1: The Two Nations of the Republic
Preface || 2: The Party of Political Evasion >>
"There is really no Union now between the North and the South....
No two nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter
rancor toward each other than these two nations of the Republic."
This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of
Ohio, provides the key to American politics in the decade
following the Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of the
people to its ultimate source, one would have to go far back into
colonial times. There was a process of natural selection at work,
in the intellectual and economic conditions of the eighteenth
century, which inevitably drew together certain types and
generated certain forces. This process manifested itself in one
form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in another in
those of the South. As early as the opening of the nineteenth
century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so
far alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely
admit of reconciliation. It is a truism to say that these
differences gradually were concentrated around fundamentally
different conceptions of labor--of slave labor in the South, of
free labor in the North.
Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that
this growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose
in either part of the country. It was apparently necessary that
this Republic in its evolution should proceed from confederation
to nationality through an intermediate and apparently reactionary
period of sectionalism. In this stage of American history,
slavery was without doubt one of the prime factors involved, but
sectional consciousness, with all its emotional and psychological
implications, was the fundamental impulse of the stern events
which occurred between 1850 and 1865.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential
Southerners had come generally to regard their section of the
country as a distinct social unit. The next step was inevitable.
The South began to regard itself as a separate political unit.
It is the distinction of Calhoun that he showed himself toward
the end sufficiently flexible to become the exponent of this new
political impulse. With all his earlier fire he encouraged the
Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national parties, Whig
and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern party, and
to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single concerted
policy for the entire South.
At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern
point of view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battle was fought
at the polls between the two Southern ideas--the old one which
upheld separate state independence, and the new one which
virtually acknowledged Southern nationality. The issue at stake
was the acceptance or the rejection of a compromise which could
bring no permanent settlement of fundamental differences.
Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina,
for it brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who
ten years later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert
Barnwell Rhett. In 1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea
of state independence and to carry South Carolina as a separate
state out of the Union. Accordingly it is significant of the
progress that the consolidation of the South had made at this
date that on this issue Rhett encountered general opposition.
This difference of opinion as to policy was not inspired, as some
historians have too hastily concluded, by national feeling.
Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
Federal Government supreme over the State Government. They
opposed Rhett because they felt secession to be at that moment
bad policy. They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the
Union in 1851, she would go alone and the solidarity of the South
would be broken. They were not lacking in sectional patriotism,
but their conception of the best solution of the complex problem
differed from that advocated by Rhett. Their position was summed
up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede now is to secede
from the South as well as from the Union." On the basis of this
belief they defeated Rhett and put off secession for ten years.
There is no analogous single event in the history of the North,
previous to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a
sectional consciousness. On the surface the life of the people
seemed, indeed, to belie the existence of any such feeling. The
Northern capitalist class aimed steadily at being non-sectional,
and it made free use of the word national. We must not forget,
however, that all sorts of people talked of national
institutions, and that the term, until we look closely into the
mind of, the person using it, signifies nothing. Because the
Northern capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it does
not follow that he set up any other in its place. Instead of
accomplishing anything so positive, he remained for the most part
a negative quantity.
Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, he made it his
chief purpose to regulate the outflow of manufactures from that
industrial region and the inflow of agricultural produce. The
movement of the latter eastward and northward, and the former
westward and southward, represents roughly but graphically the
movement of the business of that time. The Easterner lived in
fear of losing the money which was owed him in the South. As the
political and economic conditions of the day made unlikely any
serious clash of interest between the East and the West, he had
little solicitude about his accounts beyond the Alleghanies. But
a gradually developing hostility between North and South was
accompanied by a parallel anxiety on the part of Northern capital
for its Southern investments and debts. When the war eventually
became inevitable, $200,000,000 were owed by Southerners to
Northerners. For those days this was an indebtedness of no
inconsiderable magnitude. The Northern capitalists, preoccupied
with their desire to secure this account, were naturally eager to
repudiate sectionalism, and talked about national interests with
a zeal that has sometimes been misinterpreted. Throughout the
entire period from 1850 to 1865, capital in American politics
played for the most part a negative role, and not until after the
war did it become independent of its Southern interests.
For the real North of that day we must turn to those Northerners
who felt sufficient unto themselves and whose political
convictions were unbiased by personal interests which were
involved in other parts of the country. We must listen to the
distinct voices that gave utterance to their views, and we must
observe the definite schemes of their political leaders.
Directly we do this, the fact stares us in the face that the
North had become a democracy. The rich man no longer played the
role of grandee, for by this time there had arisen those two
groups which, between them, are the ruin of aristocracy--the
class of prosperous laborers and the group of well-to-do
intellectuals. Of these, the latter gave utterance, first, to
their faith in democracy, and then, with all the intensity of
partisan zeal, to their sense of the North as the agent of
democracy. The prosperous laborers applauded this expression of
anopinion in which they thoroughly believed and at the same time
gave their willing support to a land policy that was typically
Northern.
American economic history in the middle third of the century is
essentially the record of a struggle to gain possession of public
land. The opposing forces were the South, which strove to
perpetuate by this means a social system that was fundamentally
aristocratic, and the North, which sought by the same means to
foster its ideal of democracy. Though the South, with the aid of
its economic vassal, the Northern capitalist class, was for some
time able to check the land-hunger of the Northern democrats, it
was never able entirely to secure the control which it desired,
but was always faced with the steady and continued opposition of
the real North. On one occasion in Congress, the heart of the
whole matter was clearly shown, for at the very moment when the
Northerners of the democratic class were pressing one of their
frequent schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympathetic
Northern henchmen were furthering a scheme that aimed at the
purchase of Cuba. From the impatient sneer of a Southerner that
the Northerners sought to give "land to the landless" and the
retort that the Southerners seemed equally anxious to supply
"niggers to the niggerless," it can be seen that American history
is sometimes better summed up by angry politicians than by
historians.
We must be on our guard, however, against ascribing to either
side too precise a consciousness of its own motives. The old
days when the American Civil War was conceived as a clear-cut
issue are as a watch in the night that has passed, and we now
realize that historical movements are almost without exception
the resultants of many motives. We have come to recognize that
men have always misapprehended themselves, contradicted
themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded themselves
with sophistications upon the springs of action. In a word,
unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and
dramatic senses to shape their conceptions of their own lives.
That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold has so
much to say, is at work in us all, subtly making us into
illusions, first to ourselves and later to the historian. It is
the business of history, as of analytic fiction, both to feel the
power of these illusions and to work through them in imagination
to the dim but potent motives on which they rest. We are prone
to forget that we act from subconscious quite as often as from
conscious influences, from motives that arise out of the dim
parts of our being, from the midst of shadows that psychology has
only recently begun to lift, where senses subtler than the
obvious make use of fear, intuition, prejudice, habit, and
illusion, and too often play with us as the wind with blown
leaves.
True as this is of man individually, it is even more
fundamentally true of man collectively, of parties, of peoples.
It is a strikingly accurate description of the relation of the
two American nations that now found themselves opposed within the
Republic. Neither fully understood the other. Each had a social
ideal that was deeper laid than any theory of government or than
any commercial or humanitarian interest. Both knew vaguely but
with sure instinct that their interests and ideals were
irreconcilable. Each felt in its heart the deadly passion of
self-preservation. It was because, in both North and South, men
were subtly conscious that a whole social system was the issue at
stake, and because on each side they believed in their own ideals
with their whole souls, that, when the time came for their trial
by fire, they went to their deaths singing.
In the South there still obtained the ancient ideal of
territorial aristocracy. Those long traditions of the Western
European peoples which had made of the great landholder a petty
prince lay beneath the plantation life of the Southern States.
The feudal spirit, revived in a softer world and under brighter
skies, gave to those who participated in it the same graces and
somewhat the same capacities which it gave to the knightly class
in the days of Roland--courage, frankness, generosity, ability in
affairs, a sense of responsibility, the consciousness of caste.
The mode of life which the planters enjoyed and which the
inferior whites regarded as a social paradise was a life of
complete deliverance from toil, of disinterested participation in
local government, of absolute personal freedom--a life in which
the mechanical action of law was less important than the more
human compulsion of social opinion, and in which private
differences were settled under the code of honor.
This Southern life was carried on in the most appropriate
environment. On a landed estate, often larger than many of
Europe's baronies, stood the great house of the planter, usually
a graceful example of colonial architecture, surrounded by
stately gardens. This mansion was the center of a boundless
hospitality; guests were always coming and going; the hostess and
her daughters were the very symbols of kindliness and ease. To
think of such houses was to think of innumerable joyous days; of
gentlemen galloping across country after the hounds; of coaches
lumbering along avenues of noble oaks, bringing handsome women to
visit the mansion; of great feastings; of nights of music and
dancing; above all, of the great festival of Christmas,
celebrated much as had been the custom in "Merrie England"
centuries before.
Below the surface of this bright world lay the enslaved black
race. In the minds of many Southerners--it was always a secret
burden from which they saw no means of freeing themselves. To
emancipate the slaves, and thereby to create a population of free
blacks, was generally considered, from the white point of view,
an impossible solution of the problem. The Southerners usually
believed that the African could be tamed only in small groups and
when constantly surrounded by white influence, as in the case of
house servants. Though a few great capitalists had taken up the
idea that the deliberate exploitation of the blacks was the high
prerogative of the whites, the general sentiment of the Southern
people was more truly expressed by Toombs when he said: "The
question is not whether we could be more prosperous and happy
with these three and a half million slaves in Africa, and their
places filled with an equal number of hardy, intelligent, and
enterprising citizens of the superior race; but it is simply
whether, while we have them among us, we would be most prosperous
with them in freedom or in bondage."
The Southern people, in the majority of instances, had no hatred
of the blacks. In the main they led their free, spirited, and
gracious life, convinced that the maintenance of slavery was but
making the best of circumstances which were beyond their control.
It was these Southern people who were to hear from afar the
horrible indictment of all their motives by the Abolitionists and
who were to react in a growing bitterness and distrust toward
everything Northern.
But of these Southern people the average Northerner knew nothing.
He knew the South only on its least attractive side of
professional politics. For there was a group of powerful
magnates, rich planters or "slave barons," who easily made their
way into Congress, and who played into the hands of the Northern
capitalists, for a purpose similar to theirs. It was these men
who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned the common people
of the North to mind their own business; and for doing so they
were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class. It was
therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized
capital that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the
Northern hammer"--as Sumner put it, in one of his most furious
speeches--in their aim to destroy a section where, intuitively,
they felt their democratic ideal could not be realized.
And what was that ideal? Merely to answer democracy is to dodge
the fundamental question. The North was too complex in its
social structure and too multitudinous in its interests to
confine itself to one type of life. It included all sorts and
conditions of men--from the most gracious of scholars who lived
in romantic ease among his German and Spanish books, and whose
lovely house in Cambridge is forever associated with the noble
presence of Washington, to the hardy frontiersman, breaking the
new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at sunset shaded her
tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she stood on the
threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her man
across the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued. Far
apart as were Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet
felt themselves to be one in purpose.
They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner
of the democrats at the opening of the century. In the North,
there had come to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had
touched democracy with mysticism and had added to it a vague but
genuine romance. This new vision of the destiny of the country
had the practical effect of making the Northerners identify
themselves in their imaginations with all mankind and in creating
in them an enthusiastic desire, not only to give to every
American a home of his own, but also to throw open the gates of
the nation and to share the wealth of America with the poor of
all the world. In very truth, it was their dominating passion to
give "land to the landless." Here was the clue to much of their
attitude toward the South. Most of these Northern dreamers gave
little or no thought to slavery itself; but they felt that the
section which maintained such a system so committed to
aristocracy that any real friendship with it was impossible.
We are thus forced to conceive the American Republic in the years
immediately following the Compromise of 1850 as, in effect, a
dual nation, without a common loyalty between the two parts.
Before long the most significant of the great Northerners of the
time was to describe this impossible condition by the appropriate
metaphor of a house divided against itself. It was not, however,
until eight years after the division of the country had been
acknowledged in 1850 that these words were uttered. In those
eight years both sections awoke to the seriousness of the
differences that they had admitted. Both perceived that, instead
of solving their problem in 1850, they had merely drawn sharply
the lines of future conflict. In every thoughtful mind there
arose the same alternative questions: Is there no solution but
fighting it out until one side destroys the other, or we end as
two nations confessedly independent? Or is there some conceivable
new outlet for this opposition of energy on the part of the
sections, some new mode of permanent adjustment?
It was at the moment when thinking men were asking these
questions that one of the nimblest of politicians took the center
of the stage. Stephen A. Douglas was far-sighted enough to
understand the land-hunger of the time. One is tempted to add
that his ear was to the ground. The statement will not, however,
go unchallenged, for able apologists have their good word to say
for Douglas. Though in the main, the traditional view of him as
the prince of political jugglers still holds its own, let us
admit that his bold, rough spirit, filled as it was with
political daring, was not without its strange vein of idealism.
And then let us repeat that his ear was to the ground. Much
careful research has indeed been expended in seeking to determine
who originated the policy which, about 1853, Douglas decided to
make his own. There has also been much dispute about his
motives. Most of us, however, see in his course of action an
instance of playing the game of politics with an audacity that
was magnificent.
His conduct may well have been the result of a combination of
motives which included a desire to retain the favor of the
Northwest, a wish to pave the way to his candidacy for the
Presidency, the intention to enlist the aid of the South as well
as that of his own locality, and perhaps the hope that he was
performing a service of real value to his country. That is, he
saw that the favor of his own Northwest would be lavished upon
any man who opened up to settlement the rich lands beyond Iowa
and Missouri which were still held by the Indians, and for which
the Westerners were clamoring. Furthermore, they wanted a
railroad that would reach to the Pacific. There were, however,
local entanglements and political cross-purposes which involved
the interests of the free State of Illinois and those of the
slave State of Missouri.
Douglas's great stroke was a programme for harmonizing all these
conflicting interests and for drawing together the West and the
South. Slaveholders were to be given what at that moment they
wanted most--an opportunity to expand into that territory to the
north and west of Missouri which had been made free by the
Compromise of 1820, while the free Northwest was to have its
railroad to the coast and also its chance to expand into the
Indian country. Douglas thus became the champion of a bill which
would organize two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, but
which would leave the settlers in each to decide whether slavery
or free labor should prevail within their boundaries. This
territorial scheme was accepted by a Congress in which the
Southerners and their Northern allies held control, and what is
known as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was signed by President Pierce
on May 30,1854.1
1The origin of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has been a much discussed
subject among historians in recent years. The older view that
Douglas was simply playing into the hands of the "slavepower" by
sacrificing Kansas, is no longer tenable. This point has been
elaborated by Allen Johnson in his study of Douglas ("Stephen A.
Douglas: a Study in American Politics"). In his "Repeal of the
Missouri Compromise", P.O. Ray contends that the legislation of
1854 originated in a factional controversy in Missouri, and that
Douglas merely served the interests of the proslavery group led
by Senator David R. Atchinson of Missouri. Still another point
of view is that presented in the "Genesis of the Kansas-Nebraska
Act," by F. H. Hodder, who would explain not only the division of
the Nebraska Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, but the object
of the entire bill by the insistent efforts of promoters of the
Pacific railroad scheme to secure a right of way through
Nebraska. This project involved the organization of a
territorial government and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
Douglas was deeply interested in the western railroad interests
and carried through the necessary legislation.
Preface || 2: The Party of Political Evasion >>