Three centuries of American democracy

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN

(1815-1860)
in the Home University Library

THREE CENTURIES

OF

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

BY

WILLIAM MacDONALD, LL.D.

SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY
IN BROWN UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1923

THE If£W YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY,

ASTOR. LEt*)X AND

^LDENFOUNDATiONS

R 1 etz L

COPYBIGHT, 1923,
BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PRINTED TN
tiNICE.1 STATES OF AMEBICA

,

PREFACE

I have had particularly in mind, in writing this
book, the very large number of persons who want
to know the main facts and the formative influences
in the growth of the United States as a democratic
nation, but who nevertheless have no time to read
elaborate narratives or to study a series of books on
special periods or topics. I hope, however, that the
book may also prove useful to students and teachers
as a summary narrative around which the details of
lectures or comprehensive reading can be grouped.

The references to authorities are intended, like the
text, primarily for the general reader who may wish
to pursue the subject further in books that are most
worth while. So many elaborate bibliographies of
American history are now available that anyone who
desires to follow any particular topic to its limits
can easily find guidance, while the systematic student
will naturally enlarge his bibliography according to
his needs or the library resources at his command.

I can acknowledge only in a general way, but at
the same time with sincere appreciation, my indebted-
ness to the long list of scholars, many of them my
valued associates and friends, whose labors have
made so much of American history an open book to

vi PREFACE

whomsoever will read. I must pay particular hom-
age, however, to the late Professor William A.
Dunning and Professor John W. Burgess of Columbia
University, who more than any others have placed
the constitutional aspects of the Civil War and the
Reconstruction period in their true light, and whose
views at a number of points will be found reproduced
in these pages.

William MacDonald

January, 1923.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Centuries of Beginnings i

II. Through Revolution to Independence . . 26

III. Framing a National Constitution .... 50

IV. The Organization of Government and

Politics 79

V. Democracy and Nationality 107

VI. A New Phase of Democratic Control . . 140

VII. A House Divided against Itself 167

VIII. The Triumph of Nationality 196

TX. The Politics of Industry and Power ... 226

X. America and a New World 256

XL Politics and the American Mind 284

vu

THREE CENTURIES OF
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER I
THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS

The United States is often spoken of as pre-
eminently a country of rapid growth. Only in com-
parison with Europe, however, where civilization had
reached a high development centuries before the
existence of the American continent was known, or
with China and India, where culture was a well-
developed plant ages before European civilization
had wholly broken with barbarism, is America a
young country. Between the first voyage of Colum-
bus and the Declaration of Independence nearly
three hundred years elapsed, and the Declaration of
Independence is now almost a century and a half
behind us. The establishment of the elements of
European civilization in North America was accom-
plished only by long and devious efforts, with steps
often halting and always slow, while the imposing
political structure which the United States presents
today has been the arduous achievement of four
generations.

The discovery of a New World at the end of the
fifteenth century, only forty years after the invention

2 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of printing, was one of a succession of events which
completed the historical transition from the later
middle ages to early modern times. Preceded as it
was by a series of geographical discoveries which had
revealed the general form of the African continent,
and by an eager study of geography which rapidly
dispelled many older notions regarding the shape and
size of the globe, the discovery of extensive land
areas to the west took its place at first with the other
discoveries that were being made, and years passed
before the importance of what had been found was
generally appreciated. Even after the existence of
two great continents and numerous adjacent islands
had been definitely established, and map makers had
drawn in crude outline the form of the American
Atlantic coast, only three European .states, Spain,
France, and England, interested themselves in the
new discoveries and for more than a century Spain
alone attempted permanent occupation. The impor-
tance of America, either as a field for European
colonization or as an element in the spread of political
influence, dawned but slowly upon the consciousness
of Europe.

It is interesting to note that the colonizing efforts
of Spain, the nation which until the end of the six-
teenth century took the lead in American discovery
and settlement, were directed throughout to regions
whose influence upon the development of the United
States has been relatively slight. The theory of
colonization which England in time came to follow,

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 3

namely, the transfer over seas of a population which
should reproduce in the colony something of the
social and political life of the mother country and
work its way to eventual self-support, found no illus-
tration in Spain. To Spain the American colonies
meant a rich revenue with which to support dynastic
and political ambitions at home, and revenue and
control rather than general economic or social
development were the chief aims. Spain found what
it wanted in the native states of the west coast of
South America and in Mexico, where in each case the
native population was virtually enslaved for the
exploitation of the mines and a few natural products.
By the time of the American revolution Spain was
in control of all of South America except Brazil,
which a papal bull had allotted to Portugal, of Cen-
tral America and Mexico, of the peninsula of Florida
and the Gulf coasts of the present States of Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and of the Pacific
coast as far north as San Francisco, this latter point
having been reached in the year in which the Declara-
tion of Independence was issued. In none of these
regions, however, was there a veritable Spanish civil-
ization, none had any considerable Spanish popula-
tion, and in none had the general economic develop-
ment of the country been systematically undertaken
either by the government or by the inhabitants.
The records of the labors and journeys of missionary
priests and soldier adventurers are still fascinating
reading, and the old Spanish missions of California

4 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

still recall the days when church and state made
common cause for the advancement of the kingdom
of God and the king; but the American colonies of
Spain were only outposts of Spanish political in-
fluence, occupied territories held rigorously in sub-
jection and mercilessly exploited, foreign areas which
Spain had appropriated in the days of its greatness
and which it long clung to in its decay.

France, a century behind Spain in American
colonization save for one or two unimportant essays,
pursued in general the same unenlightened policy.
Until the defeat of the Spanish armada, in 1588,
destroyed the naval power of Spain and in conse-
quence weakened its hold upon its colonies, no nation
ventured seriously to interfere with its activities in
the regions which it had occupied. French adven-
turers turned to the north, explored the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, followed the St. Lawrence river to its
source in the Great Lakes, traversed the lakes and
charted their limits, found the headwaters of the
Mississippi, and pursued the Father of Waters to the
Gulf and paddled their canoes the length of the Ohio,
the Illinois, and other tributary streams. From
Quebec, the seat of French power in America, traders
and priests made long and hazardous journeys into
the interior, fraternized with the Indians when tribes
were not hostile, exchanged European goods, fire-
arms, and brandy for furs, and cultivated regard for
the French people and respect for the French king.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the whole

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 5

northern half of the continent east of the Rocky
Mountains and a large part of the Mississippi valley-
were in French hands, and the colony of New France
was the proudest appanage of the French crown. A
century and a half of romantic effort, however, had
brought no considerable French population to New
France, the economic foundations of a permanent
society had not been laid, food and other articles of
common use had still in part to be brought from
France, and the fur trade, the one remunerative ven-
ture, had begun to show decline. There was little
assurance that French colonial power in North
America would long continue even if political events
in Europe had not conspired to overthrow it.

With the exception of California and the States of
the southwest, no important traces of either French
or Spanish colonization survive in the United States.
Even in Canada the use of the French language con-
tinued only within the limits of the ancient province
of Quebec or here and there among fur traders and
Indians, French law and customs exercised no perma-
nent influence outside of the, zone of French occupa-
tion except in Louisiana, and the Catholic faith found
small tolerance in any English colony except Mary-
land and was long regarded with aversion in many
American States. Almost the only surviving evi-
dences of Spanish occupation, aside from the missions,
in the southwest and California are the old Spanish
land grants, the basis of land titles in much of the
territory which once belonged to Spain, and the use

6 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of a corrupt speech, partly Spanish and partly
Mexican, among certain classes of the population.
The colonies which declared their independence, took
the name of the United States of America, and fought
to a successful issue a war of revolution were over-
whelmingly English in race, language, law, social
institutions, and habits of thought.

The period of English colonization which begins
with the successful establishment of an English
settlement in Virginia extends over a hundred and
twenty-five years. The motives of colonization were
various. The influx of gold and silver from the mines
of Mexico and Peru, continuing with little interrup-
tion until the latter part of the sixteenth cenury, had
profoundly affected economic life in Europe, made
possible an increasing substitution of money exchange
for barter, facilitated international trade, and sup-
ported the armies upon which the power of Spain
largely rested. With the rapid decline of Spain after
1588 rival nations sought in America, although not
in the Spanish colonies, the same wealth which had
made Spain great. England, at last a sea power,
reached out for colonies in a half-conscious search
for imperial control, and with the further hope of
finding markets for its goods and profits for its
capital and its ships. Religious difficulties, fruits of
the Protestant revolt which had separated England
from Rome and given it a national church, led the
members of more than one dissenting or proscribed
sect to seek in America the freedom of faith and

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 7

practice which was denied to them at home. To not a
few Englishmen colonization appealed as a romantic
adventure, a new knight errantry in which gentlemen
and commoners might hope to win distinction at the
same time that they recouped their fortunes or
rehabilitated their reputations.

Colonization, however, was expensive, and the
English crown under James I and his successors was
poor. The spread of English influence beyond seas
must be accomplished by private effort if it was to be
accomplished at all. Resort was had, accordingly,
to chartered companies and huge land grants to
individuals or groups of proprietors. The Virginia
company, chartered in 1606 and twice reorganized,
succeeded after several years of painful effort in
establishing a permanent colony in the James river
region; but the cultivation of tobacco, made possible
on a large scale by the gradual introduction of Negro
slave labor, proved profitable, and by 1621, when the
charter of the company was withdrawn and the
colony reverted to the crown, the success of the
Virginia experiment was assured. The Maryland
colony, based upon a charter granted to Lord Balti-
more in 1628, was more wisely and generously
managed and prospered from the start, while the
freedom of conscience which was extended to Catho-
lics gave both the colony and its founder an honor-
able place in the history of religious liberty. Neither
Virginia nor Maryland, however, was a source of
financial profit to its founders, neither ever attracted

8 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

any large emigration from England, and for many-
years the growth of population and trade was small.

The desire for religious liberty which led Lord
Baltimore, with the help of royal connivance, to open
the Maryland colony to Catholics turned the eyes of
English Protestant dissenters also toward America.
The first attempt at colonization, that of the Separa-
tists or Pilgrims at Plymouth, was pitifully weak, for
the supporting sect was small and without financial
resource, and no Protestant body in England had
charity for any other. Labors and privations as
great as those which had been undergone in Virginia
marked the first years of the Plymouth settlement,
and the little colony never succeeded in obtaining a
charter or an assured legal status.

The Massachusetts colony, on the other hand,
represented a large and well-managed effort of the
powerful Puritan body in England to set up in
America a Puritan commonwealth. Organized in
form as a trading company with a royal charter, and
with a vast grant of territory far beyond any possi-
bility of immediate settlement, the Massachusetts
company was in fact a close corporation controlled
by Puritans and in close touch, until the Puritan
period in England came to an end, with the Puritan
body and its leaders at home. Firmly and arbitrarily
ruled by its Calvinist clergy and a few secular lead-
ers, the colony ruthlessly repressed religious and
political dissent, destroyed with barbaric cruelty the
power of some of the Indian tribes, dominated the

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 9

neighboring colonies of Connecticut and Rhode
Island, spread its lines of control into New Hamp-
shire and Maine, and for fifty years stoutly resisted
every effort of the crown to call it to account or to
interfere with the conduct of its affairs. Population
grew, settlements multiplied, trade increased, and the
level of individual prosperity was high. Alone
among all the colonies that England has had Massa-
chusetts was governed by a sect, and it was in the
colony in which religion was long the greatest single
force in public life that the spirit of political inde-
pendence was most pronounced and the later struggle
for independence most aggressive and unrelenting.

Dissenters were akin, however, in little save dis-
sent, and the religious intolerance and arbitrary
political methods of the Massachusetts Puritans
caused more than one group to seek freedom else-
where. A violent theological controversy sent Wheel-
wright and a few followers to Exeter, where they
founded a settlement which later grew into the colony
of New Hampshire. Another group, followers of
Mrs. Ann Hutchinson, a strong-minded woman who
had been adjudged a dangerous heretic, established
themselves on the island of Rhode Island; while still
another group of religious and social libertarians, led
by Roger Williams, settled at Providence. The
colony of Rhode Island, organized as such under a
royal charter in 1663, represented the union of four
different settlements, Newport, Providence, Ports-
mouth, and Warwick, each of which had its own

io AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

particular reasons for regarding Massachusetts with
distrust. A less aggressive body of dissenters, headed
by Thomas Hooker, quietly withdrew to the fertile
valley of the Connecticut, and a party of emigrants
from England who had expected to settle in Massa-
chusetts, but who were deterred by the heresy con-
troversies which they found there upon their arrival,
moved on to New Haven. In 1665 a royal charter
merged New Haven and the river towns in the colony
of Connecticut. A few straggling settlements in
Maine, eventually absorbed by Massachusetts, com-
pleted the English occupation of New England.

The downfall of the Puritan commonwealth and
Cromwellian protectorate in England and the restora-
tion of Charles II, in 1660, brought a renewal of
interest in colonization. The charters of Connecticut
and Rhode Island, far more liberal from the stand-
point of popular government than any previous
charters had been, were a rebuke to the oligarchical
spirit of Puritanism and an important step in the
direction of a divorce of religion from politics.
Charles had many political debts to pay, however,
and the American continent, most of whose eastern
half had already been claimed in one way or another
for the English crown notwithstanding the French
occupation of the interior, was a welcome resource.
A Dutch colony in New York, the only attempt of
The Netherlands at colonization in North America,
was taken as spoils in a war with the Dutch and given
to the king's brother, the Duke of York. Lord

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS n

Carteret, a royal favorite, received a grant of New
Jersey, and a group of titled proprietors headed by
Lord Shaftesbury obtained a grant of Carolina for
which John Locke, the English philosopher, drafted
a feudal constitution. The colonizing work of the
seventeenth century was completed in 1681 when
William Penn, the most prominent representative of
the Quaker sect in England, was made lord proprietor
of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania colony was the
first English enterprise to attract a German population,
and the absorption of some small Swedish settlements
in Delaware presently made it even more cosmo-
politan.

There was little in all this to suggest the ultimate
emergence of a great nation. The English colonies,
scattered along the Atlantic coast from Maine to
Carolina and with their settlements everywhere easily
accessible from the sea, were hemmed in between the
ocean which separated them from England and an
untrodden wilderness stretching no one knew how
far to the west. The conquest of the country meant
the levelling of primeval forests, the slow clearing of
the land, and the defeat or subjugation of Indian
tribes which in the centre and north long remained
hostile. There was no important emigration from
Europe, save to Pennsylvania, after 1640, and while
the abundance of free land and a healthy climate
made America a place of opportunity for those who
could support the rigors of a primitive and laborious
life, there was no apparent promise of a large popu-

12 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

lation for many generations to come. With the
abatement of religious bitterness in England and the
waning of the early spirit of adventure the infant
settlements were left to grow in numbers mainly by
the slow process of natural increase, and to depend
upon themselves for the financial resources necessary
for the development of their economic life. None
of the colonies was financially profitable to the com-
panies or individuals who initiated them, and in none
was prosperity due to English financial aid.

The spirit of union, too, was lacking. Each colony
was a separate political entity, owing allegiance to the
mother country but politically in no way bound to
regard its neighbors. Virginia had nothing in com-
mon with New York or New Jersey, and Quaker
Pennsylvania had small inducement to cultivate the
friendship of Puritan New England. Physical com-
munication was difficult except by sea. The Carolina
settlements, separated by a wilderness from Virginia
and Maryland, saw more of the English colonists in
the island of Barbados, from which the early Carolina
population had been in part recruited, than they did
of their neighbors to the north, and another stretch of
wilderness separated Virginia and Maryland from
Pennsylvania. Only in New England, where dis-
tances were small and the towns of one colony touched
those of another, was colonial union natural or prac-
ticable. A New England Confederation, formed in
1643 primarily for joint defence against the Indians,
held the germ of intercolonial unity; but the domi-

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 13

neering attitude of Massachusetts bred discontent in
Connecticut and Rhode Island, the foundations of
genuine political accord in general matters were not
laid, and with the collapse of the Indian resistance
the Confederation first declined and then ceased to
exist. Not until the later French and Indian wars
did the northern colonies again make serious attempts
to act together, and the temporary unions which were
then formed were for military purposes only.

Economic and social conditions, also, made for
sectional diversity and separateness rather than for
unity. The dominating class of landed proprietors in
Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, at one in origin and
social sympathy with the Cavaliers and country gentle-
men of England, preferred country life to life in towns
and were averse to manual labor or personal partici-
pation in trade; and the plantation system of farm-
ing, with its staple crops of tobacco and rice marketed
through agents in England, and its slave labor which
climatic conditions seemed to ordain as the only form
of labor possible, coincided with their tastes. Most
of the southern planters who were church members,
except the declining Catholic minority in Maryland,
were adherents of the Church of England, and the
theological controversies which were long the meat
and drink of the Puritans suggested to Episcopalians
only a fierce and half-successful attempt to destroy
the crown and set up a Calvinist theocracy.

In New England, on the other hand, where the
Church of England was nonexistent and where Puri-

14 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

tanism left an indelible mark, the primary physical
conditions were different. The climate was rigorous,
the soil possessed by nature only moderate fertility,
the rivers were not navigable far from the sea
although good harbors were numerous, and the
Indians were long a menace. Physical conditions,
accordingly, dictated the location of the first settle-
ments on the coast rather than in the interior, drew
the population together in small compact communi-
ties, and reduced individual land holdings to com-
paratively small areas which a single family, working
without the aid of either slave or hired labor, could
clear and cultivate. In place of staple crops for
export there was diversified production almost wholly
for local consumption. Every advance of settlement
into the Indian wilderness was a hazardous venture,
and for a hundred and thirty years after colonization
began the frontier settlers were exposed to attack.
Puritan faith and practice, moreover, with their
emphasis upon personal conduct and weekly religious
instruction, accorded better with town life than with
life in the country. The town, accordingly, became
the political unit throughout New England, whereas
in the south the political unit was the plantation or
the county. Even in Rhode Island, an alien region
of dissent so far as Puritanism was concerned, the
organization of social life was essentially the same as
in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

On the other hand, with all their local differences
and insularities the English colonies nevertheless

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 15

possessed important fundamental characteristics out
of which unity might grow. The prevailing language
was everywhere English. The use of Dutch in New
York had begun to decline even before the colony
passed into English control, and the corrupt dialect
which the Pennsylvania Germans developed did not
spread beyond that colony and was localized even
there. Every colony had English law as the basis of
its jurisprudence, and the procedure of the colonial
assemblies was modelled upon that of the House of
Commons. Every colony looked to England as the
protecting mother, and the claims of allegiance were
not disputed, except in Massachusetts, even when
quarrels with the crown became most acute. Some
trade went on from colony to colony, and colonial-
built vessels carried lumber and fish from New Eng-
land to the south, tobacco and rice from the southern
colonies to England, rum to the West Indies and
Africa, and Negro slaves from Africa to the planta-
tion colonies.

Certain political resemblances, also, prepared the
way for common political action later. Whatever
the original legal organization of the colony, whether
a chartered company as in Virginia and Massachu-
setts, a grant to one or more proprietors as in Mary-
land, Carolina, and Pennsylvania, or something
resembling an incorporation of the whole people as in
Connecticut and Rhode Island, time and circum-
stances had developed forms of government which
were in the main similar from colony to colony and

1 6 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

which in practice gave to each colony a virtually
complete control of its own internal affairs. Every
colony had a legislative house the members of which
were elected by the freemen, or legal voters, and an
upper house or council which exercised executive
powers and in some cases shared in those of legis-
lation. The governors, appointed by the crown in
Virginia after 162 1 and by the proprietors where
proprietary control continued, were in New England
chosen by the freemen, but whether elected or
appointed the governor was the head of the colonial
executive and the responsible director of colonial
defence. The needs of local government were met
by the organization of towns and counties, a system
of courts with final appeal to the king in council was
gradually evolved, and local and colonial taxes were
voted, assessed, and collected.

Strictly speaking, however, no colony except Caro-
lina possessed a constitution, and the elaborate feudal
constitution of Carolina was not in fact applied. The
colonial charters, framed with the approval of the law
officers of the crown and granted in the king's name,
were grants of territory and privilege and as such
were naturally the fundamental bases of colonial
rights; but they did not spring from the people them-
selves, they were not subject to amendment by the
people or by the colonial governments, and they might
at any time be taken away for cause by the royal
authority which had granted them. From a constitu-
tional standpoint a colonial charter resembled far more

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 17

a modern municipal charter, in which are embodied
the privileges and duties to which the municipality is
subject and beyond which it cannot go, than a modern
State constitution. The innumerable controversies
which developed with proprietors or crown over
charter rights, however, and the disposition of the
colonies to insist upon the most favorable interpreta-
tion of their claims which the charter provisions would
bear had the effect of giving to a charter something
of the character of a fundamental law, and prepared
the way for the devotion to the idea of a written
constitution which is specially characteristic of the
United States.

Some of the early grants of territory, made at a
time when the form and size of the continent were
unknown, appear grotesque. The Massachusetts,
Virginia, and Carolina grants, for example, ran " from
sea to sea," the notion that the South sea or Pacific
ocean was to be found at least as near as the Missis-
sippi long persisting among political geographers.
The Pennsylvania and Maryland grants overlapped,
the boundaries between Connecticut and Rhode
Island and between Connecticut and New York were
long in dispute, and the aggressive colony of Massa-
chusetts fought hard for the extension of its frontiers
into Rhode Island on the south and into New Hamp-
shire and Maine on the north. No serious attempts
were anywhere made, however, to settle the far inte-
rior, and most of the vast region west of the Appala-
chian mountains eventually reverted to the crown.

18 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The English claims to territory did not go undis-
puted. Spain, firmly planted in Mexico and Cuba
and with its territory encircling the Gulf of Mexico,
was a barrier in the way of expansion to the south,
and north of Mexico was slowly conquering the south-
west and the Pacific coast. France, unsuccessful as
a colonizer so far as the establishment of large per-
manent settlements was concerned, but zealous and
aggressive when the acquisition of territory and
political influence was the prize, laid claim by right
of discovery, exploration, and occupation to the entire
Mississippi valley and the region tributary to the
Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, drew its bound-
aries so as to include about half of the present State
of Maine, and dreamed of a mighty effort which
should crowd the English into the sea and win North
America for the French crown.

Perhaps France could never in any case have
realized its romantic hopes even had the French and
English colonies been left to settle the matter for
themselves, but the shattering of its dream was the
result of events in Europe to which the struggles of
French and English in America were only incidental
accompaniments. The accession of William and
Mary as joint sovereigns, in 1689, marked the end
of the attempt which Charles II and James II had
persistently made, the former more or less secretly
and the latter openly, to restore Catholicism in
England. Charles was dead, James was a fugitive
in France. Between William of Orange, who before

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 19

his accession to the English throne had been the fore-
most leader of political Protestantism in Europe, and
Louis XIV of France, the most powerful and dazzling
representative of political Catholicism, there had long
been relentless hostility, and the main interest of
William in the English crown was the added oppor-
tunity which it gave him to safeguard and advance
the interests of Protestantism against the schemes of
the French king. Beyond the question of religion,
however, far more a force in international politics in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than it has
been at any time since, was the yet larger question of
political control in Europe and throughout the world.
When, in 1763, the power of France was broken and
the world predominance of England was assured,
Europe and America had been for nearly seventy-five
years involved in war.

The four successive intercolonial wars in America
which fill most of the period between 1689 and 1763,
and which were commonly referred to in the English
colonies as the French and Indian wars, were in
essence only the American phases of wars between
England and France in Europe. Colonial posses-
sions, more and more regarded as potential resources
of wealth as well as undoubted resources of political
prestige, were prizes to be fought for, and when
France and England went to war in Europe the
French and English colonies went to war in America.
Until the Seven Years' war (1 756-1 763) only the
northern English colonies were particularly affected,

20 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

for French occupation of the Ohio valley had been
too slight to permit the French to take the offensive
there or to make their presence a menace. In the
north, on the other hand, where the French had the
advantage of position and could rest on the defensive
if they chose, the frontiers of New England and New
York lay open to attack, and it was along this exposed
frontier that the French in Canada, reinforced by
Indian allies, struck repeated blows and carried
death, plunder, and devastation far and wide.

The first three wars, the last of which ended in
1748, made comparatively little impression upon the
French position. The vast territory of New France
remained essentially intact. A new English colony,
Georgia, fruit of the philanthropic interest of Ogle-
thorpe in debtors and men who had failed in life, had
been planted between South Carolina and Florida in
part as a further protection against Spanish invasion,
but the other English settlements still hugged the
coast and the frontier was everywhere in peril. The
island of Cape Breton with its fortress of Louisburg
had been taken from the French by siege only to be
restored to them by treaty. No other successful
attempt had yet been made to attack Canada by sea,
and the colonies had been left to rely mainly upon
themselves for troops, munitions, and supplies. In-
ternally, however, New France was weaker than the
English knew. Its population was hopelessly out-
numbered by the population of the English colonies,
its fur trade was profitless, its political administra-

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 21

tion was inefficient and corrupt, and communication
with France depended far less upon French war
vessels in the Gulf of St. Lawrence than upon the
inactivity of the English fleet at sea.

The Seven Years' war which was to see the down-
fall of French power in America began irregularly in
the colonies two years before war was formally
declared in Europe. The opening campaigns were
disastrous for the English. Braddock met defeat in
an attempt to reach the Ohio, and efforts to penetrate
Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the valley
of the Mohawk were frustrated by dissentions, bad
management, delays, and French adroitness. Nova
Scotia and Cape Breton were presently taken by the
English, however, some thousands of the French popu-
lation of Nova Scotia being harshly deported to the
English colonies, and the way was prepared for a
combined attack upon Quebec and Montreal by land
and sea. In 1759 an English force under Wolfe took
Quebec, and the next year New France surrendered
to Amherst. The rich possessions of France in India
had already passed into English hands, and the
colonial power of France was for the time being de-
stroyed.

The downfall of New France was a victory for the
English colonies aided by English subsidies, English
troops, and the English navy, and in the laurels of
victory both the mother country and the colonies were
entitled to share. It was not a victory of a better
theory of empire over an inferior one, nor of a nation

22 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

with a healthy civilization over a nation whose civili-
zation was unsound. It was a victory of superior
numbers, superior resources, and wiser planning.
While to England, however, the overthrow of the
French power in America was of small importance in
comparison with the humiliation of France by the
establishment of English supremacy in Europe, to
the colonies the intercolonial wars were an experience
of far-reaching value. War had enforced the need
of colonial unity. It had familiarized the colonists
with military operations on a considerable scale, and
the experience stood them in good stead when, a
dozen years later, the war of revolution broke. The
defeat of the French not only freed the frontier from
danger of further attack, but also opened the door
to the extension of settlement westward as popula-
tion grew. With the obstacle of New France re-
moved the building of a great colonial dependency
could go on unchecked. The immediate future of
the American continent north of the Spanish posses-
sions was now in English hands.

By the peace of Paris, concluded in 1763, France
ceded to England all French territory on the main-
land of North America, while Spain, which had joined
in the war, ceded Florida and a narrow strip of terri-
tory on the Gulf of Mexico as far west as the Missis-
sippi. The entire eastern half of the continent, from
the Mississippi to the Atlantic and from the Gulf of
Mexico to the Arctic ocean, thus passed under Eng-
lish control. A royal proclamation, issued shortly

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 23

after the peace, provided for the administration of
the newly-acquired territory. Three governments
were created: Quebec, comprising in general the parts
of Canada which depended upon the St. Lawrence and
the Great Lakes; East Florida, practically coex-
tensive with the present State of Florida; and West
Florida, comprising the extreme southern parts of
what are now the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana as far as the Mississippi delta. The region
between Quebec and the Floridas and west of the
Appalachians as far as the Mississippi was left with-
out organization, and the governors of the English
colonies were forbidden to make any grants of land
in the region without special authorization. By
drawing a demarcation line along the Appalachian
watershed which separates the streams flowing into
the Atlantic from those which belong to the Missis-
sippi river system, and setting off the territory west
of the line as a region apart, the proclamation in
effect fixed the western boundaries of the older colo-
nies and put an end to their old claims to indefinite
extension westward.

The Paris settlement was not wholly satisfactory
to the older colonies. The guaranty of the continu-
ance of French law and the Catholic faith which
Amherst had given when New France surrendered,
and which was confirmed by the peace, was viewed
with apprehension in Puritan Massachusetts and
Connecticut. The abridgment of the western land
claims was unpalatable to every colony whose claims

24 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

were affected, and while the royal proclamation had
perforce to be acquiesced in for the moment, no
colony abandoned its claims and several of them,
notably Virginia, revived them after the Revolution
to the temporary embarrassment of the national gov-
ernment.

As a whole, however, the territorial arrangements
of 1763 excited little general interest. There were
other concerns of more immediate appeal. War
debts were heavy notwithstanding English aid, the
paper currency was depreciated and the volume of
specie small, and taxation was burdensome. The first
charter of Massachusetts had been taken away in
1684, and the new charter of 1691, under which the
governor was appointed by the crown, had been fol-
lowed by renewed quarrels in which governors and
people were about equally at fault. The royal gov-
ernors of New York were in many instances incom-
petent or corrupt, and heated controversies with the
assembly and the people regularly recurred. North
Carolina, separated from South Carolina early in the
eighteenth century, long remained a weak and back-
ward colony in comparison with its southern neigh-
bor, and the new colony of Georgia showed little
strength until after the Revolution.

Yet the colonies on the whole were prosperous.
Population was growing, intercolonial and over seas
trade was expanding, and the beginnings of manufac-
tures were to be discerned. American-built vessels
were readily sold in Europe, and Virginia tobacco,

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS 25

South Carolina rice, wheat from Pennsylvania, and
timber, naval stores, fish, and rum from New Eng-
land were increasingly in demand. Intellectual
interests, too, narrow as their horizon undoubtedly
was, had not been wholly neglected. The colleges of
Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary were leading
the way to higher education, the study of law was
zealously pursued, a few libraries had been accumu-
lated, and the writings and scientific discoveries of
Benjamin Franklin had made his name familiar to
European scholars. The hold of Puritanism had
been greatly weakened by the spread of a liberal
theological movement, and a series of preaching tours
by George Whitfield, which extended to all the colo-
nies, strengthened the trend to religious tolerance.
A few colonial newspapers had sprung up, the colonial
press turned out a swelling stream of pamphlets and
books, and a postal system operated regularly be-
tween Boston and Philadelphia and irregularly from
Philadelphia to Virginia and the south. Political
discussion, although often envenomed by personal-
ities, was on the whole serious, and practical experi-
ence in colonial assemblies and town or county meet-
ings accorded an invaluable training for the treatment
of larger general affairs when the day of union should
arrive. It was a primitive, simple, healthy, con-
ventional, hard-working, but forward-looking America
which emerged from the intercolonial wars to face the
grave issue of independence.

CHAPTER II

THROUGH REVOLUTION TO
INDEPENDENCE

The revolt of the English colonies in America
against British control which broke out suddenly soon
after the peace of Paris, and which in a little more
than a decade developed into open revolution and a
war for independence, was primarily occasioned by
an attempt of the British government to tax the colo-
nies for the purpose of meeting a part of the increas-
ing cost of colonial administration. To the colonial
protest against taxation, however, was joined a pro-
test against a system of trade regulation which for
more than a century had been imposed by Great
Britain, and the enforcement of which, albeit irregular
and often negligent, had long been a source of irri-
tation and complaint. Whether the trade restrictions
alone would ultimately have provoked a revolution
may well be doubted, for the system was far less
burdensome in fact than it was in form; but the an-
nouncement of a purpose to enforce the trade laws
in connection with the project of taxation made a
combination of grievances too weighty to be borne.

As early as 1649 Parliament had attempted to
regulate the trade of the colonies for the special bene-

26

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 27

fit of British merchants and ship owners, and from
1660 a long series of statutes had sought to exclude
foreigners from the colonial trade, to insure the
marketing of all important colonial products in Eng-
land or in other English colonies, and to make Eng-
land the door through which foreign goods destined
for the colonies must pass. Colonial and British
vessels were, to be sure, put upon the same footing
so far as trade with the colonies was concerned, and
the purpose of the statutes was undoubtedly to en-
courage colonial trade rather than to check its
development; but the denial of the right to buy or
sell directly in foreign ports placed the colonial mer-
chant and ship owner at the mercy of English ship-
builders and traders, and deprived the colonies of the
benefits of foreign competition either in prices or in
transportation rates.

The restrictions which the acts of navigation and
trade sought to impose were met in America for many
years by more or less open disregard and by system-
atic evasion. Smuggling was widely practiced and
generally condoned, and the bribery of customs offi-
cials and even of royal governors took on the charac-
ter of a system. As a matter of fact, accordingly,
the statutes, while increasingly elaborate and detailed
as the system grew, interfered but little with colonial
prosperity, and the protests of English merchants and
shippers at the practical failure of a system which
had been created for their benefit did not avail to
secure even a moderate enforcement. It was clear

28 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

to the colonists, however, that with as yet no colonial
manufactures of importance and a disposition in
England to restrict the few that had been established,
and consequently with a permanent adverse balance
of trade which must be settled in specie, exclusion
from foreign markets save through the gateway of
England entailed a continual drain of specie and in-
creasing economic servitude to England; and against
the restrictive system, once the enforcement of the
acts seemed likely to be taken seriously in hand,
America was prepared to make vigorous protest.

The Seven Years' war left Great Britain with a
heavy debt, a depleted treasury, and an unprece-
dented burden of taxation. It seemed to the Gren-
ville ministry only proper that the colonies, freed by
the war from any further danger from the French
and with their own war expenditures in part reim-
bursed by grants from the British treasury, should
pay some portion at least of the imperial cost of colo-
nial administration. Apparently the ministry would
have been satisfied if the amounts required could
have been furnished by the colonies themselves
through taxes imposed by the colonial assemblies, but
the assemblies had long been prone to use the power
of the purse as a lever for coercing governors and
other representatives of the crown, quarrels and
delays over salaries and other charges had been fre-
quent, and even with a willing spirit the amounts
obtainable through assembly grants would probably
be irregular and would almost certainly be insuffi-
cient.

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 29

Accordingly, with some hesitation and apprehen-
sion, resort was had to direct taxation. An elaborate
scheme of stamp duties, applicable to legal docu-
ments and certain classes of printed matter and
similar in all essential respects to a system long in
operation in England, was prepared, but the action
of Parliament was delayed for a year in order that
the colonial assemblies might, if they chose, propose
some satisfactory alternative through which the
desired revenue could be obtained. The assemblies
were agreed only in objecting to the tax, and accord-
ingly in March, 1765, the Stamp Act became law.
The attention of the ministry having in the mean-
time been drawn to the great extent of colonial smug-
gling, the provisions of an act imposing heavy duties
upon sugar and molasses, which had been allowed to
lapse, were revived and extended, and preparations
were made for a rigorous enforcement of the trade
laws.

The Stamp Act encountered forcible resistance
in the colonies. Stamp distributors were mobbed or
intimidated, stamps and stamped paper were de-
stroyed, and only in the Carolinas and Georgia were
the requirements of the act observed. A colonial
congress, meeting at New York, adopted resolutions
protesting against the claim of right to tax the colo-
nies without their consent. Four months after the
act was to have gone into effect it was repealed, the
repeal being accompanied, however, by a resolution
asserting the constitutional right of Parliament to tax

30 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the colonies in all cases whatsoever — a declaration
which would have been ominous had there been any
real likelihood of translating it into a permanent
policy. The attempt to enforce the trade laws proved
to be extremely costly, but naval vessels with rev-
enue jurisdiction continued to patrol the coast not-
withstanding that smuggling still went on. In 1767,
with a new ministry, a new revenue scheme of indirect
taxation through customs duties was elaborated, and
writs of assistance authorized revenue officers to
search for and seize smuggled goods. The antici-
pated revenue, however, was not obtained, and fre-
quent collisions with customs officers kept alive the
fires of revolt.

It was reasonably clear that America could not be
made to pay taxes of any kind for the support of the
British colonial establishment, and that the enforce-
ment of the revenue laws involved an expense out
of all proportion to the revenue collected. It was
equally clear that the relations between the colonists
and British officials were becoming dangerously
strained and that the authority of the crown was
being openly defied. Not all of the colonies, how-
ever, were equally aggressive in their opposition.
Down almost to the outbreak of war the leadership
of colonial resistance lay with Massachusetts and
Virginia, and while Connecticut, Rhode Island, and
New York followed willingly where others led the
way, neither New Jersey, Pennsylvania, nor Mary-
land showed equal energy in resisting the crown

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 31

demands, and the Carolinas and Georgia followed
Virginia only afar off. Had the British ministry
comprehended the real situation it might very pos-
sibly have divided the colonies by concessions or
special treatment, and checked the growth of the
movement for independence before the movement had
become strong.

The task of raising the controversy from the nar-
row plane of economic grievance to the broader field
of constitutional right was assumed by Massachusetts.
The Puritan colony was well fitted for the work.
Almost from the beginning of its existence it had
stubbornly resisted every attempt of the crown to
interfere with its affairs, and had boldly claimed
rights and privileges under its charters which neither
the first nor the second charter had apparently in-
tended to grant. In the new controversy which had
now opened the arguments drawn from the restrictive
effect of the trade laws were urged with all the force
and ingenuity that they would bear, but the attempt to
raise a revenue by taxation was met by the contention
that, among Englishmen, there could be no taxation
without representation. That the American colonies
were not represented in Parliament even indirectly
could not be questioned; that they could in practice be
represented, in view of the distance which separated
them from England, was more than doubtful; and if
they could not enjoy the privilege of representation
which the British constitution enshrined, they were
by that fact freed from any obligation to pay taxes

32 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

save such only as their own elected assemblies im-
posed. And since taxation without representation
was unconstitutional, taxation without representation
was tyranny, and tyranny might properly be resisted
by force.

Such was the argument which Samuel Adams and
other revolutionary leaders in Massachusetts devel-
oped, and which in time, with far-reaching inferences
and applications, twelve other continental colonies
came to accept. Only slowly, however, did the logic
of Adams and his followers win its way. Many mem-
bers of the aristocratic and official classes, many pro-
fessional men and large landowners, and an appre-
ciable percentage of the rank and file either rejected
the argument altogether as leading straight to revo-
lution and independence, or gave it only a half-hearted
assent, or surrendered at last to the inevitable only
when the patriot party, admirably organized and
wholly uncompromising, resorted to coercion. The
revolution which made the United States an inde-
pendent nation was undoubtedly in its inception the
work of a small minority, and the partisans of Eng-
land who were forcibly suppressed or harshly expelled
numbered some of the wealthiest and most influential
men whom colonial life had produced; but the
minority had laid hold of the great ideas of nationality
and independence which the conservative opposition
did not share, and with those ideas the minority car-
ried the day.

To the growth of the spirit of resistance and inde-

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 33

pendence which the revenue schemes aroused, British
colonial policy made a substantial contribution. The
colonial theory which regarded the colonies as fields
for economic exploitation, and measured the strength
of empire by the area to which imperial rule extended
rather than by the happiness and prosperity of the
people, was not English in origin, for the same theory
had obtained throughout in Spain and France; and
the restrictions which England had imposed upon
colonial shipping and trade were no more unenlight-
ened than was the economic policy of the eighteenth
century generally. The attempt to tax the colonies
directly, however, in addition to taxing them in-
directly through the control of their most lucrative
trade, was a grave political blunder all the more seri-
ous because the constitutional issue involved was
easily to be perceived; and constitutional struggles
had more than once brought revolution in England
itself. It was long the fashion to blame the king,
George III, for the loss of the American colonies, and
the baneful influence of the royal personality was
unquestionably great and compelling; but the states-
men who scrambled and bribed for office under George
III showed little more practical wisdom than did the
king when the American colonies were concerned.
Neither Whigs nor Tories, the two great parties of
the day, were deeply troubled about the constitutional
rights of Englishmen, and no strong, clear voice save
that of Edmund Burke was long heard in opposition.
Later generations, more liberal and intelligent, were

34 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

to see in the struggle against absolutism in America
an important phase of the still longer struggle against
a similar policy in the mother country, but the full
significance of the contest was not appreciated until
after a vast colonial domain in America had been lost.

Multiplying incidents showed better than argument
the inflammable state of colonial public opinion. A
street fight with British troops at Boston in March,
1775, magnified by history into a massacre, evidenced
the hatred which the British uniform excited. In
1772 the British sloop-of-war Gaspee, engaged in
enforcing the customs laws, was burned by Rhode
Island men in Narragansett bay. Associations whose
members pledged themselves not to import or use
British goods were formed, and when the ministry,
seeking to make a test case as well as to help the
East India Company out of financial embarrassment,
reduced to a low point the colonial duties on tea, the
people of Boston threw the consignments of tea into
the' harbor and tea ships arriving in other colonies
were sent back or their cargoes impounded. Colonial
newspapers published long discussions of colonial
rights, revolutionary pamphlets multiplied, and patri-
otic clergy spoke out.

It was not in the British temper to yield to oppo-
sition without a struggle, and a policy of open coer-
cion was now inaugurated. Massachusetts was
obviously the chief offender, and that colony was
singled out for punishment. In 1774 the port of
Boston was closed to commerce except in food, the

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 35

embargo to remain in force until satisfaction was
accorded to the East India Company for its tea, town
meetings were forbidden, and the choice of members
of the colonial council was placed under the control
of the royal governor. A parliamentary statute,
applicable to all the colonies, authorized the trial in
England or in another colony of persons charged with
offences under the revenue laws, colonial juries being
notoriously unwilling to convict even in the face of
indubitable evidence. Boston passed under martial
law, General Gage arrived as military governor, and
the military and naval forces in America were
strengthened.

The open resort to coercion was the one thing
needed to unite the colonies. From New Hampshire
to Georgia the people rallied to the support of Massa-
chusetts and the relief of the embargoed inhabitants
of Boston. A Continental Congress framed a for-
cible but dignified statement of colonial rights, and
adopted articles of association which looked to com-
plete commercial nonintercourse with Great Britain
and the encouragement of American industries.
Secret committees of correspondence kept the several
colonies informed of British plans and proceedings,
committees of public safety collected arms and organ-
ized military drill, and available stores of munitions
and military supplies were carefully listed. When
in April, 1775, a British force from Boston, attempt-
ing to destroy some military stores at Lexington and
Concord, met stubborn resistance and was driven

36 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

back in ignominious retreat, the time for argument
had passed and the war of revolution had begun.

Not as yet, however, was it a war for independence.
The second Continental Congress, which in 1775
assumed the direction of colonial resistance and gov-
erned by general consent until it was replaced by the
Congress of the Confederation in 1781, appointed
George Washington commander-in-chief of the forces
of the United Colonies, planned military operations
on a comprehensive scale, wrestled with problems of
finance, authorized one colony after another to resist
the crown, and opened to trade all American ports;
but it also framed a " declaration of the causes and
necessity of taking up arms " which explicitly repu-
diated the idea of independence and asserted that
forcible resistance had been resorted to only because
the rights of the colonies were endangered. It was
the logic of events, enforced by the practical argu-
ments of a small minority who had caught the vision
of nationality and were determined at all hazards to
make it a reality, that turned the war from the nar-
row confines of organized resistance to the large
ground of a war for independence. That independ-
ence was inevitable once open warfare had begun is
today easily to be perceived, but nearly fifteen months
elapsed after the fighting at Lexington and Concord
before the great Declaration made the United States
an independent nation.

The British defeat of April 19, 1775, was followed
by the investment of Boston by irregular colonial

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 37

forces, the nucleus of the American army of which
Washington shortly took command. Royal gover-
nors were driven out, assemblies which had been pro-
rogued or dissolved were reconvened and popular
governments restored, and forts and munitions were
seized. Thousands of loyalists, willing to oppose the
mother country by peaceful means but unwilling to
oppose it by force, sought in England or Nova Scotia
new homes in place of those which they were con-
strained, not always gently, to abandon. An am-
bitious attempt under Benedict Arnold to capture
Quebec failed disastrously, but the hope of conquer-
ing Canada, whose inhabitants showed no desire to
join the English colonies in revolt, continued to be
cherished. In March, 1776, the British were forced
to abandon Boston, and the British headquarters were
transferred to New York, thereafter throughout the
war in British hands. The strategical importance of
the Hudson river, separating New England from the
middle and southern colonies and opening access to
Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the Mohawk
valley, made the New York region the key to the
military situation; and the success of Washington in
maintaining himself on the Hudson, keeping open
land communication with New England, and pre-
venting the successful invasion of the colonies from
the north was one of the great causes of ultimate
victory for the American arms.

The response of the British ministry to colonial
protest and resistance was a combined offer of the

38 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

sword and the olive branch. A royal proclamation
declared the colonies to be in rebellion, an act of
Parliament interdicted all trade, and more troops were
sent. With these coercive measures went the an-
nouncement that the right to impose taxes in the
colonies would not be exercised provided the colonial
assemblies would themselves undertake to make pro-
vision for the support of the British administration.
In terms the concession might mean much or little,
but there was no confidence in America in the good
faith of either the king or his minister, Lord North,
and the reply of the Continental Congress was a
stinging rejection of the offer. No other reply could
well have been made even if confidence had been
great, for the signature of John Hancock, president
of the Congress, to the Declaration of Independence
was only a few hours old when the answer was given.
The Declaration of Independence, in the main the
work of Thomas Jefferson, combined with rare skill
and effectiveness a theory of government and a state-
ment of grievances. The theory of a free state,
grounded in a divine order of human equality, sub-
sisting under forms of government sanctioned by the
consent of the governed, operating for the mainte-
nance of human rights, and subject to change through
revolution when the government ceased to serve the
ends for which it had been created, was of a piece
with the political philosophy which the writings of
Rousseau immortalized, but it was also, although with
different pihraseology, the essential foundation of

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 39

English political theory and practice. No modern
state has made its entrance into the family of nations
with a more noble statement of doctrine than that
which the United States adopted as the basis of its
faith, none has more solidly buttressed its programme
of independent action with a convincing specification
of grievances. The long indictment of the king and
Parliament which the Declaration contains swept the
field of British injustice and misconduct, and left no
other possible conclusion than that the colonies had
become absolved from further allegiance to the
British crown and were entitled to live henceforth as
free and independent states. Here and there an
earnest patriot drew back from this last irrevocable
step, but the overwhelming majority of what was now
to become the American people approved. From
the fourth of July, 1776, there was no longer a group
of American colonies but an American nation.

Independence had been proclaimed, but the
declaration had still to be made good. More than
five years of dreary and desperate war, illumined on
only two occasions by decisive successes, were to
pass before the preliminaries of a victorious peace
could be signed. The brilliant campaigns of Wash-
ington in New Jersey, while they revealed to the
world a master of strategy, did not shake the hold of
the British upon New York, and the " rebel capital "
of Philadelphia passed easily into British hands when
the British were ready to take it. The defeat of
Burgoyne and the capitulation of his army, however,

4o AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

in October, 1777, put an end to all danger of further
invasion from Canada and brought to the United
States the active aid of France. South of Virginia,
where early grievances against Great Britain had
been less serious and where enthusiasm for the war
was in consequence less sustained than in New Eng-
land and the middle States, the British for a time
overran the country, but the persistent and skilful
fighting of Nathanael Greene and his associates even-
tually drove Cornwallis from the interior of North and
South Carolina to the coast and ended the possibility
of dismembering the union by cutting off the Caro-
linas and Georgia. On the sea American losses were
heavy, but American naval vessels and privateers ter-
rorized British commerce even in British waters and
bred respect for American seamanship and daring.

The alliance with France, cemented by political
and commercial treaties in 1778, was of inestimable
importance to the United States. Everything that
was chivalrous and romantic in the French tempera-
ment had been stirred by the spectacle of a group of
struggling colonies resisting British domination and
boldly asserting their right to independence, and the
Declaration of Independence made a profound im-
pression in a country in which the seeds of a yet
greater revolution were already ripening. It was to
the lasting credit of Franklin, for ten years a colonial
agent in England before the war and now the Ameri-
can diplomatic representative in France, that he
should from the first have gauged with precision the

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 41

temper of the French people, and he used all the re-
sources of his extraordinary personal popularity and
consummate diplomatic skill to win France to the
American cause. Official French support for the
United States was not, of course, wholly disinterested.
There was still the memory of a New France that had
been lost, there was still the age-long antipathy to
England and English policy which waited only a
favorable moment for revenge; and while the re-
covery of New France was a hope too shadowy even
for a dream, the loss by Great Britain of its colonial
possessions in America would be a blow to British
imperial prestige which France might help to strike
and from which it might expect to reap advantage.

The opportunity came with the defeat of Burgoyne
at Saratoga, and in February, 1778, the treaties of
alliance and commerce were signed. From a political
point of view the terms were exacting for the United
States, because France, foreseeing that an open
alliance with America meant a renewal of war with
England, insisted that in the making of peace between
the United States and Great Britain the interests of
France should be consulted. The United States, in
other words, was not at liberty to make peace alone.
But the conclusion of an alliance meant also French
troops and French naval forces in America, much
needed supplies of war material, and loans, in addi-
tion to formal recognition as a nation, and the price
was not too high. Moreover, the widening of the
field of war, dividing British forces and multiplying

42 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

British efforts, was reasonably likely to work to the
supreme advantage of the United States if another
victory like that over Burgoyne could be obtained.

The victory came at Yorktown in October, 1781,
through the combined efforts of the Americans and
the French. The British forces under Cornwallis,
escaping northward from the Carolinas and counting
upon aid from Clinton at New York, were caught in
the Yorktown peninsula by the armies of Washing-
ton and Rochambeau which had hurried from the
north, and surrendered. The war for independence
was over. Couriers carried the good news from town
to town and from State to State, night watchmen
echoed the joyful tidings as they made their rounds,
and bonfires, parades, and church services voiced the
gratitude of a people whose anxious hopes had been
long deferred. The ministry of Lord North fell, and
the demand for peace which had been growing in
England ever since the signature of the French
alliance needed no further arguments to enforce it.
In September, 1782, a preliminary peace was signed.
A year elapsed before the terms of peace with France
and Spain, both of which nations were now parties to
the war, could be arranged; then in September, 1783,
a definitive treaty in terms identical with those of
the preliminary treaty of the previous year ended the
state of war. The Declaration of Independence
issued more than seven years before had been made
good, and the United States took its unquestioned
place among the nations.

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 43

In the discussion of the terms of ultimate peace
which had gone on in Congress ever since the alliance
with France, the question of how much territory
should be claimed had naturally played an important
part. The early hope of conquering Canada had
been abandoned, but there were still many who
desired to include within the boundaries of the United
States all British territory at least as far north as the
St. Lawrence. This ambition was wisely laid aside.
The French population of Quebec had no grievances
against the British crown, it was guaranteed the use
of the French language and French law and the free
exercise of the Catholic faith, and its incorporation in
the new United States would have introduced an
alien element not easily to be assimilated. The
settled portion of French-speaking Canada, accord-
ingly, remained in British hands. West of the point,
in the northern part of the State of New York, at
which the boundary line cut the St. Lawrence the
line followed the middle course of the river and Lakes
Ontario, Erie, and Huron to a point on the western
side of Lake Superior, and thence to the source of the
Mississippi, incorrectly supposed at that time to rise
in the Lake of the Woods. The western boundary
was the Mississippi, while the southern boundary was
the provinces of East and West Florida, which at the
close of the war were retroceded by Great Britain to
Spain. All of the region west of the original thirteen
States, which by the royal proclamation of 1763 had
been detached from the coast colonies and left without

44 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

political organization, thus passed to the United
States.

The war had been a bold adventure, and almost to
the end defeat seemed often more imminent than
victory. It is clear that Great Britain persistently
underestimated the magnitude of its military task,
and that more troops and better leadership might
have crushed American resistance beyond reasonable
hope of early resurrection. The larger proportion of
the British forces were always available for a single
engagement or campaign, and the task of Washing-
ton, with widely scattered contingents less in num-
bers by a fourth than those of his opponent, was to
avoid operations in which his army would certainly
be crushed and at the same time keep the field.
Nearly one-half of the American land forces were
furnished by New England, but the difficulties of
recruiting increased as the war dragged on and short
term enlistments and desertion were a constant men-
ace. Arms, munitions, clothing, food, and supplies
of all kinds were pitifully deficient, and the sufferings
of the American troops in the memorable winter at
Valley Forge were only a more striking example of
privations which were endured by all the American
forces throughout the period of the war.

Economically, the war exacted a heavy toll.
Manufacturing was in its infancy when the war began,
and supplies of the most common and necessary
articles were speedily drained. Foreign and coast-
wise commerce was all but destroyed, and the few

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 45

staples upon which the colonies had depended for
purchase of European goods remained unsold. So far
as the civil population was concerned there was at
no time any serious lack of food, but the depreciated
paper currency issued by Congress and the States,
practically worthless by the end of the war, paralyzed
trade and made the provisioning of the army difficult
and irregular. The attempts of Congress, none of
them more than temporizing devices, to deal with the
pressing problems of finance and trade achieved no
important result, and the country drifted into bank-
ruptcy beyond the power of either the nation or the
States to prevent it. Far the larger part of the loans
which France extended took the form of supplies
rather than money, and almost the only specie in
circulation was that which the British shrewdly dis-
pensed in purchasing food. Fortunately for the
future there was little devastation of the country,
and few scars of war remained to tell where the
armies had fought.

The war bore with unequal weight upon the dif-
ferent sections of the country. New England saw
few important military operations after the British
evacuation of Boston. New York City, on the other
hand, was occupied by the British until the conclu-
sion of peace, and Washington's most difficult and
brilliant operations were carried on in New Jersey
and near Philadelphia. Virginia saw no fighting of
importance after the opening of hostilities until the
siege of Yorktown, notwithstanding that for two years

46 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

British and American forces were pursuing one an-
other back and forth across the Carolinas. When,
following the surrender of Burgoyne, the British
turned their attention to the south, it was apparently
with the hope of detaching the southern States from
the rest of the country and holding them for the
crown either by conquest or by conciliation. That
the effort failed was due to the prompt action of the
patriot party, which at the very beginning of the war
had crushed a loyalist rising in western North Caro-
lina, and which now met the campaigns of Corn-
wallis and the raids of Tarleton with the guerilla
tactics of Marion, Sumter, and Pickens reinforced by
the able generalship of Greene. " United we stand,
divided we fall " had been an early colonial motto,
and the underlying spirit of union, albeit very un-
equally developed in different States and sections, was
sufficient even under the severest stress of war to
defeat the plans for disrupting the nation.

No story of the American revolution would be
complete which did not take account of the great
personalities which the more than sixteen years of
continuous struggle brought to the front. To Samuel
Adams of Massachusetts, more than to any other one
man, belongs the honor of seeing from the beginning
the inevitable connection between open resistance and
independence; and to the achievement of independ-
ence and the rejection of every offer of compromise
he devoted himself with unrelenting zeal. No other
Massachusetts leader stands out so prominently in

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 47

the first ten years, but the constitutional arguments
of John Adams, elaborated in pamphlets and news-
paper articles, carried weight with many thoughtful
patriots to whom oratory and agitation made less
convincing appeal, and stamp their author as one of
the great constitutional statesmen of the revolutionary
period. A somewhat similar matching of personal-
ities was to be found in Virginia, where the fiery
speeches of Patrick Henry were balanced by the
dignified but powerful writings of Jefferson. The
state papers and controversial articles which flowed
from the pen of John Dickinson of Pennsylvania were
so numerous and important as to earn for their author
the title of " the penman of the revolution," and
although, when the Declaration of Independence was
adopted, Dickinson drew back at the thought of an
irrevocable break with the crown, he nevertheless
accepted the decision of Congress and the people and
entered the patriot army as a common soldier.

The greatest of Pennsylvanians and the peer of
American diplomatists, Franklin, served the colonies
faithfully in England until the approaching rupture
dictated his withdrawal, took the leading part in
negotiating the treaties which brought France to the
American side and the treaties with Great Britain
which ended the war, and lived to put his name to the
Constitution of the United States. The impressive
figure of John Rutledge, combining in himself for more
than two years all the powers of government of South
Carolina while Greene and the partisan leaders fought

48 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the British until Cornwallis withdrew, is one to which
historians have yet to do full justice. The popular
writings of Thomas Paine, reaching ears which were
dull to formal argument, lent a weight which more
sober leaders gladly recognized.

The overshadowing personality of Washington had
more than military greatness to give it distinction.
It fell to Washington, first as commander-in-chief
responsible to Congress and later as military head
with virtually dictatorial powers, to deal with Con-
gress and the country as well as with the army; and
his wisdom, patience, and hope, sorely tried as they
were by the incompetence of politicians and the in-
trigues of his own military subordinates, stand out
boldly even in the days of deepest gloom. The mili-
tary success which came to him after years of
desperate struggle would of itself have sufficed to
make him a national hero, but it was the dignity and
nobility of his character combined with his abilities
as a general which marked him even during the war
as the most representative American. It is said that
John Adams, who as a member of Congress proposed
the choice of Washington as commander-in-chief, was
shrewdly of the opinion that a Virginian and an
Episcopalian as commander of a New England army
of dissenters would make for colonial unity; but
whatever the opinion of the candidate on that ques-
tion, it is certain that neither during the war nor
afterwards as president was Washington regarded as
the representative of anything less than the whole
United States.

REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE 49

The one hundred and seventy years which inter-
vened between the first charter of Virginia and the
Declaration of Independence had transformed thirteen
independent colonies into States and bound the States
together in a nation. The sharp conflicts which had
ended in separation had not greatly changed the
essentially English character of the American people,
for America was still English in habits of thought as
well as in its fundamental political and legal insti-
tutions, and the resentment and bitterness which the
war evoked did not long survive the conclusion of
peace. The way was open now, however, for the
development of practices, institutions, and ideals which
should be distinctively American. The immediate
outlook for success was not encouraging, for the
treasury was empty, industry was prostrate, and the
structure of national government was upon the point
of falling to pieces. Few nations have begun their
careers with greater burdens than those which in 1783
rested upon the United States. It was for the men
who had organized the country for independence and
war to show that they could now organize it for
nationality and peace. If that great step could be
successfully taken the future of the new American
nation was assured.

CHAPTER III
FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION

No sooner was the Declaration of Independence
adopted than the Continental Congress turned its
attention to the preparation of a national constitution.
The informal union of the States which had taken
the name of the United States of America rested as
yet only upon general consent, and the Congress
which had assumed the direction of affairs had only
a precarious and undefined authority. If the States
which collectively had declared their independence
were to receive recognition as a nation, capable of
making war and concluding peace, of conferring and
maintaining rights of citizenship, and of exercising the
powers and enjoying the privileges which inter-
national law accorded to sovereign nations, it was
necessary that the powers of the national government
should be defined and the relations between the nation
and the States regulated. English precedent would
have dictated the formation of a constitution partly
written and partly the creation of precedent, in which
case the Declaration of Independence would have
been only one of numerous constitutional documents.
The controversy over taxation and representation,
however, the peculiar importance which in a number

SO

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 51

of colonies had been attached to the charters or pro-
prietary grants, and the inclination early shown by
States to draw up constitutions for themselves, com-
bined to dictate a national constitution which should
be written. Only in this way, it was believed, would
the independent powers of the States be preserved
and the limits of national authority established. It
was a novel idea for which the practice of nations
afforded no conclusive precedent, but it accorded with
the American temperament and seemed likely to meet,
better than any other method, the existing conditions.
The committee to which the matter was referred
was industrious, and within a few weeks after the
adoption of the Declaration of Independence a draft
form of Articles of Confederation was reported to
Congress. The engrossing preoccupations of war, on
the other hand, delayed consideration, and it was not
until November, 1777, some fifteen months after the
draft was reported, that the document received con-
gressional approval. The States, whose acceptance
was necessary before the Articles could become effec-
tive, took their time, and a controversy over claims
to western lands in which Virginia, which had asserted
a preposterous claim under one of its ancient charters
to the region of the Ohio valley and about the Great
Lakes, refused to yield unless other States would
surrender their claims, threatened for a time to defeat
the scheme. Only in March, 1781, more than three
years and three months after the Articles had been
approved by Congress, was the ratification of the last

52 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

State received. Almost every political, social, and
military condition which existed when the draft was
first presented had changed by the time the first con-
stitution of the United States became operative.

The Articles of Confederation provided for a
national government in which legislative and execu-
tive powers, the latter only rudimentary, were vested
in a Congress the members of which were designated
by the State legislatures, the number of representa-
tives being not less than two nor more than seven as
each State might choose, but each State having one
vote. The powers conferred upon Congress and the
limitations imposed upon the States were similar, so
far as they went, to the powers and limitations set
forth later in the Constitution of 1787, but neither
directly nor indirectly was Congress vested with
power to enforce its decisions, nor could any State
be compelled to observe the restrictions which the
Articles laid down. With the exception of an un-
wieldy system of arbitration courts for the settle-
ment of controversies over land grants a judicial
department was lacking, and there was no recognition
of a " supreme law of the land " which the present
Constitution accords to acts of Congress, treaties, and
the Constitution itself. The only financial resource
of the national government was requisitions appor-
tioned among the States, but while the States were of
course morally bound to pay the requisitions, Con-
gress was financially helpless if payment failed or was
refused.

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 53

The defects of the Articles of Confederation,
obvious enough in the light of the more perfect Con-
stitution which replaced the Articles, were bound in
the long run to prove fatal; but the narrowness of
political vision with which the statesmen who framed
the document have often been charged should not be
over-emphasized. There were serious obstacles in
the way of constructing any scheme of national
government at all. A union composed of thirteen
States, no one of which had any organic political
connection with any other and each of which regarded
itself as independent and sovereign, must in the
nature of things be a federal union; and a federal
union, if it was to be successful, presupposed not only
a just and workable distribution of duties and privi-
leges between the States on the one hand and the
national government on the other, but also an assured
protection of the States against the encroachment of
the nation and power in the national government to
enforce and maintain the rights conferred upon it.
It was precisely at these elementary but vital points
that the Articles of Confederation were inherently
defective, but the defects were due to the suspicions
and jealousies of the States and their unwillingness
to accept a central authority rather than to the short-
sightedness and political inexperience of the Congress
which framed the plan. In the then state of public
opinion independence was one thing and nationality
another, and the States which individually or in
informal co-operation had pressed the controversy

54 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

with Great Britain and taken up arms in defence of
their rights had yet to learn that only through organic
union could they insure for themselves or for their
posterity a common defence or a general welfare.

Throughout nearly the entire period of the war,
accordingly, the United States continued to lack a
national government legally constituted. The Con-
tinental Congress which organized American resist-
ance, concluded an alliance with France, pledged the
faith of the nation for the repayment of foreign loans,
and wrestled with the all but insoluble problem of
revenue was indeed a government de facto, and its
acts, though often questioned and still more often
ignored, were nevertheless to be looked upon as
grounded in general consent; but it was not a govern-
ment de jure, and the long interval which elapsed
between the adoption of the Articles of Confederation
by Congress and their acceptance by the States made
the eventual transition from revolutionary to con-
stitutional government far more a matter of form
than of practical substance.

At the beginning of March, 1781, the Articles hav-
ing at last been ratified, the Continental Congress,
which during the larger part of the war had sat at
Philadelphia, quietly transformed itself into the Con-
gress of the Confederation. In October came the sur-
render of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and before another
year had passed the preliminary treaty of peace had
ended the war. Aside from the conclusion of peace, in
regard to whose terms there was frequent debate, the

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 55

most pressing issue was that of revenue. So much
of the army as did not melt away was disbanded, and
Washington took leave of his officers, surrendered his
commission to Congress, and retired to his seat at
Mount Vernon. But the army was unpaid, the
national government was bankrupt, the national and
State currency retained only a shadow of value, and
every State was heavily in debt. Washington, in a
circular letter to the governors, urged the necessity
of establishing public credit and paying the revo-
lutionary debts, but the counsel was not easily to be
acted upon in a country from which specie had almost
disappeared from circulation and domestic industry
and foreign trade were stagnant. There were still
staple products to export, but the British trade laws,
which in spite of their restrictions had given America
a privileged market in Great Britain and the British
West Indies, now operated to exclude American
products as those of a foreign country or to burden
them with heavy duties; and the absence of a com-
mercial treaty with Great Britain to supplement the
political treaty of peace left American commerce to
seek its markets in other parts of the world or else
to risk the evasion of the British trade laws by the
old device of smuggling.

The eight years during which the Articles of Con-
federation remained nominally in force are a gloomy
record of desperate and ineffectual attempts on the
part of Congress to obtain a revenue. The response
of the States to requisitions grew more and more lax,

56 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

and by 1786 all hope of further returns from that
source had disappeared. A natural source of reve-
nue, that of customs duties, could be made available
only with the consent of all the States, and two urgent
requests for authority to levy such duties were nega-
tived, one by the refusal of Rhode Island, the other
by the opposition of New York. The western lands,
the claims to which had been ceded to the United
States and which were held as public domain, were
vaguely regarded as a potential source of wealth from
which the national debt might eventually be paid;
but although the survey of the lands and the acqui-
sition of the Indian titles was begun, no appreciable
returns from sales were received until years after the
Constitution was adopted, and the public lands never
yielded in revenue as much as they had cost.

Within the States, also, social order was disrupted
and the authority of government was in peril. As
happens in every war some fortunes had been made
by speculation, but the people as a whole were poor,
taxes were heavy, efforts of creditors to press their
claims in court were a grievance hard to bear, and
farm products could not be sold. Even with the best
of public spirit the requisitions of Congress could
with difficulty have been paid because of the lack of
specie and the worthless condition of the currency,
and with little money for any purpose the States
naturally looked first to their own needs rather than
to those of the nation. There were alarming symp-
toms of insurrection, and when in 1786-87 an armed

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 57

revolt against the State government broke out in
Massachusetts and only with difficulty was suppressed,
it was clear that events were moving toward a
crisis. Massachusetts had appealed to Congress for
aid, but there was no national army adequate for the
emergency and Congress doubted its own consti-
tutional authority to act. If a formidable revolt
against government could develop in Massachusetts,
admittedly one of the strongest States in the Union,
what might not insurrection accomplish in a weaker
State with a national government impotent?

It was evident that the Articles of Confederation
must be revised. The question of revenue and debt
could not be much longer postponed, and the States
must be guarantied protection against domestic vio-
lence in case their own powers were insufficient. A
conference at Annapolis, Maryland, called nominally
to consider a commercial dispute between Maryland
and Virginia involving jurisdiction over the waters
of Chesapeake bay, could find no way of permanently
settling either that or any other controversy between
States so long as the Articles remained in force. The
obstacles to revision were serious, for the Articles
themselves could be amended only with the unani-
mous consent of the States, and the same particular-
istic spirit which had twice defeated the attempt to
secure an independent national revenue could be
counted upon to oppose changes which, if they were to
meet the existing difficulties, would certainly deprive
the States of some of their powers. Washington and

58 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

other political leaders, however, had for some time
been corresponding on the subject, and with this
preparation and the added influence of the Annapolis
convention Congress took the bold step of calling for
a convention to revise the Articles and " adapt them
to the exigencies of the union."

The Constitutional Convention assembled in May,
1787, at Philadelphia. It was a notable body, repre-
sentative of the best intelligence, the widest political
experience, and the most devoted public spirit of the
States. The choice of Washington as president of
the Convention, while it removed him from the floor,
insured a dignified and serious conduct of business
and at the same time left him free to exercise his
influence personally with members. The proceedings
went on behind closed doors, the journal recorded
action and not debate, and the public knew nothing
of the proposals submitted or the controversies en-
gendered until, after more than four months of labor,
the new Constitution was transmitted to Congress
for submission by that body to the States.

It was well, perhaps, that the proceedings were
secret, for acute and fundamental divergencies of
opinion developed from the first. The Convention
had been called to revise the Articles of Confedera-
tion, and any amendments which it proposed would
require the approval of all the States. But it was
early perceived that a mere revision of the Articles,
remedying a defect here and supplying an omission
there, would not meet the existing crisis. It was the

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 59

Articles themselves that were at fault. A government
without an independent revenue or power to enforce
its votes could never be a workable institution, and
neither of these indispensable attributes could be
grafted upon the Articles without changing funda-
mentally the essential character of the document and
creating a wholly new relationship between the nation
and the States. Was the Convention at liberty to
frame a new system under the guise of amending the
Articles, and, if it was, would its work have to go
for naught unless every State approved? In view of
the attitude of Rhode Island and New York toward
the two revenue proposals which Congress had made,
and of the suggestive fact that Rhode Island, alone
among the States, had failed to send any delegates to
the Convention, no member of the Convention would
have been willing to affirm that any amendment that
might be framed would receive the assent of all the
States.

When the Convention, convinced that a new federal
government must somehow be constructed, turned to
that task it met other serious difficulties. How, for
example, was the relative influence of large and small
States in the new national legislature to be adjusted?
In the Congress of the Confederation each State,
irrespective of the number of delegates which it chose
to send, had one vote. If that system were continued
the large States, less numerous at the time than the
small ones, might at any time find themselves out-
voted, and the majority of population and wealth in

60 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the country would thus be subjected to the will of a
minority merely because the minority happened to
represent a greater number of organized common-
wealths. On the other hand, if the voting power of
the States were to be made proportionate to their
population, the minority of large States would enjoy a
complete and permanent control and the views of the
small States could be disregarded at will. The prob-
lem of how to connect representation and voting with
population was further complicated by the existence
in five southern States of a considerable population
of Negro slaves. If the slave population were de-
ducted and only whites were counted, these five
States would be automatically reduced to relative
unimportance in the national legislature; while if
slaves were counted the southern whites, who save
in rare instances alone enjoyed political rights, would
have a political weight out of all proportion to their
numbers.

The rival economic interests and contrasted social
conditions of the several States provoked still other
controversies. In those States in which, as in Massa-
chusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania,
manufactures were developing and interest in foreign
trade was keen, traders and manufacturers wanted a
strong national government which should encourage
industry and trade by imposing discriminating tariff
duties and restrictive navigation laws as an offset to
the hostile commercial policy of Great Britain. The
agricultural interests, on the other hand, strong in

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 61

all the States and predominant in the South, feared
lest protective tariffs and restrictive trade laws should
operate to raise the prices of manufactured goods
without any corresponding increase in the prices of
agricultural products in either home or foreign mar-
kets. In the States in which Negro slavery no longer
existed or had become of no importance the conflict
between aristocratic and democratic theories of
government was already going on; and although the
influence of the aristocratic classes had been much
weakened by the expulsion of loyalists during the
Revolution, the wage-earning population of the larger
towns and many small farmers and merchants looked
with distrust upon any government, State or national,
in which wealthy landowners and representatives of
a few old families were in control. Many members
were opposed to Negro slavery, and others were
anxious to abolish the African slave trade even though
slavery itself was not disturbed.

These were some of the problems of a national
legislature. The question of a national executive,
while apparently regarded as less fundamental, was
not easily settled. A New York delegate, Alexander
Hamilton, later the organizer of the national finances
and the consummate expounder of foundation theories
of American constitutional law, frankly wished for a
strong executive with powers akin to those of the
British crown. At the other extreme were members
who would have put the executive power in the hands
of a committee or commission and subjected it closely

62 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

to the legislature. An executive elected for seven
years, an executive ineligible for re-election whatever
the length of the term, an executive chosen by Con-
gress, were among the proposals submitted. The
question of a national judiciary, a department of
government which was lacking under the Articles,
seems to have given less trouble than either the legis-
lature or the executive, possibly because there was
little reason to anticipate that national courts would
be of much importance; but the related question of
how best to make national laws and obligations bind-
ing upon a State without something like physical
coercion at the hands of Congress and the executive
was not easily settled.

Only with sharp differences of opinion, and a near
approach to rupture which led Franklin to suggest
that the proceedings of the Convention be opened
with prayer, were the divergent views of States, sec-
tions, and classes finally compromised. In the Con-
stitution as at last adopted the existing Congress of
one house, with each State possessing one vote, was
replaced by a Congress of two houses, the upper
house, or Senate, composed of two members from
each State and the lower house, or House of Repre-
sentatives, made up of members whose number varied
with the population of the States, each member of
either house having one vote. The question of slaves
was compromised by counting three-fifths of the slave
population for purposes of representation in the
House of Representatives. The interests of the

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 63

small States were safeguarded by giving to the States
equal representation in the Senate and requiring the
assent of both houses to every act of legislation; the
interests of the large States were protected by reserv-
ing to the House of Representatives the right of
originating bills for raising revenue; and the desires
of those who wished for commercial retaliation against
Great Britain were satisfied by giving to Congress the
right to regulate commerce with foreign nations and
between the States. To the Senate, which was
thought of as a body having somewhat the character
of an executive council notwithstanding its legislative
functions, was reserved the right of approving treaties
and confirming executive appointments, but in most
other respects the powers of the two houses of Con-
gress were equal save in respect of money bills.

The executive authority was vested in a president,
chosen for four years not by the people, or by Con-
gress, or by the State legislatures, but by electors
equal in number to the senators and representatives
to which each State was entitled, and selected for the
purpose in any manner that a State might think best
to adopt. On the question of the eligibility of the
president for a second or third term the Constitution
was silent, and the only suggestion of a cabinet was
a reference to " heads of executive departments "
whose opinions the president might require in writing.
A vice-president, chosen in substantially the same
manner as the president and for the same term, was
designated as the presiding officer of the Senate, but

64 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

no share in the executive power was assigned to him,
and no provision was made for the choice of another
vice-president in case the elected vice-president,
through the death, resignation, removal, or disability
of the president, became president. Between the
president and Congress, on the other hand, a certain
connection was established by provisions impowering
the president to suggest desirable legislation and
giving him a qualified veto upon bills or resolutions
which the two houses might pass.

The federal judicial system, as a whole the most
novel feature of the Constitution in comparison with
the Articles of Confederation, comprised a Supreme
Court and such lesser courts as Congress might from
time to time create. The judges of all the courts,
appointed by the president with the approval of the
Senate, were protected against political interference
by a tenure of office during good behavior — an Eng-
lish definition which meant in practice tenure for
life — and a guaranty that their salaries should not
be reduced during their terms of service. The juris-
diction of the federal courts was carefully guarded,
but the all-important supremacy of federal law was
insured by the provision that the Constitution, the
laws of Congress, and treaties should be " the supreme
law of the land," binding upon officials and courts
of the States as well as upon those of the nation.
With federal law directly applicable to individuals
throughout the United States, devices for coercing a
State in case of neglect or disobedience became un-

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 65

necessary except in the event of open rebellion, and
of open rebellion the Convention was not called upon
to think.

The powers which the new Constitution granted
to Congress insured to the federal government an
independent revenue, the control of the post office
and of interstate and foreign commerce, the sole right
to coin money, and complete authority in international
relations. The admission of new States to the Union,
together with the administration of federal territory
not yet organized, was also vested in Congress. With
the grant of power, however, went the imposition of
obligations, one of the most important obligations
being that which bound the United States to guaran-
tee to every State a republican form of government,
to protect a State against invasion, and to aid in
the suppression of domestic violence if requested to
do so by the State legislature or executive. Domestic
risings such as had lately threatened the government
of Massachusetts, if they occurred again, would have
now to reckon with a federal government constitution-
ally impowered to interfere.

The fact that the Constitution of 1787 has never
been revised as a whole, and that amendments of its
specific provisions have for more than one hundred
and thirty years been regarded as sufficient to adapt
it to the needs of a growing nation, has been in large
measure responsible for the " worship of the Con-
stitution " which foreign critics have often noted as
an American political trait. Historically considered,

66 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

however, the Constitution had both virtues and de-
fects. The virtues were many and great. The Con-
stitution replaced a loose, primitive, and hopelessly-
inadequate scheme of federal government with a
firmly-knit, highly-organized, and practically effec-
tive plan. It gave an equitable voice in national
affairs to States which differed widely in population
and economic condition, preserved to the States the
control of their domestic affairs at the same time that
it merged their common interests in the larger general
welfare of the nation, and conferred upon the federal
government the powers necessary to effective existence
without thereby making the federal government
absolute. It created executive and judicial depart-
ments, and defined the limits of their powers and of
those of the legislature at the same time that it pro-
vided for the co-operation of Congress, the president,
and the courts in the joint work of government. Not
the least of its virtues was that it was brief and con-
cise, drawing broad lines and framing fundamental
definitions. Its provisions were definite enough to
sustain all the powers granted, flexible enough to
admit of application to changing social conditions,
and open to amendment whenever three-fourths of
the States could agree upon a change. It was essen-
tially a practical document, drawn up by practical
men to meet a practical need, and the fact that it has
worked in the main as it was expected to work not-
withstanding the vast social changes which have since
taken place is a tribute to the political wisdom of

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 67

the statesmen who laboriously hammered it into
shape.

The defects of the Constitution were chiefly such
as time alone could show. The overpowering per-
sonality of Washington, marking him out beyond
cavil as the first president under the new scheme,
apparently blinded the eyes of the Convention to the
inherent weakness and possible mischief of an elec-
toral procedure under which a majority of the whole
number of electors, with no opportunity for joint
consultation, must nevertheless agree upon the same
candidate if the choice of a president was not to be
thrown into the House of Representatives. The
growth of political parties and elaborate party organ-
izations was not foreseen, and the Constitution in fact
contains no allusion to parties, candidates, or plat-
forms. Few persons anticipated the admission to
the Union of a long series of new States, none foresaw
the extension of American territory to the Pacific,
Alaska, and the islands of the sea. The growth of
great business corporations, the struggles of capital
and labor, and a host of economic and social problems
now regarded as of national rather than State con-
cern, and in the face of which the ancient Constitution
has sometimes been subjected to grave strain, were
all in the future. It was the Constitution rather than
the nation which in 1787 led the way, but it is easy
to see that the growth of the nation has today left
the Constitution somewhat behind.

The fundamental weakness of the Constitution,

68 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

viewed from the standpoint of European rather than
American political development, lies in the absence of
provisions for direct popular initiative and control in
federal affairs. The English theory of responsible
government, under which the direction of national
policy is vested in a ministry which represents the
party majority for the time being in the popular
branch of the legislature, finds no illustration in the
American Constitution of 1787. Instead, the Con-
stitution prescribes fixed chronological terms of six
years and two years respectively for senators and
representatives, and creates an executive head who
is not responsible to Congress, performs none of the
functions of a prime minister, and only indirectly can
control or direct legislative action. The member-
ship of the House of Representatives is renewed as a
whole every two years. The members of the first
Senate were divided by the Constitution into three
classes elected for two, four, and six years respec-
tively, so that while the maximum term is six years,
in practice the renewal of one-third of the member-
ship of the Senate coincides with the biennial renewal
of the entire membership of the House. A change of
public sentiment which showed itself in a complete
alteration of the party complexion of the House could
not, accordingly, affect more than one-third of the
Senate, while the four-year term of the president
overlaps two full terms of the House and is itself
overlapped by the full term of the Senate. There is
no way in which members of the House can be called

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 69

to account by their constituents before the expiration
of the chronological period of two years, and the
Senate, prior to the adoption of a recent amendment,
was removed from direct popular control by the fact
that its members were chosen by the State legisla-
tures.

The reason for the adoption of this rigid system
instead of a system generally spoken of as popular
or responsible were mainly two. The first was the
absence as yet of national political parties organized
for the support of national policies. The beginnings
of American parties date only from the submission of
the Constitution of 1787 to the States for ratification,
and the first national elections were those for which
the Constitution itself provided. Neither nominating
conventions nor formal platforms were to appear for
more than forty years. To have constructed a
national government which embodied the principles
of ministerial responsibility and control such as in
theory, although at the time very little in practice,
prevailed in England would have been to frame a
constitution for political conditions which did not yet
exist.

The second reason was the underlying fear which
a majority of the Convention felt of too great popular
control. No State as yet had universal manhood
suffrage, and the connection between voting and
property holding was everywhere recognized as one
rightly to be maintained. The system of so-called
" checks and balances " which set the Senate over

70 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

against the House of Representatives, the executive
against the Congress, and the States against the
federal government, while primarily intended to pre-
serve the States, the nation, and the several depart-
ments of the government from encroachment one
upon the other, operated equally to make the federal
government secure against sudden or radical changes
of public opinion; and such security the Convention
obviously tried to attain. The new frame of govern-
ment did indeed insure government by the people,
but " the people " were long to be regarded not as the
whole nation taken together and governing directly
through elected representatives, but rather as a select
minority fitted by education, property, and social
position for the high duties of voting and the special
privilege of holding office. The growth of democracy
waited upon the growth of nationality.

A comparison of the texts of the Articles of Con-
federation and the Constitution shows many similari-
ties of phrase, and a number of the provisions of the
earlier document were transferred bodily to the later
instrument. Only a liberal use of language, however,
could regard the Constitution as a revision of the
Articles, and the procedure which the Convention
agreed upon for the adoption of the Constitution by
the States was as revolutionary as was the other
action taken. The Articles, it will be remembered,
could be amended only with the consent of all the
States. There was only too much reason to fear that
some of the States would object, and the Constitution

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 71

itself accordingly provided that ratification by con-
ventions in nine States should be sufficient to put
the Constitution into effect for those nine. What
would happen if the States which refused or neglected
to ratify should insist upon their rights under the
Articles was not clear, but it was apparently assumed
that if nine States accepted the Constitution the
superiority of the new system would eventually win
the adhesion of the others. The Constitution was
accordingly transmitted to Congress with the request
that it be submitted to the States for ratification by
conventions in accordance with its terms.

The submission of the Constitution to the States
made public for the first time the text of the docu-
ment, and within and without the State conventions
party lines speedily formed. Innumerable objections
to details were of course raised, but the objection
that the Convention had exceeded its authority in
framing a new constitution instead of revising an old
one had weight with those only who enjoyed splitting
technical hairs. The most fundamental criticism had
to do with the essential nature of the new federal
scheme, and in particular with the mutual relations
of nation and States. The champions of the Con-
stitution, taking the name of Federalists, while insist-
ing that a new government would be useless unless
it was strong where the Confederation was weak, took
pains to point out that the proposed federal govern-
ment would possess only such powers as the States
delegated to it, and that whatever was not granted

72 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

was to be understood as withheld. The national
government must be independent and efficient, other-
wise it would not long endure, but there was no
danger, it was urged, that the States would be reduced
to inferiority, because the control of their own domes-
tic affairs and large powers of government generally
would still rest with them. Accordingly the omission
of a bill of rights, the absence of which provoked
immediate and general criticism, was not important
because none of the personal privileges and immuni-
ties which the traditional bill of rights embodied was
affected by any of the powers given by the Consti-
tution to the federal government.

The argument was satisfactory to those who wanted
a strong central government, able to deal with finance
and trade and capable of inspiring respect among the
nations. It was not at all convincing to the Anti-
Federalists, who dreaded the encroachment of a
strong federal authority and preferred to trust the
States rather than the nation. Patrick Henry warned
the Virginia convention of the anticipated danger, and
further pointed out that, once in the new union, no
State could withdraw. The difference between the
Federalists and the Anti-Federalists at this stage
should be correctly understood. No one wished to
perpetuate the weaknesses of the Confederation; no
one desired a national government which could not
command respect. To the Federalists, however, the
hope of developing a strong nation lay in the creation
of a strong centralized government, while to the Anti-

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 73

Federalists such a hope seemed most likely to be
realized by preserving a high degree of State inde-
pendence and reducing the powers of the national
government to the lowest practicable terms. Over
these two divergent points of view American political
parties were to fight their battles for more than
seventy years.

Happily for the nation the victory lay with the
Federalists. On December 7, 1787, Delaware rati-
fied the Constitution, and on June 21, 1788, the
affirmative vote of New Hampshire brought the num-
ber of ratifying States to the prescribed nine. In
Delaware, New Jersey, and Georgia acceptance had
been unanimous, and the majorities in Pennsylvania,
Connecticut, Maryland, and South Carolina were
large. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, where
opposition was curiously strong, ratification was
secured only by the close vote of 187 to 168, and
the vote in New Hampshire stood 57 to 46. With
the ratification of New Hampshire, the ninth State,
the Constitution was technically in force. Two of the
most important States, however, Virginia and New
York, had not yet ratified, and without their support
the union would fail. Fortunately the question did
not come to an issue, the ratification of Virginia fol-
lowing only four days after that of New Hampshire,
while New York ratified in July. In each of these
States the margin of assent was slight, the vote of
Virginia standing 89 to 79 and that of New York 30
to 28. In North Carolina and Rhode Island political

74 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

controversies long prevented ratification, and neither
of these States was represented in the new union until
some time after the new federal government had been
put into operation.

More than forty years later, in the great debate in
the Senate between Webster and Hayne, the question
was raised as to who ratified the Constitution. Web-
ster, expounding a large nationalist view, insisted that
ratification, although in form the work of State con-
ventions, was in fact the solemn act of the people of
the whole United States, and that the States as such
were not parties to the agreement. Hayne, who was
supporting the attempt of South Carolina to nullify
an act of Congress so far as the territory and people
of that State were concerned, insisted that ratification
was the work of the States, and that " the people of
the United States " was a meaningless phrase since
the only "people " in 1787-88 was the people of the
several States. The letter of the Constitution sus-
tained the argument of Hayne, but the theory of
Webster, embodied in the constitutional law of the
United States, was the theory of nationality and the
only one upon which the nation could oppose dis-
union. Four years of civil war, however, were
necessary before the old theory of State rights was
finally disposed of and the national theory of the
Constitution established.

One notable piece of legislation, profoundly affect-
ing the future of the United States, had come from
Congress during the sessions of the Constitutional

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 75

Convention. In July, 1787, an ordinance had been
passed for the organization and government of the
territory of the United States northwest of the Ohio
river. A provisional government under a governor
and council was provided for, but whenever any por-
tion of the territory attained a population of sixty
thousand it was to be entitled to admission to the
Union as a State on a footing of equality with the
other States. Not less than three nor more than five
States were to be formed out of the region, and in
each of them slavery was to be prohibited. The
ordinance marked the beginning of the system of
territorial government which existed until compara-
tively recent years, and the present States of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin have the
ordinance of 1787 as a part of their fundamental law.
Provisional governments, not as yet recognized by
Congress, had already been set up in Vermont and
Kentucky, and settlement was spreading into Tennes-
see, so that with the prospect of a State government
in Ohio the thirteen original States seemed likely in
a few years to have their number increased to at
least sixteen or seventeen. It was with this modest
expansion in mind that the Constitutional Convention
gave to Congress the right to admit new States, but
with the proviso that no new State should be formed
out of another State or by uniting two or more States
or parts of States without the consent of the States
concerned as well as of Congress.
As soon as the adoption of the Constitution by the

76 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ratification of eleven States was assured, Congress
took the necessary steps to put the new government
into operation. The first Wednesday of January,
1789, was designated as the date for the choice of
presidential electors, the first Wednesday of February
as the date at which the electors should meet and cast
their votes for president and vice-president, and the
first Wednesday in March as the date for the inaugu-
ration of the new government. In the absence of
party organizations and nominating machinery the
system of independent and isolated selection which
the Constitution had provided was left to work out
such results as it might. That the scheme did not
break down completely at the start was due solely to
the general expectation that Washington would be
the first president, and the electors met that expecta-
tion by making him their unanimous choice. With
regard to the vice-presidency, on the other hand,
there was no such unanimity, and the choice of John
Adams, while representing the largest number of
votes cast for any candidate except Washington,
represented also a minority of the whole number of
votes cast. Until 1804, however, the Constitution
required a majority vote only in the case of the
president, the vice-president being chosen by a
plurality.

Pending the selection of a site for a national capital
it had been agreed that the new government should
be inaugurated at New York. The journey of Wash-
ington from Mount Vernon was a triumphal progress,

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 77

towns and States vying with one another in doing
honor to the first citizen of the reorganized republic.
But difficulties of communication and travel, together
with the dilatory habits which the lax times of the
Confederation had encouraged, made the new Con-
gress late in assembling, and it was several weeks
before the two houses were able to organize. In an
impressive ceremony of inauguration, delayed until
April 30, Washington took the oath of office, read a
brief address, and the first presidential administration
began. For his services as commander-in-chief dur-
ing the Revolution Washington had declined to accept
compensation, asking only that his necessary expenses
be reimbursed, and he now followed the same course
as president.

With the inauguration of the new government
under the Constitution the Congress of the Con-
federation, which for some weeks before had held no
sessions, ceased to have a legal existence. There
were none to mourn its going, but its record, weak
indeed in comparison with that of the powerful body
to which it gave place, had not been without honor.
It had made the peace which recognized the inde-
pendence of the United States. It had held the
nation together in the face of bankruptcy, economic
prostration, and social confusion. It had provided a
governmental organization for the western territory
and paved the way for the admission of new States.
It had summoned the Constitutional Convention and
directed the transition from the old government to

78 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the new. Its weakness was the weakness of the loose
confederated system under which it worked — a sys-
tem which magnified the States at the expense of the
nation and exposed the national government to vexa-
tious obstruction. That the Congress could have
done much better few would now care to affirm; that
it did as well as it did was to its credit.

With a scheme of government indefinitely superior
to that which it had hitherto possessed and with a
president who commanded universal affection and
respect, the Republic passed into a new stage of its
career. There remained the task of organizing the
system which the Constitution outlined, of binding
the States together in a new loyalty, and of making
the United States a nation in fact as well as in name.

CHAPTER IV

THE ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT
AND POLITICS

The United States of 1789 occupied a continental
area considerably less than one-third of that to which
the republic, exclusive of Alaska, now extends. The
population, slightly less than four million in 1790,
the first census year, had already begun an irregular
movement westward, but four-fifths of the population
was still to be found within a comparatively short
distance of the Atlantic. There were as yet few
large towns, the most important being Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. To the north
lay the British possessions in Canada, to the south the
Spanish provinces of East and West Florida barred
access to the Gulf of Mexico save by way of the
Mississippi, and the vast region west of the Missis-
sippi also belonged to Spain. The treaty of peace
with Great Britain had proclaimed freedom of navi-
gation on the Mississippi and its tributaries, but Spain
held the mouth of the river and New Orleans, and it
was some years before unimpeded access to the gulf
was secured. The boundary line between the Ameri-
can and British possessions, defined in terms by the
peace treaty, had not yet been run, and more than

79

80 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

fifty years were to pass before the last remnants of
boundary controversy disappeared.

The political subdivisions of the United States
comprised the thirteen original States and the North-
west Territory. Vermont, which had maintained an
independent political organization since the Revo-
lution, was ready for admission as a State as soon as
the opposition of New York and New Hampshire,
which between them claimed jurisdiction over the
region, should be withdrawn. The District of Maine,
substantially identical in area with the present State,
was a part of Massachusetts, although separated from
Massachusetts proper by the intervening State of
New Hampshire. The admission of Kentucky
awaited the consent of North Carolina, which had not
yet ratified the Constitution but which asserted a
shadowy jurisdiction over the Kentucky settlements;
and the admission of three, four, or five States out of
the Northwest Territory had already been promised
whenever the requirement of the ordinance of 1787
regarding population should be met. A region not
exceeding ten miles square, the location of which had
not yet been determined, to be acquired by cession on
the part of one or more States, had been assigned by
the Constitution to the exclusive jurisdiction of Con-
gress as the seat of the national government.

Each of the States had an organized government
based upon a written constitution. The State con-
stitutions differed widely in form and content, and in
Connecticut and Rhode Island the colonial charters

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT Si

of the previous century, amended by substituting the
authority of the State for that of the crown, continued
to serve for many years the purpose of constitutions.
In every State, however, legislative, executive, and
judicial powers were more or less clearly separated,
State officers and members of the legislature were
elected for short terms, and appropriate forms of
local government served local needs. In New Eng-
land, where compact settlements were numerous, the
local government was the town; in the more sparsely
settled South, the county; while in the middle Atlantic
States the two forms were variously combined. City
government was still in its infancy, but a few com-
munities had special forms of municipal organization.
A property qualification for voting and holding office
was practically universal, and the percentage of voters
to population was from two to five times less than
the present average.

The Congress which assembled in March and April,
1789, faced a colossal task. There was a written
Constitution to interpret and a national government to
organize. All of the debts which the Congress of the
Confederation had contracted and all of the other
engagements which it had entered into were by the
Constitution made binding upon the new govern-
ment, but almost the only action of the earlier Con-
gress which could be called legislation was the ordi-
nance of 1787, which the new Congress promptly con-
firmed. A department of foreign affairs, a depart-
ment of war, a finance department, and an office of

82 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

postmaster general had been created under the Con-
federation, but with these exceptions there was hardly
the intimation of a federal administrative system to
be taken over. The new congressional system of two
houses bore little resemblance to the previous system
of a single chamber, while for the organization of the
federal courts there were no federal precedents what-
ever. For all practical purposes the work of organ-
ization had to be begun at the foundation.

The Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties which
had been formed while the Constitution was before
the States for ratification continued into the con-
stitutional period, but with important changes in
character and purpose. The Federalists, who had
championed the Constitution when it was submitted
and later had won the battle in the State conventions,
had succeeded in winning all the seats in the Senate
and more than four-fifths of the seats in the House
of Representatives, and the Federalist majority now
set itself to organize a strong national government
based upon a liberal interpretation of the consti-
tutional provisions. The Anti-Federalists, with oppo-
sition to the Constitution no longer an issue, found
their platform in a strict construction of the Con-
stitution and a limitation of the powers of the federal
government to the authority clearly granted. The
marked legal character which American political
debate exhibited for nearly a century was the direct
result of these early party differences.

The position of Washington was peculiar. His

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 83

political sympathies were with the Federalists, and
his appointments to office as a whole favored that
party. On the other hand the presidency, as he con-
ceived it, was essentially a nonpartisan office, far more
akin to the constitutional position of the crown in
Great Britain than to that of presidential party
leadership at the present time. When, accordingly,
Congress shortly created the executive offices of secre-
tary of foreign affairs (soon changed to secretary of
state), secretary of the treasury, and secretary of war
(including for several years the navy), together with
the office of attorney general, Washington apportioned
the appointments equally between Federalists and
Anti-Federalists. The first secretary of state, Jeffer-
son, was the intellectual leader and presently the
controlling political head of the Anti-Federalists, and
the first attorney general, Edmund Randolph of Vir-
ginia, was of the same party. The secretaryship of
the treasury, on the other hand, far more important
at the moment than the portfolio of foreign affairs,
was given to Alexander Hamilton of New York, the
intellectual leader of the Federalists, and another
Federalist, General Henry Knox of Massachusetts,
was made secretary of war. It did not escape notice
that two of the four secretaries were from the same
State as the president, and that the important State
of Pennsylvania had been passed over.

The practice which Washington early adopted of
calling for the opinions of these heads of departments,
not merely upon subjects " relating to the duties of

84 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

their respective offices " as the Constitution pre-
scribes, but upon questions of general policy as well,
created the cabinet. The name, borrowed from Eng-
land, was a misnomer, for the heads of the American
executive departments were not ministers in the
English sense, they were not responsible to Congress
for the tenure of their offices, and neither collectively
nor in conjunction with the president were they
charged by the Constitution or by Congress with for-
mulating or directing government policy. They were
only chief clerks, holding office at the discretion of the
president and subject to his control. Washington
felt the need of advice, however, and consulted his
cabinet frequently, and the anomalous and peculiarly
American institution continued notwithstanding that
a number of presidents made but little use of it.

The energy and sagacity with which Congress
addressed itself to the organization of the federal
system make the years of Washington's first adminis-
tration among the most notable in the history of the
nation. A long series of statutes, many of whose
provisions are still in force, provided for the work of
the executive departments, the army and navy, and
the post office, established a decimal system of coin-
age, gave legal protection to authors and inventors in
copyrights and patents, established rules for the
naturalization of foreigners and the registration of
shipping, and provided for the survey and sale of
public lands. A protective tariff act levied discrimi-
nating duties on a considerable list of imported articles

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 85

with the avowed purpose of encouraging American
manufactures. The great judiciary act of 1789
created a federal district court for each State, grouped
the States in three circuits over whose courts the
justices of the Supreme Court were to preside, and
regulated the jurisdiction and procedure of the courts
and the process of appeal from a lower court to a
higher. As the United States, being a government
of delegated powers, had no common law such as each
of the States had inherited from England, there could
be no common law offences against the nation, and an
act was accordingly passed defining certain crimes
against the United States and providing for their
punishment.

Washington was free to try the experiment of a
bipartisan cabinet, but political partisanship and per-
sonal rivalries could not long be kept out of Congress
when great questions of national policy were at stake.
The first great controversy, destined to have a pro-
found influence for many years upon the course of
party development, arose over the question of the
national debt. Hamilton, who as secretary of the
treasury had been called upon by the House of Repre-
sentatives to submit a plan, proposed a funding
scheme under which not only the federal debt, ac-
crued interest as well as principal and domestic
indebtedness equally with foreign loans, but also the
Revolutionary debts of the States should all be as-
sumed by the United States as a funded or consoli-
dated national debt. The total amount of this

86 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

indebtedness was about eighty million dollars, of
which approximately twenty-five million dollars
represented the debts of the States. The existing
paper currency was so nearly worthless that no at-
tempt was made to redeem it, but provision was made
for receiving the paper money in payment of sub-
scriptions to the proposed new loan for which the
funding scheme called.

Immediate and violent opposition to the plan ap-
peared both in Congress and in the country. The
aggregate of the proposed debt, it was declared, was
appalling and the amount could never be paid. The
principal and interest of the foreign loans must pre-
sumably be paid in full if embarrassing complications
abroad were to be avoided, but why pay interest upon
interest by turning the arrears of interest upon both
foreign and domestic debt into a new principal?
Hamilton had proposed to assume the old debt at its
face value, but all of the old issues of certificates were
heavily depreciated, and much of the debt was notori-
ously held by speculators who had bought at a ruin-
ously low figure on the chance of a rise. It would
be a gross injustice, the opponents of the plan insisted,
to reward speculators who had taken a gambling
chance, and neglect the original holders of the debt
who, perhaps from sheer necessity, had parted with
their investment at a loss. The opposition to the
proposed assumption of the State debts was par-
ticularly violent. Not all of the States were equally
in debt; some had already paid a part of their indebt-

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 87

edness, and reimbursement would be a gift out of
hand; others had paid nothing, and to them reim-
bursement would be equivalent to approval of their
neglect. It was intimated that Hamilton and his
friends were in league with the speculators and the
monied classes, and the presentation of the report
was declared to have started numerous agents on
their travels in search of debt holders who would sell.
Hamilton had anticipated most of the objections,
and the arguments with which he combatted them
were a lesson in ethics quite as much as in public
finance. The foundation of national credit, he
pointed out, was good faith, and good faith implied a
scrupulous performance of engagements in accord-
ance with their terms. A certificate of national in-
debtedness was a promise on the part of the govern-
ment to pay to the holder the full amount for which
the certificate called, and the holder, whether or not
he was the original purchaser, should be taught that
the promise of the government was good. If, accord-
ingly, the original owner had parted with his certifi-
cate for less than its face value with interest, his
loss was a proper penalty for his want of faith in
the government; while as for the present holder who
had bought the certificate at a discount, his position
was identical with that of the original purchaser so
far as the obligation of the government to pay the
full amount called for was concerned. The arrears
of interest were as much an obligation as the prin-
cipal, but since under the circumstances the entire

88 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

arrearage could not well be paid at once any more
than could the entire principal of the debt, the only
just method was to treat it as a part of the new prin-
cipal. As for the debts of the States, they equally
with the national debt were the price of liberty, and
the nation which had won its independence because
of what the States had done ought now to assume the
State debts as a common charge.

The argument could not be answered, but a
political bargain was nevertheless necessary to carry
the funding bill through Congress. The question of
the location of the national capital had aroused keen
rivalry between States and sections, and the general
understanding that Washington and Jefferson favored
the selection of a site on the Potomac, the title to
which Virginia and Maryland were prepared to cede,
met with strong opposition in the middle States and
New England. Jefferson, on the other hand, to-
gether with many members of Congress from the
South, was bitterly opposed to the funding plan, and
the opposition votes seemed likely to be sufficient to
defeat the bill. Hamilton, who had the support of
the northern Federalists, saved his scheme by an
agreement with Jefferson under which, in return for
enough southern votes to insure the passage of the
bill, northern members agreed to the location of the
capital on the Potomac. The funding bill became
law, the new loan was promptly subscribed, and the
crucial question of the debt ceased to be either a
danger or an anxiety.

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 89

The funding of the debt was only a part of Hamil-
ton's far-reaching plan. Financial machinery was
still lacking, and the federal mint, whose only output
for some time was copper cents, could not meet the
imperative need for a national currency. Hamilton
accordingly proposed the incorporation of a national
bank. The bank, comparable in its organization to
the Bank of England rather than to the present
national banks, was to be a private corporation twenty
per cent, of whose capital of ten million dollars was
to be subscribed by the United States, with a corre-
sponding representation of the government on the
board of directors and close government supervision
of operations. The bank was to act as the fiscal
agency of the government and serve as the repository
of government funds, in return for which services it
was to have the privilege of issuing paper currency
which the government agreed to receive so long as
the notes circulated at par. The charter of the bank
was to run for twenty years, and during that time no
other similar institution was to be created.

The proposal of a bank precipitated another violent
debate in which Jefferson, chagrined at his own share
in the success of the funding scheme and now openly
in opposition to the great secretary, took a leading
part. It was insisted that the bank was a monopoly,
that it would be able to coerce the States, and that
nowhere in the Constitution was authority for the
creation of a bank or any other kind of corporation
to be found. The constitutional objection, raised at

90 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

a time when the supreme court had as yet rendered
no important decisions, went to the roots of the
theory of the national government. There was no
question but that the Constitution contained no refer-
ence to corporations or to banks; and if the Consti-
tution represented a specific grant of power, and if
what was not clearly granted was to be understood as
withheld, on what ground could an action to which
the Constitution made neither direct nor indirect
allusion be sustained?

There were Federalist votes enough to pass the
bank bill, but Washington, moved by the violent
attacks in Congress and himself apparently somewhat
in doubt, called for the written opinions of his
cabinet before affixing his signature. The opinion of
Jefferson, to which that of Randolph, the attorney
general, was merely supplementary, developed con-
cisely the strict construction view of the Constitution
with which he and his political followers were there-
after to be identified. To Jefferson the question was
solely one of constitutional authority. Whether or
not a bank was a useful thing he did not discuss, for
the reason that, under his strict interpretation of the
Constitution, the federal government was limited to
things that were necessary; and since a bank, how-
ever useful or convenient, was obviously not neces-
sary, the government was debarred from creating such
an institution. " Necessary," in the sense in which
the word is used in the Constitution, meant indis-
pensable or unavoidable; to interpret the word in the

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 91

sense of convenient or useful would open the door
to an extension of federal power whose limits no one
could foresee.

The opinion of Hamilton, prepared with Jeffer-
son's opinion before him, is the first great exposition
of the legal theory of the American Constitution and
the basis of the position taken years later by the
Supreme Court. To Jefferson's theory of strict or
literal interpretation Hamilton opposed the doctrine
of implied or resulting powers. It is true that the
Constitution is a grant of powers and that what is
not granted is withheld, but how much is granted and
how much is withheld is a question of fact whose
answer must take account, not merely of the text of
the Constitution, but of the nature of government in
general and of the aims which the government of the
United States was created to serve. Every grant of
power to a government carries with it, by necessary
implication, the right to employ any means that are
appropriate to putting the power into effect, pro-
vided only that the means selected are not forbidden
by the Constitution and, in the case of the United
States, are not reserved to the States. When, accord-
ingly, the Constitution, after enumerating at length
the powers of Congress, gives to Congress the author-
ity to make all laws " necessary and proper " to give
effect to the enumerated powers, the phrase is entitled
to be construed liberally; and since a national bank
is not forbidden by the Constitution, infringes upon
no rights of the State or of the people, and is itself

92 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

a useful agency for the management of national
finances, Congress is free to incorporate such an
institution if it so desires.

Washington approved the bill, the bank enjoyed
a successful career for the twenty years of its exist-
ence, and the notes of the bank provided a national
currency which circulated at par.

The importance of the bank controversy in the
development of American nationality can hardly be
overestimated. The broad construction views which
Hamilton and his followers expounded, while they
unquestionably widened the application of the Con-
stitution far beyond anything which the framers of
the instrument probably had in mind, nevertheless
gave to the federal government a range of power, a
wealth of resource, and a weight of authority which
the restrictive interpretation of Jefferson and the
Anti-Federalists would have denied. The Jeffersonian
view was in essence the theory of a loose confedera-
tion, while Hamilton's view was that of a nation. Yet
for more than two generations the Jeffersonian doc-
trine was to continue to find able and aggressive sup-
porters, political parties were to make strict con-
struction the underlying basis of their programmes,
and national control was to encounter resistance in
the States on the ground that State rights were being
infringed. It was no mere theoretical discussion
among lawyers that divided States, sections, and
public men into hostile camps and prepared the way
for civil war. It was a profound and soul-stirring

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 93

consideration of the nature of the American union, a
searching inquiry into the philosophy of American
political and social life, and in defense of the rival
opinions thousands of good men later dared to die.
A third part of Hamilton's financial programme
remained. The great measures which Congress had
adopted still left the national revenue deficient, and
this deficit Hamilton proposed to meet by the imposi-
tion of internal taxes on distilled spirits. The ques-
tion in this case was one of policy rather than of
constitutional right. Internal revenue or excise taxes
were notoriously hateful, and the inquisitorial methods
which had commonly been employed for their col-
lection had provoked evasion and fraud if not open
resistance. Hamilton pointed out, however, that not
only were distilled liquors everywhere regarded as
proper subjects of taxation, but that the inducement
to fraud would be greatly lessened by a licensing
system under which the producer, while subject to
strict governmental supervision, would find it to his
advantage to pay the tax in return for the exclusive
privilege of manufacture and sale. It was apparent
that, with the exception of customs duties, the avail-
able sources of federal revenue were few, and the need
of revenue carried the proposal through Congress. A
local insurrection in western Pennsylvania directed
against the tax was later suppressed without blood-
shed by an imposing display of military force, and the
ability of the government to secure obedience to its
laws was demonstrated.

94 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

With the submission of an elaborate report on
manufactures in which the economic doctrine of pro-
tection to young industries was set forth at length,
the financial work of Hamilton came to an end. He
had brought order out of financial chaos, given the
nation a revenue, laid the foundations of American
constitutional law, and framed for the Federalists a
political theory and a programme ; and the great work
which he accomplished still, in its principles, survives.

More than two hundred amendments to the Con-
stitution had been proposed by the ratifying conven-
tions of the States, and there was general agreement
that a bill of rights ought to be incorporated in the
document. James Madison of Virginia, who had
been a member of the constitutional convention and
later had been elected to the House of Representa-
tives, took the lead in urging amendment. One of
the first acts of Congress, accordingly, was to frame
out of the numerous proposals twelve amendments,
ten of which were ratified by the State legislatures
and became in 1791 a part of the Constitution. North
Carolina ratified the Constitution before the end of
1789, and the ratification of Rhode Island followed
in 1790. The next year Vermont was admitted as
a State. The admission of Kentucky in 1792 and
of Tennessee in 1796 brought the number of States
to sixteen before the close of Washington's second
administration. In 1791 the seat of the national
government was transferred from New York to
Philadelphia, where it remained until 1801, when it

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 95

was permanently established in the District of
Columbia.

Meantime the party struggles of Federalists and
Anti-Federalists grew more intense. The congres-
sional elections of 1790, while making no material
change in the party complexion of the House of
Representatives, reduced to a narrow margin the
Federalist majority in the Senate — an indication
that in some of the States Federalism was losing
ground. Washington and Adams were re-elected
with unimportant opposition in 1792, but the congres-
sional elections of that year gave the Anti-Federalists,
now coming to be known as Republicans, a slight
majority in the House. The democratic principles
of Jefferson, reinforced by the early successes of the
French Revolution of 1789 and systematically spread
by correspondence, private conversations, and a
radical press, were making their way among the
people, and although the great organizing work of
the Federalists was not likely to be undone, the class
spirit which that party embodied and the arrogant
temper which it more and more exhibited presaged
a fall.

Until 1792 the United States was happily free from
foreign entanglements, but the declaration of war by
France against Great Britain in that year suddenly
raised the question of the position of the United
States under the treaty of alliance with France. One
of the provisions of the treaty of 1778 was a mutual
guaranty of territorial integrity in case of attack; and

96 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

if the war between Great Britain and France,
although formally declared by France, was in fact a
war for the defence of the French Revolution, the
United States was apparently bound to side with its
ally. The arrival early in 1793 of a new French
minister, the Citizen Genet, eager to insure American
support, precipitated a decision. The official recep-
tion of the minister would be a recognition of the
revolutionary government which he represented, and
such recognition would probably lead to war with
England. Washington and his cabinet, however, took
the ground that while Genet should be received, the
war was not a war of defence, and a proclamation of
American neutrality was accordingly issued. The
proclamation gave deep offence to Genet, and his
political intrigues and criticism of the administration,
continued for several months, finally led Washington
to ask for his recall. A change of government in
France in the meantime would have put Genet's head
in peril had he returned, and he preferred to remain
in America as an exile. He married a daughter of
Governor Clinton of New York, became a gentleman
farmer and a promoter of agricultural societies, and
died in 1836.

The controversy with Genet was followed in 1794
by the conclusion of a commercial agreement with
Great Britain. No British minister had as yet been
accredited to the United States, and the only diplo-
matic agreement between the two governments was
the peace treaty of 1783. Now that Great Britain

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 97

and France were at war, American commerce, already
suffering somewhat from the discriminating duties and
regulations of the acts of trade, was exposed to loss
unless American neutrality was respected. In No-
vember, 1794, John Jay, chief justice of the Supreme
Court, whom Washington had sent to England as a
special envoy, succeeded in concluding a commercial
treaty. The treaty was far from satisfactory in a
number of respects, and the provision regarding trade
with the British West Indies, a trade particularly
lucrative for Americans and consequently greatly
coveted, was so restrictive that the Senate, in ratify-
ing the treaty, rejected the West Indies article.
Imperfect as it was, however, the agreement was bet-
ter than no treaty at all, for it at least laid a founda-
tion for commercial relations. The House of Repre-
sentatives, which under the Constitution has no voice
in the ratification of treaties, but is nevertheless under
obligation to vote any money for which the execution
of a treaty calls, attempted to make political capital
for the opposition by calling upon Washington for
copies of the papers relating to the negotiations, but
the request was refused and the necessary appropria-
tions were eventually made. A British minister was
presently sent to the United States, and diplomatic
intercourse between the two countries ran for a time
as uneventful a course as the continued wars of revo-
lutionary France would permit.

Washington could probably have had a third term
had he desired it, but his decision to retire to private

98 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

life in 1797 set the precedent which has ever since
been followed of two terms as the maximum period
of presidential office. He had not found the presi-
dency a bed of roses. Dissensions in the cabinet had
sorely tried his patience, and partisan criticism in
Congress and in the country had proved a painful
and exasperating experience. Great as was the
personal affection which the people as a whole still
accorded to him, his political popularity had suffered
with the waning prestige of the Federalist party.
His farewell message, apparently in considerable
measure the work of Hamilton, was a legacy of wise
political counsel to the young but growing nation, and
his warning against "entangling alliances" with
foreign states strengthened a conviction which has
continued to the present time as one of the main
characteristics of American policy. At the expiration
of his term he retired to Mount Vernon, where he
died suddenly in 1799. The luster of his name has
not dimmed with the years, and the stately home
which he loved is still a pilgrims' shrine.

John Adams, upon whom the choice of the presi-
dential electors fell, had long served the States and
the nation honorably and well. He was an able
lawyer, an experienced diplomatist, a staunch patriot,
and a statesman of ripe knowledge and high purpose.
But the qualities and tastes which in Washington
showed themselves in an impressive dignity produced
in Adams a coldness and hardness of manner which
repelled, and those of his political supporters who

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 99

most respected him felt for him little personal regard.
The political position of the administration, more-
over, was anomalous. The election of 1796 had given
Adams seventy-one electoral votes and Jefferson sixty-
eight, and as the vote of Jefferson was larger than
that of any other candidate except Adams, Jefferson
became vice-president. With a Federalist president
and a Republican vice-president, and with the vice-
president the acknowledged head of a party whose
power in the country was rapidly becoming predomi-
nant, the electoral contest of 1800 was foreshadowed
from the start.

The congressional elections of 1798 seemed to indi-
cate a Federalist revival. The Republican majority
in the House of Representatives was reduced and the
Federalist majority in the Senate increased. In
1798 an attempt on the part of three mysterious go-
betweens in France, whose names were concealed in
the published diplomatic correspondence by the
letters X, Y, and Z, to extort money from American
envoys as the price of a new treaty with the govern-
ment of the Directory, and the indignant declaration
of Adams that he would never send another minister
to France until he could be assured that the American
representative would be received and treated in a
becoming manner, caused an outburst of war fever,
raised Adams for a brief moment to popularity, and
in the congressional elections of that year gave the
Federalists control of both branches of Congress.

It was a short-lived victory, however, for the

; oOA

ioo AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Republican tide could not be stayed and the days of
the Federalists were numbered. Jefferson could per-
haps have prevented the Federalist success of 1798
had he chosen to exert his strength, but he preferred
to wait until 1800 when the presidency as well as
Congress might be won. In the meantime the strong-
holds of Federalism were attacked on their doctrinal
side. A suit against the State of Georgia, in 1793,
brought in a federal court by a citizen of another
State, had suddenly opened the eyes of the States
to the possibility of using the federal courts to en-
force the claims of private persons against sovereign
States. Under pressure from the States a consti-
tutional amendment excluding from the jurisdiction
of the federal courts suits against a State by citizens
of other States or of foreign countries was framed by
Congress, and in 1798 became a part of the Constitu-
tion. There could be but little doubt that the Con-
stitution as originally adopted made possible such
suits as were now barred, but the adoption of the
Eleventh Amendment was a clear victory for the
reserved rights of the States on whose behalf Jefferson
had long forcibly argued.

The theory of State rights and strict construction
was further developed in the political field in two
notable documents. Two sets of resolutions, one
drafted by Madison and the other by Jefferson, were
introduced in the assemblies of Virginia and Ken-
tucky and with some modification were adopted.
Approaching the question of the nature of the union

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 101

from a different angle than that which had been taken
in the controversy over the bank, the Kentucky and
Virginia resolutions laid down the doctrine that the
federal union was a political compact between sove-
reign States. To this compact each State gave its
adhesion as a State, and since the powers which the
Constitution conferred upon the federal government
were such only as the States themselves had volun-
tarily granted, each State was entitled to judge for
itself whether or not the compact had been observed
and, if the terms had been violated, of the nature and
means of redress. Precisely what, in practice, were
the means at the disposition of a State for obtaining
redress in case the federal compact was violated the
Virginia resolutions did not make clear, but the Ken-
tucky resolutions declared that a State might right-
fully nullify within its own territory an act of the
federal government which it believed the Constitution
did not authorize.

This was the famous compact theory of American
government which, thirty years later, Webster in his
debate with Hayne vigorously opposed and to which
South Carolina by an ordinance of nullification
essayed to give practical application. The extent to
which nullification might rightfully be carried, and
the situation in which a State would find itself if the
federal government refused to yield, were questions
to which the resolutions afforded no satisfactory
answer, but no great political wisdom was needed to
perceive that nullification, if it meant anything more

102 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

than formal protest, could end only in a forcible
repudiation of federal authority. Moreover, if the
union was a compact to which the States were sever-
ally parties, any State which felt itself aggrieved
might presumably withdraw and become independent,
for as between a State and the nation there naturally
could be no impartial judge before whom the case
might be tried. That such was the necessary out-
come of the combined theories of compact and nulli-
fication, however, Jefferson and his followers did not
go so far as to admit, and the dark clouds of a super-
ficial and unworkable political doctrine, conceived in
opposition to a growing national government whose
unifying force able men were long eager to resist,
continued to hang over the progress of the nation
until the civil war cleared the air.

The State legislatures to which the Kentucky and
Virginia resolutions were sent either returned guarded
replies or sought to turn the argument by emphasiz-
ing the importance of the union, but the Federalist
leaders nevertheless looked forward with apprehen-
sion to the presidential election of 1800. The party
could do no less than support Adams for a second
term, and the foreordained candidate of the Republi-
cans was Jefferson. The electoral vote showed an
unexpected result. Jefferson had received seventy-
three votes; Aaron Burr of New York, a Republican
aspirant for the vice-presidency and for the presi-
dency if he could get it, had the same number; and
Adams had received sixty-five. The Constitution

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 103

provided that in case of a tie vote the House of Rep-
resentatives should choose the president by ballot
from the two or more candidates having the same
number of electoral votes, each State casting one bal-
lot. The choice, accordingly, lay between Jefferson
and Burr, with the further consequence that which-
ever of the two was not chosen president would be-
come vice-president by virtue of having, after the
choice of a president, the next highest number of
votes.

It was a bitter situation for the Federalists, for
that party was in a majority in the House, and a
Federalist House was now called upon to choose be-
tween two Republican candidates. Politically, the
only question was which of the two was the least
objectionable. Burr, a brilliant but unscrupulous
politician of questionable morals, who had long been
the leading opponent of Hamilton in New York, was
frankly regarded as dangerous. Jefferson, on the
other hand, while radically opposed to Federalist
policy at most points, was the author of the Declara-
tion of Independence and had had practical experi-
ence of public affairs as governor of Virginia,
secretary of state, and vice-president. After long
discussion and rumors of attempted intrigue, ten
States voted for Jefferson and he was accordingly
elected. Burr, who then had the highest vote of the
remaining candidates, became vice-president. The
congressional elections had given the Republicans a
majority of more than two-thirds in the House and of

io4 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

nearly one-third in the Senate, so that both the execu-
tive and the legislative departments of the govern-
ment were now in the hands of the same party. The
majority of the Supreme Court was Federalist, and
the Federalists attempted to insure judicial protection
for their policies by creating, in the last hours of the
Adams administration, an additional and wholly un-
necessary set of federal district courts whose judges,
under the Constitution, could not be removed on
political grounds. The attempt to set the courts in
opposition to the rest of the government failed, how-
ever, for while the new administration could not
remove the judges the same result was presently
attained by abolishing the new offices.

The Republican victory in 1800 ended the impor-
tance of the Federalists as a national party. Feder-
alist candidates for the presidency or vice-presidency
continued to be voted for as late as the election of
1816, but the control of Congress was never regained.
In a number of States, particularly in New England,
there continued to be for some years an influential
Federalist following, but the party attitude toward
national issues became increasingly one of mere fac-
tional opposition, and during the war of 181 2 some
fragments of the party were openly disloyal. The
great achievements of the party in its early years,
however, endured. The Federalists had carried the
Constitution to ratification in the State conventions,
organized the new federal government on a broad and
practical basis, championed a theory of national rights

ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT 105

and powers which no subsequent assaults were able
to overthrow, and prepared the way for general re-
spect for the United States abroad. They had brought
to the support of the government in its period of
beginnings the indispensable aid of the propertied
classes and placed the national finances on a solid
foundation. The administrative system which they
set up is identical in principle with that which obtains
today, and much of the constitutional law which the
federal courts expound is only the logical develop-
ment of the doctrine which Hamilton, the greatest of
all the Federalist statesmen, laid down.

The strength of the party was also its weakness.
With all the practical ability of the Federalists in
getting necessary things done, their conception of gov-
ernment was essentially aristocratic rather than
popular. The conservative reaction which set in in
Europe after the first few years of the French Revo-
lution found its counterpart in America in the
Federalist devotion to the idea of a strong and cen-
tralized government and in a profound dread of
popular control. A numerous democracy comprising
the whole adult manhood of the nation, free from
property qualifications for voting or office holding and
acting upon Congress and the president through the
influence of organized public opinion, was a political
conception alien to the Federalist mind. The incom-
ing wave of Jeffersonian democracy, accordingly,
could be met by the Federalists only with an instinc-
tive resistance whose end was party collapse. They

106 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

had laid the foundations and erected the super-
structure, and the imposing building which they
planned still stands as their monument, but the house
was now to become for a time a people's house in a
sense of which its Federalist builders had not dreamed.

CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY

Jefferson was the first great American statesman
whose personal ascendancy was both complete and
undivided. Hamilton, notwithstanding his intellec-
tual power and rare political skill, shared his political
influence among the Federalists with Washington and
Adams, and neither in elections nor in the working
out of party policy in Congress was his leadership the
only force to be reckoned with. Jefferson, on the
other hand, had no peers. He dominated his party
from the beginning to the end of his eight years of
office, and the leaders whom he drew about him only
echoed his thoughts, repeated his words, and did
what he desired. Jeffersonian Republicanism was
more than a phrase; it represented a body of doctrine
and a political programme of action of which Jeffer-
son, far more than any of his contemporaries, was the
author and the responsible exponent, and long after
he had retired from office his followers continued to
associate themselves with his name and to turn to
him for advice. Time has modified the Jeffersonian
principles and worked revolutionary changes in their
application, and the Democrats who today celebrate
the anniversary of Jefferson's birth are a party whose

107

108 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

opinions and acts Jefferson would often have viewed
with apprehension, but the commemoration is never-
theless a tribute to a statesman who fought the Fed-
eralists to defeat by the popular force of democratic
argument.

The personality of Jefferson presented striking
contradictions. He was widely read, possessed an
omnivorous interest in science, literature, geography,
politics, and philosophical speculation, and enjoyed
a wider personal acquaintance in France and a more
intimate knowledge of French thought and social
habits than had been possessed by any other Ameri-
can except Franklin. In an age when theological
opinions were prevailingly rigid and dogmatic he was
an extreme liberal, and Puritan ministers in Massa-
chusetts did not hesitate to brand him as an atheist
and to hold his name anathema. He possessed a
modest fortune which made him financially inde-
pendent, and his life as a Virginia planter was in
most external respects like that of his neighbors. But
he had also, to a degree quite without parallel among
American statesmen, a French love of political theory
and of theoretical consistency. The democratic ideas
which the French Revolution embodied held for him
the only sound philosophy of government, and his
opposition to Federalism was a matter both of con-
science and of intellectual conviction.

Jefferson took office under peculiarly favorable
conditions. The overwhelming success of the Repub-
licans in the election of 1800 had given the party a

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 109

clear working majority in the Senate and an impreg-
nable majority in the House of Representatives, and
congressional support for presidential policies was
assured. The country was prosperous. In most of
the States except those of the slaveholding South
manufactures were developing, and both domestic and
foreign trade were active. The new secretary of the
treasury, Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, while en-
tirely sympathetic with Jefferson's political views, was
an able financier of the Hamilton school, and the
finances of the nation were certain to have competent
management at his hands. The census of 1800
showed a population of more than 5.300,000, an in-
crease of over one-third since 1790. The settled
area was expanding rapidly toward the west and by
1802 Ohio was ready for admission as a State, while
within the manufacturing States the growth of indus-
try was drawing people from the country into the
towns and enlarging the varied interests of an urban
life. In Europe the peace of Amiens, in 1802, ended
for a time the war which for ten years had been going
on between Great Britain and France, and gave the
harassed continent a brief breathing space before the
long struggle with Napoleon which was soon to begin.
With Europe at peace and American industry expand-
ing the economic outlook was bright.

Jefferson was zealous for economy, and Gallatin
shared his view. Hamilton, in submitting his funding
plan, had argued that the debt certificates or bonds,
in a country where money capital was deficient, would

no AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

serve some of the purposes of currency. Hamilton
apparently regarded a public debt as a permanent
charge upon which other financial transactions could
be based, but to Jefferson a debt was a burden and
a menace and he accordingly bent all his efforts to
discharge it. By drastic economies in every direc-
tion, including the reduction of the army and navy
almost to the vanishing point, the debt was reduced
nearly one-half by March, 1809. The early hope of
obtaining a revenue from the public lands, on the
other hand, was not realized. The cost of surveying
the lands was small, but a low price per acre led to
large purchases by speculators and discouraged settle-
ment, while a high price or sales only in large tracts
deterred individual buyers who desired homes. No
satisfactory solution of the difficulty was ever found,
and although the varying prices which were adopted
from time to time — for a considerable period $1.50
per acre for ordinary land in quantities not less than
a quarter section, or 160 acres — aimed primarily to
encourage settlement, the large grants eventually
made to highways, railways, and other public objects
in addition to those made to the States left a final
deficit on the land account.

Jefferson was an expansionist. He believed in the
West, and before the ordinance of 1787 had been
adopted he had drafted a plan for the organization
of the western territory and a scheme of public land
survey. When, accordingly, in 1802 it became known
that Spain by a secret treaty had transferred all of

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY in

its vast possessions between the Mississippi river and
the Rocky mountains to France, Jefferson took alarm.
The hold of Spain upon New Orleans and the mouth
of the Mississippi was already an obstacle to the
development of commerce between the young settle-
ments in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee and the
other States by way of the Gulf of Mexico; and with
the province of Louisiana, as the western possessions
of Spain were called, in the hands of Napoleon the
facilities for the transshipment of goods at New
Orleans which Spain had accorded might at any time
be withdrawn. The prospect of a French colonial
empire in America, moreover, filled Jefferson with so
much apprehension as to lead him to declare that an
alliance between the United States and Great Britain
would become a necessity.

The American minister at Paris was accordingly
instructed to negotiate for the purchase of so much
of Louisiana as would give to the United States the
control of the lower course of the Mississippi and
insure unimpeded access to the gulf. Napoleon's
interest in Louisiana was short-lived, and although the
French foreign minister, Talleyrand, refused to part
with the mouth of the river he suddenly offered to sell
the whole province, and with some hesitation the offer
was accepted. The purchase price, to be paid partly
in money and partly by the assumption of certain
claims of French subjects against the United States,
was about $15,000,000.

Jefferson had fought the Bank of the United States

ii2 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

on the ground that neither directly nor indirectly was
such an institution authorized by the Constitution,
and it was even more clear that the Constitution con-
tained no reference to the acquisition of foreign terri-
tory. Constitutional objections, however, appear to
have had no weight with Jefferson so far as Louisiana
was concerned, and he not only approved the treaty
of purchase but continued to the end of his life to
regard the acquisition of Louisiana as one of the
great achievements of his career. The opposition in
Congress was unimportant and in April, 1803, the
treaty was ratified. The Louisiana purchase nearly
doubled the area of the United States, and the nation
was committed to a policy of expansion which there-
after was steadily pursued.

The interest of Jefferson in Louisiana did not date
from the transfer of the province from Spain to
France. Some time before the secret treaty was
known in America he had proposed to Congress the
dispatch of an exploring expedition which should
trace the course of the Missouri river, find the head-
waters of the Columbia, and follow the latter river
to the Pacific. The fact that the region to be trav-
ersed belonged to another nation did not deter him,
and in the message in which he communicated the
suggestion to Congress he even went so far as to refer
to the " declining state " of Spanish influence in the
region and to the expedition itself as a " literary
enterprise " to which Spain would probably not ob-
ject. The Lewis and Clark expedition which set out

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 113

in 1804 was the fruit of this proposal, and upon its
discoveries was later based in part the claim of the
United States to the Columbia river valley and the
Oregon country.

The frontier population of Kentucky and Tennessee
had at no time felt respect for the Spanish authority
at New Orleans, and a policy of expansion favored
conspiracies and plots. As far back as the beginning
of Washington's second administration there had been
mysterious intimations that Genet, the French minis-
ter, had in mind an attack upon Spanish power in
Louisiana and West Florida and that Jefferson, then
secretary of state, was not ignorant of what was going
on. The recall of Genet, however, ended the matter
until the project was revived by Aaron Burr. Burr,
who had killed Hamilton in a duel in 1804, and in
consequence had disappeared from public office at the
close of his first term as vice-president, was now a
disreputable figure and a desperate man. He still
possessed, however, a certain underground influence
which made him dangerous, and neither public odium
nor poverty lessened his capacity for political intrigue.
In 1806, after protracted negotiations and plottings
the precise nature of which is not yet fully known, he
started down the Ohio at the head of a small armed
force, apparently expecting to be reinforced in Ken-
tucky and in the recently organized Territory of
Mississippi and to stir up a revolution in the south-
west or in West Florida. Jefferson, who had kept
himself informed of Burr's movements, waited until

ii4 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the expedition was well on its way; then at Natchez
Burr was arrested and later was tried in Virginia for
treason. The federal court was obviously hostile to
Jefferson as Jefferson was to the court, but Chief
Justice Marshall properly held that Burr could not
lawfully be tried in Virginia for an alleged crime com-
mitted in the West, and intimated that if he were
guilty of treason at all, in regard to which there was
doubt, the place for the trial was Ohio, where the
expedition had been organized. The case was not
pressed, but the episode completed the political ruin
of Burr, and the once powerful politician lived there-
after in obscurity and poverty until his death in 1818.
Jefferson's attitude toward Burr was for the
moment sharply criticized. It was true that he had
risked his political popularity in the Southwest by
arresting Burr, and the trial was an assertion of the
right of the United States under the Constitution to
protect itself against treasonable conspiracy notwith-
standing that the Burr expedition had much popular
support. But the president had taken no steps to
break up the conspiracy while the plans were being
almost openly laid, and his effort to secure a con-
viction from the court was so apparent as to lead to
the suspicion that he was seeking to crush a political
opponent quite as much as to vindicate the national
authority. It was once more a case, apparently, of
the defect of the quality. Jefferson's belief in State
rights made him in general tolerant of opposition and
indifferent to intrigue, but the same temper made him

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 115

merciless in punishment when his authority as presi-
dent was openly defied. The episode did not per-
manently injure either his own popularity or that of
his party. Jefferson himself had been re-elected in
1804, the congressional elections of that year and of
1806 still further reduced the dwindling Federalist
minority in both houses, and the Republican position
was secure. The federal and State officials in the
Southwest who had refrained from breaking with
Burr until they could see how the enterprise was
likely to turn out hastened to wash their hands of him
after his arrest, and before long the Burr conspiracy
had ceased to be talked of as sober history and had
become a romantic tale. The people of the South-
west, on the other hand, did not change. They cared
little for Burr personally and they respected Jeffer-
son, but they had only contempt for the Spanish rule
in West Florida and were ready, when the time should
come, to put an end to Spanish authority by force
and carry American territory to the gulf.

In the meantime Jefferson and his party had been
meeting a test of a different kind. The renewal of
war in Europe under Napoleon in 1803 again exposed
American commerce to attack. Napoleon was unable
to cope with Great Britain on the sea, and he accord-
ingly sought to break its power by the establishment
of a " continental system " under which virtually the
whole Atlantic coast of Europe was declared to be
under blockade and neutral commerce with Europe
or with British dependencies was subjected to

n6 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

search, seizure, or confiscation. The United States
as a neutral power had no direct interest in the war,
but although the expiration of the Jay treaty in 1806
left it once more without a commercial agreement
with Great Britain, it insisted upon its right as a
neutral to trade with both belligerents in goods which
were not contraband of war, and denied the right of
either France or Great Britain to enlarge the defi-
nition of contraband to include food and articles of
common use merely because such goods might pos-
sibly serve military purposes. But if France was
anxious to prevent American trade with Great Britain,
Great Britain was equally determined to prevent
American trade with France, and as the " continental
system" stood by the end of 1806 any American
vessel bound for a European port was liable to be
searched or seized by a British naval vessel, at the
same time that any American vessel which had been
searched by a British vessel was thereby, under
Napoleon's decrees, rendered liable to seizure by
France. The claim which France put forward was
peculiarly irritating because search and seizure could
not as a rule be safely resisted by merchant vessels,
and the detention of vessels and their cargoes under
such circumstances appeared very much like an insult
added to injury.

The position of the United States was obviously
one of great difficulty. Legally, its rights as a neu-
tral power were hardly open to serious question even
though some of its claims were debatable. Under such

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 117

war conditions as prevailed in Europe, on the other
hand, American rights could not be maintained ex-
cept by force, and force implied an efficient navy
and an administration willing to use it. But the
economies of Jefferson had reduced the navy to a few
vessels, and any attempt to meet British and French
aggression by force would not only court ignominious
failure but might involve the United States in war
with both of the European belligerents. Jefferson
adopted a policy of systematic non-resistance. He
refused to allow American naval vessels to leave port
or to be put into commission, he declined to authorize
the privateering which at that time was sanctioned by
international law. For the defence of the coast
against naval raids he relied upon gunboats, light
draught vessels carrying one or two small cannon and
capable of operating in shallow waters and small har-
bors which the deep draught British or French vessels
could not enter. The gunboats, at which the Federal-
ists jeered with delight, never rendered any appre-
ciable service, but more than one hundred were built
at the cost of Gallatin's carefully accumulated sur-
plus. Finally, in 1806, the American ports were
closed altogether to commerce by an embargo act.

The effect of the embargo was disastrous. The
trade of Great Britain, against which the act was
specially aimed, suffered no serious injury, but the
American export trade was destroyed. Manufactures
and agricultural staples could not be sold, prices de-
clined heavily, workingmen and farm laborers were

n8 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

thrown out of employment, merchants sustained heavy
losses or went into bankruptcy, and vessels deterio-
rated at their wharves. For nearly two years, how-
ever, the embargo continued; then, with the business
of the country stagnant and commercial and man-
ufacturing New England apparently on the point of
revolt, the embargo act was withdrawn and an act of
non-intercourse substituted. The only material differ-
ence between the two systems was in the permission
which the non-intercourse act gave for the resumption
of trade with either Great Britain or France in case
either of those powers lifted its restrictive orders or
decrees.

Jefferson's second term ended with the controversy
still pending. In all probability he could have been
again elected had he offered himself as a candidate,
but the precedent which Washington had set could not
with dignity be disregarded. Few presidential ad-
ministrations are so difficult to judge impartially. A
later disciple of Jefferson and an even more rigorous
exponent of strict construction doctrine, John C. Cal-
houn of South Carolina, admitted that Jefferson did
not live up to his theoretical opinions during his
presidency, and the historian Hildreth acutely ob-
serves that Jefferson's political philosophy was always
more negative than positive. It was his fate to come
to prominence, first as author of the Declaration of
Independence and later as head of the Anti-Federal-
ists, primarily as a critic of abuses and leader of an
opposition, and throughout his career his attention

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 119

was centered far more upon what he regarded as ex-
cesses and usurpations of power than upon the for-
mulation of a constructive policy. The political evils
which needed to be combated always bulked larger
in his mind than the good which a self-governing
society might hope in practice to attain.

Once authority was in his hands, however, the in-
evitable demands of a growing nationality gripped his
judgment and made short work of his theoretical
scruples. The ostentatious simplicity which led
him at the opening of his first administration to
present himself without display to take the oath of
office gave place within two years to an official routine
which differed but little from that which had char-
acterized the administrations of his predecessors; and
his substitution of written for spoken addresses to
Congress, while due in part to the fact that he was
a poor speaker, strengthened rather than weakened
his official influence through the power of his pen.
The administrative machine which the Federalists
had constructed was too efficient and too necessary
to be displaced, and while most of the Federalist
functionaries who were in office in 1801 had given
way to Republicans by 1809 and the number of civil
employes had been cut down, the everyday opera-
tions of government went on very much as before.
Jefferson bought Louisiana without a shadow of
direct constitutional warrant because the safety and
welfare of the nation seemed to require it, and be-
cause so superb an opportunity for territorial expan-

120 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

sion was not to be lost. He ruled his party with an
iron hand, and his control of the government was far
more absolute than that which Washington had ever
exercised or than any succeeding president was to
enjoy until the memorable days of Andrew Jackson;
yet he never ceased to believe and to declare that
power belonged to the people, and it does not appear
that he ever thought of himself as acting in any other
capacity than that of the people's chosen represent-
ative. It was the familiar case of a statesman whose
theoretical views, stoutly held to throughout as mat-
ters of doctrine, bent in practice to the necessities of
circumstance and the exigencies of party leadership,
and the dreary episode of the embargo and non-re-
sistance did not shake his hold upon the devotion of
the people or prevent the nation from marching for-
ward on its way.

A Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified
by the States in time for use in the election of 1804,
had made impossible the recurrence of such a com-
plication as had arisen in 1800 by requiring the
electors to cast two ballots, one for president and the
other for vice-president, both president and vice-
president being chosen by a majority of all the votes
cast for the respective offices. The mantle of Jeffer-
son descended upon Madison, the third Virginia
president, who had served acceptably as secretary of
state and was in full sympathy with the Jeffersonian
programme. The opposition to the embargo caused
the congressional elections of 1808 to show a slight

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 121

Federalist gain, but there was no sign of any real
weakening of Republican control. Anything like
open opposition to the federal government such as
was being talked of quietly in New England was too
serious a step to be taken lightly; a war policy was
out of the question at the moment unless the United
States wished deliberately to invite defeat, and the
plight of American commerce might at any time be
ended by the decisive victory of Great Britain or
France in Europe. If the new administration could
weather the storm Republican ascendancy might
apparently long continue.

Madison, however, although the inheritor of the
Jeffersonian tradition, had none of the commanding
personal influence which had been Jefferson's great
resource, and the progress of events carried him
swiftly forward in a current whose force he could not
resist and in which he was hardly free to choose his
course. The Napoleonic wars, growing in magnitude
and bitterness until almost every European nation
was involved, had locked Great Britain and France
in a life or death struggle, and no small state, least
of all a small and remote neutral nation like the
United States, could hope for consideration from either
combatant. Small as was the United States in com-
parison with the European belligerents, however, it
was independent, it had neutral rights to maintain
and national dignity and self-respect to assert, and
the drift toward war was irresistible. But against
whom, if war came, should war be declared? So far

122 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

as injuries to American commerce were concerned
both France and Great Britain were aggressors, for
what was not seized by the one was ruthlessly appro-
priated by the other. Should the United States de-
clare war against both and launch its combat against
all Europe? The fact that England was the ancient
enemy and France the ancient friend had some weight
in determining public opinion, but war must be justi-
fied nevertheless and as between the two aggressors
it was not easy to apportion guilt.

The war of 1812 has sometimes been spoken of
as a second war of independence, but the resemblance
to the great contest of 1775-83 is slight. Madison,
in his message to Congress recommending a declara-
tion of war against Great Britain, felt called upon to
specify a number of grievances, but none of them
except interference with American commerce and the
impressment of American seamen by the British navy
had previously been emphasized and the unfriendly
conduct of France was overlooked. As a matter of
fact specific grievances, irritating as they were, had
much less to do with the case than the general feeling
of indignation and chagrin which the long-continued
aggressions of both Great Britain and France had
caused, and the declaration of war was levied against
the former rather than against the latter because the
British navy, since Nelson had ended the sea power
of France at Trafalgar in 1805, had been the chief
offender. Whether or not Madison, as hostile rumor
charged, consented to war as the price of a renomina-

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 123

tion, is of no great importance and there was no need
of denial to disprove the tale, for Madison was too
shrewd a politician and too well informed regarding
public opinion not to know that the country as a
whole wanted war, and that if he opposed a declara-
tion another president would be chosen in his place.

The war was a record of almost unrelieved incom-
petency, unpreparedness, and failure for the United
States so far as land operations went, and the land
operations of the British in America brought them no
glory. The naval victory of Commodore Perry on
Lake Erie in September, 1813, stirred the nation to
enthusiasm, but the attempt of the American forces
to invade Canada was a failure notwithstanding one
or two successful engagements, and the burning of
the capitol building at Washington by the British in
retaliation for the destruction of the parliament build-
ing at York, now Toronto, was an inglorious achieve-
ment. New England was openly opposed to the war
throughout, and a convention at Hartford, Connecti-
cut, adopted a series of resolutions demanding, among
other constitutional amendments which were deemed
essential, one which should take from Congress
the power to declare war without the support
of three-fourths of the States represented. The dis-
heartening failures on land, however, were offset by
some brilliant victories on the sea, and the small
American navy, supplemented by privateers, made
American skill and courage respected.

So much of Europe was at war in 181 2 that the

124 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

addition of a war with the United States made little
difference for the moment, and Great Britain in fact
paid relatively small attention to the American cam-
paigns until after the overthrow of Napoleon in 1814.
The opinion of Wellington, whose advice was then
sought, was unfavorable to the continuance of the
war in America, and as the downfall of Napoleon left
no reason for continuing the policy of restricting
neutral commerce, no particular reason for going on
with the war remained. The British orders in coun-
cil affecting American trade had in fact been with-
drawn shortly before Congress issued a declaration
of war, but the withdrawal was not known in the
United States until after hostilities had begun and the
action was then too late to exert any influence.

The peace treaty, signed at Ghent on December
24, 1 8 14, made no mention of the causes or occasion
of the war and contained no renunciation by Great
Britain of the commercial policy over which the war
had in the main been fought. Both parties appear
to have realized that the past with its irritating and
grievous incidents was over, and that with the dis-
appearance of the circumstances went also the drop-
ping of the policy of harassing neutral trade. There
was no conquered territory to change hands and the
United States made no claim for damages on account
of injuries to its commerce, but provision was made
for settling the long-standing dispute over the north-
eastern boundary. Three weeks after the treaty was
signed, but before the news was known in America,

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 125

the one brilliant American victory of the war came
with the defeat of a British army at New Orleans by
General Andrew Jackson, and victory and peace were
celebrated at the same time. The conclusion of a
commercial treaty presently re-established commer-
cial relations between the two nations, and contro-
versy with Great Britain disappeared for a time from
American politics.

The conclusion of peace opened a new period of
enlargement for American industry. Political oppo-
sition to the Bank of the United States had been
sufficient to prevent a renewal of the bank charter
upon its expiration in 181 1, and the United States
went through the war without the aid of a fiscal
agency and a stable paper currency such as the bank
had provided. In 1816, however, a second bank,
substantially identical in character with the earlier
institution but with a capital of thirty-five million
dollars instead of ten million, was chartered and the
financial policy which Hamilton had inaugurated was
resumed. A new tariff act of the same year imposed
relatively high duties on an enlarged list of imported
articles with the avowed object of encouraging and
protecting American manufactures. The war itself
had not been particularly expensive, but the decline
of revenue during the period of the embargo had
stopped the reduction of the debt, and the costs of
war together with the added expenses of civil adminis-
tration caused the debt to increase from $53,000,000
in 1810 to about $91,000,000 in 1820. A policy of

126 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

economy and the absence of extraordinary expendi-
tures reduced the debt by nearly one-half in the
course of the next decade. Louisiana was admitted
as a State in 1812, and the admission of Indiana in
181 6 brought the number of States to nineteen by the
close of Madison's second administration.

It was apparent that the Republican party was
changing its policy, and that theories and practices
which the Anti-Federalists and even Jefferson him-
self would have rejected were now recognized ele-
ments of the Republican programme. A Republican
Congress, for example, had refused in 181 1 to extend
the charter of the first Bank of the United States,
but it was a Republican Congress which chartered
the second bank five years later. The encourage-
ment of American manufactures by the imposition of
protective tariff duties was a Federalist rather than
an Anti-Federalist policy, but it was a Republican
Congress that enacted the protective tariff act of
1 81 6. Theoretically the Republicans still stood for
State rights and a strict construction of the Constitu-
tion, for economy in expenditure and the reduction of
the powers of the federal government to the lowest
point consistent with efficient administration, but in
actual practice there was little now to distinguish
Republican methods at these points from those which
had obtained during the years of Federalist control.
The powerful influence of the Supreme Court, forced
into the background under Jefferson but now assert-
ing itself more and more as important cases multi-

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 127

plied, was thrown consistently upon the side of a
liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and the
greatest of all the chief justices, John Marshall of
Virginia, whose appointment to office was one of the
last acts of the Adams administration, must be counted
among the foremost builders of American nationality.
Virginia has been called the mother of presidents,
but in the early years of the republic the Federalist
opposition referred to the succession of Virginia presi-
dents which began with Jefferson by the less compli-
mentary epithet of the Virginia hierarchy. The Hart-
ford convention of 1814 had proclaimed as one of its
grievances the apparent purpose to keep the presi-
dential succession, which already numbered Washing-
ton, Jefferson, and Madison, in the Virginia line and
to make the office of secretary of state, which both
Jefferson and Madison had held, a stepping-stone to
the presidency. Only once more, however, was the
Virginia precedent to be observed. James Monroe
of Virginia, to whom the majority of the presidential
electors gave their choice in 181 6, had been secretary
of state under Madison, and was the last of the presi-
dents who had seen service in the Revolutionary war.
Educated as a lawyer, he gave up the practice of the
profession early in life and for a number of years
before his election as president had been almost con-
tinuously in office, part of the time as American
representative in France. His political views were
in general those of Jefferson, but he had no marked
force of personal character, and the two great events

128 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of his administration owed little of their importance
to his personal influence. The absence of pronounced
political color in the president, on the other hand, was
at the moment an advantage rather than an embarrass-
ment. Party lines were fading, and although the
" era of good feeling," as the later years of Monroe's
presidency came to be called, was in reality a period
of factional struggle and uncertain groping for new
issues, there was no assured party following which
Monroe or any other president could have led. His
all but uncontested re-election in 1820 was a tribute
which a more aggressive president could hardly have
received, and the modest dignity and urbanity with
which he filled the presidential office helped to facili-
tate the passage of the political life of the nation
from an old order to a new.

The disappearance of old party distinctions and the
temporary waning of popular interest in the legal
and constitutional aspects of public questions was
largely due to the marked changes in social and
economic conditions which the United States was
undergoing. The first two decades of the republic
had seen the invention and development of the steam-
boat, the cast-iron plough, the cotton gin, the textile
carding machine, the high-pressure steam engine, and
the screw propeller; and the application of steam,
joined to rapid improvements in machinery and
mechanical processes, was working an industrial revo-
lution whose effects were felt throughout the country.
The steamboat solved the problem of up-stream navl-

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 129

gation on the Ohio and Mississippi, opened the West
to the manufactured products of the middle States and
New England, and shortened by one-half the ordinary
voyage to Europe. Until 1793 the difficulty of clear-
ing the cotton fiber of seeds and chaff had kept the
cultivation of cotton at a low level in comparison
with tobacco and rice, but the invention of the cotton
gin in that year changed the face of southern agri-
culture and in a few years made cotton the king of
American staples. In the face of an expanding in-
dustrial life at once varied and profitable the old con-
troversies over a strict or loose interpretation of the
Constitution and the reserved rights of the States lost
interest for the average citizen, and the people turned
with a new zeal to the conquest of the western wilder-
ness and the acquisition of wealth through manufac-
tures and trade.

The lure of the West, strong even during the Revolu-
tion, drew the venturesome with an irresistible attrac-
tion. A steady stream of population from the older
States of the East poured into the Ohio valley, and
a new frontier was hardly established before the
waves of migration again pushed it forward. One by
one the Indian tribes were dispossessed and their
remnants removed to the border of the Mississippi or
beyond, and town and county organizations reflected
the local political habits of the settlers from New
England, the middle States, and Virginia and the
Carolinas. North of the Ohio river slavery had been
excluded by the ordinance of 1787, and it was a free

130 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

population of workers that levelled the forests, broke
the prairies, and built homes, churches, and schools.
Into the Atlantic coast States in turn filtered, after
1 815, the first appreciable beginnings of the mighty
stream of European immigration which within another
generation was largely to displace native-born labor
in the mills, reinforce the westward movement, and
give to the United States a permanently cosmopolitan
character. Census returns of population leaped from
5,300,000 in 1800 to 7,200,000 in 1810; by 1820 the
figure had grown to 9,600,000. Mississippi was
ready for admission in 181 7 and Illinois was added the
following year. In 181 0, after a tedious diplomatic
controversy and a period of irregular fighting hardly
to be dignified by the name of war, the Spanish
provinces of East and West Florida passed into the
control of the United States by purchase and terri-
torial expansion had reached the Gulf of Mexico.
The admission as a State of Alabama, the gulf por-
tion of which American forces had early invaded,
followed immediately, but nearly a generation elapsed
before Florida was ready for statehood.

The Florida annexation was just being completed
when there burst upon the country, with a sudden-
ness which to the aged Jefferson was as a fire bell in
the night, the political issue of slavery. The Terri-
tory of Missouri, organized in 181 2 with a western
frontier which extended to the Rocky mountains,
applied for admission as a State, and at the same time
a similar application was made, with the approval of

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 131

Massachusetts, by the District of Maine. Maine, of
course, would be a free State, and the House of
Representatives, a majority of whose members repre-
sented States in which slavery did not exist, demanded
that slavery should be excluded from Missouri.
The admission of two free States, however, would
destroy the balance which thus far had been main-
tained between free and slave States, and give the
free states a permanent majority in the Senate, where
the States were represented equally, as well as in
the House. The Senate, its action controlled by the
slavery interests, refused either to pass the Missouri
bill or to admit Maine unless slavery was to be per-
mitted in Missouri, while the House refused to vote
for the admission of Missouri save as a free State,
and the result was a deadlock in Congress and a con-
troversy which shook the nation to its foundations.
The political opposition to slavery went back to
the beginning of the government. The compromise
in the constitutional convention by which three-
fourths of the slaves were counted in reckoning the
population of a State for purposes of representation
in the House was a concession to the political power
of the slaveholding States which the free States had
been compelled reluctantly in 1787 to make. A fur-
ther compromise, aimed at the African slave trade,
had allowed the trade to continue for twenty years,
at the end of which time Congress was empowered to
prohibit it, and a prohibitory statute had been passed
in 1806. At the time when the Constitution was

112 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

l0

framed slavery was relatively of small importance,
and many southern slave owners shared the feeling
of repugnance which the institution inspired in the
North; but with the invention of the cotton gin slave
labor suddenly took on a new significance for indus-
try, and the wealth which was now being drawn from
the cotton fields dulled the opposition of southern
planters as well as of many northern merchants and
manufacturers to the inherent evils of the system. Yet
it was clear that with all its apparent prosperity the
South was not sharing in the industrial development
of the rest of the country, that free labor and manu-
factures would not go where slave labor predominated,
and that the South was doomed, if it adhered to
slavery, to remain a primitive agricultural section
constantly declining in relative wealth and importance.
Negro slavery, in other words, was on the defensive
as an economic system. To have abolished it, on
the other hand, would have been to overturn the
established economic and social order of the slave-
holding States with no assurance that free labor, under
the peculiar conditions of a hot climate, would take
its place; at the same time that the political impor-
tance of the southern States, with a relatively small
white population which would alone enjoy political
rights, would hopelessly decline. A large part of
the South seemed predestined by nature for the pro-
duction of cotton, and the destruction or even the
serious curtailment of one of the greatest of American
industries was something not even to be threatened.

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 133

The weakness of slavery was thus also to some degree
its strength. The only hope of slavery, in a nation
which was developing a varied industry carried on
by free labor, was in the maintenance of a balance
between slave and free States in the Senate, where
the equal representation of the States would be suf-
ficient to bar hostile legislation; and the free States
were certain in the long run to support such a com-
promise lest the entire cotton industry, production,
manufacture, and export, should be put in jeopardy.
Of the twenty-two States which in 1819 composed the
union eleven were free and eleven were slave. The
admission of Missouri with slavery, Maine being
free, would maintain the sectional balance, but with
slavery excluded from Missouri the control of the
Senate would be lost forever. The free State mem-
bership of the House of Representatives already
exceeded the slave State membership by twenty-four,
and with a growth of population appreciably less in
the slaveholding section than in the rest of the coun-
try there was no prospect that slavery would ever
gain control of the House.

The argument was political and sectional but it was
not constitutional, and if slavery was to be protected
the Constitution must somehow be brought to its side.
The supporters of slavery found their ground in a
new development of strict construction doctrine,
namely, that under the Constitution every State was
entitled to maintain its own " domestic institutions "
without interference by the other States or by Con-

134 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

gress, and that the protection to which the States were
constitutionally entitled extended to their labor sys-
tem whether slave or free. It was not difficult to
show that the Constitution recognized slavery as
existing, but whether or not the Constitution was in-
tended to protect slavery was not so clear. If slavery
was a national institution Congress might certainly
regulate or restrict it, but if it was in fact one of the
" domestic " institutions over which the States were
assumed to retain complete control, only great lati-
tude of interpretation could bring it within the scope
of the " general welfare " for which Congress was
empowered to provide.

The controversy could not be settled on principle
and it was accordingly settled by compromise. The
House of Representatives agreed to the admission of
Missouri as a slave State, the Senate agreed to the
admission of Maine, and the two houses joined in
prohibiting forever the admission of further slave
States from the Louisiana purchase north of the par-
allel of latitude 36' 30", the southern boundary of
Missouri. As the boundary between the United
States and the Spanish possessions in the Southwest
at that time coincided roughly with the eastern and
northern boundaries of the present State of Texas
and the western boundary was the Rocky mountains,
it was evident that the territory which the Missouri
compromise left open for the organization of slave
States was very much smaller than the territory which
would be free; but the disparity seemed less then

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 135

than it does now because most of the territory west
of the Mississippi and the Missouri was regarded as
permanently unfit for settlement, and for years there-
after was represented in maps as the great American
desert.

The Missouri struggle was a rude shock to the
spirit of national unity. The growth of slavery in
one-half of the States, slowly molding economic life
and social habit into forms radically different from
those which the other States enjoyed, had suddenly
provoked a grave political crisis which had divided
the nation and in regard to which political parties
must henceforth take sides. The controversy was
novel to many in that it seemed to present only a
fundamental issue of right or wrong, but a social
institution to which a large part of the nation was
devoted, and upon which material prosperity seemed
at the moment vitally to depend, was certain, now that
it had been put upon the defensive, to ally itself with
every national or sectional interest from which it
might hope to draw support, and to put the Union
itself in peril rather than to yield ground. In the
presence of slavery the American nation found itself
sectional, and the fatal step of compromise taken in
1820 indicated the line which for forty years the
nation was to follow.

Thanks to the far-seeing statesmanship of John
Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state, the Mon-
roe administration won a diplomatic victory abroad
which did something to offset the rebuff which the

136 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Missouri controversy had given to national unity at
home. The attempt of Napoleon to bring Spain
under the control of France had awakened a new
spirit of nationality among the Spanish people, and
with the failure of that attempt and the subsequent
downfall of the Napoleonic power in the peninsula
a succession of revolts against the reactionary Span-
ish crown spread throughout the colonies of Spain
in America. By the beginning of Monroe's second
administration every Spanish colony in Central and
South America had a revolutionary government and
was successfully maintaining the independence which
it had declared. Under the lead of the Holy Alli-
ance, a reactionary combination of European powers
of which Metternich, the chief minister of Austria,
was the moving spirit Spain was encouraged to1 at-
tempt the recovery of its colonies. The prospect of
a Spanish invasion of Central and South America
backed by the military resources of the Holy Alliance
was a grave menace to the United States, presaging a
renewal of political complications with Europe even
more serious than those from which the United States
had lately emerged. At the same time Russia, which
already held Alaska, took occasion to assert an ill-
founded claim to so much of the Pacific coast as lay
between Alaska and the Oregon country, and an im-
perial ukase closed the region to foreign trade. If
the Russian claim were allowed to go uncontested and
the plans of the Holy Alliance were carried out, the
United States would find itself confronted with a

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 137

powerful European combination to the south and the
Russian imperial government in the northwest, and
the American continents would once more become a
field for European exploitation.

Adams had been the principal negotiator of the
treaty of Ghent, and a long official residence abroad
had made him intimately aware of the political spirit
of Europe. He accordingly persuaded Monroe to in-
corporate in his annual message to Congress in 1823
two passages which together constitute the famous
Monroe doctrine. One, aimed particularly at Russia,
declared that the American continents were not here-
after to be regarded as fields for colonization by any
European power. The other, directed at Spain and
the Holy Alliance, announced that while the policy
of the United States was one of non-interference with
the affairs of any European state and non-participation
in European political arrangements, any attempt on
the part of the allied powers to assist Spain in over-
throwing the revolutionary governments which had
declared their independence, and whose independence
the United States had recognized, would be regarded
as " the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition "
toward the United States. The bold warning was
sufficient, the plans of Spain and the allies were
abruptly dropped, and the independence of the gov-
ernments of Central and South America was assured.
Negotiations with Russia had been begun before Mon-
roe's message was delivered, and a treaty presently
provided for the withdrawal of the Russian claim.

138 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The substance of the Monroe doctrine was not new,
for the policy of holding aloof from entangling alli-
ances with Europe went back to the time of Wash-
ington and was implicit in the neutrality which had
several times been proclaimed. The statements of
Monroe's message, however, were the first clear enun-
ciation of the principle as a national policy, and
although time has greatly modified the position taken
in 1823 and national practice has more than once
seriously infringed upon it, the Monroe doctrine still
remains one of the primary principles of American
diplomacy so far as political relations with Europe
are concerned. The declaration made clear the su-
premacy of the United States in American affairs, and
its prompt acceptance by the European powers whose
schemes it disrupted was a tribute to the moral and
physical weight of the young nation. The fact that
Canning, the British prime minister, who was opposed
to the Holy Alliance, had suggested in 1822 a joint
declaration by Great Britain and the United States
against European intervention in Central and South
America does not lessen the distinction of Adams's
achievement, for the suggestion of Canning was de-
clined on the same ground as that upon which the
declaration of Monroe was later based, and the
Monroe doctrine once it was proclaimed applied to
Great Britain as well as to Spain and the allies.

Monroe was not only the last of the Virginia hier-
archy but the last also of the presidents who had
personally taken part in the establishment of the fed-

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY 139

eral government. Most of the statesmen of the early-
constitutional period were dead, a new generation with
new ideas and a new spirit had come upon the stage,
and there was a crude but energetic West henceforth
to be reckoned with. The transition to a new order of
which Monroe had seen the beginnings had been
nearly accomplished, and no prophet was needed to
foretell that the new order would be very different
from the old.

CHAPTER VI

A NEW PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL

If birth, education, and public service could ever
of themselves suffice as a preparation for the presi-
dency, John Quincy Adams should have been one of
the most successful of American presidents. He was
the son of John Adams. He had entered the public
service in boyhood as his father's secretary, served
with distinction as a diplomatic representative of the
United States in The Netherlands and elsewhere dur-
ing some of the most exciting years of the Napoleonic
wars, concluded the peace treaty with Great Britain
at the close of the war of 1812, and after the war had
returned to the United States to become for eight
years secretary of state under Monroe. He was
widely read, possessed a greater familiarity with
European politics than any American of his day, and
was one of the few presidents who have had a prac-
tical knowledge of foreign languages. His one-time
Federalist support in New England had dropped away
when he upheld the embargo, and thereafter his polit-
ical opinions became those of a moderate Republican
with whom an intense belief in American nationality
and a jealous regard for American independence and
prestige were controlling motives. No man in public

140

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 141

life was apparently better fitted to lead the nation in
the period of political transition through which it was
passing and to bridge the interval which separated the
old order from the new.

Yet the four years of his presidency were for the
nation a period of acrimonious political turmoil, while
to Adams they brought declining official influence and
personal regard and an ultimate repudiation and de-
feat clearly foreshadowed from the start. Trouble
began with the election of 1824. Of the four candi-
dates in the field, all nominally Republicans, Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee received 99 electoral votes,
Adams 84, William H. Crawford of Georgia 41, and
Henry Clay of Kentucky 37. No candidate had a
majority, and the election devolved for a second time
upon the House of Representatives, which under the
Twelfth Amendment was required to choose a pres-
ident from among the three candidates having respec-
tively the highest number of votes, each State casting
one vote. Clay, accordingly, was ineligible, and the
contest lay in fact between Jackson and Adams but
with the supporters of Clay holding the balance in the
decision. The vote of the House was delayed until
February, 1825; then Clay gave his support to Adams
and Adams was chosen. Of the twenty-four States
thirteen voted for Adams, seven for Jackson, and four
for Crawford. The vice-president, over whose elec-
tion there was no dispute, was John C. Calhoun of
South Carolina.

The election of 1824-25 had far-reaching conse-

142 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

quences. Jackson, while conceding that the result was
entirely regular from the point of view of the consti-
tutional requirements, nevertheless insisted that he
rather than Adams was the people's choice and that
the will of the people had been defeated by the action
of the House. Jackson, accordingly, whose personal
popularity in the Southwest was very great and whose
military exploit in 1815 had earned for him the title
of " the hero of New Orleans," was certain to be a
formidable candidate for the presidency in 1828, and
the legislature of Tennessee shortly nominated him
for the office. The renewed candidacy of Clay, who
had stood at the bottom of the list in 1824, was less
certain, but Clay was already one of the most prom-
inent and influential figures in Congress and the part
which he had taken in the House election had shown
his power. His acceptance of the office of secretary
of state under Adams, on the other hand, lent color
to the charge, apparently unfounded, that he had
made a " corrupt bargain " with Adams of which the
office was the reward, and Jackson industriously
spread the charge. The position of Calhoun, also,
was peculiar. Some years before, while serving as
secretary of war under Monroe, Calhoun had urged
the court-martialling of Jackson for the high-handed
conduct of the " hero " in invading Florida and sum-
marily hanging two British subjects suspected of
treasonable intrigue; but the personal popularity of
Jackson had deterred Monroe and the cabinet, and in
place of drastic punishment the action of Jackson was

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 143

sustained. The secret of the cabinet discussions had
been well kept and Jackson, who suspected Adams
rather than Calhoun of hostility, regarded Calhoun
as his friend. Calhoun could not hope to win the
presidency in 1828 in the face of Jackson's candidacy,
but he might secure a second term as vice-president.
On the other hand, if Jackson were chosen president
in 1828 he would assuredly be a candidate for re-
election in 1832 if he lived, and since a third term as
vice-president was hardly to be thought of the prize
of the presidency seemed in the way of slipping for-
ever from Calhoun's grasp. The shadows of the elec-
tion of 1824-25, in other words, darkened the political
horizon for at least eight years to come.

A more forcible man than Adams could not have
hoped to cope successfully with so complicated a situ-
ation. The tide of a new democracy, urged on by the
vigorous and unconventional spirit of the West, was
flowing strongly, and neither as a politician nor as a
statesman was Adams able to stay it or to direct its
course. His high sense of public duty would not allow
him to use the federal civil service as party spoils, and
holders of public office intrigued against him. The
comprehensive recommendations of his messages to
Congress covered a wider range of important subjects
than those of any previous president and showed a
statesmanlike grasp of national problems, but the
Congress to which they were addressed for the most
part passed them by. His broad constitutional views,
also, exposed him to attack from the Jackson follow-

144 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ing. In 1 817 Monroe had vetoed on constitutional
grounds a bill appropriating money for what were
known as internal improvements, a term long used to
designate the policy of aiding by federal grants the
construction of highways and canals and the improve-
ment of navigable rivers, and for some years after the
veto appropriations for those purposes were small.
Adams favored internal improvements, and the con-
gressional appropriations for such undertakings
amounted by the end of his term to some fourteen
million dollars, while expenditures of several times
that amount had been forecast by preliminary
surveys.

It was clear that the republicanism, if the term might
still with propriety be employed, of Adams and his fol-
lowers resembled far more the theories and practices of
the early Federalists than the doctrinal views of Jeffer-
son, and that the new democracy of which Jackson
was now the popular embodiment could not at all
points claim Jefferson as its author. The Adams fol-
lowing accordingly sought to differentiate themselves
from their opponents by taking the name of National
Republicans, while the " Jackson men," as they were
for some time called, presently took the party name
of Democrats. The latter name endured, and the
present Democratic party is historically identical,
although with varied mutations of principle and for-
tune, with the new party which took form during the
last months of Adams's administration. The National
Republicans later took the name of Whigs, and under

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 145

that name the party continued until the eve of the
Civil War, when its remnants gave way to the present
Republican party. The broad distinction between a
liberal and a strict construction of the Constitution
which had divided Federalists from Anti-Federalists
was perpetuated in the new party alignment, but the
later surrender of the Democrats to the political de-
mands of slavery forced the Democratic party into an
extreme State rights position for which the policies of
Jefferson and Jackson afforded no sufficient support.

The presidential campaign of 1828, however, was
hardly at all a campaign of issues. It was a campaign
for the " vindication " of Jackson and the enthrone-
ment of " the people," and the campaign slogan
"Hurrah for Jackson! " prevailed over any discus-
sion of policy past, present, or future. The election
was a Democratic landslide. Jackson received 178
electoral votes in comparison with 83 votes cast for
Adams, and the vice-presidential vote for Calhoun
was only a trifle less than the electoral vote for
Adams. Both branches of Congress had been strongly
Republican ever since the Jeffersonian victory of
1800, but the congressional elections of 1828 slightly
increased the new Democratic majority in the Senate
and added materially to the Democratic strength in
the House of Representatives.

The election of Jackson brought to the presidential
office the most vivid and emphatic personality that
American politics had yet produced. Jackson had
little of the imposing dignity of Washington and none

146 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of the culture of Jefferson. His experience of public
affairs had been limited to a short term as senator
from Tennessee and a brief service as governor of
that State; his military career, aside from his defeat
of the British at New Orleans, had been mainly that
of an aggressive fighter of Indians, and his small
practice of law had given him neither professional dis-
tinction nor a judicial temperament. He was distinc-
tively a product of the frontier West, the idol of a
section which cared little for precedent or tradition
and still less for the technicalities of constitutional
interpretation, but which nevertheless possessed a keen
sense of right and wrong and an abiding confidence
in the virtue of direct political action. What his policy
as president would be no one knew and few of his
followers inquired, but there was a general expecta-
tion that he would punish his enemies and reward his
friends, cleanse the federal government of abuses, and
make the national authority respected at home and
abroad. Whether or not in the process the require-
ments of the Constitution would be scrupulously ob-
served none troubled themselves to ask. The Consti-
tution had been made for the nation; it was not the
nation that had been made for the Constitution.

A tumultuous inauguration in which crowds of ad-
miring supporters invaded the White House, upset
the tubs of punch which had been prepared for their
refreshment, and stood with muddy boots upon up-
holstered furniture, was followed by an unprecedented
removal of federal office-holders. Functionaries long

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 147

in office were arbitrarily dismissed and their places
given to clamoring Democrats. The change of per-
sonnel was not complete and many political opponents
of Jackson contrived to retain their posts throughout
his administration, but the wholesale introduction of
the spoils system demoralized the federal administra-
tive service as a whole, and established a baneful
precedent which continued to be more or less regu-
larly followed until the present civil service law began
the substitution of a merit system. Jackson's own
position in the matter, however, was entirely clear and
his equanimity was not disturbed. In his view gov-
ernment offices belonged to the people, no special ex-
perience or skill was necessary in order to perform
their duties, and long continuance in office was an
evil from which the country should not be asked to
suffer.

The eight years of Jackson's presidency were
marked by two great controversies which revealed
in startling outlines the character and political ideals
of Jackson and his aggressive national spirit. Neither
controversy could have been avoided, for the seeds of
contention were planted in the historical events which
ultimately provoked them, but the political signifi-
cance of the fierce battles which were waged was due
in large measure to the personality and methods of
Jackson himself.

The first controversy was with the Bank of the
United States. The bank had had a prosperous career
as a financial institution, its notes circulated through-

148 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

out the country at par, its services as the fiscal agency,
practically the treasury, of the government were effi-
ciently performed, and its paramount influence was
sufficient to keep the various State banks in a reason-
ably satisfactory financial condition. It was, how-
ever, a huge financial monopoly, and its capital of
$35,000,000, together with its exclusive right to issue
a paper currency which the federal government had
agreed to accept, made it a powerful factor in national
business as well as in national finance. From the
date of its incorporation in 1816, accordingly, it had
met with opposition, particularly in the southern and
western States, where numerous attempts were made
to tax the branches of the bank out of existence or
otherwise restrict their operations and influence. In
1 81 9 the Supreme Court, in the great case of
McCulloch v. Maryland, had upheld the constitution-
ality of the bank and denied the right of the States to
tax its branches, but the decision of Chief Justice
Marshall did not end the opposition and the attacks
by the States continued.

The attention of Jackson had been attracted to the
bank in the campaign of 1828 by the report that the
branch of the bank at Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
was using its political influence in opposition to his
candidacy; but he was already familiar with the hos-
tile state of public opinion regarding the institution
in the West, and the Portsmouth incident only con-
firmed his belief that the bank was dangerous. In a
brief reference to the bank at the end of his first an-

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 149

nual message he raised the question of monopoly,
pointed out that the bank would probably apply for
a renewal of its charter which expired in 1836, and
suggested that if a bank were looked upon as essential
to the financial operations of the government, an in-
stitution wholly under government control, and with
private profit eliminated, would better serve the pur-
pose than the existing bank. The attack was re-
peated somewhat more elaborately in his second an-
nual message in 1830, but in each instance the bank
was able to obtain from Congress favorable commit-
tee reports as to its soundness and efficiency. In
1 83 1, accordingly, with another presidential campaign
in prospect for the following year, Jackson contented
himself with a brief reiteration of his objections and
an ominous, reference of the question to the " judg-
ment of the people " and their representatives.

The bank, confident of support from Congress and
apparently thinking that the attacks had ended,
rashly chose this critical moment to apply for a re-
newal of its charter. The charter bill was passed by
substantial majorities, and Jackson vetoed it. The
veto message was a scathing arraignment of the bank
and its policies and an excellent campaign document,
but it was also a startling revelation of Jackson's
constitutional views. Jackson declined to accept the
decision of the Supreme Court upholding the consti-
tutionality of the bank as binding upon either the
executive or the legislative departments of the gov-
ernment, and insisted that both Congress and the

150 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

president were at liberty to act in accordance with
their own opinions of what was and what was not
constitutional so far as the enactment or approval of
laws was concerned. Beyond the federal government,
moreover, were the States and the people, and the
persistent opposition of the States was sufficient to
convince Jackson that the people had repudiated the
bank. Jackson, in other words, stood forth as the in-
terpreter of the popular mind irrespective of any
action which either Congress or the Supreme Court
had taken, notwithstanding that the bank question
had not as yet been an issue in any national election
and the " will of the people " had in no tangible way
been expressed. If this novel doctrine were to pre-
vail, government in the United States would cease to
be government under a constitution which the
Supreme Court was authorized to interpret and to
whose provisions, so interpreted, Congress and the
executive must conform, and would become a govern-
ment of presidential intuition. The bank support in
Congress, however, was insufficient to pass the bill
over the veto and the bank prepared to wind up its
affairs.

The veto of the bank bill made the question of the
bank one of the pivotal points in the presidential
election of 1832, and the overwhelming victory of
Jackson was to him sufficient proof that his course
was right. A somewhat questionable financial trans-
action had confirmed his suspicion that the bank was
unsound, and he now called upon the secretary of the

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 151

treasury to remove from the bank the federal funds.
Under the law creating the bank the government
funds were to be deposited in the bank or its branches
unless the secretary of the treasury should otherwise
direct, and an order of the secretary was accordingly
necessary before the removal could legally take place.
In an elaborate paper which was read to the cabinet
and given to the press Jackson took pains to disclaim
any intention of coercing the secretary of the treas-
ury or of asking that official to do anything which his
judgment or conscience disapproved, but he also
made clear that the direction of the executive branch
of the government was by the Constitution vested in
the president and that the opinion of the president
upon questions of policy ought in consequence to
prevail. Jackson was expounding for the first time
the true constitutional theory of the cabinet, for the
so-called cabinet officers are not ministers in the
European sense of the term, and the policy of an ad-
ministration is that of the president and not that of
president and cabinet combined; but the velvet glove
of Jackson's paper only thinly concealed the iron
hand.

The secretary of the treasury, McLane, did not
feel himself legally justified in removing the deposits.
He was accordingly " kicked upstairs " and made
secretary of state, and the office of secretary of the
treasury was given to Duane. Duane shared the gen-
eral views of Jackson in regard to the bank, but he
could find no legal justification for interfering with

152 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the deposits and he was thereupon asked to resign.
He refused to resign, and Jackson dismissed him and
transferred the treasury portfolio to the attorney gen-
eral, Roger B. Taney, later chief justice of the Su-
preme Court, who issued the necessary orders. Ar-
rangements had already been made with a number of
State banks to receive the deposits, and the govern-
ment funds were gradually withdrawn from the Bank
of the United States until the accounts were extin-
guished.

A spectacular episode, but one also of serious con-
stitutional importance, followed. The Senate, which
throughout the controversy had been friendly to the
bank, called upon Jackson for a copy of the paper
which had been read to the cabinet. Although the
paper had been published the request for a copy was
refused, whereupon the Senate adopted a resolution
censuring Jackson for his conduct toward the bank.
In an elaborate communication, prepared in the main
by Taney, Jackson mercilessly dissected the resolu-
tion, defended his course in the bank matter, denied
the right of the Senate to censure the president and
thereby condemn him publicly without a hearing
when the Constitution expressly provides for trial by
impeachment if high crimes or misdemeanors are al-
leged, and requested the Senate to enter the message
of protest upon its journal. The Senate, angered at
the rebuff, retorted by denying the right of the presi-
dent to protest and refused to spread the protest upon
its records. Thomas H. Benton, senator from Mis-

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 153

souri and a warm supporter of Jackson, immediately
moved to expunge from the journal the resolution of
censure, and when the motion was rejected announced
his purpose to introduce a similar resolution at every
session of the Senate thereafter until the resolution
was adopted or his own senatorial career terminated.
With each succeeding session the opposition dwindled,
and just before Jackson's administration closed the
expunging motion was adopted. In a melodramatic
scene the manuscript journal was solemnly brought
into the Senate chamber, black lines were drawn
about the offending resolution of censure, and the ex-
punging order was written across its face. The Bank
of the United States, however, had some months before
ceased to exist as a government institution and the
triumph of Jackson was complete.

There can be no question but that Jackson was in
the right in opposing the continuance of the govern-
ment connection with the bank. The bank was too
powerful a monopoly to be safely tolerated, and its
potential political influence, albeit not very aggres-
sively exercised until Jackson began his attack, was
a standing menace to popular government. The
methods which Jackson employed, on the other hand,
were needlessly violent, and his open denial of the
binding force of a decision of the Supreme Court
raised a constitutional issue which, if it had become
a recognized precedent, would speedily have trans-
formed the government of the United States into an
executive autocracy. The overthrow of the bank

154 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

undoubtedly gave the federal government a new
supremacy, but the problems of democracy took on
an unwonted form when a man of Jackson's domina-
ting temper assumed to interpret the people's will.

While the fight with the bank was going on another
great controversy, wholly different in character and
more immediately threatening the unity of the nation,
had been dividing the attention of the country. The
enactment of a protective tariff in 1816 had been fol-
lowed by an extraordinarily rapid growth of manu-
factures, and the inevitable demand for still further
protection, especially strong in New England and
Pennsylvania, had been met in 1824 by increased
and more comprehensive duties. In the slaveholding
South, however, manufactures had no hold, and the
argument that protective duties, while of benefit in
the first instance to particular States or industries,
in fact diffused their benefits throughout the nation
and were thus indirectly of advantage to agriculture
as well as to manufactures, made no impression upon
southern opinion and was viewed with misgivings in
parts of the West. To the South in particular, ap-
parently fated by nature to remain a region whose
only important industry was the production of a few
great agricultural staples through the labor of Negro
slaves, a protective tariff was sectional, and sectional
legislation, when the protection of slavery was not at
stake, was unconstitutional. To be sure, the Con-
stitution empowered Congress to levy taxes, duties,
imposts, and excises, but it apparently also restricted

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 155

the power to the broad national purposes of paying
the debt and providing for the common defence and
general welfare of the United States; and sectional
legislation, it was urged, was not legislation for the
general welfare and protective duties were not pri-
marily intended for the payment of the debt.

When, accordingly, in 1828 the tariff duties were
again sharply raised, the South, thoroughly com-
mitted historically to strict construction habits of
thought, vigorously protested. The advent of Jack-
son, whose opinions on the tariff question were nebu-
lous but who was supposed to be unfriendly to high
protection, caused a temporary lull in the controversy.
Before many months had passed, however, a violent
personal quarrel growing out of the attempt of Jack-
son to force the social recognition of the wife of the
secretary of war disrupted the cabinet, and Calhoun,
whose attitude toward Jackson in the Florida episode
years before the president had learned, resigned the
vice-presidency and became senator from South Caro-
lina. Calhoun had already written an elaborate de-
fence of State rights, although only a few persons
knew or suspected his authorship of the document,
and the " South Carolina Exposition," as it was
called, had been adopted as a report by the South
Carolina legislature. The opportunity to put the
doctrine of the " Exposition " into practice came in
1832. A new tariff act of that year modified some-
what the tariff duties of 1828, but showed no dispo-
sition to abandon the protective principle. South

156 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Carolina accordingly issued an ordinance of nullifica-
tion declaring the tariff acts of 1824, 1828, and 1832
null and void within the territory of the State, for-
bidding the collection of the duties, and announcing
that any attempt on the part of the federal govern-
ment to use force would be regarded as incompatible
with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the
Union. The nullification doctrine of the Kentucky
and Virginia resolutions of 1798 had been pushed to
its logical consequences, and an open menace of dis-
union stared the nation in the face.

South Carolina had counted upon the supposed
State rights sympathies of Jackson, notwithstanding
his vigorous course with the bank, to make its pro-
test and threat effective, and Jackson himself had
given much color to the hope. In an acute contro-
versy between the State of Georgia and some Indian
tribes whose reservations the State had sought to
appropriate the Supreme Court had upheld the title of
the Indians to their lands, but Jackson declined to
enforce Chief Justice Marshall's decision and did not
resent the display of force which Georgia had made,
and the Indians were dispossessed. If Georgia could
be allowed to accomplish practically by force what it
could not accomplish by law or politics, South Caro-
lina might fairly hope for equal tolerance.

Jackson's course with the Georgia Indians hardly
admits of explanation on any ground of principle, but
the challenge of the South Carolina ordinance of nul-
lification roused to the full his great sense of nation-

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 157

ality. He had already quietly made military and
naval preparations, and no sooner was the ordinance
published than South Carolina found itself confront-
ing a president whom it well knew would not hesitate
to act. For some weeks the controversy hung in
balance while Congress anxiously sought to frame a
compromise which would avert an armed collision.

Under the lead of Clay a compromise tariff, pro-
viding for a sliding-scale reduction of duties over a
period of years, was enacted and the ordinance of
nullification was then withdrawn. Each party could
claim to have been victorious, for while the authority
of the federal government had been vindicated and
the Union had been preserved, the protest of South
Carolina had been heeded and the policy of high
protection had been abandoned. Clay, who was a
protectionist, had yielded to what he regarded as the
supreme necessity of saving the Union. Webster, on
the other hand, now senator from Massachusetts and
the ablest of American constitutional lawyers, would
apparently have preferred to see the question settled
on its merits, for to his mind the compromise settled
no issue of principle regarding the rights of the States
and the same question would assuredly arise again.
Before another generation had passed the soundness
of Webster's judgment was to receive impressive
demonstration.

The same rude vigor, the same intuitive perception
of what was best or most expedient for the nation
characterized Jackson's treatment of lesser issues.

158 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The absence of war and of occasions for extraordi-
nary federal expenditure favored a reduction of the
national debt, and by 1835 the debt had been prac-
tically discharged. The lavish appropriation of fed-
eral funds in aid of internal improvements, many of
which were local rather than national undertakings,
early encountered the presidential veto, and with some
irregular exceptions the States were left to develop
their highways and navigable waterways for them-
selves. The government of France, against which the
United States held unpaid claims some of which
dated back more than a generation, was brought
sharply to book and the claims were paid. Save for
the payment of the national debt, on the other hand,
the management of federal finances after the sep-
aration from the Bank of the United States was dis-
astrous. The State banks which were used as gov-
ernment depositories were ill-regulated and their
paper currency, unsupported by any adequate re-
serve of specie, became dangerously depreciated. A
sudden decision in the summer of 1837 to require
specie payment in sales of public lands precipitated
a wild scramble for specie which demoralized the
values of all State bank currency and prepared the
way for a financial panic which broke upon the head
of Jackson's successor.

Ever since the disruption of the cabinet Jackson
had given his confidence increasingly to his first sec-
retary of state, Martin Van Buren of New York.
Van Buren was a member of a powerful political or-

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 159

ganization in New York known as the Albany
regency, and the evident purpose of Jackson to make
Van Buren his successor in the presidential chair en-
countered widespread opposition in the Democratic
party. In 1832, however, the nomination of Van
Buren for the vice-presidency was forced upon, the
party, and the election of 1836 saw the victory of
Jackson's plan. An electoral vote of 170 as against
a vote of 73 for the Whig candidate, William Henry
Harrison of Ohio, carried Van Buren to the presi-
dency as the residuary legatee of Jackson's prestige.
With his political enemies defeated and his political
friends rewarded Jackson retired to the Hermitage at
Nashville, Tennessee, where he died in the early sum-
mer of 1845. He lived long enough to see the great
party which he had led hopelessly entangled with
slavery, but with Oregon on the point of being added
to the Union and plans for the seizure of Mexican
territory ready to launch.

Not until Lincoln was there to be another president
with so rugged a personality, such clear convictions,
or such sheer unhampered courage, nor one who was
to leave so deep an impress upon his time. The
Democratic party, throughout all its mutations of
theory and practice, has continued to join the names
of Jackson and Jefferson as those of its two great
founders. Yet the contrasts between the two leaders
are far more striking than the resemblances. Jackson
had none of the fondness for political speculation
which characterized Jefferson, and although neither

160 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

could claim much credit for consistency in moments
of crisis, the course of Jackson was more nearly in
accord with his public statements than was the course
of Jefferson. The guardianship of the doctrine of
State rights and strict construction after 1828 be-
longed logically to Calhoun and his followers rather
than to Jackson, notwithstanding that the party of
which Jackson was the titular head still held to the
doctrine as one of its fundamental tenets. The su-
preme importance which Jackson attached to the will
of the people, and his assumption of a practically ex-
clusive right to interpret that will for himself irre-
spective of anything that had consciously been voted
at any election, was an egotistic pretension for which
the American system of government affords no war-
rant, and if it had continued to have any such force
in the hands of succeeding presidents as Jackson gave
to it the constitutional character of the federal gov-
ernment would before long have been greatly changed.
The Jackson temperament, in short, was that of an
enlightened despot, not that of a constitutional ex-
ecutive, and his liberal interpretation of his powers
as president allied him in principle much more closely
with the Whigs and later Republicans than with his
Democratic supporters. The Jackson regime was a
period of vivid personal government little mindful of
constitutional restraints, and although Jackson's as-
sertive policy restored to the presidency a prestige
which during the preceding twenty years the office
had gradually lost, the precedent was hardly one that

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 161

could be safely followed. It remained to be seen
whether the United States, all but alone among the
great nations in the possession of a written constitu-
tion, was to be governed constitutionally through the
harmonious cooperation of executive, legislative, and
judicial departments, or whether the magnifying of
the presidential office was to enthrone an executive
supremacy to which Congress, courts, States, and
people would alike be forced to bow.

History goes by stages, however, and the constitu-
tional revolution which the Jackson period threatened
to unloose was checked by the contrasted weakness
of Van Buren and the development of party organiza-
tion. The Albany regency had shown the possibilities
of political control in a State through the agency of
a party machine, and the election of 1832 saw the ap-
pearance of national nominating conventions and
party platforms. The road was now open for the sys-
tematic marshalling of public opinion throughout the
country, the selection of presidential candidates
through national conventions representing party or-
ganizations in the various States, and the framing of
platforms whose " planks " should harmonize the di-
vergent views of different sections and conceal the
rivalries of factions. The president would still be
the most conspicuous representative of his party, but
it was evident that candidacy would more and more
be the result of compromise and that executive leader-
ship would be shared with party leaders unless the
president were a towering personality. Van Buren had

162 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

no marked personality, and the machine system which
he was adept at manipulating prevailed.

Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren the elements of
a financial crisis, and in the summer of 1837 the
storm broke. The panic of 1837 was n°t due solely
to industrial and financial disorders in the United
States, for disturbed conditions in England lent their
aid, but it was nevertheless the inevitable outcome of
a system under which the federal government, de-
positing its funds in State banks over whose opera-
tions it could exercise no satisfactory control, looked
to the banks to provide in their own self-interest a
sound currency based upon an adequate specie reserve.
Van Buren wisely declined to interfere, rightly judg-
ing that the disease had best be left to run its course,
but an issue of $10,000,000 of treasury notes was
voted by Congress in the hope of relieving the finan-
cial strain. Calhoun had secured in 1836 the pas-
sage of a law distributing the surplus revenue of the
government among the States, and three quarterly
instalments had been paid before the panic put an
end to the surplus; then distribution ceased and was
not resumed. The instalments, which by law were
subject to repayment on demand, were not recalled
and the amount distributed, about $27,000,000, has
never been returned to the treasury. The panic was
followed by nearly two years of business depression
before the country began slowly to recover. The
compromise tariff of 1833 was not interfered with,
and the gradual reduction of duties for which the act

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 163

provided continued to operate for the ten year period
which the law established.

In 1840 the first step was taken in the direction
of a financial system which should divorce the gov-
ernment from banks of any kind. Jackson in his
veto of the bill to recharter the Bank of the United
States had suggested the possibility of organizing an
institution founded solely upon the credit of the gov-
ernment and its revenues, without authority to en-
gage in private business, and meeting its expenses by
selling bills of exchange. The system which was now
adopted dispensed entirely with the form of a bank
and created instead a national treasury at Washington,
with subtreasuries elsewhere, and devolved upon the
federal government itself the custody and manage-
ment of its funds. Political opposition was strong
enough to force a repeal of the act within a year, but
in 1846 the subtreasury system, as it was called, was
re-established and the direct control of federal funds
through a federal treasury has continued to the present
time. The panic of 1837 drove many State banks into
liquidation, and in the period of reorganization which
followed a number of the States, notably Massachu-
setts and New York, undertook to provide better
safeguards for deposits and notes; but State bank
notes continued to suffer from depreciation and the
problem of a national paper currency remained un-
solved.

Fortunately for the country the national debt was
inappreciable, and not until after the panic did the

1 64 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

treasury receipts begin to show a deficit. Population
continued to grow by leaps and bounds, rising from
9,300,000 in 1820 to 12,800,000 in 1830 and to more
than 17,000,000 in 1840. No modern state had ever
shown so marvellous a growth. Foreign immigration
was still small, but a modest total of somewhat over
8,000 in 1820 had grown to more than 79,000 in 1837,
and in 1842 more than 84,000 immigrants entered the
country. The more prosperous immigrants pressed
on into the West, attracted by the abundance of low-
priced land, but an increasing number of the less re-
sourceful remained in the manufacturing cities and
towns of the Atlantic coast region, where they more
and more displaced native-born labor in the factories
and mills. The presence in some of the larger eastern
cities of considerable bodies of foreigners, often igno-
rant as well as poor, and for whom priests of the
Catholic church struggled hard to care, bred an anti-
foreigner and an anti-Catholic feeling which took
form later in a Native American party and bade fair
for a time to become of some permanent importance.
Two new States were added to the Union during
Jackson's presidency, Michigan in 1836 and Ar-
kansas in 1837, and the early admission of Iowa and
Wisconsin, both of which now had territorial organi-
zations, was clearly foreshadowed.

Politically the country was ready for a change.
The choice of Van Buren had cost the Democrats the
control of the House of Representatives, and the
congressional elections of 1838 gave the Whigs a

A PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL 165

majority in the Senate also. The Democrats had no
outstanding candidate to substitute for Van Buren
in 1840 and he was accordingly renominated. The
Whig candidate, on the other hand, General William
Henry Harrison, had made a gallant contest for the
presidency in 1836, and his record as a fighter of
Indians in the Black Hawk war of 1832 gave the
party an opportunity to exploit to the full the " hero
of Tippecanoe '; and the picturesque log cabin life
of the West. With Harrison was associated, as the
candidate for the vice-presidency, John Tyler of
Virginia, a former State rights Democrat who had
broken with his party on the question of the sub-
treasury and now regarded himself as a Whig. It was
an unhappy choice as events were to show, but the
Whig party had a considerable following in the South
and Tyler was a conspicuous representative of his
section.

The campaign was picturesque to the last degree.
In its lack of issues it resembled the Jackson cam-
paign of 1828 save that the "hero" was not one
whose previous defeat was to be avenged. Open air
meetings, torchlight parades, and representations of
log cabins with the presidential candidate drinking
hard cider took the place of debate, and before the
popular enthusiasm the Democracy of Jackson and
Van Buren went down to defeat. Harrison and Tyler
each received 234 electoral votes against the meagre
sixty which Van Buren secured, and the Whig ma-
jority in the House of Representatives was mate-

1 66 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

rially increased. For the moment the triumph seemed
complete. Old men whose memories went back to
the early years of the republic saw in the Whig vic-
tory a return to the principles upon which the nation
had been founded; younger men saw in it the victory
of Whig principles in the West; and even the Demo-
cratic South was not disheartened because slavery
was secure and new slave territory was on the point
of being grasped.

CHAPTER VII
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

President Harrison died exactly one month after
his inauguration, and the presidential office passed to
the vice-president, Tyler. The situation was fateful
for the Whigs. Tyler was sincere and able, but the
popular demonstrations of the campaign of 1840 had
not been for him, and circumstances rather than po-
litical conviction had caused him to be numbered
with the Whigs. His strict construction sympathies
were not long in showing themselves. No proper
system of caring for the government funds existed
after the repeal of the short-lived subtreasury act,
and the country was threatened with a repetition of
the same financial trouble which had helped to bring on
the panic of 1837. The Whigs desired a national
bank, and Tyler was understood to favor the crea-
tion of an institution which, without being open to
the criticisms which the second Bank of the United
States had invited, would nevertheless serve as the
needed fiscal agency of the government. A bill pro-
viding for a Fiscal Bank of the United States was
accordingly passed, but Tyler's constitutional scruples
asserted themselves and the bill was vetoed, the main
objection being the permission given to the bank to

167

1 68 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

establish branches without the previous consent of
the States. The Whigs in dismay consulted Tyler
with a view to ascertaining what kind of an institu-
tion he would approve, and another bill conforming to
his wishes was presently passed, but again the veto
was interposed. The entire cabinet with the excep-
tion of Webster, the secretary of state, who was en-
gaged in an important negotiation with Great Britain,
immediately resigned, and the Whig leaders, incensed
at what they could but regard as an act of bad faith,
publicly repudiated the president and thereafter
Tyler stood alone. The party which had sung and
marched itself to a triumphant victory a few months
before was left without an executive head at a mo-
ment when one of the gravest national issues which
had yet appeared was upon the point of dividing the
nation.

The question of Negro slavery had presented itself
to the United States in a variety of forms. It was an
economic question, not only because staple agricul-
ture based upon slave labor was the only important
industry in the South, but also because slave labor
and free labor were inherently hostile and free labor
would not go where manual work was regarded as dis-
honorable for whites. From the days when the Con-
stitution was being framed slavery had been also a
constitutional question, and the existence of a slave
population and of the foreign slave trade had forced
the adoption of two of the most important constitu-
tional compromises in the Convention of 1787. It was

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 169

a political question, committing the South to invin-
cible advocacy of State rights and strict construction
for the protection of its labor system, and dividing
political parties in their struggles for national sup-
port. It was an international question, for while the
African slave trade had been prohibited by law it had
not been prohibited in fact, and the abolition of the
traffic by European governments left the United
States the only power which more or less openly tol-
erated it. It was a sectional question, for the ordi-
nance of 1787 had excluded slavery forever from the
territory of the United States northwest of the Ohio
river, and the Missouri compromise had drawn an
east and west line north of which no more slave States
were to be erected. And it was a moral question, for
the atrocious conditions under which the African slave
trade was carried on, the separation of families in the
domestic slave trade or in the settlement of estates,
the denial to the slaves of legal rights or assured
recognition of the family relation, and the generally
ignorant and degraded condition of the slaves
throughout the slaveholding area bred a moral revolt
against the system among many to whom economic,
legal, or constitutional difficulties made no strong
appeal.

The moral argument was peculiarly dangerous be-
cause it was at once idealistic and uncompromising.
Many southern slaveholders regretted the system.
Washington was no friend of slavery and Jefferson
by his will emancipated his slaves. Anti-slavery

170 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

societies were numerous before 1820, the movement
for voluntary emancipation had support in the South,
and the number of free Negroes, although very small
in the aggregate, tended to increase. But the eman-
cipation which was freely talked about in public
meetings or discussed in print was too remote
in time to have any practical significance, and the
growth of the cotton industry dulled the consciences
even of moralists to the evils of a system from which
no individual slaveholder could see a practical way
of escape and to which a great section of the nation
obviously owed its prosperity.

It was the work of William Lloyd Garrison to vital-
ize the abolition movement as a moral force. Gar-
rison had little first-hand acquaintance with slavery,
his personal views were extreme and his language
was often violent and revolutionary, and laws and
Constitution had no sacredness in his eyes when
national sin was to be combated; but the qualities
which made him odious to slaveholders, politicians,
and moderate men generally made him strong with
radical advocates of moral reform, and by 1833 ms
writings and addresses, his weekly newspaper " The
Liberator," established at Boston in 1831, and the
American Antislavery Society and other organizations
which he formed or inspired had made abolition a
national question. When, before long, abolitionists
were mobbed, public meetings broken up, newspapers
seized, and the mails rifled for copies of abolition
publications, the moral revolt against slavery had in-

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 171

trenched itself in the conscience of the North too
firmly to be thereafter dislodged.

Moral agitation alone, however, could not avail to
change an economic system which was imbedded in
the fundamental law of the land and inseparably
bound up with the political issues over which national
parties were contending. There was needed some
large political controversy to which the demand for
the abolition of slavery could attach itself and whose
settlement it might hope in some measure to direct.
The opportunity came in the application of the in-
dependent state of Texas for admission to the Union.
Following the revolt of the Spanish colonies in
America which had called forth the declaration of the
Monroe doctrine, the Mexican state of Coahuila and
Texas had declared its independence, had maintained
itself notwithstanding the efforts of Mexico to recover
it, and in 1837 had been accorded recognition by the
United States as an independent republic. A con-
siderable American population from the South flowed
into Texas, drawn by the attraction of rich cotton
land as well as by the inherent American spirit of
adventure and expansion, and a constitution which
recognized and protected slavery was, after some
opposition, adopted.

The application of Texas for admission to the Union
raised at once the old question of the further extension
of slaveholding territory. Texas was nearly four
times as large as Missouri, the largest slave State,
and the addition to the Union of a region out of which

1 72 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

four or five large States might easily be formed would
immensely strengthen the representation of slave
States in the House of Representatives and destroy,
in favor of slavery, the sectional balance in the Sen-
ate. The Democrats insisted with much reason that
slavery, although not formally mentioned under that
name in the federal Constitution, was nevertheless a
" domestic " or State institution whose legal exist-
ence the federal government had repeatedly recog-
nized and whose rights it was bound to protect, and
they accordingly not only championed the demand for
the annexation of Texas but further declared that
Texas, if it were admitted, was entitled to come into
the Union with slavery if its people so desired. Once
a member of the Union, Texas, it was generally be-
lieved, would consent to be subdivided for the sake of
strengthening the slavery cause. The Whigs, on the
other hand, were split, the southern Whigs taking in
general the same position as the Democrats while the
northern Whigs, mindful of the abolition movement,
as a rule opposed annexation.

The position of the northern Whigs was an inform-
ing indication of the direction which the antislavery
movement was taking. The antislavery Whigs were
not abolitionists. Their opposition to slavery went
no further as yet than the conviction that the institu-
tion, while one that must be tolerated and if neces-
sary protected, was nevertheless one whose territorial
growth and political influence ought to be restricted.
The conclusion was superficial, for if slavery was eco-

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 173

nomically sound and morally defensible there was no
good reason why it should not be allowed to spread to
any part of the United States in which it would thrive,
and no reason at all why a region whose soil and
climate were adapted to slave labor should be refused
incorporation in the Union unless it would consent to
abolish the institution. Neither then nor at any later
time, however, was the economic aspect of slavery
seriously examined, and the moral argument, forcibly
urged only by abolitionists who demanded the extirpa-
tion of slavery root and branch, was too radical and
unpractical to win general support. The attitude of
the antislavery Whigs, in other words, was almost ex-
clusively political, and as usually happens under such
circumstances the issue was compromised and the
vested rights of slavery prevailed. The handful of
devoted abolitionists might proclaim from the house-
tops the moral doctrine of human freedom and insist
that if slavery were not destroyed the Union would
perish, but they could not convince the Whigs who
walked the streets below that there was any real
danger of collapse.

The question was further complicated by a dispute
over the boundaries of Texas. The boundary line
between the old province of Louisiana and the Span-
ish possessions in Mexico had never been run, but the
territory which France sold to the United States
in 1803 under the name of Louisiana was declared by
the treaty to be the same as that which the province
then had as a French possession and as it had had

i74 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

when it belonged to Spain. Each part of the defini-
tion was apparently regarded as confirming or ex-
plaining the other, and the boundary which was laid
down by the Spanish treaty of 1819 between Amer-
ican and Spanish territory in the southwest left Texas
a part of Mexico. In the presidential campaign of
1844, however, the Democrats raised the point that
John Quincy Adams, in negotiating the treaty of 1819
under Monroe, had bargained away, perhaps unwit-
tingly, territory which in fact belonged to the United
States, and that a part of Texas was in law American
soil. The Democratic platform of that year accord-
ingly demanded the " re-annexation " of Texas. The
dispute was one in regard to whose merits geographers
are not yet entirely agreed, but the popular appeal of
a demand for re-annexation was obviously very great.
The year 1844 brought the matter to a crisis. A
treaty of annexation was negotiated, but the anti-
slavery opposition in the Senate was sufficient to pre-
vent ratification and the treaty failed. Tyler then
took the bold step of sending a copy of the treaty
to the House of Representatives, evidently with the
intention of thereby making the Texas question a
prominent issue in the campaign. Tyler himself was
not a candidate for re-election, and Clay, the Whig
candidate, had compromised with the Texas issue as
he compromised with most other political questions
throughout his long career. The sweeping victory of
the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk of Tennes-
see, who received 170 of the 275 electoral votes, was

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 175

partly due to the weakening of the Whigs by a Liberty
or abolition party vote in New York, but Tyler
rightly interpreted the election as a popular verdict
in favor of annexation, and in March, 1845, a joint
resolution of Congress provided for the incorporation
of Texas within the Union. The terms of the resolu-
tion were accepted by Texas in July, and in December
Texas was admitted as a State. The ambitious hopes
of the slave States, however, were doomed to disap-
pointment. The terms of admission provided that
not more than four States, in addition to Texas itself,
might with the consent of Texas be formed out of the
territory acquired, but no suggestion looking to the
subdivision of the State ever found favor once Texas
was safely in the Union, and the congressional gains
of slavery were limited to two senators and two
members of the House of Representatives.

Tyler was fairly entitled to some of the credit for
the acquisition of Texas, for while the Whigs had
repudiated him, and the Democrats, by their success
in the election of 1844, had made annexation a fore-
gone conclusion whether the president wished it or
not, the question had come to a head in his adminis-
tration and had been settled before he retired from
office. As with Jefferson and Monroe so with Tyler,
the territory of the United States had been enlarged
to meet a national emergency and in accord with a
natural trend of expansion, and there could be no
question but that the people approved. Still another
diplomatic success was to be carried to Tyler's ac-

176 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

count. The northeastern boundary of the United
States had long been in dispute, and attempts to run
the line in accordance with the provisions of the peace
treaty of 1783 had encountered obstacles which di-
plomacy had not been able to overcome. The British
claim to the extreme northern portion of the State of
Maine had been resisted, and in 1838-39 armed col-
lision along the border seemed imminent. In 1842
Webster, who by agreement with the Whig leaders
had remained in office as secretary of state after the
other cabinet members resigned, concluded with Lord
Ashburton a treaty which ended the controversy. A
small section of the northwestern boundary was still
in question, but with that exception all of the dis-
putes to which the treaty of 1783 had given rise had
been disposed of.

Polk had had a comparatively inconspicuous public
career, and his position as speaker of the House of
Representatives had not sufficed to give him much
national prominence. It was the party and not the
candidate that won the victory of 1844. Polk was a
consummate politician, however, and the events which
came upon the country were masterfully turned by
him to the advantage of his administration. He in-
herited two great issues each of which, although for
different reasons, held a threat of war. Mexico had
never relinquished its claim to Texas, and the an-
nexation of Texas without the consent of Mexico was
regarded by Mexico as a deliberate violation of in-
ternational comity. In the Pacific Northwest the

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 177

question of Oregon was nearing its crisis, and the
possibility of war with Great Britain had been clearly-
foreshadowed in 1844 in the campaign slogan of
" fifty-four forty or fight."

The claim of the United States to the region known
as Oregon or the Oregon country dated back to the
end of the eighteenth century, when an American ship
captain had discovered the mouth of the Columbia
river. The Lewis and Clark expedition had explored
the river, and during the war of 181 2 an American
trading post near the mouth of the river had been cap-
tured by the British only to be restored when peace
was made. The treaty of 1819 with Spain fixed the
northern limit of the Spanish possessions on the Pa-
cific coast at the forty-second parallel, while in 1825
Russia had abandoned its claims to territory on the
coast south of the parallel 540 40'. The Oregon
country was the extensive region between these two
parallels! — between the northern boundary of the
present State of California and the southern boundary
of Alaska — and from all of the region under the
Monroe doctrine foreign colonization was excluded.
The British claim, on the other hand, resting in part
upon the ancient charter of the Hudson Bay Com-
pany and in part upon occupation, was not lightly to
be disregarded notwithstanding a considerable Amer-
ican immigration into the Columbia valley, and in
1827 an agreement for the joint occupancy of the
region for ten years, subject to renewal, was entered
into between the two governments.

178 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The ten-year period had hardly expired when Great
Britain was called upon to suppress a rebellion in
Canada, and in 1841 eastern Canada was reorganized
and responsible government established. Political
agitation in Canada evoked a measure of popular
sympathy in the United States, especially in New
England and New York, and American filibustering
raids strained for a time the diplomatic relations of
the American and British governments. Negotiations
for the settlement of the northern boundary of the
United States from Lake Superior westward were long
fruitless of results, and the popular demand for " the
whole of Oregon or none " was reflected in the de-
mand of the Democratic platform for all of Oregon as
far north as the parallel 54 ° 40'. The possibility of
war if Great Britain refused to yield counted for little
with the American public, for the fever of expansion
had been stirred up by the annexation of Texas and
Great Britain was still looked upon more as an ancient
enemy than as a continental neighbor.

Fortunately for both nations the quarrel yielded
to diplomacy. In 1846 Great Britain, after refusing
to accept as the boundary the parallel 49 ° with the
free navigation of the Columbia river, changed its
mind and accepted, and a treaty settled the boundary
dispute on that basis. Oregon was presently given a
territorial organization, and a steady stream of mi-
gration across the plains flowed into the fertile valley
of the Columbia and prepared the way for statehood
thirteen years later. The vague dream of the ancient

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 179

colonial charters had in part come true, for the United
States now extended from sea to sea and the con-
tinental pre-eminence of the nation was demonstrated
fact. The first free State west of the Mississippi,
Iowa, was admitted to the Union in the same year in
which the boundary controversy was settled, Wiscon-
sin was almost ready for admission, and Minnesota
had a territorial government. Only the hold of Spain
upon California and the remote Southwest barred the
further expansion of the United States to the Pacific.
The war with Mexico was on the part of the United
States essentially a war of aggression, and not the less
so because Polk manipulated the situation with skill
in order to make it appear that Mexico was the
offender. The refusal of Mexico from the beginning
to consent to the withdrawal of Texas had irritated
American public opinion, and the uncertainty regard-
ing the boundary between Texas and Mexico af-
forded an excuse for the American occupation of
territory, under the guise of protecting Texas from in-
vasion, which Mexico continued to claim as its own.
For more than a year after the inauguration of Polk,
however, the controversy kept to the field of diplo-
macy notwithstanding the presence of American
troops in the disputed area. Then, following an at-
tack on April 24, 1846, by a Mexican force upon an
American detachment, the news of which was hurried
to Washington, Polk framed a message to Congress
which reviewed the recent course of events in a way
highly prejudicial to Mexico, declared that Mexico

180 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

had invaded the territory of the United States and
" shed American blood upon American soil," and
asked for a declaration of war. The message, sent
to the houses two days after the news from Mexico
was received, was denounced by the northern Whigs
as untruthful in fact and a deliberate provocation to
war, but the declaration and money were promptly
voted and the invasion of Mexico began. That a suc-
cessful war would mean the further strengthening of
the political power of slavery no one doubted, and the
opponents of slavery and of territorial expansion
never ceased to lay upon the South the responsibility
for the war. Outside of New England, however, the
war was popular, and the excitement of a military
adventure and the prospect of adding still further
to American territory quite outweighed the slavery
argument.

Ultimate victory for the American armies was not
at any time doubtful, but nearly two years of cam-
paigning were necessary before Mexican resistance
could be overcome. The first successes were won by
General Zachary Taylor, who for months before the
declaration of war had occupied the disputed Texas
region on the Mexican border, and who on May 8
and 9 defeated the Mexican forces at Palo Alto and
Resaca de la Palma in decisive engagements which
made him a popular hero. An overland expedition
took possession without difficulty of the northern
Mexican provinces, now the States of New Mexico
and Arizona, pushed on to California, and in cooper-

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 181

ation with American land and naval forces which had
already been operating there brought California under
American control. Polk, who was a confirmed ex-
pansionist, decided to keep the northern provinces
and California whatever the outcome of the war else-
where, but to pay Mexico a reasonable price for the
territory which it was to be forced to cede. A sum
as large as thirty million dollars, twice the amount
which Mexico eventually received, was talked of in
this connection. The remainder of the war, accord-
ingly, was fought not with a view to further conquest
of territory but to prevent Mexico from recovering
the northern provinces and to bring it to terms. The
central point of attack was the City of Mexico, and
with the occupation of the capital in 1847 after a
stubborn defence the fighting ceased. General Tay-
lor, who had not enjoyed the full confidence of Polk
and who was dissatisfied with the treatment which he
had received, had resigned from the army and re-
turned to the United States, and the honors of final
victory were gained by General Winfield Scott.

A treaty of peace, concluded on the part of the
United States by an American in Mexico, Slidell,
without full official authorization, was signed on
July 4, 1848, accepted by Polk, and shortly ratified
by Congress. The terms were substantially those
which Polk had already planned to impose. The
boundary between Texas and Mexico was fixed at the
Rio Grande river, while west of Texas the boundary
continued to the Pacific on a line which left to the

1 82 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

United States the present States of New Mexico,
Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah and a part of
Colorado. The area ceded by Mexico embraced over
529,000 square miles, and for this the United States
agreed to pay approximately fifteen million dollars.
A readjustment of a portion of the boundary in 1853,
known as the Gadsden purchase, added about thirty
thousand square miles to the original cession. With
the exception of the Gadsden purchase and Alaska, the
latter not acquired until after the Civil war, the
Mexican war left the United States with the same
continental area which it now possesses — an area
three and one-half times as great as that which the
United States possessed at the close of the Revolu-
tion and only a little less than that of the vast British
possessions to the north. Polk had reason to be proud
of his handiwork.

Further than this, however, Polk was not to be
allowed to go. The enthusiasm which a successful war
had awakened brought him no enduring personal
popularity, and although the Democrats still con-
trolled the Senate they had lost in 1846 their majority
in the House of Representatives. The Whigs, on the
other hand, ready enough to seize party advantage
from the war notwithstanding that they had given the
war only a divided support, had a popular candidate
for the presidency in Taylor, and the election of 1848
was a Whig victory so far as the control of the exec-
utive went. The unstable condition of parties was
shown by the fact that the Democrats, in spite of the

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 183

success of the Whig candidate for the presidency, re-
covered their control of the House, and Congress and
the president were once more of opposing parties.

The question of slavery could not be kept down.
In 1846, when a preliminary appropriation of money
for the purchase of Mexican territory was asked
for, a Democratic member of the House, David
Wilmot of Pennsylvania, had attempted to attach
to the bill a proviso excluding slavery from any
territory that might be acquired, and the same at-
tempt was again made in 1847. In September, 1848,
gold was discovered in California, and when in a few
months the startling news reached the East one of
the greatest movements of migration that the world
has ever seen began. From all parts of the United
States except the South people flocked to California
in search of gold. Some went by sea by way of the
isthmus of Panama, crowding to repletion the few
steamships that were available; many more made the
long and hazardous journey across the western plains
in wagons drawn by oxen or horses, fighting the
Indians as they went; still others took the long sea
route around Cape Horn. Before the fall of 1849 a
provisional government had been set up, a State con-
stitution prohibiting slavery had been prepared by a
convention, and California applied to Congress for
admission as a free State. The fact that California
had never been a Territory was of no interest to its
people, for they all were familiar with State govern-
ment in the States from which they came, the popula-

1 84 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

tion was rapidly nearing a hundred thousand, and the
pioneers and gold seekers who were building a com-
monwealth saw no reason why they should not have
statehood at once; but it must be statehood without
slavery.

The admission of California alone, however, would
destroy the sectional balance of States which the
South must if possible continue to preserve. The
admission of Florida and Texas in 1845 nad been fol-
lowed by the admission of Iowa in 1846 and of Wis-
consin in 1848, and the thirty States of which the
Union was now composed were equally divided. But
where was an offset to California to be found? Texas
was unwilling to be subdivided. Less than half of the
territory acquired from Mexico outside of California
lay to the south of the Missouri compromise line of
3 6° 30', and practically the whole of the Mexican
acquisition except California was believed to be unfit
for agriculture on a large scale. The organization of
a territorial government in Oregon merely prepared
the way for the formation of another free State. The
only apparent solution of the difficulty was to regard
the Missouri compromise not as a great national
settlement which was to be applied no matter how
far westward the territory of the United States might
extend, but as a settlement limited to the area which
the United States possessed in 1820. In that case
the compromise would have no application to the
territory acquired from Mexico, and all of that ter-
ritory except California, which it was agreed would

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 185

have to be admitted as a free State if it was admitted
at all, would be open to slavery if the people so de-
sired. The chance would still be a doubtful one for
slavery because of the physical characteristics of the
country, but the organization of two Territories, New
Mexico and Utah, comprising between them all of
trie Mexican acquisition except California, held out the
possibility of two slave States with which to offset
California and Oregon, and the chance must be taken
or sectional control of the Senate was lost.

The debate in Congress which attended the framing
of what is known as the compromise of 1850 ranged
over almost every aspect of the slavery question. To
the old arguments which urged the protection of slav-
ery on constitutional grounds, however, was added the
new contention that the status of slavery in territory
acquired by annexation was properly to be deter-
mined only by the people of the region concerned,
and that Congress ought neither to legislate slavery
into such territory nor prohibit it there, but should
leave the people free to choose their " domestic insti-
tutions " for themselves. Slave labor, it was urged,
was after all primarily a matter of soil, climate, and
general circumstances. If nature made slave labor
profitable slavery would be established and should
be protected. If natural conditions were adverse
slavery would not endure even if it were introduced,
and no act of Congress would be necessary to legislate
it out of a Territory, because it would die of itself.
Accordingly the only just policy, if territorial govern-

1 86 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ments were set up for New Mexico and Utah, was to
leave the question of slavery to be settled by local
option, and to admit the Territories later as States
with or without slavery as their constitutions might
prescribe at the time of admission.

The plea for local option was difficult to answer
notwithstanding that it seemed to cast disturbing
doubt upon the constitutionality of such long-estab-
lished decisions as the ordinance of 1787 and the
Missouri compromise. The opponents of slavery ex-
tension, on the other hand, strengthened in their faith
by the moral opposition to slavery which the abolition
movement had kept alive, rightly feared that the
supporters of slavery, seeing their control of Congress
jeopardized, would leave no stone unturned to force
slavery upon the proposed new Territories and thereby
succeed in determining in advance the character of the
future States as slave or free. Local option, in other
words, was a peril rather than a principle. The anti-
slavery and free soil forces accordingly insisted that
slavery was not a matter in regard to which the people
of a Territory should be invited to choose, because the
institution itself was bad; that natural law devoted
all acquired territory to freedom, and that the whole
history of the United States so far as slavery was
concerned showed that slavery had always been re-
garded as something to be restrained in its territorial
growth. It had been excluded in 1787 from the terri-
tory of the United States northwest of the Ohio river
because even at that early date its encroachment had

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 187

been feared, and the confirmation of the ordinance
by the first Congress under the Constitution was a
weighty approval of that action. The Missouri com-
promise further upheld restriction by excluding slavery
from most of the Louisiana purchase, although for po-
litical reasons it had been necessary to admit Missouri
as an exception, and the principle of the Missouri
compromise required the extension of the compromise
line to the Pacific now that American territory ex-
tended so far. It was further urged that Mexico
itself had prohibited slavery by law in its northern
provinces years before the Mexican war, and that to
open the way to the introduction of slavery in the
newly-acquired territory would be to re-establish
slavery in a region from which it had long been legally
excluded.

Two other aspects of slavery, neither of which had
as yet been prominent as a political issue, also entered
into the great debate. The Constitution provided
that no person legally held to service or labor under
the laws of any State, if he escaped into another
State, should thereby be entitled to freedom from his
servitude, but should be given up and returned upon
the demand of the person to whom the service or
labor was due. The abolitionists had long been active
in helping fugitive slaves to find asylum in free States
or in Canada, and although the total number of
fugitive slaves was small, southern slave owners com-
plained bitterly of the loss of their property, of the
difficulties which were met with in obtaining the re-

1 88 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

turn of slaves who were found in free States, and
of the insufficiency of the existing federal laws de-
signed to give effect to the constitutional provision.
The South accordingly demanded the enactment of a
stringent fugitive slave law which would protect them
in their rights. On the other hand many northern
members of Congress had long been hostile to the con-
tinuance of slavery and the domestic slave trade in
the District of Columbia, and the distressing scenes
which were frequently to be witnessed in the slave
market at the national capital were a powerful argu-
ment for abolition. There was no question of the
authority of Congress over both of these subjects, for
the Constitution expressly provided for the return
of fugitive slaves and gave to Congress complete juris-
diction over the territory occupied as the seat of the
national government.

The death of President Taylor in July, 1850, and
the succession to the presidency of the vice-president,
Millard Fillmore of New York, were without influence
upon the slavery controversy, for the main lines of
compromise, drawn largely under the direction of
Clay, had already been laid down and in a few weeks
settlement was completed. California was admitted
as a State under its free constitution. Two Terri-
tories, New Mexico and Utah, were organized with the
promise that when admitted as States they should
be received with or without slavery as their
constitutions might prescribe. A drastic fugitive
slave law was enacted, and the slave trade but not

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 189

slavery was prohibited in the District of Columbia.
The compromise of 1850 is a great line of division
in the political history of the American nation. It
marks the place at which the Democratic party be-
comes avowedly a proslavery party, committed to the
defence of slavery at whatever point the institution
might be attacked. The Whig party, on the contrary,
was split wide open by the compromise, the southern
section siding with the Democrats when slavery was
involved, while the northern section, although by no
means in favor of abolition, clung to the old policy
of restriction. From this time, too, the temper of
the slaveholding States underwent a change. Until
1850 the South had been in general willing to admit
the weaknesses of slavery as a system, and it had re-
peatedly apologized for the institution as one which
climate and history had together forced it to main-
tain; but after 1850 apology ceased and slavery was
upheld as a worthy system which the South was pre-
pared to support without regard to public opinion
elsewhere or to economic or moral argument. Long-
established political reputations, too, went by the
board, and not even death availed to shield great men
from rebuke. Clay's philosophy of compromise had
nothing more to offer, and his two-sided attitude to-
ward the greatest of national issues had already put
the hoped-for presidency beyond his grasp. Webster,
the idol of Massachusetts and the strongest intellec-
tual force among the northern Whigs, turned his back
on antislavery and supported the compromise, braved

190 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

for a few months the contempt and scorn of his con-
stituents and former friends, then died of a broken
heart. Calhoun, the shadow of death upon him, was
wheeled into the Senate chamber while a colleague
read his last plea for slavery and the States, then
in a few weeks he too had passed into history. The
days of the " great triumvirate " were spent, and the
tangled estate which they left was now to be ad-
ministered by other and stronger minds.

Nevertheless, the conclusion of the compromise of
1850 brought to the country for the moment a great
sense of relief. Save in extreme radical circles men
affected to believe that the slavery controversy had at
last been settled. It was true that the admission of
California had destroyed the long-cherished balance
between the sections in the House of Representatives
and that the outlook for slavery in New Mexico and
Utah was dubious, but the willingness of the South to
accept the compromise even with these conditions was
taken as evidence that the aggressiveness of the
slavery supporters had moderated and that sectional
strife, if it continued, would now take a different
turn. The early demand for abolition, at no time
actively championed by either of the dominant parties,
had resolved itself into a demand for free soil in new
Territories and States; and although it was the free
soil Whigs who had forced the fighting in 1850,
neither antislavery nor free soil criticism was a
serious menace to slavery as such. There was reason
for suspecting that slave agriculture was in fact

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 19 1

already on the decline, and that another generation
or two might see its virtual disappearance because
it was unprofitable. If the " peculiar institution "
was doomed to early death by natural economic laws
there was less need of bitter and distracting con-
troversies to hasten its end.

The hoped-for peace was of short duration, for in
a few months the enforcement of the fugitive slave
law was driving the North to exasperation. Agents
of southern slave owners, armed with legal authority
as the law provided, scoured the North in search of
runaway Negroes, demanded the arrest of the alleged
fugitives by local or State officials, pushed through
before federal commissioners a form of judicial hear-
ing in which the fugitive was debarred by law from
testifying in his own behalf, and returned the fugitives
under federal protection to the States from which they
had fled. In the face of an invasion which was always
offensive and sometimes brutal moderate antislavery
opinions tended rapidly to give way, and throughout
the North prominent citizens joined in resisting the
arrests and deportations. South Carolina had openly
proclaimed tariff laws to be null and void within its
borders, only to find its nullification doctrine repudi-
ated by the rest of the country and the federal exec-
utive ready if necessary to use force, but half a score
of northern States now nullified the fugitive slave law
either by overlooking the organized resistance of
their citizens or by extending to fugitives the protec-
tion of State courts. Fillmore's temper was not that

192 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of Jackson, and where Jackson had deployed the army
and navy Fillmore could only issue a proclamation.
Webster had advised Fillmore that the fugitive slave
law was constitutional, and the president was perhaps
to be excused for signing the bill, but even Webster's
authority had no weight with a North which regarded
the law as immoral. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ad-
dressing his fellow-townsmen at Concord, Massachu-
setts, denounced the law as one which no person could
enforce or help to enforce without loss of self-respect
and the name of a gentleman, and the pithy phrase
expressed the judgment of the people.

The law gave the final blow to the tottering Whig
party. Weakened by hopeless division into two sec-
tional groups and with no programme save one of
compromise, its listless defence of the legislation of
1850 only hastened its end. Even its soldier candi-
date, General Scott, the "hero of Chapultepec,"
could not save it in the presidential contest of 1856; 2.^
and although the Democratic candidate, Franklin
Pierce of New Hampshire, was of far less importance
than Scott, the Democratic victory was complete. Be-
fore another election came round the Whig party had
disappeared as a national organization and a new Re-
publican party was ready to take its place.

Even without the odious fugitive slave law, how-
ever, the issue of slavery could not have been kept
out of politics, for the compromise itself contained
the germ of further dissension. The compromise
measures had established the principle of local option

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 193

regarding slavery in federal territory to which the
Missouri compromise did not apply, but it had not
repealed the earlier compromise or interfered with its
operation. The treatment of the same subject by
two entirely different and inherently opposed methods
in different parts of the United States was an illogical
procedure not likely long to endure, since the argu-
ments which supported the one method could readily
be turned against the other. In less than three years
after the last step in the compromise of 1850 had
been taken the whole question of slavery was torn
open by the demand in Congress for the organization
of a Kansas Territory west of the Missouri river and
the application to the new Territory of the principle
of local option. The region involved, comprising in
general the area of the present States of Kansas and
Nebraska and westward to the Rocky mountains
watershed, had been left without political organization
when Missouri was admitted as a State, but the
slavery prohibition of the Missouri compromise ap-
plied to it because it lay north of the compromise line
of 360 30' and it had not been affected by the
measures of 1850.

Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from
Illinois, who had taken a prominent part in framing
the legislation of 1850, championed the demand of
the South for the organization of Kansas Territory
with the local option principle on the ground that
that principle, being inconsistent with the principle of
absolute prohibition of slavery which the Missouri

194 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

compromise embodied, had superseded the earlier
principle and was now the recognized national policy.
The debate which the Kansas proposal unloosed shook
the country as no political debate on any subject had
ever shaken it. Northern members of Congress,
among them numerous Democrats, their repugnance
to slavery intensified by the operation of the fugitive
slave law, accused the South of deliberately tearing
up a national agreement to which the good faith of the
nation was solemnly pledged. The South, convinced
now that slavery would not be successfully established
in either New Mexico or Utah, defiantly insisted upon
a new trial of strength in Kansas, and under the
leadership of Douglas the South won. The original
proposal was modified to the extent of providing for
the organization of two Territories, Kansas and
Nebraska, instead of one, with some changes of
boundary, but not only was the principle of the com-
promise of 1850 applied to both Territories but the
slavery prohibition of the Missouri compromise was
specifically repealed.

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act in May,
1854, was the last effort of slavery to maintain itself
by territorial compromise. With all of the remaining
unorganized domain of the United States now by im-
plication open to slavery, the domestic institution
which had long been apologized for had become a
national institution to be protected and defended like
any other. The Union was divided, half free and half
slave, but the slave section for the moment was in

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 195

control. There remained for it the task of establishing
slavery firmly in one or the other of the two new
Territories and bringing either Kansas or Nebraska
into the Union as a slave State. If the South failed
in that undertaking and the sectional struggle con-
tinued, there was nothing left for the slave States to
do but to withdraw, for the days of compromise were
over.

CHAPTER VIII
THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY

The struggle for the establishment of slavery in
Kansas Territory has been aptly called the prelude
to the Civil War. The armed conflict which for two
years went on in Kansas was a warning that the time
for argument had passed, and that the political claims
of slavery would now be upheld by force if they met
with opposition. There was little disposition in the
South to leave the question of slavery in Kansas to
be settled by the natural course of events; on the
contrary slavery was if possible to be forced upon
Kansas, lawfully if that were practicable, lawlessly
if that seemed necessary. The future of slavery hung
upon the outcome, for no other region remained in
which slavery could hope to exist even if it were in-
troduced. Kansas was in the same latitude as
southern Missouri, and while two-thirds at least of the
Territory was believed to be sterile the eastern portion
was undoubtedly fit for agriculture. Nebraska ac-
cordingly dropped for the time being out of sight and
Kansas became the battle ground.

The drama unfolded rapidly. The Kansas-Ne-
braska act became law on May 30, 1854. Within a
month a considerable number of Missourians had

196

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 197

moved across the border and taken possession of some
of the best land. The newcomers were soon fol-
lowed by parties of emigrants from New England and
other northern States, and the New England Emigrant
Aid Society undertook to plant in the Territory a pre-
ponderant population of free State men and women.
The territorial election of 1855 was carried by the pro-
slavery faction by open fraud, armed parties from
Missouri entering the Territory on the morning of
election day, taking possession of the polling places,
stuffing the ballot boxes, and furnishing three-fourths
of the total vote returned. The territorial governor
was able to set aside the returns on technical grounds
in a few districts only, and the proslavery legislature
which had been elected hastened to enact the Missouri
code of laws for Kansas with the addition of stringent
provisions for the protection of slavery. The free
State party, which had repudiated the election,
organized a free State legislature and elected a dele-
gate to the House of Representatives at Washington
as the proslavery legislature had done. With rival
governments struggling for control Kansas passed into
a period of border warfare having all the character-
istics of civil war, and for nearly two years raids,
burnings, and armed encounters were the normal
order of the day.

Both of the territorial delegates who had been
chosen were rejected by the House of Representa-
tives, but an investigation in 1856 by a committee of
the House produced only majority and minority re-

iq8 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ports each of which flatly contradicted the findings
of the other. President Pierce gave his support to
the proslavery faction and under his orders a free
State convention at Topeka was dispersed by federal
troops, but a free State constitution was nevertheless
drawn up and application made to Congress for the
admission of Kansas as a free State. The proslavery
party retorted by drafting the Lecompton consti-
tution recognizing slavery, and submitted the consti-
tution for popular approval under conditions by which,
if the constitution were rejected, the future growth of
slavery would be restricted but the slaves already in
Kansas would continue to be held. The free State
men denounced the Lecompton constitution as a fraud
and stayed away from the polls, with the result
that the constitution was adopted by an overwhelming
majority.

The Kansas controversy was at its height when the
election of 1856 came on. A new Republican party,
based upon broad construction principles and calling
for a protective tariff and the exclusion of slavery from
the Territories, had entered the field and was drawing
into its ranks both antislavery Whigs and antislavery
Democrats. Public opinion, already excited and em-
bittered by the extraordinary events in Kansas, was
further outraged by a brutal assault in the Senate
chamber upon Charles Sumner, senator from Massa-
chusetts, a determined opponent of slavery and a bril-
liant but vituperative orator. The Republican candi-
date for the presidency, however, John C. Fremont of

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 199

California, was known to the country only as a
western explorer, and although the Republican popu-
lar vote reached the large figure of more than
1,390,000, the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan
of Pennsylvania, was elected. An American party,
with strict naturalization laws and the exclusion of
all but native-born citizens from office as its distinc-
tive tenets, also entered the contest, but its candidate,
former President Fillmore, received only a few elec-
toral votes. The congressional elections of 1854 had
already overturned the Democratic majority in the
House of Representatives, and the combined Repub-
lican and American membership controlled the House
in 1856.

The antislavery forces in Congress were not strong
enough to admit Kansas with its free State constitu-
tion, but the rejection of the Lecompton constitution
when a vote without conditions was presently taken
ended the effort of the South to capture Kansas for
slavery. Kansas remained a Territory until 1861,
but by 1858 the free State population was in control
and the battle for freedom had been won.

On March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration
of Buchanan, the Supreme Court of the United States
announced its decision in the famous case of Dred
Scott. A decision had actually been reached late in
the previous year and Buchanan was aware of its
import, but the announcement was held back for po-
litical effect until the new administration had taken
office. The case, long and carefully prepared, was

200 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ideally adapted to secure from the court what the
South had long desired, namely, an authoritative ju-
dicial decision regarding the status of the Negro and
the constitutionality of acts of Congress excluding
slavery from parts of the United States. Dred Scott
was a Negro whose ancestors had been imported into
the United States from Africa and held and sold as
slaves. He had lived with his owner, an army sur-
geon, in Illinois, a State in which slavery was pro-
hibited by the ordinance of 1787; in a part of the
Louisiana purchase from which slavery was excluded
by the Missouri compromise and where, with the con-
sent of his owner, he had married; and finally in Mis-
souri, a slave State. Following the death of his
former owner Scott became the property of one Sand-
ford, a citizen of New York. The case came to the
Supreme Court from the federal district court for
Missouri, where Scott had brought suit to establish
his claim to freedom on the ground of previous resi-
dence in free territory and to secure damages for the
alleged illegal detention of himself and his family as
slaves. Counsel for Sandford had argued that Scott,
being a Negro and a slave, was not a citizen within
the meaning of the federal Constitution and hence
was not entitled to sue in a federal court, but the dis-
trict court decided in favor of Scott and the case was
then carried to the Supreme Court on appeal.

In an elaborate opinion in which a majority of the
eight associate justices concurred, Chief Justice Taney
denied the claim of Scott to citizenship. The whole

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 201

history of slavery in the United States, Taney de-
clared, showed that the Negro had always been re-
garded as of an inferior race whose members certain
States had deemed it proper to hold in servitude and
to class as property; and while a State might if it
chose make a Negro a citizen of the State, such
citizenship did not make him also a citizen of the
United States or confer upon him the right to sue in
a federal court. The importance of Taney's decision
at this point will be understood by recalling that the
Constitution at that time did not define citizenship,
and the Dred Scott case brought out the first authori-
tative judicial ruling that citizenship of a State was
not the same thing as citizenship of the United States.
Here Taney should have stopped. If Dred Scott
was not a citizen and had no right to sue in a federal
court, the court obviously had no jurisdiction of his
plea, and the decision of the federal district court for
Missouri sustaining his claim should have been re-
versed by the customary procedure. Taney was
thinking of politics as well as of law, however, and
he accordingly went on to consider whether or not
Scott was entitled to his freedom by reason of his
previous residence in territory from which slavery
had been excluded by law. A long examination of the
history of the Missouri compromise and of the legal
points which it involved failed to show any consti-
tutional warrant for excluding from any part of the
territory of the United States anything which any
State recognized as property, and the Missouri com-

202 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

promise was accordingly pronounced unconstitutional
and void. Associate Justice Curtis, in a powerful dis-
senting opinion, exposed the inaccuracy of some of
Taney's historical statements and the fallacies of his
reasoning in regard to the citizenship of Negroes, and
sustained the claim of Scott and the constitutionality
of the compromise, but the decision of the majority
was the decision of the court. The Dred Scott deci-
sion upheld with judicial finality virtually every
claim of right or privilege that slavery had ever made,
and left the Negro without hope even if he were freed.
The legal doctrines of the decision were at least
open to debate, and the ruling with respect to citizen-
ship was probably good law. The decision was in-
stantly repudiated, however, by Republicans and
antislavery Democrats as immoral, and the obloquy
which befell the court for its uncalled-for attempt to
settle a purely political question was a blow to its
prestige from which it required years to recover. A
series of political debates in Illinois in 1858, where a
comparatively unknown lawyer, Abraham Lincoln,
contested unsuccessfully the seat of Douglas in the
Senate, discussed in all its phases the Dred Scott de-
cision and strengthened the Republican opposition.
Yet the North as a whole still hoped for peace. Lin-
coln's pointed assertion that the Union could not con-
tinue half slave and half free, but must become wholly
one thing or the other, while it expressed a conviction
to which the more radical antislavery sentiment of the
country was rapidly being driven, did not as yet voice

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 203

the opinion of the free States as a whole. The long
years of compromise had had their effect, and the
North still looked for a settlement without the dreaded
intervention of force. When in October, 1859, John
Brown made a spectacular attempt to free the slaves
in Virginia his raid awakened only sporadic sympathy
in the North, although it was of Brown that Union
soldiers were singing less than two years later.

The presidential election of i860 was the crucial
test. The Republicans were confident, but they were
not strong enough to win on the slavery issue alone,
and accordingly their platform, while vigorously de-
nouncing the Dred Scott decision and demanding free-
dom in the Territories, gave a prominent place to
the demand for a protective tariff, internal improve-
ments, and a railway to the Pacific. The obvious
Republican candidate was William H. Seward, an
able antislavery leader who had been governor of
New York and United States senator. Seward's firm-
ness on the slavery question in the form which the
question had now taken was in doubt, however, and
the choice of the convention fell upon Lincoln, whose
speeches in the Illinois debates and elsewhere had
made him one of the leading exponents of Republican
antislavery opinion. With Lincoln was associated as
vice-presidential candidate Hannibal Hamlin of
Maine. The selection of both candidates from north-
ern States not only emphasized the sectional character
of the party, but offered also a bold challenge to the
disunionists to show their hand.

204 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

The Democrats were divided. The majority,
staunchly supporting slavery but as staunchly op-
posed to disunion, nominated Douglas, while the dis-
union minority in a separate convention nominated
J. C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. A remnant of the
old Whigs, taking the name of the Constitutional
Union party, held a convention and nominated John
Bell of Tennessee on a platform which called for
nothing more specific than the Constitution of the
country, the union of the States, and the observance
of the laws, to none of which demands had any party
thus far been opposed. Of the 303 electoral votes 180
were given for Lincoln and Hamlin, all of the northern
States except New Jersey supporting the Republican
candidates, but it was the popular vote that showed
the mind of the nation. In a total vote of 4,675,853
Lincoln received 1,866,352, or considerably less than
one-half; Douglas, the Democratic Union candidate,
received 1,375,157; and Bell, the candidate of the
Constitutional Unionists, received 589,581. The com-
bined vote of the union candidates was thus over
3,830,000, while the vote for Breckinridge, the only
candidate who stood upon a disunion platform, wTas
only 845,763. It was clear that disunion as a cam-
paign issue had extremely small support in the
country at the same time that the Republicans, not-
withstanding an overwhelming majority in both houses
of the new Congress, were hardly strong enough with
the people to pursue an aggressive policy unless the
South forced the issue.

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 205

But the South did not hesitate, and again it was
South Carolina that led. The day following the elec-
tion every federal office holder in South Carolina re-
signed, and on December 20 an ordinance of seces-
sion, carefully framed to avoid every constitutional
difficulty, declared the State to be independent. Sim-
ilar action was soon taken in Virginia, Georgia, Flor-
ida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Southern
senators and representatives in Congress gave up
their seats, federal officers in the seceded States sur-
rendered their offices, and federal property, including
the mint at New Orleans, was seized. In February,
1 86 1, a convention of seven States met at Montgomery,
Alabama, and drew up a constitution for the Con-
federate States of America, and in March the new
government, to which North Carolina and Texas ad-
hered, went into operation with Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi as president. Of the five border States
of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and
Arkansas only Tennessee and Arkansas formally se-
ceded; in the others the disunion movement was frus-
trated by political dissensions or by the quick action
of Union supporters. Delaware, hitherto counted as a
slave State, suffered from disaffection but remained
in the Union.

President Buchanan was a State rights strict con-
struction Democrat of the old school who had no
sympathy with secession, but he could see no legal
way of preventing a State from withdrawing from the
Union save by resort to coercion, and for coercion the

*jp

206 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Constitution afforded no clear authority. The South,
accordingly, was practically assured of a free hand
throughout the whole interval between the election
in November and the inauguration of Lincoln in the
following March. Congress, apparently only half
realizing the significance of what was taking place,
took no important steps to strengthen the re-
sources of the federal government, wasted time in the
discussion of further compromises, and actually
framed and submitted to the States a proposed consti-
tutional amendment which would have deprived the
United States forever of power to interfere with
slavery. Lincoln, meantime, remained quietly at his
home in Illinois, expressing on occasion his hope for
a peaceable adjustment but giving no indication of
his plans. Then on the fourth of March, 1861, the
unhonored administration of Buchanan passed into
history and Lincoln took up the mighty task of pre-
serving the nation from disunion.

Lincoln's inaugural address was conciliatory, but
councils of peace were not to prevail. On April 12
Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, one of the forts
which the Confederates had not seized, was fired upon
by Confederate batteries and the next day surren-
dered, and the great Civil war had begun. The Federal
army was insignificant and nearly one-half of the
force had been lost when Texas seceded, but in re-
sponse to Lincoln's call for volunteers the North, its
party differences forgotten now that the Union had
been assailed, sprang instantly to arms. Thanks to

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 207

the patriotic foresight of Governor Andrew of Massa-
chusetts the Old Bay State was ready, and the Sixth
Massachusetts regiment, the first of the hundreds
of Union regiments to be in the field, fought its way
through the streets of Baltimore en route to Washing-
ton, where it was quickly joined by the Seventh New
York. In a few weeks an assembled army, largely
undisciplined and poorly equipped but abounding in
spirit, had insured the safety of the national capital.
But nation and army demanded haste, and haste
brought disaster. On July 21 the Federal and Con-
federate forces met at Bull Run, and when the beaten
and demoralized Federal army poured back to Wash-
ington in disorderly retreat the dream of an easy
victory over the Confederacy had vanished and the
North sternly settled down to war.

From a military point of view the position of the
Confederacy had some elements of strength. The se-
ceded States could rest upon the defensive and
thereby throw upon the North the burden of attack.
Their white population was homogeneous, and the
assurance of a food supply through slave labor freed
most of the adult male population for fighting. The
seizure of federal forts, arsenals, and other property
gave the Confederacy an initial advantage in the
possession of military supplies, and many officers of
the regular army " went with their State " when the
States seceded and entered the Confederate service.
Moreover, the cause for which the South fought was
in form that of independence, the right to live its own

208 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

life in its own way, and to that cause all save an in-
significant fraction of the people were devoted. Yet
the elements of weakness were far more important
than the elements of strength. Of the population of
slightly more than 12,300,000 in the South in i860, a
number equal to about two-fifths of the total popula-
tion of the country, 3,500,000 were slaves. The South
was not a manufacturing region, and unless factories
were established with amazing rapidity the needed
supplies of arms, munitions, and manufactured com-
modities generally could be obtained only through im-
portation from abroad. A blockade of the coast, on
the other hand, would destroy Confederate commerce,
cotton could not be sold, manufactured goods of all
kinds would before long disappear, and the collapse of
the Confederacy would then be only a matter of time.
The Mississippi river, cutting the Confederacy in two,
was a menace to unity, and unless the lower course of
the river could be held Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas could be cut off and the western border of
Mississippi would be open to attack; while the great
length of the northern border, open to simultaneous
attack at a number of points, made the Confederate
frontier hard to defend.

Before the close of Buchanan's administration the
withdrawal of southern members of Congress had
made possible the admission of Kansas as a State, and
with the beginning of hostilities the Democrats, while
retaining their separate party organization, joined
loyally with the Republicans in the work of putting

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 209

the North on a war basis. A long list of statutes pro-
vided for the increase of the army and navy and the
enrolment of volunteers, railway and telegraph lines
passed under the control of the military authorities,
the Union Pacific Railway was projected, and fac-
tories and mills worked day and night at the fabrica-
tion of military equipment. The establishment of
the present national banking system in 1863 was fol-
lowed by the issuance of a series of huge loans for
whose repayment the faith of the nation was expressly
pledged, and by large emissions of paper currency.
Foreign governments were early warned that the war
was regarded by the federal government as a rebel-
lion for whose suppression the army and navy must
be employed, but that the right of the Confederate
States to secede from the Union could not be admitted
and that foreign intervention in aid of the Confed-
erate cause would be looked upon as an unfriendly act.
A federal blockade tightened its hold upon the Con-
federate coast, and although a certain amount of lu-
crative blockade-running went on throughout the war,
and Confederate cruisers and privateers dealt hard
blows to American commerce, southern commerce of
every kind was before long practically cut off and
Confederate armed vessels were relentlessly pursued,
captured, or destroyed in every sea.

Lincoln had early meditated the emancipation of
the slaves, rightly holding that slavery was the under-
lying foundation upon which the Confederate demand
for independence was built. But the war was a war

2io AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

for union, not a war for emancipation, and the freeing
of the slaves, if it were to take place while the war was
going on, would be the act of the president as com-
mander-in-chief of the national military forces and
justifiable only as a military measure under the recog-
nized laws of war. In the summer of 1862 Lincoln
read to his cabinet the draft of an emancipation proc-
lamation, but the lack as yet of any marked victory
of the Federal armies would, it was thought, weaken
the moral effect of the proclamation if it were issued
then, and it was accordingly withheld. The long-
looked-for victory came at Antietam, and on Septem-
ber 22 a preliminary proclamation, announcing that
on January 1, 1863, the slaves would be freed in all
of the States which had not by that time laid down
their arms, was published. The Confederate resist-
ance did not cease, and on January 1 emancipation
was proclaimed. The proclamation did not abolish
slavery as an institution, that step being one which
only a constitutional amendment could achieve, and
the act of emancipation applied to those States only in
which armed resistance to the federal authority was
still going on, but it was nevertheless a death blow to
the system and to the Confederacy as well.

The blow was timely, for the North was showing
signs of reaction. The unexpectedly long continuance
of the war, the heavy loss of life, the repeated calls
for volunteers, the arbitrary arrest of thousands of
suspected persons and their confinement for long
periods without a trial, and the imposition of a draft

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 211

system when voluntary enlistment failed, all com-
bined to dampen the enthusiasm with which the North
had rushed to arms and to create an ominous volume
of discontent. There was a feeling in many quarters
that the war had changed its original character, and
that the destruction of slavery and the supremacy of
the Republican party rather than the saving of the
Union had become the main objective. In July, 1863,
the enforcement of the draft provoked a formidable
outbreak of mob violence in New York and Brooklyn,
and order was restored only with the aid of Federal
troops hurriedly brought from the front. The mob
outburst was the more significant because only two
weeks before, on July 1-3, a mighty effort of the Con-
federacy to invade the North had been defeated at
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and although the Federal
victory was not promptly followed up it was clear
to military men that the power of the Confederacy
had passed its zenith and was on the decline. The
British government, too, strangely misconceiving the
nature of the conflict, had from the beginning been
friendly to the South, and had not only permitted
Confederate cruisers and privateers to be built and
outfitted in British ports, but was apparently willing
to join with other European powers in some kind of
intervention had not France and Russia refused. The
irritation toward Great Britain did not subside until
in 1870 an arbitration tribunal at Geneva awarded to
the United States substantial damages for the losses
to American commerce which the unneutral conduct

212 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of the British government was held to have caused.
The Republicans, however, were not disturbed not-
withstanding significant Democratic gains in the con-
gressional elections of 1862, and in 1864 they renom-
inated Lincoln on a platform which boldly cham-
pioned all that the party and the president had done in
the prosecution of the war and called for the continu-
ance of the war until the Confederate resistance
should be crushed. To encourage the growing union
sentiment in the South and at the same time empha-
size the national character of the party as they had
not been able to emphasize it in i860, the nomination
for the vice-presidency was given to Andrew Johnson
of Tennessee, a State which had seceded but which the
Federal armies had recovered. The Democrats, ready
now that the slaves had been emancipated to oppose
the continuance of the war, nominated a former Union
general, George B. McClellan, on a platform which
denounced the conduct of the war as a failure. Mc-
Clellan had no reason to love the Republicans, for
while he had performed praiseworthy service at the
beginning of the war he had later been sharply criti-
cized for lack of energy and had eventually retired
from the army; but he knew as a soldier that the war
had not failed and he accepted the nomination at the
same time that he rejected the platform. The elec-
tion gave Lincoln 212 electoral votes and McClellan
21, while the popular majority for Lincoln was more
than 400,000. The Republican policy had been en-
dorsed by the people and the war was to go on.

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 213

The force of the Confederacy was nearly spent.
The Mississippi had been wrested from Confeder-
ate control, and the area of military operations had
dwindled until only Virginia and parts of the Caro-
linas and Georgia offered strong resistance. In Vir-
ginia the hammering tactics of Grant, wasteful as they
were of human life, were beating down the Confed-
erate strongholds despite the able generalship of Lee.
A desolating raid from Atlanta to the sea by Sher-
man's army showed the hollowness of Confederate
power, and hunger, privation, and lack of men for
recruits marked the beginning of the end. On April
9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox and
the great war was practically over. Grant's terms
were generous and the demoralized and prostrate
South, conscious that Lincoln had never felt for it ill-
will, had no reason to anticipate vengeance from the
nation whose unity it had failed to break. But the
healing task of restoration was not for Lincoln to per-
form. Five days after Lee's surrender the president
was shot in Ford's theatre at Washington and in a few
hours was dead. The whole nation mourned his go-
ing, for his simple life, his staunch courage, and his
steadfast faith had been the people's inspiration, but
the South had more reason than the North to regret
his passing, for without his moderating influence the
future spelled despair.

The victory of the North was a victory of superior
numbers, superior wealth, and a superior industrial
and commercial resource. Between the two sections

214 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

no comparison in any of these respects could profit-
ably be made, for the disparity was overwhelming.
That the South was able to hold out so long was due
to the superb devotion which it exhibited to the cause
for which it fought, its skillful utilization of the
meagre resources at its command, and the military
genius of Lee. Yet the moral issues which the war in-
volved were more significant than the arrays of money
and men. In spite of the criticisms which the con-
duct of the war called out the North never lost sight
of the principle of national unity which secession had
challenged, and the destruction of slavery and of the
political power of slaveholding States was only an inci-
dent in comparison with the preservation of the Union.
The independence for which the South contended had
no such broad moral basis as the demand for Amer-
ican independence had presented in the eighteenth
century Revolution, because there was no moral
grievance. The economic system which the South
sought to uphold was unsound in theory and anti-
quated in practice, and it was for the good of the South
that the system should disappear. The development
of the American nation as a modern state demanded
free labor and free men, and when at the end of 1865
the Thirteenth Amendment swept American slavery
out of existence the nation itself was free.

The problem of restoring normal conditions in the
South and of bringing the late seceded States back
into their proper constitutional relations with the
Union was one of infinite complexity. For more than

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 215

four years the Confederate States had maintained a
separate political existence. They had taken a col-
lective name; they had adopted a constitution with
executive, legislative, and judicial departments; they
had enacted laws, levied taxes, and issued a paper
currency; they had sent diplomatic agents abroad
and had sold Confederate bonds to foreign pur-
chasers; and they had carried on war by land and
sea. During the four years they had distinctly and
in terms repudiated the authority of the United
States, and no federal authority had in fact been ex-
ercised in any part of the Confederacy save where
the federal military forces had established themselves.
If, notwithstanding the ultimate failure, secession
had nevertheless been for a time an accomplished
fact, then the Union had been broken, the Confeder-
ate States had withdrawn, and their status now was
analogous to that of conquered provinces which the
federal government was free to deal with as it chose.
On the other hand, if secession had never been legally
accomplished and the Confederate States had merely
carried on a prolonged but unsuccessful rebellion,
punishment for treason or rebellion might indeed be
meted out to individuals, but the States as such had
not ceased to be States and were apparently entitled
to be again represented in Congress, to take part in
national elections, and to enjoy the benefit of federal
laws. Their relative weight in the House of Repre-
sentatives would of course be reduced, because there
were no longer slaves to be counted as part of their

216 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

population and emancipation had not made the Negro
a citizen, but they would still enjoy equal representa-
tion in the Senate.

The gravity of the constitutional issue, likely at
any moment to be raised before the Supreme Court,
had been early perceived both by Congress and by the
president, and preparations had been made to meet it.
The numerous acts and resolutions which were passed
during the war and the presidential proclamations
which were issued carefully avoided recognizing the
Confederate government as in any sense a legal gov-
ernment, and consistently referred to the war as a
rebellion or insurrection and to those who aided it as
rebels or insurgents. The great collection of Civil
War documents published by the government years
after the war had ended bears the title " War of the
Rebellion: Official Records." The question of how
the seceded States were to be restored to their former
position in the Union, however, was one upon which
Congress and the president differed widely. Lincoln,
far less concerned about the constitutional aspects of
the case than with the practical necessity of ending
the war and restoring peace as quickly and easily as
possible, was ready to recognize any Union govern-
ment which had the support of loyal citizens equal in
number to ten per cent, of those who were legally
qualified to vote under the laws of the State in i860,
and he was prepared if necessary to uphold such a
government by military force; but it was of course
understood that the admission of senators and rep-

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 217

resentatives from such a reconstructed State would
still rest with Congress. A loyal government which
was presently established in Louisiana under this plan
was recognized, as was a Union government differently
constituted in Tennessee, and both States voted for
the Republican candidates in the presidential election
of 1864; but although the Republican convention had
found no difficulty in selecting its vice-presidential
candidate from Tennessee, the electoral votes of both
States were rejected by Congress and senators and
representatives were refused seats.

Congress was much more concerned than was Lin-
coln about constitutional procedure and very much
less disposed than he to be generous with the South.
The congressional opposition to the Lincoln pro-
gramme rested mainly upon two grounds. The first
was the feeling that a number of loyal citizens equal
to only ten per cent, of the number of qualified voters
in i860 was too slender a basis upon which to estab-
lish a reconstructed State government, and that such
a government would not be able to protect the Negroes
in their newly-acquired freedom. The other was the
conviction that the political restoration of the seceded
States properly belonged to Congress rather than to
the president; and although there was no serious
thought of reducing the States to the position of Ter-
ritories or holding them indefinitely as conquered
provinces, the conviction was strong that unless the
process of restoration were carefully guarded and all
of its steps firmly controlled the moral fruits of vie-

2i8 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

tory would be endangered, those who had led the
South to secession would again take control of the
State governments, and " rebel brigadiers " would re-
appear as members of the Senate and House of Rep-
resentatives. So long as Lincoln lived, however, the
congressional policy was of necessity held in abey-
ance, but the refusal of Congress to seat representa-
tives or senators or to count electoral votes from
States which Lincoln had recognized rendered the
executive programme practically sterile of results.

The succession of Andrew Johnson as president
darkened the prospect of a generous or amicable solu-
tion of the reconstruction problem. Johnson was an
able man, but he was of coarse fibre. He belonged to
the class of southern whites which had held few or no
slaves and which despised the planter aristocracy, and
his violent temper and objectionable personal habits
alienated supporters to whom his political and con-
stitutional ideas might otherwise have appealed. The
bitter controversy with Congress which continued
throughout Johnson's administration, and which cul-
minated in the attempt of Congress to impeach him
and remove him from office, was attended with dis-
creditable incidents which reflected upon both parties
and make the period of reconstruction a dark page
in American political annals, but the conflict was in-
evitable because the executive and congressional views
as to how reconstruction should be carried out were
inherently antagonistic and compromise was impos-
sible. It is obvious now, as it was all but apparent at

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 219

the time; that the Republican leaders were influenced
more and more by their determination to make their
party supreme for years to come, but the fear that the
president, if his policy were allowed to prevail, would
undo much of the work of the war, and that Negro
servitude would replace Negro slavery, also weighed
heavily in the scale.

The congressional plan as elaborated finally in
March, 1867, divided the late seceded States into dis-
tricts, and placed in immediate charge of each district
a military commander intrusted with the supervision
of the reconstruction process. Under the direction of
the military commander the voters of the States, purged
of disloyalty by the administration of a stringent oath
which few Confederates could take, were to call con-
ventions which should draw up new State constitu-
tions. The constitutions were to repudiate the seces-
sion debts, give the suffrage and equal political and
legal rights to Negroes, and exclude from voting and
office holding former supporters of the Confederacy
who declined to take a prescribed form of oath or who
did not receive the benefit of amnesty. In the popu-
lar vote which was to be taken on the Constitution
Negroes as well as whites were to participate, the Ne-
groes thus voting on the question of the rights which
under the Constitution were to be accorded to them;
and if the Constitution, after having been approved
by this extraordinary body of voters, was also ap-
proved by Congress the State might choose its quota
of federal senators and representatives and take part

220 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

in presidential elections. Until the act of Congress
had been fully complied with and the States formally
recognized, the control of the military commanders
was to continue.

Hardly any of the steps which the acts of Congress
prescribed would bear scrutiny from the point of
view of the Constitution, and the decision to thrust
the suffrage upon the Negroes called out widespread
dissent. The great mass of the former slaves were
ignorant as well as illiterate, and the economic tran-
sition from slavery to a wages system had only just
begun. The southern whites, however sincerely they
might have been disposed to accept the abolition of
slavery, could not by any possibility be expected to
regard the former slaves as political equals and racial
antagonism and social animosity were certain to show
themselves in politics. The United States had laid
down slavery only to take up the race problem, and
the latter problem was more difficult and dangerous
than the former. On the other hand the Republicans,
while fully expecting that the Negroes would every-
where support the Republican candidates out of grat-
itude to the party which had given them their free-
dom, insisted that freedom without suffrage would be
an impossible anomaly, and that unless the Negroes
could defend themselves at the polls their freedom
would not long endure. A number of southern States
had already enacted laws which created a virtual
condition of Negro servitude under the guise of pre-
venting vagrancy, and it was believed that other

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 221

States would not be long in following the example if
Congress did not interpose.

Johnson in able messages vetoed the reconstruction
acts, but the bills were at once passed over the veto
and Congress went steadily on with its programme.
A Fourteenth Amendment, setting aside the doctrine
of the Dred Scott decision by declaring all persons
born or naturalized in the United States and subject
to its jurisdiction to be citizens of the United States
and of the State in which they reside, prohibiting any
State from denying to any citizen of the United States
the equal protection of the laws, and penalizing by
a reduction of its representation in the House of Rep-
resentatives any State which denied the right to vote
to any person save on account of participation in re-
bellion or other crime, became a part of the Consti-
tution in 1868. The presence of federal troops in-
sured the carrying out of the congressional policy, and
by the end of 1868 most of the southern States had
been reconstructed and their representatives had been
admitted to the Senate and House.

The grave step of impeaching the president was
clearly foreshadowed once the implacable hostility of
the president to the congressional policy became ap-
parent, and both Congress and the president hastened
the climax. Johnson had not failed to put the recon-
struction acts into operation, but fear lest he might
use his authority as head of the army to embarrass if
not defeat the measures led to an unwarranted invasion
of his constitutional power as commander-in-chief by

222 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

an act which partially removed from his control the
commanding general of the army. Johnson on his
part, in a series of public addresses at Chicago, St.
Louis, and elsewhere, violently attacked Congress and
some of its members. In 1868, accordingly, articles of
impeachment were voted by the House of Representa-
tives and the trial began before the Senate, the chief
justice of the United States presiding. The articles
charged the president with high crimes and misde-
meanors in that he had interfered with the operation
of various acts of Congress, but for popular effect
some scandalous passages from his public addresses
were also cited. Johnson, who did not appear in per-
son, was defended by able counsel, bore himself with
great dignity throughout the proceedings, and by a
close vote was acquitted. The impeachment trial
marked the extreme height of Republican aggressive-
ness, but the power of the president had already been
broken and the final attack added no weight to his
defeat.

The anger of the South at its subjection to military
government in time of peace and the extension of
the suffrage to the Negroes caused systematic efforts
to be made to defeat the evident purpose of the Four-
teenth Amendment and prevent Negroes from voting.
A Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting any State from
denying or abridging the right of any citizen to vote
because of race, color, or previous condition of servi-
tude, was accordingly framed and in 1870 was ac-
cepted by the necessary number of State legislatures.

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 223

The Supreme Court later decided that the Fifteenth
Amendment did not confer the right to vote upon
anyone, but merely stated certain grounds upon which
the right to vote should not be denied; and for many
years the southern States continued to apply restric-
tions, such as property qualifications or laws limiting
the suffrage to those persons and their descendants
who possessed the right before the war, in order to
eliminate the Negro vote. By 1870, however, the last
of the States had been reconstructed and the Union
was again whole.

The years of political reconstruction are a period
which the thoughtful American can recall only with
regret. The problems that had to be solved were
without doubt extremely difficult and complex, and
the enmities and suspicions which the war had devel-
oped created a political atmosphere in which modera-
tion and clear thinking were hard to obtain. The
South itself was far from blameless, and the long agony
which it suffered was in no small part due to its own
shortsightedness and misconduct. But the arrogance
of the Republican leaders, flushed with victory and
bent upon insuring party control in the South by
means of the Negro vote, led them into excesses which
many years were needed to redress and some of whose
traces still survive. There can be no question but
that much of the legislation of the reconstruction
period was unwarranted by the Constitution, that the
Supreme Court bent before the demands of politics,
and that the moral tone of political discussion was

224 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

seriously lowered. Only in law, moreover, was the
attempt to give the ballot to the Negro successful,
and Negro suffrage is not yet a fully accomplished
fact in any southern State. The penalty which the
Fourteenth Amendment provides for States in which
the equal right of citizens to vote is denied was prac-
tically of no importance and its application has never
been seriously contemplated. No effort of any con-
sequence was ever made by the federal government
to educate the 'Negroes whom it had freed, or to help
the southern States to bridge the gulf which sep-
arated the old regime of slavery from the new regime
of free labor. The South, which had been beaten to
its knees in war, was crushed politically by reconstruc-
tion, and for more than thirty years the Republican
party stood with the flag upon the ruins and called
it peace.

But the Union had been preserved. The herculean
effort to detach a group of important States and
form an independent confederation had failed, and
the old doctrines of State rights and strict construc-
tion which for seventy years had clogged the wheels
of national progress had been hurled into oblivion.
Yet the fruits of victory, when weighed and measured,
were more important for the South than for the North.
To the victorious North the downfall of the South
meant the triumph of political ideas in which the
North had always more or less firmly believed and
without which it was difficult to think of the United
States as a nation at all. No new political or social

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY 225

vistas of striking color or imposing outline were
opened to the North by the surrender of Lee; the
progress of the future was to be along lines already
marked out and now happily cleared of embarrassing
obstructions. To the South, on the other hand, defeat
meant the dawning of a new day, the opening of a
new period of social outlook and industrial and agri-
cultural expansion incomparably larger and more
fruitful than the years of provincial backwardness
which had gone before; and in spite of the losses of
war and the political distresses of reconstruction the
South had been enriched with a new opportunity and
a new hope. The appeal of the " lost cause " still
touches the hearts of a generation to which the war
is now only a story which the fathers told, but the
appeal of union and nationality knows today neither
North nor South, but only a common country, a com-
mon allegiance, and an undivided national spirit.

CHAPTER IX

THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER

The twenty years during which slavery, civil strife,
and reconstruction absorbed the political attention
of the United States were a period of extraordinary
economic development as well. For a decade before
the war, industry, commerce, and agriculture had been
rapidly expanding, and the artificial stimulus which
the war gave to agriculture and manufactures con-
tinued to show its effects long after the war had
ceased. The use of southern cotton, temporarily
checked by the war, was quickly resumed when
southern markets were again open, but the production
of woolen and linen textiles which the lack of cotton
had encouraged was by that time firmly established
and continued to grow. Food crops in the North and
West were large during the war, and the shortage of
farm labor which the heavy demands for volunteers
occasioned was largely made good by the increased
use of farm machinery and by the labor of women.
Imports and exports, on the other hand, declined,
partly because the export of cotton practically ceased
and partly because exceptional war demands absorbed
much of the surplus of food and manufactured goods
which previously had been exported. The decline was

226

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 227

temporary and domestic and foreign exports, which
had fallen from about $333,500,000 in i860 to
$158,000,000 in 1864, rose in 1866 to $348,000,000
and by 1874 had reached $586,000,000; and
although fluctuations during these years showed that
the United States was not yet an exporting country
in the sense of producing regularly large quantities
of goods intended for sale abroad, American business
found compensation in the fact that the extraordi-
nary growth of population, rising from 23,000,000 in
1850 to more than 38,500,000 in 1870, created a
demand for food products and manufactures which
absorbed far the larger part of what the country was
able to produce.

The phenomenon of western development continued
to show itself on an imposing scale. Before the war
the frontier line of continuous settlement had reached
the Mississippi and was extending irregularly into the
broad area between the river and the Rocky moun-
tains. Kansas, admitted as a State in 1861, was fol-
lowed by Nevada in 1864 and by Nebraska in 1867.
With Minnesota and Oregon, which had been ad-
mitted in 1858 and 1859, and West Virginia, set off
from Virginia in 1863 as a reward of loyalty, the
Union by 1870 numbered thirty-six States besides the
organized Territories. East of the Mississippi a net-
work of railways, built in the case of many of the
western lines with the aid of federal land grants and
State and local financial help, bound the States to-
gether, and the Union Pacific Railway, projected in

228 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1863 but not opened until after the war, brought Cal-
ifornia and the central Pacific coast for the first time
into easy communication with the rest of the country.
In 1850, 178,672 miles of postal route served 18,417
post offices; in 1870 the mails were carried over 231,-
232 miles of established routes and 28,492 post offices
were in operation. The purchase of Alaska from Rus-
sia in 1867 did not for many years appreciably influ-
ence the course of western settlement, for it was long
before the great mineral wealth of the region was
known, but the acquisition was politically important
because it removed another European power from the
continent.

The national debt, which had been practically
extinguished in Jackson's time, had been increased
by the Mexican war and the purchase of territory
from Mexico, and in i860 stood at about $60,000,000.
The Civil war swelled the interest-bearing debt to
over $2,200,000,000, to which is of course to be
added, in estimating the aggregate cost of the war,
the debts of the States and of local communities, the
annual interest charge, and the ultimate cost of pen-
sions for Union soldiers and sailors and their depend-
ents. As late as 192 1 nearly half a million Civil war
pensions were still being paid. The Confederate
debt, including the debts of the several States of the
Confederacy, was a total loss, the Fourteenth Amend-
ment expressly prohibiting the payment of any public
debts incurred in aid of secession or on account of
the emancipation of slaves; but the cost of freeing the

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 229

slaves in the District of Columbia, emancipated by
law in 1862, was met by the United States and the
war expenses of the loyal States were eventually re-
imbursed. Extravagant expenditures by some of the
reconstruction governments during the years when
northern political adventurers, familiarly known as
" carpet-baggers," and Negro politicians were in con-
trol added some $275,000,000 to the debts of the
southern States, the larger part of which was legally
valid.

The sudden and extraordinary demand for revenue
at the outbreak of the war speedily drained the fed-
eral treasury, drove specie out of circulation, and
forced resort to heavy taxation, extensive borrowing
through issues of bonds, and the issuance of paper
currency. Tariff duties were raised, internal revenue
taxes reached out to almost every taxable commodity
or business transaction and to numerous occupations,
and an income tax was imposed. The receipts of the
federal treasury, which had amounted to only a little
more than $56,000,000 in i860, rose by 1865 to more
than $322,000,000. It was a defect of the congres-
sional policy, however, that while it imposed heavy
taxes in many directions the amount raised by taxa-
tion was much less than the country was both able
and willing to pay, and the large issues of government
bonds shifted to a later generation a financial burden
a considerable part of which could without great dif-
ficulty have been borne while the war was going on.
The continuance of heavy taxation after the war,

230 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

moreover, partly with a view to the reduction of the
debt but also, in the case of the tariff duties,
because of the firm hold which the protective policy
had obtained, produced in a few years a surplus rev-
enue which was a temptation to extravagance, and the
problem of bringing the country back to a specie
basis was not finally solved until 1879.

The national banking system established in 1863
was an ingenious expedient for securing at one and
the same time a paper currency and a market for gov-
ernment bonds, the issuance of national bank notes
being based upon the security of bonds which the
banks were required to purchase. The huge issues
of bonds, however, exceeded the quantity which the
banks could absorb, and the need of further currency
was accordingly met by the issuance of treasury notes
of various kinds and of unsecured and irredeemable
paper money commonly known, from the color of the
notes, as greenbacks. The constitutionality of so
much of the greenback law as made the notes a legal
tender in payment of private debts was more than
doubtful, and in 1869 the Supreme Court gave an
adverse decision which, if it had been adhered to,
would have overthrown the greenback policy and
greatly embarrassed the government. The occurrence
of vacancies, however, shortly gave Grant an oppor-
tunity to reconstitute the court, and in 1870 the
former decision was reversed and the legal tender
provision of the law was upheld. The court had
already in Johnson's administration refused to pass

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 231

upon the constitutionality of the reconstruction acts
in a case which the State of Georgia had sought to
raise, properly holding that the question was political
and not judicial, and the reversal of its decision in
the legal tender cases, although generally regarded
as a surrender to the political views of Congress,
nevertheless freed the hands of the federal govern-
ment in the difficult matter of the currency and the
national debt.

Not for some years was the Republican hold upon
Congress or the country seriously endangered. The
Democratic party, discredited in the North and West
by its old identification with slavery and its sympathy
for the South during the period of reconstruction,
only slowly recovered prestige, and so long as federal
troops were at hand to support the reconstructed
State governments the southern States could regularly
be counted in the Republican column. The presi-
dential election of 1868, however, while a sweeping
victory for Grant, the Republican candidate, so far
as the electoral vote was concerned, showed that
public opinion was turning. The electoral vote for
Grant was 213 in comparison with 80 for Horatio
Seymour of New York, the Democratic candidate, but
the Republican popular majority was only a little
over three hundred thousand in a total vote of more
than five and one-half million. The administration
of Grant and the Republican Congress increased
rather than lessened the growing discontent. Not-
withstanding the fact that all of the southern States

232 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

had by 1870 been restored to their former political
rights as members of the Union, the employment of
federal troops for political purposes continued; and
the attempt of Congress to suppress the Ku Klux
Klan and other secret societies which had been
formed in the South with the object of regaining the
control of State and local government for the whites
and preventing the Negroes from voting, joined to
an ill-advised effort to take over the supervision of
federal elections, had no other effect than to empha-
size the partisan policy of Congress, increase the
public criticism of the president, and strengthen the
Democratic opposition.

The election of 1872 brought into the field no less
than eight candidates for the presidency and eleven
for the vice-presidency. A Liberal Republican move-
ment, organized by independent and reform Repub-
licans who were willing to support a Democratic
candidate as a rebuke to the party in power, had for
a year been gathering headway in the East, and a
temperance party had been organized. The Repub-
licans profited by factional divisions in the Demo-
cratic ranks and by the general unfitness of the
leading opposition candidate, Horace Greeley, long
an influential Republican and famous the country
over as the editor of the New York " Tribune," to
whom the Liberal Republicans gave their support;
and Grant was again elected with a largely increased
electoral and popular vote.

The pressing question was that of the currency.

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 233

The disappearance of specie from circulation early
in the war and the long-continued use of national
bank notes, treasury notes, and greenbacks, none of
which were at par in gold, had been accompanied by
a marked rise of prices, and although the level of
prices had declined somewhat after the war and the
paper money was rising in value the currency problem
as a whole remained. A wide difference of opinion
prevailed regarding the policy that should be pursued.
Banking and business interests desired an early return
to the gold standard, but in the West, particularly
among the farmers, the demand was growing for the
continued use of greenbacks and the increased coin-
age of silver. There was a vague feeling that gold
had in some way appreciated in value, and that a
gold standard meant " dear money " and the con-
tinuance of inflated prices. In 1873, however, when
the coinage laws were revised, the coinage of the
standard silver dollar was discontinued. The silver
dollar had never been a popular coin in the eastern
part of the country, but its omission from the list
of coins was popularly interpreted as meaning that
silver, the cheaper metal, was to be demonetized, and
the action presently began to be denounced as the
" crime of 1873." A disastrous financial crisis the
same year confirmed the popular impression that the
financial system was bad, and the burden of responsi-
bility was thrown upon the Republicans, who in
general favored the gold standard. The congres-
sional elections of 1874 were a tidal victory for the

234 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Democrats in the House of Representatives, a Repub-
lican majority of no being replaced by a Demo-
cratic majority of 74. In 1875, however, provision
was made by law for the resumption of specie pay-
ment on the first of January, 1879, and a bill to
inflate the currency was vetoed by Grant.

Both of the great parties looked forward with
apprehension to the presidential campaign of 1876.
The discovery of serious financial and political scan-
dals, some of them involving high officials of the
government, was a telling popular argument in favor
of a party change. Two new parties had in the
meantime arisen. The Greenback party, an out-
growth in part of the political activities of farmer
organizations known as Patrons of Husbandry, or
Granges, and the forerunner in its financial views of
the later People's or Populist party, opposed the
resumption of specie payment and demanded the
continued use of greenbacks and the enlarged coinage
of silver. The Prohibition party, the successor of
the temperance party of 1872, called for the prohi-
bition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating
liquors, a policy which had already been adopted in
a few States. Neither of these minor parties, how-
ever, was likely to be very important except in close
States, and the national contest was between the
Republicans and the now reunited Democrats. The
Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, for-
merly governor of Ohio and a general in the Union
army during the Civil War. The Democratic can-

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 235

didate was Samuel J. Tilden, an able lawyer and
prominent party leader who had been governor of
New York. The Republican candidate, who had
also been a member of Congress, had not shown
offensive partisanship in his support of reconstruction,
and his nomination was skilfully planned to allay
discontent and to win back the Liberal Republicans
whose support had been lost in 1872.

The result of the electoral vote showed an unprece-
dented complication. In South Carolina, Florida,
Louisiana, and Oregon there were double returns each
certified to as the true vote of the State. In the case
of Oregon the dispute involved the legal right of a
postmaster to act as a presidential elector, the Con-
stitution prohibiting the appointment as elector of
any person holding an office of trust or profit under
the United States. In the case of the three southern
States the double returns came from rival bodies
known as returning boards, each of which represented
a government claiming to be the only lawful govern-
ment of the State. If all of the contested votes were
counted for the Republican candidate, Hayes would
be elected by a majority of one vote, while the loss
of a single vote would give the election to the Demo-
crats.

The excitement throughout the country was intense.
The Republican leaders immediately decided to
" claim everything," while the Democrats, aware of
the disadvantage which they were under in dealing
with the contested votes from the South, sought dili-

236 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

gently to find a Republican elector who might be
bribed. There was loose talk of seating Tilden by
force in case the election went against him, but no
Democratic president was likely to be seated by force
with Grant in the presidential chair. A study of the
Constitution' only added to the difficulty. The Consti-
tution provides that the certifieS returns of the elec-
toral votes, transmitted sealed to the president of the
Senate, shall be opened by him in the presence of the
two houses and that " the votes shall then be
counted," but on the question of who shall count the
votes or how disputed returns are to be dealt with
the Constitution is silent. The Senate was Repub-
lican, the House of Representatives was Democratic,
and the president of the Senate let it be known that
while he was prepared to open the certificates as the
Constitution required he would take no responsibility
of deciding which returns were lawful or of counting
the votes.

There being apparently no constitutional way out
of the dilemma an extra-constitutional method was
finally devised. The decision of the legal questions
involved in the counting of the returns was referred
to an electoral commission composed of seven mem-
bers of the Senate, seven members of the House of
Representatives, and a justice of the Supreme Court,
and it was agreed that the decisions of the commis-
sion should be final unless both houses concurred in
rejecting them. The Republican Senate chose four
Republicans and three Democrats, the Democratic

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 237

House chose four Democrats and three Republicans.
With the fourteen congressional members of the com-
mission equally divided politically the momentous
responsibility of decision virtually rested with the
member chosen by the Supreme Court. The funda-
mental legal question which the commission felt
called upon to decide was that of determining where,
in a presidential election, the authority of a State
ends and the authority of the United States begins.
The Supreme Court member, Associate Justice Bradley
of Massachusetts, had been a Republican, and by a
party majority the commission decided that Congress,
in counting the electoral vote, could not " go behind
the returns," and that the certificate of the recognized
government of a State as to what electors had been
chosen must be accepted. The application of this
ruling gave all the votes in dispute to Hayes, and he
was accordingly declared to have been elected. Til-
den accepted the result without reproaches, but Hayes
had to bear throughout the rest of his life the abusive
attacks of Democrats who insisted that he had
obtained the presidential office by fraud.

Most of the federal troops had been withdrawn
from the South before Hayes took office, and Hayes
presently withdrew the few that were left. The
reconstructed Republican governments, which only
the presence of soldiers or the fear of their employ-
ment had sustained, quickly gave way to Democratic
governments from which Negroes and northern
adventurers were excluded, and from that day until

238 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

this no southern State except Tennessee has given its
electoral votes to a Republican candidate for the
presidency, and the vote of Tennessee was given only
as late as 1920. Republican reconstruction had cre-
ated a solid Democratic South. By one device or
another the larger part of the Negro vote was elimi-
nated, and for nearly a generation Republicans were
only rarely to be found in either State or local offices.
The dignity with which Hayes met the difficult
situation in which the disputed election had placed
him gradually won the respect of the country, and by
the close of his administration the partisan bitterness
of feeling in regard to him had largely disappeared.
The Civil War was over, and while among the older
generation its memories and hates survived, a new
generation was addressing itself to new problems.
Disastrous strikes and lockouts in 1877, attended in
some instances with destructive riots, testified to the
existence of a labor situation with which the federal
government would sooner or later have to deal. In
1878 the demand for a bimetallic coinage, championed
by a National party which had replaced the Greenback
organization, was strong enough to force the passage of
the so-called Bland-Allison law providing for the com-
pulsory purchase and coinage of two million dollars'
worth of silver monthly and restoring the standard
silver dollar to the list of coins. Colorado had been ad-
mitted as a State in 1876, and the owners of the
Colorado silver mines could now make their voices
heard in Congress.

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 239

Hayes was not a candidate for re-election, and the
Republican choice devolved upon James A. Garfield
of Ohio, a former member of Congress and like Hayes
a Union soldier. The electoral vote again showed a
large Republican majority, but the popular vote for
Garfield exceeded by only seven thousand the vote for
General Winfield S. Hancock, the Democratic can-
didate, and of the total popular vote Garfield received
less than one-half. The outlook for the Republicans
was not encouraging. The National or Greenback
party, which had polled 81,000 votes in 1876, polled
more than 307,000 votes in 1880. The border States
of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri were
Democratic as was also the Civil war State of West
Virginia, and the popular vote in California showed
a slight Democratic plurality. The Greenback vote,
significant of a political revolution which was already
threatening the integrity of both the Republican and
the Democratic parties, was especially strong in
Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri,
and Texas, and attained figures of more than twelve
thousand in New York and more than twenty thou-
sand in Pennsylvania. The meaning of the figures was
clear: a new economic sectionalism was emerging in
national politics in addition to the political sectional-
ism of the reconstructed South.

Garfield had earned some credit for independence
in 1873 when as a member of the House of Repre-
sentatives he refused to accept an inordinate increase
of salary which Congress had voted to its members,

24o AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

and early in his administration he freed himself from
subserviency to a group of New York Republicans
familiarly known as " Stalwarts," led by the two
New York senators, Roscoe Conkling and Thomas C.
Piatt. But he was not long to enjoy the honor which
his party had bestowed upon him. On July 2, 1881,
he was shot by an irresponsible office seeker in a rail-
way station at Washington, and on September 19,
after a lingering and painful illness, died at Long
Branch, New Jersey. For the second time a presi-
dent had been assassinated, but the sickness and
death of Garfield raised a question which the death
of Lincoln had not presented. The vice-president,
Chester A. Arthur of New York, declined to assume
the duties of the presidential office so long as Gar-
field lived, and as Garfield was wholly incapacitated
from the time of the assault upon him until his death
the executive branch of the government was for two
and a half months practically without a head. An
old law provided that the presidency, in the event
of the death, removal, or disability of both the presi-
dent and the vice-president, should devolve upon the
speaker of the House of Representatives or the pre-
siding officer of the Senate. The new Congress, how-
ever, did not assemble until several weeks after
Garfield's death, and the death or disability of Arthur,
if either had occurred during the interval, would have
left the United States without a president and with
no provision for choosing one. Not until 1886 was
a new law enacted devolving the succession, in case

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 241

a vice-president is lacking, upon the members of the
cabinet in order beginning with the secretary of state.
Even then the question of what, under the Consti-
tution, constitutes disability was left open, to reap-
pear, again without settlement, in the second adminis-
tration of Woodrow Wilson.

Arthur had an embarrassing record as a New York
politician, but his conduct as president was as a whole
both dignified and honorable, and his old associations
with machine politics had comparatively little influ-
ence upon his course as chief executive. His detach-
ment in this respect was the more praiseworthy be-
cause the Republican party had for some years been
subjected to severe criticism at the hands of reform-
ers for its open support of the spoils system. The
partisan theory that " to the victors belong the spoils
of office " dated back at least as far as the time of
Jackson, but the exclusion of Democrats from office
and the use of the federal civil service to reward party
workers had been a settled Republican policy ever
since the Civil War had made necessary a wholesale
removal of disloyal office holders. In 1883 a civil
service system was established under which appoint-
ments to the larger number of departmental offices
were to be made only in accordance with the results
of examinations for fitness, and removals for political
reasons were forbidden. The new system was long,
however, in winning more than formal and half-
hearted support from either of the two leading parties,
and more than twenty years elapsed before the civil

242 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

service regulations were allowed to work substantially
as they were intended to work.

So far as the personal quality of the presidents
went the series from Lincoln to Arthur formed a
descending scale. Neither . Hayes; Garfield, nor
Arthur were strong men, and the forceful executive
leadership which the country expected of a president
was lacking. The feeling was widespread that the
Republicans, notwithstanding their distinguished suc-
cesses, had been too long in power, that the party
leadership was corrupt, and that the welfare of the
nation would be served by a change. In 1884 the
Democrats, reinforced by the support of large num-
bers of Independents or " Mugwumps " who had
forsaken the Republican party because of its identifi-
cation with the spoils system and other abuses, found
their candidate in Grover Cleveland, an independent
and courageous Democrat who in 1882 had been
elected governor of New York by an immense
majority and had made a commendable record as a
reformer. The Republicans nominated James G.
Blaine of Maine, a brilliant politician of magnetic
personality who had long been a member and for
some time speaker of the House of Representatives.
The campaign was embittered by the circulation of
charges affecting the personal character of the can-
didates, but the real issues were the protective tariff
policy of which Blaine was a staunch supporter, the
solid South, and the Republican record as contrasted
with Democratic promises of reform. The election

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 243

was a substantial victory for the Democrats, but the
popular plurality for Cleveland was only a little over
62,000 in a total vote of more than ten million, and
again less than a majority of the total vote polled.
The National or Greenback party vote fell abruptly
to less than half the vote that had been secured in
the previous elections, but the Prohibition party,
whose vote had dwindled in 1880 to ten thousand,
polled over 151,000 votes in 1884. The Republicans
had lost the control of the Senate in 1880, and had
regained control in 1882 only to suffer large losses
in the House of Representatives. The election of
1884 strengthened the Republican following in the
Senate and somewhat reduced the Democratic ma-
jority in the House. The outlook for the new Demo-
cratic administration, accordingly, was not reassuring,
especially if the tariff issue were raised, for the
Republican Senate could be counted upon to oppose
to the last any attack upon the cardinal Republican
doctrine of protection.

Cleveland possessed abounding courage, and he did
not hesitate. A rapidly increasing treasury surplus,
due in large part to the continuance of high protective
duties notwithstanding a large reduction of the
national debt, was an obvious menace to business as
well as to politics, for the accumulating revenue repre-
sented money withdrawn from circulation and busi-
ness uses at the same time that it offered a strong
temptation to wasteful or unnecessary appropriations.
On the other hand the readjusted duties of the tariff

244 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

of 1883, the first thoroughgoing revision of the
schedules which had been made since the Civil war,
had refined and perfected the protective system, and
tariff protection as a national political and economic
policy irrespective of the amount of revenue pro-
duced, as against any kind of tariff framed primarily
for revenue purposes, was now widely advocated by
manufacturers in all parts of the country, by the wool
growers of Ohio and other western States, and by an
appreciable number of farmers.

In his first and second annual messages to Congress,
in 1885 and 1886, Cleveland called attention pointedly
to the condition of the treasury and the dangers of the
surplus and urged a reduction of duties. But the
Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives
was weak, the Senate was hostile, and nothing was
done. Cleveland then took the bold step of devoting
his third annual message in 1887 solely to the tariff.
He denounced the tariff as a " vicious source " of un-
necessary revenue and declared that " a condition
and not a theory " confronted the nation. The sur-
plus in the treasury, it was estimated, would amount
to $140,000,000 by the end of the fiscal year. A re-
vised tariff bill, known as the Mills bill from its
official sponsor, was passed by the House, but the
Senate framed a substitute measure, and as neither
house would accept the proposals of the other the
session ended without action.

Cleveland had staked his chances of a re-election
upon the success of his tariff policy, and the lament-

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 245

able failure of his party to support him marked both
president and party for defeat. In other respects
than the tariff the record of the administration was
one of lights and shades. Long-standing complaints,
especially outspoken in the central West, of the polit-
ical influence of the railways and of gross discrimi-
nations in transportation rates between localities and
shippers were met by the creation, in 1887, of an
Interstate Commerce Commission charged with the
general supervision of railway rates, and by the prohi-
bition of numerous objectionable practices such as
the lavish issuance of free transportation. A law
punishing polygamy, aimed especially at the Mormon
sect in Utah, and a law prohibiting for ten years the
immigration of Chinese laborers, were also passed.
The civil service policy of the president, on the other
hand, was sharply attacked. Cleveland was pledged
to support the new civil service reform, but his appli-
cation of its principles was by no means nonpartisan
and many of the Independents who had voted for
him felt that they had been both deceived and be-
trayed. The veto of numerous private pension bills
intended to benefit by special laws veterans of the
Civil war, while a courageous effort to check a
notorious abuse, aroused the unrestrained anger of
the " old soldier " vote.

Cleveland, in short, was in the unfortunate position
of being the titular head of a party which he could
not control. Little as the Democratic leaders cared
for him, however, it would have been party suicide

246 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

not to have renominated him, and his popular vote
in 1888 exceeded by 98,000 that of his Republican
opponent, Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. The
Democratic electoral vote, on the other hand, was
only 168 while that of the Republicans was 233, and
the Republicans were once more in control. The
political overturn extended to Congress as well as to
the presidency, both Senate and House being now
Republican. In the enthusiasm of victory small
attention was paid to the significant fact that the
Prohibition party had increased its popular vote by
nearly a hundred thousand and that a new United
Labor party had polled more than 148,000 votes.

The Republican leaders in Congress immediately
turned their attention to the tariff. It was realized
that the duties must be revised and the accumulation
of a surplus revenue stopped, but the Republicans
chose to interpret the election of 1888 as a national
endorsement of the protective system and a condem-
nation of what was misleadingly called free trade.
Under the leadership of William McKinley, a mem-
ber of the House of Representatives from Ohio, a
tariff bill was accordingly prepared and in October,
1890, became law. The McKinley tariff marked a
distinct advance over all previous tariffs in its scien-
tific adjustment of duties with a view to protecting
American industry against foreign competition. A
considerable body of Republican opinion, however,
of which Blaine, who had been appointed secretary
of state under Harrison, was the mouthpiece, objected

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 247

that the new tariff, while it might effectually exclude
foreign goods and stimulate American manufactures,
would not open any foreign markets to American
agricultural staples, and that a policy of reciprocity
under which the duties might be reduced in return
for tariff concessions abroad ought to be included.
Provision was accordingly made for the negotiation
of reciprocity treaties, and a considerable number of
such agreements were presently concluded under
Blaine's direction. The interest in reciprocity, how-
ever, was of short duration and the results of the
policy were not important, and in the course of a few
years treaties and policy alike disappeared.

The passage in 1890 of the Sherman anti-trust act
prohibiting trusts or combinations in restraint of
trade or commerce was a serious attempt to curb the
industrial and commercial trusts which had been
formed by the hundred during the previous decade;
and the repeal of the Bland-Allison act of 1878 with
its compulsory coinage of standard silver dollars, and
the substitution of the Sherman act under which silver
purchases, while still compulsory to the amount of
4,500,000 ounces per month, were to be represented
in part by the issuance of silver certificates, was a
step away from a bimetallic standard for the national
coinage. But the McKinley tariff, the repeal of the
Bland-Allison act, and the passage of a dependent
pension law which nearly doubled the number of
federal pensioners was too great a load for the Repub-
licans to carry, and in the congressional elections of

*

248 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1890 they met catastrophe. A Republican majority
of eight in the fifty-first Congress (1 889-1 891) gave
way to a Democratic majority of 147 in the fifty-
second Congress (1 891-1893), and the Republican
majority in the Senate was also reduced. It was the
worst defeat that any American party had ever sus-
tained. The predominant sentiment of the country
undoubtedly favored a policy of protection, but the
demand for a tariff which should be framed primarily
for revenue rather than for protection, and whose pro-
tective character, in consequence, should be incidental
rather than deliberate had for a long time been grow-
ing apace; and the wide popular conviction that the
elaborate and complicated McKinley tariff not only
gave unnecessary and extravagant protection to cer-
tain industries which possessed large political
influence and made substantial contributions to cam-
paign funds, but also increased the cost of living
more than it increased wages or opportunities for
industrial employment, reacted upon the Congress
which had supported the measure. Foreign immigra-
tion, amounting on the average in the decade from
1880 to 1890 to half a million immigrants a year,
had enabled many protected employers to replace
native-born workers with low-paid foreign labor, and
resentment was easily stirred up against a tariff policy
which, it was widely believed, benefited employers
and investors at the expense of the living standards
of wage earners.

The multiplication of so-called third parties was

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 249

symptomatic not only of the increasing dissatisfaction
with Republican policy and Democratic inefficiency,
but also of the development of issues with which
neither of the two great parties seemed able or willing
to deal. None of the third parties which had ap-
peared since the Civil War had been able to win any
electoral votes except in 1872, but the popular vote
of these dissenting groups was of some importance in
critical States and an appreciable number of third
party candidates had from time to time been elected
to seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.
The Independent Republican movement of the seven-
ties had been in fact a spasm of liberalism within the
Republican party, and most of the Independents who
had supported Cleveland in 1884 had returned to the
Republican fold by 1888. In each of the two leading
parties, however, was to be found a growing body of
thoughtful voters who felt no invincible attachment
to any party and who cast their ballots for Repub-
lican, Democratic, or third party candidates accord-
ing as the candidates or policies of one party or the
other seemed to them most worthy of support; and
while the hold of the great historical parties was
strong and Republicans and Democrats were born
whereas independents and liberals were made, the
disintegrating work of dissent continued.

Of the third party movements that had yet
appeared the most formidable was that of the People's
or Populist party. In part an outgrowth of the
grange movement among the farmers of the central

2 50 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

West and inheriting also some of the financial tenets
of Greenbackism, Populism represented a new demand
for federal aid to agriculture, federal regulation of
railway rates and service, and " cheap " money based
upon government credit rather than upon gold. The
apparent disposition of the Republicans to adhere to
the gold standard made the Populists fervent advo-
cates of the silver dollar, and a demand for the free
and unlimited coinage of silver became also an im-
portant element in the party creed. In the election
of 1892, the first presidential election in which the
new party appeared, the Populist candidate, James
B. Weaver of Iowa, polled over a million votes and
secured twenty-two electoral votes, all of the latter
in the West. The election, however, went to the
Democrats, who had again nominated Cleveland, but
the popular vote showed that the People's Party
support had been drawn largely from the Republicans
and Independents. It had been the hope of political
liberalism to hold the balance of power even though
it could not elect a president or capture either house
of Congress, but the long-established precedent of
two parties dividing between them all but an insig-
nificant fraction of the popular vote seemed at last
upon the point of being broken, not by the efforts of
those who called themselves Independents but by the
sudden rise of a veritable new party with its strong-
hold in the West.

Cleveland was even less than formerly the master of
his party, and his second administration encountered

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 251

strong Democratic opposition in Congress at the same
time that events were discrediting both the president
and the party in the country. The Wilson tariff bill,
a Democratic measure in its origin, was so changed
in the course of its passage through Congress that
Cleveland declined to approve it and allowed the bill
to become a law without his signature. An income
tax provision which the law embodied was presently
adjudged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and
it was not until 1913 that the adoption of the Six-
teenth Amendment made the imposition of a federal
income tax possible. A treaty for the annexation of
the Hawaiian islands, negotiated under the Harrison
administration, was withdrawn from the Senate by
the president because of charges that Hawaii had been
coerced, and the annexation of the islands was not
finally achieved until 1897. A severe financial crisis
in 1893, followed by a long period of business depres-
sion, called attention sharply to the dangerous con-
dition of the treasury gold reserve. Silver certificates
issued against the silver purchased under the Sherman
law were used to withdraw gold from the treasury,
and repeated sales of bonds failed to maintain the
gold reserve at the one hundred million dollars which
by custom had been regarded as the minimum of
safety. In February, 1894, a bill for the further
coinage of silver failed only through the president's
veto, and in 1896 a bill for the free coinage of silver
passed the Senate but was fortunately rejected by
the House. The one bright spot so far as Cleveland's

252 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

personal popularity was concerned was his vigorous
intervention in a boundary dispute in which Great
Britain and Venezuela were involved, and his success-
ful though brusque insistence that the question should
be referred to arbitration.

The presidential campaign of 1896 revolved about
a single issue, that of the free coinage of silver at the
ratio of sixteen to one for gold. The Democratic
national convention, carried off its feet by a brilliant
speech of William J. Bryan, a delegate from Ne-
braska, adopted a free silver platform and made Mr.
Bryan the party nominee; and as Mr. Bryan received
also the Populist party nomination the free silver
forces seemed for the moment able to sweep the
country. The Republicans, opposed to free coinage
but unwilling to come out for the gold standard
without equivocation because of the uncertain
strength of the free silver movement, put their trust
in McKinley, whose record on the tariff had made
him the leading spokesman of the protected interests
and whose financial views were regarded as safe. The
campaign was one of popular economic education,
and every phase of the intricate and technical subject
of coinage and money values was eagerly and vol-
uminously discussed. The resounding victory of the
Republicans ended the importance of silver and free
coinage as national issues. A popular plurality of
more than six hundred thousand for McKinley was
matched by an electoral vote of 271 in comparison
with 178 votes given for Mr. Bryan, and the business

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 253

interests of the country took new courage with the
realization that a threatened financial calamity had
been averted.

There was scanty time for rejoicing over the past,
however, for a future of unprecedented greatness was
already dawning. The political situation in Cuba
had for years been an occasion of anxiety and irri-
tation to the United States. The Spanish colonial
administration had been unable to suppress successive
revolts which its own corruption and inefficiency had
provoked, a war for independence which had begun
in 1895 was still going on, and the island itself was
being devastated. The natural American sympathy for
a people that was oppressed was crossed by the popu-
lar feeling that Cuba belonged geographically to the
United States and that possession of the island would
add to the safety of Florida and the gulf coast States
in the event of war, but there can be no question that
humanitarian considerations far outweighed any
popular desire in the United States for annexation.

The harsh measures, increasing in severity, which
were resorted to by the Spanish authorities for the
subjugation of Cuba excited general indignation in
the United States, but the protests of the American
government, although politely received, in the main
went unheeded. Fuel was added to the flame when, on
February 15, 1898, the American battleship " Maine "
was destroyed by an explosion in the harbor of
Havana. McKinley was patient but firm, and at the
last moment, after a prolonged diplomatic correspond-

2 54 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ence, the reforms which he had demanded out of
regard to American interests and safety as well as
out of concern for the welfare of the Cuban people
were in terms conceded. But Spanish evasion and
delay had destroyed confidence in the good faith of
the Spanish government, the country was in a mood
for war, and on April 21 war with Spain was de-
clared. The American army was scandalously un-
prepared, but Spanish resistance was hopeless, and
with the battles of San Juan and El Caney and the
destruction of a Spanish squadron at Santiago in July
the fighting was over and Spain sued for peace. An
American squadron under Commodore Dewey, which
had been obliged to leave Hongkong because of
British neutrality, had in the meantime taken Manila.
Preliminaries of peace were signed on August 12, and
on December 10 the treaty of Paris recognized the
independence of Cuba and transferred to the United
States Porto Rico, the Philippine archipelago, and a
number of small islands in the Pacific. The United
States paid to Spain $20,000,000 but the treaty care-
fully refrained from making the payment a return
for the cession of territory.

The rapidity with which the international stage
setting had been shifted was startling. The war had
hardly begun when it was over. Within a few
months the time-honored American policy of non-
interference with the affairs of European govern-
ments had been thrown to the winds, and Spain had
not only been ordered to withdraw from Cuba but

POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER 255

the colonial possessions of Spain in the Pacific, none
of which had been in any way concerned in the Cuban
dispute, had been seized and their cession to the
United States exacted. With electrifying suddenness
and without premeditation America had become a
world power, and the old issues which had divided
parties and threatened to create a new sectionalism
faded into insignificance before the new vision of
world responsibilities and world prestige. The Mon-
roe doctrine and historical isolation still remained to
trouble the minds of purists, but with the overwhelm-
ing mass of the American people the day of national-
istic contentment passed when the Spanish possessions
in the Pacific were surrendered, and an unwonted
imperial spirit began to look out upon the world.

CHAPTER X
AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD

The acquisition of the Philippines was not the first
appearance of the United States as a Pacific power.
The purchase of Alaska had given the United States
a longer coast line on the Pacific than any other
country possessed, and San Francisco bay and Puget
sound afforded superb facilities for commerce with
Asia. As far back as 1854 Commodore Perry had
opened the door to commercial intercourse with
Japan, and while the immigration of Chinese laborers
had been prohibited as a concession to white labor in
California, political relations with both China and
Japan continued to be friendly. By the Berlin treaty
of 1890 the United States had shared with Germany
and Great Britain a protectorate over the Samoan
islands, and when in 1900 the triple agreement was
terminated the island of Tutuila with its important
harbor of Pago-Pago passed to the United States.
A sharp controversy with Great Britain over the seal
fisheries in Bering sea had been settled by arbitration
in 1893 favorably to the United States. The annex-
ation of Hawaii in 1897 gave the United States a
coaling and naval station in the strategic centre of
the north Pacific. The conquest of the Philippines,

256

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 257

accordingly, was geographically only the further ex-
tension of American control in an ocean where the
United States had long been firmly established.

It was inevitable that the territorial results and
implications of the war with Spain, coming as they
did at a time when party dissent and independent
voting were manifesting themselves in all parts of the
country, should encounter opposition in quarters
where colonies and dependencies were regarded as
little more than areas for economic exploitation and
political oppression. Shortly after the preliminaries
of peace with Spain were signed a vigorous anti-im-
perialist agitation, chiefly supported in New England
and Illinois, was organized to oppose the retention of
the Philippines. The seizure of an archipelago of some
two thousand islands in the remote south Pacific be-
cause of Spanish misconduct in Cuba was denounced
as an act of wanton spoliation, and the policy of
holding the islands as a dependency was declared to
be contrary to the spirit of American institutions, a
violation of the Constitution, and a dangerous infrac-
tion of the Monroe doctrine. When, in spite of the
opposition, the treaty of Paris was ratified the anti-
imperialists continued to insist that the people of the
Philippines, who had organized a revolutionary gov-
ernment which was in control of most of the archi-
pelago except Manila, Cavite, and a few other points,
were entitled to their independence, and that the
United States ought to announce its purpose to go no
further than to aid in the establishment of a perma-

258 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

nent government and protect the islands against
foreign interference. The discussion of imperial and
colonial problems which went on rivalled the days of
the free silver movement in its educational character,
but the anti-imperialist agitation attracted neither a
considerable nor an important following and McKin-
ley refused to turn from his course. The military
conquest of the Philippines was systematically pushed,
and the capture of Aguinaldo, the Filipino leader,
early in 1901 virtually ended the rebellion. The next
year a temporary civil administration which had been
set up was replaced by a government under a com-
mission some of whose members were Filipinos, and
under this commission government the Philippines
continued until 191 6, when the present form of repre-
sentative government was established. The pro-
visions of the federal Constitution were not fully ex-
tended to the islands, however, because of racial and
other conditions, and the inhabitants are " citizens of
the Philippine islands " rather than, in the usual
sense, citizens of the United States. The settle-
ment never gave satisfaction to those who continued
to share the early anti-imperialist views of national
policy, and the demand for political independence has
been increasingly urged by the Filipinos themselves.
The United States had pledged itself to give inde-
pendence to Cuba, and with the inauguration of a
Cuban republic in 1902 the American troops were
withdrawn. A virtual protectorate, however, con-
tinued to be exercised over the island and its affairs,

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 259

and intervention has several times been deemed neces-
sary to restore order or settle election troubles. Porto
Rico, which was included in the Spanish cession, re-
ceived a provisional government which was replaced
by a permanent government only in 191 7.

Thanks to departmental reforms and a programme
of naval construction initiated under the second
Cleveland administration and continued under Mc-
Kinley the war found the American navy ready, but
the unpreparedness of the army, political influence in
appointments and promotions, and grave scandals
which developed in connection with the supply of
food and clothing for the troops, called forth a storm
of popular criticism to which no effective rejoinder
could be made. But the robe of victory and world
power went far to cover weaknesses and defects, and
the election of 1900 was a complete indorsement of
McKinley and his policies. Both the popular and
the electoral vote showed a large increase over 1896,
and the Republican control of both branches of Con-
gress was unshaken. The enactment of a law defi-
nitively establishing the gold standard had eliminated
the currency issue from politics, and the Democrats,
who again nominated Mr. Bryan, had nothing to offer
that the country preferred to the Republican pro-
gramme. But the imperial work which McKinley
had seen begun he was not long to oversee. On Sep-
tember 6, 1 90 1, the president was shot while attend-
ing an exposition at Buffalo, and on the fourteenth
died. The public mourning for his death recalled the

26o AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

scenes which had followed the assassination of Lin-
coln, and enemies and friends joined in tributes to a
president under whom the nation had seen new visions
of power and taken up new and weighty responsi-
bilities.

No personal contrast could well have been greater
than that which McKinley and the vice-president,
Theodore Roosevelt of New York, presented. Mc-
Kinley, although deeply versed in the economics of
tariff-making, was not in other respects a man of
marked intellectual or social interests, and a simple
but somewhat old-fashioned dignity which attached
to him kept him from emotional enthusiasm or bold
outspokenness either in public or in private. The
temper of the reformer was alien to him, and the great
steps of his administration, so far as they were within
his control, were taken only after reflection and
always with an obvious regard to their party bearing.
He was, in short, a high-minded and consummate
politician whom great events had elevated to states-
manship. Roosevelt, on the other hand, although by
birth and education a product of aristocratic circles
in New York and Massachusetts, had early imbibed
to the full the unconventional and aggressive spirit
of the far West, and he retained throughout the larger
part of his nearly eight years of office the devoted
regard of a region whose history and ways he knew
and whose temper he loved. His first irruption into
politics as a member of the New York assembly had
been in the role of a reformer, and his subsequent

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 261

career as a police commissioner in the city of New
York, chairman of the federal Civil Service Commis-
sion, assistant secretary of the navy, commander of
a troop of Rough Riders in the war with Spain, and
governor of New York had marked him as a man of
outspoken independence and determined enmity to
inefficiency and political corruption. A boundless
physical energy and love of sports endeared him to
young men, while a genuine concern for everyday
human welfare and a veritable passion for social
justice made him the ardent champion of an endless
variety of good causes. No president with such en-
cyclopaedic interests or such phenomenal energy had
ever filled the executive office, and the Republican
leaders who had sought to curb his growing popularity
with the masses by relegating him to the unimportant
place of vice-president looked forward with appre-
hension to the years in which he should now be the
nation's head.

It was Roosevelt's fortune to succeed to the presi-
dency just at a time when, the responsibilities of
colonial power having been accepted, concern for
social and economic reform had taken hold of the
national mind and was beginning to trouble the
national conscience. In place of the constitutional
and sectional issues which for generations had pre-
dominated in American politics, popular interest was
turning to the more immediate and vital questions of
trusts, strikes and labor disturbances, foreign immi-
gration, wages and working conditions in factories

262 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

and mines, and the conduct of business generally.
There was a widespread feeling that social and eco-
nomic conditions in the United States were acutely
in need of betterment, that the States were not strong
enough to remedy abuses even if they were disposed
to make the effort, and that only the power and re-
sources of the federal government could avail to cope
with a situation in which vast aggregations of capital
acting without regard to State lines seemed to domi-
nate the life of the people as a whole and to threaten
the independence of government itself.

Roosevelt's primary sympathies were with causes
in which the element of moral appeal was strong, and
he was a masterful politician as well as a reformer.
He was fully aware that he had not been the choice
of his party for president, and the circumstances
under which he took office as well as sound political
wisdom dictated the carrying on, for the time being at
least, of the policies for which McKinley and the
Republican party had stood. Until the latter part
of his first term as president, accordingly, his course
was somewhat restrained. But his overwhelming
election to succeed himself in 1904 left him free to
follow his bent, and the amazing energy with which
he threw himself into the fight against abuses has no
parallel in American annals. A rapid succession of
messages and addresses, eagerly read by all classes
and acclaimed by the people as an inspiring gospel
of practical social righteousness, set forth in vigorous
and epigrammatic language the evils of " predatory

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 263

wealth," pleaded the cause of labor and the virtues
of an ennobling citizenship, and called for reforms as
bewildering in number and variety as they were far-
reaching in scope. The tone was often that of the
preacher and the concrete results were disappointing,
but when powerful trusts were haled into court and
" malefactors of great wealth " were pilloried before
the country, when a great coal strike was settled
through a federal commission which the president had
appointed and pure food laws put the shocking prac-
tices of certain great food industries under the ban,
and when subjects as far removed from ordinary
politics as race suicide, college athletics, and reformed
spelling came within the president's ken, no one could
fail to see that executive influence had taken a new
extension, and that even if less was accomplished
than was proposed the new vantage ground of presi-
dential power would never be relinquished.

Yet the limitations of Roosevelt were as striking
as his powers. With all his hatred of injustice and
eagerness for reform his temper was emotional and
moralistic rather than positive and constructive. His
political philosophy savored at times of the school to
which truth is that aspect of a subject which is most
vividly perceived, and the fact that he was more
often than not on the right side of the economic and
social issues in which he interested himself did not
make his reasoning always profound, nor did it pre-
vent him from neglecting other matters regarding
which there was loud complaint or from acting on

264 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

occasion in a high-handed fashion hardly susceptible
of moral defence. He manifested no special interest
in the tariff question, for example, notwithstanding
that the Dingley tariff of 1897, imposing still higher
protective duties than those of 1890, was denounced
by tariff reformers as gross favoritism to the pro-
tected industries and an impediment to American
business and foreign trade. The war with Spain
made inevitable the construction of the Panama canal
by the United States and its control as an American
waterway, and in November, 1903, the United States
acquired by agreement with Panama a perpetual right
to the occupancy and use of a canal zone across the
isthmus; but when a cession of the zone in full sove-
reignty could not be obtained by diplomacy a revo-
lution was stirred up with the knowledge of the presi-
dent, American armed forces intervened, and the
desired treaty of cession was extorted. Not until
192 1 was the wrong done to Colombia repaired by an
agreement to pay for the sovereignty which had been
ceded.

The wholesale attacks which Roosevelt made upon
abuses of all kinds, joined to the forcible language in
which his allegations and proposals were often
couched, caused him to be widely regarded in business
circles as a dangerous radical of socialistic views.
The characterization was only in very small degree
merited. Roosevelt was throughout the larger part
of his public life a partisan Republican, and the re-
form which he labored strenuously to obtain was

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 265

reform within and through the Republican party.
He had no sympathy with socialism, and the only
political activity of organized labor which for a long
time he was able to approve was that which kept
within the established party lines. Only when he
became convinced that reform through the agency of
the Republican party was not to be hoped for and
that the party organization no longer represented the
progressive sentiment of the country did he abandon
his lifelong associations.

Roosevelt might well have been pardoned if, as he
retired from office, he believed that he could before
long successfully lead a great movement of revolt, for
he had become, next perhaps to the emperor of Ger-
many, the most conspicuous and most talked-of
political figure in the world. His popular plurality
of over two and a half million votes in 1904 was four
times as great as the plurality of McKinley in 1900,
and although by 1908 his popularity had waned the
magnetism of his personality was still an immense
political force. He had intervened with a tender of
good offices in the Russo-Japanese war and in Sep-
tember, 1905, had had the satisfaction of seeing the
war ended by a treaty signed at Portsmouth, New
Hampshire. In 1906 he intervened by force in Cuba
and established a provisional government, and in 1907
concluded a treaty with Santo Domingo by which
the customs administration and the debt of the coun-
try were taken under American control. The glam-
our of his name enhanced respect for the United

266 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

States in every quarter of the globe, and his books
stood high in the list of " best sellers." No nation
except France had ever produced so extraordinary a
leader of men, and the bitterest enemies of the Ameri-
can Napoleon could not but admire even while they
feared.

Roosevelt had never been bound by precedents or
restrained by dread of inconsistency, and he would
apparently have been glad to hold the presidential
office for a third term. The suggestion met with
general disfavor, however, and in 1908 his influence
secured the Republican nomination for William H.
Taft, who had been governor of the Philippines and
later secretary of war. Mr. Bryan, again the Demo-
cratic candidate, was still formidable and the popular
plurality for Mr. Taft was only about one-half that
which Roosevelt had received in the memorable elec-
tion of 1904, but the party victory was nevertheless
emphatic.

The inevitable reaction against the Roosevelt poli-
cies, however, and even more against the Roosevelt
methods was flowing strongly. The country was
tired of exhortation. " Big business," which for a
time had walked warily, was recovering its courage,
and the convictions of trusts and other offenders were
less numerous than the number of prosecutions had
threatened. The Republican majority in the House
of Representatives had declined since 1904, and in
the congressional elections of 1910 Democratic con-
trol of the House was re-established with a strong

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 267

party majority. Oklahoma, admitted as a State in

1907, was Democratic, and the two remaining Terri-
tories of New Mexico and Arizona were in Demo-
cratic hands. Throughout the country, but particu-
larly in the West and on the Pacific coast, a so-called
Progressive movement was disintegrating the Repub-
lican party and vigorously fighting the old party
leadership, and an aggressive group of " insurgent "
senators and representatives aided the movement in
Congress. Of the new Progressive movement Roose-
velt presently became the leader, and his desertion
of the president whom his influence had placed in
office created a breach between the two men which,
if it did not add to Mr. Taft's political strength, in-
creased distrust of Roosevelt's political sincerity. In
the cities and industrial centres and to a significant
extent in intellectual circles radical political doctrines
were spreading, and the Socialist party, which had
polled more than a quarter of a million votes in

1908, was preparing to make a great fight for its
popular candidate, Eugene V. Debs, in 191 2. The
submission to the States in May, 191 2, of a Seven-
teenth Amendment of the Constitution, providing for
the election of United States senators by popular vote,
was a step in the direction of increased popular con-
trol of Congress, but the opposition was strong, and
although in 1913 the amendment was adopted twelve
States failed to ratify it.

Mr. Taft had none of the crusading zeal which
animated Roosevelt, and his general sympathy with

268 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the old school Republicanism identified him in the
popular mind with the party machine against which
the Progressive movement was openly arrayed. A
stronger man than he, however, would have had diffi-
culty, even without Roosevelt's opposition, in leading
the Republicans to victory in 191 2, for the country
was yielding to the spell of another great personality,
that of Woodrow Wilson, Democratic governor of
New Jersey. Mr. Wilson's approach to the presi-
dency was unique. By birth a Virginian and by
early professional training a lawyer, he had been for
the larger part of his life a college professor, had
passed from a professorship to the presidency of
Princeton University, and from the latter office had
entered State politics as a Democrat. Before his
political career began he had won wide repute as a
brilliant writer and able speaker, and his governor-
ship of New Jersey had revealed him to the country
as a masterful politician and a determined foe of
political corruption. Cold and reserved, save to his
few intimate friends, where Roosevelt was warm and
ebullient, and with his intellectual interests centered
in politics, his earnest and rhetorically vivid appeals
for the recognition of democratic principles in the
conduct of national affairs had caught the imagination
of liberals everywhere; and while it seemed unlikely
that he could draw to his support such of the Pro-
gressives as felt for Roosevelt a strong personal
devotion, no other Democrat was so well fitted
to strengthen the lines of the Democratic party

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 269

or to profit by the schism in the Republican ranks.
The election of 191 2, accordingly, saw three well-
known candidates besides Mr. Debs in the field. The
regular Republican candidate was Mr. Taft. The
Progressives, repudiating his candidacy as represent-
ing most of the things to which they were opposed,
held a separate convention and nominated Roosevelt,
and the Democrats nominated Mr. Wilson. The
popular vote for Mr. Wilson was considerably less
than half of the total number of votes recorded, but
the Democratic electoral vote was colossal. Of the
531 electoral votes Mr. Taft received only eight and
Roosevelt eighty-eight; the remainder were given to
Mr. Wilson. The admission of New Mexico and
Arizona in 191 2 had brought the number of States
to forty-eight, and of these all but eight were in the
Democratic column. Only Utah and Vermont voted
for Mr. Taft, and only Pennsylvania, Michigan, Min-
nesota, South Dakota, Washington, and California
voted for Roosevelt. The Progressive vote, drawn
mainly from former Republicans, had given the elec-
tion to the Democrats, and the popular support for
Mr. Taft was less than that for either of the other
two leading candidates. The Socialist party, al-
though it polled over 900,000 votes, did not succeed
in winning any electoral votes. The Democratic tide
swept away the Republican majority in the Senate
and both branches of Congress were strongly Demo-
cratic, although the Progressives won eighteen seats
in the House of Representatives.

270 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

" This is not a day of triumph," declared Mr. Wil-
son as he closed his inaugural address, " it is a day
of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party,
but the forces of humanity." The evils which he
particularly singled out for remedy included " a
tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the
commerce of the world, violates the just principles
of taxation, and makes the government a facile in-
strument in the hands of private interests; a banking
and currency system based upon the necessity of the
government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and per-
fectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting
credits; an industrial system which, take it on all
its sides, financial as well as administrative, holds
capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and
limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without
renewing or conserving the natural resources of the
country"; an unbusinesslike and unscientific agri-
culture bereft of suitable facilities of credit; "water-
courses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, for-
ests untended fast disappearing without plan or pros-
pect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every
mine "; and disregard of sanitary and pure food laws
and of laws regulating the conditions of labor. No
Roosevelt programme had been more sweeping, no
Progressive demands were more radical.

So far as the president was concerned the execu-
tion of the new programme began at once. Congress
was called to meet early instead of in December, and
on April 8, 19 13, Mr. Wilson, brushing aside the

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 271

established precedent of more than a century, revived
the practice of Washington and read his message in
person to the two houses. The message itself was
devoted to the tariff, and called for a thoroughgoing
revision of the schedules in a way to " abolish every-
thing that bears even the semblance of privilege or
of any kind of artificial advantage," and the sub-
stitution of duties designed to encourage effective
competition in business with the rest of the world.
The Underwood tariff which was shortly enacted
made drastic reductions in the rates which had been
fixed by the Payne-Aldrich tariff of 1909, and the
protection which it accorded was in general incidental
to its revenue purpose.

Mr. Wilson's conception of federal powers was
large, and had world affairs continued to run their
normal course it is probable that the great movement
of reform which Roosevelt had vitalized would have
continued with equal, if less' spectacular, energy under
the new Democratic administration. The first six
months of 19 14 had scarcely passed, however, when
questions of domestic policy were swept into the
background by the bursting tempest of the great war.
On June 28 the Archduke of Austria was assassinated
at Sarajevo, and the long-smoldering rivalries and
animosities of the European powers were soon aflame.
A few weeks of negotiation and intrigue followed,
then on August 1 Germany declared war upon Russia.
Hardly had the news been printed when the German
armies invaded Belgium and France, and the war

272 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

which was eventually to involve Europe, Asia, Africa,
and America was in full swing. The swift advance
of the German forces threatened the obliteration of
Belgium and France, and although Great Britain
quickly threw its army and navy into the scale on
the side of the invaded countries, there seemed small
reason to hope that the desolating German rush which
was already turning parts of France and Belgium
into a desert could in the end be stayed.

The United States had no direct interest in the
causes of the war, and its policy of neutrality was in
accord with its tradition. But the position of the
United States was difficult. Officially the government
was neutral, but popular sympathy for Belgium and
France was immediate and widespread and the action
of Germany in deliberately provoking war was out-
spokenly condemned. On the question of American
intervention, however, public opinion was divided,
and it was not clear that Mr. Wilson would have had
the country with him had he called early for active
participation in the struggle. For more than two and
a half years, accordingly, he waited for the logic of
events to do their work. In February, 1915, Ger-
many by proclamation established a war zone about
the British Isles into which no neutral vessel might
enter without being liable to seizure, but the protest
of the United States against this interference with
neutral rights brought only an unsatisfactory re-
sponse, and the issue was complicated by a contro-
versy with Great Britain over the use of the American

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 273

flag by British merchant vessels and by the refusal
of both Great Britain and France to relinquish the
right to seize neutral vessels carrying enemy goods.
The sinking of the transatlantic steamship "Lusitania"
on May 7 led only to a warning that further attacks
upon merchant vessels would be regarded by the
United States as " deliberately unfriendly." In Sep-
tember the recall of two German attaches who had
been guilty of political intrigue was requested and
before long the Austrian ambassador was dismissed,
but diplomatic relations with Germany and Austria
continued. In March, 191 6, the sinking of the
steamer " Sussex " in the English Channel and the loss
of American citizens called out from Mr. Wilson
nothing stronger than a warning that a severance of
diplomatic relations was threatened. Not until Feb-
ruary 3, 191 7, were diplomatic relations with Ger-
many broken off, only on April 6 did the United
States finally declare war, and the declaration of war
against Austria was postponed until December 7.

The long and irritating diplomatic correspondence
with Germany was viewed with increasing impatience
and hostility by the country and by Congress, and
the more because of public statements which led to
the suspicion that Mr. Wilson was either an invincible
pacifist or else a lukewarm friend of the allies. A
circular letter to the powers, for example, issued in
December, 191 6, pointed out that the war aims of
each side, " as stated in general terms to their people
and to the world," were " virtually the same," and a

274 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

clear statement of the objects for which the parties
were contending was invited. The statement, its
qualifying phrase ignored, was bitterly assailed as
putting the war aims of Germany and the allies on
the same moral plane. The disposition to accept
German assurances regarding the conduct of sub-
marine warfare, and the insistence that the allies as
well as Germany should respect American neutral
rights, were hailed as evidence of sympathy for
Germany and of an unwillingness to hold the Berlin
government to account. Mr. Wilson stood his
ground, however, until the American case was un-
assailable, and when on April 2, 191 7, before a Con-
gress which had met in extra session, he reviewed the
course of the conflict and called for a declaration of
war, his stern arraignment of the German government
and his ringing assertion that " the world must be
made safe for democracy " threw the nation into a
delirium of praise, and from that moment until the
war had ended the American people were as clay in
his hands. He had waited for the psychological
moment, and when the moment came he seized it
with a master hand.

The stupendous energy with which the United
States went into the war was an impressive example
of what a great democracy could do once its enthusi-
asm was aroused and its course was clear. A draft
law called for the registration of all men of military
age, huge appropriations and loans hastened the train-
ing and equipment of troops and their dispatch over

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 275

seas, and transportation, food supply and distribution,
and war manufactures were taken under federal con-
trol. Enormous shipments of supplies for armies and
civilians were poured into Europe, and loans aggre-
gating more than ten billion dollars were advanced
to the allied governments. Opposition to the war,
both public and private, was ruthlessly suppressed,
newspapers and mails passed under a censorship,
enemy property was sequestrated, and German sym-
pathizers and pacifists were effectually cowed. The
stimulation of industry was unparalleled and wages,
prices, and profits rose by leaps and bounds. The
adherence of the United States to the allied cause
made certain the defeat of Germany, and although
none of the great battles of the war were won by
American forces alone, it was the overwhelming aid
of the United States which made possible the final
victory.

In an address to the Senate on January 22, 191 7,
more than two months before the American declara-
tion of war, Mr. Wilson, looking forward to the time
when peace must be made, had declared that it must
be a " peace without victory." The statement, al-
though carefully explained and guarded in the address
itself, gave deep offence to the growing war sentiment
of the country. A review of the president's war utter-
ances, however, makes it clear that Mr. Wilson,
while at no time fundamentally sympathetic with
Germany but rather the reverse, nevertheless feared
that the allies, if victorious at arms, might impose

276 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

upon Germany a peace so severe as to constitute in
itself a provocation to further war, and he accordingly
set himself to elaborate the bases of a peace which
to him seemed just. His second inaugural address in
March, 191 7, outlined the principles which such a
peace should embody, and in January, 191 8, in an
address to Congress, he propounded fourteen points
as a scheme of political and territorial settlement.
The proposals were not new, for all of them had been
advanced at one time or another in the speeches or
notes of allied statesmen, but Mr. Wilson brought
them together and gave them the status of a pro-
gramme. One of the fourteen points called for the
creation of a league of nations, and to the establish-
ment of such a league as the only security against
war Mr. Wilson thenceforth devoted himself. The
fourteen points, which contained no reference to
reparations or indemnities, were accepted by Ger-
many, practically accepted by Great Britain, ac-
claimed with approval by some of the lesser European
States and by racial minority groups which hoped
for independent recognition, and were not rejected by
France.

On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed,
and on December 2, in his address to Congress, Mr.
Wilson announced his intention of going to Paris and
of personally taking part in the work of the peace
conference. The reception which was accorded to
him in Europe was wholly extraordinary. The high
ethical tone of his writings and state papers with their

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 277

brilliant pleas for equality and fraternity among
nations, his winning appeals for a moral treatment
of all political questions, the sharp distinction which
he had drawn between the German people and the
German imperial government in apportioning respon-
sibility for the war, his demand for a just peace and
for the recognition of the right of every people to
live under a government of its own choosing, and the
practical programme of the fourteen points of which
he was popularly regarded as the sole author, all
combined to make him the idol of the masses, the
hope of every unfree or oppressed minority, and the
embodiment of the democratic ideals which the forth-
coming settlement was to consecrate. Back of the
American president was the American nation whose
boundless resources, thrown into the war only after
every effort to maintain neutrality had failed, had
determined the outcome of the struggle, but which
nevertheless, alone among the powers that would
meet at the peace table, asked for itself neither indem-
nities nor territory nor political advantage of any
kind. If peace could be made on the lines which
Mr. Wilson had drawn, and American help could be
continued in the great task of social and political
reconstruction, the name of the president and of the
nation which he represented would be held in endur-
ing and untarnished honor by the peoples of the
world.

It was not so to be. Mr. Wilson had called for
freedom of the seas alike in peace and in war, but

278 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

the demand was surrendered before the peace nego-
tiations were begun. He had denounced the evils of
secret diplomacy and called for " open covenants of
peace openly arrived at," but the peace of Versailles
was framed in secret and the history of the proceed-
ings is not yet fully known. He had championed the
rights of peoples to self-determination, but few of
the smaller nationalities whose immediate destinies
the peace conference controlled were consulted save
as a matter of form, and minority groups were refused
a hearing. He had insisted that in disposing of
colonies the wishes of the inhabitants as well as those
of the controlling government should be taken into
the account, but the German colonies were appor-
tioned without even a pretence of consulting the
colonial populations. The fourteen points had called
for the removal of economic barriers between nations
and the establishment of an equality of trade con-
ditions, but no steps in that direction were taken by
the Paris negotiators.

Mr. Wilson did not attempt to defend himself
against the torrent of criticism which his course at
Paris unloosed, and one may not venture to say with
positiveness why so much of his announced pro-
gramme was apparently so easily abandoned. There
is reason for thinking, however, that the programme
of the fourteen points was not so much a minimum
upon which Mr. Wilson intended to insist as a maxi-
mum which he would be glad to obtain, that the
complicated economic adjustments which a return

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 279

to peace involved were regarded by him as matters
for later rather than immediate settlement, and that
he looked to the League of Nations, the creation of
which outweighed in his thought all other considera-
tions, to adjust the conflicts which the practical appli-
cation of the peace terms might develop. The
territorial dispositions which were made conformed
in general to his original proposals, and with these
and the League of Nations assured the remainder of
his programme was apparently looked upon as inci-
dental.

The treaty of Versailles, the first of the peace
treaties which the Paris conference concluded, was
signed on June 28, 1919. Although hundreds of
printed copies of the treaty had been privately cir-
culated at Paris and unofficial texts were promptly
published, Mr. Wilson refused to make public the
text of the treaty in the United States or to lay before
the Senate the records of the negotiations, but de-
manded the acceptance of the treaty as it stood. The
echoes of the long and heated controversy which en-
sued have not yet died away. The objections of the
Senate, accentuated by resentment at the treatment
which it had received, centered in Article X of the
covenant of the League of Nations, which was inter-
preted as binding the United States to support, if
necessary by force, the territorial arrangements which
the treaty embodied, even though the United States
had itself no direct or obvious interest in the matter
in dispute; and while the majority opinion of the

2 So AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

country apparently favored the acceptance of the
treaty as an international settlement to which the
United States had contributed and in whose enforce-
ment it was honorably bound to aid, the prospect of
long-continued involvement in European political
arrangements was nevertheless viewed with apprehen-
sion. Mr. Wilson, however, refused to assent to any
material modification of Article X, and on November
19 the treaty was rejected by the Senate. The re-
jection was not final and consideration of the treaty
was presently resumed, but on March 19, 1920, rati-
fication was again refused.

Mr. Wilson had for some months been suffering
from a physical breakdown to which his labors in
behalf of the treaty had contributed, and for most
of the period during which the controversy in the
Senate was raging he was practically incapacitated.
It was a melancholy close of a phenomenal career,
for in addition to bodily suffering he had seen his
world popularity fade and his motives and conduct
had been widely assailed, but he bore reproaches and
attacks in silence and left to time the justification or
condemnation of his course. The congressional elec-
tions of 19 1 6 had broken the Democratic control of
the House of Representatives, and in 191 8 the Repub-
licans were again in a majority in both houses. There
was no strong Democratic candidate with whom to
replace Mr. Wilson in 1920, and the Republican
nominee, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, won an
overwhelming victory. A Nineteenth Amendment to

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 281

the Constitution opening the suffrage to women had
been adopted in time to be availed of in the election,
and the popular vote for all the presidential candi-
dates reached the enormous total of more than
26,780,000, or about one-fourth of the aggregate
population of the country.

The position of the United States toward Europe,
however, was anomalous. So far as American rati-
fication was concerned the treaty of Versailles was
dead, but the United States was still technically at war
with Germany and Austria, American relations with
Germany were still governed by the armistice terms
of November, 191 8, and the peace treaty with Austria
which American representatives had signed at Paris
had not been presented to the Senate. The League
of Nations had been created and Mr. Wilson had
issued the call for the first meeting, but the United
States was not a member and nowhere in the country
was interest in the League strong. A body of Ameri-
can troops continued to be maintained in the occu-
pied part of Germany, and an unofficial American
representative sat with the international commission
which had been established at Paris to deal with the
question of reparations, but the United States was
not a signatory party to the peace nor in any way
legally responsible for its enforcement. There was
a general feeling that a separate peace should be con-
cluded with Germany and Austria which would end
the state of war, and that the United States was
entitled to claim the advantages which it would have

282 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

had if the allied treaties with those powers had been
ratified, and in October, 192 1, peace was made upon
that basis. The equivocal position of the United
States did not wholly disappear, however, for Ameri-
can troops remained on the Rhine and the reparations
commission continued to have an unofficial American
member.

The enthusiasm of war had already given way to
pronounced reaction among all classes, and reaction
brought hesitation and distrust. American public
opinion, convinced that European governments and
especially the government of France were militaristic,
and that swollen military and naval budgets, ill-
adjusted taxation, and excessive issues of depreciated
paper money were largely responsible for the slow
economic recovery of Europe, veered more and more
toward the traditional attitude of aloofness from
European affairs; and although the Harding adminis-
tration convened a disarmament conference at Wash-
ington in November, 1921, and arranged with Great
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan a programme for
the limitation of naval construction, it declined to take
part in successive international conferences which
were held in Europe to consider the problems which
peace and reconstruction had raised. The demobili-
zation of American war industry, the treatment of
serious questions of disordered business and wide-
spread unemployment, and the safeguarding of
American financial interests abroad called for atten-
tion such as in the last years of Mr. Wilson's adminis-

AMERICA AND A NEW WORLD 283

tration they had not received, and for the moment
Europe was left to settle its political and economic
problems for itself.

Yet the obvious lessons of the great war had not
been forgotten. The United States had played too
large a part in the world struggle to remain perma-
nently in isolation, and the moral values for which it
had contended bound it in obligations which awaited
only the favorable moment to be fulfilled. The prob-
lem which faced the United States was how the great-
est, richest, best organized, and most powerful democ-
racy in the world could preserve its historical inde-
pendence of action and at the same time serve with
all its force the cause of peace. Once that question
could be answered the resources of the nation would
again be at the service of mankind.

CHAPTER XI
POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND

The forces which through three centuries operated
to produce an American social type were many and
diverse. The English inheritance of language, law,
custom, and intellectual habit, predominant from the
beginning in most of the colonies and in New York
and Pennsylvania after the first few years, afforded
a primary foundation of the utmost importance, but
the modifications which were worked by geographical
remoteness, the conditions of life in a wilderness con-
tinent, and climatic contrasts between the different
sections of the country were far-reaching. At no
time were the American colonies a reproduction even
on a lessened scale of the mother country. English
political institutions were from the outset freely
adapted to American needs, the religious controversies
which racked England in the seventeenth century lost
much of their bitterness when transferred over seas,
and the daily life of the people was at once freer,
healthier, and relatively more prosperous than that
which seventeenth or eighteenth century England
showed. The struggle for independence, the erection
of a novel form of federal government, the romantic

284

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 285

conquest of the West and progressive absorption of
foreign territory, the effort to control slavery and
preserve the Union, the assimilation of a vast and
heterogeneous European population, and the phenom-
enal growth of agriculture, manufactures, mining, and
commerce on a continental scale all worked to
develop an American character different from any
that the old world had produced. The resulting
product, too, was composite rather than cosmo-
politan, for the various elements were blended, not
merely assembled and associated.

Neither in origin nor in circumstances, however,
were the English plantings much alike, and the early
years of colonization seemed to promise the creation
of types rather than a type. The staunch and rigid
Puritanism which long dominated Massachusetts and
Connecticut gave to the political and social life of
those colonies a moral tinge which even today has not
been wholly effaced, and Rhode Island still preserves
marked traces of the extreme individualism which its
dissenting founders cherished; but the Puritan spirit
did not spread to other colonies, and sectarian dis-
crimination remained with few exceptions a New
England monopoly. New York and New Jersey,
given from the start to commercialism and factional
politics, had no marked interest in religious questions
of any kind, and the tolerant Quakers of Pennsyl-
vania found their peculiar tenets no bar to worldly
success or political class control. In the South, on
the other hand, where the religious intolerance and

286 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

thrifty trading spirit of New England were disliked,
the planter class, drawing its wealth from a staple
agriculture whose products were marketed directly
in England or on the continent, reproduced the easy-
going but masterful characteristics of the English
country gentlemen from whose loins many of them
had sprung. Each section lived as suited its environ-
ment or its ambition, envious of nothing that the
others possessed and stirred by no impulse to change
the status in which circumstances and its own free
choice had placed it. The union which came later
was the fruit of outside happenings, not of inward
discontent with lot or place.

Certain intellectual similarities, on the other hand,
early developed notwithstanding the differences of
physical environment. New England Puritanism, its
intellectual interest long centered in theological specu-
lation, produced a mental and moral habit which, if
it long resisted the approaches of literature and
robbed the lives of children and young people of joy,
nevertheless planted a school in every town, founded
the colleges of Harvard and Yale, made the weekly
sermon an intellectual performance, and enforced
public service as a moral and legal obligation. The
generation and a half of Dutch proprietorship in New
York bore no important intellectual fruit, and the first
generation of English occupation was almost equally
barren, but prosperous Pennsylvania, once the period
of beginnings had been passed, turned with zest to
the publication of books and pamphlets in German

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 287

and English, the development of newspapers, and the
establishment of institutions of learning, and before
long New York was following in its wake. A seven-
teenth century Virginia governor could thank God,
apparently in all sincerity, that there were no free
schools in that colony, but the college of William and
Mary had been established before the seventeenth
century closed and the English universities and Inns
of Court had a regular succession of South Carolinians
among their students down to the Revolution.

The widespread interest in law which prevailed in
all the colonies was a natural result of the long con-
troversies over charter rights and royal or parliamen-
tary interference which most of the colonies under-
went. The political doctrines of State rights and
strict construction which played so large a role in
political discussion in the constitutional period trace
back to the time when the colonies, each standing
upon independent ground so far as connection with
England went, sought to defend themselves against
encroachment by appealing to the letter of their char-
ters or by devising reasons for evading or ignoring
the laws of parliament relating to colonial affairs.
Physical remoteness and practical liberty gendered
also freedom and independence of thought, and when
by the beginning of the eighteenth century the old
notions of the divine right of kings and the sin of
resisting the crown gave way in England to the idea
of government founded in popular consent as ex-
pressed through a representative parliament, the

288 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

colonies saw in the new philosophy only a confirmation
of principles for which in practice they had all along
contended. At every point at which liberty was
involved the constitutional thought of most colonial
lawyers and of an influential minority of the people
had far outrun the prevailing constitutional thought
of England when the Revolution of 1775 came on,
and the political doctrines of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, however much they owed to French polit-
ical speculation, seemed to the average patriot only
impressive statements of English political principles
which to the colonists had long been self evident and
unassailable.

Edmund Burke, turning with scorn in the House
of Commons in 1775 to those who insisted that the
rebellious colonies had grown through British nur-
ture, declared that they had grown rather through
neglect. The assertion was more than a forensic
retort. At no time throughout the whole colonial
period did the English government exert itself to
develop the American colonies. The acts of navi-
gation and trade, while indeed assuring to colonial
vessels and colonial products a privileged market in
England, were primarily designed to exploit colonial
commerce for the benefit of British merchants and
ship owners rather than to protect or encourage
American industry of any kind. Substantial duties
were from time to time imposed upon American com-
merce, the important tea trade of the East India Com-
pany was a monopoly to be avoided only by smug-

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 289

gling, the restriction of the trade in salt bore heavily
upon the colonial fisheries, and in the eighteenth cen-
tury the prohibition of American manufactures was
begun. Not until the Seven Years' war was any
considerable military or naval force sent to America,
and at the close of the war the westward extension of
settlement was barred by a royal proclamation for-
bidding land grants in the Ohio valley. For more
than a hundred years the American colonies were left
practically to themselves to clear the forests, develop
agriculture, fisheries, and commerce, build roads and
bridges, establish schools, fight the Indians and the
French, and deal with the Negro slaves whom the
home government urged upon them.

Yet the colonies might well have been grateful for
neglect, for neglect was building better than either
they or England knew. The very absence of pater-
nalism favored the development of qualities which
were to become of the warp and woof of American
character. Initiative, industry, thrift, and inventive
genius, perseverance in the face of great natural
obstacles, pride in labor and achievement rather than
in birth or social place, respect for intellectual attain-
ment in leaders, individual education and skill in the
worker, equality of opportunity for all who would
work, and contempt for mere precedent as such, all
these are qualities which only a people thrown upon
its own resources and compelled to make its way by
its own effort ever developes on a large scale, and
all were recognized American traits when revolution

290 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

and national independence put them to the test.
Equally characteristic in the field of politics was the
pervading sense of justice and fair play and a willing-
ness to cut with clean, swift strokes any knot which
after long effort refused to be untied.

The generation which carried the colonies through
revolution to independence brought to its task an
intellectual and moral equipment of a high order,
exceptionally high when the isolation of America from
general world interests is recalled. The crude bar-
renness of the days of beginnings had disappeared.
Illiteracy was as good as unknown, newspapers had
multiplied in every colony, and books on serious sub-
jects were in demand. The classical education of
the colonial colleges bore comparison with that which
the English public schools and universities afforded,
acquaintance with English literature had taken the
place of theological and devotional reading, and the
political and legal writings of English jurists and
publicists were well known. The state papers of the
revolutionary period are admirable examples of liter-
ary style and logical presentation of arguments, and
political oratory was everywhere esteemed. Ethi-
cally, too, the standard of social and public conduct
was high. No one can read the history of the Revo-
lution without being impressed by the self-restraint
which the mass of the people exhibited under provo-
cation, the constant appeal to the moral aspect of
questions in controversy, and the comparative absence
of lawless excess and personal self-seeking. The per-

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 291

secution of loyalists left no long memory of ill will,
and friendly relations with Great Britain were resumed
after the separation as soon as Great Britain itself
was willing. A grave seriousness attended the proc-
lamation of independence and the prosecution of the
war, and the enthusiasm which followed the final
victory was the tempered exultation of men who had
solemnly essayed a great work and in faith and sacri-
fice had brought it to success. The struggle for
nationality was no light-hearted adventure from which
some measure of romantic distinction might be gained
whether one lost or won, and shouts and cheers were
less in evidence than prayers of thanksgiving when
the prize was grasped.

Thereafter, whether the tide ebbed or flowed, the
intellectual and moral life of the nation was insepar-
ably bound up with politics: politics of leadership and
parties, politics of territorial expansion and wilder-
ness conquest, politics of States in conflict with the
federal power, politics of slavery and disunion, poli-
tics of industry and economic strength. Naturally,
the early stages saw more problems developed than
were solved. The struggle for the adoption of the
Constitution divided public opinion at the outset into
two great camps, soon transformed into two national
parties, and from that time onward the two-party
system relegated all independent or third party move-
ments to the background and magnified party regu-
larity at the cost of independent political thinking.
Only once in American history has the two-party sys-

2g2 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

tern gone to pieces and only twice have third parties
seriously affected a presidential election. The exist-
ence of a written Constitution over whose interpre-
tation the two dominant parties differed radically
emphasized the merely legal sides of public questions,
turned whole masses of voters into amateur lawyers
as a presidential election approached, subordinated
the consideration of governmental policy to the nar-
rower study of constitutional power, and encouraged
technical procedure in the courts. Broadly or strictly
interpreted, however, the " worship of the Constitu-
tion " which foreigners have often noted kept its hold,
and few of the nineteen amendments that have been
adopted have affected the foundation lines of the
instrument.

How nationality was best to be developed and
conserved, on the other hand, was a question in regard
to which public opinion was long divided. A strong
minority of the nation at all times and a substantial
majority for considerable periods looked upon the
growth of federal power as a dangerous centralization,
and insisted that only by sedulously preserving the
rights of the States could federal absolutism be
averted. There can be little question but that State
rights and strict construction, both as political theo-
ries and as party programmes, were a positive hin-
drance to the growth of a unified national spirit, and
that the relegation of great questions of policy like
internal improvements to the States, few of which
pursued in such matters an enlightened policy and

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 293

most of which had no policy at all, retarded both
social and political progress; but with a Constitution
to be obeyed and a federal system to be applied the
controversy had to be fought out. The salvation of
nationalism came with the opening of the West.
Every western State was the direct creation of the
federal government, a tangible and grateful embodi-
ment of federal power set in the wilderness to possess
the land; and while the bank controversy, the slavery
issue, and nullification were every whit as vital to the
West as to any other section, regard for the nation
and its prestige overshadowed historical precedents
and fine-spun constitutional distinctions and gave to
the consideration of clearly national questions a dis-
tinctively national tone. The West had nothing to
defend except its liberty of thought and conduct, no
inherited local attachments which held its people from
moving forward as the frontier pursued the sun, and
liberty within the bonds of national allegiance and
affection shackled neither its action nor its mind.

Nevertheless the United States long remained iso-
lated and provincial. The political and social revo-
lutions which swept over Europe in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries had few marked repercus-
sions in America. The French Revolution made no
deep or lasting impression upon American political
thought or social habit, partly no doubt because the
United States had already put liberty into practice
for itself; and the successes of Napoleon inspired in
the American people neither fear nor imperial am-

294 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

bition. The conservative reaction against constitu-
tional government which followed the final overthrow
of Napoleon had no counterpart in the United States;
the warning policy of the Monroe doctrine, so far as
popular approval of the doctrine was concerned,
voiced an instinctive dread of being disturbed rather
than an informed and reasoned fear of political absol-
utism; and the liberal movements of 1830 and 1848
came and went with no discernible influence upon
American politics.

There were reasons why the United States should
have been so little moved. The study of modern
languages did not begin to displace Greek and Latin
in American colleges until after the Civil War, con-
tinental literature was little known save through frag-
mentary translation or occasional critical comment,
and foreign travel was too difficult and costly to be
widely indulged. A few feeble experiments in com-
munism and co-operation were almost the only public
evidences of interest in the theories and schemes of
social reorganization which agitated western Europe
after the Napoleonic wars, and the political exiles
whom the reactionary policy of Metternich and his
contemporaries sent to the United States found liberty
and opportunity but not a following. It was long the
fortune of the United States to receive European
social impulses late, months or even years after the
movements themselves had spent their initial force,
and what was then left of novel thought or programme
became the more readily dissipated in the great

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 295

American mass. That the result was loss of interest
in what was being thought, said, and done in Europe
is evident, but the loss was not wholly without com-
pensation, for while intellectual aloofness aided the
provincial trend the barriers of time and distance
worked for American society more than one happy
escape.

It was easier to let Europe go its way, moreover,
because contact with European governments and indi-
vidual Europeans had so often been unfriendly. The
interference with American commerce prior to the war
of 1 81 2, the long controversies over the northeastern
and northwestern boundaries, the neglect of France
to pay long-standing claims until payment was ener-
getically demanded, the strained relations with Great
Britain over Oregon and the Canadian rebellion and
with Russia over Alaska worked in practice to create
distrust. The observations of European travellers
were often unsympathetic and unintelligent, and al-
though the typical Yankee or western Hoosier whose
peculiarities diverted Europe was as infrequent in
reality as was the noble savage of Cooper's novels,
American temperament was sensitive and the fan-
tastic picture gave pain.

The irritation at foreign criticism, always tending
to degenerate into contempt for foreign opinion, was
the greater because all the while settlement was
growing and a nation was being built. The men and
women who pushed the frontier westward, levelled
the forests, broke the tough sod of the prairies, opened

296 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

roads, built homes, churches, and schools, set up town
and county governments, drafted State constitutions
and codes of law, established factories and mills, set
steamboats and barges afloat on the rivers and the
Great Lakes, founded banks and commercial houses,
and pledged their credit in aid of railways and canals,
were practical idealists with whom political opinion
and the gospel of work went hand in hand; and the
people of the older East, if their life because of age
was less romantic, were not less zealous for the great-
ness of the nation whose foundations they had laid.
The widespread support for a protective tariff policy
came naturally to a country whose physical resources
were immense but whose money capital for their
development was small, and the lucrative home
market which a rapidly growing population afforded
seemed only a proper reward for American invest-
ment. To produce as much as possible at home and
buy as little as possible abroad, to give preference to
American ships in both domestic and foreign trade,
to pay wages commensurate with the standard of
living of the native born, and to use profits and sur-
plus for the enlargement of industries rather than as
an endowment for leisurely living, became the national
policy; and although precious natural resources were
too often recklessly wasted and small economies were
often despised, the marvellous growth of wealth
through agriculture, manufactures, and trade never-
theless brought the dream of economic conquest to
realization. It was a practical and immediate con-

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 297

ception of greatness because material opportunity
abounded and the tangible prizes of success were
large, but it was not a selfish ideal, for all who came
were welcome to share.

The protracted and intense absorption of the people
in the development of economic life goes far to explain
the long-continued tolerance of slavery and the efforts
to dispose of the slavery question by compromise.
Few thoughtful persons outside of the slave-holding
States had failed to perceive, long before the threat
of secession became an open challenge, that the South
was falling behind, that its intellectual growth had
been stunted and its planter aristocracy hardened into
a caste, and that its political power was being used
for obstruction or sectional aggrandizement more
than for the well-being of the nation as a whole. The
exhilaration of every territorial expansion was appre-
ciably chilled by the reflection that with each, new
annexation the old straw of the slavery issue must
again be threshed. So long, however, as cotton con-
tinued to be produced in quantities sufficient for
American and foreign demands moral repugnance to
slavery was not strong enough to determine northern
or western public opinion, for the northern cotton
mills were prosperous, the export trade in cotton
meant freights and profits for American-built ships,
and a South which did not raise its own food was a
near-by market for the agricultural products of the
central West. Not until the Union was attacked did
the rest of the country turn in all its strength upon the

298 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

institution which had nourished sectionalism and bred
secession, and the bitter intensity of the change of
front was shown not only in the relentless prosecution
of the Civil war and the extirpation of slavery as an
institution, but even more in the drastic programme
of reconstruction which the dominant Republican
party ruthlessly enforced upon the beaten and pros-
trate South.

That the North and the West, once the unity of
the nation was threatened, should launch themselves
into the fight with something of the exaltation and
intolerance of a crusader finds its explanation also in
the forces of religious fervor and humanitarian in-
terest which had long been stirring in northern and
western society. The great religious revivals which
for a generation before the Civil war repeatedly
swept the central West raised whole communities to
extraordinary emotional heights, magnified personal
confession of sin and profession of faith as social
virtues, and made the prevailing Protestantism an
effective handmaid of reform. What Methodism and
Presbyterianism achieved by sensational methods in
the West, Unitarianism accomplished by quieter but
more enduring intellectual agitation in New England.
Throughout the country was to be seen a phenomenal
multiplication of religious sects, often with peculiar
tenets or practices, and interest in temperance and
prison reform was for a time widespread. Women,
although long politically subjected, set the moral tone
of every northern community, and conventional stand-

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 299

ards of personal morals were prevailingly high.
Immigrants from Europe were welcomed as to free-
dom's paradise provided they would work, and the
marked emphasis upon party regularity in domestic
politics was no bar to the admission of political exiles
who fled from persecution at home. The organized
hostility to foreigners and Catholics which for a few
years thrust itself upon State and national politics
was a localized episode due primarily to the economic
menace of masses of ignorant immigrants and to the
belief that the Catholic church was a political as well
as a religious power, and before the Civil war the
agitation had disappeared. Every northern and
western State had a developed system of free public
schools, sectarian colleges dotted the country, and
State universities were being established. Against a
region whose hard-working pursuit of material wealth
was broadly crossed by religious, educational, and
philanthropic aspiration the lance of slavery and dis-
union could be tilted only to be broken.

The nationalizing influence of the youthful litera-
ture which flowered rapidly after 1815 has also to
be counted. Irving, although a large part of his life
was spent abroad, added the " Sketch Book " to the
world's classics, fixed for more than a century the
popular conception of the social life of Dutch New
York, and told in elaborate detail the story of Wash-
ington. The vivid imagination of Cooper idealized
the Indian in contact with the whites, Longfellow
softened and humanized the traits of the Pilgrim

300 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

fathers and gave to the exiled Acadians of Nova
Scotia a pathetic immortality, and Hawthorne flashed
the lights and shades of New England Puritanism
upon a generation which had almost forgotten its
colonial past. Hildreth had published before the
Civil War a monumental narrative of American
history down to 1820 whose later volumes emphasized
the achievements of Federalism, and Parkman's
" Oregon Trail " had been written and published be-
fore Hildreth's work appeared. The essays of Emer-
son were a challenge to ethical and speculative
thought as well as to religious conservatism, and Story
and Kent had written masterly expositions of Ameri-
can law which the courts still cite. The North
American Review and other magazines had begun
to do for American literature what the great English
monthlies and quarterlies had long done for literature
in England, and a group of great editors in New
York were making newspaper editorials a political
power. No account of slavery and its overthrow
would be complete that did not recognize the modest
literary contribution of Mrs. Stowe, for the generation
which fought to preserve the Union was the same
which had wept over the sufferings of Uncle Tom
and cursed the brutal tyranny of Legree.

The Civil war stands in American history as both
a culmination and a point of departure. All that the
nation possessed of character and material resource
went into the war on the one side or on the other,
but although slavery was abolished and the Union

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 301

saved from rupture both victors and vanquished bore
scars which the sixty years that have since elapsed
have not sufficed wholly to obliterate. Only slowly
did the sectional and party animosities which the
war had aroused disappear, and long after the formal
task of political reconstruction was completed the
South was often spoken of with bitterness and its
loyalty was held in question. Practical concern for
the welfare of the Negro waned rapidly in the North
after emancipation, Negro education was left almost
wholly to private or sectarian effort, and the barrier
of race and color operated not only to prevent social
intercourse but also to limit increasingly for Negroes
the field of skilled employment. The political temper
of the solid South, joined to the disposition of immi-
grants when naturalized to ally themselves with the
Democrats rather than with the Republicans, made
membership in the Democratic party long a social
stigma in many northern States and cemented the
hold of the Republicans upon the business and pro-
fessional classes. Neither party was much concerned
to keep its political methods pure, and the corrupt
use of money in national, State, and local elections
was an evil common to both ; and when the Democrats
who had saluted Cleveland as a leader failed to sup-
port his recommendations, fought him openly in Con-
gress and in the press, and exhibited in practice no
higher moral standards and less capacity for rule than
their Republican opponents, reformers and independ-
ents found it easy to denounce both parties as offer-

302 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ing only a choice of evils and to register a fruitless
protest by staying away from the polls.

The American temperament was tolerant of polit-
ical abuses, but it was not disposed to accept in perpe-
tuity either inefficiency or corruption, and before long
the work of reformation began both within and with-
out the party organizations. Men whose business or
professional fortunes were still to be made braved
social odium and supported Cleveland, and young men
who had sneered at politics as " dirty business " laid
aside their prejudices and took a hand. Teachers of
economics and political science put protection and
political corruption on the defensive in colleges and
universities, and newspapers found it expedient to
drop their party banners and proclaim at least a
nominal independence. A powerful weekly press,
including denominational journals of wide circulation,
came to the aid of civil service reform, tariff revision,
and sound money, popular books on political and
economic subjects multiplied, and the brush and
pencil of the cartoonist exhibited without mercy the
foibles and vices of politicians. A new generation
in Congress turned from the old and distasteful issues
of the war and reconstruction to the more vital prob-
lems of trusts,, railway regulation, and financial re-
form, while beyond the Mississippi the opening of
transcontinental railway lines and the development
of mining, grain growing, and cattle raising were
banishing the last remnants of the frontier and form-
ing a prosperous and energetic society ready to follow

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 303

any leader who could lead with small regard to the
party to which he had once belonged.

The war with Spain, bringing together the South,
the North, and the West in a brief but exhilarating
common effort and opening new vistas of world power,
only deepened the national searching of heart, and a
veritable mania for investigation and reform prepared
the way for the sweeping and fervid exhortations of
Roosevelt. A mere enumeration of the things to
which the public mind with feverish vigor turned
its attention would be bewildering. Scandals were
hunted out and probed, administrative practices were
overhauled, charges of corruption in elections or in
public office were exposed, and State laws undertook
to regulate party primaries, punish bribery and fraud,
and limit campaign expenditures by candidates. State
constitutions were repeatedly revised or amended,
associations of lawyers busied themselves with the
drafting of model statutes, city government by com-
mission was widely essayed, new political devices of
referendum, initiative, and recall were introduced, and
suffrage for women was hopefully pressed. The ap-
pointment of committees in the House of Repre-
sentatives was wrested from the control of the speaker
and a close oligarchy of party leaders, and public
hearings on measures of importance became an es-
tablished practice. Without essential modification of
the Constitution itself the legislative machinery of
the federal government was liberalized and executive
efficiency enhanced, and government in States and

304 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

nation became a government of the people and for the
people to a greater degree than had ever before been
known.

The reconstitution of social life kept pace with the
reform of politics. The establishment of an eight-
hour day, payment of wages in money instead of in
orders for goods, the regulation of the labor of women
and children, factory and tenement house inspection
and improved building laws, the abolition of the sweat
shop, industrial insurance, old age pensions, and
accident prevention, stricter regulation of railway
transportation, the abatement of immigration abuses,
improved housing and municipal sanitation, federal
control of public health and epidemic diseases, city
planning, open spaces and playgrounds, the extir-
pation of commercialized vice, rigorous supervision of
the liquor traffic clearly foreshadowing ultimate pro-
hibition, free and compulsory education for the
masses and State-supported education in universities
and professional schools, and a scientific and humani-
tarian treatment of poverty, crime, and delinquency
are only the more striking incidents of a crusade
which made social service a passion and broadened
the foundations of national happiness. Where public
funds failed private generosity came to supplement
them, and the millions of accumulated wealth which
were poured out in aid of social undertakings made
American giving the amazement not only of other
peoples but of the nation itself.

Neither politically nor socially, however, did the

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND 305

American temperament lose its practical and in-
herently conservative character. No exposure of
industrial abuses shook the hold of capitalism upon
prevailing economic thought, and the economic teach-
ings of socialism at no time acquired wide popular
vogue. Save for the short-lived Progressive move-
ment and the less important Populist agitation, polit-
ical liberalism never broke completely with old party
affiliations and liberal journals lived only by the aid
of private subsidies. The unstinted generosity of the
rich maintained throughout a predominantly practical
interest, and the endowment of scientific research or
professional study was more readily obtained than
philanthropic support for literature, art, or general
public education. The war with Spain bred no
aggressive spirit in international relations, and the
successful and mighty efforts of the world war left
the United States as destitute as ever of militaristic
ambition and anxious only for the speedy return of
peace. In America as everywhere the overthrow of
the Russian imperial government was acclaimed as a
great step toward liberty, and the revolutionary move-
ments which succeeded the downfall of the Tsar were
watched with sympathetic attention by all classes,
but when constitutional revolution gave way to
bolshevism official recognition of the novel regime was
refused and the propagation of communist doctrine
in the United States was ruthlessly repressed.
Wherever a European population was starving or
pestilence was rampant American financial relief and

3o6 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

scientific skill were ready with their aid, and the huge
war loans to the allies were granted for the asking,
but after the war was over no fervor or subtlety of
petition could induce either government or people to
do for Europe what it was firmly believed Europe
should be left to do for itself. Stirred to the depths
as it easily is by the appeal of great human causes,
gigantic as is the strength which it disposes when it
feels that the time for action has come, the American
mind keeps firm its hold upon reality and trusts to
the perfected working of tried historical processes for
the coming of the social betterment to which the
nation has never ceased to aspire.

The history of American democracy is only in a
special and limited sense a story of material growth.
The subjugation of nature to the service of man has
been cast for the United States upon a continental
scale and the physical fruits of conquest have been
varied and large, but the temper of the conquerors
has been from the beginning the temper of those who,
fixing their eyes upon the future, have thought of them-
selves as they would like to be. Neither discourage-
ment nor contentment nor illusion has ever dominated
the American spirit for long, and the failures and
successes of yesterday have been only the points of
departure for today. It is the priceless possession of
the American nation that it is still young, that it still
has material battles to fight and conquests of mind
to gain, and that in a world which has not yet found
peace its spirit ranges generous, buoyant, and free.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

THE CENTURIES OF BEGINNINGS

Authorities. A considerable number of the most
important contemporary accounts have been collected,
with editorial notes, in Jameson's Original Narratives of
American History; Hart's American History Told by
Contemporaries, covering the whole period until after the
Civil War, gives numerous short extracts. The European
situation in the period of discovery and early settlement
is admirably summarized in Cheyney's European Back-
ground of American History. The best brief modern
account of Spanish exploration and conquest is Bourne's
Spain in America. For the French achievements Park-
man's Pioneers of France in the New World, The Jesuits
in North America, La Salle and the Discovery of the
Great West, The Old Regime in Canada, Frontenac and
New France, A Half Century of Conflict, and Montcalm
and Wolfe still hold their place in scholarship and liter-
ary charm; Thwaites's France in America is the best brief
account. Channing's History of the United States, in-
tended to cover the whole period, is a scholarly narrative
embodying recent investigations. The fullest account by
an English writer is Doyle's English in America, but the
treatment of colonial affairs in Gardiner's History of
England in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, and the

3°9

310 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

later works by the same author on the Puritan period in
England, should not be neglected. See also Eggleston's
Beginners oj a Nation, Fiske's Dutch and Quaker Colo-
nies, Andrews's Colonial Selj -Government, and Greene's
Provincial America. Selections from charters and other
formal documents (to 1898) are in MacDonald's Docu-
mentary Source Book oj American History.

CHAPTER II

THROUGH REVOLUTION TO INDEPENDENCE

Authorities. Of the comprehensive narratives of the
Revolutionary period that of Channing, History oj the
United States, is the most scholarly and judicious. Lecky's
History oj England in the Eighteenth Century gives a
critical English view. Tyler's Literary History oj the
American Revolution is indispensable for an understand-
ing of the period, and Fisher's Story oj the American
Revolution is often important for details. Burke's
speeches on American Taxation and Conciliation with
America are the great pleas of a great statesman. The
most useful biographies, important also in some cases for
the early constitutional period as well, are those of Frank-
lin, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Wash-
ington, and Jefferson in the American Statesmen series,
and Sumner's Robert Morris, the latter the most elaborate
account of Revolutionary finance. There is an admirable
brief sketch of the finances of the Revolution in Dewey's
Financial History oj the United States, which work should
also be consulted on all later financial topics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 311

CHAPTER III

FRAMING A NATIONAL CONSTITUTION

Authorities. To Channing's United States may now
be added McMaster's History of the People 0} the United
States, beginning with the close of the Revolution and
extending to the Civil War, and rich in social and economic
material. Hildreth's History of the United States, an
older work extending to 1820, is still important. Ban-
croft's History of the Formation and Adoption of the
Constitution is a ponderous work not yet wholly super-
seded, but McLaughlin's The Confederation and the
Constitution gives in brief compass the essential data.
Farrand's edition of the debates in the Federal Conven-
tion has displaced all earlier editions. The classical con-
temporary exposition of the Constitution is The Federalist,
by Hamilton and others, available in numerous editions.
There are useful biographies of Madison and Jay in the
American Statesmen series.

CHAPTER IV
THE ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Authorities. For the general narrative Channing and
McMaster as before, and in addition Schouler's History of
the United States, an important work extending to 1865.
Hildreth, who wrote with a Federalist leaning, should not be
passed over. Stanwood's History of the Presidency is the
authoritative account of the successive presidential elec-

3i2 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

tions. Additional biographies in the American Statesmen
series include those of Marshall, Gallatin, and Monroe.
With 1789 begin the regular series of Senate and House
journals and other documents, debates in Congress (in
successive collections known as Annals of Congress, Con-
gressional Debates, Congressional Globe, and Congressional
Record), the United States Statutes at Large, and the
decisions of the Supreme and other Federal courts.
Richardson's Messages and Papers 0} the Presidents is a
standard compilation. There are editions, in some cases
several editions, of the collected writings of most of the
earlier statesmen of prominence.

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY

Authorities. For the period from 1801 to 181 7
Henry Adams's History of the United States is of marked
importance, especially on the diplomatic side. Channing's
Jeffersonian Period and Turner's Rise 0} the New West
are valuable summary accounts. Mahan's Sea Power in
the War 0} 1812 is a special study of high value. Addi-
tional biographical literature includes the lives of Cass,
John Quincy Adams, and Jackson in the American States-
men series, and the lives of Jackson by Parton (an old-
fashioned work still valuable) and Bassett. The most
notable work of reminiscence is the diary of John Quincy
Adams, supplemented now by Ford's edition of Adams's
writings. Turner's The Frontier in American History is
an interpretation of the first importance; Roosevelt's Win-
ning 0} the West has scholarly merit as well as literary
interest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

CHAPTER VI

A NEW PHASE OF DEMOCRATIC CONTROL

Authorities. To the biographies already referred to,
and the diary of John Qirincy Adams, should be added
the lives of Webster, Calhoun, Benton, and Van Buren
in the American Statesmen series, Benton's Thirty Years'
View (1820-1850), Amos Kendall's Autobiography, and
the diary of Van Buren. Special studies of importance
include MacDonald's Jacksonian Democracy, Hart's
Slavery and Abolition, DuBois's History oj the Suppression
of the African Slave Trade, Houston's Critical Study of
Nidlification in South Carolina, Catterall's History of the
Second Bank of the United States, Taussig's Tariff History
of the United States, and Bourne's History of the Surplus
Revenue of 1837.

CHAPTER VII

A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

Authorities. Until 1850 the authorities are mainly
those already referred to. After 1850 Rhodes's History
of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 is the
fullest and most important narrative account. Burgess's
Middle Period and Garrison's Westward Extension are
useful shorter studies. The lives of Seward, Sumner,
Chase, and Lincoln in the American Statesmen series, and
the elaborate life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay, also
deal with the period. For the Mexican war J. H. Smith's
War with Mexico, Polk's Diary, a human document of
remarkable interest, and McCormac's James K. Polk.

3i4 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIUMPH OF NATIONALITY

Authorities. The monumental history of the aboli-
tion movement is W. P. and F. P. Garrison's William
Lloyd Garrison. Spring's Kansas is the best and most
picturesque account of the Kansas episode. The best
biographies of John Brown are those by Sanborn and
Villard. Burgess's Civil War and the Constitution is
indispensable for the constitutional side of the Civil war,
as are the same author's Reconstruction and the Consti-
tution and Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Eco-
nomic, for the reconstruction period; see also the life of
Thaddeus Stevens in the American Statesmen series. For
the position of the South, Davis's Rise and Fall oj the
Confederate Government, Stephens's War Between the
States, and Pollard's Lost Cause are of first-rate impor-
tance. For economic conditions in the South during the
war, Schwab's Confederate States of America. Dewey's
Financial History of the United States, already referred
to, gives an- admirable view of Civil war finance. The
elaborate government publication known as War of the
Rebellion: Official Records, is a vast collection of war
documents, chiefly military and naval. The documents
of the Confederate government, with the exception of the
statutes of the Confederate Congress, are still for the
most part unpublished. The memoirs of Grant, Sherman,
Sheridan, McClellan, and other military leaders have some
importance as personal narratives or apologies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 315

CHAPTER IX

THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRY AND POWER

Authorities. Rhodes's History oj the United States
from the Compromise oj 1850, which ends with 1877, is
continued by the same author's History oj the United
States from Hayes to McKinley. Sparks's National De-
velopment and Dewey's National Problems are compen-
dious narratives of much usefulness. Problems of tariff
and revenue are ably treated in Taussig's Tariff History
and Dewey's Financial History, already referred to; see
also Laughlin's Bimetalism and Horace White's Money
and Banking. The collected writings of George William
Curtis are especially important for the civil service reform
movement. For international questions see Hart's Foun-
dations oj American Foreign Policy, Moore's Principles
oj American Diplomacy, Fish's American Diplomacy, and
Latane's America as a World Power; with these, for the
documents, Moore's monumental International Law Digest.
Attention should again be called to Stanwood's History
oj the Presidency, containing the texts of party platforms
and details of presidential campaigns and electoral votes,
and Richardson's Messages and Papers oj the Presidents.

CHAPTER X

AMERICA AND THE NEW WORLD

Authorities. With the exception of Sparks's National
Development and Dewey's National Problems, already
cited, and Paxton's Recent History oj the United States,

316 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

recourse must now be had to the various annual cyclo-
paedias and political almanacs, the International Year
Book and American Year Book being especially compre-
hensive. Bishop's Theodore Roosevelt and his Time and
Woodrow Wilson's State Papers and Addresses are of
fundamental importance. There is as yet no scholarly
account of the world war, and most of the popular sketches
are highly biased; McMaster's The United States in the
World War, Crowell and Wilson's How America went to
War, and Scott's Survey of International Relations be-
tween the United States and Germany, 1Q14-1Q17, have,
however, some usefulness. The fullest and ablest account
of the negotiations at Paris is Temperley's History of the
Peace Conference, with the texts of the various treaties
and numerous documents.

CHAPTER XI

POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN MIND

Authorities. There is no comprehensive work on the
topics treated in this chapter. The following, however,
will be found useful in addition to many of the works
already cited: The Cambridge History of American Litera-
ture, Merriam's American Political Theories, Bryce's
American Commonwealth, De Tocqueville's Democracy in
America (for the first half of the 19th century), Hayes's
American Democracy, its History and Problems, Croly's
The Promise of American Life, Stearns's Liberalism in
America.

CHRONOLOGY

CHRONOLOGY
I. Until the Revolution

1492. First voyage of Columbus. Second voyage 1493.

third 1498, fourth 1502. Neither voyage ex-
tended to the mainland of North America.

1493. A bull of Pope Alexander VI divided America

between Spain and Portugal.
1497. Cabot discovered some part of North America,

probably Cape Breton or Labrador. The basis

of English claims to American territory.
1 5 13. Ponce de Leon explored Florida.
1 5 19. Pineda found the mouth of the Mississippi.
1539-42. De Soto traversed the Gulf coast from Florida

to the Mississippi.
1587. Grant of American territory to Raleigh, who

named the territory Virginia. A " lost colony "

planted in North Carolina.
(1603-25, reign of James I.)

1606. First Virginia charter; first settlement 1607.
1609. Second Virginia charter.

161 2. Third Virginia charter, revoked by the crown 1624.
1 6 14. John Smith explored the New England coast.

1 619. Representative government established in Virginia;

first introduction of negro slaves.

1620. Grant of territory to the Council for New Eng-

land. Settlement of Separatists at Plymouth.

319

320 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

162 1. Charter of Dutch West India Company; 1623,
first settlement at New Amsterdam (New York).
(1625-49, reign of Charles I.)

1628. Puritan settlement at Salem, Massachusetts.

1629. First charter of Massachusetts: annulled 1684.

(Parliament dissolved, no other for eleven years.)
1632. Charter of Maryland; taken away 1688, restored
1 71 5; representative government established in
Massachusetts.

1635. First English settlement in Connecticut.

1636. Settlement of Providence, Rhode Island; Harvard

College established.

1638. Swedish settlements on the Delaware; passed

under English jurisdiction 1664; acquired by
Penn from the Duke of York 1682; Delaware
a separate colony 1703.

1639. Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the first

frame of government.

1643-84. New England Confederation.

1644. Patent for Providence Plantations.

1649. Maryland Toleration act.

(1649-60, Commonwealth and Protectorate.)

1 65 1. Beginning of series of navigation acts and acts
of trade, intended to control colonial trade in
the interest of England; 1660, so-called First
Navigation act, consolidating and extending
earlier provisions; numerous later acts to 1696.

(1660-85, reign of Charles II.)

1663. First charter of Carolina; second charter 1665; in
1729 the two colonies of North and South Caro-
lina passed under the control of the crown;
charter of Rhode Island, legally operative, with
some changes at the time of the Revolution,

CHRONOLOGY 321

until 1843; charter of Connecticut, legally
operative, with changes as in Rhode Island, until
1818.
1664. Following war between England and Holland the
Dutch possessions in America, which had been
taken by the English, were given to the Duke
of York (later James II), and the names of
New Netherland and New Amsterdam were
changed to New York. Grant of New Jersey
by the Duke of York to Berkeley and Carteret;
in 1674 the colony was divided, and Carteret's
rights in East New Jersey were later acquired
by Penn and Quaker associates; New Jersey a
royal province from 1702.

1 68 1. Charter of Pennsylvania, in force until the Revo-

lution.

1682. La Salle took possession of the Mississippi valley

for Louis XIV of France; 1699, first settlements
in Louisiana; 1718, New Orleans founded.

1683. Representative government established in New

York.

(1685-89, reign of James II; 1688-89, English Revo-
lution.)

( 1 689-1 702, reign of William and Mary.)

1689-97. War between England and France, known in
America as King William's war, and involving
war between the English and French colonies
without change in the territorial status of either.

1 69 1. Second charter of Massachusetts, with Plymouth
incorporated; Maine later purchased by Massa-
chusetts from the Gorges claimants.

1693. William and Mary College established.

1701. Cadillac founded Detroit.

322 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

(1702-14, reign of Anne.)

1702-13. War of the Spanish Succession, known in

America as Queen Anne's war.
(1714-27, reign of George I.)
(1727-60, reign of George II.)
1733. Charter of Georgia, limited to 21 years.
1744-48. War of the Austrian Succession, known in

America as King George's war.
1746. Princeton College founded.
1 756-63. Seven Years' war (fighting in America from

1754).
(1760, beginning of the reign of George III.)

1763. Peace of Paris.

II. The Revolution and the Confederation

1763. Royal proclamation regulating the administration

of the territory acquired from France.

1764. Sugar act, a revival and revision of the Molasses

act of 1733, regulating the colonial trade in sugar
products.
C765. Stamp act, repealed 1766 to the accompaniment
of a Declaratory act asserting the right of
Parliament to tax the colonies; Stamp Act
Congress at New York.

1767. Townshend Revenue acts; modified in 1770 with

the retention of a duty on tea.

1768. British troops sent to Boston.
1770. March 5, Boston Massacre.

1772. Committees of Correspondence begin in Massa-
chusetts, later appointed in all the colonies;
burning of the Gaspee in Narragansett Bay.

CHRONOLOGY 323

1773. December 16, destruction of East India Company

tea at Boston.

1774. The "five intolerable acts": (1) closing the port

of Boston, (2) altering the Massachusetts char-
ter, (3) providing for the trial in England or in
other colonies of persons accused of crime
through enforcement of revenue laws, (4) regu-
lating the provision of quarters for troops, (5)
relating to the province of Quebec. Sept.-Oct.,
First Continental Congress, Philadelphia, issued
a Declaration of Rights and adopted a non-
importation and non-consumption agreement
known as " The Association."

1775. April 19, battles of Lexington and Concord; May

10, meeting of Second Continental Congress, in
existence until the adoption of the Articles of
Confederation, 1781; June 17, battle of Bunker
Hill; July, Washington took command of the
American army; December, unsuccessful attempt
to take Quebec.

1776. March 17, British evacuated Boston; June, un-

successful attempt of British to take Charles-
ton; July 4, Declaration of Independence;
August, battle of Long Island, followed by
Washington's retreat across New Jersey; De-
cember, battle of Trenton.

1777. January, battle of Princeton; June, Burgoyne's

invasion; August, St. Leger defeated at Oriskany;
September, Washington defeated at Brandywine
Creek; October, Burgoyne surrendered at Sara-
toga, Washington unsuccessful at Germantown;
November, Articles of Confederation adopted by
Congress and submitted to the States.

324 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1778. February, alliance with France; British abandoned

Philadelphia, but occupied Charleston and
Savannah; beginning of three years' war in the
South; Indian power broken in the Wyoming
valley; Kaskaskia and Vincennes taken by
Clark.

1779. Naval victories of John Paul Jones.

1 78 1. Articles of Confederation in effect; October, sur-

render of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

1782. Preliminary treaty of peace.

1783. September 3, definitive treaty of peace.

1784. Jefferson's plan for the organization of the western

territory.
1787. May, Federal Convention, Philadelphia; Septem-
ber, Constitution adopted by the convention,
transmitted by Congress to the States, and rati-
fied by conventions in eleven States by the end
of 1788; Northwest Ordinance, or Ordinance of
1787, adopted by Congress while the Federal
Convention was in session.

III. Constitutional Period

1789-93. First Washington administration. 1st and 2d

Congresses.
April 30, 1789. Washington inaugurated at New York, the

administration dating legally from March 4;

Federal capital at New York 1789-91, then at

Philadelphia until 1801, then removed to the

District of Columbia.

1789. North Carolina ratified the Constitution.

1790. Rhode Island ratified the Constitution; first decen-

nial census.

CHRONOLOGY 325

1 79 1. First Bank of the United States chartered, the

charter expiring by limitation in 181 1; Vermont
admitted as a State; December, first ten Amend-
ments of the Constitution in force.

1792. Kentucky admitted as a State.

1793. Proclamation of American neutrality in war be-

tween England and France; Genet episode;
cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney.
1793-97. Second Washington administration. 3d and
4th Congresses.

1794. Whiskey insurrection in Pennsylvania; Jay treaty

with England.

1796. Tennessee admitted as a State.

1 797-1801. John Adams administration. 5th and 6th
Congresses.

1798. January 8, Eleventh Amendment in force; X. Y. Z.
affair; naval war with France; Alien and Sedi-
tion acts; Kentucky and Virginia resolutions.

1801-05. First Jefferson administration (Jefferson chosen
by the House of Representatives), yth and 8th
Congresses.

1801-02. War with the Barbary states.

1803. Ohio admitted as a State; Louisiana purchased

from France.

1804. September 25, Twelfth Amendment in force.
1805-09. Second Jefferson administration, gth and 10th

Congresses.
1806. Embargo act; the Burr conspiracy.
1809-13. First Madison administration, nth and 12th

Congresses.
1810. American occupation of Spanish territory east of

the Mississippi.

326 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1812. Declaration of war against England; Louisiana

admitted as a State.
1813-17. Second Madison administration. 13th and

14th Congresses.

1 8 14. August, capitol and other buildings at Washington

burned by the British; September, naval battles
of Lake Erie and Lake Champlain; October,
British and Indians defeated by Harrison at the
Thames; December 24, treaty of Ghent.

181 5. January, defeat of the British by Jackson at New

Orleans.

1816. Protective tariff act; second Bank of the United

States chartered (the constitutionality of the
bank was upheld by the Supreme Court in 18 19,
in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland; the
charter expired by limitation in 1836); Indiana
admitted as a State.
181 7-2 1. First Monroe administration. 15th and 16th
Congresses.

181 7. Mississippi admitted as a State.

1 81 8. Jackson invaded Florida; Illinois admitted as a

State.

1 8 19. The Floridas acquired from Spain by treaty

(ratified by Spain 1821); Alabama admitted as
a State.

1820. First Missouri compromise; Maine admitted as a

State.

182 1. Second Missouri compromise; Missouri admitted

as a State.
1821-25. Second Monroe administration. 17th and 18th
Congresses.

1823. Declaration of the Monroe doctrine.

1824. Protective tariff act.

CHRONOLOGY 327

1825-29. John Qnincy Adams administration (Adams
chosen by the House of Representatives), igth
and 20th Congresses.

1825. Erie canal completed.

1828. Protective tariff, known as the " tariff of abomi-
nations."

1829-33. First Jackson administration. 21st and 22d
Congresses.

1830. The "great debate" in the Senate between Web-

ster and Hayne; first section of the Baltimore
& Ohio Railroad opened.

183 1. First national nominating convention, that of the

Anti-Masonic party; the "Liberator" founded
by William Lloyd Garrison.

1832. Bill to recharter the Bank of the United States

vetoed; protective tariff act, modifying the
duties of the act of 1828; South Carolina ordi-
nance of nullification; Jackson's proclamation to
South Carolina; New England Anti-Slavery
Society founded.

1833. Compromise tariff act.

1833-37. Second Jackson administration. 23d and 24th
Congresses.

1833. Removal of the deposits; Senate resolution cen-
suring Jackson expunged from the journal
January, 1837.

1836. Act for the distribution of the surplus revenue
among the States; "gag rule" of the House of
Representatives against the reception of aboli-
tion petitions; Arkansas admitted as a State;
Texas declared its independence of Mexico.

1837-41. Van Bur en administration. 25th and 26th
Congresses.

328 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1837. Michigan admitted as a State; panic of 1837.

1839. "Aroostook war" over the disputed northern

boundary of Maine.

1840. Independent Treasury act, repealed 1841, system

reestablished 1846.

1841-45. Harrison and Tyler administrations (Harrison
died April 4, 1841). 2jth and 28th Congresses.

1842. Ashburton treaty settling the northeastern bound-
ary dispute; tariff act.

1844. Treaty for the annexation of Texas rejected by

the Senate.

1845. Texas annexed by joint resolution, admitted as a

State in December; Florida admitted as a State.
1845-49. Polk administration. 29th and 30th Congresses.

1846. May 8, battle of Palo Alto; May 9, battle of

Resaca de la Palma; May 13, declaration of war
against Mexico; Wilmot proviso regarding
slavery in territory purchased from Mexico;
Iowa admitted as a State.

1847. February, battle of Buena Vista; September, occu-

pation of the city of Mexico.

1848. February 2, treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending

the Mexican war; discovery of gold in Cali-
fornia; Wisconsin admitted as a State.
1849-53. Taylor and Fillmore administrations (Taylor
died July 9, 1850). 31st and 32d Congresses.

1849. A free State constitution adopted by California.

1850. Compromise measures; California admitted as a

State; Clayton-Bulwer treaty with Great Britain
regarding an isthmian canal.
1852. Publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
1853-57. Pierce administration. 33d and 34th Con-
gresses.

CHRONOLOGY 329

1853. Gadsden purchase of Mexican territory.

1854. Kansas-Nebraska act; Republican party organized

in Michigan; Ostend manifesto regarding the
annexation of Cuba.

1855-56. Civil war in Kansas.

1857-61. Buchanan administration. 35th and 36th Con-
gresses.

1857. Dred Scott decision; panic of 1857.

1858. Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois; Minnesota

admitted as a State.

1859. John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry; Oregon

admitted as a State.

i860. December 20, South Carolina ordinance of seces-
sion.

1861. January, Kansas admitted as a State; February,
government of the Confederate States of America
formed at Montgomery.

1861-65. First Lincoln administration. 37th and 38th
Congresses.

1 86 1. April 13, surrender of Fort Sumter; July 21, first

battle of Bull Run; the Trent affair.

1862. Union victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson,

Madrid, and Island No. 10; March, Monitor-
Merrimac encounter; Lincoln's message recom-
mending compensated emancipation; April, bat-
tle of Shiloh; New Orleans taken; June-July,
Wilderness campaign; August 29-30, second
battle of Bull Run; September, battle of
Antietam, followed by the Emancipation Procla-
mation, effective January 1, 1863; greenback
currency introduced; Union Pacific and Central
Pacific railways chartered; Homestead act.

1863. July 1-3, battle of Gettysburg; July 4, Vicksburg

330 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

taken, completing the opening of the Mississippi;
September, battle of Chickamauga; November,
battle of Chattanooga; National Bank act;
Habeas Corpus act; Draft act, followed by riots
in New York; West Virginia admitted as a
State.

1864. May, Wilderness battles; June, the Alabama sunk

by the Kearsarge; August, Mobile taken; August-
October, Sheridan's Shenandoah valley raid;
September, Atlanta taken; December, Savannah
and Nashville taken; Nevada admitted as a
State.
1865-69. Lincoln and Johnson administrations (Lincoln
assassinated April 14, died the next day). 39th
and 40th Congresses.

1865. April 9, surrender of Lee; April 26, surrender of

Johnston; May 29, Johnson's amnesty procla-
mation; December 18, Thirteenth Amendment
in force.

1866. Freedmen's Bureau act; Civil Rights act; June,

Fourteenth Amendment adopted by Congress, in
force July 28, 1868; Atlantic cable opened.

1867. Reconstruction acts; Tenure of Office act; im-

peachment of Johnson; Nebraska admitted as a
State; Alaska purchased from Russia; National
Grange of the Pa'.rons of Husbandry formed.
1869-73. First Grant administration. 41st and 42nd
Congresses.

1869. Knights of Labor organized.

1870. Fifteenth Amendment in force.

1870-72. Federal election acts, popularly known as the
" force bills."

1 87 1. Treaty of Washington for the arbitration of the

CHRONOLOGY 331

Alabama claims and the northwest boundary

controversy.
1873-77. Second Grant Administration. 43d and 44th

Congresses.
1873. A Coinage act, later known as " the crime of 1873,"

omitted the standard silver dollar from the list

of coins; panic of 1873.

1875. Resumption act, providing for the resumption of

specie payment January 1, 1879.

1876. Colorado admitted as a State.

1877-81. Hayes administration (Hayes chosen in accord-
ance with the decisions of an Electoral Com-
mission). 45th and 46th Congresses.

1877. Baltimore & Ohio Railway strike.

1878. Bland- Allison Silver Coinage act.

1880. Treaty with China restricting Chinese immigration.
1881-85. Garfield and Arthur administrations (Garfield

shot July 2, died September 19). 47th, and
48th Congresses.

1 88 1. American Federation of Labor organized.

1882. Act prohibiting for ten years the immigration of

Chinese laborers; 1892, act extended for another
ten years.

1883. Pendleton Civil Service act; revised protective

tariff act.

1884. Revised tariff bill defeated.

1885-89. First Cleveland administration. 4Qth and 50th
Congresses.

1887. Cleveland's tariff message; Interstate Commerce act.

1889-93. Harrison administration. 51st and $2d Con-
gresses.

1889. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and
Washington admitted as States.

332 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1890. McKinley Tariff act; Sherman Anti-Trust act;
Sherman Silver Purchase act, repealed 1893;
Idaho and Wyoming admitted as States.

1892. Homestead, Pa., strike.

1893. Treaty for the annexation of Hawaii submitted

to the Senate, later withdrawn by Cleveland.
1893-97. Second Cleveland administration. 53rd and
54th Congresses.

1893. Panic of 1893; Behring Sea arbitration.

1894. Wilson-Gorman tariff act; Chicago railway strike.

1895. Venezuela boundary controversy with Great Britain.

1896. Utah admitted as a State.

1897-1901. First McKinley administration. 55th and
56th Congresses.

1897. Dingley protective tariff act.

1898. February 15, Battleship Maine destroyed by an

explosion at Havana; April 11, McKinley's
message on the Cuban crisis; April 19, joint
resolution on the independence of Cuba; April
23, declaration of war against Spain; May 1,
Dewey's victory at Manila; July 3, destruction
of the Spanish fleet at Santiago; August 12, pre-
liminary peace; December 10, definitive treaty
of peace (a later cession of islands in the Philip-
pines November 7, 1920) ; July, Federal Bank-
ruptcy act.

1899. Tripartite treaty (United States, Great Britain,

and Germany) partitioning the Samoan Islands;
First Hague Conference.

1900. Civil government established in the Philippines.

1901-05. McKinley and Roosevelt administrations (Mc-
Kinley shot September 6, 1901, died September
14). 57th and 58th Congresses.

CHRONOLOGY 333

1 90 1. Panama Canal treaty with Great Britain re-

placing the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850; first

of several important acts amending the Inter-
state Commerce act of 1887.

1902. Act for the reclamation of arid lands; anthracite

coal strike.

1902. Commission government for the Philippines estab-

lished; replaced by representative government in
1916.

1903. Isthmian Canal convention.

1904. Panama Canal Zone treaty.

1905-09. Roosevelt administration, sgth and 60th Con-
gresses.

1907. Inland Waterways Commission established; Okla-

homa admitted as a State.

1908. First conference of governors at Washington.
1909-13. Tajt administration. 61 st and 62d Congresses.

1909. Payne-Aldrich tariff act.

1910. Postal savings banks established.

1910-n. Garment workers' strike, New York and
Chicago.

191 2. Arizona and New Mexico admitted as States.

1913. February 25, Sixteenth Amendment in force.

19 13-17. First Wilson administration. 63d and 64th
Congresses.

19 13. May 31, Seventeenth Amendment in force; Under-

wood tariff act; Federal Reserve Bank system
established.

19 14. August, declarations of war in Europe.

19 1 6. Champlain Barge Canal completed.

19 1 7-2 1. Second Wilson administration. 65th and 66th
Congresses.

1917. February 5, Immigration Restriction act (further

334 AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

restrictions by act of June 5, 1920); March 2,
Porto Rico Government act; March 31, Virgin
Islands occupied by the United States under
treaty of purchase with Denmark; April 2, Wil-
son's war message; April 6, declaration of war
against Germany; December, declaration of war
against Austria.

19 1 8. November 11, armistice; Erie Barge Canal opened.

19 19. January 18, Peace Conference opened at Paris;

June 28, treaty of Versailles signed; November
19, treaty rejected by the Senate.

1920. January 16, Eighteenth Amendment in force;

March 19, treaty of Versailles again rejected by
the Senate; April 13, Railway Wage Board
established; June 10, Nineteenth Amendment in
force.
192 1- . Harding administration. 67th Congress.

192 1. May 18, Immigration Restriction act establishing

a quota system, operative until June 30, 1922,
but subsequently extended; May 27, Emergency
Tariff act; June 16, Federal Budget and Account-
ing act; July 2, joint resolution declaring peace
with Germany and Austria; August 15, Meat
Packers and Stockyards act; August 24, Grain
Exchange Trading act; August 25, treaty of
peace with Germany signed; October 18, peace
treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary
ratified by the Senate; treaty with Colombia
paying for the Panama Canal zone; November,
Washington Conference on disarmament; De-
cember 13, four-Power treaty (United States,
Great Britain, France, and Japan) regarding the
Pacific.

INDEX

Abolition movement, 170, 171.

Adams, John, in Revolution,
47; vice-president, 76, 95;
president, 98.

Adams, J. Q., and Monroe doc-
trine, 13 5, 137; president,
140-145; treaty of 1819, 174.

Adams, Samuel, 32, 40.

Africa, colonial trade with, 15.

Aguinaldo, 258.

Alabama, 23, 130, 205.

Alaska, 67, 177; Russian claim,
136, 137; purchased, 228.

Albany regency, 159, 161.

Amendments, constitutional: I-
X, 94; XI, 100; XII, 76, 120;
XIII, 214; XIV, 221, 222,

224, 228; XV, 222, 223; XVI,

251; XVII, 267; XIX, 280,
281. See Constitution of the
United States.

America, discovery, 1, 2.

American Antislavery Society,
170.

American party, 199.

Amherst, General, 21, 23.

Amiens, peace of, 109.

Andrew, John A., 207.

Annapolis convention, 57.

Anti-Catholic agitation, 164.

Anti-Federalists, origin, 72 ; in
first Congress, 82 ; bank con-
troversy, 92 ; in second Con-
gress, 95.

Anti-Imperialism, 257, 258.

Antislavery societies, early, 170.

Anti-Trust act, 247.
Antietam, 210.
Appalachian mountains, 23.
Arizona, 180, 182, 269.
Arkansas, 164, 205, 208.
Armistice of 1918, 276.
Arnold, Benedict, 37.
Arthur, Chester A., president,

240.
Articles of Confederation, 51-

54-
Ashburton treaty, 176.
Atlanta, Ga., 213.
Attorney-General, office created,

83-
Austria, archduke assassinated,
271; ambassador dismissed,
273; war with, 273; peace
with, 281, 282.

Baltimore, Lord, 7.

Baltimore, Md., 207.

Bank of the United States, first,
89-93, 125; second chartered,
125; under Jackson, 147-

154-

Banks, national, 209, 230; State,
158, 162.

Barbados, 12.

Bering sea seal fisheries, 256.

Belgium, 271.

Bell, John, presidential candi-
date in i860, 204.

Benton, Thomas H., 152, 153.

Berlin treaty, 256.

Black Hawk war, 165.

335

336

INDEX

Blaine, James G., 242, 246, 247.

Bland-Allison act, 238, 247.

Blockade, Civil war, 209.

Bolshevism, 300.

Bond issues, Civil war, 230.

Boston, Mass., 25, 34-37, 79.

Boundaries of the United States
in 1783, 43; northern, 79;
Texas, 173, 174; northeastern,
176.

Boundary controversies, colo-
nial, 17.

Braddock, General, 21.

Bradley, Associate Justice, 237.

Brazil, 3.

Breckinridge, J. C, presidential
candidate in i860, 204.

Brooklyn, N. Y., draft riots,
211.

Brown, John, 203.

Bryan, W. J., presidential can-
didate in 1896, 252 ; in 1900,
259; in 1908, 266.

Buchanan, James, administra-
tion, 199-206.

Buffalo, N. Y., 259.

Bull Run, first battle of, 207.

Burgoyne, General, 39, 41, 46.

Burke, Edmund, 33, 288.

Burr, Aaron, election of, 1800,
102-104; kills Hamilton, 113;
conspiracy, 113-115.

Cabinet, origin, 83, 84; Jack-
son's theory, 151; rupture
under Jackson, 155; resigna-
tions under Tyler, 168.

Calhoun, John C., on Jefferson,
118; vice-president in 1824,
141-143 ; vice-president in
1828, 14s; resigns the vice-
presidency, 155 ; South Car-
olina "Exposition," 155;

leader of strict construction-
ists, 160; death, 190.

California, Spanish occupation,
5 ; in Mexican war, 180-182 ;
gold discovered, 183 ; State
constitution, 183; admitted,
188; vote in 1880, 239; in
election of 1912, 269.

Campaign contributions, 248.

Canada, 5, 20, 79; during the
Revolution, 37, 40, 43; war
of 1812, 123; rebellion of

1837, 178.

Canning, Lord, 138.

Cape Breton, 20, 21.

Capital, federal, constitutional
provisions, 80 ; controversy
over location, 88 ; at Phila-
delphia, 94; District of Co-
lumbia, 95.

Carolina grant, 11.

Carpet-baggers, 229.

Carteret, Lord, 11.

Cavite, P. I., 257.

Censure of Jackson, 152, 153.

Census of 1790, 77; of 1800,
109; of 1810 and 1820, 130,
164; of 1830 and 1840, 164;
of 1850 and 1870, 227.

Champlain, Lake, 21, 37.

Charles II, 10, 18.

Charleston, S. C, 79, 207.

Charters, colonial, of Virginia
and Maryland, 7; Massachu-
setts, 8 ; Rhode Island, 9 ;
Connecticut, 10; Pennsylvania
and Carolina, 11; nature of,
16, 17.

Checks and balances in the
Constitution, 69, 70.

Chinese immigration, 256.

Chisholm v. Georgia, 100.

Church of England, 13.

INDEX

337

Citizenship under Dred Scott
decision, 201.

Civil service under Jefferson,
no; under J. Q. Adams, 143;
under Jackson, 146, 147; law
of 1883, 241 ; under Cleve-
land, 245.

Civil war, 206-213; nationalism,
300.

Clay, Henry, in election of 1824,
141 ; secretary of state, 142 ;
compromise tariff of 1833,
157; presidential candidate in
1848, 174; compromise of
1850, 188.

Cleveland, Grover, first adminis-
tration, 242-246; defeated in
1888, 246; second administra-
tion, 250-252.

Clinton, General, 42.

Clinton, Governor, 96.

Coinage, decimal system, 84;
laws revised in 1873, 233.

Colombia treaty, 264.

Colonial policy of Great Britain,

33-

Colorado, 182, 238.

Columbia river, 112, 177, 178.

Commerce, colonial, 24, 25;
neutral, in Napoleonic wars,
115, 116; statistics, 227.

Commonwealth, English, 10.

Communists, 305.

Compact theory of the Consti-
tution, 101.

Compromise, Missouri, 130-135;
of 1850, 184-191.

Concord, Mass., 35.

Confederate States of America,
205.

Confederate States, constitu-
tions of, under reconstruction,
219.

Congress, first, 81, 84-94; sec-
ond, 95.

Conkling, Roscoe, 240.

Connecticut, 10; boundary con-
troversies, 17; in Revolution,
30; ratifies the Constitution,

73-

Constitution of the United
States, convention, 58-71 ;
ratification, 7r-74; counting
electoral vote, 236; applica-
tion to Philippines, 258.

Constitutional Union party,
204.

Constitutions of southern States
under reconstruction, 219.

Continental Congress, first, 35;
second, 36, 38, 54.

Continental system, 115, 116.

Cooper, James Fenimore, 299.

Cornwallis, General, 40, 42, 46,

54-

" Corrupt bargain," 142.

Cotton gin, 129, 132.

Crawford, William H., 141.

" Crime of 1873," 233.

Cromwell, Oliver, 10.

Cuba, relations with, 253; inde-
pendence, 254; protectorate,
258, 259; provisional govern-
ment, 265.

Currency, Revolutionary paper,
45; as a political issue, 232,
233. See Silver.

Curtis, Associate Justice, 202.

Davis, Jefferson, 205.

Debs, Eugene V., presidential
candidate in 1912, 267, 269.

Debt, national, Hamilton's fund-
ing plan, 85-88; Jefferson's
opposition to funding, 88; in
1810-1820, 125; in 1835, 158;

338

INDEX

in i860, 228; Civil war, 228;
Confederate states, 228.

Declaration of the causes and
necessity of taking up arms,
36.

Declaration of Independence, 38,
39; in France, 40.

Delaware, 73, 205.

Democratic party, origin of
name, 144; Texas, 172; com-
promise of 1850, 189; Kansas-
Nebraska act, 194; Dred Scott
decision, 202 ; Civil war, 208 ;
after Civil war, 231; election
of 1876, 235, 236; criticism of
Hayes, 237.

Dependent pension act, 247.

Deposit, removal of, 150-152.

Dewey, Commodore, 254.

Dickinson, John, 47.

Dingley tariff, 164.

Directory, French, 97.

Disarmament conference, 282.

Discovery of America, 1, 2.

District of Columbia, federal
capital, 95; slave trade in,
188, 189; emancipation in,
229.

Douglas, Stephen A., Kansas-
Nebraska act, 193, 194; de-
bates with Lincoln, 202, 213.

Draft riots, 211.

Dred Scott case, 199-203.

Duane, William J., 151.

Dutch at New York, 10, 15.

East Florida, 43, 79, 130.

East India Company, 34, 35.

Education, colonial, 290.

El Caney, 254.

Elections, congressional, of 1790,

95; of 1804 and 1806, 115;

of 1808, 120, 121; of 1828,

145; of 1840, 165; of 1846,
182; of 1848, 164, 165; of
1856, 199; of 1874, 233, 234;
of 1880-1884, 243; of 1888,
246; of 1890, 248; of 1900,
259; of 1910, 266; of 1912,
269; of 1916 and 1918, 280.

Elections, presidential. See
names of presidents.

Electoral commission, 236, 237.

Emancipation, Lincoln's procla-
mation, 209, 210; in District
of Columbia, 229.

Embargo act, 117.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 192,

• 300.

English colonization, beginnings,
6 seq.

Erie, Lake, battle of, 123.

European war of 1914-1918,
271-276.

Exeter, N. H., 9.

Federal Convention. See Con-
stitution of the United States.

Federalist party, origin, 71 ; first
Congress, 82 ; second Con-
gress, 95; decline, 104, 105;
Congressional elections of
1804-1806, 115; of 1808, 120,
121.

"Fifty-four forty or fight," 177.

Filipinos demand independence,
258.

Fillmore, Millard, president,
188; presidential candidate in
1856, 199.

Fiscal Bank of the United
States, 167, 168.

Florida (Spanish), 20; ceded to
England, 22; East, 23; West,
23 ; treaty of 1819, 130.

Florida (State), 184, 205, 235.

INDEX

339

Foreign criticism, 295.

Fort Sumter, 206.

Fourteen points, 276.

France, exploration and coloniz-
ation, 4, 5, 18, 20; alliance
with, in 1778, 40, 41; loans,
45; relations with, 95, 96, 99;
claims paid, 158.

Franklin, Benjamin, 25, 40, 47,
62.

Freedom of the seas, 277, 278.

Fremont, John C, presidential
candidate in 1856, 199.

French and Indian wars, 19-

23-
French Revolution, 95, 96,

105.
Fugitive slave law, 187, 188;
enforcement, 191, 192.

Gadsden purchase, 182.
Gage, General, 35.
Gallatin, Albert, 109.
Garfield, James A., election,

239; death, 245.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 170.
" Gaspee " burned, 34.
Genet, 96, 113.

Geneva arbitration, 211, 212.
George III, 33.
Georgia, 20, 24, 31, 73;

Eleventh Amendment, 100;

Indians, 156; secedes, 205; in

Civil war, 213; reconstruction

acts, 230, 231.
Germans in Pennsylvania, 11,

15.
Germany, Samoan islands, 256;

declares war on Russia, 272;

declaration of war against,

273; peace with, 281, 282.
Gettysburg, Pa., 211.
Ghent, treaty of, 124, 137.

Gold in California, 183; gold

standard, 259.
Government, colonial, 15, 16.
Governors, colonial, 16, 24.
Grange movement, 234.
Grant, Ulysses S., in Civil war,

213; first administration, 230,

231; second, 232; Hayes-

Tilden election, 236.
Great Britain, Seven Years'

war, 28 ; colonial policy, 33 ;

treaty of 1783, 42; Jay treaty,

96, 97; during Civil war, 211,

212; Samoan islands, 256.

See Boundaries of the United

States ; wars.
Great Lakes, 4, 18.
Greeley, Horace, presidential

candidate in 1872, 232.
Greenback controversy, 230.
Greenback party, 234, 238, 239,

243.
Greene, Nathanael, 40, 46.
Gunboat system, 117.

Hamilton, Alexander, in Consti-
tutional Convention, 61 ; sec-
retary of the treasury, 83;
funding plan, 85-88, 109, no;
bank plan, 89-91 ; internal
revenue plan, 93; report on
manufactures, 94 ; Washing-
ton's farewell address, 98;
death, 113.

Hamlin, Hannibal, 203.

Hancock, John, 38.

Hancock, Winfield S., presiden-
tial candidate in 1880, 239.

Harding, Warren G., adminis-
tration, 280-283.

Harrison, Benjamin, administra-
tion, 246-250.

Harrison, William Henry, presi-

34o

INDEX

dential candidate in 1836,
159; elected president, 165;
death, 167.

Hartford, Conn., 127.

Hartford convention, 123.

Harvard College, 25, 286.

Hayes, Rutherford B., adminis-
tration, 234-237.

Hawaiian islands, 251, 256.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 300.

Hayne, Robert Y., debate with
Webster, 74, 101.

Henry, Patrick, 47, 72.

Hildreth, Richard, 118, 300.

Holy alliance, 136.

Hongkong, 254.

Hooker, Thomas, 10.

Hudson Bay Company, 177.

Hudson river, 37.

Hutchinson, Mrs. Ann, 9.

Illinois, 75, 130.

Immigration, 11, 130, 164, 248;

Chinese, 256.
Impeachment of Johnson, 221,

222.
Implied powers, 91, 92.
Income tax, 251.
Independence, Declaration of,

38, 39-

Independents, 242, 249.

India, 21.

Indiana, 75, 126.

Indians, 8, 12-14, 2°-

" Insurgents " in Congress, 267.

Intercolonial wars, 19-23.

Internal improvements, 144,
158.

Internal revenue, Hamilton's
plan, 93.

Interstate Commerce Commis-
sion, 245.

Iowa, 164, 179, 184.

Irving, Washington, 299.
Italy, 282.

Jackson, Andrew, at New Or-
leans, 125; in election of 1824,
141 ; in Florida, 142 ; ad-
ministrations, 145-162 ; com-
pared with Jefferson, 159, 160.

" Jackson men," 144.

James I, 7.

James II, 18.

Japan, 256, 282.

Jay treaty, 96, 97, 116.

Jefferson, Thomas, in Revolu-
tion, 47 ; secretary of state,
83 ; opposition to Hamilton,
88; on Bank of the United
States, 89-91 ; vice-president,
99 ; Kentucky resolutions,
100; election of 1800, 102-
104; ideas and leadership,
107, 108; administrations,
108-120; compared with
Jackson, 159, 160; attitude
toward slavery, 169.

Johnson, Andrew, vice-presi-
dent, 212; administration,
218-231.

Judiciary act, 85.

Kansas, 196-199, 208.

Kansas-Nebraska act, 193-196.

Kent, James, 300.

Kentucky, 75, 80, 94; resolu-
tions of 1798, 100; Burr con-
spiracy, 113; in Civil war,
205.

Knox, Henry, 83.

Ku Klux Klan, 232.

Land system, colonial, 14; colo-
nial grants, 17, 18; western

INDEX

34i

claims of States, 18, 23 ; pub-
lic, 56, 84, no.

Law, colonial interest in, 287,
288.

League of Nations, 279, 280.

Lecompton constitution, 198,
199.

Lee, Robert E., 213, 214.

Lewis and Clark expedition,
112, 113.

Lexington, Mass., 35.

Liberal Republicans, 232, 235.

"Liberator, The," 170.

Liberty party, 175.

Lincoln, Abraham, debates with
Douglas, 202, 203; first elec-
tion, 204; first administration,
206-213; second election,
212; reconstruction policy,
216-218; death, 213.

Literature, American, 299, 300.

Locke, John, n.

Lockouts in 1877, 238.

Longfellow, Henry W., 299.

Louis XIV, 19.

Louisburg, 20.

Louisiana (Spanish), 23; pur-
chase, no— 113, 119.

Louisiana (State), admitted,
126; secedes, 205; in Civil
war, 208; in election of 1886,

235-
Loyalists, 291.
"Lusitania" sunk, 273.

McCIellan, George B., presiden-
tial candidate in 1864, 212.

McCulloch v. Maryland, 148.

McKinley, William, tariff, 246-
248; first administration, 252-
259 ; second election and
death, 259.

McLane, Louis, 151.

Madison, James, in first Con-
gress, 94; Virginia resolutions
of 1798, 100; first administra-
tion, 120-122; war message,
122; second administration,
122-127.

Maine, 9, 10, 18, 80; admission,
I3i-i35i northeastern bound-

! ary dispute, 176.

" Maine " battleship, 253.

Manila, 254.

Marshall, John, 114, 127, 148,
156.

Maryland, 7, 17, 30, 73, 205,

239.

Massachusetts, 8, 24; in Revolu-
tion, 30, 31, 34, 35 ; Shays's
rebellion, 57; ratifies Consti-
tution, 73; State banks, 163;
in Civil war, 207.

Methodism, 298.

Metternich, 136, 294.

Mexico and Texas, 171, 176;
war with, 179-182.

Mexico, City of, 181.

Michigan, 75, 164, 269.

Mills tariff, 244.

Minnesota, 179, 227, 269.

Mississippi, 113, 130, 205.

Mississippi river, 4, 23, 79; in
Civil war, 208, 213.

Missouri compromise, 130-135;
repealed, 194; held unconstitu-
tional, 201, 202; in 1850, 184.

Missouri (State), 205, 239.

Mohawk valley, 21, 37.

Monroe, James, administrations,
127-139; attitude toward
Jackson, 142.

Monroe doctrine, 135-137, 257,
294.

Montgomery, Ala., convention,
205.

342

INDEX

Montreal, 21.
Mormons, 245.
Mount Vernon, 55, 76, 98.
Mugwumps, 242.

Napoleon, 109, ill, US, "6,

121.
Narragansett bay, 34.
Natchez, Miss., 114.
National party, 238, 239, 243.
National Republican party, 144.
Native American party, 164.
Navigation acts, English, 26-

28.
Nebraska, 194, 196, 227.
Negro slavery, 7; suffrage, 219,
220, 222-224, 238. See Re-
construction ; Slavery.
Netherlands, The, 10.
Neutral trade, 116, 117.
Neutrality in 1793, 96; in

European war, 272-274.
Nevada, 182, 227.
New England, 13-16; in Rev-
olution, 44, 45 ; local govern-
ment, 81; embargo act, 118;
war of 1812, 123; Mexican
war, 180.
New England Confederation, 12.
New England Emigrant Aid So-
ciety, 197.
New France, 20, 21.
New Hampshire, 9, 34, 73. 80.
New Haven, Conn., 10.
New Jersey, 11, 30, 39, 45, 73.

204.
New Mexico, 180, 182, 188,

269.
New Orleans, under Spanish

control, 79, 125, 205.
Newport, R. I., 9.
Newspapers, colonial, 25, 34.
New York (State), 17, 3°, 37.

50, 73, 76, 80; State banks,

163; Cleveland governor, 242.
New York (City), 45, 79, 211.
Nominating convention, first,

161.
Non-Intercourse act, 118.
North, Lord, 38, 42.
" North American Review," 300.
North Carolina, 24, 40, 46, 80;

ratifies Constitution, 73, 74,

94-
Northeastern boundary, 176.

Northwest Territory, 75, 80.
Northwestern boundary, 178.
Nova Scotia, 21, 37.
Nullification, South Carolina,

156, i57; fugitive slave law,

191.

Oglethorpe, James, 20.

Ohio, 75, 109.

Ohio valley, French occupation,

20.
Oklahoma, 267.

Orders in council, British, 124.
Ordinance of 1787, 73, 81.
Oregon, 136, 176, 178, 184, 227,

235-
Pacific islands acquired in 1898,

254.
Pago-Pago, 256.
Paine, Thomas, 48.
Palo Alto battle, 180.
Panama route to California,

183 ; canal, 264.
Panic of 1837, 158, 162, 163;

of 1893, 251.
Papal bull of 1493, 3-
Parkman, Francis, 300.
Parliament and colonial repre-
sentation, 31.
Parties, political. See under

party names.

INDEX

343

Party system, American, 291,

292.
Patrons of Husbandry, 234.
Payne- Aldrich tariff, 271.
Penn, William, 11.
Pennsylvania, 11, 17, 3°; 73, 93,

269.
Pensions, 228, 245, 247.
People's party, 234, 249, 250.
Perry, Commodore, 123, 256.
Philadelphia, Pa., 25, 39, 45, 54,

79; federal capital, 94.
Philippine islands, 254, 257,

258.
Pierce, Franklin, administration,

192-198.
Platforms, political, origin of,

161.
Piatt, Thomas C, 240.
Plymouth, Mass., 8.
Polk, James K., election, 174;

administration, 176-182.
Polygamy, 245.

Popular vote, presidential elec-
tions. See Vote, popular.
Populist party, 234, 249, 250.
Porto Rico, 254, 259.
Portsmouth, N. H., 148, 265.
Portsmouth, R. I., 9.
Postoffice, colonial, 25, 84, 228.
Presbyterianism, 298.
Presidential succession, 240, 241.
Princeton University, 268.
Proclamation, royal, of 1763,

22, 23, 43.
Progressive movement, 267.
Prohibition party, 234, 243, 246.
Protection, Hamilton's report,

94; southern opposition, 154-

157; Blaine's support, 242;

McKinley tariff and public

opinion, 248; as a policy, 296.

See Tariff.

Protectorate of Cromwell, 10.
Protestant revolt, 6.
Providence, R. I., 9.
Puritanism in America, 13, 14,

25, 108, 285, 286.
Puritans, English, 8.

Quakers, n.

Quebec, 4, n, 21, 23; in Revo-
lution, 37, 43-

Race problem, 220.

Railway mileage, 228; political
issue in West, 245.

Randolph, Edmund, 83.

"Re-annexation" of Texas, 174.

Reciprocity, 246, 247.

Reconstruction, 214-216; Lin-
coln's plan, 216-218; Con-
gressional plan, 219-221.

Religious liberty in Maryland,
7, 8; revivals, 298.

Reparations commission, 282.

Republican party (first), 95,
99, 100; election of 1800, 103,
104; under Jefferson, 107,
108; elections of 1804 and
1806, 115; change of policy,
126; (second) in 1856, 198,
199; Dred Scott decision,
202; election of i860, 204;
reconstruction, 220, 223;
Hayes-Tiiden election, 235 ;
criticism of, 242.

Requisitions, 52, 55, 56.

Resaca de la Palma, 180.

Returning boards, 235.

Revenue act of 1767, 30.

Rhode Island, 9, 10, 14, 17; in
Revolution, 30, 34; under
Confederation, 56 ; Federal
Convention, 59; ratifies Con-
stitution, 73, 74, 94.

344

INDEX

Rio Grande river, 1S1.

Riots in 1877, 238.

Rochambeau, Count, 42.

Roman Catholics in colonies, 5;
in England, 18.

Roosevelt, Theodore, first ad-
ministration, 260-262 ; second,
262-267 ; heads Progressive
movement, 267 ; presidential
candidate in 191 2, 269.

Russia, claim to Alaska, 136,
137; war with Japan, 265;
revolution, 305.

Rutledge, John, 47.

St. Lawrence river and gulf ex-
plored, 4, 18, 21.

" Salary grab," 239.

Sandford, owner of Dred Scott,
200.

San Juan, P. R., 254.

Santiago, Cuba, 254.

Santo Domingo treaty, 265.

Sarajevo, 272.

Saratoga, N. Y., 41.

Scott, Winfield S., 181, 192.

Scott v. Sandford, 199-203.

Seal fisheries, 256.

Secession, South Carolina or-
dinance, 205. See Civil
war.

Secret diplomacy, 278.

" Self-determination," 278.

Senate censure of Jackson, 152,

153.
Separatists, 8.
Seven Years' war, 19, 21, 28,

289.
Seward, William H., 203.
Seymour, Horatio, presidential

candidate in 1868, 231.
Shaftesbury, Lord, n.
Sherman, John, anti-trust act,

247 ; silver purchase act, 247,
251.

Sherman, William T., 213.

Silver: standard dollar dropped,
233; Bland-Allison act, 238,
247; Sherman act, 247; free
coinage issue, 250-252.

Slavery, constitutional provi-
sions, 60, 61 ; Northwest Ter-
ritory, 75 ; Missouri compro-
mise, 130-135 ; economic sys-
tem, 131-133; political issue,
168-170; Texas, 171; com-
promise of 1850, 184-191 ;
influence and decay, 297, 298.

Slave trade, colonial, 15; domes-
tic, 188; District of Columbia,
188, 189.

Slidell, John, 181.

Socialist party, 269.

"Solid South," 238.

South, opposition to funding,
88; population in i860, 208.

South Carolina, 24, 40, 73 ; nul-
lification, 74, 101 ; " Exposi-
tion," 155; ordinance of nulli-
fication, 156, 157; secession,
205 ; election of 1876, 235.

South Dakota, 269.

Spain, 2-4, 6; cedes Florida to
England, 22; possessions west
of the Mississippi, 79; treaty
of 1819, 130; colonial revolts,
136; war with, 254.

Specie circular, 158.

Specie payment resumed, 234.

Spoils system, 241.

" Stalwarts," 240.

Stamp act, 29.

State rights, Kentucky and Vir-
ginia resolutions, 100-103 >'
after 1828, 160; nationalism,
292.

INDEX

345

States under Confederation, 56,
57; governments in 1789, 80,
81; banks, 163.

Steamboat and western develop-
ment, 128, 129.

Story, Joseph, 300.

Stowe, Harriet B., 300.

Strict construction, first Bank
of the United States, 91, 92;
Kentucky and Virginia resolu-
tions, 100-103; slavery, 133-
135; after 1828, 160.

Strikes in 1877, 238.

Subtreasury system, 163.

Sumner, Charles, 198.

Supreme Court, 64, 85, 91, 97,
104; Marshall and Burr, 114;
after war of 1812, 126; under
reconstruction, 223; green-
backs, 230.

Surplus revenue distributed, 162.

"Sussex" sunk, 273.

Swedish settlements, 11.

Taft, William H., administra-
tion, 266-268; presidential
candidate in 1912, 269.

Talleyrand, in.

Taney, Roger B., removal of de-
posits; Dred Scott case, 200-
202.

Tariff of 1789, 84; of 1816, 125,
154; of 1824, 154; of 1828,
155; of 1832, 155; of 1833,
157, 162; Civil war, 229;
under Cleveland, 243-245 ;
McKinley act, 246-248; Wil-
ison act, 251 ; Dingley act,
264; Payne-Aldrich, 271;
Underwood act, 271. See
Protection.

Taxation, colonial, 26, 29, 30,
33; Civil war, 229.

Taylor, Zachary, in Mexican
war, 180, 181 ; administration,
182; death, 188.

"Tea party," Boston, 34.

Tennessee, 75, 94, 113, 205, 212,
238, 239.

Texas, 1 71-176, 184, 206, 208.

Third parties, 248.

Tilden, Samuel J., presidential
candidate in 1876, 235.

Tobacco, 7, 13, 15.

Topeka, Kan., 198.

Tories, English, 2>3-

Toronto (York), Canada, 123.

Town, New England, 14.

Trade, colonial, 15, 28.

Treaty of 1763, 22; of 1778, 95,
96; of 1783, 42; Jay, 97. "6;
Ghent, 124; of 1819, 130, 174,
177; Texas, 174; Ashburton,
176; northwest boundary,
178; Mexico, 181, 182; Gads-
den, 182; of 1898, 254; Ver-
sailles, 276-280.

Trusts, Sherman act, 247.

Tutuila, 256.

Tyler, John, vice-president, 165 ;
administration, 167-176.

Underwood tariff, 271.

Union Pacific railway, 209, 227,

228.
Unitarianism, 298.
United Labor party, 246.
United States in 1789, 79.
Utah, 182, 188, 269; Mormons

in, 245.

Vagrancy acts, 220.
Valley Forge, Pa., 44.
Van Buren, Martin, vice-presi-
dent, 159; administration,

346

INDEX

158-165; presidential candi-
date in 1840, 165.

Venezuela boundary contro-
versy, 252.

Vermont, 75, 80, 94, 269.

Versailles treaty, 276-280.

Virginia, 7, 16, 24, 25, 30, 45;
ratines Constitution, 73 ; reso-
lutions of 1798, 100; presi-
dential succession, 127; Civil
war, 205, 213.

Vote, popular, in i860, 204 ; in
1868, 231; in 1880, 239; in
1884, 243; in 1888, 246; in
1892, 250; in 1896, 252.

Wars: intercolonial, 19-22;
Revolution, 36-42 ; Napole-
onic, 109, 115 seq.; of 1812,
122-124; Mexican, 179-182;
Civil, 206-213; with Spain,
254; European, 271-276.

Warwick, R. I., 9.

Washington, George, during the
Revolution, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44,
45, 55; letter to governors,
55 ; Constitutional Conven-
tion, 58 ; first administration,
76-95; party position, 82, 83;
signs bank act, 92 ; second
administration, 95 ; declines
third term, 97; farewell ad-
dress, 98; retirement and
death, 98; attitude toward
slavery, 169.

Washington, D. C, 123.

Washington (State), 269.

Weaver, James B., presidential
candidate in 1892, 250.

Webster, Daniel, debate with

Hayne, 74, 101 ; on South
Carolina nullification, 157;
secretary of state, 176; Ash-
burton treaty, 176; compro-
mise of 1850, 189, 190, 192.

Wellington, Duke of, 124.

West, settlement after 1812,
129, 130; growth, 164; na-
tionalism, 293.

West Florida, 43, 79, 113, 115,
130.

West Indies, 15, 55, 97.

West Virginia, 227, 239.

Wheelwright, Eleazer, 9.

Whig party, name, 144; elec-
tion of 1840, 165; policy, 167;
Texas, 172; abolition, 172,
173; in 1846-1848, 182; com-
promise of 1850, 189; end,
192.

Whiskey insurrection, 93.

Whitfield, George, 25.

William and Mary, 18.

William and Mary College, 25,
287.

Williams, Roger, 9.

Wilmot proviso, 183.

Wilson tariff, 251.

Wilson, Woodrow, administra-
tions, 268-280.

Wisconsin, 75, 164, 184.

Wolfe, General, 21.

Writs of assistance, 30.

X. Y. Z. affair, 99.

Yale College, 25, 286.

York, Duke of, 10.

York (Toronto), Canada, 123.

Yorktown, Va., 42, 45, 54.

THE NE^
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