A History of the United States
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Title: A History of the United States
Author: Cecil Chesterton
Author of introduction, etc.: G. K. Chesterton
Release date: December 28, 2007 [eBook #24062]
Language: English
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A HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: _Russell & Sons photo_
CECIL CHESTERTON]
A HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES
BY
CECIL CHESTERTON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1919
_First published January 16, 1919_
_Second impression January 17, 1919_
_All rights reserved_
DEDICATED TO
MY COMRADE AND HOSPITAL MATE,
LANCE-CORPORAL WOOD,
OF THE KING'S OWN LIVERPOOLS,
CITIZEN OF MASSACHUSETTS,
WHO JOINED THE BRITISH ARMY IN
AUGUST, 1914.
" ... O more than my brother, how shall I thank thee for all?
Each of the heroes around us has fought for his house and his line,
But thou hast fought for a stranger in hate of a wrong not thine.
Happy are all free peoples too strong to be dispossessed,
But happiest those among nations that dare to be strong for the rest."
--ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
INTRODUCTION
The author of this book, my brother, died in a French military hospital
of the effects of exposure in the last fierce fighting that broke the
Prussian power over Christendom; fighting for which he had volunteered
after being invalided home. Any notes I can jot down about him must
necessarily seem jerky and incongruous; for in such a relation memory is
a medley of generalisation and detail, not to be uttered in words. One
thing at least may fitly be said here. Before he died he did at least
two things that he desired. One may seem much greater than the other;
but he would not have shrunk from naming them together. He saw the end
of an empire that was the nightmare of the nations; but I believe it
pleased him almost as much that he had been able, often in the intervals
of bitter warfare and by the aid of a brilliant memory, to put together
these pages on the history, so necessary and so strangely neglected, of
the great democracy which he never patronised, which he not only loved
but honoured.
Cecil Edward Chesterton was born on November 12, 1879; and there is a
special if a secondary sense in which we may use the phrase that he was
born a fighter. It may seem in some sad fashion a flippancy to say that
he argued from his very cradle. It is certainly, in the same sad
fashion, a comfort, to remember one truth about our relations: that we
perpetually argued and that we never quarrelled. In a sense it was the
psychological truth, I fancy, that we never quarrelled because we always
argued. His lucidity and love of truth kept things so much on the level
of logic, that the rest of our relations remained, thank God, in solid
sympathy; long before that later time when, in substance, our argument
had become an agreement. Nor, I think, was the process valueless; for
at least we learnt how to argue in defence of our agreement. But the
retrospect is only worth a thought now, because it illustrates a duality
which seemed to him, and is, very simple; but to many is baffling in its
very simplicity. When I say his weapon was logic, it will be currently
confused with formality or even frigidity: a silly superstition always
pictures the logician as a pale-faced prig. He was a living proof, a
very living proof, that the precise contrary is the case. In fact it is
generally the warmer and more sanguine sort of man who has an appetite
for abstract definitions and even abstract distinctions. He had all the
debating dexterity of a genial and generous man like Charles Fox. He
could command that more than legal clarity and closeness which really
marked the legal arguments of a genial and generous man like Danton. In
his wonderfully courageous public speaking, he rather preferred being a
debator to being an orator; in a sense he maintained that no man had a
right to be an orator without first being a debater. Eloquence, he said,
had its proper place when reason had proved a thing to be right, and it
was necessary to give men the courage to do what was right. I think he
never needed any man's eloquence to give him that. But the substitution
of sentiment for reason, in the proper place for reason, affected him
"as musicians are affected by a false note." It was the combination of
this intellectual integrity with extraordinary warmth and simplicity in
the affections that made the point of his personality. The snobs and
servile apologists of the _régime_ he resisted seem to think they can
atone for being hard-hearted by being soft-headed. He reversed, if ever
a man did, that relation in the organs. The opposite condition really
covers all that can be said of him in this brief study; it is the clue
not only to his character but to his career.
If rationalism meant being rational (which it hardly ever does) he might
at every stage of his life be called a red-hot rationalist. Thus, for
instance, he very early became a Socialist and joined the Fabian
Society, on the executive of which he played a prominent part for some
years. But he afterwards gave the explanation, very characteristic for
those who could understand it, that what he liked about the Fabian sort
of Socialism was its hardness. He meant intellectual hardness; the fact
that the society avoided sentimentalism, and dealt in affirmations and
not mere associations. He meant that upon the Fabian basis a Socialist
was bound to believe in Socialism, but not in sandals, free love,
bookbinding, and immediate disarmament. But he also added that, while he
liked their hardness, he disliked their moderation. In other words, when
he discovered, or believed that he discovered, that their intellectual
hardness was combined with moral hardness, or rather moral deadness, he
felt all the intellectual ice melted by a moral flame. He had, so to
speak, a reaction of emotional realism, in which he saw, as suddenly as
simple men can see simple truths, the potterers of Social Reform as the
plotters of the Servile State. He was himself, above all things, a
democrat as well as a Socialist; and in that intellectual sect he began
to feel as if he were the only Socialist who was also a democrat. His
dogmatic, democratic conviction would alone illustrate the falsity of
the contrast between logic and life. The idea of human equality existed
with extraordinary clarity in his brain, precisely because it existed
with extraordinary simplicity in his character. His popular sympathies,
unlike so many popular sentiments, could really survive any intimacy
with the populace; they followed the poor not only at public meetings
but to public houses. He was literally the only man I ever knew who was
not only never a snob, but apparently never tempted to be a snob. The
fact is almost more important than his wonderful lack of fear; for such
good causes, when they cannot be lost by fear, are often lost by favour.
Thus he came to suspect that Socialism was merely social reform, and
that social reform was merely slavery. But the point still is that
though his attitude to it was now one of revolt, it was anything but a
mere revulsion of feeling. He did, indeed, fall back on fundamental
things, on a fury at the oppression of the poor, on a pity for slaves,
and especially for contented slaves. But it is the mark of his type of
mind that he did not abandon Socialism without a rational case against
it, and a rational system to oppose to it. The theory he substituted
for Socialism is that which may for convenience be called
Distributivism; the theory that private property is proper to every
private citizen. This is no place for its exposition; but it will be
evident that such a conversion brings the convert into touch with much
older traditions of human freedom, as expressed in the family or the
guild. And it was about the same time that, having for some time held an
Anglo-Catholic position, he joined the Roman Catholic Church. It is
notable, in connection with the general argument, that while the deeper
reasons for such a change do not concern such a sketch as this, he was
again characteristically amused and annoyed with the sentimentalists,
sympathetic or hostile, who supposed he was attracted by ritual, music,
and emotional mysticism. He told such people, somewhat to their
bewilderment, that he had been converted because Rome alone could
satisfy the reason. In his case, of course, as in Newman's and
numberless others, well-meaning people conceived a thousand crooked or
complicated explanations, rather than suppose that an obviously honest
man believed a thing because he thought it was true. He was soon to give
a more dramatic manifestation of his strange taste for the truth.
The attack on political corruption, the next and perhaps the most
important passage in his life, still illustrates the same point,
touching reason and enthusiasm. Precisely because he did know what
Socialism is and what it is not, precisely because he had at least
learned that from the intellectual hardness of the Fabians, he saw the
spot where Fabian Socialism is not hard but soft. Socialism means the
assumption by the State of all the means of production, distribution,
and exchange. To quote (as he often quoted with a rational relish) the
words of Mr. Balfour, that is Socialism and nothing else is Socialism.
To such clear thinking, it is at once apparent that trusting a thing to
the State must always mean trusting it to the statesmen. He could defend
Socialism because he could define Socialism; and he was not helped or
hindered by the hazy associations of the sort of Socialists who
perpetually defended what they never defined. Such men might have a
vague vision of red flags and red ties waving in an everlasting riot
above the fall of top-hats and Union Jacks; but he knew that Socialism
established meant Socialism official, and conducted by some sort of
officials. All the primary forms of private property were to be given to
the government; and it occurred to him, as a natural precaution, to give
a glance at the government. He gave some attention to the actual types
and methods of that governing and official class, into whose power trams
and trades and shops and houses were already passing, amid loud Fabian
cheers for the progress of Socialism. He looked at modern parliamentary
government; he looked at it rationally and steadily and not without
reflection. And the consequence was that he was put in the dock, and
very nearly put in the lock-up, for calling it what it is.
In collaboration with Mr. Belloc he had written "The Party System," in
which the plutocratic and corrupt nature of our present polity is set
forth. And when Mr. Belloc founded the _Eye-Witness_, as a bold and
independent organ of the same sort of criticism, he served as the
energetic second in command. He subsequently became editor of the
_Eye-Witness_, which was renamed as the _New Witness_. It was during the
latter period that the great test case of political corruption occurred;
pretty well known in England, and unfortunately much better known in
Europe, as the Marconi scandal. To narrate its alternate secrecies and
sensations would be impossible here; but one fashionable fallacy about
it may be exploded with advantage. An extraordinary notion still exists
that the _New Witness_ denounced Ministers for gambling on the Stock
Exchange. It might be improper for Ministers to gamble; but gambling was
certainly not a misdemeanor that would have hardened with any special
horror so hearty an Anti-Puritan as the man of whom I write. The Marconi
case did not raise the difficult ethics of gambling, but the perfectly
plain ethics of secret commissions. The charge against the Ministers was
that, while a government contract was being considered, they tried to
make money out of a secret tip, given them by the very government
contractor with whom their government was supposed to be bargaining.
This was what their accuser asserted; but this was not what they
attempted to answer by a prosecution. He was prosecuted, not for what
he had said of the government, but for some secondary things he had said
of the government contractor. The latter, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, gained a
verdict for criminal libel; and the judge inflicted a fine of £100.
Readers may have chanced to note the subsequent incidents in the life of
Mr. Isaacs, but I am here only concerned with incidents in the life of a
more interesting person.
In any suggestion of his personality, indeed, the point does not lie in
what was done to him, but rather in what was not done. He was positively
assured, upon the very strongest and most converging legal authority,
that unless he offered certain excuses he would certainly go to prison
for several years. He did not offer those excuses; and I believe it
never occurred to him to do so. His freedom from fear of all kinds had
about it a sort of solid unconsciousness and even innocence. This
homogeneous quality in it has been admirably seized and summed up by Mr.
Belloc in a tribute of great truth and power. "His courage was heroic,
native, positive and equal: always at the highest potentiality of
courage. He never in his life checked an action or a word from a
consideration of personal caution, and that is more than can be said of
any other man of his time." After the more or less nominal fine,
however, his moral victory was proved in the one way in which a military
victory can ever be proved. It is the successful general who continues
his own plan of campaign. Whether a battle be ticketed in the history
books as lost or won, the test is which side can continue to strike. He
continued to strike, and to strike harder than ever, up to the very
moment of that yet greater experience which changed all such military
symbols into military facts. A man with instincts unspoiled and in that
sense almost untouched, he would have always answered quite naturally to
the autochthonous appeal of patriotism; but it is again characteristic
of him that he desired, in his own phrase, to "rationalize patriotism,"
which he did upon the principles of Rousseau, that contractual theory
which, in these pages, he connects with the great name of Jefferson. But
things even deeper than patriotism impelled him against Prussianism. His
enemy was the barbarian when he enslaves, as something more hellish
even than the barbarian when he slays. His was the spiritual instinct by
which Prussian order was worse than Prussian anarchy; and nothing was so
inhuman as an inhuman humanitarianism. If you had asked him for what he
fought and died amid the wasted fields of France and Flanders, he might
very probably have answered that it was to save the world from German
social reforms.
This note, necessarily so broken and bemused, must reach its useless
end. I have said nothing of numberless things that should be remembered
at the mention of his name; of his books, which were great pamphlets and
may yet be permanent pamphlets; of his journalistic exposures of other
evils besides the Marconi, exposures that have made a new political
atmosphere in the very election that is stirring around us; of his visit
to America, which initiated him into an international friendship which
is the foundation of this book. Least of all can I write of him apart
from his work; of that loss nothing can be said by those who do not
suffer it, and less still by those who do. And his experiences in life
and death were so much greater even than my experiences of him, that a
double incapacity makes me dumb. A portrait is impossible; as a friend
he is too near me, and as a hero too far away.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
I have taken advantage of a very brief respite from other, and in my
judgment more valuable, employment, to produce this short sketch of the
story of a great people, now our Ally. My motive has been mainly that I
do not think that any such sketch, concentrated enough to be readable by
the average layman who has other things to do (especially in these days)
than to study more elaborate and authoritative histories, at present
exists, and I have thought that in writing it I might perhaps be
discharging some little part of the heavy debt of gratitude which I owe
to America for the hospitality I received from her when I visited her
shores during the early months of the War.
This book is in another sense the product of that visit. What I then saw
and heard of contemporary America so fascinated me that--believing as I
do that the key to every people is in its past--I could not rest until I
had mastered all that I could of the history of my delightful hosts.
This I sought as much as possible from the original sources, reading
voraciously, and at the time merely for my pleasure, such records as I
could get of old debates and of the speech and correspondence of the
dead. The two existing histories, which I also read, and upon which I
have drawn most freely, are that of the present President of the United
States and that of Professor Rhodes, dealing with the period from 1850
to 1876. With the conclusions of the latter authority it will be obvious
that I am in many respects by no means at one; but I think it the more
necessary to say that without a careful study of his book I could
neither have formed my own conclusions nor ventured to challenge his.
The reading that I did at the time of which I speak is the foundation of
what I have now written. It will be well understood that a Private in
the British Army, even when invalided home for a season, has not very
great opportunities for research. I think it very likely that errors of
detail may be discovered in these pages; I am quite sure that I could
have made the book a better one if I had been able to give more time to
revising my studies. Yet I believe that the story told here is
substantially true; and I am very sure that it is worth the telling.
If I am asked why I think it desirable at this moment to attempt,
however inadequately, a history of our latest Ally, I answer that at
this moment the whole future of our civilization may depend upon a
thoroughly good understanding between those nations which are now joined
in battle for its defence, and that ignorance of each other's history is
perhaps the greatest menace to such an understanding. To take one
instance at random--how many English writers have censured, sometimes in
terms of friendly sorrow, sometimes in a manner somewhat pharisaical,
the treatment of Negroes in Southern States in all its phases, varying
from the provision of separate waiting-rooms to sporadic outbreaks of
lynching! How few ever mention, or seem to have even heard the word
"Reconstruction"--a word which, in its historical connotation, explains
all!
I should, perhaps, add a word to those Americans who may chance to read
this book. To them, of course, I must offer a somewhat different
apology. I believe that, with all my limitations, I can tell my
fellow-countrymen things about the history of America which they do not
know. It would be absurd effrontery to pretend that I can tell Americans
what they do not know. For them, whatever interest this book may possess
must depend upon the value of a foreigner's interpretation of the facts.
I know that I should be extraordinarily interested in an American's view
of the story of England since the Separation; and I can only hope that
some degree of such interest may attach to these pages in American eyes.
It will be obvious to Americans that in some respects my view of their
history is individual. For instance, I give Andrew Jackson both a
greater place in the development of American democracy and a higher meed
of personal praise than do most modern American historians and writers
whom I have read. I give my judgment for what it is worth. In my view,
the victory of Jackson over the Whigs was the turning-point of American
history and finally decided that the United States should be a democracy
and not a parliamentary oligarchy. And I am further of opinion that,
both as soldier and ruler, "Old Hickory" was a hero of whom any nation
might well be proud.
I am afraid that some offence may be given by my portrait of Charles
Sumner. I cannot help it. I do not think that between his admirers and
myself there is any real difference as to the kind of man he was. It is
a kind that some people revere. It is a kind that I detest--absolutely
leprous scoundrels excepted--more than I can bring myself to detest any
other of God's creatures.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE,
_May 1st, 1918._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE ENGLISH COLONIES 1
II. ARMS AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN 14
III. "WE, THE PEOPLE" 36
IV. THE MANTLE OF WASHINGTON 51
V. THE VIRGINIAN DYNASTY 65
VI. THE JACKSONIAN REVOLUTION 90
VII. THE SPOILS OF MEXICO 110
VIII. THE SLAVERY QUESTION 129
IX. SECESSION AND CIVIL WAR 156
X. "THE BLACK TERROR" 203
XI. THE NEW PROBLEMS 227
INDEX 241
A HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
CHAPTER I
THE ENGLISH COLONIES
In the year of Our Lord 1492, thirty-nine years after the taking of
Constantinople by the Turks and eighteen years after the establishment
of Caxton's printing press, one Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor,
set sail from Spain with the laudable object of converting the Khan of
Tartary to the Christian Faith, and on his way discovered the continent
of America. The islands on which Columbus first landed and the adjacent
stretch of mainland from Mexico to Patagonia which the Spaniards who
followed him colonized lay outside the territory which is now known as
the United States. Nevertheless the instinct of the American democracy
has always looked back to him as a sort of ancestor, and popular
American tradition conceives of him as in some shadowy fashion a
founder. And that instinct and tradition, like most such national
instincts and traditions, is sound.
In the epoch which most of us can remember pretty vividly--for it came
to an abrupt end less than five years ago--when people were anxious to
prove that everything important in human history had been done by
"Teutons," there was a great effort to show that Columbus was not really
the first European discoverer of America; that that honour belonged
properly to certain Scandinavian sea-captains who at some time in the
tenth or eleventh centuries paid a presumably piratical visit to the
coast of Greenland. It may be so, but the incident is quite irrelevant.
That one set of barbarians from the fjords of Norway came in their
wanderings in contact with another set of barbarians living in the
frozen lands north of Labrador is a fact, if it be a fact, of little or
no historical import. The Vikings had no more to teach the Esquimaux
than had the Esquimaux to teach the Vikings. Both were at that time
outside the real civilization of Europe.
Columbus, on the other hand, came from the very centre of European
civilization and that at a time when that civilization was approaching
the summit of one of its constantly recurrent periods of youth and
renewal. In the North, indeed, what strikes the eye in the fifteenth
century is rather the ugliness of a decaying order--the tortures, the
panic of persecution, the morbid obsession of the _danse macabre_--things
which many think of as Mediæval, but which belong really only to the
Middle Ages when old and near to death. But all the South was already
full of the new youth of the Renaissance. Boccaccio had lived, Leonardo
was at the height of his glory. In the fields of Touraine was already
playing with his fellows the boy that was to be Rabelais.
Such adventures as that of Columbus, despite his pious intentions with
regard to the Khan of Tartary, were a living part of the Renaissance and
were full of its spirit, and it is from the Renaissance that American
civilization dates. It is an important point to remember about America,
and especially about the English colonies which were to become the
United States, that they have had no memory of the Middle Ages. They had
and have, on the other hand, a real, formative memory of Pagan antiquity,
for the age in which the oldest of them were born was full of enthusiasm
for that memory, while it thought, as most Americans still think, of the
Middle Ages as a mere feudal barbarism.
Youth and adventurousness were not the only notes of the Renaissance,
nor the only ones which we shall see affecting the history of America.
Another note was pride, and with that pride in its reaction against the
old Christian civilization went a certain un-Christian scorn of poverty
and still more of the ugliness and ignorance which go with poverty; and
there reappeared--to an extent at least, and naturally most of all where
the old religion had been completely lost--that naked Pagan repugnance
which almost refused to recognize a human soul in the barbarian. It is
notable that in these new lands which the Renaissance had thrown open to
European men there at once reappears that institution which had once
been fundamental to Europe and which the Faith had slowly and with
difficulty undermined and dissolved--Slavery.
The English colonies in America owe their first origin partly to the
English instinct for wandering and especially for wandering on the sea,
which naturally seized on the adventurous element in the Renaissance as
that most congenial to the national temper, and partly to the secular
antagonism between England and Spain. Spain, whose sovereign then ruled
Portugal and therefore the Portuguese as well as Spanish colonies,
claimed the whole of the New World as part of her dominions, and her
practical authority extended unchallenged from Florida to Cape Horn. It
would have been hopeless for England to have attempted seriously to
challenge that authority where it existed in view of the relative
strength at that time of the two kingdoms; and in general the English
seamen confined themselves to hampering and annoying the Spanish
commerce by acts of privateering which the Spaniards naturally
designated as piracy. But to the bold and inventive mind of the great
Raleigh there occurred another conception. Spain, though she claimed the
whole American continent, had not in fact made herself mistress of all
its habitable parts. North of the rich lands which supplied gold and
silver to the Spanish exchequer, but still well within the temperate
zone of climate, lay great tracts bordering the Atlantic where no
Spanish soldier or ruler had ever set his foot. To found an English
colony in the region would not be an impossible task like the attempt to
seize any part of the Spanish empire, yet it would be a practical
challenge to the Spanish claim. Raleigh accordingly projected, and
others, entering into his plans, successfully planted, an English
settlement on the Atlantic seaboard to the south of Chesapeake Bay
which, in honour of the Queen, was named "Virginia."
In the subsequent history of the English colonies which became American
States we often find a curious and recurrent reflection of their origin.
Virginia was the first of those colonies to come into existence, and we
shall see her both as a colony and as a State long retaining a sort of
primacy amongst them. She also retained, in the incidents of her history
and in the characters of many of her great men, a colour which seems
partly Elizabethan. Her Jefferson, with his omnivorous culture, his love
of music and the arts, his proficiency at the same time in sports and
bodily exercises, suggests something of the graceful versatility of men
like Essex and Raleigh, and we shall see her in her last agony produce a
soldier about whose high chivalry and heroic and adventurous failure
there clings a light of romance that does not seem to belong to the
modern world.
If the external quarrels of England were the immediate cause of the
foundation of Virginia, the two colonies which next make their
appearance owe their origin to her internal divisions. James I. and his
son Charles I., though by conviction much more genuine Protestants than
Elizabeth, were politically more disposed to treat the Catholics with
leniency. The paradox is not, perhaps, difficult to explain. Being more
genuinely Protestant they were more interested in the internecine
quarrels of Protestants, and their enemies in those internecine
quarrels, the Puritans, now become a formidable party, were naturally
the fiercest enemies of the old religion. This fact probably led the two
first Stuarts to look upon that religion with more indulgence. They
dared not openly tolerate the Catholics, but they were not unwilling to
show them such favour as they could afford to give. Therefore when a
Catholic noble, Lord Baltimore, proposed to found a new plantation in
America where his co-religionists could practise their faith in peace
and security, the Stuart kings were willing enough to grant his request.
James approved the project, his son confirmed it, and, under a Royal
Charter from King Charles I., Lord Baltimore established his Catholic
colony, which he called "Maryland." The early history of this colony is
interesting because it affords probably the first example of full
religious liberty. It would doubtless have been suicidal for the
Catholics, situated as they were, to attempt anything like persecution,
but Baltimore and the Catholics of Maryland for many generations deserve
none the less honour for the consistency with which they pursued their
tolerant policy. So long as the Catholics remained in control all sects
were not only tolerated but placed on a footing of complete equality
before the law, and as a fact both the Nonconformist persecuted in
Virginia and the Episcopalian persecuted in New England frequently found
refuge and peace in Catholic Maryland. The English Revolution of 1689
produced a change. The new English Government was pledged against the
toleration of a Catholicism anywhere. The representative of the
Baltimore family was deposed from the Governorship and the control
transferred to the Protestants, who at once repealed the edicts of
toleration and forbade the practice of the Catholic religion. They did
not, however, succeed in extirpating it, and to this day many of the old
Maryland families are Catholic, as are also a considerable proportion of
the Negroes. It may further be noted that, though the experiment in
religious equality was suppressed by violence, the idea seems never to
have been effaced, and Maryland was one of the first colonies to
accompany its demand for freedom with a declaration in favour of
universal toleration.
At about the same time that the persecuted Catholics found a refuge in
Maryland, a similar refuge was sought by the persecuted Puritans. A
number of these, who had found a temporary home in Holland, sailed
thence for America in the celebrated _Mayflower_ and colonized New
England on the Atlantic coast far to the north of the plantations of
Raleigh and Baltimore. From this root sprang the colonies of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island, and later the
States of New Hampshire and Maine. It would be putting it with ironical
mildness to say that the Pilgrim Fathers did not imitate the tolerant
example of the Catholic refugees. Religious persecution had indeed been
practised by all parties in the quarrels of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; but for much of the early legislation of the
Puritan colonies one can find no parallel in the history of European
men. Calvinism, that strange fierce creed which Wesley so correctly
described as one that gave God the exact functions and attributes of the
devil, produced even in Europe a sufficiency of madness and horror; but
here was Calvinism cut off from its European roots and from the reaction
and influence of Christian civilization. Its records read like those of
a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their
keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the
Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart's tail for kissing
each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole
culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witchburning so
vividly described in one of the most brilliant of Mrs. Gaskell's
stories, "Lois the Witch." Of course, in time the fanaticism of the
first New England settlers cooled into something like sanity. But a
strong Puritan tradition remained and played a great part in American
history. Indeed, if Lee, the Virginian, has about him something of the
Cavalier, it is still more curious to note that nineteenth-century New
England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties,
suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of
soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a
murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth
century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the warriors of the
Covenant.
The colonies so far enumerated owe their foundation solely to English
enterprise and energy; but in the latter half of the seventeenth century
foreign war brought to England a batch of colonies ready made. At the
mouth of the Hudson River, between Maryland and the New England
colonies, lay the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. The first colonists
who had established themselves there had been Swedes, but from Sweden
its sovereignty had passed to Holland, and the issue of the Dutch wars
gave it to the English, by whom it was re-christened New York in honour
of the King's brother, afterwards James II. It would perhaps be
straining the suggestion already made of the persistent influences of
origins to see in the varied racial and national beginnings of New York
a presage of that cosmopolitan quality which still marks the greatest
of American cities, making much of it a patchwork of races and
languages, and giving to the electric stir of Broadway an air which
suggests a Continental rather than an English city, but it is more
plausible to note that New York had no original link with the Puritanism
of New England and of the North generally, and that in fact we shall
find the premier city continually isolated from the North, following a
tradition and a policy of its own.
With New Amsterdam was also ceded the small Dutch plantation of
Delaware, which lay between Maryland and the Atlantic, while England at
the same time established her claim to the disputed territory between
the two which became the colony of New Jersey.
Shortly after the cession of New Amsterdam William Penn obtained from
Charles II. a charter for the establishment of a colony to the north of
Maryland, between that settlement and the newly acquired territories of
New Jersey and New York. This plantation was designed especially as a
refuge for the religious sect to which Penn belonged, the Quakers, who
had been persecuted by all religious parties and especially savagely by
the Puritan colonists of New England. Penn, the most remarkable man that
ever professed the strange doctrines of that sect, was a favourite with
the King, who had a keen eye for character, and as the son of a
distinguished admiral he had a sort of hereditary claim upon the
gratitude of the Crown. He easily carried his point with Charles, and
himself supervised the foundations of the new commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Two surveyors were sent out by royal authority to fix the
boundary between Penn's concession and the existing colony of
Maryland--Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon by name. However elated these two
gentlemen may have been by their appointment to so responsible an
office, they probably little thought that their names would be
immortalized. Yet so it was to be. For the line they drew became the
famous "Mason-Dixon" line, and was to be in after years the frontier
between the Slave States and the Free.
In all that he did in the New World Penn showed himself not only a great
but a most just and wise man. He imitated, with happier issue, the
liberality of Baltimore in the matter of religious freedom, and to this
day the Catholics of Philadelphia boast of possessing the only Church in
the United States in which Mass has been said continuously since the
seventeenth century. But it is in his dealings with the natives that
Penn's humanity and honour stand out most conspicuously. None of the
other founders of English colonies had ever treated the Indians except
as vermin to be exterminated as quickly as possible. Penn treated them
as free contracting parties with full human rights. He bought of them
fairly the land he needed, and strictly observed every article of the
pact that he made with them. Anyone visiting to-day the city which he
founded will find in its centre a little strip of green, still unbuilt
upon, where, in theory, any passing Indians are at liberty to pitch
their camp--a monument and one of the clauses of Penn's celebrated
treaty.
In the same reign the settlement of the lands lying to the south of
Virginia had begun, under the charter granted by Charles II. to the Hyde
family, and the new plantations were called after the sovereign
"Carolina." But their importance dates from the next century, when they
received the main stream of a new tide of immigration due to political
and economic causes. England, having planted a Protestant Anglo-Scottish
colony in North-East Ireland, proceeded to ruin its own creation by a
long series of commercial laws directed to the protection of English
manufacturers against the competition of the colonists. Under the
pressure of this tyranny a great number of these colonists, largely
Scotch by original nationality and Presbyterian by religion, left Ulster
for America. They poured into the Carolinas, North and South, as well as
into Pennsylvania and Virginia, and overflowed into a new colony which
was established further west and named Georgia. It is important to note
this element in the colonization of the Southern States, because it is
too often loosely suggested that the later division of North and South
corresponded to the division of Cavalier and Puritan. It is not so.
Virginia and Maryland may be called Cavalier in their origin, but in the
Carolinas and Georgia there appears a Puritan tradition, not indeed as
fanatical as that of New England, but almost as persistent. Moreover
this Scotch-Irish stock, whose fathers, it may be supposed, left Ireland
in no very good temper with the rulers of Great Britain, afterwards
supplied the most military and the most determined element in
Washington's armies, and gave to the Republic some of its most striking
historical personalities: Patrick Henry and John Caldwell Calhoun,
Jackson, the great President, and his namesake the brilliant soldier of
the Confederacy.
The English colonies now formed a solid block extending from the coasts
of Maine--into which northernmost region the New England colonies had
overflown--to the borders of Florida. Florida was still a Spanish
possession, but Spain had ceased to be formidable as a rival or enemy of
England. By the persistence of a century in arms and diplomacy, the
French had worn down the Spanish power, and France was now easily the
strongest nation in Europe. France also had a foothold, or rather two
footholds, in North America. One of her colonies, Louisiana, lay beyond
Florida at the mouth of the Mississippi; the other, Canada, to the north
of the Maine, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. It was the aim of French
colonial ambition to extend both colonies inland into the unmapped heart
of the American continent until they should meet. This would necessarily
have had the effect of hemming in the English settlements on the
Atlantic seaboard and preventing their Western expansion. Throughout the
first half of the eighteenth century, therefore, the rivalry grew more
and more acute, and even when France and England were at peace the
French and English in America were almost constantly at war. Their
conflict was largely carried on under cover of alliances with the
warring Indian tribes, whose feuds kept the region of the Great Lakes in
a continual turmoil. The outbreak of the Seven Years' War and the
intervention of England as an ally of Prussia put an end to the
necessity for such pretexts, and a regular military campaign opened upon
which was staked the destiny of North America.
It is not necessary for the purposes of this book to follow that
campaign in detail. The issue was necessarily fought out in Canada, for
Louisiana lay remote from the English colonies and was separated from
them by the neutral territory of the Spanish Empire. England had
throughout the war the advantage of superiority at sea, which enabled
her to supply and reinforce her armies, while the French forces were
practically cut off from Europe. The French, on the other hand, had at
the beginning the advantage of superior numbers, at least so far as
regular troops were concerned, while for defensive purposes they
possessed an excellent chain of very strong fortresses carefully
prepared before the war. After the earlier operations, which cleared the
French invaders out of the English colonies, the gradual reduction of
these strongholds practically forms the essence of the campaign
undertaken by a succession of English generals under the political
direction of the elder Pitt. That campaign was virtually brought to a
close by the brilliant exploit of James Wolfe in 1759--the taking of
Quebec. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Canada was ceded to England.
Meanwhile Louisiana had been transferred to Spain in 1762 as part of the
price of a Spanish alliance, and France ceased to be a rival to England
on the American continent.
During the French war the excellent professional army which England was
able to maintain in the field was supported by levies raised from the
English colonies, which did good service in many engagements. Among the
officers commanding these levies one especially had attracted, by his
courage and skill, and notably by the part he bore in the clearing of
Pennsylvania, the notice of his superiors--George Washington of
Virginia.
England was now in a position to develop in peace the empire which her
sword had defended with such splendid success and glory. Before we
consider the causes which so suddenly shattered that empire, it is
necessary to take a brief survey of its geography and of its economic
conditions.
The colonies, as we have seen, were spread along the Atlantic seaboard
to an extent of well over a thousand miles, covering nearly twenty
degrees of latitude. The variations of climate were naturally great, and
involved marked differentiations in the character and products of
labour. The prosperity of the Southern colonies depended mainly upon two
great staple industries. Raleigh, in the course of his voyages, had
learned from the Indians the use of the tobacco plant and had introduced
that admirable discovery into Europe. As Europe learned (in spite of the
protests of James I.) to prize the glorious indulgence now offered to
it, the demand for tobacco grew, and its supply became the principal
business of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Further to the south
a yet more important and profitable industry was established. The
climate of the Carolinas and of Georgia and of the undeveloped country
west of these colonies, a climate at once warm and humid, was found to
be exactly suited to the cultivation of the cotton plant. This proved
the more important when the discoveries of Watt and Arkwright gave
Lancashire the start of all the world in the manipulation of the cotton
fabric. From that moment begins the triumphant progress of "King
Cotton," which was long to outlast the political connection between the
Carolinas and Lancashire, and was to give in the political balance of
America peculiar importance to the "Cotton States."
But at the time now under consideration these cotton-growing territories
were still under the British Crown, and were subject to the Navigation
Laws upon which England then mainly relied for the purpose of making her
colonies a source of profit to her. The main effect of these was to
forbid the colonies to trade with any neighbour save the mother country.
This condition, to which the colonists seem to have offered no
opposition, gave to the British manufacturers the immense advantage of
an unrestricted supply of raw material to which no foreigner had access.
It is among the curious ironies of history that the prosperity of
Lancashire, which was afterwards to be identified with Free Trade, was
originally founded upon this very drastic and successful form of
Protection.
The more northerly colonies had no such natural advantages. The bulk of
the population lived by ordinary farming, grew wheat and the hard
cereals and raised cattle. But during the eighteenth century England
herself was still an exporting country as regards these commodities, and
with other nations the colonists were forbidden to trade. The Northern
colonies had, therefore, no considerable export commerce, but on the
seaboard they gradually built up a considerable trade as carriers, and
Boston and New York merchant captains began to have a name on the
Atlantic for skill and enterprise. Much of the transoceanic trade passed
into their hands, and especially one most profitable if not very
honourable trade of which, by the Treaty of Utrecht, England had
obtained a virtual monopoly--the trade in Negro slaves.
The pioneer of this traffic had been Sir John Hawkins, one of the
boldest of the great Elizabethan sailors. He seems to have been the
first of the merchant adventurers to realize that it might prove
profitable to kidnap Negroes from the West Coast of Africa and sell them
into slavery in the American colonies. The cultivation of cotton and
tobacco in the Southern plantations, as of sugar in the West Indies,
offered a considerable demand for labour of a type suitable to the
Negro. The attempt to compel the native Indians to such labour had
failed; the Negro proved more tractable. By the time with which we are
dealing the whole industry of the Southern colonies already rested upon
servile coloured labour.
In the Northern colonies--that is, those north of Maryland--the Negro
slave existed, but only casually, and, as it were, as a sort of
accident. Slavery was legal in all the colonies--even in Pennsylvania,
whose great founder had been almost alone in that age in disapproving of
it. As for the New England Puritans, they had from the first been quite
enthusiastic about the traffic, in which indeed they were deeply
interested as middle-men; and Calvinist ministers of the purest
orthodoxy held services of thanksgiving to God for cargoes of poor
barbarians rescued from the darkness of heathendom and brought (though
forcibly) into the gospel light. But though the Northerners had no more
scruple about Slavery than the Southerners, they had far less practical
use for it. The Negro was of no value for the sort of labour in which
the New Englanders engaged; he died of it in the cold climate. Negro
slaves there were in all the Northern States, but mostly employed as
domestic servants or in casual occupations. They were a luxury, not a
necessity.
A final word must be said about the form of government under which the
colonists lived. In all the colonies, though there were, of course,
variations of detail, it was substantially the same. It was founded in
every case upon Royal Charters granted at some time or other to the
planters by the English king. In every case there was a Governor, who
was assisted by some sort of elective assembly. The Governor was the
representative of the King and was nominated by him. The legislature was
in some form or other elected by the free citizens. The mode of election
and the franchise varied from colony to colony--Massachusetts at one
time based hers upon pew rents--but it was generally in harmony with the
feeling and traditions of the colonists. It was seldom that any friction
occurred between the King's representative and the burgesses, as they
were generally called. While the relations between the colonies and the
mother country remained tranquil the Governor had every motive for
pursuing a conciliatory policy. His personal comfort depended upon his
being popular in the only society which he could frequent. His repute
with the Home Government, if he valued it, was equally served by the
tranquillity and contentment of the dominion he ruled.
In fact, the American colonists, during the eighteenth century, enjoyed
what a simple society left to itself almost always enjoys, under
whatever forms--the substance of democracy. That fact must be
emphasized, because without a recognition of it the flaming response
which met the first proclamation of theoretic democracy would be
unintelligible. It is explicable only when we remember that to the
unspoiled conscience of man as man democracy will ever be the most
self-evident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that
blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational
privilege as inevitable, and at last to see nothing strange in being
ruled by a class, whether of nobles or of mere parliamentarians. But the
man who looks at the world with the terrible eyes of his first innocence
can never see an unequal law as anything but an iniquity, or government
divorced from the general will as anything but usurpation.
CHAPTER II
ARMS AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN
Such was roughly the position of the thirteen English colonies in North
America when in the year 1764, shortly after the conclusion of the Seven
Years' War, George Grenville, who had become the chief Minister of
George III. after the failure of Lord Bute, proposed to raise a revenue
from these colonies by the imposition of a Stamp Act.
The Stamp Act and the resistance it met mark so obviously the beginning
of the business which ended in the separation of the United States from
Great Britain that Grenville and the British Parliament have been
frequently blamed for the lightness of heart with which they entered
upon so momentous a course. But in fact it did not seem to them
momentous, nor is it easy to say why they should have thought it
momentous. It is certain that Grenville's political opponents, many of
whom were afterwards to figure as the champions of the colonists, at
first saw its momentousness as little as he. They offered to his
proposal only the most perfunctory sort of opposition, less than they
habitually offered to all his measures, good or bad.
And, in point of fact, there was little reason why a Whig of the type
and class that then governed England should be startled or shocked by a
proposal to extend the English system of stamping documents to the
English colonies. That Parliament had the legal right to tax the
colonies was not seriously questionable. Under the British Constitution
the power of King, Lords and Commons over the King's subjects was and is
absolute, and none denied that the colonists were the King's subjects.
They pleaded indeed that their charters did not expressly authorize such
taxation; but neither did they expressly exclude it, and on a strict
construction it would certainly seem that a power which would have
existed if there had been no charter remained when the charter was
silent.
It might further be urged that equity as well as law justified the
taxation of the colonies, for the expenditure which these taxes were
raised to meet was largely incurred in defending the colonies first
against the French and then against the Indians. The method of taxation
chosen was not new, neither had it been felt to be specially grievous.
Much revenue is raised in Great Britain and all European countries
to-day by that method, and there is probably no form of taxation at
which men grumble less. Its introduction into America had actually been
recommended on its merits by eminent Americans. It had been proposed by
the Governor of Pennsylvania as early as 1739. It had been approved at
one time by Benjamin Franklin himself. To-day it must seem to most of us
both less unjust and less oppressive than the Navigation Laws, which the
colonists bore without complaint.
As for the suggestion sometimes made that there was something
unprecedentedly outrageous about an English Parliament taxing people who
were unrepresented there, it is, in view of the constitution of that
Parliament, somewhat comic. If the Parliament of 1764 could only tax
those whom it represented, its field of taxation would be somewhat
narrow. Indeed, the talk about taxation without representation being
tyranny, however honestly it might be uttered by an American, could only
be conscious or unconscious hypocrisy in men like Burke, who were not
only passing their lives in governing and taxing people who were
unrepresented, but who were quite impenitently determined to resist any
attempt to get them represented even in the most imperfect fashion.
All this is true; and yet it is equally true that the proposed tax at
once excited across the Atlantic the most formidable discontent. Of this
discontent we may perhaps summarize the immediate causes as follows.
Firstly, no English minister or Parliament had, as a fact, ever before
attempted to tax the colonies. That important feature of the case
distinguished it from that of the Navigation Laws, which had
prescription on their side. Then, if the right to tax were once
admitted, no one could say how far it would be pushed. Under the
Navigation Laws the colonists knew just how far they were restricted,
and they knew that within the limits of such restrictions they could
still prosper. But if once the claim of the British Parliament to tax
were quietly accepted, it seemed likely enough that every British
Minister who had nowhere else to turn for a revenue would turn to the
unrepresented colonies, which would furnish supply after supply until
they were "bled white." That was a perfectly sound, practical
consideration, and it naturally appealed with especial force to
mercantile communities like that of Boston.
But if we assume that it was the only consideration involved, we shall
misunderstand all that followed, and be quite unprepared for the
sweeping victory of a purely doctrinal political creed which brought
about the huge domestic revolution of which the breaking of the ties
with England was but an aspect. The colonists did feel it unjust that
they should be taxed by an authority which was in no way responsible to
them; and they so felt it because, as has already been pointed out, they
enjoyed in the management of their everyday affairs a large measure of
practical democracy. Therein they differed from the English, who, being
habitually governed by an oligarchy, did not feel it extraordinary that
the same oligarchy should tax them. The Americans for the most part
governed themselves, and the oligarchy came in only as an alien and
unnatural thing levying taxes. Therefore it was resisted.
The resistance was at first largely instinctive. The formulation of the
democratic creed which should justify it was still to come. Yet already
there were voices, especially in Virginia, which adumbrated the
incomparable phrases of the greatest of Virginians. Already Richard
Bland had appealed to "the law of Nature and those rights of mankind
that flow from it." Already Patrick Henry had said, "Give me liberty or
give me death!"
It was but a foreshadowing of the struggle to come. In 1766 the
Rockingham Whigs, having come into power upon the fall of Grenville,
after some hesitation repealed the Stamp Act, reaffirming at the same
time the abstract right of Parliament to tax the colonies. America was
for the time quieted. There followed in England a succession of weak
Ministries, all, of course, drawn from the same oligarchical class, and
all of much the same political temper, but all at issue with each other,
and all more or less permanently at issue with the King. As a mere
by-product of one of the multitudinous intrigues to which this situation
gave rise, Charles Townshend, a brilliant young Whig orator who had
become Chancellor of the Exchequer, revived in 1768 the project of
taxing the American colonies. This was now proposed in the form of a
series of duties levied on goods exported to those colonies--the one
most obnoxious to the colonists and most jealously maintained by the
Ministers being a duty on tea. The Opposition had now learnt from the
result of the Stamp Act debate that American taxation was an excellent
issue on which to challenge the Ministry, and the Tea Tax became at once
a "Party Question"--that is, a question upon which the rival oligarchs
divided themselves into opposing groups.
Meanwhile in America the new taxes were causing even more exasperation
than the Stamp Act had caused--probably because they were more menacing
in their form, if not much more severe in their effect. At any rate, it
is significant that in the new struggle we find the commercial colony of
Massachusetts very decidedly taking the lead. The taxed tea, on its
arrival in Boston harbour, was seized and flung into the sea. A wise
Government would have withdrawn when it was obvious that the enforcement
of the taxes would cost far more than the taxes themselves were worth,
the more so as they had already been so whittled down by concessions as
to be worth practically nothing, and it is likely enough that the
generally prudent and politic aristocrats who then directed the action
of England would have reverted to the Rockingham policy had not the King
made up his unfortunate German mind to the coercion and humiliation of
the discontented colonists. It is true that the British Crown had long
lost its power of independent action, and that George III. had failed in
his youthful attempts to recapture it. Against the oligarchy combined he
was helpless; but his preference for one group of oligarchs over another
was still an asset, and he let it clearly be understood that such
influence as he possessed would be exercised unreservedly in favour of
any group that would undertake to punish the American rebels. He found
in Lord North a Minister willing, though not without considerable
misgivings, to forward his policy and able to secure for it a majority
in Parliament. And from that moment the battle between the Home
Government and the colonists was joined.
The character and progress of that battle will best be grasped if we
mark down certain decisive incidents which determine its course. The
first of these was the celebrated "Boston Tea Party" referred to above.
It was the first act of overt resistance, and it was followed on the
English side by the first dispatch of an armed force--grossly inadequate
for its purpose--to America, and on the American by the rapid arming and
drilling of the local militias not yet avowedly against the Crown, but
obviously with the ultimate intention of resisting the royal authority
should it be pushed too far.
The next turning-point is the decision of the British Government early
in 1774 to revoke the Charter of Massachusetts. It is the chief event of
the period during which war is preparing, and it leads directly to all
that follows. For it raised a new controversy which could not be
resolved by the old legal arguments, good or bad. Hitherto the colonists
had relied upon their interpretation of existing charters, while the
Government contented itself with putting forward a different
interpretation. But the new action of that Government shifted the ground
of debate from the question of the interpretation of the charters to
that of the ultimate source of their authority. The Ministers said in
effect, "You pretend that this document concedes to you the right of
immunity from taxation. We deny it: but at any rate, it was a free gift
from the British Crown, and whatever rights you enjoy under it you enjoy
during His Majesty's pleasure. Since you insist on misinterpreting it,
we will withdraw it, as we are perfectly entitled to do, and we will
grant you a new charter about the terms of which no such doubts can
arise."
It was a very direct and very fundamental challenge, and it inevitably
produced two effects--the one immediate, the other somewhat deferred.
Its practical first-fruit was the Continental Congress. Its ultimate but
unmistakably logical consequence was the Declaration of Independence.
America was unified on the instant, for every colony felt the knife at
its throat. In September a Congress met, attended by the representatives
of eleven colonies. Peyton Randolph, presiding, struck the note of the
moment with a phrase: "I am not a Virginian, but an American." Under
Virginian leadership the Congress vigorously backed Massachusetts, and
in October a "Declaration of Colonial Right" had been issued by the
authority of all the colonies represented there.
The British Ministers seem to have been incomprehensibly blind to the
seriousness of the situation. Since they were pledged not to concede
what the colonists demanded, it was essential that they should at once
summon all the forces at their command to crush what was already an
incipient and most menacing rebellion. They did nothing of the sort.
They slightly strengthened the totally inadequate garrison which would
soon have to face a whole people in arms, and they issued a foolish
proclamation merely provocative and backed by no power that could
enforce it, forbidding the meeting of Continental Congresses in the
future. That was in January. In April the skirmishes of Lexington and
Concord had shown how hopelessly insufficient was their military force
to meet even local sporadic and unorganized revolts. In May the second
Continental Congress met, and in July appeared by its authority a
general call to arms addressed to the whole population of America.
Up to this point the colonists, if rebellious in their practical
attitude, had been strictly constitutional in their avowed aims. In the
"Declaration of Colonial Right" of 1774, and even in the appeal to arms
of 1775, all suggestion of breaking away from the Empire was repudiated.
But now that the sword was virtually drawn there were practical
considerations which made the most prudent of the rebels consider
whether it would not be wiser to take the final step, and frankly
repudiate the British Sovereignty altogether. For one thing, by the laws
of England, and indeed of all civilized nations, the man who took part
in an armed insurrection against the head of the State committed
treason, and the punishment for treason was death. Men who levied war on
the King's forces while still acknowledging him as their lawful ruler
were really inviting the Government to hang them as soon as it could
catch them. It might be more difficult for the British Government to
treat as criminals soldiers who were fighting under the orders of an
organized _de facto_ government, which at any rate declared itself to be
that of an independent nation. Again, foreign aid, which would not be
given for the purpose of reforming the internal administration of
British dominions, might well be forthcoming if it were a question of
dismembering those dominions. These considerations were just and carried
no little weight; yet it is doubtful if they would have been strong
enough to prevail against the sentiments and traditions which still
bound the colonies to the mother country had not the attack on the
charters forced the controversy back to first principles, and so opened
the door of history to the man who was to provide America with a creed
and to convert the controversy from a legal to something like a
religious quarrel.
Old Peyton Randolph, who had so largely guided the deliberations of the
first Continental Congress, was at the last moment prevented by
ill-health from attending the second. His place in the Virginian
Delegation was taken by Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was not yet thirty when he took his seat in the Continental
Congress, but he was already a notable figure in his native State. He
belonged by birth to the slave-holding gentry of the South, though not
to the richest and most exclusive section of that class. Physically he
was long limbed and loose jointed, but muscular, with a strong ugly face
and red hair. He was adept at the physical exercises which the
Southerners cultivated most assiduously, a bold and tireless rider who
could spend days in the saddle without fatigue, and a crack shot even
among Virginians. In pursuit of the arts and especially of music he was
equally eager, and his restless intelligence was keenly intrigued by the
new wonders that physical science was beginning to reveal to men;
mocking allusions to his interest in the habits of horned frogs will be
found in American pasquinades of two generations. He had sat in the
Virginian House of Burgesses and had taken a prominent part in the
resistance of that body to the royal demands. As a speaker, however, he
was never highly successful, and a just knowledge of his own
limitations, combined perhaps with a temperamental dislike, generally
led him to rely on his pen rather than his tongue in public debate. For
as a writer he had a command of a pure, lucid and noble English
unequalled in his generation and equalled by Corbett alone.
But for history the most important thing about the man is his creed. It
was the creed of a man in the forefront of his age, an age when French
thinkers were busy drawing from the heritage of Latin civilizations
those fundamental principles of old Rome which custom and the
corruptions of time had overgrown. The gospel of the new age had already
been written: it had brought to the just mind of Jefferson a conviction
which he was to communicate to all his countrymen, and through them to
the new nation which the sword was creating. The Declaration of
Independence is the foundation stone of the American Republic, and the
Declaration of Independence in its essential part is but an incomparable
translation and compression of the _Contrat Social_. The aid which
France brought to America did not begin when a French fleet sailed into
Chesapeake Bay. It began when, perhaps years before the first whisper of
discontent, Thomas Jefferson sat down in his Virginian study to read the
latest work of the ingenious M. Rousseau.
For now the time was rife for such intellectual leadership as Jefferson,
armed by Rousseau, could supply. The challenge flung down by the British
Government in the matter of the Charter of Massachusetts was to be taken
up. The argument that whatever rights Americans might have they derived
from Royal Charters was to be answered by one who held that their
"inalienable rights" were derived from a primordial charter granted not
by King George but by his Maker.
The second Continental Congress, after many hesitations, determined at
length upon a complete severance with the mother country. A resolution
to that effect was carried on the motion of Lee, the great Virginian
gentleman, an ancestor of the noblest of Southern warriors. After much
adroit negotiations a unanimous vote was secured for it. A committee was
appointed to draft a formal announcement and defence of the step which
had been taken. Jefferson was chosen a member of the committee, and to
him was most wisely entrusted the drafting of the famous "Declaration."
The introductory paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence contain
the whole substance of the faith upon which the new Commonwealth was to
be built. Without a full comprehension of their contents the subsequent
history of America would be unintelligible. It will therefore be well to
quote them here verbatim, and I do so the more readily because, apart
from their historic importance, it is a pity that more Englishmen are
not acquainted with this masterpiece of English prose.
_When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another
and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal
station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a
decent respect for the opinion of Mankind requires that they shall
declare the cause that impels the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that
to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it, and to reinstate a new government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness._
The Declaration goes on to specify the causes of grievances which the
colonists conceive themselves to have against the royal government, and
concludes as follows:--
_We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in
General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World
for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the name and by the authority
of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that
these United Colonies are and of right ought to be Free and Independent
States._
The first principles set out in the Declaration must be rightly grasped
if American history is understood, for indeed the story of America is
merely the story of the working out of those principles. Briefly the
theses are two: first, that men are of right equal, and secondly, that
the moral basis of the relations between governors and governed is
contractual. Both doctrines have in this age had to stand the fire of
criticisms almost too puerile to be noticed. It is gravely pointed out
that men are of different heights and weights, that they vary in
muscular power and mental cultivation--as if either Rousseau or
Jefferson was likely to have failed to notice this occult fact!
Similarly the doctrine of the contractual basis of society is met by a
demand for the production of a signed, sealed, and delivered contract,
or at least for evidence that such a contract was ever made. But
Rousseau says--with a good sense and modesty which dealers in
"prehistoric" history would do well to copy--that he does not know how
government in fact arose. Nor does anyone else. What he maintains is
that the moral sanction of government is contractual, or, as Jefferson
puts it, that government "derives its just powers from the consent of
the governed."
The doctrine of human equality is in a sense mystical. It is not
apparent to the senses, nor can it be logically demonstrated as an
inference from anything of which the senses can take cognizance. It can
only be stated accurately, and left to make its appeal to men's minds.
It may be stated theologically by saying, as the Christian theology
says, that all men are equal before God. Or it may be stated in the form
which Jefferson uses--that all men are equal in their "inalienable
rights." But it must be accepted as a first principle or not at all. The
nearest approach to a method of proving it is to take the alternative
proposition and deduce its logical conclusion. Would those who would
maintain that the "wisest and best" have rights superior to those of
their neighbours, welcome a law which would enable any person
demonstrably wiser or more virtuous than themselves to put them to
death? I think that most of them have enough modesty (and humour) to
shrink, as Huxley did, from such a proposition. But the alternative is
the acceptance of Jefferson's doctrine that the fundamental rights of
men are independent of adventitious differences, whether material or
moral, and depend simply upon their manhood.
The other proposition, the contractual basis of human society and its
logical consequences, the supremacy of the general will, can be argued
in the same fashion. It is best defended by asking, like the Jesuit
Suarez, the simple question: "If sovereignty is not in the People, where
is it?" It is useless to answer that it is in the "wisest and best." Who
are the wisest and best? For practical purposes the phrases must mean
either those whom their neighbours think wisest and best--in which case
the ultimate test of democracy is conceded--or those who think
themselves wisest and best: which latter is what in the mouths of such
advocates it usually does mean. Thus those to whom the Divine Right of
the conceited makes no appeal are forced back on the Jeffersonian
formula. Let it be noted that that formula does not mean that the people
are always right or that a people cannot collectively do deliberate
injustice or commit sins--indeed, inferentially it implies that
possibility--but it means that there is on earth no temporal authority
superior to the general will of a community.
It is, however, no part of the function of this book to argue upon the
propositions contained in the Declaration of Independence. It is merely
necessary to chronicle the historical fact that Jefferson, as mouthpiece
of the Continental Congress, put forward these propositions as
self-evident, and that all America, looking at them, accepted them as
such. On that acceptance, the intensity and ardent conviction of which
showed itself, as will presently be seen, in a hundred ways, the
American Commonwealth is built. In the modern haze of doubt and amid the
denial of all necessary things, there have been found plenty of
sophists, even in America, to dispute these great truisms. But if the
American nation as a whole ever ceases to believe in them, it will not
merely decay, as all nations decay when they lose touch with eternal
truths; it will drop suddenly dead.
We must now turn back a little in time in order to make clear the
military situation as it stood when Jefferson's "Declaration" turned the
war into a war of doctrines.
The summer of 1775 saw the first engagement which could well be
dignified with the name of a battle. A small English force had been sent
to Boston with the object of coercing the recalcitrant colony of
Massachusetts. It was absolutely insufficient, as the event showed, even
for that purpose, and before it had landed it was apparent that its real
task would be nothing less than the conquest of America. The
Massachusetts rebels wisely determined to avoid a combat with the guns
of the British fleet; they abandoned the city and entrenched themselves
in a strong position in the neighbourhood known as Bunker's Hill. The
British troops marched out of Boston to dislodge them. This they
eventually succeeded in doing; and those who regard war as a game like
billiards to be settled by scoring points may claim Bunker's Hill as a
British victory. But it produced all the consequences of a defeat. The
rebel army was not destroyed; it was even less weakened than the force
opposed to it. It retired in good order to a position somewhat further
back, and the British force had no option but to return to Boston with
its essential work undone. For some time England continued to hold
Boston, but the State of Massachusetts remained in American hands. At
last, in the absence of any hope of any effective action, the small
English garrison withdrew, leaving the original prize of war to the
rebels.
On the eve of this indecisive contest the American Congress met to
consider the selection of a commander-in-chief for the revolutionary
armies. Their choice fell on General George Washington, a Virginian
soldier who, as has been remarked, had served with some distinction in
the French wars.
The choice was a most fortunate one. America and England have agreed to
praise Washington's character so highly that at the hands of the young
and irreverent he is in some danger of the fate of Aristides. For the
benefit of those who tend to weary of the Cherry Tree and the Little
Hatchet, it may be well to say that Washington was a very typical
Southern gentleman in his foibles as well as in his virtues. Though his
temper was in large matters under strict control, it was occasionally
formidable and vented itself in a free and cheerful profanity. He loved
good wine, and like most eighteenth-century gentlemen, was not sparing
in its use. He had a Southerner's admiration for the other sex--an
admiration which, if gossip may be credited, was not always strictly
confined within monogamic limits. He had also, in large measure, the
high dignity and courtesy of his class, and an enlarged liberality of
temper which usually goes with such good breeding. There is no story of
him more really characteristic than that of his ceremoniously returning
the salute of an aged Negro and saying to a friend who was disposed to
deride his actions: "Would you have me let a poor ignorant coloured man
say that he had better manners than I?" For the rest the traditional
eulogy of his public character is not undeserved. It may justly be said
of him, as it can be said of few of the great men who have moulded the
destinies of nations, that history can put its fingers on no act of his
and say: "Here this man was preferring his own interest to his
country's."
As a military commander Washington ranks high. He had not, indeed, the
genius of a Marlborough or a Napoleon. Rather he owed his success to a
thorough grasp of his profession combined with just that remarkably
level and unbiassed judgment which distinguished his conduct of civil
affairs. He understood very clearly the conditions of the war in which
he was to engage. He knew that Great Britain, as soon as she really woke
up to the seriousness of her peril, would send out a formidable force of
well-disciplined professional soldiers, and that at the hands of such a
force no mere levy of enthusiastic volunteers could expect anything but
defeat. The breathing space which the incredible supineness of the
British Government allowed him enabled him to form something like a real
army. Throughout the campaigns that followed his primary object was not
to win victories, but to keep that army in being. So long as it existed,
he knew that it could be continually reinforced by the enthusiasm of the
colonials, and that the recruits so obtained could be consolidated into
and imbued with the spirit of a disciplined body. The moment it ceased
to exist Great Britain would have to deal simply with rebellious
populations, and Washington was soldier enough to know that an army can
always in time break up and keep down a mere population, however eager
and courageous.
And now England at last did what, if she were determined to enforce her
will upon the colonists, she ought to have done at least five years
before. She sent out an army on a scale at least reasonably adequate to
the business for which it was designed. It consisted partly of excellent
British troops and partly of those mercenaries whom the smaller German
princes let out for hire to those who chose to employ them. It was
commanded by Lord Howe. The objective of the new invasion--for the
procrastination of the British Government had allowed the war to assume
that character--was the city of New York.
New York harbour possesses, as anyone who enters it can see, excellent
natural defences. Manhattan Island, upon which the city is built, lies
at the mouth of the Hudson between two arms of that river. At the
estuary are a number of small islets well suited for the emplacement of
powerful guns. The southern bank runs northward into a sharp promontory,
at the end of which now stands the most formidable of American
fortresses. The northern approach is covered by Long Island. The British
command decided on the reduction of Long Island as a preliminary to an
assault upon the city. The island is long and narrow, and a ridge of
high ground runs down it like a backbone. This ridge Washington's army
sought to hold against the attack of the British forces. It was the
first real battle of the war, and it resulted in a defeat so
overwhelming that it might well have decided the fate of America had not
Washington, as soon as he saw how the day was going, bent all his
energies to the tough task of saving his army. It narrowly escaped
complete destruction, but ultimately a great part succeeded, though with
great loss and not a little demoralization, in reaching Brooklyn in
safety.
The Americans still held New York, the right bank of the Hudson; but
their flank was dangerously threatened, and Washington, true to his
policy, preferred the damaging loss of New York to the risk of his army.
He retired inland, again offered battle, was again defeated and forced
back into Pennsylvania. So decided did the superiority of the British
army prove to be that eventually Philadelphia itself, then the capital
of the Confederacy, had to be abandoned.
Meanwhile another British army under the command of General Burgoyne
held Canada. That province had shown no disposition to join in the
revolt; an early attempt on the part of the rebels to invade it had been
successfully repelled. Besides English and German troops, Burgoyne had
the aid of several tribes of Indian auxiliaries, whose aid the British
Government had been at some pains to secure--a policy denounced by
Chatham in a powerful and much-quoted speech. Burgoyne was a clever and
imaginative though not a successful soldier. He conceived and suggested
to his Government a plan of campaign which was sound in strategic
principle, which might well have succeeded, and which, if it had
succeeded, would have dealt a heavy and perhaps a decisive blow to
American hopes. How far its failure is to be attributed to his own
faulty execution, how far to the blunders of the Home Government, and
how far to accidents which the best general cannot always avoid, is
still disputed. But that failure was certainly the turning-point of the
war.
Burgoyne's project was this: He proposed to advance from Canada and push
across the belt of high land which forms the northern portion of what is
now New York State, until he struck the upper Hudson. Howe was at the
same time to advance northward up the Hudson, join hands with him and
cut the rebellion in two.
It was a good plan. The cutting off and crushing of one isolated
district after another is just the fashion in which widespread
insurrectionary movements have most generally been suppressed by
military force. The Government accepted it, but, owing as it would seem
to the laziness or levity of the English Minister involved, instructions
never reached Howe until it was too late for him to give effective
support to his colleague. All, however, might have prospered had
Burgoyne been able to move more rapidly. His first stroke promised well.
The important fort of Ticonderoga was surprised and easily captured,
and the road was open for his soldiers into the highlands. But that
advance proved disastrously slow. Weeks passed before he approached the
Hudson. His supplies were running short, and when he reached Saratoga,
instead of joining hands with Howe he found himself confronted by
strongly posted American forces, greatly outnumbering his own
ill-sustained and exhausted army. Seeing no sign of the relief which he
had expected to the south--though as a fact Howe had by this time learnt
of the expedition and was hastening to his assistance--on October 6,
1777, he and his army surrendered to the American commander, General
Gates.
The effect of Burgoyne's surrender was great in America; to those whose
hopes had been dashed by the disaster of Long Island, the surrender of
New York and Washington's enforced retreat it brought not only a revival
of hope but a definite confidence in ultimate success. But that effect
was even greater in Europe. Its immediate fruit was Lord North's famous
"olive branch" of 1778; the decision of the British Government to accept
defeat on the original issue of the war, and to agree to a surrender of
the claim to tax the colonists on condition of their return to their
allegiance. Such a proposition made three years earlier would certainly
have produced immediate peace. Perhaps it might have produced peace even
as it was--though it is unlikely, for the declaration had filled men's
souls with a new hunger for pure democracy--if the Americans had
occupied the same isolated position which was theirs when the war began.
But it was not in London alone that Saratoga had produced its effect.
While it decided the wavering councils of the British Ministry in favour
of concessions, it also decided the wavering councils of the French
Crown in favour of intervention.
As early as 1776 a mission had been sent to Versailles to solicit on
behalf of the colonists the aid of France. Its principal member was
Benjamin Franklin, the one revolutionary leader of the first rank who
came from the Northern colonies. He had all the shrewdness and humour of
the Yankee with an enlarged intelligence and a wide knowledge of men
which made him an almost ideal negotiator in such a cause. Yet for some
time his mission hung fire. France had not forgotten her expulsion from
the North American continent twenty years before. She could not but
desire the success of the colonists and the weakening or dismemberment
of the British Empire. Moreover, French public opinion--and its power
under the Monarchy, though insufficient, was far greater than is now
generally understood--full of the new ideals which were to produce the
Revolution, was warmly in sympathy with the rebellion. But, on the other
hand, an open breach with England involved serious risks. France was
only just recovering from the effects of a great war in which she had on
the whole been worsted, and very decidedly worsted, in the colonial
field. The revolt of the English colonies might seem a tempting
opportunity for revenge; but suppose that the colonial resistance
collapsed before effective aid could arrive? Suppose the colonists
merely used the threat of French intervention to extort terms from
England and then made common cause against the foreigner? These obvious
considerations made the French statesmen hesitate. Aid was indeed given
to the colonial rebels, especially in the very valuable form of arms and
munitions, but it was given secretly and unofficially, with the satirist
Beaumarchais, clever, daring, unscrupulous and ready to push his damaged
fortunes in any fashion, as unaccredited go-between. But in the matter
of open alliance with the rebels against the British Government France
temporized, nor could the utmost efforts of Franklin and his colleagues
extort a decision.
Saratoga extorted it. On the one hand it removed a principal cause of
hesitation. After such a success it was unlikely that the colonists
would tamely surrender. On the other it made it necessary to take
immediate action. Lord North's attitude showed clearly that the British
Government was ready to make terms with the colonists. It was clearly in
the interests of France that those terms should be refused. She must
venture something to make sure of such a refusal. With little hesitation
the advisers of the French Crown determined to take the plunge. They
acknowledged the revolted colonies as independent States, and entered
into a defensive alliance with these States against Great Britain. That
recognition and alliance immediately determined the issue of the war.
What would have happened if it had been withheld cannot be certainly
determined. It seems not unlikely that the war would have ended as the
South African War ended, in large surrenders of the substance of
Imperial power in return for a theoretic acknowledgment of its
authority. But all this is speculative. The practical fact is that
England found herself, in the middle of a laborious, and so far on the
whole unsuccessful, effort to crush the rebellion of her colonies,
confronted by a war with France, which, through the close alliance then
existing between the two Bourbon monarchies, soon became a war with both
France and Spain. This change converted the task of subjugation from a
difficult but practicable one, given sufficient time and determination,
to one fundamentally impossible.
Yet, so far as the actual military situation was concerned, there were
no darker days for the Americans than those which intervened between the
promise of French help and its fulfilment. Lord Cornwallis had appeared
in the South and had taken possession of Charleston, the chief port of
South Carolina. In that State the inhabitants were less unanimous than
elsewhere. The "Tories," as the local adherents of the English Crown
were called, had already attempted a rebellion against the rebellion,
but had been forced to yield to the Republican majority backed by the
army of Washington. The presence of Cornwallis revived their courage.
They boasted in Tarleton, able, enterprising and imperious, an excellent
commander for the direction of irregular warfare, whose name and that of
the squadron of horse which he raised and organized became to the rebels
what the names of Claverhouse and his dragoons were to the Covenanters.
Cornwallis and Tarleton between them completely reduced the Carolinas,
save for the strip of mountainous country to the north, wherein many of
those families that Tarleton had "burnt out" found refuge, and proceeded
to overrun Georgia. Only two successes encouraged the rebels. At the
Battle of the Cowpens Tarleton having, with the recklessness which was
the defeat of his qualities as a leader, advanced too far into the
hostile country, was met and completely defeated by Washington. The
defeat produced little immediate result, but it was the one definite
military success which the American general achieved before the advent
of the French, and it helped to keep up the spirit of the insurgents.
Perhaps even greater in its moral effect was the other victory, which
from the military point of view was even more insignificant. In Sumter
and Davie the rebels found two cavalry leaders fully as daring and
capable as Tarleton himself. They formed from among the refugees who had
sought the shelter of the Carolinian hills a troop of horse with which
they made a sudden raid upon the conquered province and broke the local
Tories at the Battle of the Hanging Rock. It was a small affair so far
as numbers went, and Davie's troopers were a handful of irregulars drawn
as best might be from the hard-riding, sharp-shooting population of the
South. Many of them were mere striplings; indeed, among them was a boy
of thirteen, an incorrigible young rebel who had run away from school to
take part in the fighting. In the course of this narration it will be
necessary to refer to that boy again more than once. His name was Andrew
Jackson.
While there was so little in the events of the Southern campaign to
bring comfort to the rebels, in the North their cause suffered a moral
blow which was felt at the moment to be almost as grave as any military
disaster. Here the principal American force was commanded by one of the
ablest soldiers the Rebellion had produced, a man who might well have
disputed the pre-eminent fame of Washington if he had not chosen rather
to challenge--and with no contemptible measures of success--that of
Iscariot. Benedict Arnold was, like Washington, a professional soldier
whose talent had been recognized before the war. He had early embraced
the revolutionary cause, and had borne a brilliant part in the campaign
which ended in the surrender of Burgoyne. There seemed before him every
prospect of a glorious career. The motives which led him to the most
inexpiable of human crimes were perhaps mixed, though all of them were
poisonous. He was in savage need of money to support the extravagance of
his private tastes: the Confederacy had none to give, while the Crown
had plenty. But it seems also that his ravenous vanity had been wounded,
first by the fact that the glory of Burgoyne's defeat had gone to Gates
and not to him, and afterwards by a censure, temperate and tactful
enough and accompanied by a liberal eulogy of his general conduct, which
Washington had felt obliged to pass on certain of his later military
proceedings. At any rate, the "ingratitude" of his country was the
reason he publicly alleged for his treason; and those interested in the
psychology of infamy may give it such weight as it may seem to deserve.
For history the important fact is that Arnold at this point in the
campaign secretly offered his services to the English, and the offer was
accepted.
Arnold escaped to the British camp and was safe. The unfortunate
gentleman on whom patriotic duty laid the unhappy task of trafficking
with the traitor was less fortunate. Major André had been imprudent
enough to pay a visit to a spot behind the American lines, and, at
Arnold's suggestion, to do so in plain clothes. He was taken, tried, and
hanged as a spy. Though espionage was not his intention, the Americans
cannot fairly be blamed for deciding that he should die. He had
undoubtedly committed an act which was the act of a spy in the eyes of
military law. It is pretty certain that a hint was given that the
authorities would gladly exchange him for Arnold, and it is very
probable that the unslaked thirst for just vengeance against Arnold was
partly responsible for the refusal of the American commanders to show
mercy. André's courage and dignity made a profound impression on them,
and there was a strong disposition to comply with his request that he
should at least be shot instead of hanged. But to that concession a
valid and indeed irresistible objection was urged. Whatever the
Americans did was certain to be scanned with critical and suspicious
eyes. Little could be said in the face of the facts if they treated
André as a spy and inflicted on him the normal fate of a spy. But if
they showed that they scrupled to hang him as a spy, it would be easy to
say that they had shot a prisoner of war.
Arnold was given a command in the South, and the rage of the population
of that region was intensified into something like torment when they saw
their lands occupied and their fields devastated no longer by a stranger
from overseas who was but fulfilling his military duty, but by a
cynical and triumphant traitor. Virginia was invaded and a bold stroke
almost resulted in the capture of the author of the Declaration of
Independence himself, who had been elected Governor of that State. In
the course of these raids many abominable things were done which it is
unnecessary to chronicle here. The regular English troops, on the whole,
behaved reasonably well, but Tarleton's native "Tories" were inflamed by
a fanaticism far fiercer than theirs, while atrocity was of course
normal to the warfare of the barbarous mercenaries of England, whether
Indian or German. It is equally a matter of course that such excesses
provoked frequent reprisals from the irregular colonial levies.
But aid was at last at hand. Already Lafayette, a young French noble of
liberal leanings, had appeared in Washington's camp at the head of a
band of volunteers, and the accession, small as it was, led to a
distinct revival of the fortunes of the revolution in the South. It was,
however, but a beginning. England, under pressure of the war with France
and Spain, lost that absolute supremacy at sea which has ever been and
ever will be necessary to her conduct of a successful war. A formidable
French armament was able to cross the Atlantic. A French fleet
threatened the coasts. Cornwallis, not knowing at which point the blow
would fall, was compelled to withdraw his forces from the country they
had overrun, and to concentrate them in a strong position in the
peninsula of Yorktown. Here he was threatened on both sides by
Washington and Rochambeau, while the armada of De Grasse menaced him
from the sea. The war took on the character of a siege. His resources
were speedily exhausted, and on September 19, 1781, he surrendered.
It was really the end of the war so far as America was concerned, though
the struggle between England and France continued for a time with
varying fortunes in other theatres, and the Americans, though approached
with tempting offers, wisely as well as righteously refused to make a
separate peace at the expense of their Allies. But the end could no
longer be in doubt. The surrender of Burgoyne had forced North to make
concessions; the surrender of Cornwallis made his resignation
inevitable. A new Ministry was formed under Rockingham pledged to make
peace. Franklin again went to Paris as representative of the
Confederation and showed himself a diplomatist of the first rank. To the
firmness with which he maintained the Alliance against the most skilful
attempts to dissolve it must largely be attributed the successful
conclusion of a general peace on terms favourable to the Allies and
especially favourable to America. Britain recognized the independence of
her thirteen revolted colonies, and peace was restored.
I have said that England recognized her thirteen revolted colonies. She
did not recognize the American Republic, for as yet there was none to
recognize. The war had been conducted on the American side nominally by
the Continental Congress, an admittedly _ad hoc_ authority not
pretending to permanency; really by Washington and his army which, with
the new flag symbolically emblazoned with thirteen stars and thirteen
stripes, was the one rallying point of unity. That also was now to be
dissolved. The States had willed to be free, and they were free. Would
they, in their freedom, will effectively to be a nation? That was a
question which not the wisest observer could answer at the time, and
which was not perhaps fully answered until well within the memory of men
still living. Its solution will necessarily form the main subject of
this book.
CHAPTER III
"WE, THE PEOPLE"
An account of the American Revolution which took cognizance only of the
armed conflict with England would tell much less than half the truth,
and even that half would be misleading. If anyone doubts that the real
inspiration which made America a nation was drawn, not from Whiggish
quarrels about taxes, but from the great dogmas promulgated by
Jefferson, it is sufficient to point out that the States did not even
wait till their victory over England was assured before effecting a
complete internal revolution on the basis of those dogmas. Before the
last shot had been fired almost the last privilege had disappeared.
The process was a spontaneous one, and its fruits appear almost
simultaneously in every State. They can be followed best in Virginia,
where Jefferson himself took the lead in the work of revolutionary
reform.
Hereditary titles and privileges went first. On this point public
feeling became so strong that the proposal to form after the war a
society to be called "the Cincinnati," which was to consist of those who
had taken a prominent part in the war and afterwards of their
descendants, was met, in spite of the respect in which Washington and
the other military heroes were held, with so marked an expression of
public disapproval that the hereditary part of the scheme had to be
dropped.
Franchises were simplified, equalized, broadened, so that in practically
every State the whole adult male population of European race received
the suffrage. Social and economic reforms having the excellent aim of
securing and maintaining a wide distribution of property, especially of
land, were equally prominent among the achievements of that time.
Jefferson himself carried in Virginia a drastic code of Land Laws,
which anticipated many of the essential provisions which through the
_Code Napoleon_ revolutionized the system of land-owning in Europe. As
to the practical effect of such reforms we have the testimony of a man
whose instinct for referring all things to practice was, if anything, an
excess, and whose love for England was the master passion of his life.
"Every object almost that strikes my view," wrote William Cobbett many
years later, "sends my mind and heart back to England. In viewing the
ease and happiness of this people the contrast fills my soul with
indignation, and makes it more and more the object of my life to assist
in the destruction of the diabolical usurpation which has trampled on
king as well as people."
Another principle, not connected by any direct logic with democracy and
not set forth in the Declaration of Independence, was closely associated
with the democratic thesis by the great French thinkers by whom that
thesis was revived, and had a strong hold upon the mind of Jefferson--the
principle of religious equality, or, as it might be more exactly defined,
of the Secular State.
So many loose and absurd interpretations of this principle have been and
are daily being propounded, that it may be well to state succinctly what
it does and does not mean.
It does not mean that anyone may commit any anti-social act that appeals
to him, and claim immunity from the law on the ground that he is impelled
to that act by his religion; can rob as a conscientious communist, murder
as a conscientious Thug, or refuse military service as a conscientious
objector. None understood better than Jefferson--it was the first principle
of his whole political system--that there must be _some_ basis of
agreement amongst citizens as to what is right and what is wrong, and that
what the consensus of citizens regards as wrong must be punished by the
law. All that the doctrine of the Secular State asserted was that such
general agreement among citizens need not include, as in most modern States
it obviously does not include, an agreement on the subject of religion.
Religion is, so to speak, left out of the Social Contract, and consequently
each individual retains his natural liberty to entertain and promulgate
what views he likes concerning it, so long as such views do not bring him
into conflict with those general principles of morality, patriotism and
social order upon which the citizens of the State _are_ agreed, and
which form the basis of its laws.
The public mind of America was for the most part well prepared for the
application of this principle. We have already noted how the first
experiment in the purely secular organization of society had been made
in the Catholic colony of Maryland and the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania.
The principle was now applied in its completeness to one State after
another. The Episcopalian establishment of Jefferson's own State was the
first to fall; the other States soon followed the example of Virginia.
At the same time penalties or disabilities imposed as a consequence of
religious opinions were everywhere abrogated. Only in New England was
there any hesitation. The Puritan States did not take kindly to the idea
of tolerating Popery. In the early days of the revolution their leaders
had actually made it one of the counts of their indictment against the
British Government that that Government had made peace with Anti-Christ
in French Canada--a fact remembered to the permanent hurt of the
Confederacy when the French Canadians were afterwards invited to make
common cause with the American rebels. But the tide was too strong even
for Calvinists to resist; the equality of all religions before the law
was recognized in every State, and became, as it remains to-day, a
fundamental part of the American Constitution.
It may be added that America affords the one conspicuous example of the
Secular State completely succeeding. In France, where the same principles
were applied under the same inspiration, the ultimate result was something
wholly different: an organized Atheism persecuting the Christian Faith.
In England the principle has never been avowedly applied at all. In theory
the English State still professes the form of Protestant Christianity
defined in the Prayer-book, and "tolerates" dissenters from it as the
Christian States of the middle ages tolerated the Jews, and as in France,
during the interval between the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and
its revocation, a State definitely and even pronouncedly Catholic
tolerated the Huguenots. Each dissentient religious body claims its right
to exist in virtue of some specific Act of Parliament. Theoretically it
is still an exception, though the exceptions have swallowed the rule.
Moreover, even under this rather hazy toleration, those who believe
either more or less than the bulk of their fellow-countrymen and who
boldly proclaim their belief usually find themselves at a political
disadvantage. In America it never seems to have been so. Jefferson
himself, a Deist (the claim sometimes made that he was a "Christian"
seems to rest on nothing more solid than the fact that, like nearly all
the eighteenth-century Deists, he expressed admiration for the character
and teaching of Jesus Christ), never for a moment forfeited the
confidence of his countrymen on that account, though attempts were made,
notably by John Adams, to exploit it against him. Taney, a Catholic, was
raised without objection on that score to the first judicial post in
America, at a date when such an appointment would have raised a serious
tumult in England. At a later date Ingersoll was able to vary the
pastime of "Bible-smashing" with the profession of an active Republican
wire-puller, without any of the embarrassments which that much better
and honester man, Charles Bradlaugh, had to encounter. The American
Republic has not escaped the difficulties and problems which are
inevitable to the Secular State, when some of its citizens profess a
religion which brings them into conflict with the common system of
morals which the nation takes for granted; the case of the Mormons is a
typical example of such a problem. But there is some evidence that, as
the Americans have applied the doctrine far more logically than we, they
have also a keener perception of the logic of its limitations. At any
rate, it is notable that Congress has refused, in its Conscription Act,
to follow our amazing example and make the conscience of the criminal
the judge of the validity of legal proceedings against him.
Changes so momentous, made in so drastic and sweeping a fashion in the
middle of a life and death struggle for national existence, show how
vigorous and compelling was the popular impulse towards reform. Yet all
the great things that were done seem dwarfed by one enormous thing left
undone; the heroic tasks which the Americans accomplished are forgotten
in the thought of the task which stared them in the face, but from which
they, perhaps justifiably, shrank. All the injustices which were
abolished in that superb crusade against privilege only made plainer the
shape of the one huge privilege, the one typical injustice which still
stood--the blacker against such a dawn--Negro Slavery.
It has already been mentioned that Slavery was at one time universal in
the English colonies and was generally approved by American opinion,
North and South. Before the end of the War of Independence it was almost
as generally disapproved, and in all States north of the borders of
Maryland it soon ceased to exist.
This was not because democratic ideals were more devotedly cherished in
the North than in the South; on the whole the contrary was the case. But
the institution of Slavery was in no way necessary to the normal life
and industry of the North; its abrogation made little difference, and
the rising tide of the new ideas to which it was necessarily odious
easily swept it away. In their method of dealing with it the Northerners,
it must be owned, were kinder to themselves than to the Negroes. They
declared Slavery illegal within their own borders, but they generally
gave the slave-holder time to dispose of his human property by selling
it in the States where Slavery still existed. This fact is worth noting,
because it became a prime cause of resentment and bitterness when, at a
later date, the North began to reproach the South with the guilt of
slave-owning. For the South was faced with no such easy and manageable
problem. Its coloured population was almost equal in number to its white
colonists; in some districts it was even greatly preponderant. Its staple
industries were based on slave labour. To abolish Slavery would mean an
industrial revolution of staggering magnitude of which the issue could
not be foreseen. And even if that were faced, there remained the sinister
and apparently insoluble problem of what to do with the emancipated
Negroes. Jefferson, who felt the reproach of Slavery keenly, proposed to
the legislature of Virginia a scheme so radical and comprehensive in its
character that it is not surprising if men less intrepid than he refused
to adopt it. He proposed nothing less than the wholesale repatriation of
the blacks, who were to set up in Africa a Negro Republic of their own
under American protection. Jefferson fully understood the principles and
implications of democracy, and he was also thoroughly conversant with
Southern conditions, and the fact that he thought (and events have
certainly gone far to justify him) that so drastic a solution was the
only one that offered hope of a permanent and satisfactory settlement is
sufficient evidence that the problem was no easy one. For the first time
Jefferson failed to carry Virginia with him; and Slavery remained an
institution sanctioned by law in every State south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
While the States were thus dealing with the problems raised by the
application to their internal administration of the principles of the
new democratic creed, the force of mere external fact was compelling
them to attempt some sort of permanent unity. Those who had from the
first a specific enthusiasm for such unity were few, though Washington
was among them, and his influence counted for much. But what counted for
much more was the pressure of necessity. It was soon obvious to all
clear-sighted men that unless some authoritative centre of union were
created the revolutionary experiment would have been saved from
suppression by arms only to collapse in mere anarchic confusion. The
Continental Congress, the only existing authority, was moribund, and
even had it been still in its full vigour, it had not the powers which
the situation demanded. It could not, for instance, levy taxes on the
State; its revenues were completely exhausted and it had no power to
replenish them. The British Government complained that the conditions of
peace were not observed on the American side, and accordingly held on to
the positions which it had occupied at the conclusion of the war. The
complaint was perfectly just, but it did not arise from deliberate bad
faith on the part of those who directed (as far as anyone was directing)
American policy, but from the simple fact that there was no authority in
America capable of enforcing obedience and carrying the provisions of
the treaty into effect. The same moral was enforced by a dozen other
symptoms of disorder. The Congress had disbanded the soldiers, as had
been promised, on the conclusion of peace, but, having no money, could
not keep its at least equally important promise to pay them. This led to
much casual looting by men with arms in their hands but nowhere to turn
for a meal, and the trouble culminated in a rebellion raised in New
England by an old soldier of the Continental Army called Shay. Such
incidents as these were the immediate cause of the summoning at
Philadelphia of a Convention charged with the task of framing a
Constitution for the United States.
Of such a Convention Washington was the only possible President; and he
was drawn from a temporary and welcome retirement in his Virginian home
to re-enter in a new fashion the service of his country. Under his
presidency disputed and compromised a crowd of able men representative
of the widely divergent States whose union was to be attempted. There
was Alexander Hamilton, indifferent or hostile to the democratic idea
but intensely patriotic, and bent above all things upon the formation of
a strong central authority; Franklin with his acute practicality and his
admirable tact in dealing with men; Gerry, the New Englander, Whiggish
and somewhat distrustful of the populace; Pinckney of South Carolina, a
soldier and the most ardent of the Federalists, representing, by a
curious irony, the State which was to be the home of the most extreme
dogma of State Rights; Madison, the Virginian, young, ardent and
intellectual, his head full of the new wine of liberty. One great name
is lacking. Jefferson had been chosen to represent the Confederacy at
the French Court, where he had the delight of watching the first act of
that tremendous drama, whereby his own accepted doctrine was to re-shape
France, as it had already re-shaped America. The Convention, therefore,
lacked the valuable combination of lucid thought on the philosophy of
politics and a keen appreciation of the direction of the popular will
which he above all men could have supplied.
The task before the Convention was a hard and perilous one, and nothing
about it was more hard and perilous than its definition. What were they
there to do? Were they framing a treaty between independent
Sovereignties, which, in spite of the treaty, would retain their
independence, or were they building a nation by merging these
Sovereignties in one general Sovereignty of the American people? They
began by proceeding on the first assumption, re-modelling the
Continental Congress--avowedly a mere alliance--and adding only such
powers as it was plainly essential to add. They soon found that such a
plan would not meet the difficulties of the hour. But they dared not
openly adopt the alternative theory: the States would not have borne it.
Had it, for example, been specifically laid down that a State once
entering the Union might never after withdraw from it, quite half the
States would have refused to enter it. To that extent the position
afterwards taken up by the Southern Secessionists was historically
sound. But there was a complementary historical truth on the other side.
There can be little doubt that in this matter the founders of the
Republic desired and intended more than they ventured to attempt. The
fact that men of unquestionable honesty and intelligence were in after
years so sharply and sincerely divided as to what the Constitution
really _was_, was in truth the result of a divided mind in those who
framed the Constitution. They made an alliance and hoped it would grow
into a nation. The preamble of the Constitution represents the
aspirations of the American Fathers; the clauses represent the furthest
they dared towards those aspirations. The preamble was therefore always
the rallying point of those who wished to see America one nation. Its
operative clause ran: "We, the People of the United States, in order to
form a more perfect Union, ... do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America." That such language was a strong point
in favour of the Federalist interpreters of the Constitution was
afterwards implicitly admitted by the extreme exponents of State
Sovereignty themselves, for when they came to frame for their own
Confederacy a Constitution reflecting their own views they made a most
significant alteration. The corresponding clause in the Constitution of
the Southern Confederacy ran, "We, _the deputies of the Sovereign and
Independent States_, ... do ordain," etc., etc.
For the rest two great practical measures which involved no overbold
challenge to State Sovereignty were wisely planned to buttress the Union
and render it permanent. A clause in the Constitution forbade tariffs
between the States and established complete Free Trade within the limits
of the Union. An even more important step was that by which the various
States which claimed territory in the as yet undeveloped interior were
induced to surrender such territory to the collective ownership of the
Federation. This at once gave the States a new motive for unity, a
common inheritance which any State refusing or abandoning union must
surrender.
Meanwhile it would be unjust to the supporters of State Rights to deny
the excellence and importance of their contribution to the
Constitutional settlement. To them is due the establishment of local
liberties with safeguards such as no other Constitution gives. And, in
spite of the military victory which put an end to the disputes about
State Sovereignty and finally established the Federalist interpretation
of the Constitution, this part of their work endures. The internal
affairs of every State remain as the Constitution left them, absolutely
in its own control. The Federal Government never interferes save for
purposes of public taxation, and, in the rare case of necessity, of
national defence. For the rest nine-tenths of the laws under which an
American citizen lives, nearly all the laws that make a practical
difference to his life, are State laws. Under the Constitution, as
framed, the States were free to form their separate State Constitutions
according to their own likings, and to arrange the franchise and the
test of citizenship, even for Federal purposes, in their own fashion.
This, with the one stupid and mischievous exception made by the
ill-starred Fifteenth Amendment, remains the case to this day, with the
curious consequence, among others, that it is now theoretically possible
for a woman to become President of the United States, if she is the
citizen of a State where female suffrage is admitted.
Turning to the structure of the central authority which the Constitution
sought to establish, the first thing that strikes us--in the teeth of
the assertion of most British and some American writers--is that it was
emphatically _not_ a copy of the British Constitution in any sense
whatever. It is built on wholly different principles, drawn mostly from
the French speculations of that age. Especially one notes, alongside of
the careful and wise separation of the judiciary from the executive, the
sound principle enunciated by Montesquieu and other French thinkers of
the eighteenth century, but rejected and contemned by England (to her
great hurt) as a piece of impracticable logic--the separation of the
executive and legislative powers. It was this principle which made
possible the later transformation of the Presidency into a sort of
Elective Monarchy.
This result was not designed or foreseen; or rather it was to an extent
foreseen, and deliberately though unsuccessfully guarded against. The
American revolutionists were almost as much under the influence of
classical antiquity as the French. From it they drew the noble
conception of "the Republic," the public thing acting with impersonal
justice towards all citizens. But with it they also drew an exaggerated
dread of what they called "Cæsarism," and with it they mixed the curious
but characteristic illusion of that age--an illusion from which, by the
way, Rousseau himself was conspicuously free--that the most satisfactory
because the most impersonal organ of the general will is to be found in
an elected assembly. They had as yet imperfectly learnt that such an
assembly must after all consist of persons, more personal because less
public than an acknowledged ruler. They did not know that, while a
despot may often truly represent the people, a Senate, however chosen,
always tends to become an oligarchy. Therefore they surrounded the
presidential office with checks which in mere words made the President
seem less powerful than an English King. Yet he has always in fact been
much more powerful. And the reason is to be found in the separation of
the executive from the legislature. The President, while his term
lasted, had the full powers of a real executive. Congress could not turn
him out, though it could in various ways check his actions. He could
appoint his own Ministers (though the Senate must ratify the choice) and
they were wisely excluded from the legislature. An even wiser provision
limited the appointment of Members of Congress to positions under the
executive. Thus both executive and legislature were kept, so far as
human frailty permitted, pure in their normal functions. The Presidency
remained a real Government. Congress remained a real check.
In England, where the opposite principle was adopted, the Ministry
became first the committee of an oligarchical Parliament and later a
close corporation nominating the legislature which is supposed to check
it.
The same fear of arbitrary power was exhibited, and that in fashion
really inconsistent with the democratic principles which the American
statesmen professed, in the determination that the President should be
chosen by the people only in an indirect fashion, through an Electoral
College. This error has been happily overruled by events. Since the
Electoral College was to be chosen _ad hoc_ for the single purpose of
choosing a President, it soon became obvious that pledges could easily
be exacted from its members in regard to their choice. By degrees the
pretence of deliberate action by the College wore thinner and thinner.
Finally it was abandoned altogether, and the President is now chosen, as
the first magistrate of a democracy ought to be chosen, if election is
resorted to at all, by the direct vote of the nation. At the time,
however, it was supposed that the Electoral College would be an
independent deliberative assembly. It was further provided that the
second choice of the Electoral College should be Vice-President, and
succeed to the Presidency in the event of the President dying during his
term of office. If there was a "tie" or if no candidate had an absolute
majority in the College, the election devolved on the House of
Representatives voting in this instance by States.
In connection with the election both of Executive and Legislature, the
old State Rights problem rose in another form. Were all the States to
have equal weight and representation, as had been the case in the old
Continental Congress, or was their weight and representation to be
proportional to their population? On this point a compromise was made.
The House of Representatives was to be chosen directly by the people on
a numerical basis, and in the Electoral College which chose the
President the same principle was adopted. In the Senate all States were
to have equal representation; and the Senators were to be chosen by the
legislatures of the States; they were regarded rather as ambassadors
than as delegates. The term of a Senator was fixed for six years, a
third of the Senate resigning in rotation every two years. The House of
Representatives was to be elected in a body for two years. The President
was elected for four years, at the end of which time he could be
re-elected.
Such were the main lines of the compromises which were effected between
the conflicting views of the extreme Federalists and extreme State Rights
advocates, and the conflicting interests of the larger and smaller States.
But there was another threatened conflict, more formidable and, as the
event proved, more enduring, with which the framers of the Constitution
had to deal. Two different types of civilization had grown up on opposite
sides of the Mason-Dixon line. How far Slavery was the cause and how far
a symptom of this divergence will be discussed more fully in future
chapters. At any rate it was its most conspicuous mark or label. North
and South differed so conspicuously not only in their social organization
but in every habit of life and thought that neither would tamely bear to
be engulfed in a union in which the other was to be predominant. To keep
an even balance between them was long the principal effort of American
statesmanship. That effort began in the Convention which framed the
Constitution. It did not cease till the very eve of the Civil War.
The problem with which the Convention had to deal was defined within
certain well-understood limits. No one proposed that Slavery should be
abolished by Federal enactment. It was universally acknowledged that
Slavery within a State, however much of an evil it might be, was an evil
with which State authority alone had a right to deal. On the other hand,
no one proposed to make Slavery a national institution. Indeed, all the
most eminent Southern statesmen of that time, and probably the great
majority of Southerners, regarded it as a reproach, and sincerely hoped
that it would soon disappear. There remained, however, certain definite
subjects of dispute concerning which an agreement had to be reached if
the States were to live in peace in the same household.
First, not perhaps in historic importance, but in the insistence of its
demand for an immediate settlement, was the question of representation.
It had been agreed that in the House of Representatives and in the
Electoral College this should be proportionate to population. The urgent
question at once arose: should free white citizens only be counted, or
should the count include the Negro slaves? When it is remembered that
these latter numbered something like half the population of the Southern
States, the immediate political importance of the issue will at once be
recognized. If they were omitted the weight of the South in the
Federation would be halved. In the opposite alternative it would be
doubled. By the compromise eventually adopted it was agreed that the
whole white population should be counted and three-fifths of the slaves.
The second problem was this: if Slavery was to be legal in one State and
illegal in another, what was to be the status of a slave escaping from a
Slave State into a free? Was such an act to be tantamount to an
emancipation? If such were to be the case, it was obvious that slave
property, especially in the border States, would become an extremely
insecure investment. The average Southerner of that period was no
enthusiast for Slavery. He was not unwilling to listen to plans of
gradual and compensated emancipation. But he could not be expected to
contemplate losing in a night property for which he had perhaps paid
hundreds of dollars, without even the hope of recovery. On this point it
was found absolutely necessary to give way to the Southerners, though
Franklin, for one, disliked this concession more than any other. It was
determined that "persons held to service or labour" escaping into
another State should be returned to those "to whom such service or
labour may be due."
The last and on the whole the least defensible of the concessions made
in this matter concerned the African Slave Trade. That odious traffic
was condemned by almost all Americans--even by those who were accustomed
to domestic slavery, and could see little evil in it. Jefferson, in the
original draft of the Declaration of Independence, had placed amongst
the accusations against the English King the charge that he had forced
the slave trade on reluctant colonies. The charge was true so far at
any rate as Virginia was concerned, for both that State and its
neighbour, Maryland, had passed laws against the traffic and had seen
them vetoed by the Crown. But the extreme South, where the cotton trade
was booming, wanted more Negro labour; South Carolina objected, and
found an expected ally in Massachusetts. Boston had profited more by the
Slave Trade than any other American city. She could hardly condemn King
George without condemning herself. And, though her interest in the
traffic had diminished, it had not wholly ceased. The paragraph in
question was struck out of the Declaration, and when the Convention came
to deal with the question the same curious alliance thwarted the efforts
of those who demanded the immediate prohibition of the trade. Eventually
the Slave Trade was suffered to continue for twenty years, at the end of
which time Congress might forbid it. This was done in 1808, when the
term of suffrance had expired.
Thus was Negro Slavery placed under the protection of the Constitution.
It would be a grave injustice to the founders of the American
Commonwealth to make it seem that any of them liked doing this.
Constrained by a cruel necessity, they acquiesced for the time in an
evil which they hoped that time would remedy. Their mind is
significantly mirrored by the fact that not once in the Constitution are
the words "slave" or "slavery" mentioned. Some euphemism is always used,
as "persons held to service or labour," "the importation of persons,"
"free persons," contrasted with "other persons," and so on. Lincoln,
generations later, gave what was undoubtedly the true explanation of
this shrinking from the name of the thing they were tolerating and even
protecting. They hoped that the Constitution would survive Negro
Slavery, and they would leave no word therein to remind their children
that they had spared it for a season. Beyond question they not only
hoped but expected that the concession which for the sake of the
national unity they made to an institution which they hated and deplored
would be for a season only. The influence of time and the growth of
those great doctrines which were embodied in the Declaration of
Independence could not but persuade all men at last; and the day, they
thought, could not be far distant when the Slave States themselves would
concur in some prudent scheme of emancipation, and make of Negro Slavery
an evil dream that had passed away. None the less not a few of them did
what they had to do with sorrowful and foreboding hearts, and the author
of the Declaration of Independence has left on record his own verdict,
that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.
CHAPTER IV
THE MANTLE OF WASHINGTON
The compromises of the Constitution, on whatever grounds they may be
criticized, were so far justified that they gained their end. That end
was the achievement of union; and union was achieved. This was not done
easily nor without opposition. In some cities anti-Constitutional riots
took place. Several States refused to ratify. The opposition had the
support of the great name of Patrick Henry, who had been the soul of the
resistance to the Stamp Act, and who now declared that under the
specious name of "Federation" Liberty had been betrayed. The defence was
conducted in a publication called _The Federalist_ largely by two men
afterwards to be associated with fiercely contending parties, Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison. But more persuasive than any arguments that
the ablest advocate could use were the iron necessities of the
situation. The Union was an accomplished fact. For any State, and
especially for a small State--and it was the small States that hesitated
most--to refuse to enter it would be so plainly disastrous to its
interests that the strongest objections and the most rooted suspicions
had eventually to give way. Some States hung back long: some did not
ratify the Constitution until its machinery was actually working, until
the first President had been chosen and the first Congress had met. But
all ratified it at last, and before the end of Washington's first
Presidency the complement of Stars and Stripes was made up.
The choice of a President was a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew that
Washington was the man whom the hour and the nation demanded. He was
chosen without a contest by the Electoral College, and would undoubtedly
have been chosen with the same practical unanimity by the people had
the choice been theirs. So long as he retained his position he retained
along with it the virtually unchallenged pre-eminence which all men
acknowledged. There had been cabals against him as a general, and there
were signs of a revival of them when his Presidency was clearly
foreshadowed. The impulse came mostly from the older and wealthier
gentry of his own State--the Lees for example--who tended to look down
upon him as a "new man." Towards the end of his political life he was to
some extent the object of attack from the opposite quarter; his fame was
assailed by the fiercer and less prudent of the Democratic publicists.
But, throughout, the great mass of the American people trusted him as
their representative man, as those who abused him or conspired against
him did so to their own hurt. A less prudent man might easily have worn
out his popularity and alienated large sections of opinion, but
Washington's characteristic sagacity, which had been displayed so
constantly during the war, stood him in as good stead in matters of
civil government. He propitiated Nemesis and gave no just provocation to
any party to risk its popularity by attacking him. While he was
President the mantle of his great fame was ample enough to cover the
deep and vital divisions which were appearing even in his own Cabinet,
and were soon to convulse the nation in a dispute for the inheritance of
his power.
His Secretary to the Treasury was Alexander Hamilton. This extraordinary
man presents in more than one respect a complex problem to the
historian. He has an unquestionable right to a place and perhaps to a
supreme place among the builders of the American Republic, and much of
its foundation-laying was his work. Yet he shows in history as a
defeated man, and for at least a generation scarcely anyone dared to
give him credit for the great work that he really did. To-day the
injustice is perhaps the other way. In American histories written since
the Civil War he is not only acclaimed as a great statesman, but his
overthrow at the hands of the Jeffersonians is generally pointed at as a
typical example of the folly and ingratitude of the mob. This version is
at least as unjust to the American people as the depreciation of the
Democrats was to him. The fact is that Hamilton's work had a double
aspect. In so far as it was directed to the cementing of a permanent
union and the building of a strong central authority it was work upon
the lines along which the nation was moving, and towards an end which
the nation really, if subconsciously, desired. But closely associated
with this object in Hamilton's mind was another which the nation did not
desire and which was alien to its instincts and destiny. All this second
part of his work failed, and involved him in its ruin.
Hamilton had fought bravely in the Revolutionary War, but for the ideals
which had become more and more the inspiration of the Revolution he
cared nothing, and was too honest to pretend to care. He had on the
other hand a strong and genuine American patriotism. Perhaps his origin
helped him to a larger view in this matter than was common among his
contemporaries. He was not born in any of the revolted colonies, but in
Bermuda, of good blood but with the bar sinister stamped upon his birth.
He had migrated to New York to seek his fortune, but his citizenship of
that State remained an accident. He had no family traditions tying him
to any section, and, more than any public man that appeared before the
West began to produce a new type, he felt America as a whole. He had
great administrative talents of which he was fully conscious, and the
anarchy which followed the conclusion of peace was hateful to his
instinct for order and strong government. But the strong government
which he would have created was of a different type from that which
America ultimately developed. Theoretically he made no secret of his
preference for a Monarchy over a Republic, but the suspicion that he
meditated introducing monarchical institutions into America, though
sincerely entertained by Jefferson and others, was certainly false.
Whatever his theoretic preferences, he was intensely alive to the logic
of facts, and must have known that a brand-new American monarchy would
have been as impossible as it would have been ludicrous. In theory and
practice, however, he really was anti-democratic. Masses of men seemed
to him incapable alike of judgment and of action, and he thought no
enduring authority could be based upon the instincts of the "great
beast," as he called the mob. He looked for such authority and what
seemed to him the example of history, and especially to the example of
England. He knew how powerful both at home and abroad was the governing
machine which the English aristocracy had established after the
revolution of 1689; and he realized more fully than most men of that
age, or indeed of this, that its strength lay in a small but very
national governing class wielding the people as an instrument. Such a
class he wished to create in America, to connect closely, as the English
oligarchy had connected itself closely, with the great moneyed
interests, and to entrust with the large powers which in his judgment
the central government of the Federation needed.
Jefferson came back from France in the winter of 1789, and was at once
offered by Washington the Secretaryship of State. The offer was not a
very welcome one, for he was hot with the enthusiasm of the great French
struggle, and would gladly have returned to Paris and watched its
progress. He felt, however, that the President's insistence laid upon
him the duty of giving the Government the support of his abilities and
popularity. He had accepted the Constitution which he had no share in
framing, not perhaps as exactly what he would have desired, but
certainly in full good faith and without reserve. It probably satisfied
him at least as well as it satisfied Hamilton, who had actually at one
time withdrawn from the Convention in protest against its refusal to
accept his views. Jefferson's criticisms, such as they were, related
mostly to matters of detail: some of them were just and some were
subsequently incorporated in amendments. But there is ample evidence
that for none of them was he prepared to go the length of opposing or
even delaying the settlement. It is also worth noting that none of them
related to the balance of power between the Federal and State
Governments, upon which Jefferson is often loosely accused of holding
extreme particularist views. As a fact he never held such views. His
formula that "the States are independent as to everything within
themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations" is
really a very good summary of the principles upon which the
Constitution is based, and states substantially the policy which all the
truest friends of the Union have upheld. But he was committed out and
out to the principle of popular government, and when it became obvious
that the Federalists under Hamilton's leadership were trying to make the
central government oligarchical, and that they were very near success,
Jefferson quite legitimately invoked and sought to confirm the large
powers secured by the Constitution itself to the States for the purpose
of obstructing their programme.
It was some time, however, before the antagonism between the two
Secretaries became acute, and meanwhile the financial genius of Hamilton
was reducing the economic chaos bequeathed by the war to order and
solvency. All of his measures showed fertility of invention and a
thorough grasp of his subject; some of them were unquestionably
beneficial to the country. But a careful examination will show how
closely and deliberately he was imitating the English model which we
know to have been present to his mind. He established a true National
Debt similar to that which Montague had created for the benefit of
William of Orange. In this debt he proposed to merge the debts of the
individual States contracted during the War of Independence. Jefferson
saw no objection to this at the time, and indeed it was largely through
his favour that a settlement was made which overcame the opposition of
certain States.
This settlement had another interest as being one of the perennial
geographical compromises by means of which the Union was for so long
preserved. The support of Hamilton's policy came mainly from the North;
the opposition to it from the South. It so happened that coincidentally
North and South were divided on another question, the position of the
projected Capital of the Federation. The Southerners wanted it to be on
the Potomac between Virginia and Maryland; the Northerners would have
preferred it further north. At Jefferson's house Hamilton met some of
the leading Southern politicians, and a bargain was struck. The
Secretary's proposal as to the State debts was accepted, and the South
had its way in regard to the Capital. Hamilton probably felt that he
had bought a solid advantage in return for a purely sentimental
concession. Neither he nor anyone else could foresee the day of peril
when the position of Washington between the two Southern States would
become one of the gravest of the strategic embarrassments of the Federal
Government.
Later, when Hamilton's policy and personality had become odious to him,
Jefferson expressed remorse for his conduct of the occasion, and blamed
his colleague for taking advantage of his ignorance of the question. His
sincerity cannot be doubted, but it will appear to the impartial
observer that his earlier judgment was the wiser of the two. The
assumption of State debts had really nothing "monocratic" or
anti-popular about it--nothing even tending to infringe the rights and
liberties of the several States--while it was clearly a statesmanlike
measure from the national standpoint, tending at once to restore the
public credit and cement the Union. But Jefferson read backwards into
this innocuous and beneficent stroke of policy the spirit which he
justly perceived to inform the later and more dubious measures which
proceeded from the same author.
Of these the most important was the creation of the first United States
Bank. Here Hamilton was quite certainly inspired by the example of the
English Whigs. He knew how much the stability of the settlement made in
1689 had owed to the skill and foresight with which Montague, through
the creation of the Bank of England, had attached to it the great
moneyed interests of the City. He wished, through the United States
Bank, to attach the powerful moneyed interests of the Eastern and Middle
States in the same fashion to the Federal Government. This is how he and
his supporters would have expressed it. Jefferson said that he wished to
fill Congress with a crowd of mercenaries bound by pecuniary ties to the
Treasury and obliged to lend it, through good and evil repute, a
perennial and corrupt support. The two versions are really only
different ways of stating the same thing. To a democrat such a standing
alliance between the Government and the rich will always seem a corrupt
thing--nay, the worst and least remediable form of corruption. To a man
of Hamilton's temper it seemed merely the necessary foundation of a
stable political equilibrium. Thus the question of the Bank really
brought the two parties which were growing up in the Cabinet and in the
nation to an issue which revealed the irreconcilable antagonism of their
principles.
The majority in Congress was with Hamilton; but his opponents appealed
to the Constitution. They denied the competency of Congress under that
instrument to establish a National Bank. When the Bill was in due course
sent to Washington for signature he asked the opinions of his Cabinet on
the constitutional question, and both Hamilton and Jefferson wrote very
able State Papers in defence of their respective views. After some
hesitation Washington decided to sign the Bill and to leave the question
of constitutional law to the Supreme Court. In due course it was
challenged there, but Marshal, the Chief Justice, was a decided
Federalist, and gave judgment in favour of the legality of the Bank.
The Federalists had won the first round. Meanwhile the party which
looked to Jefferson as leader was organizing itself. It took the name of
"Republican," as signifying its opposition to the alleged monarchical
designs of Hamilton and his supporters. Later, when it appeared that
such a title was really too universal to be descriptive, the
Jeffersonians began to call themselves by the more genuinely
characteristic title of "Democratic Republicans," subsequently
abbreviated into "Democrats." That name the party which, alone among
American parties, can boast an unbroken historic continuity of more than
a century, retains to this day.
At the end of his original term of four years, Washington was prevailed
upon to give way to the universal feeling of the nation and to accept a
second term. No party thought of opposing him, but a significant
division appeared over the Vice-Presidency. The Democrats ran Clinton
against John Adams of Massachusetts, and though they failed there
appeared in the voting a significant alliance, which was to determine
the politics of a generation. New York State, breaking away from her
Northern neighbours, voted with the Democratic South for Clinton. And
the same year saw the foundation in New York City of that dubious but
very potent product of democracy, which has perhaps become the best
abused institution in the civilized world, yet has somehow or other
contrived to keep in that highly democratic society a power which it
could never retain for a day without a genuine popular backing--Tammany
Hall.
Meanwhile the destinies of every nation of European origin, and of none
perhaps more, in spite of their geographical remoteness, than of the
United States, were being profoundly influenced by the astonishing
events that were shaping themselves in Western Europe. At first all
America was enthusiastic for the French Revolution. Americans were
naturally grateful for the aid given them by the French in their own
struggle for freedom, and saw with eager delight the approaching
liberation of their liberators. But as the drama unrolled itself a
sharp, though very unequal, division of opinion appeared. In New
England, especially, there were many who were shocked at the proceedings
of the French, at their violence, at their Latin cruelty in anger, and,
above all perhaps, at that touch of levity which comes upon the Latin
when he is face to face with death. Massacres and _carmagnoles_ did not
strike the typical Massachusetts merchant as the methods by which
God-fearing men should protest against oppression. The strict military
government which succeeded to, controlled and directed in a national
fashion the violent mood of the people--that necessary martial law which
we call "the Terror"--seemed even less acceptable to his fundamentally
Whiggish political creed. Yet--and it is a most significant fact--the
bulk of popular American opinion was not shocked by these things. It
remained steadily with the French through all those events which
alienated opinion--even Liberal opinion--in Europe. It was perhaps
because European opinion, especially English opinion, even when Liberal,
was at bottom aristocratic, while the American people were already a
democracy. But the fact is certain. By the admission of those American
writers who deplore it and fail to comprehend it, the great mass of the
democracy of America continued, through good and evil repute, to extend
a vivid and indulgent sympathy to the democracy of France.
The division of sympathies which had thus become apparent was converted
into a matter of practical politics by the entry of England into the war
which a Coalition was waging against the French Republic. That
intervention at once sharpened the sympathies of both sides and gave
them a practical purpose. England and France were now arrayed against
each other, and Americans, though their Government remained neutral,
arrayed themselves openly as partisans of either combatant. The division
followed almost exactly the lines of the earlier quarrel which had begun
to appear as the true meaning of Hamilton's policy discovered itself.
The Hamiltonians were for England. The Jeffersonians were for France.
A war of pamphlets and newspapers followed, into the details of which it
is not necessary to go. The Federalists, with the tide going steadily
against them, had the good luck to secure the aid of a pen which had no
match in Europe. The greatest master of English controversial prose that
ever lived was at that time in America. Normally, perhaps, his
sympathies would have been with the Democrats. But love of England was
ever the deepest and most compelling passion of the man who habitually
abused her institutions so roundly. The Democrats were against his
fatherland, and so the supporters of Hamilton found themselves defended
in a series of publications over the signature of "Peter Porcupine" with
all the energy and genius which belonged only to William Cobbett.
A piquancy of the contest was increased by the fact that it was led on
either side by members of the Administration. Washington had early put
forth a Declaration of Neutrality, drawn up by Randolph, who, though
leaning if anything to Jefferson's side, took up a more or less
intermediate position between the parties. Both sides professed to
accept the principle of neutrality, but their interpretations of it were
widely different. Jefferson did not propose to intervene in favour of
France, but he did not think that Americans were bound to disguise their
moral sympathies. They would appear, he thought, both ungrateful and
false to the first principles of their own commonwealth if, whatever
limitation prudence might impose in their action, they did not _desire_
that France should be victorious over the Coalition of Kings. The great
majority of the American people took the same view. When Genet, the
envoy of the newly constituted Republic, arrived from France, he
received an ovation which Washington himself at the height of his glory
could hardly have obtained. Nine American citizens out of ten hastened
to mount the tricolour cockade, to learn the "Marseillaise," and to take
their glasses to the victory of the sister Republic. So strong was the
wave of popular enthusiasm that the United States might perhaps have
been drawn into active co-operation with France had France been better
served by her Minister.
Genet was a Girondin, and the Girondins, perhaps through that defect in
realism which ruined them at home, were not good diplomatists. It is
likely enough that the warmth of his reception deranged his judgment; at
any rate he misread its significance. He failed to take due account of
that sensitiveness of national feeling in a democracy which, as a
Frenchman of that time, he should have been specially able to
appreciate. He began to treat the resources of the United States as if
they had already been placed at the disposal of France, and, when very
properly rebuked, he was foolish enough to attempt to appeal to the
nation against its rulers. The attitude of the Secretary of State ought
to have warned him of the imprudence of his conduct. No man in America
was a better friend to France than Jefferson; but he stood up manfully
to Genet in defence of the independent rights of his country, and the
obstinacy of the ambassador produced, as Jefferson foresaw that it must
produce, a certain reaction of public feeling by which the Anglophil
party benefited.
At the close of the year 1793, Jefferson, weary of endless contests with
Hamilton, whom he accused, not without some justification, of constantly
encroaching on his colleague's proper department, not wholly satisfied
with the policy of the Government and perhaps feeling that Genet's
indiscretions had made his difficult task for the moment impossible,
resigned his office. He would have done so long before had not
Washington, sincerely anxious throughout these troubled years to hold
the balance even between the parties, repeatedly exerted all his
influence to dissuade him. The following year saw the "Whiskey
Insurrection" in Pennsylvania--a popular protest against Hamilton's
excise measures. Jefferson more than half sympathized with the rebels.
Long before, on the occasion of Shay's insurrection, he had expressed
with some exaggeration a view which has much more truth in it than those
modern writers who exclaim in horror at his folly could be expected to
understand--the view that the readiness of people to rebel against their
rulers is no bad test of the presence of democracy among them. He had
even added that he hoped the country would never pass ten years without
a rebellion of some sort. In the present case he had the additional
motives for sympathy that he himself disapproved of the law against
which Pennsylvania was in revolt, and detested its author. Washington
could not be expected to take the same view. He was not anti-democratic
like Hamilton; he sincerely held the theory of the State set forth in
the Declaration of Independence. But he was something of an aristocrat,
and very much of a soldier. As an aristocrat he was perhaps touched with
the illusion which was so fatal to his friend Lafayette, the illusion
that privilege can be abolished and yet the once privileged class
partially retain its ascendancy by a sort of tacit acknowledgment by
others of its value. As a soldier he disliked disorder and believed in
discipline. As a commander in the war he had not spared the rod, and had
even complained of Congress for mitigating the severity of military
punishments. It may be that the "Whiskey Insurrection," which he
suppressed with prompt and drastic energy, led him for the first time to
lean a little to the Hamiltonian side. At any rate he was induced,
though reluctantly and only under strong pressure, to introduce into a
Message to Congress a passage reflecting on the Democratic Societies
which were springing up everywhere and gaining daily in power; and in
return found himself attacked, sometimes with scurrility, in the more
violent organs of the Democracy.
Washington's personal ascendancy was, however, sufficient to prevent the
storm from breaking while he was President. It was reserved for his
successor. In 1797 his second term expired. He had refused a third,
thereby setting an important precedent which every subsequent President
has followed, and bade farewell to politics in an address which is among
the great historical documents of the Republic. The two points
especially emphasized were long the acknowledged keynotes of American
policy: the avoidance at home of "sectional" parties--that is, of
parties following geographical lines--and abroad the maintenance of a
strict independence of European entanglements and alliances.
Had a Presidential election then been what it became later, a direct
appeal to the popular vote, it is probable that Jefferson would have
been the second President of the United States. But the Electoral
College was still a reality, and its majority leant to Federalism.
Immeasurably the ablest man among the Federalists was Hamilton, but for
many reasons he was not an "available" choice. He was not a born
American. He had made many and formidable personal enemies even within
the party. Perhaps the shadow on his birth was a drawback; perhaps also
the notorious freedom of his private life--for the strength of the party
lay in Puritan New England. At any rate the candidate whom the
Federalists backed and succeeded in electing was John Adams of
Massachusetts. By the curiously unworkable rule, soon repealed, of the
original Constitution, which gave the Vice-Presidency to the candidate
who had the second largest number of votes, Jefferson found himself
elected to that office under a President representing everything to
which he was opposed.
John Adams was an honest man and sincerely loved his country. There his
merits ended. He was readily quarrelsome, utterly without judgment and
susceptible to that mood of panic in which mediocre persons are readily
induced to act the "strong man." During his administration a new quarrel
arose with France--a quarrel in which once again those responsible for
that country's diplomacy played the game of her enemies. Genet had
merely been an impracticable and impatient enthusiast. Talleyrand, who
under the Directory took charge of foreign affairs, was a scamp; and,
clever as he was, was unduly contemptuous of America, where he had
lived for a time in exile. He attempted to use the occasion of the
appearance of an American Mission in Paris to wring money out of
America, not only for the French Treasury, but for his own private
profit and that of his colleagues and accomplices. A remarkable
correspondence, which fully revealed the blackmailing attempt made by
the agents of the French Government on the representatives of the United
States, known as the "X.Y.Z." letters, was published and roused the
anger of the whole country. "Millions for defence but not a cent for
tribute" was the universal catchword. Hamilton would probably have
seized the opportunity to go to war with France with some likelihood of
a national backing. Adams avoided war and thereby split his party, but
he did not avoid steps far more certain than a war to excite the
hostility of democratic America. His policy was modelled upon the worst
of the panic-bred measures by means of which Pitt and his colleagues
were seeking to suppress "Jacobinism" in England. Such a policy was
odious anywhere; in a democracy it was also insane. Further the Aliens
Law and the Sedition Law which he induced Congress to pass were in
flagrant and obvious violation of the letter and spirit of the
Constitution. They were barely through Congress when the storm broke on
their authors. Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, saw that his hour
was come. He put himself at the head of the opposition and found a whole
nation behind him.
Kentucky, carved out of the western territory and newly grown to
Statehood, took the lead of resistance. For her legislature Jefferson
drafted the famous "Kentucky Resolutions," which condemned the new laws
as unconstitutional (which they were) and refused to allow them to be
administered within her borders. On the strength of these resolutions
Jefferson has been described as the real author of the doctrine of
"Nullification": and technically this may be true. Nevertheless there is
all the difference in the world between the spirit of the Kentucky
Resolutions and that of "Nullification," as South Carolina afterwards
proclaimed its legitimacy. About the former there was nothing sectional.
It was not pretended that Kentucky had any peculiar and local objection
to the Sedition Law, or was standing against the other States in
resisting it. She was vindicating a freedom common to all the States,
valued by all and menaced in all. She claimed that she was making
herself the spokesman of the other States in the same fashion as Hampden
made himself the spokesman of the other great landed proprietors in
resisting taxation by the Crown.
The event amply justified her claim. The oppression laws which the
Federalists had induced Congress to pass were virtually dead letters
from the moment of their passing. And when the time came for the nation
to speak, it rose as one man and flung Adams from his seat. The
Federalist party virtually died of the blow. The dream of an
oligarchical Republic was at an end, and the will of the people,
expressed with unmistakable emphasis, gave the Chief Magistracy to the
author of the Declaration of Independence.
CHAPTER V
THE VIRGINIAN DYNASTY
I have spoken of Jefferson's election as if it had been a direct act of
the people; and morally it was so. But in the actual proceedings there
was a certain hitch, which is of interest not only because it
illustrated a peculiar technical defect in the original Constitution and
so led to its amendment, but because it introduces here, for the first
time, the dubious but not unfascinating figure of Aaron Burr.
Burr was a politician of a type which democracies will always produce,
and which those who dislike democracy will always use for its reproach.
Yet the reproach is evidently unjust. In all societies, most of those
who meddle with the government of men will do so in pursuit of their own
interests, and in all societies the professional politician will reveal
himself as a somewhat debased type. In a despotism he will become a
courtier and obtain favour by obsequious and often dishonourable
services to a prince. In an old-fashioned oligarchy he will adopt the
same attitude towards some powerful noble. In a parliamentary
plutocracy, like our own, he will proceed in fashion with which we are
only too familiar, will make himself the paid servant of those wealthy
men who finance politicians, and will enrich himself by means of "tips"
from financiers and bribes from Government contractors. In a democracy,
the same sort of man will try to obtain his ends by flattering and
cajoling the populace. It is not obvious that he is more mischievous as
demagogue than he was as courtier, lackey, or parliamentary intriguer.
Indeed, he is almost certainly less so, for he must at least in some
fashion serve, even if only that he may deceive them, those whose
servant he should be. At any rate, the purely self-seeking demagogue is
certainly a recurrent figure in democratic politics, and of the
self-seeking demagogue Aaron Burr was an excellent specimen.
He had been a soldier not without distinction, and to the last he
retained a single virtue--the grand virtue of courage. For the rest, he
was the Tammany Boss writ large. An able political organizer, possessed
of much personal charm, he had made himself master of the powerful
organization of the Democratic party in New York State, and as such was
able to bring valuable support to the party which was opposing the
administration of Adams. As a reward for his services, it was determined
that he should be Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency. But here
the machinery devised by the Convention played a strange trick. When the
votes of the Electoral College came to be counted, it was found that
instead of Jefferson leading and yet leaving enough votes to give Burr
the second place, the votes for the two were exactly equal. This, under
the Constitution, threw the decision into the hands of the House of
Representatives, and in that House the Federalists still held the
balance of power. They could not choose their own nominee, but they
could choose either Jefferson or Burr, and many of them, desiring at the
worst to frustrate the triumph of their great enemy, were disposed to
choose Burr; while Burr, who cared only for his own career, was ready
enough to lend himself to such an intrigue.
That the intrigue failed was due mainly to the patriotism of Hamilton.
All that was best and worst in him concurred in despising the mere
flatterer of the mob. Jefferson was at least a gentleman. And, unfairly
as he estimated him both morally and intellectually, he knew very well
that the election of Jefferson would not be a disgrace to the Republic,
while the election of Burr would. His patriotism overcame his
prejudices. He threw the whole weight of his influence with the
Federalists against the intrigue, and he defeated it. It is the more to
his honour that he did this to the advantage of a man whom he could not
appreciate and who was his enemy. It was the noblest and purest act of
his public career. It probably cost him his life.
Jefferson was elected President and Burr Vice-President, as had
undoubtedly been intended by the great majority of those who had voted
the Democratic ticket at the elections. But the anomaly and disaster of
Burr's election had been so narrowly avoided that a change in the
Constitution became imperative. It was determined that henceforward the
votes for President and Vice-President should be given separately. The
incident had another consequence. Burr, disappointed in hopes which had
almost achieved fulfilment, became from that moment a bitter enemy of
Jefferson and his administration. Also, attributing the failure of his
promising plot to Hamilton's intervention, he hated Hamilton with a new
and insatiable hatred. Perhaps in that hour he already determined that
his enemy should die.
Jefferson's inauguration was full of that deliberate and almost
ceremonial contempt of ceremony in which that age found a true
expression of its mood, though later and perhaps more corrupt times have
inevitably found such symbolism merely comic. It was observed as
striking the note of the new epoch that the President rejected all that
semi-regal pomp which Washington and Adams had thought necessary to the
dignity of their office. It is said that he not only rode alone into
Washington (he was the first President to be inaugurated in the newly
built capital), dressed like any country gentleman, but, when he
dismounted to take the oath, tethered his horse with his own hands. More
really significant was the presence of the populace that elected
him--the great heaving, unwashed crowd elbowing the dainty politicians
in the very presence chamber. The President's inaugural address was full
of a generous spirit of reconciliation. "We are all Republicans," he
said, "we are all Federalists." Every difference of opinion was not a
difference of principle, nor need such differences interfere with "our
attachment, to our Union and to representative government."
Such liberality was the more conspicuous by contrast with the petty
rancour of his defeated rival, who not only refused to perform the
customary courtesy of welcoming his successor at the White House, but
spent his last hours there appointing Federalists feverishly to public
offices solely in order to compel Jefferson to choose between the
humiliation of retaining such servants and the odium of dismissing
them. The new President very rightly refused to recognize nominations so
made, and this has been seized upon by his detractors to hold him up as
the real author of what was afterwards called "the Spoils System." It
would be far more just to place that responsibility upon Adams.
The most important event of Jefferson's first administration was the
Louisiana Purchase. The colony of Louisiana at the mouth of the
Mississippi, with its vast _hinterland_ stretching into the heart of the
American continent, had, as we have seen, passed in 1762 from French
into Spanish hands. Its acquisition by the United States had been an old
project of Jefferson's. When Secretary of State under Washington, he had
mooted it when settling with the Spanish Government the question of the
navigation of the Mississippi. As President he revived it; but before
negotiations could proceed far the whole situation was changed by the
retrocession of Louisiana to France as part of the terms dictated by
Napoleon to a Spain which had fallen completely under his control. The
United States could not, in any case, have regarded the transfer without
uneasiness, and to all schemes of purchase it seemed a death-blow, for
it was believed that the French Emperor had set his heart upon the
resurrection of French Colonial power in America. But Jefferson was an
excellent diplomatist, at once conciliatory and unyielding: he played
his cards shrewdly, and events helped him. The Peace of Amiens was
broken, and, after a very brief respite, England and France were again
at war. Napoleon's sagacity saw clearly enough that he could not hope to
hold and develop his new colony in the face of a hostile power which was
his master on the sea. It would suit his immediate purpose better to
replenish his treasury with good American dollars which might soon be
urgently needed. He became, therefore, as willing to sell as Jefferson
was to buy, and between two men of such excellent sense a satisfactory
bargain was soon struck. The colony of Louisiana and all the undeveloped
country which lay behind it became the inheritance of the American
Federation.
Concerning the transaction, there is more than one point to be noted of
importance to history. One is the light which it throws on Jefferson's
personal qualities. Because this man held very firmly an abstract and
reasoned theory of the State, could define and defend it with
extraordinary lucidity and logic, and avowedly guided his public conduct
by its light, there has been too much tendency to regard him as a mere
theorist, a sort of Girondia, noble in speculation and rhetoric, but
unequal to practical affairs and insufficiently alive to concrete
realities. He is often contrasted unfavourably with Hamilton in this
respect: and yet he had, as events proved, by far the acuter sense of
the trend of American popular opinion and the practical requirements of
a government that should command its respect; and he made fewer mistakes
in mere political tactics than did his rival. But his diplomacy is the
best answer to the charge. Let anyone who entertains it follow closely
the despatches relating to the Louisiana purchase, and observe how
shrewdly this supposed visionary can drive a good bargain for his
country, even when matched against Talleyrand with Bonaparte behind him.
One is reminded that before he entered politics he enjoyed among his
fellow-planters a reputation for exceptional business acumen.
Much more plausible is the accusation that Jefferson in the matter of
Louisiana forgot his principles, and acted in a manner grossly
inconsistent with his attitude when the Federalists were in power.
Certainly, the purchase can only be defended constitutionally by giving
a much larger construction to the powers of the Federal authority than
even Hamilton had ever promulgated. If the silence of the Constitution
on the subject must, as Jefferson had maintained, be taken as forbidding
Congress and the Executive to charter a bank, how much more must a
similar silence forbid them to expend millions in acquiring vast new
territories beyond the borders of the Confederacy. In point of fact,
Jefferson himself believed the step he and Congress were taking to be
beyond their present powers, and would have preferred to have asked for
a Constitutional Amendment to authorize it. But he readily gave way on
this to those who represented that such a course would give the
malcontent minority their chance, and perhaps jeopardize the whole
scheme. The fact is, that "State Rights" were not to Jefferson a first
principle, but a weapon which he used for the single purpose of
resisting oligarchy. His first principle, in which he never wavered for
a moment, was that laid down in the "Declaration"--the sovereignty of
the General Will. To him Federalism was nothing and State Sovereignty
was nothing but the keeping of the commandments of the people. Judged by
this test, both his opposition to Hamilton's bank and his purchase of
the Louisiana territory were justified; for on both occasions the nation
was with him.
Jefferson's inconsistency, therefore, if inconsistency it were, brought
him little discredit. It was far otherwise with the inconsistency of the
Federalists. For they also changed sides, and of their case it may be
said that, like Milton's Satan, they "rode with darkness." The most
respectable part of their original political creed was their
nationalism, their desire for unity, and their support of a strong
central authority. Had this been really the dominant sentiment of their
connection, they could not but have supported Jefferson's policy, even
though they might not too unfairly have reproached him with stealing
their thunder. For not only was Jefferson's act a notable example of
their own theory of "broad construction" of the Constitution, but it was
perhaps a more fruitful piece of national statesmanship than the best of
Hamilton's measures, and it had a direct tendency to promote and
perpetuate that unity which the Federalists professed to value so
highly, for it gave to the States a new estate of vast extent and
incalculable potentialities, which they must perforce rule and develop
in common. But the Federalists forgot everything, even common prudence,
in their hatred of the man who had raised the people against them. To
injure him, most of them had been ready to conspire with a tainted
adventurer like Burr. They were now ready for the same object to tear up
the Union and all their principles with it. One of their ablest
spokesmen, Josiah Quincey, made a speech against the purchase, in which
he anticipated the most extreme pronouncements of the Nullifiers of 1832
and the Secessionists of 1860, declared that his country was not America
but Massachusetts, that to her alone his ultimate allegiance was due,
and that if her interests were violated by the addition of new Southern
territory in defiance of the Constitution, she would repudiate the Union
and take her stand upon her rights as an independent Sovereign State.
By such an attitude the Federalists destroyed only themselves. Some of
the wiser among them left the party on this issue, notably John Quincey
Adams, son of the second President of the United States, and himself to
be raised later, under somewhat disastrous circumstances, to the same
position. The rump that remained true, not to their principles but
rather to their vendetta, could make no headway against a virtually
unanimous nation. They merely completed and endorsed the general
judgment on their party by an act of suicide.
But the chief historical importance of the Louisiana purchase lies in
the fact that it gave a new and for long years an unlimited scope to
that irresistible movement of expansion westward which is the key to all
that age in American history. In the new lands a new kind of American
was growing up. Within a generation he was to come by his own; and a
Westerner in the chair of Washington was to revolutionize the
Commonwealth.
Of the governing conditions of the West, two stand out as of especial
importance to history.
One was the presence of unsubdued and hostile Indian tribes. Ever since
that extraordinary man, Daniel Boon (whose strange career would make an
epic for which there is no room in this book), crossed the Alleghanies a
decade before the beginning of the Revolution and made an opening for
the white race into the rich valleys of Kentucky, the history of the
western frontier of European culture had been a cycle of Indian wars.
The native race had not yet been either tamed or corrupted by
civilization. Powerful chiefs still ruled great territories as
independent potentates, and made peace and war with the white men on
equal terms. From such a condition it followed that courage and skill in
arms were in the West not merely virtues and accomplishments to be
admired, but necessities which a man must acquire or perish. The
Westerner was born a fighter, trained as a fighter, and the fighting
instinct was ever dominant in him. So also was the instinct of loyalty
to his fellow-citizens, a desperate, necessary loyalty as to comrades in
a besieged city--as, indeed, they often were.
The other condition was the product partly of natural circumstances and
partly of that wise stroke of statesmanship which had pledged the new
lands in trust to the whole Confederacy. The Westerner was
American--perhaps he was the first absolutely instinctive American. The
older States looked with much pride to a long historical record which
stretched back far beyond the Union into colonial times. The
Massachusetts man would still boast of the Pilgrim Fathers. The
Virginian still spoke lovingly of the "Old Plantation." But Kentucky and
Tennessee, Ohio and Indiana were children of the Union. They had grown
to statehood within it, and they had no memories outside it. They were
peopled from all the old States, and the pioneers who peopled them were
hammered into an intense and instinctive homogeneity by the constant
need of fighting together against savage nature and savage man. Thus,
while in the older settlements one man was conscious above all things
that he was a New Englander, and another that he was a Carolinian, the
Western pioneer was primarily conscious that he was a white man and not
a Red Indian, nay, often that he was a man and not a grizzly bear. Hence
grew up in the West that sense of national unity which was to be the
inspiration of so many celebrated Westerners of widely different types
and opinions, of Clay, of Jackson, of Stephen Douglas, and of Abraham
Lincoln.
But this was not to take place until the loyalty of the West had first
been tried by a strange and sinister temptation.
Aaron Burr had been elected Vice-President coincidently with Jefferson's
election as President; but his ambition was far from satisfied. He was
determined to make another bid for the higher place, and as a
preliminary he put himself forward as candidate for the Governorship of
New York State. It was as favourable ground as he could find to try the
issue between himself and the President, for New York had been the
centre of his activities while he was still an official Democrat, and
her favour had given him his original position in the party. But he
could not hope to succeed without the backing of those Federalist
malcontents who had nearly made him President in 1800. To conciliate
them he bent all his energies and talents, and was again on the point of
success when Hamilton, who also belonged to New York State, again
crossed his path. Hamilton urged all the Federalists whom he could
influence to have nothing to do with Burr, and, probably as a result of
his active intervention, Burr was defeated.
Burr resolved that Hamilton must be prevented from thwarting him in the
future, and he deliberately chose a simple method of removing him. He
had the advantage of being a crack shot. He forced a private quarrel on
Hamilton, challenged him to a duel, and killed him.
He can hardly have calculated the effect of his action: it shocked the
whole nation, which had not loved Hamilton, but knew him for a better
man than Burr. Duelling, indeed, was then customary among gentlemen in
the United States, as it is to-day throughout the greater part of the
civilized world; but it was very rightly felt that the machinery which
was provided for the vindication of outraged honour under extreme
provocation was never meant to enable one man, under certain forms, to
kill another merely because he found his continued existence personally
inconvenient. That was what Burr had done; and morally it was
undoubtedly murder. Throughout the whole East Burr became a man marked
with the brand of Cain. He soon perceived it, but his audacity would not
accept defeat. He turned to the West, and initiated a daring conspiracy
which, as he hoped, would make him, if not President of the United
States, at least President of something.
What Burr's plan, as his own mind conceived it, really was it is
extremely difficult to say; for he gave not only different but directly
opposite accounts to the various parties whom he endeavoured to engage
in it. To the British Ambassador, whom he approached, he represented it
as a plan for the dismemberment of the Republic from which England had
everything to gain. Louisiana was to secede, carrying the whole West
with her, and the new Confederacy was to become the ally of the Mother
Country. For the Spanish Ambassador he had another story. Spain was to
recover predominant influence in Louisiana by detaching it from the
American Republic, and recognizing it as an independent State. To the
French-Americans of Louisiana he promised complete independence of both
America and Spain. To the Westerners, whom he tried to seduce, exactly
the opposite colour was given to the scheme. It was represented as a
design to provoke a war with Spain by the invasion and conquest of
Mexico; and only if the Federal Government refused to support the
filibusters was the West to secede. Even this hint of hypothetical
secession was only whispered to those whom it might attract. To others
all thought of disunion was disclaimed; and yet another complexion was
put on the plot. The West was merely to make legitimate preparations for
the invasion of Mexico and Florida in the event of certain disputes then
pending with Spain resulting in war. It was apparently in this form that
the design was half disclosed to the most influential citizen and
commander of the militia in the newly created State of Tennessee, Andrew
Jackson, the same that we saw as a mere school-boy riding and fighting
at Hanging Rock.
Jackson had met Burr during the brief period when he was in Congress as
representative of his State. He had been entertained by him and liked
him, and when Burr visited Tennessee he was received by Jackson with all
the hospitality of the West. Jackson was just the man to be interested
in a plan for invading Mexico in the event of a Spanish war, and he
would probably not have been much shocked--for the West was headstrong,
used to free fighting, and not nice on points of international law--at
the idea of helping on a war for the purpose. But he loved the Union as
he loved his own life. Burr said nothing to him of his separatist
schemes. When later he heard rumours of them, he wrote peremptorily to
Burr for an explanation. Burr, who, to do him justice, was not the man
to shuffle or prevaricate, lied so vigorously and explicitly that
Jackson for the moment believed him. Later clearer proof came of his
treason, and close on it followed the President's proclamation
apprehending him, for Burr had been betrayed by an accomplice to
Jefferson. Jackson at once ordered out the militia to seize him, but he
had already passed westward out of his control. The Secretary for War,
who, as it happened, was a personal enemy of Jackson's, thinking his
connection with Burr might be used against him, wrote calling in
sinister tone for an account of his conduct. Jackson's reply is so
characteristic of the man that it deserves to be quoted. After saying
that there was nothing treasonable in Burr's communications to him
personally, he adds: "But, sir, when proofs showed him to be a Treator"
(spelling was never the future President's strong point), "I would cut
his throat with as much pleasure as I would cut yours on equal
testimony."
The whole conspiracy fizzled out. Burr could get no help from any of the
divergent parties he had attempted to gain. No one would fight for him.
His little band of rebels was scattered, and he himself was seized,
tried for treason, and acquitted on a technical point. But his dark,
tempestuous career was over. Though he lived to an unlovely old age, he
appears no more in history.
Jefferson was re-elected President in 1804. He was himself doubtful
about the desirability of a second tenure, but the appearance at the
moment of a series of particularly foul attacks upon his private
character made him feel that to retire would amount to something like a
plea of guilty. Perhaps it would have served his permanent fame better
if he had not accepted another term, for, owing to circumstances for
which he was only partly to blame, his second Presidency appears in
history as much less successful than his first.
Its chief problem was the maintenance of peace and neutrality during the
colossal struggle between France under Napoleon and the kings and
aristocracies of Europe who had endeavoured to crush the French
Revolution, and who now found themselves in imminent peril of being
crushed by its armed and amazing child.
Jefferson sincerely loved peace. Moreover, the sympathy for France, of
which he had at one time made no disguise, was somewhat damped by the
latest change which had taken place in the French Government. Large as
was his vision compared with most of his contemporaries, he was too much
soaked in the Republican tradition of antiquity, which was so living a
thing in that age, to see in the decision of a nation of soldiers to
have a soldier for their ruler and representative the fulfilment of
democracy and not its denial. But his desire for peace was not made
easier of fulfilment by either of the belligerent governments. Neither
thought the power of the United States to help or hinder of serious
account, and both committed constant acts of aggression against American
rights. Nor was his position any stronger in that he had made it a
charge against the Federalists that they had provided in an
unnecessarily lavish fashion for the national defence. In accordance
with his pledges he had reduced the army. His own conception of the best
defensive system for America was the building of a large number of small
but well-appointed frigates to guard her coasts and her commerce. It is
fair to him to say that when war came these frigates of his gave a good
account of themselves. Yet his own position was a highly embarrassing
one, anxious from every motive to avoid war and yet placed between an
enemy, or rather two enemies, who would yield nothing to his
expostulations, and the rising clamour, especially in the West, for the
vindication of American rights by an appeal to arms.
Jefferson attempted to meet the difficulty by a weapon which proved
altogether inadequate for the purpose intended, while it was bound to
react almost as seriously as a war could have done on the prosperity of
America. He proposed to interdict all commerce with either of the
belligerents so long as both persisted in disregarding American rights,
while promising to raise the interdict in favour of the one which first
showed a disposition to treat the United States fairly. Such a policy
steadily pursued by such an America as we see to-day would probably have
succeeded. But at that time neither combatant was dependent upon
American products for the essentials of vitality. The suppression of the
American trade might cause widespread inconvenience, and even bring
individual merchants to ruin, but it could not hit the warring nations
hard enough to compel governments struggling on either side for their
very lives in a contest which seemed to hang on a hair to surrender
anything that might look like a military advantage. On the other hand,
the Embargo, as it was called, hit the Americans themselves very hard
indeed. So great was the outcry of the commercial classes, that the
President was compelled to retrace his steps and remove the interdict.
The problem he handed over unsolved to his successor.
That successor was James Madison, another Virginian, Jefferson's
lieutenant ever since the great struggle with the Federalists and his
intimate friend from a still earlier period. His talents as a writer
were great; he did not lack practical sagacity, and his opinions were
Jefferson's almost without a single point of divergence. But he lacked
Jefferson's personal prestige, and consequently the policy followed
during his Presidency was less markedly his own than that of his great
predecessor had been.
Another turn of the war-wheel in Europe had left America with only one
antagonist in place of two. Trafalgar had destroyed, once and for all,
the power of France on the sea, and she was now powerless to injure
American interests, did she wish to do so. England, on the other hand,
was stronger for that purpose than ever, and was less restrained than
ever in the exercise of her strength. A new dispute, especially
provocative to the feelings of Americans, had arisen over the question
of the impressment of seamen. The press-gang was active in England at
the time, and pursued its victims on the high seas. It even claimed the
right to search the ships of neutrals for fugitives. Many American
vessels were violated in this fashion, and it was claimed that some of
the men thus carried off to forced service, though originally English,
had become American citizens. England was clearly in the wrong, but she
refused all redress. One Minister, sent by us to Washington, Erskine,
did indeed almost bring matters to a satisfactory settlement, but his
momentary success only made the ultimate anger of America more bitter,
for he was disowned and recalled, and, as if in deliberate insult, was
replaced by a certain Jackson who, as England's Ambassador to Denmark in
1804, had borne a prominent part in the most sensational violation of
the rights of a neutral country that the Napoleonic struggle had
produced.
There seemed no chance of peace from any conciliatory action on the part
of Great Britain. The sole chance hung on the new President's
inheritance of Jefferson's strong leaning in that direction. But Madison
was by no means for peace at any price; and indeed Jefferson himself,
from his retreat at Monticello, hailed the war, when it ultimately came,
as unmistakably just. For a long time, however, the President alone held
the nation back from war. The War Party included the Vice-President
Munroe, who had been largely instrumental in bringing about the
Louisiana purchase. But its greatest strength was in the newly populated
West, and its chief spokesman in Congress was Henry Clay of Kentucky.
This man fills so large a space in American politics for a full
generation that some attempt must be made to give a picture of him. Yet
a just account of his character is not easy to give. It would be simple
enough to offer a superficial description, favourable or hostile, but
not one that would account for all his actions. Perhaps the best
analysis would begin by showing him as half the aboriginal Westerner and
half the Washington politician. In many ways he was very Western. He had
a Westerner's pugnacity, and at the same time a Westerner's geniality
and capacity for comradeship with men. He had to the last a Westerner's
private tastes--especially a taste for gambling--and a Westerner's
readiness to fight duels. Above all, from the time that he entered
Congress as the fiercest of the "war hawks" who clamoured for vengeance
on England, to the time when, an old and broken man, he expended the
last of his enormous physical energy in an attempt to bridge the
widening gulf between North and South, he showed through many grievous
faults and errors that intense national feeling and that passion for the
Union which were growing so vigorously in the fertile soil beyond the
Alleghanies. But he was a Western shoot early engrafted on the political
society of Washington--the most political of all cities, for it is a
political capital and nothing else. He entered Congress young and found
there exactly the atmosphere that suited his tastes and temperament. He
was as much the perfect parliamentarian as Gladstone. For how much his
tact and instinct for the tone of the political assembly in which he
moved counted may be guessed from this fact: that while there is no
speech of his that has come down to us that one could place for a
moment beside some of extant contemporary speeches of Webster and
Calhoun, yet it is unquestionable that he was considered fully a match
for either Webster or Calhoun in debate, and in fact attained an
ascendancy over Congress which neither of those great orators ever
possessed. At the management of the minds of men with whom he was
actually in contact he was unrivalled. No man was so skilful in
harmonizing apparently irreconcilable differences and choosing the exact
line of policy which opposing factions could agree to support. Three
times he rode what seemed the most devastating political storms, and
three times he imposed a peace. But with the strength of a great
parliamentarian he had much of the weakness that goes with it. He
thought too much as a professional; and in his own skilled work of
matching measures, arranging parties and moving politicians about like
pawns, he came more and more to forget the silent drive of the popular
will. All this, however, belongs to a later stage of Clay's development.
At the moment, we have to deal with him as the ablest of those who were
bent upon compelling the President to war.
Between Clay and the British Government Madison's hand was forced, and
war was declared. In America there were widespread rejoicings and high
hopes of the conquest of Canada and the final expulsion of England from
the New World. Yet the war, though on the whole justly entered upon, and
though popular with the greater part of the country, was not national in
the fullest sense. It did not unite, rather it dangerously divided, the
Federation, and that, unfortunately, on geographical lines. New England
from the first was against it, partly because most of her citizens
sympathized with Great Britain in her struggle with Napoleon, and partly
because her mercantile prosperity was certain to be hard hit, and might
easily be ruined by a war with the greatest of naval powers. When,
immediately after the declaration of war, in 1812, Madison was put
forward as Presidential candidate for a second term, the contest showed
sharply the line of demarcation. North-east of the Hudson he did not
receive a vote.
The war opened prosperously for the Republic, with the destruction by
Commander Perry of the British fleet on Lake Ontario--an incident which
still is held in glorious memory by the American Navy and the American
people. Following on this notable success, an invasion of Canada was
attempted; but here Fortune changed sides. The invasion was a complete
failure, the American army was beaten, forced to fall back, and
attacked, in its turn, upon American soil. Instead of American troops
occupying Quebec, English troops occupied a great part of Ohio.
Meanwhile, Jefferson's frigates were showing their metal. In many duels
with English cruisers they had the advantage, though we in this country
naturally hear most--indeed, it is almost the only incident of this war
of which we ever do hear--of one of the cases in which victory went the
other way--the famous fight between the _Shannon_ and the _Chesapeake_.
On the whole, the balance of such warfare leant in favour of the
American sea-captains. But it was not by such warfare that the issue
could be settled. England, summoning what strength she could spare from
her desperate struggle with the French Emperor, sent an adequate fleet
to convoy a formidable army to the American coast. It landed without
serious opposition at the mouth of the Chesapeake, and marched straight
on the national capital, which the Government was forced to abandon.
No Englishman can write without shame of what followed. All the public
buildings of Washington were deliberately burnt. For this outrage the
Home Government was solely responsible. The general in command received
direct and specific orders, which he obeyed unwillingly. No pretence of
military necessity, or even of military advantage, can be pleaded. The
act, besides being a gross violation of the law of nations, was an
exhibition of sheer brutal spite, such as civilized war seldom witnessed
until Prussia took a hand in it. It had its reward. It burnt deep into
the soul of America; and from that incident far more than from anything
that happened in the War of Independence dates that ineradicable hatred
of England which was for generations almost synonymous with patriotism
in most Americans, and which almost to the hour of President Wilson's
intervention made many in that country doubt whether, even as against
Prussia, England could really be the champion of justice and humanity.
Things never looked blacker for the Republic than in those hours when
the English troops held what was left of Washington. Troubles came
thicker and thicker upon her. The Creek Nation, the most powerful of the
independent Indian tribes, instigated partly by English agents, partly
by the mysterious native prophet Tecumseh, suddenly descended with fire
and tomahawk on the scattered settlements of the South-West, while at
the same time a British fleet appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, apparently
meditating either an attack on New Orleans or an invasion through the
Spanish territory of Western Florida, and in that darkest hour when it
seemed that only the utmost exertions of every American could save the
United States from disaster, treason threatened to detach an important
section of the Federation from its allegiance.
The discontent of New England is intelligible enough. No part of the
Union had suffered so terribly from the war, and the suffering was the
bitterer for being incurred in a contest which was none of her making,
which she had desired to avoid, and which had been forced on her by
other sections which had suffered far less. Her commerce, by which she
largely lived, had been swept from the seas. Her people, deeply
distressed, demanded an immediate peace. Taking ground as discontented
sections, North and South, always did before 1864, on the doctrine of
State Sovereignty, one at least, and that the greatest of the New
England States, began a movement which seemed to point straight to the
dilemma of surrender to the foreigner or secession and dismemberment
from within.
Massachusetts invited representatives of her sister States to a
Convention at Hartford. The Convention was to be consultative, but its
direct and avowed aim was to force the c
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