[Transcriber's Notes]

Text has been moved to avoid fragmentation of sentences and paragraphs.

The other five texts in this series were obtained from the 1912 edition
of original books. Volume 3 was missing from the set.
This text, Volume 3, is derived from a PDF image file of the 1896 edition
on the Internet Archive at
http://www.archive.org/details/histusearliest03andrrich

[End Transcriber's Notes]



HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES



The First Gun Fired from Fort Sumter



HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

FROM THE EARLIEST DISCOVERY
OF AMERICA TO THE PRESENT DAY

BY

E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
PRESIDENT OF BROWN UNIVERSITY


WITH 400 ILLUSTRATION AND MAPS


VOLUME III


NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1896



COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place. New York



CONTENTS

PERIOD II

WHIGS AND DEMOCRATS TILL THE
DOMINANCE OF THE SLAVERY CONTROVERSY

1814--1840


CHAPTER I. THE WHIG PARTY AND ITS MISSION.

The Word "Whig."
Republican Prestige.
Schism.
Adams's Election.
Five Doctrines of Whiggism.
I. Broad Construction of the Constitution.
II. The Bank.
Death of Old and Birth of New.
Opposition by Jackson.
III. The Tariff of 1816.
Its Object.
IV. Land.
Whig versus Democratic Policy.
V. Internal Improvements
Rivers and Harbors.
Need of Better Inland Communication.
Contention between the Parties.
Whig Characteristics.
Adams.
Webster.
His Political Attitude.
Clay.
His Power, as an Orator.
His Duel with Randolph.
His Wit.
His Influence.


CHAPTER II. FLORIDA AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE.

Florida's Disputed Boundary.
West Florida Occupied.
Jackson Seizes East Florida.
Puts to Death Ambrister and Arbuthnot.
His Excuse.
Defended by Adams.
Sale of Florida.
Revolt of Spanish America.
Monroe's Declaration.
Its Origin.


CHAPTER III. THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE.

Missouri Wishes Statehood.
Early History of Slavery.
Hostility to it.
First Abolitionist Societies.
Ordinance of 1787.
Slavery in the North.
In the South.
Pleas for its Existence.
Missouri Compromise.
Pro-slavery Arguments.
The Policy Men.
Anti-slavery Opinions.
Difficulties of the Case.
The Anti-slavery Side Ignores these.


CHAPTER IV. THE GREAT NULLIFICATION.

Rise of Tariff Rates after 1816.
Relations of Parties and Sections to the Tariff.
Minimum Principle.
Tariff of Abominations Adopted.
Harmful to the South.
Nullification Project.
Calhoun's Life and Pet Political Theory.
South Carolina Recedes.
Compromise Tariff.
State Rights and Central Government.
Webster's Plea.


CHAPTER V. MINOR PUBLIC QUESTIONS OF JACKSON'S "REIGN."

Jackson's Life.
Mistaken Ideas.
Civil Service Reform.
Perfecting of Party
Organization in the Country.
Jackson and the United States Bank.
His Popularity.
Revival of West Indian Trade.
French Spoliation Claims.
Paid.
Our Gold and Silver Coinage.
Gold Bill.
Increased Circulation of Gold.
Specie Circular.


CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST WHIG TRIUMPH.

Election of Harrison in 1840.
Causes.
Jackson's Violence.
Sub-treasury Policy.
Panic of 1837.
Decrease of Revenue.
Whig Opposition to Slavery.
Seminole War.
Amistad Case.
Texan Question.
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too."


CHAPTER VII. LIFE AND MANNERS IN THE FOURTH DECADE.

Population and Area.
The West.
The East.
An American Literature.
Newspaper
Enterprise, Mails, Eleemosynary Institutions.
American Character.
Temperance Reform.
The Land of the Free.
Religion.
Anti-masonic Movement.
Banking Craze.
Moon Hoax.
Party Spirit.
Jackson as a Knight Errant.
His Self-will.
Enmity between Adams and Jackson.
Costumes.


CHAPTER VIII. INDUSTRIAL ADVANCE BY 1840.

F. C. Lowell and his Waltham Power-loom.
Growth of Factory System.
New Corporation Laws.
Gas, Coal, and Other Industries.
The Same Continued.
The National Road.
Stages and Canals.
Ocean Lines.
Beginning of Railroads.
Opposition.
First Locomotive.
Multiplication of Railroads.


PERIOD III

THE YEARS OF SLAVERY CONTROVERSY

1840-1860

CHAPTER I. SLAVERY AFTER THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE.

Cotton and Slavery.
Evils of Slavery: Social, Economic.
Slave Insurrections.
Turner's Rebellion.
Abolition in Virginia.
Black Laws.
Lull in Anti-slavery
Agitation.
Colonization Society.
Fugitive Slave Laws.
Prigg's Case.
Personal Liberty
Laws in the North.
Kidnapping Expeditions.
Domestic Slave-trade.
Non-emancipation Laws.
Business Relations between North and South.


CHAPTER II. "IMMEDIATE ABOLITION."

Renewed Hostility to Slavery.
Lundy.
Garrison.
Affiliations of this Movement.
The New England Anti-slave Society.
Significance, Purpose, Work.
Methods of Abolitionists.
Southern Opposition.
Northern.
Anti-abolitionist Riots at the North.
Murder of Lovejoy.
Outrages against Northern Blacks.
Colored Schools Closed.
Schism among the Abolitionists.
The Liberty Party.
Ultra-abolitionists' Unreason.
Why Abolitionism Spread.
Ambiguity of the Constitution.
Seizure of Black Seamen.
Grievances on both Sides.


CHAPTER III. THE MEXICAN WAR.

Texas Declares her Independence.
Battle of San Jacinto.
The Democracy Favors
Annexation.
Calhoun's Purpose.
Opposition of Clay and the Whigs.
Texas Admitted to the Union.
Causes of the War.
The Nueces vs. the Rio Grande.
Preliminary Operations.
Battle of Palo Alto.
Declaration of War.
Monterey Captured.
Santa Anna again President.
Buena Vista.
Taylor's Victory.
Scott Appointed to Chief Command.
Capture of Vera Cruz.
Cerro Gordo.
Jalapa.
Re-enforced by Pierce.
On to the City of Mexico.
Contreras.
Churubusco.
Molino del Rey.
Storming of Chapultepec.
Capture of the Capital.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Its Conditions.
The Oregon Question.


CHAPTER IV. CALIFORNIA AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1850.

Invasion of New Mexico.
Exploration and Seizure of California.
Discovery of Gold.
Resulting Excitement.
Increase of Population.
Gold Yield.
Early Law and Government.
Slavery's Victory.
The Wilmot Proviso.
Taylor President.
Application by California for Admission to the Union.
Clay's Omnibus Bill.
Webster Superseded by Sumner.
Passage of the Omnibus Compromise.
California a State.
Enlargement of Texas.
New Fugitive Slave Law.
Revival of Abolitionism.
Underground Railroad.
Rendition of Anthony Burns.
Other Cases.


CHAPTER V. THE FIGHT FOR KANSAS.

Plot against the Missouri Compromise.
Pierce's Election.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill.
Abrogation of the Missouri Compromise.
Squatter Sovereignty.
Anti-slavery Emigration to Kansas.
Political Jobbery by the Slavocracy.
Topeka Convention.
Kansas Riots.
Lecompton Constitution.
Opposed by Free-State Men.
Kansas Admitted to the Union.
Assault upon Sumner.
Southern Repudiation of the Douglas Theory.
Dred Scott Decision.
Startling Assumption of the Supreme Court.
Effect.
Counter-theory.


CHAPTER VI. SLAVERY AND THE OLD PARTIES.

Democracy and Whiggism.
Ambiguous Attitude of the Latter toward Slavery.
The Creole Case.
Giddings's Resolutions.
Quincy Adams as an Abolitionist.
The First Gag Law.
Adams's Opposition.
The Second and Third.
Their Repeal.
Pro-slavery Whigs.
Submission to Slavocracy.
Its Insolent Demands.
Death of Whiggism.
Americanism.
The Know-Nothings.
Revolt from the Democracy at the North.


CHAPTER VII. THE CRISIS.

Consolidation of Anti-slavery Men.
Worse Black Laws.
Schemes for Foreign Conquest.
Lopez's and Walker's Expedition.
Ostend Manifesto.
Supremacy of Slavery.
Rise of Free-soilers.
Incipient Republicanism.
Republican Doctrine.
John Brown's Raid.
Schism between the Northern and the Southern Democrats.
Nomination of Douglas.
Breckenridge and Lane.
Bell and Everett.
Lincoln and Hamlin.
Lincoln's Popularity.
His Election to the Presidency.


CHAPTER VIII. MATERIAL PROGRESS

Population and Economic Prosperity.
Growth of the West.
Indian Outbreaks.
Improvements farther East.
Canals and Railroads.
The Steam Horse in the West.
Morse's Telegraph.
Ocean Cables.
Minor Inventions.
Petroleum.
Financial Crisis of 1857.


PERIOD IV

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

1860-1868

CHAPTER I. CAUSES OF THE WAR.

An "Irrepressible Conflict."
Growth of North.
Influence of Missouri Compromise Repeal.
Slavery as Viewed by the South.
Stephens.
Anti-Democratic Habits of Thought.
Compact Theory of the Union.
State Consciousness, South.
Argument for the Calhoun Theory.
Secession not Justifiable by this.
Moderates and Fire-eaters.
Northern Grievances.
Do not Excuse Secession.
Lincoln's Election.
Patriotic and Philanthropic Considerations Ignored.
Prudence also.
Resources of South and of North.


CHAPTER II. SECESSION

Threats of Secession before 1860.
By New England.
By the South in 1856.
Governor Wise.
The 1860 Campaign.
Attitude of South Carolina.
Of the Gulf States.
Georgia, North Carolina, Louisiana.
Election of Lincoln.
South Carolina will Secede.
Judge Magrath.
The Palmetto State Goes.
Enthusiasm.
The State Plays Nation.
Effect upon Other States.
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.
and Texas Follow.
Strong Union Spirit Still.
Vain.
Georgia and Secession.
The Question in Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee,
  Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina.
Seizure of United States Property.
Floyd's Theft.
Fort Moultrie Evacuated for Sumter.
Fort Pickens.
New Orleans Mint.
Twiggs's Surrender.
Theory of Seceding States as to Property Seized.
Southern Confederacy.
Davis President.
His History.
Inaugural Address.
Powers.
Confederate Government and Constitution.
Slavery.
State Sovereignty.
Tariff.
Good Features.
Bright Prospects of the New Power.


CHAPTER III. THE NORTH IN THE WINTER OF 1860-61.

Apathy.
Disbelief in South's Seriousness.
Divided Opinion.
Suggestions toward Compromise.
Anti-coercion.
Convention at Albany.
Mayor Wood of New York.
Buchanan's Vacillation.
Treason all about Him.
Star of the West Fired on.
Inaction of Congress.
Crittenden's Compromise Lost.
Washington Peace Congress.
Vain.
Earnestness of South.
Lincoln Inaugurated.
His Address.
How Received.
His Difficult Task.
Plight of Army, Navy, Treasury.
Sumter Fired on.
Defended.
Evacuated.
Effect at North.
War Spirit.
75,000 Volunteers.
The Sixth Massachusetts in Baltimore.
Washington in Danger.
General Scott's Measures.
March of the Massachusetts Eighth and the New York Seventh.
Their Arrival in Washington.


CHAPTER IV. WAR BEGUN

Both Sides Expect a Brief Struggle.
South's Advantages.
Call for Three Years' Men.
Butler in Baltimore.
Maryland Saved to the Union.
Alexandria and Arlington
Heights Occupied.
Ellsworth's Death.
Each Side Concentrates Armies in Virginia.
Fight at Big Bethel.
At Vienna.
The Struggle in Missouri.
Lyon and Price.
Battle of Wilson's Creek.
Lyon's Death.
Fremont, Hunter, and Halleck in Missouri.
The Contest in Kentucky.
The State becomes Unionist.
In West Virginia.
Lee and McClellan.
Brilliant Campaign of the Latter.
West Virginia Made a State.
Beauregard at Manassas.
Patterson's Advance.
Harper's Ferry Taken.
"On to Richmond."
Battle of Bull Run.
Union Defeat and Retreat.
Losses.
Comments.
Depression at the North, followed by New Resolution.
McClellan.
Army of Potomac Organized.
The Capital Safe.
Affair of Ball's Bluff.
The South Hopeful.
And with Reason.



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


THE FIRST GUN FIRED FROM FORT SUMTER.

WEBSTER'S HOME AT MARSHFIELD, MASS.

DANIEL WEBSTER.
(From a picture by Healy at the State Department, Washington).

THE HOUSE IN WHICH HENRY CLAY WAS BORN.

THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE SLASHES.

HENRY CLAY. (From a photograph by Rockwood of an old daguerreotype).

JOHN RANDOLPH.
(From a picture by Jarvis in 1811, at the New York Historical Society).

JAMES MONROE.
(From a painting by Gilbert Stuart--now the property of T. Jefferson
Coolidge).

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. (From a picture by Gilbert Stuart).

JOHN C. CALHOUN. (From a picture by King at the Corcoran Art Gallery).

CALHOUN'S LIBRARY AND OFFICE.

ANDREW JACKSON (From a photograph by Brady).

ROGER B. TANEY.

MARTIN VAN BUREN. (From a photograph by Brady).

GENERAL WILLIAM J. WORTH.

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.
(From a copy at the Corcoran Art Gallery of a painting by Beard in 1840).

JOHN TYLER. (From a photograph by Brady).

A PONY EXPRESS.

THURLOW WEED. (From an unpublished photograph by Disderi,
Paris, in 1861. In the possession of Thurlow Weed Barnes).

FROM AN OLD TIME-TABLE.
  (Furnished by the ABC Pathfinder Railway Guide).

TRIAL BETWEEN PETER COOPER'S LOCOMOTIVE "TOM THUMB" AND ONE OF
STOCKTON'S AND STOKES' HORSE CARS. (From "History of the First
Locomotives in America").

PETER COOPER'S LOCOMOTIVE.

OBVERSE AND REVERSE OF A TICKET USED IN 1838 ON THE
NEW YORK & HARLEM RAILROAD.

BALTIMORE & OHIO RAILROAD, 1830.

OLD BOSTON & WORCESTER RAILWAY TICKET (ABOUT  1837).

THE "SOUTH CAROLINA," 1831, AND PLAN OF ITS RUNNING GEAR.

BOSTON & WORCESTER RAILROAD, 1835.

THE DISCOVERY OF NAT TURNER.

JOHN G. WHITTIER.

WM. LLOYD GARRISON.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

FACSIMILE OF HEADING OF THE "LIBERATOR."

GENERAL SAM. HOUSTON.

GENERAL SANTA ANNA.

JAMES K. POLK. (After a photograph by Brady).

GENERAL WINFIELD SCOTT.

THE PLAZA OF THE CITY OF MEXICO.

ZACHARY TAYLOR. (After a photograph by Brady).

THE SITE OF SAN FRANCISCO IN 1848.

SUTTER'S MILL, CALIFORNIA, WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST DISCOVERED.

MILLARD FILLMORE.
(From a painting by Carpenter in 1853. at the City Hall, New York).

THE RENDITION OF ANTHONY BURNS IN BOSTON.

FRANKLIN PIERCE.
(From a painting by Healy, in 1852, at the Corcoran Art Gallery).

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.

CHARLES SUMNER.

THOMAS H. BENTON.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. (After a rare photograph in the possession of Noah
Brooks. Only five copies of this photograph were printed).

JOHN BROWN.

WILLIAM H. SEWARD. (From a photograph by Brady).

ELIAS HOWE.

THE VANDALIA. THE PIONEER PROPELLER ON THE LAKES.

OLD STONE TOWERS OF THE NIAGARA SUSPENSION BRIDGE.

THE NEW IRON TOWERS OF THE NIAGARA BRIDGE.

BIRTHPLACE OF S. F. B. MORSE, AT CHARLESTOWN, MASS. BUILT 1775.

S. F. B. MORSE.

THE FIRST TELEGRAPHIC INSTRUMENT, AS EXHIBITED IN 1837 BY MORSE.


CALENDERS HEATED INTERNALLY BY STEAM, FOR SPREADING INDIA RUBBER INTO
SHEETS OR UPON CLOTH, CALLED THE "CHAFFEE MACHINE."

THE GREAT EASTERN LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE.

SOUNDING MACHINE USED BY A CABLE EXPEDITION.

CYRUS W. FIELD.

PAYING OUT CABLE GEAR. FROM CHART HOUSE.

SHORE END OF CABLE--EXACT SIZE.

BARNACLES ON CABLE.

JAMES BUCHANAN. (From a photograph by Brady).

STREET BANNER IN CHARLESTON.

MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON.

MAJOR ANDERSON REMOVING HIS FORCES FROM FORT MOULTRIE TO FORT SUMTER,
DECEMBER 26, 1861.

JEFFERSON DAVIS.

ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

SCENE OF THE FIRST BLOODSHED, AT BALTIMORE.

CAPTAIN NATHANIEL LYON.

GENERAL JOHN C. FREMONT.

GENERAL IRVIN McDOWELL.

GENERAL SAMUEL P. HEINTZELMAN.

GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON.

GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN.



LIST OF MAPS

THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE ADMISSION OF ARKANSAS, 1836.

PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF BUENA VISTA, MORNING 23D FEBRUARY, 1847.

ROUTE OF THE SIXTH MASSACHUSETTS TROOPS THROUGH BALTIMORE.

THE ROUTES OF APPROACH TO WASHINGTON.

THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY.

BULL RUN--THE FIELD OF STRATEGY.

BULL RUN--BATTLE OF THE FORENOON.

BULL RUN--BATTLE OF THE AFTERNOON.



PERIOD II.

WHIGS AND DEMOCRATS TILL THE DOMINANCE OF THE SLAVERY CONTROVERSY.

1814-1840

CHAPTER I.

THE WHIG PARTY AND ITS MISSION

[1820]

The term "whig" is of Scotch origin. During the bloody conflict of the
Covenanters with Charles II. nearly all the country people of Scotland
sided against the king. As these peasants drove into Edinburgh to
market, they were observed to make great use of the word "whiggam" in
talking to their horses. Abbreviated to "whig," it speedily became, and
has in England and Scotland ever since remained, a name for the
opponents of royal power. It was so employed in America in our
Revolutionary days. Sinking out of hearing after Independence, it
reappeared for fresh use when schism came in the overgrown Democratic
Party.

The republican predominance after 1800, so complete, bidding so fair to
be permanent, drew all the more fickle Federalists speedily to that
side. Since it was evident that the new party was quite as national in
spirit as the ruling element of the old, the Adams Federalists, those
most patriotic, least swayed in their politics by commercial motives,
including Marshall, the War Federalists, and the recruits enlisted at
the South during Adams's administration, also went over, in sympathy if
not in name, to Republicanism. The fortunate issue of the war silenced
every carper, and the ten years following have been well named the "era
of good feeling."

But though for long very harmonious, yet, so soon as Federalists began
swelling their ranks, the Republicans ceased to be a strictly
homogeneous party. Incipient schism appeared by 1812, at once announced
and widened by the creation of the protective system and the new United
States Bank in 1816, and the attempted launching of an internal
improvements regime in 1821, all three the plain marks of federalist
survival, however men might shun that name. Republicans like Clay,
Calhoun in his early years, and Quincy Adams, while somewhat more
obsequious to the people, as to political theory differed from old
Federalists in little but name. The same is true of Clinton, candidate
against Madison for the Presidency in 1812, and of many who supported
him.

[1825]

But to drive home fatally the wedge between "democratic" and "national"
Republicans, required Jackson's quarrel with Adams and Clay in 1825,
when, the election being thrown into the House, although Jackson had
ninety-nine electoral votes to Adams's eighty-four, Crawford's
forty-one, and Clay's thirty-seven, Clay's supporters, by a "corrupt
bargain," as Old Hickory alleged, voted for Adams and made him
President. Hickory's idea--an untenable one--was that the House was
bound to elect according to the tenor of the popular and the electoral
vote. After all this, however, so potent the charm of the old party, the
avowal of a purpose to build up a new one did not work well, Clay
polling in 1832 hardly half the electoral vote of Adams in 1828. This
democratic gain was partly owing, it is true, to Jackson's popularity,
to the belief that he had been wronged in 1825, and to the widening of
the franchise which had long been going on in the nation. Calhoun's
election as Vice-President in 1828, by a large majority, shows that
party crystallization was then far from complete. From about 1834, the
new political body thus gradually evolved was regularly called the
Whigs, though the name had been heard ever since 1825.

[1830-1833]

The doctrines characteristic of Whiggism were chiefly five:

I. Broad Construction of the Constitution.

This has been sufficiently explained in the chapter on Federalism and
Anti-Federalism, and need not be dwelt upon. The whig attitude upon it
appears in all that follows.

II. The Bank.

The First United States Bank had perished by the expiration of its
charter in 1811. It had been very useful, indeed almost indispensable,
in managing the national finances, and its decease, with the consequent
financial disorder, was a most terrible drawback in the war. Recharter
was, however, by a very small majority, refused. The evils flowing from
this perverse step manifesting themselves day by day, a new Bank of the
United States, modelled closely after the first, was chartered on April
10, 1816, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster being its chief champions.
Republican opponents, Madison among them, were brought around by the
plea that war had proved a national bank a necessary and hence a
constitutional helper of the Government in its appointed work.

In the management of this second bank there were disorder and
dishonesty, which greatly limited its usefulness. This, notwithstanding,
was considerable. The credit of the nation was restored and its treasury
resumed specie payments. But confidence in the institution was shaken.
We shall see how it met with President Jackson's opposition on every
possible occasion. In 1832 he vetoed a bill for the renewal of its
charter, to expire in 1836, and in 1833 caused all the Government's
deposits in it, amounting to ten million dollars, to be removed. These
blows were fatal to the bank, though it secured a charter from
Pennsylvania and existed, languishing, till 1839.

III. The Tariff.

Until the War of 1812 the main purpose of our tariff policy had been
revenue, with protection only as an incident. During the war
manufacturing became largely developed, partly through our own embargo,
partly through the armed hostilities. Manufacture had grown to be an
extensive interest, comparing in importance with agriculture and
commerce. Therefore, in the new tariff of 1816, the old relation was
reversed, protection being made the main aim and revenue the incident.
It is curious to note that this first protective tariff was championed
and passed by the Republicans and bitterly opposed by the Federalists
and incipient Whigs. Webster argued and inveighed vehemently against it,
appealing to the curse of commercial restriction and of governmental
interference with trade, and to the low character of manufacturing
populations.

But very soon the tables were turned: the Whigs became the high-tariff
party, the Democrats more and more opposing this policy in favor of a
low or a revenue tariff. It should be marked that even now the idea of
protection in its modern form was not the only one which went to make a
high tariff popular. There were, besides, the wish to be prepared for
war by the home production of war material, and also the spirit of
commercial retortion, paying back in her own coin England's burdensome
tax upon our exports to her shores.

IV. Land.

What may not improperly be styled the whig land policy sprung from the
whig sentiment for large customs duties. Cheap public lands, offering
each poor man a home for the taking, constantly tended to neutralize the
effect of duties, by raising wages in the manufacturing sections, people
needing a goodly bribe to enter mills in the East when an abundant
living was theirs without money and without price on removing west. As a
rule, therefore, though this question did not divide the two parties so
crisply as the others, the Whigs opposed the free sale of government
land, while the Democrats favored that policy. In spite of this,
however, eastern people who moved westward--and they constituted the
West's main population--quite commonly retained their whig politics even
upon the tariff question itself.

V. Internal Improvements.

It has always been admitted that Congress may lay taxes to build and
improve light-houses, public docks, and all such properties whereof the
United States is to hold the title. The general improvement of harbors,
on the other hand, the Constitution meant to leave to the States,
allowing each to cover the expense by levying tonnage duties. The
practice for years corresponded with this. The inland commonwealths,
however, as they were admitted, justly regarded this unfair unless
offset by Government's aid to them in the construction of roads, canals,
and river ways.


Webster's Home at Marshfield. Mass.


The War of 1812 revealed the need of better means for direct
communication with the remote sections of the Union. Transportation to
Detroit had cost fifty cents per pound of ammunition, sixty dollars per
barrel of flour. All admitted that improved internal routes were
necessary. The question was whether the general Government had a right
to construct them without amendment to the Constitution.

The Whigs, like the old Federalists, affirmed such right, appealing to
Congress's power to establish post-roads, wage war, supervise
inter-state trade, and conserve the common defence and general welfare.
As a rule, the Democrats, being strict constructionists, denied such
right. Some of them justified outlay upon national rivers and commercial
harbors under the congressional power of raising revenue and regulating
commerce. Others conceded the rightfulness of subsidies to States even
for bettering inland routes. Treasury surplus at times, and the many
appropriations which, by common consent, had been made under Monroe and
later for the old National Road, encouraged the whig contention; but the
whig policy had never met general approval down to the time when the
whole question was taken out of politics by the rise of the railroad
system after 1832. The National Road, meantime, extending across Ohio
and Indiana on its way to St. Louis, was made over in 1830 to the States
through which it passed.


Daniel Webster. From a picture by Healy at the State Department,
Washington.


The Whig Party deserves great praise as the especial repository, through
several decades, of the spirit of nationality in our country. It
cherished this, and with the utmost boldness proclaimed doctrines
springing from it, at a time when the Democracy, for no other reason
than that it had begun as a state rights party, foolishly combated
these. Yet Whiggism was mightier in theories than in deeds, in political
cunning than in statesmanship. It was far too fearful, on the whole,
lest the country should not be sufficiently governed. To secure power it
allied itself now with the Anti-Masons, strong after 1826 in New
England, New York, and Pennsylvania; and again with the Nullifiers of
South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, led by Calhoun, Troup, and
White. It did the latter by making Tyler, an out-and-out Nullifier, its
Vice-President in 1840.

A leading Whig during nearly all his political career was John Quincy
Adams, one of the ablest, most patriotic, and most successful presidents
this country has ever had. He possessed a thorough education, mainly
acquired abroad, where, sojourning with his distinguished father, he had
enjoyed while still a youth better opportunities for diplomatic training
than many of our diplomatists have known in a lifetime. He went to the
United States Senate in 1803 as a Federalist. Disgusted with that party,
he turned Republican, losing his place. From 1806 to 1809 he was
professor in Harvard College. In the latter year Madison sent him
Minister to St. Petersburg. He was commissioner at Ghent, then Minister
to England, then Monroe's Secretary of State, then President.


The House in which Henry Clay was Born.


But Mr. Adams's best work was done in the House of Representatives after
he was elected to that body in 1830. He sat in the House until his
death, in 1848--its acknowledged leader in ability, in activity, and in
debate. Friend and foe hailed him as the "Old Man Eloquent," nor were
any there anxious to be pitted against him. He spoke upon almost every
great national question, each time displaying general knowledge; legal
lore, and keenness of analysis surpassed by no American of his or any
age.

Webster was, however, the great orator of the party. Reared upon a farm
and educated at Dartmouth College, he went to Congress from New
Hampshire as a Federalist in 1813. Removing to Boston, he soon entered
Congress from Massachusetts, first as representative, then as senator,
and from 1827 was in the Senate almost continuously till 1850. He was
Secretary of State under Harrison and Tyler, and again in the
Taylor-Fillmore cabinet from 1850.



The School-house of the Slashes.


As an orator Webster had no peer in his time, nor have the years since
evoked his peer. He was an influential party leader, and repeatedly
thought of for President, though too prominent ever to be nominated. On
two momentous questions, the tariff and slavery, he vacillated, his
dubious action concerning the latter costing him his popularity in New
England.



Henry Clay. From a photograph by Rockwood of an old daguerreotype.


Yet in many respects the most interesting figure in the party was Henry
Clay. He was born amid the swamps of Hanover County, Va., and had grown
up in most adverse surroundings. His father, a Baptist clergyman, died
while he was an infant, leaving him destitute. In "The Slashes," as the

James Monroe. From a painting by Gilbert Stuart--now the property of T.
Jefferson Coolidge.


[1818]

December, 1817, Jackson was placed in command in Georgia. To clear out
the filibusterers, the chief source of the Indians' discontent ever
since before the Creek War, the hero of New Orleans, mistakenly
supposing himself to be fortified by his Government's concurrence,
boldly took forcible possession of all East Florida. Ambrister and
Arbuthnot, two officious English subjects found there, he put to death.

This procedure was quite characteristic of Old Hickory. He acted upon
the theory that by the law of nations any citizen of one land making war
upon another land, the two being at peace, becomes an outlaw.
International law has no such doctrine, and most likely the maxim
occurred to Jackson rather as an excuse after the act than in the way of
forethought. Nor was it ever proved that the two victims were guilty as
Jackson alleged. With him this probably made little difference. Having
undertaken to quiet the Floridian outbreaks he was determined to
accomplish his end, whatever the consequences of some of his means.

With the country the New Orleans victor, who had now dared to hang a
British subject, was ten times a hero, but the deed confused and
troubled Monroe's cabinet not a little. Calhoun wished General Jackson
censured, while all his cabinet colleagues disapproved his high-handed
acts and stood ready to disavow them with reparation. On this occasion
Jackson owed much to one whom he subsequently hated and denounced, viz.,
Quincy Adams, by whose bold and acute defence of his doubtful doings,
managed with a fineness of argument and diplomacy which no then American
but Adams could command, he was formally vindicated before both his own
Government and the Governments of England and Spain.

The posts seized had of course to be given up, yet our bold invasion had
rendered Spain willing at last to sell Florida, while Great Britain,
wishing our countenance in her opposition to the anti-progressive,
misnamed Holy Alliance of continental monarchs, concurred. Spain after
all got the better of the bargain, as we surrendered all claim to Texas,
which the Louisiana purchase had really made ours.

[1823]

The Florida imbroglio nursed to its first public utterance a sentiment
which has ever since been spontaneously taken as a principle of American
public policy, almost as if it were a part of our law itself. Spain's
American dependencies had been sensible enough to avail themselves of
that land's distraction in Napoleon's time, to set up as states on their
own account. She naturally wanted them back. Ferdinand VII. withheld
till 1820 his signature of the treaty ceding Florida, in order to
prevent--which, after all, it did not--our recognition of these
revolted provinces as independent nations. Backed by the powerful
Austrian minister, Metternich, and by the Holy Alliance, France, having
aided Ferdinand to suppress at home the liberal rebellion of 1820-23,
began to moot plans for subduing the new Spanish-American States. Great
Britain opposed this, out of motives partly commercial, partly
philanthropic, partly relating to international law, yet was unwilling
so early to recognize the independence of those nations as the United
States had done.

Assured at least of England's moral support, President Monroe in his
message of December, 1823, declared that we should consider any attempt
on the part of the allied monarchs "to extend their system to any
portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety," and
any interposition by them to oppress the young republics or to control
their destiny, "as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward
the United States." This, in kernel, is the first part of Monroe's
doctrine.

The second part added: "The American continents, by the free and
independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by
any European powers." The meaning of this was that the mere hap of first
occupancy on the continent by the citizens of any country would not any
longer be recognized by us as giving that country a title to the spot
occupied.

These important doctrines--for though akin in principle they are really
two--were no sudden creation of individual thought, but the result
rather of slow processes in the public mind. Germs of the first are
traceable to Washington; express statements of both, yet not essentially
detracting from Monroe's originality, to Jefferson. Both were put in
form by Quincy Adams, Monroe's Secretary of State. Especially Monroe's,
we believe, is the second, a resolution to which Russia's advance down
the Pacific coast, and more still the recent vexations from the
proximity of Spain in Florida, had pushed him.



CHAPTER III.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

Louisiana having become a State in 1812, that portion of the purchase
north of the thirty-third degree took the name of the Missouri
Territory. St. Louis was its centre of population and of influence.

[1818]

Being found in this extensive domain at the purchase, slavery had never
been hindered in its growth. It had therefore taken firm root and was
popular. The application, early in 1818, of the densest part of Missouri
Territory for admission into the Union as a slave State, called
attention to this threatening status of slavery beyond the Mississippi,
and occasioned in Congress a prolonged, able, angry, and momentous
debate. Jefferson, still alive, wrote, "The Missouri question is the
most portentous which has ever threatened the Union. In the gloomiest
hour of the Revolutionary War I never had apprehensions equal to those
which I feel from this source."

To see the bearing of the tremendous question thus raised, we have need
of a retrospect. Property in man is older than history and has been
nearly universal. It cannot be doubted that in an early stage of human
development slavery is a means of furthering civilization. Negro slavery
originated in Africa, spread to Spain before the discovery of America,
to America soon after, and from the Spanish colonies to the English. The
first notice we have of it in English America is that in
1619 a Dutch ship landed twenty blacks at Jamestown for sale. The Dutch
West India Company began importing slaves into Manhattan in 1626. There
were slaves in New England by 1637. Newport was subsequently a great
harbor for slavers. Georgia offered the strongest resistance to the
introduction of the system, but it was soon overcome. Till about 1700,
Virginia had a smaller proportion of slave population than some northern
colonies, and the change later was mostly due to considerations not of
morality but of profit. Anti-slavery cries were indeed heard from an
early period, but they were few and faint. Penn held slaves, though
ordering their emancipation at his death. Whitfield thought slavery to
be of God. But its most culpable abettor was the English Government,
moved by the profits of the slave trade. A Royal African Company, with
the Duke of York, afterward James II., for some time its president, was
formed to monopolize this business, which monarchs and ministries
furthered to the utmost of their power.

Thus the Revolution found slavery in all the colonies, north as well as
south. But it was then, so far south as Virginia, thought to be an evil.
That commonwealth had passed many laws to restrain it, but the King had
commanded the Governor not to assent to any of them. The Legislature,
replying, stigmatized the traffic as inhuman and a threat to the very
existence of the colony. Hostility extended from the trade to slavery
itself. Jefferson was for emancipation with deportation, and trembled
for his country as he reflected upon the wrong of slavery and the
justice of God. Patrick Henry, George Mason, Peyton Randolph,
Washington, Madison, in a word all the great Virginians of the time held
similar views.

The Quakers of Pennsylvania were, however, the most aggressive of
slavery's foes. So early as 1775 a society, the first in America if not
in the world for promoting its abolition, was formed in Pennsylvania. In
1789 it was incorporated, with Franklin for president. Similar
organizations soon rose in several northern States, numbering among
their members many of the most eminent men in the land. The British
Abolition Society, formed in 1787, and the labors of Wilberforce,
Clarkson, and Zachary Macaulay against the slave trade in the West
Indies, had influence here, as had still more the French Assembly's bold
proclamation of the Rights of Man.

The Ordinance of 1787 for the Northwest Territory marked a most decisive
point in the history of slavery. By its decree, in Jefferson's language,
there was never to be either slavery or involuntary servitude in the
said territory otherwise than in punishment for crimes. It is to the
everlasting honor of the southern members then in the Continental
Congress that they all voted for this inhibition. Virginia, whose assent
as a State was necessary to its validity, she having at this time rights
over much of the domain in question, also concurred. Whatever the
strictly legal weight of this prohibition over the immense Louisiana
purchase, it certainly aided much in confirming freedom as the
presupposition and maxim of our law over all our national territory.

Vermont had never recognized slavery save to prohibit it in its first
constitution. In New Hampshire it existed but nominally. The
Massachusetts constitution of 1780 virtually ended it in that State.
Gradual abolition statutes passed in Pennsylvania in 1780, in Rhode
Island and Connecticut in 1784. The constitution made it possible to
forbid the importation of slaves in 1808. A national law to that effect
was passed in 1807, making the trade illegal and affixing to it heavy
penalties. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 for the
purpose of negro deportation. It did little of this, but rendered some
service toward carrying out the act against slave importation. A new law
in 1820, which made this traffic piracy, punishable with death, was
partly due to its influence. Also many, like Birney, Gerrit Smith and
the Tappans, who began as colonizationists, subsequently became
abolitionists.

Notwithstanding all these influences slavery increased in strength every
year. South Carolina and Georgia were finding it exceedingly profitable
for cotton and rice culture, and the income from slave traffic into the
vast opening lands of Tennessee and Kentucky constituted an irresistible
temptation. In spite of the law of 1807 and of the indescribable horrors
of the business, even the foreign slave trade went on. The institution
found many defenders in the Federal Convention of 1787, and in the first
and subsequent Congresses. The pleas began to be raised, so current
later, that the negro was an inferior being, slavery God's ordinance, a
blessing to slaves and masters alike, and emancipation a folly. Now
began also that policy of bravado by which, for sixty years, the friends
of slavery bullied their opponents into shameful inaction upon that
accursed thing politically as well as morally, which was so nearly to
cost the nation its life. Thus stood matters when the Missouri
Compromise was mooted in the national Legislature.

We hardly need say that this strife ended in a compromise. Missouri was
created a slave State, balanced by Maine as a free State, but at the
same time slavery was to be excluded forever from all the remainder of
the Louisiana purchase north of 36 degrees  30 minutes, the southern
line of Virginia and Kentucky as well as of Missouri itself. The land
between Missouri and Louisiana had been in 1819 erected into the
"Territory of Arkansaw."

In the memorable discussion over this issue, involving the country as
well as Congress, two sorts of argumentation were heard in favor of the
suit of Missouri. The genuine pro-slavery men urged the sacredness of
property as such, and the special sacredness of property-right in slaves
as tacitly guaranteed by the Constitution. They also made much of the
third article of the Louisiana purchase treaty. This read as follows:
"The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the
Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible, according
to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all
the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States;
and in the meantime they shall be maintained and protected in the free
enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they
profess."

There were with these, men who acted from mere policy, thinking it best
to admit the slave State because of the difficulty and also the danger
to the Union of suppressing slavery there. They appealed as well to the
sacred compromises in the Constitution, meaning the permission at first
to import slaves, the three-fifths rule for slave representation in
Congress, and the fugitive slave clause. They spoke much of the
necessity of preserving the balance of power within the Union, and of
Congress's inaction as to slavery in the Louisiana purchase hitherto,
and also in Florida. These arguments won many professed foes of slavery,
as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Quincy Adams. In all Congress Clay was
the most earnest pleader for the compromise.

To all these arguments the unbending friends of free soil replied that
property right was subordinate to the national good, and that Congress
had full power over territorial institutions and should never have
permitted slavery to curse the domain in question. If it had committed
error in the past, that could not excuse continuance in error. The terms
of the Louisiana purchase, it was further urged, could not, even if they
had been meant to do so, which was not true, detract from this sovereign
power. It was pointed out that in every case in which a State had been
admitted thus far, Congress had prescribed conditions. It was boldly
said, still further, that if slavery threatened disunion unless allowed
its way, it ought all the more to be denied its way.

The chief strength of slavery in this crisis lay in the distressing
practical difficulty, if the prayer of Missouri were refused, of dealing
with slaves and slave proprietorship there, and of quieting a numerous
and spirited population bent upon statehood and slavery together. The
more decided foes of slavery did not sufficiently consider these
complications. Nor did they duly reflect upon the sweeping triumph which
freedom had withal secured in the pledge that the vast bulk of the
Louisiana purchase should be forever free. The pledge was indeed broken
in 1854, but not until such a sense of its sacredness had been impressed
upon the country that the breach availed slavery nothing.



CHAPTER IV.

THE GREAT NULLIFICATION

[1816-1828]

The tariff rates of 1816 on cottons and woollens were to be twenty-five
per cent. for three years, after that twenty. Instead of this the cotton
tariff was in 1824 replaced at twenty-five per cent., the same as that
upon woollens costing thirty-three and a third cents or less per square
yard; woollens over this price bearing thirty per cent. Wool, which by
the tariff of 1816 was free, now bore, some grades fifteen, some twenty,
some thirty per cent. Iron duties were put up in 1818 and again in 1824,
from which date for ten years they ranged between forty and one hundred
per cent. The whole tendency of tariff rates was strongly upward. The
duty upon all dutiables averaged between 1816 and 1824 only twenty-four
and a half per cent; from 1824 to 1828 the average was thirty-two and a
half per cent. Importation remained copious, notwithstanding, which made
the cry for protection louder than ever.

[1828]

From Quincy Adams's presidency the tariff question becomes on the one
hand political, dividing Whigs from Democrats about exactly, which had
never been the case before, and on the other, sectional, the West, the
Centre, and now also the East, pitted against the solid South, except
Louisiana. The year 1824 heard Webster's last speech for free trade and
saw Calhoun's and Jackson's last vote for protection. However, so strong
was the protectionist sentiment in the XXth Congress, though democratic,
that free-traders could hope to defeat the new tariff bill of 1828 only
by rendering it odious to New England. They therefore conspired to make
prohibitive its rates for Smyrna wool, and nearly so those on iron,
hemp, and cordage for ship-building; also on molasses, the raw material
for rum, whereon no drawback was longer to be allowed if it was
exported.



John Quincy Adams. From a picture by Gilbert Stuart.


The Whigs had arranged, to be now passed, a series of minimum rates on
woollens, by which all costing over fifty cents a square yard were to
pay as if costing $2.50, and all over this as if costing $4.00. The rate
was to be forty per cent. the first year, forty-five the second, and
fifty thereafter.

This illustrates the famous "minimum principle," which has played such a
figure in all our tariff history since 1816, its effect being always to
make the tariff much higher than it seems. Thus in the case before us,
most of the woollens then imported cost about ninety cents. If based on
this price, the tariff would be thirty-six per cent., but if based on
$2.50 as the price, it would mount up to one hundred and ten per cent.
To prevent this and to render the bill still more unpalatable to the
Whigs, the Democrats introduced a dollar "minimum," so that the tariff
on the bulk of our imported woollens, costing, as just stated, about
ninety cents, would come in at forty-four and four-tenths per cent.

But as this was after all more vigorous protection than woollens had
before received, amounting, through minima, in some cases to over one
hundred per cent., sixteen out of the thirty-nine New England members,
led by Webster, accepted this universally odious tariff bill--the Tariff
of Abominations, it was called--as the preferable evil, and, aided by a
few Democrats in each house, made it a law. The average duty on
dutiables was now about forty-three and a third per cent.

No one can question that this high tariff worked injustice to the South.
It forced from her an undue share of the national taxes, as well as
extensive tribute to northern manufacturers. But in resenting the evil
she exaggerated it, mistakenly referring all the relative decrease in
her prosperity to tariff legislation, when a great part of it was due
simply to slavery. The South complained that selfishness and political
ambition, not patriotism or reason, determined the dominant policy, and
there was of course some truth in this. Moreover, as New England now
favored it, this policy bade fair to become permanent, and since the
tariff bills did not announce protection as their purpose, the
constitutionality of them could not be gotten before the courts.

[1830]

Nearly all the southern Legislatures consequently denounced the tariff
as unjust and as hostile to our fundamental law. Most of them were,
however, prudent enough to suggest no illegal remedies. Not so with
fiery South Carolina, where a large party, inspired by Calhoun, proposed
a bold nullification of the tariff act, virtually amounting to
secession. At a dinner in this interest at Washington, April 13, 1830,
Calhoun offered the toast: "The Union; next to our liberty the most
dear; only to be preserved by respecting the rights of the States."

[1832]

John C. Calhoun was now, except, perhaps, Clay, the ablest and most
influential politician in all the South. Born in South Carolina in 1782,
of Irish-Presbyterian parentage, though poor and in youth ill-educated
like Clay and Jackson, his energy carried him through Yale College, and
through a course of legal study at Litchfield, Conn., where stood the
only law school then in America. November, 1811, found him a member of
Congress, on fire for war with Britain. Monroe's Secretary of War for
seven years from 1817, he was in 1825 elected Vice-President, and
reelected in 1828. He had meantime turned an ardent free-trader, and
seeing the North's predominance in the Union steadily increasing, had
built up a nullification theory based upon that of the Virginia and
Kentucky resolutions and the Hartford Convention, and upon the history
of the formation of our Constitution. He had worked out to his own
satisfaction the untenable view that each State had the right, not in
the way of revolution but under the Constitution itself--as a contract
between parties that had no superior referee--to veto national laws upon
its own judgment of their unconstitutionality.



John C. Calhoun
From a picture by King at the Corcoran Art Gallery.


On this doctrine South Carolina presently proceeded to act. November 24,
1832, the convention of that State passed its nullification ordinance,
declaring the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 "null, void, and no law,"
defying Congress to execute them there, and agreeing, upon the first use
of force for this purpose, to form a separate government.

This was the quintessence of folly even had good theory been behind it.
The tone of the proceeding was too hasty and peremptory. The decided
turn of public opinion and of congressional action in favor of large
reduction in duties was ignored. But the theory appealed to was clearly
wrong, and along with its advocates was sure to be reprobated by the
nation. A precious opportunity effectively to redress the evil
complained of was wantonly thrown away. Worst of all, from a tactical
point of view, South Carolina had miscalculated the spirit of President
Jackson. At the dinner referred to, his toast had been the memorable
words: "Our Federal Union; it must be preserved." Men now saw that Old
Hickory was in earnest. General Scott, with troops and warships, was
ordered to Charleston.

The nullifiers receded, a course made easier by Clay's "compromise
tariff" of  1833, gradually reducing duties for the next ten years, and
enlarging the free list. From all duties of over twenty per cent. by the
act of 1832, one-tenth of the excess was to be stricken off on September
30, 1835, and another tenth every other year till 1841. Then one-half
the excess remaining was to fall, and in 1842 the rest, so that the end
of the last named year should find no duty over twenty per cent.

This episode, threatening as it was for a time, drew in its train
results the most happy, revealing with unprecedented vividness to most,
both the original nature of the Constitution as not a compact, and also
the might which national sentiment had attained since the War of 1812.
The doctrine of state rights was seen to have gradually lost, over the
greater part of the country, all its old vitality. Nearly every State
Legislature condemned the South Carolina pretensions, Democrats as
hearty in this as Whigs. Jackson's proclamation against them--impressive
and unanswerable--ran thus: "The Constitution of the United States
forms a government, not a league; and whether it be formed by compact
between the States, or in any other manner, its character is the same
. . . . I consider the power to annul a law of the United States
incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by
the letter of the Constitution, and destructive of the great object for
which it was formed. . . . Our Constitution does not contain the
absurdity of giving power to make laws, and another power to resist
them. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to
say that the United States are not a nation."



Calhoun's Library and Office.


The congressional debates which the nullification question evoked, among
the ablest in our parliamentary history, held the like high national
tenor. Calhoun's idea, though advocated by him with consummate skill,
was shown to be wholly chimerical. The doughty South Carolinian, from
this moment a waning force in American politics, was supported by Hayne
almost alone, the arguments of both melting into air before Webster's
masterful handling of constitutional history and law. Not questioning
the right of revolution, admitting the general government to be one of
"strictly limited," even of "enumerated, specified, and particularized
powers," the Massachusetts orator made it convincingly apparent that the
Calhoun programme could lead to nothing but anarchy. It was seen that
general and state governments emanate from the people with equal
immediacy, and that the language of the clause, "the Constitution and
the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof" are "the
supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any
State to the contrary notwithstanding," means precisely what it says. To
this language little attention had apparently been paid till this time.



CHAPTER V.

MINOR PUBLIC QUESTIONS OF JACKSON'S "REIGN"

[1828]

Andrew Jackson was born March 15, 1767. His parents had come from
Carrick-fergus, Ireland, two years before. He was without any education
worthy the name. As a boy, he went into the War for Independence, and
was for a time a British prisoner. He studied law in North Carolina,
moved west, and began legal practice at Nashville. He was one of the
framers of the Tennessee constitution in 1796. In 1797 he was a senator
from that State, and subsequently he was a judge on its supreme bench.
His exploits in the Creek War, the War of 1812, and the Seminole War are
already familiar. They had brought him so prominently and favorably
before the country that in 1824 his vote, both popular and electoral,
was larger than that of any other candidate. As we have seen, he himself
and multitudes throughout the country thought him wronged by the
election over him of John Quincy Adams. This contributed largely to his
popularity later, and in 1828 he was elected by a popular vote of
647,231, against 509,097 for Adams. Four years later he was reelected
against Clay by a still larger majority. Nor did his popularity to any
extent wane during his double administration, notwithstanding his many
violent and indiscreet acts as President.


Andrew Jackson. From a photograph by Brady.


Much of Jackson's arbitrariness sprung from a foolish whim of his,
taking his election as equivalent to the enactment of all his peculiar
ideas into law. Ours is a government of the people, he said; the people
had spoken in his election, and had willed so and so. Woe to any senator
or representative who opposed! This was, of course, to mistake entirely
the nature of constitutional government.

After all, Jackson was by no means the ignorant and passionate old man,
controlled in everything by Van Buren, that many people, especially in
New England, have been accustomed to think him. Illiterate he certainly
was, though Adams exaggerated in calling him "a barbarian who could not
write a sentence of grammar and could hardly spell his own name." He was
never popular in the federalist section of the Union. Yet with all his
mistakes and self-will, often inexcusable, he was one of the most
patriotic and clear-headed men who ever administered a government. If he
resorted to unheard-of methods within the law, very careful was he never
to transgress the law.

The most just criticism of Jackson in his time and later related to the
civil service. It was during his administration that the cry, "turn the
rascals out," first arose, and it is well known that, adopting the
policy of New York and Pennsylvania politicians in vogue since 1800, he
made nearly a clean sweep of his political opponents from the offices at
his disposal. This was the more shameful from being so in contrast with
the policy of preceding presidents. Washington removed but two men from
office, one of these a defaulter; Adams ten, one of these also a
defaulter; Jefferson but thirty-nine; Madison five, three of them
defaulters; and Monroe nine. The younger Adams removed but two, both of
them for cause.

[1830]

Yet of Jackson's procedure in this matter it can be said, in partial
excuse, so bitter had been the opposition to him by officeholders as
well as others, that many removals were undoubtedly indispensable in
order to the efficiency of the public service. It is not at all
necessary for the rank and file of the civil service to be of the same
party with the Chief Magistrate, but it is necessary that they should
not be so utterly opposed to him as to feel bound in conscience to be
working for his defeat.

The fine art of party organization, semi-military in form, has come to
us from Jackson and his workers. Before his time, candidates for high
state offices had usually been nominated by legislative caucuses, and
those for national posts by congressional caucuses. State party
conventions had been held in Pennsylvania and New York. Soon after 1830
such a device for national nominations began to be thought of, and the
history of national party conventions may be said to begin with the
campaign of 1832.

[1832]

Jackson's dearest foe while in office was the United States Bank.
Magnifying the dishonesty which had, as everyone knew, disgraced its
management, he attacked it as a monster, an engine of the moneyed
classes for grinding the face of the poor. Like Jefferson, like Madison
at first, he disbelieved in its constitutionality. In his first message
and continually in his official utterances he inveighed against it as a
public danger, using its funds and patronage for party ends. This made
him unpopular with many who had been his friends, so that in the
campaign of 1832 Clay forced the bank question to the front as one on
which Jackson's attitude would greatly advantage the whig cause. He
accepted Clay's challenge with pleasure, and from this moment gave the
bank no quarter. We may call the contest of this year a pitched battle
between Jackson and the bank.



Roger B. Taney.


[1833]

In 1832 he vetoed a bill for a renewal of its charter, which was to
expire in 1836, and

New York, was reported about to expose in a publication the secrets of
that order. The Masons were desirous of preventing this and made several
forcible efforts to that end. Morgan was soon missing, and the exciting
assumption was almost universally made that the Masons had taken him
off. There was much evidence of this; but conviction was found
impossible because, as was alleged, judges, juries, and witnesses were
nearly all Masons. An intense and widespread feeling was developed that
Masonry held itself superior to the laws, was therefore a foe to the
Government and must be destroyed. The Anti-Masons became a mighty
political party. Masons were driven from office. In 1832 anti-masonic
nominations were made for President and Vice-President, which had much
to do with the small vote of Clay in that year. It was this party that
brought to the front politically William H. Seward, Millard Fillmore,
and Thurlow Weed.



Thurlow Weed. From an unpublished Photograph by Disderi, Paris, in 1861.
In the possession of Thurlow Weed Barnes.


In 1833 Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania passed laws
suppressing lotteries, but the gambling mania seemed to transform itself
into a craze for banks. In many parts this was such that actual riots
took place when subscriptions to the stock of banks were opened, the
earliest comers subscribing the whole with the purpose of selling to
others at an advance. To make a bank was thought the great panacea for
every ill that could befall. In this we see that the American people,
bright as they were, could be duped.

Less wonder, then, at the success of the Moon Hoax, perpetrated in 1835.
It was generally known that Sir John Herschel had gone to the Cape of
Good Hope to erect an observatory. One day the New York Sun came out
with what purported to be part of a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal
of Science, giving an account of Herschel's remarkable discoveries. The
moon, so the bogus relation ran, had been found to be inhabited by human
beings with wings. Herschel had seen flocks of them flying about. Their
houses were triangular in form. The telescope had also revealed beavers
in the moon, exhibiting most remarkable intelligence. Pictures of some
of these and of moon scenery accompanied the article. The fraud was so
clever as to deceive learned and unlearned alike. The sham story was
continued through several issues of the Sun, and gave the paper an
enormous sale. As it arrived in the different places, crowds scrambled
for it, nor would those who failed to secure copies disperse until some
one more fortunate had read to them all that the paper said upon the
subject. Several colleges sent professorial deputations to the Sun
office to see the article, and particularly the appendices, which, it
was alleged, had been kept back. Richard Adams Locke was the author of
this ingenious deception, which was not exploded until the arrival of
authentic intelligence from Edinburgh.

Party spirit sometimes ran terribly high. A New York City election in
1834 was the occasion of a riot between men of the  two parties,
disturbances continuing several days. Political meetings were broken up,
and the militia had to be called out to enforce order. Citizens armed
themselves, fearing attacks upon banks and business houses. When it was
found that the Whigs were triumphant in the city, deafening salutes were
fired. Philadelphia Whigs celebrated this victory with a grand barbecue,
attended, it was estimated, by fifty thousand people. The death of
Harrison was malignantly ascribed to overeating in Washington, after his
long experience with insufficient diet in the West. Whigs exulted over
Jackson's cabinet difficulties. Jackson's "Kitchen Cabinet," the power
behind the throne, gave umbrage to his official advisers. Duff Green,
editor of the United States Telegraph, the President's "organ," was one
member; Isaac Hill, of New Hampshire, and Amos Kendall, first of
Massachusetts, then of Kentucky, were others, these three the most
influential. All had long worked, written, and cheered for Old Hickory.
In return he gave them good places at Washington, and now they enjoyed
dropping in at the White House to take a smoke with the grizzly hero and
help him curse the opposition as foes of "the people."

Major Eaton, Old Hickory's first Secretary of War, had married a
beautiful widow, maiden name Peggy O'Neil, of common birth, and much
gossipped about. The female members of other cabinet families refused to
associate with her, the Vice-President's wife leading. Jackson took up
Mrs. Eaton's cause with all knightly zeal. He berated her traducers and
persecutors in long and fierce personal letters. His niece and
housekeeper, Mrs. Donelson, one of the anti-Eatonites, he turned out of
the White House, with her husband, his private secretary. The breach was
serious anyway, and might have been far more so but for the healing
offices of Van Buren, who used all his courtliness and power of place to
help the President bring about the social recognition of Mrs. Eaton. He
called upon her, made parties in her honor, and secured her entree to
the families of the greatest foreign ministers. Mrs. Eaton triumphed,
but the scandal would not down.

When Jackson wrote his foreign message upon the French spoliation
claims, his cabinet were aghast and begged him to soften its tone. Upon
his refusal, it is said, they stole to the printing-office and did it
themselves. But the proofs came back for Jackson's perusal. The lad who
brought them was the late Mr. J. S. Ham, of Providence, R. I. He used to
say that he had never known what profane swearing was till he listened
to General Jackson's comments as those proofs were read.

Jackson and Quincy Adams were personal as well as political foes. When
the President visited Boston, Harvard College bestowed on him the degree
of Doctor of Laws. Adams, one of the overseers, opposed this with all
his might. As "an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, he would not be
present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary
honors upon a barbarian." Subsequently he would refer, with a sneer, to
"Dr. Andrew Jackson." The President's illness at Boston Adams declared
"four-fifths trickery" and the rest mere fatigue. He was like John
Randolph, said Adams, who for forty years was always dying. "He is now
alternately giving out his chronic diarrhoea and making Warren bleed him
for a pleurisy, and posting to Cambridge for a doctorate of laws,
mounting the monument of Bunker's Hill to hear a fulsome address and
receive two cannon-balls from Edward Everett."

To be sure, manifestations of a contrary spirit between the political
parties were not wanting. The entire nation mourned for Madison after
his death in 1836, as it had on the decease of Jefferson and John Adams
both on the same day, July 4, 1826.

A note or two upon costume may not uninterestingly close this chapter.

Enormous bonnets were fashionable about 1830. Ladies also wore Leghorn
hats, with very broad brims rolled up behind, tricked out profusely with
ribbons and artificial flowers. Dress-waists were short and high. Skirts
were short, too, hardly reaching the ankles. Sleeves were of the
leg-of-mutton fashion, very full above the elbows but tightening toward
the wrist. Gentlemen still dressed for the street not so differently
from the revolutionary style. Walking-coats were of broadcloth, blue,
brown, or green, to suit the taste, with gilt buttons. Bottle-green was
a very stylish color for evening coats. Blue and the gilt buttons for
street wear were, however, beginning to be discarded, Daniel Webster
being one of the last to walk abroad in them. The buff waistcoat, white
cambric cravat, and ruffled shirt still held their own. Collars for full
dress were worn high, covering half the cheek, a fashion which persisted
in parts of the country till 1850 or later.



CHAPTER VIII.

INDUSTRIAL ADVANCE BY 1840

[1840]

During the War of 1812 we had in England an industrial spy, whose
campaign there has perhaps accomplished more for the country than all
our armies did. It was Francis C. Lowell, of Boston. Great Britain was
just introducing the power loom. The secret of structure was guarded
with all vigilance, yet Lowell, passing from cotton factory to cotton
factory with Yankee eyes, ears, and wit, came home in 1814, believing,
with good reason, as it proved, that he could set up one of the machines
on American soil. Broad Street in Boston was the scene of his initial
experiments, but the factory to the building of which they led was at
Waltham. It was owned by a company, one of whose members was Nathan
Appleton. Water furnished the motive power. By the autumn of 1814 Lowell
had perfected his looms and placed them in the factory. Spinning
machinery was also built, mounting seventeen hundred spindles. English
cotton-workers did not as yet spin and weave under the same roof, so
that the Lowell Mill at Waltham may, with great probability, be
pronounced the first in the world to carry cloth manufacture
harmoniously through all its several successive steps from the raw stuff
to the finished ware.

From this earliest establishment of the power-loom here, the
cotton-cloth business strode rapidly forward. Fall River, Holyoke,
Lawrence, Lowell, and scores of other thriving towns sprung into being.
Every year new mills were built. In 1831 there were 801; in 1840, 1,240;
in 1850, 1,074. Henceforth, through consolidation, the number of
factories decreased, but the number of spindles grew steadily larger.
This rise of great manufacturing concerns was facilitated by a new order
of corporation laws. There had been corporations in the country before
1830, as the Waltham case shows; but the system had had little
evolution, as incorporation had in each case to proceed from a special
legislative act. In 1837 Connecticut passed a statute making this
unnecessary and enabling a group of persons to become a corporation on
complying with certain simple requirements. New York placed a similar
provision in its constitution of 1846. The Dartmouth College decision of
the United States Supreme Court in 1819, interpreting an act of
incorporation as a contract, which, by the Constitution, no State can
violate, still further humored and aided the corporation system.



From an Old Time-table. (Furnished by the ABC Pathfinder Railway Guide.)


In 1816 the streets of Baltimore were lighted with gas. A gas-light
company was incorporated in New York in 1823. Not till 1836, however,
did the Philadelphia streets have gas lights. The first savings-banks
were established in Philadelphia and Boston in 1816. Baltimore had one
two years later. Portable fire-proof safes were used in 1820. The Lehigh
coal trade flourished this year, and also the manufacture of iron with
coal. The whale fishery, too, was now beginning. The first factory in
Lowell started in 1821. In 1822 there was a copper rolling mill in
Baltimore, the only one then in America, and Paterson, N. J., began the
manufacture of cotton duck. Patent leather was made in the United States
by 1819. In 1824 Amesbury, Mass., had a water-power manufactory of
flannel. The next year the practice of homoeopathy began in America, and
matches of a rude sort were displacing the old tinder-box. The next
year after this Hartford produced axes and other edged tools.
Lithography, of which there had been specimens so early as 1818, was a
Boston business in 1827. Pittsburgh manufactured damask table linen in
1828. The same year saw paper made from straw, and planing machinery in
operation. The insuring of lives began in this country in 1812.



Trial between Peter Cooper's Locomotive "Tom Thumb" and one of Stockton's
and Stokes' Horse Cars. From "History of the First Locomotive in
America."


The first figured muslin woven by the power-loom in America, and perhaps
in the world, was produced at Central Falls, R. I., in 1829. Calico
printing began at Lowell the same year, also the manufacture of cutlery
at Worcester, of sewing-silk at Mansfield, Conn., of galvanized iron in
New York City. With the new decade chloroform was invented, in 1831,
being first used as a medicine, not as an anaesthetic. Reaping machines
were on trial the same year, and three years later machine-made wood
screws were turned out at Providence. About the same time, 1832, pins
were made by machinery, hosiery was woven by a power-loom process, and
Colt perfected his revolver. In 1837 brass clocks were put upon the
American market, and by 1840 extensively exported. Also in 1837 Nashua
was making machinists' tools. By 1839 the manufacture of iron with hard
coal was a pronounced success. In 1840 daguerreotypes began to appear.
Steam fire-engines were seen the next year.



Peter Cooper's Locomotive, 1829.


So early as 1816 the New York and Philadelphia stages made the distance
from city to city between sun and sun. The National Road from Cumberland
was finished to Wheeling in 1820, having been fourteen years in
construction and costing $17,000,000. It was subsequently extended
westward across Ohio and Indiana. It was thirty-five feet wide,
thoroughly macadamized, and had no grade of above five degrees. Over
parts of this road no less than 150 six-horse teams passed daily,
besides four or five four-horse mail and passenger coaches. In Jackson's
time, when for some months there was talk of war with France and extra
measures were thought proper for assuring the loyalty of Louisiana,
swift mail connections were made with the Mississippi by the National
Road. Its entire length was laid out into sections of sixty-three miles
apiece, each with three boys and nine horses, only six hours and
eighteen minutes being allowed for traversing a section, viz., a rate of
about ten miles an hour. Great men and even presidents travelled by the
public coaches of this road, though many of them used their own
carriages. James K. Polk often made the journey from Nashville to
Washington in his private carriage. Keeping down the Cumberland River to
the Ohio, and up this to Wheeling, he would strike into the National
Road eastward to Cumberland, Md. He came thus so late as 1845, to be
inaugurated as President; only at this time he used the new railway from
Cumberland to the Relay House, where he changed to the other new railway
which had already joined Baltimore with Washington.



Obverse and Reverse of a Ticket used in 1838 on the New York & Harlem
Railroad.


The first omnibus made its appearance in New York in 1830, the name
itself originating from the word painted upon this vehicle. The first
street railway was laid two years later. The era of the stage coach was
at this time beginning to end, that of canals and railroads opening. Yet
in the remoter sections of the country the old coach was destined to
hold its place for decades still. Where roads were fair it would not
uncommonly make one hundred miles between early morning and late
evening, as between Boston and Springfield, Springfield and Albany. So
soon as available the canal packet was a much more easy and elegant
means of travel. The Erie Canal was begun in 1817, finished to Rochester
in 1823, the first boat arriving October 8th. The year 1825 carried it
to Buffalo. The Blackstone Canal, between Worcester and Providence, was
opened its whole length in 1828; the next year many others, as the
Chesapeake and Delaware, the Cumberland and Oxford in Maine, the
Farmington in Connecticut, the Oswego, connecting the Erie Canal with
Lake Ontario, also the Delaware and Hudson, one hundred and eight miles
long, from Honesdale, Pa., to Hudson River. The Welland Canal was
completed in 1830.



Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 1830.


Salt-water transportation had meantime been much facilitated by the use
of steam. It had been thought a great achievement when, in 1817, the
Black Ball line of packet ships between New York and Liverpool was
regularly established, consisting of four vessels of from four hundred
to five hundred tons apiece. But two years later a steamship crossed the
Atlantic to Liverpool from Savannah. It took her twenty-five
days--longer than the time in which the distance often used to be
accomplished under sail. In 1822 there was a regular steamboat between
Norfolk and New York, though no steamboat was owned in Boston till 1828.
The Atlantic was first crossed exclusively by steam-power in 1838, and
the first successful propeller used in 1839. The last-named year also
witnessed the beginning of a permanent express line between Boston and
New York, by the Stonington route. The next year, the Adams Express
Company was founded, doing its first business between these two cities
over the Springfield route, in competition with that by the Stonington.



Old Boston & Worcester Railway Ticket (about 1837).


But all these improvements were soon to be overshadowed by the work of
the railway and locomotive. The first road of rails in America was in
the Lehigh coal district of Pennsylvania. Its date is uncertain, but not
later than 1825. In 1826, October 7th, the second began operation, at
Quincy, Mass., transporting granite from the quarries to tide-water,
about three miles. This experiment attracted great attention, showing
how much heavier loads could be transported over rails than upon common
roads, and with how much greater ease and less expense ordinary weights
could be carried. The same had been demonstrated in England before.
Locomotives were not yet used in either country, but only horse-power.
The conviction spread rapidly that not only highway transportation but
even that by canals would soon be, for all large burdens, either quite
superseded or of secondary importance. In 1827 the Maryland Legislature
chartered a railroad from Baltimore to Wheeling. The projectors, though
regarding it a bold act, promised an average rate between the two cities
of at least four miles per hour. Subscriptions were offered for more
than twice the amount of the stock. The Massachusetts Legislature the
same year appointed commissioners to look out a railway route between
Boston and Hudson River. Also in this year a railway was completed at
Mauch Chunk, Pa., for transporting coal to the landing on the Lehigh.
The descent was by gravity, mules being used to haul back the cars.

In most country parts, the new railway projects encountered great
hostility. Engineers were not infrequently clubbed from the fields as
they sought to survey. Learned articles appeared in the papers arguing
against the need of railways and exhibiting the perils attending them.
When steam came to be used, these scruples were re-enforced by the
alleged danger that the new system of travel would do away with the
market for oats and for horses, and that stage-drivers would seek wages
in vain.

The first trip by a locomotive was in 1828, over the Carbondale and
Honesdale route in Pennsylvania. The engine was of English make, and run
by Mr. Horatio Allen, who had had it built. This was a year before the
first steam railroad was opened in England. July 4, 1828, construction
upon the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was begun. It, like the other early
roads, was built of stone cross-ties, with wooden rails topped with
heavy straps of iron. Such ties were soon replaced by wooden ones, as
less likely to be split by frost, but the wooden rail with its iron
strap might be seen on branch lines, for instance, between Monocacy
Bridge and Frederick City, Md., so late as the Civil War.


The "South Carolina," 1831, and plan of its running gear.


The first railroad for passengers in this country went into operation
between Charleston and Hamburg, S. C., in 1830. The locomotive had been
gotten up in New York, the first of American make. It had four wheels
and an upright boiler. This year the railroad between Albany and
Schenectady was begun, and fourteen miles of the Baltimore & Ohio opened
for use. In 1831 Philadelphia was joined to Pittsburgh by a line of
communication consisting of a railway to Columbia, a canal thence to
Hollidaysburg, another railway thence over the Alleghanies to Johnstown,
and then on by canal. The railway over the mountains consisted of
inclined planes mounted by the use of stationary engines. It is
interesting to notice the view which universally prevailed at first,
that the locomotive could not climb grades, and that where this was
necessary stationary engines would have to be used. Not till 1836 was it
demonstrated that locomotives could climb. Up to the same date, also,
locomotives had burned wood, but this was now found inferior to coal,
and began to be given up except where it was much the cheaper fuel.



Boston & Worcester Railroad, 1835.


From 1832 the railway system grew marvellously. The year 1833 saw
completed the South Carolina Railroad between Charleston and the
Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles. This was the first
railway line in this country to carry the mails, and the longest
continuous one then in the world. Two years later Boston was connected
by railway with Providence, with Lowell, and with Worcester, Baltimore
with Washington, and the New York & Erie commenced. In 1839 Worcester
was joined to Springfield in the same manner, and in 1841 a passenger
could travel by rail from Boston to Rochester, changing cars, however,
at least ten times.



PERIOD III.

THE YEARS OF SLAVERY CONTROVERSY 1840-1860

CHAPTER I.

SLAVERY AFTER THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

[1820]

Slavery would most likely never have imperilled the life of this nation
had it not been for the colossal industrial revolution sketched above.
Cotton had been grown here since, 1621, and some exportation of it is
said to have occurred in 1747. Till nearly 1800 very little had gone
from the United States to England, for by the old process a slave could
clean but five or six pounds a day. In 1784, an American ship which
brought eight bags to Liverpool was seized, on the ground that so much
could not have been the produce of the United States. Jay's treaty, as
first drawn, consented that no cotton should be exported from America.
It changed the very history of the country when, in 1793, Eli Whitney
invented the saw-gin, by which a slave could clean 1,000 pounds of
cotton per day. Slavery at once ceased to be a passive, innocuous
institution, promising soon to die out, and became a means of gain, to
be upheld and extended in all possible ways. The cotton export, but
189,316 pounds in 1791, and a third less in 1792, rose to 487,600 pounds
in 1793, to 1,610,760 pounds in 1794, to 6,276,300 pounds in 1795, and
to 38,118,041 pounds in 1804. Within five years after Whitney's
invention, cotton displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the
slave States had become the cotton-field of the world. In 1869 the
export was nearly 1,400,000,000 pounds, worth about $161,500,000.
[Footnote: Johnson, in Lalor's Cyclopaedia, Art. "Slavery."]

So profitable was slavery to vast numbers of individuals because of this
its new status, that men would not notice how, after all, it militated
against the nation's supreme interests. It polluted social relations in
obvious ways, setting at naught among slaves family ties and the behests
of virtue, influences that reacted terribly upon the whites. The entire
government of slaves had a brutalizing tendency, more pronounced as time
passed. "Plantation manners" were cultivated, which, displaying
themselves in Congress and elsewhere, in all discussions and measures
relating to the execrable institution, made the North believe that the
South was drifting toward barbarism. This was an exaggeration, yet
everyone knew that schools in the South were rare and poor, and thought
and speech little free as compared with the same in the North. Political
power, like the slaves, was in the hands of a few great barons, totally
merciless toward even southerners who differed from them. It is of course
not meant that virtue, kindliness, intelligence, and fair-mindedness
were ever wanting in that section, but they flourished in spite of the
slave-system.

Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial
evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a
free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and
weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were
improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave
soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew
steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slaves.
Invention, care, forethought were as good as unknown among them. Slave
labor proved incompetent even for agriculture, impoverishing the richest
soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the
slave-owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the
danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the same time
that the system diminished in every community the number of its natural
defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in
natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every
single element of prosperity.

[1831]

One of these insurrections was the event of 1831 in Virginia,
originating near the southern border. Four slaves in alliance with three
whites commenced it by killing several families and pressing all the
slaves they could find into their service, until the force was nearly
two hundred. They spread desolation everywhere. Fifty-five white persons
were murdered before the insurrection was in hand. Virginia and North
Carolina called out troops, and at last all the insurgents were captured
or killed. The leader was a black named Nat Turner, who believed himself
called of God to give his people freedom. He had heard voices in the air
and seen signs on the sky, which, with many other portents, he
interpreted as proofs of his divine commission. When all was over Turner
escaped to the woods, dug a hole under some fence-rails and lived there
for six weeks, coming out only at midnight for food. Driven thence by
discovery, he still managed to hide here and there about the plantations
in spite of a whole country of armed men in search of him, until at last
he was accidentally confronted in the bush by a white man with levelled
rifle. He was hanged, November 11th, and sixteen others later. His wife
was tortured for evidence, but in vain. Twelve negroes were transported.
Very many were, without trial, punished in inhuman ways, the heads of
some impaled along the highway as a warning. Partly in consequence of
this horrible affair, originated a stout movement for the abolition of
slavery in Virginia. This was favored by many of the ablest men in the
Old Dominion, but they were overruled.



The Discovery of Nat Turner.


Danger from the blacks necessitated the most rigid laws concerning them.
Time had been when it was thought not dangerous to teach slaves to read.
In 1742 Commissary Garden, of the English Society for Propagating the
Gospel, founded a negro school in Charleston, where slaves were taught
by slave teachers, these last being the society's property. Honest Elias
Neale, the society's catechist in New York, engaged in the same work
there, and afterward catechists were so employed in Philadelphia. That
organization did much to stir up the planters to teach their slaves the
rudiments of Christianity. [Footnote: Eggleston in Century, May, 1888.]
Now, all this was changed. The strictest laws were made to keep every
slave in the most abject ignorance, to prevent their congregating, and
to make it impossible for abolitionists or abolitionist literature or
influence to get at them.

[1816]

Inconvenient and perilous as slavery was, southern devotion to it for
many reasons strengthened rather than weakened. The masses did not
perceive the ruin the system was working, which, moreover, consisted
with great profits to vast numbers of influential men and to many
localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming
free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and
the practical problem of emancipation, really difficult, being too
easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of
circumstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the
present century. Completion of the emancipation process in the North was
assured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to
slavery there from July 4, 1827. The view that each State was absolute
sovereign over slavery within its own borders, responsibility for it and
its abuses there ending with the State's own citizens, was now
universally accepted. Success in securing the act of 1807, making the
slave trade illegal from January 1, 1808, and affixing to it heavy
penalties, lulled multitudes to sleep. This act, however, had effect
only gradually, and its beneficence was greatly lessened in that it left
confiscated negroes to the operation of the local law.

Such quietude was furthered through the formation of the American
Colonization Society in 1816, by easy philanthropists and statesmen,
North as well as South, who swore by the Constitution as admitting no
fundamental amendment, admired its three great compromises, loved all
brethren of the Union except agitators, and deprecated slavery and the
black race about equally; its mission negro deportation, but its actual
efforts confined to the dumping of free blacks, reprobates, and
castaways in some remote corner of the universe, for the convenience of
slave-holders themselves. [Footnote: 3 Schouler's United States, 198.]

[1839]

Meantime much was occurring to harden northern hostility to slavery into
resolute hatred, a fire which might smoulder long but could not die out.
The fugitive slave law for the rendition of runaways found in free
States operated cruelly at best, and was continually abused to kidnap
free blacks. The owner or his attorney or agent could seize a slave
anywhere on the soil of freedom, bring him before the magistrate of the
county, city, or town corporate in wh

CHAPTER III.

THE MEXICAN WAR

[1836]

Attracted by fertility of soil and advantages for cattle-raising, large
numbers of Americans had long been emigrating to Texas. By 1830 they
probably comprised a majority of its inhabitants. March 2, 1836, Texas
declared its independence of Mexico, and on April 10th of that year
fought in defence of the same the decisive battle of San Jacinto. Here
Houston gained a complete victory over Santa Anna, the Mexican
President, captured him, and extorted his signature to a treaty
acknowledging Texan independence. This, however, as having been forced,
the Mexican Government would not ratify.

[1845]

Not only did the Texans almost to a man wish annexation to our Union,
but, as we have seen, the dominant wing of the democratic party in the
Union itself was bent upon the same, forcing a demand for this into
their national platform in 1840. Van Buren did not favor it, which was
the sole reason why he forfeited to Polk the democratic nomination in
1844. Polk was elected by free-soil votes cast for Birney, which, had
Clay received them, would have carried New York and Michigan for him and
thus elected him; but the result was hailed as indorsing annexation.
Calhoun, Tyler's Secretary of State, more influential than any other one
man in bringing it about, therefore now advocated it more zealously than
ever. Calhoun's purpose in this was to balance the immense growth of the
North by adding to southern territory Texas, which would of course
become a slave State, and perhaps in time make several States. As the
war progressed he grew moderate, out of fear that the South's show of
territorial greed would give the North just excuse for sectional
measures.



General Sam. Houston.


Henry Clay, with nearly the entire Whig Party, from the first opposed
the Tyler-Calhoun programme. Clay's own reason for this, as his
memorable Lexington speech in 1847 disclosed, was that the United States
would be looked upon "as actuated by a spirit of rapacity and an
inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement." His party as a whole
dreaded more the increment which would come to the slave power. After
much discussion in Congress, Texas was annexed to the Union on January
25, 1845, just previous to Polk's accession. June 18th, the Texan
Congress unanimously assented, its act being ratified July 4th by a
popular convention. Thus were added to the United States 376,133 square
miles of territory.



General Santa Anna.


The all-absorbing question now was where Texas ended: at the Nueces, as
Mexico declared, or at the Rio Grande, as Texas itself had maintained,
insisting upon that stream as of old the bourne between Spanish America
and the French Louisiana. Mexico, proud, had recognized neither the
independence of Texas nor its annexation by the United States, yet would
probably have agreed to both as preferable to war, had the alternative
been allowed. To be sure, she was dilatory in settling admitted claims
for certain depredations upon our commerce, threatened to take the
annexation as a casus belli, withdrew her envoy and declined to accept
Slidell as ours, and precipitated the first actual bloodshed. Yet war
might have been averted, and our Government, not Mexico's, was to blame
for the contrary result. Slidell played the bully, the navy threatened
the coast, our wholly deficient title, through Texas, to the
Nueces-Rio-Grande tract was assumed without the slightest ado to be
good, and when General Arista, having crossed the river in Taylor's
vicinity, repelled the latter's attack upon him, the President, followed
by Congress, falsely alleged war to exist "by act of the Republic of
Mexico."

[1846]

During most of 1845, General Zachary Taylor was at Corpus Christi on the
west bank of the Nueces, in command of 3,600 men. The first aggressive
movement occurred in March of the following year, when Taylor, invading
the disputed territory by command from Washington, advanced to the Rio
Grande, opposite Matamoras. April 26th, a Mexican force crossed the
river and captured a party of American dragoons which attacked them.
Taylor drew back to establish communication with Point Isabel, and on
advancing again toward the Rio Grande, May 8th, found before him a
Mexican force of nearly twice his numbers, commanded by Arista. The
battle of Palo Alto ensued, and next day that of Resaca de la Palma,
Taylor completely victorious in both. May 13th, before knowledge of
these actions had reached Washington, warranted merely by news of the
cavalry skirmish on April 26th, Congress declared war, and the President
immediately called for 50,000 volunteers. In July Taylor was re-enforced
by Worth, and proceeded to organize a campaign against Monterey, a
strongly fortified town some ninety miles toward the City of Mexico.
This place was reached September 19th, and captured on the 22d, after
hard fighting and severe losses on both sides. An armistice of eight
weeks followed.



James K. Polk, after a photograph by Brady.



PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF BUENA VISTA MORNING 23 OF FEB 1847.


[1847]

Meantime a revolution had occurred in Mexico. The banished Santa Anna
was recalled, and as President of the Republic assumed command of the
Mexican armies. On February 23, 1847, occurred one of the most
sanguinary but brilliant battles of the war, that of Buena Vista.
Taylor, learning that a Mexican force was advancing under Santa Anna, at
least double the 5,200 left him after the requisition upon him which
General Scott had just made, drew back to the strong position of Buena
Vista, south of Saltillo. Here Santa Anna, having through an intercepted
despatch learned of Taylor's weakness, ferociously fell upon him with a
force 12,000 strong. On right and centre, by dint of good tactics and
bull-dog fighting, Taylor held his own and more, but the foe succeeded
at first in partly turning and pushing back his left. The Mexican
commander bade Taylor surrender, but was refused, whence the saying that
"Old Rough and Ready," as they called Taylor, "was whipped but didn't
know it."

To check the flanking movement he sent forward two regiments of
infantry, well supported by dragoons and artillery, who charged the
advancing mass, broke the Mexicans' column, and sent them fleeing in
confusion. This saved the day. The American loss was 746, including
several officers, among them Lieutenant-Colonel Clay, son of the
Kentucky statesman. Colonel Jefferson Davis, one day to be President of
the Southern Confederacy, caused during this conflict great havoc in the
enemy's ranks with his Mississippi riflemen. Santa Anna's loss was
2,000.



General Winfield Scott.


General Winfield Scott had meantime been ordered to Mexico as chief in
command. Taylor was a Whig, and the Whigs whispered that his martial
deeds were making the democratic cabinet dread him as a presidential
candidate. But Scott was a Whig, too, and if there was anything in the
surmise, his victorious march must have given Polk's political household
additional food for reflection. Scott's plan was to reduce Vera Cruz,
and thence march to the Mexican capital, two hundred miles away, by the
quickest route. Vera Cruz capitulated March 27, 1847.

Scott straightway struck out for the interior. He was bloodily opposed
at Cerro Gordo, April 18th, and at Jalapa, but he made quick work of the
enemy at both these places. In the latter city, after his victory, he
awaited promised re-enforcements. When the last of these had arrived,
August 6th, under General Franklin Pierce, so that he could muster about
14,000 men, he advanced again. August 10th the Americans were in sight
of the City of Mexico. This was a natural stronghold, and art had added
to its strength in every possible way. Except on the south and west it
was nearly inaccessible if defended with any spirit. Scott of course
directed his attack toward the west and south sides of the city. The
first battle in the environs of the capital was fiercely fought near the
village of Contreras, and proved an overwhelming defeat for the
Mexicans. Two thousand were killed or wounded, while nearly 1,000,
including four generals, were captured, together with a large quantity
of stores and ammunition. The American loss was only 60 killed and
wounded.

The survivors fled to Churubusco, farther toward the city, where, with
every advantage of position, Santa Anna had united his forces for a
final stand. An old stone convent, which our artillery could not reach
till late in the action, was utilized as a barricade, and from this the
Mexicans poured a most deadly fire upon their assailants. The Americans
were victorious, as usual, but their loss was fearful, 1,000 being
killed or wounded, including 76 officers. A truce to last a fortnight
was now agreed upon, but Scott, seeing that the Mexicans were taking
advantage of it to strengthen their fortifications, did not wait so
long. He now had about 8,500 men fit for duty, and sixty-eight guns.
Hostilities were renewed September 7th, by the storm and capture,
costing nearly 800 men, of Molino del Rey, or "King's Mill," a mile and
a half from the city.

Possession of the Molino opened the way to Chapultepec, the Gibraltar of
Mexico, 1,100 yards nearer the goal. As it was built upon a rock 150
feet high, impregnable on the north and well-nigh so on the eastern and
most of the southern face, only the western and part of the southern
sides could be scaled. But the stronghold was the key to the city, and
after surveying the situation, a council of war decided that it must be
taken. Two picked American detachments, one from the west, one from the
south, pushed up the rugged steeps in face of a withering fire. The
rock-walls to the base of the castle had to be mounted by ladders. This
was successfully accomplished; the enemy were driven from the building
back into the city, and the castle and grounds occupied by our troops. A
large number of fugitives were cut off by a force sent around to the
north.



The Plaza of the City of Mexico.


[1848]

To pierce the city was even now by no means easy. The approach was by
two roads, one entering the Belen gate, the other the San Cosme. General
Quitman advanced toward the Belen, but at the entrance was stopped by a
destructive cannonade from the citadel itself. Those fighting their way
toward the San Cosme succeeded in entering the city, Lieutenant U. S.
Grant making his mark in the gallant work of this day. The city was
evacuated that night, and on the 15th of September, 1847, was fully in
the hands of Scott.

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848. It
established the Rio Grande as the boundary between the two countries,
and New Mexico, of course including what is now Arizona and also
California, was ceded to the United States for $15,000,000. The United
States also assumed, to the sum of $3,250,000, the claims of American
citizens upon Mexico. For Gadsden's Purchase, in 1853, between the Gila
River and the Mexican State of Chihuahua, we paid $10,000,000 more. Our
territory thus received in all, as a consequence of the Mexican War, an
increment of 591,398 square miles.

Inseparable from the politics of the Mexican War is the Oregon question,
since Oregon's re-occupation and "fifty-four forty or fight" had been
democratic cries for securing to Polk west-northern votes in 1844. We
had, however, no valid claim so far north, except against Russia--by the
treaty of 1824. The Louisiana purchase, indeed, had vested us with
whatever--very dubious--rights France had upon the Pacific, and the
Florida treaty of 1819 gave us the far better title of Spain to the
coast north of 42 degrees. This treaty, with Gray's discovery of the
Columbia in 1792, Lewis and Clarke's official explorations of the
Columbia valley in 1804-05-06, England's retrocession, in 1818, of
Astoria, captured during the War of 1812, and extensive actual
settlements upon the river by American citizens from 1832 on, made our
claim perfect up to 49 degrees at least. This parallel the convention
with Great Britain in 1818 had already fixed as our northern line from
the Lake of Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Between this and 54 degrees 40
minutes, England's title, from exploration and settlement, was superior
to ours, which was based upon alleged old Spanish discovery. The same
convention of 1818, renewed in 1827, opened the Oregon country to
occupation by settlers from both nations. Increase of immigration
rendering a fixing of jurisdictions imperative, England pressed for the
line of the Columbia below its intersection of the forty-ninth parallel.
We had twice offered to settle upon 49 degrees, which limit the rapid
growth of our population in the region induced England in 1836 to
accept. Whether Polk's blustering demand for "all Oregon," which came
near bringing on war with England, and his much condemned recession
later, were mere opportunist acts, is still a question. Many consider
them pieces of a deep-laid policy by Polk to tole Mexico to war in hope
of England's aid, then, suddenly pacifying England, to devour Mexico at
his leisure.



CHAPTER IV.

CALIFORNIA AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

[1846]

One of the campaigns at the beginning of the Mexican War was that of
General Stephen W. Kearney, from Fort Leavenworth, against New Mexico.
It was opened in May, 1846. He invaded the country without much
opposition, arrived at Santa Fe August 18th, having marched 873 miles,
declared the inhabitants free from all allegiance to Mexico, and formed
a territorial government over them as United States subjects.

Captain John C. Fremont had previously, but in the same year, 1846, been
sent to California at the head of an exploring expedition, and in May he
was notified to remain in the country in anticipation of hostilities. On
June 15th he captured Samona. Meanwhile, Commodore Sloat was erecting
our flag over the towns on the coast. In July Sloat was superseded by
Commodore Stockton, who routed the Mexican commander, De Castro, at Los
Angeles, joined Fremont, and on August 13th seized Monterey, the then
capital. The two commanders now placed themselves at the head of a
provisional government for California.



Zachary Taylor. After a photograph by Brady.



The Site of San Francisco in 1848.


[1848-1849]

In 1848, on the same day and almost at the same hour when the peace of
Guadalupe Hidalgo was concluded, gold was discovered in California. It
was on the land of one Sutter, a Swiss settler in the Sacramento Valley,
as some workmen were opening a flume for a mill. In three months over
4,000 persons were there, digging for gold with great success. By July,
1849, it is thought, 15,000 had arrived. Nearly all were forced to live
in booths, tents, log huts, and under the open sky. The sparse
population previously on the ground left off farming and grazing and
opened mines. People became insane for gold. Immigrants soon came in
immense hordes. In 1846, aside from roving Indians, California had
numbered not much over 15,000 inhabitants. By 1850, it seems certain
that the territory contained no fewer than 92,597. The new-comers were
from almost every land and clime--Mexico, South America, the Sandwich
Islands, China--though, of course, most were Americans. The bulk of
these hailed from the Northwest and the Northeast. To this land of
promise the sturdy pioneers from the Mississippi Valley found their way
on foot, on horseback, or in wagons, over the Rocky Mountains and the
Sierras, following trails previously untrodden by civilized man. Those
from the East made long detours around Cape Horn or across the Isthmus
of Panama.


Sutter's Mill, California, where Gold was First Discovered.


The yield of gold from the virgin placers was enormous, a laborer's
average the first season being perhaps an ounce a day, though many made
much more. During the first two years about $40,000,000 worth of gold
was extracted. According to careful estimates the gold yield of the
United States, mostly from California, which had been only $890,000 in
1847, increased to $10,000,000 in 1848, to $40,000,000 in 1849, to
$50,000,000 in 1850, to $55,000,000 in 1851, to $60,000,000 in 1852, and
in 1853 to $65,000,000.

Most interesting were the spontaneous governmental and legal
institutions which arose in these motley communities, some of them
finding their originals in the English mining districts, others in
Mexico and Spain, and still others recalling the mining customs of
medieval Germany. For a time many camps had each its independent
government, disconnected from all human authority around or above. Some
of these were modelled after the Mexican Alcaldeship, others after the
New England town. Over those who rushed to the vicinity of Sutter's mill
that gentleman became virtual Alcalde, though he was not recognized by
all. The men first opening a placer would seek to pre-empt all the
adjoining land, giving up only when others came in numbers too strong
for them. Officers were elected and new customs sanctioned as they were
needed. Partnerships were sacredly maintained, yet by no other law than
that of the camp. Crimes against property and life seem to have been
infrequent at first, but the unparalleled wealth toled in and developed
a criminal class, which the rudimentary government could not control.
San Francisco formed in 1851 a vigilance committee of citizens, by which
crimes could be more summarily and surely punished. The pioneer banking
house in California began business at San Francisco in January, 1849.
The same month saw the first frame house on the Sacramento, near
Sutter's Fort.

The vast acquisition of territory by the Mexican War seemed destined to
be a great victory for slavery, because nearly all of it lay south of 36
degrees 30 minutes and hence by the Missouri Compromise could become
slave soil. But there was the complication that under Mexico all this
wide realm had been free. To exist there legally slavery must therefore
be established by Congress, making the case very different from the
cases of Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, which came under United States
authority already burdened. This predisposed many who were not in
general opposed to slavery, against extending the institution hither.
Early in the war a bill had passed the House, failing almost by accident
in the Senate, which contained the famous Wilmot Proviso, so named from
its mover in the House, that, except for crime, neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude should ever exist in any of the territories to be
annexed. Wilmot was a Democrat, and at this time a decided majority of
his party favored the proviso. But the pro-slavery wing rallied, while
the Whigs, disbelieving in the war and in annexation both, offered the
proviso Democrats no hearty aid. In consequence it was defeated both
then and after the annexation.

The election of 1848 went for the Whigs, and the next March 4th, General
Taylor became President. Though a southerner and a slave-holder, he was
moderate and a true patriot. So rapid had been the influx into
California that the Territory needed a stable government. Accordingly,
one of Taylor's first acts as President was to urge California to apply
for admission to statehood. General Riley, military governor, at once
called a convention, which, sitting from September 1st to October 13th,
framed a constitution and made request that California be taken into the
Union. This constitution prohibited slavery, and thus a new firebrand
was tossed into the combustible material with which the political
situation abounded. By this time nearly all the friends of freedom were
for the proviso, but its enemies as well had greatly increased. The
immense growth, actual and prospective, of northern population, greatly
inspired one side and angered the other.

[1850]

Resort was now had again to the old, illusive device of compromise, Clay
being the leader as usual. He brought forward his "Omnibus Bill," so
called because it threw a sop to everybody. It failed to pass as a
single measure, but was broken up and enacted piecemeal. Stubborn was
the fight. Radicals of the one part would consent to nothing short of
extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific; those of the
other stood solidly for the unmodified proviso.

In this crisis occurred President Taylor's death, July 9, 1850, which
was most unfortunate. He was known not to favor the pro-slavery
aggression which, in spite of Clay's personal leaning in the opposite
direction, the omnibus bill embodied. Mr. Fillmore, as also Webster,
whom he made his Secretary of State, nervous with fear of an
anti-slavery reputation, went fully Clay's length. The debate on this
compromise of 1850 was the occasion when Webster deserted the free-soil
principles which were now dominant in New England. His celebrated speech
of March. 7th marked the crisis of his life. He argued that the proviso
was not needed to prevent slavery in the newly gotten district, while
its passage would be a wanton provocation to the South From this moment
Massachusetts dropped him. When she next elected a senator for a full
term, it was Charles Sumner, candidate of the united Democrats and
Free-soilers, who went to Congress pledged to fight slavery to the
death.

But the omnibus compromises were passed. California was, indeed,
admitted free, September 9, 1850--the thirty-first State in order--and
slave-trade in the District of Columbia slightly alleviated. On the
other hand, Texas was stretched to include a huge piece of New Mexico
that was free before, and paid $10,000,000 to relinquish further claims.
This was virtually a bonus to holders of her scrip, which from seventeen
cents the dollar instantly rose to par. New Mexico and Utah were to be
organized as Territories without the proviso, and were made powerless to
legislate on slavery till they should become States. Least sufferable, a
fugitive slave law was passed, so Draconian that that of 1793, hitherto
in force, was benign in comparison. It placed the entire power of the
general Government at the slave-hunter's disposal, and ordered rendition
without trial or grant of habeas corpus, on a certificate to be had by
simple affidavit. Bystanders, if bidden, were obliged to help marshals,
and tremendous penalties imposed for aid to fugitives.

This act facilitated the recovery of fugitives at first, but not
permanently. Many who had labored for its passage soon saw that it was a
mistake. It powerfully fanned the abolition flame all over the North.
New personal liberty laws were enacted. A daily increasing number
adopted the view that the new act was unconstitutional, on the ground
that the Constitution places the rendition of slaves as of criminals in
the hands of States, and guarantees jury trial, even upon title to
property, if over twenty dollars in value. After the act had been
justified in the courts, multitudes of moderate northern men urged to a
dangerous degree the doctrine of state rights in defence of the liberty
laws. Others adopted the cry of the "higher law," and without joining
Garrison in denouncing the Government, did not hesitate to oppose in
every possible way the operation of this drastic legislation for
slave-catching.



Millard Fillmore.
From a painting by Carpenter in 1853, at the City Hall, New York.


The country's growth made escape from bondage continually easier and
easier. Once across the border a runaway was sure to find many friends
and few enemies. Openly, or, if this was required, by stealth, he was
passed quickly along to the Canada line. Between 1830 and 1860 over
30,000 slaves are estimated to have taken refuge in Canada. By 1850,
probably no less than 20,000 had found homes in the free States. The new
law moved many of these across into the British dominions. It was hence
increasingly difficult for the slave-owner to recover stray property.
All possible legal obstructions were placed in his way, and when these
failed he was likely still to be opposed by a mob which might prove too
powerful for the marshal and any posse which he could gather.



The Rendition of Anthony Burns in Boston.


In Boston, when a slave named Shadrach was arrested, his friends made a
sudden dash, rescued him from the officers and freed him. With Simms the
same was attempted, but in vain.  The removal of Anthony Burns from that
city in 1855 was possible only by escorting him down State Street to the
revenue cutter in waiting, inside a dense hollow square of United States
artillerymen and marines, with the whole city's militia under arms and
at hand. Business houses as well as residences were closed and draped in
mourning. It was an indignity which Massachusetts never forgot. At
Alton, Ill., slave-hunters seized a respectable colored woman, long
resident there, who fully believed herself free. She was surrounded by
an infuriated company of citizens, and would have been wrenched from her
captors' clutch had not they, in their terror, offered to sell her back
into freedom. The needed $1,200 was raised in a few minutes, and the
agonized creature restored to her family. Judge Davis, whom the evidence
had compelled to deliver the woman, on rendering the sentence resigned
his commission, declaring: "The law gives you your victim. Thank it and
not me, and may God have mercy on your sinful souls."



CHAPTER V.

THE FIGHT FOR KANSAS

[1850-1854]

The measures of 1850 proved anything but the "finality" upon slavery
discussion which both parties, the Whigs as loudly as the Democrats,
promised and insisted that they should be. Elated by its victory in
1850, and also by that of 1852, when the anti-slavery sentiment of
northern Whigs drove so many of their old southern allies to vote for
Pierce, giving him his triumphant election, the slavocracy in 1854
proceeded in its work of suicide to undo the sacred Missouri Compromise
of 1820. Douglas, the ablest northern Democrat, led in this, succeeding,
as official pacificator between North and South, somewhat to the office
of Clay, who had died June 29, 1852. The aim of most who were with him
was to make Kansas-Nebraska slave soil, but we may believe that Douglas
himself cherished the hope and conviction that freedom was its destiny.

This rich country west and northwest of Missouri, consecrated to freedom
by the Missouri Compromise, had been slowly filling with civilized men.
It did not promise to be a profitable field for slavery, nor would
economic considerations ever have originated a slavery question
concerning it. But politically its character as slave or free was of the
utmost consequence to the South, where the resolution gradually arose
either to secure it for the peculiar institution or else prevent its
organization even as a Territory. A motion for such organization had
been unsuccessfully made about 1843, and it was repeated, equally
without effect, each session for ten years. None of these motions had
contained any hint that slavery could possibly find place in the
proposed Territory. The bill of December 15, 1853, like its
predecessors, had as first drawn no reference whatever to slavery, but
when it returned from the committee on Territories, of which Douglas was
chairman, the report, not explicitly, indeed, made the assumption,
unheard of before, that Kansas-Nebraska stood in the same relation to
slavery in which Utah and New Mexico had stood in 1850; and that the
compromise of that year, in leaving the question of slavery to the
States to be formed from these Territories, had already set aside the
agreement of 1820. These assumptions were totally false. The act of 1850
gave Utah and New Mexico no power as Territories over the debatable
institution, and contained not the slightest suggestion of any rule in
the matter for territories in general.

But the hint was taken, and on January 16th notice given of intention to
move an out-and-out abrogation of the Missouri Compromise. Such
abrogation was at once incorporated in the Kansas-Nebraska bill reported
by Douglas, January 23, 1854. This separated Kansas from Nebraska, and
the subsequent struggle raged in reference to Kansas alone. The bill
erroneously declared it established by the acts of 1850 that "all
questions as to slavery in the Territories," no less than in the States
which should grow out of them, were to be left to the residents, subject
to appeal to the United States courts. It passed both houses by good
majorities and was signed by President Pierce May 30th. Its animus
appeared from the loss in the Senate of an amendment, moved by S. P.
Chase, of Ohio, allowing the Territory to prohibit slavery.



Franklin Pierce.
From a painting by Healy, in 1852, at the Corcoran Art Gallery.


Thus was first voiced by a public authority Judge Douglas's new and
taking heresy of "squatter sovereignty," that Congress, though
possessing by Article IV., Section iii., Clause 2 of the Constitution,
general authority over the Territories, is not permitted to touch
slavery there, but must leave it for each territorial populace "to vote
up or vote down." At the South this doctrine of Douglas's was dubbed
"nonintervention," and its real aim to secure Kansas a pro-slavery
character avowed. It was consequently popular there as useful toward the
repeal, although repudiated the instant its working bade fair to render
Kansas free.



Stephen A. Douglas.


[1855]

This was soon the prospect. Organizations had been formed to aid
anti-slavery emigrants from the northern States to Kansas. The first was
the Kansas Aid Society, another a Massachusetts corporation entitled the
New England Emigrant Aid Society. There were others still. Kansas began
to fill up with settlers of strong northern sympathies. They were in
real minority at the congressional election of November, 1854, and in
apparent minority at the territorial election the next March. The vote
against them on the last occasion, however, was largely de

both factions, and both sets were admitted, each with half the state
vote. This satisfied neither side. The Barn-burners called a convention
at Utica in June, and put Van Buren in nomination for the presidency.
The Liberty Party men had the preceding year nominated Hale for this
office, but now, seeing their opportunity, they called a new convention
at Buffalo for August 9, 1848, to which all Free-soilers were invited;
and this convention made Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams its
candidates for President and Vice-President. The platform declared
against any further extension of slavery. The party was henceforth known
as the "Free-soilers," the name coming from its insistence that the
territory conquered from Mexico should forever remain free. Its platform
denounced slavery as a sin against God and a crime against man, and
repudiated the compromise of 1850. It also laid special emphasis upon
the wickedness of the new fugitive slave law, of which it demanded the
repeal. By 1852 the regular Democracy in New York had won back a large
proportion of the Barn-burners or free-soil revolters, so that the
free-soil prospect in this year was not encouraging. Only 146,149
free-soil votes were polled in all the northern states.

[1856]

What quickened this drooping movement into new and triumphant life was
the revocation of the Missouri Compromise. This rallied to the free-soil
standard nearly all the northern Whigs, many old Barn-burners who since
1848 had returned to the democratic fold, and vast numbers of other
anti-Lecompton Democrats. Most of the Know-nothings throughout the North
also joined it, while of course it had in all its anti-slavery measures
the hearty co-operation, directly political or other, of the
Abolitionists. The first national convention of this new party,
fortunately styling itself "Republican," was in 1856. Whig doctrine
early appeared in the party by the demand for protection, internal
improvements, and a national banking system; in fact, Republicanism may
be said to have received nearly entire the whig mantle, as the Whigs did
that of Federalism.

But the living soul and integrating idea of the party was new, the rigid
confinement of slavery and the slave power to their narrowest
constitutional limits. It denounced the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. In the election of this year, 1856, eleven States chose
Republican electors, viz.: all New England, also New York, Ohio,
Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Evidently the Democracy had at last found
a foe at which it were best not to sneer. The Dred Scott decision
immensely aided the growth of this new political power, as it was now
quite generally believed in the North that the whole policy of the South
was a greedy, selfish grasping for the extension of slavery.

[1858]

Out of this conviction, apparently, grew the John Brown raid into
Virginia in 1858. John Brown was an enthusiast, whom sufferings from the
Border Ruffians in Kansas, where one of his sons had been atrociously
murdered and another driven to insanity by cruel treatment as a
prisoner, had frenzied in his opposition to slavery. He had dedicated
himself to its extirpation. The intrepid old man formed the purpose of
invading Virginia, and of placing himself with a few white allies at the
head of a slave insurrection that should sweep the State.  Friends in
the North had contributed money for the purchase of arms, and on October
16th, Brown, with fourteen white men and four negroes, seized the United
States Armory at Harper's Ferry. He stopped the railway trains, freed
some slaves, and assumed to rule the town. United States troops were at
once despatched to the scene, when the misguided hero, with his devoted
band, fortified themselves in the engine house, surrendering only after
thirteen of them, including two of Brown's sons, were killed or mortally
wounded. Brown and the other survivors were soon tried, convicted, and
hung. This insane attempt was deprecated by nearly all of all parties;
but the fate of Brown, with his resolute bravery, begot him large
sympathy, and the false assumption of the South that he really
represented northern feeling made his deed helpful to the anti-slavery
movement, of which the Republican Party was now the centre.



John Brown.


[1860]

Notwithstanding all this the Democracy might still have elected a
president in 1860 had it been united. But it was now desperately at feud
with itself, the cause of this, beautifully enough, lying back in that
very device of Repeal which was intended to make Kansas a slave State
and so to perpetuate the democratic sway. Judge Douglas, and most of the
northern Democrats with him, had insisted so long and earnestly upon the
doctrine of squatter sovereignty that they could not now possibly recede
from it even had they desired to do so. The great majority of them did
not so desire, but sincerely believed in that doctrine as part and
parcel of the true democratic faith. But it was now obvious that the
working out of the Douglas theory was absolutely sure to make free all
the western States henceforth to be formed. This would, of course,
remove the Senate from the domination of slavery. Hence the South was
irrevocably opposed to it, and insisted with all its might upon the
Calhoun-Taney contention that the national Government must protect
slavery in all the Territories to which it pleased to go. In a passage
at arms with Douglas as they were stumping Illinois for the senatorship
in 1858, Lincoln keenly forced upon him the question whether under the
Dred Scott decision any Territory could possibly be kept free from
slavery. "If," said he, "Douglas answers yes, he can never be President;
if no, Illinois will not again elect him senator." Douglas replied in
the affirmative, and, as his antagonist prophesied, became in the South
a doomed man.

The schism was fully apparent when, on April 23d, the democratic
convention of 1860 began its session in Charleston. A majority of the
delegates were for Douglas, voting down the Calhoun-Taney view, though
willing that the party should bind itself to obey the Dred Scott
decision. When the Douglas platform was adopted the delegations from
Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas, with parts of those from
Louisiana, North and South Carolina, Arkansas, and Delaware, seceded.
Douglas had a majority vote as presidential candidate, but not
two-thirds. The convention adjourned to meet at Baltimore June 18th, and
when it met there Douglas was nominated by the requisite two-thirds
vote. The seceders met at Richmond, June 11th, where, imitating some new
seceders at Baltimore they nominated Breckenridge and Lane. The
so-called Constitutional Union Party also had in the field its ticket,
Bell and Everett, which secured votes from a few persistent Whigs and
Know-nothings still foolish enough to suppose that further clash between
the powers of slavery and freedom could somehow be averted.

The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, and Hannibal
Hamlin, of Maine. Lincoln was already a marked man in his party,
especially in the West, his brilliant joint debate with Judge Douglas
during some months in 1858 having brought out his matchless good sense
and good nature, his rare knowledge of our history and law, and his high
quality as thinker and speaker. Born in Kentucky in 1809, removing to
Indiana in 1816, to Illinois in 1830, reared in extreme poverty and
wholly self-educated, this man had risen by his wits, his sturdy
perseverance and industry, his extraordinary ability, and his proverbial
honesty, to be the acknowledged peer of the "Little Giant" himself. He
began political life a Whig and ably represented that party in the
national Congress from 1847 to 1849, making his voice heard against the
high-handed procedure of the Administration in the Mexican War. But as
with Seward, Greeley, Fessenden, Thaddeus Stevens, Sherman, Dayton,
Corwin, and Collamer, subsequent events had intensified his anti-slavery
feeling, convincing him, as he avowed, that the Union could not
"permanently continue half slave and half free." He was thus drawn to
unite his fortunes with the Republicans. His nomination was received
coolly in the East, where Seward had been preferred; but as men studied
Lincoln's record they were convinced of the wisdom which had made him
the party's leader. He swept New England, New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin,
California, Minnesota, and Oregon, having 180 electoral votes to
Breckenridge's 72, Bell's 39, and Douglas's 12.



William H. Seward.
From a photograph by Brady.



CHAPTER VIII.

MATERIAL PROGRESS

[1860]

The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,443,321. In spite of
the threatening political complications between 1840 and 1860, these
years were characterized by astonishing economic prosperity. The decade
after 1848 was, indeed, in point of advance in material weal, the golden
age of our history. Between 1850 and 1860, the wealth of the nation
swelled 120 per cent., the value of its farms 103 per cent., its total
manufacturing product 87 per cent., its manufactured export 171 per
cent., its railroad mileage 220 per cent. Making all due allowance for
the rise of prices during the period, this is still a remarkable
exhibit.

The great West continued to come under the hand of civilization. Between
1850 and 1860 our centre of population made a longer stride westward
than during any other decade--from east of the meridian of Parkersburg,
W. Va., to the meridian of Chillicothe, O. Florida and Texas having been
admitted to statehood in 1845, Iowa followed next year, Wisconsin in
1848, California in 1850, Minnesota, which had been an organized
Territory since 1849, in 1858, and Oregon in 1859. Kansas, Nebraska,
Utah, and Washington Territories were organized before 1860. By this
date there were settlements far up the Rio Grande. The Pacific coast was
sought for lands and homes as well as for gold. Fremont's expeditions in
1842, 1844, and 1848 had done much to show people the way thither. In
1853 the Government sent out four different parties to survey suitable
routes for a Pacific railway, a work followed up by three other parties
the next summer. The settlements in Oregon had, by 1845, in places
become dense.



Elias Howe.


Immigration hither was unfortunately checked a little later by Indian
hostilities, the gravest attacks being in 1847 and 1855. In the latter
year Major Haller, leading an exploring party, was surrounded by the
savages and cut off from food and water, only making his escape by a
fight of two days against overwhelming odds. He and his party at last
hewed their desperate way through, losing their entire outfit, besides
one-fifth of their number. The whole territory was harassed by Indians
on the war path, and General Wool had to be sent up from San Francisco
to restore peace. This done, immigration was renewed. A thousand new
inhabitants came to Oregon in 1852, and its northern half was organized
as Washington Territory the following year. The Pacific Mail Steamship
Company had been chartered in 1848, and four years earlier a newspaper
started, the first in English on that coast. Its seat was Oregon City,
its name the Flumgudgeon Gazette.



The Vandalia. The Pioneer Propeller On the Lakes.



Old Stone Towers of the Niagara Suspension Bridge.


The old West prospered, notwithstanding the drain which it, in common
with the East, experienced in favor of parts farther toward the setting
sun. The first lake propeller was launched at Cleveland in 1847. The
same year the Tribune was started in Chicago. In 1850 the city had its
theatre and its board of trade. The Chicago streets began this year to
be lighted with gas. The first bridge across the Mississippi was built
in 1855 at Minneapolis; that at Rock Island, 1,582 feet long, in 1856.
The Niagara suspension bridge was finished in 1855.

The increase of railways did not at once end the opening of canals. The
Miami Canal, between Cincinnati and Toledo, 215 miles, begun in 1825,
was finished in 1843, and the Wabash and Erie, between Evansville and
Toledo, opened in 1851; but the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts was, in
1853, abandoned and filled up from the loss of its business to
railroads. In 1857 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company purchased from the
State the canal and railway line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and
soon after extended the railway portion to cover the whole. A traveller
from Boston to the West could get to Rochester by rail in 1841. Next
year he could go on to Buffalo by the same means. In 1842, Augusta, Ga.,
was connected by rail with Atlanta, Savannah with Macon, and the Boston
& Maine Railway finished to Berwick.



The New Iron Towers of the Niagara Bridge.


The first railway out of Chicago--it was the first in Illinois--was
built in 1850, to Elgin. Chicago had no railway connection with the East
till two years later, when the Michigan Southern was opened. The
Michigan Central was finished soon after the Southern, and the Rock
Island before the end of the year. The Michigan Central had direct
connection east across Canada to Niagara Falls by 1854. In 1856 the
Burlington route reached the Mississippi and the Rock Island went on to
Iowa City. This year witnessed the opening of the first railroad in
California--from Sacramento to Folsom. In 1857 Chicago and St. Louis
were joined by rails, as also the latter city with Baltimore, over the
Parkersburg branch of the Baltimore & Ohio.



Birthplace of S. F. B. Morse, at Charlestown, Mass. Built 1775.



S. F. B. Morse.

We now come to an improvement of which the preceding period knew
nothing, the magnetic telegraph, introduced by Professor Morse in 1844.
In this year Morse secured a congressional appropriation of $30,000 for
a line from Washington to Baltimore. The wires were at first encased in
tubes underground. In spite of the success of the project, further
governmental patronage was refused, the Postmaster-General advising
against it under the conviction that the invention could not become
practically valuable. Morse appealed for aid from private capitalists.
Ezra Cornell, of New York, soon opened a short line in Boston for
exhibition, following this with a similar enterprise in New York City.
The admission fee was twelve and a half cents. Few cared to pay even
this trifle, so that the undertaking was hardly a success in either
city.

Amos Kendall then engaged as Morse's agent, and by dint of great effort
secured subscriptions for a line from New York to Philadelphia, being
obliged to sell the shares for one-half their face value. Incorporation
was secured from the Maryland Legislature, under the first American
charter, for the telegraph business. The line was completed in 1845 to
the Hudson opposite the upper end of Manhattan Island, and an effort
made to insulate the wire and connect with the city along the bottom of
the river. This failed, and for some time messages had to be taken over
in boats. In 1846 the wire was carried on to Baltimore. In the same year
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were connected by telegraph, New York and
Albany, New York and Boston, Boston and Buffalo. The first line in
California was erected in 1853.



The First Telegraphic Instrument, as exhibited in 1837 by Morse.


In 1850 Hiram Sibley embarked in the telegraph business. He bought the
House patent, and next year organized the New York and Mississippi
Valley Telegraph Company. By 1853 or 1854, some twenty companies had
started, with a capital of  $7,000,000--too many for good management or
high profits. Accordingly, Sibley and Cornell united in buying them up,
and thus formed, in 1856, the Western Union, which Sibley's energy
extended all over the country east of the Rocky Mountains. In 1860 he
went to Washington with a scheme for a transcontinental telegraph line,
and secured from Congress a subsidy of $40,000 for ten years. Just then
the Overland Telegraph Company was started in San Francisco. It and
Sibley united, breaking ground July 1, 1861, and proceeding at the rate
of nearly ten miles of wire per day. On October 25th, telegraph wire
stretched all the way between the two oceans. In 1864 this line was
amalgamated with the Western Union.



Calenders heated internally by Steam, for spreading India Rubber into
Sheets or upon Cloth, called the "Chaffee Machine."


Still more wonderful, ocean telegraphy was broached and made successful
during these years. Tentative efforts to operate the current under water
were made between Governor's Island and New York City so early as 1842.
A copper wire was used, insulated with hemp string coated with India
rubber and pitch. In 1846 a similar arrangement was encased in lead
pipe. This device failed, and sub-aqueous telegraphy seems to have been
for the time given up.

In 1854 Mr. Cyrus W. Field, of New York, with Peter Cooper and other
capitalists of that city, organized the New York, Newfoundland, and
London Telegraph Company, stock a million and a half dollars, and began
plans to connect New York with St. Johns, Newfoundland, by a cable under
the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Little progress was made, however, till 1857,
when it was attempted to lay a cable across the Atlantic from
Newfoundland. The paying out was begun at Queenstown and proceeded
successfully until three hundred and thirty-five miles had been laid,
when the cable parted. Nothing more was done till the next year in June.
Then, in 1858, after several more unsuccessful efforts, the two
continents were successfully joined. The two ships containing the cable
met in mid-ocean, where it was spliced and the paying out begun in each
direction. The one reached Newfoundland the same day, August 5th, on
which the other reached Valencia, Ireland. No break had occurred, and
after the necessary arrangements had been effected, the first message
was transmitted on August 16th. It was from the Queen of Great Britain
to the President of the United States, and read, "Glory to God in the
highest, peace on earth and good will to men." A monster celebration of
the event was had in New York next day.



The Great Eastern Laying the Atlantic Cable.


Although inter-continental communication had been actually opened, the
cable did not work, nor did ocean cabling become a successful and
regular business till 1866, when a new cable was laid. This event
attracted the more attention from the fact that the largest ship ever
built was used in paying out the cable. It was the Great Eastern, 680
feet long and 83 broad, with 25,000 tons displacement.



Sounding Machine used by a Cable Expedition.


Street railways became common in our largest cities before 1860, the
first in New England, that between Boston and Cambridge, dating from
1856. Sleeping-cars began to be used in 1858. The express business went
on developing, being opened westward from Buffalo first in 1845. A steam
fire-engine was tried in New York in 1841, but the invention was
successful only in 1853. Baltimore used one in 1858. Goodyear
triumphantly vulcanized rubber in 1844, making serviceable a gum which
had been used in various forms already but without ability to stand
heat. Elias Howe took out his first patent for a sewing machine in 1846,
being kept in vigorous fight against infringements for the next eight
years. The anaesthetic power of ether was discovered in 1844.
Gutta-percha was first imported hither in 1847. The first application of
the Bessemer steel process in this country was made in New Jersey in
1856, the manufacture of watches by machinery begun in 1857,
photo-lithography in 1859. New York had a clearing house in 1853, Boston
in 1855. The petroleum business may with propriety be dated from 1860,
although the existence of oil in Northwestern Pennsylvania had been long
known, and some use made of it since 1826. For several years experiments
had been making in refining the oil. The excellence of the light from it
now drew attention to the value of the product, wells began to be bored
and oil land sold for fabulous prices.



Cyrus W. Field.



Paying out Cable Gear. From Chart House.


We close this chapter with a word about the painful financial crisis
that swept over the country in the autumn of 1857. Its causes are
somewhat occult, but two appear to have been the chief, viz., the
over-rapid building of railroads and the speculation induced by the
prosperity and the rise of prices incident to the new output of gold.
Interest on the best securities rose to three, four, and five per cent.
a month. On ordinary securities no money at all could be had. Commercial
houses of the highest repute went down. The climax was in September and
October. The three leading banks in Philadelphia suspended specie
payments, at once followed in this by all the banks of the Middle
States, and upon the 13th of the next month by the New York banks.
Manufacturing was very largely abandoned for the time, at least thirty
thousand operatives being thrown out of work in New York City alone.
Prices even of agricultural produce fell enormously. Tramps were to be
met on every road. Easier times fortunately returned by spring, when
business resumed pretty nearly its former prosperous march.




Shore End of Cable-exact size. [About 3.5 inches in diameter.]



Barnacles on Cable.



PERIOD IV.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

1860-1868

CHAPTER I.

CAUSES OF THE WAR

[1861]

It were a mistake to refer the great Rebellion, for ultimate source, to
ambiguity in the Constitution or to the wickedness of politicians or of
the people. It was simply the last resort in an "irrepressible conflict"
of principle--in the struggle for and against the genius of the world's
advance. Economic, social, and moral evolution, resulting in two
radically different civilizations, had enforced upon each section
unfaithfulness to the spirit and even to the letter of its
constitutional covenant. The South was not to blame that slavery was at
first profitable; and if it deemed it so too long and even thought of it
as a good morally, these convictions, however big with ill consequences
to the nation, were but errors of view, not strange considering the then
status of slavery in the world.

The South's pride, holding it to the course once chosen, was also no
indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime
for its "higher law fanaticism," which was simply the spirit of the age;
or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon
the land. Much as was "nominated in the bond" of the Constitution,
neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly
in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern
congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase
and being in the majority, they had gone on punctiliously heeding formal
obligation against manifest national weal. And when, in 1854, the great
sacred compact of 1820 was set aside by the authority of the South
itself, the North felt free even from formal fetters. All talk of
extra-legal negotiations and understandings touching slavery was now at
an end. The northern majority was at last united to legislate upon
slavery as it would, subject only to the Constitution. The South too
late saw this, and fearing that the peculiar institution, shut up to its
old home, would die, sought separation, with such chance of expansion as
this might yield.

The South had come to love slavery too well, the Constitution too
little. Upon conserving slavery all parties there, however dissident as
to modes, however hostile in other matters, were unconditionally bent.
The chief argument even of those opposing disunion was that it
endangered slavery. Our new government, said Alexander H. Stephens, soon
to be vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, is founded, its
cornerstone rests, upon the great physical, philosophical, and moral
truth, to which Jefferson and the men of his day were blind, that the
negro, by nature or the curse of Canaan, is not equal to the white man;
that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is, by ordination of
Providence, whose wisdom it is not for us to inquire into or question,
his natural and normal condition. As the apostle of such a principle the
South could not but abjure the old establishment, whose genius and
working were inevitably in the contrary direction. Many confessed it to
be the essential nature of our Government, and not unfair treatment
under it, against which they rebelled.

Slavery had also bred hatred of the Union indirectly, by fostering
anti-democratic habits of thought, feeling, and action. "The form of
liberty existed, the press seemed to be free, the deliberations of
legislative bodies were tumultuous, and every man boasted of his
independence. But the spirit of true liberty, tolerance of the minority
and respect for individual opinion, had departed, and those deceitful
appearances concealed the despotism of an inexorable master, slavery,
before whom the most powerful of slave-holders was himself but a slave,
as abject as the meanest." Over wide sections, untitled manorial lords,
"more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but
overbearing," controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional
districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man
save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists,
whom love for the "peculiar institution" rendered callous to national
interests.

The vigorous secession movements in the South at once after Lincoln's
election, raised a question of the first magnitude, which few people at
the North had reflected upon since 1833, viz., whether or not
non-revolutionary secession was possible. Almost unanimously the North
denied such possibility, the South affirmed it. This was at bottom
manifestly nothing but the old question of state sovereignty over again.
The South held the Union to be a state compact, which the northern
parties thereto had broken. To prove the compact theory no new proof was
now adduced. Rather did the southern people take the assertion of it as
an axiom, with a simplicity which spoke volumes for the influence of
Calhoun and for the indoctrination which the South had received in 1832.

Not alone Calhoun but nearly every other southerner of great influence,
at least from the day of the Missouri Compromise, had been inculcating
the supreme authority of the State as compared with the Union. The
southern States were all large, and, as travelling in or between them
was difficult and little common, they retained far more than those at
the North each its original separateness and peculiarities. Southern
population was more fixed than northern; southern state traditions were
held in far the deeper reverence. In a word, the colonial condition of
things to a great extent persisted in the South down to the very days of
the war. There was every reason why Alabama or North Carolina should,
more than Connecticut, feel like a separate nation.

This intense state consciousness might gradually have subsided but for
the deep prejudices and passions begotten of slavery and of the
opposition it encountered from the North. Their resolution, against
emancipation led Southerners to cherish a view which made it seem
possible for them as a last resort to sever their alliance with the
North. It was this conjunction of influences, linking the slave-holder's
jealousy and pride to a false but natural conception of state
sovereignty, which created in southern men that love of State, intense
and sincere as real patriotism, causing them to look upon northern men,
with their different theory, as foes and foreigners.

A very imposing historical argument could of course have been built up
for the Calhoun theory of the Union. The Union emerged from the
preceding Confederacy without a shock. Most who voted for it were
unaware how radical a change it embodied. The Constitution, one may even
admit, could not have been adopted had it then been understood to
preclude the possibility of secession. Doubtless, too, the gradual
change of view concerning it all over the North, sprung from the
multiplication of social and economic ties between sections and States,
rather than from study of constitutional law. We believe that the
untruth of the central-sovereignty theory in no wise follows from these
admissions, and that its correctness might be made apparent from a
plenitude of considerations.

Champions of the northern side deemed it the less necessary to expatiate
upon this question, since, admitting the South's basal contention, the
right in question depended upon sufficiency of grievance. As, in the
South's view, the case was one of sovereigns one party of whom, without
referee, was about to break a compact without the other's consent, the
adequacy of the grievance should, to excuse the step, have been
absolutely beyond question. On the contrary it was subject to the
gravest question.

The South's only significant indictment against the North was the one
concerning the personal liberty laws. Moderates like Stephens, indeed,
stoutly condemned this plea for secession as insufficient; but,
believing in the State as sovereign, they had perforce to yield, and
they became as enthusiastic as any when once this "paramount authority"
had spoken. "Fire-eaters," at first a small minority, saw this advantage
and worked it to the utmost. On its complaint touching the personal
liberty legislation the South's case utterly broke down, theorizing the
Union into a rope of sand, not "more perfect" but far less so than the
old, which itself was to be "perpetual." According to the Calhoun
contention States were the parties to a pact, and it was a good way from
clear that any northern State as such, even by personal liberty
legislation, had broken the alleged pact. The liberty laws were innocent
at least in form, and at worst

hour later the embrasures are opened, the black guns run out, and Sumter
hurls back her answer to the voice of rebellion. The bombs making it
unsafe to use the barbette cannons of the open rampart, Anderson was
confined to his twenty-one casemate pieces, mostly of light calibre. The
fire was kept up briskly all the morning. Sumter stood it well, but did
little damage to the opposing batteries. At sunset the guns of both
sides became silent, but the mortars maintained a slow fire through the
night.

Early next morning the cannonade opened afresh, and in the course of the
forenoon hot shot set fire to Sumter's wooden barracks. The flames soon
got beyond control; the powder magazine had to be closed; and the heat
and smoke became so stifling that the garrison was forced, in order to
avoid suffocation, to lie face downward upon the floor, each man with a
wet cloth at his mouth. Powder was at last exhausted. About one o'clock
the flag was shot away. It was immediately raised again upon a low
jury-mast, but could not be seen for the smoke, and Beauregard sent to
ask if Anderson had surrendered. The latter offered to evacuate upon the
terms named before the bombardment, to which Beauregard agreed, and all
firing ceased. The next day at noon, after a salute of fifty guns to
their flag, Major Anderson and his men evacuated the scene of their
heroism, and soon after took passage for New York.

The disunion leaders had rightly calculated that an open blow would
bring the border slave States into the Confederacy; but they had not
anticipated the effect of such a deed beyond Mason and Dixon's line.
When it was known that the old flag had been fired upon, a thrill of
passionate rage electrified the North from Maine to Oregon. Then was
witnessed an uprising unparalleled in our history if not in that of
mankind. From every city, town, and hamlet, loud and earnest came the
call, "The Union must be preserved! Away with compromise! Away with
further attempts to conciliate traitors! To arms!" Slavery might do all
else, so little did most northerners yet feel its evil, but it could not
rend the Union. Pulpit, platform, and press echoed with patriotic cries.
Everywhere were Union meetings, speeches, and parades. Union badges
decked everyone's clothing, and the Stars and Stripes were kept unfurled
as only on national holidays before. In New York City a mass-meeting of
two hundred thousand declared for war. The New York Herald changed its
sneer to a war-blast. Party lines were thrown down. Democrats like
Butler, Cass, and Dickinson were in the Union van. Senator Douglas,
lately Lincoln's antagonist, and at first strongly opposed to coercion,
went through the West arousing the people by his patriotic eloquence.
"There can be no neutrals now," were his words, "only patriots and
traitors."



Route of the Sixth Massachusetts Troops through Baltimore.]


April 15th, President Lincoln issued a call for seventy-five thousand
volunteers, and each free State responded with twice its quota.
Enlisting offices were opened in every town and hamlet, and the roll of
the drum and the tramp of armed men with faces set southward were heard
all over the North. First to march was the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment.
Forming on Boston Common it took cars for Washington on April 17th,
reaching Baltimore on the morning of the 19th.

Maryland was trembling in the balance between Union and disunion. A
determined disunionist minority was working with might and main to drag
the State into secession. Baltimore was white-hot with southern zeal,
determined that the Bay State troops should never reach Washington
through that metropolis. Eight of the cars containing the soldiers were
drawn safely across the city. The next was assailed by a hooting mob,
and the windows smashed in by bricks and paving stones. Some of the
soldiers were wounded by pistol shots, and a scattering fire was
returned. Sand, stones, anchors, and other obstructions were heaped upon
the track. The remaining four companies therefore left the cars and
started to march. They soon met the mob, flying a secession flag. A
melee ensued. The troops moved double-quick toward the Washington depot,
surrounded by a seething mass of infuriated secessionists filling the
air with their brick-bats and stones, while bullets whizzed from
sidewalks and windows. The troops returned the fire, and several in the
crowd fell. The chief of police with fifty officers appeared on the
scene, who, by presenting cocked revolvers, held the rioters in check
for a while, till the distressed troops could join their comrades.
Baltimore was in the hands of this secessionist band for the rest of the
day. The bridges north of that city were also burned, so that no more
troops could reach Washington by this route.



Scene of the First Bloodshed, at Baltimore.


Meanwhile the capital city was in great peril, devotees of the South
being each moment expected to make an attack upon it. Only fifteen
companies of local militia and six of regulars were present at
inauguration time, stationed by General Scott at critical points in the
city. Pickets were posted continually on roads and bridges outside. Four
hundred Pennsylvania troops happily arrived on April 18th, and the next
day came the Sixth Massachusetts. But the city was not yet secure. There
were reports that large bodies of men were gathering in Maryland and
Virginia for a descent upon it. Washington was put in a state of siege,
the public buildings barricaded and provided with sentinels. The
Government seized the Potomac steamers and also all the flour within
reach. Business ceased. Alarmed by rumors of a military impressment,
hundreds of government clerks, besides officers in the army and navy,
came out in their true colors and fled south. Enemies at Baltimore had
cut off telegraphic communication between Washington and the North.
Reports came that re-enforcements were on the way, but day followed day
without witnessing their arrival. The President and all Unionists were
in an agony of suspense.



The Routes of Approach to Washington.
Russell & Struthers, Eng's, N. York.


On April 22d the Eighth Massachusetts, under General B. F. Butler, and
the famous Seventh Regiment from New York City, met at Annapolis. Here
they were delayed several days. Governor Hicks had warned them not to
land on Maryland soil. The railroad to Washington had been torn up for
many miles and the engines damaged. Among his troops Butler found the
very machinists who had made the engines. Repairs were promptly
effected, the track re-laid, and about noon of the 25th the gallant New
Yorkers landed in Washington amid the joyful shouts of the loyal
populace. Up Pennsylvania Avenue swept the solid ranks, bands playing
and colors flying, to gladden the heart of the careworn President as he
welcomed them at the White House. A sudden change came over the city.
Secessionists slunk away, the faces of the loyal beamed with joy. The
national capital was safe.