolested, seize, burn, sink, destroy 
 our ships in our own inlets and in sight of our own harbours." 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 279 
 
 That national bankruptcy and dissolution were imminent 
 was the conviction of many, and even the gratification of some. 
 Senator Pickering of Massachusetts wrote in January, 1815, 
 before the news of Jackson's victory had reached the East: 
 "If the British succeed in their expedition against New Orleans 
 (and if they have tolerable leaders I see no reason to doubt 
 of their success), I shall consider the Union severed. I do not 
 expect to see a single representative in the next Congress from 
 the Western states." Disaffection had been constant in New 
 England since the beginning of "Mr. Madison's war." "Ex- 
 press your sentiments without fear," said an address of the 
 Massachusetts General Court to the people of the state, "and 
 let the sound of your disapproval of this war be loud and 
 deep. ... If your sons must be torn from you by conscription, 
 consign them to the care of God, but let there be no volunteering 
 except for defensive war." The New England governors re- 
 fused to furnish militia for the invasion of Canada, their bankers 
 declined to subscribe to national loans "to heat the war poker," 
 their merchants speculated in British bills of exchange, and 
 their farmers supplied the armies in Canada with beef and 
 grain. When the government returned to Washington in the 
 autumn of 1814, the ruins amid which it sat down were a 
 symbol of its own condition. The Treasury borrowed paltry 
 sums of the local bankers- of Georgetown to meet pressing bills. 
 Not only the New England States but New York, Pennsylvania, 
 Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky began to raise armies for 
 their own defense. "The states must and will take care of 
 themselves," said Congressman Miller of New York. 
 
 A call went out from the legislature of Massachusetts to the 
 other New England States, in October, 1814, for a convention 
 of delegates "to unite in such measures for our safety as the 
 times demand and the principles of justice and the law of self- 
 preservation will justify." Connecticut and Rhode Island 
 responded promptly, and twenty-three delegates (later joined 
 by three members from Vermont and New Hampshire) met 
 at Hartford, December 15, 1814. For three weeks they sat 
 
280 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 behind closed doors, secrecy giving the air of conspiracy to their 
 deliberations. There were wild rumors abroad of the seces- 
 sion of New England and her alliance with Great Britain. But 
 when the debates were published some years later, they proved 
 to be no more treasonable than the Virginia and Kentucky 
 Resolutions of 1798. The convention declared that when there 
 were "deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the 
 Constitution" it was the right and duty of the states to "inter- 
 pose their authority for the preservation of their liberties." It 
 resolved that the states represented should take steps to pro- 
 tect their citizens from conscription by act of Congress and to 
 secure the right to divert, for the support of armies raised in 
 the state for the defense of its own territory, a part of the 
 federal revenue collected in the states. It also recommended 
 amendments to the Constitution omitting slaves from the census 
 on which representation and direct taxes are based ; requiring 
 a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new states, impose com- 
 mercial restrictions, or declare war ; excluding naturalized citi- 
 zens from federal office ; limiting the president to a single term ; 
 and prohibiting the election of two persons in succession from 
 the same state. The hostility to the South and the "Virginia 
 dynasty" of presidents in these proposed amendments to the 
 Constitution is obvious. Three envoys were appointed to carry 
 the resolutions of the convention to Washington to "negotiate" 
 with the federal government. They learned on their way of 
 Jackson's victory at New Orleans, and arrived in Washington 
 together with the messenger who brought the news of the peace 
 treaty of Ghent. Amid the general rejoicing the "ambassa- 
 dors" from New England slipped out of the capital as quietly 
 as they had come in, and nothing more was heard of the "states' 
 rights" doctrine of New England Federalism. 
 
 There is little reason for Americans to be proud of the War 
 of 1812. Although Madison, in transmitting the treaty of peace 
 to the Senate, spoke exuberantly of our success as the "natural 
 result of the wisdom of legislative councils, of the patriotism 
 of the people, of the public spirit of the militia, and the valor 
 of the military and naval forces of the country," every historical 
 
THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 281 
 
 scholar knows that the sober truth of the matter is summed 
 up in Admiral Mahan's characterization: "a record upon the 
 whole of gloom, desertion, and governmental incompetence, re- 
 sulting from the lack of national preparation." The military 
 significance of the war was trifling, the armies were small, and 
 the total losses in killed and wounded were less than 5000 in 
 a population of 8,000,000. The enemy never penetrated more 
 than twenty-five or thirty miles into our territory and, except 
 for Washington, never held one of our cities for a day. Never- 
 theless, the effects of the war upon our political, economic, and 
 social life were far-reaching. America struck out on a new 
 path in 1815 the path of full autonomy and quickened na- 
 tional consciousness. Since the beginning of Washington's 
 second administration we had been in a state of semicolonial 
 dependence on the Old World. Our parties had been English and 
 French, "Anglomen" and "Jacobins." The actions of Pitt and 
 Talleyrand, of Canning and Napoleon, had dictated our policies. 
 Adjustment to European conditions had been our chief concern. 
 We had made seven treaties with foreign nations within the 
 period 1794-1814. But in 1815 all this changed suddenly. We 
 turned our back on Europe and began to grapple with the prob- 
 lems of our national life and the development of our national 
 domain. Embargo, nonintercourse, blockade, and war had al- 
 most ruined our shipping. Large sums of money were already 
 finding employment in manufacturing industries. In 1815 New 
 England had $40,000,000 invested in cotton factories alone, 
 which handled 27,000,000 pounds of raw cotton. The war had 
 revealed the need for a stable currency, a dependable revenue, 
 a national army, adequate defenses on the frontiers and the 
 coasts, canals and roads to bind the sections of the country 
 into a real Union. 
 
 But, most important of all, the strong particularistic senti- 
 ment that had been brought out by the war aroused the country 
 to the danger of the dissipation of political power to which the 
 doctrine of states' rights might lead. The fate of our national 
 government hung in the balance at the close of the year 1814. 
 "The shock of a severe defeat at New Orleans," says Professor 
 
282 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Babcock, "or a complete rupture at Ghent, might have loosed 
 even the slender ties holding the administration together, and 
 sent the fragments of a discredited government flying from 
 the capital, just as the march of the British had dispersed the 
 President and his cabinet in the preceding summer. " The 
 "revolution of 1800," which had brought Jefferson into power, 
 had been based on distrust of a strong central government. It had 
 heralded democracy but a democracy which was suspicious 
 of nationalism. Political power should be strongest in the local 
 centers and delegated with decreasing confidence to the remoter 
 "higher" authorities. But the actual management of govern- 
 ment had taught the Republican statesmen, beginning with Jef- 
 ferson himself, the impracticability of their theory, and the 
 stress of war had completed the lesson. By 1815 the Repub- 
 licans had abandoned every point of opposition to a supreme 
 national power. The presidents had issued proclamations, and 
 their Congresses had revived whole systems of Federalist tax- 
 ation. The words spoken by Jefferson in the generous rhetoric 
 of his first inaugural were now true in fact : there were no longer 
 Republicans and Federalists, for the Republicans had put on 
 Federalism. Democracy and nationalism were joined in a 
 happy union, destined to inspire the coming generation to 
 wonderful accomplishments in the name of the new America. 
 The one-time author of the Virginia Resolutions wrote the pro- 
 gram of the new age in his annual message to Congress in 
 December, 1815 a liberal provision for national defense, new 
 frigates for the navy, a standing army, national aid for the 
 construction of roads and canals, encouragement to manufac- 
 tures by a protective tariff, and even the reestablishment of a 
 National Bank. All of this was "for the great object of ena- 
 bling the political authority of the Union to employ promptly 
 and effectually the physical power of the Union in the cases 
 designated by the Constitution." The Jeffersonian era was 
 closed. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE NEW NATIONALISM 
 
 Europe extends to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 EXPANSION POLITICAL, INDUSTRIAL, AND TERRITORIAL 
 
 The keynote of the period of American history from the 
 close of the second war with England to the presidency of 
 Andrew Jackson is expansion the amplification of the power 
 of the central government in acts of Congress and decisions of 
 the Supreme Court, the development of .industry in manufac- 
 tures and agriculture, and the extension of our frontier beyond 
 the Mississippi. This triple process of political, economic, and 
 geographical adjustment brought new forces into play in our 
 American life and raised the problems of states' rights, pro- 
 tectionism, the status of territories, internal improvements, 
 sectional rivalries, and slavery, which characterize the years 
 1815-1860 the "middle period" of our history. 
 
 The response of the Republican Congress to Madison's mes- 
 sage of December 5, 1815, was prompt and hearty, and no less 
 hearty was the response of the country to the measures of Con- 
 gress. If traces of that suspicion of the abuse of power in the 
 hands of the central government which had been the creed of the 
 Jeffersonian party of 1800 still remained, they were confined to 
 the few "old Republicans," like John Randolph of Roanoke, 
 belated voices crying in the wilderness. The Republican party 
 had put off its particularism and become strongly national- 
 istic. As Josiah Quincy remarked, with a tinge of sarcasm in 
 his congratulation, it had "out-Federalized Federalism." No 
 sooner was the President's message read than a committee of 
 Congress, headed by John C. Calhoun, was appointed to deal 
 
 283 
 
284 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 with the pressing question of our currency. It reported a bill 
 for the establishment of a National Bank with a capital of 
 $35,000,000, whose stock should be subscribed to partly in coin 
 and partly in the funded debt of the United States and whose 
 notes should be receivable for all dues to the government. The 
 Bank was to be exempt from taxation and was to hold the 
 government balances free of interest. In return for these favors 
 it was to transfer public funds from point to point without 
 brokerage charges, lend the government sums up to $500,000, 
 and pay a bonus of $1,500,000 for its charter, which was to 
 run twenty years. The United States should own one fifth of 
 the Bank's stock and appoint one fifth of the board of directors. 
 Southern statesmen had opposed the establishment of Hamil- 
 ton's Bank a quarter of a century earlier, on the ground that 
 it was an undue extension of the powers " necessary and proper" 
 to carry out the functions given to Congress by the Constitu- 
 tion, but Calhoun now declared that any discussion of the 
 constitutional aspect of the case was "a useless consumption of 
 time." Henry Clay had argued against the recharter of the 
 old Bank in 1811, but now he descended from the Speaker's 
 chair to urge the charter of the new Bank, confessing that he 
 was " willing to sacrifice the pride of consistency rather than the 
 welfare of the country." The Republican press literally took a 
 leaf from Hamilton's book of politics by reprinting his argu- 
 ments for the charter of the Bank advanced in 1 791. The Bank 
 bill passed the House by a vote of 80 to 69, the Senate con- 
 curred, and President Madison, " surmounting the prejudices 
 of a lifetime," signed the bill on April 10, 1816. Early the next 
 year the Bank went into operation, -rapidly extending its busi- 
 ness to nineteen branch establishments in the various states. 
 Although the Bank was neither very wisely nor very honestly 
 managed in the first two years, its beneficent influence on the 
 currency of the country was felt immediately. The state banks, 
 which had increased from fewer than 100 in 1811 to nearly 
 300 in 1 8 1 6 and which had flooded the country with notes whose 
 value diminished from New England southward and westward, 
 were obliged to resume specie payment by February 20, 1817, 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 285 
 
 on pain of having whatever government deposits they held 
 withdrawn. In the three years following the establishment of 
 the Bank the amount of state bank notes decreased over 40 
 per cent, being replaced by the uniform, specie-based notes of 
 the Bank of the United States. 1 Secretary Alexander J. Dallas, 
 to whose genius and energy this reorganization of our fiscal 
 system was chiefly due, retired from the Treasury in 1816, 
 handing over to his successor, William H. Crawford, a surplus 
 
 Of $2O,OOO,OOO. 2 
 
 Seventeen days after the Bank bill became law Madison 
 signed another bill, which gave even stronger proof of the new 
 nationalistic spirit. Embargo, nonintercourse, and war had vir- 
 tually ruined American shipping. Our foreign trade dropped 
 from $246,800,000 in 1807 to $19,800,000 in 1814. Capital to 
 the amount of some $100,000,000 was diverted into manufac- 
 tures. A memorial presented to Congress by the New England 
 manufacturers in December, 1815, recounted the progress of 
 the cotton and woolen industries in that section. There were 
 already 140 cotton mills within a radius of thirty miles of 
 Providence, Rhode Island. Pioneer industries had been car- 
 ried across the Alleghenies to the Ohio valley, where cotton 
 and woolen mills and factories for the manufacture of their 
 machinery were found scattered from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. 
 When the war ended, England began "dumping" the accumu- 
 lated products of her factories on the American market at 
 ominously cheap prices, "in order," as Lord Brougham said 
 
 1 The state banks had issued some $170,000,000 of paper currency, based on 
 not more than $15,000,000 of specie in their vaults. When all the banks south 
 and west of New England suspended specie payment (that is, redemption of their 
 notes in coin), in the autumn of 1814, these notes became practically "bills of 
 credit," whose issue is expressly forbidden to the states by the Constitution. 
 Like bills of credit, they depreciated, passing at different values in different parts 
 of the country. Only in New England, where the banks still paid specie, were 
 the notes at par. The contamination of this depreciated currency added to the 
 weakness of the country in 1814-1815, causing the United States Treasury notes 
 also to decline and fluctuate in credit. 
 
 2 It is a singular fact that the three greatest Secretaries of the Treasury in our 
 history before the Civil War were all aliens : Hamilton and Dallas were born 
 in the British West Indies, Gallatin in Switzerland. 
 
286 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 in Parliament, "to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures 
 in the United States which the war has forced into exist- 
 ence, contrary to the natural course of things" the "natural 
 course" being England's continued monopoly of the Amer- 
 ican trade. In a single year England sent $90,000,000 of mer- 
 chandise to our shores. Crates of earthenware and bales of 
 cotton goods, piled on the docks of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and 
 New York, were sold to eager bidders at auction. Over $450,000 
 was realized from a single week's sale, and the receipts of 
 the New York customhouse from April to June, 1815, were 
 almost $4,000,000. To what end had we finally accomplished 
 our political independence of the Old World if we were now to 
 be made an economic satellite of Great Britain! How could 
 we maintain our dignity as a nation if we were to remain de- 
 pendent on foreign countries for the necessities and comforts 
 of life! Even the Virginians of the old school joined the 
 enthusiastic prophets of the younger generation like Clay, 
 Lowndes, Calhoun, Grundy, and Porter in their demand for 
 national encouragement to the development of our national 
 industries. Jefferson, who, in his "Notes on Virginia," had 
 urged that "our workshops should remain in Europe," lest the 
 introduction of their industrial proletarians should substitute 
 the corrupting influences of the cities for the Arcadian virtues 
 of agriculture in our land, now declared himself in favor of 
 domestic manufactures, to save us from the alternative of being 
 reduced to dependence on a foreign country or "to be clothed in 
 skins and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns." Madison 
 recommended protection to home industries in his last two mes- 
 sages to Congress, and Monroe echoed the same sentiments in 
 his inaugural address. 
 
 It was in response to this demand for economic self- 
 sufficiency, rather than as a deliberate favor to the newly 
 established industries, that Congress, in the spring of 1816, 
 passed a tariff bill continuing, and even slightly enhancing, the 
 "double duties" levied for the support of the war. Iron, glass, 
 hardware, pottery, leather, and woolens profited by the new 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 287 
 
 tariff, but cotton was the chief beneficiary. No other industry 
 had made such rapid progress. Thanks to the improvement of 
 the cotton gin, the spinning jenny, and the power loom, our mills 
 consumed 90,000 bales of cotton in the year 1815, as against 
 100 bales a decade earlier, and turned out a product worth 
 $9,000,000. To prevent the competition of the cheap fabrics 
 from India, worth as low as 6 cents a yard, the bill of 1816 
 provided that no imported cotton would be rated at less than 
 2 5 cents a yard in the tariff schedule. The bill was reported by 
 a committee whose chairman (Lowndes) and a majority of 
 whose members were Southerners, and it was supported in 
 every state of the Union except North Carolina and Louisiana. 
 There were no constitutional objections raised. The bill 
 was a measure of national preparedness. Only a few men, 
 like John Randolph and McDuffie, called attention in vain to 
 the truth (which was later realized by all the statesmen of the 
 South) that it favored the manufacturer at the expense of the 
 farmer. "I lay the claims of the manufacturer entirely out of 
 view," replied Calhoun; "it is the duty of the country as a 
 means of defense to encourage the domestic industry of the 
 country." The bill, he thought, would bind the different sec- 
 tions of our rapidly growing country together, and this mutual 
 dependence would be the surest guaranty against that direst of 
 all dangers that could threaten us disunion. 
 
 Other measures testifying to the new spirit of nationalism 
 were passed immediately on the close of the war. To avoid a 
 repetition of the humiliating experience of relying on an un- 
 reliable militia, Congress voted to maintain a regular army of 
 10,000 men, with Jacob Brown and Andrew Jackson as major 
 generals for the Northern and Southern sections respectively. 
 While such important points as boundaries, fishing-rights, the 
 West Indian trade, and impressments were left unsettled by the 
 peace, there was no guaranty that the peace would be per- 
 manent or of long duration. We were pledged, as Secretary 
 Monroe said in 1815, "to maintain our rank among the nations." 
 Jefferson's gunboats were ordered to be sold, and appropriations 
 
288 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 were made for new warships to guard our coasts and our ship- 
 ping effectively. Two hundred thousand dollars a year for three 
 years was voted for the purchase of ship timber alone. Al- 
 together the appropriations for army and navy reached some 
 $4,500,000. Our coast defenses were strengthened, our interior 
 forts remanned and reprovisioned, taxes levied on foreign ton- 
 nage in our ports, and our coastwise trade confined to ships of 
 American registry. 
 
 The acceptability of the new Republican program of nation- 
 alism to the country at large was shown by the presidential 
 election of 1816. Backed by the influence of President Madison, 
 James Monroe, Secretary of State, secured the Republican 
 nomination over his colleague in the cabinet, William H. Craw- 
 ford of Georgia, in a very "thin" caucus of Congress, by the 
 narrow vote of 65 to 54. Monroe was not a man of first-rate 
 ability, like Jefferson, but his patriotism, openness, industry, 
 and intellectual patience were unquestioned. He was plodding 
 and visionless, too opinionated and insistent over small matters. 
 His diplomatic record at the three courts of Paris, Madrid, and 
 London left much to be desired. His Federalist rival, Rufus 
 King of New York, was an abler statesman, but his weakness 
 was the weakness of declining Federalism, while Monroe's 
 strength was the strength of the new national Republicanism. 
 The Federalists were under no illusions as to the desperate con- 
 dition of their party the party of the Hartford Convention, 
 of opposition to the war, of antagonism to the admission of 
 Louisiana, and of hostility to the growing West. "If we can- 
 not make any impression upon the presidential election at this 
 time," wrote Timothy Pickering to King, "I see no hope for the 
 future." King himself had abandoned hope after his unsuccess- 
 ful canvass for the governorship of New York in the spring of 
 1816. He spoke of his candidacy as "a fruitless struggle." He 
 even confessed that it was "the real interest and policy of the 
 country that the Democracy should pursue its natural course." 
 "Federalists of our age," he said, "must be content with the 
 past." All that remained to them, he said to his son Edward, 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 289 
 
 was "to support the least wicked section of Republicans in 
 case of division among them.' 7 The election of November con- 
 firmed King's gloomy prophecy. He received only 34 electo- 
 ral votes from the states of Massachusetts. Connecticut, and 
 Delaware. The other nineteen states cast their 183 votes for 
 Monroe. 
 
 A few weeks after his inauguration President Monroe set 
 out for a tour of the North and West for the ostensible purpose 
 of inspecting the national defenses. As he journeyed north- 
 ward through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York 
 he was received with enthusiastic demonstrations of welcome, 
 which rose to such a pitch when he reached New England that 
 "a humorous cynic compared the scene to the adoration of the 
 Wise Men of the East." Hartford, only eighteen months earlier 
 the seat of the convention which had been bent on wresting the 
 control of the government from the hands of the "Virginia 
 dynasty," now hailed this Virginian president as the "political 
 father and guide" and assured him that party spirit no longer 
 rendered "alien to each other those who ought to be bound 
 together by fraternal affection." In Boston, the very citadel 
 of Federalism, the public authorities and the press vied with 
 each other in heaping honors upon this intimate friend of 
 Jefferson's, who had contributed so much to the conduct of 
 "Mr. Madison's war." The Boston Centinel, which had ap- 
 peared edged in mourning when Jefferson was elected to the 
 presidency, spoke of Monroe's visit as a jubilee which ushered 
 in "an era of good feelings." Monroe took up the phrase and 
 repeated it as he journeyed northward to Portsmouth, then 
 across the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York to 
 Ogdensburg, and thence by the St. Lawrence and the Lakes to 
 Buffalo and Detroit. The phrase caught the fancy of the 
 American people too and has served ever since to designate 
 the period of Monroe's presidency. 
 
 In spite of the festive optimism with which it had been ush- 
 ered in, however, Monroe's term of office was anything but an 
 era of good feelings. With the burden of foreign war removed, 
 
2 go THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 with our manufactures encouraged and our trade improved, 1 
 with our Treasury filled 2 and the Indian danger removed so that 
 the pioneers could safely move to the Mississippi and beyond, 
 up the valley of the Missouri, there emerged a number of prob- 
 lems and sectional interests which had been seen only dimly 
 before the war. Since by far the most important of these prob- 
 lems were raised by the development of the country west of the 
 Alleghenies, we must now turn our attention to that region. 
 
 No other single factor in American life has had so continuous 
 and decisive an influence as our ever-westward-moving frontier. 
 Already in the colonial days there had developed a marked 
 contrast between the merchants and planters on the Atlantic 
 coast and the pioneer farmers of the "back country," whom the 
 call of cheaper land, the love of adventure, the desire to escape 
 debts and taxes, and the determination to be rid of the 
 aristocratic pretensions of the ruling propertied classes drove 
 westward under the urge of that same "rude impulse" which 
 had sent their fathers across the sea. In the same year that the 
 French relinquished their claims to the west of the Alleghe- 
 nies, stretching "all down at the back of our colonies," King 
 George III drew the Proclamation Line along the crest of the 
 mountains and forbade the colonists to cross it into the Indian 
 lands (1763). But King George's decree was no more effective 
 than King Canute's. Pioneers from Virginia and the Carolinas 
 followed Boone, Robertson, and Harrod across the Alleghe- 
 nies and down the westward-flowing rivers into Kentucky and 
 Tennessee. Others left the rocky farms of New England for 
 the rich river bottoms of the Ohio. Before the inauguration 
 of Washington over 100,000 settlers had entered the Western 
 country, and a number of new states had been projected (Van- 
 dalia, Transylvania, Westsylvania, Franklin) within the limits 
 of western Pennsylvania and Virginia and the present states 
 of Kentucky and Tennessee. 
 
 1 Our exports for 1815 were $52,500,000, and our imports $103,000,000. The 
 figures for 1816 were $81,000,000 and $147,000,000 respectively. 
 
 2 Dallas estimated the customs receipts for 1816 at $13,000,000. They actually 
 were $39,000,000. 
 
PROJECTS FOR NEW WESTERN STATES IN THE 
 REVOLUTIONARY EPOCH 
 
2 92 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The conditions of life beyond the mountains tended to 
 enhance the spirit of self-reliance and adventurous enterprise 
 which had caused these pioneers to separate from their brothers 
 on the seaboard. Not only did they have to employ constant 
 vigilance in defending their families against the Indians and in 
 getting a living from the inhospitable forest, but they showed 
 this same vigilance in their political life. They were a new 
 band of immigrants, carrying a new Declaration of Independ- 
 ence into the Western land. 1 They formed "bodies politic," 
 " association's," " societies" for "their own and the public good," 
 petitioning the old states within whose limits they were to 
 recognize them and take them under their protection. They 
 realized that they were the heralds of an American empire, 
 "erecting," as one of their leaders said, "the corner-stone of 
 an edifice, the height and magnificence of whose superstructure 
 is now in the womb of futurity." But they were looked upon 
 by the older communities, which they had left, as groups of mal- 
 contents, "lawless mobs," "hordes of bandits," "land pirates." 
 Their departure was sometimes deplored as a secession, weak- 
 ening the political authority and disturbing the economic sta- 
 bility of the states, and sometimes welcomed as a relief to 
 the "sober and well-disposed" people whom they left behind. 
 President Dwight of Yale College, in the "land of steady 
 habits," thanked Providence for "opening in the vast western 
 wilderness a retreat sufficiently alluring to draw them away 
 from the land of their nativity." 
 
 The tide of westward migration fluctuated with the political 
 fortunes of the government. During the period of general war 
 in Europe, and the consequent expansion of. the American 
 carrying-trade from 1793 to 1807, there was sufficient demand 
 for men and goods in our seaports to interrupt the migration 
 to the West. But embargo, nonintercourse, and the virtual 
 ruin of our trade in the second war with Great Britain again 
 
 1 It is interesting to compare the language of the convention which met to 
 establish the new state of Franklin in 1785 with that of the Declaration of 
 Independence. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 293 
 
 turned men's eyes and feet across the mountains, where fine 
 land was to be bought in quarter sections (160 acres) at two 
 dollars an acre. The victories of Harrison north of the Ohio 
 and of Jackson south of the Tennessee relieved the pressure 
 from hostile Indians on our frontiers. The appearance of the 
 steamboat on the Ohio and the Mississippi guaranteed the 
 rapid development of the commerce of our great "hinterland" 
 through the port of New Orleans. After the Treaty of Ghent 
 a veritable exodus to the Western country began. The news- 
 papers of the times, diaries and letters of travelers, prospec- 
 tuses of land-booming companies, reports of committees of 
 state legislatures all testify to the steady stream of emigrants 
 along the Western pikes and trails. They went on horseback 
 or in big covered wagons, or sometimes even walked, pushing 
 before them rude carts piled high with their household goods 
 and driving their cattle. In the year 1817 a company of 120 
 from Durham, Maine, started out to purchase a township in 
 Indiana, following their pastor as the Massachusetts Puritans 
 had followed Hooker to the Connecticut valley nearly two cen- 
 turies before. The same year nearly 4000 emigrants from the 
 Carolinas and Georgia met at Burnt Corn Springs, bound for 
 the cotton lands on the Alabama River, with " carts, sleighs, 
 rigs, coaches, and waggons/' and fifty droves of cattle and hogs. 
 The ranks of the emigrants were swollen by new immigrants 
 from Europe, especially from Germany and the British Isles, 
 where a period of acute industrial depression had followed the 
 exertions of the long series of wars against Napoleon. An 
 English traveler, himself among the stream of settlers of 1817 
 seeking a new home in the West, wrote in his " Notes on a 
 Journey from Virginia to Illinois": "The old America seems 
 to be breaking up and moving westward. We are seldom out 
 of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of 
 family groups behind and before us." 
 
 From New England to Georgia there were protests against 
 this depletion of man power. The populous Atlantic states 
 remained stationary while the Western communities grew some 
 
294 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 50, some 100, and some 500 per cent in the few years imme- 
 diately following the war. 1 "That alarming disease denomi- 
 nated the Ohio fever," said the New Hampshire Supporter in 
 1817, "continues to rage in many parts of New England, by 
 which vast numbers are taken off. In Connecticut it has spread 
 to such a surprising extent that Governor Walcott considers 
 an investigation of the causes which produce it as by far the 
 most important subject which can engage the attention of the 
 legislature." Two years earlier a committee of the North Caro- 
 lina legislature had complained that only 600,000 people were 
 left in the state, while it was "mortifying to see that thousands 
 of rich and respectable citizens were moving west each year" 
 to add to the 200,000 who had already "removed to the waters 
 of the Ohio and the Tennessee since the inauguration of General 
 Washington." The Virginia legislature complained of "wasted 
 and deserted fields, of dwellings abandoned ... of churches 
 in ruins, because the fathers of the land are gone where another 
 outlet to the ocean [the Mississippi] turns their thoughts from 
 the place of their nativity and their affections from the haunts 
 of their youth." 
 
 It was inevitable that this rapid movement of population to 
 the West should bring with it important consequences for our 
 economic, political, and social life. The first effect was the 
 awakening of our people to the need for adequate means of 
 transportation for the development of the home market which 
 grew up with the expanding surplus of agricultural products. 
 The farmers of the Northwest sent their pork and beef, their 
 butter, beans, corn, flour, cheese, apples, whisky, cider, and 
 vinegar down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. 
 In 1818 there passed through that port 136,000 tons of prod- 
 uce, valued at $16,771,711. Cattle and hogs to the number of 
 
 a The following figures from the census reports are eloquent: 
 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 VIRGINIA 
 
 INDIANA 
 
 MISSOURI 
 
 MISSISSIPPI 
 
 1810 
 1820 
 
 472,040 
 523,287 
 
 959,049 
 I,373,8i2 
 
 974,600 
 1,065,386 
 
 24,520 
 147,178 
 
 19,783 
 66,586 
 
 40,352 
 
 75,448 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 295 
 
 100,000 were driven each year from Ohio, Indiana, and Ken- 
 tucky to the seaboard, feeding on the way, to furnish meat for 
 export and hides for the New England leather manufacturers. 
 As the cotton-planters moved into the fresh lands of the South- 
 west and built their plantation wharves along the banks of the 
 Mississippi, they began to absorb the supplies of horses, mules, 
 hay, and food that came down the river. More than half 
 a million acres of public land were sold in Mississippi and 
 Alabama in the year 1817. IniSio over 90 per cent of our 
 cotton crop was raised in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia ; 
 but ten years later more than one third of the crop was grown 
 in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. How to 
 take advantage of the great market opening up in the West for 
 the manufactures of the East, and at the same time to bind 
 together the sections separated by the mountains, became the 
 question of the hour. The sentiment of nationalism and the 
 thirst for profits combined to stimulate the demand for internal 
 improvements. The schemes of Jefferson and Gallatin for a 
 great system of communication by roads and canals between 
 the Eastern and the Western states were taken up anew and 
 pushed vigorously in Congress and the state legislatures. 
 
 A few illustrations will show the need for improved trans- 
 portation facilities. Freight was drawn in heavy wagons by 
 horses, mules, or oxen along poor roads at incredibly slow 
 speed and high cost. From Baltimore to Cincinnati it took 
 a month in transit and often cost $150 a ton. It cost so much 
 to get a bushel of wheat from western Pennsylvania or New 
 York to the seaboard that the farmer had little incentive to 
 raise more than enough to satisfy his own needs and the scanty 
 market in his vicinity. He saw the major part of the value 
 both of the products which he sent eastward and of the imple- 
 ments, clothing, and household articles which he bought in 
 return go into the pockets of the teamsters. The roads in 
 Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky were so poor that it did not pay 
 to raise grain or tobacco fifty miles from a navigable river. 
 A representative from the back country of Virginia, less than 
 one hundred miles from the coast, declared in Congress that 
 
296 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 it cost the farmer in his district on the average one bushel of 
 wheat to transport two to tidewater. 
 
 Unless the farm products of Ohio were to seek outlet through 
 the Lakes and the St. Lawrence via Montreal, enriching the 
 British carrying-trade, and the whole wealth of the Mississippi 
 Valley were to go down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf, 
 to be competed for by British, French, and Spanish shipping, 
 there must be inducement enough offered to the farmer to get 
 his produce across the mountains to New York, Philadelphia, 
 Baltimore, and Charleston. The clumsy method of sending 
 freight from the Atlantic ports to Louisville, Cincinnati, and 
 Pittsburgh via New Orleans could not be continued with profit 
 to the shipper or the receiver. Peter B. Porter of New York, 
 in a famous speech in Congress in 1811, warned the country of 
 the danger of the separation of the Union into an eastern and 
 a western section unless measures were speedily taken to bind 
 together the farmers on one side of the mountains and the 
 manufacturers and merchants on the other. The clauses of the 
 Constitution would be powerless to do this. Economic needs 
 were stronger than political theories: "It is by producing a 
 mutual dependence of interests between these two great sec- 
 tions, and by this means only, that the United States can ever 
 be kept together." The bitter experiences of the war added 
 force to Porter's warning. Even the fathers of the old Virginia 
 school began to follow, though "with caution and good heed," 
 the lead of the younger generation of Republicans, like Porter, 
 Clay, and Calhoun. President Madison, in his last message to 
 Congress, urged "the expediency of exercising their existing 
 powers, and when necessary of resorting to the prescribed mode 
 of enlarging them [by Constitutional amendments], in order 
 to effectuate a comprehensive system of roads and canals such 
 as will have the effect of drawing more closely together every 
 part of our country by promoting intercourse and improvements 
 and by increasing the share of every part in the common stock 
 of national prosperity." 
 
 A few days after Madison's message John C. Calhoun intro- 
 duced a bill to commit the government to a generous and con- 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 297 
 
 tinuous application of the public funds to the development of 
 the West. He moved that the $1,500,000 bonus to be paid 
 to the government for the charter of the new United States 
 Bank, together with the annual interest on the government's 
 $7,000,000 of stock in the Bank, be set apart as a fund for 
 internal improvements. Not alone the prosperity of the farm- 
 ers and the merchants but the strength and unity of the country 
 were concerned in such a policy, he urged. Our vastness 
 exposed us to the worst of all calamities disunion. 
 
 We are great and rapidly, I was about to say fearfully, growing. 
 This is our pride and our danger, our weakness and our strength. . . . 
 Let us bind the Republic together with roads and canals. Am I 
 told that the Constitution does not give Congress the necessary 
 power? ... I answer, I am no advocate of refined arguments on 
 the Constitution ! That instrument was not intended as a thesis for 
 the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to be construed 
 into plain good sense. . . . " Congress shall have the power," says the 
 Constitution, "to provide for the common defense and general welfare 
 of the country" . . . and as roads and canals will contribute to 
 the general welfare, Congress may lay taxes and duties to pay for 
 them. ... If we are restricted in the use of our money to the 
 enumerated powers, on what principle can the purchase of Louisiana 
 be justified? 
 
 Calhoun's bill passed the House in February, 1817, by the 
 close vote of 86 to 84, and the Senate by 20 to 15. It reached 
 President Madison the day before his retirement from office 
 (March 3). With the caution characteristic of the Jeffersonian 
 school, Madison vetoed the bill, not because he disapproved of 
 its object, but because of political scruples. He thought an 
 amendment to the Constitution necessary to enable Congress to 
 spend the public money in such wholesale fashion for purposes 
 not enumerated among its powers. His successor, Monroe, 
 was equally interested in the plan of improvements and equally 
 cautious as to the method of putting it into operation. As there 
 was no hope for obtaining the two-thirds vote in Congress 
 to override the presidential veto, the agitation for internal 
 improvements lapsed. When Monroe was succeeded by John 
 
2 98 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Quincy Adams, who was ready and anxious to put his name to 
 such bills, sectional rivalries and jealousies had put an end 
 to that generous enthusiasm for national expansion at national 
 expense which had marked the years immediately following the 
 Treaty of Ghent. The Calhoun of 1825 would have been the 
 last man in the country to deliver the speech of the Calhoun 
 of 1816. 
 
 Constitutional scruples and economic theories, however, were 
 not the only factors that entered into the debates aroused by 
 the demand of the West for recognition of its growing interests. 
 Thirty- four of the 41 votes of the New England States in the 
 House, and all but one of their votes in the Senate, were cast 
 against Calhoun's bill. Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware also 
 registered about three fourths of their votes in the negative. 
 The 84 votes in favor came almost wholly from the states west 
 of the Alleghenies and from New York and Pennsylvania, 
 whose interest in the region of the Great Lakes and the Ohio 
 valley was obvious. In short, it was already a sectional issue, 
 betraying the concern of the seaboard states, and especially of 
 New England, lest the increasing West, by draining off their 
 population, should displace their predominant influence in 
 the nation's politics. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts had 
 protested on the floor of Congress against the admission of 
 Louisiana in 1811, declaring that such an action would be 
 " virtually a dissolution of the Union" and would justify the 
 secession of the Eastern states. "You have no authority/' he 
 continued, "to throw the rights and liberties and property of 
 this people into a hotch-potch with the wild man on the Missouri 
 nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo- 
 Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the sands at the mouth 
 of the Mississippi." "What will become of the old United 
 States who first entered into the compact contained in the 
 Constitution," cried his colleague Wheaton, "and for whose 
 benefit alone that instrument was made and executed ? Instead 
 of these new states being annexed to us, we shall be annexed 
 to them, lose our independence, and become altogether subject 
 to their control." Other New Englanders affected to despise 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 299 
 
 rather than fear the voluntary exiles who joined the "thieves 
 and insolvents" in the "land beyond the Sabbath." "The 
 people of the Atlantic states," wrote Flint in his "Recollections 
 of the Last Ten Years" (1826), "have not yet recovered from 
 the horror inspired by the term ' Backwoodsman/ This prej- 
 udice is especially strong in New England, and is more or less 
 felt from Maine to Georgia." We shall note the effects of this 
 social cleavage on our political and economic history when the 
 unprecedented growth of our Western communities and the 
 rapid addition of the states of Indiana (1816), Mississippi 
 (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and Missouri (1821) 
 had made it complete. Here it is instructive to remember 
 that the vote on Calhoun's Bonus bill was taken on the eve 
 of Monroe's tour to consolidate the "era of good feelings." 
 The new president's speeches on "the harmony of sentiment 
 so extensively maintained," and his congratulations, at the 
 opening of his first Congress, on "the prosperity and happy 
 condition of a country where local jealousies are rapidly yield- 
 ing to more generous, enlarged, and enlightened views of na- 
 tional policy," must be read in the light of the debates and 
 the vote on the Bonus bill. 
 
 A condition indispensable to the settlement of the West was 
 the removal of the Indians. Our pioneers pressed steadily 
 into the red man's hunting-grounds, making each treaty of ces- 
 sion the vantage ground for new encroachments. The Indians, 
 slow to understand that the cessions excluded them from the 
 lands over which their fathers had roamed, were strengthened in 
 their resistance to American advance by British commercial 
 agents who wished to keep the fur trade in the channels of the 
 Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. In General Harrison's opin- 
 ion, it was due largely to British encouragement that Tecumseh 
 had started the Indians of the Northwest on the warpath after 
 the treaty of Fort Wayne (1809) had compelled them to part 
 with some 3,000,000 acres of land in Indiana. At Ghent the 
 British commissioners had demanded the erection of a buffer 
 Indian state to the south of the Great Lakes and insisted that the 
 Indians be admitted as parties to the treaty. But the Americans 
 
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 were firm in the defense of their thousands of pioneers who had 
 settled in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. They would grant 
 neither land nor recognition to the Indians, but only complete 
 amnesty on the cessation of hostilities. The British reluc- 
 tantly acquiesced. After the Treaty of Ghent was concluded, 
 the Indians of the Northwest held a council at Detroit (1815), 
 where Tecumseh's brother "the Prophet" solemnly buried the 
 hatchet. The succeeding years saw the rapid extinguishment 
 of Indian titles in the Northwest. More than one half the area 
 of Illinois, one third the area of Indiana, and nearly one quarter 
 the area of Ohio were ceded to the United States between 1816 
 and 1819, with large tracts in southern Michigan. The new 
 states of Indiana and Illinois came into the Union with all their 
 rich lands either already under or soon to pass under the 
 acknowledged authority of the white man. 
 
 While the Indians north of the Ohio buried the hatchet and 
 gave the land peace for nearly a score of years, the Treaty of 
 Ghent only gave the occasion for fresh wars south of the 
 Tennessee. It will be remembered that Andrew Jackson's 
 treaty with the Creeks, after his punitive campaign of the 
 summer of 1814, had compelled them to surrender two thirds 
 of their land in Alabama (p. 273). The exiles of the tribe took 
 refuge with the Seminoles ("wanderers") on the Florida strip 
 south of the boundary of the United States. Here a British 
 adventurer, Colonel Nichols, without the authorization of his 
 government, took under his protection the Seminoles with their 
 motley crew of allies, consisting of refugee Creeks and runaway 
 negroes from the plantations of Georgia. He encouraged the 
 Indians in the belief that the Treaty of Ghent restored the 
 lands which they had surrendered in Alabama. He built a 
 fort near the mouth of the Appalachicola and stocked it plenti- 
 fully with arms and ammunition. Then he sailed for England, 
 leaving negroes in possession of the fort, whence raiding parties 
 issued to destroy the crops, steal the cattle, and massacre the 
 inhabitants of Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. Reprisals 
 naturally followed. The Americans threw a red-hot cannon 
 ball into the fort, igniting several hundred barrels of gun- 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 301 
 
 powder and blowing the whole "garrison " into eternity. A lit- 
 tle later they wiped out the Indian village of Fowlton, whose 
 inhabitants had fired on Major Triggs. The Indians retaliated 
 by ambushing a boatload of Americans on the Appalachicola 
 River and massacring men, women, and children with frightful 
 barbarity. Thus the Seminole War was opened in the late 
 autumn of 1817. 
 
 Andrew Jackson was the major general in command of the 
 southern district of the United States. A letter was dispatched 
 to him by Secretary of. War Calhoun, on December 26, 1817, 
 ordering him to proceed to the scene of disturbances with the 
 militia of Tennessee and Georgia, to pursue the Indians across 
 the Spanish border if necessary in breaking up their marauding 
 bands, but to respect the strongholds under the command of 
 Spain. These orders crossed a letter from Jackson to Monroe 
 advising the seizure of all East Florida as a guaranty for 
 Spain's reparation of the outrages committed on American soil 
 by Indians under her nominal control, and signifying his 
 willingness, on a hint from the authorities at Washington, to 
 reduce the Floridas to submission within sixty days. Monroe, 
 having already sent the orders of December 26, put aside 
 Jackson's more drastic plan without a reply; but Jackson 
 claimed that before he had reached the Appalachicola River he 
 had received a letter from Congressman Rhea of Tennessee with 
 the authorization of the government to conquer the Floridas. 
 Whatever the truth may be about the correspondence, 1 Jack- 
 son was not the man to fight an Indian war in the cautious 
 spirit of a diplomat. He not only pursued the enemy into 
 Spanish territory, but he seized the forts of St. Marks and 
 Pensacola in defiance of their Spanish governors, garrisoned 
 them with American troops, and raised the American flag over 
 every important post in Florida except St. Augustine. 2 He 
 seized two British subjects, Arbuthnot and Ambrister, tried 
 
 ir The student will find a full discussion of President Monroe and the Rhea 
 letter in James Schouler's ''History of the United States," Vol. Ill, p. 83. 
 
 2 He ordered General Gaines to capture St. Augustine, but the order reached 
 Washington and was countermanded. 
 
302 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 them by court-martial, shot one and hanged the other at the 
 yardarm of his own trading-schooner. By the end of May, 
 1818, Jackson had finished his work and was on his way back 
 to Nashville to be feted as the hero and idol of the West. He 
 left Florida subdued to the power of the United States, but 
 his precipitate campaign had raised embarrassments for the 
 administration which absorbed the attention of the country 
 for months to come. 
 
 As the reports of the events in Florida reached Washington 
 they stirred amazement and indignation, admiration and per- 
 plexity. Relief for the security of our southern border was 
 balanced by anxiety for the offense given to the friendly powers 
 of Spain and Great Britain. Don Luis de Onis, the Spanish 
 minister, in high dudgeon, demanded the "prompt restitution 
 of St. Marks, Pensacola, Barrancas, and all other places wrested 
 by General Jackson from the crown of Spain" and the punish- 
 ment of the general and his officers. The President and the 
 cabinet agreed that Jackson had exceeded his instructions of 
 December 26, and instructions were sent to the commanders 
 at the forts to deliver them over on the arrival of a Spanish 
 force strong enough to curb the Indians. Monroe thought that 
 Jackson's "war against Spain" should be disavowed. Calhoun 
 was in favor of punishing him for insubordination. John 
 Quincy Adams was the only member of the cabinet to uphold 
 the general's actions. He maintained that Jackson had not 
 waged war against Spain, but that he had seized the forts in 
 self-defense in obedience to his orders to pursue the Indians 
 into Spanish territory and terminate their depredations. If 
 Spanish authority had suffered in Florida, it was but a just 
 retribution on Spain for failing to use her power to control 
 the Indian and negro hordes, as she had solemnly promised to 
 do in the treaty of 1 795. When the ministry at Madrid renewed 
 the demand of De Onis for the disavowal of Jackson's behavior 
 and the punishment of the "haughty invader," Adams sent an 
 ultimatum instead of an apology to the Spanish court. He 
 reviewed the long course of outrages on American life and 
 property, permitted and even abetted by Spanish authority; 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 303 
 
 justified Jackson's behavior "by all the laws of prudence and 
 humanity"; and closed with a sharp summons to Spain to 
 cease to speak in the language of injured pride and to make 
 her choice immediately "either to place in Florida a force 
 adequate at once to the protection of her territory and the ful- 
 filment of her engagements, or to cede to the United States 
 a province of which she retains nothing but the nominal pos- 
 session, but which is in fact a derelict open to the occupancy 
 of every enemy, civilized and savage, of the United States." 
 
 King Ferdinand of Spain was powerless to meet the chal- 
 lenge. Restored to the throne of Madrid on the collapse of 
 Napoleon's power, he found the Spanish colonies in America 
 in full revolt and his own kingdom torn between the aristo- 
 cratic and priestly advocates of his policy of reaction and the 
 adherents of the liberal "revolutionary" constitution of 1812. 
 Moreover, the British commercial interests were exerting pres- 
 sure on Parliament to prevent that restoration of Spain's colo- 
 nial empire which would interrupt the lucrative trade opened 
 to them by the revolutions in Central and South America. 
 Since Florida was slipping from his grasp, Ferdinand wisely 
 decided to make such profit as he could out of its loss. On 
 February 22, 1819, his minister at Washington signed a treaty 
 surrendering East and West Florida to the United States on 
 condition that our government would accept responsibility up 
 to $5,000,000 for claims of American citizens against Spain, 
 for depredations committed since the opening of the Napoleonic 
 wars. By the same treaty a line was drawn fixing the boundary 
 between the United States and Spain on the west and south 
 of the Louisiana Purchase. It ran alternately north and west 
 from the mouth of the Sabine River to the point where the 
 forty-second parallel of latitude meets the Pacific coast (see 
 map, p. 319). The ratification of the treaty by the Senate 
 was immediate and unanimous, but the Spanish Cortes with- 
 held its consent for over a year and a half, for fear it would 
 encourage the United States to recognize the rebel governments 
 of Central and South America. It was not until July, 1821, 
 that the province of Florida was turned over to the United 
 
304 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 States and erected into a territory. Andrew Jackson, whose 
 conduct in the Seminole War had received full vindication at 
 the hands of Congress, in spite of the opposition of Henry Clay, 
 and whose name was already being associated with the White 
 House in the mouths of the men beyond the mountains, was 
 made the first governor of the territory. 
 
 Two points bearing on the Louisiana Purchase deserve notice 
 in the important treaty of 1819. By allowing West Florida to 
 be included in the cession by Spain we virtually abandoned the 
 claims put forward and acted upon by Jefferson, Madison, and 
 Monroe since 1804 that we had purchased that region from 
 Napoleon in 1803. And by accepting the Sabine as the south- 
 western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase we relinquished, 
 not without regret on the part of members of the cabinet and 
 protests on the part, of Western members of Congress, the far 
 better claim which we had to Texas under the terms of the 
 treaty of 1803 (see page 220). The "surrender of Texas," 
 however, in spite of Clay's and Benton's fervid oratory, was not 
 allowed to trouble the national rejoicing over the acquisition of 
 the whole of Florida by clear title from the Iberville to the 
 Atlantic. 1 That acquisition was a great step in the expansion 
 of our republic. It removed the dangers which for years had 
 beset the westward march of our cotton-planters, and opened 
 an uninterrupted communication from the rivers of that region 
 to the Gulf. It made the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico an 
 American lake. Henceforth the ships which left the mouth of 
 
 1 Clay's objections to the treaty were rightly interpreted as a rather factious 
 opposition to the administration which had honored Adams instead of himself 
 with the office of Secretary of State; and Benton's impassioned plea for the 
 possession of the sparsely populated region beyond the Sabine was still looked 
 on as the dreaming of a visionary. Even Jackson, according to the testimony of 
 John Quincy Adams's "Diary" (February 2, 1819), advised Monroe in a con- 
 versation that the American people would be well content to let Texas go in lieu 
 of the acquisition of Florida. Besides, the debates over the admission of Missouri 
 as a slave state were beginning to convulse Congress and the country just at the 
 moment when the Spanish treaty was concluded. Monroe may well have wished 
 to avoid the charge of favoring the interests of the slaveholder by adding to our 
 national domain another vast region which was certain in time to be made into 
 one or more slave states. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 305 
 
 the Mississippi would have no fear from pirate crews issuing 
 from their lair at the very delta, and might coast along the 
 shore saluting the Stars and Stripes over the fortresses which 
 had harbored thieves and marauders under the flag of Spain. 
 The impetus of expansion extended even to the far North- 
 west; through that "empire of mountains and prairies where 
 the men of the Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling 
 waves of the tide of civilization that was to sweep them away." 
 American traders and explorers, following in the footsteps of 
 Lewis and Clark, began to contest with the British and Spanish 
 agents the monopoly of the trappers' and hunters' rendezvous. 
 After the unsuccessful attempt of the Missouri Fur Company 
 to maintain a post in Oregon in 1810, John Jacob Astor estab- 
 lished the emporium of the Pacific Fur Company at Astoria, at 
 the mouth of the Columbia River. He was obliged to surrender 
 it to the British during the War of 1812, but recovered it a 
 few years later by the restitution clause of the Treaty of 
 Ghent. The British, in spite of Captain Gray's discovery of the 
 Columbia River, and Lewis and Clark's expedition to its mouth, 
 had asserted a claim to all the Pacific coast between Rus- 
 sian Alaska on the north and Spanish California on the south. 
 But now they consented tardily to recognize our interest 
 in Oregon, the name by which the huge region lying west 
 of the Rockies between the northern and southern limits 
 just described was known. By a treaty negotiated at London 
 in iSiS, 1 the boundary of Canada and the United States west 
 of the Lake of the Woods was fixed at the forty-ninth parallel 
 of latitude as far west as the "Stony Mountains" (see map, 
 p. 319) ; while the Oregon region beyond was to be held for a 
 period of ten years by joint occupation, "free and open to the 
 
 ^^The same treaty regulated the vexed question of the American fishing-rights 
 off the Canadian coast, which had been granted by the treaty of 1783 but which 
 the British contended had been abrogated by the War of 1812. Adams had 
 labored in vain at Ghent to secure the protection of the New England fisher- 
 men, whose exports in 1814 reached the enormous sum of $12,000,000. The new 
 treaty of 1818 restored to the United States the right to catch, dry, and cure 
 fish on certain extensive coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland and to use all 
 the Canadian ports in case of distress or need of food. 
 
306 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 vessels, citizens, and subjects of the two powers." This joint 
 occupation continued until 1846, when the dividing line of 49 
 was extended to Puget Sound. 
 
 In addition to the acts of Congress and the treaty negotiations 
 described in this section, several important decisions of the 
 Supreme Court came to reenforce the sentiment of nationalism 
 in these years. Down to the Treaty of Ghent our national 
 judiciary had shown but little sign of the great prestige which 
 it was destined to enjoy on our history. Only three important 
 cases had come before it in the years 1800-1815. Membership 
 in what we now regard as the most august body in our consti- 
 tutional system was not very ardently sought for or highly 
 prized. John Jay regarded it as a promotion to be transferred 
 from the Supreme Court to the governorship of New York. 
 Edward Rutledge preferred an appointment to the bench of 
 South Carolina. But beginning with the year 1816, a series 
 of decisions written by Chief Justice Marshall and his able 
 young associate Justice Story raised the court to a high emi- 
 nence as the guardian of the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 In the case of Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee the paramount 
 authority of the United States over the highest tribunal of a 
 state was maintained. The twenty-fifth section of the Judiciary 
 Act of 1789 provided that appeals might be taken from the 
 state courts to the Supreme Court in cases involving the inter- 
 pretation of the Constitution. When the Virginia Court of Ap- 
 peals, in 1816, defying the act, refused to allow the case to 
 go beyond its jurisdiction, the Supreme Court ruled that the 
 act was constitutional and that the laws of the states were 
 subject to the appellate power of the United States tribunal 
 whenever the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the nation were 
 concerned (i Wheat. 1 304!!). Three years later, in the case 
 of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward (4 Wheat. 518 ff.) the 
 court nullified a law of the legislature of New Hampshire alter- 
 
 ir rhe United States Reports, or cases decided by the Supreme Court, are 
 cited down to 1875 under the name of the reporter of the court (as Wheaton, 
 Cranch, Howard, Wallace, etc.) . After that date they are cited by volume and 
 page simply (as 105 U. S. 654). 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 307 
 
 ing the charter of the college against the will of the trustees. The 
 principle involved here was the inviolability of contracts (Art. I, 
 sect. 10, par. i), the court holding that the charter of the 
 college was a contract between the state and the trustees. The 
 majority of the court was won to this decision by the impas- 
 sioned plea of Daniel Webster in behalf of the injured dignity 
 of his Alma Mater. Since the state legislatures were the source 
 of innumerable charters to corporations of every kind, whose 
 general regulation was under the police power of the state, 
 this decision seemed to subject the various industrial, financial, 
 educational, and public-service coporations of the country to 
 the authority of the national judiciary. The sweeping effect 
 of the decision was later modified by the insertion in the 
 charters themselves of clauses giving the states the right to 
 control corporations by legislation for the. safeguarding of their 
 moral and material interests. 
 
 Most important of all the decisions of the court in those 
 years was that handed down in the case of McCulloch vs. Mary- 
 land in 1819 (4 Wheat. 316 ff.). The National Bank was 
 unpopular in many quarters. The old Democratic prejudice 
 against the Bank as a privileged corporation and an engine 
 of plutocracy was still strong, especially in the Western states. 
 Furthermore, the Bank had been carelessly managed during 
 the first two years of Madison's presidency, and its disordered 
 condition was made responsible in the minds of many for the 
 financial panic which overtook the country in 1819, although 
 the panic was really due to a too rapid extension of enterprise 
 and credit in the enthusiastic years which followed the War of 
 1812. When the branches of the United States Bank began to 
 demand specie for the notes of the state banks which they held, 
 the legislatures of various states (North Carolina, Ohio, Ken- 
 tucky, Tennessee) started a war against the National Bank by 
 taxing the issues of its branches within their borders. In Ohio 
 an officer of the state actually drove up to the door of the United 
 States branch bank at Chillicothe, entered the vaults, and seized 
 the amount of money necessary to cover the tax. In Maryland 
 the cashier of the United States branch bank at Baltimore, 
 
3 o8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 James W. McCulloch, refused to pay the tax on its notes levied 
 by the legislature and carried his case against the state to the 
 Supreme Court. The court unanimously agreed in the decision 
 written by Chief Justice Marshall, which affirmed the right of 
 Congress to incorporate a bank under the " implied" power 
 of adopting "necessary and proper" means to carry out a 
 legitimate end (Art. I, sect. 8, pars, i, 2, 5, 12, 13, 18) and to 
 establish in the states branches which should be immune from 
 taxation except for the regular property tax on their buildings 
 and land. "The power to tax," said Marshall, "is the power to 
 destroy." If the states could levy a small tax on the Bank 
 issues, they could also levy a large one and so drive the Bank 
 out of business. 
 
 These famous decisions, maintaining the competence of the 
 national court to interpret the extent of the powers of the 
 national government, were alarming to the old-school Repub- 
 licans, who insisted on the strict limitation of Congress to the 
 powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution. Jefferson, 
 who, since his retirement from the presidency, had tended to 
 revert to his earlier championship of states' rights and distrust 
 of the "general government," led the attack on these "usurp- 
 ing" doctrines of his political enemy John Marshall. "The 
 great object of my fear," he wrote to Thomas Rich in the year 
 1820, "is the federal judiciary. That body, gaining ground 
 step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing insidiously 
 the special [state] governments into the jaws of that which 
 feeds them." But the process of centralization, so obvious in 
 the acts of Congress and the conduct of the executive, could 
 not be stopped at the portals of the Supreme Court chamber. 
 It was all a part of the process of expansion and nationalism 
 traced in this section. It was the expression of the spirit of the 
 new nation. 
 
 There were numerous other signs in our political and eco- 
 nomic life, and even in our literary and religious life, that bore 
 witness to the new spirit : the remodeling of state constitutions 
 along more democratic lines, the reduction in the price of pub- 
 lic lands, the completion of the first section of the national 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 309 
 
 Cumberland Road, the breaking down of the political and so- 
 cial power of the old Calvinistic orthodoxy, the beginnings of 
 a distinctly American school of literature, the rise of a group 
 of nationally minded statesmen and orators like Webster, Ben- 
 ton, Clay, Calhoun, and Everett. On April 13, 1818 (Jefferson's 
 birthday!) our new national flag, with its thirteen alternate 
 stripes of white and red and its twenty white stars in an azure 
 field, was raised over the Capitol. 1 It was a happy symbol of 
 the new America. 
 
 THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE 
 
 The same wave of westward migration which filled the land 
 between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi with a solid block 
 of states in the four years succeeding the Treaty of Ghent did 
 not stop at the banks of the great river. Timothy Flint, a 
 trading preacher from New England, tells in his delightful 
 " Recollections" how he stood on the heights of St. Charles on 
 the lower Missouri in 1818 and watched the immigrants cross 
 the ferry of the Mississippi with their "4 and 6 horse waggons," 
 their cattle "with a hundred bells," their expectant families 
 and excited negroes headed for the land of boundless promise. 
 The territory of Missouri had been organized when Louisiana 
 was admitted to the Union in 1812. Its population of some 
 20,000, scattered among a score of river settlements, was a 
 medley of French hunters and trappers, shrewd Yankee ped- 
 dlers, and solid German farmers dwelling in solid stone houses. 
 When the peace of Ghent removed the Indian danger from the 
 frontier, the territory began to fill up rapidly. Before the close 
 of the decade the population of 20,000 had grown to 66,500, 
 including about 10,000 slaves brought by the farmers of Ken- 
 
 1 By act of April 4, 1818, the flag designed by Betsy Ross for the thirteen 
 states in 1777, and slightly modified in 1794, was altered to fit our growth. The 
 act provided that a new star be added to the blue field on the Fourth of July 
 succeeding the admission of each new state to the Union. At first the cluster of 
 white stars was arranged in the form of a large star, but later the stars were 
 arranged in horizontal lines. 
 
310 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 tucky and Tennessee. Over 50 steamboats were running on the 
 Mississippi and doing a business of $2,500,000 a year. The 
 settlements had spread 60 miles and more up the Missouri val- 
 ley to Boone's Lick, whose name celebrated the pioneer of 
 trans- Allegheny migration. The climate was wholesome as con- 
 trasted with the malarial regions to the south. All the cereals 
 grew in abundance ; the corn yielding 90 bushels to the acre. 
 The southern part of the territory was suitable for cotton 
 culture. Deposits of lead and salt were worked with profit. 
 
 In March, 1818, the enterprising people of the Missouri 
 territory presented to Congress through their delegate, John 
 Scott, a petition praying for admission to the Union as a state. 
 The matter went over to the next session of Congress, where a 
 similar petition was read on December 18, 1818. The following 
 February the House began the debate on the petition, and 
 James Tallmadge of New York precipitated the famous Mis- 
 souri controversy by offering an amendment "that the further 
 introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, 
 except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall 
 have been duly convicted, and that all children born within the 
 said state after the admission thereof into the Union shall be 
 free, but may be held to service until the age of twenty-five 
 years." The House, "after an interesting and pretty wide de- 
 bate," adopted the Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 87 to 76, 
 but the Senate rejected it. The House refused to recede from 
 its position, and the Fifteenth Congress expired, March 3, 1819, 
 with the two Houses in deadlock on the question of slavery in 
 the proposed new state of Missouri, but with little surmise that 
 they had exchanged the first shots in a conflict which was to 
 plunge the country into civil war. 
 
 Negro slavery had been introduced into the colony of James- 
 town in 1619. The few thousand slaves brought over in the 
 seventeenth century to work in the tobacco and rice fields of 
 Virginia and the Carolinas, or to serve as coachmen and butlers 
 in the families of the rich merchants of the North, seem to have 
 been no cause of offense except to the little group of Quakers 
 or to a sensitive philanthropist here and there. But the eight- 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 311 
 
 eenth century saw a great change in the attitude of the colo- 
 nists toward slavery. A clause in the Treaty of Utrecht (the 
 "Asiento") gave to England the monopoly of the slave trade 
 from the shores of Africa to the Spanish colonies of the New 
 World (1713). There was an unlimited market on the Guinea 
 coast for the rum distilled in New England, and there was an 
 unlimited supply of sugar and molasses in the West Indies for 
 the manufacture of more rum. The unoffending African served 
 as the medium of exchange in the profitable transaction. Sold 
 by their captor chiefs for rum, they were packed into the sti- 
 fling holds of wooden vessels and brought through the equatorial 
 seas to the West Indies, with all the horrors of the "middle 
 passage." Rich merchants, high nobles, and even members of 
 the royal family were interested in this nefarious traffic. The 
 stimulus of greed, added to the natural development of our 
 plantations, forced the rate of slave importation higher and 
 higher. Several times during the eighteenth century the legis- 
 latures of the Southern colonies, notably of Virginia, under the 
 double impetus of humanitarian sentiment and concern for 
 the increasing growth of an unassimilable element in their 
 population, passed laws restricting the importation of African 
 negroes, but the crown of England vetoed these laws. "We can- 
 not allow the colonies," said Lord Dartmouth in 1774, "to 
 check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the 
 nation." On the eve of the American Revolution there were 
 more than half a million slaves in the colonies ; 1 and how seri- 
 ously the colonies then regarded the traffic is shown by the 
 resolution of the first Continental Congress in October, 1774, 
 to the effect that no more slaves should be imported . after 
 December, and that whoever broke this resolution should be 
 "universally condemned as an enemy of American liberty." 
 It is well known, too, that Thomas Jefferson, in the original 
 draft of the Declaration of Independence, included among the 
 grievances against King George a scathing indictment of his 
 
 1 Our first census, of 1790, gives the number of slaves as 697,897, of whom 
 40,370 were north of Mason and Dixon's line. Of the 657,527 in the South the 
 states of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas held 604,129. 
 
312 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 encouragement of "this execrable commerce." Jefferson sup- 
 pressed the clause, however, out of deference to the feelings of 
 the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. The economic 
 advantages of slavery in the lower South already outweighed 
 humanitarian considerations, leaving the more noble-minded 
 masters in a state of reluctant acquiescence. 1 
 
 Slavery was warmly debated in the Constitutional Conven- 
 tion of 1787, and although the words "slaves" and "slavery" 
 were not mentioned in the Constitution, the institution was 
 recognized and treated with considerable indulgence. Three 
 fifths of the slaves were added to the white population to make 
 the federal apportionment for representation, presidential elec- 
 tors, and direct taxes. Congress was forbidden to interfere 
 with the importation of slaves for a period of twenty years 
 after the adoption of the Constitution. The return to their 
 masters of fugitive slaves who had escaped into the free states 
 was guaranteed. In accordance with the last-mentioned clause 
 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1793. This 
 recognition of slavery by the Constitution furnished the 
 Southerners of a later day with a good argument in favor of 
 slavery as a national institution ; but the antislavery advocates, 
 like Chase, Seward, and Lincoln, went back to the resolution of 
 1774 and to the principles of the Declaration of Independence 
 to prove that our Union was formed by patriots who believed 
 that "all men are created equal" and endowed with liberty as 
 an "unalienable right." 
 
 Most important of all the questions concerning slavery was 
 that of its extension to the great dominion beyond the Al- 
 legheriies, ceded to us by England in the treaty of 1783. The 
 very next year Thomas Jefferson submitted to Congress an or- 
 dinance for the government of this territory, forever forbidding 
 
 1 Patrick Henry of Virginia wrote to a Quaker friend in 1773 : "Every think- 
 ing honest man rejects it [slavery] in speculation, but how few in practice. . . . 
 Would any one believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am 
 drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I 
 cannot, justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to 
 virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my 
 want of conformity to them." 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 313 
 
 slavery within its borders. The antislavery clause of Jefferson's 
 ordinance was lost by the vote of a single state. Three years 
 later Congress passed the famous Northwest Ordinance (con- 
 firmed by an act of the first Congress under the Constitution), 
 which excluded slavery from all our territory north of the 
 Ohio River. The states formed out of this territory (Ohio in 
 1803, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, Michigan in 1837, and 
 Wisconsin in 1848) all came into the Union free; but south of 
 the Ohio the states formed from lands ceded by Virginia, the 
 Carolinas, and Georgia (Kentucky in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, 
 Mississippi in 1817, and Alabama in 1819) were naturally slave- 
 holding. Thus the Ohio River formed the continuation of 
 Mason and Dixon's line as the boundary between slavery 
 and freedom. 
 
 For several reasons the application of Missouri for state- 
 hood in 1818 marked a critical moment in our history. In the 
 first place, the area of the proposed state lay wholly west of 
 the Mississippi, land never owned nor claimed by any of the 
 original states but purchased from Napoleon by the national 
 government. Part of this area was above and part below the 
 mouth of the Ohio, and it had received immigrants from both 
 the free and the slave states. Its admission would form a prece- 
 dent for the rest of the immense Louisiana Purchase territory. 1 
 Furthermore, the free and slave states were exactly balanced 
 (eleven each), which meant equal weight in the Senate. Since 
 the North was increasingly predominant in the House, the 
 Senate had to preserve this parity in order to protect its inter- 
 ests. 2 Again, the economic advantage of slavery to the South 
 appeared immensely greater in 1820 than at the time of the 
 
 a To be sure, the extreme southern part of the territory had been admitted as 
 the state of Louisiana in 1812, with its existing institution of slavery. But the 
 case of Missouri was different in that it was a territory built up chiefly by 
 emigration from the United States. 
 
 2 The population of the sections of the country north and south of Mason and 
 Dixon's line was nearly equal by the first census, of 1790 (1,968,455 to 1,961,327). 
 But by 1820 the North had 5,132,372, while the South, counting three fifths of 
 the slaves, had only 3,312,244. The representation in the House in 1820 was 104 
 from the free states and 79 from the slave states. 
 
314 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 debates on the Constitution. The results of the invention of 
 the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, which multiplied over 
 three hundredfold the productive power of the slave in cleaning 
 the seed from the cotton fiber, were fully manifest now. In 
 1791, when Hamilton made his famous report on manufactures, 
 the South exported cotton for the first time a meager 20,000 
 pounds. The crop grew to 20,000,000 pounds a decade later, 
 and by 1820 it reached 160,000,000 pounds. 1 Such figures show 
 that the destiny of the South was fixed in the production of the 
 staple crop of cotton, to the exclusion of manufactures and 
 diversified farming. They show also what a constant demand 
 there was for new lands and new hands for the cotton culture. 
 The lands were found in abundance in the new states of the 
 West, but neither the natural increase among the slaves nor the 
 importation of large numbers of negroes bred in the border 
 states sufficed for the labor of the cotton fields. Some thousands 
 of slaves were smuggled into the Southern ports from Africa 
 each year, in spite of the prohibition of the act of Congress of 
 1807, and no jury in the South could be found to convict the 
 offending captains and owners of the vessels. 
 
 The zeal to reserve the land west of the Mississippi for free 
 states alone, to keep the balance against slavery in Congress 
 and to rebuke the South for the open violation of the law for 
 which all her representatives and senators had voted a dozen 
 years before, gave a vehemence to the words of the Northern 
 orators, like King, Taylor, and Tallmadge, which had not been 
 heard in Congress since the days of Washington and Adams, 
 when Federalist "Anglomen" and "Jacobinical" Republicans 
 flayed one another ; while the Southern speakers, like Pinkney, 
 Cobb, and McLean, met defiance with defiance and threat with 
 threat. Jefferson said that 'the debates startled him like the 
 sound of the fire bells at night. "The Missouri question is the 
 
 1 The importance of the West in the growth of the cotton industry is seen by 
 the following figures. In 1801 only 2 per cent of the crop was grown west of 
 the Alleghenies; in 1821 the states of Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Loui- 
 siana produced 34.7 per cent of the 173,000,000 pounds, and in 1834 these same 
 states produced 60.8 per cent of the 456,000,000 pounds grown. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 315 
 
 most portentous one which has ever threatened the Union/' he 
 wrote; "in the gloomiest hour of the Revolutionary War I 
 never had any apprehensions equal to those which I feel from 
 this source." 
 
 The deadlock over the Tallmadge amendment, just as the Fif- 
 teenth Congress came to a close, threw the country into a state 
 of great excitement. Resolutions for and against the restric- 
 tion of slavery in Missouri were passed by various state legis- 
 latures ; petitions came to Washington from societies, churches, 
 and clubs; the press was filled with controversial articles. It 
 seemed as though all other national questions the tariff, in- 
 ternal improvements, the currency, and the panic had been 
 forgotten. When the new Congress met in December, 1819, the 
 debates were resumed, the language growing more passionate 
 and threatening as the issue became more clearly drawn the 
 extension or the limitation of slave soil. The North argued that 
 the clause in the Constitution reading "New states may be 
 admitted by Congress into the Union" conferred on Congress 
 the power to determine on what conditions it would admit new 
 states to the Union. Moreover, several states had already been 
 admitted under various restrictions in regard to slaveholding, 
 the taxation of lands, the navigation of rivers, and interference 
 with civil or religious liberty. The South replied that such 
 restrictions, except as they were expressly contained in the 
 Constitution of the United States, were invalid, and that for 
 Congress to impose terms of entrance on a state at will was to 
 reduce such a state to a mere province of the central govern- 
 ment. It was as an equal in a union of equal states that 
 Missouri sought admission; she must be as free as South 
 Carolina or Massachusetts to determine her domestic institu- 
 tions. Otherwise, she came in, as William Pinkney of Mary- 
 land said, " shorn of her beams, with the iron collar of servitude 
 about her neck instead of the civic crown of republican freedom 
 upon her brow." Congress might indeed refuse admission to 
 Missouri as long as it wished, but when the state came in, it 
 must be with her sovereign rights unimpaired. This was the 
 crux of the controversy, though other arguments were not lack- 
 
316 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ing. When the South pointed to the third article of the 
 Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803, by which we promised that 
 the inhabitants of the territory should be incorporated into the 
 United States as soon as possible, and in the meantime be " pro- 
 tected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the 
 religion which they profess," Rufus King replied that inter- 
 national law did not recognize slaves as "property" nor include 
 them as such in treaty stipulations. When Henry Clay argued 
 that admitting slavery into Missouri would "not add to the slave 
 population a single soul," but would "dilute" the evil by spread- 
 ing it over a wider area and "alleviate the unhappy lot of those 
 hemmed in within too narrow lines," the Northern speakers 
 rebuked the sophistry which recommended the extermination of 
 the poisonous weed by scattering its seeds broadcast. 
 
 There seemed to be little hope of a peaceable settlement of 
 the Missouri question. The South would not give up the consti- 
 tutional right of a new state to enter the Union on an equal 
 footing with the other states, and the North would not give 
 up its determination to prevent the spread of slavery beyond 
 the Mississippi. One section was accused of concealing beneath 
 its zeal for the doctrine of states' rights the sinister purpose of 
 opening new territory to slavery ; the other section was accused 
 of stirring up moral indignation against slavery as a mere polit- 
 ical ruse for restoring the Federalists to power and keeping 
 Southern interests in permanent subjection in both Houses of 
 Congress. The patient, imperturbable Monroe was confident 
 that a compromise could be found, but few of our leading 
 statesmen were so optimistic. John Quincy Adams confided 
 his apprehension of civil strife to his "Diary," with the comment 
 that if the battle must come it had better come on this issue. 
 Henry Clay feared that in five years the Union would be split, 
 and declared that the words "civil war" and "disunion" were 
 uttered "almost without an emotion." Cobb of Georgia warned 
 Tallmadge that he had "kindled a fire ... which only seas 
 of blood could extinguish." However, a way of compromise 
 was found. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 317 
 
 The province of Maine, which had been a part of Massa- 
 chusetts since its purchase from the heirs of Gorges in 1677, 
 had long been eager to be formed into a separate state. It 
 finally won the consent of the legislature of Massachusetts, and 
 at the opening of Congress in December, 1819, applied, with a 
 free-state constitution already formed, for admission to the 
 Union. The House promptly passed the bill admitting Maine. 
 The Senate committee, however, added to the Maine bill a 
 provision for the admission of Missouri without any restriction 
 in regard to slavery. After an exciting debate of a month in 
 the Senate, Thomas of Illinois proposed as an amendment to 
 the part of the bill touching Missouri that slavery be forever 
 excluded from all the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 
 latitude 36 30' (the southern boundary of Missouri), except in 
 the proposed state of Missouri itself. Fourteen of the twenty- 
 two senators from the slave states voted for the Thomas 
 amendment. The House at first rejected the Thomas amend- 
 ment, repassing the bill for the admission of Missouri with the 
 Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 91 to 82 ; but after a con- 
 ference with the Senate enough Northern votes were won to 
 carry the Thomas clause. The final vote in the House on the 
 Compromise was 90 to 87. The fourteen Congressmen from 
 the free states who joined the unanimous delegation of South- 
 erners in voting for the Missouri Compromise were actuated by 
 honorable motives, 1 but the caustic John Randolph contemptu- 
 ously dubbed them "dough-faces" a name thereafter applied 
 to Northern men who supported the proslavery measures of 
 the South. On March 3, 1820, President Monroe signed the 
 bill admitting Maine as a free state, and three days later the 
 
 1 They believed that compromise was necessary to save the Union, and that 
 the South had shown great generosity in accepting the Thomas amendment, 
 which closed nine tenths of the Louisiana Purchase territory to slavery. Further- 
 more, the consent of Massachusetts to the separation of Maine was conditioned 
 on the admission of Maine to the Union before March 4, 1820. Perhaps some of 
 the Northern Republicans were induced to vote for the Compromise, by the 
 fear that the Federalists, led by Rufus King, would get back into power on the 
 issue of slavery restriction. 
 
318 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 bill authorizing Missouri to frame a constitution without any 
 restriction of slavery. 1 
 
 The full importance of the Missouri Compromise appears 
 only in the light of the history of the generation following. For 
 the moment it seemed to have settled the controversy over 
 slavery and thwarted the formation of new political parties 
 on that issue. 2 Regarded as a cowardly surrender of principles 
 by zealots on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, like 
 Tallmadge and Randolph, the Compromise stimulated aboli- 
 tionist sentiment in the North and fortified the doctrine of 
 states' rights in the South. It revived the agitation over the 
 ethics of slaveholding, which had been rather in abeyance since 
 the debates of the Constitutional Convention and thoroughly 
 quieted with the passage of the law forbidding the slave trade. 
 It revealed with startling clearness to the North, where slavery 
 was rapidly nearing extinction, how firmly the economic conse- 
 quences of the invention of the cotton gin (enormously acceler- 
 ated production, clamor for new lands, trebling of the price 
 of sound negroes) had fixed the institution on the South. It 
 connected the question of the restriction or extension of slavery 
 with westward expansion. By sanctioning the line of 36 30' be- 
 tween slavery and freedom in our Western territory, it empha- 
 
 a The actual admission of Missouri was delayed for more than a year because 
 the House objected to clauses in the proposed constitution which discriminated 
 against free negroes. Henry Clay engineered the final compromise, by which 
 Missouri was admitted (August 10, 1821) on agreeing that no clause of her con- 
 stitution should ever "be construed to authorize the passage of any laws ... by 
 which any citizen of either of the states of the Union shall be excluded from the 
 enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which said citizen is en- 
 titled under the Constitution of the United States." 
 
 2 John Quincy Adams writes in his "Diary" (Vol. VI, p. 529): "The discus- 
 sion of the Missouri question . . . revealed the basis for a new organization of 
 parties. Here was a new party ready formed . . . threatening in its immediate 
 effect that southern domination which had swayed the Union for the last 20 
 years." All through the long period of electioneering for the presidential cam- 
 paign of 1824 there were fears among the followers of Clay north of the Ohio 
 that the Missouri question would be revived and that under the slogan "No 
 slavery " the Northwest would be stampeded to Adams. 
 
THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI COUNTRY AND THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE 
 
320 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 sized the sectional rivalry and helped to detach the new states 
 of the Northwest (Indiana and Illinois) from their sympathy 
 with the agrarian communities of the South and join them to 
 the manufacturing and commercial communities of the East. 
 The free-soil motive became for the first time an integrat- 
 ing principle from Boston Harbor to the banks of the upper 
 Mississippi. 
 
 Contemporary statesmen maintained that the Missouri Com- 
 promise saved the Union, but it is not difficult for us to see the 
 germs of disunion in the measure. It deliberately divided the 
 national house against itself. The control of the territories by 
 Congress was not the point at issue. All the members of 
 Monroe's cabinet, including Calhoun, agreed to that doctrine. 
 Every Southerner in the House voted for it in the Missouri bill. 
 The controverted question was whether Congress could put 
 restrictions on a new state about to enter the Union. The 
 Tallmadge amendment embodied that doctrine. It failed to 
 pass the Senate, by a vote of 16 to 22, four Northern men voting 
 against it. Had these men from Illinois, Massachusetts, and 
 Pennsylvania supported the amendment, it would have passed 
 the Senate and in all probability have been signed by the 
 President. Congress then, with its increasing free-soil repre- 
 sentation, could have made the prohibition of slavery the con- 
 dition for the admission of future states until there were enough 
 free states in the Union to secure the passage of an amendment 
 to the Constitution abolishing slavery. This program, to be 
 sure, might have met with opposition and been thwarted in 
 ways which we cannot see, but its initial failure in the case of 
 Missouri wrecked whatever chance there was for the peaceable 
 abolition of slavery. This is the immense significance of the 
 Missouri Compromise. "It contributed towards making the war 
 of 1 86 1 an historic necessity." 
 
 It seems at first sight strange that the very year which wit- 
 nessed the final stormy debates on the Missouri Compromise 
 should have marked also the culmination of the "era of good 
 feelings," in the virtually unanimous reelection of James Monroe 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 321 
 
 to the presidency. 1 The logical outcome of the Missouri strug- 
 gle would have been the formation of a proslavery states'-rights 
 party in the South to oppose the free-soil trend of the North. 
 Yet such a party was some years in forming. Attachment to the 
 Union was strong on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. 
 The generous enthusiasm with which statesmen of both sections 
 had given themselves to plans for national aggrandizement 
 after the War of 1812 was still working powerfully. The Vir- 
 ginian president continued to recommend protection for manu- 
 factures in his messages of 1821, 1822, and 1823, and he was 
 supported not only by Henry Clay of Kentucky but also by 
 Senator Hayne of South Carolina. Although the comprehensive 
 bill for the upkeep of the national Cumberland Road was vetoed 
 by Monroe in the spring of 1822, the opposition proceeded 
 rather from scruples as to the powers of Congress under the 
 Constitution to foster "internal improvements" than from any 
 realization that the interests of the South were opposed to the 
 encouragement of a surplus in the Treasury to be expended on 
 the development of a free Northwest. 2 Finally, the years im- 
 mediately following the Missouri controversy were occupied 
 with the discussion of important foreign questions, whose effect 
 is always to sink domestic discord in the larger issue of national 
 safety and prestige. 
 
 The turbulent events of the French Revolution and the rise 
 and fall of Napoleon's dominion in Europe, which had exercised 
 
 candidate ran against Monroe, who received all but one of the electoral 
 votes. That one was cast for John Quincy Adams, for the purely sentimental 
 reason that the elector wished to see reserved for George Washington alone the 
 tribute of a unanimous choice. 
 
 2 Monroe in his long veto message argued the constitutional point with great 
 earnestness, consistently maintaining the position that an amendment to the Con- 
 stitution would remove his scruples. That the Westerners believed their interests 
 thwarted by a mistaken political philosophy and not by any sectional opposition 
 from the South is shown by the comments of the Western press. "There is a 
 party of politicians at Washington," said an Ohio paper in July, 1823, "whose 
 consciences are so tender or whose minds are so contracted that no general system 
 of internal improvements can be anticipated from the councils of the nation until 
 there is a radical change in the Executive Department." 
 
322 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 so powerful an influence over the domestic and foreign policies 
 of the new American republic for a quarter of a century, had 
 their aftermath in diplomatic negotiations which culminated in 
 the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. And from the close of Monroe's 
 second term to the end of the nineteenth century no major 
 American policies were dictated by the action of the European 
 powers. Conservative reaction to repair the havoc which 
 Napoleon had made among the thrones of Europe was inevitable 
 after the overthrow of the Corsican adventurer. On its senti- 
 mental side it took the form of the Holy Alliance, a league in 
 which the rulers of Austria and Prussia joined the romantic 
 Czar of Russia in an agreement to rule their peoples as pious 
 despots, "in accord with the principles of the holy Christian 
 religion." On its more practical side it took the form of a 
 quadruple alliance between the above-mentioned powers and 
 England (France being admitted a little later, when she had 
 given due signs of repentance for her infatuation with Napo- 
 leon), to watch over Europe and prevent the tares of democ- 
 racy, which had been sowed by the French Revolution, from 
 springing up and choking the pure wheat of authority. The 
 program of the Quadruple Alliance was to be carried out in 
 a series of European congresses meeting at frequent intervals 
 to uphold the principle of "legitimacy," which Henry Clay 
 called "a soft word for despotism." So long as the Alliance 
 confined its operations to Europe, chastising revolution in 
 Piedmont or Naples, it was no concern of the United States ; 
 but when the Congress of Verona (1822), in addition to the 
 plan of crossing the Pyrenees to quell revolt in Spain, mooted 
 the design of crossing the Atlantic to restore to King Ferdinand 
 Spain's colonies which had set up as independent republics in 
 the New World, the aspect of affairs was changed. Great Britain 
 refused to be a party to the schemes of the Congress of Verona. 
 She had developed a thriving trade with the South American 
 republics, which the restoration of the authority of Spain would 
 have ruined. Besides, there were rumors that Mexico was to 
 be allotted to France and California to Russia in payment for 
 their shares in the overseas enterprise. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 323 
 
 Meanwhile there had been growing in the United States a 
 sentiment in favor of recognizing the independence of the new 
 Spanish- American republics and even of forming a close alliance 
 with them. The champion of this Pan-American policy was 
 Henry Clay, who in impassioned speeches in the House urged 
 the sympathy of our nation for -"eighteen millions of people 
 struggling to burst their chains." "We look too much abroad," 
 he said; "let us no longer watch the nod of any European 
 politician, let us become real and true Americans and place 
 ourselves at the head of the American system." So long as our 
 negotiations with Spain over the Florida treaty were pending 
 (seepage 303) we cautiously refrained from recognizing the new 
 republics, although we showed our sympathy for them by open- 
 ing our ports to them and maintaining "agents" in Caracas, 
 Buenos Aires, and other centers of the revolt. The Florida 
 treaty was finally ratified by the Spanish Cortes in 1821, and 
 in the spring of the next year Monroe signified to Congress 
 his readiness to recognize the republics, asking for the appro- 
 priations necessary to maintain diplomatfc establishments in 
 them. The House responded with but a single dissenting vote. 
 On June 17, 1822, a minister from Colombia was formally re- 
 ceived at Washington, and within the next few months United 
 States ministers were sent to the most important of the Spanish- 
 American republics. Colombia and Chile, in a treaty of July, 
 1822, suggested "the construction of a continental system for 
 America" as a makeweight to the Quadruple Alliance in Europe. 1 
 
 Another important event occurred about the same time to 
 warn the American government of the danger of the encroach- 
 ment of European powers on the Western Hemisphere. The 
 Czar of Russia issued an ukase (decree) in the early autumn 
 of 1821, claiming the north Pacific coast as far south as the 
 
 1 Perhaps they were taking a leaf from the book of Henry Clay, who had made 
 a speech in the summer of 1821 exposing the sinister designs of the Holy Alliance 
 and advocating the formation of a counterbalancing alliance in the two Ameri- 
 cas, with liberty and democracy for its watchwords in the place of legitimacy 
 and autocracy. Still earlier (1820) Clay had announced the grandiose plan of es- 
 tablishing "a human-freedom league in America, including all the nations from 
 Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn." 
 
324 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 fiftieth parallel and warning the vessels of all other nations not 
 to approach within one hundred miles of that coast. Secretary 
 Adams met the decree with a powerful protest. He told the 
 Russian minister, Baron Tuyl, that we "should contest the 
 right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this conti- 
 nent, and should assume distinctly the principle that the Amer- 
 ican continents are no longer subjects for any new European 
 colonial establishments." When, therefore, the British foreign 
 minister, George Canning, suggested to Richard Rush, our 
 minister at the court of St. James, the desirability of united 
 action on the part of the two countries in preventing the Alliance 
 from extending its activities to the American continents, he 
 spoke to receptive ears. 1 Rush referred the matter to Wash- 
 ington, and Monroe, as was his custom, conferred with the 
 ex-presidents Jefferson and Madison. Both of them were in 
 favor of accepting Canning's proposal. Jefferson's reply, dated 
 October 24, 1823, is especially noteworthy as containing the 
 gist of the doctrine announced six months later by the Presi- 
 dent: "The question presented by the letters you have sent 
 me is the most momentous which has been presented to my 
 contemplation since that of independence. That made us a 
 nation, this sets our compass and points the course which we 
 are to steer through the ocean of time opening upon us. ... 
 Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle 
 ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second never to suffer 
 Europe to meddle in cis-Atlantic affairs. America, north and 
 south, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and 
 peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her 
 own apart from those of Europe." 
 
 1 As a matter of fact, the first suggestion of common action between the 
 United States and Great Britain for the protection of the Latin-American re- 
 publics had come from this side of the water. John Quincy Adams records in 
 his "Diary," under the date of July 25, 1818, "Two days ago Monroe had very 
 abruptly asked me to see Mr. Bagot [the British minister at Washington] and 
 propose through him to the British government an immediate cooperation 
 between the United States and Great Britain to promote the independence of 
 South America." But on the English side Lord Castlereagh was not willing, and 
 on our side the Florida negotiations stood in the way. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 325 
 
 John Quincy Adams was no less eager than Jefferson or 
 Madison to thwart the designs of the Alliance in the Western 
 Hemisphere, but he believed that we should "make it an Amer- 
 ican cause alone," especially as we were the only nation that had 
 recognized the independence of the South American republics. 
 "It would be more candid as well as more dignified," he said in 
 cabinet meeting, "to avow our principles explicitly to Russia 
 and France than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of a 
 British man-of-war." The view of the Secretary of State pre- 
 vailed with Monroe over the advice of his two older councilors, 
 and the annual message which the President sent to Congress 
 on December 2, 1823, contained that announcement of our 
 policy in regard to the relations of European powers to the 
 Western Hemisphere which has ever since been known as the 
 Monroe Doctrine. 
 
 There are three main principles set down in the Monroe 
 Doctrine two specific and one general. The first, aimed es- 
 pecially at Russia's threat of encroachment on the Pacific coast, 
 declared that "the American continents, by the free and inde- 
 pendent condition which they have assumed and maintained, 
 are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colo- 
 nisation by any European powers." The second was a warning 
 to the Quadruple Alliance not to interfere to reduce the new 
 Spanish-American republics to their old allegiance, nor to at- 
 tempt to establish on this continent the autocratic principles of 
 divine-right monarchy: "We owe it therefore to candor, and to 
 the amicable relations existing between the United States and 
 those powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on 
 their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemi- 
 sphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing 
 colonies of any European power we have not interfered and shall 
 not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their 
 independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we 
 have, on great considerations and on just principles, acknowl- 
 edged, we could not view any interposition for the sake of 
 oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their des- 
 tiny by any European power, in any other light than as the 
 
326 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United 
 States." The third principle was the general proposition of the 
 "two spheres" of influence the United States disclaiming any 
 desire to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe, and at the 
 same time denying the right of Europe to interfere with affairs 
 in America: "In the wars of the European powers in matters 
 relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does 
 it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights 
 are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or 
 make preparations for our defence. . . . Our policy in regard 
 to Europe is not to interfere with internal concerns of any of 
 its powers, to consider the government de facto as the legitimate 
 government for us, to cultivate friendly relations with it, ... 
 meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submit- 
 ting to injuries from none. But in regard to these continents 
 circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is 
 impossible that the allied powers should extend their political 
 system to any portion of either continent without endangering 
 our peace and happiness." 
 
 This general principle, on which the specific warnings of the 
 Monroe Doctrine were based, did not originate with Monroe or 
 Adams or Canning. It is as old as our national government 
 itself. It appears in Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 
 1793 and in his Farewell Address of 1796. It was constantly 
 reiterated by his successors, especially by Jefferson. Canning 
 told Rush in a conversation in 1823 that he had been reading 
 Jefferson's letters as Secretary of State (1793) and that he 
 found them "admirable," forming a "complete neutral code." 
 As for the specific announcement of December, 1823, it lias 
 been claimed that Adams's name, or even Canning's, would be 
 more appropriately linked with it than Monroe's. Canning 
 virtually claimed the credit for safeguarding the independence 
 of the new republics when he made his famous boast in Par- 
 liament in 1826, "I called the New World into existence to 
 redress the balance of the Old." But as we have seen, Monroe 
 had sought to approach the British minister in Washington on 
 the subject as early as 1818. Furthermore, Canning was not 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 327 
 
 at all pleased with the form which the Monroe Doctrine actually 
 took, and spoke sneeringly of "the President's influential mes-. 
 sage.' 7 He was a vain man, a Tory with little sympathy for 
 republican institutions, and he maintained throughout his ten- 
 ure of power the tone of urbane hostility to the United States 
 which he had shown in the days of his negotiations with Jeffer- 
 son's government on impressments and our maritime rights. 
 He refused to acknowledge the independence of the Spanish- 
 American republics and was interested only in getting us to 
 support England in the preservation of the open door for their 
 commerce. When he was assured by the French minister at 
 London that there was really no danger of intervention to 
 restore the rule of Spain on this side of the Atlantic, his ardor 
 for a proclamation for the protection of the republics cooled. 
 Adams, of course, contributed very largely to the promulgation 
 of the Monroe Doctrine and probably furnished much of the 
 actual text of the document. But Adams never suggested that 
 the credit for the message belonged to him, and in his own 
 presidency he referred to it as "the doctrine announced by 
 my predecessor to the world." 
 
 The Monroe Doctrine was resented and ridiculed in the press 
 of Europe; but it was received "with one general glow of 
 enthusiasm in the United States," as Daniel Webster said, and 
 it has ever since been the most popular slogan in American 
 history. 1 In 1895, when we were in the midst of a controversy 
 with Great Britain over the boundary line between Venezuela 
 and British Guiana, Secretary Olney asserte.d that the Monroe 
 Doctrine was "the accepted public law of this country." But 
 to call it "public law" was rather bold. It was nothing more 
 than an announcement of policy in a presidential message. 
 The European nations never accepted its validity as a tenet 
 of international law, although they generally respected it in 
 practice. Henry Clay introduced a joint resolution into Con- 
 gress in 1824 sanctioning the doctrine, but the legislative de- 
 
 1 The immediate result was a treaty with Russia, concluded in 1824, by which 
 that power agreed to limit her claims to the southward on the Pacific coast by 
 the parallel 54 40' north latitude. 
 
328 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 partment of our government was content to let the matter rest 
 as an executive pronouncement. Nor have our courts based 
 their decisions upon the doctrine as "public law." 
 
 Captain Mahan declared that the Monroe Doctrine possesses 
 "the inherent principle of life, which adapts itself with the 
 flexibility of a growing plant to the successive conditions it 
 encounters." It is true that the doctrine has been invoked 
 again and again as our warrant to dictate as to the ownership 
 of "the existing European colonies" in the Western Hemi- 
 sphere, to assert our authority in the settlement of controversies 
 over boundaries or debts between European powers and the 
 Spanish-American republics, and even to interfere in the in- 
 ternal affairs of those republics themselves. The stretching of 
 the Monroe Doctrine by "interpretation" was begun as early as 
 the summer of 1825, when Clay warned France that we should 
 not allow Cuba or Porto Rico to be transferred from Spain 
 to any other European power. But there is nothing in the 
 language of the doctrine to warrant these later widenings of 
 its scope. There is no word of an hegemony of the United 
 States over the countries to the south or of our right to arbi- 
 trate their disputes. There is no hint of a financial protector- 
 ate, such as we have exercised in Santo Domingo, Haiti, and 
 Nicaragua. All these powers have been derived from the doc- 
 trine by "implication." The purpose of the doctrine as it existed 
 in Monroe's mind was fulfilled when the danger of Russian 
 aggression on the Pacific coast and of European intervention 
 in South America was over. It was purely defensive and pre- 
 cautionary. It has been made aggressive and comprehensive. 
 That part of the doctrine which announced our guardianship 
 of the independence and inviolability of the Latin-American 
 republics has tended more and more toward a pan-American 
 union. That part which declared our policy of abstention from 
 the "wars agitating Europe" was broken in spirit when we 
 embarked on colonial adventures in the Far East and joined 
 the powers in the preservation of the integrity of the Chinese 
 Empire, and in letter when we sent American troops to the 
 battlefields in Flanders and France in the great World War. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 329 
 
 SECTIONAL RIVALRY 
 
 As Monroe's highly successful administration drew to a close 
 the country was at the flood tide of prosperity. The forty years 
 which had elapsed since the close of the American Revolution 
 had seen our population grow from less than 4,000,000 to over 
 10,000,000, and our area more than doubled by the acquisitions 
 from France and Spain. An agreement had been made with 
 Great Britain in 1818 for the joint occupation of the Oregon 
 territory beyond the Rockies. The new national defenses and 
 naval enlargement projected after the War of 1812 had pro- 
 gressed satisfactorily. Our debt, which stood at $123,000,000 
 at Monroe's inauguration, was reduced to $79,000,000 when he 
 left office. The financial panic of 1819 was weathered, and the 
 National Bank, surviving its brief period of mismanagement, 
 was entering on a career of prosperity under its able president, 
 Langdon Cheves. The American ship Savannah crossed the 
 ocean under sail and steam in the summer of 1819, and within 
 a few years steam "packets" were plying regularly between 
 New York and Liverpool. On our inland waters and along the 
 coast from Boston to New Orleans steam navigation was in- 
 creasing rapidly. The great Erie Canal, destined to open an 
 ice-free waterway from the Lakes to the Atlantic and to make 
 New York the metropolis of the Western World, was begun 
 the year Monroe entered office, being completed with fitting 
 ceremonies the year he retired. / 
 
 The sectional bitterness caused by the War of 1812 seemed*/ 
 to have died away. Massachusetts returned to the Republican 
 fold with the election of Governor Eustis in 1823, while the 
 legislature of the state struck from its records the unpatriotic 
 resolutions of a decade before to the effect that it was " un- 
 becoming a moral and religious people" to rejoice over the 
 naval victories of Hull, Bainbridge, and Decatur. Although 
 the tone of the debates on the Missouri question had been omi- 
 nous, all danger of civil strife seemed to be removed by the 
 Compromise. The balance between the free and the slave states 
 was preserved and the status of slavery "forever" fixed in the 
 
330 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 new Western territory by the 36 30' line. Finally, in the 
 Monroe Doctrine we had assumed the role of arbiter of impor- 
 tant matters in the western continent and had spoken to Europe 
 in a tone of firm consciousness of our place among the "powers" 
 of the world. Few presidents in our history have been able to 
 look back upon their administration with more unalloyed satis- 
 faction than the patient, sagacious, conciliatory James Monroe 
 an administration which the old Federalist John Adams pro- 
 nounced " without a fault," and the Federalist Judge Marshall 
 declared "was not darkened by a single cloud." 
 
 Nevertheless, the historical student, from the vantage ground 
 of a wider perspective, sees already germinating in Monroe's 
 second administration the seeds of a bitter sectional rivalry 
 which was to make the administration of his successor a con- 
 stant trial and to result in a new alignment of parties which was 
 to last through a generation to the great crisis of the Civil War. 
 Every feature of that revival of national spirit which we have 
 studied in the present chapter the restoration of the National 
 Bank, the high tariff, the increase of our defenses on sea and 
 land, the expenditure of national funds for internal improve- 
 ments, the unlimited offer of public lands at cheap prices, the 
 growing prestige and authority of the Supreme Court, and even 
 the bold and popular policy announced in the Monroe Doc- 
 trine became a subject of violent controversy, in which the 
 divergent interests of the various sections of our country 
 clashed. 
 
 The first test of the strength of the rival sections came in 
 the presidential election of 1824, although the sectional charac- 
 ter of the rivalry was not yet explicit or avowed. The "dynasty 
 of Virginia secretaries" came to an end with Monroe. But long 
 before the expiration of his term of office different parts of the 
 country were recommending their "favorite sons" for the suc- 
 cession. The legislature of South Carolina designated William 
 Lowndes as early as 1821. The next year Tennessee put for- 
 ward Andrew Jackson and Kentucky named Henry Clay. In 
 January, 1823, a mixed convention of Republican members of 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 331 
 
 the legislature and delegates of the towns of Massachusetts 
 nominated John Quincy Adams. The time-honored method of 
 selecting a candidate by a congressional caucus was falling into 
 disrepute because of its undemocratic nature. Still, a caucus 
 met in February, 1824, and named the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, William H. Crawford, who had been manipulating the 
 political wires and using his official patronage for some years to 
 accomplish this desired result. But the fact that only 68 of the 
 261 members of Congress attended the caucus was a sufficient 
 indication of the measure of strength which this method of 
 nomination would give to Crawford's candidacy. 
 
 All of these aspirants for the presidency belonged to the Re- 
 publican party for there was no other party to belong to. 
 Each of them, wishing to appear as a truly national figure with 
 a program to win votes in all parts of the Union, minimized or 
 disguised in ambiguous language the interests of the particular 
 section which he represented. Besides, those interests, as we 
 have already seen, were not sharply enough defined in 1824 
 to unite compact political parties in their support. The tariff 
 bill passed in the spring of that presidential year is an illus- 
 tration. It was championed by Clay, praised by Adams, and 
 accepted by Jackson only Crawford refusing to commit him- 
 self. The consistent policy of the support of high tariffs by the 
 North and their antagonism by the South, which appears in all 
 subsequent tariff legislation, was not developed in 1824. Such 
 fight as there was over the bill was on the question of the 
 distribution of the benefits of protection. Kentucky, Missouri, 
 and Pennsylvania supported the measure for its duties on hemp, 
 lead, and iron ; the industrial interests of the North, for its pro- 
 tection to the cotton and woolen manufactures; while the 
 mercantile interests of New England and New York made com- 
 mon cause with the South in opposing a bill which increased 
 the cost of materials for building ships, cultivating plantations, 
 and clothing slaves. The narrow margin by which the bill was 
 finally passed after a debate of two and a half months (105 to 
 102 in the House, 25 to 22 in the Senate) gave little encour- 
 
332 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 agement to Clay's optimistic theory that harmony could be 
 preserved by a judicious distribution of sectional favor. 1 
 
 In the absence of any clearly defined political issues, the 
 campaign of 1824 took on an intensely personal aspect, the 
 more so as all the aspirants for the presidency were together in 
 Washington* during the previous winter Adams, Calhoun, and 
 Crawford in Monroe's cabinet, Jackson in the Senate, and Clay 
 in the House. Adams's voluminous " Diary" reveals the extraor- 
 dinary amount of electioneering that went on. The vote in 
 November resulted in the choice of 99 electors for Jackson, 84 
 for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. Calhoun, seeing 
 the drift of his own state of South Carolina toward Jackson, 
 had wisely accepted the advice of a Pennsylvania convention to 
 run for the vice presidency. He received 182 of the 261 votes 
 cast. As no candidate for the presidency had received a ma- 
 jority, the names of the three highest on the list went to the 
 House for a decision, the group of Representatives from each 
 state casting a single vote. Henry Clay, though out of the race 
 himself, obviously had it in his power to turn the scales in favor 
 of either Adams or Jackson. His influence as Speaker of the 
 House was great, and the Republicans of those states which 
 had given him their electoral votes (Kentucky, Ohio, and 
 Missouri) would naturally support the candidate whom he 
 favored. The genial Speaker, therefore, was courted by each 
 of the factions and assured by each of the great respect in 
 which his talents were held by their respective candidates. Clay 
 had not been friendly to Adams during tiie Monroe adminis- 
 tration. He had himself coveted the high appointment which 
 Adams received. The two men were, moreover, uncongenial in 
 their tastes and habits. Yet they were brought together and had 
 a long interview (the details of which Adams discreetly omits 
 from his "Diary") a few weeks before the balloting began 
 
 1M It has appeared to me in the administration of the general government to 
 be a just principle to inquire what interests belong to each section of our coun- 
 try, and to promote those interests as far as practical, consistently with the Con- 
 stitution, having always an eye to the welfare of the whole" (to Francis Brooke, 
 August 28, 1823). 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 333 
 
 in the House. Immediately after the interview Clay announced 
 that he should support Adams. On the first ballot cast by the 
 House Adams was elected by the votes of thirteen states. Jack- 
 son carried seven and Crawford four. Two days later Adams 
 offered Clay the first place in his cabinet. 
 
 This series of events gave rise to the charge of a " corrupt 
 bargain" between Adams and Clay to defeat the will of the 
 people of the United States to seat Andrew Jackson in the presi- 
 dential chair. A Republican from Pennsylvania, named Kremer, 
 published a card in a Philadelphia paper, alleging that Adams 
 had offered Clay the post of Secretary of State in return for his 
 votes in the House, and that Clay would have been willing to 
 secure Jackson's election if the latter's agents had been ready 
 to meet the bid. "None of Jackson's friends would descend to 
 such mean barter and sale," declared Kremer. Clay indignantly 
 repelled the charge in a public communication and demanded 
 an investigation by the House, which Kremer sneaked out of. 
 Nevertheless, when Clay received and accepted the appoint- 
 ment, Jackson believed that the charge was true, and pilloried 
 Clay as "the Judas of the West," who had made his unholy 
 bargain for thirty pieces of silver. The Jackson forces every- 
 where took up the cry. Impetuous John Randolph poured out 
 his scorn for this alliance of "the Puritan and the Black-leg," 
 and answered for his epithets by a duel with Clay, in which 
 neither was hurt. 
 
 Adams has been called "injudicious" by some historians for 
 appointing Clay in defiance of the widespread suspicion of a 
 "deal" between them. But both men are above any suspicion 
 of dishonorable action. Clay had every good reason to give 
 his support to Adams. On the questions of national policy 
 which Clay had most at heart, like the protective tariff and 
 internal improvements, Adams was far more sympathetic than 
 either of the other two candidates. Crawford, besides his per- 
 sonal unfitness for the office, due to a stroke of paralysis suf- 
 fered in the autumn of 1823, was already committed to 
 the thoroughgoing states'-rights view of the older men of the 
 South. And Jackson was not only Clay's bitter rival for the 
 
334 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 leadership of the West but was in Clay's opinion utterly unfit 
 for the presidency, being a mere "military chieftain" whose 
 claim to political honors rested on the victory of New Orleans 
 and the chastisement of Indians and half-breeds in Florida. 
 If Clay also believed that his own political fortunes would be 
 best served by alliance with a candidate who had carried New 
 England and New York, he was entertaining a notion which 
 it would be mere hypocrisy to condemn in our American 
 politics. As for the upright Adams, there is no evidence that he 
 consulted any other consideration than the public good in ap- 
 pointing Clay, nor has it ever been a cause of reproach to 
 our presidents, down to Woodrow Wilson, that they have given 
 the first place in their cabinets to disappointed rivals or to men 
 who have made their own election sure. 
 
 John Quincy Adams, by his natural gifts, his training, his 
 wide experience in public affairs, 1 by the justness of his views 
 and the spotless integrity of his character, was one of the best- 
 qualified men ever elected to the presidency. But he was chosen 
 at an evil moment for his own peace of soul. His entire admin- 
 istration was vexed with factional quarrels and sectional jeal- 
 ousies, while he himself tried to pursue a course of broad and 
 impartial nationalism. 2 He alone refused to recognize the ri- 
 valry of interests between North and South, East and West, 
 that were rapidly developing throughout his term, and he paid 
 for his persistent nationalism by a splendid isolation. From 
 the very outset he had to meet dogged opposition. Fifteen of 
 the forty-one senators voted against the confirmation of Clay. 
 Although the electors of all the states (except Connecticut) 
 
 *At the age of eleven he had accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission 
 to France (1778), and had subsequently served as secretary, minister, or special 
 envoy at the courts of Russia, Prussia, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and 
 England. He had been a United States senator from Massachusetts for ten years 
 when Monroe appointed him Secretary of State in 1817 an office which he filled 
 with conspicuous success during both of Monroe's terms. 
 
 2 He even wished to keep Monroe's cabinet intact, only filling the vacancies 
 caused by his own and Calhoun's elevation. He asked Crawford to continue in 
 the Treasury and wanted Jackson to serve as Secretary of War. But neither of 
 these rivals would enter the cabinet, and Adams filled the vacant places with 
 Richard Rush of Pennsylvania and James Barbour of Virginia. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 335 
 
 that had voted for Adams had also voted for Calhoun as vice 
 president, the latter declared his opposition to the administra- 
 tion as soon as Clay was appointed to the cabinet. He used 
 his position as President of the Senate to appoint committees 
 hostile to Adams and allowed John Randolph to abuse the Presi- 
 dent to his heart's content on the floor of the Senate. Van 
 Buren, a senator from New York and a boss of the famous 
 " Albany Regency," who had resorted to trickery in the attempt 
 to get the legislature of his state to cast its electoral vote for 
 Crawford, made opposition to every measure of the Adams ad- 
 ministration a matter of principle, quite irrespective of the 
 merits of the questions. On one occasion, when the President's 
 supporters won a victory in the Senate, he remarked, "They 
 have beaten us by a few votes, . . . but if they had only taken 
 the other side we should have had them." And all the time 
 Andrew Jackson's tireless lieutenants were harping on the 
 theme of the "corrupt bargain" and rousing the "plain people" 
 to redress the wrong by which an intriguing and aristocratic 
 House of Representatives had been able to thwart their will. 1 
 The Republican party divided then into the Adams-Clay 
 wing and the Jackson-Calhoun-Crawford wing. The former 
 came to be known as National Republicans, because of their 
 adhesion to the nationalistic program of the decade following 
 the War of 1812. The latter returned to the old states'-rights 
 doctrine of the Jeffersonian school, denouncing the intimate 
 connection of the money power with national politics, opposing 
 the tariff as detrimental to the staple industry of the South, and 
 realizing ever more clearly the danger to the slavery interests 
 
 1 Jackson was the choice of the people, his supporters said, and therefore 
 entitled to the presidency. But the claim has no foundation. Our presidents are 
 not elected by popular vote, nor is there any proof that the vote of the coun- 
 try at large in 1824 would have been cast for Jackson. Legislatures -chose the 
 electors in one fourth of the states, and in those states where the people chose 
 them the majority of the votes were not cast for Jackson. Nor did Jackson 
 himself seem to think that any injustice had been done to him in the method of 
 the election. He congratulated Adams on the evening of his choice by the House. 
 But when Clay was appointed and confirmed, Jackson resigned from the Senate 
 and began the four years' campaign which was to carry him triumphantly into 
 the White House. 
 
336 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of the extension of the power of the national government over 
 the territories. They claimed to be the genuine Democratic 
 Republicans, and resuscitated the party name of "Democrat," 
 which had been dropped a generation before, when the excesses 
 of the French Revolution had brought it into disrepute. 
 
 The new party lines were not drawn with the distinctness 
 which had separated the old Federalists and Republicans in 
 Washington's administration. Our country was much larger 
 and its interests were much more varied and complicated. 
 The West, for example, which formed but 3 per cent of the 
 population in 1790, counted 32 per cent in 1820, and by the 
 census of the latter year was entitled to 47 of the 213 seats in 
 the House. Nine of the twenty- four states in the Union at the 
 beginning of John Quincy Adams's administration lay west of 
 the Alleghenies, giving them three eighths of the seats in the 
 Senate. The material interests of the West seemed on the whole 
 to lie with the Adams-Clay school, which favored internal im- 
 provements at national expense and a tariff for their wool, 
 hemp, iron, and lead; but the intense democracy of the new 
 Western commonwealths 1 and growing pride in their self- 
 sufficiency inclined them to the Jackson-Calhoun side. In the 
 election of 1824 they had shown this conflict of sentiment. 
 Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee voted for Jack- 
 son; Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio for Clay; while Illinois 
 and Louisiana divided their votes between Jackson and Adams. 
 Finally, as events were soon to show, there was no real identity 
 of interests between Jackson and Calhoun. They only made 
 common cause for the moment against Adams and Clay. 
 
 Adams realized the embarrassing position in which he was 
 placed. Addressing his first Congress (in which the adminis- 
 tration candidate for Speaker of the House was elected by a 
 margin of only five votes), he said, "Less possessed of your 
 confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply 
 
 1 Ohio was the only state of the Northwest, and Louisiana and Mississippi 
 were the only Western states south of the Ohio, that had not adopted manhood 
 suffrage. In these states either the payment of taxes or the purchase of public 
 lands or enrollment in the militia conferred the vote. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 337 
 
 conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener 
 in need of your indulgence." But if Adams craved the indul- 
 gence of his congressmen, he had no intention of indulging their 
 cravings. Office-seekers went away hungry from his door. He 
 steadfastly refused to use the enormous power of the presi- 
 dential patronage to build up a party machine. He declined 
 to deprive men of office because they worked for Jackson or 
 Crawford. A despairing editor-politician, after laboring in 
 vain with the President to get him to dismiss a political enemy, 
 left with the Parthian shot that Mr. Adams would find himself 
 "dismissed" at the next election. Adams was unwilling or un- 
 able, also, to temper his policy so as to win waverers to his side. 
 In his first message to Congress he went to such extremes in 
 the advocacy of internal improvements that even Henry Clay 
 was somewhat taken aback. Many of the President's friends 
 were alienated, and his enemies made the message an occasion 
 for the charge that he was aiming to revive the old Federalist 
 party and principles. 1 Thomas Jefferson, now in his eighty- 
 third year, wrote to Madison from Monticello, in his alarm for 
 the preservation of the rights of the states, suggesting that a 
 public protest based on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 
 of 1798 should be issued. Adams failed to win support for his 
 national policy and was obliged to confine his recommendations 
 to the modest limits prescribed in the bill of April, 1824 ap- 
 propriations for the surveys and plans of roads projected as 
 national highways, for the repair of existing roads, and for the 
 purchase of stock in private companies (controlled by state 
 laws) for the construction of canals. Any national work on the 
 scale of the great Erie Canal, which was opened with imposing 
 festivities only a few weeks before he sent his first message to 
 
 1 Thomas H. Benton says, in his "Thirty Years' View": "The declaration of 
 principles which would give so much power to the government, and the danger 
 of which had just been so fully set forth by Mr. Monroe in his veto of the 
 Cumberland Road bill, alarmed the old Republicans and gave new grounds of 
 opposition to President Adams' administration in addition to the strong one 
 growing out of the election in the House of Representatives." Crawford wrote 
 to Henry Clay, "The whole of his [Adams's] first message to Congress is re- 
 plete with doctrines which I hold to be unconstitutional." 
 
33$ THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Congress, Adams was not destined to inaugurate. The net re- 
 sult of his ardor for internal improvements was to furnish his 
 enemies another arrow for their quiver. 
 
 Three events in Adams's administration illustrate from dif- 
 ferent angles the sectional opposition to his broad policy of 
 national control : the Panama mission, the quarrel with Georgia 
 over the Indian lands within her borders, and the tariff of 1828. 
 
 The new republic of Colombia, with the great " liberator " 
 Simon Bolivar as its president, took the lead in organizing a 
 confederation of the Latin-American states. Treaties were made 
 with Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Mexico in the years 1823- 
 1825, forming a military league and providing for a congress of 
 the states to cement "in a most solid and stable manner the 
 intimate relations which ought to exist between all and every 
 one of them." The ministers from Colombia and Mexico ap- 
 proached Clay in the spring of 1825 on the subject of the 
 participation of the United States in the congress, which was 
 appointed to meet at Panama, and found in the Secretary an 
 enthusiastic partner. President Adams, however, asked first 
 to be informed on the subjects which the congress proposed to 
 discuss, on the powers to be granted to the delegates, and on 
 the methods of procedure. He told Clay to make it clear to the 
 ministers that the United States would not join a military 
 league for prosecuting a war with Spain. When the answers 
 to Adams's questions came in November, 1825, they proved 
 very unsatisfactory. No details of powers or procedure were 
 given ; only the general purpose was repeated of joint resistance 
 of the American republics to European interference. This the 
 South Americans interpreted as the meaning of the Monroe 
 Doctrine. It was, of course, far removed from Monroe's in- 
 tention to pledge the United States to go to war on the judgment 
 and initiation of the Latin-American states. Adams wanted the 
 United States to be represented at Panama, however, and in his 
 message to Congress on the subject, in the winter of 1825, he 
 gave his own interpretation of the purpose of the. meeting, 
 dwelling on the opportunity of improving our commerce with 
 Latin America, of forwarding the principles of maritime neu- 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 339 
 
 trality, and even of exerting the moral influence of the United 
 States for the advancement of religious liberty. 
 
 But behind these amiable considerations of commercial policy 
 and missionary zeal there was involved a very definite question 
 of American expansion and the slavery interests. The rich island 
 colonies of Cuba and Porto Rico offered a tempting prize to 
 European nations in Spain's extremity. As Secretary of State in 
 Monroe's cabinet, Adams had already warned our ministers 
 abroad that the United States could not allow France to seize 
 these islands in her crusade to reestablish absolutism in Spain, or 
 England to take them as a reward for alliance with Spain in de- 
 feating the French invasion. He had even gone so far as to say 
 that in looking forward half a century it was " impossible to 
 resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to the United 
 States" would be "indispensable to the continuation of the 
 Union itself." The danger of the seizure of the islands by a 
 European power seemed removed by the announcement of the 
 Monroe Doctrine (although Clay made the appearance of a 
 French fleet off Cuba in the summer of 1825 a subject for 
 remonstrance) ; but there had arisen the new danger that the 
 league of Latin-American republics might themselves under- 
 take the liberation of Cuba and Porto Rico from Spain. 
 
 Adams made it clear that his object was to preserve things 
 as they were in the islands of the Caribbean, and Clay wrote 
 to his friend Bolivar to dissuade him from plans of conquest 
 there. Yet the Southern statesmen deliberately misrepresented 
 the purposes of the administration. They professed to know 
 the mind of President Adams better than he knew it himself. 
 "It is clearly the intent of the President," said White of Ten- 
 nessee in the Senate, "to enter into an agreement at Panama 
 that if the powers of Europe make common cause with Spain 
 we shall unite with Spanish-America to resist them." But it 
 was clearly in the words of the President that he would do no 
 such thing. The Southern senators maintained also that par- 
 ticipation in the congress would mean indorsement of the plan 
 to emancipate the blacks in the islands of Cuba and Porto 
 Rico, and perhaps the establishment there of negro republics 
 
340 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 like Haiti. Our participation in such plans was not for a 
 moment dreamed of by the administration, yet senator after 
 senator returned to the charge. Hayne of South Carolina 
 declared that the discussion of slavery was not to be tolerated 
 by the federal government or the free states, and that "on the 
 very day when the unhallowed attempt should be made" to 
 interfere with the domestic institution of the South "we shall 
 consider ourselves as driven from the Union." Benton of Mis- 
 souri protested against our entering into diplomatic relations 
 with Haiti, "because the peace of eleven states of this Union will 
 not permit black consuls and ambassadors to establish them- 
 selves in our cities and parade through our country and give 
 their fellow blacks in the United States proof in hand of the 
 honors which await them for a like successful effort [of revo- 
 lution] on their part." 
 
 The Senate committee reported unfavorably on the Panama 
 project, but the report was voted down and Adams's envoys 
 were confirmed by the narrow vote of 24 to 19. It was an empty 
 victory for the administration. One of the envoys died on his 
 way to the congress, and the other arrived only after the meet- 
 ing had adjourned. The congress itself was a complete failure. 
 The net result of the whole business for the United States was 
 the increase of sectional feeling. Especially ominous were the 
 bitter debates in the Senate on the slavery issue in the congress. 
 
 At the same time a long-standing controversy between the 
 state of Georgia and the national government came to a head. 
 When Georgia, in 1802, ceded to the United States her charter 
 claims to lands as far west as the Mississippi, it was with the 
 provision that the national government should secure by treaty 
 the extinction of the Indian claims within the borders of the 
 state. The matter had dragged on for a score of years before 
 the government had acquired some 15,000,000 acres from the 
 Creeks and Cherokees scarcely more than half the immense 
 area in Georgia occupied by these fairly civilized tribes. 1 The 
 
 1 Their total holdings in Georgia in 1802 were 25,000,000 acres, equal to the 
 whole area of the New England states excepting Maine, and more than the area 
 of the state of South Carolina. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 341 
 
 state was impatient with the dilatoriness of the government at 
 Washington, its impatience growing to exasperation when the 
 Western boom that had followed the War of 1812 sent the prices 
 of land and cotton soaring. In 1819 the legislature of Georgia 
 began to protest, alleging not only that the government did not 
 remove the Indians, but that by conferring citizenship on the 
 Cherokees and encouraging them in the arts of civilization it 
 was virtually assuring them of a fixed tenure of their lands. 
 Troup, the energetic governor of Georgia, pushed the adminis- 
 tration in the closing days of Monroe's term, but all the re- 
 ply that Secretary Calhoun could get from the Creeks and 
 Cherokees was that they would not sell one foot of their land 
 nor would they exchange it for homes beyond the Mississippi. 
 They sanctioned the penalty of death for any chieftain who 
 should disobey the order. Nevertheless, some of the Creek 
 leaders, induced by cupidity, signed a treaty at Indian Springs, 
 February 12, 1825, by which, in consideration for $400,000 
 and trans-Mississippi grants, they ceded nearly all the Creek 
 claims in Georgia. The Indians were given until September, 
 1826, to move out. 
 
 As soon as the treaty was signed (the day after Adams's 
 inauguration) Governor Troup began to survey the Indian 
 lands. In spite of remonstrances from Washington and the 
 dispatch of General Gaines to Georgia to protect the rights 
 of the Indians under the treaty, Troup persisted in his course. 
 The state of Georgia, he said, was sovereign on her soil, and 
 the behavior of the President was unreasonable and "extraor- 
 dinary." The government of the United States was making 
 itself "the unblushing ally of savages." The Indians were but 
 tenants at will, anyway. Georgia must and would have the 
 lands, even if it involved resisting the central government in 
 arms. When Adams, convinced that fraud had been practiced 
 in the treaty of Indian Springs, negotiated a new treaty at 
 Washington (January, 1826) more favorable to the Indians, 
 the legislature of Georgia denounced the treaty as "illegal and 
 unconstitutional." The state,. it said, had never devolved upon 
 the central government that jurisdiction over its internal affairs 
 
342 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 which had become vested in its authorities with the extinction 
 of the king's power in the colony. Adams received little support 
 in the Senate when it appeared that persistence in his policy 
 would involve coercing the state of Georgia. He was relieved 
 from a most embarrassing situation by the conclusion of a 
 treaty with the Creeks late in 1827, by which they finally gave 
 up their lands. 1 The significant fact in this controversy was 
 the defiance of the administration at Washington by a " sov- 
 ereign state." The victory remained with Troup and not with 
 Adams for the former had been heartily and unanimously 
 supported by his legislature, while the latter had been left in 
 the lurch by a factious Congress. 
 
 But most serious of all the manifestations of sectional rivalry 
 developing in the Adams administration was the controversy 
 over the tariff. The growth of manufactures in the Northern 
 and central states had been rapid and steady since the recovery 
 from the panic of 1819. During the period of Monroe's second 
 term the capital employed in manufactures increased from less 
 than $100,000,000 to $160,000,000, and the number of workers 
 employed from a few hundred thousand to nearly 2,000,000. 
 Only about six per cent of all this capital and labor was to be 
 found in the cotton-raising states of the Carolinas, Georgia, 
 Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Every session of Con- 
 gress from 1820 on saw the attempt on the part of the manu- 
 facturers to get a new tariff bill passed, and their narrow success 
 in 1824 was due to a "dicker" with the Western states, by which 
 the duties on raw wool, iron ore, hemp, and lead were increased. 
 But still the woolen interests of the North were not satisfied. 
 England had reduced the duty on raw wool, so that her factories 
 were able to send quantities of cheap woolen goods to America. 
 The only remedy for our woolen manufacturers was in a system 
 of minimal valuations such as had saved the cotton industry in 
 the tariff of 1816 (see page 287). A bill incorporating this 
 principle was passed in the House early in 1827, but was de- 
 feated by Vice President Calhoun's casting vote in the Senate. 
 
 1 The contest was not settled until the Indians were forced by President 
 Jackson, in 1835, to seek homes across the Mississippi. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 343 
 
 This bill (the Mallory Bill) was the signal for a violent 
 agitation over the tariff. During the long recess of Congress 
 from March to December, 1827, resolutions of state legis- 
 latures, conventions, and mass meetings, indorsements and 
 protests in pamphlets, newspapers, and memorials abounded. 
 The closing of the British West Indies to American trade in 
 July, 1826, had cut off a valuable market for the grain and 
 flour of the West, without providing a compensation in the 
 growth of a home market; while the sheep-raising interest 
 saw with growing dismay the failure of the domestic woolen 
 manufactures. It was not difficult, then, to get the Western 
 states north of the Ohio to join with New England and the 
 middle Atlantic states in sending delegates to a convention at 
 Harrisburg in the midsummer of 1827 to devise a scheme of 
 high duties under the name of the "American System." The 
 South, at the same time, began in united fashion to resist the 
 tariff on principle. A rise in price of woolens meant a large 
 addition to the planter's bill for coarse clothing for his slaves 
 and bagging for his crop, and an increase in the duties on iron 
 meant higher prices for his farm implements; while any in- 
 crease in tariff rates meant offending England, which took two 
 thirds of his cotton crop. The legislatures of Georgia, South 
 Carolina, and Alabama declared that Congress had no power 
 to "regulate commerce" for the sake of aiding domestic manu- 
 factures in one section of our country, but only for the raising 
 of a revenue; and that they intended to submit to no other 
 interpretation of the Constitution than this. In an ardent speech 
 at a large gathering of planters at Columbia, South Carolina, 
 Dr. Thomas Cooper, president of the State College, asserted 
 that the avowed object of the scheme of high protective duties 
 proposed at Harrisburg was to tax the South for the interest 
 of the North, to deprive them of their best customers, and to 
 reduce them to "colonies and tributaries" of the manufacturing 
 states. "We shall ere long be forced to calculate the value of 
 our union," he cried, "to ask of what use is this unequal alliance 
 by which the South has always been the loser and the North 
 always the winner." 
 

 344 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 When the inevitable tariff bill was introduced into the Twen- 
 tieth Congress and referred to the committee on manufactures, 
 the Southern members, realizing that oratory was powerless 
 against interest, resorted to a scheme for defeating the bill, 
 whose details were confessed by Calhoun to the Senate nine 
 years later. Instead of opposing the high rates on raw materials, 
 like wool, pig iron, and hemp, they raised them still higher, 
 adding duties on molasses and cordage, which were used in large 
 quantities in New England. The object was to make the duties 
 on raw material so high that New England would reject the 
 whole bill. Politics entered into the plan, also. It was the year 
 of the presidential election, and the Jackson forces were la- 
 boring with all their might to take the vote of the Northern 
 states from Adams. 1 It was agreed that the Northern Democrats 
 should support the bill, thereby getting credit for being friends 
 of the protective system, while at the last moment the Southern 
 Democrats should vote against it and, with the expected aid of 
 New England, defeat it. This clever scheme to kill protection 
 by a homeopathic overdose failed. New England voted for the 
 bill, bitter as its ingredients were, and it passed the House and 
 Senate by the close margins of 109 to 91 and 26 to 2 1. President 
 Adams signed it May 19, 1828. 
 
 The passage of the " Tariff of Abominations" led to an out- 
 burst of protests, threats, and warnings in the South surpassing 
 that of the previous summer. Governors of states were appealed 
 to, to summon legislatures and even, as one South Carolina jour- 
 nalist wrote, "to prepare for a secession from the Union." 
 A boycott was urged against the manufactures of the North 
 and the products of the West. Southerners would go in home- 
 spun, as their Revolutionary fathers had done in the days of the 
 " Association" against England in 1774, and would starve rather 
 than buy the beef and bacon of the Ohio valley. Toasts were 
 
 1 Some Southern statesmen went so far as to say that the tariff campaign of 
 1827-1828 was started primarily for political reasons, to secure the cooperation 
 of the farming interests of the West and the manufacturing and commercial in- 
 terests of the East in the support of Adams. John Randolph said that the 
 only kind of manufactures the bill was directed to was "the manufacture of a 
 president." 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 345 
 
 proposed at public banquets setting the sovereignty of the states 
 above the authority of the nation, pledging independence as 
 dearer than union. "Let the New England beware how she 
 imitates the Old," was the contribution of C. C. Pinckney of 
 South Carolina. McDuffie called the Stamp Act of 1765 and 
 the tariff of 1828 "kindred acts of despotism." Immediate nul- 
 lification of the tariff act was advised by some, and resistance 
 "to the last ditch" against its execution. Hayne of South Caro- 
 lina "rejoiced for the South and its liberties that the regular 
 army of the United States was a mere handful of men." The 
 voices of the ex-presidents Madison and Monroe were raised 
 for moderation. Let a remedy be sought by compromise, as in 
 the Missouri struggle. Let there be no talk of disunion. 
 
 The election of Jackson over Adams in November by an 
 overwhelming majority gave the South pause. Every state west 
 of the Alleghenies and every state south of Mason and Dixon's 
 line except Maryland and Delaware gave its entire vote to 
 Jackson, and he had all the electors of Pennsylvania, 20 out of 
 36 in New York, and 5 out of n in Maryland besides a total 
 of 1 78 to 83 for Adams. Although the Jackson men in the dif- 
 ferent sections of the country were by no means agreed in their 
 economic interests, here was a chance for the South to regain 
 the alliance of the West on a political basis. Jackson might be 
 the reconciler. He was known not to be keen for protection. 
 He was a native of South Carolina. Further action on the 
 abominable tariff of 1828 was postponed, therefore, until it 
 should be seen what Jackson would do when he should assume 
 the presidential office on the fourth of March, 1829. 
 
 Meanwhile John C. Calhoun put forth his famous "Expo- 
 sition and Protest" (December, 1828) denouncing the tariff on 
 the score of its unconstitutionality and its offensive economic 
 discrimination against the South. The pamphlet was only a 
 resume of the arguments urged for a year or more past by 
 various writers and orators of the South : the noncompetence 
 of Congress to lay duties for the encouragement of special 
 industries, the doctrine of the national government as a "com- 
 pact" between the states, and hence the impropriety of permit- 
 
346 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ting that government or any branch of it, like the Supreme Court, 
 to set itself up as the final arbiter of the rights of the common- 
 wealths which had created it and whose "agent" it was. If the 
 minority in any section of the country is oppressed by the legis- 
 lation of the majority in Congress, the remedy lies in the 
 "reserved rights of the states when properly called into action." 
 That such a minority was oppressed in the South by the tariff 
 bills Calhoun showed by a mathematical demonstration. The 
 Southern states, with their tobacco, rice, and cotton, furnished 
 $37,500,000 out of the total $53,000,000 of exports from the 
 country. It was the proceeds from these sales which paid for 
 the goods imported. Hence some two thirds of the $23,000,000 
 collected in customs duties on imports was virtually paid by the 
 South. The fallacy of Calhoun's argument, of course, was in 
 the middle term, which boldly assumed both that the South 
 spent all her money for imports and that the North spent none 
 of hers so. But whoever paid for the imports, it was still true 
 that the South suffered by the tax on them. And this actual 
 grievance was the sufficient basis, in the eyes of the South, for 
 Calhoun's political theory and for his economic calculation. 
 The "Exposition and Protest" marked Calhoun's break with 
 the nationalism which he had so ardently championed in the 
 decade following the War of 1812. Henceforth he was the 
 protagonist of states' rights and the interests of the South. 1 It 
 was he more than any other man who prepared the way for the 
 great secession, although he protested, and honestly protested, 
 his love for the Union, even to that March day of 1850 when 
 his solemn voice, for the last time and from the edge of the tomb, 
 warned the North that obedience to its conscience in crying 
 aloud against the evil of slavery would mean the provocation of 
 the South to sever the bonds which were a token of friendship 
 
 1 Henry Adams, in his "Life of John Randolph," claims that it was the ardent 
 and eccentric Virginian who converted Calhoun to the extreme states'-rights 
 doctrine, "as he sat rigid and statue-like in the vice-presidential chair and lis- 
 tened with pale face and lips compressed and hair brushed back over his im- 
 perious forehead" to Randolph's doctrines prophesying slave emancipation as 
 the result of arming the government with power after power over commerce, 
 public lands, currency, etc. 
 
THE NEW NATIONALISM 347 
 
 between equals but a symbol of servitude when the strong 
 oppressed the weak. 
 
 Into such an era of hard feelings had the tangled economic 
 interests of East, West, and South converted the "era of good 
 feelings" which marked Monroe's all but unanimous reelection 
 to the presidency. The national government had been defied, its 
 laws and treaties declared unconstitutional, and the very value 
 of its existence called in question. "The hour is come, or is 
 rapidly approaching," said a report of the Georgia legislature, 
 "when the states from Virginia to Georgia, from Missouri to 
 Louisiana, must confederate and, as one man, say to the Union, 
 'We will no longer submit our retained rights to the snivelling 
 insinuations of bad men on the floor of Congress.'" 
 
 The interests of the South were clearly divergent from those 
 of the North and West on almost every important economic 
 question of the day. She had no manufactures to profit by a 
 tariff. The foreign market for her cotton was far more valuable 
 than the home market. She had no need for improved highways 
 and waterways to the West, for she had no merchandise to send 
 over them. And, most serious of all, she looked with alarm on 
 the rapidly growing power which a full Treasury and unre- 
 stricted immigration were bringing to the financial and indus- 
 trial centers of the North, while her own ancestral estates 
 were being sold for less than they had been worth in George 
 Washington's day. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 
 
 A more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be 
 established in America. JOHN ADAMS 
 
 THE NEW DEMOCRACY 
 
 Democracy is a relative term. A literal rule of the people is 
 possible only in small communities like a New England town or 
 a Swiss canton. In large political units, like state or nation, a 
 pure democracy yields to a representative democracy. Instead 
 of "government of the people by the people" there is govern- 
 ment of the people by their chosen agents with a great vari- 
 ety of qualifications for both the agents and the choosers. 
 The fathers of the American republic were not concerned to 
 strengthen democracy on these shores. They made no pro- 
 vision in the Constitution for enlarging the suffrage, accepting 
 as qualified to vote for national representatives and presidential 
 electors those whom the various states allowed to vote for "the 
 most numerous branch" of their legislatures. And the suffrage 
 in the various states, in turn, was quite generally the same 
 as in the old colonial governments, which were anything but 
 "democratic." It is estimated that in Washington's adminis- 
 tration not more than one male adult in seven was a voter, while 
 the actual direction of politics was in the hands of a small group 
 of "the rich, the well born, and the able/' who regarded any 
 disposition of the people at large to interfere with their pre- 
 rogative as a kind of ungrateful impertinence. Even Jefferson, 
 who was looked on as a dangerous innovator for his devotion 
 to the "French doctrine" of the rights of man, confined his 
 "democracy" in practice to furthering the interests of the com- 
 mon people through the authorities already established instead 
 
 348 
 
"THE REIGN- OF ANDREW JACKSON" 349 
 
 of overthrowing those authorities. He made no campaign for 
 the extension of the suffrage or the principles of "direct gov- 
 ernment." In fact, the social soil of the old states, with their 
 colonial traditions, was not favorable to the growth of a real 
 democracy. 
 
 It was out of the West that the impetus came. In those 
 pioneer communities beyond the mountains differences of social 
 rank disappeared. Men were few and they all counted. Vigor, 
 self-reliance, industry, not birth, privilege, or wealth, were the 
 test of citizenship. The constitutions which the new trans- 
 montane states framed as they followed one another rapidly 
 into the Union were almost all completely democratic, pro- 
 viding for manhood suffrage, frequent elections, and popular 
 control of the executive and the judiciary. The influence of 
 the Western democracy on the Eastern states was continuous 
 and strong. One by one the strongholds of privilege fell. The 
 suffrage was widened, the election of many officials was taken 
 from the assemblies or special councils 1 and put into the hands 
 of the people. Religious and property qualifications for office- 
 holding were abolished ; public education was encouraged. The 
 process of democratization was slow at first, but came to a 
 rapid culmination in the decade of the thirties, when Delaware 
 (1831), Mississippi (1832), Georgia (1833-1835), and Tennes- 
 see (1834) all abolished their property qualifications for the 
 suffrage. By 1840 Rhode Island was the only state left in the 
 Union with the old colonial policy of exclusion still unmodified. 2 
 
 Second only to the influence of the Western states in estab- 
 lishing the new democracy was the growth of a prosperous 
 wage-earning class in the manufacturing centers of the Eastern 
 
 a For example, two small councils in the state of New York had controlled the 
 executive and legislative departments until the year 1821. The Council of Ap- 
 pointments of five members named about 15,000 officials, and the Council of 
 Revision had the power to veto laws. 
 
 2 Rhode Island kept its old colonial charter of 1662, which confined the suf- 
 frage to property-holders, until 1842, when, as the result of an armed rebellion 
 led by Thomas Dorr in support of a "Peoples' constitution," the conservatives 
 were forced to call a convention and frame a new, liberal constitution abolishing 
 the property qualification. 
 
350 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 and Middle States, which had been developing under the high 
 tariffs since the War of 1812. This incipient proletariat was 
 fruitful soil for the seeds of democracy. The workingmen, 
 organized into unions, began to make their influence felt in 
 politics. A Labor party held a national convention in Philadel- 
 phia in 1833 and presented demands for shorter hours, higher 
 pay, and sanitary reforms in shops and factories. It peti- 
 tioned state legislatures to pass laws in the interests of labor- 
 lien laws on buildings to protect mechanics from the loss of 
 wages by the failure or fraud of contractors, relief and stay 
 laws to keep debtors out of prison, school laws to give free edu- 
 cation to their children, and anti-convict-labor laws to prevent 
 the competition of prison-made goods with the products of free 
 labor. The journeymen bakers of New York sent out a mani- 
 festo to the public in June, .1834, protesting against a labor pro- 
 gram of eighteen to twenty hours a day at starvation wages, and 
 publishing a " white list" of employers who had " nobly agreed 
 to give the wages required." A pathetic appeal signed by "many 
 operatives" in the cotton mills of Philadelphia represented the 
 folly and injustice of employing children from six years of age, 
 " confined to steady employment during the longest days of the 
 year from daylight until dark, and growing up as ignorant as 
 Arabs of the Desert." Delegates from over a dozen trades met 
 in convention at Boston in March, 1834, to form a general trade 
 union of mechanics "to settle dissentions between employers 
 and employed" and "produce a friction of mind and . . . sparks 
 of intellectual fire . . . which will electrify, enlighten and warm 
 the whole body." 
 
 The political significance of this economic and social trend 
 was very great. Here were new masses of voters to be organized 
 and kept to party allegiance not so much through the per- 
 suasion of reason and principles as by the appeal to emotion 
 and immediate material interests. The boss and his machine 
 began to appear. Astute party managers flattered the ears of 
 the groundlings. All the tricks of political advertisement, with 
 shibboleths and popular catchwords, badges and banners, were 
 pressed into service. Public offices came to be looked on not 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 351 
 
 as honorable positions of civic responsibility so much as rewards 
 with which to pay political obligations. "Patronage" became 
 the allotment of fodder from the public crib. A classic remark 
 of William M. Marcy of New York in a debate in the Senate 
 in 1832, "To the victors belong the spoils," has fastened upon 
 his name the unenviable and undeserved reputation of being the 
 author of the "spoils system." Marcy was only giving pictur- 
 esque expression to an idea that had been long germinating. 
 Some years earlier, Edward Everett of Massachusetts had 
 said, "For an administration to bestow its patronage without 
 distinction of party is to court its own destruction." 
 
 The man who was first to take advantage of these tendencies 
 in our national politics, and with whose name the new democ- 
 racy is indissolubly linked, was Andrew Jackson. He was the 
 first president from the new West, the first to break through 
 the "dynastic" succession of Secretaries of State, the first 
 since George Washington who owed neither his selection nor his 
 election to any agency of Congress. He came into the White 
 House fresh from the hands of the "people," triumphant in a 
 campaign whose chief rallying-cry had been, "Down with the 
 aristocrats ! " The oft-described scene of Jackson's inaugura- 
 tion on March 4, 1829, when the "great unwashed" throng of 
 farmers and laborers, of Western frontiersmen and rough old 
 Indian fighters, swarmed into the White House to grasp the 
 hand of the "old hero" of New Orleans and fought in mq&Uigr 
 mannerly fashion for the sandwiches and orange punch, was 
 looked on by dignified statesmen like Webster and Story as the 
 opening of the reign of King Mob. But Andrew Jackson lacked 
 neither dignity nor poise. He was even courtly, with the direct 
 and ingenuous courtliness of the borderer. He was incorrupt- 
 ible, intensely patriotic, devoted in his attachments and in 
 his antipathies. Trained by a long and hard schooling in mili- 
 tary responsibility, he was rapid in decision, courageous in 
 council, and vigorous in action. With the soldier's virtues he 
 had the soldier's faults, exacting a servile obedience from his 
 appointees, regarding dissent from his policies as insubordi- 
 nation, and carrying the zest of battle into the arena dedicated 
 
352 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to peaceful deliberation. His strong will he had never learned 
 nor wished to learn to curb, and the generally successful outcome 
 of his arbitrary conduct had fortified his self-confidence. Excess 
 of zeal spared him the embarrassment of a lack of knowledge. 
 His vigorous intellect was impatient of schooling, and he pro- 
 ceeded to conclusions on difficult and intricate questions like 
 finance and banking with sadly inadequate light. 
 
 It was in thorough accord with Andrew Jackson's character 
 that he, first of all our presidents, interpreted his office as a 
 direct commission from the people, appropriating to the full 
 the ample powers given to the chief executive by the Consti- 
 tution. Ever since the inauguration of Madison, Congress had 
 dominated the executive. It seemed as though our government 
 were approaching closer to the English model, with the executive 
 as the mouthpiece of a parliamentary majority. We have seen 
 with what almost humiliating deference John Quincy Adams 
 waited on the will of his Congress. Nothing shows more clearly 
 the change in the spirit of the executive than a comparison of 
 Adams's pathetic appeal in his first message to Congress for 
 their "indulgence" to a president who stood "less possessed 
 of their confidence" than his predecessors with Jackson's de- 
 fiant toleration of a branch of the government coordinate with, 
 but in no sense superior to, the president of the people's choice. 
 Jackson was concerned neither to "manage" Congress, like 
 Jefferson, nor to get into harmony with it, like Jefferson's suc- 
 cessors. He rather let it go its own way in the interpretation 
 of the Constitution, while he went his. He used the veto power 
 freely, depending always on popular majorities at the polls to 
 support his policies. For this unwonted exercise of his con- 
 stitutional prerogative he was dubbed "King Andrew the First" 
 and represented in cartoons with crown and scepter, trampling 
 the Constitution under his sandled feet. In the House there 
 was even talk of impeaching him. But however exasperating 
 to Henry Clay and the other congressional leaders Jackson's 
 selection of his "Pretorian guard" of advisers or his veto of 
 bills or his removal of secretaries might be, there was nothing 
 in all these acts that violated his oath to support the Constitu- 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 353 
 
 tion, or that could by any strain of interpretation be charged 
 against him as "treason, bribery, or other high crimes or 
 misdemeanors." 
 
 Although Jackson had put himself on record in a famous 
 letter to President-elect Monroe, in 1816, as an enemy of 
 partisan appointments, declaring that men should be selected 
 who were "most conspicuous for probity, virtue, firmness, and 
 capacity, without regard to party," he threw his doctrine to 
 the winds when he himself entered the presidency. Heads of 
 bureaus, chief clerks of departments, collectors and surveyors 
 of customs, registrars of land offices, naval officers, marshals, 
 district attorneys, diplomatic and consular agents, with hosts 
 of minor secretaries and clerks, were turned out of office. Be- 
 tween March and June, 1829, over three hundred postmasters 
 were dismissed. To have supported Adams in the campaign of 
 1828, or approved the "corrupt bargain" between Adams and 
 Clay in 1825, meant an official's political death warrant. "Ike" 
 Hill, one of Jackson's most devoted henchmen, playfully de- 
 clared that "the barnacles must be scraped clean from the 
 Ship of State." There was undoubtedly some justification 
 besides a political victory for a shake-up in the civil service. 
 Many officials, by long tenure of power, had come to regard 
 their positions as a prescriptive right, even after they had out- 
 lived their usefulness. The wits of Washington spoke of the 
 Treasury as the "octogenarian department." But the indecent 
 and indiscriminate haste with which removals were made in 
 order to build up the new Jackson "machine" opened the door 
 to incompetence and corruption. The "clean sweep" was made 
 with a very dirty broom. 
 
 John C. Calhoun, who had been reflected to the vice presi- 
 dency, expected to wield a large influence in the Jackson ad- 
 ministration and to succeed the "old hero" in the presidency 
 in 1833. For a single term was one of tfye Democratic profes- 
 sions ostentatiously put forward by Jackson until he became 
 convinced of the desirability of a second term. Calhoun's serv- 
 ices entitled him to great expectations. He had labored as vice 
 president for four years in Washington to bring the Adams-Clay 
 
354 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 administration into disgrace and smooth the way for Jack- 
 son's succession. He had thrown his enormous influence in 
 the South in favor of Jackson, defeating whatever chances 
 Crawford might have to contest the election of 1828. He had 
 advised South Carolina and her sister states of the South to 
 defer any action on the oppressive tariff of 1828 until Jackson's 
 administration should have come into office, believing that his 
 opinion would have decisive weight with a president who was con- 
 fessedly not very conversant with theories of taxation. But one 
 thing after another came to spoil the influence of Calhoun and 
 the extreme Southern wing of the Democracy with the adminis- 
 tration. Martin Van Buren, a shrewd politician of New York, a 
 Crawford man in 1824 but since then the chief lieutenant of 
 Jackson in the state, was given the first place in the cabinet. Van 
 Buren was bland, insinuating, and deferential, a servant after 
 Jackson's own heart. His influence with the President grew 
 daily and was firmly established when he espoused Jackson's side 
 in a social quarrel which convulsed the cabinet and the capital. 1 
 Besides, Jackson, being a strong Union man, already scented 
 danger to the central government and his own authority in the 
 attitude of South Carolina on the tariff ; for although Calhoun's 
 authorship of the " Exposition and Protest" was not yet ac- 
 knowledged, he was known to be moving fast in the direction 
 of particularism and states' rights. 
 
 The event which caused the final break between Jackson and 
 the ambitious vice president, however, was the revelation, dia- 
 bolically sprung by Crawford at the psychological moment, of 
 Calhoun's "treachery" to Jackson a decade before. Calhoun, 
 Crawford, and Adams had all been members of Monroe's cabinet 
 in 1818, when Jackson's conduct in the Seminole War had been 
 
 1 Jackson's Secretary of War, John Eaton, had married, only a few weeks before 
 entering the cabinet, a widow who in her girlhood had been known as Peggy 
 O'Neill, the daughter of a Washington tavern-keeper. Stories were circulated re- 
 flecting on Mrs. Eaton's character, and the ladies of the administration, beginning 
 with Mrs. Calhoun, refused to receive Mrs. Eaton as a social equal or attend the 
 functions to which she was invited. Jackson believed none of the scandal, but 
 treated the charming, witty wife of his Secretary of War with chivalrous atten- 
 tion. Van Buren, being a widower, was free to follow his chief in the same course. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 355 
 
 under discussion (p. 302 ) . Jackson had believed at the time, and 
 had continued to believe, that Calhoun had upheld his action in 
 the invasion of Florida then and that Adams had opposed him, 
 whereas the truth was that Adams had upheld him and Calhoun 
 had proposed that he should be recalled and court-martialed. 
 When Jackson heard this new version of the affair, nearly a year 
 after he had entered the presidency, he immediately called upon 
 Calhoun for an explanation. The Vice President, greatly embar- 
 rassed and anxious to restore his waning influence, shrank from a 
 manly confession of the whole truth. He produced a labored 
 and unconvincing apology for his conduct, which served only to 
 make his offense doubly deep in Jackson's eyes. All public con- 
 fidence and private friendship between the two men was 
 forever ended. Shortly afterward Jackson entirely reorganized 
 his cabinet in order to exclude the partisans of Calhoun ; and, a 
 few months later still, Calhoun himself resigned the vice presi- 
 dency and entered the Senate as the champion of the doctrines 
 of state sovereignty and a weakened Union, which were most 
 detestable to Andrew Jackson. 
 
 The breach between the administration and the great leader 
 of the South was far more significant than any mere personal 
 or factional quarrel. It had a direct bearing on our national 
 history. The South was anxious for an alliance with the new 
 democracy of the West. She tried to play off the economic 
 interests of the North against those of the West in the tariff 
 controversies. She only reluctantly gave up her champion- 
 ship of internal improvements (advocated by Calhoun as late 
 as 1825) when the fear of increasing the power of the cen- 
 tral government outweighed the gratitude to be derived from 
 the benefited section. Soon after the opening of Jackson's 
 first Congress the South made another bid for Western support. 
 Senator Foote of Connecticut introduced a resolution late in 
 December, 1829, limiting the sales of public lands in the 
 Western states. Hayne of South Carolina replied, denouncing 
 legislation which discriminated against any section of our coun- 
 try. Warmed by his own eloquence, Hayne left the subject of 
 the resolution and launched into a general condemnation of the 
 
356 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 North for its selfish policy of sectionalism, as shown especially 
 in the high-tariff legislation. He declared that a way was open 
 under the Constitution for a state to be rid of an oppressive act 
 of Congress. When challenged by Daniel Webster to make his 
 meaning clear, Hayne delivered a long speech on January 21, 
 1830, in which he set forth the doctrine of the " Exposition and 
 Protest" in its full vigor. The federal government was but the 
 trustee of the states, in which sovereignty ultimately resided. 
 It could not, either in its legislative or in its judicial branch, be 
 the judge of its own powers, for that would be to reduce the 
 states to mere "corporations." Hence the federal laws were 
 subject to review and even annulment at the hands of the 
 sovereignties which had first called the federal government into 
 being and conferred upon it certain specified powers. Thus 
 "for the first time in the halls of Congress was openly asserted 
 the doctrine that the sovereignty of the states was original and 
 paramount, while that of the Federal Union was delegated and 
 subsidiary." Webster's reply to Hayne on the 26th and 27th of 
 January is considered by many the most powerful speech ever 
 made in the American Congress. He took his stand squarely on 
 the ground that the Constitution of the United States was the au- 
 thoritative charter of government of the American people ; that 
 it might be amended by the people, but must always be obeyed 
 as the supreme law to which the officials in every state had 
 pledged their oath of allegiance. He showed that the assump- 
 tion by one state or another of the power to annul this or that 
 law which it found unwelcome would result in confusion worse 
 confounded. The government of the United States would 
 become an absurdity. The Constitution would be a "rope of 
 sand" to bind the states together, and we should be plunged 
 again into the anarchy of the Confederation, from which we 
 had been rescued by precisely the creation of a truly national 
 government. 
 
 Jackson, of course, could have no part in the debates of the 
 Senate, but an opportunity soon came for him to show his colors. 
 For the celebration of Jefferson's birthday (April 13) a banquet 
 was arranged in Washington by a committee of Southern states- 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 357 
 
 men, who planned to use the occasion to exploit the great 
 Virginian as the sponsor of the doctrines put forward by Cal- 
 houn and Hayne. Jackson had meditated carefully on the 
 situation, taking council of his advisers on the wording of the 
 toast which he, as chief magistrate, would be called on first to 
 deliver. He rose, lifted his glass, and, looking Calhoun straight 
 in the eyes, proposed "Our Federal Union it must and shall 
 be preserved ! " Isaac Hill, who sat near the President, in de- 
 scribing the scene, said: "A proclamation of martial law in 
 South Carolina and the order to arrest Calhoun where he sat 
 could not have come with more staggering, blinding force." 
 Calhoun rose with the rest to drink the toast, his glass trembling 
 in his hand. Jackson stood silent and impassive. Calhoun waited 
 until all had sat down ; then he slowly rose and with hesitating 
 accent offered the second voluntary toast: "The Union next 
 to our liberty most dear ! " Then, after a moment's delay, and 
 in a way that left doubt as to whether he intended it for a 
 part of his toast or for a preface to a speech, he added, "May 
 we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting 
 the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits 
 and burdens of the Union." More toasts followed, but all 
 interest in the feast was at an end. The company (more than a 
 hundred at the start) had dwindled to thirty within five minutes 
 after Calhoun sat down. On the morrow Jackson's friends 
 secured from Crawford corroboration of the story of Calhoun 's 
 behavior in the cabinet meetings of 1818. From this moment 
 it was certain that the enormous influence which Andrew Jack- 
 son had with the new democracy of the West would not be 
 cast on the side of alliance with the South Carolina school of 
 statesmen. 
 
 But if Jackson brought joy to the hearts of nationalists like 
 Webster, Adams, and Clay in his determination to maintain 
 the authority of the Union, he disappointed them in his no less 
 positive determination to defeat their program of economic 
 and financial centralization. It was a democratic Union, a peo- 
 ple's Union, which he cherished. The people were great, and 
 Andrew Jackson was their prophet. He looked with distrust 
 
358 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 on Congress as the seat of aristocratic privilege. Had it not 
 thwarted the people's will in 1825? Calhoun and Clay were 
 drifting far apart in their political theories, the one toward the 
 pole of disunion, the other toward the pole of Federalism. 
 Both were equally abhorred in Jackson's eyes, and each knew 
 that the " military chieftain in the White House" was his 
 enemy. As the Calhoun-Hayne school tried to alienate Jack- 
 son's followers in the North by championing the cheap sale of 
 public lands, so the Adams-Clay school tried to discredit him 
 in the West on the issue of internal improvements. Clay got 
 a bill through Congress in May, 1830, for the construction at 
 national expense of a turnpike from Maysville to Lexington in 
 the state of Kentucky. Jackson vetoed the bill, and the country 
 at large approved his action. The era of internal improvements 
 was passed, not to be reopened until the period following the 
 Civil War, when the development of a vaster West demanded 
 the ample resources of our national government. 
 
 The most conspicuous example, however, of the President's 
 leadership of the new democracy was his appeal to the people 
 in his mighty struggle against the Bank of the United States. 
 Jackson was not an expert in the theory of banking and finance, 
 but he saw in the Bank a huge privileged institution with an op- 
 portunity for sinister influence in politics through its grip on the 
 business interests of the country and its arbitrary distribution of 
 financial favors. He had the frontiersman's prejudice against 
 corporations with accumulated capital, which kept interest rates 
 high and discouraged the circulation of cheap and abundant 
 currency. The Bank of the United States especially, by its 
 power to refuse to accept for government dues notes which were 
 not secured by specie, held the whip hand over the state banks 
 of the West. Jackson did not begin the attack on the Bank, as 
 is often asserted. A full year before his inauguration (March 3, 
 1828) Senator Benton of Missouri denounced the institution as 
 a private beneficiary of the public wealth. The Bank, he de- 
 clared, held $3,000,000 of government deposits, from the loan of 
 which it realized some $150,000 a year, to be distributed to its 
 stockholders, while the government was taxing the people for the 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 359 
 
 payment of interest on its public debt. The surplus should be 
 drawn out of the bank and applied to the discharge of the debt. 
 Jackson was in thorough sympathy with Benton on this subject. 
 In his first annual message, of December, 1829, he declared that 
 a large portion of the people questioned the constitutionality and 
 expediency of the law creating the Bank, and furthermore that 
 the Bank had failed to provide the country with a sound and uni- 
 form currency. The first of these statements was Jackson's pri- 
 vate opinion, which he had no data to substantiate ; the second 
 was not true. 
 
 But Jackson did not judge the Bank on its merits. 1 It was 
 enough for him that it was an undemocratic institution, a privi- 
 leged corporation. There were rumors that the branches of the 
 Bank in Charleston, New Orleans, Lexington, and Portsmouth 
 had contributed money to the Adams campaign of 1828; and 
 the president of the Portsmouth branch, Jeremiah Mason, was 
 charged by Levi Woodbury, a Jackson senator from New Hamp- 
 shire, with partiality toward the anti- Jackson business interests 
 of the state. Nicholas Biddle, the able and autocratic president 
 of the parent bank in Philadelphia, denied the charges and main- 
 tained that five hundred men less implicated in the strife of party 
 factions than the officials of the Bank could not easily be found 
 in the United States. The Bank was not "in politics." But 
 Jackson would not be placated, even by the appointment of 
 some Kentucky directors out of a list submitted by one of 
 his cabinet officers. A lively correspondence on the subject be- 
 tween Jackson, Biddle, Ingham (Secretary of the Treasury), 
 Mason, and Jackson's lieutenants Lewis, Hill, and Kendall 
 filled the summer months. In his second message (December, 
 1830) the President returned to the charge, advocating a Bank 
 without a charter, stockholders, loaning-privileges, or note 
 issues a simple branch of the Treasury, to hold deposits but 
 
 1 The Bank report of December i, 1829, showed assets of $100,000,000 and de- 
 posits of $13,000,000, with $27,000,000 worth of notes outstanding. Its discounts 
 amounted to over $40,000,000. The stock stood at 125 and the dividends were 
 at 6 or 7 per cent. The stock was widely distributed both in America and 
 abroad, and the notes were considered as good as gold. 
 
360 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to do no discount business. Benton attempted soon after to in- 
 troduce a resolution into the Senate against the renewal of the 
 Bank's charter, but was voted down. 
 
 Meanwhile the House, through McDuffie, chairman of the 
 Ways and Means Committee, had made a report favorable to 
 the Bank, which only inflamed Jackson the more against "the 
 hydra of corruption." The contest spread to the country ; state 
 legislatures passed resolutions for or against the recharter. 
 When Jackson reorganized his cabinet in the summer of 1831 
 (p. 355), the new Secretaries of State (Edward Livingstone) 
 and of the Treasury (Louis McLane) both proved to be friendly 
 to the Bank. A new series of conferences was opened between 
 the administration and the Bank officials, and a kind of truce 
 was arranged. The government was to cease its attack, and the 
 Bank was to refrain from a petition for recharter until after the 
 presidential campaign of the coming summer. Jackson's mild 
 words on the Bank in his third annual message gave apparent 
 approval of this bargain. He said that he was content to leave 
 the matter "for the present to the investigation of an enlight- 
 ened people and their representatives." 
 
 The approach of the presidential year is the explanation of 
 this situation. Jackson, in spite of his advocacy of a constitu- 
 tional amendment limiting the presidency to a single term, had 
 no desire to relinquish the reins of government. Moreover, 
 enough states had already declared for him for a second term 
 to defeat such an amendment if proposed. He allowed the ad- 
 ministration paper, the Washington Globe, to announce early 
 in 1831 that he could not retreat under the fire of his political 
 enemies nor deny the people the chance to indorse his policies at 
 the polls. His partisans saw the embarrassment of having the 
 influence and wealth of the Bank arrayed against them in the 
 election. Hence the truce. 
 
 A very important innovation was introduced into our politics 
 in the presidential campaign of 1832; namely, the national 
 nominating convention. It was one of the most conspicuous fea- 
 tures of the new democracy. The Constitution made no provi- 
 sion for the selection of a candidate for the presidency. The 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 361 
 
 framers believed that the electoral colleges chosen in each state 
 would cast their ballots for men of their own choice. But it 
 was inevitable, as soon as national parties were formed, that 
 there should be found a way of agreeing on a standard-bearer of 
 the party in the campaign. A canvass of the members of the 
 party in Congress was the commonest method of nominating a 
 candidate down to 1824, when the congressional caucus was dis- 
 approved, by the growing democracy of the West especially, as 
 arbitrary and aristocratic. It was not right that the president of 
 the great American people should be picked out by a few men in 
 secret conclave in Washington. Crawford, the last caucus nom- 
 inee, got less than half as many votes in the election of 1824 as 
 Jackson or Adams, who were nominated by state legislatures, 
 conventions, and mass meetings. But if the congressional- 
 caucus method was too exclusive, the nominations by separate 
 states were too scattering and uncertain. It was a third party 
 of very minor and temporary influence in our national politics 
 that hit upon the scheme, ever since followed by all our parties, 
 of a national nominating convention. The Antimasons, 1 origi- 
 nating in New York State in the late twenties, held an interstate 
 convention at Philadelphia in 1830. Nine states were repre- 
 sented, and the plan was adopted of holding a national conven- 
 tion at Baltimore in the following year to nominate candidates 
 for the presidency and vice presidency of the United States. At 
 the Baltimore convention of September, 1831, where thirteen 
 states were represented, William Wirt of Maryland and Amos 
 Ellmaker of Pennsylvania were nominated as the ticket, and a 
 " platform" was published in the form of an address to the 
 people of the country to put down the archfoe of democracy, 
 Freemasonry. 
 
 !In 1826 a certain William Morgan, a bricklayer of Batavia, New York, had 
 published a book revealing the secrets of Freemasonry. For this he had been kid- 
 naped by a band of conspirators and spirited away. He was traced to Fort 
 Niagara, and some time later a body was found in the Niagara River which 
 was never proved to be Morgan's. Indignation against the Masons for this 
 alleged murder grew to such a pitch that the party of Antimasons polled 33,000 
 votes in 1828 and 128,000 in 1830. 
 
362 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The National Republicans followed the lead of the Anti- 
 masons. On December 12, 1831, delegates of their party from 
 seventeen states met at Baltimore and, with but one dissenting 
 voice, named Henry Clay for president. The sectional charac- 
 ter of the " solid South" was already foreshadowed in this con- 
 vention, not a delegate being present from South Carolina, 
 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Missouri. The National- 
 Republican convention did not put forth a platform of prin- 
 ciples, but it published an address denouncing the administration 
 of Jackson for its abuse of the civil service, its partisanship and 
 incompetency, its defiance of Congress, its attack on the Bank, 
 its dependence on a "kitchen cabinet" of demagogues in news- 
 paper offices and minor Treasury posts, its hostility to our 
 judiciary, its treachery on the tariff, and its encouragement 
 to the state of Georgia to defy the supreme law of the land in 
 the Indian treaties (p. 341). The following May a " Young 
 Men's National- Republican Convention" ( called " Clay's Infant 
 School") met at Washington and adopted a positive platform 
 for the party, advocating "adequate protection to American in- 
 dustry," "a uniform system of internal improvements," the 
 final arbitrage of the Supreme Court in all cases arising under 
 the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the main- 
 tenance of a stable, honest, and trained civil service. These 
 "planks," with the support of the United States Bank, were 
 taken over, a few years later, as the fundamental principles of 
 the new Whig party. 
 
 The Democratic convention also met at Baltimore, on 
 May 21, 1832. There was no need for a presidential nomi- 
 nation, for Jacks'on was already the acknowledged candidate 
 of the whole party. The convention followed the President's 
 wish in naming Van Buren for the second place on the ticket. 
 Van Buren had been appointed minister to Great Britain on the 
 break-up of the cabinet in 1831 and had actually sailed for 
 London. When the Congress assembled in December the Senate 
 rejected his name by the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun. 
 It was a sweet morsel of revenge for Jackson to have Van 
 Buren nominated for Calhoun's place, where he would preside 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON " 363 
 
 for four years over the august body which had humiliated him. 
 The Democratic convention of 1832 adopted the "two-thirds 
 rule" for the choice of candidates, which has prevailed in the 
 Democratic conventions to this day. The effect of these con- 
 ventions, with their platforms and addresses, their review of 
 public questions, their reports in the press, their recommen- 
 dation of nationally indorsed candidates, was to stimulate and 
 exploit the new democratic fervor and to bring out a large vote 
 in the elections. Clay and Jackson stood out more clearly 
 against each other than had any competing condidates since 
 Jefferson and Adams a generation before. 
 
 Clay was anxious to have the election fought on a specific 
 issue and believed that the recharter of the Bank was the most 
 promising issue for the National Republicans. "Now or never 
 is the time to act," he said. Webster and McDuffie agreed with 
 him. The Bank had a majority of supporters in both Houses of 
 Congress. A bill for recharter would be sure to pass, therefore, 
 and would impale Jackson on the horns of a dilemma. If the 
 President signed the bill he would be convicted of inconsistency 
 with his position of 1829 and 1830 ; if he vetoed it he would lose 
 the support of the great state of Pennsylvania and be rebuked 
 in the election by the constituencies of the majority of the 
 congressmen who had voted for the bill. A report of September, 
 1831, showed the Bank to be in excellent condition, its stock 
 high, its liabilities modest, its loans all secured, its dividends 
 steady at 7^ per cent. President Biddle, in spite of his hostility 
 to Jackson, wished to keep the Bank out of the campaign, 
 observing the compact made with the Secretaries. McLane, 
 from the administration side, warned the friends of the Bank 
 not to precipitate the question of a recharter. But Clay con- 
 fidently and jubilantly overbore all opposition. He secured the 
 introduction into the Senate, on March 13, 1832, of a bill 
 providing for the extension of the charter (with a few inconsid- 
 erable amendments) for a period of fifteen years after its ex- 
 piration on March 3, 1836. The bill was passed by votes of 28 
 to 25 in the Senate and 107 to 85 in the House. It went to the 
 President on July 4, and six days later came back with his veto. 
 
364 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The veto message was the most vigorous one ever written by 
 an American president. "It had all the fury," wrote Biddle, 
 "of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage." Jackson 
 condemned the Bank as an aristocratic, un-American institution, 
 over $8,000,000 of whose stock was in the hands of foreigners. 
 It fostered sectional jealousy by making the West the financial 
 tributary of the East, since the nine trans-Allegheny states, with 
 only $140,000 of stock on which to receive dividends, were 
 paying over $1,600,000 interest on its loans. It enriched its 
 stockholders by dividing among them the interest on millions 
 of the public money held on deposit. It tyrannized over the 
 state banks, arbitrarily interfering with the financial condition 
 of the various sections of the country by its power to regulate 
 discount rates and give or withhold loans. Even if it had been 
 declared constitutional in John Marshall's famous decision of 
 1819, that did not mean that it must or ought to be established. 
 The President in his executive capacity was as fully entitled to 
 judge what were the agencies "necessary and proper" to his 
 duties under the Constitution as was Congress in its legislative 
 capacity or the Supreme Court in its judicial capacity. " Each 
 public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution 
 swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as 
 it is understood by others. . . . The opinion of the judges has 
 no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Con- 
 gress has over the judges ; and on that point the President is 
 independent of both." 
 
 Clay and Biddle were delighted with the veto. They believed 
 that it would disrupt the President's party. The respectable 
 men of the East would not vote for a demagogue who wished to 
 knock the bottom out of their financial security nor for a despot 
 who proclaimed the president's will supreme in the interpreta- 
 tion of the Constitution. But Clay and Biddle were mistaken. 
 They depended on the educated and reasoning classes ; Jackson 
 relied on the masses. The vast majority of the voters knew 
 nothing of the constitutional argument for or against the Bank. 
 They did not come into contact with the Bank at all as de- 
 positors or stockholders. What little money they handled was 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 365 
 
 in the form of state bank notes. But they believed in Andrew 
 Jackson, the democrat, the "old hero/' and when he said that 
 the Bank was a "monster," that it was the instrument of a 
 bloated aristocracy robbing the poor of their money and sending 
 the rates of interest up for the borrower, they rallied to his call 
 for its overthrow. State after state gave its vote to Jackson 
 when the elections were held in the autumn of I832. 1 When the 
 returns were all in, it was found that Clay had carried only the 
 six states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Dela- 
 ware, Kentucky, and Maryland, with 49 electoral votes. Wirt, 
 the Antimason candidate, carried Vermont, and Jackson the 
 other sixteen states, with 219 electoral votes. The popular vote 
 was 687,502 for Jackson and 530,187 for Clay. Jackson had 
 appealed to the people over the head of Congress, in the face 
 of a strong and wealthy corporation, 2 against the most powerful 
 rival the opposition party could furnish. He could embark on 
 the important measures of his second administration confident 
 in the indorsement of the American people. 
 
 A French scholar and publicist, Alexis de Tocqueville, came 
 to our country in 1831 with a commission from his government 
 to investigate our prison system. Tocqueville 's interest widened 
 into a study of the whole machinery of our government and of 
 the spirit of our institutions. His famous treatise on "Democ- 
 racy in America" was the result. At the close of a section 
 entitled "What are the chances of the duration of the American 
 Union and what dangers threaten it?" he gives the following 
 estimate of Jackson's character: "We have been told that 
 President Jackson is an energetic man, prone by nature and 
 habit to the use of force, covetous of power and a despot by 
 inclination. All this may be true, but the inferences that are 
 drawn from these truths are very erroneous. It has been 
 imagined that General Jackson is bent on establishing a des- 
 
 x lt was not until January, 1845, that an act of Congress was passed fixing the 
 first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the uniform day for choos- 
 ing presidential electors in all the states. 
 
 2 The Bank spent over $50,000 on the campaign against Jackson. It is true 
 that this was after his veto message and hence was a measure of self -protection. 
 
366 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 potism in America, introducing a military spirit and giving a 
 degree of influence to the central authority which cannot but be 
 dangerous to the provincial [state] liberties. But in America 
 the time for similar undertakings and the age for men of this 
 kind is not yet come [ ! ] ; if General Jackson had thought of 
 exercising his authority in this manner, he would infallibly have 
 forfeited his political station, and compromised his life. . . . 
 Far from wishing to extend the Federal power, the President 
 belongs to a party which is desirous of limiting that power to the 
 clear and precise letter of the Constitution. He was placed in 
 this lofty station by the passions which are most opposed to the 
 central government. It is by perpetually flattering these pas- 
 sions that he maintains his station and his popularity. General 
 Jackson is the slave of the majority ; he yields to its wishes, its 
 propensities, its demands say rather anticipates and forestalls 
 them. ... He appears to me, if I may use the American ex- 
 pression, to be a Federalist by taste and a Republican by calcu- 
 lation. General Jackson stoops to gain the favor of the majority, 
 but when he feels that his popularity is secure, he overthrows all 
 obstacles in the pursuit of the objects which the community 
 approves or of those which it does not regard with jealousy. 
 Supported by a power which his predecessors never had, he 
 tramples on his personal enemies, whenever they cross his path, 
 with a facility without example. He takes upon himself responsi- 
 bility for measures which no one before him would have ven- 
 tured to attempt. He even treats the national representatives 
 with a disdain approaching to insult. He puts his veto on 
 the laws of Congress, and frequently neglects even to reply to 
 that powerful body. He is a favorite who sometimes treats his 
 master roughly. The power of General Jackson perpetually 
 increases, but that of the President declines ; in his hands the 
 Federal government is strong, but it will pass enfeebled into the 
 hands of his successor." 
 
 Such was the distinguished foreigner's estimate, curiously 
 compounded of truth and error, of the man who was the 
 incarnation of the new American democracy. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 367 
 
 NULLIFICATION 
 
 Four days after Jackson had vetoed the Bank bill he signed 
 the new tariff bill. By the first act he bade defiance to the Clay- 
 Adams-Webster program in Congress; by the second he de- 
 stroyed the last hope of the Calhoun-Hayne-McDuffie forces 
 for support from the administration. Ever since the appearance 
 of Calhoun's "Protest" against the "Tariff of Abominations" 
 in December, 1828, the offended South had been waiting with 
 fluctuating hopes and fears for relief at the hands of the 
 Southern, slaveholding, states'-rights president who had de- 
 feated John Quincy Adams. That he was heretically indifferent 
 on the tariff they knew, 1 but his championship of the state of 
 Georgia in her conflict with Congress and the Supreme Court 
 in the Cherokee Indian affair encouraged them to believe 
 that he would defend also the interests of his native state of 
 South Carolina. 
 
 Meanwhile the progress of the opposition to the tariff in South 
 Carolina was steady. George McDuffie of South Carolina, the 
 chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House and 
 an extreme advocate of state sovereignty, delivered a speech on 
 April 29, 1830, in support of an amendment to the tariff, to 
 reduce the duties on woolen and cotton goods, iron, hemp, 
 indigo, and molasses to the levels which had prevailed before 
 1824. McDuffie developed the economic argument against the 
 protective tariff, as Calhoun had developed the constitutional 
 argument. He maintained that those who produce the exports 
 of a country pay the duty on the imports, and consequently drew 
 the deduction that because the cotton and rice states of the 
 South furnished more than half the exports, they paid more than 
 one half the revenue duties, though they constituted only one 
 fifth of the population and consumed less than one fifth of the 
 imports. The Northern majority in Congress, "the representa- 
 
 x On the subject of the tariff Iredell wrote impatiently to Mangum of North 
 Carolina, February 4, 1832 : "Why does not General Jackson come out upon it ! 
 Why this studied equivocation in all his messages Who can understand on 
 which side he is ? " 
 
368 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 tives of those who receive the bounty and put it in their pockets," 
 were thus "laying the iron hand of unconstitutional and lawless 
 taxation upon the people of the Southern States." Since the 
 government had " degraded itself into a partisan of the stronger 
 interest," no course remained to the outraged minority except to 
 resist the execution of the tariff acts. McDuffie's open threat of 
 nullification on the floor of Congress, at a moment when plans 
 for a reduction of the tariff were already under consideration, 1 
 added to the large majority by which his amendment was voted 
 down. But his defiant speech was the trumpet call to the 
 disaffected elements of the South. 
 
 A battle royal was waged in South Carolina between the nul- 
 lifiers and the antinullifiers, who were nicknamed the "nullies" 
 and the "submission men" respectively. The "nullies" had to 
 gain a two-thirds majority in both branches of the state legis- 
 lature in order to issue a call for a state convention. To that 
 end they enlisted the power of the press, held rallies, mass 
 meetings, and public banquets, and sent out appeals to their 
 sister states of the South. One paper declared that the system 
 of "plunder and robbery on a large scale by unconstitutional 
 law" must be resisted, though resistance "might lead to disunion 
 and possible bloodshed." The North would not dare to push the 
 cotton states to the extreme of secession, said McDuffie ; for then 
 the South, exporting her $40,000,000 of produce, would control 
 the imports of foreign merchandise and cut off the revenues 
 which were enriching "the other parts of the Confederacy." 
 Charleston would rival New York, and the wealth of the North 
 would be shifted to the commercial centers of the South. The 
 mills of Providence and Lowell would be silenced. The busy 
 centers of industry in the New England States "would exhibit 
 one wide unbroken scene of desolation and ruin." As for the 
 
 a just a month after McDuffie's speech Jackson signed a bill reducing duties 
 on tea, coffee, and cocoa. The near prospect of the extinction of the national 
 debt gave promise of the reduction of the national income by a still further cur- 
 tailment of import duties ; and even though these were so arranged as to protect 
 the Northern manufacturer, they would still bring a measure of relief to the 
 Southern consumer. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 369 
 
 submission men, who exclaim in most pathetic agonies, "The 
 Union is in danger ! " and who conjure up frightful pictures of 
 war and blood to alarm the timid, let them not impose upon us 
 by so shallow an artifice. "The Union, such as the majority 
 have made it, is a foul monster, which those who worship, after 
 seeing its deformity, are worthy of their chains." 
 
 Few went to the extreme lengths of the fiery McDuffie. 
 Calhoun, the real leader of the nullifiers, always protested 
 his love for the Union and maintained that his doctrine was 
 the very guarantee of that Union as it had come from the hands 
 of the fathers. In a long philosophical disquisition, filling six- 
 teen columns of fine print in Niles' Register, Calhoun again 
 went over the whole ground of the doctrine of "the right of in- 
 terposition be it called what it may : state right, veto, nullifi- 
 cation or any other name." This right he conceived to be 
 "the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts 
 historically as certain as the Revolution itself, and deductions 
 as simple and demonstrable as that of any political or moral 
 truth whatever." Calhoun's language was calm, but his spirit 
 was growing more defiant every month. The break with Jackson 
 over the Florida matter had already come. The cabinet was 
 being purged of his partisans. His friends were beginning to 
 urge his name as the Democratic candidate to replace Jackson 
 in the election of the coming year. Personal resentments 
 and rivalries thus entered in to stiffen his argument. He 
 was not merely contending for an abstraction he was nursing 
 an ambition. 
 
 Nullifiers and Union men celebrated the Fourth of July, 1831, 
 in Charleston with rival bands and banners, as they marched to 
 their respective rallying-places for songs and speeches. In re- 
 sponse to an invitation to attend the banquet of the Unionists, 
 Jackson sent a letter which was read amid great enthusiasm by 
 heralds at four points in the hall. It was an unsparing con- 
 demnation of any plan or counsel of dismemberment. That, 
 said Jackson, "would begin with civil discord and end in colo- 
 nial dependence on a foreign power and obliteration from the 
 list of nations." The high and sacred duty of defending the 
 
370 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Constitution and laws of the United States, which he had as- 
 sumed by his oath of office, would be performed at all hazards. 
 To his friends and associates Jackson spoke in even stronger 
 terms of hanging the first man who defied the laws of the 
 country to the first tree he could find, and of enforcing those 
 laws in South Carolina, even if he should have to " depopulate 
 the state of traitors and repopulate it with a wiser and better 
 race." Jackson was used to speaking in hyperbole, but none 
 made the mistake of taking his exaggerations for mere bravado. 
 When Congress met in December, 1831, the tariff became at 
 once the subject of active debate, not only on account of South 
 Carolina's threatening attitude but also because the abnormally 
 high rates of 1828 were piling up a surplus in the Treasury 
 just when the national debt was Hearing extinction. It was 
 estimated that the debt would be paid in less than two years, 
 leaving surplus revenues of some $12,000,000. There were three 
 propositions for tariff reform. McDuffie insisted that the bill 
 should come from his committee of Ways and Means and suc- 
 ceeded in introducing a sweeping measure for the hasty reduc- 
 tion of all duties to a basis of 12^ per cent ad valorem rate. 
 Jackson favored a more gradual readjustment, under the leader- 
 ship of John Quincy Adams, chairman of the Committee on 
 Manufactures, who was one of the moderate protectionists. 
 But Henry Clay, in the Senate, was determined that*no item of 
 protection to American manufactures should be sacrificed. He 
 confessed that the revenues ought to be reduced, but contended 
 that the whole reduction should fall on such imports as did not 
 compete with our mills and factories. If there was still a sur- 
 plus, the government should spend it on internal improvements. 
 Clay was confident, even elated. He had just been triumphantly 
 nominated for the presidency by the National-Republican con- 
 vention at Baltimore. He expected, as we have seen in studying 
 the Bank controversy, to drive the Jackson administration to 
 the wall. When he was warned that his extreme measures 
 would provoke the South and the President, he replied that 
 to preserve his " American System" he would "defy the South, 
 the President, and the Devil." 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 371 
 
 McDuffie's "free trade" bill was promptly rejected by the 
 House, partly on its own demerits and partly to rebuke its 
 author for his intemperate sectional speech. The Adams Bill, on 
 the other hand, which was carefully prepared on the basis of the 
 Secretary of the Treasury's report of December, 1831, was 
 debated for nearly two months. Clay's influence in the Senate 
 secured certain modifications for the better protection of home 
 industries, and the bill went to the President on July 9 with 
 a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress. Jackson 
 signed the bill five days later. The tariff of 1832 furnished 
 some relief for the Southern planters in the reduction or remis- 
 sion of duties on their supplies ; but it still left cotton and woolen 
 manufactures highly protected, and registered on the whole a 
 victory for Clay's " American System." The vote showed a 
 complete sectionalization of the country. 
 
 It was for this disappointing result, then, that South Carolina 
 had waited too patiently, as she thought for four years. 
 From this moment her energies were concentrated on the nullifi- 
 cation program. She ignored the national candidates Jackson and 
 Clay in the campaign of 1832, throwing her electoral vote away 
 on John Floyd of Virginia. Governor Hamilton had already long 
 been a champion of nullification, and Clay's speeches of 1831 
 had won the important municipal government of Charleston to 
 the cause." In the state elections of 1832 a two-thirds majority 
 in both branches of the legislature was secured, and a proclama- 
 tion was issued for a convention to meet at the capital on 
 November 19 to take action. The convention, in spite of the 
 brave opposition of its little group of Union men, adopted an 
 Ordinance of Nullification, by the overwhelming vote of 136 to 
 26. It declared the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 "null and void 
 and no longer binding upon the state" after the first day of 
 February, 1833. It ordered the state legislature to pass laws to 
 carry the ordinance into effect and forbade any appeal to the 
 Supreme Court of the United States on the validity of these laws. 
 It enacted an oath of obedience to the ordinance and the laws 
 passed under it from every civil and military official of the state. 
 And it concluded with a threat that any attempt on the part of 
 
372 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the national government to coerce the state by shutting up her 
 ports or harassing her commerce would be considered a just 
 cause for secession: "The people of South Carolina, absolved 
 from all connection with the people of the other states, would 
 forthwith proceed to organize a separate government and do all 
 other acts and things which sovereign and independent states 
 may of right do." The legislature immediately gave effect to 
 the ordinance by an act authorizing the governor to call out the 
 militia of the state and accept volunteers besides if necessary, to 
 provide for defense against invasion by the forces of the United 
 States. South Carolina, in the words of Felix Grundy, "had 
 legislated the Federal government out of the state." 
 
 President Jackson's reply to the ordinance was prompt and 
 vigorous. As he wrote to James Buchanan, then our minister 
 to Russia and the man who twenty-eight years later, in Jack- 
 son's own high office, was confronted not with the threat but 
 with the fact of secession, "I met nullification at the thresh- 
 old." In a proclamation to South Carolina, dated Decem- 
 ber 10, he declared in language that echoed Webster's, "The 
 Constitution of the United States forms a government and 
 not a league." He considered "the power to annul a law of the 
 United States incompatible with the existence of the Union, 
 contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, and 
 destructive of the great objects for which it was framed: to 
 say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is 
 to say that the United States are not a nation." He wrote to 
 Poinsett, collector of the port of Charleston, that on receiving 
 notice of the attempt to carry into effect the Ordinance of 
 Nullification he would have ten or fifteen thousand well- 
 organized troops, equipped for the field, in the city of Charleston 
 within ten or fifteen days at the latest. Jackson had already 
 taken measures to give his words effect. General Scott was 
 sent to Charleston, artillery was brought from Fortress Monroe 
 to Fort Moultrie, two warships were stationed in Charleston 
 harbor, the customs officers were ordered to perform their duties 
 to the federal government, and the collector was authorized to 
 transfer the port of entry to Castle Pinckney if necessary, where 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 373 
 
 5000 stands of arms with ammunition had been sent subject to 
 his orders. The President's proclamation was received with 
 derisive shouts of laughter by the legislature of South Carolina, 
 especially a paragraph in which he admonished them, "in 
 parental language, as sons of his native state not to rush to 
 certain ruin." Governor Hayne, who had succeeded Hamilton, 
 was ordered to issue a counterblast, and the legislature went on 
 with its preparations for the defense of the state. 
 
 The situation at the opening of 1833 was critical in the 
 extreme. The specter of disunion loomed portentously. Cal- 
 houn had conjured up a spirit which he could not lay. He might 
 persuade himself in his theorizing of the "peaceful" and "con- 
 stitutional" remedy of nullification; but when his theory, in the 
 hands of practical men of action, began to bear its inevitable 
 fruit of disunion, he was appalled. He was deceived in his be- 
 lief that the doctrine of nullification would enlist the support of 
 the whole South. One by one the "co-states " rejected it. Virginia 
 sent a commission to South Carolina to persuade her to repeal 
 the ordinance. Mississippi denounced the doctrine as "subver- 
 sive of the Constitution." If South Carolina decided to resist the 
 government of the United States, she would have to do it alone. 
 Calhoun was already receiving warnings of the punishment that 
 waited for "traitors." He was ready for compromise, and in 
 this compromise he formed an alliance with the man who was 
 most responsible for the woes of South Carolina Henry Clay. 
 
 Clay's part in the transaction was motivated by his opposition 
 to Andrew Jackson. He too wished to see the Union pre- 
 served, and believed, further, that the laws of the United States 
 must be executed. But he abhorred the thought of having these 
 things accomplished by the "military chieftain" in the White 
 House, the man who had just humiliated him in the campaign 
 on the Bank issue and had received from the people another 
 four years' tenure of power. As Calhoun, therefore, welcomed 
 compromise for the sake of averting armed conflict between the 
 United States and the state of South Carolina, Clay supported 
 it to prevent Andrew Jackson from conducting the conflict. But 
 the truculent sentiments attributed to the President by Clay and 
 
374 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 others of his personal enemies were not founded on fact. 
 Although Jackson insisted that the laws should be obeyed, and 
 asked Congress in a special message of January 16, 1833, for 
 the grant of military powers to assure the collection of the 
 revenues in South Carolina, he nevertheless encouraged at 
 the same time the passage of a new tariff law to remove the 
 grievance of the South. 1 
 
 In fact, the two policies of the maintenance of the govern- 
 ment's authority and the reform of the tariff went along side 
 by side in the closing session of the Twenty-first Congress. But 
 the House, loath to give satisfaction to the milliners, dallied 
 over the Verplanck Bill for the reduction of the revenue, while 
 the Wilkins Bill (the "Force Bill," or "bloody bill" as it was 
 called by the milliners), empowering the President to use the 
 army and navy in enforcing the law, was held up in the Senate by 
 the opposition of Calhoun. There was a deadlock on the ques- 
 tion of which of the policies should take precedence, and the 
 end of Congress was less than three weeks off when Clay, to the 
 astonishment of the Senate, introduced a bill for the gradual 
 reduction of the tariff to a 20 per cent ad valorem basis, extend- 
 ing over a nine-year period. 2 He declared that he accepted the 
 disavowal by South Carolinian congressmen and senators of 
 any purpose of rebellion or secession, and that he wished to give 
 the state (which had postponed action from February i to the 
 end of the session) an opportunity to recede from a position 
 rashly taken, by a bill which should relieve the South without 
 wholly abandoning the protective system. Calhoun hastened 
 
 1 Daniel Webster accused the President of not wishing a tariff-reform bill to 
 pass, in order that he might have "the undivided honor of suppressing nullifica- 
 tion." But Benton, who was much closer to the President and a better interpreter 
 of his purposes, wrote: "Many thought that he ought to relax in his civil measures 
 for allaying discontent, while South Carolina held the military attitude of armed 
 defiance to the United States and among them Mr. Quincy Adams. But he ad- 
 hered steadily to his purpose of going on with what justice required for the relief 
 of the South, and promoted by all means in his power the success of the bills to 
 reduce the revenue." 
 
 2 The scale of reduction was as follows: one tenth of the excess over 20 per 
 cent to be taken off at the close of each of the years 1833, 1835, 1837, 1839 ; 
 three tenths at the close of 1841 ; and the remaining three tenths on June 30, 1842. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 375 
 
 to the support of the bill, rather disingenuously asserting that 
 it met the demands of South Carolina. He even withdrew his 
 active opposition to the " Force Bill," which passed the Senate, 
 February 20, with but a single dissenting vote. 1 The clause of 
 the Constitution requiring that bills for raising revenue should 
 originate in the House stood in the way of adopting Clay's 
 measure. Clay's ingenious quibble that his bill provided for 
 the reducing and not the raising of revenue was hardly con- 
 vincing; but a scarcely less ingenious way of overcoming the 
 technical difficulty was found by Letcher of Kentucky, who in 
 the last days of the session "amended" the Verplanck Bill by 
 substituting Clay's for it in toto. The House passed the Clay 
 Bill, and the Senate concurred, March i, 1833. On the same 
 day the House passed the Wilkins " Force Bill" by a large 
 majority, though the South Carolinians called it a brutum 
 fulmerij since they had all voted for the compromise tariff, 
 which settled the matter of resistance. On March 2 the Pres- 
 ident signed both bills, and two days later he was inaugurated, 
 under these happy auspices of reconciliation, for his second 
 term. On March 1 1 the South Carolina legislature reconvened 
 and unanimously rescinded the ordinance of the previous No- 
 vember. The nullification episode was at an end, and the fed- 
 eral troops were recalled. 
 
 As is customary in all political compromises, both sides 
 claimed the victory. Yet the federal government had little 
 cause to congratulate itself. The state of South Carolina did 
 not repeal her defiant ordinance until she had forced Congress 
 to make a drastic reform of the tariff. Furthermore, the con- 
 vention of South Carolina, in the very session in which it re- 
 pealed the nullification ordinance, nullified the " Force Bill" 
 with complete impunity. Whatever signs of relief there might 
 be in South Carolina, there were none of repentance. The state 
 flag, with its emblem of the coiled rattlesnake and the palmetto, 
 
 32 of the 47 senators voted on the bill. Calhoun and his followers left 
 the Senate chamber just before the roll call began. Clay did not vote on the bill, 
 either. John Tyler of Virginia, the future president of the United States, was the 
 only senator who voted Nay. 
 
376 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 was everywhere displayed, while no sign of the national Stars 
 and Stripes was seen, among the decorations at a states'-rights 
 ball in Charleston in honor of the men who had volunteered to 
 protect their state against invasion by the federal troops. 
 
 Some historians have seen in the failure of the national 
 government to "meet the nullifiers then and there upon their 
 own issue and break the stubborn pride of South Carolina" the 
 source of the country's woes a generation later. "The sword of 
 civil war is always terrible to draw," wrote Schouler, "yet the 
 worst slaughter in 1833 would have been light in comparison 
 with that which followed the second provocation of this state less 
 than thirty years later." 1 But to make South Carolina's seces- 
 sion of 1860 the outgrowth of the half-triumph of the "prin- 
 ciples of disloyalty and dissolution " in her nullification doctrine 
 of 1832 is a rash assumption. No event in our history more 
 strikingly illustrates the truth of General Hancock's much- 
 ridiculed remark that "the tariff is a local issue" than the 
 nullification contest. It was essentially a quarrel between the 
 United States and Charleston, the great port of the South. But 
 the slavery issue was not "local." Slavery was the cause of the 
 entire Southland, and, so far from being deterred from leading 
 that cause by the memory of "coercion and abasement" suf- 
 fered in 1833, South Carolina would have been, if possible, 
 only the more spurred on thereby. 
 
 Judged on its own merits and without reference to its possible 
 influence on the events of 1860, the doctrine of nullification is 
 open to grave criticism. It was founded on an impracticable 
 political theory, supported by unsound economic assumptions. 
 The Calhoun-Hayne doctrine of a state's being competent at 
 any time to interpose to suspend the operation of a law of 
 
 1 James Schouler, "History of the United States," Vol. IV, p. no. So Augustus 
 C. Buell, in his "Life of Jackson," Vol. II, p. 286 (note), says: "When South 
 Carolina in 1 860-61 led off in the movement which only an Appomattox could 
 stop ... she was emboldened by exultant reminiscence of having bullied a Union 
 with Jackson at its head. What her behavior might have been had she been com- 
 pelled to remember such a punishment as Jackson certainly intended to visit upon 
 her, but for the pusillanimous compromises of ... Clay and Calhoun, is yet, and 
 doubtless will always remain, an interesting theme of historical hypothesis." 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 377 
 
 Congress until appeal could be made by general referendum to 
 secure the approval of that law by three fourths of the states 
 meant, as Webster and others demonstrated again and again, 
 only anarchy and confusion. We should have returned to the 
 dismal days of the Confederation. "This everlasting cant of 
 devotion to the Union, accompanied by a recommendation to 
 do those acts which must necessarily destroy it," wrote an editor 
 exasperated by Calhoun's philosophy, "is beyond patient en- 
 durance for a people not absolutely confined in their own mad- 
 houses." The economic fallacy which McDuffie brought to the 
 support of nullification we have already noticed (p. 367). It 
 assumed that the whole wealth of a country was measured by 
 its exports and imports and that the exports literally paid for 
 the imports, ignoring that major part of a country's wealth 
 which consists of the distribution of its products among its own 
 growing population. On this false hypothesis the South was 
 led to believe that its distress was wholly caused by the pro- 
 tective tariff, whereas it was in reality largely due to the unpro- 
 gressive character of a stationary civilization and undiversified 
 industry founded on slave labor. 
 
 Furthermore, granted that South Carolina had a grievance in 
 the high tariff, as she undoubtedly had, still nullification was 
 precipitated on a waning and not a waxing issue. The tariff of 
 1832 was less oppressive than the tariff of 1828, and still further 
 relief was about to follow. President Jackson's successive mes- 
 sages of 1829, 1830, and 1831 show a progressive interest in 
 tariff reform, and even the archprotectionist, Henry Clay, con- 
 fessed that the surplus revenue must be reduced as the debt 
 neared extinction. If the South Carolina leaders had spoken in 
 the language of patience and conciliation instead of defiance 
 and even abuse of the Union, they would have recommended 
 their cause to a more sympathetic Congress and country. As it 
 was, by their defiance of the law they shifted the issue from the 
 reduction of the tariff to the preservation of the authority of 
 the Union. 
 
 President Jackson entered on his second term at the zenith 
 of his popularity. He was adored in the West as the conquering 
 
378 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 hero who had fought the battle of the plain people against 
 monopoly and privilege. Whatever dissatisfaction his veto of 
 the bill for the recharter of the Bank may have brought in the 
 conservative East was swallowed up in the rejoicing over his 
 firm stand against the milliners and disunionists. He made a 
 tour to New England in the early summer of 1833 and was 
 received with a welcome that almost rivaled that given to 
 Lafayette eight years before. Harvard College conferred on 
 him the degree of Doctor of Laws, to the great disgust of 
 John Quincy Adams, who refused to grace the occasion with 
 his presence. 1 The cities vied with one another in providing 
 pageants, reviews, and banquets until they almost killed the 
 President with kindness. He was obliged suddenly to cancel 
 his further engagements, in order, as his physician said, that he 
 " might get back to Washington alive." In the South he had 
 made some enemies by his rigorous measures for the coercion of 
 a sovereign state, but South Carolina had been her own worst 
 advocate and was left alone at last in her threat of disunion. 
 
 In the few matters of foreign concern with which he had to 
 deal in his first administration Jackson acted with prompt 
 energy and success. Ever since the peace treaty of 1783 our 
 ships had been shut out of the prosperous trade of the British 
 West Indies by the Navigation Acts. Again and again (in the 
 Jay Treaty of 1795, in the Treaty of Ghent, and in special con- 
 ventions and diplomatic conversations) we had tried to get a 
 relaxation of the laws which had led to a long course of quarrels, 
 reprisals, tariff wars, and smuggling. John Quincy Adams was 
 an unbending man, who, in spite of his long experience with 
 European diplomatists, tried to force the British ministry to 
 concede what he believed to be our just demands in the colonial 
 trade. The courteous and insinuating Van Buren took another 
 tack, even allowing our minister at London, Louis McLane, to 
 
 1 It is a sad proof of the blindness which partisan zeal can cause, to read in 
 Adams's diary for the day of the ceremony, "Myself an affectionate child of our 
 alma mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her 
 highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of gram- 
 mar and hardly could spell his name." 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 379 
 
 represent that the people of the United States had rebuked 
 Adams's foreign policy by the election of Jackson. The result 
 of McLane's negotiation was the simultaneous removal of ton- 
 nage duties by Great Britain and the United States, and the 
 proclamation by Jackson, on October 5, 1830, of open trade 
 with the West Indies for the first time in our national history. 
 Jackson had the good fortune to prosecute his negotiations 
 for admission to the trade of the West Indies just as Great 
 Britain, under the lead of Huskisson, was breaking down the 
 Navigation Acts. 
 
 The fortunes of European politics also favored Jackson in 
 pressing the French for the settlement of claims for depredations 
 on our commerce under the Napoleonic regime. The reactionary 
 government of the Bourbon Restoration was little disposed to 
 assume any responsibility for Bonaparte's acts, but the revolu- 
 tion of July, 1830, drove Charles X from his throne and replaced 
 him with Louis Philippe, a liberal monarch of the Orleans 
 family, under the restored tricolor. William C. Rives, our min- 
 ister at Paris, concluded a treaty with the new government, 
 July 4, 1831, by which the United States was to receive 25,000,- 
 ooo francs in satisfaction of her claims, to pay counterclaims of 
 1,500,000 francs to France for alleged infringement of the 
 Louisiana Purchase treaty, and to make a considerable reduc- 
 tion in the duties on French wines. The French government 
 agreed to pay in six annual installments beginning one year 
 after the ratification of the treaty. 
 
 Success abroad and at home, the overwhelming indorsement 
 of the people at the polls, and the growth of the habit of the 
 applauded exercise of power made Jackson more and more of 
 an autocrat in his second term. Opposition developed on several 
 issues from various quarters, until the anti- Jackson forces were 
 numerous enough to form a new party to contest the election of 
 his designated successor in 1836 and inflict on him a humiliating 
 defeat in 1840. But on the fourth of March, 1833, the political 
 sky was clear. We were at peace at home and abroad. The 
 specter of disunion had been laid. Our trade was lively and our 
 industries were prosperous. We were shortly to be, for the first 
 
380 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 and only time in our national history, free from debt. To be 
 sure, William Lloyd Garrison had begun the publication of The 
 Liberator in his dingy printing-office in Boston, Nat Turner's 
 negro followers had slaughtered more than three-score whites in 
 the massacre of Southampton County, Virginia, and the first 
 antislavery society had been organized in New England. But 
 as yet the movement for emancipation was confined to a few 
 " fanatical abolitionists." The cloud that was to gather with 
 darkening menace until it should spread over the whole land 
 and burst in the awful storm of civil war was still only the size 
 of a man's hand. 
 
 While the political excitement over the Bank charter and 
 nullification was stirring the land, transformations of great im- 
 portance in the economic and social condition of the people at 
 large were quietly going on. The impetus of the newly enfran- 
 chised democracy, growing ever more conscious of its power, 
 was making itself felt in the reform of oppressions and inhu- 
 manities in many fields. The noisome dungeons and madhouses 
 in which criminals were herded began to be replaced by "reform- 
 atories" and decent jails. Cruel punishments, like branding, 
 flogging, and the cropping of ears, ceased. The death penalty, 
 which was inflicted in some states for more than a score of 
 crimes, was gradually restricted until it was applied quite gen- 
 erally only to murder and treason. The senseless custom of 
 throwing men into prison for petty debts 1 began to be aban- 
 doned. Long and exhausting hours of labor on starvation 
 wages, the exploitation of women and children in the factories 
 and mills, the helplessness of the workingman in the hands of 
 unprincipled and callous employers, the curse of intemperance, 
 the debasing competition of prison labor with the products of 
 free toil, the denial of educational opportunities to the children 
 of the poor, were all the features of programs of ardent 
 reformers of both sexes. 
 
 In the summer of 1829 the first locomotive engine in America 
 appeared on a short coal road at the terminus of the Delaware 
 
 1 There were nearly 3000 in debtors' prisons in 1830 who owed less than 
 twenty dollars. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" . 381 
 
 and Hudson Canal at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A track built 
 of wooden or stone rails had long been used for cars drawn by 
 horses, and the stationary steam engine had been common in the 
 later years of the eighteenth century; but the simple idea of 
 combining the steam engine with the railway had to wait until 
 far into the nineteenth century for its realization by the English- 
 man George* Stephenson. 1 The first railroad of importance in 
 America was the Baltimore and Ohio, over which Peter Cooper's 
 steam locomotive drew a train of cars in August, 1830, tak- 
 ing the grades and curves satisfactorily at the average rate of 
 1 5 miles an hour. Less than two years later this road, equipped 
 with 300 cars, was bringing hundreds of tons of granite, wood, 
 and pig iron and thousands of barrels of flour every week from 
 "the West" into the busy port of Baltimore. A mania for 
 railroad-building spread through the land when once the practi- 
 cability of the new method of transportation was assured. At 
 the end of Jackson's first term there were 29 railroads under 
 construction, with 1750 miles of track projected and nearly 
 400 miles actually laid. "Visionary" men began to talk of the 
 possibility of traveling all the way from New York to St. Louis 
 or New Orleans by rail. 
 
 But adventurous spirits were already pushing out far beyond 
 any dream of the terminals of the iron road, beyond St. Louis 
 and the Missouri to the vast region of Oregon, and beyond New 
 Orleans and the Sabine to the wilderness of Texas. In that same 
 month of April, 1830, when Jackson gave his famous toast at the 
 Jefferson dinner and McDuffie on the floor of Congress was 
 
 of the devices for locomotion in the earliest days of the railroad are 
 very interesting. Cars were at first drawn by horses walking or trotting between 
 the tracks. To prevent their wearing out the roadbed or stumbling over the ties, 
 the horses were often put into the cars, which they propelled by the mechanism 
 of a moving platform. The passengers sat on benches on both sides of the horse. 
 Sometimes the cars were pulled up grades by cables attached to stationary engines. 
 Even sail power was occasionally used on level stretches. The rails for the loco- 
 motives were at first wooden joists with strips of iron fastened on top of them, 
 but the curling up of the iron strips caused so many accidents that the all-metal 
 rail was soon introduced. For an amusing account of the inconveniences and an- 
 noyances of early railroad travel the student should read the experience of our 
 English visitor Harriet Martineau, in her "Society in America," Vol. II, pp. 7-13. 
 
382 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 threatening the manufacturing states with desolation and ruin 
 if they drove the South to separation, the first traders* train 
 over the Oregon Trail left St. Louis with 81 men, 10 wagonloads 
 of goods, and 12 head of cattle. In the same month, too, 
 the government of Mexico passed a law for the suspension of 
 grants of land to American colonists in the province of Texas. 
 The missionary and the colonizer followed the tracer over the 
 Oregon Trail, while the frontiersman and the land speculator 
 went to join the American pioneers in Texas the Austins, 
 Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and James Bowie. The stage was 
 being set for expansion in the next decade to the Rio Grande 
 and the Pacific. In more senses than one the birth of our great 
 democratic nation came in those wonderful years of the early 
 thirties when Andrew Jackson was at the helm of state. 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS 
 
 When President Jackson suddenly interrupted his festive visit 
 to New England in the summer of 1833 in order that he might 
 " return to Washington alive," he was already meditating the 
 stroke of policy which was to precipitate the forces of opposition 
 and finally to send his heir and successor, Van Buren, down to 
 defeat in the election of 1840. The pages of our history are 
 crowded with important events in those seven years which mark 
 the culmination and decline of the Jacksonian era with aboli- 
 tionist agitation, industrial unrest, immigration problems, diplo- 
 matic quarrels, exploration and settlement of the Far West, 
 negotiations with Texas and Mexico, wildcat banking, over- 
 speculation in lands, canals, and railroads, prosperity and panic, 
 surplus and deficit, the rise and triumph of a new political party. 
 To some of these movements we shall revert when their 
 influence on our national policy becomes acute. In this section 
 we are concerned with the facts which led directly to the defeat 
 of the Jackson- Van Buren Democracy. 
 
 The recharter of the Bank had been blocked by Jackson's 
 veto of July, 1832, and the veto had been indorsed by the people 
 at the polls the following November. Yet Jackson was not 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 383 
 
 satisfied. The "monster," as he called the Bank, was a danger 
 in his eyes and a thorn in his flesh. Its charter had still four 
 years to run, and its champions boasted confidently of renewing 
 the fight. " Emperor Nicholas" Biddle had spent tens of thou- 
 sands of the Bank's funds in the attempt to defeat Jackson in 
 1832. Would he not spend hundreds of thousands to secure a 
 Congress which would pass the next recharter bill over the 
 President's veto ! There were rumors that the immense power 
 of the "monster" would be employed to derange the financial 
 condition of the country and bring discredit and defeat to the 
 administration. Already two events had occurred which had 
 convinced Jackson of the unworthiness of the Bank to be in- 
 trusted any longer with the government deposits. The first was 
 its postponement for three months, with the consent of the 
 Secretary of the Treasury, of the payment of $6,000,000 of the 
 3 per cent government loan of 1792, which fell due in July, 1832, 
 and the secret arrangement with Baring Brothers of London to 
 carry the part of this debt (about $3,000,000) held by foreign 
 creditors as a loan to the bank at 4 per cent interest for six 
 months or a year longer. The second event was the presentation 
 of a bill of $17,000 by the Bank to the government for damages 
 for the protest of a draft by which our Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury had tried to collect the first installment of the spoliation 
 claims which the French government had agreed to pay in 
 February, 1833. 
 
 Indignant that a corporation which was already profiting by 
 the use of nearly $10,000,000 of public deposits should present 
 a petty bill of damages to the government, Jackson determined 
 to put an end once and for all to the "monster." He promoted 
 one Secretary of the Treasury (McLane) to the State Depart- 
 ment and summarily dismissed another (Duane) before he 
 found in Roger B. Taney an agent willing to carry out his 
 policy. On October i, 1833, Taney ; in pursuance of a clause in 
 the Bank charter giving the Secretary of the Treasury the power 
 to remove the government deposits provided he reported to 
 Congress, when it met, his reasons therefor, ceased to deposit 
 the government balances with the Bank of the United States. 
 
3 84 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 In its place he used twenty-three state banks, called the "pet 
 banks," whose soundness had been investigated during the 
 summer by Amos Kendall, a member of Jackson's "kitchen 
 cabinet." Taney did not immediately withdraw the balances 
 in the great Bank ; but' the Treasury drafts upon it became 
 heavier and heavier, until by March i, 1834, less than a quarter 
 of the $9,868,000 of the government balance remained. 1 
 
 When the Twenty-third Congress met in December, 1833, the 
 battle was on. Henry Clay, the archenemy of the adminis- 
 tration, led the attack by calling upon Jackson to submit to the 
 Senate the paper which he had read to his cabinet advising the 
 removal of the deposits. When the President indignantly re- 
 fused to comply with the inquisitorial demand, Clay followed 
 up the attack with two more resolutions, one to the effect that 
 the reasons which Taney gave Congress for the removal were 
 "unsatisfactory and insufficient" and the other censuring Jack- 
 son for having assumed powers in his handling of the Treasury 
 Department "not granted to him by the Constitution and laws, 
 and dangerous to the liberties of the people." The Senate re- 
 fused to confirm Taney 's appointment as Secretary and rejected 
 the President's nomination of a minister to England and four 
 government directors of the Bank. In rejecting the nominations 
 and Taney's explanations the Senate was acting within its 
 constitutional rights, but it had no right to pass a vote of censure 
 on the president of the United States. That high official is 
 responsible to the people for fidelity to his oath to support the 
 Constitution and can be brought to judgment only by the 
 people's representatives in the lower House of Congress through 
 impeachment proceedings on specific charges. The only func- 
 tion that devolves upon the Senate in this connection is to act 
 as a jury to pronounce the verdict in the trial. Jackson was 
 the last man in the country to submit tamely to an invasion of 
 his prerogative or to a censure of his conduct. He sent a vigor- 
 Jackson also pocket- vetoed a bill of Clay's for the distribution of the pro- 
 ceeds of the public-land sales among the states (a sort of variant of internal im- 
 provements at national expense), which would have put some $20,000,000 into 
 the hands of the states for roads, canals, education, and colonization. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON'' 385 
 
 ous "counterblast" to the Senate, which that body in turn 
 refused to receive, as " insulting to its dignity and an attack 
 on its privileges." 1 
 
 While this unprecedented quarrel between the President and 
 the Senate was coming to a head, the effect of the removal of 
 the deposits on the Bank and the country at large was making 
 itself felt. The Bank was of course obliged to call its loans 
 and contract its discounts, to provide for such uncertain de- 
 mands as the hostile Treasury Department might make upon it 
 and to meet a possible "run" by private depositors who saw its 
 credit shaken by the government's attack. This readjustment 
 of the business of the great Bank inevitably threw into some 
 confusion the whole credit system of the country. Money be- 
 came tight, interest and discount rates rose, business grew 
 fearful, enterprise was unduly contracted, and the labor market 
 was disturbed. Clay drew a melancholy, exaggerated picture 
 of the industrial condition of our "bleeding country" in a speech 
 before the Senate in March, 1834, dramatically summoning the 
 Vice President to repair to the White House and tell his chief the 
 doleful tale of depreciation and stagnation, of bankruptcies and 
 ruin, and entreat him "to pause and reflect that there is a point 
 beyond which human endurance cannot go," before he should 
 "drive this brave, generous, and patriotic people to madness 
 and despair." To all of which Van Buren listened with amiable 
 attention, and, when the harangue was over, left his chair and 
 walked down the aisle of the Senate to ask the orator with bland 
 politeness for a pinch of snuff! Webster retouched Clay's 
 gloomy picture of the industrial condition of the country with a 
 juster hand, but still the existence of "panicky" feeling in the 
 spring and summer of 1834 was not to be denied. Petitions in 
 great numbers came to Congress, and delegations waited on 
 Jackson in the White House, begging for a return of the deposits 
 to the Bank of the United States. 
 
 1 Thomas H. Benton of Missouri, Jackson's champion in the Senate, fought a 
 determined campaign of three years to get the resolution of censure expunged 
 from the journals of the Senate, and finally succeeded, after an exciting debate 
 mingled with hisses from the galleries, on January 16, 1837. 
 
386 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Arguments and remonstrances only confirmed the President 
 in his position. If there was a panic, it was caused not by his 
 removal of the deposits but by the Bank's policy of revenge 
 for the removal. Did not Biddle himself say that if the charter 
 were renewed the financial difficulties of the country would 
 immediately cease ? If such widespread ruin as Clay described 
 was caused, as he alleged, by the interference with the Bank, 
 it was the best possible argument for putting an end to so 
 dangerously powerful a corporation. To the petitioners who 
 came to the White House, Jackson replied testily: "We have 
 no money here, gentlemen. Go to the monster, go to Nick 
 Biddle. ... He has millions of specie in his vaults lying idle. 
 He is trying to crush the state banks and make me change my 
 policy. . . . But I would rather undergo the tortures of ten 
 Spanish Inquisitions than that the deposits should be restored 
 or the monster rechartered." Finally, he declined to receive 
 further delegations. 
 
 In striking down the one great "tyrant" of the National 
 Bank, Jackson had raised up five hundred petty tyrants in the 
 state banks. By removing the stabilizer of the currency he 
 had encouraged confusion in the standards of paper issues. 
 His remedy for the evil was drastic. He would substitute a 
 metallic currency for paper. He urged the coinage of gold, and 
 his supporters, chief among them "old bullion" Ben ton, con- 
 ducted an amusing campaign to popularize the new coins, which 
 were dubbed "Jackson's yellow boys" and "Benton's mint 
 drops." Nearly $1,500,000 in gold coin was sent out from the 
 mint in the summer of 1834. Attempts were made to get the 
 state legislatures to forbid the issue of notes under $20. But it 
 was like turning the hands back on the dial of time. To return 
 to a metallic currency after the use of so convenient and trans- 
 ferable a medium as paper was like returning to rude barter 
 after the introduction of money. Jackson only revealed his limi- 
 tations in financial science when he indulged the hope of getting 
 the banks to limit their issues of paper at the same moment that 
 he was encouraging inflation by inviting competition among 
 them for the government deposits. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 387 
 
 Jackson's high-handed conduct in dealing with the Bank and 
 the deposits caused serious disaffection among his followers and 
 gave Clay, Adams, Webster, and other opponents of his policy 
 at different points the opportunity to consolidate their forces 
 into a new party. All the popularity that Jackson had gained in 
 New England by his firm stand on nullification in 1832 was lost 
 by his assault on the national credit in 1833. His own state of 
 Tennessee, to the end of his life, never again gave its electoral 
 vote to the presidential candidate of his preference. The 
 material out of which the anti-Jackson party was built was 
 very diverse. There were old National Republicans, like John 
 Quincy Adams, who regretted the failure of the government to 
 encourage internal improvements; stanch states'-rights men, 
 like John Tyler, who resented Jackson's threat to coerce a 
 sovereign state ; financial interests injured by the derangement 
 of the currency and banking-system; and " Native American" 
 enthusiasts, who deplored the swelling number of Irish immi- 
 grants, enlisted generally under the Democratic banner. These 
 disparate elements could not have been united on any political 
 platform, but they found a common bond in their detestation 
 of the "tyranny" of Andrew Jackson. The name which they 
 adopted to signalize their opposition was "Whigs." 
 
 This name had never been entirely dropped from our political 
 vocabulary since the days of the American Revolution. 1 Its 
 revival in the spring of 1834 to designate a new party in several 
 of the Northern states is thus described in an article in Niks' 
 Register, of April 12 : "In New York and Connecticut the name 
 'Whig' is now used by the opponents of the administration 
 when speaking of themselves, and they call the Jackson men 
 by the offensive name of 'Tories.'" A few months later the 
 same journal notes: "As if by universal consent, all parties 
 
 1 For example, there was a New York Whig Club, whose object, like that of 
 the City Club today, was to encourage the interest of the citizens in good gov- 
 ernment. During the War of 1812, when the Federalists were suspected of British 
 sympathies, the name of "Whig" was freely used in opposition to them. The sug- 
 gestion of the name as an anti- Jackson slogan came from J. Watson Webb, the 
 editor of the New York Courier and Inquirer. 
 
388 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 opposed to the present administration call themselves ' Whigs.'" 
 In the autumn elections of 1834 the Whigs, combining some- 
 times with the Antimasons and sometimes taking the title of 
 " states'-rights men/' made notable gains. They chose governors 
 in Massachusetts and Indiana, state legislatures in Rhode Is- 
 land, Ohio, Maryland, and Kentucky, and over 40 congressmen 
 in half a dozen states. Outbreaks of mob violence were fre- 
 quent at the polls, great numbers of immigrants and laborers 
 newly admitted to the franchise being marshaled under their 
 ringleaders to "rush" the elections against the property-holders, 
 the educated, and the "Native Americans," who saw in the 
 rising tide of demagogism the ruin of American ideals. 
 
 Before the Whigs had the opportunity to contest the suprem- 
 acy of the Jacksonian Democracy in a national election, other 
 important issues arose to vex the administration. Chief of 
 these was the abolitionist agitation. William Lloyd Garrison 
 had begun the publication of his Liberator at New Year's, 1831. 
 In 1832 the New England Antislavery Society was formed, 
 widening the next year into the American Antislavery Society. 
 Moderate men in the North joined with the South in the effort 
 to keep the dangerous subject of slavery out of national politics. 
 They remembered the stormy debates of the Missouri Com- 
 promise : the angry defiance of the Kings and the Tallmadges, 
 the threats of secession and civil war from the Cobbs and the 
 Pinkneys. But the specter rose like Banquo's ghost and would 
 not down. Occasional petitions for the abolition of slavery 
 in the national District of Columbia had been sent to Congress 
 by Quakers and abolitionists, but they had been referred to the 
 little committee on the District and allowed to slumber. With 
 the opening of the session of 1835, however, in which the new 
 Whig congressmen were first represented, some of the Northern 
 members began to debate the question. Slade of Vermont 
 moved that an abolitionist petition be printed, and when the 
 Southerners vehemently protested and called on Congress to 
 disclaim the power of interfering with slavery in the District, 
 Slade took up the challenge and delivered a fiery speech which 
 revived the passions of 1820. He insisted that Congress had 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 389 
 
 full power over slavery in the national territory, and proceeded 
 further to " declare relentless war" against the institution. 
 Southern members, like Hammond, Jones, and Wise, interposed 
 anxious remonstrances, and Calhoun in the Senate called the 
 petitions "a foul slander on nearly one half the states of the 
 Union." The mischief was afoot. 
 
 Meanwhile the activity of the abolitionist societies was pro- 
 voking hostile reaction all through the South. The new Amer- 
 ican society collected $30,000 for propaganda, flooding the 
 states below Mason and Dixon's line with magazines, pamph- 
 lets, and tracts "Human Rights," The Anti-slavery Record, 
 The Emancipator, "The Slave's Friend," and the like. On a 
 midsummer night of 1835 citizens of Charleston broke into the 
 post office, seized bundles of the offensive papers, and burned 
 them on the Parade Ground amid the plaudits of a large and 
 excited crowd. The postmaster at Charleston wrote to the 
 postmaster at New York, whence the abolitionist material had 
 come, begging him not to allow any more such documents to be 
 forwarded to South Carolina ; and the postmaster at New York 
 reported the matter to the newly appointed Postmaster-General, 
 Amos Kendall. Kendall's reply was equivocal: He could not 
 exclude the abolitionist material from the mails, but he ap- 
 proved his subordinate's refusal to deliver it. "We owe an 
 obligation to the laws," he wrote to the postmaster at Charles- 
 ton, "but a higher one to the community in which we live." 
 When Jackson upheld this extraordinary conduct in his cabinet 
 officer, he incurred the condemnation of thousands in the North 
 who had little sympathy with abolition. If the interests of 
 slavery demanded the infraction of the law, they argued, it 
 was time that those interests be curbed. 
 
 The agitation over the petitions to Congress tended to the 
 same result. So long as the petitions were received and referred 
 to the proper committee they were left to oblivion. But when 
 the Speaker of the House, James K. Polk of Tennessee, yielding 
 to the general indignation of the Southern members, ruled that 
 the constitutional right of petition did not oblige the House 
 to receive a petition, he made the grave mistake of transferring 
 
390 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the question from the merits of abolition to the constitutional 
 rights of American citizens. John Quincy Adams, who had 
 shown no leanings toward the abolitionist cause, now took up 
 the fight in behalf of the right of petition. A battle royal was 
 waged on the floor of Congress during the spring months of 
 1836, resulting in the adoption of a set of resolutions introduced 
 by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, to the effect that Con- 
 gress could not interfere with slavery in the states and should 
 not interfere with it in the District of Columbia; that it was 
 "important and desirable that the agitation on this subject be 
 finally arrested"; and that "all petitions, memorials, proposi- 
 tions, or papers relating in any way to the subject of slavery 
 . . . shall, without being printed or referred, be laid on the 
 table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon." 
 When the roll was called on this last resolution (the " Gag- 
 rule"), John Quincy Adams answered, "I hold the resolution 
 to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, 
 the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents." 
 From that moment the ablest statesman of the House of 
 Representatives fought the battle of the abolitionists. 
 
 Professor Burgess, in his "Middle Period" of American his- 
 tory (p. 274), declares that "it would not be extravagant to 
 say that the whole course of the internal history of the United 
 States from 1836 to 1861 was determined more largely by the 
 struggle in Congress over the abolitionist petitions and the use 
 of the mails for the distribution of abolitionist literature than 
 by anything else." That struggle welded the abolitionists into 
 a political party, whose influence increased steadily in the 
 national elections from 1840 on, and whose principles, in modi- 
 fied form, triumphed in the election of Abraham Lincoln 
 twenty years later. It convinced the South that the abolition- 
 ists were bent on carrying the war against slavery into the states 
 below Mason and Dixon's line, and led those states to guard 
 their society against possible black insurrections by passing 
 severe laws against the assembling of negroes, their carrying of 
 arms, their learning to read and write, or their having in their 
 possession any abolitionist literature. It convinced the South- 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 391 
 
 ern leaders of the prime necessity of preserving their power in 
 Congress by keeping the number of slave states at least equal 
 to the number of free commonwealths ; whence their desire for 
 the annexation of new lands suitable for the extension of slave 
 labor (Texas and Cuba) and their insistence that the great 
 trans-Mississippi territory be kept free from antislavery restric- 
 tions. Finally, the attack of the abolitionists on slavery as a 
 moral evil developed pan passu a defense of the institution as 
 a useful social arrangement and a positive material and moral 
 blessing for the negro. All the scruples of a Jefferson, a Ran- 
 dolph, or a Washington on the justice or humanity of the slave 
 system were hushed, and a new generation was trained by the 
 apologetics of Thomas Dew, 1 Calhoun, Hammond, and Wise to 
 believe that the institution which they were eventually to defend 
 in arms was indispensable to their civilization and sanctioned 
 by the laws of God. 
 
 In spite of the abolitionist agitation, labor unrest, and grow- 
 ing political opposition, the country seemed to be extremely 
 prosperous as Jackson's term approached its close. The na- 
 tional debt was completely extinguished at the beginning of the 
 year 1835. The revenues from the compromise tariff of 1833 
 were ample. The sale of public lands, encouraged by the low 
 government price of $1.25 an acre, with easy extension of credit 
 and abundant issues of notes by the state banks, and stimulated 
 by hopes of rapid development and huge profits in the exploi- 
 tation of railroads and canals, rose from $4,887,000 in 1834 to 
 $14,757,000 in 1835 and over $24,000,000 in 1836. At the 
 opening of the last-named year the balance in the Treasury 
 exceeded $32,000,000. There seemed to be no way of stopping 
 the income, for the tariff was fixed by the compromise for half 
 
 1 Thomas R. Dew, a professor of politics in William and Mary College, was 
 the first to announce clearly the new spirit of the South. In 1832, as a result of 
 Nat Turner's negro insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, he published 
 a treatise in which he maintained that the doctrine of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence that all men are born "free and equal" was false, that the social and 
 economic interests of the state of Virginia demanded that the negro be kept in 
 bondage, and that such a condition was a blessing to the slaves themselves. His 
 book was very influential in the South. 
 
392 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a dozen years to come, and the price of public lands could not 
 be further lowered without prejudice to those who had already 
 bought. Various schemes for the disposal of the surplus were 
 brought forward, 1 and in the end Clay's long-cherished project 
 of a distribution of the surplus among the states in the ratio of 
 their population was passed by Congress and signed by Jackson 
 on June 23, 1836. Under the Distribution Act about $18,000,000 
 was deposited with the states before the panic of 1837 came to 
 change the surplus into a deficit. 
 
 The American people were living in a fool's paradise in the 
 middle thirties, building air castles of fortune overnight. Land 
 values were immensely inflated ; hundreds of banks recklessly 
 chartered by state legislatures were flooding the country with 
 their unsecured notes. The states (especially the newer states 
 of the West) were vying with one another in grandiose schemes 
 for canals, railroads, and land improvements, incurring huge 
 debts for public works which they fatuously believed would 
 free them, with the rush of population, from the burdens of 
 taxation. Indiana, still hardly more than a frontier commun- 
 ity with less than half a million people, planned to expend 
 $20,000,000 in the construction of canals and roads. Illinois, 
 with a debt already on her hands and the state revenues still 
 unequal to paying current expenses, rolled up a further debt of 
 $35 a head for her population of 400,000 and threw good money 
 after bad by sinking her whole allotment of the federal surplus 
 in wild schemes of internal improvement. 
 
 The first shock to this fictitious prosperity came from Pres- 
 ident Jackson. On July n, 1836, he ordered the Secretary of 
 the Treasury to publish the Specie Circular, forbidding the land 
 
 1 The most interesting of these propositions, in view of the future development 
 of industry, was made by Felix Grundy of Tennessee, at the suggestion of Presi- 
 dent Jackson himself ; namely, that the surplus be used to buy the " freedom of 
 the railroads." As roads or sections of roads were completed, a sum fixed by law 
 should be paid them by the government, in return for which the roads were to 
 transport mail, troops, and property of the government free of charge. Such an 
 arrangement would have been a long step in the direction of government owner- 
 ship. The contract was to be perpetual, and the payments were to constitute a 
 lien on the property and land of the roads. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 393 
 
 agents and the deposit banks to receive anything but gold and 
 silver after August 15 in payment for the sales of public land. 
 Thus by a stroke of the pen the government deprived of their 
 validity as national currency that vast mass of state bank notes 
 which the deposit banks had been freely receiving in payment 
 for public lands and reissuing as loans for the purchase of more 
 lands an endless chain. The deposit banks of the West began 
 to call desperately on the East for specie to meet their obliga- 
 tions to the government, and at the same time shut down 
 rigorously on their loans. The land sales virtually ceased. The 
 " wildcat banks," without specie to redeem their discredited 
 notes, collapsed. 
 
 Had the Specie Circular been issued six months earlier, the 
 panic which followed would probably have come in time to sweep 
 the administration out of office. But the campaign of 1836 
 was already far advanced, and the election took place before 
 the effects of Jackson's fateful circular were fully felt. The 
 National Democratic Convention, which met at Baltimore in 
 May, had unanimously indorsed Jackson's candidate, Van 
 Buren. The Whigs, not yet amalgamated into a party, held no 
 convention and published no platform. They depended on the 
 combination of votes given to various anti-Jackson candidates 
 (Daniel Webster in New England, Hugh L. White in the South 
 and Southwest, William H. Harrison in the Middle and Western 
 States) to prevent Van Buren from getting a majority in the 
 Electoral College, thus throwing the election into the House of" 
 Representatives. But although Van Buren had little to recom- 
 mend him for the first office in the land, the influence of his 
 great chief was powerful enough to carry him to victory, with 
 170 electoral votes against 124 for all his opponents combined. 
 His popular majority, however, was but 25,000, as compared 
 with Jackson's 157,000 in 1832. x After enjoying the peculiar 
 satisfaction on inauguration day of seeing Van Buren, whom the 
 
 1 Jackson's candidate for the vice presidency, Richard M. Johnson of Ken- 
 tucky, failed by a single vote of getting a majority in the Electoral College. For 
 the first and only time in our history the choice of a vice president then devolved 
 upon the Senate, which immediately elected Johnson. 
 
394 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Senate had refused to confirm as minister to England, sworn 
 into the presidency by Chief Justice Taney, whom the Senate 
 had refused to confirm as Secretary of the Treasury, Jackson 
 issued a farewell address to the people of America and departed 
 from Washington for his plantation in Tennessee, leaving Van 
 Buren pledged to "follow in the footsteps of my illustrious 
 predecessor," but destined to walk a path strewn with thorns. 
 The new president was hardly installed in office before the 
 country was in the throes of the worst panic in its history 
 the inevitable nemesis of overspeculation, inflation, reckless 
 banking, and frenzied schemes of canal and railroad develop- 
 ment. One misfortune pressed upon another's heels. A busi- 
 ness depression in England cut down our exports sharply. 
 The price of cotton fell from twenty to ten cents a pound, 
 forcing some of our largest planters into bankruptcy. The 
 British capitalists who had invested generously in American 
 securities in the hour of our seeming great prosperity called on 
 our banks for money just at the moment when they were beset 
 with importunities for specie to satisfy the demands of Jack- 
 son's Circular and crippled by the withdrawal of government 
 funds to pay the first installment of the distribution of the sur- 
 plus. The strain was too great. In May the banks of New 
 York suspended specie payment, and by the end of the summer 
 there was not a single bank in the United States that met its 
 obligations in gold and silver. Specie was hoarded. Interest 
 'rates rose to 3 per cent a month. Building-operations, indus- 
 trial expansion, improvement schemes, in short, every activity 
 that depended on the extension of credit, ceased. Thousands 
 of men were thrown out of employment. By September, 1837, 
 nine tenths of the factories of the Eastern states were closed. 
 The cruelty of nature was added to the folly of man to make 
 the disaster complete. In the summer and autumn of 1836 the 
 Hessian fly ravaged the wheat fields of Pennsylvania, Delaware, 
 Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The citizens of Louisville 
 declared in a memorial to the Senate that their prosperity was 
 "as completely marred as if a large invading army had passed 
 through their country." Flour rose to $i 2 a barrel. The scanty 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 395 
 
 wages of the masses of laborers in our great cities were literally 
 insufficient to buy them bread. The walls of New York were 
 placarded with angry handbills: "Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel 
 the prices must come down ! " Starving mobs broke into the 
 warehouses where the precious flour was stored and threw the 
 barrels into the street. 
 
 The panic, of course, was not due to any one man or measure. 
 However, the people at large, incompetent and impatient to seek 
 the underlying causes of economic distress, threw the blame on 
 Van Buren. And the Whigs were quick to exploit the misfortune 
 for the discredit of the Democratic administration : the trouble 
 was all due to Jackson's crimes and blunders his defeat of 
 the Bank charter, his removal of the deposits, his crusade 
 against paper money, his Specie Circular. In the widespread 
 popular distress the Whigs had their best campaign material. 
 They carried several important states in the elections of 1838, 
 including New York, where the brilliant young William H. 
 Seward won the governorship over Marcy and the "Albany 
 Regency." 
 
 Meanwhile Van Buren had called Congress in extra session 
 for the first Monday in September, 1837, to relieve the embar- 
 rassed condition of the Treasury and restore financial con- 
 fidence in the country. The distribution of the installment of 
 the surplus due in October was postponed until 183 p. 1 Treas- 
 ury notes to the amount of $10,000,000 were issued to meet 
 the government expenses. The Whigs demanded the reestablish- 
 ment of the National Bank and the repeal of the Specie Cir- 
 cular, but Van Buren remained firm in his adhesion to Jackson's 
 policies. The scheme of depositing the government balances in 
 the "pet banks" having signally failed, the President devised 
 a new plan, which divorced the government finances completely 
 from any banking system. This was the Independent Treasury, 
 commonly called the Subtreasury, plan, by which the public 
 
 iWhen the year 1839 arrived, the government had a deficit and not a surplus; 
 so the Distribution Bill lapsed, after about $28,000,000 had been deposited with 
 the states. The money was never recalled, although it continued to stand on 
 the Treasury books as funds of the United States. 
 
3Q6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 funds were to remain in the hands of government custodians 
 postmasters, directors of mints, collectors of customs until 
 called for. Van Buren labored for two years with refractory 
 elements in Congress to get the Independent Treasury bill 
 passed. The Whigs, who saw in it the doom of their hopes for 
 a National Bank, and conservative Eastern Democrats, who be- 
 lieved that the government should help the banks out of their 
 difficulty instead of abandoning them in the hour of their need, 
 combined to block the measure in the House. On the other 
 hand, Calhoun, to the amazement of his colleagues in the 
 Senate, brought the immense weight of his influence in the South 
 to the support of the administration (expecting in return Van 
 Buren's favor for the annexation of slave territory in Texas). 
 Jackson wrote an open letter from the Hermitage commending 
 the new plan. The bill was finally passed, June 30, 1840. It 
 provided for the establishment of subtreasuries in important 
 cities of the country (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. 
 Louis, New Orleans), where the public moneys were to be kept 
 in vaults. 1 
 
 The financial situation was the absorbing question of Van 
 Buren's term. It furnished the Whigs the chief rallying point 
 for opposition to the administration and for the consolidation 
 of their party. Still, there were other subjects of importance 
 with which Van Buren had to deal. In November, 1837, 
 a serious revolt against English rule broke out in Canada. 
 The insurgents appealed to the Americans along the border 
 to help them, holding out offers of annexation to the United 
 States if the revolution proved successful. The memory of 
 our two wars with England had left a heritage of hostility 
 toward the "mother country," which was increased by the 
 large Irish immigration. Meetings were held in Burlington, 
 St. Albans, Rochester, Buffalo, and many other towns in 
 
 lf rhe momentary triumph of the Whigs in the election of 1840 led to the re- 
 peal of the Independent Treasury Act; but it was repassed in 1846, after the 
 Democrats had regained control, and it remained in force until the Civil War, 
 when our government, under the stress of enormous expenses, was obliged again 
 to have recourse to the powerful banking interests of the country. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 397 
 
 Vermont and New York, at which resolutions of sympathy with 
 the insurgents were adopted, money was raised, and food, cloth- 
 ing and ammunition were collected. Volunteer companies even 
 were enlisted. Van Buren's Secretary of State, John Forsythe, 
 warned the governors of the two border states to enforce 
 a strict neutrality, but the recruiting still went on. Several 
 hundred Americans joined the banners of the rebel leader 
 Mackenzie at Navy Island in the Niagara River. A small 
 American vessel, the Caroline, was used to transport men and 
 supplies to the insurgents. In the darkness of the night of 
 December 29, 1837, a detachment of English soldiers rowed to 
 the Caroline as she was moored to her dock on the American 
 side of the river, drove the men off her decks, with several killed 
 and wounded, and sent her drifting ablaze over the falls. The 
 whole border was instantly roused to reprisals. Expeditions 
 for the invasion of Canada were launched from Detroit and 
 Ogdensburg. The President sent General Scott to the scene of 
 the disorders, with a message to the governors of Vermont and 
 New York to call out the militia, both to restrain the hot-heads 
 and to protect American soil. The excitement died down with 
 the defeat of the insurgents. Conciliatory diplomacy prevented 
 a breach with England. But the enemies of Van Buren charged 
 him with cowardice and truckling to Great Britain in allowing 
 the " murder" of American citizens on American soil. 
 
 During the whole of the administration, Congress and the 
 country were increasingly disturbed by the abolitionist agi- 
 tation. The President had declared himself in his inaugural 
 address "the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of ev- 
 ery attempt in Congress to abolish slavery in the District of 
 Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding states." But 
 all to no avail. Petitions were multiplied, the gag-rule was 
 reenacted, John Quincy Adams repeated his defiance, the de- 
 bates in the House and Senate grew angrier. Lawless bands 
 sacked and burned negro quarters in the cities, lynchings in- 
 creased, and Elijah Love joy was shot down in Alton, Illinois, 
 while defending his abolitionist press against the rioters. The 
 movement for the annexation of Texas (which we shall study in 
 
398 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the next chapter) gave a great impetus to the abolitionist cause. 
 Resolutions against annexation were passed by the legislatures 
 of state after state in the North. The antislavery congressmen 
 made the issue the topic for scathing denunciations of the 
 institution, which provoked angry replies from the South. 
 
 Abolitionism was no doctrine of the Whigs. Clay and Webster 
 professed as much horror of it as Calhoun and Benton. Yet 
 there is no doubt that the antislavery sentiment in the North, 
 of which abolitionism was the militant advance guard, found 
 a growing measure of sympathy in the Whig party. The Demo- 
 crats, especially after Calhoun came to the support of the ad- 
 ministration, tended more and more to become the party of 
 the South. It took several years, to be sure, for the demands 
 of the slave interests to wear down all other issues in the South 
 and eliminate the Whig party there, but the tendency is already 
 to be detected in the slavery debates of Van Buren's Congresses. 
 One has only to compare the resolutions offered in the Senate 
 by Calhoun and Clay on the subject of the petitions in 1837. 
 Calhoun declared that the fanaticism of the North must be 
 crushed "without temporizing or conciliation," else it would 
 destroy the Union. Domestic slavery was an institution of the 
 South, recognized by the Constitution, and "no change of feel- 
 ing on the part of the other states could justify them or their 
 citizens in open and systematic attacks thereon with a view to 
 its overthrow, or in denying to the South the advantage which 
 would accrue to her from the annexation of new states or ter- 
 ritory on the ground that the institution of slavery which 
 would be extended into them was sinful or immoral." Clay, on 
 the other hand, professed that he had no such gloomy fears for 
 the endurance of the Union. The best way to check the fa- 
 naticism of the abolitionists was to continue to receive their 
 petitions and refer them to the proper committee, where they 
 would die a natural death. Clay offered counter resolutions 
 to Calhoun's, condemning interference with slavery, but still 
 pledging the Senate "to receive and respectfully treat any 
 petitions, couched in decorous language, presented by citizens 
 of the United States, touching slavery in the District of 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 399 
 
 Columbia." As to the territory of Florida (the only one in 
 which slavery existed at the time), he regarded the abolition of 
 slavery there as " highly inexpedient," because, among other 
 reasons, "the people of the territory had not asked for abolition," 
 and, when the territory should be admitted as a state into the 
 Union, "the people would be entitled to decide that question for 
 themselves." Clay did not refer to Texas in his resolutions. As 
 between the militant and uncompromising language of Calhoun 
 and the provisos and loopholes in Clay's resolutions, it is not 
 hard to see where the antislavery men would find the more 
 comfort. 
 
 The chief point on which the Whig leaders waged their four 
 years' campaign against the Jackson-Van Buren Democracy 
 was the financial and industrial disorder which they claimed 
 had been brought upon the country by the incompetency and 
 arrogance of the administration. Adams protested against the 
 "crimes" of ignorant and corrupt officials in all departments 
 of the government; Webster thundered against the cowardice 
 and demagogism of the party in power, in abandoning the solid 
 business and banking interests of the country ; Clay toured the 
 Eastern states, thanking God that he "had been spared to help 
 in undoing the work of Andrew Jackson." A national Whig 
 convention met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, early in December, 
 1839. Henry Clay was by far the most prominent man in the 
 party, its founder and creator. He was also the personal choice 
 of the great majority of the delegates. But Clay was a Free- 
 mason, a slaveholder, and a high protectionist. On each of these 
 counts he would have lost votes. His very prominence was a 
 bar to his availability. Former Jackson men might be de- 
 tached from Van Buren, but they would never support the old 
 hero's archenemy. To Clay's bitter disappointment, and some- 
 what to his disgust, the convention nominated William H. Har- 
 rison, the hero of Tippecanoe, who had polled 73 votes in the 
 election of 1836 and could show a creditable record of nearly 
 fifty years of public service as a soldier on the northwest border, 
 governor of the Northwest Territory, representative and senator 
 in the national Congress, and our first minister to the Republic 
 
400 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of Colombia. John Tyler of Virginia was named for vice pres- 
 ident, simply to gain votes for the ticket in the South for 
 Tyler was a states'-rights man, an anti-Bank man, and a low- 
 tariff man, whose only bond of sympathy with the Whigs was 
 hatred for Andrew Jackson. The convention published no plat- 
 form, for the heterogeneous elements composing the party could 
 unite on no common purpose beyond the cry, "Down with Van 
 Buren ! " Harrison was known, however, to be a believer in 
 banks, a credit system, paper currency, and reform of the civil 
 service. Campaign orators like Clay, Webster, Corwin, Crit- 
 tenden, Wise, and Prentiss gave the voters of the different sec- 
 tions of the country to understand that if the Whig party should 
 be successful at the polls it would mean the satisfaction of 
 the particular interests and desires of the audience they were 
 addressing. 
 
 A friend of Clay's was overheard by the correspondent of a 
 Democratic paper in Baltimore to express his disappointment 
 at Harrison's nomination by the sneer: "Give him a barrel of 
 hard cider, settle a pension of $2000 a year on him, and, my 
 word for it, he will sit for the remainder of his days in his 
 log cabin by the side of a sea-coal fire, studying moral philoso- 
 phy." The paper published the remark as a campaign document 
 against the Whigs, but it proved to be a boomerang. The Whigs 
 seized upon this testimony to the simple tastes and virtuous 
 poverty of their candidate (though, as a matter of fact, Har- 
 rison lived in very comfortable circumstances on a 2ooo-acre 
 farm on the banks of the Ohio). They adopted the log cabin 
 and cider barrel as emblems of the campaign. Their candidate 
 was the unspoiled son of the soil, the Cincinnatus who had left 
 his plow to take the sword and had laid down the victorious 
 sword to take the plow again. He represented the homely 
 republican virtues of a true American, while Van Buren, in- 
 stalled in his luxurious "bachelor" quarters in the White House, 
 ate his dainty French fare off golden plates and drank costly 
 wines out of^ silver goblets, callous to the sufferings which his 
 ignorance and the corruption of his officials were bringing on 
 the country. 
 
"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 401 
 
 The Whig campaign was a continuous festival of oratory, 
 pageant, song, and shouting, in which the sober remonstrances 
 of the Democrats and their appeals to argue the merits of the 
 Bank, the currency, states' rights, and taxation were drowned. 
 Log cabins were erected for Whig headquarters, with the coon- 
 skin nailed to the wall and the latchstring hung out. Mass meet- 
 ings were gathered around the cider barrel. Huge balls were 
 rolled through the streets from town to town by hundreds of 
 men and boys shouting the songs of "Tippecanoe and Tyler 
 too" and "Van, Van, is a used-up man." Never before nor since 
 was there such a campaign of vociferation. The Democrats, as 
 one of their papers scornfully remarked, "were sung down, lied 
 down, drunk down." Nearly double the nimiber of the voters 
 of the previous election were brought out to the polls, and, 
 when the balloting was over, Harrison had carried all but seven 
 states of the Union. His electoral vote was 234 to 60 for Van 
 Buren. The Whigs got control of both Houses of Congress. 
 In the excitement of the campaign the appearance of a new 
 political party, which polled 7000 votes, passed almost unno- 
 ticed. But the Liberty party, which was quietly launched by 
 delegates froni six states meeting at Albany on the first of April, 
 1840, was destined to grow through a score of years into the 
 mighty force which shattered the Whig party into fragments 
 and sent the Democrats down to a long defeat. 
 
 The Whig triumph of 1840 marks the end of the Jacksonian 
 era. That era had been ushered in by the overwhelming victory 
 of a soldier hero, a representative of the great new West, stand- 
 ing as the champion of the people against the usurpation of their 
 power by an aristocratic government at Washington indifferent 
 to their needs and impervious to their demands. It was ended 
 by exactly another such victory. And had the Whigs been 
 destined to enjoy a dozen years of unbroken supremacy, it is 
 likely that they too would have been confronted at the end of 
 that period by a new and clamorous "democratic" movement 
 protesting against the stagnation and corruption of our govern- 
 ment. For it is in the nature of a young and vigorous de- 
 mocracy to engender demands for the reform and readjustment 
 
402 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of governmental machinery more rapidly than any actually 
 working machinery can meet those demands. The Jacksonian 
 era, roughly corresponding to the fourth decade of the last cen- 
 tury, was perhaps the period of all our history most fruitful in 
 democratic innovations, with its enlargement of the suffrage, its 
 extension of elective offices, its revised state constitutions, 
 its national nominating conventions, its organization of labor, 
 its popular discussion on the lyceum platform, in the pulpit, 
 and especially in the multiplying sheets of a cheap press of 
 such burning issues of the day as abolition, immigration, the 
 annexation of Texas, and the settlement of Oregon. It was the 
 era of the introduction of steam locomotion and of humanitarian 
 reform in debtors' laws and the keeping of jails and asylums, in 
 the curricula of the schools, in the encouragement of temper- 
 ance, and in a hundred other matters to which economic and 
 social histories of the period would give a more extended notice 
 than is possible for this more strictly political narrative to do. 
 Andrew Jackson incarnated the spirit of the new democracy. 
 He personified and dominated the developing political forces 
 of the fourth decade of the century, as Thomas Jefferson had 
 dominated and personified those of the first decade. Paradox- 
 ical as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that Jackson him- 
 self contributed more than any other man to the overthrow of 
 the Jacksonian democracy. For he taught the masses of the 
 people to hold their governors subject to their will, and educated 
 them to view as reactionary any regime that tended to separate 
 itself from the censure of public opinion or paused in the culti- 
 vation of popular approbation. He saw the Whig leaders seize 
 the very weapons in their campaign against Van Bur en which he 
 himself had used in his campaign against John Quincy Adams a 
 dozen years earlier. The rolling log cabins and the cider barrels, 
 the mass meetings and the boisterous songs, must have been 
 pathetically reminiscent of hickory poles and stamped waist- 
 coats and huzzas for New Orleans and Pensacola to the old hero, 
 now well past his threescore and ten years, who was following 
 the fortunes of his party with undiminished interest from his 
 "retreat at the Hermitage. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 
 
 Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America north 
 and south is to be peopled. THOMAS JEFFERSON 
 
 TYLER AND TEXAS 
 
 The rejoicing of the Whigs was soon turned to mourning. 
 Five weeks after the old hero of Tippecanoe had spoken his 
 inaugural address before the enthusiastic crowd gathered at the 
 eastern front of the Capitol, his body was lying in state beneath 
 its majestic dome. How far Harrison would have succeeded, 
 had he lived, in controlling and guiding the Whigs is a matter 
 of conjecture. He was not, like Jackson in 1828 and Jefferson 
 in 1800, the acknowledged leader and builder of the party which 
 had won the nation's indorsement at the polls. Both Clay and 
 Webster towered far above him, and although they yielded him 
 the place at the head of the ticket as the most "available" 
 candidate, they made slight concealment of their opinion of his 
 "mediocrity." They meant to use the old general as the im- 
 posing figurehead at the bow of the ship of state, while they 
 themselves manned the bridge and piped the crew. Clay de- 
 clined a place in the cabinet, preferring to direct the adminis- 
 tration from his seat in the Senate; but a full half of the 
 cabinet offices were filled with men of his recommendation 
 Ewing (Treasury), Badger (Navy), and Crittenden (Attorney- 
 General). Webster, given the choice of positions after Clay's 
 declination, took the portfolio of State, and brought his follower 
 Francis Granger into the cabinet as Postmaster-General. The 
 President appears to have been allowed to select his Secretary 
 of War (James K. Bell) without the interference of the giants. 
 Clay had decided in party caucus some time before the inaugu- 
 ration that the new Whig Congress must be called in extra 
 
 403 
 
404 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 session to bring the blessings of the victory of 1840 to the 
 country without delay, and Harrison had duly issued the call 
 for the session to meet on May 31, 1841. The* Whig leaders 
 had refused to let Harrison open his mouth as candidate. They 
 would now run the government for him, as they had run 
 the campaign successfully ; if he would only remain in the 
 background. 
 
 Harrison's death in no wise changed the plans of the Whig 
 leaders, nor did the accession of Vice President Tyler seem at 
 first to bode any ill to those plans. In an address to the people, 
 published immediately after Harrison's funeral, Tyler spoke 
 hopefully of the reforms to be introduced and modestly of his 
 own readiness to follow Congress in any constitutional measures. 
 His message at the opening of the extra session of Congress 
 (June i) was almost deferential in its recognition of the right 
 of the representatives fresh from their constituents to inaugu- 
 rate the needed reforms for the relief of the Treasury and the 
 improvement of the currency. His remarks on "a necessary 
 financial agent" for dealing with the public funds were inter- 
 preted by Benton as so unmistakably a recommendation for the 
 reestablishment of the National Bank that the old Jackso- 
 nian forthwith began an attack on the President in the Senate. 
 "The people, simple folk," says Schouler, " imagined that Tyler 
 would follow Harrison's plans with the same sad reverence with 
 which he had followed his hearse." 
 
 The plans, however, were not Harrison's but Clay's. On 
 June 7 'Clay introduced into the Senate an elaborate program 
 consisting of six resolutions, which were nothing less than the 
 whole plan and policy of the Whig administration. They were 
 in reality the platform of the party, which the leaders had not 
 dared to publish before the election, but which they expected 
 now, with their president in the White House and with a 
 majority in both branches of Congress, to pass without diffi- 
 culty. That it was the president's constitutional privilege to 
 recommend legislation to Congress seems not to have troubled 
 the senator from Kentucky. What the president's part was to 
 be in this administration we have already seen. The days of 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 405 
 
 executive domination were over. The good old Whig doctrine 
 of the rule of the enlightened aristocracy was to take the place 
 of the Jacksonian demagogism of "Democracy," which af- 
 fected to rest its absolute and arbitrary acts on the will of the 
 whole people. 
 
 Clay's resolutions contained three main projects: first, the 
 reestablishment of a National Bank, with the preliminary step 
 of the abolition of the Independent Treasury system ; secondly, 
 the revision of the tariff to yield an adequate revenue; and, 
 thirdly, the allotment to the several states of the proceeds of the 
 sale of the public lands within their borders. These resolutions 
 were virtually the revival of the old National Republican policy 
 of the Adams-Clay days; namely, National Bank, protective 
 tariff, and internal improvements. It is true that the last two 
 objects were not mentioned in Clay's resolutions, but one can 
 see how skillfully they are included in his demands. For if the 
 tariff were raised high enough to provide an "adequate revenue" 
 at the same time that the only other great item of revenue, the 
 public-lands sales, was made over to the states, then the tariff 
 would be high enough to be protective. And if the government 
 gave the states the proceeds of the public-lands sales to spend 
 on their own internal improvements, it would come to the same 
 thing as the government's spending the money itself. In either 
 case it would be national money devoted to local improvements. 
 
 At first all went well. The bill for the abolition of the 
 Independent Treasury was passed and promptly signed by the 
 President. Then came the crucial measure of the Congress 
 the reestablishment of the Bank. It was known that Tyler 
 was a strong states'-rights man and that some care would have 
 to be taken to draft a bill which would meet with his approval. 
 The point on which Tyler was insistent was the necessity of 
 gaining the consent of the states for establishing branches 
 within their borders. The House was apparently willing to 
 yield this point, but Clay swept it aside in the Senate. A 
 National Bank would not be "national," he maintained, if it 
 had to ask the consent of the states anywhere to do business. 
 The question of its constitutionality had been settled once for 
 
406 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 all by Marshall's great decision, and the people had reversed 
 their condemnation of the Bank in the election of 1832 by this 
 new election of 1840. John Tyler could do no better than fol- 
 low his illustrious fellow Virginian, James Madison, whom he 
 professed to reverence, and sign the bill for the Bank's charter. 
 The utmost that Clay would concede was the power of a state to 
 prevent the establishment of a branch by an express act of its 
 legislature. 
 
 The Bank bill was passed by votes of 128 to 97 in the House 
 and 26 to 23 in the Senate and was sent to the President on 
 August 6. Tyler kept the bill until the last moment of the ten 
 days allowed him for deliberation, and then returned it with his 
 veto. The narrowness of the Whig majority in the Senate made 
 the passage of the bill over his veto impossible. Another at- 
 tempt was made to frame a bill which would meet with the 
 executive's approval. Two leading Whig congressmen conferred 
 with Secretaries Webster and Ewing in preparing the new bill, 
 which, according to Swing's testimony, fulfilled the conditions 
 which Tyler demanded. Even the name "Bank" was not used. 
 The new institution was to be called a "fiscal corporation," and 
 the "agencies" (not "branches") in the states were to be de- 
 prived of their banking-functions of loan and discount. Yet to 
 the amazement and disgust of the Whig leaders Tyler vetoed 
 this second bill also (September 9). 
 
 It was evident that Tyler would have no National Bank of 
 any kind. At Clay's behest Crittenden, Ewing, Badger, and Bell 
 immediately resigned from the cabinet, and Granger soon fol- 
 lowed, leaving only Daniel Webster of the original Harrison 
 appointees. The extra session, which had begun with such prom- 
 ise in June, ended disastrously in September. The chief measure 
 of the Whigs had been defeated by this "president by acci- 
 dent," this Virginian of states'-rights convictions, whom they 
 had had no more intention of putting in the White House than 
 they had of putting on the throne of China. The breach be- 
 tween the executive and Congress was complete, and Tyler con- 
 trolled the situation through the veto which the Whigs had not 
 enough majority to override. With exasperating equanimity 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 407 
 
 Tyler proceeded to fill up his cabinet (not with Clay men this 
 time) and was ready for the resumption of hostilities at the 
 opening of the regular session of Congress. The country was 
 sadly in need of revenue the issue of several millions of short- 
 time notes had been necessary to meet the bare expenses of 
 government. The sudden reduction of the tariff which would 
 come on January i, 1842, according to the scale arranged by 
 the compromise of 1833, would leave the country facing a huge 
 deficit. Those reductions had been arranged nearly a decade 
 back and had failed to take account of the growth of the coun- 
 try and the consequent increase in the expenses of the govern- 
 ment. Tyler urged Congress to make the necessary provision 
 by increasing the tariff rates, but he refused to sign any bill that 
 did not provide for the stoppage of the distribution of the sales 
 from the public lands as soon as the tariff should have passed 
 the 20 per cent mark. In other words, he would not allow the 
 tariff to provide a surplus for internal improvement. As the 
 tariff did not drop below 20 per cent at all, Clay's pet scheme 
 was killed. 
 
 The Whigs had no alternative but to adopt the kind of tariff 
 bill Tyler would sign or let the country suffer. After the Pres- 
 ident had vetoed two tariff bills and drawn upon himself the 
 threat of impeachment, the protesting members yielded to the 
 crying need of the Treasury. On August 30, 1.842, the House 
 passed the bill containing the suspension of the distribution of 
 the land sales. John Tyler had ruined the plans of the Whigs 
 and brought the victory of 1840 to naught. He was read out of 
 the Whig party as a " traitor" and burned in effigy by the crowds 
 that had shouted themselves hoarse for him two years before. 
 In a pathetic scene Henry Clay resigned his seat in the Senate 
 (March 31), to devote himself, as his great rival Jackson had 
 done eighteen years before, to saving among the people the 
 principles which were defeated at the seat of government. 
 
 Tyler has been severely censured by our historians generally 
 for turning against a party which had elected him, and has been 
 charged with the meanest of motives vanity, jealousy, and 
 spite. He was filled with an overweening ambition, say his 
 
408 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 critics, to displace Clay and Webster, over whom Harrison's 
 providential removal had given him the whip hand, and, relying 
 on a coterie of Virginia friends who "led him by the nose," to 
 build up a Tyler party devoted to the restoration of Virginia's 
 influence in our national councils and to the extension of slavery 
 in the West. On the other hand, his son, Professor Lyon G. 
 Tyler, produced in the "Letters and Times of the Tylers" (three 
 volumes) an elaborate apology to prove that all the public acts 
 of the President were prompted by the same lofty standards 
 of gentlemanly honor that were acknowledged in his private 
 life. Tyler was known to be a states'-rights man and an anti- 
 Bank man. He was put on the Whig ticket with the hope (vain, 
 as it proved) of carrying the state of Virginia. The Whig 
 managers cared little about Tyler's views on the Bank, because 
 they believed that as vice president he would have nothing to 
 say about the Bank or, indeed, about any matter of public 
 policy. As the Whigs published no platform, their candidates 
 were bound by no promises. Naturally, the support of the head 
 of the ticket for the program of Clay and Webster was guaran- 
 teed, but was Tyler, "who cared for none of these things," 
 bound to be converted to them by the mere fact of Harrison's 
 death? A man cannot be a "traitor" to principles which he 
 has never accepted nor an "apostate" to a creed which he has 
 never professed. 
 
 But to acquit Tyler of the charge of broken faith is by no 
 means to excuse him for his vanity, sophistry, and obstinacy. 
 After all, he allowed himself to be put forward on the Whig 
 ticket, knowing that, platform or no platform, the party led by 
 Henry Clay, if successful, would renew the nationalist doctrines 
 of 1824. If his conscience would not let him sign the Bank bill, 
 even after it had been so amended as to lead several members 
 of his cabinet to give their written testimony that it was satisfac- 
 tory to him, he need not for that have wrecked the party. By 
 holding either of the bills for ten days he could have let it be- 
 come law without his signature, deferring to the Whig majority 
 in Congress. No man had more bitterly attacked Andrew Jack- 
 son's executive tyranny in the veto of bills, and yet he followed 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 409 
 
 in Jackson's footsteps. Clay's keen probe went probably to the 
 right spot when he accused Tyler of listening to the flattery 
 of his " corporal's guard" of Virginia friends (Wise, Gilmer, 
 Upshur, Tucker, Rives), who encouraged him in the belief that 
 he was a national leader when they were really using him only 
 as a sectional agent for the furtherance of states' rights and 
 slavery. Even the voluminous work of filial piety undertaken 
 by his son fails to show the President as more than an average 
 gentleman of fine breeding, with something of the pertinacity 
 and cunning of the politician in him but little of the strength 
 and vision of the statesman. 
 
 We have seen that Webster alone remained in Tyler's cabinet 
 after the close of the extra session. Among the many motives 
 that may have urged him to stay (ambition to retain office, 
 belief that he could direct the policy of the administration, 
 unwillingness to be classed with Clay's "underlings") the 
 Massachusetts statesman confessed only this: that there were 
 important negotiations with Great Britain pending and that 
 he could not desert the administration in such a crisis. This 
 reason, if not exhaustive, was certainly sufficient. Our relations 
 with England were strained almost to the breaking-point in 
 1841. British cruisers were stopping American ships off the 
 coast of Africa and exercising the hated right of search to guard 
 against the slave trade. The Caroline affair was not only not 
 settled but it was greatly exaggerated by the threat of New York 
 State to hang a certain Alexander McLeod, a British citizen who 
 came across the border boasting that it was he who had killed 
 the American on board the Caroline. The lumbermen of Maine 
 and New Brunswick, disputing over the boundary line, had ac- 
 tually precipitated a little war (the Aroostook War), which had 
 ended in a truce, leaving the boundary line still to be adjusted. 
 In the Far Northwest the Oregon region, which had been shared 
 in joint occupation by the United States and Great Britain 
 according to the treaty of 1818 (renewed in 1827), began now 
 to be a bone of contention between the two powers. The English 
 resented the growing interest of American explorers and mis- 
 sionaries in the region, while the Americans complained of the 
 
410 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 steady encroachments of the Hudson's Bay Company on the 
 southern portion of Oregon, the valley of the Columbia, which 
 naturally formed the American "sphere of influence." 
 
 The South had its grievance, too, against Great Britain. The 
 brig Creole sailed from Hampton Roads to New Orleans in 
 October, 1841, with a cargo of one hundred and thirty-eight 
 slaves. The slaves mutinied, killed their owner, overpowered 
 the captain and mate, and compelled the crew to land them on 
 the British island of Nassau, where most of them were set at 
 liberty by the authorities. Our government demanded their 
 return, but the British maintained, in common with the hated 
 abolitionists, that once outside the limits of the jurisdiction of 
 a state whose municipal law sanctioned slavery the negroes were 
 free men. Slavery had no international standing. 
 
 Finally, a number of states, Mississippi in the lead, hard hit 
 by the panic of Van Buren's administration, were actually re- 
 pudiating or threatening to repudiate their debts incurred in the 
 era of overspeculation which we have studied in connection with 
 the Jacksonian period. English capitalists had invested heavily 
 in these state securities and were now demanding that the na- 
 tional government underwrite the state debts. 1 This accumula- 
 tion of grievances at the beginning of Tyler's administration 
 made peace with Great Britain more difficult to preserve than 
 at any other time between the Treaty of Ghent and the famous 
 Trent affair in our Civil War. A spirited report from the House 
 Committee on Foreign Relations declared that we would main- 
 tain our just rights in the face of any nation of the earth. Lewis 
 Cass, our minister to France, wrote that the English colony in 
 Paris was eager for war with the United States. Measures were 
 actually taken by the British cabinet for the dispatch of regi- 
 ments and warships to Halifax. 
 
 At this juncture Daniel Webster performed a great service 
 for his country. A fortunate change in English politics in 1841 
 brought Robert Peel to the premiership in the place of Lord 
 
 1 John Quincy Adams advised that the federal government assume the repu- 
 diated debt of Mississippi and eject the state from the Union. There were worse 
 things for many a Northern statesman in 1840 than the disruption of the Union ! 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 411 
 
 Melbourne, and Lord Aberdeen to the Foreign Office in the 
 place of Lord Palmerston. Peel and Aberdeen were conciliatory. 
 They sent to Washington, in the person of Lord Ashburton, a 
 fair and courteous envoy, who knew and liked America. The 
 negotiations between Webster and Ashburton in the summer 
 of 1842 proceeded smoothly and rapidly, with the President's 
 willing aid at every point. Although the Oregon question was 
 not debated and the Creole case was postponed to drag its 
 weary settlement through a decade, all the other points of dif- 
 ficulty were solved. For the attack on the Caroline (McLeod 
 being already acquitted) Webster accepted Ashburton's apology 
 that "no slight to the authority of the United States was ever 
 intended." The two nations agreed to a cruising-convention, by 
 which each should keep its patrolling squadron on the African 
 slave coast, to act together if occasion arose. The urgent ques- 
 tion of the Maine-New Brunswick boundary was settled by a 
 compromise line which gave about 7000 of the 12,000 square 
 miles of disputed territory to the United States. Lord Ashbur- 
 ton promised that there should be no "officious interference 
 with American vessels driven by accident or violence" into the 
 ports of the West Indies and took no exception to Webster's 
 declaration that the flag of every regularly documented Amer- 
 ican merchantman should protect its crew. No one of our 
 former major treaties with Great Britain (1783, 1795, 1814) 
 had cleared the air so thoroughly as the Webster-Ashburton 
 Treaty. 1 Had it not been for the insistent demands of the ex- 
 
 1 An amusing incident of the treaty was the so-called "battle of the maps." 
 Webster had in his possession a map discovered by Jared Sparks in the archives 
 of the Department of Foreign Affairs at Paris, supposed to have been the one 
 used by Franklin and Vergennes in the peace negotiations of 1782. On it a red 
 line marked the boundary, giving to Canada an even larger share of the disputed 
 territory than Great Britain claimed in 1842. Webster naturally did not exhibit 
 the "red-line map" in his parley with Ashburton, but used it secretly to per- 
 suade Maine and Massachusetts of the excellence of the bargain he was making. 
 On the other hand, Ashburton was probably acquainted with the Mitchell map, 
 used in the negotiations of the British in 1783, on which the boundary line was 
 as favorable to the United States as that of the " red-line map " was to Canada. 
 So each commissioner could persuade himself that he was getting the better of 
 the bargain. 
 
412 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 pansionists for Texas and Oregon, our troubles with the mother 
 country would seem to have come to an end. 
 
 The most absorbing issue of Tyler's administration, and one 
 of the most fateful issues in all our history, was the annexation 
 of Texas. Whatever claims we may have had to Texas as part of 
 the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1803 were surrendered by 
 the treaty of 1819 with Spain, which fixed the southwestern 
 boundary of the United States at the Sabine River. Two years 
 later Mexico (of which Texas was a province) threw off its 
 allegiance to Spain in the general revolt of the South and Central 
 American colonies. The new republic of Mexico was at first 
 very favorable to immigration from the United States into Texas 
 and granted large tracts of land on easy terms. It even ex- 
 cepted Texas from the operation of the decree of 1829, which 
 abolished slavery in Mexico. But the very riext year a sudden 
 reversal of policy, which aimed at expelling the foreigners from 
 Texas, led to an uprising in which the Americans joined the 
 native " Liberals" in ejecting the Mexican troops from the prov- 
 ince. A wily adventurer named Santa Anna took advantage 
 of the Liberal revolt to get control of the government in Mexico 
 and then threw off his disguise and whipped the province with 
 scorpions where his predecessors had used rods. Texas was 
 deprived of her government and made a mere military depart- 
 ment in the province of Coahuila. The inhabitants of Texas, 
 of whom about 75 per cent were American immigrants, had no 
 intention of yielding to such tyranny. They organized a tem- 
 porary government, declared their independence of Mexico on 
 March 2, 1836, and on April 21, under the command of Sam 
 Houston of Tennessee, completely defeated the invading Mex- 
 ican army at the battle of San Jacinto and took its general, 
 Santa Anna, prisoner. The connection between Mexico and 
 Texas was forever severed. 
 
 Then began the campaign for the annexation of Texas to 
 the United States, urged by Houston (who had been elected 
 president of the Texan republic) and approved by the almost 
 unanimous opinion of the citizens of Texas, but denounced by 
 Mexico as a cause of war against the United States. For, in 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 413 
 
 spite of the fact that she was impotent to recover her authority 
 over the revolted province, Mexico steadily refused to recognize 
 the independence of Texas. President Jackson was heartily in 
 favor of the annexation of Texas. He had made two attempts 
 (1829, 1835) to purchase the province from Mexico, raising 
 John Quincy Adams's offer of $1,000,000 in 1827 to $5,000,000 
 and even urging, in the proposition of 1835, that Mexico relin- 
 quish the land between the parallels of 37 and 42 north 
 latitude from the Rio Grande to the Pacific. 1 Furthermore, 
 Jackson was little disturbed by delicate scruples in his methods 
 of acquiring desirable territory for the United States, as had 
 been proved by his conduct in Florida. But now, in spite of the 
 overwhelming sentiment of the Texans in favor of annexation 
 and in spite of the vote of both Houses of Congress to recognize 
 the independence of Texas when she should have shown herself 
 fit to maintain her government, Jackson hung back. The alleged 
 reason was that the annexation of Texas would bring on a war 
 with Mexico, but the fear of injuring the chances of his candi- 
 date Van Buren in the approaching election may have been the 
 more cogent reason. The abolitionist agitation over the rejec- 
 tion of the antislavery petitions by Congress and the exclusion 
 of the antislavery literature from the mails was at its height 
 (p. 388). Van Buren needed the Northern votes to win, and 
 until the election was over, Jackson confined himself to harmless 
 negotiations with Mexico. In the spring of 1837, however, he 
 recognized the independence of Texas and heightened his tone 
 in dealing with Mexico. 
 
 Van Buren, however, was little interested in expansion and 
 not at all in slavery. He would have had no inclination to favor 
 the annexation policy, even if the storm raised by the panic of 
 1837 had not occupied the administration with financial prob- 
 lems. Instead of listening to the overtures of the Texan envoy 
 
 !It was asserted by Jackson's enemies that the failure of the proposition of 
 1835 caused Jackson to give encouragement to Houston to secure the separation 
 of Texas from Mexico by arms. There is some color given to the charge by the 
 fact that Houston, after a visit to the White House, boasted that Texas would be 
 independent and that he should be its first president. But this is slim evidence 
 on which to condemn Jackson. 
 
414 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 at Washington, Van Buren preferred to negotiate a convention 
 with Mexico for the settlement of our claims against her. 1 Inter- 
 est in the annexation project waned both in the United States and 
 in Texas. The activities of the American Antislavery Society, the 
 insistence of the Northern press that we had " territory enough, 
 bad morals enough, public debt enough" already, the petitions 
 to Congress (which were "measured by the cubic feet"), the 
 three weeks' speech of John Quincy Adams against annexation 
 (in the closing session of 1838), seemed to have put the quietus 
 on the measure. The new president of Texas (Lamar) in his 
 inaugural address of December, 1838, advocated a free and 
 independent Texas. The British minister at Mexico City spoke 
 of the annexation project as "dead." It was evident that the 
 friends of annexation would have to wait until the wheel of 
 political fortune brought round a favorable moment. 
 
 That moment came in 1842. Tyler had "dished the Whigs," 
 and the Whigs had repudiated Tyler. The president was free 
 to develop his own policy, supported by his new cabinet and 
 his coterie of Virginian friends. He was personally in favor of 
 annexation. He also saw in the issue a promising platform on 
 which to unite the slave interests of the South and the expan- 
 sionist sentiment of the North for the next presidential cam- 
 paign. Moreover, Sam Houston, who, in spite of a certain 
 affectation of indifference, was always at heart an annexationist, 
 had been reflected to the presidency of the Texan republic in 
 1841. Mexico herself stimulated the movement when, after 
 six years of inactivity, she suddenly sent a considerable army 
 northward for the reconquest of the lost province, inciting the 
 adventurers of our Southwestern States to shoulder their mus- 
 kets again and march to the defense of their "fellow-citizens" in 
 Texas. Finally, the danger of British intervention in Texas 
 
 1 The behavior of Mexico in regard to these claims shows what kind of gov- 
 ernment we had to deal with in the decade preceding the Mexican War. Al- 
 though the convention was concluded in 1838, more than two years elapsed before 
 Mexico appointed her commissioners, and another two, filled with excuses and 
 evasions, before she agreed to pay the modest sum of $2,000,000 in equal quar- 
 terly installments extending over a space of five years. After the first three in- 
 stallments of $100,000 each, Mexico stopped paying. 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 415 
 
 began to loom large and to arouse all those fears and resent- 
 ments which the American people have been quick to feel 
 whenever the menace of European intervention has appeared 
 on this continent. 
 
 The interest of Great Britain in a free and independent Texas 
 was obvious. She was willing to guarantee Texas a large 
 loan in return for the abolition of slavery in the republic. She 
 was eager to have in Texas a source of supply of cotton and 
 other raw materials for which she could exchange her manu- 
 factures unhampered by the tariff laws of the American Union. 
 Her minister in Mexico was working to effect an arrangement 
 by which the independence of Texas might be acknowledged 
 and hostilities brought to an end. As mediator between Mexico 
 and her revolted province and as guarantor of the independence 
 granted, Great Britain would inevitably have an enormous 
 influence in both countries. The British government protested 
 at every stage in the negotiations over Texas (and doubtless 
 with truth) that her diplomatic conduct was perfectly "cor- 
 rect"; nevertheless, there was a widespread feeling in our 
 country that Great Britain intended to establish a kind of "pro- 
 tectorate" over Texas. And against that the Monroe Doctrine 
 was explicit. 1 
 
 When the two great Whig leaders were removed from public 
 life by the retirement of Clay from the Senate in the spring 
 of 1842 and the resignation of Webster from the c'abinet a year 
 later, Tyler moved directly toward his goal. Upshur of Vir- 
 ginia succeeded to the headship of the Department of State in 
 the autumn of 1843 an d began negotiations with Texas for a 
 treaty of annexation. The Texan government, under the rebuff 
 that it had suffered from the Van Buren administration, had 
 given up the idea of annexation and concluded treaties with 
 France (1839), Holland (1840), Belgium and Great Britain 
 (1842). The latter power was determined that Texas should 
 
 1 For example, the Washington Madisonian (President Tyler's organ) said that 
 if England interfered in Texas, the whole American people "would rise like one 
 vast nest of hornets," and that the Western States " at the call of Captain Tyler 
 would pour their noble sons down the Mississippi valley by millions." 
 
41 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 not be joined to the United States. Brougham made speeches 
 in the House of Lords (August, 1843) denouncing the "hideous 
 crime of breeding negroes," and members of Parliament openly 
 declared that "England must maintain her ascendency in 
 Texas." In the summer of 1843 tne British minister in Mexico 
 succeeded in bringing about a truce between Mexico and Texas, 
 which gave promise of the recognition of the independence of 
 the latter if she would not ally herself with the United States. 
 Furthermore, the antislavery forces were aroused by the re- 
 newal of the attempt at annexation. John Quincy Adams and 
 twelve of his associates in the House issued a defiant address 
 in March, 1843, charging that the American settlements had 
 been made in Texas, the revolt from Mexico instigated, and the 
 efforts of Mexico to regain Texas prevented, solely in order 
 that "the undue ascendency of the slave power should be 
 secured and riveted beyond all redemption," and that there 
 was no obligation on the part of the states of the Union to ac- 
 quiesce in a treaty of annexation since such a treaty could not 
 be made "under the Constitution." Annexation, said other 
 warning voices at the North, would lead to war with Mexico, 1 
 would increase the power of the South, would whet a desire to 
 acquire Mexico and Canada, would saddle us with a large Texan 
 debt, and would enrich the speculators in Texan lands. "It is 
 the contemptible scheme of a poor miserable traitor tempora- 
 rily acting as" President," said a Boston paper. John Greenleaf 
 Whittier rang the tocsin for the country in danger : 
 
 Up the hillside, down the glen, 
 Rouse the sleeping citizen, 
 Summon out the might of men. 
 
 But not all the men of the North felt like Adams and Whit- 
 tier. Secretary Upshur appealed to the manufacturer and the 
 
 J In the autumn of 1842 our Commodore Jones on the Pacific coast, acting on 
 a rumor that war had actually broken out between the United States and Mex- 
 ico, sailed into the Californian harbor of Monterey, occupied the town, and ran 
 up the American flag on the government building. As soon as he learned of the 
 falseness of the rumor he retired, and apologies were made. But the incident 
 gave color to the charge that we were anxious for war. 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 417 
 
 merchant by insisting on the advantages which would ac- 
 crue from annexation: cheaper cotton, new harbors, enlarged 
 markets. Our exports to Texas had shrunk since 1839 from 
 $1,687,082 to $190,604. From an economic point of view, at 
 least, the new republic was fast becoming a British protectorate. 
 If the establishment of a free Texas under English auspices 
 would endanger the South by furnishing a refuge for fugitive 
 slaves or a base for abolitionist raids, it would also menace the 
 protective system of the North by offering an opportunity for 
 smuggling millions of dollars' worth of British manufactures 
 across the borders, where little respect for tariff laws existed. 
 When Upshur met his tragic death, in February, 1844, by 
 the explosion of a new gun on the ship of war Princeton, his 
 work was continued by his successor in the State Department, 
 John C. Calhoun, an even more ardent annexationist. Calhoun 
 was ambitious for the presidency, and this seemed to be his 
 chance. He was not embarrassed, like Tyler, with past Whig 
 connections. He did not have to reconcile a Southern policy 
 with Northern antislavery feeling, like the New Yorker Van 
 Buren. He was an avowed slavery champion and expansionist. 
 He used boldness and even disingenuous audacity to compass 
 his end. When Lord Aberdeen wrote a letter to Pakenham, 
 the British minister in Washington, which only repeated the 
 expressions of England's interest in emancipation in Texas, as 
 in the whole world, Calhoun represented it as a new and dan- 
 gerous attack of Great Britain on the "peculiar institution" 
 of the South; and, in spite of Aberdeen's explicit denial of 
 any intent to "disturb their [Texas's] internal tranquillity or 
 thereby to affect the prosperity of the American Union," Cal- 
 houn declared that if we did not take Texas, England would. 
 Texas having been assured (by Calhoun's agent) that no 
 harm would come to her if she entered upon negotiations, the 
 treaty was signed on April 12, 1844. It provided that Texas 
 should become a territory of the Union, that she should sur- 
 render, her public lands, and that the American government 
 should assume her debt up to $10,000,000. On April 22 John 
 Quincy Adams wrote in his "Diary," "The treaty for the annex- 
 
418 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ation of Texas to the Union was this day sent to the Senate, 
 and with it went the freedom of the human race." 
 
 The presidential campaign of 1844 was approaching. A few 
 days after Adams's obituary on the freedom of the human race 
 Henry Clay, already assured of the Whig nomination, published 
 his famous "Raleigh letter" in a Washington paper, in which 
 he said that the annexation of Texas would be tantamount to 
 a declaration of war on Mexico and an act transcending the 
 power of the executive. He regarded the project as a revengeful 
 move on Tyler's part to disrupt the Whig party. It was, he 
 said, "dangerous to the Union, inexpedient in the present finan- 
 cial condition of the country, and not called for by any general 
 expression of opinion." On the evening of the same day a 
 letter from Van Buren, the most likely nominee of the Demo- 
 crats, appeared in another Washington paper, disapproving 
 annexation, but in more guarded terms. Clay was unanimously 
 nominated by the Whigs at Baltimore (May i), and the plat- 
 form of the convention, by his request, was silent on the subject 
 of Texas. In the Democratic convention, held in the same city 
 (May 27), Van Buren led on the first ballot, but failed to get 
 the two-thirds vote necessary to nominate. The friends of 
 annexation, who could not stake the success of the Democratic 
 party on the purely sectional candidate Calhoun, finally united 
 on James K. Polk of Tennessee, a "dark horse," who first 
 figured with 44 votes on the eighth ballot, and on the ninth 
 carried every delegation of the convention in a veritable stam- 
 pede. Polk was a conscientious, diligent man of moderate 
 ability, somewhat slow and inelastic in mind, often confusing 
 insistence on a detail with fidelity to a principle. His ambition 
 in 1844 was limited to a nomination for the vice presidency. 
 He had served inconspicuously as Speaker of the House, and 
 one term as governor of Tennessee, having been defeated in 
 his two succeeding campaigns for the latter office. As a warm 
 friend and political protege of Jackson's he could command the 
 support of that large section of the Democratic party, both 
 North and South, for whom the old hero was still an oracle ; 
 and as an ardent annexationist he could satisfy those Southern 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 419 
 
 interests which were looking to Jackson's old rival Calhoun. 
 The platform on which Polk ran declared for "the reoccu- 
 pation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at the earliest 
 practicable period" as "great American measures." 1 
 
 Early in June, Calhoun's treaty of annexation was defeated 
 in the Senate by 16 yeas to 35 nays. This crushing defeat of a 
 treaty for which both Upshur and Calhoun had confidently 
 claimed a two-thirds majority was due to a combination of 
 reasons, in which real opposition to the acquisition of Texas 
 probably played a small part. Some of the potent factors were 
 fidelity to Clay in his "Raleigh letter"; fear of precipitating 
 war with Mexico; unwillingness to enrich the speculators in 
 Texas land scrip ; reluctance to rousing another Missouri ques- 
 tion ; and hostility to Calhoun for his high-handed conduct of 
 the negotiations, his manifest bid for the presidency, his disin- 
 genuous use of the Pakenham correspondence, and his commit- 
 ment of the government to a military and naval protection of 
 Texas pending the discussions. 
 
 The defeat of the treaty brought the Texas issue before the 
 people at the polls in November. When Clay found himself 
 opposed to Polk, an avowed annexationist, instead of to Van 
 Buren, as he had expected, he was embarrassed by the "Raleigh 
 letter" and wrote other letters to the effect that he "would be 
 glad to see Texas admitted on fair terms," and that "slavery 
 ought not to affect the question one way or the other." This 
 blowing hot and cold, to win both North and South, disgusted 
 the antislavery Whig leaders, like Seward, Corwin, Fillmore, and 
 Webster. It put them on the defensive to "explain" their can- 
 didate's position and convinced them that Clay lacked moral 
 conviction on the subject. Enough Whigs in Michigan and New 
 York cast their ballots for the abolitionist candidate, Birney, 
 to throw those states into the Polk column. At the same time, 
 
 1 On the same day as the Democratic convention a large body of delegates met 
 in Baltimore and renominated Tyler for the presidency. But the Tyler ticket 
 had no strength. On the assurance from Jackson and other leaders of the party 
 that he would be received back into the Democratic fold without penalty to his 
 followers, Tyler resigned his candidacy and led his following into the Polk camp. 
 
420 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 however, Clay carried his own state of Kentucky and. his op- 
 ponent's state of Tennessee, both of which on the single issue 
 of annexation would have gone to Polk. And with Michigan 
 and New York in the Clay column and Kentucky and Tennessee 
 in the Polk column, the latter would still have won the election. 
 The Democrats undoubtedly profited by a large number of 
 votes of fraudulently naturalized foreigners in the Middle 
 States, as well as by the clever representation, by party leaders 
 in Pennsylvania, of Polk as a friend of the tariff of 1842. The 
 gallant Clay was thus for a third time defeated for the pres- 
 idency, and, to make the humiliation doubly bitter, by a man 
 almost obscure. The electoral vote was 170 to 105, but Polk's 
 popular majority was less than 40,000. 
 
 In spite of the complexity of issues in the campaign, and in 
 spite of the meager margin in the popular vote, the Democrats 
 declared that the voice of the people had given a clear mandate 
 for annexation. Tyler did not wait for Polk to carry out the 
 mandate. To his last session of Congress, which convened in 
 December, 1844, he announced, with not the strictest regard for 
 truth, that "a large majority of the states had declared for 
 annexation." 1 After a debate extending through the whole ses- 
 sion, both Houses passed a resolution (132 to 76 in the House, 
 27 to 25 in the Senate) for the admission of Texas to the Union, 
 on condition that she should frame and submit to Congress a 
 constitution before January i, 1846. Texas was to surrender 
 her public buildings, works of defense, ports and harbors, to 
 the United States, retaining her public lands and her debt. The 
 United States were to assume the controversy over her bound- 
 aries. Four other states might, with her consent, be carved 
 from her territory. Slavery was to be prohibited north of the 
 line 36 30'. 
 
 The resolution was signed by Tyler on March i, and two 
 days later A. J. Donalson, Jackson's nephew, was dispatched to 
 Texas, where he labored with tact and diligence to secure the 
 acceptance of the terms. Great Britain, in a last attempt to 
 
 ir rhe vote by states was actually 15 to n : 8 Southern and 7 Northern states 
 for Polk, and 5 Southern and 6 Northern states for Clay. 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 421 
 
 prevent the absorption of Texas into the Union, persuaded 
 Mexico to agree to a treaty (May 19, 1845) recognizing the 
 independence of Texas if she would remain a separate republic. 
 But the Texan Senate, convinced by Donalson's assurances of 
 our good will, unanimously rejected the Mexican offer. On 
 July 4, 1845, a convention of Texan delegates adopted by a 
 unanimous vote a constitution accepting annexation to the 
 United States, and the people of Texas ratified the constitution 
 in October with only 44 dissenting voices. Congress received 
 the new state by a large majority in both Houses, President 
 Polk signed the act of admission (December 29, 1845), an ^ the 
 laws of the Union were formally extended over the land beyond 
 the Sabine. On a February day of 1846 the blue flag of Texas, 
 with its lone white star the emblem of the republic which for 
 ten years had lived its precarious life of poverty, intrigue, and 
 war was hauled down, and in its place were raised the Stars 
 and Stripes. 
 
 THE MEXICAN WAR 
 
 The annexation of Texas was one of the most fateful events 
 .in our history. It was the first link in a chain of consequences 
 which ended in secession and civil war. For it precipitated a 
 struggle with Mexico, which brought us new Western territory, 
 in which was established a new principle for the control of 
 slavery, which was the pretext for the repeal of the Missouri 
 Compromise, which roused the North to form the Republican 
 party, whose election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency 
 drove the South to secede and make the appeal to arms. The 
 historian, looking back through the refracting medium of an 
 atmosphere clouded with the sectional strife of a score of years, 
 from the annexation of Texas to the surrender of Lee at 
 Appomattox, is tempted to see in the annexation policy only a 
 deliberate provocation of the strife, "a dark-lantern con- 
 spiracy," "a diabolical plot," to get "bigger pens to cram with 
 slaves." But this judgment is not fair to the facts in the case. 
 Texas was annexed by majorities in both Houses of Congress, 
 after an enormous amount of discussion and argument and after 
 
422 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a national election favorable to a candidate who ran on a plat- 
 form calling for annexation as a "great American measure." 
 Moreover, great as the interest of the slaveholders might be in 
 the project, the general sentiment in favor of territorial expan- 
 sion was greater. That we should carry our boundary to the 
 Rio Grande, and so regain the region " ceded" to Spain by the 
 treaty of 181-9; that we should extend our protection over our 
 " fellow-citizens" in Texas; that we should rebuke Mexico for 
 her impudent and impotent defiance; that we should thwart 
 Great Britain's designs to dictate the policy of a country on our 
 borders, all these were powerful motives with thousands of 
 voters who had no wish to extend the limits of slave soil. A few 
 prophetic souls might foresee the consequences and heed James 
 Russell Lowell's warning that "they enslave their children's 
 children who make compromise with sin," but the majority were 
 ready to take possession of Texas and leave the reckoning with 
 slavery to the future. 
 
 In the summer of 1843 the Mexican government had an- 
 nounced to our minister that it would consider the passage of 
 an act for the incorporation of Texas into the territory of the 
 United States as equivalent to a declaration of war against the 
 Mexican Republic. But this was a dog-in-the-manger policy. 
 The Mexican Minister of War himself confessed in 1844 that 
 his country had made no serious attempt to subdue Texas after 
 the battle of San Jacinto. Lord Palmerston characterized 
 Mexico's prospects of regaining the lost province as "visionary," 
 and Lord Ashburton told Clay in 1842 that England would 
 sooner expect to see Texas conquer Mexico than Mexico con- 
 quer Texas. Even Almonte, the Mexican minister at Washing- 
 ton, acknowledged to Upshur in 1844 that his country had no 
 chance of recovering Texas but that it was a "point of honor" 
 with Mexico not to recognize her independence. The point of 
 honor, however, was quickly waived, as we have seen, in the 
 spring of 1,845? when annexation was imminent. The sole aim 
 of Mexico (and Great Britain) in Texas was to keep that state 
 out of the American Union. This is not a justification for our 
 annexation of Texas, but it is a sufficient answer to those his- 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 423 
 
 torians who have shown themselves so tender of Mexico's vio- 
 lated "sovereignty" in the province. 
 
 Furthermore, the unbridled insolence of the Mexican officials 
 and press toward the United States could not but encourage the 
 war spirit in both countries. John Slidell of Louisiana was sent 
 by President Polk in the autumn of 1845 to negotiate with 
 Mexico the adjustment of our claims and of the boundary of 
 Texas. He was authorized to offer Mexico $25,000,000 for 
 California and $5,000,000 for New Mexico, but "at all events,, 
 to take up the matter in a prudent and friendly spirit, and to 
 conciliate the good will of the Mexicans." He was refused an 
 audience by two successive Mexican presidents, who did not 
 dare risk their precarious authority by seeming to make any 
 concessions to the United States or running counter to the 
 blustering war spirit of their countrymen. It is true that Polk 
 wanted Upper California and instructed Slidell to negotiate for 
 its purchase, but only if he could do so "without endangering 
 the restoration of amicable relations with Mexico." The re- 
 proach heaped on Polk that he "drove Mexico into war" is 
 unjust. The United States was not the wolf and Mexico the 
 lamb of La Fontaine's fable. It was Mexico that insisted on 
 war and began the hostilities. The Mexican authorities believed 
 that our army was contemptible and cowardly, that it would fall 
 an easy prey to their own brilliant generals, and that the rapid 
 victory over the "bullies of the North" would confirm their 
 own dictatorship over the Mexican people. When Polk was 
 denounced in the United States (as he has been ever since) for 
 forcing a war on Mexico, he was being reviled by the Mexicans 
 for trying to force peace upon them ! Santa Anna himself con- 
 fessed openly in 1847 tnat "the Mexicans desired the war." 
 Of course it is an easy solution to sneer at all of Folk's efforts at 
 peace as camouflage and to cry with Alexander Stephens of 
 Georgia, "Polk the Mendacious!" But another Georgian, 
 Robert Toombs, said, "Polk never desired any war but war on 
 the Whigs." "It is hard to think of any rational method to 
 conciliate Mexico," says Justin H. Smith, "that Polk did not 
 put into operation." 
 
424 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Having annexed Texas, it was our duty to protect her soil. 
 Mexican troops were grouped at Matamoras, on the southern 
 bank of the Rio Grande. The horrors of the Alamo and 
 Goliad might be repeated. General Zachary Taylor, in com- 
 mand of about 2000 regular troops in the Southwest, had been 
 ordered to proceed into Texas in the summer of 1845 an d had 
 established his camp near Corpus Christi, on the Nueces River. 
 When word came, early in 1846, that the Mexican government 
 would not receive Slidell, Polk ordered Taylor to advance to 
 the Rio Grande. Here Taylor erected a fort opposite Mat- 
 amoras as a warning to the Mexicans not to cross the river, 
 which Texas claimed as her boundary line. Taylor offered to 
 keep the river open if the Mexican commander Ampudia would 
 promise to refrain from hostilities, but the offer was refused. 
 Instead, Ampudia ordered Taylor to return to the Nueces 
 within twenty-four hours. 1 On April 24, 1846, the Mexicans 
 crossed the river and captured a reconnoitering party of about 
 60 dragoons under Captain Thornton. When Taylor with- 
 drew to Point Isabel to protect his base of supplies and receive 
 reinforcements sent from New Orleans, the Mexicans crossed 
 the river in force. Taylor met them at Palo Alto, about ten 
 miles north of the Rio Grande, on May 8, and inflicted a severe 
 defeat on them. The next day he drove them from the wooded 
 ravine of Resaca de la Palma back to the south side of the 
 river. On the eighteenth he occupied the town of Matamoras, 
 and the invasion of Mexico was begun. 
 
 Meantime President Polk, whose purpose was to "pursue a 
 bold and firm course" toward Mexico and to "conquer a 
 peace" by waging war with the sword in one hand and the olive 
 branch in the other, was maturing his plans in Washington. On 
 the very day that the battle of Palo Alto was fought, Slidell, 
 returned from his fruitless mission, called at the White House. 
 The next day news arrived, after the adjournment of the cabinet 
 
 ^^As Mexico claimed the whole of Texas, Taylor's presence on the Nueces with 
 an army was, of course, as much an "invasion" of Mexican territory as was his 
 presence on the Rio Grande. 
 
THE MEXICAN WAR AND THE MEXICAN CESSION 
 
426 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 meeting, of the attack on Captain Thornton. Polk reassembled 
 the cabinet in the evening, and with their unanimous consent 
 decided to send a war message to Congress. "After reiterated 
 menaces," said the message, " Mexico has passed the boundary 
 of the United States and has shed American blood on American 
 soil. . . . War exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to 
 avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself." The President 
 called for volunteers to serve for not less than six or twelve 
 months. In spite of some opposition by the Whigs, a bill to 
 raise 50,000 troops and $10,000,000 was passed through the 
 House by a vote of 174 to 14, and the Senate by a vote of 40 
 to 2. On May 13 Polk signed the bill, and the gates of war were 
 opened. Except for New England, where the abolitionist spirit 
 was most strong, the country responded with enthusiasm to the 
 call for troops. Soon 23,000 volunteers from the Western and 
 Southern states were in arms. The cry was, "Ho for the halls 
 of the Montezumas ! " 
 
 The plan of the administration was to take possession of 
 New Mexico, Upper California, and the northern provinces of 
 Mexico in all of which distant regions the authority of the 
 Mexican government was weak and, holding these regions in 
 pawn, force Mexico to the terms which we had been unable to 
 get by negotiation. The "conquest" of this vast territory in 
 the summer and autumn months of 1846 offered little difficulty 
 beyond the resistance of mountain and desert. Colonel S. W. 
 Kearny set out from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, near the end 
 of June, and in August entered Santa Fe with about 18,000 men, 
 a Mexican force of 4000 retreating before him without a fight. 
 Raising the American flag, he declared the territory of New 
 Mexico "incorporated in the United States" and absolved the 
 inhabitants from their allegiance to Mexico. A few days later 
 he published a code of laws for the territory, providing for a 
 general assembly to meet the first of August. He then set out, 
 by way of the Rio Grande and Gila valleys, for California with 
 but 300 dragoons, having detached Colonel Doniphan with 
 850 men to join General Wool at the Mexican town of Chi- 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 427 
 
 huahua. 1 When Kearny was eleven days out of Santa Fe he 
 met the scout Kit Carson coming eastward, who told him that 
 California was conquered by American arms. Continuing with 
 100 dragoons, Kearny reached the California frontier at the 
 beginning of December and, after some skirmishes with the 
 natives at San Pascual, entered San Diego. 
 
 The year had been filled with exciting events in California. 
 That magnificent but neglected land lay open like a prize to 
 the first power that should take it. Mexican authority there was 
 only "a shadow." The province, according to a Mexican offi- 
 cial, "had been forgotten for more than 20 years." The white 
 inhabitants were ready to shake off their allegiance to Mexico, 
 "not caring," as an American traveler observed, "what flag they 
 exchanged for their own." An attache of the French legation 
 in Mexico had suggested a French protectorate over California. 
 The London Times was urging the British government to oc- 
 cupy the province. But no power seemed willing itself to take 
 California or to let any other power take it. Much as Polk 
 wanted Upper California, he wrote to Larkin, our confidential 
 agent at Monterey, that "the President would make no effort 
 and use no influence to induce California to become one of the 
 free and independent states of this Union" unless the people 
 of California should desire it and it could be done "without 
 affording Mexico just cause of complaint" (October, 1845). 
 Some time earlier Commodore Sloat, in command of our naval 
 forces on the Pacific coast, had been ordered to be "assiduously 
 careful not to commit any act of aggression," but to seize San 
 Francisco if he should learn "with certainty beyond a doubt" 
 that Mexico had declared war. Sloat got news of the battles 
 on the Rio Grande at the end of May, 1846, and after long 
 
 1 Wool, who had marched from San Antonio, Texas, to occupy Chihuahua, 
 changed his plans for a variety of reasons, political and strategic, and joined 
 Taylor's army of occupation at Saltillo. Doniphan, ignorant of Wool's move- 
 ment, proceeded to Chihuahua by way of El Paso, fighting now and then, and 
 finally, after a march of a thousand miles, found Wool at Saltillo. All this tedi- 
 ous marching of Wool and Doniphan had little direct bearing on the fortunes of 
 the war, except to demonstrate the courage and endurance of the American soldier. 
 
428 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 hesitation (for which he was later superseded in his com- 
 mand by Commodore R. F. Stockton) sailed into the harbor 
 of Monterey and raised the American flag a second time above 
 the town (July 7, 1846). 
 
 The Stars and Stripes had floated for only twelve days over 
 Monterey when a band of 160 men, "with gaunt bodies, frames 
 of steel, shaggy beards, and an air of indescribable courage," 
 rode into the town. They were American pioneers, and at their 
 head was Captain John C. Fremont, topographical engineer 
 and explorer in the service of the United States. Fremont was 
 making the third of those extended expeditions between the 
 Missouri River and the Pacific coast which earned for him the 
 title of "the Pathfinder." The prospect of war with Mexico 
 and the caution of his superior at Washington, far from deter- 
 ring him from his journey, only made the deep-set eyes beneath 
 his high narrow forehead and shock of inky black hair burn 
 brighter with the fire of adventure. When he entered California, 
 early in 1846, with an armed band, he was warned by Governor 
 Castro to leave the province. Instead, he built a fort and 
 awaited the Californians' attack in vain. He then proceeded 
 to the border of Oregon, where he was overtaken by Lieutenant 
 Gillespie, under government orders, and persuaded to return 
 to the Sacramento valley. While he was encamped here some 
 of his men joined a party of American settlers under William 
 B. Ide in seizing the town of Sonoma and proclaiming the 
 Republic of California under the famous "Bear Flag." 1 On 
 the appeal of the insurgents Fremont put himself at the head 
 of the Bear Flag movement, and was preparing to resist in arms 
 the force which Castro had dispatched for the recapture of 
 Sonoma, when the news came of Sloat's seizure of Monterey. 
 The bear then came down, and the Stars and Stripes were raised 
 in his place. Fremont, now transformed from the explorer into 
 the soldier, joined Stockton in the conquest of the southern part 
 
 x The flag consisted of a piece of white cotton, to the bottom of which was 
 sewed a strip of red flannel. In the upper left-hand corner of the white was 
 painted a red star, and to the right of it an "impressionistic" bear. Under the 
 star and bear were the words " California Republic." 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 429 
 
 of Upper California. It was here that Kearny met them, as 
 we have seen, and by his victory at San Pascual helped to secure 
 the conquest. In January, 1847, the California leaders sur- 
 rendered to Fremont,' and the shadowy authority of Mexico in 
 the province came to an end. Fremont, encouraged doubtless 
 by his strenuous father-in-law, Senator Ben ton, intended to 
 organize California as a territory of the United States and 
 assume the governorship himself. But Kearny, with positive 
 orders from President Polk to hold the province under military 
 rule, vindicated his authority after an unseemly quarrel with 
 Fremont and Stockton which resulted in Fremont's court- 
 martial and dismissal from the service. The President remitted 
 the sentence, but Fremont resigned. 
 
 Meanwhile Taylor had strengthened his hold on the northern 
 provinces of Mexico. In September, 1846, he seized the im- 
 portant town of Monterey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, after a 
 fierce three days' battle which ended in a fight from house to 
 house through the streets of the town. In the next few months he 
 occupied Saltillo and Victoria, the capitals of the two provinces 
 flanking Nuevo Leon. At the beginning of the new year he ^ 
 held a line of 200 miles in northern Mexico with 10,000 troops. 
 Brave in battle and the idol of his men for his "rough and 
 ready" democracy, Taylor was -nevertheless lacking in many 
 of the qualities of a great commander. He_was often careless in 
 his strategy, reckless in his tactics, and defiant to the point 
 of insubordination in his treatment of orders from the War 
 Department. Against any other opponent than the cowardly 
 Ampudia his operations at Monterey, said the best military 
 critics, would have resulted in disaster. The victories of 1846 
 on the Rio Grande and in the Mexican provinces encouraged him 
 to listen with increasing attentiveness to the suggestions of the 
 Whig politicians that he would be a strong candidate at the next 
 presidential election. And when, in November, 1846, the ad- 
 ministration, against his advice, decided on a direct march on 
 Mexico City by way of Vera Cruz and selected General Win- 
 field Scott for the command, Taylor was provoked into a violent 
 attack on Scott and the War Department. He had been de- 
 
430 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 prived of half his troops and left with only a few thousand "raw 
 recruits/' Scott had acted in "a most contemptible manner" 
 behind his back to supplant him in command and "sacrifice" 
 him on the soil of Mexico. The adminfstration had slighted 
 him in order to kill his chances for the presidency. On 
 January 26, 1847, Taylor wrote to his friend Crittenden, the 
 Whig senator from Kentucky, announcing his candidacy for 
 the presidential nomination. 
 
 The reason for the projected campaign against the Mexican 
 capital was the conviction in the mind of Polk that only a bold 
 stroke at the heart of the country would bring Mexico to terms. 
 Repeated attempts at negotiation had failed. In spite of the 
 rejection of Slidell, Polk had again approached the Mexican 
 authorities after the battles on the Rio Grande, thinking that 
 Taylor's victories might have inclined their hearts to peace. 
 But disaster at a distance had little effect on the factional chiefs 
 who were struggling for the control of the treasury at Mexico 
 City and whose most effective stock in trade was fervid rhetor- 
 ical denunciation of the "cowardly adventurers" and "rapa- 
 cious invaders" from the" Republic of the- North. Buchanan's 
 notes were treated more like the supplications of a discouraged 
 foe than the conciliatory advances of a victor. We even fished 
 in the turbid waters of Mexican politics in the hope of landing 
 the prize of peace. Santa Anna had been driven out of Mexico 
 in 1845. When he promised from his exile in Cuba that he 
 would negotiate terms with the United States on the basis of 
 the Rio Grande boundary and the cession of Upper California, 
 Polk ordered Commodore Connor, our commander in the Gulf, 
 to let him pass through the blockading squadron. Santa Anna 
 landed at Vera Cruz in August, 1846, and soon got back his 
 power in the distracted republic. But he found the war spirit 
 so strong that he renounced the unpopular and uncongenial 
 task of attempting to close the gates of the Temple of Janus. 
 Instead, he put himself at the head of the war party, made 
 frenzied appeals for a supreme effort of patriotism, and raised 
 the best and largest army that Mexico had in the war the 
 "Army of Liberation." "Every day that passes without fighting 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 431 
 
 at the North," he cried, "is a century of disgrace for Mexico." 
 Early in January, 1847, an intercepted letter from Scott to 
 Taylor revealed to Santa Anna the plans of the Vera Cruz 
 expedition. Knowing that Taylor's forces were greatly reduced, 
 Santa Anna determined to drive him across the Rio Grande 
 before Scott could strike at the heart of Mexico. As Santa Anna 
 moved northward with his formidable army of 20,000 men, 
 Taylor concentrated his "raw recruits" to secure the defenses of 
 Saltillo, leaving General Wool to select a place for the stand 
 against the approaching host. Wool chose a magnificent defen- 
 sive position at the ranch of Buena Vista a veritable Pass of 
 Thermopylae. And here, on the twenty-second of February, with 
 the watchword "Honor of Washington" passing down the Amer- 
 ican line, the operations began. Santa Anna's superior force 
 enabled him to gain strong positions on the heights flanking the 
 American army. The situation was one of utmost danger to 
 our troops when the main battle began at dawn of the next day. 
 The Mexicans, certain of victory, fought with all the impetu- 
 ousness that exaltation lends to courage. Again and again it 
 seemed as if the American army of less than 5000 men must 
 be swept off the field. Indeed, the first reports of the battle 
 that reached Washington were that our army was routed. But 
 Taylor, arriving on the scene from Saltillo about the middle of 
 the morning, was worth the reenforcement of thousands of 
 troops. Intrepid and imperturbable, he sat in his saddle on the 
 back of "Old Whitey," directing the battle, while our soldiers 
 cheered him and fought like demons. Bragg, Sherman, Rey- 
 nolds, Davis, Thomas (names to be illustrious in our Civil 
 War77~with Wool, Hardin, and McKee, performed miracles. 
 Finally the superiority of our artillery fire prevailed against the 
 masses of the Mexican infantry. At nightfall Santa Anna's 
 army withdrew, leaving their pickets and camp fires to indicate 
 that they would renew the battle on the morrow. But when 
 morning came the exhausted Americans, springing to their guns, 
 saw the backs of their retreating foes. Taylor and Wool fell 
 weeping into each other's arms. It was a glorious victory in 
 the face of tremendous odds, against the largest army that 
 
432 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 / American troops had ever met. And it made Zachary Taylor 
 the next president of the United States. 
 
 Meanwhile Scott's troops were being conveyed down the 
 stormy waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the 
 Rio Grande to a point near Vera Cruz. They landed on 
 March g } and twenty days later took the city. Then began the 
 romantic march up through the mountains to the city of Mexico. 
 Scott appealed, not without success, to the civilian population 
 to remain quietly in their homes. The American army, he said, 
 had come to deliver them from the misrule of the unscrupulous 
 politicians who had brought on the war. Toward the people 
 of Mexico it had only the most friendly disposition. It would 
 respect persons and property and pay liberally for all supplies 
 furnished. A Mexican force of 13,000 men under Santa Anna 
 was posted on the heights of Cerro Gordo, commanding the 
 high road. Scott's 9000 drove them in utter rout in a two days' 
 battle (April 17-18), capturing 3000 prisoners. After that the 
 prestige of the Americans was so great that they were opposed 
 only here and there by guerrilla bands, while the people of the 
 towns generally welcomed them with good-natured curiosity 
 and the hopes of unwonted profits. In August, Scott reached 
 the outskirts of the capital, and after the victories of Contreras 
 and Churubusco against the troops which the quarreling factions 
 of politicians had, with the last shame of desperation, put into 
 the field, was within four or five miles of the gates of the city. 
 
 Here Scott paused to conclude an armistice with the Mexican 
 commander while another attempt at negotiation was made. 
 Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the Department of State, had 
 arrived at Scott's headquarters in May, instructed by the 
 President "to enter into arrangements with the government of 
 Mexico for the suspension of hostilities." Scott at first resented 
 this invasion of his military authority and charged it to the 
 President's willingness to embarrass his Whig generals. For 
 some days he and the commissioner were not on speaking terms. 
 But Scott was a kindly, generous man, without guile ; and Trist 
 was tactful and courteous. Before the end of June the two were 
 the best of friends. Trist had considerable latitude in his in- 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 433 
 
 structions in regard to the compensation which he might offer 
 Mexico, but he was to insist on our. retention of Texas, New 
 Mexico, and California. When the Mexican counterproposals 
 refused to cede us any part of New Mexico or California, set 
 the boundary of Texas at the Nueces, and demanded that we 
 pay the cost of the war and recompense the Mexicans for their 
 "ruined fortunes," terms that a conqueror might have im- 
 posed, there was no way left but to prosecute the war to an 
 end. Santa Anna broke the armistice by strengthening the de- 
 fenses of the city and cutting off American supplies. Then Scott 
 closed in upon him. On September 8 he drove the Mexicans 
 from Molino del Rey, and five days later stormed the high rock 
 fort of Chapul tepee. The Mexican troops in the city fled to 
 Guadalupe-Hidalgo as the city council sent offers of capitulation 
 to the American headquarters. At dawn of September 14 our 
 troops, " decorated with mud, the red stains of battle, and rough 
 bandages," entered the gates. Marching to the Plaza between 
 " sidewalks, windows, balconies, and housetops crowded with 
 people," they raised a battle-torn American flag above the pal- 
 ace, while General Scott strode up the stairway of the " Halls 
 of the Montezumas" to write the dispatch of victory. 
 
 The fall of the capital eliminated Santa Anna (the curse of 
 Mexico for a score of years) and brought to power a gov- 
 ernment desirous of peace. Trist had already been recalled 
 by an administration determined at last to deal harshly with 
 Mexico. But he stayed, counter to his orders, and made peace 
 with Mexican commissioners at Guadalupe-Hidalgo on the basis 
 of his former instructions. Mexico acknowledged our title to 
 Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, and in return we 
 paid Mexico $15,000,000 and assumed claims of our citizens 
 agamsfthe Mexican government up to $3,250,000. Some mem- 
 bers of the cabinet, including Secretary of State Buchanan, 
 were in favor of taking a part of Mexico itself, but Polk held 
 firmly io the line of the Rio Grande. In the Senate the treaty 
 of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was opposed by those who wanted no 
 territory, those who wanted more territory, and those who were 
 chagrined that Polk should finish up his program so success- 
 
434 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 fully at the opening of a presidential year. Nevertheless, the 
 treaty was ratified on March 10, 1848, by the narrow margin 
 of 38 to 14. A change of four votes would have defeated it. 
 The Mexican War has been generally condemned by our 
 historians as a blot on the honor of the country a war pro- 
 moted by the slavery interests, precipitated by an aggres- 
 sive president, and prosecuted with a conqueror's ruthlessness. 
 But this persistent attitude seems to rest rather on prejudices 
 derived from the political situation of the time than on a dis- 
 passionate judgment of the documents. The abolitionists car- 
 ried over their indignation at the annexation of Texas into a 
 denunciation of every move of the United States in the war, 
 and even into a mawkish approbation of Mexico's "virtue, 
 courage, and fortitude under the most disastrous circumstances." 
 Lowell's immortal "Biglow Papers" not only ridiculed our army 
 and counseled resistance to enlistment but even contemplated 
 disunion with apparent equanimity. The expansionist senti- 
 ment was "half of it ignorance and t'other half rum"; its 
 object, only "bigger pens to cram with slaves." 
 
 They jest want this Californy 
 So's to lug new slave states in 
 
 was Lowell's interpretation ; but the fact was that when Cali- 
 fornia framed her constitution in 1849 not a single delegate 
 voted for slavery, and there never was a moment of danger that 
 California would enter the Union as a slave state. 
 
 Whig orators in Congress hoped that the Mexicans would 
 welcome our soldiers to "hospitable graves." Whig newspapers 
 declared that "every heart worthy of American liberty had 
 an impulse to join the Mexicans," and that it would be "a 
 joy to hear that the hordes under Scott and Taylor were 
 every man of them swept into the next world." Although Con- 
 gress had sanctioned our occupation of the region beyond the 
 Nueces by the establishment of customs laws there and had 
 supported the President's war message in both Houses by tre- 
 mendous majorities, Webster had the effrontery, in a speech in 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 435 
 
 Faneuil Hall in Boston, to threaten Polk with impeachment 
 for involving the country in war without the consent of Con- 
 gress. The truth is that all the denunciation of the war that 
 was not honest abolitionisll)pposition was J^E^^ntTcsT And 
 the only comment necessary on the honesty of the Whig's 
 "pacifism" is that they exploited the most popular of the 
 victorious generals of the war in their presidential campaign 
 of 1848. They pretended that they did not want the United 
 States to beat Mexico, but what they really meant was that 
 they did not want Polk's administration to beat Mexico. 
 "Clay, Webster, and the other Whigs," wrote Markoe from 
 Vera Cruz, "have by their speeches done more to prevent peace 
 than as though they had arrayed 10,000 Mexicans against 
 Scott." "Mexican Whigs" was the not inappropriate epithet 
 bestowed upon them. 1 
 
 To contend that the Mexican War was not dishonorable, 
 however, is not to deny that it was unfortunate. It is possible 
 that a man of greater tact and patience than Polk in the White 
 House could have kept the sentiment of expansion within the 
 bounds of peace. It is possible that the vicissitudes of Mexican 
 politics might have brought into power an administration from 
 which we could have got by purchase what we took by arms. 
 It is possible that more friendly relations with Great Britain 
 would have removed what we believed to be a necessity for 
 acting promptly and decisively. But all these are only pos- 
 sibilities. What is certain is that no great part of the American 
 people realized at the time that the prize of the Western lands 
 over which their explorers and pathfinders had marched, and 
 which beckoned with the promise of a new empire for democ- 
 racy, would turn to ashes in the acquisition. The one and only 
 recompense of war is that it unites a people more firmly in 
 
 1 Justin H. Smith, in his exhaustive and judicious volumes on "The War with 
 Mexico," sums up the behavior of the Whigs in a single pithy sentence : " They 
 denounced the war enough to incriminate themselves when they supported it, 
 and they supported it enough to stultify themselves when they condemned it" 
 (Vol. II, p. 283). 
 
436 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 devotion to the highest national ideals. But the Mexican War 
 was the harbinger of naught but strife and discord. 1 
 
 The platform on which Polk was elected in 1844 called for 
 the " reoccupation " of Oregon as well as the "reannexation" 
 of Texas. Oregon (see map, p. 319) comprised the vast ter- 
 ritory west of the Rocky Mountains between the parallels of 
 42 (Spain's northern boundary by the treaty of 1819) and 54 
 40' (Russia's southern boundary by the treaty of 1824). Since 
 1818 it had been held in joint occupation with Great Britain, 
 the renewal of the agreement in 1827 giving either party the 
 right to terminate it on a year's notice to the other. Both the 
 United States and Great Britain had claims to Oregon reaching 
 back to the eighteenth century. In 1792 Captain Gray of Boston 
 had sailed into the mouth of the river which he named, after 
 his ship, the "Columbia." Lewis and Clark had traversed the 
 Oregon region, wintering on the Pacific coast in 1805. Six 
 years later John Jacob Astor had established the fur post of 
 Astoria. The British had secured trading-rights on the Oregon 
 coast from Spain, in the Nootka Sound convention of 1790, 
 and the Hudson's Bay Company had extended its fortified 
 posts down into the Columbia valley. We took little inter- 
 est in the distant region of Oregon until the missionaries, fol- 
 lowing in the track of the explorers and the fur-traders, in 
 the early thirties began to appeal to the East for support. 
 A few enthusiasts like Nathaniel Wyeth, the Lee brothers, 
 and Marcus Whitman 2 started a publicity campaign to secure 
 immigration to the region. But the response was slow. By the 
 end of 1841 not more than 500 American settlers had gone to 
 the Oregon country. 
 
 1 William H. Seward prophesied of the whole annexation policy that it would 
 give to the slave interests " a fearful preponderance which may and probably will 
 be speedily followed by demands to which the democratic, free labor states can- 
 not yield ; and the denial of which will be made the ground of secession, nullifi- 
 cation, and disunion." 
 
 2 Until it was exposed in 1900 by Professor E. G. Bourne, in the American 
 Historical Review (Vol. VI, pp. 276-300), the legend of Marcus Whitman was a 
 firm and cherished tradition of American history. According to that legend, 
 Whitman, hearing at a dinner at one of the fur posts of the intention of the 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 437 
 
 The wave of expansionist sentiment which brought Texas 
 into the Union stimulated migration to Oregon. Senators 
 Benton and Linn of Missouri were especially active to secure 
 legislation to encourage the settlement of the Far Northwest. 
 Linn's bill providing for a line of forts from the Missouri River 
 to the best pass over the Rockies, and the grant of a section 
 of land to each immigrant over eighteen years of age, went 
 through the Senate in February, 1843. Although it failed in 
 the House, the discussion that it raised and the expectation of 
 its becoming a law started a large emigration to Oregon. In 
 June, for example, a caravan of nearly 900 settlers, in 200 
 wagons, with 1300 head of cattle, started on a successful jour- 
 ney across the Rockies. Other parties followed, swelling the 
 immigrants to several thousands. The settlers in Oregon had 
 already begun to take measures for their .political protection. 
 Organizing a provisional government, they petitioned Con- 
 gress to extend the laws of the United States over their region. 
 Enthusiastic conventions in the Middle States demanded that 
 we should assert the Monroe Doctrine against Great Britain, 
 build forts from the Missouri to the Pacific, and take possession 
 of the whole of Oregon up to the boundary of Alaska (54 40'). 
 "Fifty-four forty or fight!" the slogan. 
 
 This demand of the enthusiasts for "all of Oregon or none" 
 had no sound basis. We had, since 1824, repeatedly discussed 
 with Great Britain the division of the territory and had always 
 professed ourselves satisfied with the extension of the line of 
 49 to the Pacific. Great Britain, however, insisted on the 
 Columbia as her southern boundary, with the free navigation 
 of the river for both countries. Even as late as July, 1845 
 (after having asserted in his inaugural address of March 4 that 
 "our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestion- 
 
 British to occupy the region of Oregon south of the Columbia, mounted his horse 
 and made a midwinter ride of 4000 miles across the continent to implore Tyler 
 and Webster in the White House to "save Oregon." Whitman did cross the con- 
 tinent to get aid for his mission station from the American Board of Foreign 
 Missions in Boston, but he never held the dramatic interview with the President 
 and the Secretary of State in which he implored them not to "sacrifice Oregon 
 for a cod fishery." 
 
438 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 able"), Polk renewed the offer of the line of 49 to the British 
 minister only to be repulsed. In April, 1846, both Houses of 
 Congress by large majorities (142 to 46, and 42 to 10) author- 
 ized Polk to give the year's notice to Great Britain of the 
 termination of the joint agreement of 1827. It was on the day 
 after this vote that Captain Thornton's dragoons were attacked 
 on the Rio Grande (p. 424). The President had no intention, 
 in spite of the campaign bluster of "Fifty-four forty or fight" 
 and his own bold words in the inaugural, of going to war with 
 Great Britain over a few degrees of latitude in Oregon, when a 
 war with Mexico was imminent. He let the British ministry 
 know that a proposal from them would be welcome, and when 
 they sent over the draft of the treaty accepting the line of 49, 
 he accepted it on the advice of the Senate (June 10, I846). 1 
 Benton charged the administration with bullying tactics: 
 the reason why we did not march up to the line 54 40' with 
 the same boldness that we marched down to the Rio Grande 
 was that England was a strong power and Mexico a weak 
 one. And since Benton's day this opinion has been frequently 
 repeated by our historians. 2 The facts, however, do not sup- 
 port it. Polk worked far harder to induce the Mexican govern- 
 ment to agree to a peaceful settlement than he did to conciliate 
 Great Britain. If we did not march up to 54 40' it was cer- 
 tainly partly because we had no shadow of a claim to the 
 
 1 The boundary as provided by the treaty followed the 4Qth parallel westward 
 from the Rockies to Puget Sound, and thence ran through the middle of the chan- 
 nel'to the Pacific. Great Britain was to have the whole of Vancouver Island with 
 the free navigation of the Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company was to receive 
 $650,000. A dispute over the exact location of the boundary through the Sound 
 was referred to the German Emperor for arbitration in 1871 and was decided in 
 favor of our claims. 
 
 2 "With England which was strong we were ready to compound differences; 
 from Mexico which was weak we were disposed to snatch everything" (Wood- 
 row Wilson, "Division and Reunion," p. 149). "Negotiation in the same spirit 
 as that had with Great Britain would undoubtedly have settled the difficulty, but 
 the President arrogated the right of deciding. . . . Mexico was actually goaded 
 into the war" (Rhodes, Vol. I, p. 87). Not to mention extremists like Schouler, 
 who speaks of our "profligate contempt of Mexico's rights of sovereignty" and 
 of our "repeating the story of Pizarro, only with shabbier embellishments" 
 (Vol.V, p. 443). 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 439 
 
 boundary of 54 40'. We had repeatedly offered the line of 49 
 ourselves. If we did not go to war with Great Britain as we 
 did with Mexico it was due partially to the fact that Great 
 Britain was civilized, reliable, and reasonable. She neither 
 rejected our envoys nor insulted our government. On a hint 
 from Washington her ministry sent us a treaty conceding the 
 boundaries which we fairly claimed. While the Mexicans were 
 clamoring for war to drive our armies from a state of our 
 Union, the British were but restraining us from invading a ter- 
 ritory which we had never pretended to occupy. The relative 
 strength of Great Britain and Mexico had nothing to do with 
 the merits of the case. 
 
 The Mexican War had been in progress only three months 
 when President Polk asked Congress (August 3, 1846) for an 
 appropriation of $2,000,000 to help secure our boundary from 
 Mexico. It was certain that a large transfer of territory from 
 Mexico to the United States would be the first condition of 
 peace. Stockton had already raised the American flag over 
 the Californian town of Monterey ; Kearny was but a few days' 
 march from Santa Fe in New Mexico (see page 426). The ad- 
 vocates of the restriction of slavery got David Wilmot, a Demo- 
 cratic congressman from Pennsylvania, to offer an amendment 
 to the $2,000,000 bill to the effect that "neither slavery nor 
 involuntary servitude [should] ever exist in any part of the 
 territory" acquired from Mexico. The bill, including the Wil- 
 mot Proviso, as the amendment was called, passed the House 
 (87 to 64), but failed in the Senate because the hour agreed 
 upon with the House for the adjournment of the session over- 
 took Senator Davis of Massachusetts while he was arguing 
 against a motion to strike out the amendment. When Congress 
 met again in December, 1846, the bill was reintroduced, and 
 again the House voted to incorporate the Wilmot Proviso (115 
 to 105) . The Senate rejected the Proviso by a vote of 31 to 2 1 x 
 
 1 Six of the votes of the majority came from senators of Northern states. If 
 these six men had supported the Proviso it would have passed by a vote of 27 
 to 25, and, unless vetoed by Polk, the bill excluding slavery from the newly won 
 territory of the United States would have become a law in 1847. 
 
440 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 and on the last day of the session secured the consent of the 
 House to the unamended bill. Although the Wilmot Proviso 
 failed in 1847, ft was revived in the House again and again 
 in the two years following, and it remained before the country 
 as the official demand of the liberty men of the North. Abraham 
 Lincoln, who was a member of Congress from 1847 to 1849, 
 said that he voted for the Proviso in the House more than 
 forty times. 
 
 The persistence of the advocates of the Wilmot Proviso 
 aroused equal insistence on the part of Calhoun, Davis, and 
 other Southern leaders that no restriction of slavery in the new 
 territory should be allowed by Congress. Oregon was anxiously 
 waiting for territorial organization in the summer of 1846, and 
 President Polk urged in his messages of August and December 
 that Congress proceed to the task. But when the House passed 
 a bill which extended the antislavery provision of the Northwest 
 Ordinance to Oregon (January 16, 1847), the Senate tabled it. 
 There was no intention in the mind of the Southern senators of 
 carrying slavery into Oregon. What they objected to in the bill 
 was the power of Congress to exclude slavery from Oregon. 
 When the ratification of the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in the 
 summer of 1848 made New Mexico and California American soil, 
 Polk urged the prompt organization of a territorial government 
 for these provinces also. An attempt was made to settle the 
 whole matter by the so-called Clayton Compromise of July, 
 1848, according to which Oregon was to have complete ter- 
 ritorial government with representation in Congress, while Cali- 
 fornia and New Mexico were to be administered by a governor, 
 a secretary, and judges of the Supreme Court. The question of 
 slavery was left to the Oregon legislature, but the governments 
 of New Mexico and California were forbidden to pass any laws 
 "respecting the prohibition or establishment of African slavery 
 such being referred to the United States courts." 1 This 
 measure the Senate passed after an all-night battle (July 27), 
 but the House tabled it. Finally, in August, 1848, the Senate 
 
 1 Corwin wittily said of this measure that it would be "enacting not a law 
 but a lawsuit." 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 441 
 
 so far receded from its position as to sanction the bill for the 
 organization of Oregon, including the restriction of slavery. 
 But California and New Mexico still remained unorganized. 
 
 Meantime the presidential campaign was in full swing. The 
 Democratic convention, meeting at Baltimore on May 22, had 
 nominated Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan, an ardent union- 
 ist and expansionist, confident, ornate, with pretensions to dip- 
 lomatic and military distinction. Cass was reputed "a northern 
 man with southern principles" popularly known as a "dough- 
 face." The platform defended the Mexican War as "just and 
 necessary," and denied the power of Congress to interfere with 
 the domestic institutions of the states. Every attempt in the 
 convention to discuss the Wilmot Proviso was met with calls 
 to order. The Whigs met at Philadelphia, June 7. In spite of 
 their fervid condemnation of the war, they nominated the hero 
 of Palo Alto and Buena Vista, whom they had been "groom- 
 ing" for the presidency for a year or more. There were decided 
 objections to Taylor as the candidate of a party which prided 
 itself on "principles." When asked his opinions on the Bank 
 and the tariff, he replied with his bluff honesty that he had "had 
 no time to investigate" them. He was a Louisiana planter with 
 three hundred slaves. He had never voted, but in a private 
 letter he said that he "certainly would have voted for Clay" 
 in 1844. However, these political shortcomings were all atoned 
 for by his popularity as a military hero. The Whigs simply had 
 to win. They shunned the danger of faction and defection by 
 refusing to adopt any platform or declaration of principles. 
 When the Ohio delegation attempted to introduce the Wilmot 
 Proviso they were rebuked. 
 
 The New York Democrats were divided into the factions of 
 "Barnburners" and "Hunkers," the former an antiadministra- 
 tion^roupTunder the feacTof Van Buren, with leanings toward 
 the Wilmot Proviso. A convention of the Barnburners, joined 
 by delegates from Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut, and Wis- 
 consin, met at Utica, New York, in June, and nominated Van 
 Buren for president. He was also nominated in August by the 
 convention of the new Free Soil party, which met at Buffalo, 
 
442 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 attended by 65 delegates from 18 states. Their platform de- 
 manded that Congress should neither erect another slave ter- 
 ritory nor admit another slave state. It declared that the party 
 would " fight on and fight ever" under the banner inscribed 
 "Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men," until "triumphant 
 victory" should reward its exertions. The old Liberty (Abo- 
 litionist) party merged with the Free-Soilers, its candidate, 
 J. P. Hale, withdrawing in favor of Van Buren. The coalition 
 of the Barnburners and the Free-Soilers was strong enough to 
 defeat the regular Democratic candidate in the pivotal state of 
 New York and to give the 36 electoral votes of that state, and 
 therewith the election, to General Taylor. 1 In Congress too the 
 Free-Soilers won a commanding position, their 13 members 
 holding the balance of power between the 112 Democrats and 
 the 105 Whigs. 
 
 Yet the election as a whole was without significance. It 
 marked rather a dead center in the revolution of political events. 
 The old issues of Bank, tariff, currency, internal improvements, 
 were worn threadbare. The lines of the new struggle over 
 slavery and the territories were not yet clearly drawn. Each 
 party was looking for votes wherever they could be found the 
 Whigs with a Southern slaveholder whose military record com- 
 mended him to the North; the Democrats with a Northern 
 frontiersman whose views on slavery were not offensive to the 
 South. Taylor carried seven free states and eight slave states ; 
 Cass carried eight free states and seven slave states. The 
 separation of the sections and the disruption of the old parties 
 had not yet come. The election of 1848 was, as Garrison truly 
 says, "a contest_without an issue."* 
 
 popular vote in New York was 218,000 for Taylor, 120,000 for Van 
 Buren, and 114,000 for Cass. In the electoral college Taylor had 163 votes to 
 127 for Cass. 
 
 2 Although the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the Oregon settlement, 
 and the rising controversy over slavery in the territories absorb the attention of 
 the historical student in the middle years of the decade 1840-1850, there are 
 a number of interesting facts of secondary importance in politics and civics 
 that may be recorded here: (i) By an act of June 25, 1842, the "general 
 ticket" was done away with for congressional elections, and each member was 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 443 
 
 THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 
 
 National conventions might dodge the issue of slavery, crying 
 " Avaunt and quit my sight ! " to the Wilmot Proviso, which rose 
 with the persistency of Banquo's ghost before their eyes ; Con- 
 gress might adjourn, leaving the increasing population of New 
 Mexico and California without a government; the new presi- 
 dent, in his first inaugural message, might deprecate "the 
 introduction of those exciting topics of a sectional character 
 which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the 
 public mind," but all this was as futile as King Canute's 
 injunction to the rising tide. The people at large were convinced 
 that a crisis was at hand in the~ slavery question and that it must 
 be met. Our country threatened to separate into warring fac- 
 tions. The very protestations of orators North and South in 
 their utter devotion to our priceless Union show how great the 
 danger to that Union was. 
 
 At the North the principle of the Wilmot Proviso was gain- 
 ing converts with each rejection by Congress. Its advocates 
 were determined that the acquisitions of the Mexican War 
 should bring no profit to slavery. The abolitionists redoubled 
 their efforts, planting new societies, establishing newspapers and 
 debating clubs, and circulating a great amount of propagandist 
 literature and pictures. Legislatures and conventions in the 
 free states passed scores of resolutions upholding the Proviso, 
 and petitions for its adoption poured in upon Congress in an 
 unbroken stream. The South was equally firm in its opposition. 
 
 returned to the House from a single congressional district. (2) In 1844 the 
 electric telegraph was first used to report the proceedings of the national con- 
 vention, and Silas Wright of New York had the unique experience of declining 
 the presidential nomination when it was offered to him. (3) By an act of Jan- 
 uary 23, 1845, a uniform day the first Tuesday after the first Monday in 
 November was prescribed for the choosing of presidential electors. (4) In 
 March, 1845, both Houses of Congress for the first time passed a bill over the 
 president's veto. (5) On March 3, 1845, Iowa and Florida were authorized to 
 frame constitutions for admission to the Union. (6) The Walker tariff of 1846 
 began the series of relatively low tariff rates which lasted until the Civil War. 
 (7) In August, 1846, the Independent Treasury system, which also lasted until 
 the Civil War, was reestablished. 
 
444 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 An address was drawn up by Calhoun and signed by 48 members 
 of Congress, demanding that abolitionist agitation should cease, 
 that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters, and that the 
 new territory be freely opened to the emigration of the slave- 
 holders. A mass meeting held in Kentucky requested Henry 
 Clay to resign his seat in the Senate, because he had written a 
 letter recommending a plan of gradual emancipation for the 
 slaves of the state. Resolutions voted by a large majority in the 
 legislature of Virginia declared that in the case of the adop- 
 tion and attempted enforcement of the Wilmot Proviso "the 
 sovereign people of Virginia" would not hesitate in the choice 
 between "abject submission to aggression and outrage" and 
 /'determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity." 
 The toast "a Southern confederacy" was hailed with cheers at 
 a dinner to Senator Butler of South Carolina in April, 1849. As 
 usual in times of great crises, the influence of the radicals on 
 both sides tended to carry along the majority of the moderates, 
 who in the North feared the reproach of favoring secession and 
 in the South abhorred the suspicion of condoning abolition. 
 
 When Folk's final Congress adjourned in the spring of 1849 
 without having made any provision for the government of the 
 territory acquired from Mexico, Senator Benton advised the 
 Californians to form a government for themselves. There was 
 pressing need for such action. Gold had been discovered in 
 the Sacramento valley in January, 1848, and the next year saw 
 the swarming of the "forty-niners " into California. Thousands 
 came by wagon across the great plains of the West, braving star- 
 vation, exhaustion, the fever of the alkali wastes, and the danger 
 of Indian attacks and leaving their telltale track of broken 
 wagons, dead animals, and human bones. Other thousands 
 came by sea, enduring the perils and buffetings of the six 
 months' voyage around Cape Horn, the mariners' Nemesis, or 
 crossing the pestilence-laden Isthmus of Panama on pack mules, 
 to battle like crazy men for a place on the dirty, crowded, rick- 
 ety steamers plying up the Calif ornian coast. Mexicans, South 
 Americans, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Chinamen 
 rushed to the "diggings." Men fought over disputed claims 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 445 
 
 with revolver and bowie knife. Bandits plundered the convoys, 
 Indians raided the settlements, and drunken ruffians terrorized 
 the camps. There was no law or order. As the American immi- 
 grants gained in number over the "greasers" and the yellow men 
 they determined to hold a convention for the 'establishment of a 
 civil government. The convention met at Monterey, Septem- 
 ber 3, 1849, an d framed a state constitution, excluding slavery 
 by a unanimous vote, although one third of the members were 
 from the Southern states. When Congress met in December, 
 California, its population grown from 6000 to over 80,000, was 
 asking admission to the Union as a free state. The people of 
 New Mexico, meanwhile, had petitioned for organization as a 
 non-slaveholding territory, claiming land to the east of the 
 Rio Grande over which Texas had extended her authority. 
 
 President Taylor, although a Southerner and a slaveowner, 
 became convinced on a visit to the New England states in the 
 summer of 1849 that the South was the aggressor. He met 
 the threats from South Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi in the 
 spirit of Andrew Jackson. He would answer the first overt act 
 with a blockade of the Southern ports and call for volunteers 
 from the free states. If necessary, he said*, he "would pour out 
 his blood for the defense of the Union." He was much under 
 the influence of Senator Seward of New York, the leader of 
 the antislavery Whigs. While not an advocate of the Wilmot 
 Proviso himself, the President let it be known that he would 
 do nothing to encourage the program of the Southern radicals. 
 "The people of the North/' he said in a speech in Pennsylvania, 
 in August, 1849, "need have no apprehension of the further 
 extension of slavery." His own plan was to admit California 
 at once as a free state and establish territorial governments in 
 New Mexico and Deseret (Utah) without any provision re- 
 garding slavery, leaving the people the choice when they should 
 blFTeady for statehood. 
 
 The latter doctrine was known as "popular sovereignty," 
 later nicknamed "squatter sovereignty/' because it left the for- 
 mation of communities with or without slavery to the people who 
 "squatted," or settled, on the land while it was still the public 
 
446 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 territory of the nation, without the power of a state to deter- 
 mine its municipal law by a regular constitution. The origin 
 of the doctrine is generally ascribed to Lewis Cass, who elabo- 
 rated it in a letter to a certain Mr. Nicholson of Nashville in 
 December, 1847; -but tne principle had .been discussed two 
 years earlier in connection with the admission of the territory 
 of Florida to statehood. Other possible solutions for the treat- 
 ment of the territory acquired from Mexico were (i) the ap- 
 plication of the Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery by act of 
 Congress; (2) the extension of the Missouri Compromise line 
 of 36 30' to the Pacific ; (3) the full protection, by the national 
 government, of the "property rights" of the slaveholder in the 
 common territory of the. Union (the Calhoun-Davis theory); 
 and (4) the reference of the legality of slavery to the territorial 
 courts, with appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. 
 The first of these solutions was, of course, that of the abo- 
 litionists and the Free-Soilers of the North; the second was 
 the original demand of the slavery advocates, soon, however, 
 changed into the third ; the fourth was summarily disposed of 
 by Corwin's sarcastic comment. 1 
 
 But the organization of the new territory was not the only 
 vexed question with which Congress would have to deal. North- 
 ern agitators were persistently demanding the abolition of 
 slavery and the slave trade in the national District of Columbia. 
 Northern legislatures were passing Personal-Liberty Acts, mak- 
 ing the rendition of fugitive slaves to their masters extremely 
 difficult. The " underground railroad" was aiding hundreds of 
 these fugitives from the border states to escape across the free 
 soil of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York to the 
 Canadian border. And, finally, the legislatures, the press, the 
 pulpits, the public platforms, of the South were insisting that 
 the abolitionists must cease from their " taunts and insults," 
 their self-righteous and meddling propaganda which encouraged 
 servile insurrections, and must leave the South in peace to 
 manage its own domestic institutions. 
 
 1 See page 440, note. 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 447 
 
 There was little likelihood that the Congress which met in 
 December, 1849, would heed the President's admonition to 
 "abstain from those exciting topics of a sectional character" 
 which had "produced painful apprehensions in the public mind." 
 Even before the House was organized to receive President 
 Taylor's message a three weeks' struggle between Howell Cobb 
 of Georgia and Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts for the 
 Speakership had revealed the bitterness of the sectional hos- 
 tility. Amid hisses and applause men hurled defiance at each 
 other across the aisle. Toombs of Georgia declared that if the 
 North should exclude the slaveholder from New Mexico and 
 ~Caiifornia and "fix a national degradation on half the states of 
 the Confederacy," he for one was ready for disunion. Baker of 
 Illinois sprang to his feet instantly with the retort that a dis- 
 solution of this Union would be impossible "so long as an Amer- 
 ican heart beat in an American bosom." Though the Whigs 
 outnumbered the Democrats by 112 to 105, enough of the 
 radical antislavery Whigs deserted the moderate Winthrop to 
 give the Speakership to Cobb by the narrow margin of 102 votes 
 to 100. In the Senate, where calmer counsels were supposed to 
 prevail, resolutions on every one of the "exciting topics" were 
 introduced by Douglas, Benton, Foote, Mason, and Seward. It 
 looked as if chaos would rule the session, when Henry Clay, the 
 Nestor of the Senate, rose on January 29, 1850, to introduce a 
 set of compromise resolutions to secure "the peace, concord, 
 and harmony of the Union." 
 
 After an absence of more than seven years Clay had been 
 sent by a unanimous vote of the Kentucky legislature to re- 
 sume his seat in the chamber which he had first entered in 
 Jefferson's administration forty-three years before. He was 
 now in his seventy-fourth year, and that tormenting ambition 
 for the presidency which had shaped his course and some- 
 times blurred his better judgment, since the exciting contest 
 of 1824, was stilled. He came in the first place to hold up 
 the hands of the last-elected Whig president, but still more to 
 pour oil on the troubled waters of sectional strife. There were 
 eight provisions in Clay's scheme of compromise : 
 
448 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 1. California should be admitted with her constitution as a 
 free state. 
 
 2. Territorial governments should be established in the rest 
 of the Mexican cession, without restrictions as to slavery. 
 
 3. The disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico 
 was determined. 
 
 4. The public debt of Texas acquired before 1845 should be 
 paid by the United States as an indemnity for the state's relin- 
 quishment of her claims to a part of New Mexico. 
 
 5. Slavery should not be abolished in the District of Colum- 
 bia without the consent of Maryland and of the people of the 
 District, or without direct compensation to the slave-owners. 
 
 6. The slave trade should be prohibited in the District of 
 Columbia. 
 
 7. A more effective law should be passed for the rendition 
 of fugitive slaves. 
 
 8. Congress had no power to interfere with the slave trade 
 between the states. 
 
 On the fifth and sixth of February Clay defended his resolu- 
 tions in the opening speech of the greatest debate that was ever 
 heard in the halls of Congress. His body was racked with the 
 consumptive's cough, and he was too weak to mount the steps of 
 the Capitol without a supporting arm. But once on the floor of 
 the Senate, his strength increased with his zeal as he spoke to the 
 great throng that pressed on the doorways of the gallery to get 
 within sound of his marvelous voice. His theme was conciliation. 
 He was " appalled" as he beheld in Congress and the legislatures 
 of the states "twenty-odd furnaces in full blast, emitting heat 
 and passion and intemperance, and diffusing them throughout 
 the whole extent of this broad land." What more could the 
 North in fairness ask than what she had already got ? California 
 was free soil. The table-lands of New Mexico would also un- 
 doubtedly be free. The guaranty of nature was " worth a thou- 
 sand Wilmot Provisos." Could not the South also be content if 
 the new territory were not closed to the slaveholder, if her runa- 
 way negroes were returned, and her "peculiar institution" were 
 let alone in the slave states ? Clay held out the olive branch to 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 449 
 
 'both parts of this distracted and unhappy country." No 
 sacrifice was too great to preserve the Union of the Fathers. 
 Secession could mean only war war "ferocious and bloody, im- 
 placable and exterminating," out of which a Caesar or a Napo- 
 leon might rise to put an end to self-government and " crush 
 the liberties of both the severed portions of this common 
 empire." 
 
 Calhoun spoke on the fourth of March. He too loved the 
 Union and dreaded the word "secession." But long study of 
 refined philosophy on the rights of the states had convinced 
 him that the Union as it existed was no longer a guaranty of the 
 liberties of the South, and that the Constitution had been trans- 
 formed by the interpretations of Northern majorities into an 
 engine of repression and tyranny. Calhoun was in the last stages 
 of consumption. He tottered into the Senate and sat wrapped 
 in flannels, his sunken eyes half closed beneath their shaggy 
 brows, the picture of a prophet of doom, while his colleague 
 Mason read his last direful warning to the North. The time 
 for compromise had passed. The bonds that held the Union 
 together were snapping one by one. Already the churches 
 North and South had parted company. Already Southern 
 planters were boycotting Northern merchants. The North by 
 its vicious abolitionist agitation, by its attempt to fix a stigma on 
 the character of the slaveholder and deny him free access to 
 the common territory of the Union, was driving the South out 
 of that Union. The equilibrium between the sections was 
 destroyed. For the moment free and slave states were equally 
 represented in the Senate, but let California be admitted as a 
 free state and the last semblance of equality would disappear. 
 Only one remedy was left : let the North cease from her policy 
 of aggrandizement. She alone was to blame. No institution of 
 hers was attacked, no threat was made to destroy her political 
 and economic order, no stigma was cast on her body of citizens. 
 The South had nothing to compromise or concede. She asked 
 only her rights under the Constitution. It lay with the North to 
 decide whether those rights should be respected and the equi- 
 librium between the sections restored. 
 
450 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Calhoun was terribly sincere as he spoke under the shadow 
 of death ; and the events of the next decade proved the sound- 
 ness of his judgment, as against that of the supporters of Clay's 
 measures, that compromise could not finally settle the great con- 
 troversy. In this he was closer to Lincoln and Seward, however 
 strange the comparison may seem, than he was to Clay and 
 Webster. But Calhoun's fatal error was the belief that the per- 
 petuation and nationalization of slavery was the correct solution 
 of the problem. The emancipation of the negro race meant for 
 him the defiance of the ordinance of Providence, the economic 
 ruin of the South, and the end of white supremacy the cata- 
 clysm of society. In the practical measures which he suggested 
 for the restoration of harmony between the sections, Calhoun 
 showed neither psychological nor political wisdom. His demand 
 that the North stop "agitating" the question of slavery was, as 
 Lowell pointed out a decade later, equivalent to asking a man 
 who has a fever to stop shaking. For it was slavery that was 
 agitating the North, and not the North that was agitating 
 slavery. As a political remedy Calhoun had nothing better to 
 offer than the election of two presidents, one from the free and 
 one from the slave states, each to have the veto power over all 
 legislation of Congress. Thus, as Professor Dodd remarks, 
 " permanent deadlock was proposed as the remedy for sectional 
 conflict." To match a country half slave and half free there was 
 to be an executive half slave and half free. 1 
 
 Three days after Calhoun's grave ultimatum was delivered 
 Daniel Webster spoke. Again the floor and galleries of the 
 Senate chamber were crowded, for Webster was the greatest of 
 the American orators. His majestic presence was matched by 
 a powerful intellect, and persuasion sat upon his lips. Addi- 
 tional attraction was given to the occasion by the rumor that 
 Webster was to make the effort of his life and by the uncertainty 
 of opinion as to what course he would advocate. Clay was 
 
 1 This proposed amendment for a dual executive is not in Calhoun's speech 
 of March 4, but is fully developed in a posthumous essay entitled "A Discourse 
 on the Constitution and Government of the United States." 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 451 
 
 committed to the Compromise ; Calhoun's opposition could be 
 predicted from his public utterances and writings for a score of 
 years past ; but what would Webster say ? Many of his friends 
 in the North, citing his repeated declarations against the exten- 
 sion of slavery, were sure that he would oppose the Compromise. 
 Others believed that he would sacrifice consistency for the sake 
 of preserving the Union. Others, still, with less generosity of 
 judgment, thought that he would set conciliation above con- 
 science, with the hope of uniting the great mass of conservatives 
 North and South in the support of his candidature for the presi- 
 dential nomination. No one can say just how the motives were 
 mixed in Webster's mind as he rose with the words : "I wish to 
 speak today not as a Massachusetts man nor as a Northern man, 
 but as an American. ... I speak today for the preservation of 
 the Union. * Hear me for my cause." 7 He supported the Com- 
 promise measures at every point. As to California and New 
 Mexico, he held that slavery was already excluded from those 
 territories by the laws of physical geography, which made impos- 
 sible in them the cultivation of the staple products of the South. 
 He "would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of 
 nature nor to reenact the will of God." He "would put in no 
 Wilmot Proviso for the mere purpose of a taunt or a reproach." 
 The abolitionist societies he condemned as having "produced 
 nothing good or valuable in their operations for twenty years." 
 The one real grievance of the South, he said, was the aid given by 
 public and private agencies in the North to the fugitive slaves ; 
 and in redressing this grievance he was willing, like Clay, to go 
 to any reasonable lengths to secure the rights guaranteed to the 
 South by the Constitution (Art. IV, sect. 2, par. 3). He closed 
 with a magnificent peroration, warning his countrymen of the 
 impossibility of "peaceful secession" and exhorting them to be 
 faithful to the exalted trust of preserving the Union, the Consti- 
 tution, and the harmony and peace of all who were destined to 
 live under it. 
 
 The Seventh-of-March speech brought Webster blame and 
 praise unmeasured. For his Free Soil friends of the North, who 
 
452 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 had looked for a ringing denunciation of the extension of slavery 
 " irrespective of parallels of latitude," he had proved to be a 
 broken reed and a shattered idol. Lucifer had fallen from 
 heaven. It was enough that Webster was congratulated on his 
 speech by Calhoun. Lowell spoke of his "mean and foolish 
 treachery." Whittier sang the dirge of his "departed glory" 
 in stanzas of gentle denunciation : 
 
 So fallen ! So lost ! the light withdrawn 
 
 Which once he wore ! 
 The glory from his grey hairs gone 
 
 Forevermore. 
 
 Revile him not the Tempter hath 
 
 A snare for all. 
 And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 
 
 Befit his fall. 
 
 On the other hand, the conservative business interests of the 
 North and the great majority of the South approved of Web- 
 ster's stand. A large sum of money was raised in Boston and 
 New York for printing and circulating the speech, over 200,000 
 copies of which were distributed. It was claimed that Webster, 
 by his repudiation of the Wilmot Proviso, had held the Southern 
 Whigs to the party and averted the imminent danger of dis- 
 union. We need not have recourse to the severe judgment of 
 Lowell and Whittier to explain Webster's position. He was 
 never an abolitionist and hence could not be an "apostate" from 
 his creed. He was a conservative, with a great respect for 
 property, a great reverence for the Constitution, and a great 
 love for the Union. He saw the Union in danger and hastened 
 to give assurances to the South. He saw the Constitution vio- 
 lated, and advocated an adequate law to recover fugitive slaves. 
 As for "the Tempter's snare," Webster was too good a politician 
 to need to have Theodore Parker tell him that he would lose as 
 many supporters in the North as he would gain in the South by 
 his attack on the Proviso. The most sensible as well as the most 
 charitable interpretation of his speech is that which he gave 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 453 
 
 himself: "I speak today for the preservation of the Union. 
 'Hear me for my cause.'" 1 
 
 The great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, whose 
 intelligence and eloquence had for a score of years graced the 
 hall where they now met together for the last time, had spoken. 
 Others followed, men of a later generation, who were less con- 
 cerned with the legal and constitutional aspects of the case than 
 with the settlement of a moral dilemma. Ex-Governor Seward 
 of New York, a new member of the Senate, brushed aside the 
 threats of disunion as "too trivial for serious notice." He too 
 had reverence for the Constitution, but a Constitution which 
 devoted our domain "to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, 
 and to liberty." He argued that the present generation held the 
 fortunes of the country in trust for the future ; that slavery was 
 an institution doomed to extinction by a "higher law" than the 
 Constitution. Increasing the stringency of the fugitive-slave 
 law would be of no avail, for the public sentiment of the North 
 would resist its enforcement. Had any government ever suc- 
 ceeded, he asked, in changing the moral convictions of its 
 citizens by force? He was opposed to the Compromise. He 
 would cooperate with the South in any reasonable plan to re- 
 move slavery, but he would not agree on any terms to its 
 extension. Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, a convert to the Free- 
 Soilers from the Democratic ranks and also a new man in the 
 Senate, spoke to the same purpose as Seward, but with a some- 
 what more defiant attitude toward the South. The remaining 
 speeches added nothing in the way of principle or argument. 
 
 After several weeks of discussion the Senate reported the 
 Compromise bill to a representative committee of 13, composed 
 of Henry Clay as chairman and three members each from the 
 Northern and the Southern Whigs and Democrats. Still there 
 seemed to be no more immediate prospect of settlement at the 
 opening of July than at the end of January. Seward's influence 
 
 !Even his panegyrist Rhodes admits that Webster was lacking in apprecia- 
 tion of the moral opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territory 
 whether it could actually exist there or not (Vol. I, p. 153). Lincoln's position 
 a decade later was dictated by higher principles. 
 
454 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 with President Taylor was strong, and the administration would 
 do nothing to favor the bill. The importunity of the Southern 
 Whigs only stiffened Taylor in his resistance. Death broke 
 the deadlock. On July 9 President Taylor succumbed to an 
 attack of acute cholera morbus and was succeeded by Millard 
 Fillmore, of New York, who was a friend of the Compromise. 
 One by one the measures were put through Congress in the 
 months of August and September, the Fugitive Slave Law finally 
 passing the House in a session from which some 30 Northern 
 members absented themselves in a cowardly fashion. The 
 Compromise in its final form did not differ essentially from 
 the plan proposed by Clay in January. 
 
 On the whole, it seems to the writer that the balance of 
 favor inclined to the side of the South. The $10,000,000 paid 
 to Texas for the relinquishment of territory to the east of the 
 Rio Grande made that state a powerful factor in the later 
 Confederacy. The new Fugitive Slave Act put the business of 
 returning negroes into the hands of the federal government and 
 encouraged its execution by favorable legislation. And the 
 South won its contention for the entrance of the slaveholder 
 into the new territory the definite rejection of the Wilmot 
 Proviso. On the other hand, the North secured the abolition 
 of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the admission 
 of California as a free state. By the latter provision the balance 
 between the free and the slave states, which had been main- 
 tained in the Senate since the days of the Missouri Compromise, 
 was broken, and both branches of Congress were controlled by 
 the free-soil states. Henceforth there were no more slave states 
 admitted to the Union. 
 
 It is highly probable that the Compromise of 1850 postponed 
 secession for a decade. By the advice of Calhoun a convention 
 of Southern delegates had been called to meet at Nashville, 
 Tennessee, in June. A number of radicals were determined to 
 use the Nashville meeting for the publication of an ultimatum 
 to the North. They believed that the moment for secession had 
 come. But the strong pleas for union in the Senate and the 
 reference of the Compromise measures to a mixed committee 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 455 
 
 tempered the disunion sentiment in the South. A few weeks 
 before the convention met, the National Intelligencer, the ad- 
 ministration organ at Washington, canvassed the Southern press 
 and found but 50 out of 300 newspapers in the slave states in 
 favor of a radical program at Nashville and of those 50 many 
 were "hike-warm" and "backing down." The great majority 
 of the people of the South favored waiting for the results of the 
 debates on the Compromise before taking action. When, there- 
 fore, the Nashville convention met in June, only nine states were 
 represented, and 100 of the 176 delegates were from Tennessee. 
 A small minority denounced compromise of any sort and de- 
 clared that secession was inevitable; but the majority, after 
 reasserting the doctrine that Congress had no power to exclude 
 slavery from the territories of the United States and asking for 
 the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific 
 (resolutions hardly consistent), voted to adjourn until after 
 the session of Congress. A mere "rump" convention of 59 radi- 
 cal members reassembled after the passage of the Compromise. 
 It passed resolutions urging the "assailed states" to adopt a 
 policy of social and commercial boycott of the North. The South 
 as a whole, however, accepted the Compromise heartily. Vir- 
 ginia, which had been ready to advise secession if the Wilmot 
 Proviso passed, declared herself satisfied and counseled her 
 sister state of South Carolina "to desist from any meditated 
 secession on her part." The Missouri legislature condemned 
 the Nashville convention as "tending to foment discord and 
 alienate one part of the confederation from the other." 
 A convention in Georgia declared that it would "abide by the 
 Compromise as a permanent adjustment of the sectional con- 
 troversy." The administration paper at Washington said that 
 it "could fill a double sheet of 48 columns with extracts of joy 
 and gratulations" from Southern and Western journals alone 
 on the success of the Compromise measures. 
 
 The cause for this general "joy and gratulation," which for 
 the moment overbalanced disunion sentiment in even South 
 Carolina and Mississippi, is to be found, no doubt, partly in the 
 relief from the tension of the summer's struggle over the bills. 
 
456 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 But the chief cause was the assurance given by Webster and 
 Clay to the Union men of the South that the majority of the 
 nation was ready to allow the slaveholder his constitutional 
 rights. The indorsement of Webster's speech by the "solid 
 citizens" of the New England and Middle Atlantic States was 
 welcomed by the South as a rebuke to the abolitionists; while 
 Clay, by his indefatigable labor, his tact and his charm, won 
 over the Southern Whigs and the Westerners to the cause of 
 union under the Compromise, leaving the radical South iso- 
 lated. 1 It was the last and crowning service of the "great 
 pacificator" to the cause of the Union. It is never permissible 
 for the historian to say what would have happened in any in- 
 stance had other counsels prevailed. But if secession had come 
 in 1850 instead of in 1860, two things seem almost certain: 
 first, that the North, not yet convinced of the extent of the 
 slaveholders' demands, would have been more ready to ac- 
 quiesce in the peaceful separation of the sections ; and, second, 
 that if war had come, the North would have had a far smaller 
 margin of superiority in wealth, population, and resources. 
 
 The Compromise of 1850 was hailed as the final settlement 
 of the slavery question. By the Missouri Compromise of 1820, 
 the admission of Texas as a slave state in 1845, the erection of 
 the free territory of Oregon in 18480 and the compromise meas- 
 ures of 1850 the status of slavery had been determined in every 
 square mile of our domain, from the Mississippi to the Pacific. 
 When Congress met in December, 1850, Clay secured the signa- 
 tures of 40 members to a paper declaring that they would 
 support no man for public office who refused to abide by the 
 Compromise. If only North and South would carry out the 
 pact faithfully, there seemed to be no need for further trouble. 
 
 There was, however, one very disquieting element in the 
 situation. In spite of pleas of men like Webster and Choate in 
 the East and Cass and Douglas in the West, the people north 
 of Mason and Dixon's line would not submit to the enforcement 
 
 1 Professor Dodd, in his " Expansion and Conflict," suggestively compares this 
 method of Clay's to that "by which Jackson defeated Calhoun in 1833" on the 
 nullification issue. 
 
130" 
 
 125 
 
 120 
 
 115 
 
 100 
 
 THE UNITED STATES 
 
 By the Compromise of 1850 
 
 Original Free States I I Original Slave States 
 
 "^| Free States | | Slave St 
 
 Territories closed to Slavery ~J Territories open to Slavery 
 
 ___ Oregon Trail 
 Santa Fe Trail 
 Route of the Forty-Niners 
 Cumberland Road 
 Railroads 
 
 Fremont's Expedition 
 
 Pony Express 
 
 Frontier Line of Settlement 
 
 Stage Lines 
 
 SCALE OF M1LES 
 
 Longitude 100 West_ 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 457 
 
 of the new Fugitive Slave Act. Of course, the abolitionists, who 
 set their moral convictions above the law, were opposed to the 
 return of any escaped slave, but the provisions of the new law 
 made it odious in the eyes of thousands of moderates also. It 
 was so heavily weighted against the fugitive that not even the 
 free negro of the North could feel secure. No jury trial was 
 allowed to the negro claimed as a fugitive. Master or agent 
 had simply to present an affidavit before a United States judge 
 or a commissioner, whose fee was doubled if he decided in favor 
 of the claimant. The whole community was bound by the law 
 to come to the aid of the commissioner as a posse comitatus to 
 prevent the rescue or escape of the condemned fugitive, and 
 the United States marshal was liable to a fine of $1000 and a 
 civil suit for the value of the slave in case the latter got away 
 or was rescued. Finally, the law was ex post facto (and therefore 
 unconstitutional) in that it applied to slaves who had fled from 
 their masters at any time even years before. In the face of 
 such a law it was inevitable that the "underground railroad" 
 should redouble its activity, that citizens should refuse to come 
 to the aid of the slave-catcher, and that negroes should be 
 rescued from jails and courthouses and smuggled over the 
 border into Canada. Mass meetings in the North condemned 
 the act in language as strong and "seditious" as that used by 
 the South against the Wilmot Proviso. They declared the act 
 "null and void" and registered their intention to "make it 
 powerless in the country" by an "absolute refusal to obey its 
 inhuman and diabolical provisions." 
 
 Southern extremists too, in spite of their discomfiture at 
 the Nashville convention and the manifest strength of the 
 unionist sentiment in the elections of 1851, kept up the agita- 
 tion for disunion. Governor Quitman of Mississippi, Yancey 
 of Alabama, Rhett of South Carolina, and Bell of Texas were 
 prominent in this movement. "Southern Rights" associations 
 were formed, one in Alabama calling for a new Southern party 
 and announcing that the state would follow any other Southern 
 state into secession. But the extremists, both Northern nulli- 
 fiers and Southern secessionists, were repressed by the moder- 
 
458 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ates as a dwindling group of irreconcilables. "The law will be 
 upheld," declared Cass, "wherever the flag of the Union waves." 
 In a word, the great majority of both sections were determined 
 that the Compromise should be a finality. 
 
 The only hope for this was the preservation of the two great 
 political parties as national organizations and the avoidance of 
 their polarization into a Southern Rights party and a Free Soil 
 party. Hence, in the campaign of 1852 both parties stood on the 
 platform of the finality of the Compromise. There was no other 
 important national issue, and it became simply a question as to 
 which party could show the more cohesive organization and 
 inspire the greater confidence in its fidelity to the common plat- 
 form. Since the great Whig leaders Clay and Webster had been 
 the champions of the Compromise, and the Whig president 
 Fillmore had facilitated its passage, it would seem as if the 
 Whigs should have been intrusted with its execution. But the 
 Whig party was no longer the party of Henry Clay, who was on 
 his deathbed when its convention met in June, 1852, and it 
 had never been the party of Daniel Webster. Since the Mexican 
 War the antislavery sentiment in its ranks had been steadily 
 growing, as the influence of Seward testifies. Had the con- 
 vention nominated either Fillmore or Webster, the Southern 
 wing of the party would have been content ; but the Fillmore 
 and Webster forces refused to combine, and General Winfield 
 Scott was nominated on the fifty-third ballot. The Whigs had 
 won two elections with a military candidate, and now they 
 hoped to repeat the triumphs of '40 and '48 with the "hero of 
 Lundy 's Lane and Chapul tepee." But Scott was Seward's candi- 
 date and was suspected of a tincture of Free Soil principles. 
 Leading Southern Whigs, like Toombs and Stephens, bolted 
 the ticket. The result was the overwhelming election of Frank- 
 lin Pierce of New Hampshire, whom the Democrats had nomi- 
 nated after a long struggle in their convention between Douglas, 
 Cass, Marcy, and Buchanan. Pierce carried every state in the 
 Union except Vermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Ten- 
 nessee, receiving 254 electoral votes to 42 for Scott. He was 
 an amiable, colorless, and thoroughly "safe" man, pledged to 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 459 
 
 respect the Compromise of 1850. His election appeared to be 
 the triumph of conciliation, 1 for the Free Soil vote of the North, 
 which had been the determining factor in the two previous 
 elections, shrank from 291,263 to 155,825. A less-noticed but 
 more ominous fact was the decline of the Whig vote in the 
 seven cotton states of the South 2 from 138,369 to 81,775. The 
 disintegration of the great Whig party had begun. 
 
 For the sake of following the crisis of 1850 to its logical 
 conclusion, we have passed over important and interesting dip- 
 lomatic events of the mid-century, which must claim our atten- 
 tion at the close of this chapter. The year of Taylor's election 
 was a year of general revolution in Europe. The French over- 
 threw the Orleans dynasty and established the Second Republic. 
 Liberal forces in the Italian states either drove out their Aus- 
 trian despots or curbed them by written constitutions. The 
 Prussian king, after revolution in the streets of Berlin, called an 
 assembly to frame a constitution. Prince Metternich, who for 
 a generation had been the leader of reaction in Europe, was 
 forced to flee from Vienna, and the Hungarians rose in revolt 
 against the domination of Austria, which they had endured for 
 three centuries. The United States were in hearty sympathy 
 with these democratic revolutions in Europe. Taylor sent an 
 envoy to Austria in 1849 with instructions to recognize the 
 Hungarian Republic as soon as it should be established. The 
 mission proved futile, for Russian troops came to the aid of 
 Austria in the ruthless suppression of the Hungarian revolt. 
 
 When the Austrian charge d'affaires at Washington, the Che- 
 valier Huelsemann, protested against the unfriendly behavior 
 of our government, he was answered by Fillmore's Secretary of 
 State, Daniel Webster (December 13, 1850), in a letter which 
 did justice to the mid-century spirit of "spread-eagleism." 
 
 a l say "appeared," because a vote in the House (April 5, 1852) on the reso- 
 lution that the Compromise should be accepted as a final settlement of the 
 slavery question was carried by only 103 votes to 74. 
 
 2 Namely: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and 
 Texas. The electors of South Carolina were chosen by the legislature of the 
 state until after the Civil War. 
 
460 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Webster dwelt on the achievements of the American republic, 
 its economic prosperity and political liberty, its commanding 
 place among the nations, its power "spread out over a region 
 ... in comparison with which the possessions of the House 
 of Hapsburg [were] but a patch on the earth's surface." The 
 American people could not "fail to cherish always a lively 
 interest in the fortunes of nations struggling for institutions 
 like their own." Webster acknowledged that his "boastful and 
 rough" letter was written more for home consumption than for 
 Austria's correction. It was a contribution to the "finality" 
 of the newly passed Compromise of 1850. The author of the 
 Seventh-of-March speech wrote the letter of the thirteenth 
 of December to "touch the nation's pride and make a man 
 look sheepish and silly who should speak of disunion." Even 
 Mr. Rhodes, Webster's stoutest champion, admits that the 
 letter was "hardly more than a stump speech under diplo- 
 matic disguise" (Vol. I, p. 206). 
 
 Louis Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian revolution, 
 eluded the vengeance of Austria and took refuge in Turkey, 
 whence he was brought to the United States. From the day 
 of his arrival in New York, in December, 1851, to the day of 
 his departure the next summer, he received a constant though 
 waning ovation as he traveled through the states east of the 
 Mississippi River. His impassioned pleas for downtrodden 
 Hungary gave large audiences ample opportunity to relieve by 
 tumultuous applause feelings which had been raised to the 
 highest pitch of excitement over the slavery controversy. But 
 when Kossuth 'came to reckon up the actual cash contributed 
 to the cause of Hungarian freedom, he was sorely disappointed. 
 He had collected less than $100,000. More had been spent on 
 banquets and parades in his honor. Kossuth was formally re- 
 ceived by both Houses of Congress and dined at the President's 
 table, but the government was careful not to commit itself 
 to any intervention in European affairs. 
 
 The other side of the Monroe Doctrine namely, the pro- 
 tection of the American continent against the encroachments 
 of European powers was also a lively interest in the middle 
 

 THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 461 
 
 years of the century. We have already seen (p. 415) what a 
 large part the threat of such encroachment played in the Texan 
 negotiations. Immediately after the Mexican War a critical 
 situation arose in Central America. The British had estab- 
 lished a protectorate over the Mosquito Indians of Nicaragua 
 in the seventeenth century. In spite of the protests of Spain, 
 and of the Central American republics after they had thrown 
 off the yoke of Spain, Great Britain held on persistently and 
 extended her authority until it covered most of the coast below 
 the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan and the Isthmus of Panama. 
 Our acquisition of California and Oregon had suddenly brought 
 us to the Pacific, making the control of Central America, where 
 for centuries canal routes had been projected, a point of vital 
 interest. When British warships entered the San Juan River 
 in Nicaragua and took possession of the fort of Greytown, in 
 January, 1848, there was heated discussion in Congress on the 
 question of our intervention. President Polk announced his 
 firm determination to uphold the Monroe Doctrine (April, 
 1848). A few weeks later the President sent Elijah Hise as 
 special envoy to Guatemala to " cultivate more friendly rela- 
 tions with the Central American states," and the Senate ratified 
 a treaty with New Granada (now Colombia) which had been 
 pending for two years, giving the United States right of way 
 across the isthmus for road, railroad, or canal construction. 
 Early in 1849 Hise negotiated treaties with Nicaragua and 
 Honduras for the right of transit across those republics. Great 
 Britain and the United States, each apprehending the other's 
 desire to control Central America, engaged in tart diplomatic 
 controversy, and each sought to seize a point of vantage in the 
 region. They came to an agreement when Sir Henry Lytton 
 Bulwer, who arrived in Washington at the close of the year 1849 
 as envoy extraordinary, suggested that the countries stop bick- 
 ering over spheres of influence in Central America and agree on 
 a common policy for a canal. 
 
 Taylor's Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, forthwith 
 entered into negotiations with Sir Henry. On April 19, 1850, 
 a treaty was signed, and on July 4 the ratifications of the two 
 
462 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 governments were exchanged. The famous Clayton-Bulwer 
 Treaty "for facilitating and protecting the construction of a 
 ship canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans" pledged 
 the two governments never to obtain exclusive control over such 
 a canal, nor to erect fortifications commanding it, nor to colonize 
 or acquire dominion over any part of Central America. They 
 were to protect any company that should build a canal and 
 to guarantee the neutrality of the canal when built. It was to 
 be maintained "for the benefit of mankind on equal terms to 
 all." In spite of the liberal terms of the treaty, trouble be- 
 tween the United States and Great Britain in Central America 
 was not ended. Great Britain still held on to the Mosquito 
 protectorate and Belize, and even annexed some islands off the 
 coast of Honduras (1852). A British man-of-war fired on a 
 steamer of the American Transport Company which refused 
 to pay duties to the Mosquito government; and a year later 
 an American vessel bombarded and destroyed the port of Grey- 
 town, where a mob had attacked the American consul. Had it 
 not been for the rise of more important questions for both 
 governments in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the 
 Crimean War the Central American issue might not have 
 sunk so suddenly into insignificance. 
 
 A third topic of diplomatic interest in the mid-century was 
 the attempt of certain people in the South to get possession, by 
 fair means or foul, of the island of Cuba. Ever since the days 
 of Thomas Jefferson there had been prophecies by the expan- 
 sionists that "the pearl of the Antilles" must eventually be 
 ours. At any rate, as our interest in the Gulf of Mexico grew 
 through the acquisition of Louisiana, the cession of Florida, 
 and the annexation of Texas, it became more and more obvious 
 that the great island guarding the entrance to the Gulf must 
 not be allowed to pass into the' hands of a strong European 
 power. When lands for the profitable employment of slave 
 labor were growing scarcer and the balance of power of the free 
 and the slave states in the Senate was broken, additional motives 
 for the acquisition of Cuba were furnished. The island would 
 make five fertile slave states, which would add ten members to 
 

 THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 463 
 
 the United States Senate. The ardent annexationist Polk had 
 ordered the American representative at Madrid to sound the 
 Spanish government on the sale of Cuba for $100,000,000, only 
 to be met with the reply that "rather than see the island trans- 
 ferred to any power [Spain] would prefer seeing it sunk in the 
 ocean." The way of legitimate acquisition being closed, filibus- 
 tering took its place. A Venezuelan adventurer named Lopez, 
 who had lived in Havana, conceived the idea of " liberating" 
 Cuba from Spanish rule. So popular was the project with the 
 young men of the South that the government at Washington 
 seemed powerless to enforce the neutrality laws. Meetings of 
 sympathy with the filibusterers were held in Nashville, Balti- 
 more, Cincinnati, and even in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New 
 York. Lopez had the encouragement of important men like 
 Calhoun, Governor Quitman, and Jefferson Davis. He repre- 
 sented that "all Cuba was ripe for revolution" and that "the 
 officers of the Cuban army had given written pledges to join the 
 invaders." A first descent on Cuba in the spring of 1850 failed ; 
 but Lopez found his way back to New Orleans, where, after 
 being acquitted of the charge of having violated the neutrality 
 laws, he gathered a new expedition of nearly 500 men, com- 
 prising members of some of the best families of the South. 
 Colonel Crittenden, the nephew of the Attorney-General of the 
 United States, was second in command. Again the expedition 
 proved disastrous (August, 1851). The invaders found no wel- 
 coming band of revolutionists in Cuba. Both Lopez, who had 
 marched into the interior of the island, and Crittenden, who 
 had remained on the coast, were captured and executed. Only 
 a few men escaped. Those who were not killed in the skir- 
 mishes or who had not died of fatigue, fever, and starvation 
 were taken prisoners, and of these over 150, most of them 
 American citizens, were sent to Spain, ostensibly to be put to 
 work in the mines. 
 
 When the news of the failure of the second Lopez expedition, 
 with the cruel punishment of the victims, reached New Orleans, 
 the people broke out into a riot. They wrecked the office of 
 a Spanish newspaper, destroyed Spanish shops, mobbed the 
 
464 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Spanish consulate, defaced the portrait of the queen, and tore 
 down the Spanish flag and burned it in a bonfire in the pub- 
 lic square. Secretary of State Webster could do no less than 
 apologize to Spain for the insult to her flag and frankly acknowl- 
 edge the outrage which "was committed in the heat of blood." 
 He assured the Spanish government that when a new consul 
 should be sent to New Orleans, the flag of his ship would be 
 saluted "as a demonstration of respect" and an apology "for 
 the grave injustice done to his predecessor." 
 
 The Lopez incident was thus closed, but there was no modi- 
 fication in the South either of the resentment against Spain or 
 of the desire for Cuba. President Pierce, who asserted in his 
 inaugural address that he would not be "controlled by any 
 timid forebodings of evil from expansion," seemed deliberately 
 to invite an issue with Spain over Cuba by his appointment 
 of Pierre Soule of Louisiana as minister to the court of Madrid. 
 Soule had advocated the annexation of Cuba in the United 
 States Senate and had spoken of the "heroic" Lopez and Crit- 
 tenden as deserving "the praise that is freely accorded to 
 Lafayette and Kosciusko." Even on his way to Spain, where 
 it was intimated in the press that he would not be persona 
 grata, he addressed a deputation of Cuban exiles and spoke of 
 "the tyrants of the Old World." Soon after his arrival in 
 Madrid an American merchant steamer, the Black Warrior, 
 was seized by the authorities of the port of Havana (on the 
 ground that her captain had violated an obsolete harbor regu- 
 lation) and her cargo of cotton confiscated. Instructed to pre- 
 sent our grievances to the court of Madrid, Soule, in his excess 
 of zeal, delivered an ultimatum. Unless reparation should be 
 made within forty-eight hours, he said, he would ask for his pass- 
 ports. Secretary Marcy did not support Soule in his extrava- 
 gant demand, but ordered him to confer with Buchanan and 
 Mason, our ministers to Great Britain and France respectively, 
 on the best policy for our government to pursue in regard to 
 Spain and Cuba. 
 
 The ministers met at Ostend, in the Netherlands, in the 
 summer of 1854. Buchanan and Mason were both annexation- 
 
THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 465 
 
 ists, though more moderate than Soule. They had both been 
 members of Folk's cabinet, Buchanan as Secretary of State hav- 
 ing made Spain the $100,000,000 offer for Cuba. Now, under 
 the spur of the impetuous Soule, they drew up the famous Os- 
 tend Manifesto. This remarkable document, after rehearsing 
 the reasons why Cuba should belong to the United States, con- 
 cluded with the statement that "if Spain, dead to the voice of 
 her own interests and moved by pride and a false sense of 
 honor, refused to sell Cuba/' then, if her possession of the 
 island "endangered the peace and existence of our Union," we 
 should be justified "by every law human and divine" in taking 
 it from her. Now was the moment, said Soule, when France 
 and Great Britain were involved in the Crimean War, for the 
 United States to force Spain to yield up the pearl of the Antilles. 
 It would be a great stroke of fortune for the slave interests 
 of the South. 
 
 But a new situation had arisen in the United States. The 
 battle between freedom and slavery in the Western territory had 
 been reopened after four years of troubled truce. The cautious 
 Marcy repudiated the Ostend Manifesto and forced Soule's 
 resignation by a dispatch of withering sarcasm. The Cuban 
 incident was closed, 1 and the dreams of the Southern expan- 
 sionists, roseate for a moment, were rudely broken by the voice 
 of Stephen A. Douglas. 
 
 !In the summer of 1855 we quietly accepted Spain's tardy apology for the 
 seizure of the Black Warrior. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 
 
 Unsettled questions have no pity for the repose of a nation. 
 
 JAMES A. GARFIELD 
 
 THE BUSINESS MAN'S PEACE 
 
 Confidence surrounded the handsome head of Franklin Pierce 
 like an aureole as he stood before the throng at the eastern 
 portico of the Capitol, on March 5, 1853, to deliver his in- 
 augural address. His mandate to guide the American nation 
 was the clearest since Jackson's triumphant election exactly a 
 quarter of a century before. Conciliation was the platform on 
 which he had run; harmony was the burden of his message. 
 He spoke of the faith of the fathers in the destiny of our nation 
 and congratulated the country on a steady expansion which 
 had nearly trebled the stars in our banner. He gave comfort 
 to the men who were casting longing eyes on Cuba and Nic- 
 aragua by the assertion that his administration would "not be 
 controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion." 
 But at the same time he protested that "no blot should be 
 suffered to mar our fair record," no act tolerated that could 
 not "challenge a ready justification before the tribunal of the 
 world." The Compromise measures of 1850, he declared, were 
 "strictly constitutional and to be unhesitatingly carried into 
 effect." The "perilous crisis" was safely passed, the slavery 
 question was "at rest." He fervently hoped that no sectional 
 ambition or fanatical excitement might again "threaten the 
 durability of our institutions or obscure the light of our 
 prosperity." 
 
 Yet, in spite of the new president's assurances, there was 
 something ominous in both his words and his deeds. He leaned 
 
 466 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 467 
 
 visibly toward the South. He emphasized the constitutionality 
 of "involuntary servitude" and called for a "cheerful" exe- 
 cution of the Fugitive-Slave Law. He had no word of rebuke 
 for the "fire-eaters" of the Nashville convention, but threat- 
 ened a "stern resistance" to the "morbid enthusiasm" of the 
 abolitionists. His cabinet was almost wholly proslavery in 
 its sympathies. The most influential member, Jefferson Davis, 
 Secretary of War, was notoriously dissatisfied with the great 
 compromise on which the administration claimed to rest. Not 
 a man of antislavery views was sent abroad to represent the 
 United States. Soule and Mason, who went to Madrid and 
 Paris respectively, were intense proslavery men, keen for the 
 acquisition of Cuba. Buchanan, who was sent to the court of 
 St. James, had pointed out to Pierce in 1852 that the president 
 who secured the cession of Cuba would "render his name illus- 
 trious and place it on the same level with that of his great 
 predecessor who gave Louisiana to the Union." Part of the 
 results of the President's devotion to these Southern interests 
 we have already seen in our last chapter; others will appear 
 as our story proceeds in the next section. Here we must pause 
 to consider the economic state of our country in the middle of 
 the century. 
 
 When Pierce spoke of "the light of our prosperity," he 
 struck the true note of the Compromise of 1850. It was a 
 business man's peace. The country was tired of the protracted 
 strife over slavery, which Ben ton had complained of, thirty 
 years before, as infesting our public life like the plague of frogs 
 in Egypt. The generation which had been vexed with the 
 agitation over gag resolutions, the annexation of Texas, and 
 the Wilmot Proviso witnessed at the same time a remarkable 
 growth in the population and wealth of the United States. The 
 census of 1850 was the first of those elaborate compilations 
 which furnish the data not alone of our territory and population 
 but of the moral, social, and industrial condition of our people 
 as well their religion and education, their newspapers and' 
 libraries, their charities and crimes, their occupations, wages, 
 and profits, the yield of their fields and factories, the revenues 
 
468 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 from their realty and commerce. The census of 1850 was at once 
 an indorsement and a challenge. It justified the experiment of 
 threescore years of political democracy, and it stimulated faith 
 in the greater destinies awaiting the American republic. Long- 
 fellow's "Building of the Ship" was its dedication ode. 
 
 Our population had grown from a seaboard people of 3,929,- 
 214, when the first census was taken in 1790, to a continental 
 people of 23,191,876. In 1790 we were equal in population 
 to only the tiniest powers in Europe, but by 1850 we had out- 
 distanced them all except Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and 
 France. The states of the Atlantic slope still held the major- 
 ity of our people, but only by a narrow margin. More than 
 10,000,000 of our 23,000,000 were living in the great central 
 basin of the Mississippi, with a scant 120,000 in California and 
 Oregon. The greatest acceleration of growth was in the old 
 Northwest Territory of 1787 and beyond the Mississippi in 
 the new state of Iowa and territory of Minnesota. While the 
 East increased but 10 per cent in population in the period of 
 1830-1850, and the South (including the new cotton lands of 
 the lower Mississippi Valley) increased 40 per cent, the North- 
 west grew over 75 per cent in this score of years. This increase 
 was due almost wholly to the rapid reproduction of .our na- 
 tive stock, which was 90 per cent of British extraction at the 
 time of Washington's inauguration. Early marriages and large 
 families were the rule, especially on the frontier, where home- 
 steads were easy to get and sons and daughters grew up to a 
 life of wholesome toil crowned by the clearing of their own 
 new farms still farther west. 
 
 No record was kept of the arrival of immigrants in America 
 until Congress, by a law of i8i9 ; required the collectors of 
 customs in our ports to file with the Secretary of State the age, 
 sex, occupation, and country of all foreign passengers landing 
 in their districts. From the lists kept in the imperfect execu- 
 tion of this law it appears that during the decade 1820-1830 
 about 140,000 immigrants were added to the 200,000 who were 
 estimated to have come since the foundation of our Republic. 
 This insignificant immigration shot up, however, to 600,000 in 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 469 
 
 the decade 1830-1840 and to 1,700,000 in the following ten- 
 year period. By the middle of the century some 2,800,000 
 (or 12 per cent) of our population were foreign-born. The 
 causes of this recent influx of immigrants lay partly in un- 
 toward events in Europe and partly in attractive conditions in 
 America. Political revolutions in 1830 on the continent of 
 Europe broke the unstable peace which had followed the 
 Napoleonic upheaval, and the introduction of the Industrial 
 Revolution caused widespread disturbances in the field of labor. 
 A total failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845, followed 
 by a blight which destroyed the plants entirely the next year, 
 brought the Emerald Isle to a pitiable state of famine and sent 
 hundreds of thousands of her starving people to our shores. 
 And, finally, the great revolutionary year of 1848 convulsed 
 Europe from the Pyrenees to the Balkans. America was the 
 Mecca for the destitute peasant and the exiled patriot. The 
 leveling of the privileges of wealth, creed, and family by the 
 spread of the Jacksonian democracy assured the immigrant 
 welcome into a political fellowship in the New World. The 
 expanding mills and factories of the East absorbed the labor of 
 thousands; other thousands joined contractors' gangs to work 
 on the newly projected canals and railroads ; while the bound- 
 less lands of the West called the adventurous pioneer and the 
 thrifty peasant, for whom life was not worth living unless he 
 could see the sun rise and set on his orchards and grasslands. 
 
 About 300,000 immigrants came to America in the sin- 
 gle year 1848 chiefly Germans and Irish. The former were 
 land-lovers and set out for the Middle West, sometimes, unfortu- 
 nately, lured to barren regions "on the faith of a lying pro- 
 spectus," but generally following the line of instructions which 
 were already appearing in the excellent guidebooks published 
 in their home country. By the census of 1850 there were over 
 80,000 Germans in the states of the Northwest. The popu- 
 lation of Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Chicago still 
 testifies to the great migration from the Fatherland in the mid- 
 century. The Irish, on the other hand, remained for the most 
 part in the cities on the Atlantic coast, where they soon dis- 
 
470 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 played that aptitude for "practical" politics which has made 
 the name of Tammany Hall at once a marvel and a byword. 
 New York City alone had 133,000 Irish immigrants in 1850. 
 Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the other coast cities fol- 
 lowed according to their capacity, while many a New England 
 town had its " Irish village." 
 
 The influx of large numbers of foreigners gave rise to serious 
 political and social problems. Corruption and machine politics, 
 lavish bribery in elections, a debased press pandering to prej- 
 udice and passion, to religious bigotry and race hatred, ap- 
 peared in many quarters to an alarming degree. A bitter 
 persecution was directed against the Irish, who, before the 
 large influx of Italians and Poles,, formed the bulk of our 
 Roman Catholic immigrants. A "Native American" movement 
 developed to combat the influence of the Catholic Church 
 in our politics and to resist the efforts of that church to se- 
 cure a share of the public funds for the support of its paro- 
 chial schools. As early as 1834 a convent occupied by the 
 Ursuline Sisters near Boston had been sacked and burned. 
 Anti-Catholic rioters in New York attacked churches and 
 dwellings in 1842, smashing the windows of the episcopal resi- 
 dence of Archbishop Hughes. Two years later the "Nativists" 
 organized in the wards of Philadelphia for a systematic war 
 against the Roman Catholics, declaring that "Popery" was 
 "incompatible with free institutions." Excited men rushed out 
 from heated mass meetings to attack the Irish in the streets. 
 Catholic churches, schools, and shops were set on fire. The 
 militia was called out three times before the riot was finally 
 quelled, after the destruction of thousands of dollars' worth of 
 property and the loss of a score of lives. The increased immi- 
 gration of the later forties only added fuel to the flames. In 
 1850 the Nativists formed the order of the "Star-Spangled Ban- 
 ner," which grew within five years into the powerful political 
 party of the "Know-No things," or "Native Americans," 1 elect- 
 
 ir The party had secret grips and passwords, like the Masonic lodges. When 
 asked about it the members were ordered to reply, " I know nothing." We shall 
 notice the political influence of the party in the next section. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 471 
 
 ing governors and controlling legislatures in several of the states 
 of the Union. 
 
 The boiling over of the "melting-pot," however, was after all 
 only a sign of trifling disorder in the midst of the general pros- 
 perity in the America of 1850. Capital was abundant, and new 
 opportunities for investment were opening on every hand. The 
 discovery of gold in California in 1848, followed in 1851 by the 
 uncovering of large gold deposits in Australia, provided an ample 
 specie basis for a circulating medium proportioned to a rapidly 
 expanding volume of business. Statistics carefully gathered for 
 the first time in the census of 1850 showed that manufactures 
 had already passed agricultural products in value, the respective 
 figures for the year being $1,055,511,000 and $994,000,000. In 
 the industrial region bounded roughly west and south by the 
 Wabash, the Ohio, and the Potomac Rivers the number of mill 
 and factory operatives was increasing by tens of thousands 
 yearly. The annual production of flour and meal exceeded 
 $100,000,000; cotton goods, lumber, and shoes each passed 
 the $50,000,000 mark; and the value of leather, woolens, 
 and machinery manufactured was between $25,000,000 and 
 $50,000,000. The age of small production, supplying narrow 
 local markets and preserving something still of the apprentice 
 system, was definitely over. The extension of railroad-building, 
 the use of anthracite coal for smelting, 1 low tariffs, 2 a swell- 
 ing merchant marine, unbounded confidence and inventive 
 
 1 There were but six anthracite furnaces in 1840. Fifteen years later the 
 number had grown to 120, and anthracite had displaced charcoal as the chief 
 smel ting-fuel. Until 1844 we imported the rails for our 4000 miles of railroad 
 from Europe, and in the year 1850 we turned out but 85,000 tons of iron. Before 
 the close of Pierce's administration (1857) we were producing 180,000 tons 
 annually. More than half of this product came from the Pennsylvania foundries. 
 
 2 From the second war with England to the Mexican War the condition of 
 the United States Treasury was fluctuating. A disordered currency, tariff con- 
 troversies, wild speculation in public lands, and reckless state banking kept the 
 public finances continuously disturbed. But after 1846 they steadied down. 
 Prices of staples, like cotton and wheat, became more regular. Business gained 
 confidence. A surplus of from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 came into the Treasury 
 annually under the Walker tariff of 1846 (the first of our modern "scientific" 
 tariffs, with divisions into schedules) . 
 
472 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ingenuity, 1 were some of the chief elements in our economic 
 prosperity in the decade following the Compromise measures 
 of 1850. 
 
 Although this period saw the transition from small manu- 
 factures to large-scale production, it was not yet marked by 
 those glaring inequalities of wealth which characterize the in- 
 dustrial world in this later age of the " soulless corporation." 
 Comfort, if not wealth, was widespread. Neither the capitalist 
 at one end of the economic scale nor the laborer at the other end 
 was so far removed in condition from the general public as to re- 
 gard himself as a member of a " class" whose special interest 
 must be savagely fought for at whatever expense to the ultimate 
 consumer. A distinguished European engineer who traveled 
 through the industrial parts of our country a few years before 
 the Civil War was impressed with "the wide expanse and abun- 
 dant resources" of the United States, but much more with the 
 " absence of pauperism." "Nothing is more striking to a Eu- 
 ropean," he wrote, "than the universal appearance of respecta- 
 bility of all classes in America. You see no rags, you meet 
 no beggars." 
 
 Manufactures and shipping made the prosperity of the North. 
 The West with its boundless lands was developing a varied agri- 
 culture, supplying food to the plantations of the South and raw 
 wool and hemp to the factories of the East. Cotton was the 
 wealth of the South. Year after year this staple had been in- 
 creasing at the expense of farm products in the older states of 
 the South and monopolizing the newly opened lands of the Gulf 
 shore and the lower Mississippi Valley. The crop grew from 
 1,500,000 bales in 1840 to 2,500,000 bales in 1850. In the next 
 decade it increased to 5,000,000 bales seven eighths of the 
 world's supply. But even this enormous yield did not fully meet 
 
 ir The record of the Patent Office is a good index of American prosperity. 
 During the first generation of our national history, patents averaged less than 
 150 a year. They grew to 544 by 1830, and the decade 1840-1850 saw the 
 patenting of 5942 new American inventions, including the steam hammer, the 
 sewing-machine, the telegraph, and the rotary press. In the decade 1850-1860 
 the patents jumped to 23,140, a number now exceeded every year. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 473 
 
 the demands of the factories of Europe and the New England 
 States. The average production per slave rose from 109 pounds 
 in 1820 to 325 pounds in 1850. The steady trend of the negro 
 population to the lower South, 1 an increase of 100 per cent in the 
 price of sound field hands, 2 and the persistent effort of the great 
 planters to reopen the African slave trade all show how com- 
 pletely the cotton interests dominated the life of the Southland. 
 The section was an economic unit. Because the raw cotton sent 
 abroad in 1850 constituted nearly 50 per cent of the exports of 
 the United States, 3 and the bills of exchange were largely paid 
 in imports to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, 
 the Southerners maintained that it was their plantations that 
 were enriching the country. " Cotton is King! " they said. "In 
 the 3,000,000 bags of cotton that slave labor annually throws 
 upon the world we are doing more to advance civilization than 
 all the canting philanthropists of New and Old England will do 
 in a century." 
 
 Yet there was another side to the picture. The plantation 
 system polarized society in the South. Of the 5,500,000 whites 
 of that section only 350,000 were owners of slaves, and of these 
 over 1 70,000 owned less than five slaves apiece. The great plan- 
 tation lords, who monopolized the wealth of the South even more 
 completely than the trust magnates monopolize the wealth of 
 the country today, numbered not more than 5000 families. They 
 naturally became a "caste," controlling the political, economic, 
 
 ipor example, the 300,000 slaves in Virginia in 1790 had grown to but 
 450,000 in 1850, although the natural rate of increase would indicate a slave 
 population of at least 1,500,000 at the latter date. On the other hand, the 
 30,000 slaves of Mississippi in 1820 increased to 150,000 by 1850, or more than 
 double the number to be expected from census predictions. It is estimated that 
 over 2,000,000 negroes were sent South from the border states of Virginia, Ken- 
 tucky, Delaware, and Maryland during the decade 1850-1860. 
 
 2 In 1845 a good negro slave was worth about $750. In 1858 seven slaves 
 were sold at auction in New Orleans, without a guaranty, at an average price 
 of $1538 apiece (W. E. Dodd, "The Cotton Kingdom," page 26). 
 
 3 De Bow, in his "Statistical Review of the United States" (1854, p. 188), 
 gives the total exports as $235,000,000, of which cotton formed $112,315,317, 
 manufactures $21,296,498, flour $10,524,331, tobacco $9,219,251, and beef and 
 pork $6,657,973. 
 
474 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 social, educational, and religious life of the section. Diversity 
 of profitable industry was lacking, and slave labor excluded the 
 immigrant. The planter sold cotton to buy lands and slaves, to 
 raise more cotton, to sell for more land and slaves. As the in- 
 tensive cultivation of the crop exhausted the soil rapidly, the 
 planters were always in search of fresh lands. Cuba and Cen- 
 tral America tempted them with the vision of new slave states. 1 
 Measured not by the specious index of the exports of a staple 
 commodity which enriched a few planters, but by the general 
 diffusion of prosperity among its white population, the South 
 was poor in 1850. 
 
 Over 60 per cent of the land in New England was improved, 
 as against 2 7 per cent in the states south of Mason and Dixon's 
 line. Land values in the free states averaged $25.30 an acre, 
 to $9.28 in the slave states. Of the $1,019,107,000 worth of 
 manufactured goods, $845,430,430 worth (approximately 83 per 
 cent) were turned out by Northern plants. The cotton mills 
 yielded a product worth $65,501,689, over two thirds of which 
 came from New England. Virginia and Georgia alone of the 
 slave states manufactured as much as $1,000,000 worth of cot- 
 ton. The deposits in the banks of the cotton belt amounted to 
 but $20,000,000 in 1850, showing a great lack of fluid capital. 
 Only in new cotton regions was the return on capital as high 
 as in the manufacturing and shipping states. The great sums 
 which came into the Southern ports in payment for raw cotton 
 did not remain as a fund for diversified investment. Such part 
 as was not laid out in new lands and slaves was virtually held 
 in trust for Northern capitalists and middlemen, through whom 
 the imports to the South were handled. On the eve of the Civil 
 War, New York City alone had twice as much money on deposit 
 as all the states of the South together. 
 
 Much emphasis has been laid by historians of social condi- 
 tions on the intellectual superiority of the North. A study of 
 the census figures for 1850 confirms this judgment in some 
 
 1 See pages 462-465 for designs on Cuba. The astonishing career of the fili- 
 busterer William Walker in Nicaragua is another chapter in the program of the 
 slavery expansionists (T. C. Smith, "Parties and Slavery," pp. 252-253). 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 475 
 
 respects and corrects it in others. The public-school system 
 of the North was far better developed and more liberally sup- 
 ported. In the free states 62,571 schools were allotted $5,794,- 
 499 of taxes and public funds, as against 18,407 schools with 
 $1,230,999 in the slave states. But, on the other hand, the 
 South had 120 colleges, with 12,602 students, to 119 colleges, 
 with 15,119 students, in the North. 1 The total income from 
 higher institutions of learning was larger in Virginia ($150,000) 
 than in New York ($148,000), in Kentucky ($131,000) than 
 in Ohio ($125,000), in Maryland ($112,000) than in Massa- 
 chusetts ($107,000). Louisiana spent $25,000 of her public 
 funds on colleges, South Carolina $41,000, and Virginia $90,000 ; 
 while the figures for Massachusetts, Maine, and New York 
 respectively were $5000, $6000, and $12,000. In the Southern 
 states 72 daily newspapers were published, as against 182 in 
 the North, New York alone having 51. Only 152 public li- 
 braries are enumerated in the slave states, to 1065 in the North, 
 of which Michigan boasted 280 and Massachusetts 177. Among 
 the 13,330,658 white inhabitants of the free states there were 
 449,816 illiterates (approximately i in 30), while 513,082 of 
 the 6,222,418 whites of the South (about i in 12) could neither 
 read nor write. The statistics of crime, however, tell another 
 story. New York had 1288 convicts in her prisons on June 8, 
 1850, and Massachusetts had 1236; but the largest figures for 
 the slave states were 423 for Louisiana and 313 for Virginia. 
 Culture, like wealth, in the South was not diffused. It tended 
 more and more to be the exclusive privilege of the planter class. 
 The census of 1860 shows an increase of more than 100 per 
 cent over the figures of 1850 in the income of the higher institu- 
 tions of learning of the slave states, with little or no growth 
 in the public schools. 
 
 The backward economic condition of the South was a mat- 
 ter of great concern to the men of that section. An address 
 presented to a convention of the Virginia State Agricultural 
 Society in 1852, referring to the census of 1850, said : "In the 
 
 x lt must be remembered also that many Southern youth were educated in 
 Northern colleges. 
 
476 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 above figures we find no cause for self-gratulation. They show 
 that we have not done our part in bringing the land into culti- 
 vation. ... As other states accumulate the means of material 
 greatness and glide past us on the road to wealth and empire, 
 we slight the warnings of dull statistics and drive lazily along 
 the field of ancient customs." Governor Wise, of the same 
 state, wrote seven years later: "Commerce has long since 
 spread her sails and sailed away from you. You have not as 
 yet dug more than enough coal to warm yourselves at your 
 own hearths. . . . You have not yet spun coarse cotton enough 
 to clothe your own slaves." The Lynchburg Virginian wrote in 
 1852, "Dependent on England and the North for almost every 
 yard of cloth, and every coat, boot, and hat we wear ; for our 
 axes, scythes, tubs, and buckets, in short, for everything except 
 our bread and meat, it must occur to the South that if our 
 relations with the North should ever be severed ... we would 
 be reduced to a state more abject than we are willing to look 
 at even prospectively." "The finest ship timber in the world," 
 said the New Orleans Delta, "is cut down and sent to Northern 
 ship-yards thousands of miles off, where it is used in the con- 
 struction of vessels, many of which come back here to engage 
 in the transportation of Southern produce. In 1854 Maine 
 built 168,632 tons of shipping, and Louisiana 1509 tons. North 
 Carolina, which was one of the banner ship-building states in 
 the early days of the Union, constructed but 2532 tons in 1854, 
 to over 90,000 tons for Massachusetts." Economists like De 
 Bow urged the building of mills and factories 1 and the appro- 
 priation of public money for the improvement of roads, rivers, 
 and harbors. Commercial conventions, which were held fre- 
 quently in the decade 1850-1860, proposed hundreds of meas- 
 ures for the economic salvation of the South ; but no voice was 
 raised in protest against the system which made all these pro- 
 posals futile. Slavery must be not only maintained but ex- 
 
 !"A part of our force must be taken from the soil and put into the mills. 
 Spindles and looms must be brought to the cotton fields" (J. D. B. De Bow, 
 "Industrial Resources of the Southern States," Vol. I, p. 229). A large cotton 
 mill at Sparta, Georgia, had to close down in 1855, after running three years. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 477 
 
 tended. The industrial " drive" of the decade was a failure. 
 On the eve of the war the South was manufacturing but 4 per 
 cent of its cotton crop, and the magnificent iron and timber 
 industries which now enrich the states of Alabama and Georgia 
 were undreamed of. 
 
 No better index of the prosperity of the country at the acces- 
 sion of President Pierce could be found than the figures of the 
 expansion of our commerce by sea and land. A number of 
 events in the late forties had given encouragement to American 
 shipping. The Walker tariff of 1846 inaugurated an era ,of 
 moderate customs rates which lasted till the Civil War. The 
 revolutions of the year 1848 in central and western Europe 
 gave the opportunity that continental wars always furnished 
 for the increase of American trade. The same year gold was 
 discovered in California, and the great migration to the Pacific 
 coast began. The only practical way for the transportation of 
 freight was the long loop around Cape Horn. Within two years 
 after the discovery of gold the fast California clippers were 
 doubling the Cape and reaching the Golden Gate in a little 
 more than a hundred days out from Boston and New York, 
 sometimes earning enough by a single voyage to pay for the 
 ship. Great Britain repealed the last of her Navigation Acts in 
 1850, and the lucrative trade of the East Indies was freely 
 opened to the world. The ponderous and privileged old "India- 
 men," at once passenger ships, freighters, transports, and men- 
 of-war, gave place to the swift packet boats. Then an exciting 
 rivalry began between the Yankee clipper and the new British 
 vessel built on her model for the carrying trade in the tea and 
 spices of the Orient. 1 
 
 Following England's example of 1839 m subsidizing the 
 newly projected steamship line of Samuel Cunard for carrying 
 the mails, Congress voted in 1853 an annual subvention of 
 
 *A club of Boston merchants challenged the British shippers in 1852 to a race 
 from England to China and back for a purse of $50,000. The Yankee clippers 
 frequently beat the Cunard steamers in the run from Liverpool to Sandy Hook. 
 Donald McKay's Lightning established a record of 436 sea miles in a day 
 which was not equaled by transatlantic steamers for twenty-five years. 
 
478 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 $385,000 to Edward L. Collins, who put into service four 
 paddle-wheel steamers which promised for a moment to transfer 
 to the United States the supremacy of the sea-borne trade. 1 
 At the same time many new steamship lines were established 
 along the Atlantic seaboard and down to Central and South 
 America. The tonnage on the Great Lakes, which were rapidly 
 being connected with the coast by railroads, increased from 
 75,000 to 215,000 between 1840 and 1850 and jumped to 
 611,000 in the next decade. According to a Senate Executive 
 Document 2 the tonnage of our merchant marine in the year 
 1853 exceeded by 15 per cent that of Great Britain. The 
 5>353?868 tons of American shipping in the foreign and domestic 
 trade in 1860 were not equaled until the opening of the twen- 
 tieth century. Over 70 per cent of our foreign commerce in 
 the decade 1850-1860 was carried in American ships. 
 
 Most wonderful of all was the development of the American 
 railroads in the early fifties. Until the middle of the century 
 short stretches of iron track served as feeders or binding points 
 for centers of navigation on rivers and canals. In the twenty 
 years since John Quincy Adams had turned the first spadeful 
 of soil in the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 
 (July 4, 1829) less than 5000 miles had been built. But the 
 years 1850-1854 saw the mileage increase to 20,000. The chief 
 feature of this new era of railroad-building was the develop- 
 ment of " trunk lines" connecting the Ohio and Mississippi val- 
 leys and the Great Lakes with the Atlantic seaboard. In May, 
 1851, the Erie railroad was opened, with telegraph wires along 
 the road, from Piermont (near Nyack) on the Hudson to Dun- 
 kirk near Lake Erie, the event being celebrated by a trip of 
 
 iThe steamers of the Collins line the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Baltic, and the 
 Arctic made the voyage in nine or ten days, clipping about twenty-four hours 
 off the Cunarders' time. But unfortunately the Pacific and the Arctic went 
 down, and Congress, with a short-sightedness only too common in its dealing 
 with an American merchant marine, withdrew its financial support after five 
 years of the experiment. 
 
 2 Of the Thirty-ninth Congress, second session, p. 201. A report to the Treas- 
 ury Department on the progress of shipbuilding in the United States just after 
 the Civil War. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 479 
 
 Daniel Webster and the other members of Fillmore's cabinet 
 over the entire 460 miles. The same year the Hudson River road 
 reached Albany, and two years later the eleven independent 
 roads between New York and Buffalo were consolidated into 
 the New York Central. The Pennsylvania road, chartered in 
 1846, ran its first through train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh 
 in 1852, and the next year the Baltimore and Ohio reached its 
 western terminus at Wheeling, on the Ohio. The year of Pierce's 
 inauguration saw also the Grand Trunk line opened between 
 Portland and Montreal, and the construction of the Cleveland- 
 Toledo line along the Lake Shore, which established all-rail 
 connections between Chicago and the East. In 1855 St. Louis 
 and New York were joined by rail. 1 
 
 Although the federal government was committed by long 
 years of Democratic rule to opposition to internal improve- 
 ments at national expense, so important was the demand for 
 federal aid in railroad-building that Congress yielded so far 
 as to grant public lands to the states, to be turned over to the 
 railroads. Illinois received 2,595,453 acres in 1850 for the 
 Illinois Central Railroad, which was to connect Chicago with 
 the Gulf of Mexico. Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, 
 Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa were all 
 recipients of large grants in the next half-dozen years. Alto- 
 gether Congress donated some 20,000,000 acres in the decade 
 1850-1860. States, counties, and cities supplemented the fed- 
 eral grants, while bankers and promoters borrowed heavily from 
 the financiers of London and Paris. It is estimated that some 
 $450,000,000 of European capital was invested in American 
 railroads on the eve of the Civil War. States like Illinois, Iowa, 
 and Wisconsin were doubling in population each decade, and 
 
 American Railway Times gives the following statistics of mileage in 
 the chief railroad states at the close of 1854: Ohio, 47 roads with 2927 miles; 
 Illinois, 31 roads with 2667 miles ; New York, 32 roads with 2625 miles ; Penn- 
 sylvania, 69 roads with 1992 miles ; Indiana, 39 roads with 1453 miles ; Massa- 
 chusetts, 39 roads with 1293 miles. Of the 16,500 miles built in the period 
 1849-1857 the distribution, according to the Miscellaneous Statistics of the 
 eighth census, was as follows : Northwestern States, 7500 ; New England States, 
 4000; South Atlantic States, 2750; South Interior States, 2150. 
 
480 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the rapid rise in value of lands along their completed and 
 projected lines made investment attractive. 
 
 As the East reached out to the West, the West reached out 
 to the Pacific. Asa Whitney o^ Michigan was the pioneer 
 promoter of a Pacific railroad. After laboring for ten years 
 he got the House Committee on Roads and Canals to report 
 favorably on a plan in 1852 to put at his disposal a strip of 
 land sixty miles wide from the Mississippi to the coast, which 
 he was to sell to settlers. Out of the proceeds he was to build 
 a railroad and eventually refund the government ten cents an 
 acre for the land. Nothing came of this ambitious scheme of 
 Whitney's, but projects were multiplied for building the iron 
 road where but lately the stagecoach line had been established. 1 
 The promoters of the hustling Northwest wanted Chicago for 
 the terminal. The rival St. Louisans celebrated the Fourth of 
 July, 1851, by breaking ground for a Pacific road and actually 
 sent the first steam train west of the Mississippi over the few 
 completed miles of track eighteen months later. The men of 
 the cotton states hoped to link Memphis or New Orleans with 
 San Francisco by a railroad passing through Arkansas, Texas, 
 and New Mexico. In spite of his strict constructionist prin- 
 ciples inherited from Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Pierce's Secre- 
 tary of War, found the authority, under the plea of " national 
 defense," to promote the Memphis-Santa Fe scheme. James 
 Gadsden, a railroad president of South Carolina, was made our 
 minister to Mexico for the express purpose of purchasing the 
 land south of New Mexico containing the lowest pass over the 
 Rockies. He returned in the autumn of 1853 with the Gads- 
 den Purchase of 50,000 square miles, acquired at a cost of 
 $10,000,000. Congress went so far as to authorize surveys of 
 routes at public cost, in the Rusk Bill of 1853, but all plans 
 
 *In 1851 monthly stages from Independence, Kansas, to Santa Fe were 
 started, the stages built water-tight for fording streams. Frederick Law Olm- 
 stead tells in his "Journey in the Seaboard Slave States" (Vol. II, p. 5) of 
 crossing a cypress swamp in a stage with holes bored in the floor. The pas- 
 sengers climbed to the top when the vehicle struck deep water, and came back 
 to their seats after the flood had been drained off. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 481 
 
 of peaceful expansion were adjourned by the approach of 
 the great struggle between the North and the South. 
 
 The effect of this era of railroad-building, which carried the 
 connections from the Eastern seaports to nearly a score of 
 points on the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Lakes, was momen- 
 tous for our history. It revolutionized our economic and polit- 
 ical geography. The old lines of trade ran north and south on 
 both sides of the Alleghenies, by the coasting-routes and canals 
 of the Atlantic seaboard and by the Mississippi River system. 
 The agricultural products of the Northwest went down the river 
 to Memphis, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, where 
 they were sold to the planters or reshipped on Gulf or ocean 
 steamers. In the early forties New Orleans was the fifth city 
 in size in the country, and second only to New York in the ex- 
 port trade. Over 2000 steamers arrived at her levees annually, 
 carrying half a million tons of freight, valued at $50,000,000. 
 The total commerce of the " Western waters" was estimated 
 at $100,000,000. But the coming of the railroad shifted the 
 routes of trade. The barrier of the Alleghenies sank. After 
 1850, wheat could be brought from the Northwest by lake and 
 rail to the Atlantic ports for 17 cents a bushel and flour for 
 80 cents a barrel. The region which had produced tens of 
 millions of bushels of grain to feed the South now began to 
 produce hundreds of millions to feed Europe. Our exports of 
 grain, encouraged by the repeal of the Corn Laws in England 
 in 1846, the abolition of the last Navigation Acts in. 1850, and 
 the interruption of the Russian wheat supply by the Crimean 
 War, increased 158 per cent in the decade following Franklin 
 Pierce's inauguration. By 1860 the export of grain from New 
 Orleans had dropped to 2189 bushels, while 43,211,488 bushels 
 were shipped eastward from the Lake Michigan ports alone. 
 The once enormous export trade of the Queen City of the South 
 was now confined to cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. 
 
 The political effect of this shifting of economic lines to run 
 east and west instead of north and south showed more and 
 more clearly in the ten years preceding the Civil War. Political 
 allegiance tends to follow material interests. "In 1847 not a 
 
482 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 line of railroad entered Chicago ; its population numbered about 
 25,000, and its property valuation approximated $7,000,000. 
 Ten years later 4000 miles of railway connected with all points 
 of the compass a city of nearly 100,000 people, and property 
 valuations had increased 500 per cent." 1 What was true of 
 Chicago was true only in less degree of the other Lake cities, 
 like Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit, whose amazing 
 growth during the decade 1850-1860 was due to Eastern capital 
 and Eastern merchants, bankers, and promoters. With the 
 invoices and bills of lading there went to these Western centers 
 also the ideas and ideals of the East Emerson's quiet enthu- 
 siasm for democracy, Whittier's quenchless love of freedom, 
 Lowell's satire, and Greeley's scorn. It was only when the test 
 of the sections came in 1861 that the full meaning of the shift- 
 ing of the economic affiliations of the Northwest from South to 
 East were realized though penetrating Southerners saw them 
 clearly and tried to hasten secession by a decade. 
 
 Other counsels prevailed. The vast majority of American 
 citizens, North and South, determined that harmony must be 
 maintained and the Union preserved. If the tone of confidence 
 was pitched so high that it sometimes broke into querulousness, 
 it was only the relief from the strain of a decade filled with 
 strife. If the constant reiteration, in the fervid oratory of the 
 period, of the impossibility of a dissolution of the Union seems 
 rather to betray the anxiety which it denies, it was only a par- 
 donable impatience that all Americans should leave the recent 
 quarrel behind and devote themselves with zeal to the mag- 
 nificent prospect ahead. The time was ripe for reaping the 
 harvest of America's matchless material resources. The Treas- 
 ury was full, commerce was expanding, cities were springing 
 up, mills and factories were humming, banks were multiplying, 
 credit was easy, and capital was abundant. The- halcyon days 
 had dawned. After the bitter strife of the Compromise year 
 there was peace the business man's peace. In his first message 
 to Congress, in December, 1853, President Pierce spoke of "the 
 
 1 Archer B. Hulbert, "The Paths of Inland Commerce" (Chronicles of America, 
 Vol. XXI), p. 172. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 483 
 
 sense of repose and security to the public mind" which had 
 been restored to all parts of our country, adding, "That this 
 repose is to suffer no shock during my official term, if I have 
 the power to prevent it, those who placed me here may be as- 
 sured." Less than fifty days later Pierce was closeted with 
 Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on 
 Territories, and a few other members of Congress in lending 
 the executive approval to a measure which was destined not 
 only to disturb the country's repose but to head it straight 
 toward civil war. 
 
 THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE 
 
 That part of the Louisiana Purchase territory lying west 
 and north of the states of Missouri and Iowa was known as 
 Nebraska in 1850. It was a vast unorganized region of 485,000 
 square miles, larger than the combined area of all the free 
 states in the Union excepting California. It contained less than 
 1000 white inhabitants, and our government had allotted to 
 various Indian tribes large tracts in the smiling valleys of the 
 Platte and Kansas Rivers. The overland migration to Cali- 
 fornia, which had followed the discovery of gold, together with 
 the nascent plans for a Pacific railroad, had brought the zone 
 of this region immediately west of Missouri and Iowa to the 
 public notice in the early fifties. A bill for the organization 
 of the Nebraska Territory passed the House in the last session 
 of Fillmore's term, but Congress expired (March 4, 1853) 
 before a vote was reached in the Senate. 
 
 A few days after the assembling of President Pierce's first 
 Congress, Senator A. C. Dodge of Iowa introduced a bill for 
 the organization of Nebraska, which was referred to the Com- 
 mittee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas chairman. The bill 
 was reported on January 4, 1854, with the following fateful 
 amendments : 
 
 Section 21. And be it further enacted, That in order to avoid all 
 misconstruction, it is hereby declared to be the true intent and mean- 
 ing of this act, so far as the question of slavery is concerned, to 
 
484 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 carry into practical operation the propositions and principles estab- 
 lished by the Compromise Measures of 1850, to wit: 
 
 First, that all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories 
 and the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the 
 decision of the people residing therein, through their appropriate 
 representatives. 
 
 Second, that all cases involving title to slaves and questions of per- 
 sonal property are referred to the adjudication of the local tribunals, 
 with the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. 
 
 Third, that the provisions of the Constitution and the Laws of the 
 United States in respect to fugitives from service are to be carried 
 into faithful execution in all the organized Territories the same as 
 in the States. 
 
 It will be noticed that the Missouri Compromise, by which 
 the land in question had been dedicated to freedom thirty-four 
 years before, is not mentioned in the amendments, although 
 it is practically annulled by their provisions. When Archibald 
 Dixon, a Whig senator from Kentucky, announced his inten- 
 tion of introducing an amendment expressly repealing the Mis- 
 souri Compromise, Douglas consented to the change. Only, 
 knowing that it would arouse great antagonism at the North, 
 he insisted on having the backing of the administration. This 
 he obtained in the conference with Pierce mentioned at the close 
 of the last section. The day after the conference (January 24) 
 Douglas substituted for the Nebraska Bill a Kansas-Nebraska 
 Bill, providing for two territories divided by the thirty-seventh 
 parallel of latitude. It was the tacit understanding that slavery 
 should go into the southern territory of Kansas and be kept 
 out of the northern territory of Nebraska. The bill declared 
 that "the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission 
 of Missouri into the Union" (a section excluding slavery from 
 the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 30') was "su- 
 perseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, com- 
 monly called the Compromise Measures," and was therefore 
 "inoperative." 1 
 
 x By a later amendment the wording "superseded by" was changed to "incon- 
 sistent with," and "inoperative" was changed to "inoperative and void." 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 485 
 
 The opposition to the proposed repeal of the Missouri Com- 
 promise, which Douglas foresaw, was not slow in appearing. 
 On the day after he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill an 
 address known as "The Appeal of the Independent Democrats" 
 was published over the signatures of Senators Chase, Sumner, 
 Wade, Smith, and De Witt. It denounced the bill as "a gross 
 violation of a sacred pledge" and a "part and parcel of an 
 atrocious plot to exclude from a vast and unoccupied region 
 immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own 
 States, and to convert it into a dreary region of despotism in- 
 habited by masters and slaves." It declared that "the dearest 
 interests of the people were made the mere hazards of a presi- 
 dential game," the action of the Illinois senator being "a bid 
 for Southern support in the next Democratic convention." The 
 influential newspapers of the North condemned the bill. From 
 mass meetings and state legislatures came stirring resolutions 
 of protest. Douglas himself declared that he "could travel 
 from Boston to Chicago by the light of his burning effigies." 
 
 But Douglas was not a man to be daunted by opposition. 
 Aggressive, ingenious, confident, plausible, he always rose to 
 his greatest heights as the fight grew harder. Almost unaided 
 he met the arguments of Wade, Chase, Sumner, Seward, and 
 Everett on the floor of the Senate day after day. He pushed his 
 bill with relentless energy. The Compromise Measures of 1850 
 had lingered six months in Congress ; Douglas put the Kansas- 
 Nebraska Bill through the Senate in 39 days. In the early 
 morning of March 4, 1854, after a final debate lasting seven- 
 teen hours, the vote was taken 37 for, 14 against. In the 
 House the preponderating influence of the North delayed the 
 bill for more than two months longer; but finally (May 22); 
 under the skillful management of Alexander H. Stephens, it 
 passed by the narrow margin of 113 to 100 votes. On May 30 
 President Pierce appended his signature. 
 
 The sinister credit for putting the Kansas-Nebraska Bill 
 through Congress belongs to Stephen A. Douglas. The argu- 
 ment of his report and of his speeches on the subject was that 
 the country, by the adoption of the Compromise of 1850, had 
 
486 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 substituted the principle of "squatter sovereignty" for that of 
 a geographical dividing line in the regulation of slavery in the 
 territories. He boasted that the new principle was national, 
 knowing no lines nor boundaries, no North nor South, whereas 
 the old line of 36 30' sanctioned the division of the country 
 into two permanently hostile sections. The North, he said, 
 had refused to extend the line of 36 30' through the new 
 territory acquired by the Mexican War, thus wisely abandon- 
 ing the pernicious principle of the Missouri Compromise. He 
 was now merely arguing for their consistent support of the 
 new doctrine which had brought the happy solution of the 
 slavery question in the Compromise of 1850. His bill, he main- 
 tained, was in strict accord with the pledges and platform of 
 the triumphant Democracy of 1852. 
 
 But the spuriousness of Douglas's argument is obvious. 
 There was no hint in the debates of 1850 that the Compromise 
 Measures were meant to apply to any other region than the 
 territory just acquired in the Mexican War, or to be erected 
 into a "principle" to "supersede" any former legislation. The 
 Northern votes necessary for its passage could never have been 
 obtained on any such interpretation. Clay and Webster, to 
 whose efforts the success of the Compromise of 1850 was due, 
 would not have spoken a word in its behalf if they had supposed 
 that it meant the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Indeed, 
 the chief argument of both these statesmen for the application 
 of popular sovereignty to Utah and New Mexico in 1850 was 
 that it actually would not mean the extension of slave territory. 1 
 Douglas had the audacity to argue that because the North 
 refused to extend the line of 36 30' through the Mexican ces- 
 sion, which was free soil under Mexican law, it therefore had 
 virtually consented to abolish the 36 30' line in the Louisiana 
 Purchase territory ! In other words, the rejection of the pro- 
 posal to legalize slavery south of 36 30' in New Mexico was 
 equivalent to the abandonment of the prohibition of slavery 
 
 !"They [Clay and Webster] bargained with slavery not for the purpose of 
 saving it, but in the sure confidence that it would die a natural death." Louis 
 Rowland, "Stephen A. Douglas," p. 93 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 487 
 
 north, of 36 30' in Nebraska. Douglas's crafty attempt to use 
 the support of the names of the two great Whig leaders of 1850 
 for such logic was exposed by his adversaries in the Senate, 
 especially by Edward Everett, who had been a close associate 
 of Webster's, had voted for the Compromise of 1850, and was 
 a member of Douglas's committee in 1854. However, Douglas's 
 persistency and unrivaled skill in debate bore down all opposi- 
 tion. He had his way in the triumph which was eventually 
 to wreck his own political career and to bring untold woes upon 
 his country. 
 
 The motives which impelled Douglas to inject the fateful 
 slavery amendments into the Nebraska Bill of 1854* have 
 been the subject of much speculation among historians. The 
 most widely accepted theory is that expressed by Mr. Rhodes 
 (Vol. I, p. 430) ; namely, that "the action of the Illinois Senator 
 was a bid for Southern support in the next Democratic conven- 
 tion." There is no doubt that Douglas was ambitious for the 
 presidency. There is no doubt, further, that the men who 
 would be his chief competitors for the nomination in 1856 were 
 all courting the favor of the South. 2 But this is not enough 
 to prove that Douglas sold himself to the South in 1854 for 
 a mess of presidential pottage. In spite of his famous remark 
 in 1849 that "the Missouri Compromise was canonized in the 
 hearts of the American people," and of his prediction in the 
 debate which followed that the land stretching from the Mis- 
 souri to the Pacific would be free soil, he had no deep ethical 
 convictions on the subject of slavery. Again and again we have 
 his confession that he "didn't care whether slavery was voted 
 up or voted down." He did care, however, a great deal about 
 the organization of the Western territory, the quieting of Indian 
 
 i-In all previous attempts to organize the territory of Nebraska (which began 
 with a bill introduced into the House by Douglas himself in 1844) there is no 
 hint of disturbing the Missouri Compromise. 
 
 2 Pierce was hand in glove with Jefferson Davis. Buchanan was lending him- 
 self to the schemes for the acquisition of Cuba. Marcy was more cautious but 
 not less willing. Cass was the arch-" Doughface " the Northern man with 
 Southern principles. Moreover Douglas had a handicap to overcome in that he 
 was born in the abolitionist state of Vermont and was a farmer's son. 
 
488 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 claims, and the choice of the middle Nebraska route for the 
 projected Pacific railway, instead of the Southern survey which 
 was being pushed by Jefferson Davis and other powerful friends 
 of the administration (see page 480). 
 
 No other man had had so much of a hand in the organization 
 of our trans-Mississippi territory as Douglas. As chairman of 
 the House and Senate Committees on Territories he had re- 
 ported the bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, 
 Oregon, and Minnesota had been erected as territories and 
 Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, and Wisconsin had been ad- 
 mitted as states. It was expansion, not slavery, that he was 
 interested in; and if he incorporated the slavery clauses in 
 his Kansas-Nebraska Bill to make it palatable to the South, 1 
 it was certainly not with the intention of extending slavery 
 and probably not primarily with the intention of gaining the 
 presidency, but for the immediate object of getting the new 
 territory organized. . His mistake, or rather his moral failing, 
 
 1 Professor P. O. Ray, in his monograph on "The Repeal of the Missouri 
 Compromise" (1909), pointed out the immense importance of local politics in 
 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. In the election of 1850 Thomas H. Benton had been 
 driven by David R. Atchison (proslavery) from the seat in the Senate which 
 he had held for thirty years. In his fight to regain his seat Benton appealed 
 to the people of Missouri on the issue of expansion, urging them to settle on 
 the Nebraska lands, where the bona-fide Indian allotments were scarce. Atchison 
 did not favor expansion, because he regarded the Missouri Compromise as 
 firmly established, and rather than have a new free territory to the west of 
 Missouri (which was already bounded on two sides by free states), he would 
 have no new territory at all. But Benton's insistence on the popular issue of 
 expansion forced Atchison to change his position in order to escape the accusa- 
 tion of being indifferent to the demands of the Missouri frontiersmen. Driven 
 thus to support a Nebraska bill, Atchison changed his position on the Missouri 
 Compromise. It must now be repealed. As President pro tem. of the Senate he 
 used his influence with Douglas to this end. Douglas himself had been absent 
 in Europe when the bitter battle between the senator and the ex-senator of 
 Missouri was being waged in the summer of 1853; and how little he thought 
 of the revival of the Question of slavery in the territories on his return, only a 
 month before the opening of Congress, we may judge from a letter which he 
 wrote to a political friend in Illinois outlining the important matters to come 
 before the session. These were tariff reform, Treasury reform, river and har- 
 bor bills, revision of tonnage duties, grants for railroads, and the Pacific rail- 
 way. Not a word about slavery or Nebraska! 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 489 
 
 was that he did not see that what to him was a minor and in- 
 cidental element in the bill was just the crucial point of it for 
 an increasing number of Northern men. "It is enough," says 
 William G. Brown, "to decide that Douglas took a wrong 
 course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led 
 him into it. It is too much to say that he knew it was wrong, 
 and took it solely because he was ambitious." 1 
 
 James Ford Rhodes says that the Kansas-Nebraska Act "in 
 its scope and consequences was the most momentous measure 
 that passed Congress from the day that the Senators and Repre- 
 sentatives first met to the outbreak of the Civil War" (Vol. I, 
 p. 490) ; and John W. Burgess declares that the act was "proba- 
 bly the greatest error which the Congress of the United States 
 ever committed, and the arguments by which it was supported 
 were among the most specious fallacies that have ever misled 
 the minds of men" ("The Middle Period," p. 405). Certain it is 
 that with the passage of this act the day of compromise between 
 the sections was over. "The Fugitive Slave Law did much to 
 unglue the eyes of men," wrote Emerson, "and now the Kansas- 
 Nebraska Bill leaves us staring." The importance of the act 
 may be seen in its immediate consequences. It gave the finish- 
 ing stroke to the Whig party as a national organization. Every 
 Whig member of Congress from the states north of Mason and 
 Dixon's line voted against the bill, and all but seven of the 
 Whigs from the states south of the line voted for it. It drove 
 thousands of Northern Democrats out of the party. It gave an 
 immense impetus to the Free-Soil propaganda. "Pierce and 
 Douglas," wrote Greeley in the New York Tribune, "have made 
 more Abolitionists in three months than Garrison and Phillips 
 could have made in half a century." The Anti-Nebraska men 
 of all shades of opinion drew together to resist the extension of 
 slavery into the territory long dedicated to freedom. 2 A year 
 
 1 William G. Brown, "Life of Stephen A. Douglas," p. 88. 
 
 2 The autumn elections of 1854 sent 117 Anti-Nebraska men to the House and 
 reduced the administration Democrats from 159 to 79 members. "Of the forty- 
 two Northern Democrats who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, only 
 seven were re-elected" (Rhodes, Vol. II, p. 67). 
 
490 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 after the bill was passed the Democrats were confronted by a 
 rapidly growing party whose platform was the subordination 
 of every other political issue to the fight for the restriction 
 of slavery. When Douglas reported his bill the Northwestern 
 states were solidly Democratic. Every one of the senators 
 from Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and all 
 but five of the twenty-nine members from these states in the 
 lower House, belonged to the party of the administration. The 
 enormous influence of Douglas kept Illinois in the Democratic 
 column for one more presidential election ; but Michigan, Wis- 
 consin, and Iowa went over to the new Republican party 
 forthwith, and only Indiana remained permanently in the 
 " doubtful column." 
 
 Moreover, the political revolution caused by the Kansas- 
 Nebraska Act was the result of an apparently needless and 
 wanton disturbance of the status quo of slavery in the Louisiana 
 Purchase territory. The Democrats were securely established 
 in power in every branch of the government. Unionist senti- 
 ment was victorious in the South. 1 President Pierce was pledged 
 to the " finality" of the Compromise of 1850. Douglas himself 
 had said on leaving the stormy session of the Compromise Con- 
 gress that he never expected to make another speech on the sub- 
 ject of slavery. 
 
 Of course, one may say that two civilizations so hostile to 
 each other could not long continue to exist side by side, espe- 
 cially when one was coming to be more and more a moral re- 
 proach in the eyes of the other; that if it had not been the 
 Kansas-Nebraska Bill it would have been some other bill re- 
 viving the latent strife of the sections and revealing the futility 
 of the compromise which men called final. Such speculations 
 may comfort the philosopher and excuse in his eyes the human 
 agents of fate or Providence. But for the historian a man is 
 
 does not mean that the South was at all converted to the doctrine of 
 a "consolidated" government. The Unionist victory of 1851 was not a repudia- 
 tion of states' rights. It signified only that the time was not yet ripe for a 
 Southern " nationalist " movement. " To secede from the Union now," said Cheves 
 of South Carolina, "would be to secede also from the South." 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 491 
 
 judged by his deeds. Whatever his provocation or his pretext, 
 his temptation or his excuse, the fact remains that it was Stephen 
 A. Douglas who undid the gates of Janus. And for this chiefly 
 he will be remembered as long as our history is written. 
 
 While the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was still under discussion 
 in the Senate, a group of W T higs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers 
 met at Ripon, Wisconsin (February 28), and resolved that if 
 the bill passed they would organize a new party on the sole 
 issue of resistance to the extension of slavery. E. A. Bovay, 
 the leader of the group, suggested in a letter to Horace Greeley 
 that the new party should take the name of "Republican," 
 and Greeley popularized the name through the columns of the 
 New York Tribune. On July 6 several men of all shades of 
 political opinion met in a grove of oaks on the outskirts of 
 Jackson, Michigan, and formally launched the new Republican 
 party. They adopted a platform declaring that slavery was 
 "a violation of the rights of man" and of "the law of nature, 
 which is the law of liberty." The history of the formation of 
 our government, and the testimony of men like Washington 
 and Jefferson, showed that it was "the purpose of our fathers 
 not to promote but to prevent the spread of slavery," that the 
 Constitution gave Congress "full and complete power for the 
 municipal government of the Territories," that the repeal of 
 the Missouri Compromise was an act "unprecedented in the 
 history of our country" and "a wanton and dangerous frustra- 
 tion of the purposes and hopes" of the founders of this nation. 
 They demanded the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the 
 repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850, and the abolition of 
 slavery in the District of Columbia. They recommended the 
 calling of a general convention of the free states (and of such 
 slave states as might wish to attend) to adopt nation-wide 
 measures for combating the spread of slavery. They agreed 
 to sink their political differences in the common fight for free- 
 dom and "to cooperate and be known as Republicans until the 
 contest be terminated." They nominated a full state ticket and 
 elected it the following November, together with three of the 
 four Michigan congressmen and a decided majority in both 
 
492 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 houses of the state legislature. The summer and early autumn 
 of 1854 saw conventions in various other states (Maine, Ver- 
 mont, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York) to organize political 
 opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. James G. Elaine said 
 many years later that seven states claimed the honor of being 
 the birthplace of the Republican party, as seven cities contended 
 for the honor of Homer's birth. This very rivalry is a proof 
 of the spontaneity and universality of the protest against the 
 repeal of the Missouri Compromise. 
 
 The political upheaval caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act 
 resulted in one of the strangest temporary movements in our 
 history. We have already noticed the rise of the Native- 
 American, or "Know-Nothing," agitation in connection with 
 the increasing immigration of the forties (see page 470). The 
 disruption of the Whig party and the disgust of many Northern 
 Democrats with the program of Douglas sent into the ranks of 
 the " Know-Nothings" thousands of voters who had yet no 
 organized Republican party to which totally. They elected 
 governors or legislatures in several states (frew England, Mary- 
 land, Kentucky, California) and sent a respectable delegation to 
 Congress. But a party founded on principles so un-American 
 as those of the "American" party secrecy, religious intoler- 
 ance, and opposition to immigration could never outlast a 
 period of momentary and panicky confusion in our country. 
 Furthermore, in the attempt to hold the "South Americans" 
 and the "North Americans" together it split in its first and 
 only presidential convention, of 1856. It served merely as a 
 kind of halfway house to detach Whigs and Democrats from 
 their old allegiance. Like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, it 
 burst in the effort to blow itself up to the size of a presidential ox. 
 
 Meanwhile events in the new territory of Kansas were fur- 
 nishing a dismal commentary on Douglas's doctrine of popular 
 sovereignty. Immediately after the passage of the act a battle 
 for the control of the territory began. "Come on, then, gentle- 
 men of the Slave States!" cried Seward; "since there is no 
 escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of freedom. We 
 will engage in a competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 493 
 
 God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers 
 as it is in the right ! " Eli Thayer and Amos Lawrence of Mas- 
 sachusetts organized the first Emigrant Aid Society to colonize 
 the new territory. The first company of settlers, twenty-four 
 in number, started from Massachusetts in the middle of July 
 and finally pitched their tents on the banks of the Kansas River, 
 where the free town of Lawrence sprang up. The New E',ng- 
 landers had to journey more than a thousand miles to reach 
 the territory, but the proslavery men of Missouri had only to 
 cross the border. This they did by the hundreds, forming 
 societies of "Blue Lodges" or "Sons of the South/' whose pur- 
 pose was to defeat the schemes of the immigrants to "aboli- 
 tionize Kansas." They founded the town of Atchison on the 
 left bank of the Missouri River and announced in their im- 
 provised paper, The Squatter Sovereign, that they were ready 
 "to lynch and hang, tar and feather and drown every white- 
 livered Abolitionist who dared to pollute the soil of Kansas." 
 When the first governor, Andrew H. Reeder of Pennsylvania, 
 arrived in the territory in October, he found the stage set for 
 a violent contest of vituperation, fraud, and murder which was 
 to last for more than two years. Governor Reeder set Novem- 
 ber 29, 1854, as the day for the election of a territorial delegate 
 to Congress. On the day before the election, Missourians began 
 to pour into Kansas "with every kind of vehicle that could 
 run on wheels and every horse or mule that could stand on 
 legs." The "invaders" cast over 1700 votes for the proslavery 
 candidate Whitfield, insuring his election by an overwhelming 
 majority, and returned to their homes. 
 
 It was thus that "popular sovereignty" was inaugurated in 
 Kansas. The government which was begun in fraud was con- 
 tinued in lawlessness and terror. Early in 1855 Reeder took 
 a census of the territory, preparatory to the establishment of a 
 legislature. The count showed a population of about 8500, 
 of whom 2900 were males of voting age. Yet on election day 
 (March 30) 6320 votes were cast (of which more than five 
 sixths were illegal), and a proslavery legislature was elected. 
 Summoned by the governor to meet at Pawnee, they defied his 
 
494 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 authority, unseated the few Free Soil members who had been 
 chosen, and moved to Shawnee Mission on the Missouri border, 
 where they proceeded to enact laws (over the governor's veto) 
 wholly favorable to slavery. Governor Reeder, whose only of- 
 fense was his sincere effort to secure an honest election in Kan- 
 sas, was removed by President Pierce in the midsummer of 
 1855 and went over to the antislavery party, by whom he was 
 immediately chosen territorial delegate. 
 
 The Free Soil men, unable to cope with the Missouri immi- 
 grants, proceeded with their own program. Adopting the "Cali- 
 fornia plan," they held a convention at Topeka in October, 
 
 1855, and framed a free-state constitution, which they sub- 
 mitted to the people for ratification in December. The pro- 
 slavery men, of course, ignored the Topeka Constitution. It 
 was adopted by a strictly Free Soil vote. Under it state officers 
 were chosen and a legislature was elected to meet at Topeka on 
 November 4, 1856. Thus Kansas had two governments the 
 " legal" one at Shawnee Mission, organized by fraud, and the 
 " illegal" one at Topeka, representing the will of the majority 
 of bona-fide inhabitants. President Pierce was distressed by 
 the situation. The strife in Kansas, he told Reeder when the 
 latter visited Washington in the spring of 1855, haunted him 
 day and night. In his message to Congress in December he 
 tried to dodge responsibility for the situation by declaring that 
 nothing had happened in Kansas "to justify Federal inter- 
 ference"; but the next month he sent in a special message in 
 which he took sides squarely with the proslavery party. He 
 laid all the blame for the strife on the Emigrant Aid Societies, 
 denounced the Topeka Constitution and the elections held un- 
 der it as "illegal," and recognized the fraudulent legislature at 
 Shawnee Mission as "the legitimate legislative assembly of the 
 Territory." 
 
 When the free-state legislature met at Topeka in March, 
 
 1856, under the moderating influence of "Governor" Charles 
 Robinson, it refrained from any acts of violence against either 
 Pierce's new governor, Wilson Shannon of Ohio, or the ter- 
 ritorial legislature which Pierce had recognized. It elected 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 495 
 
 Reeder and Lane as United States senators and appointed a 
 commission to draw up a petition asking for the admission of 
 Kansas to the Union as a free state. Nevertheless Judge 
 Lecompton, of the first Federal District Court of the territory, 
 virtually charged the jury to find indictments against Robinson, 
 Reeder, Lane, and other prominent free-state leaders for "con- 
 structive treason." Every month saw the confusion increasing 
 and civil war more imminent in Kansas. A committee of the 
 House sent to the territory in April, 1856,' to investigate the 
 conflicting claims of Whitfield and Reeder to the delegate's 
 seat, reported that there was no prospect of a fair election in 
 Kansas without the presence of United States troops at every 
 polling-place. Free Soil immigrants were pouring into the ter- 
 ritory by the thousands. The Missourians, unable to hold the 
 proslavery fort alone, appealed to the South for aid in the 
 autumn of 1855, and in response detachments of several hun- 
 dred men marched from Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia 
 into Kansas. Major Buford's Alabamians were armed by Gov- 
 ernor Shannon and used as a Kansas militia. The free-state 
 men fortified their capital of Lawrence. Under these circum- 
 stances the deed of violence which should lead to civil war was 
 almost inevitable. It came with the cowardly attempt of some 
 free-state man to assassinate the proslavery Sheriff Jones, as he 
 rode into Lawrence to arrest a man for murder. In revenge the 
 sheriff got control of the marshal's posse and excited a lawless 
 raid "to wipe out Lawrence." Armed men entered the town 
 on May 21, 1856, under banners bearing the mottoes and de- 
 vices of various Southern clans, and proceeded to wreck the 
 Free-State Hotel and the "abolitionist" printing-press and to 
 pillage and burn private dwellings. 
 
 While the ashes of Lawrence were still hot an outrageous 
 deed was perpetrated in the United States Senate. Sumner 
 of Massachusetts had delivered a speech on May 19-20 called 
 "The Crime against Kansas." It was a fierce attack on the 
 proslavery leaders in the territory and their abetters in the 
 South. Sumner singled out for the special victim of his venom- 
 ous invective Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, who 
 
496 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 was not present to reply. Late in the afternoon of the twenty- 
 second, when Sumner was working at his desk in the deserted 
 Senate chamber, Preston S. Brooks, a congressman from South 
 Carolina and a relative of Butler's, walked up to the senator 
 and, with a few words of justifiable reproach, struck him 
 on the head with a heavy gutta-percha cane. Sumner, dazed, 
 struggled to rise, wrenching the desk from its fastenings in his 
 effort. But Brooks rained blow after blow upon him until he 
 sank bleeding and insensible to the floor. Toombs, standing 
 in the lobby, saw Sumner fall, and Douglas and Slidell, con- 
 versing in an anteroom, were told by a Senate page what was 
 going on. But none of these men interfered to stay Brooks's 
 murderous fury. A motion to expel Brooks from the House 
 failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote. He resigned and 
 was immediately reflected by his district with emphatic testi- 
 monials of approval and with only six dissenting votes. Sumner 
 was gradually restored to a moderate degree of health by the 
 skill of European specialists, but it was not until December, 
 1859, that he was able to resume the seat in the Senate which 
 the legislature of Massachusetts had kept vacant for him. 
 
 Still another deed of horror was crowded into the fateful 
 week which saw the sack of Lawrence and the attack on Sumner. 
 John Brown, a fanatical immigrant farmer from New England, 
 brooding over the murder of free-state men in Kansas, pro- 
 ceeded on the night of May 24, with his four sons and three 
 other associates, to the settlement of Dutch Henry's on Potta- 
 watomie Creek, and, dragging five proslavery men from their 
 cabins, hacked them to pieces. This unspeakable deed let loose 
 civil war in Kansas. Bands of armed men marched up and 
 down in the land, like the factional "armies" of a Central Amer- 
 ican republic. Farmers went in groups, armed to the teeth, 
 to till their fields. No herd was safe from plunder and no house 
 nor barn from the torch. Governor Shannon tried hard to 
 restore order. He sent Colonel Sumner with United States 
 dragoons to disperse the marauding bands, but the guerrilla 
 warfare continued almost unabated. The passions roused at 
 Lawrence and Dutch Henry's had to burn themselves out. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 497 
 
 Eight days after the murders on the Pottawatomie the Demo- 
 cratic nominating convention met at Cincinnati. In the face 
 of what was happening in Kansas it had the hardihood to de- 
 clare in its platform that the principle of popular sovereignty 
 "embodied the only sound and safe solution of the slavery ques- 
 tion." Nevertheless, the delegates wisely refrained from nomi- 
 nating a man who could in any way be held responsible for the 
 Kansas situation. Their prime task was to hold the Northern 
 Democracy together. Therefore they passed over Pierce and 
 Douglas and on the seventeenth ballot named James Buchanan, 
 a mediocre man, whose eminent "availability" consisted in the 
 facts that he was acceptable to the North, that he had been 
 absent as minister to Great Britain when the Kansas struggle 
 was precipitated, and that he was expected to carry his own 
 pivotal state of Pennsylvania. John C. Breckinridge of Ken- 
 tucky was nominated for vice president. 
 
 The convention of the new Republican party met at Phila- 
 delphia on June 17. Seward might have had the nomination, 
 but he declined to let his name be presented, probably because 
 he thought that defeat at the polls would injure his political 
 career. He underestimated the chances of Republican success 
 in 1856, and he knew that his pronounced hostility to the Amer- 
 ican party, his abolitionist views, 1 and his extreme Whiggery in 
 New York politics would weaken his candidacy. Justice John 
 McLean of Ohio, who had served on the Supreme Court since 
 his appointment by Jackson twenty-six years before, was the 
 choice of the more conservative delegates. But the candidacy 
 of John C. Fremont of California had been carefully worked 
 up for months before the convention. Fremont was a man of 
 small judgment and almost no political experience, but his ro- 
 mantic career as the "pathfinder" of the Far West, his "con- 
 quest" of California, his youth and energy, all recommended 
 him as a fit leader for a young and aggressive party. "The 
 Fremont boom in the West," said Samuel Bowles, "went like 
 
 1 Seward had publicly advocated the repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 
 1850 and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. 
 
4Q8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a prairie fire." The first formal ballot resulted in 520 votes for 
 Fremont, 37 for McLean, and one for Seward. William M. 
 Dayton of New Jersey was nominated as Fremont's running- 
 mate, although Abraham Lincoln, a supporter of Judge McLean, 
 received no votes for second place on the ticket on an informal 
 ballot. The " Know-Nothings " nominated ex-President Fillmore. 
 The Republicans appealed to the country on a platform which 
 embodied the principles of the Wilmot Proviso and the Free- 
 Soilers of 1848. It was the "right and duty of Congress" to 
 exercise its power of control over the territories of the United 
 States by abolishing in them the "twin relics of barbarism," 
 slavery and polygamy. The platform reviewed and condemned 
 the shocking violations of law and order in Kansas, all "done 
 with the knowledge, sanction, and procurement of the pres- 
 ent administration." It demanded the immediate admission of 
 Kansas to the Union under its free-state constitution. The 
 Democrats knew that every day's prolongation of anarchy in 
 Kansas injured their prospects for the autumn election. Senator 
 Toombs of Georgia introduced a bill to secure "a fair and 
 honest expression of the opinion of the present inhabitants of 
 Kansas." Under the supervision of a commission of five men 
 appointed by the President a careful census of the territory 
 was to be taken ; delegates to a convention were to be chosen, 
 and they were to frame a constitution if the convention should 
 vote it expedient for Kansas to seek admission to the Union at 
 that time. The bill passed the Senate (33 to 12) on July 3 ; a 
 few hours later the Republican House passed a bill, by the nar- 
 row margin of 99 votes to 97, for the admission of Kansas under 
 the Topeka Constitution. Neither House would consider the 
 other's proposal. The Senate bill was fair enough, but the 
 Republicans maintained that the people of Kansas had already 
 decided to become a free state. Moreover, they would not in- 
 trust the appointment of a commission to Pierce, whom they had 
 condemned in their platform as the man responsible for the an- 
 archy and violence in the territory. Douglas charged them with 
 planning to keep the Kansas question unsettled in order to gain 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 499 
 
 votes. "An angel from heaven," he said, "could not write a bill 
 to restore peace in Kansas that would be acceptable to the Aboli- 
 tionist Republican party previous to the presidential election." 
 
 Congress having adjourned in August without bringing any 
 relief in the Kansas situation, the President took the matter 
 into his own hands. A new governor (the third in as many 
 years) was sent out in the person of the able John W. Geary 
 of Pennsylvania. The free-state leaders who had been im- 
 prisoned at the virtual behest of Judge Lecompton were re- 
 leased, and the unrighteous judge was eventually removed from 
 the bench. All bodies of armed men except those authorized 
 by the government were ordered to disperse. Federal troops 
 were stationed at the danger points. At the end of September 
 Geary wrote to Secretary Marcy : "Peace now reigns in Kansas. 
 Confidence is gradually being restored. Settlers are returning 
 to their claims. Citizens are resuming their ordinary pursuits, 
 and a general gladness pervades the community." If the report 
 was somewhat too roseate, there was enough truth in it to give 
 heart to the Democrats in the approaching election. It should 
 be noted in passing that Geary's work was accomplished "upon 
 the point of the sword of the Union." It testified to the utter 
 breakdown of the experiment of popular sovereignty in Kansas, 
 the repudiation by the administration itself of the doctrine of 
 "national irresponsibility." 
 
 Adopting the old slogan of the Free Soil party of 1848, "Free 
 soil, free speech, free labor, and free men," and adding "Fre- 
 mont and victory" with a shout, the Republicans went into 
 the campaign with the fervor of crusaders. But their zeal out- 
 ran their prospects, even as their cause was stronger than their 
 candidate. It was inevitable that the Republican ticket should 
 be a Northern one, and this wholly sectional ticket furnished 
 the Democrats with their best campaign material. 1 From public 
 men and the press all through the South came the awful warn- 
 
 a ln the election of 1828 both the tickets had been "sectional" Adams and 
 Rush (Republican) from the North, and Jackson and Calhoun (Democratic) 
 from the South. But Mason and Dixon's line was not yet a significant separator. 
 
500 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ing that the triumph of the "Black Republicans" would mean 
 the immediate dissolution of the Union. Fillmore asked the 
 Republicans how they could have "the madness or folly to 
 believe that our Southern brethren would submit to be governed 
 by Fremont." Conservatives in the North and South alike 
 turned to Buchanan. Toombs, the old Whig leader in Georgia, 
 who had proposed the conciliatory Kansas bill in the Senate, 
 said that the object of Fremont's friends was to conquer the 
 South. Rufus Choate, the prominent Whig statesman of Massa- 
 chusetts, "turned his eyes from the consequences" which would 
 ensue if Fremont should be elected. "To the fifteen states of 
 the South," he said, "Fremont's government would appear an 
 alien government" worse than that, "a hostile government." 
 Again, as in 1850 and 1852, the business interests and the more 
 conservative men of the North, with whom the preservation of 
 industrial peace and the political status quo counted for more 
 than the support of a moral principle at the risk of certain 
 agitation and possible dissolution of the Union, carried the day 
 for the Democrats. Buchanan was sure of the votes south of 
 Mason and Dixon's line (with the possible exception of Maryland 
 and Kentucky, which were strong for Fillmore), and he needed 
 only Pennsylvania and one other Northern state to win. The 
 contest in Pennsylvania was hectic. The Democrats, North 
 and South, poured large sums of money into the state, and the 
 Republicans sent more than a thousand campaign speakers into 
 the cities and towns from the Delaware to the Alleghenies. 
 Buchanan carried the state by a margin of only 1025 votes in a 
 total of 460,404. Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, and California 
 also went Democratic. In spite of the fact that Buchanan 
 received 174 electoral votes to 114 for Fremont, the Republicans 
 were far from discouraged. As a new party in their first presi- 
 dential election, they had polled 1,314,264 votes against 1,838- 
 169 for Buchanan, who had the backing of the old established 
 Democratic party, in possession of all the patronage of the 
 government. They believed that on the inevitable disintegration 
 of the American party, which had been a temporary refuge for 
 the undecided, the majority of Fillmore's 874,534 votes would 
 

 THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 501 
 
 be theirs. They closed their ranks after the defeat and pre- 
 pared anew for the battle, cheered by Whittier's marching-song: 
 
 If months have well-nigh won the field, 
 What may not four years do ! 
 
 Buchanan was inaugurated on the fourth of March, 1857. 
 Two days later the Supreme Court handed down the most 
 famous decision in its history. The facts in the case were as 
 follows. In 1834 an army surgeon stationed at St. Louis had 
 moved, pursuant to the orders of the government, first to Rock 
 Island, Illinois, then across the Mississippi to Fort Snelling, in 
 the Louisiana Purchase territory. He took with him his negro 
 slave, Dred Scott. Some years after the return to Missouri 
 Dred Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that residence 
 in a free state and on territory made free by the Missouri Com- 
 promise had released him from bondage. His suit was granted 
 by a lower state court at St. Louis, but the decision was reversed 
 by the supreme court of Missouri ( 1852 ) . Meantime Scott had 
 been transferred to a new master, John Sandford of New York, 
 and proceeded to bring suit for his freedom in the federal circuit 
 court of Missouri, as a citizen of one state against a citizen 
 of another state. The court heard the case, thereby virtually 
 conceding that Scott was a citizen of Missouri, but the decision 
 of the jury was adverse to the negro. He was remanded to the 
 status of a slave. Then the case was taken to the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, on a writ of error, and argued in 
 the spring and the winter terms of I856. 1 
 
 The Supreme Court had only one question to decide : Did 
 the circuit court in Missouri err in its decision remanding Dred 
 Scott to slavery? And in its argument it was bound legally 
 to review only testimony on record in the circuit court. But 
 the majority of the Supreme Court justices were Southerners, 
 and at the instigation of Justice Wayne of Georgia they pro- 
 ceeded to render a decision covering the whole question of 
 
 1 Of course the negro slave was not the author of all this litigation. A 
 Mr. Roswell Field, a stanch antislavery lawyer from Vermont, gave his services 
 gratis and secured the cooperation of Montgomery Blair in the federal courts. 
 
502 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 negro citizenship and the status of slaves in the territories. 
 They thought to put a quietus on the slavery controversy by 
 the judgment of the highest tribunal in the land. Consequently 
 Chief Justice Taney read a long and labored decision, as the 
 majority opinion of the court, declaring that the negro was 
 not a citizen in the view of the framers of the Constitution and 
 that Congress had no power to make him such ; that the circuit 
 court of Missouri, therefore, had no jurisdiction in the case ; 
 that the laws of Missouri, not Illinois, decided Scott's condition 
 so far as residence in states was concerned, and that, slaves 
 being property, the Constitution protected their owners in all 
 the territories of the Union. The Missouri Compromise, there- 
 fore, was unconstitutional. The regulation of slavery was be- 
 yond the power of the national government. Only when a 
 territory became a state could it decide for or against the 
 institution. 
 
 All of this famous opinion that went beyond the simple order 
 to the circuit court in Missouri to dismiss the case for lack of 
 jurisdiction all the disquisition on the historical status of the 
 negro and on the power of Congress over slavery in the terri- 
 tories was beside the point, an obiter dictum, or volunteered 
 commentary. It was a glaring example of the most debasing 
 action that the judiciary can commit; namely, of lending its 
 high and impartial authority to a political cause. And it added 
 enormously to the indignation which the Kansas-Nebraska Act 
 had aroused in the North. The strong dissenting opinions of 
 Justices Curtis and McLean were accepted as the sound law in 
 the case throughout the free states. 
 
 Each of the three departments of our government had now 
 committed itself to the support of slavery and sanctioned the 
 annulment of the Missouri Compromise. President Pierce had 
 been subservient to the slave interests since the beginning of 
 his administration. He had given his consent to the Douglas 
 legislation and supported the fraudulent proslavery legislature 
 of Kansas. In his last annual message, as in his first, he had 
 rebuked the free-soil agitators and charged the North with 
 " revolutionary assaults on the South 's domestic institution." 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 503 
 
 Congress had opened the vast Louisiana Purchase territory 
 north of 36 30' to slavery. And, finally, the Supreme Court 
 had set the seal of the most august authority in the land on 
 this policy of the nationalization of slavery, making the insti- 
 tution legal in every part of the country where it was not 
 positively excluded by the municipal law of the states. The 
 fathers had spared slavery, in the belief that it was an evil 
 doomed to eventual extinction. The compromisers had suffered 
 it below the 36 30' line, or conceded its theoretic right to go 
 into the arid lands of New Mexico, in the conviction that the 
 dedication of the major part of the territory of the United 
 States to freedom would inevitably bring into the Union a suc- 
 cession of free states, leaving slavery to stagnate in a narrowing 
 sectional area. But in the middle years of the decade 1850- 
 1860 the slave power broke down the barriers of a generation 
 and got the sanction of president, Congress, and Supreme Court 
 for its claims to legal status in all our territory from the Gulf 
 of Mexico to the Canadian border. The Southern leaders 
 declared that henceforth slavery should be national and freedom 
 sectional. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was their 
 defiant proclamation against any further humiliation by ter- 
 ritorial restrictions or moral aspersions. It was a challenge to 
 the free North, and it made the Civil War inevitable. 
 
 SECESSION 
 
 Like his predecessor, Buchanan began his term of office with 
 the optimistic prediction that the end of the slavery agitation 
 was in sight and that the country would soon happily return to 
 questions of greater interest and importance. But like his prede- 
 cessor he also made it evident from the start that the way of 
 return was to be the path designated by the leaders of the South. 
 No slightest sympathy or indulgence was shown for the . anti- 
 slavery position. The cabinet, though far inferior to Pierce's, 
 was as decidedly Southern in cast. The senile indolence of Lewis 
 Cass took the place of Marcy's alert and efficient conduct of the 
 Department of State. Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was con- 
 
504 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 sidered the master spirit in the cabinet, brought only disorder 
 and deficit into the Treasury Department, which had been 
 managed with surpassing skill by Guthrie of Kentucky. James 
 Floyd of Virginia, in the War Department, was a sorry substi- 
 tute for Jefferson Davis, who resumed his seat in the Senate 
 to become the most able and eloquent advocate of the demands 
 of the South. Neither Douglas nor any of his prominent sup- 
 porters had a place in the cabinet, and in the distribution of 
 the patronage the Northern Democracy was conspicuously 
 neglected. 
 
 The first important crisis of the administration showed 
 Buchanan to be a man of neither courage nor consistency. 
 Strife in Kansas, as we have seen, had been allayed by the 
 liberal employment of the federal authority (p. 499). But 
 Governor Geary, like the men who had preceded him, found that 
 a policy of conciliation in Kansas was met with suspicion by 
 the free-state men, who mistrusted any agent of the administra- 
 tion which had supported the Shawnee legislature, and that an 
 impartial policy was met with hostility by the proslavery men, 
 who, as they dwindled from month to month in the face of the 
 increasing migration from the free states, relied more and more 
 on force to carry out their program. They played their last 
 desperate card in the autumn of 1857. A convention called by 
 the Shawnee legislature met at Lecompton to frame a consti- 
 tution for Kansas. Since the convention had been called over 
 the governor's veto and the elections to it were not based on 
 a fair census, the free-state men refused to participate. The 
 result was the choice of a unanimous proslavery convention by 
 less than one eighth of the voters of the territory. In October, 
 however, the free-state men (persuaded by Buchanan's new 
 governor, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, that the adminis- 
 tration would deal fairly with Kansas) came to the polls and 
 elected a majority of the new territorial legislature. The con- 
 vention had adjourned to await the result of this election. Cer- 
 tain now that they could not get a proslavery constitution 
 adopted by a fair vote in the territory, the members of the 
 Lecompton convention resorted to a shabby trick. They com- 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 505 
 
 posed a constitution containing an article which declared the 
 right to slave property and its increase inviolable and denied 
 the prospective state the power to emancipate slaves without the 
 consent of their owners or to prevent their entrance into the 
 state. 1 It was this clause alone that was submitted to the people 
 of the territory in December. A vote for the constitution "with 
 slavery" would mean adopting the above-mentioned article; 
 a vote for the constitution "without slavery" would mean re- 
 jecting it and prohibiting the entrance of slaves into the state. 
 But a vote either way would mean the protection of the slave 
 property already in Kansas, which was guaranteed in the body 
 of the constitution. The chance to accept or reject the consti- 
 tution as a whole the only fair application of Douglas's doc- 
 trine of "popular sovereignty" was not given to the people. 
 Under these circumstances the free-state men naturally refused 
 to vote in December, and the constitution "with slavery" was 
 adopted by 6226 votes (nearly half of which were fraudulent) 
 to 629. The next month (January 4, 1858) the new anti- 
 slavery legislature submitted the Lecompton Constitution as a 
 whole to the voters of Kansas, who rejected it by the over- 
 whelming majority of 10,226 to 162. It was clear enough that 
 a majority of the people of the territory wanted neither more 
 slaves in Kansas nor those that were already there. 
 
 Now Buchanan had given ample assurance of his intention 
 to deal fairly with Kansas. He had authorized his friend J. W. 
 Forney, the Democratic manager in Pennsylvania, to make 
 pledges to that effect in the critical campaign for the presidential 
 election in that state. 2 He had prevailed on Walker to go to 
 Kansas as governor by the promise of support in an impartial 
 policy. As late as July, 1857, he wrote to Walker, "On the 
 
 1 Another article forbade any amendment whatever of the constitution for 
 seven years and prohibited forever any amendment which affected the "rights 
 of property in the ownership of slaves." 
 
 2 Rhodes (Vol. II, p. 229, note) quotes Forney in the New York Tribune of 
 September 3, 1858, as follows: "There is not a county in Pennsylvania in which 
 my letters may not be found, almost by hundreds, pledging Mr. Buchanan, in 
 his name and by his authority, to the full, complete, and practical recognition 
 of the rights of the people of Kansas to decide upon their own affairs." 
 
506 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 question of submitting the constitution to the bona fide resident 
 settlers of Kansas, I am willing to stand or fall." Yet when 
 he sent in his first annual message in December he had yielded 
 completely to the pressure from the Southern politicians. He 
 declared that the Lecompton Constitution was legal, that the 
 forthcoming vote on it would be held under legitimate author- 
 ity, and that if any part of the inhabitants refused to vote, it 
 would be their own voluntary act and they alone would be 
 responsible for the consequences. When the result of the 
 fraudulent vote in Kansas reached Washington, Buchanan sent 
 the Lecompton Constitution to Congress (February 2, 1858) 
 with a special message recommending the admission of Kansas 
 to the Union under its provisions. He condemned as " treason- 
 able" the refusal of the free-state men to vote on it. This 
 change of front he made (-as he afterward confessed to Forney) 
 because " certain Southern states had threatened that if he did 
 not abandon Walker [who resigned in disgust on December 15] 
 they would be compelled either to secede from the Union or 
 take up arms against him." A more craven deed was never 
 committed by a chief magistrate of the United States. 
 
 Douglas protested vigorously against this travesty of popular 
 sovereignty in Kansas and rebuked President Buchanan to his 
 face. When the Lecompton Bill came before the Senate, Douglas 
 was found voting with strange political bedfellows, Hale, 
 Seward, Wade, and Chase, in the negative. Still, the bill to 
 admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution passed the 
 Senate on May 23, by a vote of 33 to 25. It was defeated in 
 the House a few days later. The scheme to force slavery on 
 Kansas against the wishes of a very large majority of its settlers 
 having failed in Congress, a final attempt was made to bribe 
 the people of Kansas to accept the constitution of their own 
 will. William H. English of Indiana introduced a bill into the 
 House, called the "Lecompton Junior," which provided that 
 the whole Lecompton Constitution should be resubmitted to the 
 people, and that its adoption should carry with it a large grant 
 of public lands to the state, while its rejection should postpone 
 any further bill for the admission of Kansas until the population 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 507 
 
 
 
 of the territory should reach the federal ratio of 93,000 in- 
 habitants. The English Bill passed the House. But even then 
 the double stimulus of a bribe and a penalty failed to induce 
 the people of Kansas to accept the proslavery constitution. The 
 plebiscite on August 2, 1858, resulted in a vote of 1926 for the 
 constitution and 11,812 against it. So Kansas remained a 
 territory, theoretically open to slavery by the Dred Scott 
 decision but actually closed to it by the increasing preponder- 
 ance of free-soil inhabitants, until the withdrawal from Congress 
 of the members from the Southern states on the eve of the Civil 
 War. On January 21, 1861, the turbulent seven years 7 history 
 of the Kansas Territory came to a close with its quiet admission 
 to the Union as a free state. 
 
 Already, before the final rejection of the Lecompton Consti- 
 tution by the people of Kansas, the attention of the country 
 was drawn to an exciting contest in another Western state. 
 Douglas's second term in the Senate was about to expire, and 
 he returned to Illinois in the summer of 1858 to make his can- 
 vass for reelection. He was the most popular man in the country 
 above Mason and Dixon's line. The Northern Democrats were 
 with him to a man for his courageous opposition to the admin- 
 istration in the Lecompton affair. Many of the Republicans, 
 even, favored his return to the Senate by the legislature of Illi- 
 nois, believing that his complete breach with the Buchanan ad- 
 ministration would make him a more effective foe to the slave 
 interests and a more disruptive force in the Democratic party 
 than any Republican whom they could nominate. Even Horace 
 Greeley, in the New York Tribune, urged the Republicans of 
 Illinois not to put up a candidate against Douglas. But the 
 more clear-sighted Republicans were under no illusion that 
 Douglas would come over to their position. They applauded 
 his stand on the Lecompton Bill ; but they knew that the man 
 who had engineered the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, who 
 expressed his hearty concurrence in the Dred Scott decision, and 
 who repeatedly declared that he "didn't care whether slavery 
 was voted up or voted down/' so long 'as the people concerned 
 voted honestly, could never be indorsed by a party whose funda- 
 
508 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 mental tenet was opposition to the extension of slavery in the 
 territories of the United States. So the Republicans nominated 
 Abraham Lincoln to oppose Douglas in the campaign to win the 
 legislature which was to choose the United States Senator 
 from Illinois. 
 
 Lincoln, like Douglas, was a self-made man, born in poverty 
 to a life of toil. Like Douglas he had moved to Illinois as a youth 
 and had engaged in the practice of law. But the career of the 
 two equally ambitious men was most unequal. While Douglas 
 had rapidly attained high political honors in the state and 
 served two terms in the House and two in the Senate at Wash- 
 ington, always prominent, and since the death of Clay and Web- 
 ster preeminent, Lincoln's public honors had been limited 
 to a few years in the Illinois legislature and a single term 
 (1847-1849) in the House of Representatives. Although he 
 rose steadily to be one of the best lawyers in Illinois, Lincoln 
 became reluctantly convinced that Fortune had reserved all 
 her favors for the " Little Giant," whom he had looked on as 
 his rival for years. He confessed that he "was beginning to 
 lose interest in politics," when the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
 promise roused him. Slavery had always been abhorrent to 
 him. As early as 1837 he had protested, with one lone com- 
 panion in the Illinois legislature, against a resolution that the 
 right of property in slaves was "sacred" in the Southern states. 
 He then placed on the records his opinion that slavery was 
 "founded on both injustice and bad policy." During his term 
 in Congress he had voted over and over again for the Wilmot 
 Proviso. He now became an enthusiastic member of the new Re- 
 publican party. By the summer of 1858 he was the most prom- 
 inent Republican in Illinois, although outside of the state he was 
 known, if at all, only as a clever lawyer with an inexhausti- 
 ble repertoire of humorous stories, not always free from coarse- 
 ness, and a rather melancholy and meditative nature, which was 
 kindled to a clear, intense purpose by the appeal of injured inno- 
 cence or the threatened triumph of injustice. 
 
 In his speech of acceptance of the nomination for the senator- 
 ship, before the delegates of the state convention at Springfield, 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 509 
 
 June 1 6, 1858, Lincoln stated the issue of the campaign with 
 force and clearness: "We are now far into the fifth year since 
 a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident 
 promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Under the 
 operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased, 
 but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease 
 until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house 
 divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe that this govern- 
 ment cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do 
 not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house 
 to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. Either the 
 opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and 
 place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is 
 in the course of ultimate extinction ; or its advocates will push 
 it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old 
 as well as new North as well as South." Three weeks later 
 Douglas was welcomed home with a magnificent reception in 
 Chicago and began his canvass of the state in a special train 
 gaily decorated. He knew in his heart that he had a dangerous 
 antagonist in Lincoln, but he affected to treat him with patroniz- 
 ing condescension, as "a kind, amiable and intelligent gen- 
 tleman." With characteristic effrontery he misrepresented 
 Lincoln's prophecy of the cessation of the divided house as a 
 plea for "a war of the sections until one or the other shall be sub- 
 dued," and intimated that Lincoln's criticism of the Dred Scott 
 case was an appeal from the decision of the Supreme Court of 
 the land "to the decision of a tumultuous town meeting." 
 
 After several attempts to correct the persistent misrepresen- 
 tations of his opponent, in a kind of hide-and-seek game, Lincoln 
 suggested that they discuss the subject of slavery from the same 
 platform in a series of joint debates. Seven towns were sched- 
 uled in different sections of the state. The debates were begun 
 at Ottawa in August and closed at Alton, the scene of Love- 
 joy's murder, in October. The rivals spoke from a platform in 
 the open air, before thousands, who turned out from all the 
 houses in the towns and drove miles in buggies and carryalls 
 from the farms around. But the real audience extended far 
 
510 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 beyond the limits of Illinois. New England followed the de- 
 bates with eager interest. Long extracts from the speeches were 
 published in the papers of St. Louis, New York, and Cincinnati. 
 The administration at Washington, on the other hand, for whom 
 Douglas was a rebel and Lincoln a crude country lawyer, re- 
 garded the whole affair as a rather disreputable exhibition 
 by "a pair of depraved, blustering, mischievous, low-down 
 demagogues." 
 
 At first Lincoln appeared at a disadvantage, "with his thin 
 voice, his awkward figure, his yellow dry-wrinkled face, his 
 oddity of pose and his diffident movements," in contrast with 
 Douglas's easy bearing and confident eloquence. But as the 
 debates proceeded Lincoln's clarity of reasoning and honesty 
 of mind told more and more against his rival's skill in debate. 
 The directness of his answers to Douglas's questions and the 
 searching character of the questions which he put to Doug- 
 las converted the latter's aggressiveness into defense. Lincoln' 
 showed the speciousness of Douglas's contention that slavery 
 was one of those " local institutions" whose variety was one of 
 the surest bonds of our Union. Slavery had never been any- 
 thing but a source of strife, and the doctrine of popular sov- 
 ereignty had been "a living, creeping lie from the time of its 
 introduction till today." The " fathers" had not anticipated 
 a permanent Union half slave and half free. They had endured 
 slavery only because they had believed that it was destined ere 
 long to pass away. It was not the abolitionists, as Douglas 
 maintained, who had raised all the pother about slavery in 
 the territories. It was Douglas himself, by his wanton repeal 
 of the Missouri Compromise. "Why could you not leave 
 slavery alone?" asked Lincoln. 
 
 He asked Douglas another question in the debate at Freeport, 
 which made national history. "Can the people of a United 
 States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wishes of any 
 citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits, 
 prior to the formation of a state constitution?" If Douglas 
 answered No, he would deny his pet doctrine of popular sov- 
 ereignty ; if he answered Yes, he would antagonize the dominant 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 511 
 
 politicians of the South, led by Jefferson Davis, who maintained 
 that the only power that could deal with slavery was the 
 municipal law of a state, and furthermore he would set the local 
 authority of the territory above the Supreme Court, which 
 had declared slavery legal in all the territories of the United 
 States by the Dred Scott decision. Douglas answered the ques- 
 tion in the affirmative and tried to wriggle out of the trap by 
 declaring that although slavery might be "legal" in a territory, 
 it could not actually exist for a day or an hour where the peo- 
 ple enacted legislation " unfriendly" to it. That was the famous 
 "Freeport Doctrine." It was a poor answer from the point 
 of view of logic and was neatly paraphrased by Lincoln in 
 the paradox that a thing might then be legally excluded from 
 a place where it had a legal right to exist. But from the point 
 of view of expediency it was the only answer that Douglas 
 could give. For to deny the doctrine of popular sovereignty, 
 which was emblazoned all over the state as his great invention, 
 would have meant his sure defeat for the Illinois senatorship. 
 Lincoln was looking beyond the Illinois senatorship, much as 
 he wanted it. He knew that the answer which won that honor 
 for Douglas would lose him the greater honor of the presidency 
 of the United States. For the Southern Democracy, which had 
 voted for Douglas's bill in 1854 for the sake of annulling the 
 Missouri Compromise, had now advanced, under the encourage- 
 ment of the Dred Scott decision, to the position that the national 
 government should positively protect slavery, as it protected 
 property generally, in all the common territories of the United 
 States. Douglas won the senatorship by the narrow margin 
 of eight votes in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln won a reputa- 
 tion throughout the North as the most able defender of the 
 free-soil cause. After all, the climax of the contest was not 
 the clever challenge to Douglas at Freeport but the fine ethical 
 note struck by Lincoln in the closing debate at Alton : " Where 
 is the philosophy or statesmanship based on the assumption 
 that we are to quit talking about slavery and that the public 
 mind is all at once to cease being agitated about it? Yet this 
 is the policy that Douglas is advocating. ... I ask you if it 
 
512 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 is not a false philosophy. Is it not a false statesmanship that 
 undertakes to build up a policy upon the basis of caring nothing 
 about the very thing that everybody does care most about ? . . . 
 That is the issue which will continue in this country when the 
 poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It 
 is the eternal struggle between two principles, Right and Wrong, 
 throughout the world." 
 
 The elections of the autumn of 1858 saw decisive gains for the 
 Republicans and the antiadministration Democrats. The for- 
 mer won 21 seats in the House, where, by coalition with the 
 "Know-No things," they could outvote the Democrats. This re- 
 sult must be taken as a condemnation by the North of the Le- 
 compton fraud, although the victory of the Republicans in 
 Buchanan's own state was due largely to economic causes ; for 
 the low nonpartisan tariff of 1857 had hit the iron interests of 
 Pennsylvania hard, and a severe financial panic which broke on 
 the country in the autumn of 1857 brought its inevitable reac- 
 tion against the administration. The panic was due to overspec- 
 ulation, overextension of credit, the inflation of the currency by 
 great quantities of gold found in California and Australia, and 
 the excessive conversion of fluid capital into fixed capital in 
 railroads, factories, and public works. The remarkable pros- 
 perity of the country, which we studied in the first section of 
 this chapter, lasted for a full decade from the passage of the 
 Walker tariff in 1846 to the end of Pierce's administration. Our 
 population increased from 23,000,000 to 30,000,000, the rate 
 of increase in the cities being 78 per cent. In 1850 there were 
 some 6000 miles of railroads, in short stretches of seldom more 
 than 100 miles. It was impossible to go from New York to 
 Boston or Albany without breaking the journey. Ten years 
 later the mileage had increased to over 30,000, and New York 
 was linked to points west of the Mississippi. Nearly 80 per 
 cent of the total mileage of the country on the eve of the Civil 
 War had been laid within a decade, at a cost of $700,000,000. 
 "Premature railroads at the West," says Schouler,"had fostered 
 premature cities, teeming with premature traffic for premature 
 population." The customary wave of extravagant living fol- 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 513 
 
 lowed flush times. We went heavily in debt to Europe for im- 
 ported luxuries. In the nine years from the discovery of gold 
 in California to the outbreak of the panic the excess of imports 
 over exports of merchandise was $336,000,000, and the excess 
 of exports over imports of specie was $2 71,000,000. The liquid 
 capital that was not being converted into fixed forms was go- 
 ing to Europe to pay our debts. The crash came in October, 
 when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of Cincinnati 
 failed for $7,000,000. Large business houses, banks, and fac- 
 tories closed their doors. Hundreds of thousands of men in the 
 North and West were thrown out of employment, while in- 
 flated prices caused untold suffering. 1 
 
 The panic of 1857 contributed not a little to the tension 
 between the sections. While the Northern industries were 
 paralyzed, the cotton crops of the South were large, the prices 
 were well sustained, and the exports were moupting. "Cotton is 
 King ! " cried Hammond of South Carolina in the Senate. 
 "When you came to a deadlock and revolutions were threatened 
 . . . we poured in on you 1,600,000 bales of cotton just at the 
 crisis to save you." "The wealth of the South," said De Bow, 
 in his famous Review, "is permanent and real : that o.f the North 
 is fugitive and fictitious." If anything was needed to confirm 
 the South in its conviction that slavery was an economic blessing 
 to be nurtured and extended at all costs, it was just this bitter 
 experience of the North in 1857. Only the Southerners made 
 the mistake of taking a temporary embarrassment for the break- 
 down of a whole industrial system. 
 
 There were many signs in the Congress which convened in 
 December, 1858, that the South meant to brook no further 
 restrictions on its peculiar institution. Frustrated in the hope 
 of making Kansas a slave state, the South turned longing eyes 
 
 1 Mayor Wood of New York recommended that the city purchase 50,000 bar- 
 rels of flour and large quantities of provisions to be sold to the workmen at cost. 
 Thousands of the unemployed marched in processions, bearing banners demand- 
 ing work and bread, or met in mass meetings to denounce "the rich who lived 
 at ease while the workers starved." It was deemed necessary to bring soldiers 
 from Governor's Island to guard the Subtreasury building in Wall Street. 
 
514 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 on Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Slidell of Louisiana in- 
 troduced a bill into the Senate appropriating $30,000,000 for 
 negotiations with Spain for the purchase of Cuba, but in spite 
 of the support of the administration he failed to get the bill 
 through. Buchanan himself had asked Congress to support this 
 project, speaking in his message of 1858, in language which re- 
 called the Ostend Manifesto of four years before, of "circum- 
 stances which might make the seizure of Cuba justifiable under 
 the law of self-preservation." The President also favored a 
 protectorate over the northern part of Mexico and in 1859 
 actually suggested an invasion of the country for the sake of 
 "restoring order." Leading Southerners, like Alexander H. 
 Stephens of Georgia, were outspoken in their sympathy for 
 William Walker; a noted filibusterer, who in 1856 had inter- 
 vened in the civil wars of Nicaragua, expelled the dictator Rivas, 
 and made himself president of the republic. When Walker 
 was arrested by an American naval officer and brought to 
 the United States to be tried for the infraction of the neutrality 
 laws, no jury could be found in New Orleans to convict him. 
 Of course the interest in Spanish America, under whatever form 
 of "benevolent assimilation" it was disguised, was the quest for 
 new slave lands. These plans came to naught, but the boldest 
 of all the schemes of the Southern oligarchy was the reopening 
 of the foreign slave trade. A commercial convention at Vicks- 
 burg, in May, 1859, resolved by a vote of 49 to 19 that "all 
 laws, state or national, forbidding the African slave trade, ought 
 to be repealed." It cost the planter from $i 500 to $2000 to buy 
 a first-class negro in Virginia or Kentucky, while he might 
 have plenty from the Guinea coast for one third of that price. 
 A score of American slavers were reported off the coast of Africa 
 in the closing years of the decade, and when they brought their 
 cargoes openly into the Southern ports, in defiance of the pro- 
 hibition of 1808 and the Piracy Act of 1820, the juries refused 
 to condemn their captains or owners. Hammond confessed in 
 the Senate that the sentiment of his section was "not in accord 
 with the laws of the United States on this subject." And 
 Douglas is the authority for the statement that during the year 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 515 
 
 1859 no less than 15,000 African slaves were landed in the 
 Southern states. 
 
 Every public question came now to be treated in Congress 
 solely from the standpoint of its bearing on the great sectional 
 issue. When the Northerners tried to get a Pacific railroad bill 
 passed, Iverson of Georgia frankly acknowledged his belief that 
 the Union would soon be divided, and refused to vote for a road 
 which "would lie outside a Southern confederacy." When a 
 Homestead Bill, granting Western lands to settlers on easy 
 terms, was passed by the House (with only three favorable 
 votes from the slaveholding states), it was shelved in the Senate. 
 The Southerners saw in this measure giving "land to the land- 
 less" only national encouragement to the free-state emigration 
 which had robbed them of Kansas. As the sectional strife grew 
 more bitter, the tone of the debates grew more menacing: ex- 
 postulation and protest stiffened into the demand of the ulti- 
 matum. Concession was looked on askance as incipient treason 
 to the section. The press was unbridled in its language of 
 vituperation. Sheets like the Richmond Enquirer and De Bow's 
 Review spoke of the Northerners as if they were already the 
 inhabitants of a hostile foreign country, calling them "the worst 
 bigots on earth" and "the meanest of tyrants, who had never 
 had the slightest conception of what constitutes true liberty." 
 
 Before the new Congress assembled in December, 1859 (the 
 last Congress for more than a decade in which all the states of 
 the Union were represented), an event occurred which was mag- 
 nified far beyond its intrinsic importance, owing to the tense, 
 nervous condition of the country. John Brown, the sinister 
 hero of the Pottawatomie murders, brooding on his commission 
 from God to put an end to slavery, conceived the wild scheme of 
 carrying the war into the enemy's country with an "army" of 
 nineteen men. His plan was to establish camps in the Piedmont 
 region of the Appalachians, whence his followers could conduct 
 raids on the neighboring plantations, to incite the slaves to 
 desert their masters and join the ranks of freedom. Money 
 and arms for this undertaking were fraudulently collected in 
 the North, under the disguise of a renewed expedition against 
 
51 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the slaveholders in Kansas. Not more than four or five " choice 
 friends" were in the secret of Brown's real purpose, although 
 rumors began to get abroad in the summer of 1859, an d the 
 Secretary of War, Floyd, received an anonymous letter from 
 Cincinnati, in August, warning him of the whole plot. 
 
 On the night of October 16 Brown's little band seized the 
 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge crossing from the Mary- 
 land side of the Potomac to the Virginia village of Harpers 
 Ferry. They cut the telegraph wires, occupied the United 
 States arsenal, and began their campaign of liberation by visit- 
 ing the plantation of Colonel Lewis Washington at the dead of 
 night, arresting the owner, and inviting his bewildered negroes 
 to join the banners of freedom. The next morning the citizens 
 of Harpers Ferry seized their arms. Brown, cut off from re- 
 treat to the Maryland side, barricaded himself with his followers 
 and his hostages in the engine house in the armory yard, where 
 he conducted a desperate defense. Colonel Robert E. Lee 
 arrived on the scene in the evening with a band of United 
 States marines, and on the morning of the eighteenth, when 
 Brown refused to surrender, they battered down the doors of 
 the engine house. Brown himself, severely wounded, and four 
 of his followers were taken prisoners. Ten of his men had been 
 killed in the " siege." The other four escaped. Brown was 
 promptly tried in a Virginia court, found guilty of treason, and 
 publicly hanged on December 2, manifesting the utmost com- 
 posure to the end. Armed invasion in Virginia, like stealthy 
 murder in Kansas, was "the Lord's work" in his eyes. Legality 
 had no meaning for him. Prudence and failure were words 
 unknown in his vocabulary. John Brown's raid at Harpers 
 Ferry was a pitiable escapade of a fanatic with a handful of 
 hypnotized satellites. But seen through the distorting medium 
 of sectional hostility it assumed in the Southerners' eyes the 
 dimensions of a widespread plot to incite a slave rebellion, sup- 
 ported and encouraged by the Republican leaders ; while men 
 as sane as Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Thoreau at the 
 North glorified John Brown as a martyr and even compared him 
 to Christ on the cross. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 517 
 
 The year 1860 was the most fateful in our history, for it saw 
 the house divided against itself. In the Congress which met 
 three days after John Brown was hanged the Democrats still 
 had a majority in the slowly changing Senate (37 to 26), but in 
 the House there were 109 Republicans, 101 Democrats (of whom 
 13 were against the administration), 26 " Know-No things," 
 and one Whig. The contest for the Speakership was an eight 
 weeks' battle between the sections north and south of Mason 
 and Dixon's line. John Sherman of Ohio was the most promi- 
 nent Republican candidate, but failed of election because he 
 had allowed his name to be used in the indorsement of a book 
 entitled, "The Impending Crisis of the South, and How to Meet 
 It," written by Hilton R. Helper, a poor white of North Carolina. 
 While " Uncle Tom's Cabin" had attacked slavery in behalf 
 of the abused negro, Helper's book denounced the oligarchy of 
 the slaveholders as fatal to the progress of the millions of whites 
 of the middle and lower classes in the South. Slavery must go 
 in order to give the whites their rightful place in the economic 
 and social life of the section, to introduce a varied industry and 
 commerce, to foster thriving cities and free schools. It would 
 have been a far more dangerous book than " Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
 for the slave-holders, had the class for whom it was written been 
 able to read its arguments and comprehend its statistics. Its 
 chief use was as a campaign document in the North, where it 
 was widely circulated. Its indorsement by prominent Repub- 
 licans was regarded by the South as an insult. 
 
 As the battle for the Speakership lengthened, the passions 
 on each side grew fiercer. The Southerners charged Northern 
 statesmen of the highest standing, like William H. Seward, with 
 complicity in John Brown's raid. The Northerners met threats 
 of disunion either with scorn, or with grim sarcasm as to the 
 obvious disparity between "eighteen millions of men reared to 
 industry, with habits of the right kind" and "eight millions of 
 men without these auxiliaries." Taunts and insults were ex- 
 changed. Challenges to duels followed. Several times the 
 House seemed on the point of indulging in a general fight. 
 Senator Hammond wrote to Francis Lieber, in April, 1860, 
 
5i8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 "As I believe, every man in both Houses is armed with a 
 revolver some with two and a bowie knife." 1 The repre- 
 sentatives from North and South to the Congress of the common 
 Union met rather in the spirit of the mutually suspicious delega- 
 tions from the camps of Caesar and Ariovistus ! 
 
 On the first of February, 1860, Pennington of New Jersey 
 was elected Speaker on the forty-fourth ballot. The next day 
 Jefferson Davis presented in the Senate a set of resolutions 
 which embodied the ultimatum of the radical leaders of the 
 South and were intended as a platform on which any candidate 
 for the presidential nomination in the coming Democratic con- 
 vention must stand in order to be acceptable to the slaveholders. 
 The Davis resolutions affirmed Calhoun's doctrine of state 
 sovereignty, called upon Congress to protect slavery in the ter- 
 ritories, demanded the faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave 
 Act, and denounced Douglas's Freeport Doctrine by declaring 
 that "neither Congress nor a territorial legislature, by direct 
 or indirect legislation, has the power to annul or impair the 
 constitutional right of any citizen to take his slave property 
 into the common territories and there hold and enjoy the same 
 while the territorial condition remains." 
 
 The South had spoken through the mouth of the statesman 
 who was destined in another twelvemonth to be called to preside 
 over her fortunes as an independent confederacy. The answer 
 from the North came from the man who was destined to bear 
 the enormous responsibility for preserving the Union. Abra- 
 ham Lincoln's fame had been growing steadily since his debates 
 with Douglas. He had spoken frequently before large audiences 
 in the Western states, but was not heard in the East until the 
 Young Men's Republican Club of New York invited him, early 
 in 1860, to speak in the great hall of Cooper Union. As he faced 
 
 1 Thirty-five years later Mr. Grow of Pennsylvania, one of the candidates for 
 Speaker in the exciting contest of 1859-1860, said to Frederick Bancroft: "Dur- 
 ing the period just before the War, every member [of Congress] intended to take 
 his revolver as his hat when he went to the Capitol. For some time, a New 
 Englander who had formerly been a clergyman was the only exception. There 
 was much quiet jesting in the House when it became known that he too had 
 purchased a pistol" (Bancroft, "Life of Seward," Vol. I. p. 503). 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 519 
 
 his distinguished audience on the evening of February 27, his 
 uncouth appearance in ill-fitting clothes, his awkward gestures 
 and high-pitched voice, at first created an unfavorable im- 
 pression. But this disappeared rapidly as he proceeded with 
 masterly logic and burning conviction to unfold his thesis of 
 the consonance of the Republican doctrine with the spirit and 
 purpose of the men who founded the American State. He 
 denied that it was the North who had brought the question of 
 slavery into a new and dangerous prominence. It was the South, 
 with its mounting demands, with its threat to destroy the gov- 
 ernment unless "allowed to construe and enforce the Consti- 
 tution as it pleased," with its determination to "rule or ruin," 
 with its ultimatum to the North "to cease to call slavery wrong 
 and join [them] in calling it right." He concluded with a 
 strong appeal to the party to stand by its principles in spite of 
 false accusations. "Let us have faith that right makes might, 
 and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we 
 understand it." 
 
 The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, 
 April 23. Douglas was the unanimous choice of the Northern 
 wing of the party, but his Freeport Doctrine had killed him 
 in the South. He was regarded by the Davis following as no 
 better than Seward worse even, because he was a renegade. 
 The committee on platform, by a vote of 17 to 16, adopted 
 the .Southern program condemning the doctrine of popular 
 sovereignty. But the convention as a whole, in which the 
 Northern delegates had a decided majority, rejected the plat- 
 form and supported Douglas by a vote of 165 to 138. There- 
 upon the Alabama delegation, headed by William L. Yancey, 
 reputed the first orator and the most decided disunionist of 
 the South, left the hall. The majority of the delegates from 
 Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Ar- 
 kansas, and Georgia followed amid intense excitement, bidding 
 good-by to their Northern colleagues in speeches of pathetic 
 warning and dire prophecy. Only 253 delegates were left, and 
 as a two-thirds majority of the whole convention was necessary 
 to the choice of a candidate, Douglas failed to get the nomina- 
 

 Electoral Popular 
 Vote Vote 
 
 In Free In Slave 
 States States 
 
 Lincoln ISO 1.866,452 1.840.022- 26.430 
 
 Breckinridge 72 849,781 279.728 570.053 
 
 |p;JBell 39 588,879 72.906 515.973 
 
 Douglas 12 1.376.957 1,212.432 164.525 
 
 Circles in each state show vote of candidate 
 
 receiving largest minority 
 Numbers' in parenthesis in each state show 
 
 electoral vote 
 
 Map Plate, Patented July 5, 1921 Method of Making Maps, Patented July 5, 1921 
 
THE PRESIDENTIAL 
 ELECTION OF 1860 
 
520 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 tion in 57 ballots. On May 3 the convention adjourned, to 
 reassemble at Baltimore on June 18. The bolting radicals of 
 the South thus chose deliberately to split the great Democratic 
 party and virtually assure the election of a Republican presi- 
 dent rather than abide by the Douglas doctrine, which they had 
 enthusiastically indorsed in their Cincinnati platform four years 
 before. In June the convention at Baltimore nominated Doug- 
 las and Hershel V. Johnson of Georgia as the regular Demo- 
 cratic ticket, while the bolters, meeting in the same city, named 
 John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Joseph Lane of Oregon. 
 
 Meanwhile two other tickets had been placed in the field. 
 The remnants of the old Whig party, joined by the "Know- 
 Nothings," met at Baltimore, on May 9, as the Constitutional 
 Union party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee and Edward 
 Everett of Massachusetts on a platform which sought to allay 
 the bitter struggle over slavery by ignoring its cause. Their 
 brief declaration consisted of three platitudes: "The Consti- 
 tution of the country, the Union of the states, and the enforce- 
 ment of the laws." Such a party at such a crisis could serve 
 only as a refuge for the halting and the unconvinced. 
 
 The Republicans met at Chicago, on May i6 ; in a huge 
 structure called the "Wigwam." Ten thousand people crowded 
 into the hall, and other tens of thousands flocked to the city 
 to clamor in vain for admission. It was generally expected that 
 William H. Seward would be the nominee. He was the leader of 
 the party in Congress and the most prominent exponent of the 
 Republican principles in the country. It was to him that the 
 Southern statesmen referred when they threatened disunion 
 in case of the election of a "Black Republican President." But 
 there were points in Seward's record which injured his avail- 
 ability. He was in the closest intimacy with Thurlow Weed, 
 a powerful political manager in Albany, who was suspected of 
 a deal with the traction companies of New York City to raise 
 huge sums for the Republican campaign ; * and he had the en- 
 
 1 Seward's noisy supporters paraded the streets of Chicago with bands and 
 banners, shouting, "If you do not nominate Seward, where will you get your 
 money ? " 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 521 
 
 mity of the influential Horace Greeley, of the New York Trib- 
 une, whose support was given to Edward Bates, a conserva- 
 tive Republican from the border state of Missouri. Again, 
 Seward's intense hostility to the "Know-No things" weakened 
 him in the doubtful state of Pennsylvania, where the remnants 
 of that party were still strong. And, most serious of all, Seward 
 had delivered a famous speech at Rochester, in October, 1858, 
 on "The Irrepressible Conflict," in which he had spoken of a 
 "higher law" than the Constitution a position more radical 
 than Lincoln's "house divided against itself." 
 
 Seward led, however, on the first ballot, with 173^ votes to 
 102 for Lincoln, 50^ for Cameron of Pennsylvania, 49 for 
 Governor Chase of Ohio, 48 for Bates of Missouri, and 42 scat- 
 tering. On the next ballot Seward had 184^ to 181 for Lincoln. 
 Judge David Davis of Illinois, Lincoln's manager, was busy 
 winning delegates from Indiana^ Ohio, and Pennsylvania, prom- 
 ising cabinet positions without the sanction of Lincoln, and 
 even against his direct instructions to make no pledges or 
 promises. On the third ballot Lincoln's vote reached 23 1^, 
 only i ^ short of the majority necessary for a choice; and when 
 Cartter of Ohio announced the transfer of four votes from 
 Chase to Lincoln, the nomination was made unanimous. Pande- 
 monium reigned in the Wigwam and outside. Men hugged one 
 another and wept for joy. The streets were filled with proces- 
 sions of hilarious men shouting themselves hoarse for "Honest 
 Abe." Seward's chagrin was deep. "I am a leader," he wrote 
 to his wife, "deposed ... in the hour of organization for de- 
 cisive battle." But in spite of his disappointment he rallied 
 nobly to Lincoln's support. 
 
 The platform denied "the authority of Congress, of a ter- 
 ritorial legislature, or of an individual to give legal existence 
 to slavery in any territory of the United States," 1 called for the 
 
 1 This was a repudiation of the Dred Scott decision, and a departure as 
 radical as the South's but in a diametrically opposite direction from the 
 principles of 1820 and 1850, when Congress, with the support of the North, had 
 sanctioned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory south of 36 30' and in 
 the Mexican cession. 
 
522 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 definitive suppression of the African slave trade, the admission 
 of Kansas as a free state, the construction of a Pacific railroad, 
 the passage of a homestead bill, the appropriation of national 
 aid for river and harbor improvements, and the enactment of 
 a protective tariff to encourage home manufactures. For all 
 this variety of recommendation, the campaign was waged on 
 a single issue. The question referred to the voters was, Is 
 slavery right and to be extended, or is it wrong and to be 
 checked? Yancey and Lincoln agreed in the statement of 
 the dilemma. 
 
 When the state elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana went 
 Republican in October, Lincoln's success seemed assured. Doug- 
 las, on hearing of the results, immediately started South to 
 labor for the preservation of the Union. He spoke to large 
 audiences in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, 
 and Virginia. To the question whether Lincoln's election would 
 justify secession he returned an emphatic No ! to the question 
 whether the president would be justified in using force to pre- 
 serve the Union he returned an equally emphatic Yes! He 
 would "put the hemp around the neck of the first man who 
 raised the arm of resistance to the constituted authorities of 
 the country." But Douglas's action, however complimentary 
 to his patriotism and courage, had as little effect on the rising 
 tide of disunion as did King Canute's command to the waves. 
 The legislature of South Carolina, which had convened on 
 November 5 to cast the electoral vote of the state, decided, on 
 the advice of Governor Gist, to remain in session until the re- 
 sults of the election should be known 1 and to prepare the state 
 for any emergency "in view of the probability of the election 
 of a sectional candidate by a party . . . hostile to our institu- 
 tions and fatally bent upon our ruin." How Lincoln carried 
 the election of November 6 will appear from a study of the 
 map following page 519. The student should note the following 
 facts: (i) Lincoln's popular vote was but 40 per cent of the 
 
 1 South Carolina was the only state that still retained, in 1860, the early 
 method of choosing the presidential electors by its legislature. This custom was 
 abolished after the war. 
 

 THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 523 
 
 whole; (2) Douglas, though he carried only one state and part 
 of another, rolled up immense minorities in all the states of 
 the North; (3) Breckinridge, the disunionist candidate, re- 
 ceived but 44.7 per cent of the vote of the Southern states. 
 The Democrats secured control of both Houses of Congress by 
 rather narrow majorities (8 in the Senate and 21 in the House). 
 These figures could not be interpreted as a mandate from 
 the Southern people to dissolve the Union, yet South Carolina 
 proceeded immediately to the work. Four days after Lincoln's 
 election her legislature called for a convention of the state to 
 meet on December 17 at Charleston. On the twentieth this 
 convention, by a unanimous vote of its 169 members, passed 
 the famous Ordinance of Secession, declaring that the act of the 
 convention of May 23, 1788, "whereby the Constitution of 
 the United States was ratified . . . [is] hereby repealed, and 
 the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other 
 states under the name of the United States of America, is hereby 
 dissolved." On the same evening, in a ceremony of high re- 
 joicing attended by the officials of the state and distinguished by 
 all the beauty and chivalry of the capital city of the South, the 
 delegates set their names to the fateful ordinance. 1 Following 
 the example of the men of 1776, whom they believed they were 
 imitating, the South Carolinians published a list of grievances 
 with their "Declaration of Independence." If anyone is tempted 
 by the postbellum interpretations of Alexander H. Stephens, 
 Jefferson Davis, and others to believe that it was for the vindi- 
 cation of the theoretical doctrine of states' rights or the threat- 
 ened privilege of self-government that the South seceded, he 
 should read this manifesto of the convention of South Carolina. 
 Every grievance mentioned in it is directed against the antislav- 
 ery propaganda : the Personal-Liberty Acts, the formation of 
 abolitionist societies, the condemnation of slaveholding as sinful, 
 the encouragement to fugitive slaves, the recognition of negroes 
 as citizens, the election of a president who declared that the 
 
 1 The ceremony took place in Institute Hall, the same room where, eight 
 months before, the Southern delegates, led by Yancey, had marched out of the 
 Democratic convention. The first scene was the prelude to the second. 
 
524 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 nation could not endure half slave and half free. "All hope of 
 remedy is rendered vain," it concluded, "by the fact that the 
 public opinion at the North has invested a great political error 
 with the sanction of a more erroneous religious belief." 1 
 
 Meanwhile the timid, vacillating Buchanan was floundering 
 in a sea of indecision. The situation which confronted him 
 when Congress met on the third of December was one of grave 
 peril. Major Robert Anderson, with a garrison of only 64 men 
 and with insufficient supplies of food and munitions, was sta- 
 tioned at Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, exposed to the 
 attack of a hostile and rapidly arming community. No man 
 doubted that the convention about to meet in a fortnight would 
 declare the secession of South Carolina from the Union. The 
 President's plain duty by his oath of office was to defend the 
 authority of the United States. He should immediately and at 
 any cost have sent food and reinforcements to Anderson and, 
 declared in unequivocal terms, like Jackson's in 1832, his de- 
 termination to collect the revenues and enforce the laws in 
 every part of the Union. He had in his hands an able paper 
 written by his Attorney-General, Jeremiah S. Black, defining 
 his legal competency in these measures. But Buchanan, while 
 feebly wishing to do his duty, was surrounded by counselors 
 who boasted of "tying his hands." Three of the members of 
 his cabinet (Cobb, Floyd, and Thompson) were secessionists 
 at heart. Trescot of South Carolina, the Assistant Secretary 
 of State, was assuming to direct negotiations between the Presi- 
 
 *It is true that R. B. Rhett of South Carolina on the same day published 
 an address to the people of the slaveholding states in which he emphasized the 
 tariff as the South's grievance. But this plea was disingenuous. Every member 
 of the South Carolina delegation in the House had voted for the tariff bill of 
 1857, which was in fact the lowest in our history. Rhett himself confessed that the 
 complaint relative to the tariff would be a better cause for secession to present 
 to the European nations than a protest against the Personal-Liberty Acts. How 
 well his clever ruse succeeded is shown by the fact that when W. E. Forster 
 said in the House of Commons, in 1862, that he presumed there was no question 
 that slavery was the cause of the war, he was interrupted with cries of "No, no, 
 the tariff ! " As a matter of fact, the provisional Confederate government at 
 Montgomery continued the tariff of 1857 in force. 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 525 
 
 dent and Governor Gist of South Carolina. The advice of 
 Winfield Scott, the general of the army, and the plea of Ander- 
 son from Fort Moultrie for a policy of reenforcement were 
 ignored. Buchanan sent a "Constitutional essay" to Congress 
 on December 4, instead of a ringing declaration of purpose. 
 The upshot of the pitiable message was, in the witty comment 
 of Seward, that "it is the duty of the President to execute the 
 laws unless somebody opposes him ; and that no state has a 
 right to go out of the Union unless it wants to." Buchanan 
 declared that the states must obey the laws of the Union and 
 added that he had no power to coerce them to do so. When 
 the representatives from South Carolina in the House visited 
 him a few days later, he promised them that he would not 
 disturb the status quo in the forts in Charleston harbor so long 
 as they were not attacked. Under this "truce," inaction con- 
 tinued week after week at Washington, while disunion sentiment 
 at the South gained strength. 1 
 
 During this critical month of December, Congress, to whose 
 shoulders Buchanan would willingly have shifted the responsi- 
 bility of the executive, was busy with plans for the reconciliation 
 of the sections. An able committee of thirteen was appointed 
 in the Senate, including Davis, Douglas, Wade, and Seward. 
 The venerable J. J. Crittenden of Kentucky, the successor of 
 Henry Clay, presented a scheme of compromise consisting of 
 six unamendable amendments to the Constitution and four 
 resolutions. The proposed amendments, besides protecting 
 slavery in the states where it was legal, sanctioning the domestic 
 slave trade, and guaranteeing payment by the United States 
 government for escaped slaves, revived the 36 30' line of the 
 Missouri Compromise and forbade the interference by Congress 
 
 a lt would be hard to overrate the encouragement given to secession in other 
 states than South Carolina by Buchanan's pusillanimous course. We have seen 
 by the election figures that there was a considerable amount of Unionist senti- 
 ment in the South in November. By the end of the year it had practically dis- 
 appeared. Yancey, in urging his state of Alabama to secede, could say: "I 
 believe that there will not be power to direct a gun against a sovereign state. 
 Certainly there will be no will to do so during the present administration." 
 
526 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 with slavery south of that line. The resolutions called for the 
 faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law, the repeal of the 
 Personal-Liberty Acts, and the enforcement of the laws against 
 the African slave trade. The committee met on December 2 1 , 
 the day that the news of the secession of South Carolina reached 
 Washington. Throughout the North there was a lively hope 
 that the Crittenden Compromise might be adopted, especially 
 in the financial and commercial circles, where there was much 
 anxiety for the safety of large sums of money invested in the 
 South. It is fairly certain that if a popular referendum had been 
 taken on the Compromise it would have been adopted. But the 
 committee could not agree. Davis voted with Seward against 
 the restoration of the 36 30' line. The Republican members, 
 supported by Lincoln, who wrote "Entertain no proposition 
 for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery," voted 
 steadily in the negative. Their furthest concession was that 
 slavery should not be disturbed in the slave states. On Decem- 
 ber 31 the committee reported that it had not been able to agree 
 on any general plan of adjustment. A committee of thirty- three 
 in the House met with no better success. Its only fruit was the 
 recommendation of a constitutional amendment making slavery 
 inviolable in the states where it was established by law. The 
 amendment passed both Houses by the necessary two-thirds 
 vote, but only two states took pains to ratify it. 
 
 Major Anderson, exercising the discretion given to him by 
 verbal orders from the War Office, had spiked the guns of Fort 
 Moultrie on the day after Christmas and moved his little garri- 
 son to the safer walls of Fort Sumter. The South Carolinians 
 regarded this act as a breach of Buchanan's pledge not to dis- 
 turb the situation in Charleston harbor, and three commis- 
 sioners from the "sovereign state," who were in Washington to 
 treat with the United States government "for the apportionment 
 of the public debt and the possession of the forts and other 
 property of the United States within the state," called on the 
 President in peremptory terms to order the return of Anderson 
 to Fort Moultrie. The bewildered Buchanan seemed about to 
 yield to their demand when the Unionists of his cabinet, led by 
 
THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 527 
 
 Secretary of State Black, 1 virtually took control of affairs and 
 compelled the President to uphold Anderson. "I cannot and I 
 will not" was the new language in which he replied to the re- 
 quest of South Carolina that he withdraw the troops from 
 Charleston harbor. It gave the North cause for rejoicing at 
 the beginning of the new year. 
 
 Buchanan's supineness and the failure of Congress to reach 
 any agreement gave strength to the secession movement, which 
 moved rapidly with the opening of the new year. Between 
 January i and February i, 1861, conventions in the states of 
 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, 
 in the order named, passed ordinances of secession, generally 
 by large majorities. Only in Alabama and Georgia was there 
 a decided opposition to overcome, led in the latter state by 
 Alexander H. Stephens, who had "not lost hopes of securing 
 [our] rights in the Union," and was opposed to secession "as 
 a remedy for anticipated aggression on the part of the Federal 
 Executive or Congress." 2 Texas was the only state in which 
 the convention submitted the secession ordinance to the people 
 for a referendum; and the figures of the popular vote (37,794 
 to 11,235), contrasted with the vote in the convention (166 to 
 7) and with the large popular vote cast for the Unionist candi- 
 dates Bell and Douglas in the November election, tempt one to 
 speculate on the truth of the frequent statement that the people 
 of the South were far ahead of their leaders in the desire for 
 independence. 3 ' % 
 
 1 Cass had resigned on December 15, and Black had been moved up to his 
 place. Edwin M. Stanton had succeeded to the Attorney- Generalship. Cobb 
 had left his department of the Treasury December 8. Floyd had been forced to 
 resign on account of crooked financial dealings, on December 29. Thompson 
 remained in the cabinet until January 7. 
 
 2 Stephens might well speak so, for he had a letter from his friend President- 
 elect Lincoln, written December 23, 1860, assuring him that the Southern states 
 need have no fear that the incoming administration would disturb slavery within 
 their limits. Stephens should have made the letter public. 
 
 3 Rhodes (Vol. Ill, pp. 276-279) collects a number of citations to show that 
 the politicians of the South were far behind the people in secessionist sentiment. 
 So many instances can be cited on both sides of such a question, however, that it 
 is impossible to be sure of one's conclusions. Rhodes feels "an additional con- 
 
528 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The adoption of the Crittenden Compromise by Congress or 
 of a Jacksonian policy in the White House 1 might have halted 
 secession at the borders of South Carolina, though it is doubt- 
 ful whether more than a brief postponement of the ultimate ap- 
 peal to arms could have been accomplished. The difference 
 between the sections was beyond any device of constitutional 
 machinery to compose. There could be no enduring peace in our 
 land until slavery was banished. Lincoln was right about "the 
 house divided." Two civilizations confronted each other across 
 Mason and Dixon's line, each convinced that it stood for the wel- 
 fare of man and enjoyed the blessing of God ; each convinced 
 that the other was aggressive, faithless, and accursed. They no 
 longer understood each other's language. Words like "honor," 
 "right," "freedom," "citizen," meant different things to each 
 section. The South as*ked the North to call an institution right 
 which the North believed to be wrong. The North seemed to 
 cast a stigma on the highest society of the South by regarding 
 slavery as a blot on civilization and the slaveholder as a delib- 
 erate sinner. The South accused the North of being sectional 
 and at the same time demanded that it should mind its own busi- 
 ness and cease to "meddle" with an institution which the North 
 looked on as a national disgrace. Inconsistency, misunder- 
 standing, and passion ruled. "It would not be enough to please 
 the Southern states," wrote James Russell Lowell in the Atlantic 
 Monthly of January, 1861, "that we should stop asking them 
 to abolish slavery; what they demand of us is nothing less 
 than that we should abolish the spirit of the age." 
 
 fidence " in his statements " for the reason that the careful historians Von Hoist 
 and Schouler have come to the same conclusion" (p. 279, note). But these are 
 just the two historians who would emphasize most the testimony to Southern 
 disunionism. 
 
 1 General Scott quotes from Southern papers the admission that there would 
 have been no Southern Confederacy if his advice to strengthen the forts had 
 been followed (Memoirs, p. 616). But the opinion of a few Southern editors 
 was neither infallible nor representative. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 And when the step of Earthquake shook the house, 
 
 Wrenching the rafters from their ancient hold, 
 
 He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again 
 
 The rafters of the home. Eowm MARZHAM 
 
 THE RESORT TO ARMS 
 
 In spite of the critical situation in Charleston harbor and the 
 perplexity of the administration at Washington ; in spite of the 
 failure of the congressional committees to agree on a plan of 
 conciliation ; in spite of the rapid secession of the cotton states 
 in January and the formation of a Southern Confederacy at 
 Montgomery, Alabama, on the fourth of February, 1861 ; in 
 spite of the fact that the Star of the West, a merchant vessel 
 carrying provisions from New York to Fort Sumter and flying 
 the American flag at her masthead, had been fired upon and 
 turned back by the batteries of Charleston harbor, the great 
 majority of the citizens of both sections refused to believe that 
 the gates of the temple of Janus were really to be thrown open. 
 
 War was a horrid thought. The country was prosperous, and 
 a hundred projects of industrial enterprise and social reform 
 were stirring in the American mind. However severe the tempo- 
 rary setback of the panic of 1857, there was no effect of it visible 
 in 1860. Our population during the decade had increased from 
 23,191,876 to 31,443,322 a gain of 35.59 per cent. The in- 
 crease in the city population was 78.62 per cent. The farm, to be 
 sure, still maintained its lead over the factory in 1860, when our 
 agricultural products were valued at $1,913,000,000 (as much 
 as farm products and manufactures combined in 1850), with 
 manufactures running a very close second at $1,885,862,000. 
 The output of woolen goods had jumped from $48,600,000 to 
 
 529 
 
530 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 $73,400,000 and of cotton from $65,500,000 to $115,600,000 in 
 the ten years. In 1850 iron rails to the value of $25,000 were 
 manufactured; in 1860 this had increased to $105,000. The 
 tonnage on the Great Lakes had grown from 215,787 to 
 611,398; the railroad mileage, from 9021 to 30,635. There 
 were 50,000 miles of telegraph wires and 186,000 miles of post- 
 roads. Over 2,500,000 immigrants had come to America dur- 
 ing the decade. The 6 per cent government securities were 
 selling at a premium of 17 points. In the summer of 1858 a 
 cable had been laid on the bed of the Atlantic from Newfound- 
 land to the British Isles, and a message of greeting had been 
 exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. 
 The same year the "pony express" carried mail from the 
 Missouri River to the Pacific coast in ten days, arousing re- 
 newed interest in a transcontinental railroad. Conventions were 
 meeting to discuss women's rights, prison reform, temperance, 
 free religion, and a host of other topics. The intellectual fer- 
 ment out of which these various movements came was stimu- 
 lated by a rich literature of idealism from Emerson, Lowell, 
 Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Curtis, Simms the 
 great essayists, historians, and poets whose names are the glory 
 of American letters. 
 
 The people of the North and the border slave states were 
 loath to accept the deadlock in the committees of conciliation. 
 Petitions poured in upon Congress for the reconsideration of 
 the Crittenden amendments. Public men in high station and 
 influential newspapers declared their belief that an overwhelm- 
 ing majority of the country was in favor of their adoption. Let 
 them be submitted to a plebiscite. The people with a mighty 
 voice would decree peace where the legislators had failed. On 
 the same day that the delegates from the seceding states met at 
 Montgomery to form a Southern Confederacy, a peace conven- 
 tion was opened at Washington with the venerable ex-President 
 Tyler in the chair. Over 1 50 delegates, representing 2 1 of the 
 33 states of the Union, labored for a month, with diminishing 
 harmony, to devise an acceptable plan of compromise "a 
 Convention of Notables," as Lowell sneeringly called it, "to 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 531 
 
 thresh the straw of debate anew the usual panacea of pala- 
 ver." In the morning of March 4, a few hours before the end 
 of the Thirty-sixth Congress, the proposals of the convention 
 (not differing essentially from the Crittenden Compromise) 
 were submitted to the Senate and received seven affirmative 
 votes. The convention, like the committees, went its way "to 
 a place in the great company of historic futilities." The only 
 mouse that this mountain of conciliatory labor brought forth 
 was a proposed thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, 
 forbidding Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in any 
 state where it was established by law. 
 
 Material motives were mixed with nobler anxieties for peace. 
 It was estimated that $200,000,000 were owed by the Southern 
 planters to Northern merchants and bankers. There was a 
 movement of indignant irritability in financial and business 
 circles that this persistent specter of slavery should rise like 
 Banquo's ghost to cast its chilling presence over the scene. To 
 use Benton's simile of thirty years before, it was like the 
 Egyptian plague of frogs, infesting every nook and corner of our 
 life. Robert C. Winthrop, a prominent " cotton Whig" of Mas- 
 sachusetts, expressed the sentiment of his class in the North 
 when he deplored "the intemperate antislavery agitation" as 
 "the source of a very large part of the troubles with which the 
 country had been disturbed." 
 
 The determination of the aristocratic mercantile interests in 
 the cities of the East not to let slavery interfere with business 
 is strikingly illustrated by the case of New York. The South- 
 ern press besought the city not to "sacrifice her commerce, 
 her wealth, her population, her character," by warring on her 
 "Southern friends and best customers ... at the bidding of 
 Black Republican tyrants." When a newspaper editor from 
 Georgia visited New York to make up the list of merchants 
 whom the South should boycott or patronize according to their 
 sympathies with slavery, he was flatteringly received by scores 
 of prominent business men "who sought a place on the white 
 list." Fernando Wood, the mayor, suggested in his message 
 of January 7 that if disunion came, the city should declare 
 
532 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 its independence and preserve its trade. According to John 
 Forsythe of Alabama, one of the three commissioners whom the 
 new Confederate government at Montgomery had sent North 
 to "treat" with the United States, "200 of the most wealthy and 
 influential citizens of New York had been approached, and were 
 then arranging the details of a plan to throw off the authority 
 of the Federal and State governments, to seize the navy yard at 
 Brooklyn, the vessels of war, and the forts in the harbor, and to 
 declare New York a ' free city.' " Russell of the London Times, 
 visiting New 'York and dining with Seymour, Tilden, and Ban- 
 croft, said that their conversation and arguments left on his 
 mind the impression "that according to the Constitution the 
 government could not use force to prevent secession or to com- 
 pel states which had seceded by the will of their people to 
 acknowledge the Federal power." 1 
 
 The pacifism of the idealist, the merchant, and the constitu- 
 tionalist was reenforced by the views of the men who thought 
 that the South was not worth fighting for and that a Union held 
 together by force was not worth living in. The Garrisonian 
 abolitionists were quite willing to let the South go. The Union 
 that was left would be freed from a great curse and exoner- 
 ated from complicity in disgraceful legislation like the Fugitive 
 Slave laws and humiliating pronouncements like the Dred Scott 
 decision. 2 At least up to the close of 1860 men of enormous in- 
 fluence spread abroad the doctrine of acquiescence in peaceable 
 secession, which their later conversion to the policy of coercion 
 could not wholly undo. Winfield Scott, general of the army, 
 was for letting "the wayward sisters depart in peace." Henry 
 Ward Beecher said, in a speech in Brooklyn on November 27, 
 
 *New York City had gone against Lincoln in the election by over 30,000, 
 although he had carried the other great cities of the country (Philadelphia, Chi- 
 cago, Boston, and even St. Louis) . 
 
 2 The horror of war formed the subject of Wendell Phillips's most dramatic 
 orations. Whittier, the Quaker poet, sang : 
 
 "They break the links of Union: shall we light 
 The flames of Hell to weld anew the chain 
 On that red anvil where each blow is pain ? " 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 533 
 
 "In so far as the free states are concerned, I hold that it will be 
 an advantage for the South to go off." Horace Greeley's edi- 
 torials in the November issues of the New York Tribune in- 
 sisted that no attempt must be made to prevent secession. "If 
 the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of the 
 Union than in it, we shall insist on letting them go in peace. 
 We hope never to live in a republic where one section is pinned 
 to the residue by bayonets." "Five millions of people, of whom 
 at least a half a million are able and willing to shoulder muskets, 
 can never be subdued while fighting around and over their own 
 hearthstones." This was the language of the Charleston Mer- 
 cury and the Richmond Enquirer ! Two days before South 
 Carolina seceded an article in the Tribune spoke of "the idle 
 gabble and monstrous gassing about revolution and civil war." 
 It is little wonder, with irresolution in the executive, dead- 
 lock in Congress, and confusion of counsel among the leaders 
 of public opinion in the North, that the Southerners, with few 
 exceptions, should have believed that they would be allowed 
 peaceably to withdraw from the Union. Jefferson Davis, who 
 was one of the first to warn the Confederacy that it must expect 
 a long and bloody war, could say as late as January 21, 1861, 
 on taking pathetic leave of his colleagues in the Senate, that 
 he hoped that "peaceful relations might continue" between the 
 two sections. The South knew the North as little as the North 
 knew the South. Impassioned public speakers and editors of 
 an extremely vituperative press had encouraged the belief that 
 a great proportion of the .Yankees were fanatical abolitionists 
 filled with hatred for the South, hypocritical money-grabbers, 
 and pharisaical meddlers, too cowardly to provoke a combat. 
 In 1850 the North had been for a compromise which allowed 
 slavery to extend into the territories of the United States. But 
 the events of the decade,as theypassed in rapid succession, the 
 Fugitive-Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Lecompton 
 fraud, the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 
 the John Brown raid, had nurtured a grim conviction among 
 the plain people, not fully sensed by the leaders on either side, 
 that the test between slavery and freedom must come soon. 
 
534 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The surprised indignation of the South, when their determi- 
 nation to compel secession by the forcible seizure of Fort Sumter 
 had crystallized Northern sentiment into a practically unani- 
 mous resolve to maintain the Union by arms, is well illustrated 
 by a letter from Mrs. R. L. Hunt of New Orleans to her brother 
 Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's cabi- 
 net: "Do not delude yourself or others with the notion that 
 war can maintain the Union. Alas, I say it with a heavy heart, 
 the Union is destroyed ; it can never be restored. If, indeed, 
 the Federal Government had frowned on the first dawning of 
 disunion, things might have been different. But the United 
 States suffered South Carolina to secede without opposition, 
 and with scarcely a murmur of disapprobation. ... All the 
 Southern states, with the exception of Kentucky, Missouri, and 
 Maryland, have joined the secession, and have formed them- 
 selves in to. a powerful Confederacy, with a government pos- 
 sessing all the usual powers of sovereignties, exercising entire 
 and exclusive sway, legislative, executive, and judicial, within 
 the limits of those states and dissolving all connection with the 
 United States. Having thus by a revolution almost bloodless 
 assumed and exercised the right of self-government, the Con- 
 federate States are now threatened with war and desolation if 
 they do not abjure the government they have formed. . . . The 
 time has passed for a discussion about the territories and fu- 
 gitive slaves and the constitutional right of a state to secede. 
 . . . Secession is un fait accompli. Disunion is a fixed fact. 
 It is worse than useless to deny or attempt to evade this truth. 
 . . . And how do the statesmen of the North, how do you, my 
 dear brother, who should recognize facts as they are, propose 
 to deal with this question ? With sword and buckler, the rifle, 
 the bayonet, . . . and all the dread instruments of war . . . ? 
 With these you propose to subjugate the entire free people of 
 the South, while you mock them with the declaration that your 
 object is to maintain a Union which no longer exists. . . . You 
 may for the moment have an advantage in wealth and numbers. 
 But ... the North is fighting for subjugation and domination, 
 the South for liberty and independence. It is precisely like the 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 535 
 
 great Revolutionary struggle of '76 against the tyranny of 
 Great Britain. . . . How can you- expect victory in such a 
 cause ? . . . Surely eight millions of people, armed in the holy 
 cause of liberty, ... are invincible by any force the North can 
 send against them. . . . Never were a people more united and 
 more determined." 
 
 The government which Mrs. Hunt, with a rather premature 
 optimism, speaks of as "exercising entire and exclusive sway" 
 in the Confederate states was organized at Montgomery, Feb- 
 ruary 4, 1 86 1. It adopted a constitution patterned closely on 
 that of the United States, but characteristically substituted 
 the phrase "We, the deputies of the Sovereign and Independent 
 States" for "We, the people of the United States." Although 
 itself the result of the secession of "sovereign states," it de- 
 clared the new Confederacy "permanent." It prohibited pro- 
 tective duties and the expenditure of public money for internal 
 improvements. It guaranteed the recognition and protection 
 of slavery in any new territory which the Confederacy might 
 acquire, but, out of deference to the opinion of the civilized 
 world, it forbade the African slave trade. It provided for a 
 single term of six years for the president and gave him the 
 power to veto separate items in appropriation bills. The mem- 
 bers of the cabinet were recognized on the floor of Congress. 
 Immediately after the constitution was framed, the provisional 
 Congress 1 chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president 
 and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia as vice president. They 
 made provision for war by authorizing a military force of 
 100,000 volunteers to serve a year and a loan of $15,000,000 in 
 8 per cent bonds, levying an export tax of one eighth of a 
 
 convention which made the constitution acted as a provisional Con- 
 gress for about a year. The first regularly elected Congress of the Confederacy 
 met on February 18, 1862. The constitution had been ratified in the spring of 
 1861 by conventions in the seven seceding states, the total vote being 862 to 42. 
 Exactly half the negative votes came from South Carolina, where the exponents 
 of the extreme states'-rights doctrine protested against the features of " Southern 
 nationalism" in the constitution. This vote was the harbinger of a struggle be- 
 tween the old Southern states of the Atlantic seaboard and the "consolidated" 
 Confederate government which lasted all through the life of the Confederacy. 
 
536 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 cent a pound on cotton to pay the interest on the loan. They 
 turned over to the president the responsibility for getting pos- 
 session of Forts Sumter and Pickens. They appointed three 
 commissioners to Europe to seek recognition and alliances, and 
 three to Washington to treat with their "late confederates of the 
 United States" in relation to the public property and the 
 public debts. 
 
 Meanwhile Abraham Lincoln was quietly but anxiously 
 watching the progress of secession from his home in Springfield, 
 Illinois. The awkward arrangement of our political system 
 which allows four months to intervene between the election and 
 the inauguration of a president has never had more unfortunate 
 results. 1 While the Southern politicians were boasting of tying 
 Buchanan's hands at Washington, Lincoln's hands were tied 
 at Springfield. He was still technically only a private citizen, 
 an Illinois lawyer. He could and did write to individuals, like 
 Gilmer of North Carolina (whom he afterwards invited to fill 
 a cabinet position) and Stephens of Georgia (who had been his 
 colleague in the House in 1847), that he had no intention of 
 withholding official patronage from slaveholders, that he " would 
 be glad to see any laws of the states repealed which were in 
 conflict with the national Fugitive-Slave Act of 1850," and that 
 his administration would not interfere directly or indirectly 
 with slavery in the states where it was established by law. 
 "The South will be in no more danger in this respect," he wrote 
 Stephens, "than it was in the days of Washington." But, after 
 all, these were only private letters, which did nothing to allay 
 Southern apprehensions ; and Stephens did not see fit to make 
 the correspondence public. In one matter only did Lincoln 
 interfere during these four months to influence the counsels in 
 Washington. On the very day of the secession of South Caro- 
 
 1 Of course, in the original intent of the Constitution the delay was for the 
 purpose of allowing the electors chosen in November to meet and select a presi- 
 dent. But that procedure had ceased, almost at the beginning of our national 
 government, to be anything but a mere formality. Even today the awkward de- 
 lay is virtually equivalent to an "interregnum," which condemns the last session 
 of the Congress of the outgoing administration to the futility of marking time. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 537 
 
 lina, Thurlow Weed called on Lincoln in Springfield, as Senator 
 Seward's representative, to seek the opinion of the President- 
 elect on the proposed plan for the revival and extension of the 
 Missouri Compromise line. Lincoln's answer was unequivocal. 
 Slavery must not be tolerated in any of the territory of the 
 United States. On that issue he was inexorable. Seward ac- 
 cepted the ultimatum, and the Crittenden Compromise was 
 defeated. 
 
 Lincoln has been severely criticized for this fateful decision. 
 The advocates of the Compromise have pointed out that the 
 election of 1860 was by no means a "mandate" to carry out 
 the Chicago platform. For, although Lincoln's electoral major- 
 ity was large, the popular vote of the country, by a margin of 
 more than a million, had been cast for other candidates who 
 favored compromise. It was therefore, say these writers, a 
 selfish, narrow preference for the maintenance of their party 
 to the maintenance of the Union that actuated Lincoln and his 
 followers. This is a grave indictment, if true. Its validity 
 lies, of course, in the question of whether the Crittenden Com- 
 promise, if adopted, would have preserved the Union. Would 
 the determined South rest content with the barren victory 
 which secured to it only territories from which slavery was 
 excluded by "the laws of nature"? 1 Would the determined 
 North, even if the Republican party should commit suicide, 
 acquiesce in the very conditions which had called the Repub- 
 lican party into existence? Unless these questions can be 
 answered in the affirmative, Lincoln was right when he wrote 
 to Congressman Kellogg, "The tug has to come, and better 
 
 1 Lincoln wrote to Weed (December 17, 1861), "A year will not pass till we 
 shall have to take Cuba as a condition on which they will stay in the Union." 
 He may have been mistaken ; yet Senator Brown of Mississippi had said in 1860: 
 " I want Cuba ; I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states ; 
 and I want them all for the same reason, for the planting and spread of slavery. 
 ... I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our divine 
 Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth. ... I would make the refusal to 
 acquire territory because it was to be slave territory, a cause of disunion, just 
 as I would make the refusal to admit a new state, because it was to be a slave 
 state, a cause for disunion." 
 
538 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 now than later." The only " compromise" that either side 
 would accept in 1861 was one which appealed to the other side 
 as an abject surrender a compromise of principles. 
 
 Mr. Rhodes thinks that the South should have accepted the 
 terms which Lincoln approved and which Seward offered in 
 the Senate committee with the consensus of all the Republican 
 members ; namely, ( i ) an amendment to the Constitution for- 
 bidding Congress to interfere with slavery in the states, (2) a 
 jury trial for fugitive slaves, and (3) the recommendation of 
 Congress to the Northern states to repeal their Personal Liberty 
 laws. "Considering that the slavery question had been sub- 
 mitted to the people at the presidential election, and that the 
 antislavery party had won, was it not a fair offer? Did not 
 the Republicans meet the cotton states half way? Should not 
 Davis, Toombs, and Hunter have agreed to the proposition? 
 Could they not have done so without dishonor? As players in 
 the political game, fault cannot be found with the Southerners 
 for making extreme demands, but when they had ascertained 
 the furthest concession the Republicans were willing to make, 
 ought they not to have accepted it rather than run the risk of 
 involving the country in civil war?" 1 But it is not difficult to 
 see why the Southerners would not accept Seward's proposi- 
 tion. For them a purely sectional party had got control of 
 the government, a party whose members, in spite of the dis- 
 avowal in its platform, had condoned the behavior of John Brown, 
 a party whose leader had predicted that the country would 
 become all slave or all free. With Abraham Lincoln in office, 
 dispensing the vast amount of federal patronage, controlling 
 national policies and diplomatic negotiations, commanding the 
 army and navy of the United States, there was little chance that 
 the first clause of the alternative prophecy would come true. 
 
 1 Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 177. Yet a few pages before (Vol. Ill, p. 149, note), com- 
 paring the language of a speech of Jefferson Davis's in the Senate, December 10, 
 
 1860, with that of James Russell Lowell in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 
 
 1861, Rhodes shows how impossible compromise was. "These two quotations 
 show," he says, "as clearly as anything I know, the underlying reasons of the 
 war between the North and the South." 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 539 
 
 It is easy to discover inconsistency, irritability, and misrep- 
 resentation in the Southern position. The Southerners insisted 
 that they alone must make the terms on which they would re- 
 main in the Union. They reproached the North for being " sec- 
 tional" and at the same time told it to mind its own business, 
 their real grievance, of course, being that the North was "na- 
 tional" enough to feel a responsibility for the condition of the 
 South. They resented the bitter attacks of a comparatively few 
 abolitionist papers on their character as slaveholders, while 
 their own press, almost without exception, indulged in the wild- 
 est language of vituperation against the "Yankees." Yancey 
 and Breckinridge might travel freely in the North, presenting 
 the Southern cause to audiences in New York City, but a 
 Northerner, suspected of being tinged with abolitionist prin- 
 ciples, was promptly persuaded to leave a Southern town. 
 Calhoun demanded that there should be no discussion of slavery 
 in the North, but he insisted upon slavery's taking precedence 
 of every other question in the South. For this he would muzzle 
 the press, search the mails, make the laws of the states overbear 
 the federal statutes, and reduce the federal government to a 
 nullity which could end only in disintegration. Finally, though 
 they asserted that slavery was sanctioned by God, 1 they had no 
 confidence in its divine protection. For they would tolerate no 
 argument on the subject, ignoring the dictum of Macaulay that 
 "men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when 
 they discuss it freely." 2 But over against all this indictment 
 
 x ln a Thanksgiving sermon at New Orleans the Reverend B. M. Palmer said: 
 "In this great struggle we defend the cause of God and religion. It is our solemn 
 duty to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God to preserve 
 and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude with the right, unchal- 
 lenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it." 
 
 2 Frederick Law Olmsted, in his dispassionate survey of conditions in the 
 South, tells of asking a man in official position in Richmond whether he knew 
 anything about the reliability of certain figures in Professor Johnson's "Agri- 
 cultural Tour," on the value of slaves exported from Virginia, and receiving the 
 reply: "No, I don't know anything about it. But if they are anything unfavor- 
 able to the institution of slavery, you may be sure that they are wrong" 
 ("Journey in the Seaboard Slave States," Vol. I, p. 61). 
 
540 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 must be set the tremendous fact that the South was contending 
 for the preservation of $4,000,000,000 of slave property, for 
 the world's export market in cotton, and for a social system 
 which it believed absolutely necessary for the maintenance of 
 the civilization, the purity, and the safety of the white race. 1 
 
 Lincoln took touching leave of his neighbors in Springfield 
 on February n, 1861. His journey to Washington, marked by 
 very disappointing speeches in various cities along the route, 
 was uneventful except for rumors of assassination which reached 
 him at Philadelphia and persuaded him to avoid passing through 
 the secessionist city of Baltimore by day, as he had planned. 
 He reached the capital safely on the twenty-third, and nine days 
 later delivered his Inaugural Address to an audience not wholly 
 free from apprehension. 2 In his first public utterance as the 
 new head of the nation Lincoln pledged his administration to 
 the faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law and the non- 
 interference with slavery in the Southern states. There would 
 be no bloodshed or violence unless it should be forced on the 
 national government. "In your hands, my dissatisfied country- 
 men, and not in mine," he said to the South, "is the momentous 
 issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You 
 can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. 
 You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern- 
 ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to ' preserve, pro- 
 tect, and defend it."' Yet Lincoln at the same time declared 
 
 1 Robert Toombs put the case clearly when he said, "The question is not 
 whether we could be more prosperous and happy with these 3,500,000 slaves 
 in Africa and their places filled with an equal number of hardy, intelligent, and 
 enterprising citizens of the superior race ; but it is simply whether, while we 
 have them among us, we would be most prosperous with them in freedom or 
 bondage." To that question there was but one answer in the South. 
 
 2 All through the winter there were rumors that an attempt would be made to 
 prevent the inauguration of a Black Republican president. On Christmas Day, 
 1860, the Richmond Enquirer asked, "Can there not be found men bold and 
 brave enough in Maryland to unite with the Virginians in seizing the Capitol at 
 Washington ? " General Scott had about 450 soldiers of the regular army in 
 Washington to insure the peaceable counting of the electoral vote on February 13, 
 and the force was increased to 650 for the inauguration. Both events passed in 
 perfect quiet. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 541 
 
 that no state could lawfully leave the Union "upon its own mere 
 motion," that the ordinances of secession were void, that he 
 should take care to execute the laws of the Union in all the 
 states, as he was bound to do by his oath of office, and that he 
 would use the power confided to him "to hold, occupy, and 
 possess the property and places belonging to the Government." 
 The sinister import of these warnings could not be hidden by 
 the beautiful sentiment of the closing sentence of the Inau- 
 gural: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every 
 battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth- 
 stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the 
 Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the 
 better angels of our nature." The South, regarding secession 
 and the Confederacy as accomplished facts, interpreted the 
 Inaugural as a virtual declaration of war. 1 
 
 The next day the Senate in executive session ratified the 
 President's choice of a cabinet. 2 It was a composite body, 
 representing all shades of Unionist sentiment. Four of its 
 members had been Lincoln's rivals in the Chicago convention. 
 Chase and Welles represented the anti-Nebraska Democracy; 
 Cameron and Smith were rewarded for political services; 
 Bates and Blair were from the loyal slaveholding states. The 
 two tasks which the President saw immediately before him were 
 to hold Forts Sumter and Pickens and to keep the border slave 
 states in the Union. The day of the inauguration a report 
 reached the War Office from Major Anderson that he had pro- 
 visions for a month and that 20,000 men would be needed to 
 
 *A group of secessionists at Washington wrote to L. P. Walker, the Con- 
 federate Secretary of War, on the day of the Inaugural: "We agreed that it 
 was Lincoln's purpose at once to attempt the collection of the revenue, to rein- 
 force and hold Forts Sumter and Pickens, and to retake the other places. He 
 is a man of will and firmness. His cabinet will yield to him with alacrity. . . . 
 There are five or six ships in New York harbor all ready to start." 
 
 2 Namely : William H. Seward of New York (State), Salmon P. Chase of Ohio 
 (Treasury), Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania (War), to be replaced early in 
 1862 by Edwin M. Stanton of Ohio, Edward Bates of Missouri (Attorney- 
 General), Gideon Welles of Connecticut (Navy), Caleb Smith of Indiana (Inte- 
 rior), and Montgomery Blair of Maryland (Postmaster-General). 
 
542 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 hold Fort Sumter. General Scott advised evacuation. "As a 
 practical military question, the time for succoring Fort Sumter 
 with any means at hand," he said, "had passed away." At a 
 cabinet meeting on March 1 5 Seward, Cameron, Welles, Smith, 
 and Bates all agreed that it was unwise to attempt to provision 
 the fort. Seward's behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to 
 regard himself as the guiding spirit of the administration, whose 
 duty it was to lead the inexperienced Lincoln gently but firmly 
 along the path to peace. He entered into negotiations with the 
 Confederate "ambassadors" from Montgomery and gave them 
 secret assurance that the status of Fort Sumter would not 
 be disturbed. He declared with oracular optimism that the 
 South would soon come back to its allegiance to the Union with 
 a little careful handling : "The trouble will all blow over within 
 ninety days." "He was vigilantly attentive," says Welles, "to 
 every measure and movement in the order departments; . . . 
 watched and scrutinized every appointment that was made; 
 . . . but was not communicative in regard to the transactions 
 of the State Department." He tried to get Lincoln to omit the 
 general cabinet meetings and consult with the secretaries sepa- 
 rately as occasion arose. And finally, on April i, he submitted 
 to Lincoln an amazing paper entitled "Thoughts for the Presi- 
 dent's Consideration." At the end of a month, he said, the 
 administration still found itself without a policy domestic or 
 foreign. This indecision must not continue. Let Sumter be 
 evacuated to appease the South, and a vigorous foreign policy 
 initiated to cement the Union. "I would demand explana- 
 tions from France and Spain categorically and at once . . . 
 and if satisfactory explanations were not received . . . would 
 convene Congress and declare war against them. But what- 
 ever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecu- 
 tion of it. ... Either the President must do it himself . . . 
 or devolve it on some member of his cabinet. ... I neither 
 seek to evade nor assume the responsibility." Lincoln, with 
 great forbearance and kindness, set the importunate secre- 
 tary right on the question as to who was the head of the 
 administration. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 543 
 
 The President had already (and now with the approval of all 
 the cabinet except Seward and Smith) decided to send a relief 
 expedition to Fort Sumter and fixed April 6 as the date of its 
 departure. On that day a clerk in the State Department was 
 sent to Charleston to present the following notification, written 
 in Lincoln's own hand, to Governor Pickens of South Carolina : 
 "I am directed by the President of the United States to notify 
 you to expect that an attempt will be made to supply Fort 
 Sumter with provisions only; and that if such an attempt be 
 not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will 
 be made without further notice." Meanwhile a lively exchange 
 of telegrams had been going on between the Confederate govern- 
 ment at Montgomery, its commissioners at Washington, Gov- 
 ernor Pickens, and General Beauregard, in command of the 
 Confederate troops at Charleston. Seeing in Lincoln's Inaugu- 
 ral the doom of their hopes of peaceful secession, the Confed- 
 erates sought to gain delay for better preparations. The secret 
 instructions to the commissioners at Washington were to "play 
 with Seward" and to "delay and gain time until the South was 
 ready." But Lincoln's warning to Governor Pickens precipi- 
 tated action. The Northern papers referred to the Sumter re- 
 lief expedition as "a force which will overcome all opposition." 
 The commissioners believed that Seward had deliberately 
 deceived them. Governor Pickens believed that Lincoln was 
 hiding the purpose of armed coercion behind the pretext of pro- 
 visioning the fort. So the cabinet at Montgomery, under the 
 pressure of these representations, and in spite of the remon- 
 strances of the Secretary of State, Robert Toombs, who warned, 
 "It is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the 
 North," instructed Beauregard to demand- the surrender of 
 the fort. 
 
 Major Anderson refused to surrender. The pilots of Charles- 
 ton harbor sent word to Beauregard that a United States vessel 
 had been sighted. Another embassy was sent to Anderson at 
 midnight, and on his second refusal to surrender he was formally 
 notified at 3.20 A.M. (April 12) that the Confederate batteries 
 would open fire on the fort in one hour. With the first roar 
 
544 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of the guns the people of Charleston began to wake from their 
 light sleep and flock to the esplanade which faced the harbor, 
 where they watched the spectacular duel between the island 
 batteries and the fort. The prudent stayed on shore, cheering 
 the shots that struck and waving the Palmetto flag. The more 
 venturesome put out into the harbor with little apparent regard 
 for the range of the guns. All day the battle continued, and at 
 intervals through the night of rain and wind that followed, the 
 Confederate batteries kept up the fire. In the morning the duel 
 was resumed. After maintaining the unequal contest for thirty- 
 two hours, the fort in flames and his flag shot down, his ex- 
 hausted men tortured with the heat and choked with smoke, 
 Major Anderson surrendered on the afternoon of Saturday, 
 April 13. On Sunday he marched out of the fort, after saluting 
 the flag, with drums beating and colors flying, and embarked 
 for New York on the Federal vessels lying outside the bar. 1 
 
 The assault on Fort Sumter put an end to hesitancy and con- 
 fused counsels. The day after Anderson's surrender Lincoln 
 issued a proclamation declaring that the laws of the United 
 States were obstructed in the seven states of the secession by 
 "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary 
 course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the 
 marshals of the law," and called upon the governors of the loyal 
 states for 75,000 volunteers from their militia to serve for three 
 months. None of the governors of the eight slave states which 
 had not seceded obeyed the President's call, but the response 
 from the country north of Mason and Dixon's line was instan- 
 taneous and hearty. Party lines were obliterated. The mal- 
 contents swung into line. "That first gun at Fort Sumter," 
 
 1 The relief expedition which Lincoln had planned with Gustavus V. Fox, 
 Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was to consist of the powerful warship Pow- 
 hatan with three smaller vessels, the steamer Baltic, and three tugs to take the 
 provisions into the fort. By Seward's officious meddling, over the heads of the 
 Navy Department, the Powhatan was detached from the expedition and sent to 
 Pensacola, Florida. The tugs all failed to reach the scene of the rendezvous out- 
 side Charleston* harbor. The other vessels, powerless to render aid to Anderson, 
 lay rolling in the heavy sea off the bar during the entire bombardment, waiting 
 vainly for the Powhatan to arrive. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 545 
 
 wrote Lowell, "brought all the free states to their feet as one 
 man." Greeley was enthusiastic ; Fernando Wood, addressing 
 a huge patriotic mass meeting in Union Square, New York, 
 cried, "I am with you in this contest: we know no party now." 
 Douglas hastened to pledge the support of the Democrats of the 
 North, declaring, " There can be no neutral in this war only 
 patriots or traitors." The ex-presidents, Pierce and Buchanan, 
 who had been so conspicuously under the influence of the South- 
 ern statesmen while in the White House, rallied to Lincoln's 
 support. "The North will sustain the administration almost to 
 a man," wrote 'Buchanan, "and it ought to be sustained at all 
 hazards." 1 The actual outbreak of war and Lincoln's call for 
 troops stimulated an equal enthusiasm in the South. Volun- 
 teers flocked to answer President Davis's call for 100,000 men, 
 and the Confederate Congress met in extra session to pass meas- 
 ures for the financial, industrial, and military security of the 
 Confederacy. 
 
 The week following the fall of Fort Sumter was crowded 
 with events of the greatest importance. On Monday, April 15, 
 Lincoln issued his proclamation. On Tuesday the militia of 
 Massachusetts, trained for weeks by Governor John A. Andrew, 
 began to muster. On Wednesday the Sixth Massachusetts 
 regiment started for Washington, and the state of Virginia se- 
 ceded. On Thursday the federal authorities abandoned Harpers 
 Ferry, burning the armory and destroying most of the arms. 
 On Friday the Massachusetts troops, marching from station to 
 station through Baltimore, were attacked by a mob, and a 
 bloody affray followed in which four soldiers and several of the 
 assailants were killed the first bloodshed of the Civil War. 
 The same day Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the Atlantic 
 coast from South Carolina to Florida. On Saturday Robert E. 
 Lee, after a harrowing inward struggle between his love for the 
 Union and his devotion to his state, resigned his commission in 
 the United States army, deeming, in the words of Alexander H. 
 
 1 The South was surprised at the "desertion" of the men whom they re- 
 garded as their friends. See a number of quotations from the Southern press 
 on this subject in Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 399, note 3. 
 
546 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Stephens, that his state had " never parted with her sovereign 
 right to demand the ultimate allegiance of her citizens." He had 
 been informally tendered the command of the Federal army, 
 but he chose to accept his commission from the governor of 
 Virginia. Lee was the soul of honor like Bayard, a " knight 
 without fear or reproach." He hated slavery and cherished 
 the Union. That such a man, and hundreds of gentlemen like 
 him in the South, should have been compelled to make such a 
 choice is a distressing proof of the power of an established 
 social order to sweep men along in its current. 1 
 
 The defection of Virginia from the Union brought secession 
 up to the banks of the Potomac and planted the Stars and Bars 
 within sight of the Capitol. Washington was poorly defended. 
 Officeholders and citizens were leaving in something of a panic, 
 and rumors were current that Beauregard was going to use 
 his South Carolina troops for the capture of the city. The 
 President shared the anxiety, pacing the floor of his office in the 
 White House and gazing down the Potomac in vain for the ap- 
 pearance of the boats which he expected to bring reenforce- 
 ments via Chesapeake Bay. By the order of Mayor Brown of 
 Baltimore the Marylanders had destroyed direct railroad con- 
 nections and telegraphic communication with the North. Regi- 
 ments from New York and Boston, coming by the circuitous 
 
 1 As it is unjust to call such men as Lee "traitors" for their interpretation of 
 their duty of allegiance, so it is unfair to use their names to cover the evil of 
 slavery. One sometimes reads such sentences as, "The civilization which pro- 
 duced a Robert E. Lee could not have been altogether bad." But the de- 
 testable institution of slavery no more "produced" Robert E. Lee than the 
 corruptions of Imperial Rome produced Marcus Aurelius. It is true, in a 
 sense, that the discussion of slavery today is, as Goldwin Smith remarked, "like 
 trampling on a grave." Yet to refrain from a discussion of slavery is to re- 
 nounce writing the history of the Civil War. Professor McLaughlin seems to 
 me to have stated in admirable terms the spirit in which such discussion should 
 be approached : " We often find in life gentle and refined people who tolerate a 
 system of industrial or social intolerance which one would expect them to reject. 
 One ought to be allowed to attack evils in an industrial and social system with- 
 out being charged with attacking the conscience and character of all who are 
 caught up and entangled in that system" ("Steps in the Development of Ameri- 
 can Democracy," p. 139, note) . 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 547 
 
 way of Chesapeake Bay and Annapolis and relaying the torn-up 
 tracks as they advanced, finally marched into Washington on 
 April 25, and the capital felt safe. There was really little cause 
 for anxiety. The Confederate government had no intention of 
 marching troops across the soil of the " sovereign states" of 
 North Carolina and Virginia. The South, overestimating the 
 forces at Washington, was thinking far more of her own pro- 
 tection than of delivering an attack on the North. Richmond 
 was as much " panic-stricken" as Washington. 
 
 Lincoln succeeded better in his hope to stem the tide of se- 
 cession than in his determination to hold Fort Sumter. To be 
 sure, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee followed Vir- 
 ginia out of the Union, but the four other slaveholding states 
 Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were kept loyal. 
 Except in Delaware, where slaves were very few, the task was 
 difficult, and it was accomplished largely through the tact- 
 ful, conciliatory patience of President Lincoln. He summoned 
 Mayor Brown to the White House and agreed not to send more 
 troops through the excited city of Baltimore if their passage 
 via Perry ville and Annapolis were not interfered with. When 
 the loyal Governor Hicks convened the legislature at Frederick 
 City, Lincoln had General Scott show enough force to encourage 
 the Unionist sentiment, without giving the secessionists provo- 
 cation for making a disturbance. The result was the triumph 
 of Union feeling in the state. A solid loyal delegation was 
 elected for the extra session of Congress which Lincoln had 
 called for July 4. By the middle of May the governor was 
 strong enough to dismiss the secessionist militia in Baltimore, 
 repair the railroad and telegraph communications with the 
 North, and raise four regiments to fill the state's quota of the 
 troops called for by Lincoln's proclamation. 1 Of course, thou- 
 sands volunteered for the Confederate ranks. When Lee's army 
 
 1 After the defeat of the Union army in the summer of 1861, Secretary of 
 War Cameron, fearing that Maryland might secede, took measures of repression 
 unwarranted by the Constitution. The press was censored, and several members 
 of the legislature were seized without warrants and imprisoned (with other sus- 
 pects from Kentucky and Missouri) in forts in New York and Boston Harbors. 
 
548 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 launched its great invasion of the North in the Gettysburg 
 campaign of 1863, the song that went down the swinging col- 
 umn was "Maryland, my Maryland." 
 
 Lincoln's task of keeping his native state of Kentucky in the 
 Union was harder. Governor Magoffin had answered his call 
 for troops with an indignant refusal. The legislature was de- 
 termined that the state should remain neutral. Even so loyal a 
 Unionist as Crittenden approved this policy, believing that Ken- 
 tucky, interposed as a buffer between the two hostile sections, 
 could keep them from war. Though he saw the folly of such 
 a hope, Lincoln treated it with consideration. He used three 
 able Kentuckians to win over the state. Major Anderson was 
 stationed at Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River, with instruc- 
 tions to receive volunteers from Kentucky and Virginia. L. H. 
 Rousseau, a state senator, was commissioned to raise a brigade 
 of Kentuckians for the United States army at Camp Joe Holt, 
 on the Indiana side of the river. A third Kentuckian, William 
 Nelson, a young naval officer, was given leave of absence to or- 
 ganize and supply with arms the Unionist volunteers in the 
 central part of the state. In spite of the secessionist influence of 
 Governor Magoffin, the elections in May for the extra session 
 of Congress resulted in the return of nine Unionist members out 
 of a delegation of ten. The state remained in the Union, but 
 the names of Breckinridge, Buckner, Hood, and Albert Sidney 
 Johnston are proof of the strength which Kentucky furnished 
 to the Confederacy. 
 
 In Missouri it actually came to civil war. Francis P. Blair, 
 Jr., of St. Louis, a strong Union man and a brother of Lincoln's 
 Postmaster-General, raised four regiments of "Home Guards," 
 chiefly from the loyal German population of Missouri, and of- 
 fered them to the President as the state's quota of militia. He 
 secured the appointment of Captain Nathaniel Lyon as their 
 commander. Governor Jackson, an out-and-out secessionist, 
 also organized armed bands, called the "Minute Men," and 
 established Camp Jackson, on the outskirts of the city, with 
 the object of seizing the arsenal. When Lyon discovered that 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 549 
 
 Jackson was receiving arms and ammunition from the Confed- 
 erate government at Montgomery, he attacked Camp Jackson, 
 drove the governor out, and, following him up the river, seized 
 the state capital of Jefferson City (June 15). Jackson and his 
 general, Sterling Price, withdrew to the southern part of the 
 state, along the western slopes of the Ozark Mountains, to 
 receive reinforcements from the state of Arkansas, while a 
 convention assembled at the capital established a Unionist 
 government. 
 
 Neither side won a complete victory in the border states. 
 Although the upper tier were held officially in the Union, they 
 furnished hundreds of thousands* of volunteers to the Confed- 
 erate armies ; and, on the other hand, while Virginia, North Car- 
 olina, Arkansas, and Tennessee seceded, large districts of three 
 of these states remained loyal and eventually supplied some 
 200,000 to the armies of the North. In eastern Tennessee, for 
 example, the vote on secession, on June 8, was 14,780 for and 
 32,923 against, while the central and western parts of the state 
 voted in the affirmative by 90,000 to 14,000. The forty-eight 
 counties of Virginia west of the Alleghenies cast about 30,000 
 votes against secession in May, 1861. When Governor Letcher 
 sent troops across the mountains to defeat the design of 
 these counties to "secede from secession," General George B. 
 McClellan, in command of the Ohio militia on the northern 
 bank of the river, sent aid to the West Virginia Unionists. In 
 a five weeks' campaign (June- July) McClellan, with greatly 
 superior forces, had little trouble in clearing the Confederate 
 troops out of the counties. 1 A convention at Wheeling had 
 chosen F. H. Pierpont governor and established a legislature 
 embracing as a nucleus the forty-six members of the Virginia 
 convention who had voted against secession. This " Rump Par- 
 liament" elected United States senators, who were received and 
 
 1 McClellan 's West Virginia campaign was of -slight military magnitude, but 
 it had the important effect of cutting the main line of the Baltimore and Ohio 
 Railroad, which ran across the northern part of the state, and of bringing 
 McClellan into a fateful prominence as "the man of the hour." 
 
550 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 seated at Washington. Their new state, at first called Kanawha, 
 was formally admitted to the Union in 1863 as West Virginia. 
 McClellan formed the ambitious plan of marching his victorious 
 army southward, "liberating" the Unionists of the mountain 
 regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia and attack- 
 ing Richmond (which had become the Confederate capital in 
 May) from the rear. But his plan was spoiled by the defeat of 
 the Union army in Virginia, which we shall relate presently. 
 
 To sum up the important developments between the fall of 
 Fort Sumter and the midsummer of 1861 : Four new states had 
 been added to the Confederacy, bringing the total population of 
 the seceded area to 8,700,000 as against 22,700,000 in the 23 
 states of the Union. As 3,500,000 of the population of the South 
 were slaves, the real superiority of the North in man power was 
 about four to one. In wealth, facilities of transportation, variety 
 of industries, mobility of capital, control of commerce, abun- 
 dance of food supply, in short, in every economic aspect (unless 
 the great volume of cotton exports could be maintained), the 
 North was vastly superior. To offset this disparity in numbers 
 and resources, the South had some marked advantages. They 
 would fight a defensive war on their own soil, for the protection 
 of their homes and their property. Their men were on the 
 whole better material from which to make soldiers, and the 
 Mexican War had been a valuable training-ground for many of 
 their officers. Their president was a distinguished graduate of 
 West Point, a commander with experience in the field, an ex- 
 Secretary of War, and acquainted with the military personnel 
 of the country, while Lincoln was a civilian who had to learn by 
 slow and painful experience that minimum of tactical and 
 strategic knowledge which he needed as commander in chief of 
 the forces of the United States. Furthermore, the South, firm 
 in the faith that "Cotton is king," looked confidently to Great 
 Britain, whose queen had recognized the Confederacy in May 
 as a belligerent power, to break the blockade which threatened 
 famine to the cotton mills of Lancashire. The tone in the press 
 and the Parliament of aristocratic England left no doubt as to 
 
THE UNITED STATES 
 
 in the period of 
 THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 SCALE OF MILES 
 
 Dates indicate year of admission to the Union 
 
75 1 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 551 
 
 where the sympathies of the governing classes of the island lay. 1 
 Finally, absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their cause, 
 the South entered the war as a holy crusade, repeating the lan- 
 guage of the men of 1776 and resolved to defend their liberty 
 and independence to the last man and the last dollar. 2 
 
 So the men of the North and the men of Dixie confronted each 
 other in arms in the midsummer of 1861. The " irrepressible 
 conflict" had come. Two systems of social and economic life, 
 which had engendered two systems of political theory, irrecon- 
 cilable, reciprocally contemptuous, mutually destructive, stood 
 grimly determined to fight out on the field of battle the solu- 
 tion which thirty years of unconvincing compromise had failed 
 to furnish. 
 
 THE FIELD OF BATTLE 
 
 From the surrender of Major Anderson at Fort Sumter in 
 April, 1 86 1, to the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox in 
 April, 1865, one supreme purpose guided the entire policy of 
 the governments on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. 
 Every measure of diplomacy, finance, public law, and economic 
 legislation was taken with a view to the accomplishment of the 
 supreme purpose the winning of the war. All eyes were fixed 
 on the advance and the retreat of the armies. Everybody's ears 
 were strained for news "from the front." In order, therefore, 
 
 as the South had departed from Jefferson's views on the moral evil 
 of slavery, they still held to his belief in the virtual coercion of Great Britain 
 through commercial pressure. "There is the key," said a Charleston merchant 
 to the correspondent of the London Times, pointing to a wharf piled high with 
 cotton bales, "which will open all our ports and put us into John Bull's strong 
 box as well." A Charleston paper advised an embargo on cotton as the weapon 
 to force the recognition of the Confederacy. 
 
 2 How little this spirit was realized in the North is shown by Seward's opti- 
 mistic program of the reduction of " a state a month " to allegiance to the Union, 
 and the quite general opinion that secession was "the work of a strong and un- 
 scrupulous minority," who could be cowed by a show of force. Lincoln, in his 
 address to Congress on July 4, could still question "whether there is today a 
 majority of the legally qualified voters of any state, except, perhaps, South 
 Carolina, in favor of disunion." 
 
552 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 to give as clear a view as possible of the progress of the conflict, 
 we shall postpone to the following section important matters 
 touching the public and private life of North and South during 
 the war and here confine our attention to the field of battle. 
 
 Not that we shall attempt to follow in detail the marching 
 and countermarching of dozens of armies, invading or defend- 
 ing the enormous area stretching 800 miles from the Potomac 
 to the Gulf and 1700 miles -from the Atlantic seaboard to 
 the western boundary of Texas. The Official Records of the 
 Union and Confederate Armies and Navies in the War of the 
 Rebellion fill 130 large volumes and describe over 2000 en- 
 gagements, of which 150 are dignified by the name of "battles." 
 Livermore's "Numbers and Losses in the Civil War" estimates 
 the Union enlistments on a three years' basis at 1,556,878 and 
 the Confederate at 1,082,119. A bare list of the titles of works 
 dealing with the military and political history of the war would 
 fill many more pages than we have to devote to the description 
 of its course. 1 Without trespassing, therefore, on the techni- 
 cal field of military strategy and tactics or noticing the minor 
 operations, we shall follow the few great campaigns on which 
 the fortunes of the struggle were staked. 
 
 At the beginning of July, 1861, there were in the camps 
 around Washington about 30,000 raw and undisciplined troops, 
 whom General Scott wished to train in garrison duty. Some 
 thirty-five miles to the southwest General Beauregard was in 
 command of 22,000 Confederates at the important station of 
 Manassas, the junction of the Manassas Gap and the Orange 
 and Alexandria railroads. In the Shenandoah Valley, to the 
 west, lay 9000 Confederates, commanded by Joseph E. John- 
 ston, lately Quartermaster-General of the army of the United 
 States. A mediocre general (Patterson) with a superior force 
 confronted Johnston at Harpers Ferry. 
 
 The diminished Congress of the United States met in extra 
 session on July 4. The Confederate Congress was called to 
 
 iQne list, published only a year after the conclusion of the war (Bartlett's 
 "Literature of the Rebellion"), contains 6073 such titles. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 553 
 
 meet at Richmond on July 20. The Northern press was clam- 
 oring for action. A sharp, prompt blow must end the war at 
 once. The "rebel" Congress must not be allowed to meet. 
 Foreign nations, especially Great Britain, which had recognized 
 the belligerency of the Confederacy, must be shown that the 
 United States had the power to nip sedition in the bud. Be- 
 sides, the three months' term of the volunteers was soon to 
 expire. To what end had they been called and drilled in 
 Washington if they were not to be used ? "On to Richmond ! " 
 was the cry. Scott protested that the troops were not ready ; 
 some of them had been in camp less than a week. General 
 Irvin McDowell, who was the field commander, agreed with 
 his chief, but reluctantly consented to move on Manassas if 
 he could be assured (as he was) that Patterson would hold 
 Johnston in the valley. So the 30,000 set forth, an undisci- 
 plined host, hastily brigaded, straggling by the way to pick 
 berries or take naps under the trees, and accompanied by sev- 
 eral congressmen who rode out to see the victory. Before 
 McDowell had completed his plans for crossing Bull Run, the 
 little stream which flows just north of Manassas, Johnston had 
 slipped away from Patterson and joined Beauregard with three 
 of his four brigades. Long before dawn of Sunday, July 20, 
 McDowell launched his well-planned offensive from the north 
 and west to turn the Confederate left flank. Through the in- 
 tolerable heat of the midday hours the battle raged about the 
 Henry House Hill, where Thomas J. Jackson stood "like a 
 stone wall" between the Confederates and defeat. President 
 Davis, arriving on the field from Richmond in the early after- 
 noon, was met by a fugitive who told him that the battle was 
 lost. But at 3.30 the rest of Johnston's army arrived from the 
 valley and was forthwith thrown into the fray. The Confed- 
 erates rallied for a bayonet charge which decided the fortunes 
 of the day. Exhausted by more than twelve continuous hours 
 of marching and fighting, the Union troops broke and fled. All 
 the afternoon and night they were pouring back into Washing- 
 ton, leaving guns and baggage by the way, as if in a race with 
 the discomfited congressmen to see which could reach the 
 
554 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 shelter of the city fortifications first. Great was their relief 
 and surprise when they discovered that the Confederates were 
 not on their heels. 1 
 
 In spite of the humiliation and chagrin, the defeat at Bull 
 Run was a blessing in disguise for the North. It swept away 
 once and for all the fool's paradise of easy optimism and faith 
 in the collapse of the "rebellion" at the first touch of the 
 Ithuriel spear point of the North. On the morrow of the battle 
 the disillusioned government set to work in earnest to pre- 
 pare for the war. Lincoln rode through the encampments of 
 Washington, encouraging the men with words of kindly cheer. 
 Congress met the emergency with courage. It ratified the Presi- 
 dent's exercise of extraordinary war powers, authorized loans 
 and taxes, and passed a resolution to the effect that the war 
 was waged "not for conquest or subjugation, or to overthrow 
 or interfere with the rights of the established institutions of the 
 sovereign states, but to maintain the supremacy of the Consti- 
 tution and to preserve the Union." On the eve of its adjourn- 
 ment, August i, Congress passed a Confiscation Act, releasing 
 from their masters' claims any slaves who were employed in 
 military duties against the United States. 2 To this the Con- 
 federate Congress replied with a Sequestration Act, ordering 
 
 1 "Stonewall" Jackson, standing on the heights above Bull Run with Presi- 
 dent Davis after the victory, oblivious of his wounded hand in the exaltation 
 which battle always inspired in him, begged to be allowed to follow up the 
 retreating foe. "With 10,000 troops," he said, "I will take Washington tomor- 
 row." But the Confederates were in no condition to assault the strong defenses 
 of the city. They too were raw levies, and had perhaps been saved from a rout 
 as complete as that of the Union army only by the fortunate arrival of John- 
 ston's fourth brigade. The commander himself thought that the Confederates 
 were " more disorganized by victory than the United States army by defeat." 
 
 2 When fugitive slaves had come within the lines of General B. F. Butler's 
 command at Fortress Monroe in the early summer, he refused to give them up 
 to their masters and set them to work on his own fortifications. He called them 
 "contraband of war," and "contraband" continued to be the nickname of the 
 confiscated negroes throughout the war. Lincoln insisted, but not with very 
 great success, that only those negroes should be retained who came within the 
 definition of the Confiscation Act. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 555 
 
 i 
 
 Southerners who owed debts to the Northern merchants and 
 bankers to pay the money into the Confederate treasury. 1 
 
 McDowell's defeat made the choice of a new commander 
 necessary, excellent as his conduct of the battle had been. The 
 man to whom the administration turned, with the enthusiastic 
 approval of the entire North, was the hero of the West Vir- 
 ginia campaign. George B. McClellan, not yet thirty-five years 
 old, a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican 
 War, had probably the best military education of all the gen- 
 erals of the North. He was a magnificent organizer, a tireless 
 worker, an inspiring commander, and withal a gentleman with 
 a winning personality and the highest devotion to his country. 
 He took the demoralized army of Bull Run and the tens of 
 thousands of recruits that poured into the encampments about 
 Washington and trained them into one of the most efficient 
 armies that the world has ever seen. Yet he was a failure, 
 because he didn't know how to use the great Army of the 
 Potomac which he had trained. He talked much about what 
 he was going to do ; but he was never quite ready to act. His 
 soldiers were too precious to risk. The responsibility of com- 
 manding an army which by December had swelled to nearly 
 200,000 men was too great for him; and indeed it might well 
 have paralyzed the nerve of a man of riper years and experience. 
 As month after month passed, and the administration and the 
 people grew impatient of inaction, McClellan became a prey 
 to obsessions which rendered him useless. He persisted in 
 ridiculous exaggeration of Johnston's forces. When he himself 
 had over 150,000 men and Johnston was vainly trying to get 
 his army of 41,000 at Manassas reenforced by 15,000 or 20,000 
 
 act was expected to yield an enormous sum, as the war broke out in 
 the spring, when the indebtedness of the South to the North was at its maxi- 
 mum. The Richmond Dispatch estimated that Virginia's contribution alone 
 would be "at least $15,000,000," and the New Orleans Delta put Louisiana's at 
 $12,000,000. But the Southern planters and merchants preferred to pay neither 
 their Northern creditors nor their own treasury. In December, 1863, the Con- 
 federate Secretary of the Treasury reported only $1,812,550 received from the 
 Sequestration Act. 
 
556 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 troops, McClellan wrote that the enemy had " three or four 
 times" his own numbers. Worst of all, he nursed a grievance 
 that he was not appreciated and that the "imbecile" adminis- 
 tration at Washington was doing all it could to cause the ruin 
 of his army. He quarreled with Stanton and Halleck and 
 treated Lincoln with supercilious discourtesy. In the letters 
 written to his wife at the time, and in "McClellan's Own Story," 
 an apology written twenty years later, he appears in a most 
 unfavorable light, as an inspired genius who had "saved his 
 country," whereas he had really only saved his army from 
 fighting. So the autumn and winter passed amid anxieties and 
 vexations for the North, the expenses mounting from $175,000 
 to over $1,000,000 a day, incompetence and corruption in the 
 War Department under Cameron, inefficiency and insubordi- 
 nation in the Department of the West under the vain, con- 
 temptuous Fremont, an ugly quarrel with England over the 
 Trent affair, an almost undisguised hostility on the part of the 
 ruling and commercial classes in Great Britain and France, 
 seven months of war with no step forward, but only the monot- 
 onous echo of the patrols of the great idle army on which the 
 hopes of millions were fixed: "All quiet along the Potomac! " 
 Before McClellan started his long-deferred advance on Rich- 
 mond, in March, 1862, events of the first importance had hap- 
 pened in the Mississippi Valley and on the Atlantic coast. We 
 have seen how Governor Magoffin tried to keep Kentucky 
 neutral at the outbreak of the war and how careful President 
 Lincoln was not to drive the state into the arms of the Con- 
 federacy by coercion or invasion. But so anxious was the gov- 
 ernment at Richmond to win this great state, which extended 
 from Virginia to the Mississippi and whose possession would 
 bring the borders of the Confederacy to the Ohio, that General 
 Polk was allowed to seize Columbus early in September, 1861, 
 and extend his lines to Bowling Green, near the center of the 
 state. The political and military effects of this move appeared 
 forthwith. The legislature of Kentucky, after calling in vain 
 on Polk to withdraw his troops, passed measures definitely 
 aligning the state on the Union side, and the Federal forces 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 557 
 
 in the West prepared to break Folk's line. The command of 
 the Union armies west of the Alleghenies was divided between 
 two generals. t W. H. Halleck's authority reached from Missouri 
 eastward to the center of Kentucky, and Don Carlos Buell's 
 extended from that point to the Alleghenies. BuelPs plan was 
 to march southward to rally the Unionists of eastern Tennessee 
 to his banners ; and an auspicious beginning was made when his 
 brigadier general George H. Thomas caught a Confederate army 
 which had come through the Cumberland Gap into eastern 
 Kentucky under General Zollicoffer, and defeated it at Mill 
 Springs, January 19, 1862. It was the first gleam of success 
 for the Federal arms since the disaster at Bull Run. But BuelPs 
 plans were interrupted by developments further west, where 
 in the short space of fifty miles the four great rivers the Missis- 
 sippi, the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee mingle 
 their waters. Halleck's brigadier general in this region was 
 a short, compact, taciturn man of thirty-nine, who, since his 
 service in the Mexican War, had waged an unequal battle with 
 poverty, obscurity, laziness, and liquor. Lincoln's call to arms 
 found him a clerk in his father's leather store in Galena, 
 Illinois, and it instantly transformed him into the man of 
 destiny Ulysses S. Grant. 
 
 To guard the interior of Tennessee and protect the Memphis 
 and Charleston railroad, the Confederates had built Forts Henry 
 and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respec- 
 tively, close to the Kentucky line. The forts were back to back 
 and only twelve miles apart, so that troops could be moved from 
 one to the other in a short day's march. Grant got permission 
 from Halleck to attack these forts and started up the Tennessee 
 River from Paducah with 15,000 men, supported by Flag- 
 Officer Foote with a fleet of seven formidably armed gunboats. 
 Foote's heavy cannon reduced Fort Henry easily enough, but 
 not until General Tilghman had transferred practically all his 
 garrison of 3000 men to Fort Donelson. Then Grant marched 
 across the "isthmus," while Foote took the gunboats around by 
 the rivers. But the capture of Fort Donelson was as difficult as 
 that of Fort Henry had been easy. The higher guns, command- 
 
558 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ing the winding approaches of the Cumberland, kept Footers 
 fleet from effective work, and before Grant was ready to attack, 
 Albert Sidney Johnston, the ablest Confederate general in the 
 West, had increased the garrison of Fort Donelson to 20,000 
 men. Grant invested the fort, but the Confederates, making a 
 sortie in the early morning of February 15, drove back his 
 right wing under General McClernand and seemed to have a 
 clear path of escape to Nashville. Unfortunately for them, 
 they postponed their march until the morrow. Grant was on 
 a gunboat in conference with Foote when he heard of Mc- 
 Clernand's plight. Repairing to the scene at once, he restored 
 the morale of the troops, launched a general attack, and before 
 nightfall had recovered his original lines. The counsels of the 
 commanders of the fort were at variance; the spirit of the 
 garrison was broken. When General Buckner, who had been 
 deserted by his colleagues, Floyd and Pillow, sent to Grant 
 the next morning to ask terms, the Union commander replied : 
 "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can 
 be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." 
 Buckner surrendered with 14,000 prisoners, 20,000 stands of 
 arms, and 48 pieces of artillery. 
 
 The effect of the victory at Fort Donelson was tremendous. 
 For the North it was the reparation of the disaster of Bull Run. 
 "The underpinning seems to have been knocked from under 
 the rebellion," said Chase. Jefferson Davis, inaugurating the 
 "permanent" Confederate government at Richmond on Feb- 
 ruary 22, spoke of "the recent serious disasters" as marking 
 "the darkest hour of our struggle." 1 The sympathizers with 
 the Confederacy in England, who had been proclaiming in press 
 and Parliament that the North was beaten, were hushed. 2 Ken- 
 tucky was now secure for the Union. Buell entered Nashville 
 
 1 Besides Donelson, the "disasters" were the defeat at Mill Springs (Jan- 
 uary 19) and the capture of Roanoke Island (February 7). 
 
 2 Henry Adams writes to his brother Charles Francis, Jr., from London, "The 
 English on hearing of Donelson and the fall of Nashville, seem to think our 
 dozen armies are already across the St. Lawrence and at the gates of Quebec" 
 ("A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. I, p. 120). 
 
1 P K J 
 
 I r Getty B iurg. .._. 
 
 Railroads 
 
 Limits of Confederate Power. April, 1861 
 
 July, 1863.. 
 " 1864 
 Grant and Farraguts- Mississippi 
 
 Campaigns oM862 and 1863 * x_x.x x x x 
 
 Buell, Rosecrans, .andJBraggs' Kentucky 
 
 and Tennessee Campaigns of 1862 o 0.010000.0 00.00 
 
 Morgan's raid 1863 
 
 Sherman's March 1864-1865. 
 
 Hood's Campaign against Thomas 1864 
 
 THE WAR IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 
 
560 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 without striking a blow. The first Confederate line of defense 
 in the West was shattered, and the army of Johnston retired 
 to Corinth, Mississippi. An imposing procession of more than 
 80 Union steamers, loaded with exultant men, swept up the Ten- 
 nessee toward the strategic points on the Alabama and Missis- 
 sippi frontiers. By April Grant's army, 45,000 strong, was 
 concentrated at Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh on the Tennessee 
 River, only fifteen miles from the Mississippi border, and Buell, 
 with 36,000 men, was on his way from Nashville to join him. 
 
 In order to prevent this junction, Johnston and Beauregard 
 led their army of 40,000 out of Corinth to attack Grant at 
 Pittsburg Landing. The Union commander was taken by sur- 
 prise. In his confident belief that the spirit of the Southern 
 army had been broken by the disasters in Tennessee, 1 he had 
 neglected to fortify his position, although the enemy were but 
 twenty miles away. The furious attack of the Confederates 
 on the morning of April 6 drove in the Federal outposts, and 
 Johnston boasted that he would water his horses in the Ten- 
 nessee River that evening. But while the sun was still high 
 the gallant commander was killed, leading a frontal attack on 
 a strong Union position, and night fell with the desperate battle 
 still undecided but with the Federal troops sadly demoralized. 2 
 The next morning Buell and Lew Wallace brought 25,000 fresh 
 men onto the field, and the tables were turned. Beauregard 
 made a stubborn fight of eight hours against great odds, but 
 was finally forced to retreat to Corinth, which he evacuated 
 a few days later before the advance of the Federal army. 
 The Confederates had lost 11,000 men and their great com- 
 mander. The Union loss was 13,000. These numbers seem 
 trifling when compared with the statistics of carnage in the 
 recent World War, but no battle of our country's history 
 
 1 Grant wrote in his "Memoirs" in 1884, "My opinion was and still is that 
 immediately after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was open to the National 
 forces all over the Southwest without much resistance." 
 
 2 Nelson, arriving with the vanguard of BuelPs army at the Tennessee River 
 late in the afternoon of the first day of the battle, reported that he found 
 " cowering under the river bank from 7000 to 10,000 men frantic with fright and 
 utterly demoralized." 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 561 
 
 had ever witnessed such slaughter as that at Shiloh. Thousands 
 of homes in the West were plunged in mourning. Chicago was 
 a city of gloom. 
 
 As Grant had moved up the Tennessee, General Pope and Com- 
 modore Foote went down the Mississippi in a parallel course, 
 reducing the Confederate fortifications at Island No. itf, New 
 Madrid, and Fort Pillow, and opening the great river as far as 
 the beetling cliffs above Vicksburg. Meanwhile, "as the crown- 
 ing stroke of adverse fortune," to use the words of the Con- 
 federate Secretary of War, the Southerners saw the fall of the 
 "Queen City" at the mouth of the Mississippi. On the night of 
 April 24 Flag-Officer David G. Farragut, commanding the West 
 Gulf blockading squadron, with seventeen ships, ran the gauntlet 
 of fire from Forts Jackson and St. Philip on the lower Mississippi, 
 which guarded the approaches to New Orleans. It was the 
 most spectacular event of the war as the fleet crept up the river 
 through the blackness of night and smoke, its perilous path 
 murkily lighted by the incessant fire of the Confederate guns 
 and the high columns of pitchy flame rising from the fire rafts. 
 "At length," said Farragut, "the fire slackened, the smoke 
 cleared off, and we saw to our surprise that we were above the 
 forts." The way to New Orleans was open. Farragut reached 
 the panic-stricken city the next day and anchored off the levee, 
 where he found "ships, steamers, cotton, coal, etc. all in one 
 common blaze." On May i General B. F. Butler occupied the 
 city with Union troops and ruled it for six months with a ruth- 
 lessness which has made his name a byword in the South to 
 this day. Farragut sailed up the river to Vicksburg, but found 
 his fleet too feeble to reduce the fortifications and returned to 
 New Orleans. The Confederates then fortified Port Hudson, 
 Louisiana, to protect the mouth of the Red River, through which 
 vast supplies of grain, horses, cattle, and produce were brought 
 from Texas, Arkansas, and western Louisiana to the eastern 
 bank of the Mississippi. This important "bridge" of one 
 hundred and twenty-five miles from Port Hudson to Vicksburg 
 was all of the Mississippi that was left to the Confederacy by 
 the midsummer of 1862. 
 
562 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 While the Union armies and river fleets were achieving these 
 victories in the Mississippi Valley, the blockading squadrons 
 were tightening their cordon around the Atlantic and Gulf 
 shores of the Confederate states. The South had no navy and 
 virtually no merchant marine from which a navy could be im- 
 provised. For, in spite of magnificent advantages for ship- 
 building, this industry had failed to attract capital away from 
 the absorbing monopoly of slaves and cotton. 1 In 1854 there 
 were constructed 485,763 tons of shipping in the free states, 
 as against 48,053 in the slave states and of that 48,053 more 
 than half was built in the states of Maryland and Delaware. 
 Maine alone launched 168,632 tons in that year, to 11,862 from 
 all the states from the mouth of the Potomac to the mouth of 
 the Rio Grande. While the South was trying to buy ships 
 abroad, the North was busy converting every kind of craft- 
 merchantmen, excursion boats, pleasure yachts, and tugs into 
 ships of war. By the close of 1861 the Federal navy consisted 
 of 264 ships, with 2575 guns and over 20,000 seamen. Four 
 main squadrons guarded the 3500 miles of blockaded coast 
 from Virginia to Texas, to prevent cotton from leaving the 
 Southern ports and military supplies from entering them. The 
 capture of Hatteras Inlet (August 29, 1861), Port Royal (No- 
 vember 7), Roanoke Island (February 8 ; 1862), and Fort 
 Pulaski, guarding the entrance to Savannah (April n), gave 
 the Federal navy control of all the important points on the 
 Atlantic coast except Wilmington and Charleston, but until 
 Farragut's exploit at New Orleans no considerable Confederate 
 port on the Gulf was taken. At first the South tried to bring 
 pressure to bear on England to break the blockade, by with- 
 holding cotton which might easily have been run through the 
 
 New Orleans Delta said: "We possess the finest ship timber in the 
 world, in inexhaustible quantities, which is easy of access and can be transported 
 cheaply to any point. Almost every day this timber is cut down, split, hewed 
 and sawed into proper lengths and shapes, and sent to the Northern ship-yards 
 . . . where it is used in the construction of vessels, many of which come back 
 here and engage in the transportation of Southern produce." North Carolina, 
 once a great shipbuilding state, had to rely even for craft to carry its coasting- 
 trade "on the canal boats of Norfolk and the New England vessels." 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 563 
 
 scattered Federal squadrons. Only 19,127 bales were exported 
 in 1 86 1 as against 615,000 in 1860. But as their hopes of in- 
 tervention by England and France faded, the Southerners de- 
 veloped the hazardous but profitable business of exchanging 
 cotton for munitions, clothing, medicines, and luxuries by means 
 of narrow, swift, lead-colored blockade-runners, plying between 
 Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, or Galveston and the West 
 Indian ports of Nassau or Havana. 1 
 
 While Grant's victorious Donelson army was being trans- 
 ported up the Tennessee, the South made a bold attempt to 
 break the blockade on the Atlantic coast. Raising the 4o-gun 
 frigate Merrimac, which had been sunk when the Federal officer 
 abandoned the Norfolk navy yard on the secession of Virginia, 
 the Confederates cut her down to the water's edge and erected 
 a large rectangular casemate on her hull, whose sloping sides 
 they covered with 4-inch iron plates. To her prow they fas- 
 tened an iron ram. This formidable but slow and unwieldy 
 ironclad, rechristened the Virginia, crept into Hampton Roads 
 on March 8, 1862, and proceeded to demolish the wooden ships 
 of the Federal navy, whose shots glanced off her sides like 
 pebbles from a sling. She rammed a hole in the 3O-gun sloop 
 Cumberland and sank her. The 5o-gun frigate Congress ran 
 aground to escape capture, but the Virginia set her aflame with 
 red-hot shot. The steam frigate Minnesota was also aground, 
 waiting like a trembling animal at bay for her fate. But the 
 Virginia, leaking and her engines overstrained, drew off to 
 prepare for the destruction of the rest of the ships the next 
 day. Four hours later another outlandish craft steamed into 
 Hampton Roads. This was the Monitor, designed by Captain 
 Ericsson and built in three months' time to thwart the Virginia. 
 From the center of the Monitor's deck, which was flush with 
 the water, rose a revolving turret 20 feet in diameter, armed 
 with two 1 1 -inch guns. She was nicknamed "a cheese box on 
 
 1 Lieutenant Colonel Freeman tie, an English visitor, wrote in his "Three 
 Months in the Southern States" (p. 202) that he saw in Wilmington, in June, 
 1863, "eight large steamers, all handsome, leaden colored vessels, which ply 
 their trade with the greatest regularity." 
 
564 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a raft." During the entire morning of March 9 these two 
 strange ironclads bombarded each other with little harm to 
 either; and then the Virginia withdrew, leaving the wooden 
 ships safe but henceforth as obsolete for naval warfare as 
 Noah's Ark. 1 
 
 Month after month McClellan held his fine army inactive on 
 the Potomac, while Johnston's force at Manassas, of less than 
 one third of his own, was all that stood between him and Rich- 
 mond. McClellan persisted in believing that he was confronted 
 by an army vastly superior to his own, and superciliously ig- 
 nored both the administration's entreaties that he should march 
 on Richmond and his own subordinates' better estimate of the 
 enemy's strength. Even Lincoln's positive order for a general 
 advance on February 22 failed to budge the Fabian commander. 
 On that day, however, Johnston abandoned his dangerous posi- 
 tion at Manassas. McClellan followed him but not to Rich- 
 mond. To the President's disappointment, he changed his plans 
 and decided to take the Army of the Potomac down to the 
 mouth of Chesapeake Bay and approach Richmond by the 
 peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Relieved to 
 see McClellan move in any direction, the administration ap- 
 proved his plan, but only with the understanding that the city 
 of Washington must not be left unprotected. The troops were 
 ferried down the Potomac, and on April 2 McClellan joined 
 them at his base at Fortress Monroe. The Confederate general 
 Magruder held a thirteen-mile line between the rivers, thinly 
 defended by some 11,000 men. McClellan should have broken 
 this line like a thread and been on his way up the peninsula, 
 but instead he settled down with an elaborate train to besiege 
 Yorktown and scold the administration. After delaying him 
 for more than a month before Yorktown, which bristled with 
 wooden guns painted black, Magruder slipped away, leaving 
 McClellan with his empty prize. The Union general followed 
 with the utmost caution, taking two weeks to cover the forty 
 
 1 Neither boat was destined to last long. When the Confederates evacuated 
 Norfolk in May, they blew up the Virginia. The Monitor, unable to stand 
 rough seas, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras in December. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 565 
 
 miles between Yorktown and his new base at White House on 
 the Pamunkey River. Toward the end of May the Federal 
 army was encamped on both sides of the Chickahominy River, 
 the advance posts being near Fair Oaks station, with the church 
 spires of Richmond clearly visible less than five miles away. 
 All this time the Confederates had been strengthening their 
 army, until Johnston had 63,000 troops to oppose McClellan's 
 110,000. On May 31 Johnston attacked the two Federal army 
 corps south of the Chickahominy River, which had been con- 
 verted into a torrent by heavy rains. He would have routed 
 McClellan's left wing completely had not General Sumner led 
 his troops across the submerged and swaying bridge and saved 
 the day. Johnston was knocked from his horse by a piece of 
 shell, and on the next day Robert E. Lee assumed command of 
 the Army of Virginia. 
 
 After the discomfiture of the Confederates at Fair Oaks, it 
 was expected that McClellan would concentrate his army south 
 of the Chickahominy and move directly on Richmond. The 
 city was in a state of panic during the May days. It seemed as 
 though its doom were sealed. The destruction of the Virginia 
 left the way open to the Federal gunboats, which had gone up 
 the James to Drewry's Bluff, within seven miles of the Confed- 
 erate capital. The government packed up its archives to send to 
 Columbia and Lynchburg. President Davis appointed a day of 
 public prayer. A hostile editor of Richmond pictured him as 
 "standing in a corner telling his beads, and relying on a miracle 
 to save the country." But still MgClellan did not move. He 
 was waiting for reinforcements. President Lincoln had prom- 
 ised, now that his army was again between Washington and 
 Richmond, to send him McDowell's 35,000 men, who had been 
 kept back to defend the Federal capital when the Army of the 
 Potomac had gone down to Fortress Monroe. 
 
 But McClellan waited for his reinforcements in vain. Across 
 the Blue Ridge, in the valley of the Shenandoah, Stonewall 
 Jackson was waging the most wonderful campaign of the war. 
 The Federal general Banks was at the lower end of the valley 
 with 10,000 men, guarding the "back door" to Washington. 
 
566 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Further west was Fremont, in command of an army which was 
 rapidly swelling to 20,000, while McDowell's corps lay close to 
 Washington. Jackson had only 17,000 men, but he made them 
 do the work of a host, moving them from point to point with a 
 rapidity that earned them the name of "Jackson's foot cavalry." 
 He outwitted the pompous Fremont, the impetuous Banks, and 
 the clever Shields at every point. He prevented the junction of 
 the Federal armies and accomplished the reunion of his own 
 raiding parties with a punctuality that was little short of mirac- 
 ulous. He drove Banks down the valley and across the Potomac ; 
 and when McDowell's corps (which had been promised to 
 McClellan) were sent to join with Shields and Fremont to cut 
 him off, he dashed back up the valley, eluding his pursuers and 
 crossing the last bridge of safety just as Fremont's troops "ap- 
 peared on the opposite bank of the swollen Shenandoah and 
 wept with wrath and mortification, as they stood barred by the 
 few yards of swirling torrent." Then the great strategist slipped 
 out of the valley and entrained for Richmond, leaving his mys- 
 tified antagonists groping for him like bandaged boys in a game 
 of blindman's buff. "In forty-eight days he had marched 676 
 miles, fought five hard battles, accomplishing in each his pur- 
 pose, baffled three Federal armies, his 17,000 matched against 
 50,000, brought off prisoners and booty unmeasured, ruined the 
 campaign of McClellan, and stricken the North with terror." 
 "The fate of Richmond," say Wood and Edmonds, "was de- 
 cided not on the banks of the Chickahominy, but by the waters 
 of the Shenandoah." 
 
 Jackson joined Lee at Richmond on June 23, and the two 
 great commanders laid their plans to drive McClellan out of 
 the peninsula. On the twenty-seventh the Confederates, 55,000 
 strong, fell upon the 25,000 troops of General Fitz-John Porter 
 at Gaines's Mill, north of the Chickahominy. The Unionists 
 made a plucky fight but were borne back by the weight of num- 
 bers, and a rout like that of Bull Run might well have followed 
 Lee's call for a final charge on the wavering line had not two 
 brigades from Sumner's corps arrived on the field in the nick of 
 time to cover the retreat. Lee's bold stroke north of the river 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 567 
 
 had left only 25,000 men under Magruder to protect the capital. 
 McClellan, with three times that number, had then the golden 
 chance to pounce on Richmond, but Magruder, "the prince of 
 bluff," marched his men back and forth like a stage army, 
 keeping up a furious discharge of cannonry, until McClellan 
 was convinced that he " would have to meet more than 100,000 
 men if he marched on Richmond." Instead, he executed a mas- 
 terly retreat across the peninsula from the Chickahominy to the 
 James, ineffectually harassed by Jackson and Lee. Reaching 
 the James, he took a strong position on Malvern Hill, against 
 which the Confederates delivered a frontal attack on July i. 
 The Union army hurled back the impetuous charge with heavy 
 artillery fire and deadly infantry volleys, driving brigade after 
 brigade across the open field at the foot of the hill. The defeat 
 of Gaines's Mill was wiped out. In the week's fighting across the 
 peninsula the Union army had lost 15,800 men to 20,100 for the 
 Confederates. The morale of McClellan's troops at Malvern 
 Hill was perfect. The way to Richmond was again open. But 
 McClellan, to the chagrin of his best corps commanders, fell 
 back down the river to Harrison's Landing, under the protec- 
 tion of the Federal gunboats. Thus ended the famous Penin- 
 sular campaign. 
 
 McClellan has found defenders, though none to take him at 
 the full value of his own rating in his letters and his apologia. 
 No doubt he was sometimes hampered by political interference 
 (as what general has not been ! ). The administration annoyed 
 him by its importunity for an advance, and he 'had enemies 
 in the cabinet. Lincoln appointed his corps commanders with- 
 out consulting him. He was denied (for reasons which we have 
 seen) the promised reenforcement by McDowell's corps. But 
 none of these things should have prevented a resolute com- 
 mander with McClellan's advantages from taking Richmond. 
 He did not need McDowell's troops. If he was deceived in his 
 estimate of the Confederate forces, it was his own fault. The 
 cavalry of Lee rode completely around his army on both sides 
 of the Chickahominy in June and could report the number and 
 disposition of his forces ; yet he, almost in sight of Richmond, 
 
568 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 could be fooled by Magruder's bluster and by clever lies in 
 the newspapers into believing himself confronted by a mighty 
 host. "Macbeth himself was never daunted by so unsubstan- 
 tial visions." Moreover, McClellan was always attending to 
 some more important matter in some other spot at the moment 
 of battle. When the armies were fighting at Fair Oaks on the 
 southern side of the river, he was on the northern side; and 
 when they fought at Gaines's Mill on the northern side, he was 
 on the southern side. He was not on the field at Williamsburg 
 at the beginning of the campaign or at Malvern Hill at its 
 close, though he was fully aware of the inspiration which his 
 presence gave the troops. He nursed the grievance that he was 
 unappreciated and unsupported by the administration, and ex- 
 pressed his grievance in language at once querulous, boastful, 
 and insolent. 1 The task intrusted to him was too great for his 
 powers. Because he had been successful on a small stage, he 
 was suddenly called, with the most confident expectations, to 
 fill a very large stage. In the year from Bull Run to Malvern 
 
 iThe following are samples of McClellan's utterances during the campaign: 
 " I learn that Stanton and Chase have fallen out. . . . Alas ! poor country that 
 should have such rulers ! I tremble for my country when I think of these 
 things. [He had other things to think of !] When I see such insane folly be- 
 hind me, I feel that the final salvation of my country demands the utmost pru- 
 dence on my part, and that I must not run the slightest risk of disaster [ ! ] , for 
 if anything happened to this army our cause would be lost. . . . But I will yet 
 succeed, notwithstanding all they do and leave undone in Washington to pre- 
 vent it. I would not have on my conscience what these men have for all the 
 world." (To his. wife, June 22.) "I know that a few more thousand men 
 would have .changed this battle [Gaines's Mill] from a defeat to a victory. As 
 it is, the government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result. 
 ... If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or 
 to any other person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this 
 army." (To Secretary Stanton, June 28.) "I am ready for an attack now 
 [three days after Malvern Hill] ; give me 24 hours even and I will defy all 
 secession." (To his wife, July 4.) The victims of the "insane folly" at Wash- 
 ington replied to McClellan's scoldings with kindly forbearance. Lincoln tele- 
 graphed, July 3 : " I am satisfied that yourself, officers and men have done the 
 best you could. All accounts say no better fighting was ever done. Ten thou- 
 sands thanks for it." Stanton wrote, July 5, "Be assured that you have the 
 support of this department and the government as cordially and faithfully as 
 ever was rendered by man to man." 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 569 
 
 Hill he built and trained a great army. But his inability 
 to use that army postponed for three years the fall of the 
 Confederate capital. 
 
 Bitter as was the disappointment at McClellan's failure, the 
 North rallied with enthusiasm. Great mass meetings were held 
 in the cities to pledge recruits and money. The governors of 
 eighteen states offered Lincoln 300,000 more men. Generals 
 Halleck and Pope were called from the West, the former to 
 assume the direction from Washington of all the Union armies 
 in the field, the latter to command the new Army of Virginia, 
 50,000 strong, composed of the forces of McDowell, Banks, 
 and Fremont. Pope, spurred thereto by Stanton and Benjamin 
 Wade (the chairman of the Congressional committee on the 
 conduct of the war), issued a pompous proclamation, reflect- 
 ing on the valor of the Army of the Potomac, and beginning: 
 "I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen 
 the backs of our enemies, from an army whose business it has 
 been to seek the adversary and beat him when found. ... It 
 is my purpose to do so, and that speedily." It proved, however, 
 not to be his own program that Pope was so bravely announcing, 
 but Stonewall Jackson's. That wizard of strategy devised 
 with General Lee and successfully executed "a plan perhaps the 
 most daring in the history of warfare." Early in the morning 
 of August 25 Jackson took 25,000 men (about half the army 
 of Lee before Richmond) with three days 7 provisions in their 
 haversacks and no train except the necessary ambulances and 
 munitions wagons, and started northwestward for a destina- 
 tion which not even his officers knew. "If silence is golden," 
 said one of them, "then Jackson is a bonanza." Covering fifty- 
 six miles in two days, he dashed through the Blue Ridge at 
 Thoroughfare Gap and put his force thirteen miles to the rear 
 of Pope's army, severing the Federal connections with Wash- 
 ington. He surprised Pope's supply trains at Manassas Junction 
 and after appropriating all the bacon, beef, pork, and flour that 
 his army could use set fire to the rest. By mysterious marches 
 and countermarches he baffled the Union commanders until a 
 confusion of orders resulted in the Federal camp, and the re- 
 
570 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 enforcements which were coming to Pope from the Army of the 
 Potomac were deflected. At the appointed time Longstreet 
 brought up the rest of the Confederate army through the gap 
 in the mountains which Pope had inexcusably left unguarded, 
 and the two Southern generals united their armies in the very 
 face of their foe. The battle which followed on the old field 
 of Bull Run, August 29 and 30, saw the Federal forces, though 
 superior in numbers, completely outgeneraled, defeated, and 
 driven back in rout to the protection of the fortifications of 
 Washington. Pope was relieved of his command, and the Army 
 of Virginia was absorbed into the Army of the Potomac, under 
 its old leader McClellan. 1 
 
 This summer of disaster to the Federal arms in Virginia 
 wiped out the joy over the victories of Grant and Farragut 
 in the spring. A strong tide of reaction set in against Lincoln's 
 government. The hundreds of thousands of men and the mil- 
 lions of dollars which had been so generously furnished to 
 preserve the Union seemed to have been wasted. Men were 
 beginning to declare openly that the defeat of the South was im- 
 possible. Political strife revived. The Democrats who had sup- 
 ported Lincoln in 1861 deserted the administration in 1862. 
 The cabinet threatened to dissolve in faction. The President 
 was harassed on every side : distressed by the military failures, 
 
 1 Although Pope was incapable of dealing with such genius as Lee's and 
 Jackson's, it must be said that he worked under severe handicaps. His superior, 
 Halleck, fussy, irritable, incompetent, and conceited, attempted to direct the 
 campaign by telegraph from his office chair in Washington. Furthermore, Pope's 
 officers and men, alienated by his proclamation, never gave him that hearty 
 confidence which made the morale of the Confederates under their adored com- 
 manders Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, and the Hills so perfect. It was even be- 
 lieved that the officers of the Army of the Potomac were half willing to see 
 Pope fail. Porter, one of McClellan's corps commanders, was court-martialed 
 for not obeying an order of Pope's, and the case for his rehabilitation dragged 
 on till the summer of 1886. He had written just before the battle: "I believe 
 the enemy have a contempt for the Army of Virginia. I wish myself away from 
 it with all our old Army of the Potomac, and so do our companions." It is 
 said that the soldiers of General Franklin (another of McClellan's officers) 
 taunted Pope's troops as they fled from the field, "jeered at the new route to 
 Richmond," and made no secret of their glee at the downfall of McClellan's 
 rival" (Rhodes, Vol. IV, p. 135). 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 571 
 
 scolded by Greeley for not emancipating the slaves, scored for 
 his "despotism" in suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus and 
 inflicting military punishments on civilians. On the other side 
 of Mason and Dixon's line hope was high. It was "the one brief 
 space in Confederate history that was pure sunshine." The 
 Southern agents in Europe were confident that England and 
 France were on the point of interceding in their behalf. Pres- 
 ident Davis felt that the moment had come to launch the 
 movement which should drive the Federal armies out of the 
 Southland and establish the independence of the Confederacy. 
 A great triple offensive was planned. Lee's victorious army was 
 to invade Maryland, delivering the "sister state" of the South 
 from Federal domination, threatening the Northern capital, and 
 encouraging the defeat of the administration in the autumn 
 elections. Braxton Bragg, who had succeeded Beauregard, was 
 to expel the Union army from Kentucky. And Van Dorn was 
 to clear the troops of Rosecrans and Grant out of Mississippi 
 and Tennessee and regain control of the great river. Before the 
 autumn frosts tinged the maples the triple plan was defeated 
 at every point, and the Confederates were thrown back on the 
 defensive. 
 
 Lee crossed the Potomac on September 4, publishing a procla- 
 mation that he had come to the aid of the oppressed people of 
 Maryland in "throwing off their foreign yoke." His army was 
 neither large nor well supplied, but he counted on the sympathy 
 of the inhabitants to smooth his way. With the same contempt 
 for McClellan's strategy as he had shown for Pope's, he divided 
 his army in the face of his enemy, sending Jackson to take 
 Harpers Ferry from its 12,000 defenders while he himself pro- 
 ceeded to Sharpsburg on Antietam Creek. When McClellan's 
 army was passing through Frederick City on Lee's heels a pri- 
 vate from an Indiana regiment had the rare luck to pick up a 
 dispatch from Lee to D. H. Hill, revealing the whole plan of the 
 Confederate advance. With this information in his possession 
 and with his great superiority in numbers, McClellan might have 
 destroyed the armies of Lee and Jackson in quick succession; 
 but he let the favorable moment slip by, as usual, and before he 
 
572 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 was ready to attack, Jackson had completed his work and re- 
 joined Lee. Even then McClellan had 87,000 men to oppose to 
 Lee's 55,000 when the armies joined in the terrific battle of 
 Sharpsburg, or Antietam, on September 1 7. All day "the battle 
 line swayed back and forth like a rope in adverse currents," 
 and at nightfall Lee still held his ground. The next morning, 
 yielding to the advice of his generals and convinced that he had 
 nothing to hope from the people of Maryland, he withdrew his 
 forces unmolested to the southern side of the Potomac. Tech- 
 nically Sharpsburg was a victory for McClellan, and he con- 
 gratulated himself on it as "a masterpiece of art." But in 
 reality he had lost the opportunity to destroy Lee's Army of 
 Virginia. His tactics were wretched. Instead of directing the 
 battle himself, he left it largely to his corps commanders, with 
 the result of a succession of unrelated attacks. Obsessed by 
 his persistent bogy of the preponderance of the Confederate 
 forces, he held nearly one third of his magnificent army in re- 
 serve during the entire battle. To be sure, the immediate object 
 of the battle had been gained by McClellan : Lee's invasion of 
 the North had been checked. 1 But the discouraging fact re- 
 mained that Lee had led back his army intact (except for the 
 11,000 who fell on the field of battle) to the Virginia side of the 
 Potomac. After six weeks of further procrastination McClellan 
 was removed from command (November 5), and General Am- 
 brose E. Burnside was appointed in his place. 2 
 
 1 This fortunate event gave Lincoln the opportunity for publishing his long- 
 contemplated Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the states or 
 parts of states still in rebellion against the Federal government (September 22). 
 
 2 Burnside was a brave soldier and a gallant officer, but he lacked the gifts 
 of field marshal. He knew that he was unequal to the command of the great 
 Army of the Potomac, and he had twice refused the offer of it before he 
 received the order which he felt he had no right to disobey. Substituting reck- 
 lessness for McClellan's overcaution, he delivered a frontal attack on the Con- 
 federates' magnificently fortified position on the heights above Fredericksburg 
 on the Rappahannock (December 13) and was repulsed with fearful loss. He 
 sent his men to certain death like sheep to the slaughter, persisting in the charge 
 against the advice of his best corps commanders. In January he was relieved 
 of his command, but he never could be relieved of the memory of "those men 
 over there," who had marched against a wall of fire at his rash command. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 573 
 
 At the moment Lee crossed the Potomac into Maryland, 
 Confederate armies under Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg 
 were moving northward into Kentucky. Smith, capturing Lex- 
 ington and marching to within four miles of the Ohio, threw 
 the city of Cincinnati into a panic. Bragg, following a few days 
 later from eastern Tennessee, entered Kentucky, as Lee had 
 entered Maryland, with a proclamation offering the inhabitants 
 the opportunity to shake off the yoke of "the Abolitionist ty- 
 rant" and "be restored to the freedom inherited from their 
 fathers." He took 20,000 stands of arms for recruits, but the 
 Kentuckians did not flock to his banners. Buell meantime had 
 moved south to accomplish Lincoln's pet plan of succoring the 
 Unionists in eastern Tennessee and capturing Chattanooga if 
 possible. Bragg had a clear way open to Louisville, and had he 
 moved with decision and speed he might have taken the poorly 
 defended city. But, discouraged by the hostile attitude of the 
 Kentuckians, he paused and turned aside, allowing Buell to 
 beat him in the race to Louisville. Strengthening the fortifica- 
 tions of the city and gathering reinforcements, Buell turned 
 south again, in pursuit of Bragg. The armies met on October 8 
 at Perryville. After a sharp engagement Bragg retired toward 
 the Tennessee border. 
 
 Buell, like McClellan, was slow and overcautious on the 
 offensive. Political influence had long been working against 
 him, and late in October he was replaced by Rosecrans. For 
 more than two months Bragg and Rosecrans lay facing each 
 other in Tennessee, while the bold Confederate raiders Morgan, 
 Forrest, and Joe Wheeler wrought much damage on railroads, 
 bridges, and supply depots. Finally, on the day after Christmas, 
 when the North was plunged in gloom over Burnside's terrible 
 defeat at Fredericksburg, Rosecrans moved from his quarters at 
 Nashville to attack the Confederates encamped near Murfrees- 
 boro. The armies on both sides were fairly matched and the 
 losses heavy. On the night of January 2, 1863, Bragg re- 
 treated from Murfreesboro, and President Lincoln telegraphed 
 to Rosecrans, "God bless you! " Neither Perryville nor Mur- 
 freesboro could fairly be called a Union victory on the field, yet, 
 
574 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 like McClellan's more brilliant action at Sharpsburg, they ac- 
 complished the main purpose of frustrating the Confederate 
 advance. Bragg was thrown back on Chattanooga, in the ex- 
 treme southeastern corner of Tennessee, and, except for Hood's 
 desperate dash on Nashville two years later, the Confederates 
 made no further attempt to win the two great states of the 
 Middle West south of the Ohio. 1 
 
 The new year brought little comfort to either side. The 
 failure of their triple advance was perhaps the least of the 
 South's misfortunes. The blockade was beginning to produce 
 the misery which was to grow more and more acute during the 
 last two years of the war. Rations were reduced. Shoes, blankets, 
 and medicines were lacking. The transportation system broke 
 down, because supplies for the maintenance of the railroads 
 were not available. A Conscription Act of April, 1862, which 
 had called to the colors all the white men between the ages of 
 eighteen and thirty-five, was bitterly resisted. Papers like the 
 Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Examiner attacked 
 Jefferson Davis as incompetent and despotic. The old states 
 of the seaboard, where the doctrine of states' rights was strong, 
 arrayed themselves against "the violations of constitutional 
 law by the supreme government." North Carolina demanded 
 the return of her volunteers for the defense of the state, like the 
 New England governments in the War of 1812. The conven- 
 tion in South Carolina proposed to forbid the Confederate 
 government to raise troops in the state except by voluntary en- 
 listment. Governor Brown of Georgia defied President Davis, 
 as Governor Troup had defied President Adams thirty-six years 
 before. The Confederate legislature demanded the dismissal 
 of the Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin. And, finally, the 
 high hopes of the South for British and French intervention 
 began to wane with the publication of the Emancipation Procla- 
 mation and the failure of the Confederate arms in Maryland 
 and Kentucky. 
 
 1 The third part of the general Confederate offensive in the autumn of 1862 
 was foiled when Generals Price and Van Dorn, in a spirited two days' battle 
 (October 3 and 4) , failed to dislodge General Rosecrans from Corinth, Mississippi. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 575 
 
 At the North despondency was profound. The almost un- 
 relieved misfortune of the Union army in Virginia, culminating 
 in the awful disaster of Fredericksburg, had strengthened the 
 belief of thousands of men from Maine to Minnesota that it 
 was impossible to subdue the South. The " Copperheads" came 
 to the fore with their demands for the immediate cessation of 
 the war. Their leader, Vallandigham of Ohio, harangued the 
 House of Representatives : "You have not conquered the South ; 
 you never will. The war for the Union is in your hands a most 
 bloody and costly failure. . . . Money you have expended with- 
 out limit, and blood poured out like water. . . . Defeat, debt, 
 taxation, and sepulchres these are your only trophies." Gov- 
 ernor Morton of Indiana telegraphed to Secretary Stanton that 
 the legislatures of Indiana and Illinois contemplated passing a 
 " joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy and 
 urging the states of the Northwest to dissolve all constitutional 
 relations with the New England states." "By a common in- 
 stinct," wrote Joseph Medill of Chicago, "everybody feels that 
 the war is drawing to a disastrous and disgraceful termination. 
 Money cannot be supplied much longer to a beaten, demoralized, 
 and homesick army. Sometimes I think that nothing is left now 
 but to fight for a boundary." The expenses of the government 
 had risen to $2,500,000 a day, of which less than one quarter 
 was realized from the customs duties and taxes. The armies of 
 Grant and Sherman tried in vain during the spring months 
 of 1863 to approach the great stronghold of Vicksburg by the 
 treacherous, fever-laden bayous of the Yazoo swamps; while 
 "Fighting Joe" Hooker, who had replaced Burnside in the 
 command of the Army of the Potomac, was outgeneraled and 
 defeated by Lee and Jackson in the Virginia forests about Chan- 
 cellorsville (May 2 and 3). 1 Volunteering had ceased, and the 
 Federal Congress resorted to conscription (March 3, 1863), as 
 
 ^n the deepening twilight after the battle Stonewall Jackson and a few of 
 his staff, who had ridden far in advance of the line, were mistaken by Confed- 
 erate sharpshooters for a group of Federal cavalry and fired upon. Jackson was 
 mortally wounded, and his death was, in the opinion of many men of the South, 
 the loss of the war. 
 
576 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the Confederate Congress had done a year earlier. This Con- 
 scription Act and an act of the same day authorizing President 
 Lincoln to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus wherever he saw 
 fit provoked redoubled criticism of the laboring administration. 
 While the draft was resisted desertions multiplied. Civilian 
 clothing was smuggled into the lines of the Army of the Potomac 
 by the carloads to encourage the slackers to leave the ranks. 
 
 The turning-point of the war came in the opening days of 
 July, 1863, with the repulse of Lee's second invasion of the 
 North at Gettysburg and with the fall of the Confederate strong- 
 hold of Vicksburg. Many considerations urged Lee to cross the 
 Potomac again to fight on Union soil. The morale of his army 
 of 75,000 men was at its peak. After the victories of Freder- 
 icksburg and Chancellorsville the Army of Virginia felt itself 
 to be invincible. Furthermore, Lee, who was a close student of 
 public opinion in the North, believed that the moment was 
 opportune to encourage the Copperheads in their resistance to 
 Lincoln's government. What possibilities there were in a vic- 
 tory on Northern soil ! It would throw panic into the capital 
 and the great commercial cities of the seaboard, close the vaults 
 of the New Yorjc bankers to Secretary Chase's appeal for funds, 1 
 divert Grant and Sherman from the siege of Vicksburg, bring 
 the peace party to the fore in the North, and end the war by a 
 single blow, with the acknowledgment of the independence of 
 the South. 
 
 As Lee's magnificent columns, under Longstreet, A. P. Hill, 
 and Ewell (Jackson's successor), moved from Fredericksburg 
 toward the Shenandoah Valley, Hooker followed on "interior 
 lines," keeping to the east of the Blue Ridge. Ewell pressed 
 ahead rapidly until by the end of June his cavalry were within 
 three or four miles of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and his artil- 
 lery shook the buildings of the town. From Pittsburgh to 
 Philadelphia terrifying rumors spread that Lee with 250 guns 
 was shelling Harrisburg that he was marching on Philadelphia 
 with 100,000 men. Lincoln called out the militia from Ohio, 
 
 1 Chase had just inaugurated the system of national banks, which we shall 
 study in the next section. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 577 
 
 Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. The Democratic 
 Governor Seymour of New York, who was accused of Copper- 
 headism, offered his support to the limit. Meanwhile the im- 
 perious Hooker, quarreling with Halleck about the disposition 
 of the garrison at Harpers Ferry, had offered his resignation in 
 a moment of irritation and had been replaced (June 27) by 
 General George G. Meade, a modest, tireless worker and a fine 
 disciplinarian, whose lack of brilliancy was atoned for by a devo- 
 tion to the cause which, as Grant remarked to Stan ton, " would 
 have led him to resign his general's commission if ordered, and 
 fall into the ranks without a murmur." 
 
 Meade's rapid advance into Pennsylvania caused Lee to re- 
 call Ewell from Harrisburg and concentrate his whole force near 
 the little town of Gettysburg. On July i the armies came into 
 contact, the Confederates defeating the Union left, commanded 
 by the gallant Reynolds, who was killed on the field. Meade 
 sent forward Hancock to take his place, and the line was re- 
 stored. The second day's fighting consisted of a number of 
 desperate but not well-coordinated attacks of the Confederates 
 on both wings. The Unionists had a double advantage : They 
 were being reenforced hourly, until by the afternoon they had 
 some 90,000 men to oppose to Lee's 70,000. Moreover, the Fed- 
 eral position on Cemetery Ridge was a convex formation, which 
 allowed easier transfer of troops behind the lines than did the 
 concave front of Seminary Ridge, occupied by the Confederates. 
 On the third day of the battle (July 3) Lee decided to attack 
 the Union center. In vain Longstreet remonstrated with his 
 chief against sending the men to certain death infantry against 
 batteries, "over nearly a mile of open ground under the rain of 
 canister and shrapnel." "The enemy is there, General Long- 
 street, and I am going to strike him," was Lee's quiet answer. 
 General Pickett's division of 15,000 Virginians, the flower of the 
 Confederate army, was selected for the attack. About three 
 o'clock in the afternoon, "with banners flying and with the 
 steadiness of a dress parade," the magnificent columns swept 
 down the slopes of Seminary Ridge into the valley. When they 
 had crossed half the fourteen hundred yards that separated the 
 
578 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 battle lines, the heavy Union artillery opened fire on them, mow- 
 ing great gaps in their ranks. On they went unfaltering, until 
 their thinning columns came within range of Hancock's shel- 
 tered infantry. Still on and up the hill they went, against a 
 wall of flame. A hundred men with the gallant Armistead 
 scaled the Union fortifications and, driving the gunners from 
 their posts, planted the Confederate colors within their lines 
 the high-water mark of the Confederacy. But the ordeal was 
 greater than flesh and blood could bear. The attacking line 
 halted, bent slowly backward, then broke and fled what there 
 was left of it through the valley of death to the shelter of its 
 own guns. 1 
 
 Like a gambler, Lee had staked all on a desperate throw 
 and lost. With unfailing magnanimity he took all the blame 
 on himself and had no words but praise for his officers and 
 men. On the night of the Fourth of July he began his retreat 
 to the Potomac through a dismal rain. The river, swollen by 
 floods, held him on the Maryland side for several days, during 
 which he was apprehensive of an attack by the victorious Union 
 army. Meade himself favored and planned such an attack, 
 but was dissuaded by the advice of five of his six corps comman- 
 ders. Lincoln was greatly distressed when he learned that Lee 
 had crossed the Potomac into Virginia. "We- had them within 
 our grasp," he said. "We had only to stretch forth our hands 
 and they were ours." But the case was not so simple. The 
 Union army had been severely handled in the three days' fight- 
 ing. Reynolds was killed. Hancock was severely wounded. 
 The army needed rest, recuperation, and reorganization. Be- 
 
 1 The Federal losses were 23,049, the Confederate 28,063. Lee's fame is so 
 deservedly dear to his fellow countrymen that they have often shrunk from 
 criticizing his military tactics too severely. But to his contemporaries, and even 
 to his associates, he was not always inspired. Longstreet called him "perfect in 
 defensive warfare but over-rash in attack." He was certainly at fault in the third 
 day's fighting at Gettysburg, as he had been in the frontal attack on McClellan 
 at Malvern Hill. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a cavalry colonel in the Union 
 army and a keen military critic, gives a very unfavorable opinion of Lee's gen- 
 eralship, in "A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. II, pp. 56, 57. 
 After Gettysburg Lee offered his resignation, but Davis refused to accept it. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 579 
 
 sides, Lee, always masterly on the defensive, had chosen and 
 fortified his position well on the banks of the Potomac. 
 
 The retreat of the rain-soaked Confederates from Gettys- 
 burg would have been more dismal still had they known that on 
 the same Fourth of July General Pemberton had surrendered 
 his garrison of 29,500 men at Vicksburg, together with 170 
 cannon and 50,000 small arms. For the details of the wonderful 
 campaign of eight months against the Mississippi stronghold 
 the student must read the memoirs of the two great Union 
 commanders, Grant and Sherman. Baffled in his attempt to 
 approach the impregnable defenses of Vicksburg from the north 
 and east in the late autumn of 1862, Grant shifted his opera- 
 tions to the west of the Mississippi, where the network of 
 bayous, swollen by winter rains, made a series of submerged 
 islands and peninsulas with the tortuous course of the river. 
 Floundering through the swamps, swarming like waterfowl to 
 the patches of dry land for their huddled camps, battling with 
 malaria and pests, the army slowly gained the shore of the river 
 below Vicksburg, while Admiral Porter ran his gunboats past 
 the batteries of the fortress and towed barges laden with sup- 
 plies. On April 30 Grant got his troops across to the eastern 
 bank of the river at Bruinsburg, about thirty-five miles south 
 of Vicksburg, and telegraphed Halleck that he felt that the 
 battle was "more than half won." Cutting loose from his base 
 on the river and living off the country, Grant moved northward 
 toward the state capital of Jackson, where Johnston was arriv- 
 ing with 15,000 reinforcements for Pemberton from the Army 
 of Virginia. 
 
 Driving Johnston out of Jackson, and destroying the arsenals 
 and military stores in the city, Grant turned westward to close 
 in upon Pemberton. The Confederates made a valiant stand 
 against superior numbers at Champion's Hill and the Big Black 
 River, but were forced back to the defenses of Vicksburg, where 
 the Union army held them closely besieged in a line of twenty- 
 five miles extending from Haines's Bluff to Warrenton. In the 
 eighteen days since he had ferried his troops across the Missis- 
 sippi at Bruinsburg, Grant had marched one hundred and eighty 
 
580 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 miles through a hostile and difficult country, fighting the enemy 
 at every step. He had captured the state capital, dispersed 
 Pemberton's reinforcements, seized the Vicksburg and Jackson 
 railroad, secured the river approaches to Vicksburg from north 
 and south, and shut in an army of 40,000 men behind the 
 frowning ramparts. For six weeks the beleaguered city held 
 out, until the inhabitants were reduced to eating mules and 
 rats. To avoid the shells from Grant's batteries on the land and 
 Porter's gunboats on the river, many of the families took refuge 
 in underground chambers hewn in the hard clay of the bluffs. 
 When all hope of relief from Johnston was gone and his soldiers 
 were staggering in the trenches from starvation, Pemberton 
 surrendered. 
 
 The capture of Vicksburg was by far the most momentous 
 event of the war. It meant the opening of the great river to 
 the commerce of the whole Mississippi Basin. 1 It meant the 
 severance of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from their sister 
 states of the Confederacy. But chief of all, it meant the stop- 
 page of the most important source of supplies for the Southern 
 armies. For not only had large quantities of grain and beef 
 come eastward from Texas over the "bridge" of the Mississippi 
 between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but with the constantly 
 tightening blockade of their own shores on the Atlantic and 
 the Gulf, the Confederates had found it convenient to get 
 arms, munitions, medicine, and other articles from Europe via 
 the Mexican ports, whence they had been smuggled across the 
 boundary into Texas and so over the famous "bridge." The 
 blockade was the first step, and the recovery of the Mississippi 
 the second, in that process of starving out the South which 
 counted for more than the victories on the battlefield in the 
 final collapse of the Confederacy. 
 
 1 Port Hudson, Louisiana, a. smaller river stronghold about one hundred and 
 twenty-five miles below Vicksburg, was besieged by the Union general Banks. 
 When its commander, General Gardner, heard of the fall of Vicksburg, he sur- 
 rendered his garrison of 5000 men, July 9. Just one week later the steamer 
 Imperial, from St. Louis, anchored with a cargo of merchandise at New Orleans. 
 Lincoln wrote in August to a mass meeting in his home town of Springfield, 
 Illinois, " The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 581 
 
 "Gettysburg and Vicksburg ought to have ended the war," 
 says Rhodes (Vol. IV, p. 3 19) . There was plenty of fight left in 
 the Southern armies, to be sure, but it was henceforth a fight of 
 desperation the spirit of "the last ditch." President Davis 
 kept to the last his nervous confidence in the favorable outcome 
 of the struggle, and the Southern press, minimizing the impor- 
 tance of Vicksburg and calling Gettysburg "a drawn battle," 
 insisted with redoubled assurance on the eventual victory of the 
 Confederacy. The generals in the field knew better. "Dick" 
 Taylor, one of the best of them, declared that after the cam- 
 paign of 1864 opened "the commanders . . . fought simply to 
 afford statesmanship an opportunity to mitigate the sorrows of 
 inevitable defeat," and George Gary Eggleston, in "A Rebel's 
 Recollections," said, "We all knew from the beginning of 1864 
 that the war was hopeless." Confederate bonds, which had 
 been bought in large quantities in England and France, sank to 
 one fifth of their par value. The tone of the British press and 
 of most of the influential men in Parliament, which had been 
 favorable to the South, began to change. 1 Napoleon III de- 
 sisted from his efforts to bring about a recognition of the inde- 
 pendence of the Confederacy with British cooperation. 2 The 
 hearty response of the North to calls for money and men, and 
 the indorsement of the administration in the elections of the 
 autumn of 1863, showed that the two great victories had done 
 much to dispel the discouragement and disaffection of the second 
 year of the war. 3 
 
 1 See the exultant letter written by Henry Adams from London to his brother 
 Charles Francis, Jr., on the news of the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg 
 (July 23) in "A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. II, pp. 58 f. 
 
 2 As early as March, 1861, Mercier, the French minister at Washington, had 
 advised Napoleon to recognize the Confederacy. Two weeks before the battle 
 of Gettysburg, Slidell, the special Confederate envoy to France, interviewed the 
 emperor, who sanctioned contracts for building cruisers for the Southern cause 
 at Bordeaux and Nantes. "You may build the ships," said Napoleon, "but it 
 will be needful to conceal their destination " (Schouler, Vol. VI, p. 434). 
 
 3 An interesting feature of the rejoicing over the victories was Lincoln's proc- 
 lamation of a day of national thanksgiving, borrowed from the old New England 
 festival of the Puritans. The precedent has been followed every year since 1863 
 by our presidents. 
 
582 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Before the close of 1863 another major campaign resulted 
 in the capture of a Confederate position second in importance 
 only to Vicksburg. For six months after his New Year's battle 
 at Murfreesboro, Rosecrans had idly confronted Bragg in cen- 
 tral Tennessee. Finally, heeding the repeated exhortations of 
 Halleck, he took the field late in June and by skillful strategy 
 compelled Bragg to withdraw across the Cumberland Mountains 
 and the Tennessee River into the northwest corner of Georgia. 
 Rosecrans then occupied the town of Chattanooga on the 
 southern bank of the Tennessee. But here his strategy ceased. 
 Mistaking Bragg 's concentration in the Chickamauga valley 
 for a further retreat into Georgia, Rosecrans followed with 
 hasty and imperfect formations, neglecting to secure the im- 
 portant heights of Lookout and Missionary Ridge on the south 
 side of the river. He met a furious attack of Bragg's army on 
 Chickamauga Creek, which broke his right and center, chasing 
 men and officers (including Rosecrans himself) back twelve 
 miles to the defenses of Chattanooga. Only Thomas, "the Rock 
 of Chickamauga," stood firm on the left wing through the 
 afternoon till nightfall, with his forces formed in a horseshoe, 
 bearing the repeated onsets of Bragg's whole line (September 
 20) and retiring at last in good order to join his routed com- 
 rades. Bragg fortified the ridges skillfully and held Rosecrans's 
 army closely invested in Chattanooga, with only a single inade- 
 quate and harassed road over the hills to the northward for 
 his supplies. Rations fell low, and horses and mules died of 
 hunger by the thousands. 
 
 Rosecrans was saved from Pember ton's fate in Vicksburg 
 by the prompt action of the administration. At Secretary 
 Stan ton's urgent request 16,000 troops under Hooker were de- 
 tached from the Army of the Potomac and sent by rail via Wash- 
 ington, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville, reaching the 
 Tennessee River some forty miles below Chattanooga in eight 
 days. 1 Reinforcements for Rosecrans were sent also from 
 Grant's Vicksburg army, by way of Memphis, but as the river 
 
 1 This exploit is one of the most conspicuous examples of the advantage 
 which the North enjoyed during the war in its efficient railroad system. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 583 
 
 was low and the Confederate cavalry raiders had made havoc 
 with roads and bridges, these troops under Sherman did not 
 reach Chattanooga until the middle of November. Meanwhile 
 an important change in command had been effected. Grant, 
 promoted to a major-generalcy in the regular army as a reward 
 for his services at Vicksburg, was met in person by Secretary 
 Stanton at Indianapolis and put in charge of all the armies 
 between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi north of Banks's 
 department of the Gulf States. He immediately replaced Rose- 
 crans by the reliable Thomas, to whom he telegraphed to hold 
 Chattanooga at all hazards till help should arrive. Thomas, with 
 characteristic energy and with the invaluable engineering aid 
 of General W. F. Smith, set about to secure lines of communica- 
 tion down the river. When Grant arrived at Chattanooga on 
 October 23, "wet, dirty, and well," he found the morale of the 
 troops improved and hope revived. 
 
 In another month, with Sherman's reinforcements at hand, 
 Grant was able to begin the brilliant operations which drove 
 Bragg's army from its strong positions on the heights south of 
 the town. No more wonderful exploits in arms have been per- 
 formed on our soil than the assaults of the three days (Novem- 
 ber 23-25) known as the battle of Chattanooga, where soldiers 
 from the armies of the Potomac, the Cumberland, and the Mis- 
 sissippi cooperated under the command of the four greatest 
 Union generals of the war Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and 
 Thomas. On the first day Thomas's troops drove the Con- 
 federates from their first lines, and at midnight Sherman set 
 5000 men across the river. The next day Hooker led his sol- 
 diers up the slope of Lookout Mountain through rain and mist, 
 fought the famous " battle above the clouds," and planted the 
 Stars and Stripes on the topmost peak. But the greatest feat 
 of all was reserved for Thomas's Cumberland troops on the 
 third day. Ordered to take the Confederate rifle pits at the base 
 of Missionary Ridge, they refused to pause after the work was 
 done, but stormed up the broken, crumbling face of the ridge 
 in an uncontrollable dash, led by the impetuous Sheridan, driv- 
 ing the enemy from his second line and continuing up the rough 
 
584 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 steeps, "oblivious of the bristling rifle pits on the crest and the 
 30 cannon enfilading every gully." Reaching the top, they 
 drove the astonished gunners and riflemen before them and sent 
 Bragg down the eastern slope of the ridge in full retreat, burn- 
 ing his stores and bridges behind him. The victory of Chat- 
 tanooga made Tennessee secure for the Union 1 and left the 
 North only the task of subduing the old states of the southern 
 Atlantic seaboard. The news of the great victory reached the 
 Northern cities on the first national Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 From the close of the year 1863 the nature of the war was 
 changed. It ceased to be a contest on anything approaching 
 equal terms. The enormous resources of the North in men and 
 money were placed ungrudgingly at the disposal of the govern- 
 ment. Thanks to Secretary Chases's skillful financial manage- 
 ment Lincoln could speak in his message of December, 1863, 
 of "the prompt and full satisfaction of all demands on the 
 Treasury." In the summer of 1863 the draft had been resisted 
 at many points in the North, with a terrible riot in New York 
 City costing 1500 lives. The war had been called a failure and 
 Lincoln branded as a "tyrant." 2 But in 1864, drafts in March, 
 July, and December for an aggregate of more than 1,000,000 
 men were quietly and quickly met. By sheer weight of numbers 
 Grant and Sherman bore down on the diminishing armies of 
 
 protection of the inhabitants of the mountain regions of eastern Ten- 
 nessee was always a matter of solicitude to Lincoln, but it was not till the 
 summer of 1863 that the military situation allowed an army of relief to be sent 
 to them. General Burnside occupied Knoxville while Rosecrans was forcing Bragg 
 out of Tennessee. After his victory at Chickamauga, Bragg sent Longstreet to 
 drive Burnside out of Knoxville, but the Federal victory at Chattanooga made 
 Longstreet's position in the interior of the state untenable. 
 
 2 Richard H. Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams on March 9, 1863: "As 
 to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal 
 loyalty to the President. ... He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, 
 none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, 
 he would not get the vote of a state. He does not act, or talk, or feel like the 
 ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. ... He is an unutterable calamity to 
 us where he is. Only the army can save us. Congress is not a council of state. 
 It is a mere district representation of men of district reputations" (C. F. Adams, 
 Jr., "Richard Henry Dana," Vol. II, p. 264). 
 
. u.* 
 
 '. *>Gett 
 
 Campaigns of McClellan 
 
 and Burnside, 1862 
 Campaigns of Grant, 1864-1865 
 Lee's Antietam Campaign, 1862 
 Lee's Gettysburg Campaign. 1863 
 
 THE WAR IN EASTERN VIRGINIA, MARYLAND, AND PENNSYLVANIA 
 
586 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Lee and Johnston in the seaboard states of the South, slowly 
 crushing their power of resistance. If there were still spasmodic 
 offensives on the part of the South, like Morgan's cavalry raid 
 into Ohio or Early's dashes down the Shenandoah Valley or 
 Hood's desperate rush on Nashville, they were only the sudden 
 flame that shoots from a dying fire. Never after Chattanooga 
 did the Southern armies advance as they had advanced at Shiloh 
 and the second Bull Run, at Sharpsburg, Murfreesboro, and 
 Gettysburg, to achieve the victory that should seal the inde- 
 pendence of the Confederacy. 
 
 General Sherman wrote in 1885 that it "was not till after 
 both Gettysburg and Vicksburg that the war professionally 
 began." By which he meant that only then did the seasoned 
 Union soldiers, scientifically brigaded and under a unified com- 
 mand, move steadily toward a preconcerted goal. Congress, 
 on the last day of February, 1864, revived the grade of lieu- 
 tenant general, conferred only twice since Washington's day, 
 and Lincoln immediately appointed Grant to this lofty honor, 
 which carried with it the command, under the president, of all 
 the armies of the United States. Sherman took Grant's place 
 as leader of the combined armies of the West. The plan of 
 campaign for 1864 was simple. Grant made his headquarters 
 with the Army of the Potomac, of which he left Meade in 
 nominal command. He was ready on the third of May to cross 
 the Rapidan and begin his advance against Lee's army and 
 Richmond. At the same moment Sherman, with the combined 
 armies of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, com- 
 manded by Schofield, McPherson, and Thomas respectively, 
 moved from Chattanooga into Georgia, where Joseph E. John- 
 ston had succeeded to Bragg 's command. Both Grant and 
 Sherman outnumbered their opponents about two to one; but 
 both needed decided advantage in men, for Grant was moving 
 in an unfamiliar region against an adversary who knew every 
 foot of the land he was defending, and Sherman had to protect 
 at every point an ever-lengthening line of railroad for his sup- 
 plies. We need not trace in detail the summer's campaign of 
 these two great armies as they gradually closed in on the Con- 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 587 
 
 federacy from the north and west. For a month Grant ham- 
 mered his way toward Richmond, sacrificing tens of thousands 
 of men in the battle of the Wilderness (the scene of Hooker's 
 defeat just a year before), at the " bloody angle" of Spottsyl- 
 vania, and in the reckless frontal assault on Lee's strongly for- 
 tified position at Cold Harbor. "I intend to fight it out on this 
 line if it takes all summer," he telegraphed to Halleck after the 
 Wilderness fight. But his terrible losses 1 led him to change his 
 plan. Avoiding the strong defenses of Richmond, he trans- 
 ferred his army to the James, twenty miles below the city, and 
 laid siege to the important railroad junction of Petersburg. An 
 unsuccessful attempt to enter Petersburg through a breach in 
 the fortifications (the famous "crater") made by the explosion 
 of a huge mine, on July 30, was the last active offensive of the 
 Army of the Potomac for the year. 
 
 This costly and ineffective campaign of the new lieutenant 
 general, from whom rapid success was expected, brought mourn- 
 ing to thousands of homes and discouragement to millions of 
 hearts. July and August were months of almost unrelieved 
 gloom in the North. 2 General Jubal A. Early, operating against 
 inferior Union commanders in the Shenandoah Valley, crossed 
 the Potomac and appeared before the defenses of Washington 
 on July ii. The city was barely saved by a detachment from 
 the Army of the Potomac. Sherman was slowly advancing in 
 Georgia, to be sure, but not without severe checks too, like that 
 at Kenesaw Mountain, where on June 27 he sacrificed 3000 
 men in an attack on Johnston's trenches. Admiral Farragut's 
 capture of the forts in Mobile Bay (the first note of cheer in 
 the gloomy summer) did not come till the twenty- third of 
 August. Meanwhile it looked as if the administration might go 
 
 1 Grant's losses from May 4 to June 12 were 54,929, a number approximately 
 equal to Lee's whole force at the opening of the campaign. In the assault at Cold 
 Harbor, hardly less reckless than Burnside's at Fredericksburg, Grant lost 7000, 
 with no compensating advantage gained, as he later confessed in his "Memoirs." 
 
 2 A resolution passed Congress on July 2, 1864, asking Lincoln to appoint a 
 day for humiliation and prayer, to implore the Almighty "as the supreme ruler 
 of the world not to destroy us as a people," 
 
5 88 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 down to defeat in the presidential election under the weight of 
 military failure. Lincoln himself thought it " extremely prob- 
 able" that he would not be reflected and on the very day of 
 Farragut's victory at Mobile wrote down his apprehensions in 
 a secret memorandum. The Democratic convention, which met 
 August 29 at Chicago, nominated General McClellan for presi- 
 dent and adopted a platform containing a plank (written by 
 Vallandigham) to the effect that " after four years of failure to 
 restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, hu- 
 manity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate 
 efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities." 1 
 
 The autumn brought brighter hopes for the administration. 
 On September i Sherman entered Atlanta. On October 19 
 Sheridan, by his dashing ride from Winchester, " twenty miles 
 away," turned the defeat of Cedar Creek into a magnificent 
 victory and drove the cavalry of Early out of the Shenandoah 
 Valley. In the election which followed in November, Lincoln 
 carried every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Ken- 
 tucky, although McClellan's minorities were large. The vote 
 in the electoral college was 212 to 21, but the popular vote gave 
 Lincoln less than 400,000 plurality in a total of 4,000,000. 
 
 Before the year was out two more tidings of victory came from 
 the Union generals in the South. Sherman, cutting loose from 
 his base and sending Thomas back to defend Nashville, marched 
 through the rich fields of Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, with 
 60,000 men in four columns, living off the country and destroy- 
 ing railroads and public buildings in a wide swath of sixty miles. 2 
 
 a lt is only fair to McClellan to say that he repudiated this plank, while 
 accepting the nomination of the party which was to "hurl the tyrant Lincoln 
 from his throne." McClellan said that he could not look his old comrades in 
 arms in the face if he indorsed the sentiment that the war was a failure. 
 
 2 There has been much controversy over the conduct of the troops, and 
 Sherman has been execrated as a vandal for the damage wrought on this famous 
 march. Sherman was harsh in his determination that the South should feel the 
 ravages of war. He wrote to Grant that he would "make Georgia howl." Yet 
 he and all his officers asserted that no wanton damage was done by official 
 orders. As a matter of fact, discipline was not strictly enforced, and camp fol- 
 lowers, "bummers," and negroes undoubtedly committed acts of wanton de- 
 struction and pillage. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 589 
 
 On the night of December 20 General Hardee got his garrison of 
 15,000 men out of Savannah into South Carolina by a pontoon 
 bridge across the river, and Sherman took possession of the city, 
 with 1 50 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 
 25,000 bales of cotton, which he presented to Lincoln as a 
 Christmas gift. Meantime General Hood, who had replaced 
 Johnston when Sherman was approaching Atlanta, left Georgia 
 to take care of itself as best it could and struck across the 
 Tennessee River to crush Thomas. If he succeeded it would 
 mean the undoing of Chattanooga, the reoccupation of Tennes- 
 see, and the opportunity for Hood with his victorious army to 
 move eastward and cooperate with either the Confederate troops 
 in the Carolinas or Lee's hard-pressed army near Richmond. 
 The anxiety of the men in high position, from Lincoln down 
 through Stanton, Grant, and Halleck, was great. Grant repeat- 
 edly urged Thomas to attack, and even went so far as to desig- 
 nate General Logan to supersede him. But Thomas knew his 
 ground and coolly waited until he was ready. On December 1 5 
 he completely shattered Hood's force before Nashville. The 
 Southern army, which had numbered 53,000 when Johnston had 
 faced Sherman, melted away, and Hood was relieved from the 
 service at his own request. 
 
 The victories of Sherman and Thomas in December practi- 
 cally brought the resistance of the South to an end. The spring 
 months of 1865 found Davis and his Congress at odds. The 
 destitution of the Confederacy could no longer be concealed. 
 Desertions were frequent, food was scarce, Union money was 
 circulating in spite of the prohibition of the government, and 
 negroes began to be recruited in the armies. Public men, in 
 ever-increasing numbers, were convinced that further resistance 
 was hopeless. A delegation headed by Alexander H. Stephens 
 met Lincoln and Seward at Hampton Roads, February 3, to dis- 
 cuss terms for the cessation of hostilities. Lincoln insisted on 
 two points: the restoration of the Union and the abolition of 
 slavery. The Southerners pronounced his terms "unconditional 
 submission to the mercy of conquerors," and the conference 
 broke up. Davis and Lee both upheld the Southern delegates 
 
590 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 in their refusal to abandon the independence of the Confed- 
 eracy. "I can have no common country with the Yankees," 
 said Davis. "My life is bound up with the Confederacy. If 
 any man supposes that under any circumstances I can be an 
 agent of the reconstruction of the Union, he mistakes every 
 element of my nature. With the Confederacy I will live or 
 die." Lee told his soldiers in a proclamation that their choice 
 was between "war and abject submission." Yet both these men 
 lived to be reconciled to the United States of America, and 
 Davis at the close of his history of the Confederacy wrote of 
 the Union, "Esto perpetual" The Southern leaders in the 
 spring of 1865 utterly misunderstood Lincoln's conciliatory 
 spirit. They used such phrases as "abject submission," "sub- 
 jugation," "our arrogant foe," when arrogance or revenge was 
 as far from Lincoln's thoughts as the east is from the west. 
 His beautiful second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 
 breathed only magnanimity in his deep longing for a just, 
 kindly, and lasting peace for the war-torn country, "with malice 
 toward none, with charity for all." 
 
 Yet it is not strange that the deeds of Sherman spoke more 
 loudly to the South than the words of Lincoln. The general, 
 after a brief stay in the city of Savannah, began his march 
 northward through the Carolinas a march which he calls in 
 his "Memoirs" "ten times as important" as his famous march 
 through Georgia. Among officers and men there was much 
 resentment against South Carolina, as the state responsible for 
 the war. Columbia, the state capital, was burned the morn- 
 ing the Union troops entered the city (February 19). Although 
 the responsibility for the conflagration has not been fixed to 
 this day, and evidence points strongly to its origin in burn- 
 ing cotton fired by the townspeople themselves, Sherman was 
 charged with the deed as the culmination of his policy of vandal- 
 ism. It is in the light of the flames of Columbia that the reply 
 of the South to Lincoln's terms of peace must be read. 
 
 Grant renewed active operations against Petersburg late in 
 March. His army of 116,000 men gradually closed in upon 
 Lee's force of less than half that number. On Sunday, April 2, 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 591 
 
 a messenger from Lee brought to President Davis, as he sat at 
 worship in St. Paul's church, the warning that Richmond must 
 be evacuated. The Confederate government left the city that 
 night for Danville, and the next day Union troops entered, 
 their bands playing " Rally round the Flag, Boys ! " Lee tried 
 to get his army to the hilly land of western Virginia, where he 
 believed that he could maintain a defensive warfare for many 
 months to come, but Sheridan's cavalry, spreading out along 
 the Appomattox valley, headed him off, defeating his hungry, 
 exhausted soldiers at Five Forks and bringing him to the bitter 
 decision of surrender. Grant and Lee met at the McLean 
 farm at Appomattox Court House, April 9. After a few min- 
 utes of friendly conversation recalling their old days of com- 
 radeship in the Mexican War, Grant drew up to a table and 
 wrote out in a few sentences the liberal terms of surrender. 
 All that was asked was that the soldiers should lay down their 
 arms and return to their allegiance to the Union. The officers 
 were allowed to retain their mounts and side arms, and the 
 cavalry and artillerymen, at Lee's request, were permitted to 
 keep their own horses, "to work their farms/' as Grant said 
 with his wonderful simplicity. Lee immediately signed the 
 terms, with a gracious acknowledgment of their generosity. 
 
 The Army of Virginia had been the mainstay of the Con- 
 federacy. With Lee's surrender the submission of the other 
 armies was only a matter of days. The surrender of Johnston 
 to Sherman at Raleigh, North Carolina (April 26), 1 and of 
 "Dick" Taylor's forces east of the Mississippi and Kirby 
 Smith's west of the river to Canby (May 4 and 26 respectively) 
 brought the end of armed resistance to the authority of the 
 United States. Nearly 175,000 Confederate soldiers laid down 
 their arms in those spring weeks of 1865 and returned to their 
 
 1 0n April 18 Sherman had entered into an agreement with Johnston, secur- 
 ing the promise of the surrender of all the Confederate troops to the Rio Grande 
 in return for political engagements as to the treatment of the seceded states. 
 Sherman transcended his competence as a military commander in discussing 
 these political matters, and his arrangements were promptly disavowed by the 
 government at Washington. However, his intentions were good, and the harsh 
 censure meted out to him by Stanton was unkind if not undeserved. 
 
592 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 plantations and homes to begin the long task of repairing the 
 ravages of war. They had fought a valiant fight. The courage 
 of the men and the self-sacrificing devotion of the women re- 
 main a cherished tradition in Dixie Land. But there are few, 
 if any, of the children of those who fought for the "lost cause " 
 who would wish today that the outcome of the Civil War 
 had been different none who would not now echo the final 
 benediction of Jefferson Davis on our common Union: "Esto 
 perpetua ! " 
 
 GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE IN WAR TIME 
 
 "In the clash of arms the laws are silent" runs the old 
 Roman proverb. War tends inevitably to increase the power 
 of the executive arm of government, even in democracies. Quick 
 decision, unity of plan, efficiency in action, are the conditions 
 of military success, which ill tolerates the slow deliberations of 
 a legislative body or that insistence on the right of free expres- 
 sion of opinion which is cherished as a fundamental liberty by 
 self-governing peoples. The United States and the Confederate 
 States of America proved no exception to this general rule in 
 the Civil War. 
 
 From the fall of Fort Sumter to the meeting of the extra 
 session of Congress nearly three months later, Abraham Lin- 
 coln was virtually a "dictator." By executive proclamation he 
 increased the regular army and navy of the United States by 
 some 40,000 men, although he had no constitutional right to 
 add a single man to a regiment or a ship. He proclaimed a 
 blockade of the ports of the cotton states and threatened with the 
 fate of pirates anyone who should molest the commerce of the 
 United States, although a blockade is an incident of war and war 
 had been neither declared nor recognized. He authorized Gen- 
 eral Scott to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus and make mili- 
 tary arrests anywhere on the line between Philadelphia and 
 Washington, although the right to suspend the writ is enumer- 
 ated among the powers of Congress in the Constitution (Art. I, 
 sect. 9, par. 2), and a decision of Chief Justice Marshall at the 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 593 
 
 time of the Burr conspiracy had denied it to the executive. 
 When Congress met on July 4, Lincoln confessed the unconstitu- 
 tionally of his proclamations, which, he said, "were ventured 
 upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a pub- 
 lic necessity." Congress promptly and enthusiastically ratified 
 his actions. A "higher law" had superseded the Constitution 
 the law of self-preservation. Throughout the war Congress 
 cooperated with the President, conferring on him the power to 
 suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wherever he 
 deemed it necessary and allowing him great freedom in the in- 
 terpretation and execution of its acts. 
 
 The administration at Washington was hardly consistent in 
 its attitude toward the South. Lincoln held to the theory that the 
 seceding states had not left the Union and could not leave the 
 Union, but that groups of men in them, too numerous and pow- 
 erful to be dealt with by the civil authorities, were in insurrec- 
 tion against the United States. To recognize the Confederacy 
 as a belligerent power would be virtually to concede that it was 
 another "nation," and yet to treat the Confederate armies and 
 navies merely as masses of individual "traitors" would have 
 been impossible and ridiculous. 1 Therefore, while maintaining 
 its claim to sovereignty over the citizens of the seceding states 
 (as shown, for example, by the Nonintercourse Act of July 13, 
 1 86 1, the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the exemption 
 of parts of the slaveholding states from the application of the 
 Emancipation Proclamation), the government at Washington 
 virtually recognized the sovereignty of the Confederacy over 
 the same citizens by according them the status of a belligerent 
 power, with exchanges of prisoners, paroles, and the reception 
 of overtures for peace. It was inconsistency but the alter- 
 native would have been rank inhumanity. 
 
 
 dilemma was presented in the autumn of 1861, when the crew of the 
 privateer Savannah were brought as captives into New York Harbor. The men 
 were convicted of piracy, in accord with Lincoln's proclamation of blockade. 
 But when President Davis, invoking the lex talionis, threatened to treat an 
 equal number of Union prisoners in the same way as these men were treated, 
 the sentence was never carried out. 
 
594 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The policy of the government in regard to slavery was revo- 
 lutionized by the war. On the day after the battle of Bull Run 
 both Houses of Congress, in accord with the Republican plat- 
 form and Lincoln's repeated statements, passed a resolution 
 that "this war is not waged ... in any spirit of oppression, 
 or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of 
 overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established insti- 
 tutions of those [seceded] states, but to defend and maintain 
 the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union 
 with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states 
 unimpaired ; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the 
 war ought to cease." But when it appeared that the slaves were 
 employed in the Confederate army, driving munition wagons, 
 cooking in the camps, and digging at the trenches and fortifica- 
 tions, a Confiscation Act was passed (August 6) declaring such 
 of them as "were required or permitted to work in or upon any 
 fort, navy yard, dock, armory, ship, or intrenchment against 
 the lawful authority of the United States," to be forfeited. This 
 act did not go far enough for those who believed that, since 
 slavery was the cause of the war, the extermination of slavery 
 should be the first object of the war. General Fremont, com- 
 mander of the Department of the West, issued a proclamation 
 (August 31) emancipating the slaves of all persons in Missouri 
 in rebellion against the United States, but Lincoln ordered him 
 to modify the proclamation to accord with the Confiscation 
 Act. 1 The President's great desire was to win the border states 
 to a policy of compensated emancipation, and to that end he 
 secured the passage of a bill in April, 1862, offering to loyal 
 slaveholders a maximum of $300 for each slave. On July 14 he 
 summoned the members of Congress from the border states to 
 the White House to urge them in person to accept this offer, 
 
 X A similar proclamation by General Hunter of the Department of the South, 
 nine months later, emancipated the slaves in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, 
 and Florida. Lincoln repudiated this order too, declaring that he must reserve 
 to himself the responsibility of setting the slaves free in any state, in his capacity 
 as commander in chief of the army and navy. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 595 
 
 but to his bitter disappointment they refused. 1 A week later 
 Lincoln read to his cabinet the draft of the Emancipation Proc- 
 lamation. On the wise advice of Seward he postponed issuing 
 the proclamation until a Union victory in the field should give it 
 weight. Shortly after Lee's invasion of Maryland was checked 
 at Antietam, Lincoln published the proclamation (September 
 22 ), which announced that on January i, 1863, he would declare 
 "forever free" the slaves in all the states which were in arms 
 against the authority of the Federal government on that day. 
 
 The Emancipation Proclamation was not an abolitionist docu- 
 ment but a military punishment. It did not alter the actual 
 status of the negro in the South, because it applied to just that 
 part of the South where President Lincoln's authority was not 
 recognized, and explicitly exempted those regions where it was 
 recognized. Only the conquest of the South by arms actually 
 liberated the slaves. Neither did the Proclamation accomplish 
 the legal emancipation of the slaves. Except where it was done 
 by state action (as in Missouri, Maryland, and Tennessee) this 
 waited for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 
 1865. If, then, the Emancipation Proclamation meant neither 
 the actual nor the legal abolition of slavery, one may ask why 
 it should be classed with the Declaration of Independence and 
 the Constitution of the United States as one of the "immortal" 
 documents of our history. The answer is, Because it was the an- 
 nouncement that henceforth the war was to be waged not only 
 for the preservation of the Union but also for the permanent 
 banishment of slavery from its borders. Congress had abolished 
 slavery in the District of Columbia in April, 1862, and in all the 
 territories of the United States in June. From the summer of 
 1862 on, President Lincoln made the acceptance of a general 
 emancipation program, as well as the restoration of the Union, 
 
 1 Unfortunately the conference took place in the days of discouragement just 
 after McClellan's failure before Richmond. James G. Elaine, in his "Twenty 
 Years of Congress" (Vol. I, p. 447), says, "The border state men, becoming 
 doubtful of Union success, preferred to keep their slaves rather than part with 
 them for bonds which would soon become valueless." 
 
596 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a sine qua non of any terms of peace (see the Hampton Roads 
 conference, p. sSg 1 ). 
 
 The effect of the Emancipation Proclamation upon Europe 
 was wholly favorable to the Union cause. Whether there should 
 be one or two federations of states between Canada and the 
 Gulf of Mexico was of little concern to most of the people 
 across the Atlantic, but a war to abolish slavery roused the 
 hearty response of all the humanitarian sentiment among the 
 liberals of Great Britain and the Continent. A monster mass 
 meeting, held in Exeter Hall in London, on January 29, 1863, 
 acclaimed the Proclamation with cheers. Addresses of congrat- 
 ulation came to Lincoln from antislavery societies and trade- 
 unions. The workers of Manchester, although reduced to 
 poverty by the stoppage of the cotton supply from the Southern 
 states, sent a letter of sympathy, to which Lincoln gratefully 
 replied in his own hand. 
 
 At home, however, the results of the Proclamation were dis- 
 appointing. It tended to unite the South and divide the North. 
 The Southern press cynically referred to it as an attempt to stir 
 up hatred against the slaveholder in order to "atone for de- 
 feat in the field"; 2 and malicious newspapers represented the 
 language of the Proclamation as encouragement to negro insur- 
 rection. 3 Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster-General, warned 
 
 1 From the Emancipation Proclamation to the end of the war 180,000 negroes 
 were enlisted in the Northern armies and fought with conspicuous bravery. The 
 Confederate Congress, on May i, 1863, passed a resolution to the effect that 
 "every white person being a commissioned officer . . . who shall command 
 negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States . . . shall be deemed 
 as inciting servile insurrection, and shall if captured be put to death or be 
 otherwise punished at the discretion of the court." Yet toward the end of the 
 war Jefferson Davis himself advised the Southerners to enroll their slaves "as an 
 alternative to subjugation." General Lee approved the plan, believing that 
 the negroes could be made "efficient soldiers," and on March 13, 1865, an act of 
 the Confederate Congress provided for the "enlistment of colored people." The 
 war ended before there were actually any negro regiments in the Southern armies. 
 
 2 The autumn of 1862 was the period of the brightest hopes of the South. 
 It was in the very month of the Proclamation that the great triple offensive 
 was launched by the Confederate armies (see page 571). 
 
 3 A clause in the document read, "The executive government of the United 
 States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 597 
 
 Lincoln that the Proclamation " would cost the administration 
 the autumn elections." As a matter of fact, the Democrats did 
 carry the important states of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, 
 Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, all of which had gone for 
 Lincoln in 1860, and gained 32 seats in the House of Represent- 
 atives. A narrow majority in Congress was saved for the admin- 
 istration only by the return of a solid Republican delegation 
 from Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, where the voting was 
 conducted under the supervision of Federal troops. But it is 
 impossible, as is generally the case in American elections, to say 
 how far the result was due to a single issue. There were causes 
 enough for a Republican reverse at the polls in the autumn of 
 1862 besides the Emancipation Proclamation: military arrests, 
 the suppression of free speech, the suspension of the writ of 
 Habeas Corpus, the failure of McClellan in the Peninsular cam- 
 paign, the withdrawal of Lee's army intact from Maryland and 
 of Bragg's from Kentucky. 1 
 
 The first step in the process which was to make the abolition 
 of slavery final and legal was taken on December 14, 1863, when 
 the fortunes of the North had been repaired by the victories 
 of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Representative 
 Ashley of Ohio introduced into the House a Thirteenth Amend- 
 ment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery within the United 
 States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. A test vote in 
 the House failed to secure the two thirds necessary for adoption, 
 and the matter rested there until the next meeting of Congress, 
 in December, 1864. Farragut had captured the forts of Mobile 
 Bay, Lincoln had been triumphantly reflected, and Sherman 
 had completed his famous march to the sea by the occupation 
 
 maintain the freedom of such persons [slaves] ... in any efforts they may 
 make for their actual freedom." The London Saturday Review, violently pro- 
 Southern, said, "The American law-giver not only confiscates his neighbors' 
 slaves, but orders those slaves to cut their masters' throats." 
 
 1 Indeed, it was the opinion of men like Grimes of Iowa and Sumner of 
 Massachusetts that the Emancipation Proclamation had actually saved the ad- 
 ministration from defeat in the elections of 1862. "We made the Proclamation 
 an issue," wrote Grimes to Chase, "and carried the state (Iowa) by bringing 
 the radical electorate up to the polls," 
 
598 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 of Savannah when the momentous measure came before the 
 House for the final roll call, on the afternoon of January 31, 
 1865. The yeas were 119, the nays 56. When the vote was 
 announced the members rose from their seats cheering wildly, 
 while the crowded galleries answered with equally jubilant de- 
 fiance of parliamentary rules. In honor of the great event the 
 House immediately adjourned. The Thirteenth Amendment 
 was ratified during the year by the legislatures of three fourths 
 of the states and proclaimed in force in December. The cancer 
 which for generations had been feeding on the strength of the 
 Republic and for more than a decade threatening the life of the 
 Union was finally removed by the dreadful surgery of civil war. 
 Both President Lincoln and President Davis had to endure 
 a vast amount of opposition from their own sections dur- 
 ing the Civil War. Lincoln's deliberation was interpreted as 
 vacillation, his poise as baffled confusion, and his silence as a 
 confession of political and military bankruptcy. In the same 
 breath he was ridiculed as a " Simple Susan" and denounced 
 as a "tyrant." The strict constitutionalist was offended by his 
 assumption of "despotic" power in suspending the writ of Ha- 
 beas Corpus and making military arrests. The men who were 
 more concerned for the preservation of their personal liberty 
 than for the preservation of the Union resented the arbitrary 
 proclamations interfering with the freedom of speech and ac- 
 tion. 1 The extreme abolitionists thought that the South, cursed 
 with slavery, was not worth keeping in the Union espe- 
 cially at the cost of rivers of blood and unlimited treasure. The 
 more moderate abolitionists scolded Lincoln for repudiating the 
 proclamations of Fremont and Hunter and for not making 
 the war from the beginning a crusade against slavery. 2 The 
 
 1 Especially the drastic proclamation of September 24, 1862, subjecting to mil- 
 itary arrest, imprisonment without bail or privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus, 
 and trial by court-martial of all persons "discouraging volunteer enlistments, 
 resisting military drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, or affording any aid 
 and comfort to rebels against the United States." 
 
 2 Horace Greeley's editorial entitled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," in 
 the New York Tribune of August 20, 1862, was the most conspicuous example 
 of the pressure brought to bear on Lincoln to declare immediate emancipation. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 599 
 
 Copperheads, like the secessionists, protested against the "coer- 
 cion" and " subjugation" of " sovereign states." The slacker re- 
 sented the Conscription Act of March 3, 1863, and resisted the 
 draft. 1 
 
 Even Congress, which had loyally supported the President 
 since its ratification of his extraordinary war measures in the 
 summer of 1861, finally turned against him. Lincoln issued a 
 proclamation in December, 1863, looking toward the restora- 
 tion of the seceded states to their place in the Union. Whenever 
 10 per cent of the qualified voters of 1860 in any state should 
 take an oath of allegiance to the United States, accept the acts 
 of Congress and the proclamations of the President on the sub- 
 ject of slavery, and reestablish a state government, he would 
 recognize that government as a true state. 2 The radical Repub- 
 licans and the Democrats, under the lead of Henry Winter 
 Davis of Maryland in the House and Benjamin Wade of Ohio 
 in the Senate, opposed Lincoln's plan as too lenient to the South 
 and a usurpation of power by the executive. They got a bill 
 through Congress declaring that the seceded states were out of 
 the Union and requiring a clear majority of the voters of any 
 state to take the oath of allegiance before its reconstruction 
 could begin. For readmission into the Union a state must 
 accept the abolition of slavery, repudiate its debt incurred in the 
 
 Lincoln patiently replied: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the 
 Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the 
 Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; and if I could save it by free- 
 ing all the slaves, I would do it. ... What I do about slavery and the colored 
 race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ; and what I forbear, I 
 forbear because I believe it would not help to save the Union." 
 
 a A severe draft riot occurred in New York in July, 1863, in which over a 
 thousand persons lost their lives, and which was quelled only after four days of 
 horror, by an order from the provost marshal suspending the draft in New 
 York and Brooklyn and by the return of the militia regiments from Gettysburg. 
 A chief cause of the riot was the hostility between the immigrant laborers and 
 the colored men of New York. The Irish resented the employment of negroes 
 as strike-breakers and refused to be drafted into a war to fight for "niggers." 
 
 2 This was limited, of course, to executive recognition. Lincoln had no power 
 to assure representatives and senators from the restored "states" seats in Con- 
 gress, each House being the judge, by the Constitution, of the qualifications of 
 its own members. 
 
6oo THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 support of the Confederacy, and exclude certain classes of 
 people from holding office. The Da vis- Wade Bill was submit- 
 ted to the President for his signature on the very day (July 4, 
 1864) that Congress was to adjourn. Unwilling to accept the 
 doctrine that the seceded states were out of the Union, or to 
 adopt as yet any single rigid scheme for their' reconstruction, or 
 to see the work already begun in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Ten- 
 nessee under his 10 per cent plan undone, Lincoln withheld his 
 signature from the Davis-Wade Bill. 1 The authors replied by a 
 fierce attack on the President in the New York Tribune, accus- 
 ing him of a "studied outrage on the legislative authority of the 
 people" at the dictation of personal ambition and warning him 
 that "if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his 
 executive duties to obey and execute and not to make the laws 
 to suppress by arms armed rebellion, and leave political reor- 
 ganization to Congress." It is little wonder that under the 
 burden of political opposition and personal detraction greater 
 than that borne by any other president since the days of George 
 Washington the lines in Abraham Lincoln's face deepened into 
 furrows and the genial smile faded from his lips and eyes. 
 
 Jefferson Davis had perhaps even a harder burden to bear. 
 At least, he lacked the qualities of his Northern rival which 
 alleviated the burden. In the place of Lincoln's physical robust- 
 ness he had a nervous, delicate, high-strung constitution. His 
 wife wrote that again and again he came home from his office 
 tormented by a racking headache and apparently on the verge 
 of a complete mental collapse. His mind was rigid, lacking that 
 great flexibility of judgment and willingness to be persuaded 
 which were so conspicuous in Lincoln's mental temper. He was 
 not charitable of opposition, and, above all, he entirely lacked 
 the saving grace of humor, which in Lincoln's large mind was 
 
 a As the president has ten days for the consideration of any bill passed by 
 Congress, he can defeat a bill handed to him within ten days of adjournment 
 simply by putting it in his pocket. The "pocket veto" of the Davis-Wade Bill 
 was important as the first gun in a long and bitter battle between the president 
 and Congress over their respective spheres of authority in dealing with the 
 reconstruction of the seceded states. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 601 
 
 the solvent of a thousand cares and worries. The exigencies of 
 war compelled Davis to be as "autocratic" as Lincoln, but the 
 temper and tradition of the South were far less favorable to 
 executive centralization. It was only as a "nation" that the 
 South could fight the war with any hope of success, yet the in- 
 veterate states '-rights pretensions constantly stood in the way 
 of Southern nationalism. Nothing could exceed the fidelity of 
 the men and officers in the field and the self-sacrificing devotion 
 of the women at home to the Southern cause, but the political 
 opposition to President Davis's conduct of the war, in the press, 
 the Congress, and the state governments, was constant and 
 bitter. Editors of influential papers called him "an incubus" 
 and spoke of him as directing the war "from his cushioned seat 
 in Richmond." His vice president, Stephens, characterized him 
 as "a man of good intentions, weak, vacillating, timid, petulant, 
 peevish, obstinate, and aiming at absolute power." A Virginia 
 newspaper friendly to the administration begged the opposition 
 press to stop complaining of "imaginary violations of the Con- 
 stitution" and to hold up the president's hands; for "only 
 when our independence is achieved, established, and acknowl- 
 edged," it said, "will the sovereignty of the states be a reality." 1 
 Governors of states, especially the original states of the sea- 
 board, resisted the acts of Congress for the conscription of men, 
 the impressment of food, the suspension of the writ of Habeas 
 Corpus, the control of the militia, and the regulation of their ex- 
 ports and imports, as an invasion of their sphere of authority. 
 The convention of South Carolina proposed to allow no recruit- 
 ment of soldiers within the state except with the consent of the 
 legislature. The impetuous Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia 
 denounced the Conscription Act as "unconstitutional" and 
 scolded the administration after the fall of Atlanta for "leaving 
 Georgia to her fate." He threatened the Secretary of War, 
 Seddon, that he would call all the sons of Georgia to "return to 
 their state and rally round her glorious flag." He was ready to 
 fight both the Union and the Confederacy if they did not stop 
 
 1 General Lee, with unwonted sarcasm, remarked that "the mistake of the 
 South was in making all its best military officers editors of newspapers." 
 
602 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 invading the sovereign rights of Georgia. Governor Vance of 
 North Carolina, a precisionist and an obstructionist, carried on 
 an acrimonious and interminable correspondence with the au- 
 thorities at Richmond, objecting to every measure of Congress 
 or the executive that was designed to help win the war. He freed 
 military prisoners by the defiant issue of the writ of Habeas 
 Corpus, ignored the orders from Richmond for the control of 
 commerce and the requisition of produce, threatened at one 
 time to raise militia to drive the regular troops out of a part of 
 his state, and gave his belated support wholly to the Southern 
 cause only toward the close of the war, when he was confronted 
 with the dilemma of choosing between the peace party, who 
 were willing to " secede from secession," and the war party, 
 who stood for Southern independence. Vance seemed incapable 
 of realizing that it was impossible for the South to wage the war 
 with the remotest prospect of success if the sovereign rights 
 of the states were to remain unimpaired. Compared with the 
 behavior of Brown and Vance the opposition of Governor Sey- 
 mour of New York to Lincoln was mild. In no state of the 
 secession did Davis have the cordial and enthusiastic support 
 that was given to Lincoln by war governors like Andrew of 
 Massachusetts, Morton of Indiana, Yates of Illinois, Dennison, 
 Tod, and Brough of Ohio, Randall of Wisconsin, Sprague of 
 Rhode Island, and Cur tin of Pennsylvania. 
 
 After Cameron's removal from the War Department at the 
 beginning of 1862, no member of Lincoln's cabinet was seriously 
 antagonized by Congress until political opposition to the Blairs 
 caused the resignation of the Postmaster-General, in Septem- 
 ber, 1864. But the legislature at Richmond was constantly har- 
 assing President Davis's secretaries and forcing changes in the 
 cabinet. The special objects of criticism were C. C. Memminger 
 of the Treasury and the brilliant Judah P. Benjamin, "the 
 ablest, most versatile, and most constant of all Davis's civil coun- 
 sellors," who occupied successively the positions of Attorney- 
 General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, and whom 
 Davis, in spite of the most bitter attacks from Congress, stead- 
 fastly refused to dismiss. At the beginning of 1865 a delegation 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 603 
 
 from Congress waited on President Davis with the request that 
 all the members of the cabinet except Secretary Trenholm (who 
 had succeeded Memminger in the Treasury) be asked to resign; 
 and at the same time there were rumors of a cabal in Congress 
 (like the Conway Cabal in the Revolutionary War) to set aside 
 Davis himself and offer a dictatorship to General Lee. 
 
 Notwithstanding all this opposition to the " tyranny" of Jef- 
 ferson Davis, the Confederate administration was, on the whole, 
 more observant of constitutional limitations than was the Fed- 
 eral government. Lincoln was authorized by the act of March 3, 
 1863, to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wher- 
 ever he pleased ; but the Confederate Congress, in spite of the 
 fact that the invading armies were encamped on the soil of 
 the South, never gave President Davis this blanket authority. 
 The writ was suspended in the South only for limited periods be- 
 tween the spring of 1862 and the summer of 1864, and military 
 arrests were allowed only for " treason, conspiracy, desertion, 
 and communicating intelligence to or trading unlawfully with 
 the enemy." 1 The Confederate Congress never made its paper 
 money (Treasury notes) legal tender, as the North did the 
 "greenbacks"; it never created a national banking-system to 
 float and support its bonds, as Secretary Chase did (see 
 page 607) ; it never organized a Supreme Court, as it was di- 
 rected to do by the Constitution, "in view," says Schwab, "of 
 the particularistic feeling which such an enlargement of the 
 central authority would have necessarily stimulated." 2 
 
 Turning now from the strictly political to the politico- 
 economic aspects of the two sections, we note first the striking 
 difference in the methods of the North and of the South in pro- 
 viding the enormous sums of money needed to finance the war. 
 The North was a highly developed industrial and agricultural 
 country, with large amounts of money in circulation and on de- 
 posit in the banks, thus offering the government a fair field for 
 loans and taxes. Except in a few centers, like New Orleans, 
 
 1 Compare the drastic proclamation of Lincoln's of September 24, 1862 
 (page 598, n. i). 
 
 2 J. C. Schwab, "The Confederate States of America," p. 220. 
 
604 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Charleston, and Richmond, the South had scant supplies of fluid 
 capital. Its wealth was in the cotton crop, and the eventual 
 marketing of that crop was the resource on which the entire 
 fiscal policy of the Confederacy was based. Though the North 
 issued about $450,000,000 of greenbacks, or non-interest-bearing 
 Treasury notes, these notes were hardly more than one fifth of 
 the regular bonded loans, with interest payable in coin ; and after 
 the machinery of taxation in customs duties, internal revenue, 
 and income taxes got to working, the amounts received from 
 these sources more than equaled the issues of paper money. 
 
 The South, on the other hand, became committed early in 
 the war to the issue of Treasury notes and never realized more 
 than trifling amounts of specie from taxation or loans. Just 
 what volume of non-interest-bearing notes the Confederate 
 government issued is not known, but conservative scholars esti- 
 mate it at no less than $1,000,000,000. For example, in the 
 first nine months of the year 1863 the receipts of the Con- 
 federate Treasury were $600,000,000, of which only $5,000,000, 
 or less than i per cent, were from taxes, $153,000,000 (25 per 
 cent) from the sale of bonds, and $442,000,000 (74 per cent) 
 in notes. Although the Confederate government did not make 
 the notes legal tender, 1 it still found itself obliged, by their 
 rapid depreciation, to resort to partial repudiation. In February, 
 1864, when the paper dollar was worth only 6 cents, the holders 
 of the notes were given the option of converting them into 4 per 
 cent bonds or accepting a new standard of value, in which three 
 of the old dollars were equal to two of the new. This act gave 
 the finishing stroke to Confederate credit. Secretary Trenholm 
 wrote to Governor Bonham of South Carolina in August, 1864, 
 "Apprehensions of ultimate repudiation crept like an all- 
 pervading poison into the minds of the people, and greatly 
 diminished the purchasing power of the notes." 
 
 of the state governments, however, compelled creditors to receive the 
 notes, and public opinion was exerted in various ways to coerce those who re- 
 fused them. The legislature of Florida passed an act in 1863 providing that 
 anyone who was exempt from military service should be put into the ranks 
 immediately if he refused to accept the Treasury notes. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 605 
 
 The North was slower than the South in making provision 
 for the war. Long before the extra session of Congress met at 
 Washington, July 4, 1861, the provisional Congress at Mont- 
 gomery had seized the money in the mints of the South and 
 secured nearly half the available specie in the Southern banks 
 by a $15,000,000 loan at 8 per cent, the interest on which was 
 guaranteed by an export duty of one eighth of a cent a pound 
 on cotton. In March it had issued the first $1,000,000 of 
 Treasury notes and in May provided for a loan of $50,000,000 
 (later increased to $150,000,000) in twenty-year bonds, for 
 which cotton and produce were receivable. The Federal Con- 
 gress in July authorized Secretary Chase to borrow$2 50,000,000, 
 increased the tariff, and levied a direct tax of $20,000,000 on the 
 states and an income tax of 3 per cent on incomes above $800. 
 By an appeal to the New York bankers Chase secured a loan 
 of $150,000,000 in August, but the opening of the year 1862 
 found the Federal government in debt $100,000,000, with an 
 estimated need of $250,000,000 to .$300,000,000 more before 
 the end of June. The people of the North were able and willing, 
 as the event proved, to bear heavy taxation, but it would be at 
 least a year before the new tax schedules would yield their 
 revenue to the Treasury, and meanwhile the need for money 
 was pressing. "We must have at least $100,000,000 during the 
 next three months," said Spaulding in the House, "or the 
 government must stop payment." 
 
 Under these circumstances, and in spite of great opposition 
 from bankers and economists, Congress resorted to that most 
 tempting, dangerous, and ultimately most expensive method 
 of procuring funds; namely, the creation of an unsupported 
 paper currency. An act of February 25, 1862, authorized the 
 issue of $150,000,000 non-interest-bearing Treasury notes, 
 which were to be legal tender, receivable for all debts and public 
 dues except duties on imports. On the same day Congress voted 
 an issue of $500,000,000 in 6 per cent bonds, due in twenty 
 years but redeemable at the pleasure of the government after 
 five years. These bonds were called the "five-twenties." The 
 Treasury notes, or greenbacks, were convertible into the five- 
 
606 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 twenties, and it was hoped that they would be rapidly turned 
 into the Treasury in payment for the bonds. A new tax bill fol- 
 lowed on July i, imposing taxes on almost every product of in- 
 dustry and process of exchange. 1 On July 14 the tariff was 
 raised. 
 
 The greenbacks, aside from being of doubtful constitution- 
 ality, 2 were a source of injustice, since they furnished debtors 
 with a currency for paying their debts cheaper than that in 
 which the debts had been contracted. Moreover, the easy ex- 
 pedient of printing paper and endowing it with the quality of 
 "money" by fiat proved (as it always has in history) too strong 
 a temptation to a government in urgent need of funds. What 
 was intended as a temporary stimulant became a regular diet. 
 By successive issues the volume of greenbacks was raised to 
 $449,338,902 in 1864. The inevitable result was an inflation 
 of prices and speculation in specie. Gold stood at 172 in Feb- 
 ruary, 1863, and rose to 285 in July, 1864, when General Early 
 was threatening the defenses of Washington. The government 
 thought that it would be more profitable to issue greenbacks 
 than to sell its bonds for what they would bring in the market 
 (estimated at 60) ; but it actually lost hundreds of millions by 
 this policy. 3 For with gold at 2 85 the government was receiving 
 for its bonds paper dollars worth only 35 cents and was paying 
 in coin 1 7 per cent on its 6 per cent bonds. 
 
 At the opening of 1863 the Federal government was in a bad 
 way financially. The debt was nearing $1,000,000,000, and the 
 expenses were $2,500,000 a day. The arrears of pay to the 
 soldiers and sailors were $60,000,000. Gold was at a premium 
 
 1 These taxes, growing with business, brought to the Treasury the immense 
 sum of $311,000,000 during the year 1866. 
 
 2 The Constitution (Art. I, sect. 10, par. i) forbids the states to make any- 
 thing but gold and silver legal tender, and it was argued that the national 
 government could not, or should not, commit an economic injustice which it 
 had forbidden to the states. In a case in the Supreme Court, five years after 
 the war, Chase himself, then Chief Justice, pronounced against the constitution- 
 ality of the greenbacks. 
 
 3 It also bequeathed the country the "greenback problem" in currency leg- 
 islation, which was not settled until fifteen years after the war. 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 607 
 
 of 72. The bonds were not selling, and the failure of the Army 
 of the Potomac to take Richmond had brought widespread dis- 
 couragement. At this critical time Secretary Chase executed 
 the most successful financial measure of the war in the creation 
 of the national banking-system. On February 25, 1863, an act 
 of Congress provided that any group of not fewer than five per- 
 sons, furnishing a capital of $100,000 in cities of over 10,000 
 inhabitants and of $50,000 in smaller centers, might organize a 
 banking-association. They must purchase United States bonds 
 to the amount of at least one third of their paid-up capital, and 
 in return they should receive from the Comptroller of the Cur- 
 rency notes equal to 90 per cent of the market value of the 
 bonds. These "bank notes" were a true national currency, 
 receivable for all dues to the United States (except customs 
 duties, which must be in coin for the payment of the interest 
 on the bonds) and protected from the fluctuations of the state- 
 bank currency by the credit of the United States bonds behind 
 them. By an act of March 3, 1865, a tax of 10 per cent was 
 imposed on the notes of the state banks, driving them out of 
 circulation. They had been a source of confusion and em- 
 barrassment in our currency since the formation of the govern- 
 ment, and their replacement by a national currency was one of 
 the most beneficent results of the Civil War. 1 
 
 The National Bank Act was a blessing in every way. Besides 
 creating a stable and reliable 2 national currency it opened an 
 eager market for the sale of the government's bonds. $300,- 
 000,000 of greenbacks came into the Treasury in exchange for 
 them. The bankers, in addition to receiving the interest on the 
 bonds deposited with the Comptroller, enjoyed the profits from 
 
 1 In 1861 there were nine hundred state banks issuing notes without a specie 
 basis. According to the Bankers' Magazine of January, 1863, $170,000,000 of 
 the $202,000,000 of state-bank notes then in circulation had either no security 
 or very bad security behind them. Various bankers' associations had tried in 
 vain to cope with the situation, by refusing to accept the issues of banks which 
 did not comply with certain rules. 
 
 2 The notes of the state banks were subject to all kinds of fluctuations and 
 were so easily counterfeited that a manual called the Bank Detector was an 
 indispensable equipment for every cashier. 
 
6o8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 the loan of the bank notes; and the business interests of the 
 country at large, through the multifarious transactions of credit 
 and discount, were enlisted in the support of the government 
 securities which lay behind their currency. It was an ingenious 
 device for distributing the burden of the debt through the com- 
 munity without the sinister features of a forced loan or currency 
 inflation, which characterized the issue of the greenbacks. And 
 the national-bank system served the country well until the 
 twentieth century, when the bonded indebtedness of the United 
 States became too narrow a basis for the support of a currency 
 adequate to the increasing volume of business. 1 Three months 
 after the act the condition of the Treasury was greatly improved. 
 The victories of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga fur- 
 ther strengthened the public credit, and in his annual message 
 of December, 1863, President Lincoln could announce, with 
 other cheering news, that "all demands on the Treasury" had 
 been "promptly met and fully satisfied," and that "by no people 
 were the burdens incident to a great war ever more cheerfully 
 borne." There was discouragement enough, and political dis- 
 affection to follow in 1864, but national bankruptcy was not 
 among the worries. 
 
 The financial condition of the South, on the other hand, grew 
 steadily worse after the spring of 1863. When the $20,000,000 
 or so of specie obtained at the beginning of the war 2 had been 
 exhausted by the purchase of supplies and munitions abroad, the 
 Confederate government found it impossible to get money. The 
 flood of Treasury notes sent prices soaring, and as expenses in- 
 creased, the only way of meeting them was by new issues of 
 notes making a vicious financial circle. The Confederate paper 
 dollar was worth only 33 cents in gold at the beginning of 1863. 
 After Gettysburg and Vicksburg it sank to 10 cents, after Chat- 
 tanooga to 5 cents, and at the close of the war to 1.6 cents. 
 Flour sold at $1000 a barrel, shoes at $200 a pair, coffee at 
 
 1 The remedy was found in the Owen-Glass Act, of 1913, which established 
 the Federal Reserve banking-system. 
 
 2 This had been secured through the seizure of the money in the mints and 
 from the $15,000,000 loan, which took most of the available specie in the banks. 
 

 THE CIVIL WAR 609 
 
 $40 a pound, and wood at $5 a stick. When the farmers refused 
 to sell their produce for the depreciated notes, the government 
 commandeered it by impressment. But the process was waste- 
 ful and inefficient. Supplies of beef, bacon, flour, and cotton 
 were accumulated at points whence they could not be dis- 
 tributed for lack of an adequate transportation system, or were 
 destroyed before the advance of the Federal armies or sold by 
 dishonest agents. The fever of speculation raged. Everybody 
 was anxious to convert the sinking notes into commodities be- 
 fore they sank still further. A national banking-system like 
 that of the North, although discussed, was impossible, for there 
 was no stability in the bonds on which it must necessarily have 
 rested. Even the best of the bond issues (the $15,000,000 loan, 
 secured by the duty on cotton exports), which stood at 90 in 
 the spring of 1862, dropped to 40 before the end of the year, as 
 the blockade shut off the cotton trade, and were quoted at 5 
 and under in 1864. 
 
 The most promising attempt of the Confederate government 
 to secure specie from abroad was the Erlanger loan. Early in 
 1863, when the military hopes^of the South were high, Secretary 
 Memminger arranged with Emile Erlanger, a Paris banker, 
 for floating in Europe a loan of $15,000,000, bearing 7 per cent 
 interest, the principal payable in New Orleans cotton at 1 2 cents 
 a pound, within six months after the conclusion of peace. As 
 cotton had advanced in England from 14 cents a pound in May, 
 1861, to 44 cents in December, 1862, the loan offered roseate 
 promises of profit -provided the South could get the cotton to 
 Europe. 1 Erlanger took the bonds at 77 and sold them readily 
 in England at 95^, the loan being oversubscribed in London 
 threefold in two days. But with the improvement in the Federal 
 finances the Erlanger bonds began to drop. The Confederate 
 
 !At the time of the loan the Confederate government had on hand over 
 350,000 bales of cotton, obtained from the produce loan and impressment, which 
 at 12 cents a pound would have far more than covered the Erlanger loan. But the 
 inexorable Federal blockade kept the cotton from the market. Of all the 430,000 
 bales which the government secured during the war, less than 20,000, or 5 per 
 cent, got through the blockade. 
 
6io THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 government spent $6,000,000 of the proceeds in "bulling" the 
 London markejt, buying back the bonds at 90 to keep the price 
 up. But it was in vain. Gettysburg and Vicksburg sent them 
 down to 65 ; Chattanooga, to 37. They recovered with the re- 
 newal of Confederate hopes in 1864, and on McClelland nomi- 
 nation for the presidency on a platform which promised peace 
 they reached 84; but they quickly fell off again, and became 
 worthless with the triumph of the Union arms in 1865. The 
 bondholders lost $i 0,000,000.* The Confederate government, 
 after deducting the discounts and commissions to Erlanger 
 and the money spent in bulling the market, realized only 
 $6,250,000.* Only Erlanger profited by the transaction, clear- 
 ing up some $2,500,000 on the deal. 
 
 In the Civil War, as in all wars, "the instincts of trade con- 
 flicted with the instincts of patriotism." The extremity of the 
 government was the opportunity of the profiteer. Huge profits 
 were made by selling supplies (often of inferior quality) to the 
 government and by speculating in the fluctuating values of all 
 commodities. The high price of cotton in the North offered 
 temptations to the planter that could not be resisted. Politi- 
 cians, officials of the government, and even generals in the field 
 speculated in cotton. Northern currency was quoted on the 
 Richmond exchange and freely circulated in the South at the 
 close of the war in spite of laws against it. The economic con- 
 dition of the Confederacy can be summed up in a word : the 
 blockade isolated the South, which was not sufficiently de- 
 veloped in manufactures, transportation, banking, or capital 
 accumulations to take care of itself. The blockade starved 
 the South into surrender. None of the Northern victories, 
 except Vicksburg and Nashville, wiped out Southern armies; 
 but the steady pressure of the blockade reduced the whole 
 
 1 From time to time for twenty years after the close of the war the English 
 bondholders entertained hopes of recovering some of their lost fortunes, even 
 though the Confederate debt was repudiated by the Fourteenth Amendment. 
 
 2 Schwab estimates that this $6,250,000, with the $15,000,000 loan of 1861 and 
 the $5,500,000 from customs and the mints, a total of about $27,000,000, 
 "constituted the entire specie revenue of the Confederacy during its four years 
 existence" (J. C. Schwab, "The Confederate State of America," p. 42). 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 611 
 
 South to a degree of destitution which made the further support 
 of armies impossible. 
 
 The North, on the other hand, after a temporary economic 
 embarrassment caused by the actual shock of war, the loss of the 
 Southern markets, the confiscation of the $200,000,000 owed 
 to the North by the Southern planters and merchants, the drain 
 of specie from the banks, and the disappearance of a metallic 
 currency, 1 entered with the year 1863 on a period of industrial 
 prosperity which continued increasingly through the war. Pro- 
 fessor Fite, in his " Social and Industrial Conditions in the 
 North during the Civil War," has presented a bewildering array 
 of statistics to show the progress in agriculture, manufactures, 
 commerce, transportation, public works, education, and chari- 
 ties in these four years. The unprecedented demand of the 
 government for supplies of all kinds, munitions, horses, 
 wagons, blankets, shoes, clothing, and food, the enlarged 
 European market for our grain and beef, and the issue of an 
 abundant national currency all stimulated industry and sent 
 prices soaring. Millionaires began to abound, and, while luxury 
 and extravagance ran riot, contributions to charities and endow- 
 ments were never more generous. The Sanitary Commission, 
 the Christian Commission, Ladies' Aid Societies, and numerous 
 other associations for the relief of the soldiers and their families 
 were the precursors of the Red Cross, 2 the "Y's", the Knights 
 of Columbus, and other relief agencies of the great World War. 
 The Sanitary Commission alone spent about $25,000,000 for 
 the care and comfort of soldiers in the field and in soldiers' 
 
 banks suspended specie payments at the close of 1861, and not only 
 gold but silver began to be an object of speculation. Silver coins disappeared 
 from circulation, and their place was taken by postage stamps and "shin- 
 plasters" or tokens of indebtedness issued by tradesmen, hotel and restaurant 
 keepers, business concerns, and shopkeepers. By an act of July, 1862, Congress 
 prohibited the use of shinplasters, and later substituted for the inconvenient, 
 sticky postage stamps a varicolored "scrip" of small notes ranging in value 
 from 3 to 50 cents. This paper "fractional currency" was not replaced by coins 
 for more than a decade after the war. 
 
 2 The Red Cross was organized, at Geneva, in 1863, but not joined by the 
 United States until after the Civil War. 
 
612 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 homes. The women, both North and South, were tireless in 
 their devotion to works of mercy, though the women of the 
 South were called upon to endure a greater burden of self- 
 sacrifice and sorrow than their more fortunate sisters of the 
 North. 1 
 
 The war brought important developments in the relations of 
 capital and labor. It hastened the tendency, visible in the dec- 
 ade of the fifties, toward the consolidation of capital. In the 
 first place, the needs of the government encouraged business 
 on a large scale. The enormous currency issues and the huge 
 profits furnished abundant capital for investment. Rising prices 
 called for the reduction of expense in management and over- 
 head charges. The multiplicity of taxes on products in every 
 stage of manufacture made the combination of as many indus- 
 trial processes as possible in a single establishment profitable. 2 
 And, finally, the combinations of manufacturers into powerful 
 associations enabled them to exert an influence on the govern- 
 ment in its tariff legislation. These factors all worked against 
 the small manufacturer, breaking up that "self-reliant local- 
 ism" in industry which had prevailed generally before the war. 
 
 The lion's share of the benefits of the new industry went to 
 the capitalists. Prices and profits increased far more rapidly 
 than wages, the estimated ratio for the whole period of the 
 war being about 100 to 55. Those who felt the pinch of high 
 prices most were the classes without organization for exerting 
 pressure on the economic world, the unskilled laborers and the 
 poor seamstresses, or people living on fixed salaries, like clerks, 
 
 1 Speaking at one of the great fairs of the Sanitary Commission at Wash- 
 ington in 1864, President Lincoln said: "I am not accustomed to the language 
 of eulogy; I have not studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I 
 must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of 
 the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would 
 not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, 
 God bless the women of America ! " 
 
 ' 2 Fite cites the example of the textile industry. There was a tax of 2 cents 
 a pound on the sale of raw cotton, 6 cents a pound on the yarn, 6 per cent on 
 the woven product, 6 per cent on the dyed fabric. The firm which did its own 
 spinning, weaving, and dyeing avoided all these taxes but the last (E. D. Fite, 
 "Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War," p. 166). 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 613 
 
 clergymen, school-teachers, and college professors. 1 Before the 
 war there were very few labor unions in the country, and 
 those were limited in location and meager in membership. "In 
 general," says Fite, "labor was contented when the war came 
 and little need of united action was felt." 2 But with the sharp 
 rise in prices and the tightening of capitalistic control, labor 
 began rapidly to organize. Painters, plasterers, carpenters, 
 hat-makers, bricklayers, masons, tailors, telegraphers, engi- 
 neers, cigar-makers, and a score of other trades were unionized. 
 Nearly fifty new unions were represented at a meeting in New 
 York near the close of 1863. Indeed, the modern problems of 
 American labor the strike, the boycott, the lockout, the 
 "scab," picketing, collective bargaining, arbitration may al- 
 most be said to have originated in the sharp bifurcation of 
 capital and labor during the Civil War. 
 
 This concentration of industrial life was simply one aspect 
 of the general centralizing tendency of the war. Our country 
 was first welded into a true Union in the fierce fires of that 
 ordeal. The national state replaced the federation of states. 
 The war was not only the triumph of the North over the South, 
 of freedom over slavery it was also the triumph of nationalism 
 over states' rights, of Webster over Calhoun. Besides creating 
 a national currency, a national bankings-system, a national army, 
 and national taxes, the war extended and enhanced the power of 
 the central government in a score of ways. All the jealous re- 
 strictions of a former generation were broken through. Congress 
 assessed a direct tax upon the states, raised a national mili- 
 tia within their borders, cut off the western counties of Vir- 
 ginia and admitted them as a new state to the Union, exercised 
 full sovereignty in all the territories, gave homesteads to West- 
 
 1 For example, women in New York City, in 1864, working fourteen hours 
 a day making underwear earned less than $1.50 a week. Eight hundred school- 
 teachers in Philadelphia received 80 cents a day less than a washerwoman's 
 wages. 
 
 2 "Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War," p. 204. 
 The London Times of December i, 1863, said, "If ever there was a country in 
 which labor was in clover, in which it was petted and humored, it certainly 
 was this North American community." 
 
6i4 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 ern farmers, endowed colleges in all the states for the promotion 
 of agriculture and the mechanical arts, made large grants of land 
 to a Pacific railroad and underwrote its bonds. The National 
 Republicans of 1825, a John Quincy Adams or a Henry Clay, 
 would have stood aghast at the nationalism of the Republicans 
 of 1865. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, he 
 stood before "blocks of marble and piles of iron castings" of 
 an unfinished Capitol. During the war the House and Senate 
 wings were completed and the building was crowned with its 
 majestic dome. The finished Capitol was the symbol of the 
 achievement of the national state. Had the South won its in- 
 dependence it is not probable that it could any more have main- 
 tained the contradiction of a "nation" of "sovereign states" 
 than could our government in the days of the Confederation. 1 
 
 It remains to speak briefly of our foreign relations during the 
 war. The governments of Europe, with two conspicuous ex- 
 ceptions, were favorable to the Union. Great Britain, still gov- 
 erned by an aristocracy which had not changed essentially since 
 the eighteenth century, and France, under the hypnotic influ- 
 ence of that prince of adventurers the emperor Napoleon III, 
 gave their official (and often officious) sympathy to the Con- 
 federacy. The governing class in England regarded the planter 
 aristocracy of the South as a higher social order than the as- 
 sertive, leveling democracy of the North, while the great mer- 
 cantile and industrial interests on which the power of the Whig 
 aristocracy was based resented the protective tariff and the 
 blockade of the cotton ports. Napoleon's animus against the 
 Union proceeded rather from a general jealousy of the power 
 of the great transatlantic republic and the desire to complete 
 his uncle's abandoned project of restoring the diminished in- 
 fluence of the Latin race in the Western Hemisphere. Napo- 
 
 1 Rhodes contrasts centralization North and South as follows: "The Federal 
 government may be called a dictatorship. Congress and the people surrendered 
 certain of their powers and rights to a trusted man. The Confederacy was a 
 grand socialized state, in which the government did everything. It levied directly 
 on the produce of the land and fixed prices. It managed the railroads, operated 
 manufacturing establishments, owned merchant vessels, and carried on foreign 
 commerce" ("History of the Civil War," p. 394). 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 615 
 
 Icon was far less scrupulous than the Queen's ministers in 
 observing the obligations of a neutral. He tried in vain to get 
 Great Britain and Russia to join him in forcing the United States 
 to agree to an armistice of six months. He encouraged the ex- 
 treme pro-Southern advocates in Parliament, like Roebuck. He 
 gave audiences to Jefferson Davis's special envoy, Slidell, per- 
 mitting him to have ships built for the Confederacy in Bordeaux 
 and Nantes, provided their destination were kept secret. He 
 was instrumental in floating the only considerable Confederate 
 loan in Europe (see page 609). And, finally, he defied the 
 Monroe Doctrine by erecting an empire in Mexico at the point 
 of French bayonets. But, on the whole, our contact with 
 France was so slight that we could permit Napoleon to continue 
 his persistent and ineffective meddling until the close of the 
 war, when we promptly extinguished his phantom empire in 
 Mexico. 
 
 Great Britain, on the other hand, was the one European 
 power with whom our relations had been continuous, intimate 
 and generally unfriendly. As mistress of the seas, as our chief 
 transatlantic customer, as our permanent neighbor on the north, 
 as the people bound to us by the ties of kinship, language, and 
 tradition, Great Britain could never be regarded with indiffer- 
 ence by the United States. We expected England to understand 
 us better, to judge us more fairly, to support our common ideals 
 of liberty more heartily, than did any other foreign nation. 1 But 
 
 solicitude appears constantly in public dispatches and private corre- 
 spondence, in lectures, sermons, essays, and poetry, during the war, sometimes 
 in the pathetic language of disillusionment, sometimes in accents of bitter 
 reproach. Lowell wrote in his second series of "Biglow Papers": 
 
 "We know we have a cause, John, 
 Thet's righteous, just, and true; 
 We thought 'twould win applause, John, 
 Ef nowheres else, from you." 
 
 The correspondence of Charles Sumner and John Bright is filled with this sen- 
 timent. Our minister to England, Charles Francis Adams, sums up the indict- 
 ment against Great Britain as follows: "That Great Britain did, in the most 
 terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil 
 she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to 
 
6i6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 from the very beginning of the war President Lincoln had noth- 
 ing but trouble with the Palmerston ministry. In the first 
 place, the Queen's proclamation recognized the Confederacy 
 as a belligerent power in May, 1861, before the South had won 
 a battle on land or sea and before the American minister had 
 arrived in London. There was no intention of offending the 
 United States in this action, as Lord John Russell, the Foreign 
 Minister, explained to Adams. It was only Great Britain's 
 way of announcing her strict neutrality. Moreover, Lincoln, 
 by his proclamation of a blockade a month before, had virtu- 
 ally recognized the South as a belligerent power. For all that, 
 England's action seemed like a premature expression of sym- 
 pathy for the Montgomery government, and it certainly gave 
 encouragement and standing to the Confederate agents who had 
 been sent abroad to purchase supplies and win the favor of the 
 European powers. 
 
 Toward the close of the year the resentment against Great 
 Britain found expression in a dramatic incident. Messrs. Mason 
 and Slidell, commissioners of the Confederate government to 
 England and France respectively, passed through the blockade 
 and on November 7 boarded the British mail steamer Trent 
 at Havana, bound for Liverpool. The next day the American 
 sloop-of-war San JacintOj Charles Wilkes captain, stopped the 
 Trent by a shot across her bows and forcibly removed the com- 
 missioners, carrying them to a fort in Boston Harbor. The 
 whole North rang with cheers for Captain Wilkes. He was 
 congratulated by Secretary Welles, feted by the merchants 
 of Boston, and complimented by Congress. Nevertheless, his 
 deed was a violation of the law of nations and of the very 
 principle which we had fought to maintain in the War of 1812 
 with Great Britain. When news of the Trent affair reached 
 England the ministry dispatched 800 troops to Canada and 
 instructed Lord Lyons, their representative at Washington, to 
 demand his passports if the prisoners were not released within 
 
 master it, and then become the only foreign nation [ ?] steadily contributing in 
 every way possible to verify its prejudgment" (James Schouler, "History of 
 the United States," Vol. VI, p. 116). 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 617 
 
 a week. But Secretary Seward and Charles Sumner, chairman 
 of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had already 
 convinced the administration, if not the country, of the injustice 
 of Wilkes's action. Seward replied to Lord Lyons on December 
 26 that Mason and Slidell would be "cheerfully liberated." 
 They were put on board an English steamer at Provincetown, 
 Massachusetts, and the incident was closed, much to the dis- 
 appointment of the South and of the "war-mongers" in Eng- 
 land, who were anxious to aid in the disruption of the Union. 
 Naturally, the Trent affair did not help to smooth the relations 
 of the United States with Great Britain. 
 
 But the most serious matter of controversy between the two 
 countries was the building of ships in British yards to prey 
 on the commerce of the United States. An act of Parliament of 
 1818 (the Foreign-Enlistment Act) forbade any subject of the 
 realm to "equip, furnish, fit out, or arm any ship to be employed 
 in the service of a foreign state, to commit hostilities against any 
 state at peace with Great Britain." James Bulloch of Georgia 
 (a maternal uncle of Theodore Roosevelt) had been sent to 
 England by the Confederate government to buy armed ships 
 to molest the commerce of the United States. He secured from 
 eminent English lawyers the opinion that it would be no in- 
 fringement of the Foreign-Enlistment Act to build ships in Great 
 Britain for any purpose, provided they were not "equipped" 
 there, or to equip and arm them anywhere outside the realm. 
 On the strength of this quibble he persuaded the shipbuilders 
 of the Clyde and the Mersey to set to work. The Oreto was 
 built by Laird and Sons at Birkenhead, ostensibly for the 
 Italian government, and sailed for Nassau in March, 1862, 
 where she was fitted out with her armament and, under the 
 name of the Florida, was run into Mobile Bay. The "290," 
 a much more powerful war vessel, was under construction at the 
 same yards when Adams called the attention of the ministry to 
 the breach of neutrality and asked that the vessel be detained. 
 While the Collector of the Customs, the Lords of the Admiralty, 
 the crown lawyers, and the Attorney-General were conducting 
 their ponderous campaign of cross reference over the case, the 
 
618 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 "290" was completed. She slipped out of Liverpool the day 
 before the orders for her detention came from the Solicitor- 
 General. Proceeding to the Azores, she received her heavy 
 armament and was delivered over to Captain Semmes of the 
 Confederate navy as the Alabama. 1 The Georgia was built on 
 the Clyde early in 1863 and armed on the French coast. The 
 Alexandra (named for the new Princess of Wales) was built 
 at Liverpool but held in port by the orders of the government. 
 After a long process in the courts the builders were acquitted 
 of breaking the Foreign-Enlistment Act. The vessel, however, 
 was not delivered to the Confederacy. Finally, Adams made 
 repeated, and as he feared fruitless, attempts to get Earl Russell 
 to detain two powerful ironclad rams which Bulloch had build- 
 ing with the Lairds at Birkenhead. On September 5, 1863, 
 Adams wrote to Russell in the language of an ultimatum, "It 
 would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that 
 this is war." But the ministry, instructed by the case of the 
 Alabama, and impressed by the victories of Gettysburg and 
 Vicksburg, had already given orders two days before to have 
 the rams detained. With this virtual confession of her un- 
 neutral conduct, Great Britain ceased to give aid and comfort 
 to the Confederacy. 
 
 The damage wrought by these commerce-destroyers was enor- 
 mous. The merchant fleet of the United States was practically 
 driven from the ocean. "The Georgia, on her second voyage," 
 said W. E. Forster in Parliament, "did not meet a single Ameri- 
 can vessel in six weeks, though she saw more than 70 vessels 
 in a few days." The Alabama alone destroyed more than 60 
 American merchant ships before she was sunk by the Kear- 
 sarge off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in a spectacular 
 battle, June 19, 1864. The Shenandoah was still roaming the 
 Pacific in search of her prey weeks after the war had ceased. 2 
 
 1 Jefferson Davis said later, "There was no secrecy about the building of 
 the Alabama." 
 
 2 The story of England's reparation for the damage done by these vessels, as 
 determined by the adjudication of the "Alabama claims" at Geneva, in 1872, 
 belongs to a later chapter. 
 

 THE CIVIL WAR 619 
 
 Napoleon's rash venture can be disposed of in a few words. 
 Mexico, enormously rich in undeveloped natural resource^ but 
 distracted by revolution and burdened with debt, had offered 
 a tempting field for foreign invasion ever since her independ- 
 ence from Spain. In the autumn of 1861 Great Britain, 
 France, and Spain agreed at London on a joint expedition to 
 Mexico to force the payment of her debts to them and the 
 better protection of their citizens. Great Britain and Spain 
 withdrew their fleets in the spring of 1862 ; but Napoleon de- 
 termined to overthrow the government of President Juarez and 
 set up a state to his own liking in Mexico. Under General 
 Forey and Marshal Bazaine 35,000 French soldiers fought 
 their way up to Mexico City, where Bazaine organized a "gov- 
 ernment" of subservient factionists, who formally offered the 
 crown of the "Mexican Empire" to Napoleon's candidate, the 
 Archduke Maximilian of Austria. That inoffensive and deb- 
 onair prince, in an evil hour for his own happiness, accepted 
 the precarious honor in an elaborate ceremony at his palace 
 of Miramar, on the Adriatic. In June, 1864, he arrived in 
 Mexico to rule his strange and unwilling subjects. 
 
 The government at Washington kept a watchful eye on all 
 these proceedings, although, much to the disappointment of the 
 South, it refused to be diverted by them from its main task of 
 winning the war. Seward warned Napoleon, in mildly remon- 
 strative dispatches, that Mexico must enjoy a government of 
 its own choice, and seemed willing for the time being to believe 
 Napoleon's protestations that that was just what he was trying 
 to give her. In spite of a belligerent resolution by the House, 1 
 in April, 1864, the administration held to its noncommittal 
 
 1 The resolution was proposed by Henry Winter Davis, whose opposition to 
 Lincoln's 10 per cent plan for the reconstruction of the Southern states we have 
 already studied (p. 599). It declared that "it does not accord with the policy 
 of the United States to acknowledge any monarchical government erected on 
 the ruins of any republican government in America, under the auspices of any 
 European power." The South, hoping that the United States and France would 
 become embroiled, taunted Seward for his "gingerly" handling of the Mexican 
 situation, accusing the administration of "arrant cowardice" for not vindicating 
 the Monroe Doctrine. 
 
620 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 course, refusing to be stampeded into a war with France. As 
 soon. as the Civil War was over, however, General Sheridan 
 was sent to the Texas border as a warning that the forbearance 
 of the United States respecting this flagrant violation of the 
 sovereignty of the Mexican Republic was at an end. The story 
 of the withdrawal of the French troops and the seizure and exe- 
 cution of the guileless puppet "Emperor" Maximilian belongs 
 to a later chapter. 
 
 On the fourteenth of April, 1865, the fourth anniversary of 
 the surrender of Fort Sumter, a great celebration was held in 
 Charleston. At high noon General Anderson raised above the 
 ruined walls of Sumter the same tattered flag that he had hauled 
 down, while the guns from all the forts which had opened fire 
 on that flag, in the gray dawn four years before, now greeted 
 it with the national salute. At the banquet in the evening, in 
 the city of Rhett and Calhoun, the list of speakers included 
 the name of William Lloyd Garrison. That same evening, 
 President Lincoln, relieved from the awful burden of four 
 years, was seated with his wife and friends in a box at Ford's 
 theater, when a self-appointed avenger of the defeated South, 
 a half-deranged actor named John Wilkes Booth, stole up be- 
 hind him and shot him in the back of the head. The President 
 was carried unconscious to a house across the street, where he 
 lingered till morning. At 7.21 his fitful breathing ceased and 
 the low moans were stilled. Stanton, with streaming eyes, pro- 
 nounced his epitaph: "Now he belongs to the ages." 
 
 "Sic semper tyrannis ! " was Booth's cry as he leaped from the 
 President's box to the stage of the theater "So be it ever to 
 tyrants ! " But no single trait of the tyrant's nature pride, 
 passion, cruelty, fear, suspicion, hate found a place in Abra- 
 ham Lincoln's noble heart. If he was, as Stanton said, "the most 
 perfect ruler of men that ever lived," it was because his large 
 sympathy embraced all the springs and motives of men's deeds. 
 He never wished to rule, but only to "know and understand." 
 "Come, now, let us reason together," was the divine invitation 
 forever on his lips. And his justice was "likest God's" because 
 mercy tempered it. His mind was already wholly occupied with 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 621 
 
 the healing of the nation's wounds. Three days before his assas- 
 sination he spoke, in his last public utterance, from the balcony 
 of the White House, of an announcement which he intended to 
 make to the people of the South. In a last cabinet meeting on 
 his last day, his words were all of kindness and sympathy for 
 his fellow citizens who had been restored to the Union. He died 
 at a moment propitious for his fame, quit of the greatest serv- 
 ice that a man can do the saving of the state. His name, 
 with Washington's, will forever be a priceless heritage to the 
 generations of our Republic. 
 
 Our children shall behold his fame, 
 
 The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 
 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame, 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The appended bibliography makes no claim to exhaustiveness. It is 
 carefully selected with a view to the time available to the college student 
 for collateral reading and study. Lists of hundreds of titles of reference 
 at the end of each chapter, though they may show the erudition of the 
 author, can be only a source of confusion and discouragement to the stu- 
 dent. Ponderous collections of State papers, court decisions, congressional 
 debates, executive documents, and the like are for the use of advanced 
 graduate students and special investigators. The more modest lists that 
 are given here contain books which are easily accessible to the college 
 student and in which he may be expected to do considerable reading. 
 
 An almost indispensable work of reference for the student of American 
 history is the set of twenty-eight volumes entitled The American Nation 
 (Harper & Brothers), edited by A. B. Hart. Each volume is written by a 
 recognized scholar in the field, is based on the sources, and is provided with 
 excellent maps, notes, and references. The important maps in this series 
 have been collected in a volume entitled Harper's Atlas of American His- 
 tory (New York, 1920), and supplemented by valuable "Map Studies" 
 by Dixon Ryan Fox. The story of American history is covered in briefer 
 space by the four volumes called The Riverside History of the United 
 States, edited by W. E. Dodd (Houghton Mififlin Company). A third set, 
 of fifty volumes, The Chronicles of America, published by the Yale Uni- 
 versity Press, under the editorship of Allen Johnson, leaves nothing to be 
 desired in the way of scholarship, style, or workmanship. Professor Edward 
 Channing has been engaged for more than twenty-five years in the arduous 
 task of writing a History of the United States from the days of Columbus. 
 The fifth volume of this highly authoritative work (The Macmillan Com- 
 pany, 1921) brings the narrative down to the year 1848. The eight large 
 volumes of John Bach McMaster's History of the People of the United 
 States (D. Appleton and Company, 1883-1913) cover the period from the 
 close of the American Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, with 
 especial attention to the social and industrial life of the people. James 
 Schouler's History of the United States, in seven volumes (Dodd, Mead & 
 Company, 1880-1913), is a purely political history of our country to the 
 close of the Reconstruction period, with a marked tendency in favor of the 
 New England view of national policies. James Ford Rhodes has given us 
 
ii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 a masterly treatise on the history of slavery, the Civil War, and Recon- 
 struction in his seven-volume History of the United States from the 
 Compromise of 1850 (The Macmillan Company 1892-1906), which is 
 characterized by impartial judgment and great dignity and charm of style. 
 An eighth volume (1919), covering the period from 1877 to 1897, is less 
 impressive. 
 
 No secondary work on history, however skillfully constructed or vividJy 
 presented, can give the student the same sense of the reality of the persons 
 or the events of the past that he gets from the words t)f the actors them- 
 selves. It is therefore highly desirable that the student should be in fre- 
 quent touch with the sources of the narrative. Convenient collections of 
 sources are Original Narratives of Early American History (18 vols., 
 ed. J. Franklin Jameson) (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906-1917), illus- 
 trating the founding and the history of the various colonies ; American His- 
 tory told by Contemporaries (4 vols., ed. A. B. Hart) (The Macmillan 
 Company, 1897-1900), containing a great variety of selections from letters, 
 speeches, debates, journals, tracts, travels, and poems, covering the whole 
 period of our history to the close of the nineteenth century ; A Documen- 
 tary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (ed. William Mac- 
 Donald) (The Macmillan Company, 1908), containing political documents 
 only, such as charters, legislative acts, proclamations, and treaties. 
 
 The works of American statesmen from Benjamin Franklin down have 
 been published in editions too numerous to catalogue here. 
 
 The story of our industrial and economic development is well told in 
 E. L. Bogart's Economic History of the United States (Longmans, Green 
 & Co., 1912) and Katharine Coman's Industrial History of the United 
 States (The Macmillan Company, 1911). G. S. Callender's Selections from 
 the Economic History of the United States, 1765-1860 (Ginn and Com- 
 pany, 1909) is a collection of important economic sources, with valuable 
 essays introducing each chapter. 
 
 The seventh volume of The Cambridge Modern History (The Mac- 
 millan Company, 1906) is devoted to the United States. A feature of the 
 volume is the extensive bibliography filling eighty-one large octavo pages. 
 
 The plan followed in the present bibliography is to cite first a few of 
 the most important general works on the period dealt with in the chapter 
 and then to give specific references on certain topics emphasized. These 
 latter references will help the student in pursuing a subject which may 
 have particularly interested him, and they may be used by the instructor 
 in assigning special investigations and reports. 
 

 BIBLIOGRAPHY iii 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 
 
 H. L. Osgood's The American Colonies in the i?th Century (3 vols.) 
 (The Macmillan Company) is the standard work on the period of the 
 settlement and the early history of the colonies. It is particularly strong 
 on the political and institutional side of colonial history, and may be sup- 
 plemented on the economic side by G. L. Beer's The Origins of the British 
 Colonial System, 1578-1660, The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754, and 
 British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765 (The Macmillan Company); also by 
 W. B. Weeden's The Economic and Social History of New England, 1620- 
 1789 (2 vols.) (Houghton Mifflin Company) and P. A. Bruce's Economic 
 History of Virginia in the i^th Century (2 vols.) (The Macmillan Com- 
 pany). For the eighteenth century we have no such comprehensive work 
 as Osgood's. Good treatments in single volumes are E. B. Greene's Pro- 
 vincial America, 1690-1740 (Harper & Brothers), J. A. Doyle's The Colonies 
 under the House of Hanover (Henry Holt and Company), and O. M. 
 Dickerson's American Colonial Government, 1696-1765 (A. H. Clark and 
 Co.). John Fiske, in his Old Virginia and .her Neighbours (2 vols.), The 
 Beginnings of New England, and Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America 
 (2 vols.) (Houghton Mifflin Company), has given us a vivid, popular 
 story of the early settlers. Edward Eggleston's The Transit of Civiliza- 
 tion from England to America in the i^th Century (D. Appleton and 
 Company) and C. McL. Andrews's Colonial Folkways (Yale Univer- 
 sity Press) are interesting treatments of the social history of the colonies. 
 For the French in America see Francis Parkman's great work, especially 
 the volumes entitled The Old Regime in Canada, Count Frontenac and 
 New France under Louis XIV, A Half Century of Conflict, and Montcalm 
 and Wolfe (Little, Brown and Company) ; also R. G. Thwaites's France in 
 America (Harper & Brothers), A. G. Bradley's The Fight with France for 
 the New World (A. Constable and Co.), Wm. B. Munro's Crusaders of 
 New France (Yale University Press), and G. M. Wrong's The Conquest 
 of New France (Yale University Press). A wealth of source material may 
 be found in the Original Narratives of Early American History. The pe- 
 riod treated in this chapter is covered by Channing, Vols. I, II; The 
 Riverside History, Vol. I (by C. L. Becker) ; The American Nation, Vols. 
 IV-VII; and The Chronicles of America, Vols. III-X. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 i. Foreign Elements in our Early Population : CHANNING, Vol. II, 
 chap, xiv; H. P. FAIRCHILD, Immigration, chap, ii; G. C. LEE, History of 
 North America, Vol. IV, chaps, i, ii (Dutch and Swedish) ; LUCY F. BIT- 
 
iv THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 TINGER, The Germans in Colonial Times; H. E. JACOBS, German Emigra- 
 tion to America, 1709-1740 (Pennsylvania German Society, Proceedings, 
 Vol. VIII) (with interesting illustrations) ; CHARLES BAIRD, The Huguenot 
 Emigration to America, Vol. I, chap, ii, and Vol. II, chaps, xi-xiv ; A. M. 
 SCHLESINGER, The Significance of Immigration in American History (Amer- 
 ican Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXVII, No. i). 
 
 2. Social and Economic Conditions in Seventeenth-Century England: 
 G. P. GOOCH, English Democratic Ideals in the i^th Century, chap, viii; 
 R. H. GRETTON, The English Middle Class, chaps, v-viii; WILLIAM CUN- 
 NINGHAM, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern 
 Times, Vol. I, pp. 285-330. Consult also bibliography in E. P. Cheyney's 
 The European Background of American History, pp. 327-331. 
 
 3. The Acts of Trade : CHANNING, Vol. II, chaps, i, viii; G. L. BEER, 
 The Old Colonial System, Part I, chaps, i-iv, and The Commercial Policy 
 of England toward the American Colonies (Columbia University Studies, 
 Vol. Ill, No. 2); C. M. ANDREWS, British Committees, Commissions, 
 and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622-1675 (Johns Hopkins Uni- 
 versity Studies, Series XXVI, Vols. I-III) ; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. II, 
 Nos. 45, 46, 67, 85, 87, 131. 
 
 4. Contrast between the English and the French System of Colonial 
 Government : FRANCIS PARKMAN, The Old Regime in Canada, chaps, xvi- 
 xix; J. G. BOURINOT, Local Government in Canada (Johns Hopkins Uni- 
 versity Studies, Series V, Vols. V, VI); JOSEPH WALLACE, Illinois and 
 Louisiana under the French Rule ; R. G. THWAITES, France in America, 
 chap, viii ; E. B. GREENE, Provincial America, chaps, iii-viii, XL 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 Out of the enormous mass of literature on the American Revolution a 
 few works are cited here, the purpose of the selection being chiefly to give 
 the student an idea of the various interpretations of that basal event of our 
 history. G. O. Trevelyan's The American Revolution (Longmans, Green 
 & Co.) is a fascinating work by a great English scholar whose sympathies 
 are with the Americans in their struggle against the Tory program of 
 George III. John Fiske's The American Revolution (2 vols.) (Houghton 
 Mifflin Company) is a lively narrative, less critical than Trevelyan's, but 
 no less favorable to the American cause. The Tory view is presented 
 in Belcher's The First American Civil War (The Macmillan Company), 
 Sidney G. Fisher's The Struggle for American Independence (2 vols.) 
 (J. B. Lippincott Company), and Arthur Johnston's Myths and Facts of 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY v 
 
 the American Revolution (Briggs, Toronto). Accurate and impartial treat- 
 ments in single volumes may be found in W. E. H. Lecky's The American 
 Revolution (D. Appleton and Company), edited by J. A. Woodburn from 
 passages in Lecky's History of England in the i8th Century ; Edward Chan- 
 ning's History of the United States, Vol. Ill (The Macmillan Company), 
 with strong emphasis on economic factors; G. E. Howard's The Prelimi- 
 naries of the Revolution (Harper & Brothers) ; and C. H. Van Tyne's The 
 American Revolution (Harper & Brothers). A most valuable repository 
 of the views of contemporary writers is M. C. Tyler's Literary History of 
 the American Revolution (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). A. M. Schle- 
 singer's Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (Columbia 
 University Press) is an exhaustive study of the commercial controversy. 
 For extensive lists of titles on the military, political, and diplomatic his- 
 tory of the Revolution, for the war in the West, and for the French aid, 
 see the bibliographies in the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VII, pp. 
 780-784, and Van Tyne's The American Revolution, pp. 334-355. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. The Tories in the Revolution : C. H. VAN TYNE, The Loyalists in 
 the American Revolution; J. H. STARK, The Loyalists of Massachusetts; 
 A. C. FLICK, Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution; 
 J. K. HOSMER, Thomas Hutchinson; Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 Proceedings, Series II, Vols. Ill, IV; M. C. TYLER, The Party of the 
 Loyalists in the American Revolution (American Historical Review, Vol. 
 I, pp. 24 ff.), and Literary History of the American Revolution, Vol. I, 
 pp. 293-383 ; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 138, 154, 156-158, 
 166-169. 
 
 2. The War on the Frontier : F. J. TURNER, George Rogers Clark and 
 the Kaskaskia Campaign (American Historical Review, Vol. Ill, pp. 491 ff. 
 and 506 ff.) ; W. H. ENGLISH, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the 
 River Ohio ; Illinois Historical Collections, Vol. I ; THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 
 The Winning of the West, Vols. II, III; F. A. OGG, The Old Northwest 
 (Chronicles of America, Vol. XIX), chaps, ii-iv. 
 
 3. French Aid in the Revolution : C. H. VAN TYNE, Influences which 
 determined the French Government to make a Treaty with America in 
 1778 (American Historical Review, Vol. XXI, pp. 528 ff.); J. JUSSERAND, 
 With Americans of Past and Present Days, chap, i (Rochambeau) ; ELIZ- 
 ABETH S. KITE, Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence; 
 CHARLEMAGNE TOWER, The Marquis de Lafayette and the American Rev- 
 olution; Old South Leaflets, No. 97 (Lafayette); E. S. CORWIN, French 
 Politics and the American Alliance of 1778. 
 
vi THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 4. The Declaration of Independence : HERBERT FRIEDENWALD, The Dec- 
 laration of Independence, chaps, vii-ix (the purpose and philosophy of 
 the Declaration), chaps, x, xi (analysis of the grievances cited); MELLEN 
 CHAMBERLAIN, The Declaration of Independence (Massachusetts Histori- 
 cal Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. I); John H. Hazelton, The Dec- 
 laration of Independence, chap, vi, "Drafting the Declaration" (valuable 
 for original material and facsimiles) ; C. E. MERRIAM, The Political Theory 
 of Thomas Jefferson (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XVII, pp. 24 ff.). 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 
 
 John Fiske's Critical Period of American History (Houghton Mifflin 
 Company) is an excellent account of the difficulties and dangers which 
 our country passed through in the years from the close of the Revolution 
 to the adoption of the Constitution. A more extended treatment, em- 
 phasizing the currents of public opinion, may be found in the first 
 volume of J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States 
 (D. Appleton and Company). A. C. McLaughlin's Confederation and 
 the Constitution (Harper & Brothers) is one of the most scholarly and 
 illuminating volumes in the American Nation Series. In Justin Win- 
 sor's Narrative and Critical History of America (Houghton Mifflin Com- 
 pany), Vol. VII, there are valuable essays entitled The Confederation, 
 1781-1789, by Justin Winsor, and The Constitution of the United States 
 and its History, by George T. Curtis. Max Farrand's Records of the 
 Federal Convention (Yale University Press), in three large volumes, 
 furnishes ample material for the study of the debates, minutes, and cor- 
 respondence of the members of the Convention. The author has con- 
 densed the most important material into a single volume entitled The 
 Framing of the Constitution (Yale University Press). C. A. Beard's 
 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States 
 (The Macmillan Company) presents the Constitution as a conservative 
 document registering the victory of the security-holders over the farmers. 
 The Federalist is carefully edited by P. L. Ford, with an excellent intro- 
 duction (Henry Holt and Company). The same author's Essays on the 
 Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn) contains over eighty public 
 letters written by well-known men of the period, including five signers 
 of the Declaration of Independence and seven members of the Federal 
 Convention. For discussions of the power of the Federal government 
 under the Constitution, see James Bryce's American Commonwealth 
 (abridged edition) (The Macmillan Company), chaps, iii-xxvi. Everett 
 Kimball's National Government of the United States (Ginn and Com- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY vii 
 
 pany) is an excellent account of the structure and working of our Fed- 
 eral system, as is also J. A. Smith's Spirit of American Government 
 (The Macmillan Company). William MacDonald's A New Constitu- 
 tion for a New America (B. W. Huebsch) is a bold plea for a thorough 
 revision of the Constitution. Carefully selected source material may be 
 found in Allen Johnson's Readings in American Constitutional History 
 (Houghton Mifflin Company), C. A. Beard's Readings in American Gov- 
 ernment and Politics (The Macmillan Company), and Hart's American 
 History told by Contemporaries (The Macmillan Company). 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. Foreign Relations under the Confederation: J. W. FOSTER, A Cen- 
 tury of American Diplomacy, chap, iii, McMASTER, Vol. I, chaps, iii, iv; 
 LEON FRASER, English Opinion of the American Constitution and Govern- 
 ment, 1783-1798 ; A. C. MCLAUGHLIN, The Western Posts and the British 
 Debts (American Historical Association Reports, 1894) ; F. A. OGG, The 
 Opening of the Mississippi, pp. 400-460 ; W. C. FORD. The United States 
 and Spain in 1790 (introduction) ; and articles on the Spanish intrigues in 
 the West (American Historical Review, Vol. VIII, p. 5 ; Vol. IX, p. 748 ; 
 and Vol. X, p. 817). 
 
 2 . The Origins of our National Domain : B. A. HINSDALE, The Old 
 Northwest, the Beginnings of our Colonial System; JUSTIN WINSOR, The 
 Westward Movement, chaps, xxii, xxiii; R. L. SCHUYLER, Working to- 
 wards a National Domain (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, 
 p. 496); H. B. ADAMS, Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to the 
 United States (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series III, Vol. I); 
 THOMAS DONALDSON, The Public Domain, chaps, v, vi (Report of the 
 Public Land Commission, 1881); PAYSON J. TREAT, The National Land 
 System, chaps, i-iii. 
 
 3. Opposition to the Constitution : P. L. FORD, Pamphlets on the Con- 
 stitution, p. 329; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 70, 71, 73-75; 
 A. C. MCLAUGHLIN, The Confederation and the Constitution, pp. 297-317; 
 The Federalist (ed. P. L. Ford), introduction, pp. xix-xxix; C. E. MINER, 
 The Ratification of the Federal Constitution by the State of New York', 
 S. B. HARDING, The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Consti- 
 tution in the State of Massachusetts (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. II) ; 
 A. J. BEVERIDGE, The Life of John Marshall, Vol. I, chaps, ix-xii. 
 
 4. The Supreme Court : C. A. BEARD, The Supreme Court and the 
 Constitution ; B. F. MOORE, The Supreme Court and Unconstitutional Leg- 
 islation', E. S. CORWIN, John Marshall and the Constitution (Chronicles 
 of America, Vol. XVI); W. W. WILLOUGHBY, The Supreme Court of the 
 
viii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 United States : its History and Influence on our Constitutional System', 
 EVERETT KIMBALL, The National Government of the United States, chaps, 
 xv, xvi ; WILLIAM MACDONALD, A New Constitution for a New America, 
 chaps, xvii, xviii. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 
 
 Of the older standard treatments of the period from 1789 to 1801, 
 Richard Hildreth's History of the United States (Harper & Brothers), 
 Series II, Vols. IV, V (chaps, i-xv), inclines strongly to the Federalist side 
 while James Schouler's History of the United States (Dodd, Mead & 
 Company), Vol. I, chaps, ii-iv, gives the Jeffersonian Republican due em- 
 phasis. J. S. Bassett's Federalist System (Harper & Brothers) is a clear, 
 impartial treatment which will serve the student better than any other 
 single volume on the period. Edward Channing's History of the United 
 States (The Macmillan Company), Vol. IV, chaps, i-viii, and J. B. 
 McMaster's History of the People of the United States (D. Appleton and 
 Company), Vols. I, II, chaps, vi-xi, are excellent general accounts. The 
 development of parties may be studied in J. A. Woodburn's American 
 Political History (G. P. Putnam's Sons), chap, ii, or J. P. Gordy's History 
 of Political Parties in the United States (Henry Holt and Company) , Vol. 
 I, chaps, i-xxii. W. H. Trescot's Diplomatic History of the Administra- 
 tions of Washington and Adams (Little, Brown and Company), al- 
 though an old book, is still extremely valuable. It may be supplemented 
 by C. R. Fish's American Diplomacy (Henry Holt and Company), chaps, 
 viii-xi. D. R. Dewey's Financial History of the United States (Longmans, 
 Green & Co.), chaps, iv, v, contains an excellent account of the measures 
 of Alexander Hamilton. C. A. Beard's Economic Origins of Jeffersonian 
 Democracy (The Macmillan Company) is a masterly presentation of the 
 struggle between the farmers and the security-holders in the last decade 
 of the eighteenth century. The following collections of the works of the 
 greatest statesmen of the period are recommended : The Writings of George 
 Washington (14 vols., ed. W. C. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons), The 
 Works of John Adams (10 vols., ed. C. F. Adams) (Little, Brown and 
 Company), The Works of Alexander Hamilton (12 vols., ed. H. C. Lodge) 
 (G. P. Putnam's Sons), and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (10 vols., 
 ed. P. L. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). For selections from sources see 
 Hart's Contemporaries (The Macmillan Company), Vol. Ill, Nos. 83-105; 
 William MacDonald's Documentary Source Book of American History 
 (The Macmillan Company), Nos. 54-64 ; and Allen Johnson's Readings in 
 American Constitutional History (Houghton Mifflin Company), Part III. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY ix 
 
 A vivid and caustic commentary on the first two years of Washington's 
 administration, by a disaffected senator from Pennsylvania, is found in the 
 Journal of William Maclay (D. Appleton and Company). An exhaustive 
 bibliography of the period, including references to debates in Congress, 
 journals of the Houses, State papers, and manuscripts of the statesmen, can 
 be found in the appendix of Bassett's Federal System, pp. 299-305. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. Social Conditions in George Washington's Day : MCMASTER, Vol. I, 
 pp. i-ioi, and Vol. II, pp. 1-24; CHANNING, Vol. IV, chap, i; JUSTIN 
 WINSOR, The Westward Movement, pp. 398-414; TIMOTHY DWIGHT, 
 Travels in New England and New York, 1796-1815, Vol. I ; J. P. BRISSOT 
 DE WARVILLE, New Travels in the United States, 1778', ISAAC WELD, 
 Travels through the States of North America and Canada, 1795-1797 (2 
 vols.) (passim); R. W. GRISWOLD, The Republican Court (passim). 
 
 2. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions : Text in MACDONALD, Nos. 
 61-64; F. M. ANDERSON, Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Ken- 
 tucky Resolutions (American Historical Review, Vol. V, pp. 45 ff., 225 ff.) ; 
 H. V. AMES, State Documents on Federal Relations, No. i, pp. 18-26; 
 The Writings of James Madison (ed. Gaillard Hunt), Vol. VI, pp. 341- 
 407; E. P. POWELL, Nullification and Secession in the United States, 
 chap, ii; E. D. WARFIELD, The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. 
 
 3. Was Hamilton's Tariff Protective? F. W. TAUSSIG, The Tariff His- 
 tory of the United States, chaps, i, ii; The Annals of Congress, 1789-1791, 
 Vol. I, pp. 192-231, 291-317, 324-336; EDWARD STANWOOD, American 
 Tariff Controversies in the igth Century, Vol. I, chap, iii; J. L. BISHOP, 
 A History of American Manufactures, Vol. I, chap, x; F. W. TAUSSIG, 
 State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff, pp. 1-107; F. S. OLIVER, Alex- 
 ander Hamilton, pp. 228-240. 
 
 "4. New Light on Citizen Genet's Mission : F. J. TURNER, The Origin 
 of Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas (American 
 Historical Review, Vol. Ill, p. 650); The Policy of France towards the 
 Mississippi Valley in the Period of Washington and Adams (ibid. Vol. X, 
 p. 249); The Diplomatic Contest for the Mississippi Valley (Atlantic 
 Monthly, Vol. XCIII, pp. 676, 807) ; H. E. BOURNE, The Correspondence 
 of George Rogers Clark and Genet, 1793-1794 (American Historical Asso- 
 ciation Report, 1896), p. 930. 
 
x THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 
 
 Henry Adams's History of the United States of America during the 
 Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols.) (Charles Scribner's 
 Sons) is the standard work on this period. Although Adams has a poor 
 opinion of Jefferson and a still poorer x)ne of Madison, his work is very 
 valuable on account of the mass of material which he has incorporated 
 in it from the manuscript collections in foreign archives. A more sym- 
 pathetic presentation of Jefferson is given by Edward Charming, in his 
 History of the United States (The Macmillan Company), Vol. IV, chaps. 
 x-xx, and The Jeffersonian System (Harper & Brothers). Briefer but 
 excellent treatments of Jefferson are to be found in Allen Johnson's Jef- 
 ferson and his Colleagues (Yale University Press) and Union and Democ- 
 racy (Houghton Mifflin Company), chaps, vii-xii. The foreign policy of 
 Jefferson and Madison is analyzed with fine judgment in A. T. Mahan's 
 Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812 (2 vols.) (Little, Brown and 
 Company). Besides Adams and Mahan, the following works may be 
 consulted for the War of 1812 : K. C. Babcock's Rise of American 
 Nationality (Harper & Brothers), chaps, iv-x; Theodore Roosevelt's Naval 
 War of 1812 (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; and E. S. Maclay's His- 
 tory of the United States Navy (3 vols.) (D. Appleton and Company), 
 Vols. I, II (Part III, chaps, i-xvi). A wealth of material on social and 
 economic conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century will be 
 found in the first six chapters of Henry Adams's work, in Timothy 
 D wight's Travels in New England and New York (4 vols.) (New Haven), 
 and in McMaster's History of the People of the United States (D. Apple- 
 ton and Company), chaps, xii-xxix. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 
 (10 vols., ed. P. L. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons), The Writings of Albert 
 Gallatin (3 vols., ed. Henry Adams) (J. B. Lippincott Company), The 
 Writings of James Madison (9 vols., ed. Gaillard Hunt) (G. P. Putnam's 
 Sort's), and The Writings of James Monroe (7 vols., ed. S. M. Hamilton) 
 (G. P. Putnam's Sons) furnish an abundance of letters on the period. The 
 Jeffersonian Cyclopadia (ed. J. P. Foley) (Funk & Wagnalls Company) 
 is a huge volume containing extracts from Jefferson's writings, illustrat- 
 ing some nine thousand topics arranged alphabetically. Selected source 
 material will be found in Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 106-129; 
 Johnson's Readings, Nos. 50, 57, 71, 72, 74, 77, 81-86; and G. S. Callen- 
 der's Selections from the Economic History of the United States, 1765- 
 1860 (Ginn and Company), pp. 239-260. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. The Florida Boundary Dispute : H. B. FULLER, The Purchase of 
 Florida, chaps, iii-vi; F. E. CHADWICK, The Relations of the United 
 States and Spain, Vol. I, pp. 42-116; I. J. Cox, The American Intervention 
 in West Florida (American Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 290-311); 
 CHARLES GAYARRE, History of Louisiana, Vol. IV, pp. 211-243; E. S. 
 BROWN, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, pp. 170- 
 187; HENRY ADAMS, History of the United States, Vol. II, chap. v. 
 
 2. The Conspiracy of Aaron Burr: E. P. POWELL, Nullification and 
 Secession in the United States, chap, iv; F. T. HILL, Decisive Battles of 
 the Law, chap, ii; EDWARD CHANNING, History of the United States, 
 Vol. IV, pp. 336-344; W. F. McCALEB, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy, 
 Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. Ford), Vol. VIII, pp. 481-504, and 
 Vol. IX, pp. 1-67, 141-144 ; HENRY ADAMS, History of the United States, 
 Vol. Ill, chaps, x-xiv, xix ; JAMES PARTON, The Life and Times of Aaron 
 Burr, chaps, xviii-xxvi; J. S. BASSETT, The Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. I, 
 chap. iv. 
 
 3. The Struggle for Neutral Trade : RALPH D. PAINE, The Fight for 
 a Free Sea (Chronicles of America, Vol. XVII) ; Writings of James Madi- 
 son (ed. Hunt), Vol. VII, pp. 204 ff. ; Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. 
 Ford), Vol. VI, pp. 470-484; A. T. MAHAN, Sea Power in its Relation to 
 the War of 1812, Vol. I, pp. 114-127; CHANNING, Vol. IV, pp. 352-378 
 (with excellent summary of Orders and Decrees) ; CLIVE DAY, A History 
 of Commerce, chap, xlvii; E. L. BOGART, Economic History of the United 
 States, chap, ix; JAMES STEPHEN, War in Disguise, or the Frauds of 
 Neutral Flags. 
 
 4. The Hartford Convention: Letter in American Historical Review, 
 Vol. IX, pp. 96-104; ALLEN JOHNSON, Readings in American Constitu- 
 tional History, Nos. 81-85 ; HENRY ADAMS, Documents Relating to New 
 England Federalism ; HENRY ADAMS, History of the United States, 
 Vol. VIII, pp. 287-310; E. P. POWELL, Nullification and Secession in the 
 United States, chap, v ; H. V. AMES, State Documents on Federal Rela- 
 tions, No. 2, p. 10 ; S. E. MORISON, The Life and Letters of Harrison 
 Grey Otis, Vol. II, pp. 78-199. For the text of the report of the Conven- 
 tion see MACDONALD, Documentary Source Book of American History, 
 No. 70, pp. 293-302. 
 
xii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE NEW NATIONALISM 
 
 The first nine chapters of the fifth volume of Edward Channing's 
 History of the United States (The Macmillan Company) are devoted 
 to a survey of social and industrial conditions in the three decades fol- 
 lowing the War of 1812. The student may well compare this survey with 
 the work of similar purpose for the opening of the nineteenth century in 
 the first six chapters of Henry Adams's History of the United States of 
 America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. In chap- 
 ters x and xi Channing treats the political history of the administrations 
 of Monroe and John Quincy Adams. K. C. Babcock's Rise of American 
 Nationality (Harper & Brothers), chaps, xi-xviii, and F. J. Turner's 
 Rise of the New West (Harper & Brothers) cover the period of the 
 present chapter and are provided with excellent bibliographies. More 
 detailed are the accounts in J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the 
 United States (D. Appleton and Company), Vols. IV, V (chaps, xxiii- 
 liii), and James Schouler's History of the United States (Dodd, Mead & 
 Company), Vol. III. J. W. Burgess's Middle Period (Charles Scribner's 
 Sons), chaps, i-viii, is a strictly political narrative of the years 1816-1830. 
 For the economic topics of the chapter see D. R. Dewey's Financial His- 
 tory of the United States (Longmans, Green & Co.); F. W. Taussig's 
 Tariff History of the United States (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; J. L. Bishop's 
 History of American Manufactures (Philadelphia), Vol. II; and R. C. H. 
 Catterall's Second Bank of the United States (University of Chicago Press). 
 F. J. Turner's collected articles entitled The Frontier in American His- 
 tory (Henry Holt and Company) are invaluable for the westward move- 
 ment, to which may be added as interesting contemporary accounts 
 Timothy Flint's Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Cincinnati) and 
 History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley (Cincinnati) and J. M. 
 Peck's New Guide for Emigrants to the West (Boston). Albert J. Bev- 
 eridge's Life of John Marshall (Houghtxm Mifflin Company), Vol. IV, 
 contains the best discussion of the great decisions of the Supreme Court. 
 The diplomatic events of the period are treated in F. E. Chadwick's Rela- 
 tions of the United States and Spain (Charles Scribner's Sons), Vol. I ; 
 F. L. Paxson's Independence of the South American Republics (Ferris 
 and Leach); and J. H. Latane's United States and Latin America 
 (Doubleday, Page & Company), chaps, i, ii, x. In addition to the works 
 of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe cited in the preceding chapter, the 
 student will find the following collections useful to consult by index : The 
 Works of Henry Clay (10 vols., ed. Calvin Colton) (G. P. Putnam's 
 

 BIBLIOGRAPHY xiii 
 
 Sons); The Works of John C. Calhoun (7 vols., ed. R. K. Cralle) (D. 
 Appleton and Company) ; The Writings of John Quincy Adams (7 vols., ed. 
 W. C. Ford) (The Macmillan Company); and The Memoirs of John 
 Quincy Adams (12 vols., ed. C. F. Adams) (J. B. Lippincott Company). 
 The biographies of Clay by Carl Schurz, of Calhoun by H. von Hoist, of 
 John Quincy Adams by J. T. Morse, and of John Randolph by Henry 
 Adams are ajl to be found in the American Statesmen Series (Houghton 
 Mifflin Company). For selected source material see MacDonald's Documen- 
 tary Source Book, Nos. 71-80 ; Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Part VII, 
 Nos. 130-150 ; and Bogart and Thompson's Readings in the Economic His- 
 tory of the United States (Longmans, Green & Co.), chaps, ix-xvii. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. Westward Migration and Travel: TILLY BUTTRICK, JR., Voyages, 
 Travels, and Discoveries (1812-1819), in R. G. THWAITES (Ed.), Early 
 Western Travels, Vol. VIII, pp. 21-89; MORRIS BIRKBECK, Notes on a 
 Journey in America from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois 
 (1817) ; H. B. FEARON, Sketches of America: a Narrative of a Journey of 
 Five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America 
 (1817-1818) ; JOHN WOODS, Two Years' Residence in the Settlement on 
 the English Prairie in the Illinois Country (1820-1822); JAMES FLINT, 
 Letters from America (1822); TIMOTHY FLINT, Recollections of the Last 
 Ten Years (1826); JAMES HALL, Letters from the West; containing 
 Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs (1828); J. B. MCMASTER, 
 History of the People of the United States, Vol. V, chap, xlviii. 
 
 2. Internal Improvements : The Writings of James Monroe (ed. Hamil- 
 ton), Vol. VI, pp. 216-284; DAVID HOSACK, Memoirs of DeWitt Clinton, 
 Appendix; ST. G. L. SIOUSSAT, Memphis as a Gateway to the West (Ten- 
 nessee Historical Magazine, March, 1917); S. A. MITCHELL, Compendium 
 of the Internal Improvements of the United States ; G. S. CALLENDER, Early 
 Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States in Relation to the 
 Growth of Corporations (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVII, 
 PP- 3-54); H. G. WHEELER, History of Congress, Vol. II, pp. 100-513; 
 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Memoirs, Vols. VI, VII; BOGART and THOMPSON, 
 Readings, chap. xii. 
 
 3. The Monroe Doctrine : Text in MACDONALD, Documentary Source 
 Book, No. 80; J. H. LATANE, The United States and Latin America, 
 chaps, ii, x ; A. C. COOLIDGE, The United States as a World Power, chap, v ; 
 H. V. W. TEMPERLEY, The Latin-American Policy of Canning (American 
 Historical Review, Vol. XI, pp. 779 ff.) ; W. C. FORD, John Quincy Adams 
 and the Monroe Doctrine (American Historical Review,Vol. VII, pp. 676ff., 
 
xiv THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 and Vol. VIII, pp. 28 ff.) and The Genesis of the Monroe Doctrine (Massa- 
 chusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. XV, pp. 373 ff.) ; 
 A. B. HART, The Monroe Doctrine, an Interpretation-, A. B. HART, The 
 Foundations of American Foreign Policy, chap, vii ; The Writings of James 
 Monroe (ed. Hamilton), Vol. VI, pp. 343 ff. ; JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, 
 Memoirs, Vol. VI, passim; F. E. CHADWICK, The Relations of the United 
 States and Spain, Vol. I, chaps, viii-x; W. F. REDDAWAY, The Monroe 
 Doctrine. 
 
 4. The Tariff of Abominations: American State Papers, Finance, 
 Vol. V, passim ; F. W. TAUSSIG, State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff, 
 pp. 108-213, and The Tariff History of the United States, pp. 37-45, 
 68-108 ; D. F. HOUSTON, Nullification in South Carolina ; EDWARD STAN- 
 WOOD, American Tariff Controversies in the ipth Century, Vol. I, chap, 
 viii; The Works of J. C. Calhoun (ed. Cralle), Vol. VI, pp. 1-59; BOGART 
 and THOMPSON, Readings, chap, x, Nos. 4-6. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 "THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 
 
 A very satisfactory account of the Jacksonian era, especially on the 
 personal and political side, is J. S. Bassett's Andrew Jackson (2 vols.) 
 (The Macmillan Company). It may be supplemented on the financial side 
 by W. G. Sumner's Andrew Jackson as a Public Man (American States- 
 man Series) (Houghton Mifflin Company), Edward Stanwood's Tariff 
 Controversies of the Nineteenth Century (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
 and D. R. Dewey's Financial History of the United States (Longmans, 
 Green & Co.). R. C. H. Catterall's Second Bank of the United States (Uni- 
 versity of Chicago Press) ; C. R. Fish's Civil Service and the Patronage 
 (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. XI) ; Commons and Sumner's Documen- 
 tary History of American Industrial Society (10 vols.) (A. H. Clark and 
 Co.) ; D. F. Houston's Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina 
 (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. Ill), with Letters on the Nullification 
 Movement in South Carolina (American Historical Review, Vol. VI. pp. 
 736-765, and Vol. VII, pp. 92-119) ; R. T. Ely's Labor Movement in 
 America (Thomas Y. Crowell Company) ; E. R. Johnson's American Rail- 
 way Transportation (D. Appleton and Company); and J. A. Woodburn's 
 Political Parties and Party Problems in the United States (G. P. Putnam's 
 Sons) are satisfactory treatments of those problems of the Jacksonian 
 era which are indicated in the titles. The period of the chapter is treated 
 in the standard histories of McMaster (Vol. VI, chaps, liv-lxix), Schouler 
 (Vol. Ill, chap, xii, and Vol. IV, chaps, xiv, xv), and Channing (Vol. V, 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xv 
 
 chaps, xii-xiv). An excellent presentation in a single volume is William 
 MacDonald's Jacksonian Democracy (Harper & Brothers), with carefully 
 selected bibliography. F. A. Ogg's Reign of Andrew Jackson (Yale Uni- 
 versity Press), C. H. Peck's Jacksonian Epoch (Harper & Brothers), 
 and W. E. Dodd's Expansion and Conflict (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
 chaps, i-vi, are scholarly and well written. For comments on the men and 
 measures of the time, John Quincy Adams's Memoirs (cited above) and 
 T. H. Benton's Thirty Years' View (with material from private papers of 
 Jackson) (D. Appleton and Company) are invaluable. In addition to the 
 works of Clay and Calhoun above mentioned, the student may use by 
 index The Works of Daniel Webster (18 vols., ed. J. W. Mclntyre) (Little, 
 Brown and Company) and The Letters of Daniel Webster (ed. C. H. Van 
 Tyne) (McClure, Phillips and Co.). M. Ostrogorski's Democracy and the 
 Organization of Political Parties (The Macmillan Company), Vol. II, 
 Part IV, chaps, i-iii, is very valuable here. The following biographies may 
 be added : J. B. McMaster's Life of Daniel Webster (The Century Co.), 
 F. A. Ogg's Daniel Webster (George W. Jacobs & Co.), E. M. Shepard's Life 
 of Martin Van Buren (Houghton Mifflin Company), T. D. Jervey's Robert 
 Y. Hayne and his Times (The Macmillan Company), and Theodore Roose- 
 velt's Thomas Hart Benton (Houghton Mifflin Company). Alexis de 
 Tocqueville's Democracy in America (ed. D. C. Oilman) (The Century 
 Co.) is one of the most penetrating criticisms of our social and political 
 life ever written by a foreign visitor. In lighter vein are Frances E. 
 Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (H. B. Bell), Frances B. 
 Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, 1838-1839 
 (Harper & Brothers), and Harriet Martineau's Society in America (New 
 York). Jackson's public papers will be found in J. D. Richardson's 
 Messages and Papers of the Presidents (10 vols.) (Washington), Vol. II. 
 Selected source material for the period is presented in Hart's Contempo- 
 raries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 158-186; MacDonald's Documentary Source Book, 
 Nos. 82-95 ; and Bogart and Thompson's Readings, chaps, x-xvii. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 i. The Economic Basis of Nullification : C. S. BOUCHER, The Ante- 
 Bellum Attitude of the South towards Manufactures and Agriculture 
 (Washington University Studies, Vol. Ill, Part II, No. 2); U. B. PHILLIPS, 
 The Economic Cost of Slave-Holding in the Cotton Belt (Political Science 
 Quarterly, Vol. XX, pp. 257-275), and Plantation and Frontier (Docu- 
 mentary History of American Industrial Society, Vols. I, II) ; The Letters 
 of Dr. Cooper (American Historical Review, Vol. VI, pp. 725 ff.) ; G. S. 
 CALLENDER (Ed.), Selected Readings in the Economic History of the 
 
xvi THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 United States, pp. 514-536, 539~54 2 5 M. B - HAMMOND, The Cotton In- 
 dustry (American Economic Association, Publications, 1897); J. B. Mc- 
 MASTER, Vol. V, pp. 1 70 ff. 
 
 2. The War on the Bank : SCHOULER, Vol. IV, chap, xiii, sect. 3 ; J. Q. 
 ADAMS, Memoirs, Vol. VIII; The Works of Daniel Webster, Vol. Ill, 
 pp. 391-447; C. COLTON, Life and Times of Henry Clay, Vol. II, chaps. 
 iii, iv; CLAYTON, Report on the Condition of the Bank (House Reports, 
 22 Cong., ist Sess., No. 460) ; R. C. McGRANE, The Correspondence of 
 Nicholas Biddle ; CARL SCHURZ, Henry Clay, Vol. I, chap, xiii ; SAMUEL 
 TYLER, Roger B. Taney, Vol. I, chap, iii; T. H. BENTON, Thirty Years' 
 View, Vol. I. chaps, xl, xli, xlvi-xlviii. 
 
 3. The Early Railroads : E. R. JOHNSON, American Railway Trans- 
 portation, chap, ii; C. F. ADAMS, JR., Railroads, their Origin and Problems, 
 chaps, i, ii; G. S. CALLENDER (Ed), Selected Readings in the Economic 
 History of the United States, pp. 345-348, 404-431 ; A. T. HADLEY, Rail- 
 way Transportation, its History and Laws, chap, ii; W. H. BROWN, His- 
 tory of the First Locomotives in America', FRANCES B. KEMBLE, Journal 
 of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, pp. 161-172; U. B. PHILLIPS, 
 History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt, chap, iii; MEYER and 
 MACGILL, History of Transportation in the United States, pp. 422-427. 
 
 4. Labor Conditions in the Jacksonian Era : MICHEL CHEVALIER, So- 
 ciety, Manners and Politics in the United States, pp. 135-144, 341-344; 
 COMMONS and SUMNER, Documentary History of American Industrial 
 Society, Vol. V, pp. 33!., and Vol. VI, pp. 87f.; HARRIET MARTINEAU, 
 Society in America, Vol. II, pp. 53-60 ; R. T. ELY, The Labor Movement 
 in America, pp. 7-60; F. T. CARLTON, The Workingmen's Party of New 
 York City, 1829-1831 (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXII, pp. 401 f.) ; 
 J. R. COMMONS, Labor Organizations and Labor Politics (Quarterly Journal 
 of Economics, Vol. XXI, pp. 323!.); G. S. CALLENDER (Ed.), Selected 
 Readings, pp. 459-471; EDWARD CHANNING, History of the United States, 
 Vol. V, chap, iv (with references in footnotes) ; S. P. ORTH, The Armies 
 of Labor, chap. ii. 
 
 5. The Rise of the Whig Party : J. A. WOODBURN, Political Parties 
 and Party Problems in the United States, chap, iv ; EDWARD STANWOOD, 
 History of the Presidency, Vol. I, chaps, xv, xvi; S. P. ORTH, The Boss and 
 the Machine, chaps, i, ii ; MCMASTER, Vol. VI, chap. Ixix ; JOSIAH QUINCY, 
 John Quincy Adams, chaps, viii, ix ; A. D. MORSE, The Political Influence of 
 Andrew Jackson (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 153!!); C. H. 
 VAN TYNE, The Letters of Daniel Webster, pp. 141-205 ; H. J. FORD, Rise 
 and Growth of American Politics, chaps, xiii-xv ; A. C. COLE, The Whig 
 Party in the South, chaps, i, ii ; MARTIN VAN BUREN, Inquiry into Political 
 Parties, chap, vii ; C. A. DAVIS, Letters of Major Jack Downing. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xvii 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 
 
 The concluding chapters (xv-xviii) of Edward Channing's History of 
 the United States (The Macmillan Company), treating of Western set- 
 tlements in the decade 1840-1850, California, Oregon, Texas, and the 
 Mexican War, are the best general presentation of the history covered by 
 the first two sections of this chapter. For the third section the student 
 should turn to the first volume of James Ford Rhodes's great work entitled 
 The History of the United States since the Compromise of 1850 (The Mac- 
 millan Company), chaps, ii, iii, iv (with a masterly summary of the ef- 
 fects of slavery on the South). G. P. Garrison's Westward Extension 
 (Harper & Brothers) covers the decade 1840-1850 and has a careful 
 bibliography for students who can pursue the study to original sources. 
 W. E. Dodd's Expansion and Conflict (Houghton Mifflin Company), chaps, 
 vii-ix, is a clear and concise account of the period, and N. W. Stephenson's 
 Texas and the Mexican War (Yale University Press) is a most readable 
 little book prepared from excellent select sources. More extended accounts 
 of the period may be found in the standard histories of McMaster, Vols. 
 VII, VIII (chaps. Ixxii-lxxxix), and Schouler, Vols. IV, V (chaps, xvi- 
 xx). J. W. Burgess's Middle Period (Charles Scribner's Sons), chaps, 
 xiii-xvii, emphasizes the legal and constitutional aspects of the period. 
 Special works, in greater detail, on the subjects treated in this chapter are 
 L. G. Tyler's Letters and Times of the Tylers (3 vols.) (Richmond) ; 
 W. P. and F. J. Garrison's William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols.) (The Cen- 
 tury Co.), Vol. Ill; Justin H. Smith's Annexation of Texas (The Baker 
 & Taylor Co.), whose undue emphasis on British intrigue in Texas 
 may be corrected by E. D. Adams's British Interests and Activities in 
 Texas, 1838-1846 (Johns Hopkins Press) ; Justin H. Smith's War with 
 Mexico (2 vols.) (The Macmillan Company), a work of extraordinary 
 fullness and accuracy, very favorable to Polk and Scott ; G. P. Garrison's 
 Texas, a Contest of Civilizations (Houghton Mifflin Company) ; The 
 Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of Texas (3 vols.) (American 
 Historical Association Reports, 1907-1909) ; Robert Greenhow's History 
 of Oregon and California (Little, Brown and Company) ; W. A. Linn's 
 Story of the Mormons (The Macmillan Company) ; Francis Parkman's 
 Oregon Trail (Little, Brown and Company) ; H. H. Bancroft's California 
 Inter Pocula (San Francisco) ; R. H. Dana's Two Years before the Mast 
 (E. P. Button and Company) ; U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (The 
 Century Co.) ; J. H. Latane's Diplomacy of the United States in Regard to 
 Cuba (American Historical Association Reports, 1897) ; Ira D. Travis, His- 
 
xviii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 tory of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (Michigan Political Science Association, 
 Publications, 1900). The in valuable Diary oj Ja mesK.Polk has been edited 
 in four volumes by M. M. Quaife (Chicago Historical Society). Much inter- 
 esting material on the period of the chapter will be found in John Quincy 
 Adams's Memoirs, Vols. X-XII. J. C. Fremont's Report of an Explor- 
 ing Expedition to Oregon and Northern California (New York) is a lively 
 narrative. The Pro-Slavery Argument (J. B. Lippincott Company) con- 
 tains apologies for the slave system by Chancellor Harper and Gover- 
 nor Hammond of South Carolina, William Gilmore Simms, and Professor 
 Dew of William and Mary College. The four great speeches on the Com- 
 promise of 1850 may be found in the works of Henry Clay (ed. Colton), 
 Vol. IX, pp. 529-567 ; of Calhoun (ed. Cralle), Vol. IV, pp. 542-573 ; of 
 Webster (ed. Mclntyre), Vol. X, pp. 57-98; and of Seward (ed. Geo. E. 
 Baker) (Houghton Mifflin Company), Vol. I, pp. 51-93. James Russell 
 Lowell's Present Crisis and Biglow Papers (First Series) are scathing in- 
 dictments of the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. Selected 
 documents and sources on the period may be found in G. S. Calender's 
 Selected Readings, pp. 597-665 ; Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 
 185-189, and Vol. IV, pp. 7-22 ; and William MacDonald's Documentary 
 Source Book, Nos. 96-107. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty : JOHN BASSETT MOORE, Interna- 
 tional Arbitrations, Vol. I, chaps, i-vi; T. H. BENTON, Abridgment of the 
 Debates in Congress, Vol. XIV, pp. 576 f. ; Niles' Register, Vol. LXIII, 
 pp. 41-47, 53-63 (for official correspondence between Webster and Lord 
 Ashburton) ; G. T. CURTIS, Daniel Webster, Vol. II, chaps, xxviii, xxix, 
 xxxii; W. F. GANONG, A Monograph of the Evolution of the Boundaries 
 of New Brunswick, pp. 241-361 ; L. G. TYLER, Life and Letters of the 
 Tylers, Vol. II, pp. 201-243 ; H. S. BURRAGE, Maine in the Northeastern 
 Boundary Controversy ; E. D. ADAMS, Lord Ashburton and the Treaty 
 of Washington (American Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 746-782) ; 
 JARED SPARKS, The Webster-Ashburton Treaty (North American Review, 
 Vol. LVI, pp. 452 ff.). 
 
 2 . American Pioneers in Texas : HENRY BRUCE, Life of General 
 Houston, pp. 64-156; L. A. WRIGHT, Life of Stephen F. Austin (Austin 
 College Bulletin, October, 1910) ; Texas in 1840, or the Emigrants' 
 Guide', W. B. DEWERS, Letters from an Early Settler of Texas', L. G. 
 BUGBEE, Some Difficulties of a Texas Empresario (Southern Historical 
 Association, Publications, April, 1899); D. G. WOOTEN, A Comprehensive 
 History of Texas, Part II, chaps, i-ix; E. Z. FATHER, De Witt's Colony 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xix 
 
 (Texas State Historical Association, Quarterly, Vol. VIII, pp. 95-102); 
 G. P. GARRISON, Texas, a Contest of Civilizations, pp. 137-169, and The 
 First Stage of the Movement for the Annexation of Texas (American 
 History Review, Vol. X, pp. 72-96). 
 
 3. The Gold-Seekers in California : STUART EDWARD WHITE, The Forty - 
 Niners ; H. H. BANCROFT, California Inter Pocula ; J. T. BROOKS, Four 
 Months among the Gold-Finders in California ; W. G. JOHNSTON, The Ex- 
 perience of a Forty-Niner ; J. S. HITTELL, The Discovery of Gold in\ 
 California (Century Magazine, Vol. XIX, pp. 525-536) ; JOSIAH ROYCE, 
 California, pp. 220-246, 278-356; WALTER COLTON, Three Years in Cali- 
 fornia, pp. 242-290 ; BERNARD MOSES, The Establishment of Municipal 
 Government in San Francisco. 
 
 4. The Oregon Boundary Settlement : H. H. BANCROFT, History of 
 Oregon, Vol. I, chap, xiv; JAMES K. POLK, Diary (index under "Oregon"); 
 TRAVERS Twiss, The Oregon Question ; L. B. SHIPPEE, Federal Relations 
 of Oregon (in Oregon Historical Society, Quarterly, Vol. XIX, pp. 89, 189, 
 283) ; R. L. SCHUYLER, Polk and the Oregon Compromise (Political 
 Science Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, pp. 443 ff.) ; Correspondence of J. C. Cal- 
 houn (American Historical Association Reports, 1899), Vol. II, pp. 653- 
 698, 1065-1083 ; JOSEPH SCHAFER, The British Attitude toward the Oregon 
 Question (American Historical Review, Vol. XVI, pp. 273-299); C. H. VAN 
 TYNE, Letters of Daniel Webster, pp. 215, 227-330, 361 ; J. R. WILSON, 
 The Oregon Question (Oregon Historical Society, Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 
 in ff.). 
 
 5. Plans for an Isthmian Canal : J. H. LATANE', The Diplomatic Rela- 
 tions of the United States and Latin America, pp. 176-195 ; G. F. TUCKER, 
 The Monroe Doctrine, chaps, iv-vi; W. F. JOHNSON, Four Centuries of 
 the Panama Canal, pp. 51-77; Senate Executive Documents, 47 Cong., 
 ist Sess. Vol. VI, p. 194 ; L. M. KEASBEY, The Nicaragua Canal and the 
 Monroe Doctrine] T. J. LAWRENCE, Disputed Questions in Modern Inter- 
 national Law, pp. 80-142; I. D. TRAVIS, The History of the Clayton- 
 Bulwer Treaty (Michigan Political Science Association, Publications, Vol. 
 II, No. 8); HENRY HUBERICH, The Trans-Isthmian Canal, pp. 6-15; 
 J. B. MCMASTER, History of the People of the United States, Vol. VII, 
 PP. 552-577. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 
 
 James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States of America from the 
 Compromise of 1850 (7 vols.) (The Macmillan Company) will be the 
 student's main work t)f reference for this and the following chapter. 
 
xx THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 It is a work of the highest authority, accurate in statement, fair in judg- 
 ment, and dignified in style. The period from the inauguration of Pierce 
 to the fall of Fort Sumter is treated in Vol. I, chap, v, to Vol. Ill, chap, 
 xiv. Rhodes may be supplemented on the legal side by J. W. Burgess's 
 Middle Period, chaps, xviii-xxii, and The Civil War and the Constitution, 
 Vol. I, chaps, i-vi (Charles Scribner's Sons). J. B. McMaster's valuable 
 History of the People of the United States (D. Appleton and Company), 
 with its exploitation of a wide range of popular sources, comes to an 
 end with Buchanan's administration. Vol. VIII, chaps, xc-xcvii, of Mc- 
 Master, and Vol. V, chaps, xxi and xxii, of Schouler, treat the period of the 
 present chapter. Two volumes of the American Nation Series (Harper & 
 Brothers) T. C. Smith's Parties and Slavery and F. E. Chadwick's Causes 
 of the Civil War cover the decade i85o-i86o very satisfactorily and are 
 provided with exhaustive bibliographies. The following volumes of the 
 Chronicles of America (Yale University Press) contain interesting material 
 on the period : Emerson Hough's Passing of the Frontier, W. E. Dodd's 
 Cotton Kingdom, Jesse Macy's Anti-Slavery Crusade, N. W. Stephenson's 
 Abraham Lincoln and the Union, and John Moody 's Railroad Builders. 
 The Works of Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., ed. Nicolay and Hay) (The 
 Century Co.), The Works of James Buchanan (12 vols., ed. J. B. Moore) 
 (J. B. Lippincott Company), and The Works of Charles Sumner (15 
 vols.) (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company) may be consulted by index. 
 Nicolay and Hay's monumental Life of Abraham Lincoln (10 vols.) 
 (The Century Co.) is indispensable for a thorough study of the great 
 liberator. Of the scores of biographies of Lincoln in single volumes, 
 perhaps that of Lord Charnwood (Constable & Company, London) is 
 the best. Of the numerous biographies of other statesmen and lead- 
 ing figures of the period, the following may be recommended : Stephen 
 A. Douglas, by Allen Johnson (The Macmillan Company) and by Louis 
 Howland (Charles Scribner's Sons) ; Jefferson Davis, by Armitage Gordon 
 (Charles Scribner's Sons) and by W. E. Dodd (George W. Jacobs & Co.); 
 Alexander H. Stephens, by Louis B. Pendleton (George W. Jacobs & Co.) ; 
 W. H. Seward, by Frederick W. Seward (Derby and Co.), Vol. II ; James 
 Buchanan, by G. T. Curtis (Harper & Brothers) ; S. P. Chase, by A. B. 
 Hart (Houghton MifBin Company) ; John Brown, by O. G. Villard 
 (Houghton Miffiin Company) ; /. /. Crittenden, by Mrs. M. Coleman 
 (J. B. Lippincott Company). Buchanan's own apology for his position is in 
 Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (D. Appleton 
 and Company). Special works on important topics of the period are P. 0. 
 Ray's Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (Cleveland) and The Genesis 
 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (American Historical Association Reports, 
 1914, pp. 259-280) ; G. H. Putnam's (Ed.) Political Debates between 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xxi 
 
 Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; 
 Charles Robinson's Kansas Conflict (Harper & Brothers) ; Francis Curtis's 
 Republican Party (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; E. S. Corwin's 
 Dred Scott Decision in the Light of Contemporary Legal Doctrine (Amer- 
 ican Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 52-69) ; E. D. Fite's Presidential 
 Campaign of 1860 (The Macmillan Company) ; E. P. Powell's Nullifica- 
 tion and Secession in the United States (G. P. Putnam's Sons), chaps, 
 vii, viii ; J. B. Sanborn's Congressional Grants of Land in Aid of Railways 
 (University of Wisconsin, Bulletin No. jo); F. L. Olmsted's Journey in 
 the Seaboard Slave States . . . 1853-1854 (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's 
 Sons). Neither Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern- 
 ment (2 vols.) (D. Appleton and Company) nor Alexander H. Stephens 's 
 Constitutional View of the War between the States (2 vols.) (The Na- 
 tional Publishing Co.) gives an adequate treatment of the important 
 decade preceding the outbreak of the war. Invaluable material on the 
 state of the country in 1850 can be found in the Eighth Census of the 
 United States (4 vols.) (Washington), and an intimate view of the 
 opinions of leaders in the South can be gathered from the voluminous 
 Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell 
 Cobb (2 vols., ed. U. B. Phillips) (American Historical Association 
 Reports, 1911). The text of the Dred Scott decision is contained in U. 5. 
 Reports, 19 How. 393-633, and is summarized in William MacDonald's 
 Documentary Source Book, pp. 406-420. Other important source material 
 is to be found in MacDonald, Nos. 109-115; Hart's Contemporaries, 
 Vol. IV, Nos. 19-69; Bogart and Thompson's Readings, chap, xxii; and 
 G. S. Calender's Readings, pp. 738-793. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. Bleeding Kansas : J. D. RICHARDSON, Messages and Papers of the 
 Presidents, Vol. V, pp. 352-360, 390, 401-407, 449-454, 471-481 ; The 
 Works of James Buchanan, Vol. X, pp. 105-325, and Mr. Buchanan's 
 Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, pp. 28-56 ; HENRY WILSON, 
 The Rise and Pall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. II, chaps, xxxv- 
 xxxvii ; CHARLES ROBINSON, The Kansas Conflict, chaps, v-xiii ; JOHN 
 GREENLEAF WHITTIER, The Kansas Emigrants and Brown of Ossawat- 
 omie; HART, Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 36-40; L. W. SPRING, Kan- 
 sas, the Prelude to the War for the Union, chaps, iii-xii, and The Career 
 of a Kansas Politician (American Historical Review, Vol. IV,f>p. 80-104); 
 W. L. FLEMING, The Buford Expedition to Kansas (American Historical 
 Review, Vol. VI, pp. 38-48). 
 
 2. The Origin of the Republican Party : EDWARD STANWOOD, The His- 
 tory of the Presidency, chaps, xix, xx ; G. W. JULIAN, Personal Recol- 
 
xxii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 lections, pp. 134-150; FRANCIS CURTIS, The Republican Party, Vol. I, 
 pp. 172-234; T. C. SMITH, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the 
 Northwest (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. VI), chaps, xiv-xix; W. E. 
 DODD, The Fight for the Northwest (American Historical Review, Vol. 
 XVI, pp. 774-788) ; A. D. MORSE, The Republican Party (Political Science 
 Quarterly, Vol. VIJ, pp. 522-535); C. H. VAN TYNE, Letters of Daniel 
 Webster, pp. 475-542 ; D. S. ALEXANDER, The Political History of New 
 York, Vol. II, chaps, xiii-xvii ; FREDERIC BANCROFT, The Life of William H. 
 Seward, Vol. I, pp. 291-311, 363-397, 410-431 ; ALLEN JOHNSON, Stephen 
 A. Douglas, pp. 260-280 ; The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 
 I, pp. 178-226; JESSE MACY, History of Political Parties . . . 1846-1860, 
 chaps, xi, xiii, xv. 
 
 3. The Career of William Walker : H. H. BANCROFT, History of the 
 Pacific States, Vol. Ill, chaps, xvi, xvii ; JAMES J. ROCHE, The Story of 
 the Filibuster -ers; WILLIAM WALKER, The War in Nicaragua-, MCMASTER, 
 Vol. VIII, pp. 189-191, 340-344 (with references to contemporary news- 
 papers) ; C. W. DOUBLEDAY, Reminiscences of the "Filibuster" War in 
 Nicaragua', W. V. WELLS, Walker's Expedition to Nicaragua', W. O. 
 SCROGGS, Walker and the Steamship Company (American Historical Re- 
 view, Vol. X, pp. 792-811) ; WILLIAM WALKER, General Walker's Policy in 
 Central America (De Bow's Review, February, 1860). 
 
 4. The Nomination of Abraham Lincoln : G. W. JULIAN, The First 
 Republican National Convention (American Historical Review, Vol. IV, 
 pp. 313-322) ; NICOLAY and HAY, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, pp. 255-278 ; 
 J. F. RHODES, History of the United States, Vol. II, pp. 456-473 ; E. D. 
 FITE, The Presidential Campaign of 1860, pp. 117-131; MCMASTER, Vol. 
 VIII, pp. 452-457 ; The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 
 pp. 599, 616; MURAT HALSTEAD, Caucuses of 1860, pp. 141-154; EDWARD 
 STANWOOD, History of the Presidency, pp. 290-297. 
 
 5. The Southern Argument for Secession : A. P. UPSHUR, The Na- 
 ture of the Federal Government (The South in the Building of the 
 Nation, Vol. IV, pp. 466-486, 499, 500) ; JEFFERSON DAVIS, The Rise and 
 Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. I, Part I; U. B. PHILLIPS, 
 Georgia and States Rights (American Historical Association Reports, 
 1901) ; T. R. R. COBB, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery ; ALEX- 
 ANDER H. STEPHENS, The War between the States, Vol. I. pp. 17-49, 459- 
 539 ; C. F. ADAMS, The Constitutional Ethics of Secession (Massachusetts 
 Historical Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. XVII, pp. 99 f.) ; HART, 
 Contemporaries, Vol. IV, NDS. 54, 55 ; J. L. M. CURRY, The Southern 
 States considered in their Relations to the Constitution of the United States 
 and to the Resulting Union ; F. E. CHADWICK, Causes of the Civil War, 
 PP- 37-53 (Calhoun's doctrines) ; E. A. POLLARD, The Lost Cause, chap. i. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xxiii 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 The most satisfactory story of the Civil War, in point of accuracy, fair- 
 ness, and sustained interest, is contained in the third, fourth, and fifth 
 volumes of J. F. Rhodes 's History of the United States from the Com- 
 promise of 1850 (The Macmillan Company). Rhodes's account is criti- 
 cized in some respects by Charles F. Adams, in a pamphlet entitled Some 
 Phases of the Civil War. The single volume by Rhodes on the History of 
 the Civil War (The Macmillan Company) is not a condensation of this 
 larger work but a fresh presentation. Two volumes in the American Na- 
 tion Series by J. H. Hosmer The Appeal to Arms and The Outcome of 
 the Civil War (Harper & Brothers) cover the ground completely and 
 are provided with excellent bibliographies. In briefer form the period is 
 treated in N. W. Stephenson's Abraham Lincoln and the Union and in the 
 Day of the Confederacy, and in W. Wood's Captains of the Civil War 
 (Yale University Press) ; also in F. L. Paxson's Civil War (Henry Holt 
 and Company). For more detailed military treatments, with excellent 
 maps, see Wood and Edmonds's Civil War in the United States (G. P. 
 Putnam's Sons) and J. Formsby's American Civil War (Charles Scrib- 
 ner's Sons). Almost all the important commanders in the war Grant, 
 McClellan, Sheridan, Sherman, Longstreet, etc., with the notable excep- 
 tion of Robert E. Lee left memoirs. These personal accounts are subject 
 to the temptation of "coloring" which besets all memoirs, and the careful 
 student must check them by reference to the great work of the United 
 States government entitled Official Records of the Union and Confederate 
 Armies and Navies in over one hundred and fifty volumes. This work is 
 described in Hosmer's Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 314-318. The Cam- 
 paigns of the Civil War (13 vols.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) and Battles 
 and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., ed. Johnson and Buell) (The Cen- 
 tury Co.) are valuable studies of the chief campaigns, written for the most 
 part by participants. A similar work from Southern sources is C. A. Evans's 
 Confederate History (12 vols.) (The Confederate Publishing Co.). To the 
 biographies of Lincoln, Seward, Davis, and Stephens cited under a former 
 chapter should be added G. C. Gorham's Life and Public Services of Edwin 
 M. Stanton (Houghton Mifflin Company), Vol. I; G. F. R. Henderson's 
 Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (2 vols.) (Longmans, 
 Green & C9-); H. A. White's Robert E. Lee and the Southern Confed- 
 eracy (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; the Diary of Gideon Welles (Houghton 
 Mifflin Company), chaps, i-xxx; A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1860-1865 (ed. 
 W. C. Ford) (Houghton Mifflin Company); and R. E. Lee's Dispatches, 
 , to Jeferson Davis (ed. W. J. de Renne) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). 
 
xxiv THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 The constitutional aspects of the war are well treated, from the North- 
 ern point of view, in J. W. Burgess's Civil War and the Constitution 
 (2 vols.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) and William Whiting's War Powers 
 of the President (J. L. Shorey, Boston); and, from the Southern point 
 of view, in N. W. Stephenson's Day of the Confederacy (Yale Univer- 
 sity Press) and J. L. M. Curry's Government of the Confederate States 
 (Richmond). The diplomatic history is admirably treated in Rhodes's 
 History, to which may be added Montague Bernard's Historical Ac- 
 count of the Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War 
 (Longmans, Green & Co.), C. F. Adams's Studies Military and Diplomatic 
 (The Macmillan Company), and J. M. Callahan's Diplomatic History of 
 the Southern Confederacy (Baltimore). E. D. Fite's Social and Industrial 
 Conditions in the North during the Civil War (The Macmillan Company) 
 and J. C. Schwab's Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Yale Uni- 
 versity Press) are valuable studies. A useful list of personal narratives 
 illustrating social conditions during the war may be found in J. K. Hosmer's 
 Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 325-327. For naval operations see E. S. 
 Maclay's History of the United States Navy (3 vols.) (D. Appleton and 
 Company) and J. T. Scharf's History of the Confederate States Navy 
 (New York). Important political documents of the war period are printed 
 in MacDonald's Documentary Source Book, Nos. 116-142, and the social 
 life of the period is illustrated by extracts printed in Hart's Contemporaries, 
 Vol. IV, Nos. 70-140. 
 
 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH 
 
 1. The Blockade: A. ROBERTS (A. C. HOBART), Never Caught ; E. S. 
 MACLAY, History of the United States Navy, Vol. II, pp. 225-281 ; T. E. 
 TAYLOR, Running the Blockade ; H. L. WAIT, The Blockade of the Con- 
 federacy (Century Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 914-928); JOHN WILKIN- 
 SON, The Narrative of a Blockade Runner ; GEORGE C. EGGLESTON, History 
 of the Confederate War, Vol. I, pp. 261-267 ; J- R- SOLEY, The Blockade 
 and the Cruisers; J. F. RHODES, History of the United States, Vol. V, 
 pp. 396-420. 
 
 2. War Finance : T. E. BURTON, John Sherman (American Statesmen, 
 Series II), pp. 87-141; JOHN SHERMAN, Recollections, Vol. 3 I, chaps, xii, 
 xiii ; D. R. DEWEY, Financial History of the United States, chaps, xii, 
 xiii; HUGH McCuLLOCH, Men and Measures of Half a Century, chaps, 
 xv-xvii; E. P. OBERHOLTZER, Jay Cooke, Vol. I, chaps, iv-xii; J. W. 
 SHUCKERS, The Life of Salmon P. Chase, chaps, xxx, xxxvii-xxxix ; A. M. 
 DAVIS, Origin of the National Banking System ; WESLEY C. MITCHELL, 
 History of the Greenbacks ; J. C. SCHWAB, The Confederate States of 
 America; American Annual Cyclopaedia, pp, 295-314 (1861), pp. 452- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xxv 
 
 474 (1862), pp. 290-304, 394-412 (1863), PP- 371-377 (1864), pp. 335- 
 350 (1865). 
 
 3. The Trent Affair : J. F. RHODES, History of the United States, 
 Vol. Ill, pp. 520-543 ; E. L. PIERCE, Memoirs and Letters of Charles Sum- 
 ner, Vol. IV, pp. 50-62; The Works of Charles Sumner, Vol. VI, pp. 162- 
 168, 219-242 ; FREDERIC BANCROFT, Life of Seward, Vol. II, pp. 223-253 ; 
 LORD NEWTON, Lord Lyons, a Record of British Diplomacy, Vol. I, pp. 
 55-62 ; C. F. ADAMS, The Trent Affair (Massachusetts Historical Society, 
 Proceedings, Vol. XLV, pp. 148-157); A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861- 
 1865 (ed. W. C. Ford), Vol. I, pp. 75, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93, 114. 
 
 4. Martial Law and Habeas Corpus : L. G. TYLER, The Suspension of 
 Habeas Corpus (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. Ill, p. 454); ALLEN 
 JOHNSON, Readings in American Constitutional History, chap, lii, Nos. 
 155-160; JOEL PARKER, Constitutional Law with Reference to the Present 
 Condition of the United States ; SAMUEL TYLER, Roger B. Taney, chap, 
 vi ; HORACE BINNEY, The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus ; 
 A. G. FISHER, The Trial of the Constitution; J. A. MARSHALL, The 
 American Bastille ; R. C. HURD, A Treatise on Habeas Corpus ; EDWARD 
 MCPHERSON, History of the Rebellion, pp. 153-195; American Annual 
 Cyclopedia, pp. 508-515 (1862), pp. 233-258, 469-491 (1863), pp. 421- 
 425 (1864), pp. 414-421 (1865). 
 
 5. Life in the South : D. R. GOODLE, Resources and Industrial Con- 
 dition of the Southern States (Report of the United States Department 
 of Agriculture, 1865), pp. no ff.; J. B. JONES, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary ; 
 MARY A. H. GAY, Life in Dixie during the War; MRS. ROGER A. PRYOR, 
 Reminiscences of Peace and War, chaps, ix-xxvi; DAVID DODGE, The Cave 
 Dwellers of the Confederacy (Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LVIII, pp. 514- 
 521); J. K. HOSMER, The Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 269-289; 
 W. L. FLEMING, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, Parts I, II; 
 SARAH L. JONES, Life in the South ; MARY B. CHESTNUT, Diary from 
 Dixie. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aberdeen, Lord, 417 
 
 Abolitionists, 318, 388!, 397f., 532, 598 
 
 Acts of Trade, 42, 6 1 
 
 Adams, Charles Francis, 615 n., 618 
 
 Adams, Henry, 238, 253 n., 346n., 
 S58n.2,s8in.i 
 
 Adams, John, and American Revolution, 
 66, 77n., 99, 103 ; on national govern- 
 ment, io8n., 109; minister to Great 
 Britain, 121, 124, 128; on the Consti- 
 tution, 134, i44n.; vice president, 
 147, 151; on the "people," 165; re- 
 lations with France, i8of.; president, 
 189!. 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 141 n., 239; min- 
 ister to Russia, 253, 275 ; expansionist, 
 298; relations with Spain, 302 f.; on 
 Missouri Compromise, 3i6f.; on 
 Monroe Doctrine, 324^; in election 
 of 1824, 33 if.; character, 334 ; policy, 
 337 f.; in election of 1828, 345; on 
 tariff, 37f-; and slavery, 378, 390, 
 397; on Texas, 413 f. 
 
 Adams, Samuel, 62, 71, 75 
 
 Alabama, the, 618 and n. 
 
 Albany Congress, 49, 109, 113 
 
 "Albany Regency," 335 
 
 Alexander I, Czar, 275, 322 f. 
 
 Alien and Sedition Acts, 191 f. 
 
 Amendment, Twelfth, 2oon.; Thir- 
 teenth, 597 f. 
 
 American Antislavery Society, 388 
 
 American Revolution, 55 f . 
 
 "American System," 343, 370 
 
 Ames, Fisher, 152, i79n.2, 182, 185 
 
 Amherst, General Jeffrey, 50 
 
 Amiens, Peace of, 215, 232 
 
 Ampudia, General, 424 
 
 Anabaptists, 3 
 
 Anderson, Major Robert, 524^, 541 f., 
 548, 620 
 
 Andrew, Governor John A., 545 
 
 Andros, Sir Edmund, 25 f., 31, 37, 42 
 
 Annapolis Convention, 136 f. 
 
 Antietam, battle of, 571 f. 
 
 Anti-Federalists, 162 f. 
 
 Anti-Masons, 361 and n. 
 
 Anti-Nebraska men, 489 f. 
 
 " Appeal of the Independent Democrats," 
 
 485 
 
 Appomattox, surrender at, 591 
 Aranda, Count, 125 
 Armada, Spanish, 6 
 "Armed neutrality," 96 
 Arnold, Benedict, 91, 96 
 Aroostook War, 409 f. 
 Articles of Confederation, 91, nof., 
 
 Ashburton, Lord, 41 if., 422 
 "Asiento,"the,3ii 
 Assemblies, colonial, 40, 42, 45 
 "Association," the American, 72 
 "Assumption," 155 
 Astor, J. J., 305 
 Atchison, D. R.,488n. 
 Atlanta, capture of, 588 
 Austerlitz, battle of, 226, 234 
 Austria, 459 f . 
 
 Bainbridge, Captain, 264 
 
 Baltimore, city of, 545, 547 
 
 Baltimore, Lord, 12, 18, 22 andn., 2711. 
 
 Bancroft, Archbishop, 1 1 n. i 
 
 Bancroft, George, 133 n. 
 
 Bank, National (first), i58f. 
 
 Bank, National (second), 284 f., 307 f., 
 
 3S8f., 362 f., 382 f., 4 o4f. 
 Banks, state, 285 n., 607 n. 
 Banks, General N. P., 565 f. 
 Barbary States, 128, 2iof. 
 Barbe-Marbois, 215 
 Barclay, Captain, 268 
 " Barnburners," 441 
 Barren, Captain, 231 
 Bates, Edward, 521, 541 andn. 2 
 " Battle of the Maps," 41 in. 
 Bayard, Thomas, 275 
 Bayonne Decree, 247 
 Bazaine, Marechal, 619 
 Bear Flag, 428 and n. 
 Beard, Charles A., i44n., 163 n., i66n.2, 
 
 i99n., 201 n. i 
 
XXV111 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Beauregard, General P. G. T., 543, 546, 
 
 552 f., 56o 
 
 Bedford, Gunning, 140 
 Beecher, H. W., 532 
 Beer, G. L., aon.i 
 Bell, John, 403, 520 
 Benjamin, J. P., 574, 602 f. 
 Benton, T. H., 304 and n., 337 n., 340, 
 
 3S8f ., 374n. i, 38Sn., 438f., 444, 488n. 
 " Benton's Mint Drops," 386 
 Berkeley, Governor William, 16, 24 n. 
 Berlin Decree, 235, 238 
 Biddle, Nicholas, 359 f ., 363 f ., 382, 386 
 Bienville, Celeron de, 47 
 " Biglow Papers," 434 
 Birney, James G., 419 f. 
 Black, Jeremiah W., 524, 527 
 Black Rock, raid, 263 
 Black Warrior affair, 464 f. 
 "Bladensburg races," 272 
 Blaine, James G., 492, 595 n. 
 Blair, Francis P., Jr., 548 
 Blair, James, 151 
 Blair, Montgomery, 501 n., 541 and n. 2, 
 
 596f.,6o2 
 
 Blennerhassett, H., 229 
 Blockade of South, 545 f., 562 f., 574, 
 
 610 
 
 Board of Trade, 44 
 Bolivar, Simon, 339 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 183 f., 213, 226, 
 
 232, 235, 245, 247 f., 252 f., 27on., 
 
 276,321! 
 Bonus bill, 297 f. 
 Boone, Daniel, 104, 113 
 Booth, John Wilkes, 620 
 Boscawen, Admiral, 61 
 11 Boston Massacre," 68 
 "Boston Tea Party," 69 f. 
 Bovay, E. A., 491 
 Braddock's defeat, 48 
 Bragg, General Braxton, 571, 573, 582 f. 
 Brandywine Creek, battle of, 91 
 Breckinridge, John, 194 
 Breckinridge, J. C., 497, 520 
 Brock, General Isaac, 262 
 Brooklyn Heights, battle of, 84 
 Brooks, Preston S., 496 
 Brougham, Lord, 285, 416 
 Brown, General Jacob, 269 f., 287 
 Brown, John, 496, 515 f. 
 Brown, Governor Joseph E., 574, 601 
 Bryant,W. C., 171 n. 
 Bryce, James, 528 
 Buchanan, James, and Ostend Mani- 
 
 festo, 464; minister to England, 467; 
 
 nominated 1856,497 ; president, 500 f., 
 
 indecision, 524 f.; change of spirit, 
 
 545 
 
 Buckner, General Simon B., 558 
 Buell, General Don Carlos, 557, 573 
 Buena Vista, battle of, 431 f. 
 Buford, Major, 495 
 Bullock, James, 617 f. 
 Bull Run, battle of (first) , 553 f . 
 Bull Run, battle of (second) , 569 f. 
 Bulwer, Sir Henry L., 46 1 f . 
 Burgess, J. W., 107, 137 n., 390, 489 
 Burgesses, House of, 13 
 Burgoyne, General John, 90 f . 
 Burke, Edmund, 58 f ., 64, 67, 81 n. 
 Burnside, General A. E., 572 and n. 2 
 Burr, Aaron, 198 f., 222, 224, 228f., 
 
 230f. 
 
 Butler, A. P., 444, 495 f. 
 Butler, General B. F., 554, 561 
 
 Cabinet, i5of. 
 
 Cable, Atlantic, 275, 530 
 
 Cabot, John, 21 
 
 Cadore, Due de, 247 f . 
 
 Calhoun, John C., as a nationalist, 249, 
 283 f. , 287, 296 f.; and Jackson, 301 f., 
 354f.; as Secretary of War, 341; as 
 vice president, 342, 353; opposes 
 tariff, 345 f., 353, 369; on nullifica- 
 tion, 373 ; on abolitionists, 389, 398 f. ; 
 relations with Texas, 417, 419; on 
 Wilmot Proviso, 444; on Com- 
 promise of 1850, 449 f.; and Nash- 
 ville convention, 454; on slavery, 
 539 
 
 California, 42 7 f., 433, 444 f., 448 f., 454 
 
 Callender, G.S., 131 n., i6in. 
 
 Calvinists of Rhine, 3 
 
 Cameron, Simon, 541 n. 2, 547, 556, 602 
 
 Canada, French, 45 f ., 54 ; and War of 
 1812, 259f.; in 1837, 396!. 
 
 Canning, George, 102, 238 f., 241, 245, 
 256, 324, 326 
 
 Canton, 131 
 
 Carlton, Sir Guy, 99, 102 
 
 Carmarthen, Lord, 121, 124 
 
 Caroline affair, 397, 409 f. 
 
 Cass, Lewis, 410, 441 f. 446, 458, 503, 
 
 Castlereagh, Lord, 256, 275, 277 
 Cedar Creek, battle of, 588 
 Census of 1850, 467 f. 
 Central America, 462 f . 
 
INDEX 
 
 xxix 
 
 Cerro Gordo, battle of, 432 
 
 Champlain,36n. 
 
 Chancellorsville, battle of, 575 
 
 Charming, Edward, 29 n. 3, 4211.1, 
 12911.2, 13111., 186, 217 
 
 Charles I, King, 10, 23 f. 
 
 Charles II, King, 9, n, 14, 24f., 56 
 
 Charleston, 93 f., 519!, 524!, 543 f., 620 
 
 Chase, Salmon P., on Compromise of 
 1850, 453; in convention of 1860, 
 521; Secretary of the Treasury, 534, 
 541 and n.2, 558; and war finance, 
 576 and n., 584, 605 f. 
 
 Chase, Samuel, 78, 114, 211, 225 
 
 Chatham, see Pitt 
 
 Chattanooga, 574, 582 f. 
 
 Cherbourg, battle of, 618 
 
 Cherokees, 340 f. 
 
 Chesapeake affair, 231 f., 239, 250 
 
 Chesapeake defeated, 267 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 49, 51 
 
 Cheves, Langdon, 249, 329, 490 
 
 Chickamauga, battle of, 582 
 
 Chippewa, battle of, 270 
 
 Choate, Rufus, 500 
 
 Choiseul, 54 
 
 Christian Commission, 611 
 
 Clarendon, Lord, 25 
 
 Clark, Daniel, 229 
 
 Clark, George Rogers, ioon.1, 126 
 
 Clark, William, 221 f. 
 
 Clay, Henry, and War of 1812, 249, 
 252, 260; at Ghent, 276; on National 
 Bank, 284, 358, 363, 385, 4O4f.; op- 
 poses treaty of 1819 with Spain, 304 
 and n.; on Missouri Compromise, 
 316, 3i8n.; on Monroe Doctrine, 
 322 f.; in campaign of 1824, 327, 
 330 f.; Secretary of State, 333 f., 
 338 f.; in campaign of 1832, 362 f.; 
 compromise of 1833, 373; on abo- 
 lition, 398 f. ; and Harrison, 399, 403 ; 
 and Tyler, 404 f., 407; in campaign 
 of 1844, 4i8f.; and Compromise of 
 1850, 447 f., 453, 456; death, 458 
 
 Clayton, J.M., 461 f. 
 
 Clayton Compromise, 440 
 
 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 462 
 
 Clinton, DeWitt, 266 
 
 Clinton, George, 119 
 
 Clinton, Sir Henry, 84, 90 f., 93, 96, 98 
 
 Cobb, Howell, 316, 447, 503 f.> 527 n. 
 
 Cockburn, Admiral, 272 
 
 Colbert, 30 n. i, 45 
 
 Cold Harbor, battle of, 587 and n. 
 
 Collins, E. L., 478 and n. i 
 Colombia, 323, 338, 461 
 Columbia, South Carolina, 590 
 Columbia River, 1 60 n.2, 221 
 Commerce, of United States, 160, 173 
 
 and n., 174, 232^, 236, 241, 248, 256, 
 
 266f., 285,29on.i,477f. 
 Committees of Correspondence, 70 n., 71 
 Committees of Safety, 71 
 " Common Sense," 81 
 Compromise, Missouri, 309 f. 
 Compromise of 1833, 374f. 
 Compromise of 1850, 443 f., 466 
 Conciliatory Act, 92 
 Concord, battle at, 75 
 Confederacy, Southern, 529, 535 and n., 
 
 6iof. 
 
 Confiscation Act, 554, 593 f . 
 Congress, First Continental, 71 f. 
 Congress, Second Continental, 74 f., 89, 
 
 107 
 
 Congress of Vienna, 277, 322 
 Connor, Commodore, 430 
 Conscription Act, Southern, 5 74; North- 
 ern, 575 f. 
 Constitution of the United States, 112, 
 
 132 f., i38f., 141 f., 145 f. 
 Constitutional Union Party, 520 
 Continental System, 253, 275 
 " Contraband of war," 554n.2 
 Contreras, battle of, 432 
 Cooper, Peter, 381 
 Cooper, Thomas, 343 
 Cooper Union speech, 5i8f. 
 Copenhagen, 240 
 "Copperheads," 5 75 f. 
 Corinth, 560 
 Cornwallis, General, 85, 89.!, 93!., 96 f., 
 
 98 
 
 " Corrupt bargain," 333 
 Corwin, Thomas, 446 
 Cotton, John, 20 and n. 
 Cotton, production and trade, 287, 295, 
 
 314 and n., 472 f., 551 n.i, 562!., 609 
 
 and n., 610 
 
 "Cotton is King," 473, 5 13 
 Coureurs de bois, 34 
 Cowpens, battle of, 96 
 Crawford, W. H., 285, 288, 331 f ., 337 n., 
 
 354*. 
 
 Creeks, 2 73, 340 f. 
 Creole affair, 410 f. 
 " Crime against Kansas," 495 
 Crimean War, 465 
 Crittenden, Colonel, 463- 
 
XXX 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Crittenden, J. J., 404, 406 
 
 Crittenden Compromise, 525!., 528, 537 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 13 f., 23 .,31 
 
 Cuba, 339, 462 f., 514 
 
 Cumberland Road, 257, 321 
 
 Cunard, Samuel, 477 f . 
 
 Currency, in Revolution, 96; Conti- 
 nental, i2of.; in Jackson's day, 386; 
 in Civil War, 603 f. 
 
 Curtis, Justice, 502 
 
 Dallas, Alexander J., 285, 29on.2 
 
 Dartmouth, Lord, 79, 311 
 
 Dartmouth College case, 306!. 
 
 Davies, William, 183, 185 
 
 Davis, David, 521 
 
 Davis, Henry Winter, 599, 619 n. i 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, Secretary of War, 467 ; 
 on railroads, 480; in Senate, 504; 
 resolutions of 1860, 518; on seces- 
 sion, 533; as president, 535, 545, 553, 
 558, 565, 574, 587; on Union, 590; 
 escape of, 591; opposition to, 6oof. 
 
 Davis- Wade Bill, 599 f. 
 
 Dearborn, General Henry, 206, 257, 263, 
 267 
 
 De Bow, quoted, 473 n. 3, 476 and n., 
 
 513,515 
 Debt, colonial, 60 and n.; in 1783, 118 
 
 and n.; in 1789, i54f.; extinguished, 
 
 391; of states, 410, 479 f.; in Civil 
 
 War, 606 f. 
 Debtors' prisons, 380 
 Decatur, Stephen, 211, 264 
 Declaration of Independence, 7 if., 80 
 
 and n., 107, 123 
 Declaratory Act, 65 
 De Grasse, Admiral, 97, 102 
 Democracy, 348 f., 402 
 Denonville, Governor, 37 and n. ' 
 D'Estaing, Admiral, 97 n. 
 Detroit, surrendered, 262 ; recovered, 
 
 268 
 
 Dew, Thomas, 391 and n. 
 Dickinson, John, 76, no, 139 
 Dinwiddie, Governor, 2iri., 45 
 Directory, French, 179 
 Distribution Act, 392, 395 n. 
 Dixo-n, Archibald, 484 
 Dodd, W. E., quoted, 450, 456 n., 473 n. 2 
 Dodge, A. C., 483 
 Donalson, A. J.,42of. 
 Dongan, Governor Thomas, 21 n., 36f. 
 Doniphan, Colonel, 426f. 
 Dorchester, Lord, 173 
 
 Dorr, Thomas, 349 n. 2 
 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 483 f.; on Kansas, 
 
 498 f.; and Buchanan, 504 f.; and 
 
 Lincoln, 507 f.; on slave trade, S^f.; 
 
 in campaign of 1860, 5i9f.; on 
 
 South, 522, 545 
 Draft riots, 584, 599 n. i 
 Drake, Francis, 6 
 Dred Scott case, 501 f ., 52 1 n. 
 Duane, William, 224, 383 
 Du Barras, 98 
 Dunmore, Governor, 109 
 Duquesne, Fort, 50 
 Dutch on Hudson, 3, 2 in. 
 Dwight, Timothy, 198, 292 
 D'Yrujo, 229 
 
 Early, General Jubal, 587 f . 
 
 Eaton, John, 354n. 
 
 Edict of Nantes, 3 
 
 Education, in colonies, 15 f.; North and 
 South, 474 f. 
 
 " Elastic clause," 160 
 
 Election, of 1792, 166, 167 n.i; of 1796, 
 188; of 1800, 185, 195 f., 202 f.; of 
 1812, 266; of 1816, 288; of 1824, 
 330 f.; of 1828, 345; of 1832, 365; 
 of 1836, 393 ; of 1840, 401 ; of 1844, 
 4i9f.; of 1848, 442; of 1852, 458 f.; 
 of 1856, 500; of 1860, 522 f.; of 1864, 
 588 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 6f., lof. 
 
 Ellmaker, Amos, 361 
 
 Ellsworth, Oliver, 139, 183 
 
 Emancipation, compensated, 594 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation, 572 n. i, 
 595 f- 
 
 Embargo, of 1794, 174; of 1808, 240 f. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 489 
 
 Emigrant Aid Society, 493 
 
 English Bill, 506 f. 
 
 " Enumerated commodities," 44 and n. 
 
 Eppes, John, 228n. 
 
 "Era of good feelings," 289f., 299, 320, 
 
 347 
 
 Ericsson, John, 563 
 Erie Canal, 329, 337 
 Erlanger loan, 609 f. 
 Erskine, David, 245 
 Essex case, 233 
 Eutaw Springs, battle of, 96 
 Everett, Edward, 351, 487, 520 
 Ewell, General, 576 
 Ewing, Secretary of the Treasury, 404, 
 
 406 
 
INDEX 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Excise of 1791, 209 
 "Exposition and Protest," 345 f. 
 
 Fair Oaks, battle of, 565 
 
 Fallen Timbers, battle of, 177 
 
 "Family Compact," 17211. 
 
 Faneuil, Peter, 43 
 
 Farewell Address, 123, 188 
 
 Farragut, Admiral D. G., 561, 587 
 
 "Federalist, The," 143 
 
 Federalists, 162, 175, 202 f., 241! 
 
 Ferguson, Colonel, 94 
 
 Field, Roswell, 501 n. 
 
 "Fifty-four forty or fight," 437 
 
 Fillmore, Millard, 454, 458, 498, 500 
 
 Finances, Confederate, 555 n., 604, 608 f. 
 
 Finances, Northern, 576n., 584, 603, f. 
 
 Fisheries, 305 n. 
 
 Fite, E.D., quoted, 6nf. 
 
 Five Forks, battle of, 591 
 
 " Five-twenties," 605 
 
 Fletcher vs. Peck, 228 
 
 Flint, Timothy, 299, 309 
 
 Florida, 59, 99, 105, 272, 300 f., 303 f., 
 
 399, 443 n., 446 
 Florida, the, 617 
 Florida-Blanca, 126 
 Floyd, James, 504, 527 n.i 
 Floyd, John, 371 
 Foote,A.H.,355,557f.,s6i 
 Forbes, General, 50 
 "Force Bill," of 1833,374!. 
 Forney, J. W., 505 
 Forster,W.E.,6i8 
 Forsythe, John, 397, 532 
 Fort Donelson, 557 f. 
 Fort Duquesne, 50 
 Fort Henry, 557 
 Fort Jackson, 273 
 Fort Lee, 85 
 Fort McHenry, 272 
 Fort Mimms, 273 
 Fort St. Marks, 301 
 Fort St. Philip, 2 73 
 Fort Washington, 85 
 "Forty-niners," 444 f. 
 Fouche, 23 in. 
 Fox, C.J.,8in., 235 
 Fox, G. V., 554n. 
 France, aid from, 83, 92 f., 97 n., 166; 
 
 war with, in 1798, i8if. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 40, 65, 77 and n., 
 
 86n., 92, 99, 105, 109, 113, 124, 132, 
 
 139 ^ 
 Franklin, state of, 127 
 
 Frederick the Great, 90 
 Fredericksburg, battle of, 572 n., 573, 575 
 Freeman's Farm, battle of, 91 
 "Freeport Doctrine," 5iof. 
 Free-Soilers, 441 f ., 499 
 Fremont, J. C, 428 f., 497 f., 556, 566, 
 
 594 
 
 French claims, 248 n., 379 
 French Revolution, 160, 169!., 183,321 f. 
 Frenchtown, battle of, 267 
 Freneau, Philip, 164!. 
 Fries, John, 196 
 Frontenac, Count, 36 
 Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, 312; of 
 
 1850,448,454,457,467 
 
 Gadsden Purchase, 480 
 
 " Gag rule," 390 
 
 Gage, Governor, 70, 72, 75 
 
 Gaines, General, 341 
 
 Gaines's Mill, battle of, 566 
 
 Gallatin, Albert, 206 f., 241, 244, 248, 
 
 256f.,266,275f. 
 Galloway, James, 72 
 Gardoqui, 126 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 380, 388, 620 
 Gates, General Horatio, 91 
 Geary, J. W., 499, 504 
 Genet, Edmond, i7of., 175 
 George III, 41, 51, 56f., 67, 74f., 80, 
 
 89n.,98, 129, 255f., 290 
 Georgia, 42n.2, 94, 114, 227, 34of. 
 Germantown, 3 ; battle of, 91 
 Gerry, Elbridge, 180 
 Gettysburg, battle of, 577 f. 
 Ghent, Treaty of, 271, 275 
 Gibraltar, 99 
 Gillespie, Lieutenant, 428 
 Gist, Christopher, 47 
 Gist, Governor, 522 
 Gladstone, W. E., 133 
 Godoy, Don Manuel, 177 
 Gold, discovery, 444 f., 471 
 " Gold pills," 58 
 Granger, Gideon, 206 
 Grant, Sir William, 233 
 Grant, General U.S., 557 f., 579f., 583, 
 
 586f.,59i 
 
 Graves, Admiral, 98 
 Gray, Captain Robert, i6on.2,3os 
 Great Britain, and colonies, 20 f., 55 f., 
 
 103; and United States, 12 if., i72f., 
 
 285, 329; and Confederacy, 6141. 
 Greeley, Horace, 489, 491, 507, 521, 533, 
 
 598n.2 
 
XXX11 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Greenbacks, 605 f. 
 Grenville, George, 57 f., 62 f., 65 
 Greytown, bombarded, 461 
 Grundy, Felix, 249, 372, 392 n. 
 Guadalupe-Hidalgo, treaty of, 433 
 Guadeloupe, 54 
 
 Habeas Corpus, 13, 592!., 598 n.i, 6oif. 
 
 "Hail Columbia," 181 
 
 Hale, J. P., 442 
 
 Hallcck, General W. H., 556 f., 569 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, and the Consti- 
 tution, 135, 137, 143; Secretary of 
 the Treasury, 150, 152 f., 171 f.; de- 
 fends Jay's Treaty, 176; and French 
 war, i8if.; and Whisky Rebellion, 
 i86f.; and Adams, 189, 191, 192 n., 
 197, 199; and Burr, 200, 222 
 
 Hamilton, Governor, of South Carolina, 
 
 371,373 
 
 Hammond, Senator, 513, 517 f. 
 
 Hampton, General Wade, 267 
 
 Hampton Roads, battle of, 563 f.; con- 
 ference at, 589 f . 
 
 Hancock, John, 43, 60 n. 
 
 Hancock, General W. S., 376, 577 f. 
 
 Harlem Heights, battle of, 85 
 
 Harpers Ferry, 516, 571 
 
 Harrisburg convention, of 1827, 343; 
 of 1839, 399 
 
 Harrison, Benjamin, 142 
 
 Harrison, General W. H., 250, 268, 299, 
 393,399,403 
 
 Hartford Convention, 279^ 
 
 "Hartford wits," 13 6 
 
 Harvard College, 15,378 
 
 Harvey, John, 14 
 
 Hawkes, Admiral, 61 
 
 Hay, George, 230, 264 
 
 Hayne, Robert Y., 340, 345, 355 f ., 3 73 
 
 Helper, H.R., 517 
 
 Henry, Patrick, 57, sgn.i, 64, icon., 
 108, 14if., i63n.i, 3i2n. 
 
 Hessians, 89 
 
 Hicks, Governor, of Maryland, 547 
 
 Hill, General A. P., 576 
 
 Hill, General D.H., 571 
 
 Hill, Isaac, 353, 357 
 
 Hillsborough, Lord, 23 
 
 Hise, Elijah, 46 1 
 
 Hoar, G. F., 132 
 
 Holy Alliance, 322 
 
 Homestead Bill, 515 
 
 Hood, General J. B., 589 
 
 Hooker, General Joseph, 575, 577, 583 
 
 Hooker, Thomas, 2on. 
 
 Hopkinson, Joseph, 181 
 
 Houston, General Samuel, 412!. 
 
 Howe, General George, 86 
 
 Howe, Lord Richard, 84 
 
 Howe, General William, 83 f ., 88 and n., 
 
 90 f. 
 
 Hudson, campaign for, 90 f. 
 Huelsemann, Chevalier, 459 
 Huguenots, 3 
 Hull, Isaac, 264 
 
 Hull, General William, 257, 260 f. 
 Hungary, 459 f. 
 "Hunkers," 441 
 Hunt, Mrs. R.L., 534^ 
 Hunter, General, 594 n. 
 Hutchinson, Thomas, 55, 64, 66, 70, 74 n. 
 
 Ide, William B., 428 
 
 Illinois admitted, 299 
 
 Immigration, 5, 468 f., 530 
 
 "Impending Crisis, The," 517 
 
 Impressment, 237 f., 254^, 277n. 
 
 Income tax, 605 
 
 Independent Treasury, 395 f ., 405, 443 n. 
 
 Indiana admitted, 299 
 
 Industrial' Revolution, 469 
 
 Internal Improvements, 321 and n.2, 
 
 337 
 
 Intolerable Acts, 70, 72, 92 
 Iowa admitted, 443 n. 
 Ireland, 60, 79 n., 469 f. 
 Iroquois, 36 n., 114 
 "Irrepressible Conflict, The," 521 
 Izard, General George, 269 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, senator, 189; and 
 Burr, 229; in War of 1812, 269, 
 273f., 287; and Indians, 3Oof.; on 
 Texas, 3O4n.; campaign of 1824, 
 33of., 335n.; campaign of 1828, 345; 
 presidency, 348 f.; character, 35 if., 
 365 f.; and Calhoun, 354f.; and 
 Bank, 358 f., 363 f.; reflected in 1832, 
 365; and nullification, 368n., 36of., 
 372; second term, 377 f.; foreign 
 affairs, 378f. ; censured, 384; op- 
 position to, 387 ; end of era, 402 ; on 
 Texas, 413 
 
 Jackson, General T. J. ("Stonewall"), 
 
 533 *-, 56Qf. ,575 
 Jackson, Michigan, 491 
 Jackson, Mississippi, 579 
 " Jackson's Yellow Boys," 386 
 James I, if., 7f., 22 
 
INDEX 
 
 XXXlll 
 
 James II, nn.i 
 
 Jameson, J. F., 141 n. 
 
 Jay, John, 7;n., 99, 119, 126, 129, 143, 
 150, 199, 306 
 
 Jay-Gardoqui treaty, 127 f. 
 
 Jay's Treaty, of 1794, 175!, i78f., 187 f. 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, on grievances of 
 American colonies, 58, 66 n., 70 and 
 n., 72 n. i, 74, 77 n., 78; and Decla- 
 ration of Independence, 80; on Union, 
 109; on Articles of Confederation, 
 no; and Western land claims, 115; 
 minister at Paris, 12 if.; on Con- 
 stitution, 135 ; on Washington, 149 n., 
 Secretary of State, 150, 157, 169, 
 326; on Bank, 159; opposes Hamil- 
 ton, 165, i66n.2, 185; organizes 
 Republicans, i86f.; vice president, 
 189, 193 ; and Kentucky Resolutions, 
 194; elected president, 195 f., 201; 
 policy, 204 f., 209 f., 212; on New 
 Orleans, 2i4f.; on West Florida, 220, 
 225 f., 234; reelected, 222; and 
 Chesapeake affair, 239 f.; criticisms 
 of, 242 f.; on War of 1812, 260; on 
 manufactures, 286; and Marshall, 
 308; on slavery, 311, 314; ordinance 
 of 1784, 3 12 f.; on states' rights, 337 ; 
 Jeffersonian Democracy, 348 f.; birth- 
 day dinner of 1830, 356 f. 
 
 Jena, battle of, 235 
 
 Johnson, Arthur, 88n.i 
 
 Johnson, H. V., 520 
 
 Johnson, General R. M., 249, 269, 393 
 
 Johnston, General A. S., 558 f. 
 
 Johnston, General J. E., 552 f., 565, 
 
 579,586,591 
 
 Jones, John Paul, 211, 264 
 Juarez, 619 
 
 "Judas of the West," 333 
 Judiciary Act, of 1789, 151, 207, 306; 
 
 of 1801,201,206 
 
 Kalm, Peter, 42, 56 and n. 
 
 Kansas, 492 f ., 498 f., 504 f., 507 
 
 Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 484 f. 
 
 Kaskaskia, icon. 
 
 Kearny, General S. W., 426 f. 
 
 Kearsarge, the, 618 
 
 Kendall, Amos, 384, 389 
 
 Kenesaw Mountain, battle of, 587 
 
 Kentucky, admitted, 313; loyalty of, 
 
 548, 556 f.; invaded, 573 
 Kentucky Resolutions, 194 f. 
 King, Rufus, 212, 232, 244, 288f., 316 
 
 King's Mountain, battle of, 94 
 " Know-Nothings," 470 f., 492 
 Knox, Henry, 150, 152 
 Kossuth, Louis, 460 
 
 Labor, in thirties, 359f.; in Civil War, 
 
 6l2f. * 
 
 Lafayette, Marquis de, 88, 97, 103 
 
 Lake Champlain, battle of, 271 
 
 Lake Erie, battle of, 268f. 
 
 Lakes, Great, 481 f . 
 
 Lamar, president of Texas, 414 
 
 Land sales, 223,293 
 
 Lane, Joseph, 520 
 
 LaSalle,36 
 
 Latin America, 338 f. 
 
 Laud, Archbishop, n, 17, 73 
 
 Laurens, Colonel John, 97 
 
 Lawrence, Amos, 493 
 
 Lawrence, Captain, 267 
 
 Lawrence, Kansas, 495 
 
 Le Boeuf , Fort, 47 
 
 Lecky, W.E. H., quoted, 58 f., 63, 79, 83, 
 
 148 
 
 Le Clerc, General, 215 
 Lecompton, Judge, 495, 499 
 Lecompton Constitution, 504 f. 
 "Lecompton Junior," 506 
 Lee, Charles, 89 
 
 Lee, Richard H., 78, 80, no, 142 
 Lee, General Robert E., 516, 545 f., 
 
 S65f., 571 f., 576n., 578, 590 f., 6oin. 
 Lee, William, 8 1 
 Leisler, Jacob, 38 n. 
 Leonard, Daniel, 70 n. 
 Letcher, Governor, of Virginia, 549 
 Lewis and Clark expedition, 221 and n., 
 
 305 
 
 Lexington, battle of, 75 
 
 Liberator, the, 380 
 
 Liberty party, 401 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, in Congress, 440; 
 in convention of 1856, 498; debates 
 with Douglas, 508 f.;- Cooper Union 
 speech, 5 i8f.; nominated in 1860, 52 1 ; 
 on Compromise, 526; on secession, 
 536 f.; first inaugural, 540 f.; cabinet, 
 541 and n.; call for volunteers, 544; 
 and McClellan, 567 f.; opposition to, 
 in 1862, 57of.; on Gettysburg, 578; 
 on the freeing of the Mississippi, 
 58on.; criticism of, in 1863, 584 and 
 n. 2, 598 f . ; reelected, 588 ; at Hampton 
 Roads, 589; war powers, 59 2 ^-5 P- 
 position to, in war, 598 f.; on Re- 
 
XXXIV 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 construction, 599; on the Treasury, 
 608; on war relief, 6i2n.; assassi- 
 nation, 620; character, 620 f. 
 
 Lincoln, General Benjamin, 94 
 
 Lincoln, Levi, 201 n. 2, 206 
 
 Linn Bill, 437 
 
 Livermore, T. L., 552 
 
 Livingston, Edward, 219, 360 
 
 Livingston, R. R., 213 
 
 Locke, John, 73 
 
 Lodge, H. C., 153 and n. 
 
 Logan, General J. A., 589 
 
 Longstreet, General James, 570, 576 
 
 Lookout Mountain, battle of, 583 
 
 Lopez expedition, 463 
 
 Louis XIV, 3, 34, 38, 45 
 
 Louis XVI, 83,93 
 
 Louisburg, 50 
 
 Louisiana, ceded to France, 213; pur- 
 chased, 2i4f., 304; admitted as state, 
 219,298,309,31311.1 
 
 Louisville, 573 
 
 Lovejoy, Elijah, 397, 509 
 
 Lowell, J. R., 422, 434, 450, 452, 528, 
 53of., 6isn. 
 
 Lowndes, William, 249, 287, 330 
 
 Lundy's Lane, battle of, 270 
 
 Lyon, Captain Nathaniel, 548 f. 
 
 Lyons, Lord, 6i6f. 
 
 McClay, Senator, 151 
 
 McClellan, General G. B., 549 and n., 
 
 555 f-> 558, 5M-, 567f., 57of., 588 
 McCulloch vs. Maryland, i6on.i, 
 
 307 
 
 MacDonough, Thomas, 271 
 
 McDowell, General Irving, 553, 565 
 
 McDuffie, George, 345, 360, 367 f. 
 
 McKay, Donald, 47 7 n. 
 
 McLane, Louis, 360, 383 
 
 McLean, John, 497 f ., 502 
 
 McLean, Thomas, 197 
 
 McLeod, Alexander, 409 
 
 McMaster, J. B., quoted, 105 
 
 Macon Bill No. 2,248 f. 
 
 Madison, James, 107; on Mississippi, 
 127 ; work for Constitution, 129, 136, 
 143; party affiliations, 163 n.i; on 
 Virginia Resolutions, 194; Secretary 
 of State, 206, 237, 243; president, 
 244f.; and War of 1812, 25if., 254, 
 275f., 28of.; reelected, 266; on ex- 
 pansion, 282 f., 296; vetos Bank bill, 
 297 
 
 Magoffin, Governor, of Kentucky, 548 
 
 Magruder, General J. B., 564, 567 f. 
 
 Mahan, Captain A. T., 281, 328 
 
 Maine admitted, 317 
 
 Mallory Bill, 343 
 
 Malvern Hill, battle of, 567 
 
 Manassas, battle of, 553 f., 569 
 
 Manufactures, in 1812, 256f.; in 1815, 
 281, 285; in 1819, 342 f., 349; in 
 1850, 471 f.; in 1860, 529; in Civil 
 War, 612 f. 
 
 Marbury vs. Madison, 207 
 
 Marcy, W. M., 351, 464^ 
 
 Maret, 253 
 
 Marshall, John, 117, 133, i43n., i6on. i, 
 i8of., 230, 3o6f. 
 
 Martin, Luther, 139 
 
 Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee, 306 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 381 n. 
 
 Martinique, 61 
 
 Mason, George, 138 
 
 Mason, Jeremiah, 359 
 
 Mason, John M., 464, 6i6f . 
 
 Maysville veto, 358 
 
 Maximilian of Austria, 619 f. 
 
 Meade, General George, 577 f. 
 
 Mercantile theory, 27 
 
 Merchant marine, 478 
 
 Merry, Anthony, 229 
 
 Metternich, 215,459 
 
 Mexican War, 42 if., 434 f. 
 
 Mexico, 322, 412, 4i4n., 422f., 514, 
 6i9f. 
 
 " Middle passage," the, 311 
 
 Milan Decree, 236 
 
 Mill Spring, battle of, 557 
 
 Minden, battle of, 50 
 
 Minutemen, 75 
 
 Miranda, 182 n. 
 
 Missionary Ridge, battle of, 583 f . 
 
 Mississippi, admission, 299 
 
 Mississippi River, 126!, 556 f., 580 
 
 Missouri, slavery in, 304 n.; territory, 
 309 
 
 Missouri Compromise, 309 f., 3i8n.i, 
 320, 483 f. 
 
 Mobile, 273 
 
 Mobile Bay, battle of, 587 f. 
 
 Monitor and Virginia, battle of, 562 f. 
 
 Monmouth, battle of, 93 
 
 Monroe, James, 129 n.i, 137; envoy to 
 France, i78f., ig6f.,2i5f.; envoy to 
 England, 238 ; Secretary of State, 245, 
 249; and Jackson, 274, 302; elected 
 president, 288; tour, 289; on internal 
 improvements, 297 ; on Texas, 304 n. ; 
 

 INDEX 
 
 XXXV 
 
 on Missouri Compromise, 317; re- 
 elected, 321 and n. ; success, 330 
 
 Monroe Doctrine, 322 f., 325, 328, 
 46of., 615, 6ign.i. 
 
 Monterey, California, 42 7 f., 445 
 
 Monterey, Mexico, 429 , 
 
 Montgomery, Alabama, 529, 535 
 
 Montreal, 50 f. 
 
 Morgan, General Daniel, 573 
 
 Morgan, William, 361 n. 
 
 Morris, Gouverneur, 118, 141, 178 
 
 Morris, Robert, n8f., 153 
 
 Morristown, 85, 89 
 
 Morton, Governor, of Indiana, 575 
 
 Moultrie, Fort, 84 
 
 Mount Vernon, 137 
 
 Moustier, Count, 152 
 
 Murfreesboro, battle of, 573 
 
 Murray, William Vans, 182 f . 
 
 Napoleon I, see Bonaparte 
 
 Napoleon III, 581 and n.2, 6i4f., 6i9f. 
 
 Nashville, 454^, 5S8n.2, 574, 588 
 
 Natchez, 127 
 
 National Republicans, 335, 362 
 
 Native- Americanism, 387 f., 470 
 
 Nat Turner's Rebellion, 391 n. 
 
 "Natural rights," 66 and n. 
 
 Naturalization Act, 191 
 
 Navigation Acts, 25, 28 f., 32, 38, 43 f., 
 
 Navy, 207, 258, 264f., 562 f. 
 
 Nebraska, 483 f . 
 
 Necker, 116 
 
 Nelson, William, 548 
 
 Neutrality act of 1794, 171 
 
 New England, nf., 258 f., 279,388 
 
 New France, 45 f. 
 
 New Granada, see Colombia 
 
 New Mexico, 433, 440, 445 
 
 New Orleans, 2i3f., 274f., 294^, 463, 
 
 481,561 
 Newport, 93 
 Niagara, 50, 263 
 Nicaragua, 461, 474n. 
 Nominating conventions, 360 f. 
 Nonintercourse Act, of 1794, i88n.; of 
 
 1806, 235; of 1809, 242, 246; of 1811, 
 
 248; of 1861,593 
 
 Nootka Sound controversy, 169, 212 
 North, Lord, 58, 69, 73, 79, 88n.i, 92, 
 
 98, 109 
 
 Northwest Ordinance, 131 f., 313 
 Nullification, in 1798, 195; in 1832, 
 
 367 f., 371 f., 37s'f. 
 
 Ohio, admission, 222 f. 
 
 Ohio valley, contest for, 47 f. 
 
 Old Colonial System, 28, 61 . 
 
 Olmstead, F. L., 480 n., 539 n.2 
 
 Olney, Richard, 327 
 
 Onis, Don Luis de, 302 f . 
 
 Orders in Council, 235 f., 240, 251, 256, 
 
 275,277^ 
 Oregon, 221, 305 f., 381 f., 409^, 436f., 
 
 438 n. i, 440 f. 
 Oreto, the, 617 
 Orient, trade with, 131 
 Orleans, territory of, 218 
 Osgood, H. L., 20 n. 
 Ostend Manifesto, 464 f. 
 Otis, James, 43, 59 n. i, 62 f ., 66, 77n. 
 Owen- Glass Act, 608 n. i 
 
 Pacific Railroad, 480, 515 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 7211.1,81, 120 
 
 Pakenham,Sir Edward, 274^ 
 
 Palmer, B. M., 539n. i 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, 422 
 
 Palo Alto, battle of, 424 
 
 Panama mission, 338 
 
 Pan-American policy, 323 
 
 Panic, of 1837, 394f.; of 1857,512^ 
 
 Paris, Treaty of, 1763, 54, S6f.; 1783, 
 
 99 f. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 34, 49 n. 
 Parliament and colonies, 22 f., 33, 39, 
 
 42, 52, 65f. 
 Patent Office, 472 n. 
 Patterson, General Robert, 552 
 Patterson, Governor, of New Jersey, 
 
 i39 
 
 Peace convention of 1861, 530 
 Peel, Robert, 416 f. 
 Pemberton, General J. C., 579 
 Peninsular campaign, 564 f. 
 Penn, Richard, 77 
 Penn, William, 3,22 n., 2711. 
 Pensacola, 273,301 
 Perceval, Spencer, 253, 256 
 Perry, Oliver H., 268 f. 
 Perry ville, battle of, 573 
 Personal Liberty Acts, 446 
 Petersburg, siege of, 587, 590 
 Petersham, battle of, 122 
 Philippines, 20 
 Pickens, Governor, of South Carolina, 
 
 543 . 
 
 Pickering, John, 211 
 Pickering, Timothy, i8in., 182 f., 191, 
 
 241,279,288 
 
XXXVI 
 
 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Pickett's Charge, 577 f. 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 458, 464, 466, 494 f., 
 
 498, 502 
 
 Pierpont, F. H., 549 
 Pike, Zebulon, 22 in. 
 Pinckney, Charles, 390 
 Pinckney, C. C., i79f., 197, 222, 345 
 Pinckney, Thomas, 141 and n., 177, 189, 
 
 257 
 
 Pinkney, William, 238, 241, 249, 315 
 Pitt, Fort, 50 
 Pitt, William, 40, 49, 5 if., 57*-. 61, 64, 
 
 72,75,79,8in. 
 Plantation system, 473 f . 
 "Pocket veto," 600 n. 
 Poinsett, Joel R., 372 
 Polk, James K., Speaker of the House, 
 
 389; in campaign of 1844, 4i8f.; and 
 
 Mexico, 423, 42 6 f.; and Oregon, 
 
 438 f.; on Cuba, 463 
 Polk, General Leonidas, 556 f. 
 Polly case, 233 n. 
 Pondicherry, 51 
 Pontiac, 59 f. 
 "Pony express," 530 
 Pope, General John, 561, 569f., S7on. 
 "Popular sovereignty," 445 f., 505 
 Population, in 1790, 104 n.i, 313^2; 
 
 in 1850, 468; in 1860, 529, 550 
 Porter, Admiral, 579 
 Porter, General Fitz-John, 566 
 Porter, Peter B., 249, 251, 263, 269, 296 
 Port Hudson, 561, 580 and n. 
 Port Royal, 34 n. 
 Pottawatomie, 496 f. 
 Prevost, Sir George, 259, 27of. 
 Price, General Sterling, 549 
 Princeton, battle of, 89 
 Privateers, 278n. 
 Proclamation Line, 60, 113 
 Procter, General, 267, 269 
 Public lands, 2i8n., 295, 391 
 Pulaski, Count, 88 
 Puritans, n, 15 f. 
 Putnam, General Israel, 84 
 Pym, John, 23 
 
 Quadruple Alliance, 322 f. 
 
 Quakers, 17 
 
 Quartering Act, 68 n., 70 
 
 Quebec, 34 and n., 45 f., 50, 56, 59, 72, 
 
 86, 113 
 
 Queenstown Heights, battle of, 263 
 Quiberon, battle of, 51 
 "Quids," 227 
 
 Quincy, Josiah, 283, 298 
 
 Quitman, Governor, of Mississippi, 457, 
 
 463 
 Quitrents, 26 n., 42 
 
 Railroads, 380 f., 478f., 512, 582 and n. 
 
 Raleigh letter, 418 f. 
 
 Rambouillet Decree, 23 in., 236, 248 
 
 Randolph, Edmund, 138, 150, 159 
 
 Randolph, Edward, 30 and n. 
 
 Randolph, John, 207, 224, 243, 248n., 
 249, 283, 287, 317, 333, 3 44 n., 346n. 
 
 Ray, P.O., 488 n. 
 
 Red Cross, 61 1 and n. 2 
 
 Redemptioners, 9n.i 
 
 "Red Sticks," 2 73 
 
 Reeder,A.H.,493f. 
 
 Reid, Whitelaw, 55 
 
 Religion in colonies, i6f. 
 
 Removal of deposits, 383 f. 
 
 Renaissance, 5 
 
 Republicans, of 1791, i63n.2; of 1815, 
 282 ; of 1854, 49of., 498, 537 
 
 Resaca de la Palma, battle of, 424 
 
 Restoration of 1660, 23 
 
 Revolution, American, 55 f. 
 
 Revolution, English, 40 
 
 Revolution, French, see French Revolu- 
 tion 
 
 Reynolds, General J. F., 577 
 
 Rhea letter, 300 and n. i 
 
 Rhett,R.B.,4S7,S24n. 
 
 Rhode Island, 13, 38f., 6in.2, 65, 119, 
 122, i48n., 349 and n.2 
 
 Rhodes, J. F., quoted, 453"., 460, 487, 
 489, sosn., S27n.3, 538, 581, 6i4n. 
 
 Richmond, 550, 553, 564^, s86f., 591 
 
 Rives, W.C., 379 
 
 Robertson, James, 104, 113 
 
 Robinson, Charles, 494 f. 
 
 Rochambeau, General, 96 f. 
 
 Rochefoucauld, Duke of, 16 
 
 Rockingham, Marquis of, 65, 98 
 
 Rodgers, Commodore, 250 
 
 Rodney, Admiral, 100 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 150 
 
 Rose, George, 241 
 
 Rosecrans, General W. S., 573, 582!. 
 
 Ross, Betsy, 309 n. 
 
 Ross, General, 272 
 
 Rousseau, L. H., 548 
 
 Rule of 1756, 173, 233n., 245 
 
 Rush, Richard, 3 24 
 
 Rusk BUI, 480 
 
 Russell, John, 254 
 
INDEX 
 
 xxxvii 
 
 Russell, Lord John, 616, 618 
 Russell, Jonathan, 275!. 
 Russell, W. H., 532 
 Russia, treaty with, 323, 327 n. 
 Rutledge, Edward, inf., 306 
 Rutledge, John, 86 n., 151 
 
 St. Augustine, 300 and n. 2 
 
 St. Clair, General Arthur, 167, 174 
 
 St. Leger, .General, 90 f. 
 
 Sandford, John, 501 
 
 Sanitary Commission, 6n 
 
 San Jacinto, battle of, 412 
 
 San Pascual, battle of, 427, 429 
 
 Santa Anna, General, 412, 423, 43of. 
 
 Santa Fe, 426 
 
 Santo Domingo, 215 
 
 Saratoga, battle of, 91 
 
 Savannah, 94, 589 
 
 Savannah, the, 329 
 
 Schenectady, 46 
 
 Schuyler, General Peter, 91 
 
 Schwab, J. C., 6ion.2 
 
 Scotch-Irish, 2 
 
 Scott, Dred, 501 f. 
 
 Scott, Sir William, 233 n. 
 
 Scott, General Winfield, 269!, 397,429 f , 
 432 f., 458, 525, 52811.1, 532, S4on.2, 
 542, 547, 552 f. 
 
 Secession, 523 f., 527, 534f. 
 
 Sedition Act, 192 f. 
 
 Seminole War, 300 f. 
 
 Semmes, Captain Raphael, 618 
 
 Sequestration Act, 554 
 
 Seven th-of -March speech, 450 f. 
 
 Sewall, Samuel, 17 
 
 Seward, W. H., governor of New York, 
 395; on Texas, 436; and Tyler, 445; 
 on Compromise of 1850, 453 ; on 
 Kansas, 492; in campaign of 1856,, 
 497; in campaign of 1860, 52of.; 
 offers compromise, 538 ; Secretary of 
 State, 541 and n.2, 542 f.; on war, 
 551 n. 2; at Hampton Roads, 589; on 
 Trent affair, 617; warns Napoleon 
 III, 619 
 
 Seymour, Governor Horatio, 577 
 
 Shannon, Wilson, 494 f. 
 
 Sharpsburg, see Antietam 
 
 Shays's Rebellion, 122, 129, 136 
 
 Shelburne, Lord, 99 
 
 Shenandoah, the, 618 
 
 Shenandoah campaign, 565 f. 
 
 Sheridan, General Philip H., 583 f ., 588, 
 620 
 
 
 Sherman, John, 517 
 
 Sherman, General W. T., 579!., 586, 
 588 and n.2, 59of. 
 
 Shields, General, 566 
 
 Shiloh, battle of, 560 f. 
 
 Shipbuilding, 476, 562 and n. 
 
 Slade of Vermont, 388 f. 
 
 Slave trade, abolished in 1808, 244; in 
 colonies, 311; on African coast, 409; 
 in the fifties, 448, 473, 514 f.; abol- 
 ished in District of Columbia, 454 
 
 Slavery, introduction of, 310; and 
 nullification, 376; in New Mexico, 
 440 f., 446 f.; status in 1850, 456; 
 trend to lower South, 473 and n.i 
 and n.2; in Lincoln-Douglas debates, 
 5iof.; and business, 53 if.; discus- 
 sion of, 539; during Civil War, 594 f. 
 
 Slidell, John, 423 f., 514, 581 n. 2, 615 f. 
 
 Sloat, Commodore, 427 
 
 Smith, Caleb, 541 n.2. 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, 546n. 
 
 Smith, Justin H., 423, 435 n. 
 
 Smith, General Kirby, 573, 591 
 
 Smith, Robert, 206, 244 f., 249 
 
 Smith, Samuel, 206 
 
 Smith, General W. F., 583 
 
 Smythe, General Alexander, 263 
 
 Soule, Pierre, 464 f . 
 
 " Southern Rights " associations, 457 
 
 Spain, explorers, 6f . ; in Revolution, 96 ; 
 disputes with, in West, i24f., i68f.; 
 Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795), 177; 
 sells Florida, 303 ; relations with, in 
 1850-1854, 462 f. 
 
 Sparks, Jared, 41 1 n. 
 
 Specie Circular, 392 f . 
 
 Spoils system, 353 
 
 Spottsylvania, battle of, 587 
 
 " Squatter sovereignty," 445 f ., 486 
 
 Stamp Act, 62 f ., 67, 79 
 
 Stanton, Edwin M., 527 n.i, 541 n.2, 
 556, 582!., SQin., 620 
 
 Star of the West, the, 529 
 
 Stars and Bars, 546 
 
 Star-Spangled Banner, 272 
 
 Stockton, Commodore R. F., 428 
 
 Stoddard, Benjamin, 181 
 
 Story, Justice, 13 n.2 
 
 Stephens, Alexander H., 77, 423, 485, 
 514, 527, 535, 589, 601 
 
 Stephenson, George, 381 
 
 Steuben, Baron, 88, 129 
 
 Stuarts, 1,9 
 
 Subtreasury, 395 
 
xxxviii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 Suff oik Resolves, 71 f. 
 
 Sugar Act, of 1764, 62 f. 
 
 Sugar and Molasses Act, of 1733, 44, 61 
 
 Sullivan, General John, 86 n. 
 
 Sumner, Charles, 495 f ., 615 n., 617 
 
 Sumner, General E. V., 565 f. 
 
 Sumter, Fort, 541 f. 
 
 Supreme Court, 501 f ., 503 
 
 Swedes, 3 
 
 Talleyrand, i8of., 2i6n. 
 
 Tallmadge, James, 310, 315, 317 
 
 Tammany Hall, 470 
 
 Taney, Roger B., 383 f., 502 
 
 Tariff, of 1789, i49f.; of 1816, 286f.; 
 of 1824, 331 f., 342 f.; of 1828, 344f., 
 367; of 1832, 371; of 1833, 374n.2; 
 reform, of, 377; of 1842, 407; of 
 1846, 471 n. 2, 477; in Civil War, 604 
 
 Taylor, John, 193, 195 
 
 Taylor, General Richard, 581, 59 1 
 
 Taylor, Zachary,424f.,429f.,44if., 445, 
 
 454 
 
 Tea, tax on, 68 f., 92 
 
 Tecumseh, 177, 250, 269 
 
 Tennessee, 313, 549, 584 n.i 
 
 "Terrapin policy," 240 n. 
 
 Texas, "surrender" of, 304 and n.; ex- 
 pansion toward, 381 ; annexation of, 
 397 f., 412 f., 42of.; British influence 
 in, 4i4f.; in Compromise of 1850, 
 448; convention in 1861, 527 
 
 Thames, battle of, 269 
 
 Thanksgiving Day, 581 n.3, 584 
 
 Thayer, Eli, 493 
 
 Thomas, General G. H., 317, 557, 582!, 
 588f. 
 
 Thornton, Captain, 424 
 
 Tilghman, General, 557 
 
 Tippecanoe, battle of, 250 
 
 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 365 
 
 Tompkins, Governor, of New York, 241 
 
 Toombs, Robert, 423, 447, 498, 500, 
 54on.,543 
 
 Topeka Constitution, 494, 498 
 
 Tories, 79, 8if., 86, 88, 92, 100, 102, 
 
 "3*: 
 
 Toussaint L'Ouverture, 215 
 
 Townshend, Charles, 67 and n., 68 
 
 Trafalgar, battle of, 234 
 
 Treaty, of Paris (1763), 54, 56 f.; of 
 Paris (1783), 99*., 123; Jay, 175*-, 
 i78f., 187 f.; of Grenville, 177; of 
 San Lorenzo, 177; of 1800 with 
 Napoleon, 184; of San Ildefonso, 
 
 213; of 1806 with England, 238; of 
 Ghent, 277 f.; of Fort Wayne, 299; 
 of 1819 with Spain, 303 f.; of 1818 
 with Great Britain, 305 f.; of Indian 
 Springs, 341; of 1827 with Great 
 Britain, 409 ; Webster- Ashburton, 
 4iof.; of 1844 with Texas, 41 7 f.; 
 of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 433 ; of 1846 
 with Great Britain, 438 
 
 Trenholm, Secretary, 603 f . 
 
 Trent affair, 556,616 f. 
 
 Trenton, battle of, 89 
 
 Trescot, W. H., 524 
 
 Trianon Decree, 248 
 
 Triple Alliance, 25 
 
 Tripoli, 210 f. 
 
 Trist, Nicholas, 432 f. 
 
 Troup, Governor, of Georgia, 341 f. 
 
 Tucker, Dean Josiah, 78, 116 
 
 Turner, Nat, 380 
 
 Tuyl, Baron, 324 
 
 Tyler, John, 375 n., 400, 404 f., 406 f., 
 
 Tyler, L. G., 408 
 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 517 
 "Underground railroad," 446, 457 
 Unionists, Southern, 490 n. 
 Upshur, A., Secretary of State, 4i5f. 
 
 Vallandigham, C. L., 575, 588 
 
 Valley Forge, 88 
 
 Valmy, battle of, 169 
 
 Van Buren, Martin, senator, 335; 
 
 Secretary of State, 354; vice presi- 
 
 dent, 362, 385 ; nominated to English 
 
 mission, 378; president, 382, 393; 
 
 criticism of, 400; and Texas, 413 f.; 
 
 in campaign of 1844, 418; nomi- 
 
 nated in 1848, 441 f. 
 Vance, Governor, of North Carolina, 
 
 602 
 
 Van Dorn, General, 571, 574 n. 
 Van Rensselaer, General Stephen, 263 
 Van Tyne, C. H., quoted, 92 n., io8n. 
 Vaudreuil, Marquis de, 51 
 Venango, Fort, 47 
 Venezuela, 327 
 Vera Cruz, 432 
 
 Vergennes, Comte de, 56,92,99,102,125 
 VerplanckBill,374f. 
 
 Vicksburg,5i 4 ,56i,579f.>595 
 Victor, General, 220 
 Vincennes, ioon.1, 127 
 Virginia, the, 563 f. 
 
INDEX 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 Virginia Company, 7!., 31; settlement, 
 
 nn.i, 15,39 
 Virginia Resolutions, 194 f. 
 
 Wade, Benjamin, 599 
 
 Walcott, Governor, of Connecticut, 294 
 
 Walker, L. P., 541 n. i 
 
 Walker, Robert J., 504!. 
 
 Walker, William, 474 f., 514 
 
 Walker tariff, 47 1 n. 2, 477 
 
 Wallace, General Lew, 560 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 51 
 
 Walpole, Robert, 57 and n. 
 
 "War hawks," 249 
 
 Washington, city of, 204, 27 if., 546 f., 
 554 and n. i, 587 
 
 Washington, George, in French and 
 Indian War, 2 in., 47, 48 and n.; in 
 Revolution, 75 f., 77 and n., 82 f., 
 84f., 89f., 93, 96, 97, 102 f., 106; on 
 government after 1783, 117, i29n.i, 
 130; president, 123, i47f., 152, 159; 
 on West, 127, i29n.2, 135 ; and Con- 
 stitution, 137, 142, 144; character, 
 148 f.; reelection, 167; and European 
 war, 170, 175; and Jay Treaty, 176; 
 and French war, 181 ; a Federalist, 
 187; retirement, 188; death, 197 
 
 Washington, Colonel Lewis, 516 
 
 Wayne, " Mad Anthony," 177 
 
 Webb, J.Watson, 387 n. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, on Northwest Ordi- 
 nance, 132; on Hamilton, 160; in 
 Dartmouth College case, 307 ; on 
 Monroe Doctrine, 327; debate with 
 Hayne, 356; on Jackson, 374n.; in 
 campaign of 1836, 393; Secretary of 
 State, 403, 409; on Bank, 406; on 
 Mexican War, 434!. ; on Compromise 
 of 1850, 450 f.; in campaign of 1852, 
 458; Huelsemann letter, 459 f.; on 
 New Orleans riot, 464 
 
 Webster, Peletiah, 1 18 
 
 Weed, Thurlow, 520, 537 and n. 
 
 Welles, Gideon, 541 and n. 2, 616 
 
 Wellesley, marquis of, 248 f., 253 
 
 Western migration, 2i3f., 222!., 29of., 
 293 f -,336, 349 f., 355 * 
 
 West Florida, zigi ., 225f ., 255 n. 2, 304 
 West Indies, 44, 61, 92 n., 173 and n., 
 
 233, 378 f. 
 West Virginia, 550 
 Wheeler, General Joseph, 573 
 Whigs, American, 382 f., 387 f., 434 f., 
 
 459, 489 
 Whigs, English, 39 f., 74 f., 8in., 97 f., 
 
 IO2 
 
 Whisky Rebellion, 166, 174, i86f. 
 
 White, Hugh L., 393 
 
 White Plains, 85, 97 
 
 Whitman, Marcus, 436 and n.2 
 
 Whitney, Asa, 480 
 
 Whitney, Eli, 176^,314 
 
 Whittier, J. G., 416, 452, 501, 532 n.2 
 
 Wilderness, battle of, 587 
 
 Wilkes, Captain, 616 
 
 Wilkins Bill, 374f. 
 
 Wilkinson, General James, 229 f., 257!., 
 
 267 
 
 William III (of Orange) , 22tn., 26, 38,46 
 William and Mary College, 16 
 Williams, Roger, 17 
 Wilmot, David, 439 f. 
 Wilmot Proviso, 439 f., 443 f., 508 
 Wilson, James, 139, 151 
 Winder, General, 272 
 Winthrop, John, 8, 12, 17, 20 and n. 
 Winthrop, R. C., 447, 531 
 Wirt, William, 361 
 Wise, Governor Henry A., 476 
 Wolfe, General James, 50, 54, 56, 60, 86 
 Women, in Civil War, 612 n.i, 6i3n.i 
 Wood, Fernando, 513 n., 531 f ., 545 
 Woodbury, Levi, 359 
 Wool, General, 426 f. 
 Wright, Silas, 443 n. 
 
 XYZ Affair, i8of. 
 
 Yancey,W.L.,457,5i9 
 Yazoo frauds, 227!. 
 York, Duke of, 25 
 
 Yorktown, in Revolution, 93, 98; in 
 Civil War, 564 f. 
 
 Zollicoffer, General, 557