England" had become, in Calhoun's words, "a philosophic, a humane, and a divine institution." 66

This colossal recantation alienated the West from a Democratic party dominated by the South; and the great battle of wits between Lincoln and Douglas for leadership in Illinois was as significant as the cruder contest of the Kansas war.67 The Civil War is commonly regarded as one between North and South, but it was one in which the West intervened and decided the issue. "Come out West," wrote Sherman to Grant in 1863 while the outcome still hung in the balance, "take to yourself the whole Mississippi valley. Let us make it sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and the Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk. Here lies the seat of the coming empire." 68 But before Grant went west, the man of the west had already gone east to the White House to solve with consummate statesmanship as intricate and, indeed, as distressing a problem as ever man had to handle.

Lincoln had been elected by a vote nearly a million less than the combined total of his antagonists,

Ibid. 1. 370, III. 280, 324-5; Moore, Congress, p. 344. Cf. the Rev. F. A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia, 1857). "The significance of John Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry in Oct. 1859 is illustrated by Emerson's, J. S. Mill's, and Thoreau's encomiums and still more by Victor Hugo's remark, "pour nous John Brown est plus grand que Washington." Lincoln and Seward condemned the raid (J. F. Rhodes, 11. 384, 410-16).

68 Ibid. IV. 435.

and he had no mandate to abolish slavery. "I have no purpose," he quoted in his first Inaugural 69 from one of his own campaign speeches, "directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." His attitude dismayed his friends in America and bewildered his friends in England. "My paramount object in this struggle," he replied to Horace Greeley, "is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery." 70 For if the Union could be maintained, slavery was bound sooner or later to disappear; whereas, if secession succeeded, slavery might have gone on in the South for ever.71 If Lincoln won on the constitutional issue, he won all along the line; and he concentrated on the first object because he knew that the rest would follow. It was because he wanted to eradicate slavery from the whole of the Union that he was determined to keep it intact. It could not continue half-slave, half-free;

"This Inaugural, says Henry Adams, was "the final term of the winter's tactics," which turned on "the effort of the cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new President to keep Virginia in" the Union. Upon the action of Virginia, Lincoln thought, depended whether he would have a government to administer or not (Education of Henry Adams, pp. 105-6). Sumner regarded these tactics as treason (ibid. pp. 107-8).

70 F. J. Rhodes, Hist. U.S.A. IV. 74.

"Economically it is said to have been dying in 1861; but economically it was dying half a century earlier before the invention of Whitney's cotton-gin gave it a fresh lease of life, and other inventions might have prolonged it further.

and the only way to make every State free was to keep them United States.

Here he spoke less for the North, where men had sometimes dallied with ideas of secession and to which Lincoln had never belonged, than for that America which lay beyond the Alleghanies and stood for national unity because it was the offspring of the Union. Older States might quarrel over what they had done in making the Constitution. The West had no share in its ambiguities. It did not live in that compromising past but in the present; and it looked to a future nation, in which there should be neither North nor South, and of which the prophet was that pioneer who had been elected President and was "new birth of our new soil, the first American." 72 It was a symbolical coincidence that the first shot in the Civil War was fired by a Southern gun on a Northern steamer which bore the name of The Star of the West.

73

"J. R. Lowell's Commemoration Ode. For a less poetical penpicture of Lincoln, see Meade's Headquarters, ed. G. R. Agassiz, 1922, p. 325.

73 Rhodes, III. 245.

CHAPTER V

IMPERIALISM

AMES RUSSELL LOWELL'S characteriza

JAM

can" challenges comparison with the description of George Washington as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen." 1 It also illustrates one ambiguity in the word American. There are others. A citizen of the United States has no hesitation in describing himself as an American, but he doubts how far he can attribute the same nationality to citizens of the many other States which occupy the greater part of the American continents. The tendency is to limit those other Americans to the particular countries to which they belong, to call a citizen of Canada a Canadian, of Mexico a Mexican, of Peru a Peruvian, and so forth, but to call a citizen of the United States an American after the continent which is common to them all.

'The phrase occurs in the resolutions, drafted by General Henry Lee, moved by Marshall, and passed by the House of Representatives on the receipt of the news of Washington's death (Moore, Hist. of Congress, pp. 168-9). It can now be added that he was "perhaps the wealthiest man in the United States" (R. L. Schuyler, op cit. p. 73).

166

The ambiguity is symbolical of American history. From the earliest days of independence, the new confederacy was in doubt whether it would remain a new world or become a new state, remain an asylum for mankind or become a sovereign among powers, remain a league of peoples or become an empire over American nations. But if it is difficult. to find an exact and an agreed definition of an American, empire is equally elusive. What precisely was meant by calling New York the "empire" State of the Union, and Georgia the "empire" State of the South? 2 There was imperium in republican Rome, and it did not necessarily mean either military or despotic authority. It is true that the Caesars stamped that meaning on the word, but military rule was no attribute of the holier Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, nor of that empire which Tudor statesmen claimed for England and then for Britain. Even less was it what George Washington meant when he referred in his will to the United States as a "rising empire," or what Alexander Hamilton affirmed when he said that "the fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people."4 Burke, as he strove for conciliation with America, had built a bridge between the old conception and the new when he said: "My idea of it is this, that an empire is the aggregate of many

Rhodes, Hist. U.S.A. 1. 164; III. 207.

'Works, XIV. 277.

'Beard, The Supreme Court and the Constitution, p. 98.