The American Story

BOOK TWO

I

Giant in the Gristle

NOW YOU CAN SEE ALL, AROUND HIM, YOUR AMERICAN, BECAUSE for the first time he is standing alone in the midst of a hostile world, making defiant gestures at it.

He has no history. Nobody can guess what he is likely to do. He does not know himself. It is impossible for him to imagine that in 150 years he will hold in his hand the paramount power of the earth, and this he will have achieved by his own exertions, for no ends that he could foretell. If he could have known that he might have foreseen that his rise would cause the human race to divide—on one side those who would fear and hate him and seek to destroy him, and those on the other side who, fearing him too, would nevertheless cling to him for his strength.

As you observe him at this moment it is important to note that in what he has already accomplished there is nothing complete, nothing that is bound to work.

He has just conquered the kingdom of freedom, without knowing quite how he did it; and since he has successfully defied the powers of Europe he may do what he likes with this kingdom. He is free to destroy it himself—and that could happen, for he is a stranger in his own castle.

The ways of freedom are unknown. He has yet to learn how to be free—how to be as free as he thinks he is, or wants to be, and how at the same time to be responsible; how to govern and be governed, how both to command and obey, how to restrain a sovereign people and keep them in order—these were problems that had never been solved.

His first intention was to set up not a government but a living society dedicated to the proposition “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.”

It would be the first society so conceived in the history of man. But even as he wrote these words in his Declaration of Independence he forgot his own slaves; and it was written in the book of irony that among civilized men he would be the last to abolish slavery, and that to do it he would be obliged to turn his sword against himself.

There was no natural nation to begin with. There was only a ganglion of thirteen very jealous, very willful sovereign states.

To tie them together he had to write himself a Constitution—a Constitution that was all sail and no ballast, said Great Britain’s seer Macaulay, who was sure it would never work.

It had to work.

Until now he has been living a day-dream. Suddenly a grimness comes into it. Now it is the rational part of him that must begin to act.

As he wrote his Constitution, to be his supreme law, he thought of justice, tranquility, the general welfare and the blessings of liberty, but he omitted to repeat the noble words of the Declaration of Independence. He was beginning to be a little afraid of them and of himself—more afraid of the rebellious elements in his own nature than of all the kings in the world.

There was no necessity for a nation at all. It was idea only. In view of all history there was no reason why the North American Continent should not have become a New Europe, divided among many nations; but if there was going to be a nation certain things were immediately imperative. The first was the Constitution. The purposes of the Constitution were, first, to create a central government with power to conduct the affairs of a nation, and secondly, to impose upon people the disciplines of self-government.

If it was a good Constitution it would be unpopular, because, first, each state would have to surrender some measure of its precious sovereignty, and because, secondly, the revolution had left in people the passionate feeling that any government at all was a necessary evil and the less of it the better.

Thus even as he wrote his supreme law he found himself torn between reason and emotion. Liberty was sweet but order was vital.

He knew that if his Constitution were put to a popular vote it would be lost. If all the people, if half of them, voted on it the American dream would die. Happily for the dream there was no such thing as a popular vote. All men may have been created equal but manhood suffrage was still unknown, almost to say unimagined. Only about one in four of white male adults could vote; the rest were voiceless for want of a minimum amount of property.

In state conventions the Constitution was carried by small margins. When nine states had accepted it the others could take it or leave it. Nine promptly ratified it. New York, Virginia, Rhode Island and North Carolina held out for a while, until they felt the screw.

Thus the American established his nation.

There a new world history begins, and although he doesn’t know it yet he will be its hero.

If you were leaving him here, not knowing the sequel, you might reasonably say that even if he were a child of destiny, clothed with fabulous immunities, still he would need a great deal of luck. And he did. Again and again he would see the better way and take the worse; again and again he would be saved as by an inner light his eyes could not see, as by a voice his ears could not hear.

 

II

The Feud with Time

DURING THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, OR, THAT IS, NOT until after the second war with England, which might be called our coming-of-age war—not until after that had anybody noticed any difference between the Old World and the New in the tempo of life. A visitor from London or Paris could be at ease in Boston, New York or Philadelphia. There was time for everything and a little to spare.

Then suddenly it was different. The tempo of American life began to rise, faster and faster and the higher the faster, and presently it was as if these new people in a new world lived in a time dimension of their own. Then when visitors came from the leisurely life streams of Europe they had the alarming sense of shooting the rapids.

Nor was this for just then or for a while. A mortal feud with time came to be the nature-way of the American.

Imagine four or five million people living on the Atlantic fringe of the North American Continent with no more than a toe-hold there, only the most primitive means of communication, no proper tools, no engines, no industry, no capital. Right behind them a forbidding mountain barrier and no roads; beyond the barrier a wilderness full of savages to the Mississippi River; beyond the Mississippi River two thousand miles of awesome plains inhabited by the terrible buffalo; next a most amazing mountain barrier hardly crossable at all, and then the Pacific coast which belonged to anybody who would have the hardihood to take it. The Mexicans were already there and the Russians were sifting down from the north.

If the Americans were going to grapple this continent to themselves, do it with their bare hands, and do it before a land-hungry world could see too much, they would have to be in a hurry.

Yet after they had performed this incredible feat, after they had bound their continent together with bands of steel and it was entirely safe, still their feud with time went on. When they were fifty million, then one hundred million, and already the richest people in the world, still their minds were obsessed with time saving inventions of method, device and machine, as if they knew how much more there was to do and were fearful that they could not get it done in time.

This is what made American industry supreme in all the later phenomena of mass production. Other people had machines that were just as good, and had them first, other people knew the methods too, and were welcome to come and look, but they worked in another dimension of time.

Here the machine was not to save labor; it was to save time.

The first generation to live its life at the new tempo, giving it forty years from 1820 to 1860, had more sense of achievement, more excitement, more wonder and more luck than any other generation of mankind before or since.

It was not only that so many things that happened either were or seemed to be original, or as if the creative muse were acting in a spirit of purposeful play; more than that, marvel, portent and discovery obeyed what we might call a rule of sequence, so that again and again there was the right thing at just the right time, else the story might have been very different in the sequel. This was true of men, or ideas, of invention and of events that were purely adventitious, like the reluctant annexation of Texas, which had vast and unforeseen consequences.

To see it in the simplest way one may take the order in which certain physical things appeared, for example, the steamboat, which moved a European observer to say: “These Americans, who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced into navigation an engine that changes the aspect of the world.”

Even so, he did not know what the problem was. These early Americans were not thinking how to change the aspect of the world; they were wondering how they were going to create the means of internal communication. This was crucial. A letter from Boston to Charleston might arrive within a month. Travel was by stagecoach, horseback and slow coastwise sailing ships. All roads were terrible and in bad weather impossible. The cost of moving a ton of freight a long distance was prohibitive. There were rivers of course; but the trouble with rivers was that they all ran downstream.

First there was a frenzy to build turnpikes and toll roads. These were necessary and important, but they were local, and anyhow, the great problem of internal transportation was never going to be solved by wagon roads.

Meanwhile the siren voice of free land was calling from the other side of the Appalachian mountain barrier and people were spilling over it like a cataract, making their pathways as they went. The moment they disappeared over the summit they were lost. The wilderness swallowed them up. Then as they broke open the virgin soil they began to have a surplus of meat and grain to sell, but the cost of sending this produce back over the mountains was more than it was worth. So it went down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and down the Mississippi to New Orleans on rafts and flat boats; and it looked as if New Orleans was bound to become the door to the world for the great Mississippi River System. The difficulty was that the door opened only out, not in. That was so because the return was all up stream.

Then came the steamboat. It could navigate a river down stream and up. Then the door at New Orleans could work both in and out.

The steamboat was wonderful. It solved the problem of the river people. But if the steamboat had been the ultimate solution, as many people then thought it was, the American history we know would never have been written.

A self-contained Mississippi River System, having its own port of exchange with the world at New Orleans, would never tie the continent together. It would almost certainly split it down the middle. Thus you would have had a seaboard civilization between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, an inland civilization between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and whatever else might happen west of that. The continent had to be tied together, if at all, by east and west transportation.

Facing this dilemma, the eastern seaboard states turned desperately to canals—east and west canals of course. New York state had the only natural way around the Appalachian wall. Its Hudson River was navigable to Albany; from Albany west it was feasible to dig a canal 363 miles long to Lake Erie, at almost water grade. That was done. The Erie Canal was a mighty achievement. Much to the discomfiture of New Orleans, it enabled New York City to tap the top of the Mississippi River System. Now it could bring grain and meat and lumber from the middle west to seaboard and send back its own manufactured goods, all the way by water; and the cost of freightage was so low that the exchange was enormously profitable. The chroniclers noted that by canal four horses could move one hundred tons twenty miles in a day, whereas even on a good turnpike four horses could move only one ton and a half eighteen miles in a day, and even then couldn’t cross the mountains.

But one unfortunate effect of the Erie Canal was that it deformed the national economy. While New York City flourished, what were Philadelphia and Baltimore going to do?

Pennsylvania resolved to make carriage easy between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. That would take her to the Ohio River. She dug a canal to the foot of the Appalachian wall and then hauled her canal boats over the mountains by means of an inclined plane and windlass. It was a remarkable engineering stunt and that was all. It only proved that you could not leap mountains with canals.

So it would be New York on the seaboard with a siphon into the top of the Mississippi River System and New Orleans on the Gulf working the spigot, and a pattern of economic geography that could never be continental. If canals could not cross the gentle Appalachian mountains, neither could they cross the dry plains west of the Mississippi nor jump over the grim Rockies and the wild Sierra Nevadas to reach the Pacific coast.

But the Appalachian wall was about to fall, along with every other obstacle to east and west transportation. For then, just then, the locomotive appeared.

For centuries men had been dreaming of something like a locomotive. It might have come as well fifty years later as then; but if it had come fifty years later the outcome of the Civil War might have been otherwise, and fifty years later railroads had been more likely to follow the economic patterns which by that time would have been well established than to create new ones. Next in sequence came the telegraph. The railroads and the telegraph together bound up the continent with withes of cheap and fast east and west transportation before it could be split down the middle by nature’s north and south rivers—and the steamboat.

 

III

Concerning Men

THERE WAS A CERTAIN ORDER ALSO IN THE WAY MEN appeared.

Washington was the first perfect gift from the eternal unknown. We have the record of his nativity, the story of his life, the memory of his going; but whence he came and why at that one salient moment of infinite time are such questions as children ask. There is no answer. He stands utterly alone—the true father symbol of a people, himself the believer for all of them, writing slow words of wisdom on tablets of stone. The time, the place and the man were as one indivisible necessity. No Washington, no nation; no Washington, no American history. If that were his epitaph it would have to be engraved on the fragment of a broken mould.

After him, the next five Presidents were three from Virginia and two from Massachusetts; and although that includes Jefferson, who worshipped the common man in the seclusion of his library, what these five represented was austerity of government.

That was very important. The new wine of freedom was heady stuff. A demagogue at the head of government, with a people’s torch in his hand, might have reduced the republic to ashes. The debtor class, which was large, wanted cheap money. Everybody resented taxes. Had they not fought a war to get rid of the British tax collector? Now in place of him came one from the Federal Government at Washington. Almost nobody wanted a strong Federal Government at Washington. Yet a precocious wizard named Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury and thought the people “a great beast,” was able to impose on the young republic a sound monetary policy. He persuaded an unwilling Congress to restore the value of a debased currency and to undertake the honorable payment of the entire debt created by the revolution. These measures were extremely unpopular, especially as speculators who had been buying up the debt for a few pennies on the dollar were bound to make a killing. That couldn’t be helped. It was above all important to establish American credit in the world.

Well, all of that was to the good and very necessary, and perhaps could not have taken place at all if it had been postponed; and yet it would be bad if the conservative principle got itself enthroned. If it were trusted to say how far it should go it would almost certainly go too far. Unless it were tempered by the radical principle a day would come when it would have to fight for its life, and that would be an ugly struggle. There had to be a state of elastic tension between them, so that when one insisted the other would yield and when the other insisted the first would yield. On no other terms would responsible self-government work.

Moreover, it was bad that people should begin to feel, or to imagine, the existence of a governing caste divided between Virginia and Massachusetts. Why had all the Presidents so far come from one of these two states? New states were being admitted to the union—Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. This was the west—the pioneer’s second promised land.

The people of the west were building a civilization of their own. In contrast with that of the east it was poor and crude and yearning. They were borrowers and debtors. They hated the rich capitalistic east, where their money came from; their black beast was the eastern banker, who squeezed them with high interest rates and foreclosed their mortgages. Worse than all that, they had a sense of not belonging. Whose country was it? Although they sent Representatives and Senators to Washington, it was not their government. They felt more like petitioners than participants—and they were a proud and sudden people.

In the east democracy was not yet a respectable word. In the west it was a fighting word, and there manhood suffrage was arriving. The President was John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts who in his diary had expressed his “Abhorrence and contempt of simple democracy as a government.”

All the materials were divisive or explosive, or both; if they had continued to accumulate the young republic might have blown itself up. But what might have happened we shall never know, for just then Andrew Jackson appeared and made a great bonfire in which the anger of the west harmlessly burned itself out.

Jackson was from Tennessee, a violent spirit, who first went to Washington as a member of Congress with his hair done up in an eel skin and so full of choler that he could hardly make a speech without choking himself. That image of him has survived. It is both true and false.

What was he?

You may say he was a natural manifestation of the frontier. So he was; but so was Clay of Kentucky at the same time. It was more than that. In his ways of thinking and feeling, in his visceral fearlessness, in his emotional exaggerations, in what he liked and what he hated, Jackson was the frontier. He held the people in his hand. His power of destruction was tremendous—if he had been destructive. The saving fact was an integrity of character so innocent and deep that he could be moved only by conviction.

His early life in Tennessee was wild and quarrelsome, even after he had acquired a small plantation and a few slaves, who adored him. His lust for combat put him at the head of the militia. In that suitable activity he soon gained regional fame as an Indian fighter. His feats became legendary; they were owing partly to an unlearned skill in generalship and partly to the fact that he could command the obedience of willful and lawless men by sheer terror of will. His soldiers feared him, trusted him like children, and fought for him like demons.

Then came the second war with England and in one day he became a national hero by demolishing the handsome British army that had been sent to take New Orleans. The British lost their commander and 2,000 men. Jackson lost 71 men.

Later, under pretense of putting down the Indians, he seized Florida and incidentally executed two British subjects who had been helping the Indians, shooting one and hanging the other. That made a fine international row but in the end the British decided to make nothing of it and Spain ceded the territory of Florida.

As the idol of the frontier and now clothed with a national garment of military glamor, Jackson was bound to become a political figure. Tennessee of course sent him to the Senate; and there was soon a Jackson party in Washington. The population of the west was increasing very fast and its disaffection began to be alarming.

The first time Jackson was put forward for the presidency the east was incredulous. But the popular vote was startling. In the electoral college he was the high candidate, but wanted a majority, so that the House of Representatives had to decide it, and there he was beaten by a political cabal. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts got it. Massachusetts again.

Until then Jackson probably had no great passion for the office of President. But when he felt he had been tricked out of it, and the voice of the common man strangled, that was a fighting matter; and then he went in pursuit of it as once he had pursued the Creek Indians.

Adams ran for re-election. It was the first dirty campaign in the history of American politics—the people against the aristocrats—and before it was over the possibilities of printable invective had been exhausted. Jackson was called a drunkard, a gambler, a killer, and his wife Rachel, to whom he was wonderfully devoted, was slurred because she smoked a pipe. His victory was stunning. He carried the entire country, save only New England.

Defenders of the conservative principle thought this was the beginning of the end. The bitterness was such that the courtly Adams broke the amenities by refusing to meet the incoming President. Well, it was the end—the end not of the republic but of the regime of the elite. Thereafter anybody might become Mr. President.

It is a habit of history to speak of the Jackson revolution; to say that at that time power was transferred from the few to the many and the common man emerged from his immemorial oblivion with the sign of political sovereignty on his brow. That makes a kind of emotional sense; and indeed it was important that people should arrive at that state of feeling. But it was definitely a state of feeling. For all his imperious temper, Jackson apparently never was tempted to put forth his hand to seize power in the name of the people. Democracy as he understood it meant political equality, not levelling. His respect for the foundations was a habit of mind. With the temperament of a stern parent he would not permit the national purse to be opened for public works such as roads and canals which he thought states and communities ought to build for themselves.

He destroyed only two things. One was the myth of an elite, inheriting the right to govern, which in any case could not have long survived. The other was the Bank of the United States, which acted as the government’s financial agent and issued paper money.

The Bank was his dragon and he was bound to kill it. The struggle was terrific. The dragon had many defenders because it had been kind to its friends, many of whom were men in public office who were either not as innocent as they pretended to be or too naive to serve government. When it was dead the carcass stank. After all, it was absurd for the government to have a banker. Later the United States Treasury became its own banker and next there was a National Bank System controlled by national laws.

Then what was it Jackson did for that political frustration called the common man?

The appellative common man was objectionable in itself, suggesting the existence of an inferior class, and should never have had any American meaning. At that time, however, more than at any time since, it was a challenge: and it made a chord between the injured stepchild feelings of the west, where living was hard, and the unhappy wage earners of the east, who with the rise of organized industry in place of little homeside workshops, began to be conscious of themselves as a propertyless class. Jackson did not bribe them with promises or public funds; he held out to them no evangel of soft living. He was himself a passionate individualist.

But what he did do was to give them a sense of belonging; a feeling that it was their government too. “The duties of public office,” he said, “are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Therefore one as well as another was entitled to take part in government.

At his first inauguration they were all welcome to come and put their feet on the satin upholstery of the White House furniture because it was their White House too. They did come—the multitude itself. Their manners were terrible. Furniture was smashed, serving tables were overturned, the President himself had to be rescued from the uncouth hands of the people; and it might have been worse if somebody had not had the presence of mind to think of taking the punch bowls out on the lawn.

Those of the elite who had not fled were aghast. There was the mob. God save the republic! It was a vulgar and alarming spectacle. To Europeans and to many Americans also it was like a bad scene from the French revolution and they gave it the same meaning. But it had no such meaning, and the curious fact is that it was never repeated. The common man never had to assert himself in that way again. He had elected a President and could do it again. The rule of the elite was broken. That was really all that he wanted; and he did not mind that the next President was a New Yorker.

Nevertheless, to keep her way through the Jackson era the ship of state did need a lot of ballast, and that happily had been provided beforehand by another man who appeared in an unpredictable manner.

Out of the woods of Virginia had come a youth named John Marshall, with no advantages and only two possessions—one, great hardihood of character nurtured in a log cabin environment, and two, a very rare mental apparatus. In those days law was the poor young man’s pathway to career and he took it; but he had not got far when the Revolution called him. He was at Valley Forge and saw there the tragedy of feeble government; that marked him for life.

The quality of his mind began to be revealed in the struggle to get the Constitution ratified. He was on the side of the Federalists, who elected Washington to be the first President and so took control of government. More and more after that the elders included him in their solemn pow-wows, and presently he was one of three commissioners sent to Paris to reason with the corrupt and insulting body called the Directory that last governed revolutionary France until Napoleon blew it up. It was Marshall who returned from Paris with the explosive “XYZ” papers, in which it was disclosed that the French Directory would discuss nothing, not even the outrageous seizure of American ships, unless the Americans would buy its good will with a large tribute in gold. The effect was to unite the country in angry feelings against France, and there was actually some fighting at sea; a declaration of war was avoided when the French apologized.

Not long after that President Adams unexpectedly named John Marshall to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He did this to make sure that there would be on the bench, irremovable, one strong conservative, against the rising power of Thomas Jefferson and his dangerous republicans. Jefferson and his followers called themselves republicans because they did not yet dare to call themselves democrats; but they were neither so dangerous nor so radical as they thought they were.

Marshall was Chief Justice for thirty-five years. He was there at the summit of his amazing power when Andrew Jackson arrived. Meanwhile, with his own hands, he had placed so much ballast in the hold of the ship—which to begin with, Macaulay said, was all sail and no ballast—that even with all her sail set she could ride out a squall with ease.

There have been few indispensable men in American history. You could count them on your fingers. John Marshall was one of them.

We need here some background. Beginning with the Mayflower Compact and the Colonial charters, the Americans have always had a childlike trust in words committed to paper. Once when his British Majesty called upon the colonists of Connecticut to surrender their charter they hid it in an oak tree, as if the parchment itself was their talisman; so long as they had physical possession of it they were safe.

The American procedure for setting up any institution is first to agree on the principles and then to put them in writing. Then there it is in black and white and no going behind it. Besides the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme law, every state has one of its own. The British, by contrast, though very jealous of constitutional government, have never had a written constitution.

Only a little less naive than the idea of the parchment as talisman was the idea that a written constitution, once ratified by the people, could be altered only by will of the people.

The reasoning was this. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. The Congress, the President, every officer of government, the Supreme Court itself, the individual citizen, all alike are bound by it. The Constitution therefore is above government. Only the people can ever change it because the Constitution says that only the people possess sovereign power. True—literally true. Not a word, not one punctuation mark in the Constitution can be changed but by consent of the people.

Nevertheless, the Constitution may be altered by interpretation.

Words are not mathematical symbols. Saving pronouns and proper names, very few words are exact. In the common language the difficulties of making a precise and simple statement, with sharp and impervious edges, are almost insurmountable. There is a language of science and a language of law, both pretending to be exact, and that is why they are so dreary and to the layman unintelligible—and the meaning still in dispute. As we live with them, the use of words is to communicate emotions and suggest images; and the images have an embarrassing habit of changing their clothes without changing their names. A constitution has to be written in the common language; and no matter how clear it may be at first the argument very soon begins. What do the words mean?

When the Constitution says that the government may levy taxes for the “general welfare,” what does general welfare mean? At the time nobody could have imagined that these words would ever be construed, as they have been, to sanction the rise of a vast paternal bureaucracy to mind the lives of the people—their hours of labor, their sowing and reaping, their behaviour in the market place and what they do about their sickness and old age.

When the Constitution says the Congress shall enact “all laws which shall be necessary and proper” to execute the powers conferred upon government, does it not follow that what is necessary and what is proper are left to the hazards of emotional decision?

And when the Constitution says Congress “shall regulate commerce among the several states,” who will say what interstate commerce is? Is it merely the actual exchange of goods between the states, or perhaps also the means such as railroads whereby goods are brought to the point of exchange, or, in the extreme case, does it mean the manufacture in one state of goods that may be sold in another?

Such questions have given rise to endless controversy. Each dispute must somehow be settled so that people may go on with their business. But how? By a decision of the United States Supreme Court. It must say what the words mean. There is no other way out.

Disputation over the metaphysics of an unalterable law that may be altered by interpretation was 150 years old when at last a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said bluntly what everybody already knew: “The Constitution is what the Court says it is.”

The ink was still bright on the face of the Constitution when the people began to divide. On one side were the Federalists, led by Washington, Hamilton and the Adamses, who wanted a strong and magisterial central government. On the other side stood Jefferson and his republicans, whose fear of government was instinctive; they wanted to chain it down, believing that by nature all governments contain a biological principle of giantism, so that unless they are shackled they will grow out of control and devour the liberties of the people. Historically it had always been, said Jefferson, that government advanced and liberty gave way. This he dreaded.

The doctrine of limited government was fundamental in the Constitution, hence all that procedural machinery which we have learned to call the system of checks and balances, whereby the Congress may check the President, the President may check the Congress and the Supreme Court may check both of them, and then the Supreme Court itself is checked by the Constitution. In that case, what was the quarrel about? How could such a Constitution be construed in two different ways—in one way to enhance the natural powers of government and in another way to fetter them?

Well, that possibility, as we have seen, was bound to arise because rubber words like general welfare, necessary and proper can be made either to stretch or shrink. It was a conflict of theory that could not come to rest; it had to be solved by tension. A government strong enough to keep order, to discipline the ways of liberty, to hold the country up to its destiny, and at the same time a docile government belonging to the people, with no will of its own—such were the irreconcilable terms of the problem.

In the beginning certainly the need was for a much stronger Federal government than the people had imagined when they ratified the Constitution. For want of it the republic would have fallen apart. Among the original thirteen sovereign states there was a latent spirit of resistance to Federal authority, breaking forth from time to time in murmurs for secession, notably in New England, Virginia, Kentucky and South Carolina.

Into this dangerous confusion came John Marshall, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, like a mighty Vulcan resolved to forge a nation. He had no patterns or drawings to work from, nor any legal tools to work with. He took his refractory material as he found it, annealed it in the fires of reason and shaped it to his logic with terrific hammer blows. Nobody quite understood what he was doing, for it was a new thing. Lord Bryce, the British historian who wrote the one best story of the American Commonwealth, said of him that the Constitution seemed not so much to rise under his hands as to be gradually unveiled by him until it stood revealed in its harmonious perfection.

His principal antagonist was Thomas Jefferson, who said: “There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.”

All the same Jefferson, even when he was President, accepted the law as Marshall laid it down. Marshall’s power lay in the fact that he could make people see the necessity for building up the authority of the Federal Government, whether they liked it or not; if it was a great nation they were dreaming of, then it had to be like that.

His most compelling and daring decisions were unpopular. In one he established the power of the Supreme Court to declare an act of Congress null and void, on the ground that it was unconstitutional. In another he established the power of the Court to overturn an act of any state legislature on the same ground. In general he stoutly upheld the sanctity of contract, and that was important, because the repudiation of onerous contracts was becoming customary; nevertheless there was such a thing as an unconstitutional contract. New York state made a contract with the inventors of the steamboat giving them a monopoly of navigation on the Hudson River. Marshall destroyed it by holding navigation on the Hudson River to be interstate commerce, and only Congress could lawfully regulate interstate commerce.

Marshall’s time was from Jefferson, the first republican President, to Jackson, the first President to call himself a democrat, roughly thirty-five years. During all that period he was the Supreme Court; and at the end of it Constitutional law as he wanted it was so fixed that people took it to be a part of their national heritage, and in the next generation it would be proved that it could survive the shock of Civil War and save the Union from dissolution.

As between Marshall and Jackson, notwithstanding much fuming on both sides, there was less positive disagreement than people at the time imagined. Although they might disagree violently as to who should run it, both believed in a strong Federal Government. More important still, both put the sovereignty of the Union above the sovereignty of the separate states; with equal passion both denied the right of any state to defy Federal law or to secede from the Union.

Their minds met at that point when South Carolina defied a high protective tariff law and threatened to leave the Union if the Federal Government tried to enforce it. Jackson’s answer was to issue a proclamation denying the right of any state to secede, to send revenue cutters to Charleston harbor and to threaten a series of hangings under martial law if the Federal revenue collectors were resisted. Clay of Kentucky, the great compromiser, poured his special snake oil on those angry waters and nothing happened.

 

IV

Freedom’s Lares and Penates

ALL THIS BUSINESS OF BUILDING THE FIRST TEMPLE WAS VERY exciting. The hewers and bringers were many. Design, structure and materials were matters of intense interest. They were debated in the halls of Congress, on every platform, in the newspapers, in the churches, and of winter evenings around every country store stove. The difference between that debate and one that might now be current is that then the people were discussing what government should be for everybody alike, not what it should do for the farmer, for organized labor, for the little business man, for the old, the sick and the halt.

Since it was the people’s temple, dedicated not to any superstition but to the free will of man, there were many altars.

There was an altar to Union in a central place. Putting it there may have been an act of blind forethought; more belike it was done with a sense of fearful premonition. Many already knew that if that altar fell the temple was doomed, and yet there was no rational probability that in defense of it hundreds of thousands of lives would be sacrificed in the next generation. Indeed, many would have said that Union could not be bought at that price, or that if it could be it was not worth it.

Again it was that if reason had been vision we should have lost our way.

There was an altar to the Individual Man. The high priest. there was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spelled democracy with a little d and gave it the first description of its own soul. “The root and seed of democracy,” he said, “is the doctrine, Judge for yourself. Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of the doctrine, where it has any effect, to make each man a state.”

He took the American ethos to be his clay, and turned it as on a potter’s wheel, raising forms of unattainable perfection and beauty which crumbled in the instant they became visible and yet were never forgotten. In his ideal state the highest law would be ethical sovereignty, wealth and property would be subordinate to good will, and every man would know how to walk alone with his spirit in high places. The possibility of such a state had never existed anywhere, unless perhaps here for Americans, standing morally and culturally free of the world—and for them only provided they could tame their incorrigible commercial motive. This he abhorred. It made man the servant of his belly, a money chest, his feet serving his head, the ideal serving the actual. Believing in the perfectability of man, he was an optimist. Yet he had moments of extreme pessimism as he turned his gaze to a dimly lighted place in the temple and saw there the ugly altar of Mammon, toward which even his disciples slyly bent their knees as they passed out.

The other nature of man had yet much actual work to do, and although after Emerson it would never be quite the same again, nothing at that time could have stopped it from building the most gorgeous altar in the temple. That was the altar to Success.

Nearby was the altar to Progress. The idea of progress was then new in the world. We who now take it for granted as a natural concomitant of life can hardly realize how exciting it was. The first seeds of it were planted in Europe, most hopefully by a French thinker named Condorcet; but the soil of Europe had been sterilized by the wisdom of the ages. This wisdom, knowing all human history, said that civilizations were repetitive, in a preordained cycle—the beginning, the sudden growth, the rise only to heights that had been scaled many times before; then the decay, the fall and the succession. Everything that was had already been, would pass and be again, over and over.

Here only, and here for the first time in human experience, the idea of progress seized the imagination of a people who had nothing to forget, nothing to destroy and no ancient wisdom to bury. Progress—why not? Continuous, cumulative progress, with unlimited benefit to the welfare of humanity.

As B follows A, so a second idea appeared. If unlimited progress was possible, why was poverty necessary? Thus came a thought that not only was original here but original in the history of mankind—the thought of abolishing the immemorial curse of poverty.

But this progress that people now imagine—is it not more actual than ideal? Certainly it is actual. And will it not lead them to adopt that economic view of life which Emerson so deplored? They will be going straight toward it.

The fatal enigma now appears. Material progress will cause spiritual values to wither. That is not arguable. But the other side of it is that it remains to be discovered how in a real world poverty may be abolished by spiritual advance alone.

Emerson was the great idealist. Benjamin Franklin, founder of American science and zealot for the idea of progress, was the realist. Nevertheless, they had a theme in common. Their theme was humanity. The difference was that one of them was thinking of its soul and the other of its body.

Hear Franklin saying: “It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried in a thousand years the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transportation. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce. All diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard. O, that moral science were in a fair way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.”

If Franklin’s real world was a millenium away, Emerson’s ideal world was much more remote, if attainable at all; and a time when people could have both was not imaginable. In any case, no conscious choice was possible. For reasons we cannot know, a vast potential of cosmic energy was entrapped in the American’s seed. It obliged him to put forth his actual power.

There was an altar to Law. The American’s extraordinary attachment to law was not sentimental, nor was it, as some have suggested, a defense against the demon of lawlessness which he knew to be lurking in his lower nature. It derived from his political understanding. Equality before the law meant one law for all alike, and that was the very footstone of human freedom. The whole of his political philosophy was contained in the precept—“that this shall be a government of law, not of men.”

Utopia had its bright little altar. It received many prayers and answered none; gradually it was forsaken, and one day, long after the last of its candles had guttered out, it was dragged away. There were niches for the Saints of Liberty, and an altar to Science, which would become the tallest and most imposing of them all.

But there was no altar to God.

This was not a thoughtless omission. The American was neither godless nor irreligious. But in his political nature he was resolved that church and state should be forever separate. He remembered the evils and tyranny of theocracy, as in Colonial New England, where the established church laid down the laws under pretense of having received them direct from God; and he would have no more of that. A church should be what a church was for. Let God be privately housed. Let each of the fighting denominations do it in its own way—the Congregationalists in their way, the Unitarians in theirs, the Episcopalians in theirs, the Catholics in theirs, the Methodists in theirs, the Quakers in theirs, and so on.

In fact, owing to the first intoxications of modern science, to the complete release of intellectual curiosity and to the epidemic of skepticism that had seized the world of the mind, religious thought was in a state of such ferment that God could not have been comfortable in any public temple.

A new religion was rising called the natural religion, or Deism. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison—these were religious men, reverently believing in a Creator, only they could not accept the God of the Puritans. The only deity invoked by the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence was “Nature’s God.” They referred to the Creator who had made all men equal, to the Supreme Judge of the World, and went so far in the last paragraph as to lean upon Divine Providence, but never did they speak simply of the Almighty God.

In the Constitution, God was not mentioned in any way at all. The Founding Fathers who wrote it were Deists. They looked twice at religion—once to say, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and again, “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Then for the first time since man began to build temples 3,000 years Before Christ, religion, in spite of itself, was both free and unprivileged.

 

V

The American System

THIS IS STILL THE STORY OF THE FIRST GENERATION THAT LIVED the life of the high tempo.

Its gait was boom and bust, always falling down and getting up like a stumbling young giant; and that early habit of walking was to mark the Republic for life. In that one generation there were six panics. Falling down was from losing balance on the eager forward impulse.

For a while there was no sense of economic direction, simply man as the left hand of nature reacting to his environment.

Attachment to agriculture was very strong, not only for love of the soil but for other reasons. Jefferson’s famous distrust of commercialism had a long survival; so also his notion that only a nation of farmers could be free, virtuous and politically responsible. That was his ideal of a durable democracy.

Toward the end of his life he began to waver. There was something to be said for manufacturing, even though Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, had made the thought of it repugnant in his Report on Manufacturers, wherein he proposed protective tariffs and factories like England’s to absorb child labor.

Then, as more and more people began to see the limitations of an agricultural nation, came Henry Clay of Kentucky with his vision of what he called an American System. As the American farmer went on plowing and reaping free virgin land, what would he do with his surplus? If he sold it to Europe he would have to take payment in the products of European industry, the terms of that exchange would be always to his disadvantage, and this might become a permanent pattern once it had ramified itself in habit. It would be much better for the American nation to eat more of its own surplus. But how could it do that when nine-tenths of the population lived on the soil, provided its own food, and could not eat any more?

What Clay proposed was a high tariff against Europe’s manufactured goods. In the lee of this protection against foreign competition American industry would rise very fast, cities would grow, factories would draw labor away from the soil where it was already producing more than could be sold and then you would have on one side an urban population to eat the food and on the other side a rural population to produce it, tending to balance. Moreover, high tariffs would bring revenue to the United States Treasury, since of course some foreign goods would continue to come in and pay the tariff; and the Federal Government would use this revenue for internal improvements, especially roads, so that the surplus of the farms might more easily reach the cities to be exchanged there for the products of native American skill.

This was a theme of economic independence. Clay imagined a time when it would be said: “America is America’s best customer.”

Not only did that time come; a time came when from being its own best customer the United States became the great supplier of the world, with a power of industrial production equal to one-half that of all other civilized people combined, and with still a surplus of food to sell abroad, because American industry had revolutionized farming by putting mechanical energy on the land, in place of human drudgery and animal power, with the result that one man on the soil could produce as much as ten could have produced before.

To this same breathless generation—besides the steamboat, the railroad and the telegraph,—happened things such as—

The reaper, which began the mechanization of farming;

The rotary printing press;

The penny newspaper;

The first public high school;

Public sewerage;

Ether as an anesthetic;

The beginning of the revolt of women;

Garrison’s Liberator, a portent of the Civil War;

Patent medicine;

The camp meeting and revivalism;

The Yankee peddler who took culture to the backwoods;

McGuffey’s Reader;

Noah Webster’s American dictionary;

The New England poets;

The transcendentalists;

Long trousers, or democracy in the fashions;

Many utopias, like Brook Farm and New Harmony, founded on the wistful expectation of a New Moral World;

An exciting ferment of radical ideas, mostly imported from Europe by the intellectuals, with Karl Marx writing communism in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune;

A new philosophy of labor;

The call for a World Convention to emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin and misery;

The China trade;

The lovely clipper ship that outran everything on the seas not only because it was swift but because also the American sailor was the first to sail all night at top speed;

The joy of a robustious world manner that stunned the diplomacy of Europe and scared Japan into opening the gates of her hermit kingdom to western trade;

And then two fateful distractions:

One was the war with Mexico over the possession of Texas, which ended with the addition also of New Mexico, Arizona and California to American territory, thus completing the continental shape of the United States;

The second—as if to make that arid geographical mass digestible—was the discovery of gold in California a year later.

The Gold Rush of the Forty Niners, besides being the most colorful single episode in American history, had very fortunate consequences, for whereas the sheer weight of that vague and remote region might have given the vessel a bad list to port, the rapid rise of an exuberant civilization in California was compensatory and put the ship in trim again.

On the San Antonio River in Texas, just across from the town of San Antonio, was an early Catholic mission named the Alamo. It was a church surrounded by walls, in the beautiful old Spanish style, and could be used as a fort. There in February, 1836, one hundred and fifty Americans, calling themselves Texans, were trapped and beseiged by 3,000 Mexicans commanded by a butcher named Santa Anna. At the head of the Texans was Lt. Col. William Barrett Travis, who sent out a call for reinforcements, saying:

“The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid with all dispatch.”

Thirty-eight men from Gonzales did fight their way through the Mexican army to stand with the suicidal band. That made the Texans one hundred and eighty-eight. But other Texans were too far away to help and the Mexicans still were sixteen to one.

The siege lasted twelve days. In moments of lull, before the Mexicans got over the wall, they could hear from inside strains of hill-billy music. David Crockett of Tennessee, the hardest shooting man of them all, had his fiddle with him. The only woman was the wife of one of the Texans. She was cowering in the church when he rushed in to kiss her goodbye and then back again, at a signal that the Mexicans were getting over, to die with the rest. Not one Texan survived. That was the only kind of word the brutal Santa Anna could be trusted to keep. Afterward for many years it was a saying among Texans: “Thermopylae had its messenger of fate; the Alamo had none. Every man died.”

Who were these men?

The old mission has been preserved as a precious relic. You will find there a bronze plate telling you who they were. One was from New York, one was from New Orleans, one from Glasgow, and so on; they were from everywhere. That tells you nothing.

Then what were they doing there?

They were fighting for Texas. But why for Texas? It did not yet belong to them, it did not belong to the United States, it did not in fact belong to itself. Yet here were one hundred and eighty-eight Americans who would sooner die for it than surrender. Still, why? These were roving and restless men, pushing the frontier westward, whose feet never had been still before. There was plenty of land, limitless land as it then seemed; they could have gone on or they could have gone back. No. But here they would stop and here they would fight for something they did not possess, something they could not define, save by the one word Texas.

There can be only one answer. They did not choose Texas. It was the other way. Texas chose them. This you will not understand unless you are a certain kind of person, nor even then unless you have had the experience of coming awake one morning in Texas and feeling it for the first time, as might happen to you now on a Pullman train. And so, when man and nature are free to act upon each other, an environment will select its own people and put a spell upon them; and so in fact to this day in the life of America there is definitely such a thing as a Texas race.

It is not an uncommon American gesture slightly to avert one’s face from the war with Mexico or to turn that page of history quickly. It is a long and zig-zag story. The facts are all in the textbooks. Yet though you have all the facts you will have not the meaning unless you begin with the Alamo.

Underlying it all is this question: To whom does the land belong—to those who happen to be there first or to those who will make better use of it? There is a legal title and there is a moral title. Lawful societies lay stress upon the legal title, and that is proper enough; but in the end it turns out that only the moral title is valid. This you may prove by supposing the case of the man who owns a farm under a perfectly legal title. All the powers of the law and the courts, and if necessary even force, will defend him in the possession of that farm because his title is legal. All the same, unless he makes good use of the land he will certainly lose it. Both title and possession will eventually pass to a better farmer, perhaps under the sheriff’s hammer. And as for the rights of the people who happen to be there first, as for example, the Mexicans in Texas, how did they get possession but by taking it away from others who were there before them?

Americans first began to settle in the Mexican province of Texas on the invitation of the Mexican government. It offered free land to planters and farmers who would bring their families, agree to abide by the laws of Mexico and embrace the Catholic religion. The mercurial Mexican government in one of its rational moods had probably despaired of ever being able to do this pioneer job itself. The area was vast and, besides, it did not have that kind of people.

The word Texas, merely the exotic sound of it, strangely stirred the imagination of migratory Americans. They moved in so fast that the Mexican government began to be uneasy. That may not have been a very good plan, after all, especially since these Americans turned out to be not docile colonists but a forward and willful people and very hard to govern because they had ideas of their own about law. It took measures first to restrict the immigration and then to stop it and fell into the bad habit of forgetting the terms of its original contract with the settlers.

So the mortal quarrel began. The Americans—now all calling themselves Texans—resented the arbitrary nature and changeableness of Mexican law; and every effort by the Mexican government to impose its decrees by force led to acts of fierce retaliation. All the Texans demanded at first was the status of a loyal but self-governing state. That of course would not work. At last the Mexican government resolved to put the Texans in their place once for all and started an army north. The Texans thereupon set up a provisional government and prepared to fight.

The shooting started over possession of one little brass cannon that belonged to the village of Gonzales. The Mexicans sent a detachment of eighty men to take it. Eighteen Texans put them to rout and Gonzales kept the cannon. Just then the Mexican army arrived at San Antonio, sixty-four miles away. The men of Gonzales improvised a militia of Texans and went to meet it. After five days of lurid fighting the dazed Mexican army took refuge within the walls of the Alamo—the same Alamo where a few weeks later another Mexican army would catch the heroic garrison of one hundred and eighty-eight and commit its act of slaughter. The Texans had not yet learned their lesson about the enemy. In this first encounter the Mexican army inside the Alamo walls asked for terms, was permitted to surrender and then marched away.

The trouble was that the Texans had neither an army nor a general. They rose of themselves in small volunteer bodies and did as they pleased and were widely scattered. In this case, they left only a small garrison behind at the Alamo, then divided themselves and went on various errands which they believed to be military. The Mexicans of course, under a new general, returned in force for revenge, and the Alamo tragedy was what happened.

Now the Texans knew better. They let Sam Houston take command. He gathered them all up into one army and met the Mexicans at the battle of San Jacinto. In that action the Texans, crying “Remember the Alamo!” utterly destroyed the Mexican army and captured Santa Anna himself. Instead of hanging him they kept him for a while and then let him go. He returned to Mexico where he flourished in ignominy and in the end turned traitor to his own country.

Now Texas was free, a republic with a flag of its own, but bankrupt and still in danger, for there was no peace and the Mexican government might at any time return to the attack.

For nearly ten years the Texas problem was a political plague. The American government reluctantly recognized the new republic as an independent state—reluctantly for fear of giving mortal offense to Mexico—but that was not enough. Texas wanted protection and money. The money she tried to borrow first in New York and then in Europe and was disappointed. Then she wanted to be annexed to the United States. But that would mean war between the United States and Mexico, and the American government did not want war with Mexico. Instead, it offered to buy Texas from Mexico, and this with no result but to outrage Mexican pride.

Now in a very bad strait, Texas turned to Great Britain. The British Prime Minister had several ideas. One was to persuade Mexico to recognize the independence of Texas. That failed. Another was to provide Texas with British money, on one condition among others that she should abolish slavery. Nothing came of that. What the British seemed to be thinking of was an independent cotton state able to supply their spindles with fibre forever and related to Great Britain by a kind of umbilical cord, which might be something as tenuous as gratitude.

It was all somewhat vague. Nevertheless, it was alarm over Great Britain’s interest in Texas that tipped the scales in favor of annexation. The American people had wanted Texas and still did, but the subject had become embroiled in the passions of the slavery debate. The anti-slavery forces of the north were anti-Texas, believing that this was all a conspiracy on the part of the southern slave owners to extend their peculiar institution; also there was a very strong feeling both north and south against war with Mexico. One treaty of annexation, already signed by Texas, was rejected by the United States Senate.

In the next Presidential election the subject thrust itself forward in spite of anything the politicians could do about it, the friends of Texas won, and on March 1, nine years after the Alamo massacre, Texas was invited to join the United States. Thereupon the Mexican Minister at Washington asked for his passports and went home.

For a year after that the American government tried to restore amicable relations with Mexico. It was too late.

Between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in the south of Texas was a twilight zone, controlled neither by the Americans nor by the Mexicans. There a clash occurred and the war was on.

Abraham Lincoln, then a member of Congress, denounced it; so did all the anti-slavery people, for Texas was a slave state. But in the country at large there was fervor for it. Volunteers overwhelmed the recruiting stations. Never was the American soldier more valiant.

Seventeen months later Mexico City, from which the Mexican government had fled, saw the Stars and Stripes.

 

VI

Land Ecstasy

LAND.

The ceaseless land.

Mother of increase, responsive to caress, preferring impressment, sternly wanton, the ageless, anonymous, immovable land!

With now—

(1) The annexation of Texas, plus,

(2) The territory ceded to the United States by Mexico at the end of the war, plus,

(3) The addition of the Oregon country, as to which a boundary dispute with Great Britain had just been settled—

—the land room was one-half square mile for each family in the population, and hardly more than a quarter of it tamed by agricultural man.

Never before had it happened that a people already conscious and highly evolved began a civilization on land that was both virgin and free.

Being virgin it contained elemental properties which once exhausted could perhaps never be replaced by chemical ingenuity, and it may be that these properties so long stored in the soil gave the early Americans a kind of food that no large segment of the human race will ever eat again.

Being free it had one enchantment that will never return.

We now who at sight may fall in love with some lovely stitch of the earth and say, “I wonder who owns that,” or inquire perhaps for the nearest real estate agent, cannot recall the ecstasy of the man who could say, “That is mine; I saw it first.”

That alone was wonderful enough. But there was a value much deeper than satisfaction of the acquisitive instinct. Free land meant freedom. It meant freedom broken down to the grasp of one man’s hand—any man’s.

In the Old World land ownership was the lord’s portion, or it was the king who could give title and take it away again. The king, the nobles and the church—these few—owned all the land. The land could not belong to the people; the people belonged to the land in relations of serfdom, villeinage, docile peasantry and servility.

But here every man could own his piece of ground. The trees, the shade, the grass, the brook, the very stones were his, as immune from trespass as the greatest lord’s domain. In the individual case, therefore, possession of land, besides being a means to independent livelihood, satisfied also a psychic hunger. The rain was sweeter on mine than ever it was on his lordship’s, and because he could say mine, the farmer at last was a free being, and hence the spirit of American agriculture.

Yet land did not make itself free. The Old World tradition of a landed gentry put its roots down here and might have flourished if the Revolution had not savagely killed it.

In the New England Colonies the practice was to survey new land as it was needed and then allot it in small parcels. Under their charters each Colony was proprietor of all the land within its boundaries, except that the British king reserved the right to take it back at any time if he got mad. In the Crown Colonies, notably New York, immense tracts of the best land were conferred upon families and individuals who had favor with the king, and thus the beginning of large indivisible estates administered in the grand manorial manner. In Pennsylvania, which was a grant colony, the Penn family owned the land by title from the king and disposed of it to settlers in small tracts on easy terms, but did not relinquish ownership. A farmer’s land belonged to him only so long as he made to the Penn family a small annual payment, called quit rent. This quit rent arrangement was very common throughout the Crown and Grant Colonies. The annual payment was never large, but it was irksome; and moreover, under that system, land ownership, protected as it was by laws of primogeniture and entail, would become the monopoly of a few to whom the many who worked the soil would be paying tribute forever. By primogeniture and entail the owner of land bequeathed it to his first-born son, and he in turn was forbidden to bequeath it otherwise than to his first-born son, and so on and on, with intent to keep the estate intact through generations.

These beginnings of an aristocratic Old World land system were swept away by the Revolution. The king’s hand was removed from the land and the titles he had conferred were torn up. The great manorial estates were seized and broken up for the benefit of small farmers. Quit rents simply died. And the practice of primogeniture and entail was abolished by law.

Now therefore it was the people’s land. What would the people do with it? How should a wilderness be governed to begin with?

Over most of it the Indians had tribal rights, regionally demarked by use and habit; and although they were incessantly fighting one another over trespass, still they could unite from time to time to resist the white man’s advance. How should they be appeased and pushed back? If they had to be bought out, who was going to pay them? If they had to be dispossessed and killed, whose hands were to be stained with the red man’s blood?

It was easy enough to say that all open and unsettled land should be treated as public domain; that nominally the Federal Government should be the sole proprietor, able to sell and give title to it. Yet there had to be laws under which people could claim the land, take possession of it in a reasonable way with no hogging and be secure in their rights.

The first complications arose over what were called state lands. Prior to the Revolution several Colonies had acquired claims to vast reaches of wild land west of the Appalachians, particularly in the Ohio country, and although the king in a fit of ill will had cancelled them, it was natural that when the Colonies became free and independent states they should revive them. They did, and since there was no one to dispute their claims, they were all land rich. States that had no such claims took the position that since everybody had fought the war for independence all territory lying outside the boundaries of the original thirteen Colonies should belong to all the people as a public domain. New York state, whose claims were small, was the first to surrender them to the Federal Government, whereupon Congress forecast a land policy in the following resolution:

“The unappropriated lands that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States shall be disposed of for the common benefit of the United States, and be settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom and independence as the other states.”

Other states followed, even Virginia, which only a little while before had been minded to validate her western claims by men in arms. Almost without summons and certainly in a most unpredictible way, the spirit of union was working with a force which perhaps nobody at the time quite understood. Thus the public domain was consolidated.

To populate the wilderness was essentially a business of colonization. The problem was not how to plant colonies. The pioneer people were doing that for themselves. The problem was how to govern a colony through its infancy and then raise it to statehood under uniform and predetermined stipulations.

The first high act of statescraft on the part of Congress was to enact two perfect laws—one the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the other the Northwest Ordinance two years later. These laws provided that the public domain should be surveyed and mapped in rectangles of thirty-six square miles each, called townships; that in each township four square miles should be set aside for the Federal Government and one for the benefit of public schools; that as fast as the survey could be made land offices should be established to sell the land, the proceeds to be converted into the public treasury at Washington; that when any certain large area with natural geographic boundaries had been indicated as a territory its affairs should be administered by a governor and judges appointed by Congress; that when such a territory had 5,000 free male settlers it could elect a legislature and send a representative to Congress; that when it had 60,000 it should be admitted to the Union as a state equal in all respects to the original states, and finally that there should be no slavery in any territory. The land could be sold either at a low fixed price per acre which Congress might change at any time or it could be sold at auction to the highest bidder. It was in fact sold both ways.

But there is no such thing as perfect administration of a perfect law. Many bad complications were unforseen, and for fifty years there was turmoil and agony over the distribution of the land.

In the first place, long before the government’s surveyors could make their maps and of course long before any land offices were established, hundreds of thousands of settlers were already there in possession of the land.

These were the land hungry people who could not wait for the government to push the Indians back. They would do that for themselves. Groups of them built stockades and lived inside of them while they did their first clearing and farming outside with rifles leaning against the stumps; and then as the Indians receded each man went outside and built himself a log cabin or a mud hut, and when the Indians returned, as they often did, he fought them single handed or with the help of his woman, who could use the rifle too. These were the people who had squatter rights when the government arrived—rights by virtue of having been first in possession of the land, or tomahawk rights by virtue of having killed their own Indians.

What were you going to do with them? They had improved the value of the land by working it and by building crude habitations upon it. Was it fair that when the land office appeared and the land was put up for auction they should have to bid against newcomers and speculators to keep the little farms for which they had risked their lives? Was it fair that they should have to buy back their own improvements?

They were injured and very vocal and the heart of the country was with them. Here and there an individual squatter might be dispossessed, even by force, but a number of them together could successfully invoke the oldest New World tradition there was. That was the tradition that free white men had a right to pre-empt unoccupied land on sight, to have and to keep for their own. No example was more famous than that of the Vermonters, who so loved their Green Mountains and were so willing to fight for them that they defied either of the states that claimed the land or the Federal Government itself to come and take it, and won at last a state of their own.

Everywhere it was the same. First in the Ohio country, then in the Mississippi Valley, on the trans-Mississippi plains, in Texas, in California, in Oregon—the pioneer settler was there, long before the government could overtake him with its maps and land offices and scheme of order; and his rights, with or without any legal title, were bound to be upheld by a people who knew in their cells what land hunger was.

Pioneers were of two kinds. First were the pathfinders, like Daniel Boone, in skin coats and mocassins, solitary men in flight from civilization, who could live in the wilds endlessly, with only a rifle and a knife and a skill of woodcraft superior to that of the Indians. They built nothing and wanted nothing. Their role was to descry the land; and for their first knowledge of it they were often employed by exploring expeditions, survey parties and speculators who sometimes could not locate their own property.

But the pioneer farmer was the man who wanted to lay his hand on the land. His thrill was from the sight, the feel, the smell of it, and in the struggle to win it from primeval nature, no odds asked or given. He too was in flight from the demands and disciplines of civilization. Generally he took with him his woman, a bag of seed, an axe, and if he could, a pair of oxen. Picture, with that simple equipment, a man, a woman and an infant as they vanish into the wilderness. Somewhere they will find their ideal piece of ground. They do not know how far it is. The woman carries the infant, and the man, to save the oxen, carries on his shoulders the heavy oak ox yoke. That is an historically true image of the pioneer.

Later, in the west, after the land had been surveyed, thousands of wistful settlers arrived at government land offices with even less equipment, and not enough money to pay the minimum price of a dollar and a quarter an acre. They could borrow the money from the agent of an eastern bank, betting their labor against a mortgage; and it was only the farmer who could lose, for if he failed to pay, the bank could foreclose the mortgage and take the land on which he had wasted his prayers and curses.

From time to time Congress was moved to provide relief for the first land tamers, the deedless ones, whose rights were those of possession only, and then at length it passed a general law called the Pre-emption Act, which gave them legal status. Against speculators and newcomers who might be willing to pay more, the farmer who was already there could hold his land and get his title by paying the government’s minimum price of a dollar-and-a-quarter an acre.

But even at that price land was dear for the poor man whose only risk capital was his labor and hardihood.

Why had not every man a natural right to a piece of land? So long as there was a vast unoccupied public domain, why shouldn’t land be as free as air and sunshine? So the cry for free land began to be heard; it swelled to a chorus and became the slogan of a political party, and after fifteen years of withstanding the clamor Congress passed the Homestead Act. Then anywhere in the surveyed public domain a man could stake out his own farm and all he had to do to gain absolute title to it was to live on it for five years.

From the beginning land speculation was an American folk way: yet at its very worst there was more delirium than evil in it.

You might have called George Washington a land speculator, as he was, or you might say he was a forestaller on western land, which sounds better and was perfectly honorable. So also were other presidents and many public officers and members of Congress who made the land laws, and it was no reflection upon them. So also were bankers, lawyers, merchants, judges, preachers, New England spinsters, fantasts and swindlers.

Land companies appeared like mushrooms in the morning grass. One of the largest was the Ohio Company which, before there was any Land Ordinance, bought directly from Congress 1½ million acres of land at an average price of nine cents an acre. The public treasury was low and needed the cash; but Congress had also the idea that these speculators would promote settlement, as in fact they did; and the land as such was worth nothing until the hand of labor touched it.

The profits of those early land companies were not as great as you might suppose; many of them collapsed. Their one aim of course was to beat the settler to the land and then sell it to him at a profit. Their trouble was that the government at the same time was selling land to the settler at low prices. More than that, the government was making large grants of the public domain to the states in aid of education, canals and railroads, so that these states also had public land to sell in competition with the speculators. Thirdly, the speculators were under this disadvantage, that having bought their land they had to sell it to get their money back and could not wait forever, lest the taxes eat it up, whereas anything the government or the states got for land was profit, since it cost them nothing, and meanwhile they had no taxes to pay.

It was different when the government began to make large grants of land to private companies in aid of transcontinental railroad construction—to the Union Pacific, for example, alternate strips one mile wide and five miles deep on each side of the track all the way. There was scandal there, although it was less from the land grants in principle than from the corrupt profiteering of the builders in their construction contracts, against which they were receiving government loans. All of that now is forgotten. What lives is the magic, sin and all, as Robert Louis Stevenson felt it when he wrote:

“When I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, how at each stage of the construction roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again; how in these uncouth places pigtailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarreling and murdering like wolves; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me as if this railroad were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?”

The great use of the railroad land grants was precisely what Congress intended. The railroads did not want the land as land. They wanted freight. The land itself cannot yield freight. Only the labor of settlers can do that. Therefore what the railroads wanted was people on the land. Thus they became the mighty agents of western colonization. They advertised the land in Europe. They found the wistful immigrant, helped him to bundle up his lares and penates, moved him across the ocean, took him by the trainload to where the land was, settled him on it and minded his welfare until he could buy his farm—not because they loved him but because they wanted freight.

As now we look back on the history of the vanished public domain it seems to make sense if we say the disposition of it was badly managed—that there was never such a thing as a rational land policy.

It was not rational to open new land faster than the need for it increased, or faster than the total population grew, for thereby the East was hurtfully drained of people.

With land that was cheaper and cheaper and then free, the government subsidized new agriculture in the West at the expense of old agriculture in the East, with such results as that food became too cheap, there was no profit in the fruits of the soil, land values fell in a disastrous manner and the deserted farm became a poetic subject in New England. That was not rational.

Nor was it rational to give the land away, when if it had been sold at a reasonable price only as it was needed the public domain might have been a source of public revenue for many, many years.

Nevertheless there was all the time a suprarational land policy. It was never formulated. Nobody was conscious of it. Reason could not have invented it.

For what was the supreme problem? It was how to get the land settled, to get it firmly in our hands, all the way to the Pacific—as fast as possible. Now we can see it. And as against the possible failure to have done it, what great difference does it make how it was done? What would the west be like now, by what alien people might it not be settled, if we had waited at the Mississippi River until we actually needed more land?

 

VII

Killing the Great Reptile

OUR MOST TRAGIC HISTORICAL POSSESSION IS THE CIVIL WAR. As the event recedes in time it comes to have the kind of otherwhere reality that belongs to an epic poem, in which people are moved beyond themselves by forces they can only pretend to understand.

Yet we wrote it ourselves—that is, unless history too is fiction, only that those who make it true by enacting it do not invent it. If we wrote it we made it up as we went along. What happened was unwilled and unwanted. Therefore it must have been inevitable, if we know what that means.

Of rhetoric and reasoning there was an outpour the like of which has never occurred since, and neither one nor the other had anything to do with it; both collapsed in magnificent futility because, for one thing, all the premises were in quicksand.

It was that debacle of human wisdom which makes it necessary that the issue, whatever it is, shall be decided in the evening of battle. Killing is the unanswerable argument. Afterward it may turn out that neither side knew for sure what it was fighting for. Then all that was ugly, indecent, treacherous and base will be dismissed as of course; and all that was brave, heroic, generous and grand will be celebrated with festival, pageantry and memories of glory, so that life may go on again in a tolerable manner.

The abomination of slavery was abolished—yes. But it now is clear that it would have abolished itself in a little time; in the modern world it could not have survived another fifty years. Moreover, at first, even the extreme abolitionists would have sooner let the South secede, slavery and all, than to fight a war for emancipation of the Negro. The Unionists, on the other hand, were unwilling to admit until almost the end that slavery was in fact the issue. They said it was a war to preserve the Union. But the use of force to keep a state from leaving the Union was a contradiction of the Federal tradition—a contradiction so extreme that until it had been dissolved in blood forever few in the North would face it squarely.

What gave the tragedy its complete form was the fact that both sides were acting under a spell of compulsion. Even as they tore at each other’s vitals in the agony of fratricide, both the North and the South in their own hearts were divided, not only about slavery but on the question of secession. There was a great deal of anti-slavery sentiment in the South. At one time it had been even stronger than the feeling in the North. That was before the New England abolitionists began to put the mark of infamy on the slave owner, forgetting or ignoring the fact that their Puritan ancestors not only had been slave owners too but had got rich in the African slave trade. As for the right of the Southern states to secede if they wanted to, that could not be proved one way or the other. There was no law about it. Certainly the New England states, now supporting the Union, were not consistent. Their history was that they themselves had talked of secession whenever they had been mad at the Federal government, or at the party in power, and had once, during the war of 1812, gone so far in disaffection as to discuss a separate understanding with Great Britain.

But consistency is not a thread you will find in the story of the Civil War. The very passions that governed it were not consistent. Its worshipful hero, Lincoln himself, was not wholly consistent.

Now the story.

In the Constitutional Convention, year 1787, the slavery question was a sleeping two-headed reptile. One head was the black slave already here, and nobody had any clear idea of what to do about that; the other head was the continuing African slave trade. Although the common sentiment was one of loathing for the reptile and nearly all were for putting at least one of its heads in a noose that might be tightened later, nevertheless a majority held for stirring it up as little as possible, lest the Southern states with their slave economy refuse to sign the Constitution.

But a man from the slave state of Virginia, Colonel George Mason, himself a slave owner like Washington and Jefferson, was for scotching it then and there; and he uttered this dire prophecy:

“The western people are already calling out for slaves for their new land. Slavery discourages arts and manufacture. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of cause and effect Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”

You may search in vain all the vast literature of the subject for a simpler and more satisfying version of the calamity that did come, and all the more terrible when it came for having been postponed for more than seventy years.

Yet one must consider the fact that slavery was not a sin until people began to think it was. Nowhere in Christendom for nearly 1,800 years had anybody regarded it as a sin. The Puritans of New England, who would have enslaved the Indians if the Indians had been tame, could not have thought of it as a sin, since they lived by the Bible and nowhere in the Bible was slavery forbidden.

It was at first a labor problem in the immemorial design.

Greek colonists going forth to settle the Mediterranean world were instructed to seek three things: fertile land, good water and tame slaves. More than 2,000 years later in the New World the Spaniards found in Mexico and South America people who could be made to work; and that was one reason why Mexico City grew to be rich and splendid while the English colonists were still hacking away at the North American forests and had no fine cities at all.

The North American red man could not be tamed. Facing extinction he made one of the grand gestures in the history of mankind. He would sooner perish than be a slave.

The British Colonists, disappointed in the red man, had some pretty grim ideas about labor. Virginia passed a law under which an idler, even though he were a free man, could be assigned to a master who would make him work.

It was not only the elementary fact that a solitary man acting upon the land accumulates capital very slowly, whereas if he can hire labor and add it to his own it goes much faster; it was also as if the Colonists knew what it was they had to do, and the amount of labor it would take, merely to get the trees cut down by hand, was appalling. Everywhere the cry was for labor—labor for hire. Many able-bodied men would sooner work for themselves on land that was either very cheap or free, even though their reward was but primitive sustenance, than to work for others on hire. For that reason labor for hire was both scarce and dear.

There was resort to what was called indentured labor, which was a kind of limited slavery, both willing and unwilling. By the shipload England sent over paupers for whom there was no work at home; also convicts to serve sentence, London scum, disturbers of the political peace, persons enticed by false allurements, even many who were kidnapped. On arrival at a colonial port all these victims of induced migration were sold at auction to the Colonists. Their bodies were not sold, only their labor, at so much per head for a number of years, usually five to seven. The proceeds paid for their passage, with a profit of course to the shipowner, and it was a thriving business.

For many it turned out not so badly in the end. When they had worked out their time they were free, if they had behaved well and not tried to run away; and the law was that when the master set them free he should furnish them with suitable clothes to be free in, a supply of food and some rude tools with which to work the small pieces of land they were entitled to receive. After that they were better off. And it was true also that many voluntarily sold themselves into servitude beforehand in order to pay their passage to the New World. These had the true pioneer temperament and turned out very well indeed.

Then one day a Dutch vessel appeared in Jamestown harbor with twenty African negroes for sale. That was different. When you bought a Negro you bought more than his labor; you bought his body too for so long as he lived. He was yours like an animal; he was property; if he multiplied the increase was yours.

That was the beginning of the African slave trade. For a while it grew slowly because for all purposes of the Northern Colonies, in both agriculture and handicrafts, Negro labor was inferior to white labor. But when it was discovered that Negro labor was perfectly suited to the culture of tobacco and rice in the large hot fields of the South, and when to those two simple crops cotton growing was added on a plantation scale, the Negro appeared to be the complete solution of the labor problem in the South, from Virginia down.

After that the slave trade increased very fast. In a little while the plantation system of the South came to rest entirely on Negro labor. In South Carolina the blacks outnumbered the whites. The exports of tobacco, cotton and rice increased enormously. Indeed, without these cash exports, which enabled the Colonies to buy the manufactured goods of England, the story of early American development must have been very different. And black labor did it. Never could white labor alone have done it.

It has been estimated that during two hundred years the number of African natives captured for the slave trade was twenty-four million. Of these twenty-four million, half are supposed to have died miserably in the suffocating holds of slave ships. The surviving half were sold either in the West Indies, which had then the largest slave market in the world, or to the American Colonists, perhaps half and half.

And this was entirely the work of Christian slave traders, principally the British, the New England Yankees and the Dutch, in approximately that rank. The British were foremost because they had the paramount naval power of the world. In 1713 they obliged Spain to give them a monopoly of the awful traffic from Africa to the Spanish possessions in the New World. Later she repented and employed all her diplomacy to abolish the slave trade under the name of piracy. So conscience may evolve. But so far as North American civilization was concerned, the damage was already done.

The Southern Colonies bought the Negro for economic reasons; their part in stealing him out of Africa was relatively unimportant, perhaps only because they did not have the ships. The Yankee traders of New England had the ships.

Their interest was not in the Negro but in the slave trade, to which they gave a triangular pattern of infamous simplicity. On the first leg of the triangle they brought molasses from the West Indies to Boston and Providence, where it was made into rum. On the second leg, they took the rum to the coast of Africa and swapped it for Negroes. On the third leg they sailed back to the West Indies, with the Negroes stowed where the rum had been, and sold the Negroes for more molasses, to make more rum, to buy more Negroes, and so round and round. Apparently no thought of its inhumanity, let alone a sense of sin, ever entered their heads. It is remembered that one Yankee skipper engaged in the trade was censured by his Puritanical church brethren for pursuing it on Sunday when, even in Africa, he should have been observing the Lord’s Day.

Such had been the history of the slave evil up to the time of the War for Independence.

You cannot say precisely when it was that people began to think of slavery as a sin. Certain it is that after the Declaration of Independence in 1776 the American conscience was never again quite easy about it. The idea that God had created the Negro a human being and might have given him a soul was an irrepressible torment.

Eleven years later, when the Founding Fathers sat down to write a Constitution, the facts were that Massachusetts had abolished slavery, Connecticut was on her way to abolish it, Maryland and Virginia had already forbidden the importation of slaves, and North Carolina was about to do likewise.

Nevertheless, the roots of slavery as an institution had struck very deep. Georgia and South Carolina said they would be ruined without slaves. And whatever might be done about the slave trade, that is, about the importation of slaves, the case was that the Negro already here was multiplying so fast in Virginia and Maryland, called the breeding states, that now it was cheaper to raise slaves than to import them.

Unable either to ignore the abominable two-headed reptile or to challenge it, the Constitutional Convention took refuge in the hopeful position that in time slavery would disappear of itself, provided it were left to states. In that mood the Convention performed the first great feat of ambiguity in our documentary history.

The Constitution recognized slavery in an oblique manner without accepting it, and it never once used either the word slave or Negro. It referred instead to “persons held to service or labor.” The oblique recognition was on three points, namely: (1) for twenty years the Federal Government would not prohibit the importation of such persons, thus giving the slave trade a period of grace; (2) any such person escaping from a slave state to a free state should be treated as a fugitive and returned to his master when caught, and (3) when a slave state enumerated its population for purposes of representation in Congress it could count five slaves as equal to three free men. The purpose of this was to give the Southern states more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have been entitled to hold on the count of their white population alone.

As political realists the Founding Fathers were right to fear what they feared and to accommodate the reptile. It could not have been destroyed at that time; it could only have been driven South, and that would have wrecked the purpose of the Constitution, which was “to form a more perfect Union.” The feeling for Union was still very fragile.

What followed was a period of comfortable delusion. That also was necessary.

For nearly the whole of the next generation the question of slavery was what lawyers call moot—that is, something that may be debated in a harmless manner at low temperature because nobody means to do anything about it. There were free states and slave states and they lived together in one Union quite amicably. In his first message to Congress President Monroe declared that sectional jealousies were rapidly dissolving in a spirit of national unity. That was true. He was re-elected by acclaim and his second administration was known as “the era of good feeling.” The anti-slavery movement went into eclipse. In all of Congress it had but one voice. Abolition societies were folding up.

True, Congress had passed some laws intended to restrict the slave trade, but they were not enforced. At the end of the 20-year period of grace allowed in the Constitution it passed a law to prohibit the importation of slaves; nevertheless, the slave trade went on. Twelve years later it passed another law calling the slave trade piracy and forbidding American citizens to engage in it, on pain of death. Then the smugglers took over.

These laws, observe, touched only the slave trade—that is, the importation of more Negroes from Africa. Not one of them looked at the domestic institution of slavery, which now was near to be self-sustaining, with the Negroes already here multiplying almost fast enough to meet the demand for more slaves, Virginia and Maryland breeding them as a business and selling them to the Southern planters.

After having been quiet for more than thirty years the reptile made the first lunge.

The circumstances were these.

Although Congress had always treated slavery itself as a problem for the sovereign states to solve in their own way, nevertheless from the beginning there had been a law forbidding slavery in the territories—the territories being public domain over which the Federal Government claimed complete jurisdiction. This may sound a bit involved and yet it was logical enough. Many who for political reasons were unwilling to challenge slavery where and as it already existed were at the same time strongly opposed to any extension of the slave system. So, if slavery were forbidden in the territories, then as the territories one by one came into the Union they would come in as free states, until in time free states would so far outnumber slave states that slavery would wither and die. That, as it turned out, was wishful thinking.

Then one day the territory of Missouri, otherwise qualified to become a state, demanded to be admitted to the Union as a slave state. The struggle was on. The debate became extremely bitter.

The Southern states of course supported Missouri, not only because slavery was their institution but for the further reason that their power in Congress would be diminished if Missouri were added to the number of free states. For the first time the Constitutional right of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories was brought into question, on the ground that slaves were legal property. Could Congress forbid citizens to own legal property anywhere?

At the same time all the smouldering anti-slavery sentiment in the North began to send forth forked flames. It came to what seemed an ominous impasse, only that everybody desperately wanted to find a way out. The time was not yet. If the crisis could not be postponed the Union was lost.

The way out was that Maine and Missouri should be admitted to the Union simultaneously, Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, which kept the balance as it was; and that thereafter slavery should be unlawful north of a line which represented an extension of Missouri’s southern boundary due west.

That was the famous Missouri Compromise. It put away the evil day for nearly one generation more. The delusion of national unity was mended like a broken vase, everybody pretending to believe the cracks were invisible.

But never again would anything be the same.

 

VIII

The Heat of Sin

PECULIAR TO THIS STORY, AS YOU WILL SEE, IS A CERTAIN timing of events.

Hitherto it had been the nature and meaning of government that engrossed the American mind. Why now did it begin to be rocked by strange winds? High overhead they had been blowing for some time before. Whence they came nobody knew. They seemed to rise sometimes in Europe, sometimes here, and again both there and here at once.

The grounds of morality were shifting. The authority of Biblical theology was failing and at the same time a conviction of sin was rising. That was paradox.

Humanitarianism was the new religion. Reform was its shibboleth. It had the faith to believe that man was perfectible, not as a being of divine origin but as a member of the good society. By his own will he could make his world over with evil and injustice left out. This would lead to the perilous position that the righteous, who could abolish evil if they would, became themselves guilty of the sins of the unrighteous. But here also is paradox, for to abolish sin you have either to abolish the sinner or lay restraining hands upon the freedom of the individual who would sooner live in a free world than in a perfect one.

All of that could wait perhaps. The angels were writing this page of history.

In Great Britain John Morley was saying that “A great wave of humanity, of benevolence, of desire for improvement—a great wave of social sentiment, in short” was exerting its power upon “all who had the faculty of large and disinterested thinking.” Here Emerson, in the essay entitled “New England Reformers,” was saying: “What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world.”

The reformers—militant ameliorists, zealots, radicals and visionaries—were the large thinkers and had not the false humility to deny it. One of their early projects was a feud with alcohol. The first idea was to reform the drunkard; the second was to remove the temptation by law. Hence the prohibition movement of that day, celebrated in theme, sermon and balladry, with most exciting repercussions in politics.

Other projects were such as prison reform, rights for women, regulation of child labor, humane treatment of the insane, non-imprisonment of debtors, care for the blind, a better social status for wage earners, to shorten the work day which was then twelve hours or more, and to make war an impossible crime forever.

But these admirable projects, even all of them run together, could not immediately canalize the rising flood of altruistic emotion. What it required was one immense resistant evil, touching and visible, upon which to discharge its power. That evil was slavery.

Meanwhile the moral position of slavery had been worsening in the sight of the world. As a domestic institution it had wholly disappeared in Europe. Great Britain had bought the freedom of all the slaves in her colonies. All the maritime nations of Europe had willingly agreed to treat the slave trade as piracy, save only Spain and Portugal, and they were persuaded to do likewise by a subsidy from Great Britain. Even Mexico had set her slaves free by decree.

And now, whereas before the anti-slavery feeling in the North had been content to resist extension of the evil, the new passion for reform demanded its extinction, and demanded it as a judgment upon sin, with no compensation to the slave owners.

Thus the abolition crusade began. Its dreadful knight was William Lloyd Garrison, an obsessed and reckless man, to whom moderation was unknown. He was a printer to begin with and first appeared as co-editor of an anti-slavery paper in Baltimore. In 1831 he started one of his own, The Liberator, and it was a fearsome torch that blackened the day and disrupted the night. To quench it ultimately required the blood of more than a million men—but none of Garrison’s. He did not believe in war. His energy was prodigious. The Constitution, he said, was a compact with hell because it tolerated slavery and authorized the Fugitive Slave Law. Therefore he defied it, publicly committed it to a bonfire, and organized the historically famous Underground Railroad. That was a chain of secret arrangements by means of which slaves were spirited out of the South and smuggled into Canada. The number of slaves actually liberated in that way was not large, but the slave owners naturally were enraged. Slavery was legal and this was theft.

Although nothing more than a wicked coincidence could ever be proved, it happened very soon after the appearance of The Liberator that a slave rising took place in Virginia. Sixty whites were murdered by blacks. Such a thing had never occurred before and the South could hardly be blamed if it imagined that the incitement came from the North; but in the North all but the fanatical abolitionists were horrified.

After that the abolitionist forces divided. A minority of extremists followed Garrison; on the other side were the conservatives who deplored his methods and pursued the delusion that even yet there could be a political solution. And all the time in the North were many who were for letting slavery alone until in time it should perish of itself.

Violence begat violence. Conservatives and anti-Garrison abolitionists sometimes ran together in what were always described as “well-dressed mobs” to wreck the meetings of Garrison and his radicals, even in Boston, where the dreadful knight himself had a close call with lynching.

Thus it was to the end, except—first, that as feeling became incandescent on both sides the radical and moderate wings of the abolitionist movement were bound to fuse at the edges, and, second, that where formerly the leaders of Southern thought had defended slavery only as an economic necessity, now with their pride hurt to the quick by the vituperations of the North, they were obliged to invent and to believe a social doctrine in which slavery was elevated to the plane of a classical human institution indispensable to an ideal civilization. For this they could find their texts in the Bible, in Plato, in Aristotle and in immemorial historical experience.

And so a nation walked backward toward the abyss, knowing it was there and yet helpless, not fascinated but helpless. Its reason was free but its feet were caught in a winding chain. Was this what Colonel Mason had foreseen—that there would be no other way to expiate a national sin?

The doom of the reptile now could be foretold. Yet the end was postponed for a while more by two great distractions. One was the war with Mexico and the other was the discovery of gold in California. These events complicated the drama, one by raising the question of what should be done about slavery in Texas and the other by unmistakable signs that California would choose to be a free state; yet everything else would have happened anyhow, as if supreme tragedy may have its own logic of form and sequence. The sequence was as follows.

(1) The Southern members of Congress made the mistake of demanding a law to exclude anti-slavery literature from the mails, thereby alienating all defenders of freedom of communications.

(2) Next, with intent to impound the flood of angry polemics, Congress resolved to entertain no more petitions against slavery. The only effect of this was to embitter a debate which could be interminably continued under pretence of discussing not slavery but the people’s Constitutional right of petition.

(3) Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared—a gentle sentimental book that produced an amazing effect: it did more to move pity for the slave as a human being than all other anti-slavery propaganda put together.

(4) The South broke the Missouri Compromise truce by demanding that in place of a Federal law forbidding slavery in the territories it should be left to the people in the territories, as they came to write their state constitutions, to say for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not. The disaster here was that no longer could anybody believe that slavery if let alone would abate itself; clearly the South was aiming to extend it.

(5) In retaliation the free states passed more laws to frustrate the enforcement of the Federal Fugitive Slave Law, making it harder for the Southerners to get back their runaway slaves.

(6) Then was the stupid and bloody struggle for political control of Kansas, between the free soil settlers who wanted it to be a free state and lawless killers from the slave state of Missouri who were resolved to see Kansas organized as a slave state.

(7) After Senator John Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered an impassioned speech on “The Crime Against Kansas,” he was found alone in the Senate chamber by a young Southern Representative named Brooks who beat him with a cane until he was insensible, inflicting incurable injuries. Brooks had the decency to retire and go home; but he was re-elected as a hero and sent back to Congress by his admiring constituents, who also presented him with a number of memorial canes in place of the one he had broken on Sumner’s body.

(8) The case of a Negro named Dred Scott came before the Supreme Court. Scott was born a slave. He claimed now to be free on the ground that he had sojourned with his master in a territory where slavery was unlawful. The Supreme Court did not stop at deciding the case as a legal problem; it went on to say by the way that Congress had no Constitutional power to prohibit slavery in the territories or anywhere else. This opinion stunned all the anti-slavery people, both the extreme abolitionists and those who had believed that slavery could somehow be contained by law. Now the law was out. Not only was the life of the reptile beyond reach of the law in its own habitat forever; legally it was free to grow wherever it could insinuate itself.

Enter John Brown, as a pure forethought of violence, in this vacuum of law. He was a queer mystic, probably a mental case, whose movements were obscure. He had appeared in the Kansas embroilment as a killer for the Lord. Then he disappeared and was lost and turned up again here and there, a furtive, whispering figure as he accumulated some money, a few arms and a little band of fanatics. One day he appeared at Harper’s Ferry, seized the arsenal there and called on the slaves to rise. He would arm and lead them.

The slaves did not rise. Federal troops immediately recaptured the arsenal. John Brown’s sons were killed but he was taken alive.

The country’s blood ran cold. John Brown was duly hanged and in the North all the right sounds of abhorrence were heard. Much more penetrating, however, were the sympathetic sounds from those who thought of Brown as a martyr. Had he not been willing to give his life for the slaves? Ralph Waldo Emerson was applauded in Boston for calling him a saint who had made the gallows glorious, like the cross; and even Abraham Lincoln, then coming to eminence, placed him in the historic company of many before him who conceived themselves appointed by Heaven to liberate an oppressed people by killing the king.

A symbol had been created. The Yankee soldier carried it South when he sang:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

John Browns body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

As we go marching on.

 

IX

Lincoln

FIRST AND LAST THE WHIRL WIND WAS RIDERLESS.

Political behaviour was governed by a principle of avoidance. Leaders whose views were mortally irreconcilable could nevertheless converge again and again to find one more compromise. Some did it at the risk of their political lives. New England angrily smashed its idol, Daniel Webster, because in his passion to save the Union he had voted in the Senate for an unpopular concession to the South.

Several old parties were breaking up; like restless crystals their fragments coalesced, flew apart and combined again in an aimless manner, but with one common foreboding, which was that it would be disastrous to put the question of abolition to a vote of the people. In fact, it never was.

The Republican Party was formed. It was afraid to make up its mind. It denied the martyrdom of John Brown and called for a containment of slavery, not its abolition.

The falling star of the Democratic Party was Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who expected to be President. Between two presidential elections he came up for reelection to the Senate.

He was opposed by an obscure lawyer of extraordinary size and uncouth exterior who smelled of the earth and its primary people. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

What followed was the memorable Lincoln-Douglas debate, in seven installments, which brought out the people of Illinois in multitudes and caught the ear of the nation.

By relentless logic Lincoln forced Douglas to take the position that slavery could be protected by law in the territories, as the South demanded, and still be defeated by subterfuge if the people really did not want it. This extreme sophistication of compromise—that you could appease the reptile under safeguard of snake bite medicine—was too much. It cost Douglas his chance to be President and split his Democratic Party in two at the middle. The South would never trust him again and the North burned his effigy in a thousand bonfires. He was not a Machiavelli. At heart he was a Unionist, as the sequel proved; his trouble was that the gathering clouds of conflict obstructed his burning vision of a trans-Mississippi empire and a railroad to the Pacific coast. With or without slavery he wanted to get the territories settled.

Well, but for all his logic, Lincoln himself was not sure. In a prophetic vein he said:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; I do expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Yet he had no solution.

He said: “Wrong as we may think slavery to be, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence. But can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national territories and to overrun us here in these free states?”

And again: “When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution.”

Although Douglas did squeeze back into the Senate, his career was ruined; and Lincoln became a national figure.

Two years later the Republican Party convention in Chicago nominated Lincoln for President, by that kind of decision which on very rare occasions seems to make itself—or as if the men who gave it voice had been speaking with strange tongues. These could not have known by any rational process of mind that they passed by more attractive men only to pick the one who could save the Union. Indeed, they were not thinking of Union. The Unionists were holding their own convention.

In the brooding campaign that followed there was a common sense of impending disaster. The hot southern leaders were saying openly that if Lincoln were elected the South would secede.

There were three other candidates, one representing the southern wing of the Democratic Party, one to represent its northern wing and one for the new Unionist Party. This meant that there would be a great scattering of ballots. Lincoln was elected by much less than a majority of the total popular vote.

In December—that is, during the interval that had to elapse between the election of the new President and his inauguration—South Carolina proclaimed her independence. Secession had begun.

Still there was hope. The spirit of compromise was not quite dead. On the motion of Senator Crittenden of Kentucky a Senate Committee of Thirteen adopted a plan that was acceptable both to the South and all the conservatives of the North. The plan was to amend the Constitution in a way to guarantee the rights of the slave owners in the South for all time and let the North be free. Bearing the benediction of his own party, the plan was carried to Lincoln, who was sitting alone in melancholy meditation at Springfield, waiting to become President.

His answer was—No. It was a solution that would have divided the house forever—half slave and half free.

Before Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the Confederate States of America—commonly called the Confederacy—had been formed as a separate nation with a provisional president; later came the permanent organization, with a constitution, a Congress, courts and ambassadors.

Lincoln in his inaugural address was conciliatory to the point of tenderness. He referred to slavery only once, without using the word, and that was to say the Federal Government had neither the intention nor the legal right to “interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held in service.” Meaning that he was not going to touch slavery where it already was.

Beyond that his single theme was Union. No state upon its own mere motion could disrupt the Union by leaving it. Therefore all resolutions and ordinances and acts of secession were insurrectionary and illegal. The Federal Government would continue to hold and occupy its own property in the South, as everywhere else; it would continue so far as as possible to collect duties, administer the laws and deliver the mails, in the South as elsewhere, but “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

Union was his single theme until almost the very end.

In the second year of the war he wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, saying: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it. If I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. 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 do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in the third year, and that was defined in its own text as “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing the rebellion.” So that also was to save the Union. Moreover, this freedom was proclaimed for slavery in the seceding states only; slavery in the so-called border states, which were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, was left as it was.

Indeed, it was not until the fourth and last year of the war that he seized the reptile by the neck.

In his second inaugural address, March 4, 1865, he uttered these magnificent words:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly de we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

 

X

In the Scales of Battle

SOUTH CAROLINA FIRED THE FIRST SHOT.

When the small Union garrison that was holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor refused to surrender it the shore batteries opened a bombardment that reduced it in a few hours, providing a gala spectacle for the charming elite of southern society, viewing it from the porticos and from excursion boats on the water, and the bells exulting in the church steeples.

The Rebel Secretary of State, a very ardent secessionist, nevertheless tried to stay the hotheads, saying: “If you fire on that fort you will start the greatest civil war the world has ever seen.”

The curious fact was that almost nobody either North or South had realized that secession would mean war. In the North the radical abolitionists were still saying: “Let them go.”

But the reaction of the North to the shelling of Fort Sumter was a roar of animal rage. The wound was bloodless. In the battle for Fort Sumter not a single life was lost on either side. But the Stars and Stripes had been hauled down in defeat, and that was all that had been necessary to convert the faltering idea of Union into a fighting faith. The bells of Boston tolled for a day. The streets of New York and Philadelphia were choked with marching throngs. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops—to serve for three months.

The war would be over in ninety days.

Just before the 90-day enlistments ran out the first battle came—the Battle of Bull Run, only a few miles from the Capital. The fashionable society of Washington went forth in carriages to witness the chastisement of rebellion. It was an absurd battle. The Union forces broke, threw away their arms, and raced the civilians back to Washington. If the Rebel forces had been less astounded they might have taken Washington then. It was the only good chance they ever had.

So it began. Before it was finished enlistments on the Union side were 2,900,000 and on the Rebel side more than a million, and fifty years later every war college in the world was still teaching military science from the records of the American Civil War.

Weighed in the scales of a layman the advantages of the North were overwhelming—such as seven-tenths of the total population, more than seven-tenths of the country’s railroad mileage, industrial power six times greater than that of the South, and a command of credit and capital immeasurably superior.

Even so, the War of Independence against Great Britain had been won at worse odds.

The layman’s scales are wrong. They cannot weigh the imponderables. If Lincoln had once wavered or if a whiskey drinking cave man from Illinois, named Ulysses S. Grant, had not turned out to be a military Titan, the South almost certainly would have won.

It had some advantages too. One was a monopoly of cotton, which had become an indispensable commodity both here and in Europe; it expected to use cotton as an economic leverage, not only to trade it in Europe for guns and ammunition but to oblige Europe, especially Great Britain, to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation.

It had the good will of all the wily statesmen of Europe, who were not loath to see the rising American power divided in twain.

It had what military people call the advantage of interior lines,—that is, it was fighting defensively within a circle and could move swiftly in any direction on its own ground, whereas the Union forces had to mill around the periphery and crash it here and there as invaders of a hostile country.

That was true until the third year when Grant, as supreme commander, subdued all the Union armies to a single will, synchronized their striking power, and moved them with one impulse toward the heart of the Confederacy. Later, when he could reveal his strategy, he wrote:

“Before this time these various armies had acted separately and independently of each other, giving the enemy an opportunity often of depleting one command, not pressed, to reinforce another. I determined to stop this. To that end I regarded the Army of the Potomac as the center; all west to Memphis and north of it as the right wing; the Army of the James as the left wing, and all the troops south as a force in the rear of the enemy.”

That stopped it. Several times the Rebels broke out of Grant’s ring, but were forced back, and never again were they free to run to and fro in it.

At first and for a long while the martial spirit was higher in the South. That you may understand. The Union soldier was fighting for a political idea, or if not that, then, as he said in his foul moods, for the damn niggers; whereas the Rebel soldier, however it started, had the feeling that he was defending his homeland against the invader.

And from the first the South had Robert E. Lee, who broke his heart to transfer his loyalty from the Union to his native state of Virginia. His generalship was superb and became a terrible legend. The North had not his equal until the arrival of Grant.

Lastly the South was immensely benefited in a negative way by the fact that the North was never united. It was neither all resolute nor all loyal, but torn to its vitals by dissensions and treason. In his own Cabinet Lincoln had to deal with treachery, intrigue, contempt and disaffection.

The war fervor itself was fickle. Whereas at first volunteers overwhelmed the recruiting offices, in a little while willing enlistments began to fail, and this together with the insatiable demand of the generals for men, always more men, made it necessary to resort to the draft. Then came the draft riots in New York City, which had to be put down by the army at a cost of 1,000 lives.

The worst work of the disloyalists was to obstruct the draft and encourage desertion. In that role a member of Congress from Ohio, named Vallandigham, became so offensive and dangerous that the general in command at Cincinnati seized him and put him in jail. At this there was an angry uproar in the country over the suppression of speech by military authority. Lincoln changed the sentence to banishment and sent Vallandigham across the lines as a present to the Rebels, and at the same time wrote a famous letter, saying:

“Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy.”

The Constitution says that the President shall be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. His war powers, however, are not clearly defined. Lincoln carried them far—so far as to suspend that most precious instrument of civil liberty, namely, the writ of habeas corpus. Many civilians were tried by military tribunals for treasonable conduct and sent to prison. Deplorable incidents were bound to occur. Those who denounced Lincoln as tyrant, dictator, usurper, were not all disloyalists. Many whose loyalty to the Union was above question sincerely feared for the survival of the individual’s Constitutional rights.

Lincoln took this simple position: It was absurd to suppose that the Constitution which created the nation would forbid it to take whatever measures were necessary to save its life in war. What were the necessary measures? That was a decision that had to be made by one man. If the commander-in-chief of the armed forces was not the man to make it, who was?

In situations of necessity he could be very grim; yet at heart he was the greatest republican of them all. His highest sense of triumph, next to that of having saved the Union, was that through all the passions of war and notwithstanding some extreme uses of the military power, free elections were never once interrupted.

The memorable fact is that political speech, barring only the fangs of treason, was almost entirely free. The disloyalists were called Copperheads, from the stealthy snake of that name. There was a Copperhead press and an organized Copperhead party that held its mass meetings anywhere, one in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield. There was an anti-war party and a peace party, and of course the northern wing of the Democratic Party which viciously criticized the conduct of the war and was defeatist principally because it hated Lincoln.

By the middle of the third year the outcome could have been foreseen by any dispassionate mind. The North was winning, not only on the battle field, with Grant now in supreme command, but also in the world of diplomacy. Great Britain at last had made up her mind not to recognize the Confederacy as a nation, and to accept the blockade by which the North had stopped all trade between the South and Europe, this to the acute distress of Great Britain because her immense textile industry was dependent on the South for cotton.

This shift in British policy was owing partly to signs of Union victory and perhaps even more to the fact that after the Emancipation Proclamation popular feeling in England turned ardently to Lincoln. This led to one of the very few purely unselfish demonstrations of human spirit in the story of civilization.

A million wage earners in Great Britain had been reduced to beggary for want of cotton to keep their textile mills running, yet they held mass meetings and sent resolutions of cheer and sympathy to Lincoln, saying they could stand it, and, praise be, would he go on to the end. In a letter to them, Lincoln said: “I cannot but regard your decisive utterances as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

Even yet the South might have won by default. A virus of defeatism was spreading like a plague in the North, blinding its eyes to the omens of victory. A demand for peace grew from murmur to crescendo. Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune, the fickle oracle who could keep his following and be always wrong, addressed a petition to Lincoln, begging him to stop the war; the country could take no more. That became at once the formula for an avalanche of petitions.

Lincoln’s first term was expiring. He was nominated for re-election by a coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, many of whom began very soon to regret it and thought of looking for a substitute candidate. There was a party of Vindictives, who were for going on with the war, but without Lincoln, and the inconsistent Greeley joined these.

The Democratic Party met in Chicago and adopted the following resolution—

“After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities”

—and then nominated for president a disgruntled general, George B. McClellan, who was the wickedest of all detractors of Lincoln.

Of this crucial time Grant afterward wrote in his Memoirs:

“I had reason to believe that the administration was a little afraid to have a decisive battle fought at that time for fear it might go against us and have a bad effect on the November election. The convention that had met and made its nomination of the Democratic candidate had called the war a failure. Treason was talked as boldly in Chicago at that convention as ever it had been in Charleston.”

Lincoln himself lost heart, but not his resolution. The Republican National Committee was in a panic and wished him to make an overture for peace. This he would not consider. But in the presence of his Cabinet he wrote and sealed a note, which, when opened afterward, read as follows:

“It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”

Optimism of despair. The interval between the election and the inauguration would be four months.

All the politicians were wrong. They had strangely misunderstood what was silently passing between Lincoln and the people. An amazing change took place. It seemed to bring itself to pass, and was sudden, like an atmospheric phenomenon. A new light began to play upon the signs. There was Farragut’s gallant naval victory in Mobile Bay, still to be properly celebrated, to the theme of “damn the torpedoes.”

Sheridan had so scorched the Shenandoah Valley that it was no longer of any use to the South either as a storehouse or a corridor.

Sherman had burned Atlanta and was about to slash the South across the belly with his epic march to the sea.

And Grant, for all his heart-breaking losses in the Wilderness, had Lee in a bottle at Richmond.

But more than anything else, what restored the morale of the North and confounded the politicians was a glimpse of the unexpected depth of dogged resolution, like Lincoln’s, in the hearts of the people. The next call for troops was met with the crashing Battle Hymn of the Republic:

We’re coming from the hillside,

we’re coming from the shore,

We’re coming Father Abraham,

six hundred thousand more.

All but the Democratic party’s opposition to Lincoln collapsed. The Vindictives withdrew their candidate. And Mc-Clellan, the Democratic candidate, repudiated the defeatist plank in his party’s platform.

Lincoln was re-elected by a large popular majority.

On Christmas Day Sherman announced the capture of Savannah. From there with his demon army he would turn north to join Grant.

In February the South desired to negotiate for peace. Lincoln met its commissioners on a boat at Hampton Roads; one of them was vice-president of the Confederacy. They proposed to discuss peace terms as between two warring nations. Lincoln would not proceed on that ground. He would not recognize the Confederacy as a nation; it was a group of rebellious states. There is an apocryphal story, partly confirmed by Grant in his Memoirs, that Lincoln wrote on a piece of paper Union and Abolition, and pushed it over to them, saying that under these words they might write almost anything they liked. They pushed the paper back and so the result was nothing.

Shortly thereafter the South made two desperate moves. Its representatives in Great Britain were instructed to say that if the British government would recognize the Confederacy as a nation the South would abolish slavery. Too late. The second move was a resolution by the Confederate Congress to arm the slaves.

Lincoln’s mind now was deeply engrossed with the problem of what to do with the Rebels afterward. He did not want to hang any of them. For the leaders who might deserve hanging, leave the outer gates open; let them flee. For all the rest, re-engage them in loyalty to the Union and let them establish new state governments in their own way, but of course without slavery. This was his program for reconstruction. In his second inaugural address, March 4, 1865, he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

One month later Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox; and Grant, who knew Lincoln’s heart, made these forgiving terms: All men and officers to be paroled, all arms to be surrendered except the officers’ side arms, and any man who could claim a horse or a mule to take it home with him.

As Lee in his splendid uniform rode back to his men to tell them, the Union soldiers began to cheer; Grant in his battered hat and a private’s unbuttoned blouse, stopped them, saying: “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”

Two days after Lee’s surrender Lincoln made his last public speech. The theme of it was that vengeance belonged to the Lord. Let the rebellion be forgotten. Let every southern state be welcomed back as soon as one white man in ten was willing to swear allegiance to the Union.

The reptile was dead. Sherman in the middle South was trampling out its last reflex wiggle.

But the countenance of peace was haggard.

On the night of April 14, 1865, Washington was in gala attire. People were singing in the streets. The President went to the theatre. A mad actor named John Wilkes Booth entered his darkened box, shot him through the head, and leaped to the stage, shouting in Latin: “Thus always with tyrants.”

Lincoln was carried across the street to a poor lodging house where in a shabby room he lay all night, slantwise on a bed that was too short for his giant form, and there in the morning he died.

His mould was buried with him. His like would never be seen again. No President was ever so misunderstood, so hated, so shamefully reviled in life; nor was ever one so deeply revered, so imperishably enshrined in the heart of simple humanity.

His memory had no enemies, not even in the South. In a moment of afterseeing Jefferson Davis, who had been President of the Confederacy, said: “Next to the destruction of the Confederacy, the death of Abraham Lincoln was the blackest day the South has known.”

The Furies had yet to be sated.

It must be believed that if Lincoln had lived he would have mended the Union with loving hands. His successor, Vice-President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, was a man who had the common misfortune to be born without wisdom. He was pugnacious, always inept, with no gift at all for leadership, but honorable. He lived for his enemies. They impeached him on a specious political indictment and he survived by grace of but one vote in the House of Representatives.

Under the unholy leadership of a malevolent dipsomaniac from Pennsylvania and a righteous monomaniac from New England, Congress gave itself up entirely to a spirit of vengeance. The work that Lincoln had done toward reconciliation was destroyed in a ruthless manner. Instead, the South was treated as an alien and conquered country, subject to military rule.

It was divided into five districts, each with a military czar whose powers were despotic. The business of these military rulers was, first, to keep order, and secondly to nurse the creation of fantastic state governments controlled by Negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags. Carpetbaggers were Northern politicians who came with no more in their hands than could be stowed in a carpet bag and with nothing more in their minds than the vulturous intention to feast on gobbets from the corpse of a proud civilization. Scalawags were renegade southerners willing to take part in the ghoulish festival.

The Constitution was amended three times—once to abolish slavery everywhere forever, again to declare that Negroes, now being free, were citizens and entitled as such to full civil rights, and a third time to confer upon the Negro the unlimited right to vote.

Giving the Negro the vote was the supreme act of cruelty, for it meant that in some parts of the South blacks would govern whites and that in any southern state a coalition of Negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags would possess the governing power. Wherein it was not conscious cruelty it may be explained by what Andrew C. McLaughlin in his “Constitutional History of the United States” called “a belief occupying otherwise vacant space in many minds that the earth could be purified and regenerated if only enough people were allowed to vote.”

Such were the conditions under which the symbol of government in the South became a grinning gargoyle. Morals, decency and sanity were outraged. Scandal, waste and corruption were orgiastic. The Negro sitting in the seat of his master, voting laws he could not read, was more pathetic than evil. He could not understand what he was doing.

Many times in history people had delivered themselves from slavery, but in doing so they had passed through fire, learning on their way the use of discipline and what freedom would mean; or, when emancipation had come from above, they were not torn suddenly from the context of a life they would go on living, the one difference being that they were free.

But the Negroes had not delivered themselves; they had never really thought of trying. It was something that happened to them, like a miracle. They had no idea what freedom meant. To many thousands of them it meant simply freedom from work. And in this innocent fantasy they were encouraged by the designing carpetbaggers, who put them up to vote raids on the public funds or for absurd bond issues, and then kept most of the swag for themselves. Negro members of a state legislature might be seen staring at money in their hands, more than they had ever seen before, wondering where it came from and what it was for.

The Negro could not govern. That he should even participate in government on terms of equality with the whites was an idea that arrived with the Furies. Lincoln had never imagined giving him the vote.

Neither could the North govern the South in a spirit of revenge, so hostile to a return of white supremacy that it would sooner see a black republic.

One of the three new amendments to the Constitution said that no man who had broken his oath of loyalty to the Union by taking part in the rebellion could ever hold public office again. The effect of this was to disqualify not only every statesman in the South but nearly every native southerner who knew anything at all about government.

What was the southerner going to do with his pride? Soak it in the vinegar of poverty and eat it? Did unconditional surrender entail unconditional submission?

He did a dire thing. He too invoked the Furies.

With a single passion, which was to restore white supremacy, he organized secret societies to visit terror upon the Negroes. The most famous one was the Ku Klux Klan.

They rode silently at night, on horses with muffled hooves—anonymous spectral figures in hooded white robes, threatening, flogging, burning and killing. The northern military forces were unable to suppress them because nearly the entire white population was actively sympathetic.

Years later many a son of a southern doctor, teacher, preacher, lawyer, banker or merchant was astonished to find among his austere sire’s relics, perhaps at the bottom of a locked trunk in the attic, a faded Ku Klux Klan regalia.

The blacks reacted as the white man knew they would. With no history or tradition of resistance, racially docile minded, superstitious by nature, they succumbed to terror. The Constitution might say they could vote; the Ku Klux Klan said they couldn’t. The Constitution did not go riding at night in white robes with a rope in its hands.

Fewer and fewer Negroes thought that the act of casting a ballot was worth a cabin in ashes. Wherever they insisted there was trouble. Many lives were lost in race riots. Throughout the whole South violence was a natural fact to be lived with.

Gradually, however, white supremacy was restored, largely by physical intimidation of the Negro; but also the sons of the politically disqualified white men began to grow up and the hands of vengeance began to relax.

It took time. Seven years after Lee’s surrender Congress passed the Amnesty Act; that was the beginning. It took four years more to restore home rule in South Carolina, where at one time two-thirds of the lower house of the legislature had been black. Twelve years after the end of the war the last of the northern troops were withdrawn from the South, the Union was in one piece again, and the wages of sin were paid.

Meanwhile Ulysses S. Grant had been President for two terms and the people of the North and West were travelling a high road at reckless speed.