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Title: History of the United States, Volume 3

Author: Elisha Benjamin Andrews

Release date: December 5, 2007 [eBook #23748]

Most recently updated: September 13, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23748

Credits: Produced by Don Kostuch

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, VOLUME 3 ***

[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

neighborhood where Clay passed his childhood was called, he might often

have been seen astride a sorry horse with a rope bridle and no saddle,

carrying his bag of grain to the mill. He had attended only district

schools. After obtaining the rudiments of a legal education in Richmond

by service as a lawyer's clerk, he removed to Kentucky. He was soon

famous as a criminal lawyer, and a little later as a politician. The

rest of his life was spent in Congress or cabinet.

Clay's speeches read ill, but were powerful in their delivery. He spoke

directly to the heart. As he proceeded, his tall and awkward form swayed

with passion. His voice was sweet and winsome. Once Tom Marshall was to

face him in joint debate over a salary grab for which Clay had voted.

Clay had the first word, and as he warmed to his work Marshall slunk

away through the crowd in despair. "Come back," said Clay's haters to

him; "you can answer every point." "Of course," replied Marshall, "but I

can't get up there and do it now." The common people shouted for Clay as

they shouted for neither Webster nor Adams. He had infinite fund of

anecdote, remembered everyone he had ever seen, and was kindly to all.

John Tyler is said to have wept when Clay failed of the Presidential

nomination in the Whig Convention of 1839.

[1840]

Clay's vices and inconsistencies were readily forgiven. He had denounced

duelling as barbarous, yet when sharp-tongued John Randolph referred to

him and Adams as having, in 1825, formed "the coalition of Blifil and

Black George, the combination of the Puritan and the blackleg"--for Clay

gambled--Clay challenged him. They met, the diminutive Randolph being in

his dressing-gown. Neither was hurt, as Randolph fired in air and Clay

was no shot. Being asked why he did not kill Randolph, Clay said: "I

aimed at the part of his gown where I thought he was, but when the

bullet got there he had moved." In 1842, when Lord Ashburton was in

Washington, there was a famous whist game, my lord, with Mr. Crittenden,

playing against Clay and the Russian Minister, Count Bodisco, while

Webster looked on. "What shall the stake be?" asked his lordship. "Out

of deference to Her Majesty," said Clay, "we will make it a sovereign."

John Randolph.

From a picture by Jarvis in 1811, at the New York Historical Society.

Emphatically patriotic, super-eminent in debate, ambitious, adventurous

in political diplomacy, a hard worker, incessant in activity for his

party, temperate upon the slavery question, whole-souled in every

measure or policy calculated to advance nationality, this versatile man

may be put down as foremost among the leaders of the Whig Party from its

origin till his death.

CHAPTER II.

FLORIDA AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE

[1816]

It was a delicate question after the Louisiana purchase how much

territory it embraced east of the Mississippi. Louisiana had under

France, till 1762, reached the Perdido, Florida's western boundary at

present, and was "retroceded" by Spain to France in 1800 "with the same

extent that it had when France possessed it." The United States of

course succeeded to whatever France thus recovered. Spain claimed still

to own West Florida, the name given by Great Britain on receiving it

from France in 1763 to the part of Louisiana between the Perdido and the

Mississippi. Spain had never acquired the district from France, but

obtained it by conquest from Great Britain during our Revolution.

This claim by Spain, based only on the "retro" in the treaty of 1800,

our Government viewed as fanciful, regarding West Florida undoubtedly

ours through the Louisiana purchase. Spain was intractable, first of

herself, later still more so through Napoleon's dictation. Hence our

offer, in Jefferson's time, to avoid war, of a lump sum for the two

Floridas was spurned by her. In 1810 and 1811, to save it from

anarchy--also to save it from Great Britain or France, now in the

whitest heat of their contest for Spain--we occupied West Florida, as

certainly entitled to it against those powers, yet with no view of

precluding further negotiations with Spain. When in 1812 Louisiana

became a State, its eastern boundary ran as now, including a goodly

portion of the region in debate.

[1817]

The necessity of acquiring East Florida, too, was more and more

apparent. That country was without rule, full of filibusterers,

privateers, hostile refugee Creeks and runaway negroes, of whose

services the English had availed themselves freely during the war of

1812, when Spaniards and English made Florida a perpetual base for

hostile raids into our territory.  A fort then built by the English on

the Appalachicola and left intact at the peace with some arms and

ammunition, had been occupied by the negroes, who, from this retreat,

menaced the peace beyond the line. Spain could not preserve law and

order here. This was perhaps a sufficient excuse for the act of General

Gaines in crossing into Florida and bombarding the negro fort, July 27,

1816. Amelia Island, on the Florida coast, a nest of lawless men from

every nation, was in 1817 also seized by the United States with the same

propriety. Knowledge that Spain resented these acts encouraged the

Floridians. Collisions continually occurred all along the line, finally

growing into general hostility. Such was the origin of the First

Seminole War.

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 in 1833 he proceeded to break it by removing the

United States deposits which it held. Such removal was by law within the

power of the Secretary of the Treasury. Secretary McLane refused to

execute Jackson's will. He was removed and Duane appointed. Then Duane

was removed and Roger B. Taney appointed, who obeyed the President's

behest. The bank was emptied by checking out the public money as wanted,

at the same time depositing no more, the funds being instead placed in

"pet" state banks, as they were called because of the government favor

thus shown them.

The financial distress rightly or wrongly ascribed to this measure

throughout the country, instead of injuring Jackson, probably, on the

whole, made him still more popular, as showing the power of the bank.

When Congress met in 1833, the Senate passed a vote of censure upon him

for what he had done. Rancorous wranglings and debates pervaded Congress

and the whole land. After persistent effort by Jackson's bosom friend,

Senator Benton, of Missouri, this censure-vote was expunged by the

XXIVth Congress, second session, January 16, 1837. This was before

Jackson left office, and he accounted it the greatest triumph of his

public life.

[1830]

Jackson was somehow fortunate in dealing with foreign nations. It was he

who recovered for American ships that British West Indian trade which

had been so long denied. Negotiations were opened with Great Britain,

which, in 1830, had the result of placing American vessels in the

British West Indian ports at an equal advantage with British vessels

sailing thither from the United States--terms which, through the

contiguity of those islands to us, gave us a trade there better than

that of any other nation. This diplomacy brought the administration much

applause.

When Jackson became President, France was still in our debt on account

of her spoliations upon American commerce after the settlement of 1803.

The matter had been in negotiation ever since 1815, but hitherto in

vain. Jackson took it up with zeal, but with his usual apparent

recklessness. A treaty had been concluded in 1831, as a final settlement

between the two countries, binding France to pay twenty-five million

francs and the United States to pay one and one-half million. The first

instalment from France became due February 2, 1833, but was not paid.

Jackson's message to Congress in 1834, not an instalment having yet been

received, contained a distinct threat of war should not payment begin

forthwith. He also bade Edward Livingston, minister at Paris, in the

same contingency to demand his passports and leave Paris for London.

[1835]

Most public men, even those in his cabinet, thought this action

foolhardy and useless; but Quincy Adams, neither expecting nor receiving

any thanks for it, just as in the Seminole War difficulty, nobly stood

up for the President. A telling speech by him in the House led to its

unanimous resolution, March 2, 1835, that the execution of the treaty

should be insisted on. The French ministry blustered, and for a time

diplomatic relations between the two countries were entirely ruptured.

But France, affecting to see in the message of 1835, though voiced in

precisely the same tone as its predecessor, some apology for the menace

contained in that, began its payments. This money, as also all due from

the other states included in Napoleon's continental system, was paid

during Jackson's administration, a result which brought him and his

party great praise, not more for the money than for the respect and

consideration secured to the United States by insistence upon its

rights. The President's message to Congress in 1835 announced the entire

extinguishment of the public debt--the first and the last time this has

occurred in all our national history.

An important measure touching the hard-money system of our country was

passed in large part through the influence of President Jackson. By the

Mint Law of 1792 our silver dollar was made to contain three hundred and

seventy-one and a quarter grains of fine silver, or four hundred and

sixteen of standard silver. The amount of pure silver in this venerable

coin has remained unchanged ever since; only, in 1837, by a reduction of

the alloy fraction to exactly one-tenth, the total weight of the coin

became what it now is, four hundred and twelve and a half grains,

nine-tenths fine. The same law of 1792 had given the gold dollar just

one-fifteenth the weight of the silver dollar. This proportion, which

Hamilton had arrived at after careful investigation characteristic of

the man, was exactly correct at the time, but within a year, as is now

known, on account of increase in the relative value of gold, the gold

dollar at fifteen to one became more valuable than its silver mate. The

consequence was that the gold brought to the United States mint for

coinage fell off year by year, until some of the years between 1820 and

1830 it had been almost zero. Gold money had nearly ceased to circulate.

[1834-1836]

Jackson resolved to restore the yellow metal to daily use. In this he

was opposed by many Whigs, who, so zealous were they for the United

States Bank, had become paper money men. The so-called Gold Bill was

carried through Congress in 1834, changing the proportion of silver to

gold in our currency from fifteen to one to sixteen to one. It should

have been fifteen and a half to one. Now gold in its turn was

over-valued, so that silver gradually ceased to circulate, as gold had

almost ceased before. This result was made worse after 1848, when there

was a still further appreciation of silver through the discovery of gold

in California and Australia. Silver dollars did not again circulate

freely in the country until 1878, though they were full legal tender

till 1873. Gold, on the other hand, was everywhere seen after 1834,

though not abundant in circulation, owing to the large amounts of paper

money then in use.

In 1836 the President ordered his Secretary of the Treasury to put forth

the famous Specie Circular, declaring that only gold, silver, or land

scrip should be received in payment for public lands. The occasion of

this was that while land sales were very rapidly increasing, the

receipts hitherto had consisted largely in the notes of insolvent banks.

Land speculators would organize a bank, procure for it, if they could,

the favor of being a "pet" bank, issue notes, borrow these as

individuals and buy land with them. The notes were deposited, when they

would borrow them again to buy land with, and so on. As there was little

specie in the West, the circular broke up many a fine plan, and evoked

much ill-feeling. Gold was drawn from the East, where, as many of the

banks had none too much, the drain caused not a few of them to collapse.

The condition of business at this time was generally unsound, and this

westward movement of gold was all that was needed to precipitate a

crisis. A crisis accordingly came on soon after, painfully severe. It is

unfair, however, to arraign Jackson's order as wholly responsible for

the evils which accompanied this monetary cataclysm. It was rather an

occasion than the cause.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FIRST WHIG TRIUMPH

[1837]

Partly Jackson's personal influence, partly his able aides, partly

favoring circumstances had, during his administrations, brought the

Democracy into excellent condition, patriotic, national in general

spirit, with a creed that, however imperfect--close construction being

its integrating idea--was, after all, definite, consistent, and

thoughtful. Yet in 1840 the Democrats, who four years before had chosen

Van Buren by an electoral vote of 170 to 73, had to surrender, with the

same Van Buren for candidate, to the Whigs by a majority of 234

electoral votes to 60; only five States, and but two of them northern,

going for the democratic candidate.

There were several causes for this defeat. Jackson had made many enemies

as well as many friends, some of these within his own party, while the

entire opposition to him was indescribably bitter on account of the

personal element entering into the struggle. The commendably national

spirit of the Whig Party told well in its favor. Upon this point its

attitude proved far more in accord with the best sentiment of the nation

than that of the Democracy, sound as the latter was at the core and

nobly as its chief had behaved in the nullification crisis.

More influential still was the financial predicament into which on

Jackson's retirement his successor and the country were plunged. The

commercial distress which seemed to spring from Jackson's measures was

now first fully realized. Anger and pain from the death of the bank had

not abated. Ardent hatred prevailed toward the "pet" banks, extending to

the party whose darlings they were, while the Specie Circular was held

to have ruined most of the others. The subsequent legislation for

distributing the treasury surplus among the States, by removing the

deposits from the pet banks, destroyed many of these as well. They had

been using this government money for the discount of loans to business

men, and were not in condition instantly to pay it back. Hence the panic

of 1837. First the New York City banks suspended, soon followed by the

others throughout that State, all sustained in their course by an act of

the Legislature. Suspension presently occurred everywhere else. The

financial pressure continued through the entire summer of 1837, banks,

corporations, and business men going to the wall, and all values greatly

sinking. Boston suffered one hundred and sixty-eight business failures

in six months.

Martin Van Buren.

From a photograph by Brady.

One of Van Buren's earliest acts after assuming office was to call an

extra session of Congress for September 4, 1837, to consider the

financial condition of the country. When it convened, an increase of the

whig vote was apparent, though the Democrats were still in the majority.

On the President's recommendation, agitation now began in favor of the

sub-treasury or independent treasury plan, still in use to-day, of

keeping the government moneys. This had been first broached in 1834-35

by Whigs. The Democrats then opposed it; but now they took it up as a

means of counteracting the whig purpose to revive a national bank.

There was soon less need of any such special arrangement, as the

treasury was swiftly running dry. In June of the preceding year, 1836,

both parties concurring, an act had passed providing that after January

1, 1837, all surplus revenue should be distributed to the States in

proportion to their electoral votes. It was meant to be a loan, to be

recalled, however, only by vote of Congress, but it proved a donation.

Twenty-eight millions were thus paid in all, never to return. Such a

disposition of the revenue had now to be stopped and reverse action

instituted. Importers called for time on their revenue bonds, which had

to be allowed, and this checked income. This special session was needed

to authorize an issue of ten millions in treasury notes to tide the

Government over the crisis.

[1840]

Another influence which now worked powerfully against the Democracy was

hostility to slavery. This campaign--it was the first--saw a "Liberty

Party" in the field, with its own candidates, Birney and Earle. The

abolition sentiment, of which more will be said in a subsequent chapter,

was growing day by day, and little as the Whigs could be called an

antislavery party on the whole, their rank and file were very much more

of that mind than those of the opposition. Jackson had ranted wildly

against the despatch of abolition literature through the mails. The

second Seminole War, 1835-42, was waged mainly in deference to

slave-holders, to recover for them their Florida runaways, and, by

removal of the Seminoles beyond the Mississippi, to break up a popular

resort for escaped negroes.  The Indians, under Osceola, whose wife, as

daughter to a slave-mother, had been treacherously carried back into

bondage, fought like tigers. After their massacre of Major Dade and his

detachment, Generals Gaines, Jesup, Taylor, Armistead, and Worth

successively marched against them, none but the last-named successful in

subduing them. Over 500 persons had been restored to slavery, each one

costing the Government, as was estimated, at least $80,000 and the lives

of three white soldiers.

General William J. Worth.

[1839]

Van Buren was to the slavocrats even more obsequious than Jackson. His

spirit was shown, among other things, by the Amistad case, in 1839. The

schooner Amistad was sailing between Havana and Puerto Principe with a

cargo of negroes kidnapped in Africa. Under the lead of a bright negro

named Cinque the captives revolted and killed or confined all the crew

but two, whom they commanded to steer the ship for Africa. Instead,

these directed her to the United States coast, where she was seized off

Long Island by a war vessel and brought into New London. The negroes

were, even by Spanish law, not slaves but free men, as Spain had

prohibited the slave trade. Yet when their case was tried before the

district court, Mr. Van Buren spared no effort to procure their release

to the Spanish claimants. He even had a government vessel all ready to

convey the poor victims back to Cuba. The district court having decided

for the blacks, the government attorney appealed to the circuit court,

thence also to the supreme court.  Final judgment happily re-affirmed

that the men were free. The supreme court trial was the occasion of one

of John Quincy Adams's most splendid forensic victories, he being the

counsel for the negroes.

The attitude of the administration in this affair greatly injured the

party in the North, the more as it but illustrated a spirit and policy

which had grown characteristic of the party's head. In several instances

previous to this time, when ships conveying slaves from one of the

United States to another, entered the ports of the Bahama Islands

through stress of weather, England had, while freeing them, allowed some

compensation. Now, having emancipated the slaves in her own West Indian

possessions, she declined longer to continue that practice. Her first

refusal touched the slaves on the ship Enterprise, which had put in at

Port Hamilton in 1835. Jackson's administration in vain sought

indemnity, Van Buren, then Secretary of State, designating this business

as "the most immediately pressing" before the English embassy.

[1840]

In the same pro-slavery interest an increasing proportion of the

Democracy, though not Van Buren himself, had come to favor the

annexation of Texas. The southwestern boundary of the United States had

ever since the purchase in Florida in 1819 been recognized as the Sabine

River, west of this lying the then foreign country of Texas. France had

claimed the Rio Grande as Louisiana's western bound, but Mr. Monroe, to

placate the North in the Florida annexation, had receded from this

claim. Texas and Coahuila became a state in the new Mexican republic,

which Spain recognized in 1821; but in 1836 Texas declared itself

independent. It was ill-governed and weighed down with debt, and hence

almost immediately, in 1837, asked membership in the American Union. Its

annexation was bitterly opposed all over the North, so bitterly in fact

that the northern Democrats would not have dared, even had they wished,

to favor the scheme. Yet so strong was the southern influence in the

party by 1840 that the democratic platform that year urged the

"re-annexation" of Texas, the term assuming that as a part of Louisiana

it had always been ours since 1803. This was a fact, but it was now

asseverated by the Democracy for a selfish sectional purpose, and the

cry brought thousands of votes to the Whigs.

It proved good politics for the Whigs in 1840 to pass over Clay and

adopt as their candidate William Henry Harrison. He had indeed been

unsuccessful in 1836, owing to the great popularity of Jackson, all

whose influence went for Van Buren; but now that "Little Van," or

"Matty," as Jackson used to call him, stood alone, Harrison had a better

chance. His political record had been inconspicuous but honorable.

Nothing could be alleged against his character. He was a gentleman of

some ability, while his brilliant military record in 1812, now revived

to the minutest detail, gave him immense popularity. Every surviving

Tippecanoe or Thames veteran stumped his vicinity for the old war-horse.

Many wavering Democrats in the South, especially those of the

nullification stripe, were toled to the whig ticket by the nomination of

John Tyler for Vice-President. "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" rang through

the land as the whig watchword for the campaign. During the

electioneering every hamlet was regaled with portrayals of Harrison's

simple farm life at North Bend, where, a log cabin his dwelling, and

hard cider--so one would have supposed--his sole beverage, he had been a

genuine Cincinnatus. "Tippecanoe and Tyler" were therefore elected;

their popular vote numbering 1,275,017, against 1,128,702 polled for Van

Buren.

William Henry Harrison

From a Copy at the Corcoran Art Gallery of a painting by Beard in 1840.

However, this whig success, for a moment so imposing, proved superficial

and brief. Harrison died at the end of his first month in office, and

Tyler, coming in, showed that though training under the whig banner, he

had not renounced a single one of his democratic principles. The Whigs

scorned and soon officially repudiated him During the entire four years

that he held office there was constant deadlock between him and the

slight whig majority in Congress, which gave the Democrats main control

in legislation. The panic of 1837 was forgotten, while the hold of the

Democracy upon the country was so firm that its gains in Congress and

its triumphs in the States once more went steadily on.

CHAPTER VII.

LIFE AND MANNERS IN THE FOURTH DECADE

[1835]

By the census of 1830 the United States had a population of 12,866,020,

the increase having been for the preceding ten years about sufficient to

double the inhabitants in thirty years. There were twenty-four States,

Indiana having been taken into the Union in 1816, Mississippi in 1817,

Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Maine in 1820, and Missouri, the

last, in 1821. Florida, Michigan, and Arkansas were the Territories. The

area, now that Florida had been annexed, was 725,406 square miles.

Comparatively little of the soil of Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, and

Wisconsin had as yet been occupied, though settlements were making on

most of the larger streams. The southwest had at this time filled up

more rapidly than the northwest. In 1830 the centre of population for

the Union was farther south than it has ever been at any other time.

Except in Louisiana and Missouri, not over thirty thousand inhabitants

were to be found west of the Mississippi. The vast outer ranges of the

Louisiana purchase remained a mysterious wilderness. Indianapolis in

1827 contained twenty-five brick houses, sixty frame, and about eighty

log houses; also a court-house, a jail, and three churches. Chicago was

laid out in 1830. Thither in, 1834 went one mail per week, from Niles,

Mich., on horseback. In 1833 it was incorporated as a town, having 175

houses and 550 inhabitants. That year it began publishing a newspaper

and organized two churches. In 1837 it was a city, with 4,170

inhabitants. The Territory of Iowa had in 1836, 10,500 inhabitants; in

1840, 43,000. At this time Wisconsin had 31,000. So early as 1835 Ohio

had nearly or quite 1,000,000 inhabitants. Sixty-five of its towns had

together 125 newspapers. Between 1830 and 1840 Ohio's population rose

from 900,000 to 1,500,000; Michigan's, from 30,000 to 212,000; and the

whole country's, from 13,000,000 to 17,000,000. Before 1840, eight

steamers connected Chicago with Buffalo.

John Tyler

From a photograph by Brady.

By 1840 nearly all the land of the United States this side the

Mississippi had been taken up by settlers. The last districts to be

occupied were Northern Maine, the Adirondack region of New York, a strip

in Western Virginia from the Potomac southward through Kentucky nearly

to the Tennessee line, the Pine Barrens of Georgia, and the extremities

of Michigan and Wisconsin. Beyond the Father of Waters his shores were

mostly occupied, as well as those of his main tributaries, a good way

from their mouths. The Missouri Valley had population as far as Kansas

City. Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa Territory had many settlements at

some distance from the streams. The aggregate population of the country

was 17,069,453, the average density twenty-one and a tenth to the square

mile. The mass of westward immigration was as yet native, since the

great rush from Europe only began about 1847. This was fortunate, as

fixing forever the American stamp upon the institutions of western

States. To compensate each new commonwealth for the non-taxation of the

United States land it contained, it received one township in each

thirty-six as its own for educational purposes, a provision to which is

due the magnificent school system of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa,

Minnesota, and their younger sisters.

Farther east, too, there had, of course, been growth, but it was slower.

In 1827 Hartford had but 6,900 inhabitants; New Haven, 7,100; Newark, N.

J., 6,500, and New Brunswick about the same. The State of New York paid

out, between 1815 and 1825, nearly $90,000 for the destruction of

wolves, showing that its rural population had attained little density.

The entire country had vastly improved in all the elements of

civilization. A national literature had sprung up, crowding out the

reprints of foreign works which had previously ruled the market. Bryant,

Cooper, Dana, Drake, Halleck, and Irving were now re-enforced by writers

like Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Poe, Prescott,

and Whittier. Educational institutions were multiplied and their methods

bettered, The number of newspapers had become enormous. Several

religious journals were established previous to 1830, among them the New

York Observer, which dates from 1820, and the Christian Register, from

1821. Steam printing had been introduced in 1823. The year 1825 saw the

first Sunday paper; it was the New York Sunday Courier. Greeley began

his New York Tribune only in 1841.

Fresh news had begun to be prized, as shown by the competition between

the two great New York sheets, the Journal of Commerce and the Morning

Enquirer, each of which, in 1827, established for this purpose swift

schooner lines and pony expresses. The Journal of Commerce in 1833 put

on a horse express between Philadelphia and New York, with relays of

horses, enabling it to publish congressional news a day earlier than any

of its New York contemporaries. Other papers soon imitated this example,

whereupon the Journal extended its relays to Washington. Mails came to

be more numerous and prompt. More letters were written, and, from 1839,

letters were sent in envelopes. Postage-stamps were not used till 1847.

Most of the principal cities in the country, including Rochester and

Cincinnati, published dailies before 1830. Baltimore and Louisville had

each a public school in 1829. This year witnessed in Boston the

beginning work of the first blind asylum in the country. In Hartford

instruction had already been given to the deaf and dumb since 1817.

A Pony Express.

By the fourth decade of the century the American character had assumed a

good deal of definiteness and greatly interested foreign travellers.

There was, by those who knew what foreign manners were, much foolish

aping of the same. English visitors noted Brother Jonathan's drawl in

talking, his phlegmatic temperament, keen eye, and blistering

inquisitiveness. Jonathan was a rover and a trader, everywhere at home,

everywhere bent upon the main chance. He ate too rapidly, chewed and

smoked tobacco, and spat indecently. He drank too much. During the first

quarter of the century nearly everyone used liquor, and drunkenness was

shamefully common. Every public entertainment, even if religious, set

out provision of free punch. At hotels, brandy was placed upon the

table, free as water to all. The smaller sects often held preaching

services in bar-rooms for lack of better accommodations. On such

occasions the preacher was not infrequently observed, without affront to

anyone, to refresh himself from behind the bar just before announcing

his text.

In 1824 commenced in Boston a temperance movement which accomplished in

this matter the most happy reform. It swept New England, passing thence

to all the other parts of the Union. By the end of 1829 over a thousand

temperance societies were in existence. The distilling and importation

of spirits fell off immensely. It became fashionable not to drink, and

little by little drinking came to be stigmatized as immoral.

By the time of which we now speak, the old habit of expressing

solicitude for the fate of the Union had passed away. Whig like

Democrat--so different from old Federalist-swore by "the people." Every

American believed in America. Travelling abroad, the man from this

country was wont to assume, and if opposed to contend, ill-manneredly

sometimes, that its institutions were far the best in the world. No one

wished a change. The unparalleled prosperity of all contributed to this

satisfaction. Cities and towns came up in a day. Public improvements

were to be seen making in every direction. There was no idle aristocracy

on the one hand, no beggars on the other. Self-respect was universal.

The people held the power. If men attained great wealth, as not a few

did, they usually did not waste it but invested it. Business enterprise

was intense and common. Character entered into credit as an element

along with financial resources. People did not crowd into cities, but

loved and built up the country rather. Laws and penalties were become

more mild. In 1837 a man was flogged at the whipping-post in Providence,

R. I., for horse-stealing, perhaps the last case of the kind in the

country. Prisons were now made clean and healthy, and the idea of

reforming the criminal instead of taking vengeance upon him was

spreading. Reformatories for children had been opened in New York,

Boston, and Philadelphia. There were institutions for homeless children,

for the sick poor, for the insane, and for other unfortunate classes.

By this time the Methodists and Baptists had become extremely strong in

numbers. In 1833 the Massachusetts constitution was altered, abolishing

obligatory contributions for the support of the ministry of the standing

order. Connecticut had made the same change fifteen years before, in its

constitution of 1818. In many localities the newer denominations,

hitherto sects, were more influential than the old one, and in this

abolition of ecclesiastical taxes they had with them Jews, atheists,

deists, agnostics, and heathen.

About 1825 began a period of peculiar religious enthusiasm. Missions to

the heathen were instituted. Revivals were numerous and often shook

whole neighborhoods for weeks and months. About this date Millerism

began to make converts. William Miller, from whom it took its name,

preached far and wide that the world would be destroyed in 1843,

securing multitudes of disciples, who clung to his general belief even

after his prophecy as to the specific date for the final catastrophe was

seen to have failed. Mormonism was also founded, in 1830, and the Book

of Mormon published by Joseph Smith. A church of this order, organized

this year at Manchester, N. Y., removed the next to Kirtland, O., and

thence to Independence, Mo. Driven from here by mob violence, they built

the town of Nauvoo, Ill. Meeting in this place too with what they

regarded persecution, several of their members being prosecuted for

polygamy, they were obliged to migrate to Salt Lake City, where,

however, they were not fully settled until 1848.

As part of the same general stir we may perhaps register the

anti-masonic movement. One William Morgan, a Mason residing in Western

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 which the arrest was made, and prove

his ownership by testimony or by affidavit; and the certificate of such

magistrate that this had been done was a sufficient warrant for the

return of the poor wretch into bondage. Obstruction, rescue, or aid

toward escape was fined in the sum of five hundred dollars. This is the

pith of the fugitive slave act of 1793. It might have been far more

mischievous but for the interpretation put upon it in the celebrated

case of Prigg versus Pennsylvania.

Mr. Prigg was the agent of a Maryland slave-owner. He had in 1839

pursued a slave woman into Pennsylvania, and when refused her surrender

by the local magistrate carried her away by force. He was indicted in

Pennsylvania for kidnapping, an amicable lawsuit made up, and an appeal

taken to the United States Supreme Court. Here, in an opinion prepared

by Justice Story, the Pennsylvania statute under which the magistrate

had acted, providing a mode for the return of fugitives by state

authorities, was declared unconstitutional on the ground that only

Congress could legislate on the subject; but it was added that while a

free State had no right in any way to block the capture of a runaway, as

for example by ordering a jury trial to determine whether a seized

person had really been a slave, so as to protect free persons of dark

complexion, yet States might forbid their officers to aid in the

recovery of slaves. As the act of 1793 did not name any United States

officials for this service it became nearly inoperative. Spite of this

terrible construction of the Constitution, which Chief Justice Taney

thought should have included an assertion of a State's duty by

legislation to aid rendition, many northern States passed personal

liberty laws, besetting the capture of slaves with all possible

difficulties thought compatible with the Constitution. The South

denounced all such laws whatever as unconstitutional, and perhaps some

of them were.

[1835]

Constitutional or not, they were needed. There were regular expeditions

to carry off free colored persons from the coasts of New York and New

Jersey, many of them successful. The foreign slave-trade, with its

ineffable atrocities, proved defiant of law and preternaturally

tenacious of life. A lucrative but barbarous domestic trade had sprung

up between the Atlantic States, Virginia and North Carolina especially,

and those on the Gulf, for the supply of the southern market. Families

were torn apart, gangs of the poor creatures driven thousands of miles

in shackles or carried coastwise in the over-filled holds of vessels, to

live or die--little matter which--under unknown skies and strange,

heartless masters.

The slave codes of the southern States grew severer every year, as did

legislation against free colored people. Laws were passed rendering

emancipation more difficult and less a blessing when obtained. The

Mississippi and Alabama constitutions, 1817 and 1819 respectively, and

all those in the South arising later, were shaped so as to place general

emancipation beyond the power even of Legislatures. Congress was even

thus early--so it seemed at the North--all too subservient to the

slave-holders, partly through the operation of the three-fifths rule,

partly from fear that opposition would bring disunion, partly in that

ambitious legislators were eager for southern votes. As to the Senate,

the South had taken care, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee having evened

the score, all before 1800, to allow no new northern State to be

admitted unless matched by a southern. In addition to all this, the

North had a vast trade with the South, and northern capitalists held to

an enormous amount mortgages on southern property of all sorts, so that

large and influential classes North had a pecuniary interest in

maintaining at the South both good nature and business prosperity.

CHAPTER II.

"IMMEDIATE ABOLITION"

[1832]

While slavery was thus strengthening itself upon its own soil and in

some respects also at the North, its champions ever more alert and

forward, its old foes asleep, these very facts were provoking thought

about the institution and hostility to it, destined in time to work its

overthrow. Interested people saw that slavery, so aggressive and

defiant, must be fought to be put down, and that if the Constitution was

its bulwark, as all believed, provided a tithe of what the South as well

as the North had said of its evils was true, the whole country, and not

the South only, was guilty in tolerating the curse. In 1821 Lundy began

publishing his Genius of Universal Emancipation, seconded, from 1829, by

the more radical Garrison.  In 1831 Garrison founded the Liberator,

whose motto, "immediate and unconditional emancipation," was intended as

a rebuke to the tame policy of the colonizationists. "I am in earnest,"

said the plucky man, when his utterances threatened to cost him his

life, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will

not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." These were startling

tones. Had God turned a new prophet loose in the earth?

The abolition spirit was a part of the general moral and religious

quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing

itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end

of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German

philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument,

began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge.

Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the

New England Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 the American Society was

organized, with a platform declaring "slavery a crime."

[1833]

John G. Whittier in 1833.

This declaration marked one of the most important turning-points in all

the history of the United States. It drew the line. It brought to view

the presence in our land of two sets of earnest thinkers, with

diametrically opposite views touching slavery, who could not permanently

live together under one constitution. May, Phillips, Weld, Whittier, the

Tappans, and many other men of intellect, of oratorical power, and of

wealth, drew to Garrison's side. State abolition societies were

organized all over the North, the Underground Railroad was hard worked

in helping fugitives to Canada, and fiery prophets harangued wherever

they could get a hearing, demanding "immediate abolition" in the name of

God.

The Abolitionists proposed none but moral arms in fighting

slavery--papers, pamphlets, public addresses, personal appeals. They

deprecated rebellion by slaves, and urged congressional action against

slavery only in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and at

sea, where the absolute jurisdiction of the general Government was

admitted by nearly all. Nevertheless, southern hostility to them was

indescribably ferocious and uncompromising. They were charged with

instigating all the slave insurrections and insubordination that

occurred, and with having made necessary the new, more diabolical

discipline over blacks, both bond and free. Southern papers and

Legislatures incessantly commanded that Abolitionists be delivered up to

southern justice, their societies and their publications suppressed by

law, and abolitionist agitation made penal. There were northerners quite

ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if

possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says

that he found here "contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless,

prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners

themselves." The Church, politics, business--all interests save

righteousness--seemed to bow to the false god. Of all utterances against

abolitionism, those of clergymen and religious journals were the

bitterest. To call slavery sin was the unpardonable sin.

Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

[1834-1836]

In 1834, on July 4th, a mob broke up a meeting of the American

Anti-Slavery Society in New York. A few days after, Lewis Tappan's house

was sacked in the same manner, as well as several churches,

school-houses, and dwellings of colored families. At Newark, N. J., a

colored man who had been introduced into a pulpit by the minister of the

congregation, was forcibly wrenched therefrom and carried off to jail.

The pulpit was then torn down and the church gutted. In Norwich, Conn.,

the mob pulled an abolitionist lecturer from his platform and drummed

him out of town to the Rogues' March. In 1836 occurred the murder of

Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Ill. He was the publisher of The Observer,

an abolitionist sheet, which had already been three times suspended by

the destruction of his printing apparatus. It was at a meeting held in

Faneuil Hall over this occurrence that Wendell Phillips first made his

appearance as an anti-slavery orator. Also in 1836 the office at

Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was

sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river.

Birney was a southerner by birth, and had been a slave-holder, but had

freed his slaves. Between 1834 and 1840 there was hardly a place of any

size in the North where an Abolitionist could speak with certain safety.

Wendell Phillip.

The destruction of colored people's houses became for a time an

every-day occurrence in many northern cities. For some years the

condition of the free blacks and their friends was hardly better north

than south. Schools for colored children were violently opposed even in

New England. One kept by Miss Prudence Crandall, at Canterbury, Conn.,

was, after its opponents had for months sought in every manner to close

it, destroyed by fire. The lady herself was imprisoned, and such schools

were by law forbidden in the State. A colored school at Canaan, N. H.,

was voted a nuisance by a meeting of the town; the building was then

dragged from its foundations and ruined. Many who aided in these deeds

belonged to what were regarded the most respectable classes of society.

[1839-1840]

Owing to the vagaries and unpatriotism of the Garrisonians, there was

from 1840 schism in the abolition ranks. Garrison and his closest

sympathizers were very radical on other questions besides that

concerning the sin of slavery. They declared the Constitution "a league

with death and a covenant with hell" because it recognized slavery. They

would neither vote nor hold office under it. They upbraided the churches

as full of the devil's allies. They also advocated community of

property, women's rights, and some of them free love. Others, as Birney,

Whittier, and Gerrit Smith, refused to believe so ill of the

Constitution or of the churches, and wished to rush the slavery question

right into the political arena. The division, far from hindering,

greatly set forward the abolitionist cause. Perhaps neither abolition

society, as such, had, after the schism of 1840, quite the influence

which the old exerted at first, but by this time a very general public

opinion maintained anti-slavery propagandism, pushing it henceforth more

powerfully than ever, as well as, through broader modes of utterance and

action, more successfully. Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, each enlisted

his muse in the crusade. Wendell Phillips's tongue was a flaming sword.

Clergymen, politicians, and other people entirely conservative in most

things, felt free to join the new society of political Abolitionists.

In 1839 the Governor of Virginia made a requisition on Governor Seward

of New York, to send to Virginia three sailors charged with having aided

a slave out of bondage. Seward declined, on the ground that by New York

law the sailors were guilty of no crime, as that law knew nothing of

property in man. He accompanied his refusal with a discussion of slavery

and slave law quite in the abolitionist vein. To a like call from

Georgia, Seward responded in the same way, and his example was followed

by other northern governors. The Liberty Party took the field in 1840,

Birney and Earle for candidates, who polled nearly 7,000 votes. Four

years later Birney and Morris received 62,300.

It would be a mistake, let us remember, to regard the anti-abolitionist

temper at the North wholly as apathy, friendliness to slavery, or the

result of truckling to the South. Besides sharing the general fanaticism

which mixed itself with the movement, the Abolitionists ignored the

South's dilemma--the ultras totally, the moderates too much. "What

would you do, brethren, were you in our place?" asked Dr. Richard

Fuller, of Baltimore, in a national religious meeting where slavery was

under debate; "how would you go to work to realize your views?" Dr.

Spencer H. Cone, of New York, roared in reply, "I would proclaim liberty

throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof." But the thing

was far from being so simple as that. Denouncing the Constitution as

Garrison did could not but affront patriotic hearts. It was impolitic,

to say the least, to import English co-agitators, who could not

understand the intricacies of the subject as presented here.

facsimile of Heading of the "Liberator."

The fact that, defying slave-masters and sycophants alike, the cause of

abolition still went on conquering and to conquer, was due much less to

the strength of its arguments and the energy of its agitation than to

the South's wild outcry and preposterous effrontery of demand.

Conservative northerners began to see that, bad as abolitionism might

be, the means proposed for its suppression were worse still, being

absolutely subversive of personal liberty, free speech, and a free

press. More serious was the conviction, which the South's attitude

nursed, that such mortal horror at Abolitionists and their propaganda

could only be explained by some sort of a conviction on the part of the

South itself that the Abolitionists were right, and that slavery was

precisely the heinous and damnable evil they declared it to be. It was

mostly in considering this aspect of the case that the Church and clergy

more and more developed conscience and voice on freedom's side, as

practical allies of abolitionism. In each great denomination the South

had to break off from the North on account of the latter's love to the

black as a human being. Men felt that an institution unable to stand

discussion ought to fall. By 1850 there were few places at the North

where an Abolitionist might not safely speak his mind.

It were as unjust as it would be painful to view this long, courageous,

desperate defence of slavery as the pure product of depravity. The South

had a cause, in logic, law, and, to an extent, even in justice. Both

sides could rightly appeal to the Constitution, the deep, irrepressible

antagonism of freedom against bondage having there its seat. The very

existence of the Constitution presupposed that each section should

respect the institutions of the other. What right, then, had the North

to allow publications confessedly intended to destroy a legal southern

institution, deeply rooted and cherished? From a merely constitutional

point of view this question was no less proper than the other: What

right had the South, among much else, to enact laws putting in prison

northern citizens of color absolutely without indictment, when, as

sailors, they touched at southern ports, and keeping them there till

their ships sailed?   This outrage had occurred repeatedly. What was

worse, when Messrs. Hoar and Hubbard visited Charleston and New Orleans,

respectively, to bring amicable suits that should go to the Supreme

Court and there decide the legality of such detention, they were obliged

to withdraw to escape personal violence.

It was said that the North must bear these incidents of slavery, so

obnoxious to it, in deference to our complex political system. Yes, but

it was equally the South's duty to bear the, to it, obnoxious incidents

of freedom. Southern men seem never to have thought of this. Doubtless,

as emancipation in any style would have afflicted it, the South could

not but account all incitements thereto as hardships; but the North must

have suffered hardships, if less gross and tangible, yet more real and

galling, had it acceded to southern wishes touching liberty of person,

speech, and the press. That at the North which offended the South was of

the very soul and essence of free government; that at the South which

aggrieved the North was, however important, certainly somewhat less

essential. Manifestly, considerations other than legal or constitutional

needed to be invoked in order to a decision of the case upon its merits,

and these, had they been judicially weighed, must, it would seem, all

have told powerfully against slavery. Not to raise the question whether

the black was a man, with the inalienable rights mentioned in the

Declaration of Independence, the South's own economic and moral weal,

and further--what one would suppose should alone have determined the

question--its social peace and political stability loudly demanded

every possible effort and device for the extirpation of slavery. That

this would have been difficult all must admit; that it was intrinsically

possible the examples of Cuba and Brazil since sufficiently prove.

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 deposited by

Missourians who came across the border on election day, voted, and

returned. This was demonstrated by the fact that there were but 2,905

legal voters in the Territory at the time, while 5,427 votes were cast

for the pro-slavery candidates alone. These early successes gave the

pro-slavery party and government in Kansas great vantage in the

subsequent congressional contest. The first Legislature convened at

Pawnee, July 2, 1855, enacted the slave laws of Missouri, and ordered

that for two years all state officers should be appointed by legislative

authority, and no man vote in the Territory who would not swear to

support the fugitive slave law.

The free-state settlers, now a majority, ignored this Legislature and

its acts, and at once set to work to secure Kansas admission to the

Union as a State without slavery. The Topeka convention, October 23,

1855, formed the Topeka constitution, which was adopted December 14th,

only forty-six votes being polled against it. This showed that

pro-slavery men abstained from voting. January 15, 1856, an election was

held under this constitution for state officers, a state legislature,

and a representative in Congress. The House agreed, July 3d, by one

majority, to admit Kansas with the Topeka constitution, but the Senate

refused. The Topeka Legislature assembled July 4th, but was dispersed by

United States troops.

[1856-1857]

This was done under command from Washington. President Pierce, backed by

the Senate with its steady pro-slavery majority, was resolved at all

hazards to recognize the pro-slavery authorities of Kansas and no other,

and, as it seemed, to force it to become a slave State; but fortunately

the House had an anti-slavery majority which prevented this. The friends

of freedom in Kansas had also on their side the history that was all

this time making in Kansas itself. During the summer of 1856 that

Territory was a theatre of constant war. Men were murdered, towns

sacked. Both sides were guilty of violence, but the free-state party

confessedly much the less so, having far the better cause. Nearly all

admitted that this party was in the majority. Even the governors, all

Democrats, appointed by Pierce, acknowledged this, some of them, to all

appearance, being removed as a punishment for the admission. Governor

Geary, in office from September, 1856, to March, 1857, and Governor

Walker, in office from May, 1857, were just and able men, and their

decisions, in most things favorable to the free-state cause, had much

weight with the country.

Walker's influence in the Territory led the free-state men to take part

in the territorial election of October, 1857, where they were entirely

triumphant. But the old, pro-slavery Legislature had called a

constitutional convention, which met at Lecompton, September, 1857, and

passed the Lecompton constitution. This constitution sanctioned slavery

and provided against its own submission to popular vote. It ordained

that only its provision in favor of slavery should be so submitted. This

pro-slavery clause was adopted, but only because the free-state men

would not vote. The Topeka Legislature submitted the whole constitution

to popular vote, when it was overwhelmingly rejected. The President and

Senate, however, urged statehood under the Lecompton constitution,

although popular votes in Kansas twice more, April, 1858, and March,

1859, had adopted constitutions prohibiting slavery, the latter being

that of Wyandotte. But the House still stood firm. Kansas was not

admitted to the Union till January 29, 1861, when her chief foes in the

United States Senate had seceded from the Union. She came in with the

Wyandotte constitution and hence as a free State.

It was during the debate upon Kansas affairs in 1856 that Preston S.

Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, made his cowardly

attack upon Charles Sumner. Sumner had delivered a powerful speech upon

the crime against Kansas, worded and delivered, naturally but

unfortunately, with some asperity. In this speech he animadverted

severely upon South Carolina and upon Senator Butler from that State.

This gave offence to Brooks, a relative of Butler, and coming into the

Senate Chamber while Sumner was busy writing at his desk, he fell upon

him with a heavy cane, inflicting injuries from which Sumner never

recovered, and which for four years unfitted him for his senatorial

duties. Sumner's colleague, Henry Wilson, in an address to the Senate,

characterized the assault as it deserved. He was challenged by Brooks,

but refused to fight on the ground that duelling was part of the

barbarism which Brooks had shown in caning Sumner. Anson Burlingame,

representative from Massachusetts, who had publicly denounced the

caning, was challenged by Brooks and accepted the challenge, but, as he

named Canada for the place of meeting, Brooks declined to fight him for

the ostensible reason that the state of feeling in the North would

endanger his life upon the journey. A vote to expel Brooks had a

majority in the House, though not the necessary two-thirds. He resigned,

but was at once re-elected by his South Carolina constituency.

Charles Sumner.

While the fierce Kansas controversy had been raging, the South had grown

cold toward the Douglas doctrine of popular sovereignty, and had

gradually adopted another view based upon Calhoun's teachings. This was

to the effect that Congress, not under Article IV., section iii., clause

2, but merely as the agent of national sovereignty, rightfully

legislates for the Territories in all things, yet, in order to carry out

the constitutional equality of the States in the Territories, is obliged

to treat slaves found there precisely like any other property. If one

citizen wishes to hold slaves, all the rest opposing, the general

Government must support him. It is obvious how antagonistic this thought

was to that of Douglas, since, according to the latter, a majority of

the inhabitants in a Territory could elect to exclude slavery as well as

to establish it.

The new southern or Calhoun theory assumed startling significance for

the Nation when, in 1857, it was proclaimed in the Dred Scott decision

of the United States Supreme Court as part of the innermost life of our

Constitution. Dred Scott was a slave of an army officer, who had taken

him from Missouri first into Illinois, a free State, then into

Wisconsin, covered by the Missouri Compromise, then back into Missouri.

Here the slave learned that by decisions of the Missouri courts his life

outside of Missouri constituted him free, and in 1848, having been

whipped by his master, he prosecuted him for assault. The decision was

in his favor, but was reversed when appeal was taken to the Missouri

Supreme Court. Dred Scott was now sold to one Sandford, of New York. Him

also he prosecuted for assault, but as he and Sandford belonged to

different States this suit went to the United States Circuit Court.

Sandford pleaded that this lacked jurisdiction, as the plaintiff was not

a citizen of Missouri but a slave.

It was this last issue which made the case immortal. The Circuit Court

having decided in the defendant's favor, the plaintiff took an appeal to

the Supreme Court. Here the verdict was against the citizenship of the

negro, and therefore against the jurisdiction of the court below. The

upper court did not stop with this simple dictum, hard and dubious as it

was, but proceeded to lay down as law an astounding course of

pro-slavery reasoning. In this it confined the ordinance of 1787 to the

old northwestern territory, declared the Missouri Compromise and all

other legislation against slavery in Territories unconstitutional, and

the slave character portable not only into all the Territories but into

all the States as well, slavery having everywhere all presupposition in

its favor and freedom being on the defensive. The denial of Scott's

citizenship was based solely upon his African descent, the inevitable

implication being that no man of African blood could be an American

citizen.

This decision rendered jubilant all friends of slavery, as also the

ultra Abolitionists, but correspondingly disheartened the sober friends

of human liberty. How, it was asked, is the cause of freedom to be

advanced when the supreme law of the land, as interpreted by the highest

tribunal existing for that purpose, virtually establishes slavery in New

England itself, provided any slave-master wishes to come there with his

troop? But anti-slavery men did not despair. Patriots had of course to

obey the court till its opinion should be reversed, yet its opinion was

at once repudiated as bad law. Men like Sumner, Wilson, Chase, Giddings,

Seward, and Lincoln, appealing to both the history and the letter of the

Constitution, and to the course of legislation and of judicial decisions

on slavery even in the slave States, had been elaborating and

demonstrating the counter theory, under which our fundamental law

appeared as anything but a "covenant with hell."

The pith of this counter theory was that slaves were property not by

moral, natural, or common law, but only by state law, that hence

freedom, not slavery, was the heart and universal presupposition of our

government, and that slavery, not freedom, was bound to show reasons for

its existence anywhere. This being so, while Calhoun and Taney were

right as against Douglas in ascribing to Congress all power over the

Territories, it was as impossible to find slaves in any United States

Territory as to find a king there. Slaves taken into Territories

therefore became free. Slaves taken into any free State became free.

Slaves carried from a slave State on to the high seas became free. Even

the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution must be applied in the way

least favorable to slavery.

On the other hand Douglas was right in his view that citizens and not

States were the partners in the Territories. As to the assertion of

incompatibility between citizenship and African blood, it would not

stand historical examination a moment. If it was true that the framers

of the Constitution did not consciously include colored persons in the

"ourselves and our posterity" for whom they purposed the "Blessings of

Liberty," neither did they consciously exclude, as is clear from the

fact that nearly everyone of them expected blacks some time to be free.

CHAPTER VI.

SLAVERY AND THE OLD PARTIES

[1841]

The Democratic Party was predominantly southern, the Whig northern. Both

sought to be of national breadth, but the democratic with much the

better success. Democracy would not give up its northern vote nor the

Whigs their southern; but a better party fealty, due to a longer and

prouder party history, rendered the Democrats far the more independent

and bold in the treatment of their out-lying wing. The consequence was

that while its rank and file at the North never loved slavery, they

tolerated it and became its apologists in a way to make the party as a

whole not only in appearance but in effect the pliant organ of the

slavocracy. This status became more pronounced with the progress of the

controversy and of the South's self-assertion. It was real under

Jackson, rigid under Van Buren, manifest and almost avowed under Polk,

Pierce, and Buchanan.

Whig temper toward slavery was throughout the North much better, but

whig party action was little better. Fear of losing southern supporters

permanently forbade all frank enlistment by the Whig Party for freedom.

The mighty leaders, Adams, Webster, even Clay, were well inclined, and

the party, as such, was at the South persistently accused of alliance

with the Abolitionists. This was untrue. Abolitionists, Liberal Party

men, and Free-soilers oftener voted with Democrats than with Whigs. Clay

complained once that Abolitionists denounced him as a slave-holder,

slave-holders as an Abolitionist, while both voted for Van Buren.

Compromise was the bane of this party as of the other; and each of the

resplendent chieftains named at one time or another seemed so reverent

to Belial that the record is painful reading.

When in 1841 the ship Creole sailed from Richmond with one hundred and

thirty-five slaves on board bound for the southern market, and one

Madison Washington, a recovered runaway on board, headed a dash upon

captain and crew, got possession of the vessel and took her into New

Providence, Clay was as loud as Calhoun or any southern senator in

demanding of the English Government the return of these slaves to

bondage or, at least, that of "the mutineers," as they were called.

Webster, Secretary of State at the time, instructed Edward Everett, our

English minister, to insist upon this, his arguments being sound and his

tone emphatic enough to please Mr. Calhoun. This was the time when

Giddings, of Ohio, brought into the House his resolutions to the effect

that slavery was a state institution only, and that hence any slave

carried on to the open ocean or to any other locality where only

national law prevailed, was free. He was censured in the House by a

large majority and resigned, but his Ohio constituency immediately

re-elected him.

[1836-1844]

Up to this time Giddings and Adams were the only pronounced anti-slavery

men in that body. Adams had acquiesced in the Missouri Compromise, but

all his subsequent career, especially his course in the House of

Representatives after 1830, is not only creditable to him so far as the

slavery question is concerned, but registers him as one of the most

influential opponents of slavery in our history. Refusing to be classed

with the Abolitionists, he was, in effect, the most efficient

Abolitionist of them all.

Previous to 1835, though petitions against slavery reached Congress in

great numbers and nettled many members, they had been received and

referred in the usual manner. But in February, 1836, the House created a

special committee to consider these petitions. It reported a resolution,

which passed under the previous question, that thereafter all papers of

the kind should be tabled without printing or reference. Adams declared

to the House: "I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the

Constitution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the

rights of my constituents." In this rencounter Adams advanced the view

on which the Emancipation Proclamation by and by proceeded, that

slavery, even in States, was not beyond reach of the national arm, but

would be at the mercy of Congress the instant slave-masters should

rebel. This, the first of the gag laws, was, however, enacted. The

second, or Patton gag, was passed on December 21, 1837, and the third,

or Atherton gag, a year later. The principle of these, practically

cutting off all petitions to Congress respecting slavery, was taken up

in the twenty-first rule of the House in 1840.

Mr. Adams was from the first the resolute and uncompromising foe of the

gag policy. Wagon-loads of petitions came to him to offer, among them

one for his own expulsion from the House and one to dissolve the Union,

and he presented all.

February 6, 1837, he inquired of Mr. Speaker whether or not it would be

appropriate to offer a petition in his hand from slaves, whereupon the

pro-slavery members flew at him like vampires. After much uproar, in

which Adams gave as good as was sent him, he sarcastically reminded his

already infuriated assailants that the petition was in favor of slavery,

not against, and that he had emphatically not offered it, but only made

an innocent inquiry of the Speaker about doing so, the proper answer to

which was so far from obvious that the Speaker himself had signified his

intention to take the sense of the House upon it. Regularly, year after

year, Adams moved the abolition of the gag rule, was beaten as

regularly, long as a matter of course, sometimes after heated debate in

which he was always victor. But little by little the majority vote

against him lessened. In 1842 the gag passed by but four votes, in 1843

it had a majority of three only, in 1844 his motion to strike it out was

carried by a vote of one hundred and eight to eighty. Adams wrote that

day in his diary: "Blessed, forever blessed be the name of God."

[1850]

But a plenitude of Whigs, not all southern, voted for each of these

gags. The worst one of all was moved by a Whig. The XXVIIth Congress,

strongly whig, voted to retain the gag, which it was left for the

XXVIIIth, strongly democratic, finally to repeal. At the South, slavery

more and more overbore party feeling. Said Dixon, a Kentucky Whig, in

1854, "Upon the question of slavery I know no Whiggery, no Democracy--I

am a pro-slavery man." It should be added, however, that as the

conflict progressed, pro-slavery Whigs became few save in the South, and

that these nearly all soon turned Democrats.

Most humiliating was the vassalage to the slave power displayed by

northern congressmen of both parties, though forming a majority in the

House during all the great days of the slavery battle. The gag history

is one example. Resolutions against unquestionably unconstitutional laws

imprisoning northern seamen at southern ports simply because they were

colored, were tabled in the House by a large majority. Slavery in the

District of Columbia, where Congress had the right of "exclusive

legislation in all cases whatsoever," so that the entire nation was

responsible, defied every effort to abolish it till 1862, after the

Civil War began. Nor was the trade there in aught alleviated till 1850,

when some modification of it was possible as an element of the

compromise described in the preceding chapter. An enlargement of

Missouri, adding to the northwest corner of that State, as slave

territory, a vast tract which the Missouri Compromise had forever

devoted to freedom, being in truth a preliminary repeal of that pact,

was carried without opposition.

The brutal and murderous lawlessness practised against Abolitionists was

praised by northern congressmen often as slavery came up in debate. Even

Senator Silas Wright, of New York, subsequently famous as a foe of

slavery, in remarks upon the reference of anti-slavery petitions,

boasted of the atrocities at Utica in 1835 and of others similar, as

proof that "resistance to these dangerous and wicked agitators in the

North had reached a point beyond law and above law." A bill, in 1836,

for closing the mails to abolitionist literature, another defiance of

the Constitution, Amendment I., secured engrossment in the Senate by the

casting vote of Vice-President Van Buren; Wright, Tallmadge, and

Buchanan also favoring; but failed to pass, nineteen to twenty-five,

because Benton, Clay, and Crittenden had the patriotism to vote nay.

Discussion hereon laid bare the vital contradiction in our governmental

system. Calhoun showed that the Constitution permits each State for

itself to define, in order to inhibit, incendiary literature.

Characteristically, he would have forced mail agents to obey state laws

upon this matter. Yet for Congress to have so directed would plainly

have been abridging freedom of the press.

Thomas H. Benton.

Had the Whig Party, while in power from 1849 to 1853, been brave enough

boldly to assume a rational anti-slavery attitude, though it might have

been defeated, as it was in 1852, it would have had a future. The chance

passed unimproved. The temporizing attitude of the party's then leaders

and the known pro-slavery feeling of most of its southern

members--twelve Whigs voting in the House for the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise--proved deadly to the organization, its faithful old

battalions going over in the South to the Democrats, in the North to the

Republicans.

Many Whigs took the latter course by a circuitous route. Ever since the

alien and sedition laws, cry had been raised at intervals against the

too easy attainment of citizenship by the unnumbered immigrants

thronging to our shores, and agitation raised, more or less successful,

to thrust forward "Nativism" or Americanism, with opposition to the

Roman Catholic Church, as an issue in our politics. To such movements

Whigs, as legatees of Federalism, were always more friendly than

Democrats, which was partly a cause and partly a consequence of the

affinity that naturalized citizens all along showed for the Democratic

Party.

Americanism had its greatest run after 1850, when the Whigs saw their

organization going to pieces, and, mistakenly in part, attributed

democratic success to the immigrant vote. A secret fraternity arose,

called the "Know-nothings," from "I don't know," the ever-repeated reply

of its members to inquiry about its nature and doings. "America for

Americans" was their cry, and they proposed to "put none but Americans

on guard." At first pursuing their aims through silent manipulation of

the old parties, by 1854 the Know-nothings swung out as a third party.

From this date they lustily competed with the Republicans for the hosts

of whig and democratic stragglers jostled from their old ranks by the

omnibus bill legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska act, and the "Crime

against Kansas" committed by Pierce and his slavocratic Senate. In 1855

this party assumed national proportions, and worried seasoned

politicians not a little; but having crystallized around no living

issue, like that which nerved Republicanism, it fell like a

rocket-stick, its sparks going over to make redder still republican

fires. Henry Wilson became a Republican from the status of a

Know-nothing; so did Banks, Colfax, and a score of others subsequently

eminent among their new associates. Some had of old been Democrats,

though most had been Whigs.

Notwithstanding many appearances to the contrary, the Democracy had

begun to lose its hold upon the North from the moment of Polk's

nomination in 1844. In that act it showed preference, on the score of

availability, for a small man as presidential candidate. Harrison's

election and Van Buren's defeat in 1840 doubtless had something to do

with this. The same disposition was revealed in 1852, when Pierce was

made candidate. What harmed the party still more was swerving from

strict construction in declaring for the annexation of Texas, which in

this case did not imply enlargement of view in reading the Constitution,

but simply subserviency to the slave power. In this way Van Buren was

alienated and the vote of New York lost in 1848, insuring defeat that

year.

[1856-1860]

This particular breach was pretty well healed, but the evil survived.

Then came the compromise repeal, wherein the Democracy stood by the

South in casting to the winds, the moment it promised to be of service

to the North, a solemn bargain which had yielded the South Florida,

Arkansas, and Missouri as slave States. Northern Democrats, especially

in the rural parts, unwilling longer to serve slavery, drew off from the

party in increasing numbers. Northern States one by one passed to the

opposition. The whole of New England had gone over in 1856, also New

York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa--Buchanan having six votes

outside those of Pennsylvania, where he won, as many believed, by unfair

means. In 1860, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Indiana,

Minnesota, and Oregon crossed to the same side.

CHAPTER VII.

THE CRISIS

[1850]

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was politically a remarkable

epoch. It not only consolidated old anti-slavery men, but cooled, to say

the least, many "silvergray," or conservative Whigs, as well as many

"hards" and "hunkers" among the Democrats. But the slavocrats were blind

to the risk they were running, and grew bolder than ever. There were now

propositions for renewing the foreign slave-trade. Worse black laws were

enacted. There was increased ferocity toward all who did not pronounce

slavery a blessing, prouder domineering in politics, especially in

Congress, and perpetual threat of secession in case the slave power

should fail to have its way.

Abraham Lincoln. After a rare photograph in the possession of Noah

Brooks. (Only five copies of this photograph were printed.)

There were also plans for foreign conquest in slavery's behalf, which

received countenance from public and even from national authorities. The

idea seemed to be that the victory and territorial enlargement

consequent upon the Mexican War might be repeated in Central America and

Cuba. The efforts of Lopez in 1850 and 1851 to conquer Cuba with aid

from the United States had indeed been brought to an end through this

adventurer's execution in the latter year by the Cuban authorities.

Pierce put forth a proclamation in 1854, warning American citizens

against like attempts in future. Defying this, the next year William

Walker headed a filibustering expedition to the Pacific coast of

Nicaragua, conquering the capital of that state and setting up a

government which proceeded to re-establish slavery and invite

immigration from the United States. Driven out by a coalition of other

Central American states against him, Walker at once organized a new

raid, and landed at Punta Arenas, Nicaragua, November 25, 1857; but he

was seized by Commodore Paulding of our navy and brought to New York. He

made a similar effort the next year, and another in 1860, when he

captured Truxillo in Honduras, only to be soon overwhelmed, tried and

shot.

[1852]

If the Government at Washington was not openly implicated in any of

these movements, no more, surely, did it heartily deprecate them.

Fillmore's administration had in 1852 declined to enter into an alliance

with Great Britain and France disclaiming intention to secure Cuba. In

1854, inspired by Pierce, our ministers at London, Paris, and Madrid,

met at Ostend and put forth the "Ostend Manifesto." The tenor of this

was that Spain would be better off without Cuba and we with it, and

further, that, if Spain refused to sell, the United States ought as a

means of self-preservation to take that island by force, lest it should

become a second San Domingo. This proposition, like everything else

relating to the great Repeal, was under umbrage in 1856; but in 1858 the

southern Democrats in Congress brought in a bill to purchase Cuba for

$30,000,000, and the democratic platform of 1860 spoke for the

acquisition thereof at the earliest practicable moment, by all

"honorable and just means."

[1854]

Thus an institution, barbarous, anti-democratic, sectional, an

unmitigated curse even to its section, not so much as named in the

Constitution, beginning with apology from all, by the zeal and

unscrupulousness of advocates, the consolidation of political power at

the South, and apathy, sycophancy, divided counsels, and commercial

greed in the North, gradually amassed might, till, at the middle of Mr.

Buchanan's term, every branch of the national Government was its tool,

the Supreme Court included, enabling it authoritatively to mis-read the

Constitution, declare the Union a pro-slavery compact, and act

accordingly. But justice would not be mocked, and, though advancing upon

halting foot, dealt the death-blow like lightning at last.

We have seen the feeble efforts of the old Liberty Party to make head

against slavery, Birney and Earle being its candidates in 1840, Birney

and Morris in 1844. In 1848 these "conscience Free-soilers" were

re-enforced by what have been called the "political Free-soilers" of the

State of New York, led by ex-President Van Buren. This astute organizer,

aware that his defeat in the democratic convention of 1844 had resulted

from southern and pro-slavery influences, led a bolt in the New York

Democracy. His partisans in this were known as the "Barn-burners," while

the administration Democrats were called the "Hunkers." In the

democratic convention of 1848 at Baltimore appeared representatives of

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 had never been endorsed in any state

convention. Buchanan himself testified that the fugitive slave law had

been faithfully executed, and its operation is well known never to have

been resisted by any public authority.

It was suspicious that no State ventured upon secession alone. It was

equally remarkable that the Gulf States were the readiest to go, and

made most of the personal liberty laws as their pretext, accounting this

cry, as was ingenuously confessed, a necessary means for holding the

border States solidly to the southern cause. Weak enough, indeed, was

the complaint of  "consolidationist" aggression, of which certainly no

party to the so-called pact was or could have been guilty. But the deeps

of folly were sounded when northern "persecution" of the South was

mentioned, or Lincoln's election as threat of such. This was simply the

election as President, in a perfectly constitutional way, of a citizen,

honest and unambitious, who was pledged against touching slavery in

States. Having become President, he was unable to procure minister, law,

treaty, or even adequate guard for his own person save by the consent of

the party hitherto in power. Lincoln had failed of a popular majority by

a million. Both Houses of Congress were against him at the time of his

election, and, but for the absence of southern members, they would, it

is likely, have continued so through his entire term. It was the South's

bad logic on these points which gave the war Democrats their excellent

plea for drawing sword on the northern side.

But even supposing secession technically justifiable, how strange that

it should have been judged rational, prudent, or in the long run best

for the South itself. Could aught but frenzy have so drowned in

Americans the memories of our great past; or launched them upon a course

that must have ended by Mexicanizing this nation, wresting from it the

lead in freedom's march, and crushing out, in the breast of struggling

patriotism the world over, all hope of government by and for the people!

The South ought at least to have spared itself. Either its alleged

horror at the advance of central-sovereignty sentiment at the North was

sheer pretence, or it should have been certain that this section would

not hesitate, as Buchanan so illogically did, to coerce "rebellious"

state-bodies. If the North believed the totality of the nation to be the

"paramount authority," Lincoln would surely imitate Jackson instead of

Buchanan, and in doing so he would not seek military support in vain.

James Buchanan. From a photograph by Brady.

Quite as sure, too, must the final result have appeared from the census

of 1850, had people been calm enough to read this. By that census the

free States had a population fifty per cent. above the population of the

slave states, slaves included, and the disparity was rapidly increasing.

Their wealth was even more preponderant, being, slaves apart, nearly one

hundred per cent. the larger. Their merchant tonnage was five times the

greater--even young inland Ohio out-doing old South Carolina in this,

and the one district of New York City the whole South. The North had

three or four times the South's miles of railway, all the sinews of war

without importation, and mechanics unnumbered and of every sort. And

while champions of the Union would fight with all the prestige of law,

national history and the status quo on their side, Europe's aid to the

South, or even that of the border slave States, was more than

problematical, as was a successful career for the Confederacy in case

its independence should chance to be won. Events proved that the very

defence of slavery had best prospect in the Union, and it seems as if

this might have been foreseen by all, as it actually was by some.

CHAPTER II.

SECESSION

[1861]

Secession was no new thought at the South. It lurked darkly behind the

Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-99. It was brought out into

broad daylight by South Carolina in the nullification troubles of 1832.

"Texas or disunion!" was the cry at the South in 1843-44. In 1850 South

Carolina declared herself ready to secede in the event of legislation

hostile to slavery. Two years later the same State solemnly affirmed

that it had a right to secede, but that, out of deference to the wishes

of the other slave States, it forbore to exercise such right.

It must be admitted that in early years the North had helped to make the

thought of secession familiar. In 1803, in view of the great increase of

southern territory by the Louisiana Purchase, and again in 1813, when

New England opposition to the war with England culminated in the

Hartford Convention, there had been talk of a separate northern

confederacy. But from that time on the thought of disunion died out at

the North, while the South dallied with it more and more boldly. During

the presidential campaign of 1856, threats were made that if Fremont,

the republican candidate, should be elected, the South would leave the

Union. In October of that year a secret convention of southern governors

was held at Raleigh, N. C., supposed to have been for the purpose of

considering such a contingency. Governor Wise, of Virginia, who called

the convention, afterward proclaimed that had Fremont been chosen he

would have marched to Washington at the head of 20,000 troops, seized

the Capitol, and prevented the inauguration. This threatening attitude

in 1856 may have been chiefly an electioneering device; but during the

next four years the gulf between North and South widened rapidly, and

the southern leaders turned more and more resolutely toward secession as

the remedy for their alleged wrongs.

No sooner had the presidential campaign of 1860 begun than deep

mutterings foretold the coming storm. "Elect Lincoln, and the South will

secede!" cried the campaign orators of the South, while the halls of

Congress rang with threats similar in tenor. As the campaign went on and

republican success became probable, the southern leaders began to nerve

up their hosts for the conflict. In October the governor and congressmen

of South Carolina, with other prominent politicians, met and unanimously

resolved that if Lincoln should win, the Palmetto State ought to

renounce the Union. Similar meetings were held in Georgia, Alabama,

Mississippi, and Florida. Governor Gist sent a confidential circular to

the governors of all the cotton States declaring that South Carolina

would secede with any other State, or would make the plunge alone if

others would promise to follow. The governors of Florida, Alabama, and

Mississippi replied that their States would certainly do this. Georgia

proposed to wait for some overt act by the National Government. North

Carolina and Louisiana, it was learned, would probably not go out at

all.

But the enthusiasts in South Carolina had got all the encouragement they

wanted, and bided their time. Their time was at hand. The presidential

election fell on November 6th. Next day the tidings flashed over the

land that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President by the vote of a

solid North against a solid South. The wires had scarcely ceased to

thrill with this message of death to slavery-extension, when South

Carolina sounded a trumpet-call to the South. Her Legislature ordered a

secession state convention to meet in December, issued a call for 10,000

volunteers, and voted money for the purchase of arms. Federal

office-holders resigned. Judge Magrath, of the United States District

Court, laid aside his robes, declaring, "So far as I am concerned, the

temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is

now closed." Militia organized throughout the State. The streets of

Charleston echoed nightly with the tramp of drilling minute-men.

Secession orators harangued enthusiastic crowds. Hardly a coat but bore

a secession cockade. November 17th, the Palmetto flag was unfurled in

Charleston. It was a gala day. Cannon roared, bands played the

Marseillaise, and processions paraded the streets bearing such mottoes

as "Let's Bury the Union's Dead Carcass!" "Death to All Abolitionists!"

The whole South was beside itself with excitement. One State after

another assembled its convention to decide the question of secession.

Even the Georgia Legislature, within a week after the election of

Lincoln, voted $1,000,000 to arm the State.

The South Carolina convention met at Charleston, and on December 20th

unanimously adopted an ordinance declaring:

"The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under

the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved."

This action was hailed with wildest enthusiasm. Huge placards--"The

Union is Dissolved!"--were posted throughout the city, while the clang

of bells and the boom of cannon notified the country round. The

sidewalks were thronged with ladies wearing secession bonnets made of

cotton with palmetto decorations. A party of gentlemen visited the tomb

of Calhoun, and there registered their vows to defend the southern cause

with their fortunes and lives. In the evening the convention marched to

the hall in procession, and formally signed the revolutionary ordinance.

The chairman then solemnly proclaimed South Carolina an "independent

commonwealth." The little State, whose white population was less than

300,000, began to play at being a nation. The governor was authorized to

appoint a cabinet and receive foreign ambassadors, and the papers put

information from other parts of the country under the head of "foreign

news."

Street Banner in Charleston.

"One voice and millions of strong arms to uphold the honor of South

Carolina 1776-1860"

The secession of South Carolina was greeted with joy in most of the

other slave States. Montgomery and Mobile, Ala., each fired one hundred

guns. At Richmond, Va., a palmetto banner was unfurled, while bells,

bonfires, and processions celebrated the event all over the South. The

other cotton States, spurred on by the bold deed of South Carolina,

rapidly followed her lead. Mississippi seceded January 9th, Florida the

10th, Alabama the 11th, Georgia the 19th, Louisiana the 26th, Texas

February 1st.

It is probable that only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida

were the majority of whites in favor of secession. The South was after

all full of Union sentiment. The ordinance of secession proceeded in

each State from a convention, and the election of delegates to this

witnessed the earnest work. The noble efforts of those Union men in

their fierce struggle have never yet been appreciated. But they fought

against great odds, and were inevitably overborne. The opposition was

organized, ably led, and white-hot with zeal. The political power and

the wealth of the South lay in the hands of the secessionists. The

clergy threw their weight on that side, preaching that slavery, God's

ordinance, was in danger. Union proclivities were crushed out by force.

Vigilance committees were everywhere on the alert. In the rougher States

of the Southwest abolitionists were tarred and feathered. Some were

shot. In all the States Union men were warned to keep quiet or leave the

South. One of the most powerful agents of intimidation was the Knights

of the Golden Circle, a vast secret society which extended throughout

the southern States.

Yet, in spite of all, the vote was close even in several of the cotton

States. The Georgia people wanted new safeguards for slavery, but did

not at first desire secession. Alexander H. Stephens, who headed the

anti-secession movement, declared that Georgia was won over to take the

fatal step at last only by the cry, "Better terms can be made out of the

Union than in it." Even then the first vote for secession stood only 165

to 130. In Louisiana the popular vote for convention delegates was

20,000 for secession and 17,000 against.

The border States held aloof. Kentucky and Tennessee refused to call

conventions. So, for long, did North Carolina. The convention of

Virginia and of Missouri each had a majority of Union delegates. When

the Confederate Government was organized in February, only seven of the

fifteen slave States had seceded. Their white population was about

2,600,000, or less than half that of the entire slave region. But

Arkansas and North Carolina were soon swept along by the current, and

seceded in May. Virginia and Tennessee were finally carried (the former

in May, the latter in June) by the aid of troops, who swarmed in from

the seceded States, and turned the elections into a farce. Unionists in

the Virginia Convention were given the choice to vote secession, leave,

or be hanged. Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland resisted all

attempts to drag them into the Confederacy, though the first two, after

the United States began to apply force, appeared neutral rather than

loyal.

The seizure of United States property went hand in hand with secession.

Most of the government works were feebly garrisoned, and made no

resistance. By January 15th the secessionists had possession of arsenals

at Augusta, Ga., Mount Vernon, Ala., Fayetteville, N. C, Chattahoochee,

Fla., and Baton Rouge, La., of forts in Alabama and Georgia, of a

navy-yard at Pensacola, Fla., and of Forts Jackson and St. Philip,

commanding the mouth of the Mississippi. At one arsenal they found

150,000 pounds of powder, at another 22,000 muskets and rifles, besides

ammunition and cannon, at another 50,000 small arms and 20 heavy guns.

The whole South had been well supplied with military stores by the

enterprising foresight of J. B. Floyd, of Virginia, Buchanan's Secretary

of War, who had sent thither 115,000 muskets from the Springfield

arsenal alone.

Major Robert Anderson.

Fort Moultrie, in Charleston harbor, was held by Major Robert Anderson,

of Kentucky, with a garrison of some seventy men. On December 27th the

whole country was thrilled, and the South enraged, by the news that on

the previous night Anderson had secretly transferred his whole force to

Fort Sumter, a new and stronger work in the centre of the harbor,

leaving spiked cannon and burning gun-carriages behind him at Moultrie.

The South Carolina militia at once occupied the deserted fortress with

the other harbor fortifications, and began to put them into a state of

defence. At Pensacola, Fla., Lieutenant Slemmer, by a movement similar

to Anderson's, held Fort Pickens.

Major Anderson removing his Forces from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter,

December 26, 1861.

The seizure of government property went on through January and February.

In Louisiana all the commissary stores were confiscated, and the revenue

cutter McClelland surrendered. The mint at New Orleans, containing over

half a million in gold and silver, was seized. More than half of the

regular army were stationed in Texas, under General Twiggs. In February,

at the demand of a secessionist committee of public safety, he

surrendered his entire force, together with eighteen military posts. The

troops were sent to a Gulf port and there detained.

This wholesale seizure of government property, worth some $20,000,000,

has brought down upon the South much scathing rebuke. The conduct of

Floyd, stabbing his country under the cloak of a cabinet office, cannot

be too strongly condemned; but with the seceding States the case was

different. Having (so they thought) established themselves as

independent republics, they could not allow the military works within

their borders to remain in the hands of a foreign power. As to the

Government's property right, they recognized it, and proposed to pay

damages. The provisional constitution of the Confederacy, adopted in

February, provided for negotiations to settle the claim of the United

States.

The southern leaders were not more anxious to get the slave States out

of the Union than to get them into a grand Southern Confederacy. Early

in January a caucus of secession congressmen was held at Washington, and

arrangements made for a constitutional convention.

February 4, 1861, delegates from the States which had left the Union met

at Montgomery, Ala., and formed themselves into a provisional Congress.

A temporary government, styled "The Confederate States of America," was

soon organized. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was chosen President by

the Congress, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, Vice-President.

Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808. He graduated at West Point, fought

as colonel in the Mexican war, served three terms as congressman from

Mississippi, the last two in the Senate, and was Secretary of War under

Pierce. After Calhoun's death, in 1850, he became the most prominent of

the ultra southern leaders. The new President was brought from Jackson,

Miss., to Montgomery by a special train, his progress a continual

ovation. Cheering crowds gathered at every station to see and hear him.

February 18th Davis was inaugurated. In his address, which was calm and

moderate in tone, he declared that reunion was now "neither practicable

nor desirable;" he hoped for peace, but said that if the North refused

this, the South must appeal to arms, secure in the blessing of God on a

just cause.

Jefferson Davis.

The Confederate President was intrusted with very large powers,

including supreme control of military affairs. He was authorized to

muster into the service of the central government the regiments which

had been forming in the various States. A call was issued for 100,000

volunteers, and provision made for organizing a regular army. President

Davis appointed a cabinet, with state, treasury, war, navy, and

post-office departments. Robert Toombs, of Georgia, a rabid

secessionist, became Secretary of State.

March 11th the Confederate Congress adopted a permanent constitution. It

reproduced that of the United States, with some important changes. State

sovereignty was recognized in the preamble, which read, "We, the people

of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and

independent character," etc. Slavery was called by name, and elaborate

safeguards fixed for it in the States and Territories. Slave-trade from

beyond the sea, or with states not in the Confederacy, was, however,

prohibited. Protective tariffs were absolutely forbidden. The president

and vice-president were to serve six years, and the former could not be

re-elected. Some valuable features were inserted. Members of the cabinet

might discuss matters pertaining to their departments in either house of

congress. The president could veto one part of an appropriation bill

without killing the whole, and was required to lay before the senate his

reasons for the removal of any officers from the civil service.

Alexander H. Stephens.

By the last of April all the seceded States had ratified this

constitution. The other slave States were taken in as fast as they

withdrew from the Union. The Southern Confederacy, now fairly launched,

set sail over strange seas upon its short but eventful voyage. At the

start the hopes of those it bore rose high. Few believed that the North

would dare draw sword. Even if it should, the southern heart, proud and

brave, felt sure of victory. King Cotton would win Europe to their side.

Peace would come soon. Visions of a glorious future dazzled the

imaginative mind of the South. A vast slave empire, founded on the

"great physical, philosophical, and moral truth" that slavery is the

"natural condition," of the inferior black race, would spread encircling

arms around the Great Gulf, swallowing up the feeble states of Mexico,

and rise to a wealth and glory unparalleled in the history of nations.

CHAPTER III.

THE NORTH IN THE WINTER OF 1860-61

[1860-1861]

At the beginning of the secession movement the North slumbered and

slept. Even South Carolina's withdrawal from the Union caused little

alarm. "She will be glad enough to come back before long," prophesied

many. As the revolution progressed there was a gradual awakening, but

division of opinion paralyzed action. Ultra Abolitionists, with a few

others, urged that the South be let go in peace. Most Republicans

favored the preservation of the Union by force of arms if necessary; but

nearly all Democrats, with many Republicans, wished for compromise. Of

the latter class a few prayed the prodigals to return on their own

terms. More proposed a rigid enforcement of the fugitive slave law, the

repeal of personal liberty legislation, and acquiescence in the Dred

Scott decision, with all future like decrees of the Supreme Court.  This

may be called the northern-democratic position. The most pronounced

Republicans, as Seward and Stanton, would gladly have voted to

re-enforce the Constitution's guarantee to slavery in the slave States.

Throughout the North the feeling was strong against all efforts at

coercion. Most democratic papers and many republican ones insisted

loudly that use of arms was not to be mentioned, and that the South must

be conciliated. A democratic convention met at Albany in January, to

protest against forcible measures. The sentiment that if force were to

be used it should be "inaugurated at home," here evoked hearty response.

There were signs of even a deeper disaffection. An ex-governor of New

Jersey declared that his State would join the Confederacy. Mayor Wood,

of New York, proposed that if the Union were broken up, his city should

announce herself an independent republic.

At Washington matters were still worse. President Buchanan, loyal but

weak, feared to lift a finger. In his December message to Congress, he

insisted that a State had no right to secede, but that the United States

had no power to coerce a State which should secede. A majority of his

cabinet were southern men, three of them zealous secessionists. His most

intimate friends in Congress were southerners. These surrounded the

vacillating Chief Magistrate, and paralyzed what little energy was in

him, meanwhile taking advantage of his inaction to launch the

Confederacy. Now and then, spurred on by loyal old General Scott and by

the Union members of his cabinet, the President tried to break away from

the toils which the conspirators had spun around him. The Star of the

West was secretly sent with supplies and recruits to re-enforce Fort

Sumter. But Secretary Thompson warned South Carolina, and when the

vessel arrived off Charleston, January 9th, hostile batteries fired upon

her and forced her out to sea again. Another plan to relieve the fort

was half formed, but came to nothing. Buchanan's term was on the point

of expiring, and he sat supinely looking on while the disruption of the

Union proceeded apace.

The northern side in Congress showed little wisdom or spirit. Most

northern congressmen truckled to the South or wasted their energies in

fruitless attempts at compromise. Both houses, each by more than a

two-thirds majority, recommended a constitutional amendment depriving

Congress forever of the power to touch slavery in any State without the

consent of all the States. In December the venerable Crittenden, of

Kentucky, laid before the Senate his famous Suggestions for Compromise.

These, besides embodying the above amendment, restored the Missouri

Compromise, let each new State decide for itself whether it would be

slave or free, and forbade Congress to abolish slavery in the District

of Columbia or interfere with the inter-state transportation of slaves.

The United States was to pay for all fugitives whose capture should be

successfully prevented, and slaves as slaves could be carried through

free States. This measure, before Congress all winter, was finally lost

only for lack of southern votes.

A peace congress, called by Virginia, met at Washington in February.

Most of the northern States were represented and all the southern which

had not seceded. It sat for three weeks, and adopted resolutions

identical in substance with the Crittenden Compromise. These dangerously

large offers of concession, mainly well meant, happily proved useless.

The South had gone too far. She did not want compromise, but was bent

upon setting up a slave empire.

Mr. Lincoln arrived safely in Washington on February 23d, having eluded

a rumored plot to assassinate him in Baltimore. He accomplished this by

assuming a slight disguise and taking an earlier train than the one in

which he had been announced to go. He was duly inaugurated on March 4th.

In his inaugural he disclaimed all purpose to interfere with slavery in

the slave States, yet denied the right of secession, and proposed to

regain and hold the property and places belonging to the United States

in all parts thereof. There would be no bloodshed, he said, unless it

were forced upon the Government. "In your hands, my dissatisfied

fellow-countrymen," so ran his memorable words, "in your hands, not in

mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. You can have no conflict

without being yourselves the aggressors. We are not enemies, but

friends." This message, held out as an olive branch, the South denounced

as a menace. Some northern papers condemned it as the "knell and requiem

of the Union." But the general feeling it evoked at the North was one of

rejoicing. People believed that a hand both moderate and firm had at

length seized the helm.

The new President stood faced by an herculean task. Congress was not yet

fully purged of traitors, while Washington still swarmed with their

friends and agents. Floyd's treachery had tied Lincoln's hands. All the

best munitions of war had been sent south. Of the rifled cannon

belonging to the United States not one was left. Only a handful of

regular troops were within call, and the resignations of their officers

came in daily. The plight of the navy and treasury was no better.

Amazing coolness and the absurd prejudice against coercing States

largely possessed even the loyal masses. The attack on Sumter was thus a

god-send.

April 8th, Governor Pickens received notice from President Lincoln that

an attempt would be made to provision that fort. Thereupon General

Beauregard, who had left the United States army to take charge of the

fortifications at Charleston, was ordered by President Davis to demand

its evacuation. Major Anderson replied that they should be starved out

by the 15th, and would leave the fort then unless his Government sent

supplies. This answer was held unsatisfactory, and at 3.20 on the

morning of April 12th Beauregard notified Anderson that his batteries

would open fire in one hour.

Fort Sumter stood on an artificial island at the entrance of the harbor.

It was pentagonal in shape, the walls of brick, eight feet thick and

forty feet high. The parapet was pierced for 140 guns, but only 48 were

in condition for use. The garrison, including some 40 workmen and a

band, numbered 128. Surrounding the fort on all sides except toward the

sea, and distant from 1,300 to 2,500 yards, 19 Confederate batteries

were in position, mounting 47 cannon and mortars, and manned by 3,000 or

4,000 volunteers. These works were provided with bomb-proofs made of

railroad iron or of palmetto logs and sand.

The wharves, roofs, and steeples of Charleston were black with expectant

crowds, straining their eyes down the harbor where the silent castle

loomed up through the dim morning light. Boom! From a mortar battery to

the south a bombshell rises high into the air, describes its graceful

trajectory and falls within Sumter's enclosure. It is the signal gun.

One battery after another responds, until in less than an hour the

stronghold is girt by an almost continuous circle of flashing artillery.

Shells scream through the air and explode above the doomed work, and

great cannon-balls bury themselves in the brick walls. Still Sumter

speaks not. Anderson is waiting for daylight. About six o'clock he

breakfasts his garrison on pork and water, the only provisions left. An

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.

CHAPTER IV.

WAR BEGUN

[1861]

It was now apparent to both North and South that war was inevitable. Yet

neither side believed the other in full earnest or dreamed of a long

struggle. Sanguine northerners looked to see the rebellion stamped out

in thirty days. The more cautious allowed three months.

The President, however, soon saw that more troops, enlisted for a longer

term, would be necessary. At the outset the South certainly possessed

decided advantages: greater earnestness, more men of leisure aching for

war and accustomed to saddle and firearms, a militia better organized,

owing to fear of slave insurrections, and now for a long time in special

training, and withal a certain soldierly fire and dash native to the

people. The South also had superior arms. Enlistments there were prompt

and abundant. The troops were ably commanded, 262 of the 951 regular

army officers whom secession found in service, including many very high

in rank, joining their States in the new cause, besides a large number

of West Point graduates from civil life.

Accordingly on May 3d Mr. Lincoln issued a new call for troops, 42,000

volunteers to serve three years or during the war, 23,000 regulars, and

18,000 seamen. It was of first importance to secure Maryland for the

Union. On the night of May 13th, under cover of a thunderstorm, General

Butler suddenly entered rebellious Baltimore with less than 1,000 men,

and entrenched upon Federal Hill. Overawed by this bold move, the

secessionists made no resistance. A political reaction soon set in

throughout the State, which became firmly Unionist. Baltimore was once

more open to the passage of troops, who kept steadily hurrying to the

front.

Meanwhile the Confederate forces were getting uncomfortably close to

Washington. From the White House a secession flag could be seen flying

at Alexandria, which was occupied by a small pro-secession garrison.

There was fear lest that party would occupy Arlington Heights, across

from Washington, and thence pour shot and shell into the city. At two

o'clock on the morning of May 24th, eight regiments crossed the Potomac

and took possession of these hills as far south as Alexandria, and

fortified them. The latter place was entered by Colonel Ellsworth with

his famous New York Zouaves. No resistance was made, as the Confederates

had retired, but Ellsworth was brutally assassinated while hauling down

the secession flag.

Captain Nathaniel Lyon.

Upon the secession of Virginia the Confederate capital was removed to

Richmond. The main armies of both sides were now encamped on Old

Dominion soil, and at no great distance apart; but the commanders were

busy drilling their raw troops, so that for a time only trifling

engagements occurred. General Butler, with a considerable body of men,

was occupying Fortress Monroe, at the mouth of the James River. June

10th, an expedition sent by him against the Confederates at Big Bethel,

some twelve miles distant, was repulsed after a spirited attack, with a

total loss of sixty-eight. A week later an Ohio regiment took the cars

to make a reconnoissance toward Vienna, a village not far south of

Washington. They were surprised by Confederates, who placed two guns on

the track and fired on the train as it came around a curve. The Ohioans

sprang to the ground, and after some fighting drove their opponents

back.

All this time both North and South were struggling for possession of the

neutral States. Governor Jackson, of Missouri, was straining every nerve

to force his State into secession. Early in May two or three regiments

of militia were got together and drilled in a camp near St. Louis.

Cannon were sent by President Davis, boxed up and marked "marble."

Captain Lyon, of the regular army, who held the St. Louis arsenal with a

few companies, reconnoitred the secessionist camp in female dress. The

next day, May 10th, assisted by local militia, he suddenly surrounded it

and took 1,200 prisoners. A month later he embarked some soldiers on

three swift steamers, sailed up the Missouri to Jefferson City, the

state capital, and raised the Union flag once more over the State House.

Governor Jackson fled. During the next month all the armed disunionists

were driven into the southwestern part of the State.

General John C. Fremont.

The last of July a state convention organized a provisional government

and declared for the Union. But the secessionists, under General Price,

continued the struggle. The Union forces, after a brave fight against

great odds at Wilson's Creek, August 10th, in which Lyon was killed, had

to retreat north. General Fremont had shortly before been put at the

head of the Western Department, which included Missouri, Kentucky,

Illinois, and Kansas. His difficulties were great. He was unable to

clear the State of secessionists, who besieged Lexington and took it on

September 20th. Generals Hunter and Halleck, Fremont's successors, were

equally unsuccessful, and the State was harassed by a petty warfare all

the year.

In Kentucky, Governor Magoffin was inclined to secession. The

Legislature leaned the other way, but preferred neutrality to active

participation on either side. September 6th, Brigadier-General U. S.

Grant occupied Paducah, an important strategical point at the junction

of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. Next day the Confederate General Polk,

advancing from below, took possession of Columbus on the Mississippi.

With both hostile armies thus encamped on her soil, Kentucky could no

longer be neutral. Her decision was quickly taken. The Legislature

demanded of President Davis to withdraw Polk's forces, at the same time

calling upon General Anderson, the hero of Sumter, who had been placed

in charge of the Department of the Cumberland, to take active measures

for the defence of this his native State.

The mountain portion of Virginia belonged to the West rather than to the

South. It contained only 18,000 slaves, against nearly 500,000 in

Eastern Virginia. Union sentiment was therefore strong, and when the old

State seceded from the Union, Western Virginia proceeded to secede from

the State. General Lee sent troops to hold it for the Confederacy.

Thereupon General McClellan, commanding the Department of the Ohio,

threw several regiments across the river into Virginia, and defeated the

foe in minor engagements at Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Carrick's Ford.

By the middle of July he was able to report, "Secession is killed in

this country." Later in the year the Confederates renewed their

attempts, but were finally driven out. West Virginia organized a

separate government, and was subsequently admitted to the Union as a

State by itself.

Bull Run--the Field of Strategy.

While these struggles were going on in the border commonwealths, the

Union soldiers lay inactive along the Potomac. Constant drill had

changed the mob into some semblance of an organized army, but the

careful Scott feared to risk a general engagement. The hostile forces

stretched in three pairs of groups across Virginia from northwest to

southeast. In the southeastern part of the State, at Fortress Monroe,

Butler faced the Confederate Magruder. At Manassas, opposite Washington,

and about thirty miles southwest, lay a Confederate army under General

Beauregard. General Patterson, a veteran of the War of 1812, commanded

considerable forces in Southern Pennsylvania. About the middle of June

he advanced against Harper's Ferry, which had been abandoned by the

Unionists the latter part of April and was now occupied by General

Joseph E. Johnston. Johnston evacuated the place upon Patterson's

approach, and retreated up the Shenandoah Valley, in a southwesterly

direction, to Winchester. Patterson followed part way, and the two

armies now lay watching each other.

Anxious to see the rebellion put down by one blow, the North was

becoming impatient. "On to Richmond!" was the ceaseless cry. Yielding to

this, Scott ordered an advance. July 16th, General McDowell, leaving one

division to protect Washington, led forth an army 28,000 strong to

attack the enemy at Manassas. He advanced slowly and with great caution.

The enemy were found posted in a line eight miles long upon the south

bank of Bull Run, a small river three miles east of Manassas, running in

a southeasterly direction. Several days were spent in reconnoitering.

Meanwhile, Johnston, whom Patterson was expected to hold at Winchester,

had stolen away to join Beauregard, their combined forces numbering

about 30,000. McDowell was ignorant of Johnston's movement, supposing

him still at Winchester.

General Irvin McDowell.

On the morning of the 21st McDowell advanced to the attack. Beauregard

held all the lower fords, besides a stone bridge on the Warrenton

turnpike which crosses the river at right angles. Two divisions, under

Hunter and Heintzelman, were set in motion before sunrise to make a

flanking detour and cross Bull Run at Sudley's Ford, some distance

farther up. To distract attention from this movement, Tyler's division

began an attack at the stone bridge. This was held by a regiment and a

half, with four guns, under General Evans. He replied vigorously at

first, but perceiving after a while that Tyler was only feigning, and

learning of the flank movement above, he left four companies at the

bridge and drew up the rest of his forces on a ridge north of Warrenton

turnpike to await Hunter and Heintzelman's approach down the Sudley

road.

General Samuel P. Heintzelman.

The fight began about ten o'clock. Both sides were soon re-enforced.

After two hours' stubborn fighting the Confederates were driven back

across the pike, beyond Young's Branch of Bull Run, and took up a second

position on a hill each side of the Henry House. The whole Union force

had now crossed Bull Run. Griffin's and Ricketts' powerful batteries

were posted in favorable positions, whence they poured a deadly fire

upon the Confederates. The whole Union line advanced to the turnpike.

About two o'clock the Confederates were forced to abandon their second

position and fall back still farther.

Early in the morning Beauregard and Johnston had given orders for an

attack upon the Union forces across the river, not knowing that McDowell

had assumed the offensive. These orders were now countermanded, and all

available troops hurried up the Sudley road toward the Warrenton pike

front. Till after noon the prospect for the Confederates looked gloomy.

They had been steadily driven back. Some of their regiments had lost

heavily, while all were more or less demoralized. Johnston and

Beauregard gave their personal direction to re-forming the line upon a

second ridge to the south of the Warrenton pike, under cover of a

semicircular piece of woods. Twelve regiments, with twenty-two guns and

two companies of cavalry, concentrated in this favorable position and

awaited the Union advance.

Bull Run-Battle of the Forenoon.

McDowell had fourteen regiments available for the attack. He decided to

hurl them against the Confederate centre and left. About half-past two

Griffin's and Ricketts' batteries took up an advanced position on Henry

Hill. The Confederate guns opened fire, and a short artillery duel took

place. A Confederate regiment now advances to capture the exposed

batteries. They are mistaken for Union re-enforcements and allowed to

come within close range. The muskets are levelled. A terrible volley is

poured into the batteries. The gunners are stricken down. The frantic

horses dash madly down the hill. After a little confusion the Union

troops boldly advance and retake the batteries. The battle surges back

and forth. The guns are three times captured and lost again. The fight

becomes general along the Confederate centre and left. The Union

generals are getting alarmed. So far they have been confident of

victory. Now regiment after regiment is going to pieces in this terrific

melee, and still the "rebels" hold their ground. About half-past four

o'clock General Early arrives by rail with three thousand more of

Johnston's army, and, assisted by a battery and five companies of

cavalry, bursts upon the extreme right flank and rear of McDowell's

line.

Bull Run--Battle of the Afternoon.

This manoeuvre decided the day. The Union ranks waver, break, flee. The

centre and left soon follow, though in better order. Union and

Confederate generals alike were astonished at the sudden change.

McDowell found it impossible to stem the tide once set in, and gave

orders to fall back across Bull Run to Centreville, where his reserves

were stationed. As the retreat went on it turned to a downright rout.

The Confederates made only a feeble pursuit, but fear of pursuit spread

alarm through the flying ranks, demoralized by long marching and hard

fighting. Baggage and ammunition-wagons, ambulances, private vehicles

which had been standing in the rear, joined the sweeping tide, adding to

the confusion and in some places causing temporary blockade. Frightened

teamsters cut traces and galloped recklessly away. Panic and stampede

resulted, soon reaching the soldiers. Flinging away muskets and

knapsacks, they sought safety in flight. The army entered Centreville a

disorganized mass. Fugitives could not be stayed even there, but

streamed through and on toward Washington. McDowell gave the order to

continue the retreat. The reserve brigades, with the one regiment of

regulars, covered the rear in good order. All that night the crazy

hustle to the rear was kept up, and on Monday the hungry and exhausted

stragglers poured into Washington under a drizzling rain, the people

receiving them with heavy hearts but generous hands.

General Joseph E. Johnston.

The Union loss was 481 killed, 1,011 wounded, 1,460 prisoners.

Twenty-five guns were lost, thirteen of them on the retreat. The

Confederate loss was 387 killed, 1,580 wounded. The numbers actively

engaged were about 18,000 on each side. General Sherman pronounced Bull

Run "one of the best planned battles of the war, but one of the worst

fought." The latter fact was but natural. The troops on both sides were

poorly drilled, and most of them had never been under fire before.

Precision of movement, concert of action on any large scale, were

impossible. Neither side needed to be ashamed of this initial trial.

The North was at first much cast down. The faint-hearted considered the

Union hopelessly lost, but pluck and patriotism carried the day. On the

morrow after the battle Congress voted that an army of 500,000 should be

raised, and appropriated $500,000,000 to carry on the war. General

McClellan, whose brilliant campaign in West Virginia had won him easy

fame, was put in command of the Army of the Potomac. The young general

was a West Point graduate and had served with distinction in the Mexican

War. An accomplished military student, a skilful engineer, and a superb

organizer, he threw himself with energy into the task of fortifying

Washington and building up a splendid army. Many of the three-months

volunteers re-enlisted. Thousands of new recruits came flocking to camp,

and before long companies, regiments, and brigades amounting to 150,000

men were drilling daily on the banks of the Potomac, while formidable

works crowned the entire crest of Arlington Heights. In October the aged

General Scott resigned, and McClellan, at the summit of his popularity

with army and people, became commander-in-chief.

General George B. McClellan.

For several weeks after Bull Run it was feared that Beauregard and his

men would descend upon Washington, then in a defenceless condition; but

they were in no state to attack. They too felt the need of preparation

for the coming struggle, whose magnitude both sides now began to

realize.

A disheartening affair occurred in October. On the night of the 20th two

Massachusetts regiments crossed the Potomac at Ball's Bluff, a few miles

above Washington, to surprise a hostile camp which according to rumor

had been established there. A large force concealed in the woods

attacked and forced them to retreat. They were re-enforced by 1,900 men

under Colonel Baker. The enemy were also re-enforced. Baker was killed

and the Union soldiers driven over the bluff into the river. The boats

were totally inadequate in number, and the men had to make their way

across as best they could, exposed to the Confederate fire. The total

Union loss was 1,000.

On the whole, then, the South had reason to be gratified with the

aggregate result of the first year of war. Bull Run gave the

Confederates a sense of invincibility, and the ready recognition by the

foreign powers of their rights as belligerents, offered hope that

England would soon acknowledge their independence itself. And they

thought that the North had been doing its best when it had only been

getting ready.

END OF VOLUME III.

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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