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CHAPTER I

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

THE American Civil War was the result of differences and antagonisms which had long been intensifying and accumulating. Though originally of homogeneous stock-the slight intermixture of other than English stock not being sufficient to give a distinctive character to our early institutions-the Thirteen Colonies founded along the Atlantic seaboard developed in the course of two and a half centuries heterogeneous elements which in 1861 separated into mutually hostile sections, the South and the North. Much has been written about that separation: before it occurred its approach was heralded by discerning minds; the course of affairs during the conflict over separation was recorded by participants, military and civil, of the rank and of the file, and of every degree of insight, candor, accuracy and interest. Eminent foreigners described the conflict as they saw it, and others, no less eminent, discussed it as they understood it. Never before in the history of the world was there made so complete, so various, so contemporaneous a record of a great war. And to the conscious and unconscious record of the rank and of the file, of civilians who directly or indirectly participated, at the South or at the North, in helping or in hindering the struggle, there was added the voluminous official record of the government itself-constituting in all a mass of evidence long since too great for the most industrious man to read and digest, were his life prolonged many

years beyond the limit of the psalmist. And yet as time goes on, of the making of books about the Civil War there is no end.

A glance at the character of the books about the War discloses almost as much as the books themselves. Before 1861 a few heralds and prophets of unrest spoke of an "impending crisis"; of an "irrepressible conflict"; of a "house divided against itself." During the course of the war and the years immediately following, men wrote of battles, sieges and the fortunes of war; of the heroism of soldiers and sailors; of the tactics and strategy of generals, and the victory or defeat of armies. A few years passed and men were writing about the immediate results of the War; of the problems of "restoration" and of "reconstruction," and the present and future of that "unabsorbed and unabsorbable element" in America-the negro. Yet a few years later men began seriously discussing the causes and consequences of the War; not merely political causes and consequences -but social, economic, industrial causes and consequences. Strictly military and naval histories by experts began to appear: the Civil War began to disclose in perspective its enormous proportions and meaning. Men wrote with less passion and keener insight; mutual recrimination fell under the ban of justice, and students and writers and reflecting people, north and south, and in foreign lands, gradually began a rational interpretation of events which culminated in the terrible conflict and of events which followed it. In truth, the Civil War of 1861 passed into history and became the subject of investigation as other mighty conflicts have become. And out of the vast library on the War men now, more than forty years after its close, select those interpretations of its causes, its course and its consequences which appeal to the considerate judgment of mankind. Yet to the end of time, men who presume to write seriously on the American Civil War will continue to write of its causes, its course and its consequences. Of its causes there is less and less conflict of opinion as the years pass; of its course

there is, there must be, an ultimately accepted record, but of its consequences there must ever be a various interpretation. The people who colonized the South, like those who colonized the North, were of English stock. The northern colonists were imbued with moral and religious ideas which, as they interpreted morality and religion, made them austere. The soil and climate at the North compelled them to be industrious and withal contributed to develop in them social and civil ideals-conceptions of the state and notions of government which characterize them as a people in the New World. The southern colonists, of a somewhat different social class from many of the northern ones, were also imbued with moral and religious ideas, as they understood morality and religion, but their interpretation of these included pleasure and comfort and the enjoyment of material things. Both groups of colonists worshipped the same God, spoke the same tongue and swore allegiance to the same body of supreme civil law; but the potency of a latent diversity was working in America and by the time that Virginia and Massachusetts had been settled a hundred years, the people within their respective bounds were disclosing diversities and contrasts; and not their people only, but they of the entire northern group of colonies as compared with them of the entire southern group. The cause of this diversity was climate. That cause early in our national history began its obscure operation, working out two types of people whose possession in common was rapidly vanishing. The climate of the North intensified all the austere, individualistic characteristics; the industrialism, the sense of the equality of men, which grew apace during the next hundred years; and during that time the climate of the South intensified, equally, the love of material comfort, of ease and pleasure and the merger and identification of this love with the dominant ideas of morality, religion and government.

Until almost up to the outbreak of the Revolution, the colonies North and South were held in mutual sympathy and co-operation-feeble as they may have been at times-by

the consciousness of a common danger: the Indians and the French; and the cessation of this dual peril was scarcely announced before a greater followed-the intolerable administration of colonial affairs by the mother country. It is true that maladministration, such as our fathers complained of in the Declaration of Independence, may seem to many, at the present time, when compared with maladministration in other lands and in our own land at later periods, almost slight and insufficient to provoke a revolution and we know that American independence was not demanded, was, indeed, scarcely thought of until a few months before the Declaration of Independence was issued. Yet, maladministration of colonial affairs by the English government was the immediate cause of the Revolution, and that maladministration brought all the colonies closer to one another than they had ever been before. The culmination of the sense of danger and of the struggle to relieve themselves of the evils of which they complained was the independence of the colonies. In the familiar language of that time they called themselves free and independent States, and, in the treaty of peace which the representatives of these States signed, the States were described as "free, sovereign and independent." Whatever the motive of the English government in inserting this description of them, the States themselves did not appear as individual parties to the treaty of 1783. The parties to that treaty were England, France and the United States-and by the United States was meant the United States in Congress assembled. Congress, though possessing limited powers, such as had been granted to it by the several States, acted as the representative of the States and not directly of the people, because the delegates to Congress were elected by the several State legislatures much as United States senators are now elected. The Congress of the United States at the close of the Revolution stood for whatever sense of nationality then existed, without itself being a strictly national body. The national idea as now understood was hardly born in 1776. A few aggressive, discerning minds, of whom

Thomas Paine, and, later, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington were among the first, advocated nationality, and a more perfect union of the American people while yet the Revolution was in progress: but the idea was obscure to most men, North and South, and like all epoch-making ideas required ample time to work out its own definition. Obscure, however, as was the idea of nationality at the time of the Revolution and even at the time of the treaty of peace in 1783, the idea itself might be traced to the pressure of necessity as interpreted by a few leading minds of the country. Without delaying here to name the time or to define the circumstances of the birth of the national idea, it may be said that external pressure and the sense of peril brought the colonies closer to one another at the time of the Revolution than ever before: the immediate fruit of that pressure was the formation of the Confederation under a plan or constitution proposed in 1777 by the Congress and ratified by the requisite number of States, after discussion and debate running through nearly four years, on Thursday, the first of March, 1781. This was a little more than two years before the treaty of peace, September 3, 1783.

At the time of the formation of this first American Union, practically with the assembling of the Congress at Philadelphia in May, 1775 (the earlier Congresses were reform conventions rather than Congresses), the theory of government received more serious consideration than the administration of government: questions involving the organization and relation of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, their respective and aggregate powers, confederate and state, monopolized the minds of men in public life almost to the exclusion of administrative questions-such, for example, as the best method of levying taxes, the best financial system, the best industrial system, adapted to such a country as ours. The result was that America took its place among the nations of the earth as an exponent and advocate of republican institutions organized according to the somewhat

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