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pubOne.info present you this new edition. In spite of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible demands and still confronted with arbitrary points of view. It is out of the question, in a book so brief as this must necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alter these points of view. Interests that are purely local, events that did not with certainty contribute to the final outcome, gossip, as well as the mere caprice of the scholar- these must obviously be set aside.

Sujets

Histoire

USA

History of the Americas

American Civil War

États-Unis

Guerre de Sécession

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819943686
Langue	English

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION,
A CHRONICLE OF THE EMBATTLED NORTH
Volume 29 In The Chronicles Of AmericaSeries
By Nathaniel W. Stephenson
PREFACE
In spite of a lapse of sixty years, the historianwho attempts to portray the era of Lincoln is still faced withalmost impossible demands and still confronted with arbitrarypoints of view. It is out of the question, in a book so brief asthis must necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alterthese points of view. Interests that are purely local, events thatdid not with certainty contribute to the final outcome, gossip, aswell as the mere caprice of the scholar— these must obviously beset aside.
The task imposed upon the volume resolves itself, atbottom, into just two questions: Why was there a war? Why was theLincoln Government successful? With these two questions always inmind I have endeavored, on the one hand, to select and consolidatethe pertinent facts; on the other, to make clear, even at the costof explanatory comment, their relations in the historical sequenceof cause and effect. This purpose has particularly governed the useof biographical matter, in which the main illustration, of course,is the career of Lincoln. Prominent as it is here made, the Lincolnmatter all bears in the last analysis on one point— his control ofhis support. On that the history of the North hinges. The personaland private Lincoln it is impossible to present within these pages.The public Lincoln, including the character of his mind, is herethe essential matter.
The bibliography at the close of the volumeindicates the more important books which are at the reader'sdisposal and which it is unfortunate not to know.
NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON. Charleston, S. C. , March,1918.
CHAPTER I. THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
“There is really no Union now between the North andthe South. . . . No two nations upon earth entertain feelings ofmore bitter rancor toward each other than these two nations of theRepublic. ”
This remark, which is attributed to Senator BenjaminWade of Ohio, provides the key to American politics in the decadefollowing the Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of thepeople to its ultimate source, one would have to go far back intocolonial times. There was a process of natural selection at work,in the intellectual and economic conditions of the eighteenthcentury, which inevitably drew together certain types and generatedcertain forces. This process manifested itself in one form in HisMajesty's plantations of the North, and in another in those of theSouth. As early as the opening of the nineteenth century, thesocial tendencies of the two regions were already so far alienatedthat they involved differences which would scarcely admit ofreconciliation. It is a truism to say that these differencesgradually were concentrated around fundamentally differentconceptions of labor— of slave labor in the South, of free labor inthe North.
Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than thenotion that this growing antagonism was controlled by anydeliberate purpose in either part of the country. It was apparentlynecessary that this Republic in its evolution should proceed fromconfederation to nationality through an intermediate and apparentlyreactionary period of sectionalism. In this stage of Americanhistory, slavery was without doubt one of the prime factorsinvolved, but sectional consciousness, with all its emotional andpsychological implications, was the fundamental impulse of thestern events which occurred between 1850 and 1865.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the moreinfluential Southerners had come generally to regard their sectionof the country as a distinct social unit. The next step wasinevitable. The South began to regard itself as a separatepolitical unit. It is the distinction of Calhoun that he showedhimself toward the end sufficiently flexible to become the exponentof this new political impulse. With all his earlier fire heencouraged the Southerners to withdraw from the so-called nationalparties, Whig and Democratic, to establish instead a singleSouthern 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, fromthe Southern point of view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battlewas fought at the polls between the two Southern ideas— the old onewhich upheld separate state independence, and the new one whichvirtually acknowledged Southern nationality. The issue at stake wasthe acceptance or the rejection of a compromise which could bringno permanent settlement of fundamental differences.
Nowhere was the battle more interesting than inSouth Carolina, for it brought into clear light that powerfulSouthern leader who ten years later was to be the masterspirit ofsecession— Robert Barnwell Rhett. In 1851 he fought hard to revivethe older idea of state independence and to carry South Carolina asa separate state out of the Union. Accordingly it is significant ofthe progress that the consolidation of the South had made at thisdate that on this issue Rhett encountered general opposition. Thisdifference of opinion as to policy was not inspired, as somehistorians have too hastily concluded, by national feeling.Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered theFederal Government supreme over the State Government. They opposedRhett because they felt secession to be at that moment bad policy.They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the Union in 1851, shewould go alone and the solidarity of the South would be broken.They were not lacking in sectional patriotism, but their conceptionof the best solution of the complex problem differed from thatadvocated by Rhett. Their position was summed up by Langdon Cheveswhen he said, “To secede now is to secede from the South as well asfrom the Union. ” On the basis of this belief they defeated Rhettand put off secession for ten years.
There is no analogous single event in the history ofthe North, previous to the war, which reveals with similarclearness a sectional consciousness. On the surface the life of thepeople seemed, indeed, to belie the existence of any such feeling.The Northern capitalist class aimed steadily at beingnon-sectional, and it made free use of the word national. We mustnot forget, however, that all sorts of people talked of nationalinstitutions, and that the term, until we look closely into themind of, the person using it, signifies nothing. Because theNorthern capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it doesnot follow that he set up any other in its place. Instead ofaccomplishing anything so positive, he remained for the most part anegative quantity.
Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, hemade it his chief purpose to regulate the outflow of manufacturesfrom that industrial region and the inflow of agricultural produce.The movement of the latter eastward and northward, and the formerwestward and southward, represents roughly but graphically themovement of the business of that time. The Easterner lived in fearof losing the money which was owed him in the South. As thepolitical and economic conditions of the day made unlikely anyserious clash of interest between the East and the West, he hadlittle solicitude about his accounts beyond the Alleghanies. But agradually developing hostility between North and South wasaccompanied by a parallel anxiety on the part of Northern capitalfor its Southern investments and debts. When the war eventuallybecame inevitable, $200, 000, 000 were owed by Southerners toNortherners. For those days this was an indebtedness of noinconsiderable magnitude. The Northern capitalists, preoccupiedwith their desire to secure this account, were naturally eager torepudiate sectionalism, and talked about national interests with azeal that has sometimes been misinterpreted. Throughout the entireperiod from 1850 to 1865, capital in American politics played forthe most part a negative role, and not until after the war did itbecome independent of its Southern interests.
For the real North of that day we must turn to thoseNortherners who felt sufficient unto themselves and whose politicalconvictions were unbiased by personal interests which were involvedin other parts of the country. We must listen to the distinctvoices that gave utterance to their views, and we must observe thedefinite schemes of their political leaders. Directly we do this,the fact stares us in the face that the North had become ademocracy. The rich man no longer played the role of grandee, forby this time there had arisen those two groups which, between them,are the ruin of aristocracy— the class of prosperous laborers andthe group of well-to-do intellectuals. Of these, the latter gaveutterance, first, to their faith in democracy, and then, with allthe intensity of partisan zeal, to their sense of the North as theagent of democracy. The prosperous laborers applauded thisexpression of an opinion in which they thoroughly believed and atthe same time gave their willing support to a land policy that wastypically Northern.
American economic history in the middle third of thecentury is essentially the record of a struggle to gain possessionof public land. The opposing forces were the South, which strove toperpetuate by this means a social system that was fundamentallyaristocratic, and the North, which sought by the same means tofoster its ideal of democracy. Though the South, with the aid ofits economic vassal, the Northern capitalist class, was for sometime able to check the land-hunger of the Northern democrats, itwas never able entirely to secure the control which it desired, butwas always faced with the steady and continued opposition of thereal North. On one occasion in Congress, the heart of the wholematter was clearly shown, for at the very moment when theNortherners of the democratic class were pressing one of theirfrequent schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympatheticNorthern h