The American Story

BOOK ONE

I

The World in Europe’s Belly

FIRST THE ROUNDNESS OF THE EARTH HAD TO BE IMAGINED.

Then the New World was discovered by a man who was sure it was not there.

With the idea that by sailing due west he would arrive at the east, Columbus was looking for Cathay and thought he had found it. Cathay was the olden name for China. His dream was to loot the fabulous Orient and use its wealth to recapture the Holy Land from the infidel. The possibility of another world lying between Europe and Asia never occurred to him; and he died without knowing what he had discovered.

This New World had the shape of a sack tied in the middle, with grain in one end and a pig in the other—two continents extending from the Arctic north to the Antarctic south, joined together by a narrow tropical isthmus.

At that time the great maritime nations of Europe were Spain and Portugal. They were jealous and competitive. By right of discovery Spain claimed the whole of the New World for her own. But Portugal’s sailors also had performed a spectacular feat. They had reached the wonderful East by sailing around Africa. They quarreled over how the world should be divided between them—not the New World alone but all the earth, each according to the axiom that finders are keepers. Since they were both Catholic countries they appealed to the Pope. He settled it by drawing a line north and south to bisect the earth in two equal parts. All to the west of the line belonged to Spain; all to the east of it belonged to Portugal. That was before there were any proper maps. Spain wanted the line moved a little to the west and the Pope moved it. As it turned out, to everybody’s amazement, that little westward shift of the Pope’s line gave Portugal title to the great eastward bulge of South America which now we call Brazil, and so it happens to this day that the language of Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish. Portugal did very little in the New World. Her valor was great but her boots were small, and she soon fell out of the race.

The Spanish came to the New World with the cross in one hand and a sword in the other; and their first word was gold. Unhappily for them, the gold was there, and it ruined them. The treasure belt began in what now we call Mexico, continued down through the Isthmus, which is Central America, and into Peru. Here in the mysterious spontaneity of life, a rich and gorgeously ornamented civilization had been upraised. The Spaniards conquered it, pillaged its temples, tamed the natives to work in the gold and silver mines; and for more than one hundred years, to waylay the rich Spanish galleon on its homeward passage was piracy’s principal pastime.

However, this indictment of Spain is a cliche of history, true only so far as it goes. The mighty feats of daring and valor performed by the Spanish conquistadors make glamorous reading; and the fall of the empire points a facile moral. The fact is that for all the greed and cruelty of their conquering soldiers, the Spaniards were the first to bring culture to the New World. Archbishops followed the soldiers. They established libraries and universities. Authority was divided between the Church and the Crown. The largest example of ecclesiastical architecture built in the 16th century, anywhere in the world, was the cathedral of Mexico. To the gentle heroism of the Jesuit missionaries, who worked patiently with the people, taught them simple arts and the uses of irrigated agriculture in their arid lands and then baptized them, there is the silent testimony of ruined Spanish missions, with their sweet imported bells, spaced across what now is the American southwest from Texas to California. What the Spaniards paid in civilizing Christian works for the gold and silver they took to Europe left an indelible mark on this side of the world. The other moral may be that civilization becomes too hypocritical to acknowledge its debt to war and conquest.

The French came looking for the northwest passage to Asia that God forgot to make. They found the St. Lawrence River and put a military outpost at what now is Quebec. From there they pushed on to the Great Lakes, discovered the Mississippi River and followed it to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico, planting outposts on the way. They were staking out much more than they could hold. They were neither pioneers nor colonists. They brought no women. They were the first of all fur traders, and made friends with the Indians; following the fur traders came the religious martyrs, bearing the cross. The Protestant Hugenots would have been glad to colonize New France, but the French king would permit only Catholics to come, and even Catholics could not acquire title to land. Everything belonged to the King. New France was pure adventure, an explorer’s dream, a canoe empire, capsizable.

The English came late.

For one hundred years England’s principal interest in the New World ran to piracy. Her fierce sea dogs made a romantic business of capturing Spanish treasure ships; and so long as they brought the loot home and gave the Crown the lion’s share of it they were all right, save only in those rare intervals when England was at peace with Spain, in which case they might get hanged as pirates, merely as a regal gesture to the amenities; but that also was part of the pirates’ trade and they didn’t take it too hard. Moreover, it did not happen often.

Resolved at last to wipe out once for all this marauding new sea power, the Spanish King built the Invincible Armada and sent it against England. But by this time, from so much practice upon the Spanish galleons as well as by temperament, England’s sailors were the killingest fighters on the sea. They destroyed the Invincible Armada as an afternoon’s sport, a little helped by Providence, which provided a storm. This was a blow from which Spain never quite recovered.

With now the intuition that their future lay in seapower, the English dimly arrived at the idea of doing something about the New World. They were slow. From the Gulf of Mexico south and west the Spaniards had already established an empire. Above the Great Lakes and from the Great Lakes southward between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River the outlines of New France were fairly marked. But from Florida to Maine there was some fifteen hundred miles of seacoast that had not been preempted. On this wonderful seaboard were all the fine harbors and all the natural gateways to the New World. The Spaniards had passed it by because in all the length of it there were no rumors of gold; and the French likewise because the fable of a northwest passage to Asia led them further north.

Here the English began to plant colonies. Under charters permitting a large degree of self-government, the King granted enormous tracts of land to people who would form companies, provide the capital, find the emigrants and make the venture. The first one, “the lost colony of Roanoke,” where Virginia Dare was born, vanished without trace. The second, in Virginia, was a ghastly failure until the prodigal sons, the sojourners and the halt-handed either died or went home, and were succeeded by farmers and artisans who knew the meaning of work, who were changing worlds for good, and who brought their women with them.

The New England foundations came next; then Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas.

Meanwhile the Dutch had arrived. The Dutch were great sailors too, yet they hired a British navigator named Henry Hudson to look for a passage to Asia, and he thought he had found it when he sailed into what now is New York harbor and up the mighty river that bears his name to this day., The Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, built a fort there and called it New Amsterdam, and then up the Hudson River valley they parcelled out huge baronial estates to important Dutch families. But they never could get people to come and settle the land. Their system was wrong. Moreover, their heart was not in it really; their imagination was fixed on the Spice Island of the East Indies, where at length they did make their Empire. And so one day when a British squadron appeared in the harbor, trained its guns on New Amsterdam and sent a message ashore saying New Amsterdam now was New York and belonged to the English King’s brother, the Dutch gave up without a struggle.

After that the seaboard was a solid tier of thirteen English colonies, Massachusetts at the top and Georgia at the bottom. They were by no means all alike.

Georgia was an afterthought.

Virginia and the Carolinas were Church of England.

Maryland was Catholic because the King had the happy thought of that way getting rid of some of his Catholic subjects.

Pennsylvania was Quaker, not because the King loved Quakers when he gave Pennsylvania to William Penn but because the Quakers worried his troublesome Puritans both in England and in the New World.

New York, with its mixture of English and Dutch, worshipped God in an easy way; the Church of England was first for the ruling caste, the Dutch Reformed Church second.

New Jersey was just people, wishing to be let alone as such; and Delaware was a little piece that was whittled to fit a hole in the jig-saw pattern.

The New England colonists were Puritans, hair-splitters of Calvinist doctrine, non-conformists, dissenters, religious rebels and some heretics.

The school book myth is that what the New England colonists had in common was a passionate love of liberty. No doubt the seed of liberty was there, even from the beginning, but it was latent and the plant was a long time coming up. They did not understand liberty. They did not know that liberty itself must be free. They tried to imprison it.

Having fled from persecution and kingly tyranny in England, the Puritans set up in Massachusetts a tyranny of their own, that is to say, a theocracy. The church and state were one. Only members of the church could take part in government. The church elders laid down all the rules of life—moral, esthetic and economic. Disobedience was dealt with severely. Some Quakers came and were cast out. If they returned, as they often did in a spirit of defiance, they were mutilated, their ears might be cut off, and some of both sexes were hanged.

In all New England, religious tolerance was unknown, save only in the colony of Rhode Island, which was founded by Roger Williams after he had been expelled from Massachusetts in the winter time for saying religion was one thing and government another and that people should be free to think and say what they pleased. For many years, to all the rest of New England, Rhode Island was a scandal—the breathing witness of how badly people were bound to behave when they were let alone.

In other colonies it was not so bad, though bad enough; and nowhere except in Rhode Island could you say there was more liberty than people had known under kings in the Old World.

Yet there was one state of feeling that made the colonists all kin. A passion for self-government, free from the parental restraints of the English crown, burned with thirteen flames—highest in Massachusetts, next highest in Virginia.

There was endless quarreling over the terms of their charters. Except in a Crown Colony like New York, where the royal word was law, the colonies generally were permitted by their charters to tax themselves and to pass their own local laws, subject always to veto by the King’s ministers in London; but beyond that it was English policy to hold the economic life of the Colonies in a straitjacket—as to say, for example, where, with whom and on what terms the Colonial merchants should trade when they sent their ships to sea; to forbid the colonists to weave cloth and make beaver hats for sale, and to forbid them to manufacture iron at all, even for their own use.

This was all because the English wished to monopolize colonial trade in the first case, and for the reason, secondly, that the English idea was that the colonies should provide raw materials for English industry and then buy their manufactured goods in England. Briefly, to oblige the Colonies to exchange raw materials and food for manufactured goods. The whole British Empire of later years was based on that notion of swapping skill for drudgery, and it made England the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Then it ruined her, for when at last the exploited drudge people began to rebel her profit was gone and she was in trouble.

But the idea was bound to fail—and to fail first—with the English colonists in America. It made them smugglers, law-evaders and rebels, who had only to bide their time. This they did with a kind of Oriental simplicity. When they had done such a thing as to throw the King’s agent into the river, or to burn down his house, the King would say: “Now I will show these rebellious subjects. Unless they mend their ways and become immediately obedient I will cancel their charters and take away their lands.” On receiving this ultimatum, the Colonists would reply: “Your beloved Majesty, we didn’t mean it. We promise to carry out your wishes as fast as we can and to the best of our ability. We are sorry.” And then they would do nothing at all but sit down to wait for something to happen in England—for that king to get his head cut off, perhaps, or for a revolution to come—and something always did happen in England to save them.

Their time was not yet.

Events in Europe had their repercussions here. When England and France were at war, which was most of the time, a favorite diversion was for one to try to push the other out of the New World. On one side would be a few regular troops from England supported by English colonists, and on the other side a few professional troops from France reinforced by such fighting material as New France could provide; and then when they could both sides made allies of the Indians and incited them to slaughter. If the infamy of employing savages in a white man’s war was not equal, that was perhaps only because the French fur traders were generally more friendly with the Indians than the English colonials. Romantic legend hides many dishonorable scars, even this one—savages hired by white Christians to massacre other white Christians under the sign of the cross in the wilderness.

During seventy years there were four such wars. The War of the League of Augsburg in Europe had its recoil in the New World as King William’s war, the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe was Queen Anne’s War here, the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe was King George’s War here, and the Seven Years’ War in Europe was called here the French and Indian War.

The last one was conclusive. With their star everywhere ascendant, the British were at last resolved to expel France from the New World and sent troops enough to do it. After that, all east of the Mississippi River and north to the top of Hudson’s Bay was British territory. A vast region to the west of the Mississippi called Louisiana passed at the same time from France to Spain; and with it also New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi.

 

II

The American Story Begins

THE YEAR WAS 1763.

There the colonial story starts to fade and the American story begins, although no man yet had called himself an American.

Fighting with the British against the defenders of New France the Colonials had measured the valor of professional troops and found it inferior to their own; moreover, and unawares, they had produced a military genius named George Washington.

The Colonials alone could not have ejected France from the New World; it took the might of Great Britain by sea and by land to do that. But once the British had done it, and especially since they had seen for themselves how the Colonials could fight, they might have known better than to go home and leave thirteen willful Colonies in complete possession of the entire eastern seaboard of the North American continent. Thirteen is the recalcitrant number. It took the thirteen colonies just thirteen years to decide to expel the British.

The spirit of revolt was like an underground forest fire, slowly consuming the roots of loyalty, and they were very tough roots. Even the firebringers were afraid to say what their intentions were, if they really knew themselves. They talked of resistance, not of independence or separation. Four months after the shot at Concord bridge “that was heard around the world,” weeks after the battle of Bunker Hill, and with George Washington preparing to attack the British at Boston, the second Continental Congress declared that the Colonies had taken up arms “with no design of separation from Great Britain.”

The Declaration of Independence came a year later.

They were driven to it, step by step. The British King was behaving like a mad parent. The British Parliament passed a series of punitive laws, called the Intolerable Acts. Hired German troops were sent to impose them by force. The British position was that no grievances could be considered, much less redressed, until the Colonies became submissive.

The grievances, economic and political, were both real and valid, but it is absurd to suppose that reasonable men would have said, “We would sooner die than endure them,” or, as Patrick Henry did say, “As for me, give me liberty or give me death.” Indeed, in a little while the thirteen Colonies might have become members of a British Commonwealth, like Canada or Australia, who certainly think of themselves as quite free.

No. But it was a mysterious thing men were willing to die for, even though they could not say what it was—a thing true beyond reason, an event toward which everything that had happened in the world before was now tending with the anonymous force of life itself.

An unknown nation was struggling to be born. And this was a nation that in six generations would become the mightiest power on earth.

How easily it might have been strangled at birth! If Europe had only known she might have dropped her internal quarrels to unite for the single purpose of destroying this child of destiny, for if it lived the sign of paramount power which had belonged to Europe for two thousand years would presently cross the heavens and stand over the United States of America.

Of all the fictions that have ennobled the mind of man the one under which this nation was born made the most dazzling light.

The Declaration of Independence said: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Certainly it is not evident to common sense that all men are created equal. Morally it was a fiction because it left out the Negro slave. It became a supportable fiction only if you took it to mean that under a government of laws all men were equal before the law, but even that would be by resolution of men, not by act of the Creator.

The words were not new. They were current in radical European thought. But never before had they been raised to the eminence of a working political doctrine; and if a government based upon that ideal doctrine could endure, if people could actually behave as if it were true, the world would never be the same again.

For thus came the end of night for the common man.

One immediate effect was to give the common man a stake in the revolution. Yet that could hardly have been the intention. The curious fact was that the authors of the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson perhaps alone excepted—and after them the authors of the Constitution, were afraid of the common man. They held a low opinion of his political character. At that time he had not even the right to vote. Only such as owned property could qualify as voters. Manhood suffrage came in the next generation.

You do not suppose that the Colonies rose in mass to chase the British into the sea. If that had happened the war might have been won in two years instead of dragging wearily on for eight.

Society was stratified in the Colonies as it was in England, with only royalty and nobility left out. At the top was an aristocracy of wealth and birth; next came the middle class; at the bottom were the common people.

The revolution bitterly divided them. On one side were the loyalists, who stood with the British, and on the other side the revolutionaries, calling themselves patriots.

Among the aristocrats a minority only, and at first a very small minority, were patriots. The middle class—merchants, traders and farmers—was split vertically, with undoubtedly a considerable majority on the side of the patriots. The common people were both hot and cold, turbulent, riotous and apathetic, by turns.

It was a shapeless war, conducted on one side by a fatuous government three thousand miles away, whose chocolate generals loved good living more than they enjoyed killing Americans, and on the other side by a Continental Congress that was not a government. It was a body of delegates from the thirteen Colonies, elected by mass meetings, conventions and committees of patriots, and was without power to command men, money and ammunition. It could only ask the Colonies, who were now beginning to call themselves states—it could only ask them to provide an army, to clothe and feed and pay it, and the states could respond as they pleased.

Their response was so carping, so unwilling, so uncertain, that the Continental Army miserably withered. Reduced to one-quarter of its original size, it passed the third winter at Valley Forge—three thousand men “unfit for duty,” said George Washington, “by reason of their being barefoot and otherwise naked.”

The spirit of liberty might have died at Valley Forge. Washington alone kept it alive, by prayer and will and Mosaic anger. How could a people who deserved liberty forsake a naked, hungry army in the snow. Where? Not in some remote inaccessible wilderness but in Pennsylvania, which of all the Colonies was richest in food.

A few miles away in Philadelphia a British army was living on fat rations and British officers were being entertained at gay parties in some of the fine Colonial homes. The British had gold to spend, and the farmers of Pennsylvania would sooner exchange their produce for British gold than to sell it to hungry patriots at Valley Forge for Continental money. Owing to the failure of the Colonies to provide enough money, as they were perfectly able to do, the Continental Congress had to print money, but since the only security behind it was faith in the revolution people everywhere were distrustful of it and its value became a byword—“Not worth a Continental.” Afterward it was all very honorably redeemed. But the revolution had first to be won.

Having expelled the British from Boston in the first year, Washington never again won a great victory. He tried to defend New York and failed; he tried to defend Philadelphia and failed; when the British decided to leave Philadelphia and concentrate in New York he tried to stop them in New Jersey, and failed again. The explanation is not that he was either outgeneraled or outfought, but that he never dared to take a supreme risk. Always he had to think of saving his little army, for if he lost it that would be the end of the revolution. How to keep an army in being, such as it was—that was his first problem. At the end, besides all that he could do, it took a French fleet and a French army to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The Colonials as soldiers were militia minded. That was their tradition—the fireside story of men springing to arms at the call of the fife and drum to perform their feats of valor. They had no taste for continuous disciplined military duty. They were fractious and willful, and went AWOL for any reason of their own, especially the farmers when they heard from their women folk that the ripened fruits of the earth were falling to the ground.

The idea of one united Continental Army was never realized. Massachusetts was loath to send troops to defend the southern Colonies and the south thought the northern Colonies ought to take care of themselves. But in a local environment, when they were self-aroused and the battle was imminent, then the Colonials were fierce and invincible.

This was notably true of the New Englanders, as the British General Burgoyne found out when in the third year of the war he set out from Canada with a professional army of 7,000 men, intending to descend through the Hudson River valley to New York.

As he approached Saratoga the tread of his soldiers seemed to press demon patriots out of the ground. Came the Green Mountain Boys from Vermont, German farmers from the Mohawk Valley, militia men from all around, and these, opportunely supported by a contingent of the Continental Army under command of Horatio Gates, brought the British army to bay and captured it whole.

This as it turned out was the decisive victory of war, because it moved the French to come to the aid of the revolution. The French of course were athirst for revenge against the British for having cast them out of the New World, and now it would be sweet to help the Americans cast the British out—and sweeter still the secret thought that in so doing they might regain a foothold for themselves.

However, until Burgoyne’s surrender the revolution on its own resources had fared so badly that the French were reluctant to beard the British. Now at last they were willing to sign the treaty of alliance for which the Americans had been pressing with all the seductive power of Benjamin Franklin, who was their inimitable plenipotentiary at Paris. This meant of course a renewal of war between France and Great Britain.

Four years later Cornwallis was caught at Yorktown, between a French fleet in Chesapeake Bay and an army of French and Colonial troops on land. The French troops were commanded by Rochambeau and Saint Simon; the American by Washington and Lafayette.

With the surrender of Cornwallis the revolution was won.

The Colonials alone might have won it if only they had been united by a single national passion and quick to pool their resources. As it was, the patriots could not have won it without the help of the French.

Nor could it have been won at all without the active sympathy of the liberal sentiment of all Europe, even in England, where the Americans had many great friends. In France, where the spirit of revolution was moving on the waters in premonition of the storm that was coming, the Declaration of Independence was hailed with popular ecstasy. Young zealots for liberty and the rights of man, among them Lafayette, took Washington for their idol. Besides Lafayette, several distinguished European military officers volunteered to come and help train the raw Continental Army and then to fight with it, such as Baron Von Steuben, the Chevalier du Portal, Thaddeus Kosciusko; and Count Pulaski and Baron de Kalb, both of whom gave up their lives.

The American revolution was a pilot flame that leaped the Atlantic and lighted holocaust in the Old World. But its character was misunderstood and could not have been reproduced by any other people. It was a revolution exemplary. Its first fair visage never became sinister or frightful. It did not devour its own children, as most revolutions do, but made them fathers of the Republic. There was no terror, no after blood lust, no liquidation of the anti-bodies. There were fanatics but no demagogues basely to exploit the passions of the mob. Most remarkable of all, considering what the opportunities were, no false patriot attempted to seize power from the hands of the weak Continental Congress and make himself dictator.

The peace had to be made between the British on one side and the French and the Americans on the other side, and Spain came into it too because she had been on the side of France in the war on the Continent of Europe and France had vowed that the Spaniards should recover Gibraltar, which never happened.

The treaty makers gathered in Paris. The British, who still held New York, Savannah and Charleston and had more troops in American than the French and Americans combined, assumed a mighty manner. The French, who expected to dominate the American commissioners, were wily. Spain wanted anything she could get and claimed more than one-third of the whole North American continent. The Americans, who held very weak cards in this dangerous game, possessed the guile of innocence. They guessed that the British were bluffing, which was true. They suspected the French of double dealing and caught them at it; later it was proved that the French had been willing to sell out any interest but their own, and in the end they got nothing.

The Continental Congress had instructed the American Commissioners to sign nothing without the consent of France. Nevertheless, the Americans went around the French and opened direct negotiations with the British, and signed with them a most favorable preliminary treaty. As the Americans had thought, the British were anxious to make peace. Their treasury was low, the American war was too costly to go on with, and they wanted their troops and their warships back because the European cauldron was beginning to boil in a very alarming manner.

The final treaty was signed in 1783.

The Americans won everything the revolution was for. First, his British Majesty agreed that the thirteen Colonies were “free, sovereign and independent states.” Then the North American continent was divided in three ways. Great Britain kept Canada. The Americans got everything east of the Mississippi River from Canada to Florida. To Spain went all the rest of the continent—that is, everything west of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, all the way north to Canada and west to the Pacific; also Florida and unhappily New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi.

So the United States of America was born, as yet without a name, but already too big for its cradle.

Marginalia

The prenatal story is perhaps too long for the design of the book, even though it covers three centures of time; however, let it stand.

The book, as it is planned, will be in several parts, with such minor divisions of time and matter as may suggest themselves. The first part will be the outline of what happened, like the sketch for a large drawing, all details that retard the narrative left out; the second will tell how it happened, the third why it happened, and in the remainder, which will be very difficult, there will be a struggle with meaning.

How dim one may be about the meaning of one’s own life. And before you come to the enigma of meaning there is something you have to do about the facts. You may think you may know what kind of person you are. Indeed, you must be pretty sure of it, else you will fall apart for want of a soul center. Yet if your entire life could be unrolled before your eyes as on a movie film, at a speed of one year per minute, giving you time only to verify the naked facts and no time to hide any of them, again, you would almost certainly cry out, “No. I am not that kind of person.” Of course you are not. But neither are you quite the person you think you are. Which means this—that there is a truth beyond the facts, a truth to which facts pertain but which is not itself the simple sum of facts.

If this may be true of the life of an individual, what can one hope to do with the life of a nation? There can be no history without facts, yet facts alone are not history.

Here the postnatal story begins. From gristle to bone was thirty years; and on the dial of life that records the fluctuating probabilities of survival the reading was sometimes zero.

The immediate business was to create a national government; and many people demanding to know why that was necessary at all. Why couldn’t they just go on being free?

The second imperative was to isolate the new nation from the malign influence of European politics and get its life into its own hands. The writ of independence—that had been acquired and it was a precious possession, but the reality of independence had yet to be won. Until Americans could walk alone they could not say they were either independent or free.

 

III

Freedom on a Raft

LAUNCHING A NEW SHIP OF STATE ON THE TREACHEROUS political waters, even a seaworthy one, is in any case perilous enough. But in this case there was no ship of state. There was no national government. There was in fact no nation. What was it then that pushed off on a raft?

During the revolution each of the thirteen colonies had resolved itself into a political entity, calling itself a sovereign state, with a written constitution. In the second year of the war the Continental Congress, which as we have seen was merely a kind of national committee, proposed Articles of Confederation to join them all together. It took them five years to agree on the terms. One of the terms was that the Articles could be changed only by unanimous consent, which meant, practically, that they could not be changed at all—and still no national government.

By the Articles of Confederation the Continental Congress was for the first time formalized. But it was denied the right to levy taxes. Therefore it could not fill its own purse. It might pass laws; it had no power to enforce them. It had no president; therefore no executive power. It had no courts; therefore no judicial power.

The thirteen sovereign states had reserved to themselves the power to control commerce, and a pretty mess they made of it, setting up tariff barriers against one another.

Movements of secondary revolt became alarming. Although during the war conservatives and extremists had struck hands, they were never reconciled. Now the common people began to mutter and rise. Their saying was that those who had done the fighting should be rewarded by those who had saved their property. In Massachusetts poor farmers who could not pay their debts, supported by a motley of propertyless malcontents, began turning judges out of doors because they allowed the claims of creditors. That was the Shay’s Rebellion. It was put down by the militia.

The house of freedom was in trouble. Sparks were everywhere falling on combustible materials. George Washington was one who had forebodings of a great fire. Thoughtful men were in despair. The old, old problem of how to harmonize liberty with order—a problem never hitherto solved—was presenting itself in an ugly form at a most unfortunate time. The national committee that called itself the Continental Congress agreed at last that something would have to be done. What it proposed to the thirteen states was a convention of delegates to be held in Philadelphia “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”

The thirteen states sent fifty-five delegates to the Philadelphia convention; and it happened that these fifty-five men represented the American mind at its highest sum, for then or thereafter. One may say it just happened. Yet why did that happen in place of something else? It might have been very different. The doors were closed to the people; therefore no gallery and no harangue. George Washington presided.

He said: “It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterward defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”

The first thing the delegates did was to tear up their instructions—namely, the mandate from the Continental Congress to revise the Articles of Confederation. They resolved instead to create a national government in the republican form and write its constitution. Only thirty-nine of them signed the document when it was finished, and these we now speak of as the Founding Fathers.

The preamble of the Constitution reads: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”

It became the most famous political document in the world. Never before had a people, by an original act, created for themselves the kind of government they wanted, not upon the sills of an old one but from the very footing up, and bound it in writing. It had to be like that because when the revolution had been won there was no existing national government to seize or take over or build upon.

Implicit in the Constitution is this proposition: If the few rule they will oppress the many. If the many rule they will oppress the few. Therefore both the few and the many must be restrained as to things which neither shall ever do to the other. Thus the theory of inalienable individual rights becomes law.

Limitation of power is the great theme throughout.

The power of the law maker is limited.

The power of the president is limited.

The power of the courts is limited.

The sword is placed in the hand of the president, who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces—this to insure civilian control of the military power. But control of the public purse belongs to Congress, so that the sword and the purse shall never be in the same hand. Moreover, the president is forbidden to draw the sword but by consent of Congress.

Over all is the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, binding upon the law maker, the president and the courts, to the end that it shall be a government of laws, not a government of men.

The power of ultimate sovereignty—where is that? That resides with the people. Only the people are sovereign. The people collectively are king. Yet even here is a limitation, perhaps the most significant one of all. The people may change the Constitution to their heart’s content, they may even tear it up if they like and write a new one, only provided they do it by such deliberate and orderly procedures as are set forth in the Constitution itself. This is to safeguard not the Constitution only but the people themselves, against the dangers of passionate, impulsive and unreflective action.

The problem being how to reconcile government with liberty, this was in all political history the fairest and most practical solution, and so far the most successful.

The Constitution was then submitted to the people, to be ratified or rejected by vote of a popular convention in each state. It would be their government. They could take it or leave it. Ratification by nine states was necessary to give it effect.

It was a close thing. The debate moved on a very high plane, and the papers that were written both for and against ratification are among the classics of political literature in the English language to this day, especially a series of eighty-five numbers called the Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.

The wounds of liberty were still hurting. Fear of tyranny was a powerful emotion. The idea of a strong national government was definitely unpopular. One sweeping criticism of the Constitution was that it did not clearly define the inalienable rights of the individual. Friends of the Constitution, called the Federalists, granted the validity of that point and accepted the idea of ten amendments to spell out such personal rights as, among others, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and trial by jury. Thereupon the Constitution as the founders wrote it was adopted and the ten amendments were duly added. They have ever since been known as the American Bill of Rights.

George Washington was unanimously elected President. John Adams was Vice-President. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence but had nothing to do with writing the Constitution because he was then in Paris, was Secretary of State. Washington was conservative. Adams was the self-contained middle class principle. Jefferson, who loved revolution and hated bloodshed, was the common man’s first hero. Nearly every line of political cleavage for more than one hundred and fifty years thereafter could be traced back to that triangle.

The year was 1789.

In that same year the French Revolution began; and for more than twenty years thereafter the young American Republic was dangerously and almost continuously embroiled in the angry affairs of Europe, with such consequences as—(1) a shattering division of the American household on lines of partisan passion, (2) an undeclared war with the French at sea, and (3) the war of 1812 with Great Britain.

The first American reaction to the French Revolution was to regard it as the glorious love child of the American Revolution. Did not the French slogans echo the words of the American Declaration of Independence? Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. People wore French emblems, adopted the language of the Paris streets, and went about calling one another Citizen, like the French. Boston and New York renamed some of their streets to commemorate the rise of the common man in the Old World. It was the American idea that was liberating Europe. The people were overthrowing the symbols of tyranny. In a little while the whole world would be one free brotherhood, ruled by the natural goodness of man.

This frenzy lasted for nearly three years. Then came the guillotine, the terror, the news of regicide, the beginning of war between France and Europe; and the American ecstasy was chilled. Presently France and Great Britain were at war again, and France was calling upon the Americans to honor the treaty of alliance by which we were bound to defend French possessions in the West Indies. This was the treaty the Continental Congress had signed with the king of France when the Americans had to have French aid to win their independence from Great Britain.

Now the Americans were in a bad dilemma. Another war with Great Britain would probably cost them their independence, for the British, as they very well knew, had never given up the idea of returning. On the other hand, the French were not to be trusted; they were conniving with Spain to make trouble in Florida, at New Orleans and in Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi.

President Washington took the position that since the Continental Congress had made its treaty with the French king, who now was in his grave with his head cut off, the United States of America owed nothing to the new revolutionary regime in France. Therefore, he declared, the Americans were neutral, and issued a proclamation accordingly.

The effect of his action was threefold. War with Great Britain was averted for the time being, the French were very mad, but at the same time it was as if the American flag had been rent.

The people divided three ways. There was a peace party, represented by Washington; a pro-British party, which was largely New England, and a pro-French party, calling itself the republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State.

Just then, fortunately, the French sent over an amazing person named Citizen Genet, who entered at Charleston in a grand manner, threw French gold around, fitted out privateers to prey upon British commerce, moved triumphantly from there toward Philadelphia accompanied by the plaudits of republican crowds waving the French colors, and behaved generally as if he were in a French province. At last he went so far as to insult the President, appealing from him to the people on the question of American neutrality. That was too much even for many republicans, who had in them some rudiments of national pride. Jefferson, though he loved the French, stood with the President and asked France to take her Citizen Genet home. But by that time the gullotine was working so playfully that he was afraid to go home. He begged to stay here, became an American citizen, and lived quietly ever after.

The British, nursing their sore afterthoughts, were behaving in a churlish manner. On the terms of the Ghent treaty that ended the revolutionary war they stood in obstinate default, taking the position that the Americans too were evading their part. Almost more than anything else Washington dreaded another war with Great Britain. He sent John Jay to London to soothe the British temper, and Jay brought back a treaty so humilating in its terms that mobs burned effigies of him and stoned Alexander Hamilton in New York when he tried to speak in defense of the treaty. Washington stood fast—probably the most unpopular thing he ever did—and the treaty was ratified by the Senate. That made the French very mad again. They had been sure that the pro-French republicans would force the United States into war with England.

That was the state of things when John Adams succeeded Washington. Adams too was willing to pay a high price for peace. He sent a commission to Paris to pour oil on the waters there. France at that time was ruled by the corrupt Directory. The American commissioners were treated at first with silent contempt. Then Talleyrand had a brilliant thought. He sent word to the Commissioners that a settlement could be discussed, provided they undertook beforehand to pay the Directory a large gold tribute.

When one of the commissioners came home with that news there was an explosion. The pro-French republicans were sunk. People shouted: “Millions for defense; not one cent for tribute.” Mobilization for war began. Washington was called back to the colors. There was fighting on the sea. However, war was not formally declared. The French Directory said: “Sorry. It was all a misunderstanding. Please send your commissioners back.” But before the new American Commissioners arrived in Paris Napoleon had blown the Directory away with his whiff of grape shot; and Napoleon was easy to deal with in the matters immediately at issue. He had deeper designs and was not yet ready to disclose them.

So war was again postponed.

Now Jefferson succeeded Adams. Jefferson the philosopher was pro-French and republican—the word republican meaning then a radical, a leveller, or those who, if they could not have both liberty and order, would choose liberty. Later the republicans began to call themselves democrats, but for a long time the word democrat was too strong and tabu, because of its association with the frightfulness of the French revolution. But Jefferson the President was another person. It took only one scratch to touch his tough American hide.

Jefferson discovered that Napoleon secretly had obliged Spain to return to France her Mississippi Bubble, namely, title to Louisiana Territory and New Orleans; he discovered also that Napoleon was dreaming of a colonial empire in the New World. New Orleans would give him control of the Mississippi River and take him very far west, perhaps to the Pacific. He had already sent an army to Santo Domingo to put down a black revolt; the same army was expected then to take possession of New Orleans and Louisiana. Happily for the Americans the blacks and the yellow fever destroyed his Santo Domingo army. But what would he do next?

This was very alarming news. The Mississippi River system was the way to the sea for all that pioneer agricultural civilization that was rising west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Spaniards had been bad enough; but the idea of Napoleon in control of the Mississippi struck western Americans with dismay. Moreover, no matter how bitter the enmity between France and Great Britain might be, they had, at least until then, one thing in common, and that was a desire to clip the wings of the young American republic.

Once again it looked as if the Americans were going to have to make a Hobson’s choice in foreign policy. Jefferson said: “The day France takes possession of New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British fleet.”

While Napoleon was quiescent, Jefferson had an idea. He sent commissioners to Paris to offer him a few million francs for New Orleans and Florida or a lesser sum for New Orleans alone. At first their offer was ignored. Then one day in his bathtub Napoleon made one of his sudden decisions. He sent Talleyrand to ask the Americans what they would give for all of Louisiana Territory, New Orleans included.

The commissioners had no authority to buy Louisiana; that had never been thought of. But when Talleyrand said they could have it for sixty million francs they bought it and brought it home, fearful that if they waited to get instructions Napoleon might change his mind.

What had moved Napoleon? He had just received news that a British fleet was about to sail for the Gulf of Mexico to seize Louisiana. He knew he could not defend it. He would sooner see the Americans have it, possibly with the reservation that they could not defend it either if ever he should want to take it back. Nevertheless, it has been recorded that he said: “This day I have laid the foundations for a New World power that will sometime overthrow Great Britain’s control of the sea.”

Out of Louisiana Territory would come what now are the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado.

When the American commissioners got home and laid their Louisiana purchase in Jefferson’s lap he was embarrassed. Nobody knew what it was. It had never been explored. Although it more than doubled American territory, that was unknown at the time, and nobody could realize that it was the most astounding real estate bargain in all the history of land.

The voice of intuition told Jefferson that the Americans must keep it. By his own strict interpretation of the Constitution he had no power to buy it. He thought of proposing that the Constitution be amended, but that would take time, and always Napoleon might change his mind. So at last, with apologies to the Constitution, he asked the Senate to ratify his bargain, which it did over very strong opposition. The republicans at that point had the true American vision.

 

IV

Bearding the Reluctant Lion

MADISON, A GIFTED THINKER, WAS THE FOURTH PRESIDENT and the first weak one. In his Administration the postponed crisis arrived.

The war of 1812—the second war with Great Britain—was fought at the right time for the wrong reasons. It brought the young Republic to the verge of dissolution and then saved it. The issue of defeat was victory. In an age of myth it might have been our own Red Sea story.

All of Europe was at war. Great Britain and France were locked in a mortal struggle. Each was trying to starve the other by strangling its sea trade and both were ruthless with neutrals. The French forbade American ships to enter English ports and the British forbade them to enter any European port controlled by Napoleon, on pain of seizure and forfeit. Both sides shamelessly made war booty of American ships and cargoes.

Although American shipping suffered actually more from France than from England, because the British fleet for selfish reasons protected American ships running for British ports, yet feeling ran higher against England, for two reasons: one, that there was an old dispute with her over freedom of the seas in principle, and two, that ever since the beginning of American independence the British fleet had entertained itself by stopping American ships on the high seas and taking sailors away from them by force. If the kidnapped sailor was a naturalized American the pretense was that he had become an American citizen to evade British sea duty; on one pretext or another many native American sailors also were “impressed,” as the word for it was. Year after year the Americans bore this outrage. Short of going to war there was no redress.

Yet it was neither the treatment of neutrals nor the impressment of American sailors that brought on the war. If these had been fighting matters New England would have been first for war, since so much of her wealth was involved in ocean trade; but New England renounced the war. Before it was a year old Massachusetts was talking of secession and of opening her own peace negotiations with Great Britain. She refused to let her militia serve, closed her purse to war bonds and invited all the New England states to a treasonous anti-war convention at Hartford. They called it Mr. Madison’s war.

The clamor for war came not from the eastern seaboard at all but from the west—that is, from people who had no interest in ships and had never seen the sea. The war party of the west was hostile to the peace party of the east. Henry Clay of Kentucky was leader of the war party, called the War Hawks. He struck the chords of a new patriotism. Should this proud new Republic take the insults of foreign powers lying down? The first conscious feeling of nationalism began to stir in men’s hearts; a forethought of continental destiny was in the air. The voice of the land drowned out the voice of the sea.

The Republic was already land rich; rationally, the last thing it needed was more land. But the continental idea was intuitive, not rational; and it seized upon Canada. That was the last British possession left on the North American continent. The War Hawks demanded Canada. The Kentucky militia, said Clay, could take it in two weeks.

Well, they got their war. The British did not want war, certainly not then. They had their hands full with Napoleon. Partly the President was pushed into war by the War Hawks and partly he was tricked into it by Napoleon, who said the French restriction on American shipping had been lifted, which was not so.

It was disastrous. Not only was the country not prepared for war; it was dangerously, almost suicidally divided.

Save only for some brilliant naval victories at sea and on the Great Lakes, which were of no decisive importance, the Americans bungled the war from the beginning, and in fact lost it. They could not defend their own capital. A small British force entered Washington and the government fled. British officers ate the dinner that had been prepared for the President and then burned the White House and all other public buildings. The campaign against Canada was a sad failure.

During the first year Great Britain was fighting with her left hand. In the second year the European scene dramatically changed. Napoleon was crushed and exiled to Elba. Great Britain was then free to bring all of her force against the American Republic, and the situation was extremely desperate.

When the American and British commissioners met in Ghent to discuss terms for ending the war the facts were these:

The American capital was burning.

The English people were calling upon their government to punish the Americans without mercy for having stabbed England in the back while she was fighting Napoleon for her life.

Wellington’s veteran troops were embarking for North America.

A new British army was poised in Canada to liberate the New Englanders and cut them out of the Republic.

Spain was expecting the British to see that she recovered possession of New Orleans and Louisiana.

In New England the sentiment for secession was very strong. There were many who believed the end of the Republic was at hand.

For all of that, the American commissioners at Ghent won the peace. And they won it without the benefit of Andrew Jackson’s stunning victory over the British in the battle of New Orleans. News of that incredible event came afterward.

The first terms proposed by the British were as humiliating as the facts. The American commissioners rejected them flatly. The British were not anxious to go on with the war. Their treasury was low again, there was the broken map of Europe to be remade, and the French might rise from the mat. They did, in fact; Napoleon returned from Elba and then the British were glad they had not sent Wellington to North America.

Or it may be that history cannot tell what takes place in men’s minds, since it seems often to be true that they do not know themselves.

At any rate, the American commissioners blandly behaved as if all the facts were different and slowly the British began to love peace more than its terms. Then it was easy to write a treaty—a treaty that forgot to mention what the war was about, if anybody knew. Great Britain kept Canada, as it was before, and the American Republic kept everything it had before, including of course New Orleans and Louisiana.

You may have often read that the war of 1812 was the unnecessary war. So many people thought at the time. It was not so. In unexpected ways the consequences were vital. By the revolutionary war the Colonies won their independence from Great Britain. By the war of 1812 the American Republic won its independence in the world. After that it walked alone.

For now it was possible to establish the supreme principle of American foreign policy—the principle, namely, that Europe should meddle no more in the New World.

After the fall of Napoleon there had been formed in Europe a Holy Alliance of monarchs, dedicated to the proposition that monarchy was the only legitimate form of governmerit and divine, wherefore the world should be made free of republican revolutions forever. It worked at first only in Europe and put down several revolutions there. Then its thoughts began to expand and under the zealous leadership of the Czar of Russia the Holy Alliance proclaimed its grand policy. It would restore legitimate government everywhere and thus confer the blessings of tranquility upon all the states of the civilized world. This design included the newly-created republican states of Latin America, which had only recently cast off Spanish and Portuguese rule.

Clearly, Europe was planning a return to the New World. At the same time Russia was silently slipping down the Pacific coast and had established trading stations as far south as what now is San Francisco.

Great Britain did not belong to the Holy Alliance; moreover, she was definitely hostile toward its designs upon Latin America. Therefore, she proposed to the United States an Anglo-American alliance to resist it. Monroe was then President. Surrounding him were the Republic’s veteran statesmen, who again and again had out-thought and out-guessed the diplomats of Europe. They debated the startling British proposal for a long time and then John Quincy Adams, for one, found the gimmick in the terms. It was that the United States should bind itself never to acquire any Latin American territory.

If we had so bound ourselves then the conquest of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California might not have happened later. These were Mexican possessions. We had at that time no designs upon them, at least not consciously. There was only a very dim premonition of the country’s geographical destiny.

The outcome was that the British invitation was politely declined. The American government decided to act alone. Then President Monroe made his historic utterance, which ever afterward was known as the Monroe Doctrine.

The meat of it was—

(1) That neither of the American continents was any longer open to colonization by a European power;

(2) That any attempt of a European power to extend its political system to any part of the New World would be regarded as an act dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, and

(3) That, per contra, the United States pledged itself not to meddle in the political affairs of Europe.

That was the final act in the political separation of the New World from Europe.