TEXT FLY WITHIN

THE BOOK ONLY

8]<OU_1 60598 >m
Dates when States were admitted to the llnldn
rHrUfinment
m the L-m

NORTH
DAKOTA
1889

Free States

&! States of Fort Swnt&:^

seceding before the fall

States seceding after the fall ofFortSumter

Original states shown without dates
Slave states
remaining in the Union' of admission. Vermont and Maine
were carved out of of the
at the time of the Civil territory
I I Territories War states.
original
OUP $700^-8-. 1 -77-7,CCO.

OSMAMA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Call No. 3 2- O !? 7 3 AccessioQ No .
P6) 6 1
17
Author
P
Title

This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below.
 (A*

c/ tie fyntied

Jrntlitt
THE PRICE OF

UNION
BY HERBERT AGAR
The People's Choice

Land of the Free

Pursuit of Happiness

A Time for Greatness

The Price of Union

THE PRICE OF
UNION
BY HERBERT AGAR

1 9 MNn 5

Cambtibgc

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON
 COPYRIGHT,, 1950, BY HERBERT AGAR
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
 IN MEMORY OF JOHNNY WALLACE
who asked many of the questions which this book tries

to answer, but who died before he could read it.

 Preface

JLHE HUNDRED AND SIXTY YEARS of American history since George Wash-
ington first took the oath as President comprise a tale of adventure which
has been told from many points of view, to support many theories. Here it
isused to illustrate the birth and growth of a unique political system. The
system can be understood only by studying the men who built it and the
forces which impelled them. It is a flexible system, which will continue to

change from President to President, from crisis to crisis, and from Su-
preme Court to Supreme Court. Yet if we know what it is today, and how
it came to be, we can follow its shifting pattern in the future and perhaps

direct it nearer to the heart's desire. This book, however, does not discuss
or suggest improvements. It describes "what men do, and not what they
ought to do."
The detailed history is carried to 1909. Thereafter, the political passions
of today confuse the issue, and much of the evidence is not yet sifted. Two
chapters of modern instances apply the findings from the past to scenes
from recent politics.
Footnotes which enlarge or comment upon the text will be found at the
bottom of the page. Those which merely give references are numbered by
chapters and are at the back of the book.
The following friends have been good enough to read large parts of
this work in manuscript, and to help immeasurably on matters of fact,

judgment, and proportion: Henry Steele Commager, R. J. Cruikshank,

Harold Guinzburg, Allan Nevins, Joseph Links, Robert E. Sherwood,
and Milton Waldman. My publishers in England and America have
criticized the text with minute care, to my great advantage. And I am

deeply in debt to Mr. Harold Epstein, who has helped me throughout in

finding material and in raising well-informed objections to some of my use
of it. All the chapters, and most of the pages, have been improved by his
help.
The good will and assistance of my friends, however, will not have
sufficed to prevent errors. For them I claim sole responsibility.

HERBERT AGAR
Beechwood, Petworth, Sussex
June, 1949
 Contents

Preface vn
Introduction xiii

PART ONE: 1763-1850

I. The Nature of the Revolution: 1763-1788 3
II. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 25
III. The Constitution, Written and Unwritten 39
IV. The First President 58
V. The Birth of Parties 82
VI. The Failure of the Federalists 92
VII. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 111
VIII. The Tyranny of Circumstance 130
IX. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 156
X. The One-Party Period 186
XL The President without a Party 211
XII. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 232
XIII. The Jackson Men in Action 251
XIV. The Rise of the Whigs 277
XV. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 295
XVI. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 312

PART TWO: 1850-1909

XVII. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 337
XVIII. The Fruits of Executive Weakness, I (1853-1857) 356
XIX. The Fruits of Executive Weakness, II (1857-1861) 381
XX. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 403
XXI. Lincoln and the "War Powers" 419
XXII. Congress vs. the President 439
 Contents

XXIII. Grant Obeys the Senators 464

XXIV. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 485
XXV. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 509
XXVI. Civil Service vs. the Stalwarts 527
XXVII. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire 541
XXVIII. The Old Order Changes 555
XXIX. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 577
XXX. Agrarian vs. Capitalist 592
XXXI. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 614
XXXII. "7 Did Greatly Broaden the Executive Power"
. . . 628

CONCLUSION
XXXIII. Some Modern Instances, I 655
XXXIV. Some Modern Instances, II 675
XXXV. The Parties and the Union 688

The Constitution 695

Notes 707
Bibliography 717
Acknowledgments 727
Index 729
 List of Maps

1. Dates When States Were Admitted to the Union and Sectional

Alignment in the Civil War Front Endpapers

2. Claims of the States to Western Lands, 1783-1802 35

3. East and West Florida, 1783-1814 176

4. The United States in 1821 212

5. Presidential Election of 1828 229

6. Physical Geography of the United States 272

7. Average Annual Rainfall in the United States 272

8. The Oregon Controversy 310

9. Transcontinental Routes, 1850-1858 370

}
10. Western Railroad Plans of the 1850 s 371

11. Railroads Existing in 1850 372

12. Free and Slave Areas, 1860 392

13. Presidential Election, 1860 400

14. Productive Areas of the United States 557

15. Foreign-Born Population, 1910 562

16. Presidential Election of 1896 612

17. Territorial Expansion of the United States Back Endpapers

 Introduction
It has been said that democracy is the worst
form of government except all those other forms
that have been tried from time to time.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, in the House of

Commons, November 11, 1947

JL N 1 788, when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were
struggling to persuade the New York convention to ratify the Constitution
of the United States, young De Witt Clinton composed a prayer for the
Opposition: "From the insolence of great men from the tyranny of the
rich from the unfeeling rapacity of the excise-men and tax-gatherers
from the misery of despotism from the expense of supporting standing
armies, navies, placemen, sinecures, federal cities, senators, presidents, and
a long train of etceteras, Good Lord deliver us." There speaks the deep
American distaste for government, the belief that it is evil and that it must
be kept weak.
The proposed constitution seemed weak enough to its friends too weak
for safety in the opinion of Hamilton. The thirteen states were left with all
the powers which would normally concern "the lives, liberties and proper-
ties of the people," while the delegated powers of the Union were divided

among the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary in the belief that
they would check each other and prevent rash or oppressive deeds. Yet
behind this modest proposal Clinton saw threats of insolence, rapacity,
misery, needless expense, and all the corruptions of history. There is little

doubt that he spoke for the majority in NewYork; and many citizens
would still agree with him. A constant factor in American history is the
fear of Leviathan, of the encroaching state.
Wecan trace this fear from prerevolutionary days, and we can trace the
forces which have nevertheless caused Leviathan to grow steadily more

ponderous. War and industrial revolution promote strong government.

Foreign dangers, business depressions, sectional or class strife whenever
these are acute the people look to central power for help. Yet they have
not abandoned hope that life might sometime be peaceful and that gov-
ernment might become frugal and unassuming, as Jefferson promised.
And they have not abandoned the constitution which seemed to many of
those who wrote it to err on the side of weakness, to put the liberties of the
xiv Introduction

citizen before the safety of the commonwealth. Yet by unwritten means,

out of simple that constitution has been given strength and
self-protection,,
meet
flexibility to the threats and disasters of a hundred and sixty years.
The one of the most interesting forms of government the world has
result is

seen, and in the light of its problems one of the most successful.

The special problems of the American Government derive from geog-

raphy, national character, and the nature both of a written constitution
and of a federal empire. The government is cramped and confined by a
seemingly rigid bond; yet it must adapt itself to a rate of change in eco-
nomics, technology, and foreign relations which would have made all pre-
vious ages dizzy. In good times the government must abide by the theory
that its limited sovereignty has been divided between the Union and the
several states; yet when the bombs fall or the banks close or the breadlines

grow by millions it must recapture the distributed sovereignty and act like
a strong centralized nation. The government must regard the separation
of its own
powers, especially those of the Executive and the Legislature,
as an and indeed a sacred part of the system yet when the sepa-
essential ;

ration threatens deadlock and danger it must reassemble those powers in-
formally and weld them into a working team. Finally, the government
must accept the fact that in a country so huge, containing such diverse
climates and economic interests and social habits and racial and religious
backgrounds, most politics will be parochial, most politicians will have
small horizons, seeking the good of the state or the district rather than of
the Union yet by diplomacy and compromise, never by force, the govern-
;

ment must water down the selfish demands of regions, races, classes, busi-
ness associations, into a national policy which will alienate no major group
and which will contain at least a small plum for everybody. This is the
price of unity in a continent-wide federation. Decisions will therefore be
slow, will be cumbersome, political parties will be illogical and
methods
inconsistent; but the people remain free, reasonably united, and as lightly
burdened by the state as is consistent with safety.
It may be asked, if the inevitable problems are so acute and so contra-

dictory why not change the form of government? The answer is that the
American political system with all its absurdities is one of the few successes
in a calamitous age. Step by step, it has learned to avoid many of the worst
mistakes of empire, in a nation which would stretch from London to the
Ural Mountains and from Sweden to the Sahara; it has learned to cir-
cumvent threats of secession (the mortal illness of federalism) before they
appear; it has learned to evade class warfare (the mortal illness of lib-
erty), and to the dismay of its critics it shows no sign of moving toward
Introduction xv

class parties. Once,, in themidst of the long period of learning, the political
system failed totally. The was civil war. The system must always fail
result

partially, since politics cannot rise above the mixed nature of man. "Gov-
ernment is a very rough business," said Sir George Cornewall Lewis to the
young Gladstone; "you must be content with very unsatisfactory results.'*
In a world condemned to such results the American political system de-
serves attention especially that part of the system which combines com-
promise with energy, minority rights with government by a majority which
may live thousands of miles away. This is the special province of the un-
written constitution.

The written constitution has been unofficially revised, without the change
of a word or a comma, in several ways. First, the government which had
been planned as a very loose federation grew steadily more centralized.
Not even the most power-fearing statesmen could prevent this drift.
Second, the office of the presidency was captured by the emerging de-
mocracy much to the surprise of the Fathers, who thought they had put
it beyond the clutches of what they called the "mob." The President, there-

after, was the one man elected by all the voters,* so when the country be-
came a thorough democracy the President became the voice of the people.
For the most part the members of the Senate and of the House must repre-
sent their own states and districts. It is not waywardness which makes
them do this; it is the nature of the federal system. The representatives
from Delaware do not and should not spend their time serving the inter-
ests of Idaho. Yet there may be occasions when the welfare of the national
majority conflicts with that of Idaho. It then becomes the duty of the con-
gressmen from Idaho to argue for their own region and to ask for com-
promise. But the President talks for the nation.
Third, when the President became the voice of the people it was impor-
tant that his voice carry weight. Under the written constitution, as inter-

preted from the days of Madison (who came to the White House
in

1809) to those of J. Q. Adams (who left it in 1829), not even the most
popular President could impose a national policy. The Congress was "a
scuffle of local interests," and could make only desultory policy. So the

nation drifted : and out of war, in and out of depression, in and out of
in
Thus came the demand for the third unwritten change,
sectional strife.
which stabilized the others and saved the system from stagnation: the
modern political parties.
These parties are unique. They cannot be compared to the parties of
other nations. They serve a new purpose in a new way. Unforeseen and

*Except for the Vice-President, who does not matter unless the President dies.
xvi Introduction

unwanted by the Fathers, they form the heart of the unwritten constitu-
tion and help the written one to work.
It through the parties that the clashing interests of a continent find
is

grounds for compromise; it is through the parties that majority rule is

softened and minorities gain a suspensive veto; it is through the parties
that the separation of powers within the federal government is diminished
and the President is given strength (when he dares use it) to act as tribune
of the people; it is through the parties that the dignity of the states is

maintained, and the tendency for central power to grow from its own
strength is to some extent resisted. It is through the parties, also, that
many corruptions and vulgarities enter the national life, and many dubi-
ous habits like that of ignoring issues which are too grave for compro-
mise.
The parties are never static. They are as responsive to shifting condi-
tions as the Constitution of Great Britain. Above all, they are not addicted
to fixed ideas, to rigid principles. It is not their duty to be Left, or Right,
or Center but to be all three. It is not their function to defend political
or economic doctrines, but to administer the doctrines chosen by the ma-
jority, with due regard to special interests and to the habits of the regions.
Third parties may preach causes and adhere to creeds. They may edu-
cate the publicand thus mold history. But the two major parties have a
more absorbing, a more subtle, and a more difficult task. The task is pe-
culiar to a federal state covering so much land and containing so many

people that its economic and cultural life cannot and should not be
merged. Over such an area, where there is no unity of race, no immemorial
tradition, no throne to revere, no ancient roots in the land, no single reli-
gion to color all minds alike where there is only language in common,
and and the pride of the rights of man the American party system
faith,
helps to build freedom and union the blessings of liberty, and the strength
:

that comes from letting men, money, goods, and ideas move without hin-
drance.

Although the major parties do not stand for opposed philosophies and do
not represent opposed classes, there are traditional differences which di-
vide them. On the whole, it is
roughly true that the ancestors of the Demo-
cratic Party are Thomas Jefferson and his friends, who made a political
alliance in the seventeen-nineties and who came to power in 1801. And it
is
roughly true that the ancestors of the Republican Party are Alexander
Hamilton and his friends, who formed the dominant group in the Cabi-
nets of thefirst two Presidents (1789-1801).

Broadly speaking, and subject to many qualifications, the Jeffersonians

drew their strength from the landed interests (the small farmers and in
Introduction xvii

some cases the great plantation owners) and from the mechanics and
manual workers of the towns, whereas the Hamiltonians drew their
strength from the business and banking and commercial communities,
from the middle-class workers who associated their interests with these
communities, and from some of the richest owners of plantations. There
are so many exceptions to the above statements that it would be mislead-
ing to take them literally yet in a very general sense they tend to be true.
;

Some such alignment most sections of the country, not only in

existed in
the days of Jefferson and Hamilton, but in the days of Andrew Jackson
and Henry Clay and Daniel Webster (1820-1850), and in the days of
Bryan and McKinley, and in the days when Woodrow Wilson ran against
Theodore Roosevelt and Taf t, and again in the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
Yet the alignment is insignificant compared to the fundamental forces
which make the party system.
Another tendency toward strict party alignment stems from the Civil
War a tendency which cuts across and confuses the alignment which has
just been described. The Republican Party was the party of Union during
the Civil War, the party of Northern victory. As a result the farmers of the
Middle West and of New England, for whom the Union was a sacred
cause, long tended to vote the Republican ticket. So did the Negroes, for
whom Northern victory meant release from slavery. And so did the vet-
erans of the Union armies, for whom the Republican Party meant gen-
erous pensions. And on the other side the states of the Confederacy formed
the "solid South" wherein only the Democratic Party was respectable. It is
the remnants of such wartime passions which explain the Georgia judge
who said, "I shall die a penitent Christian, but meet my Maker as an im-
penitent Democrat."
Yet in recent years Franklin Roosevelt won the whole of the Middle
West for the Democrats, and the whole of New England with the excep-
tion of Maine and Vermont. And in two elections he received most of the
Negro votes. And in 1928 (under very exceptional circumstances, to be
sure) Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate, received the votes of
Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida all parts of the
"solid South."
The meaning and the purpose of the national parties cannot be sought
in traditional alignments or old animosities, and still less in economic or

political creeds. They can only be understood in the light of the regional
problem created by America's size, and of the constitutional problem
created by the separation of powers.

5
The American political system sometimes fails lamentably. Although on
the whole it promotes freedom and union, too many citizens have a sham
xviii Introduction

freedom, and too often the Union is used to press colonial servitude upon
entire regions.Yet we must remember, as Dennis Brogan says, that when
the Constitution went into effect in 1 789 "there was still a King of France
and Navarre, a King of Spain and the Indies, a Venetian and a Dutch
Republic, an Emperor in Pekin; a Pope-King ruled in Bologna, a Tsarina
in Petersburg and a Shogun in Yedo, not yet Tokio and not yet the resi-
5'
dence of the Divine Mikado.
The form of government which has weathered the wars, revolutions,
and economic collapses ravaging the world during this century and a half
must satisfy some deep need of man. And it must have resilience and
adaptability. The unwritten constitution supplies the latter qualities.
 PART ONE
1763-1850
 I

The Nature of the Revolution

1763-1788

A HE AMERICAN REVOLUTION divides conveniently into three periods. Dur-

ing the first, the colonists were slowly pushed by circumstances into claim-
ing autonomy within the Empire. This led them into war with the mother
country, and incidentally into stating their claims on grounds which
called for social revolution at home. During the second period the war
was fought, the state constitutions were created, and the social revolution
begun. During the third period a conservative revolt took effect, the loose
confederation of the war-days was attacked on the ground that it made
for anarchy, and the present Constitution of the United States was
framed.*
The years preceding the formal break with England, from 1763 to
1776, were a time when man's will did not control his fate, a time when
he was pushed by implacable forces into deeds which he had not chosen
or foreseen. At the beginning of this period there were very few in Amer-
ica, and none in Britain, who wished to see the Empire broken; yet the
defeat of France in the Seven Years War, and her expulsion from Can-
ada at the peace of 1763, had brought a revolutionary change in the
North American balance of power, and the revolutionary change produced
a revolution.
The balance was upset domestically as well as internationally. The
mechanics in the towns and the back-country farmers had long resented
the rule of the colonial oligarchy a rule based on property qualifications
for voting and officeholding, and on a refusal to give the citizens of the
newly settled western counties representation according to their numbers.
In every colony the seaboard aristocrats were distrusted by the artisans
and by the men of the frontier; and in every colony the privileges of the
rich were supported by the distant power of Britain. Yet when that power
was no longer needed as a guard against France, the merchants and
planters felt free to protest against the mother country's interference
* The first
period was from 1763 to 1775. The second period was from 1775 to
1783. The third period ended in 1788, when the required number of states had
accepted the Constitution. In 1789 the federal government, which forms the sub-
ject of this book, was installed.
3
4 The Price of Union

with their business and the poor felt free to protest against the
profits,
political inequalities contrived by the merchants and planters and bol-
stered by the government in London. Professor Merrill Jensen writes:

Colonial radicalism did not become effective until after the French
and Indian War.* Then, fostered by economic depression and aided
by the bungling policy of Great Britain and the desire of the local gov-
erning classes for independence within the empire, it became united
in an effort to throw off its local and international bonds. The discon-
tented were given an opportunity to express their discontent when
the British Government began to enforce restrictions upon the colonies
after 1763. The colonial merchants used popular demonstrations to give
point to their more orderly protests . and it was only a step from
. .

such riots, incited and controlled by the merchants, to the organization

of radical parties bent on the redress of local grievances which were of
far more concern to the masses than the more remote and less obvious
effects of British policy. . Used as tools at first, the masses were
. .

soon united under capable leadership in what became as much a war

1
against the colonial aristocracy as a war for independence.

It is amusing to notice how the leaders were driven step by step to

justify the democratic aspirations of the colonial poor. The oligarchy

could not find a good reason for pressing their case against England with-
out giving the disfranchised and underrepresented colonists a good reason
for pressing their case against the oligarchy; for if the Revolution con-
cerned the rights of man, those rights must prevail between the western
and eastern counties as truly as between Boston and London. We shall
trace the results of the people's revolt later; but first we must follow the
revolt of the well-to-do and the educated against British trade laws and
taxation. This revolt was the prime mover in all the ferment, and it was
stimulated by British success in the Seven Years War. Behind the long
transatlantic argument about prerogative, about the powers of Parlia-
ment, about internal versus external taxation, there stands the fact that
when France was driven from Canada, and her Indian allies were thus
rendered comparatively harmless, the colonists no longer had a reason
to accept vexing interference from a faraway power. There might still
have been room for America within a twentieth-century Commonwealth
of Nations, but there was no room within an eighteenth-century mer-
cantile empire even an enlightened, and on the whole benevolent, em-
pire such as the British. No one need be blamed for the fact that the
eighteenth century was not the twentieth; George III should be forgiven
for finding it impossible to be George VI.

It was inherent in the theory of eighteenth-century imperialism that

* This was the colonial name for the North American branch of the Seven
Years War.
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 5

colonies should be used for the good of the mother country, producing
raw materials, absorbing finished products, trading only with such ports
and in such bottoms as the central power decreed. Although the theory
was tempered for the American colonies because they were partly self-
governing and inhabited by Englishmen, it was inherent in human nature
that such a faraway people, feeling themselves potentially rich and find-
ing themselves suddenly safe, should object to all restraint from the day
when the mother country could produce no compensating service. The
service ended with the Seven Years War; the restraints continued.
In fact the restraints increased, just when the motive for bearing them
diminished. England felt poor in 1763; she wanted the colonists, who
had received much benefit from the recent war, to pay some of the costs.
She decided on a stern enforcement of the trade restrictions, which in
the past had been mitigated by smuggling. And she undertook to raise
extra money from the colonists by means of a stamp tax, imposing heavy
duties on legal papers, liquor licenses, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. In
London, this seemed a mild way of insuring a contribution to the com-
mon cause. As George Grenville pointed out, the stamp tax was only ex-
pected to raise about 60,000 a year, whereas the annual cost of maintain-
ing a British army in North America was about 350,000. But the colonists
no longer felt they needed a British army.
The stamp tax was a burden on the three most vocal classes in the
community, the clergy, the lawyers, and the journalists; and the decision
to enforce the trade laws was a burden on the New England merchants
and shippers, a group of men who had developed to an unusual extent
the Puritan ability to identify good business with the will of God. Yet
the decision was not tyrannous,* and the stamp tax did not in fact go
counter to the laws of nature. It was merely inexpedient, in that the
Americans did not have reason to accept it and the Parliament did not
have power to enforce it. Benjamin Franklin, the wisest of Americans,
was in London at the time, and although he had opposed the Stamp
Act he failed to foresee the explosion which would follow at home. In
fact, he procured for several of his closest friends the appointment as
local "stamp master," a job which he thought both pleasing and prof-
itable since it meant little work and carried three hundred pounds a year.
Within a few months his friends were lucky to escape with their lives
from angry American mobs.
Even more important than the resistance to the Stamp Act was the
excuse given for resisting. As early as 1761 James Otis of Massachusetts
had opposed writs of assistance, or search warrants, on the ground that
* It
was, however, foolish; for the illicit trade with the French and Spanish
Indies provided the colonies with the necessary cash to maintain the unfavorable
balance of trade with Britain.
6 The Price of Union

they were unconstitutional. Parliament itself, said Otis, did not have
the right to disregard the traditional privileges of Englishmen or to vio-
late the principles of the British Constitution. "As to Acts of Parliament,"
he said, 2 "an act against the Constitution is void. . The executive courts
. .

must pass such acts into disuse." And he referred to an opinion of Coke,
in which that famous jurist asserted, "In many cases the common law
will control Acts of Parliament and adjudge them to be utterly void; for
where an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason or re-
pugnant or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it
and adjudge it to be void."
Whether it was good law or bad, it was already a basic American belief
that man's rights are independent of government and that laws contra-
dicting such rights are void. The same point was raised against the Stamp
Act. Thomas Hutchinson, Royal Governor of Massachusetts, reported
home that "the prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament
is
against Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and
therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void." John Adams argued
that the Act "is ... of no binding force upon us for it is against our rights
;

as men and our privileges as Englishmen. An act made in defiance of the

first principles of justice.
. . There are certain principles fixed unalter-
.

ably in nature." Otis of course took the same view, and in 1766 a county
court in Virginia declared the Stamp Act unconstitutional and said that
8
it need not be obeyed.

The doctrine that men have rights which are not the gift of govern-
ment, and which government may not override, was rooted in the religious
as well as the political history of New England. The colonists, in other
words, did not invent the theory that unjust government is illegal govern-
ment in order to excuse their disobedience. The theory was an old one;
it was "the common sense of the matter," as Jefferson put it, to many

eighteenth-century minds; and in the case of the New England colonists

it had been taught by their ministers for over a century. The theory might

not have been called upon in the case of the stamp tax, which was
surely a mild evil, if there had not been many minor and sometimes un-
conscious reasons for wishing to be quit of the British connection, or at
least to loosen the bonds.
Each section of the community had a reason of its own. The merchant-
lawyer-journalist group was annoyed by the stamp tax and the suppression
of smuggling. The Southern planters were deep in debt to their London
agents, who paid poor prices for tobacco and overcharged for the goods
they shipped in return; yet the mercantile system bound the planters
to their agents and seemingly doomed them to eternal debt. And the
frontier farmers had three grievances. The first was the quitrent, a feudal
due payable by freeholders to the crown and to the proprietor. The sec-
L The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 7

ond was the Proclamation of 1763 (reaffirmed in 1774 by the Quebec

Act), which forbade settlers from crossing the Appalachian Mountains
into the Indian country beyond. In London this doubtless seemed a
reasonable way of preserving the fur trade, controlling the Indians, and
avoiding border warfare. On the frontier it seemed madness, for the
American pioneer regarded the Indian as someone whose land tenure
expired automatically the moment the white man was ready to inherit it.
The third agrarian grievance was that the British prohibited the print-
ing of paper money. Since it is natural for a debtor to have faith in the
wealth-making powers of the printing press, this prohibition was resented
not only by the small farmers but by the artisans and laborers in the cities,
many of whom were out of work because of the post-war business depres-
sion and who felt that the rule against paper money was part of a con-
spiracy between Britain and the colonial rich to oppress the colonial poor.
Behind all this lay a still greater trouble, intangible, seldom expressed,
but widely felt.

It impossible [writes F. S. Oliver] to conduct successfully the

is

infinitely complex affairs of an ordinary business from a center sep-

arated by great distances from its branches, unless the manager be
given so free a hand that he becomes in fact the predominant partner
within his own sphere. The British king and people failed to realize
this essential limitation of their sovereignty. It was no wonder, for
no country in the world had ever realized it before them. The essence
of the difficulty was never clearly stated by either side, so little was it
grasped by reason, so much was it a matter of mere instinct. Amer-
icans felt that a free hand was a necessity, and that under existing cir-
cumstances they would never obtain it. It seemed to them that they
were not understood, which was true, and that they could never hope
to be understood, which was probable. 4
Even and efficient modern state, even with cables and
in a unified
wireless and world-wide telephones, every government mission abroad
becomes irked and oppressed by the feeling that it is too little consulted
from home and that its wise suggestions are given too little heed. How
much more burdensome must the feeling have been in a sprawling ill-
administered empire, in days when the fastest communication might be
three months at sea. Only danger could impose unity under such con-
ditions, and after 1763 the danger was gone.
There was also a creative side to the revolt against far-off control;
British interference not only caused financial loss to the colonists, it
frustrated their sense of destiny. Without knowing it, they were begin-

ning to think of themselves as Americans, as members of a new type of

nation. Franklin used the word "American" in this sense in the seventeen-

fifties, Washington not long after; John Adams in the seventies; and
8 The Price of Union

Jefferson, who had lived on the frontier, apparently never thought in

other terms. In his Autobiography he writes: "I took the ground which,
from the beginning, I had thought the only one orthodox or tenable,
which was that the relation between Great Britain and these colonies was
exactly the same as that of England and Scotland after the accession of
James and until the union, and the same as her present relations with
Hanover, having the same executive chief but no other necessary political
connection." He added that many others "stopped at the half-way house
of John Dickinson, who admitted that England had a right to regulate
our commerce and to lay duties on it for the purposes of regulation but
not of raising revenue." 5
The halfway house was untenable. One by one the other leaders were
driven to Jefferson's position, not because Jefferson was right in law or in
his appeal to history, but because it was the only consistent position, and
because it expressed the sense of independence which climate, geography,
natural resources, and a reassuring absence of Frenchmen to the north,
had created in the American mind. By 1763, England had served her
purpose in the thirteen colonies. She had made possible the birth of a
nation, and it was too late to undo the work. Had King George been
as wise as Plato, and Lord North as just as Aristides, the nation would
still insisted on being born. The British might have postponed the
have
birthday but
; nothing short of a modern federalist system could have pre-
vented it. Lord North, in fact, came closer than most of the contestants to
seeing the real point; he said that the dispute was not about taxation
but about whether Great Britain possessed any authority whatever over
the "haughty American Republicans." The answer was "No."

The famous tea party at Boston shows the ignorance and misunderstand-

ing, caused by great distance and slow communications, which helped

to promote the break. The East India Company had been on the verge of

bankruptcy, and Parliament came to the rescue with the Tea Act of 1773,
designed to help the company sell its surplus tea. The act allowed the
company to send tea to the American colonies in its own ships, and to
sell it through its own agents. Instead of paying the English tax of a

shilling, such tea had only a duty of threepence at the American ports.
The result was a drop of ninepence in the price of tea. American mer-
chants who had bought their stocks legally in London (and even the
more enterprising merchants who had smuggled their stocks from Hol-
land) could now be undersold by the East India Company, while ship-
owners and sailors who lived on the tea trade would be out of a job.
t. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 9

Parliament, seeking to help the East India Company, had acted with-
out knowledge of the American mind. It may have been thought in Lon-
don that the cheapness of the new tea would more than compensate for
the ill treatment of the tea merchants; but it was not the loss of the tea
trade which stirred the merchant class in America; it was the fear of
monopoly. If Parliament favored other English trading houses in the
same fashion, it might end by ruining all the American merchants as
well as all the smugglers. Doubtless it would never have occurred to

Parliament to do anything of the sort; but if the members of that body

had not been three thousand miles away from the people for whom
they were legislating they would have known that Burke was right when
he said the Americans "anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure
of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovern-
ment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted
breeze."
Calm and sensible men in America seriously believed that the Tea
Act was the beginning of a plan to drain the colonies of their wealth.
In some ports, therefore, the tea was landed but not sold. In others it
was returned to England. And in Boston, on the night of December 16,
1773, a group of men disguised as Indians flung the cargoes from three
of the East India Company's ships into the sea.
In London the deed must have seemed wanton and anarchic, because
London did not know enough about Boston to see a connection between
tyranny and cheap tea. That was the wrong which could not be repaired :

London and Boston were too far apart, and it would be many decades
before man's inventiveness could bring them closer. In reply to the tea
party, London could think of nothing to do but assert its authority and
"restore law and order" a phrase that runs like a note of warning
throughout the history of empires. The steps taken to assert authority
united all the colonies with Massachusetts, and united the conservative
merchant class with the more aggressive rebels.
If it had not been tea it would have been something else. The world
had not then evolved a type of international society in which the colonies
could continue an unsuspicious collaboration with the mother country.
Seventy years later, when discontent arose in Canada, the British Gov-
ernment sent a commission to study the problem in the light of the
American revolt. As a result of the commission's report, the Empire began
to move toward the modern Commonwealth of Nations. But it was too
soon for such ideas in London, in 1773. The wisest of the colonists
Franklin, Jefferson, James Wilson, John Adams all had dreamed of a

federal empire as the basis for unity. It was easy to have such dreams in
America, where the need for home rule was clear. It was still impossible
in London, where the power resided, and the habits of authority.
10 The Price of Union

Only adversity can bring new ideas to men who have been long steeped
in power. After the battle of Saratoga, in October, 1777, Lord North
wished to recognize American independence at once. The king forbade
it. Lord North then introduced a bill which might have changed history.
The bill authorized a treaty with the colonies granting complete home
rule if they would acknowledge the sovereignty of the king. This, in
modern dominion status. It is independence without disunity.
effect, is
Itwould perhaps have been accepted in November; but,, Parliament took
a long Christmas holiday and the bill was not passed until February,
1778. By that time France, fearing that such concessions might be made,
and might bring peace, had signed a treaty of alliance with America. The
war had to continue to the end; but at least the new British Empire
would one day profit from the mistakes of the old.

Needless to say, the men who made the Revolution did not think they
were merely, and inevitably, sloughing off an imperial bond which was
no longer useful and which could no longer be enforced. They saw their
drive for independence as a drive for justice and for the blessings of lib-
erty, a conflict between good and evil. "Britain," wrote John Adams to
his wife on July 3, 1776, "has been filled with folly, and America with
wisdom." This complacent view of the problem had two results: it led
the colonists to invent a theory of the British Empire which, though un-
historic, gave them ethical grounds for revolution, and it led them to
state their case before the world in terms of good and evil of natural
law, the rights of man, and the compact- theory of the state. The effort
to embody these moral doctrines in political institutions led to a new
form of government, a new and distinctively American effort to solve the
old problem of power versus individual liberty.
It was hard to picture the Empire in terms which would permit the

colonists, while flouting authority, to persuade themselves that they were

merely defending the right. When they called the Stamp Act uncon-
stitutional, for example, they did so on the ground that nobody with the
rights of a British citizen could be legally taxed except with the consent
of his representatives. Since the Americans were not represented in Par-
liament, they could not be taxed by Parliament. Yet this was awkward
ground, for the colonists had frequently been taxed by Parliament with-
out complaint. The argument was therefore narrowed, and the claim
made that Parliament could not impose internal taxes, such as the stamp
tax, although it could impose external taxes such as customs duties.
It soon became clear that this too was shaky doctrine. The Stamp
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 11

Act was repealed in 1766, and in the following year Parliament passed
the Townshend Acts. Townshend had declared that the difference be-
tween internal and external taxes was "perfect nonsense"; yet if it amused
the Americans to make the distinction he was prepared to humor them.
So the Townshend Acts laid duties, to be collected in American ports,
on glass, lead, paper, tea, etc. Customs Commissioners were appointed
for the collection of these duties, and were sent to Boston. Unlike the
Stamp Collectors, they did not run away when the mob opposed them ;

they called British troops to their support.

The colonists began to feel that Townshend had been right in calling
the distinction between internal and external taxes "perfect nonsense."
A tax was a tax, it seemed, and the only good tax was a tax which was
not collected. Yet no one could claim this doctrine was part of the Brit-
ish Constitution. Neither could anyone deny that Parliament for a hun-
dred years had imposed customs duties (that is, external taxes) for the
regulation of trade, and that duties had brought revenue
some of these
to the Exchequer. Yet if the Townshend Acts were also to be flouted,
a reasonable excuse was required; so the next step was to draw a dis-
tinction between customs duties laid for the regulation of trade and
customs duties laid for the purpose of bringing in a revenue. The former,
6
said John Dickinson and his many followers, were constitutional; the
latter were not. How was the distinction to be
drawn, since any customs
duties were likely to raise some revenue? The
must rest upon
distinction
But might not Parliament pro-
the "intention" of the framers of the law.
fess the intention of regulating trade when it really intended to raise
revenue? In that case, said Dickinson, the intention must be inferred
from the nature of the law.
Professor Becker comments :

To derive the nature of an act from the intention of its framers, and
the intention of its framers from the nature of the act, was no doubt
what logicians would call reasoning in a circle; but whatever the tech-
nical defects of the argument might be, the colonists could, and did,
lay firm hold of the general conclusion that Americans have "the
same right that all states have, of judging when their privileges are in-
vaded." 7

Here, of course, was the point. The colonists did not choose to pay
taxes or to suffer restrictions for the sake of an empire they no longer
needed. It was not in their interest to do so, and it was not to be supposed
that they, alone among mankind, would sacrifice interest to sentiment,
But neither did they choose to make such a blunt, ungrateful statement.
They were breaking the law because they did not like the law, and be-
cause they felt strong enough to break it. They meant to continue break-
12 The Price of Union

ing it, and they wanted a clear and flattering excuse. The logic-chopping
of John Dickinson would not suffice, so at this time they began to talk
less about their constitutional rights as British subjects and more about
their natural rights as members of the human race. The ground was
safer; the statutes were less precise and the precedents less discouraging.
Also, the doctrine of natural rights was at home in the American mind.
In 1768 Benjamin Franklin, with his refreshing realism, wrote:

The more I have thought and read on the subject/ the more I find
myself confirmed in opinion, that no middle ground can be well main-
tained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might
be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to
make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us. . . .

Supposing [the latter] doctrine established, the colonies would then be

so many separate states, only subject to the same king, as England and
Scotland were before the union.

How to be "established," since Parliament had been

was the doctrine
legislating for the colonies ever since 1645? Franklin did the best he could
on purely historical grounds; but the result was frustrating.

That the colonies were originally constituted distinct states [he wrote
in 1770], and intended to be continued such, is clear to me
from a
thorough consideration of their original Charters, and the whole con-
duct of the Crown and nation towards them until the Restoration.
Since that period, the Parliament here has usurped an authority of
making laws for them, which before it had not. We have for some time
submitted to that usurpation.

This was a mild way of putting it, since the phrase "for some time" cov-
ered a hundred and ten years.* Clearly the argument from history was
disappointing; yet the statement that Parliament "has a power to make
720 laws for us" must somehow be supported. All attempts to find a mid-

dle ground had proved illogical and confusing; yet the colonists were un-
willing to appeal to naked force, resting their argument on power alone.
They wished a constitutional and moral reason for opposing author-
still

ity. In the end they found it where the English Whigs had found it before
them : in natural law.
James Wilson of Pennsylvania published in 1774 his Considerations
on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Par-
liament ** He agreed with Franklin that Parliament must have all power
* Franklin was mistaken in his dates. Between 1645 and 1651 the
Long Parlia-
ment laid down many regulations which controlled colonial commerce in the inter-
est ofEnglish shipping and manufactures.
** This was
probably written in 1770.
L The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1738) 13

or none. "There can be no medium," he said, "between acknowledging

and denying that power in all cases." So in order to deny it effectively
he appealed to "the principles of liberty," to "the ultimate end of all
government," and to "the happiness of the colonies." In words that
forecast the great Declaration of 1776, he wrote: "All men are, by nature,
free and equal no one has a right to any authority over another without
:

his consent: all lawful government is founded in the consent of those

who are subject to it. ... The happiness of the society is the first law of
every government." And again: "Will it ensure and increase the happi-
ness of the American colonies, that the British Parliament should possess
a supreme, irresistible, uncontrolled authority over them?"
At last the days of tortured legal quibbles were ending. At last the
argument was moving to high ground, where men could differ sensibly
and in the fresh air. At last the right questions were being asked, ques-
tions which could only be answered by statesmen or by war, not by lawyers
or by textbooks. It was no longer a puny question of what was legal; it
was becoming a question of what was reasonable and right. Step by step
the Americans were driven to this position, and when they finally oc-
cupied it they found it was a place which a man could defend. In the
process of defending it they were led to invent a wholly new model of
British Empire, a better model, which London was to accept one day.
Meanwhile, London was irked at hearing that the new Empire of Amer-
ican fantasy was really the old Empire, and that it was only the British,
who had made it, who were too stupid or too wicked to know what it was.
The difficulty of abandoning the low ground of legalism and Parlia-
mentary precedent for the high ground of natural law is shown by the
First Continental Congress, which met in the year when Wilson pub-
lished his pamphlet, and when John Adams and Jefferson were publish-

ing similar views. The Congress was called to unite the colonies in their
opposition to British "usurpations"; but there were yet no plans for in-
dependence. The members were almost evenly divided between the
legalistic position of Dickinson and the moralistic position of Wilson and
Jefferson and Adams; so their Declaration of Rights took both grounds.
It appealed to "The immutable laws of nature"; but it also stated, "We

cheerfully consent to the operation of such acts of the British Parliament

as are b on a fide restrained to the regulation of our external commerce . . .

excluding every idea of taxation internal or external, for raising a revenue

on the subjects, in America, without their consent." The members, and
the colonies for which they were delegates, could stand with Wilson and
the rights of man (not to be governed without his consent), or with
Dickinson and the rights of British subjects (not to be taxed without rep-
resentation) .

Two years later, when events had forced independence upon a largely
14 The Price of Union

reluctant people, the Declaration of Independence made no mention of

Parliament and no mention of the rights of British subjects.* The appeal
was to natural law, and the assumption was that the British Empire had

always been a federation of independent states and that Parliament had

no power outside the United Kingdom. Yet for ten years most of the colo-
nists had founded their case on "the rights of British subjects," and
had admitted the authority of Parliament in certain fields. Suddenly the
wicked Parliament was replaced by the wicked king, and the rights of
man became supreme.
Professor Becker explains the change in tone between the Declaration
of Rights (1774) and the Declaration of Independence (1776), as fol-
lows:

The primary purpose of the Declaration [of Independence] was to

convince a candid world that the colonies had a moral and legal right
to separate from Great Britain. Accordingly, the idea around
. . .

which Jefferson built the Declaration was that the colonies were not
rebels against established political authority, but a free people main-
taining long-established and imprescriptible rights against a usurping
king. . . . The king
represented as exclusively aggressive, the colo-
is

nists arerepresented as essentially submissive. In this drama the king

alone acts he conspires, incites, plunders; the colonists have the pas-
sive part, never lifting a hand to burn stamps or destroy tea they suffer
;

while evils are sufferable. It is a high literary merit of the Declaration

that by subtle contrasts Jefferson contrives to conjure up for us the
virtuous and long-suffering colonists standing like martyrs to receive
8
on their defenseless heads the ceaseless blows of the tyrant's hand.

Five generations of Americans have absorbed this impression from

Jefferson's masterly work, so it is interesting to recall the difficulties of
the revolutionary leaders in deciding which "rights" they were defending,
British or universal,and against whom, Parliament or King. Events de-
cided for them; the necessities of the occasion were well met by the Dec-
laration of Independence, and could not have been met by a text from

John Dickinson. Yet it was a fateful decision, as we shall see, to base the
new nation's life on natural law.
* The existence of Parliament and of British
rights had sometimes to be implied ;

but this was done in the most delicate and distant manner. For example: "He [the
king] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Con-
stitution, and unacknowledged by our laws ; giving his assent to their acts of pre-
tended legislation." And among the enumerated "acts of pretended legislation"
were those "for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring prov-
ince" (Quebec). It would be difficult to treat Parliament more disdainfully than
by referring to it vaguely as "others," or to pass over British rights more lightly
than by citing them only in connection with Canada.
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 15

The plain people in the colonies, in 1776, were delighted to learn they
had many and such indefeasible rights. They had thought so for a long
so
time, but nobody seemed to agree with them. Now they were prepared to
insist that when freed from what they were told was a hideous British

tyranny they should enjoy these rights and find life more friendly and
more prosperous. They read Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense,
which closed with these words:

O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but
the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with
oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and
Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger and
England hath given her warning to depart. O
receive the fugitive and
!

prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

This seems a long way from a quarrel about extra taxes. Who can blame
the people for believing that a war fought in such a cause should bring,
not only freedom from England, but equity and equality into their lives?
A number of the leaders (such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams,*
Jefferson, and Paine) agreed with the people on this point. They believed
that American society must be reorganized in all its relations, and that
the work should begin at once, in the midst of the war, while the new
state governments were being formed. They saw themselves as founding,
not merely an independent nation, but one based squarely on the concept
of natural law, a concept which to many was almost a religious faith in
the late eighteenth century. Whence did the faith arise?
Aristotle had proclaimed that there were two sorts of law,

the particular and the universal. Particular law is the law defined and
declared by each community for its own members. Universal law . . .

is the law of nature. .There really exists, as all of us in some meas-

. .

ure divine, a natural form of the just and unjust which is common to
all men, even when there is no community or covenant to bind them
to one another. It is this form which the Antigone of Sophocles' play
evidently has in her mind, when she says that it was a just act to bury
her brother Polynices in spite of Creon's decree to the contrary just,
she means, in the sense of being naturally just.

Not of today or yesterday its force:

It springs eternal: no man knows its birth.

* The radical second cousin of the conservative John Adams.

16 The Price of Union

Aristotle also quotes Alcidimas, justifying the Thebans for freeing the
Messenian serfs of Sparta: "God has left all men free, and nature has
made no man a slave."
Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, said there were four types
of law: Eternal Law, which was the mind of God; Divine Law, which
was that part of the mind of God revealed in the Bible or through the
Church; Natural Law, which was that part of the mind of God which
man could discover through the use of his reason; and Human Law,
which was Aristotle's particular law, "the law defined and declared by
each community." Natural law thus took precedence over human law;
it was a method of
learning the mind or law of God, whereas human
law might bear no relation to the mind of God. Human law was what the
state declared it to be, so long as the state had the power to compel
obedience. But, said Aquinas, "every human law has just so much of the
nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point
it deflects from the law of nature it is no
longer a law it is but a perversion
;

of law."
From the time of the Renaissance until the eighteenth century, a new
and daring hope began to grow in men's minds. The Protestant Reforma-
tion with its emphasis on
personal interpretation of the Bible, the
startling discoveries of science from Copernicus to Newton, both sug-
gested that man by the use of his reason might be able to understand the
whole of God's universe, and thus the whole of His mind. If man were
diligent the final secrets of nature might some day be revealed; the mind
of God would at last be understood; Natural law would then be the
same as Eternal law. It was a stimulating but complacent idea; it assumed
that common sense and reasonableness were the road to God and to
fulfillment; it found expression in the poetry of Alexander Pope, and in
the politics of John Locke, which became the politics of Jefferson and
the Declaration of Independence.
Locke taught that since the will of God was revealed in nature, we
could learn what God intended the government of man to be by study-
ing the nature of man. What politicalforms would man accept, what
political compact would he make, he acted according to his true nature?
if

Locke answers that it is natural for men to be "free, equal, and inde-
pendent," that it is natural for them "to order their actions and dispose
of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the
law of nature," and he adds that the law of nature is nothing but reason,
which "teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal
and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, lib-
erty, or possessions." It sounds very simple. Law and government, ac-
cording to this theory, are not based on expediency and force; they
are based on morals, on an objective right and wrong that binds all men.
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 17

A just government does not confer rights upon the citizen; it proclaims
and protects the rights which are inherent in the nature of man.
Since men are reasonable, they will voluntarily join with their neigh-
bors to promote safety, comfort, peace, and the enjoyment of property.
They may enter into this social compact themselves (as in the case of
the Americans who made the new state governments during the Revolu-
tion), or they may inherit it from their forebears; but no compact can
give away their inalienable rights; no government which conforms to
natural law can be omnipotent. Authority must always be limited; an
act of authority beyond the assigned limits is neither just nor legal. Such
was the eighteenth-century faith. Such is the central dogma of the Amer-
ican constitutional system.
Clearly, this eighteenth -century version of natural law was a blessing
for the makers of the Revolution. It was moral, since it was based on a
faith in God and in the perfection of His creation; it was effective, since
it denied the authority of any government which did not rest on consent ;

and it was "in the air" it did not have to be argued or justified. It was
:

easily accepted by the eighteenth-century mind, and could be stated as

a set of self-evident truths. Yet it is doubtful whether some of the
more conservative men who signed the Declaration foresaw the fateful-
ness of their act. Modern criticism may have made nonsense of the
"universal and eternal laws" which the eighteenth century thought it was
uncovering; modern nationalism and industrialism may have made
nonsense of the religion of Humanity which the eighteenth century
thought it was erecting; but the Declaration of Independence remains the
first American deed. The life of the nation is based upon it and the chil-

dren of the nation memorize it, and it leaves upon their minds a mark
which is not always approved by authority. The children never quite
forget that law, as defined at the birth of their country, should be
Reason backed by Justice, not Will backed by Force. When the world
which surrounds them does not seem to live up to the statement, they
tend to remember that there is a higher law than the law of man, that
there is a higher court than the Supreme Court at Washington, and that
the people may "alter or abolish" a government which infringes their
inalienable rights. This is what an American means when he talks of
"the ideas of 1776." The ideas do not make for docility, or for reverence
toward the police; but when felt with the fervor which inspired the first
Americans, they do make for hope.
In later and darker days, Americans had to return to the sad task of
reconciling belief in an absolute standard of justice with knowledge of
the perennial injustice of life, or they had to fail in the reconciliation
and abandon the initial American faith; but in the happy dawn of the
Revolution men truly thought that reason and good sense were about
18 The Price of Union

to make a better world. For a moment, man's powers of self-improvement

seemed limitless. In the Virginia Bill of Rights,* George Mason stated:
"That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved
to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, tem-
perance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental
principles." And the somber John Adams, writing to Mercy Warren in
that same year of 1776, said: "There must be a positive passion for the
public good, the public interest, honor, power, and glory, established in
the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor
any real liberty; and this public passion must be superior to all private

passions. .The only reputable principle and doctrine must be that all
. .

things must give way to the public."** A few weeks later he wrote to his
wife: "The new governments we are assuming in every part will require
a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or they
will be no blessings."
This is the view of Milton, and of Plato, and of most of the poets and
philosophers who have dealt with government: liberty is impossible
without the sternest self-discipline on the part of the free citizens. In our
disenchanted world, the statement sounds like an elaborate way of say-
ing "liberty is impossible." To our forefathers, for a few rosy years, it
sounded like a bracing challenge. John Adams, later to become famous
for his gloomy view of man's nature, wrote to the venerable George
Wythe, in 1776, in terms that suggest the young Wordsworth: "You and
I, my dear friend, have been sent into life at a time when the greatest

lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human
race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of govern-
ment, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their children!"
In such a mood, and by such men, America was committed to the doc-
trine of natural law. The mood passed but the doctrine remained, to be-
come at times a moral strength for the country, and at times a source of
contention and of physical weakness. When a powerful minority feels it-
selfoppressed, especially be a
if it regional minority, the cry goes up that
the "just powers" of government have been exceeded, and that in obedi-
ence to the law of heaven the law of man must be disregarded. Jefferson
himself "was the author of the first and most famous of such cries. In 1 798,
he recommended that a federal law be declared void by the states compos-
ing the Union, and he stated that "it would be a dangerous delusion were
a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of
*
Adopted June 12, 1776.
** Twelve
years later, in volume III of his Defence of the Constitutions of
Government of the United States of America, Adams wrote: "Very few in any
nation are enlightened by philosophy or religion enough to be at all times con-
vinced that it is a duty to prefer the public to a private interest, and fewer still
are moral, honorable, or religious enough to practise such self-denial."
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 19

our rights: that confidence

is everywhere the
parent of despotism; free
government founded
is in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy
and not confidence which prescribes limited Constitutions to bind down
those whom we are obliged to trust with power." 9
When this jealousy of government is combined with a written con-
stitution, the opportunities for obstruction are many. The whole of Ameri-
can history is colored by the struggle, on the one hand to confer upon
government sufficient power so that the public business may go forward,
and on the other hand to withhold from government the power to over-
ride the self-defined "natural rights" of minorities.

The leaders of the Revolution agreed on the Declaration of Independence

as an indictment of George III but they did not even pretend to agree on
;

the deductions which might be made from that document. Jefferson and
his friends thought it meant a new and radically democratic social order
in America. This was not the view of John Adams or of most New England
leaders; it was not the view of Alexander Hamilton, or of George Wash-
ington.
During the war, however, and for a few years thereafter, the radicals
were influential in most of the states and in the Congress of the Confedera-
*
tion. They rode to power on the arguments which the conservatives were
forced to use against the British. As early as 1774 one of the wisest of the
colonial oligarchs wrote "Farewell aristocracy. I see, and I see with fear
:

and trembling that if disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be

under the worst of all possible dominions we shall be under the domina-
;

tion of a riotous mob. It is to the interest of all men, therefore, to seek

for reunion with the parent state."**
During their time in power the radicals laid the foundation for a more
egalitarian life. They annulled the Proclamation of 1763 and disregarded
the Quebec Act, thus opening the western lands for settlement. They con-
fiscated the Crown domains and the estates of most of the men who had
remained loyal to England, redistributing the land in part at least to
farmers and war veterans. They abolished entails in every state but two.
They disestablished the Church in five states. They suppressed the feudal

* The Confederation was the loose central government which

sought to run the
country from 1781, the year of its adoption, until the acceptance of the present
constitution in 1788. Between 1775 and 1781 the Second Continental Congress, a
self-constituted central committee with undefined powers, had given the thirteen
colonies such unified guidance as they possessed.
** Gouverneur
Morris, quoted in Jensen, The Articles of Confederation, pp. 34-
35. It is interesting that when the break came Morris was on the side of the rebels.
20 The Price of Union

quitrents, and primogeniture, and titles of nobility. They of course did

away with the old vexatious curbs on American industry, whereby Britain
had interfered with the wool trade, the hat trade, the making of iron and
steel. In all but four states they liberalized colonial laws on the franchise,

so that in most taxpayer was allowed to vote.* And they wrote

states every
bills of rights into the new
state constitutions, guarding the citizen from

arbitrary power and proving that the compact-theory of government had

become the faith of the people.
The Virginia constitution declared "That all men are by nature equally
free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when
they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or
divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the
means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining
happiness and safety." And the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 said:
"The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: *it
is a social compact, by which the whole
people covenants with each citizen,
and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by cer-
tain laws for the common good." It might have amused the men who
made these governments to read certain modern writers on the absurdity
of the compact theory and its lack of historic truth. What had been stated
by Locke as little more than a parable was carried out literally in the

colonies."The people of Massachusetts," said an orator in 1781, "have

reduced to practice the wonderful theory. A numerous people have con-
vened in a state of nature, and, like our ideas of the patriarchs, have
deputed a few fathers of the land to draw up for them a glorious cove-
nant." 10
This making of governments in the midst of war and social upheaval
was an impressive achievement. Massachusetts took the lead in the spring
of 1775 by asking the Continental Congress for "explicit advice respecting
the taking up and exercising the powers of civil government, which we
think absolutely necessary for the salvation of our country." The following
year the Congress recommended all the colonies to form governments, and
the mood in which the great task was attempted is shown in John Adams's
Autobiography.
With a view to this subject [he wrote], I had looked into the ancient
and modern confederacies for examples, but they all appeared to me
to have been huddled up in a hurry, by a few chiefs. But we had a
people of more intelligence, curiosity, and enterprise, who must be all
consulted, and we must realize the theories of the wisest writers, and
* " *We the "
people of the United States,' writes J. Franklin Jameson in The
American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (p. 62), "who gave consent
to the establishment of the Constitution was a much larger and more democratic
body than 'We the people of the United States' who acquiesced in the Declaration
of Independence, though universal suffrage was yet a long way off."
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 21

invite the people to erect the whole building with their own hands, upon
the broadest foundation. . .This could be done only by conventions
.

of representatives chosen by the people in the several colonies, in the

most exact proportions. . .These were new, strange, and terrible
.

doctrines to the greatest part of the members [of the Congress], but not
a very small number heard them with apparent pleasure.

New, strange, and terrible the doctrines might be but they were carried
;

out with a sobriety and a political tact which do honor to the American
people. When the fighting was over the future of the states was not in the
hands of revolutionary committees, violent and extreme, but of popular
governments whose powers were derived from a voluntary social contract.
Perhaps this is why no revolution has ever been less revolutionary.
Moderate as they seem in the light of history, the radicals in charge of
the war-born state governments were naturally inclined to experiment,
and were naturally inexperienced. They issued paper money at a dis-
astrous rate. And they indulged their local, rural isolationism, their fear
that any centralizedpower must mean oppression, to such an extent that
the war was hampered; the Congress was unable to pay its bills; foreign
nations, contemptuous of the talkative but paralyzed confederation, with-
held credits and trade agreements. By the middle eighties the country felt
a serious depression.
The alarm of the conservative classes over this libertarian ferment was
expressed by General Knox in a letter to Washington in October, 1786:

Their creed [that is, the creed of those calling for paper money to re-
duce the burden of debt] is, that the property of the United States has
been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of
all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. This. . .

dreadful situation, for which our government have made no adequate

provision, has alarmed every man of principle and property in New
England. They start as from a dream, and ask what can have been the
cause of this delusion? What is to give us security against the violence of
lawless men? Our government must be braced, changed, and altered to
secure our lives and property.

General Knox had reason for his worry. Yet within two and a half years
of the writing of that letter the government had in fact been "braced,
changed, and altered" ; a new constitution had been contrived by the well-
to-do and accepted by the people; General Knox's property was as safe
as could be expected in this shaky world. Such a conservative reformation

by consent is unusual. It was possible for two reasons. First, because many
of the leaders in the fight for independence were men of a strong con-
servative bent. Heroes of the war but also contemners of the radical move-
22 The Price of Union

ment, they gave prestige and wise leadership to the trend toward stronger
government from 1785-1788. And the second reason was George Washing-
ton. His character and influence did much to help the people to accept
that markedly conservative document, the Constitution of the United
States, and to trust the central government with powers of coercion which
the radicals deeply feared.
Needless to say, Washington did not escape criticism. He was accused
of betraying his cause when he became head of the new federal govern-
ment. While he was President of the United States Thomas Paine ad-
dressed him an open letter: "As to you, sir, treacherous in
as follows in

private friendship .and. a hypocrite in public life, the world will be

.

puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether

you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any." The
extreme American radicals abused Washington with similar violence, call-
ing him "crocodile," "hyena," "traitor." Yet Washington had not changed
sides; he was fighting for the same cause still, though some of his former
admirers were just beginning to discover what that cause was. Washington
did not believe in democracy. "Mankind," he wrote to Henry Lee, "when
left tothemselves, are unfit for their own government." He wanted an
independent American republic, strong, free, proud, able to take posses-
sion ofits immense heritage, yet restrained by law from usurping the rights

of man. He thought, for reasons which will become clear, that such a
republic should be governed by men of property. This was the prevailing
view among the constitution-makers a view which found ready accept-
ance because most Americans could own property in those days.

There was a third group in the colonies, in addition to the radical and the
conservative revolutionists. This was composed of the loyalists, or Tories.
Some of the Tories had taken part in the early protests against the Stamp
Act, but had withdrawn when they saw that they were raising a whirlwind
and that the plain people would not be content with safeguarding the prof-
its of the well-to-do from British interference but would expect large
dividends for themselves. The rest of the Tories were men who on prin-
ciple remained loyal to the Empire, who could not break an old tie because
it had become a new burden.
They were important in number as well as
in quality.
Professor C. H. Van Tyne, in his Loyalists in the American Revolution,
writes:

After the revolution passed the bounds of peaceful resistance, it was

[except in Virginia] distinctly a movement of the middle and lower
i. The Nature of the Revolution (1763-1788) 23

classes.A new set of leaders came forward, hitherto unknown, less

educated, and eager for change. The very public documents became
more illiterate. To the aristocratic and cultured class it seemed that the
unlettered monster was unchained, and while they waited for British
power to restore the old order they withdrew for the most part from
what seemed an undignified contest.

One possible reason why Virginia was an exception has already been
mentioned: the debts of the great landowners to their London agents.
Another reason may be that there were no cities in Virginia, and therefore
no riotous mechanics, organized as "Sons of Liberty," to give warning that
the question of home rule for the colonies could not be separated from the
question of which class was to do the ruling at home. It was fortunate for
the Revolution that a majority of the Virginia gentry supported it, and
that in New England the merchants were fairly evenly divided, for in
New York,* New Jersey, and Georgia the loyalists were perhaps in a
majority, and they were strong in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas.
When the British had contrived (against all predictions and probabili-
ties) to lose the war, the loyalists suffered the usual fate of the defeated in
fraternal strife: exile and confiscation, aggravated by the wholly unjust
assertion that they had acted from the lowest motives.

In spite of the fate of the loyalists, the American Revolution was clearly
more political than social. No class was expropriated, but merely a group
of people who had taken the losing side. Few serious economic changes
were made, though certain bulwarks of aristocracy, such as entails and
primogeniture, were abolished. Property was held as before, even if there
had been a shift of names on the property lists ; and it conferred most of its
old privileges, including the privilege of the franchise. Its power was
briefly threatened in a few states; but by 1789 it was re-established.
Politically, however, the Revolution brought immense changes: first,
independence; second, the establishment of state constitutions based on a
belief in limited powers and in natural law, and some of them embodying
all the fashionable devices for popular rule; third, the invention of a

federal government similarly based and similarly limited, but without the
more alarming novelties of the state constitutions; and fourth, the first
tentative steps toward true democracy, as in the enthusiasm of the masses
for the Declaration of Independence (an enthusiasm which has never
been downed), and in the constitution of the state of Vermont which
* New York supplied 15,000 regulars and 8500 militia to the British armies.
24 The Price of Union

abolished slavery and accepted universal male suffrage.* In 1788, when

the conservatives had persuaded the country to accept the new constitu-
tion, the movement toward democracy may have seemed very slight. The
legal and social barriers against it may have seemed strong. Yet the new
idea was spreading through the Western world, and in America it could
not be restrained. By 1800 the democrats had achieved a symbolic triumph
in the election of Jefferson to the presidency; by the eigh teen-thirties they
had conquered and their creed was enthroned.

* Vermont was not

officially admitted as a state in the Union until 1791;
but it
considered itself a state, and a highly independent one, from the time of the
adoption of its constitution in 1777.
 II

War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation

J.HE THIRTEEN COLONIES might have lost the war with England and
postponed their independence, if it had not been for George Washington.
And the subsequent effort to unite them in a stable federal government
might have failed, except for Washington. It was no exaggeration to call
him "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country-
men";* yet the nature of his pre-eminence is baffling. It is easy to feel but
hard to portray. Character, strength, good sense, the ability to apply simple
ideas to complex problems and to find answers which if not subtle are
strong and enduring these rare but undramatic traits appear throughout
Washington's life. They gave him a mastery which was never successfully
challenged, and which was never used except to support the Common-
wealth. The founding of the nation cannot be explained without this in-
fluence.

Washington's relatives in Virginia were neither conspicuous nor rich

until his half-brother, Lawrence, married into a family which owned six
million acres of land beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1748, at the
age of sixteen, George was given the job of surveying this tract, thus gain-
ing his first view of the western country which was to play so large a part
in his plans and hopes. Learning through experience that the illimitable
West was too vast to be developed either from London or from weak and
separate states, he began to think in terms of a common and splendid
destiny for all the colonies within the Empire if possible, but a common
destiny in any case. He became
one of the first Americans to plan and act
nationally. He lacked formal learning, having pieced out his education
chiefly from the local clergyman and from the libraries in the houses of his
kinsmen; but his grasp of the West, and of what it might mean in the
future, was decisive in his own life and in that of his country.
When Washington was twenty his fortunes were changed by the death of
Lawrence, and of Lawrence's daughter. George inherited the pleasant
property of Mount Vernon, becoming a moderately wealthy landowner.
As a sign of his new estate he was appointed Adjutant General of the Vir-
* The words of General
Henry Lee, incorporated in John Marshall's resolutions
in Congresson the death of Washington, and repeated in Lee's memorial oration,
December 26, 1799.
25
26 The Price of Union

ginia militia with the rank of major, and in the same year he had his first
taste of war.
The French and the British both claimed the Indian lands across the
mountains, between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It was a huge
region to which neither nation had any rights except on the assumption
that the Indian was a wild animal whose claims to proprietorship were as
negligible as those of a wolf to his lair. The Governor of Virginia sent
Washington into this disputed country to order a French commander to
leave. Since the order was ignored Washington was sent back the next

year with a hundred and fifty men, to seize the fork of the Monongahela
and Allegheny Rivers. At first successful, he was later compelled to sur-
render to a superior French force. In this tiny battle on the remote fron-
tier, fought for the riverfork which is the seat of modern Pittsburgh, Wash-

ington witnessed the start of the Seven Years War. It was to rage across
the world, from the rivers of the Red Indian to the rivers of the Hindu,
and in America it was to lead not only to the expulsion of the French but
to a new mood of independence among the thirteen colonies.
In 1755 General Braddock arrived from England with two regiments to
lead a joint English and colonial attack against the French in the Ohio
Valley. Washington had an unofficial position on Braddock's staff, and was
thus present at the ambush on the Monongahela where the French and
Indians routed the British force. Out of Braddock's 1300 men, 456 were
killed and 421 wounded. The French commander, who had under him
250 of his own troops and 600 Indians, lost 30 men. Washington, one of
the few officers to be unhurt, sent his Virginians into the woods where
they could at least fight instead of huddling as defenseless targets. After
the rout he arranged for the removal of the wounded Braddock, who soon
died, and he guarded the rear of the fleeing regiments with the only
soldiers who had kept their discipline. The incident gave him a reputation
in the colonies which was to be useful when it came to choosing a leader
for the rebel armies.
In 1759 Washington married a rich widow, and thereafter took no part
in the French and Indian War. For the next sixteen years he lived at
Mount Vernon, improving his estates, buying new farms, speculating in
western lands, and taking a seat in the colonial legislature. He was twice
defeated for the Virginia House of Burgesses but with customary matter-
;

of-factness he studied his electioneering mistakes. As a result he was suc-

cessful the third time by 310 votes to 45. In view of the number of voters
it is interesting to note that Washington supplied about forty gallons of

rum punch, twenty-eight gallons of wine, twenty-six gallons of rum, forty-

six gallonsof beer, six gallons of madeira, and three and a half pints of
brandy. Having learned the secret of success, he remained in the House
of Burgesses until he left Virginia to head the Army of the Revolution.
ii. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 27

Washington's energy could not be satisfied with caring for his estates
and sitting in a provincial legislature, especially since his practical brain
preferred not to bother with politics until forced to do so by events. Unlike
Patrick Henry and the Adamses, he did not scent the coming dangers from
afar. His mind held a few clear political principles as in a vice, and whea
forced to deal with public affairs he applied these principles lucidly and
without doubts; but so far as possible he left the alien world of govern-
ment to other men. Meanwhile he turned to western land development.
As early as 1770 he was planning a canal to connect the Ohio and Potomac
Rivers the great central valley of the continent and the Atlantic coast.
He saw that when this was done, and the Indians were suppressed, settle-
ment across the mountains would become easy and profitable.
As soon as Washington began to push his project for a canal he came
hard against British interference. This boded ill for the Empire. It was a
mistake for the rulers in London to teach this calm, stubborn Virginia
farmer that his plans for the new world could not be made real so long
as America was tied to the old. At first he had not
taken the mother
country's obstruction in the West too In 1763 the year of the
seriously.
proclamation which forbade settlement across the mountains he sent his
land agent into the Ohio country to buy "some of the most valuable lands in
the King's part, which I think may be accomplished after a while, not-
withstanding the proclamation which restrains it at present, and prohibits
the settling of them at all; for I can never look upon that proclamation in
any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary
expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians." But in 1774 Parliament
passed the Quebec Act, closing the great triangle between the Ohio, the
Lakes, and the Mississippi to all further expansion from the seaboard. The
new English policy was clearly no "temporary expedient."

Late in 1774 Washington attended the First Continental Congress as a

member of the Virginia deputation. The Congress, which met in Philadel-
phia, was a revolutionary body at least, it was extra-legal, chosen and
instructed by local congresses or popular conventions. It was expected to
assert colonial rights and to work for liberty (in the sense of freedom from
Parliamentary control), but not for independence. As we have seen, it
drafted a Declaration of Rights. The following spring the Second Con-
tinental Congress, which chose Washington for Commander-in-Chief, met
at Philadelphia on May 10, three weeks after the fighting had begun in
Massachusetts. Almost fourteen months were still to pass before the Con-
gress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
28 The Price of Union

Washington was forty-three when he became Commander-in-Chief He .

was six feet three inches tall, lean, muscular, with a square jaw and strong
hands. He had large features, gray-blue eyes, and his lips closed hard, giv-
ing his face a stern expression. Since he was not interested in political
maneuvers, he may not have foreseen the calculations that led John
Adams to back him for the chief military post. He may have thought the
job should go to the man of most experience but Adams knew better. The
;

Revolution up to this point had been largely the work of New Englanders,
and Adams knew there would never be strong Southern support for a war
waged under a New England general. Massachusetts would accept a Vir-
ginian because Massachusetts was already committed to fighting; but
Virginia was not. Also, the Commander-in-Chief ought to be a rich man.
New York had quaintly instructed her delegates that the general must be
a man of fortune in order that "he may rather communicate luster to his
dignities than receive it, and that his country, in his property, his kindred
and connections, may have some pledge that he will faithfully perform
the duties of his office." There were few rich Southerners who had had
even as much fighting experience as Washington, and there was no one
else in all the colonies with his quiet massive capacity to create confidence
and to add dignity to a cause. In managing the appointment of Washing-
ton, Adams did the first of his many great deeds for America.
The question of Washington's military capacities may never be settled,
for his was not a strictly military task. It may be true that he neglected his
cavalry and made inadequate use of artillery support; but he seldom had
an army with which he could oppose the enemy in decisive battle, and he
never had a united country behind him. His job was to keep an army of
some sort in the field and wait for the English to lose the war. This the
English did, though at times it seemed impossible.
The active rebels in the colonies were probably not more than a third
of the white population of two and a half millions. There were seven
hundred thousand men between the ages of eighteen and sixty, yet Wash-
ington seldom had more than twelve thousand regular troops under his
command. Even counting the state militia there were only 90,000 troops
in 1776, and 45,000 in 1779.* Washington's regard for the militia was
never warm. "The militia," he wrote, "come in you cannot tell how, go out
you cannot tell when; consume your provisions, exhaust your stores, and
leave you at last in a critical moment," He seems to have agreed with
Dryden:
The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
* In the course of the war another
90,000 men found service at sea, mostly in
privateers.Cp. Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement) p. 103.
ii. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 29

Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,

In peace a charge, in war a weak defence;
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand.

The shortage of arms, ammunition, clothes, food, medicine, further re-

duced the effectiveness of the little army. In the summer of 1776 nearly
a quarter of the troops had no arms. "If we should fail at last," wrote the
hot-tempered Timothy Pickering in 1778, "the Americans can blame only
their own negligence, avarice, and want of almost every public virtue."
This seemed a reasonable comment on the military conduct of the rebels;
yet in civil affairs they were planning soberly for the future, showing a
restraint and a faith in constitutional law which is unusual in the midst
of revolution.

Throughout the war the loyalists were overconfident, feeling that they
need not exert themselves unduly since the British Army and Navy could
be trusted to put down this rioting. Yet Professor Van Tyne estimates that
fifty thousand loyalists served at one time or another with the British
forces. Under such conditions, even if his military knowledge was faulty,

Washington was the one man who could conquer the political chaos. With-
out his character and example the American Army would have dwindled
into a mob and the English could have found no way of failing.
One reason they did manage to fail was Lord George Germaine, the
Secretary of State for War. Having disgraced himself at the battle of
Minden under the name of Lord George Sackville, he had been tried and
dismissed from the army as "unfit to serve his Majesty in any military
capacity whatsoever." An English historian describes him as follows :

Two war occupy a unique position: Washington, be-

figures in this
cause has never been possible to praise him beyond his merits; Ger-
it

maine, for the reason that no blame has ever done justice to his incom-
petency. A
nation can only expect humiliation when, regardless of its
interest and its honor, it entrusts its War Office to a soldier of battered
reputation, incapable of transacting the simplest business with industry
and despatch. 1

A second reason for failure was that the brothers Howe (one an admiral
and one a general) were put in charge of operations. There was a small
but active group in England, to which the Howes belonged, which saw
the war as part of a struggle against ministerial autocracy which affected
both countries.* This was a reasonable view; but it was scarcely reasonable
*
Ironically, these friends of America may have contributed to the difficulty of
-
raising troops in England, and thus to the decision to hire Hessian mercenaries
a decision which did more to embitter American opinion than any other episode in
the war.
30 The Price of Union

to ask men holding such opinions to take charge of the fighting. When the
loyalists in America wished to fit out privateers to attack the privateers of
the rebels, Admiral Howe indignantly asked, "Will you never have done
oppressing these poor people?" And when General Howe, in 1776, had
Washington's whole army at his mercy in New York, he allowed it to escape
with its wounded, its stores, and its artillery apparently from a family
distaste for "oppressing these poor people." The American General Put-

nam, who was present, wrote to the Governor of Connecticut: "General

Howe is either our friend or no general." After the subsequent retreat
across New Jersey Washington commented, "Nothing was more easy to
them, with a little enterprise and energy, than to dissipate the remaining
force which still kept alive our expiring opposition."
seems fair to assume that the British strategy of unco-ordinated nib-
It

bling was based on the belief that the rebel armies must sooner or later
collapse from weariness, or from hunger, or from general discouragement
over the increasing chaos and the pro-British behavior of the loyalists. Wash-
ington's character alone prevented the collapse. So again we come back to
Washington. No amount of sloth or bad planning could have lost the war
unless there had been an American army by whom, from time to time, the
British could get themselves beaten. And Washington alone was respon-
sible for this army that is, for the nucleus of regular troops without
which nothing could have been accomplished. How he kept his troops in
the field is one of the puzzles of history. They were unpaid, except for

almost worthless paper and promises of distant land in a distant future.

They were never properly clothed and were at times shoeless. They were
badly fed, and often they were faced with the discouraging knowledge
that the farmers in the country where they camped resented selling them
food in exchange for their paper money, preferring to sell it to the English
for real cash.
Washington's proud self-confidence must have helped him to maintain
the war almost single-handed. Although he painted conditions in dark
colors to Congress (since the facts admitted of no other colors), he seems
to have found it incredible that the cause he represented could fail.

During the fierce winter of 1777-78, when the remnant of his army was
at Valley Forge and it looked as if the rebellion was being starved and
frozen into defeat, Washington wrote to his stepson: "Lands are perma-
nent rising fast in value and will be very dear when our independency
is established."
ii. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 31

In 1777 Congress approved a plan for a confederacy, known as the

Articles of Confederation. The plan had to be ratified by all the states
before it could take effect, and this was not done until 1781. Since the
Articles of Confederation said that "each state retains its sovereignty,
freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right
which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the united states
in Congress assembled," the new government seemed to proclaim itself a

league of nations. Yet the Articles provided for a court of justice with
the right to settle disputes between the states; so if the Union was in fact
a mere league the court was a form of international tribunal.
The sole agency of government, under the articles, was Congress. Each
state was to appoint from two to seven delegates annually; but each
state, regardless of size or population, was to have one vote, as in a con-
ference of ambassadors, and unanimous consent was needed for an
amendment. The Congress had no direct authority over the citizens of the
states,and could only petition the states for money, could only request
them to carry out the provisions of the treaties it might make with foreign
powers. On the other hand, Congress had authority to make war and
peace, borrow money on the credit of the United States, establish a post
office, and raise and equip an army and navy. It is little wonder that for-

eign nations did not know whether they were dealing with a government
or with a wartime alliance. Madison himself defined the Confederation as
"nothing more than a treaty of amity of commerce and of alliance, be-
tween independent and sovereign states."
The Confederation of 1781, however, is the first chapter in the history
of the United States Government, and a vital chapter if that history is to
be understood. The Articles, which were debated and drafted by Congress
during 1776 and 1777, were the work of the radical democrats. They
were a part of the people's revolution, of the egalitarian movement which
accompanied the break with England. The men who wrote the Articles
believed that the democracy of their desire was impossible under a strong
government ruling a large area. They thought that only local government
could be democratic. They disliked the Empire because they disliked
far-off control. They were fighting for home rule, and they were not pre-

pared to grant to a central power within America the authority which

they were in the act of snatching from Parliament.
They were confident that weak local governments, with state sover-
eignty, would breed a simple agrarian democracy. Most of the people in
the colonies were farmers, who could control their local governments,
32 The Price of Union

but who would be lost and helpless at the seat of a national government
with its elaborate financial machinery and its executive organization
wherein business or legal training are an asset. Centralization, thought the
radicals, meant the rule of the rich, decentralization the rule of the plain
people.
In all this they may have been right. They were certainly in agreement
with Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. They
were steadily opposed by the conservatives, who wanted a government
which would create a stable money and pay its debts, which would
enforce contracts and treaties, and which would operate directly upon the
citizens and not merely upon the states. As the conservatives well knew, a
citizen can be arrested, tried, and made to obey; but nothing can be done to
a state, short of war. Yet the conservatives were voted down and the radicals
won the constitution of their hopes. As they foresaw, it led to the creation of
agrarian democracies; but the agrarian democracies, loosely united in an
ambassadorial congress, did not prove capable of governing the country, or
even of preserving its freedom. As a result, the conservatives in 1787 were
able to remake the form of government.
Two main questions were raised during the writing of the Articles. The
firstwas the question of sovereignty: Should it reside in Congress or in
the states? As we have seen, the radicals had their way and sovereignty was
reserved to the states. The Articles were so positive on this point that
Professor Jensen can write "According to the constitution which united
:

the thirteen states from 1781 to 1789, the several states were de facto
and de jure sovereign. No partisan treatises were able to eliminate that
2
fact." Yet as early as 1785 James Wilson, the conservative Scot who had
settled in America and become a leader in politics and law, was arguing
that the Continental Congress had powers before there was a Confed-
eration and that the states were therefore never sovereign. The states,
according to this view, did not evolve out of the colonial governments until
the Continental Congress had first suggested a procedure and then de-
clared independence.* This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said
in a special message to Congress in 1861, "The Union is older than the
states, and in fact created them as states." If the Union is older than the
states, then the oft-repeated arguments for secession are illogical; but if
the states are older than the Union, and created the Union by a compact
among themselves, then it would seem that the states have a right to
secede. Unhappily, it was not a question which could be settled by reason,
so in the end it was settled by war.
The second main question raised during the writing of the Articles has
not been settled at all. Even if the states were sovereign, it was admitted
* Yet New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey had drawn up
state constitutions before the Declaration ofIndependence.
ii. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 33

that some central authority was needed, with delegated powers. But what
powers should be delegated? What powers are properly "national," and
what are "local"? The radicals triumphed in the Confederation, and the
Congress was given the minimum of powers. Yet from that day to this,
and seemingly inevitably, there has been a movement toward centraliza-
tion. The first and perhaps the longest step was taken in 1787. "The
Articles of Confederation were designed to prevent the central govern-
ment from infringing upon the rights of the states, whereas the Constitu-
tion of 1787 was designed as a check upon the power of the states and the
3
democracy that found expression within their bounds." Yet the change
could not have been avoided if America was to remain free. Thirteen
weak little democracies would have been reabsorbed by Europe.
The same sense of inevitability accompanies all the moves toward
centralization which we shall review in this book. Always the centraliza-
tion is resisted, in the name of freedom, by some of the wisest men of the
time. Always it is unpopular with many of the citizens, perhaps with a
majority. And always it seems to be unavoidable, if the nation's business
is to be done and the nation's interest served. The
decentralizing demo-
crats had their chance under the Articles of Confederation. They had
written the constitution they wanted, and it was a good constitution for
their purposes; but their purposes were not adequate in a world of power
and cruelty and greed.

The Confederation was by no means a total failure. It could not govern

but it could think, and during itsbrief years of life it developed a policy

for the Western lands which has been a boon to

America and which
determined the political development of large parts of the country.
Before the war seven of the colonies had western land claims, many
of which overlapped.* By 1786 a number of the claims had been ceded
to the Confederation, and it seemed obvious that in the end they would
all be ceded. How was this empire of land to be governed? How was it

to be settled? What was to be its political future? The answer to these

questions would decide whether America must repeat the pattern of all
previous empires, or whether she could devise a colonial system which
would satisfy the colonists. In 1787 the Congress of the Confederation
passed "An Ordinance for the government of the Territory of the United
States northwest of the River Ohio." The territory was organized as a
district and ruled by a governor appointed by Congress. When the terri-

tory should contain five thousand free male inhabitants of voting age it
* Between them the British lands from the Allegheny Mountains
they claimed all
to the Mississippi River.
34 The Price of Union

could elect a legislature and send a non-voting delegate to Congress. In

the course of time, no more than five or less than three new states were
to be formed from the territory, and whenever one of these states had

sixty thousand free inhabitants it was to be admitted to the Union "on

an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever." This
momentous law established the colonial policy which made it possible for
America to expand to the Pacific, and to forty-eight states, as a national
community rather than as a mother country plus a set of dependencies.*
It meant that the thirteen original states would soon be a minority, and
that the time would come when the new members of the Union could
make national policy.
Meanwhile the weakness of the Confederation, combined with a post-
war depression and a devalued paper currency, led to a state of near
anarchy in parts of the country. Where debtors gained control of the
Rhode Island, they passed laws insisting that cred-
state legislature, as in
itors
accept worthless paper at its face value. Where commercial interests
were in control, as in Massachusetts, the desperate farmers banded to-
gether to prevent the county courts from sitting, since the only alternative
they could see was debtors' prison and the loss of their lands. Men of
property, and men with a feeling for order and authority in government,
were either longing vainly for the good old days or planning for a reforma-
tion before the country foundered and proved itself unworthy of inde-

pendence. It was in these circumstances that Washington was induced to

emerge from the retirement into which he had gone so thankfully in
1 783, and to become the
guarantor of a moderate counter-revolution.
It was, significantly, an interference with his plans for western land de-

velopment that caused Washington to take action in support of the Fed-

eralists (as the proposers of a strong central government came to be called) .

In 1784, a year after resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief,

Washington set out on a trip through the Ohio and Kanawha river
country to look into the condition of his own lands and to find the best
trade routes from the Ohio basin to the East. He went no farther than
to George's Creek, near the mouth of the Cheat River in western Penn-

sylvania; but the trip convinced him of what he had long believed, that
the whole country west of Virginia, between the mountains and the
Mississippi, would be open to development the moment the Ohio River
was connected by canal with the Potomac and the James. If some such
connection were not made the western country would soon attract settlers
* The statement
applies to the political development of the nation, not to the
economic. As will be seen below, many of the economic mistakes of earlier empires
were repeated in the United States. The economic colonialism later imposed upon
the South and West by the money power of the East is reminiscent of eighteenth-
century mercantilism. It forms one of the chief problems of American history from
the eighteen-thirties to the present.
 ^DISTRICT
Of KENTUCKY

until 1602, added, to

MISSISSIPPI
I8O4

Claims of the States to Western Lands

1783 ~ is oz
36 The Price of Union

anyway (indeed, it was already doing so) ; but with no outlet to the east
the settlers would be compelled to use the Mississippi for their trade
route. The mouth of the Mississippi, as well as the whole right bank, was
in the hands of Spain. Washington foresaw the menace to his national

hopes if the time came, as it soon might, when Spain could offer the
Westerners trade and prosperity whereas the young United States could
not.
The first step toward Washington's cherished canal cheme was to
secure the co-operation of Virginia and Maryland. The Potomac River
was the boundary between these "sovereign" states, and trade on the
river and in Chesapeake Bay could never run freely until the states

agreed on duty-charges and other commercial regulations. In 1785, dele-

gates from the two states met at Mount Vernon and an agreement was
reached. This meeting led to an effort (at the Annapolis convention of
1786) to establish similar agreements between all the states of the Con-
federation, many of which had proved their sovereignty by erecting trade
barriers against their neighbors. Only five states were represented at
Annapolis, so the delegates took no action except to recommend that a
larger convention be held the following year. The suggestion was en-
dorsed by the Congress of the Confederation, and in May, 1787, there
assembled at Philadelphia the convention which devised the present Con-
stitution of the United States. Sixty-five delegates had been chosen by the

legislatures of twelve states, and fifty-five attended. George Washington

was made presiding officer. The convention soon agreed to ignore its
instructions, which were to revise the Articles of Confederation, and to
produce a wholly new document. This was a revolutionary act, done in
thename of conservatism.
The question then arose, How would the document be ratified? Whence
would it derive authority? Some wished to refer it to the legislatures of
the states; but George Mason of Virginia convinced the delegates that
the people alone, through state conventions, had the authority to ac-
cept or reject such momentous proposals. The legislatures, he said, "are
the mere creatures of their state Constitutions, and cannot be greater than
their creators. . Whither then must we resort? To the people with
. .

whom power remains that has not been given up in the Constitutions
all
derived from them." Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court
was later to make telling use of this "resort to the people."
"There is nothing more common," said Dr. Benjamin Rush of Phila-
delphia* in January, 1787,
than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the
late American war. The American war is over: but that is far from
*
Physician, philosopher, signer of the Declaration of Independence, friend of
John Adams and other leading conservatives.
ii. War and Peace: Prelude to a Federation 37

being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing
but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish
and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the prin-
ciples, morals, and manners of our citizens, for these forms of govern-
ment, after they are established and brought to perfection.
This was the mood
which the Convention met. The early course of
in
the American Revolution had been displeasing to most of the delegates,
and they meant to redirect it, to "establish and perfect" a new govern-
ment, and to induce the people to consent. Their success is one of the
marvels of history. It was strange enough that they should come to agree
with one another; but that they should bring the nation to accept the
results of their arguments and their compromises was a masterpiece of

persuasion.
As Bryce points out,

the Convention at the most fortunate moment of American his-

met
tory. . . . Had
been attempted four years earlier or four years later
it

... it must have failed. In 1783 the people, flushed with their victory
over England, were full of confidence in themselves and in liberty,
persuaded that the world was at their feet, disposed to think all author-
ity tyranny. In 1791 their fervid sympathy with the Revolution in
France had not yet been damped by the excesses of the Terror nor
alienated by the insolence of the French government and its diplomatic
agents in America. But in 1787 the first reaction from the War of Inde-
pendence had set in. Wise men had come to discern the weak side of
popular government; and the people themselves were in a comparatively
humble and teachable mind. Before the next wave of democratic
enthusiasm swept over the country the organization of a national
government under the Constitution was in all its main features com-
4
plete.

It was inevitable that Washington, having presided over the Convention,

should be asked to take the chief part in the new government. It was
inevitable that he should fear the call to active politics, and be filled
with misgivings, but that his sense of duty should force him to accept.
Ever since the close of the war with England Washington had wanted
a stronger Union. In 1783 he wrote to Hamilton, "It is clearly my opin-
ion, unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes, that
the distresses we have encountered, the expense we have incurred, and the
blood we have spilt, will avail us nothing." And shortly before the Con-
vention met in 1787 he said, "I do not conceive we can exist long as a
nation without having lodged somewhere a power, which will pervade
38 The Price of Union

the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the state

governments extends over the several states." This puts both the conven-
tion's problem, and the answer, as succinctly as possible. Washington
could not refuse to serve the Constitution he had done so much to bring
into being. He had insisted that the Articles of Confederation give way
to a stronger government the people had a right to insist that the stronger
;

government be headed by Washington.

Yet we may feel sure that on the April morning of 1789 when he took
the oath of office as President of the United States, on a balcony over-
looking Wall Street in New York City, he regretted that he had once
more been compelled to leave his agricultural experiments at Mount
Vernon and to become the leader of his country.
 Ill

The Constitution: Written and Unwritten

ASHINGTON would not have found it easy to describe the duties of the
r

officehe had accepted. While presiding over the Constitutional Conven-

tion at Philadelphia he had listened with his usual care to many long
debates on the subject; but the debaters themselves were uncertain. The
wisest of them admitted that the nature of the new government would be
largely determined by the men who took part in it and by the spirit of
the country. In this they were more right than they suspected; for even
when they thought they knew exactly what type of government they were
building, time was often to prove that they were building the opposite.*
They thought they were creating a government which would save the
country from further excesses of democracy; they were really creating a
government which would transform itself, with hardly a change in the
written constitution, into a democracy more thorough than anything they
foresaw in their gloomiest visions. They thought they were creating a
government which would save the country from faction and from polit-
ical parties; they were really creating a government which would soon

prove that it could not perform its duties without the help of political
parties. They thought they were creating a government which adapted
to the uses of a republic the main features of the British Constitution ; they
were really creating a government which made forever impossible the
constitutional development at that moment taking place in England.
The mood in which the constitution-makers assembled at Philadelphia
is described in the fifteenth number of The Federalist** Discussing the
state of the Union under the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton wrote:

We may indeed with propriety be said to have reached almost the

last stage of national humiliation. There is scarcely anything that can
wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation
which we do not experience. Are there engagements to the performance
of which we are held by every tie respectable among men? These are
* The Constitution of the United States, a model of
brevity, is printed in full in
the Appendix.
** The
best contemporary gloss on the Constitution, and one of the wisest of
commentaries. Eighty-five essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison,
political
and John Jay, defending the new plan of government. The essays appeared serially
in 1787 and 1788, during the struggle for ratification.
39
40 The Price of Union

the subjects of constant and unblushing violation. Do we owe debts to

foreigners and to our own citizens contracted in a time of imminent
peril for the preservation of our political existence? These remain
without any proper or satisfactory provision for their discharge. Have
we valuable territories and important posts in the possession of a foreign
power which, by express stipulations, ought long since to have been
surrendered? These are still retained, to the prejudice of our interests,
not less than of our rights. ... What indication is there of national
disorder, poverty, and insignificance that could befall a*community so
peculiarly blessed with natural advantages as we are, which does not
form a part of the dark catalogue of our public misfortunes?

Few of theradical leaders were present at the Philadelphia Convention.

Jeffersonwas in Paris, as American Minister; Patrick Henry refused to

attend; Samuel Adams was not chosen. The Convention consisted mostly
of the friends of property and business. These men attributed much
of Hamilton's "dark catalogue of public misfortunes" to the fact that
democracy had been making headway among the new state governments.
Professor Henry Jones Ford writes :

That which they had feared all along, which had made them so reluc-
tant to carry their resistance to parliamentary oppression to the point
of declaring their independence of the British crown the outbreak of
democratic licentiousness had come to pass, and they were aghast
at the evil look of the times. They met behind closed doors and could
talk freely. Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independ-
ence, and a man of the humblest origin, solemnly laid down the rule that
"the people should have as little to do as may be with the government."
George Mason thought "it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of
a proper character for chief magistrate to the people, as it would be to
1
refer a trial of colors to a blind man."

John Adams, who was abroad during the Convention, went even fur-
ther, describing democracy as "the most ignoble, unjust and detestable
form of government." Even in 1815, long after the country's drift toward
this "detestable form" had become clear, Adams was unreconciled. He
wrote to John Taylor:

Democracy has never been and never can be so desirable as aristoc-

racy or monarchy, but while it lasts, is more bloody than either. Re-
member, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and
murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit
suicide.*
* At times the Federalist
fathers, especially John Adams, seemed to be attacking
"pure" democracy, in which all the citizens assemble together to vote and debate
as in a Greek city-state, rather than representative democracy in the modern Ameri-
Hi. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 41

This was the prevailing view of the gentry throughout the Union.
Gouverneur Morris,* New York's most distinguished cynic, predicted:
"give the votes to the people who have no property and they will sell
them to the rich." Fisher Ames** of Massachusetts wrote: "Our country
is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.
... Its vice will govern it by practising upon its folly. This is ordained
for democracies." And
once, feeling more than usually mournful, Ames
remarked that democracy, like death, is "only the dismal passport to a
more dismal hereafter." Another disgruntled New England worthy, George
Cabot,*** said, "I hold democracy in its natural operation to be the gov-
ernment of the worst." And again, "If no man in New England could vote
for legislators who was not possessed in his own right of $2,000 value in
land, we could do something better." Pinckney of South Carolina advo-
cated a property qualification of $100,000 for the president, of $50,000
for justices of the Supreme Court, and of a proportionate sum for mem-
can sense. Their worst animadversions, nevertheless, and their gloomiest predictions,
were called forth by the election of Jefferson in 1800, so it seems fair to say that
they feared democracy in any form. When it was pointed out to Fisher Ames that
Jefferson was behaving mildly in the White House, he refused to take comfort on
the ground that if Jefferson continued to behave well he would be displaced by
men more terrible than himself. "Brissot," said Ames, "will fall by the hand of
Danton, and he will be supplanted by Robespierre." Yet for all their anti-democratic
talk these men made and administered a government which gave the people wide
power.
* The
charming and talented Morris was lord of the great manor at Morrisania.
He had more to say than any other delegate at the Philadelphia Convention, and
took the most conservative view of all. He served as Minister to France for a time
under President Washington, and then briefly as senator from New York. Like
many conservatives, he became embittered against his country during the long
rule of the Jeffersonians after 1801.
** Son of the famous almanac-maker,
innkeeper, and physician of Dedham,
Massachusetts. Educated at Harvard, he became one of the most widely read and
interesting men in public life. He went to Congress in 1789, defeating Samuel
Adams. He was an ardent Hamiltonian, and a strong anti-democrat; he was also
the greatest orator of his day. When Washington retired from the presidency,
Ames refused re-election and left public life. He later refused the presidency of
Harvard College. After the election of Jefferson, he became another victim of the
anti-democratic rage, convinced that his country was doomed: first to anarchy,
and then to despotism. "Our days," he wrote, "are made heavy with the pressure
of anxiety, and our nights restless with visions of horror."
***
"George Cabot," wrote John C. Hamilton, "was one of those rare men,
who, without ambition, without effort, almost without the consciousness of admitted
superiority, control, and become the oracles of communities." (History of the Re-
public, quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in his article on Cabot in the Dictionary
of American Biography.} At the age of eighteen, having left Harvard to escape
admonition for "idle behavior," Cabot was skipper of a schooner carrying codfish
from Beverley, Massachusetts, to Bilbao. Fifteen years later, in 1785, he was a rich
man, ready to retire from business and to devote his life to idle behavior and to
politics. In 1791 he became Senator from Massachusetts; but his important role
in public affairs was as the elder statesman of the Essex Junto: the group which
might have started a secession movement in New England if it had not been for
the lethargy and caution of George Cabot.
42 The Price of Union

bers of the Congress. And he said that the election of Representatives by

popular vote was theoretical nonsense that would bring the councils of the
United States into contempt. While discussing the subject of suffrage in
the Convention, Madison stated:

The Freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of

Republican liberty. In future times a great majority of the people will
be not only without land, but any other sort of property. These will
either combine under the influence of their common situation in which ;

case, the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in
their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of
opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on
another side.

It was this relation between property and political power which filled
the minds of the delegates. "Power follows property," said John Adams,
and there was no one at the Convention to disagree with him. 2 It seemed
clear that unless all men could have property all men should not have the
vote, for the propertyless (if they one day became a majority) must
either combine to oppress the minority or, in Madison's words, they must
"become the tools of opulence and ambition." As we shall see, there were
many who felt that America could still choose to remain an agrarian com-
munity of small farmers, turning its back upon industrialism, and could
thus move safely toward a democracy of widespread ownership. It was this
half -conscious assumption in many of their minds which gave them hope,
in spite of their acceptance of Madison's gloomy views on the relation
between property and free government.
Those who hold and those who are without property [wrote Madison
inThe Federalist} have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those
who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like dis-
crimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile
interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of
necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes,
actuated by different sentiments and views. ... Is a law proposed
concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are
parties on the one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to
hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be,
themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words,
the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. . . .

It is vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust

these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public
3
good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.
A selfish minority, Madison continues, may be held in check in a re-

public; but a selfish majority can "sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest
both the public good and the rights of other citizens." How
can we hope
iii. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 43

to protect "the public good and private rights" from such oppression?
Not, said Madison, by moral or religious means, for these have small
effect on individuals and no
effect on large and greedy groups.
be seen that the men who made the Constitution were neither
It will
misled by optimism nor cheered by ignorance of the past. They had never
heard or read of a government which worked satisfactorily, and they were
not so rash as to assume they could create one. The brief bright hours of
revolutionary enthusiasm were over, and men had reverted to the normal
mood of the eighteenth century, which was not addicted to Songs Before
Sunrise, but rather to prayers lest the sun should irrevocably set.*

The Convention's answer to Madison's question was twofold. The ma-

jority must be kept from oppressing the minority, first, by excluding the
propertyless from any direct share in politics;** second, by distributing
authority, and balancing the powers of government, so that no selfish or
self-righteous party could impose its will unchecked. This was a negative
plan, based on the deep American jealousy of power. It sought to avoid
corruption, injustice, and the tyranny of numbers by ensuring that power
must always be limited, rather than by accepting the fact of power and
ensuring that it be used responsibly. In this we see the influence of Amer-
ica's colonial history, and of her experience with the constitutions of the
several states.
By 1777 all the ex-colonies had adopted constitutions. Three had
merely reaffirmed their old charters, but the rest had devised new docu-
ments. In general, the state governments preserved the outlines of the
colonial governments. They were, as Professor Nevins says, "the fruit of

*
Benjamin Franklin, the oldest and perhaps the wisest of the delegates, expressed
the prevailing mood on the last day of the Convention: "I agree to this Constitu-
tion with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government
necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to
the people if well administered; and believe farther that this is likely to be well
administered for a course of years and can only end in despotism, as other forms
have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupt as to need despotic
government, being incapable of any other. When you assemble a number of men
. . .

to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those
men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests,
and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected ?
. .
. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and
because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I nave had of its errors,
I sacrifice to the public good."
** The President was to be elected indirectly; the Senators were to be chosen by
the state legislatures; and the members of the House of Representatives were to be
"chosen every second year by the people of the several states." In 1789, however,
"the several states" allowed only a restricted group of their people to vote.
44 The Price of Union

a growth which had begun when, under the King's charter, the Governor,
Council, and Burgesses of Virginia met in the little Jamestown church in
1619 to hold the first representative legislature on American soil." 4 The
growth, however, was distinctively American, and did not follow the
constitutional change taking place in England. In America the steady
struggle against the authority of the colonial governors, and the strife
between the governors and the elected legislatures, seemed to confirm
everything which had been written by Locke and Montesquieu about
the need for the separation of powers. While England moved toward her
modern Parliamentary system, which in effect annuls the separation of
powers, Americans were convincing themselves that only by keeping the
Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary in tight compartments could
they hope to preserve their freedom.
The state constitutions were not written by specially elected conven-
tions,' but by the revolutionary legislatures which were mostly in the hands
5*'

of radicals. These were the men who, drafting the Articles of Confedera-
tion, had
insisted that state sovereignty was the friend of freedom. Simi-

larly, when they drafted the state constitutions, they insisted that a weak
local government would benefit the masses, a strong one the aristocracy.
They thought the governor should have the least possible powers and a
short term, that the legislature should be elected annually, that the
judges should be removable with ease. They wanted an extension of the
suffrage, and fair representation for the western counties. The conserva-
tives, on the other hand, wanted a stronger governor and a more accurate
balance of powers, an independent judiciary, high property qualifications
for voting and office-holding, and underrepresentation for the radical
West. The conservatives were usually successful in maintaining an un-
democratic suffrage and unequal electoral districts but for the rest, half of
;

the early constitutions were written by the radicals.

In North Carolina, for example, the governor was a shadow. He was
surrounded, and hampered, by an executive council. He had no veto,
could make few appointments, and could not even call the legislature in
special session. And in Pennsylvania there was an executive council in-
stead of a governor, a unicameral legislature, annual elections, and no
property qualification for voting or office-holding. This headless monster
of a constitution was abandoned in 1790 for one of marked conservatism.
These extremely radical constitutions fortified the delegates to the
Convention at Philadelphia both in their conservatism and in their theory
of divided powers. North Carolina and Pennsylvania, they believed, had
shown that the legislature could not govern; yet the people, after their
long jealousy of royal governors, would not accept an executive who
* Until Massachusetts abandoned her charter and wrote a new constitution in
1780.
in. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 45

could control policy; thus it seemed sensible to check and balance the
departments of government according to the plans of Locke and Mon-
tesquieu. And it was agreed that the popular branch of the legislature
must be checked with special care.
Edmund Randolph of Virginia told the Convention, "our chief danger
rises from the democratic parts of our constitutions. It is a maxim which
I hold incontrovertible, that the powers of government exercised by the
people swallow up the other branches. None of the [state] constitutions
have provided sufficient checks against the democracy." He added that
Maryland had tried to provide a check, and that New York and Massa-
chusetts had done still better; "but they all seem insufficient." 5
The conservative state constitutions were carefully studied by the dele-
gates. The brevity and clarity of New York's document were taken as a
model; Maryland supplied the elaborate but vain device of an electoral
college; and Massachusetts, when she abandoned her charter and ac-
cepted a new constitution in 1780, insisted on a special drafting conven-
tion and on ratification by all adult freemen an important precedent
for Philadelphia. "The American Constitution," says Bryce, "is no excep-
tion to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience
and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more
slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring is it likely
to prove. There is little in this Constitution that is absolutely new. There
is much that is as old as Magna Charta." 6
Not only did the delegates have the British Constitution to build on,
and colonial experience, and the century and a half of keen political think-
ing since the days of Harrington and Milton, and the Articles of Con-
federation, and the state constitutions, good and bad, but as a result of
the argument with England between 1763 and 1775 they had seized "one
principle of the English common law whose importance deserves special
mention, the principle that an act done by any official person or law-
making body in excess of his or its legal competence is simply void. Here
lay the key to the difficulties which the establishment of a variety of
authorities not subordinate to one another, but each supreme in its own
7
defined sphere, necessarily involved." Here lay the key to federation, to
the distribution between state and central governments of an indivisible
sovereignty.
The central government of the United States was not superior to the
state governments; the state and the federal governments each had their
share of sovereignty; each operated directly upon its citizens; each was
supreme in its own field. Like many successful devices in politics, this was
unreasonable. The great question which preceded the Revolution was
whether federalism within an empire was possible. Great Britain said
that it was not, that sovereignty cannot be divided. In logic she won
46 The Price of Union

the argument; but in fact she lost the empire. And the illogical American
federationstill rests on the faith that governments may be limited by law,

that a constitution which has been accepted as "the supreme law of the
land" automatically renders void any act which contravenes it. If the
Constitution decrees that in certain areas the states are sovereign and
in other areas the federal government, and if any act contrary to the
Constitution is self-destructive, then the distribution of powers is self-

preserving so long as the Constitution is accepted. Until the people

choose to exercise their right of revolution under the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, or of revision under the Constitution, that document not only
divides power among the three main branches of the federal government,
but shares sovereignty between the central power and the states. The fact
that in strict logic this is
impossible may explain some of the complications
of federal politics.
The Constitution-makers had their full share of the American fear that
governments capable of swift, decisive action will usually act unjustly.
'The less government we have the better," said Ralph Waldo Emerson,
echoing Jefferson, and there has never been a time when a majority of his
fellow citizens would not sign the statement. Government and oppression,
government and waste, government and cumbersome folly: these are
synonymous in the average American mind. Thus everything was done at
Philadelphia to make government action slow, cautious, and easily
checked. The delegates believed that they were sacrificing efficiency for
liberty. They believed, in the words of Madison, that they were "so con-
triving the interior structure of the government as that its several con-
stituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping
each other in their proper places." Yet in fact they were contriving a gov-
ernment with a perilously weak legislature and therefore with an execu-
tive which circumstances would compel to become the agent of the demo-
cratic will. Time and the demands of democracy, and the repeated mortal

dangers of the world, were to force the presidency in the direction of the
oldest of political institutions an elective kingship.*
:

The latter development would have surprised the delegates more than
anything else which has happened to their handiwork; for they were
*
George Mason of Virginia told the delegates "We are not indeed constituting
:

a British government, but a more dangerous monarchy, an elective one." And in the
eighteen-sixties Lincoln's secretary of state said to a correspondent of The Times of
London: "We elect a king for four years, and give him absolute power within
certain limits, which after all he can interpret for himself."
Hi. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 47

confident that they had protected the executive from democratic control.
Their Constitution provided that each state should appoint, in such man-
ner as the legislature might direct, a number of electors equal to the
number of Senators and Representatives to which the state was entitled in
Congress. These electors were to meet in* their respective states and vote
by ballot for the two men they thought most suitable, "one of whom at
least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state as themselves." The
ballots were to be sent to the President of the Senate, opened in the
pres-
ence of the two Houses, and counted. "The person having the greatest
number of votes shall be President," says the Constitution, "if such number
be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed." If no one had
such a majority the House of Representatives, casting one vote for each
state, would choose a President from the five highest on the list. If two

people had a majority, and an equal number of votes, the House of Repre-
would choose one of them for President.* And the Constitution
sentatives
adds: "After the choice of the President, the person having the greatest
number of votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there
should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose
from them by ballot the Vice President."
It seemed a safe way to keep the "turbulent mob," as the people were
then described, from seizing the presidency. Yet it proved a frail defense,
for reasons which are easy to understand as we study the history of the
next forty years, but which were unforeseen.
It was the House of Representatives which was intended to be the voice
of the people, so far as the people were to have a voice. Members of the
House were the only federal officers for whom the people were to vote,
the Constitution providing that whoever voted for "the most numerous
branch of the state legislature" might also vote for a federal Representa-
tive. In 1790, all but three states had property qualifications for the

franchise, and those three states had taxpaying qualifications.** It was

foreseen with dismay that these qualifications might in time be lowered
and that the "mob" might one day elect the members of the House. Such
a House, it was thought, would have an immense vitality and might grow

* It was assumed that in most cases the

electors, voting blindly in their several
states, would fail to give a majority to any candidate. The large states, with their
numerous electoral votes, would thus have the advantage in nominating the
candidates among whom the House must later choose; but the small states would
come into their own in the House of Representatives, which would elect the presi-
dent on the basis of one vote to each state. This was another plan which went wrong
because of the rise of the party system.
** Vermont had universal suffrage; but Vermont had not yet been formally ad-
mitted as a state. Connecticut's requirements were the most original: "Maturity in
years, quiet and peaceable behavior, a civil conversation, and 40 shillings freehold or
40 personal estate."
48 The Price of Union

too strong; so the delegates undertook to check the legislature by a careful

description of its powers. Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution con-
tains eighteen paragraphs in which the powers assigned to Congress are
defined and therefore limited. This reassured the delegates who feared
too strong a House, and also the delegates who feared too strong a central
government. It was, according to Professor McLaughlin,

the most satisfying answer to the critical problem of granting adequate

authority to the central government without destroying the states. . . .

The states, as part of the federal system, were given substantial security
by the enumeration of the powers. Combined with the principle that
the Constitution is law, the designation of powers granted to the cen-
tral government marks out the essentials of federalism established on
a legal foundation. 8

That was all very well as a solution to the problem of balance between
the central and the state governments; but it tended to upset the balance
within the federal government, tipping it in favor of the President. The
delegates, with the example of the radical state constitutions before them,
were afraid of a weak Executive; so Executive power was conferred in
blanket form. The President was made Commander-in-Chief of the Army
and Navy; he was given control of the patronage of the government;*
he was required "from time to time to give to the Congress information
of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such
measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient"; and he was given
power to make treaties "by and with the advice and consent of the
Senate . .
provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." Most
.

important of all, the President was given the power to veto acts of Con-

gress, with the provision that his veto can be overridden by a two-thirds
majority of both Houses. Since the President, if impeached, can only be
convicted by a majority of two thirds of the Senators present, he cannot be
punished by Congress for his use of the veto. A Congress which could not
override the veto could not secure a conviction. Finally, the President's
oath is made to read that he will "faithfully execute the office of President
of the United States." There can be little doubt that the accurate authors
of the Constitution saw the difference between "executing an office" and
merely "enforcing the law," Within a few years Hamilton was arguing
that the Executive had plenary powers under the Constitution, except as to
the few enumerated prohibitions. The President could do anything he was
* The Constitution vested the
appointing power in the President, subject in many
cases to the advice and consent of the Senate; but the First Congress decided that
the Senate held no check on the President's power of removal. Many years later, as
we shall see, this became the subject of fierce controversy; yet on the whole the de-
cision has stood. It was inevitable, therefore, that the President should become the
main source of patronage.
in. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 49

not forbidden; but the Congress could do nothing that was not authorized
in the eighteen paragraphs.
The presidency was thus made an office of great power and independ-
ence; in the hands of strong men it has become an office of the greatest
power ever exercised in a free country; but one thing it was not an office
of clearly defined relations. Nobody could tell, when Washington was
inaugurated, and nobody has decided to this day, exactly what are the
intended relations between the President and the Congress. As we shall
see, Washington and Hamilton and John Marshall had their own theory
of what the relation should be. It was probably the theory of most of the
delegates, and it had the virtue of being workable; but they failed to
establish it in practice. Jefferson and his friends proposed an alternative

theory, which they did for a time establish. Unfortunately, it was a theory
which could only work when the President was a political genius. It broke
down when Jefferson retired. Finally, in the eighteen-thirties under
Andrew Jackson, an entirely new type of presidency was established, un-
known to the Constitution, unimagined by the Fathers, buttressed by a
massive party system equally unforeseen but without which the new presi-
dency could not function. It, too, had the defect that while it worked
reasonably well in the hands of a strong man it scarcely worked at all
when the president was weak. And as Madison pointed out, "enlightened
statesmen will not always be at the helm."

The delegates at Philadelphia felt they could safely leave a number of

important questions unanswered in the written document because they
themselves would be members of the new government, and because Wash-
ington would be the first President. According to Charles A. Beard, "four
fifths of the active, forceful leaders of the Convention helped to realize
9
as a process of government the paper constitution they had drafted."
view of their experience, wisdom and freedom from
It is fortunate, in

illusions, that so of the men of Philadelphia were on hand at New

many
York when the government was born. Their presence, however, made
inevitable the destruction of one of their major hopes: that America
would be governed without political parties. For there was another group
at New York, a pressing and articulate group which had been virtually

unrepresented at Philadelphia, and which took a different view of the

Constitution from that of the men who had written it. This is the group
of which Jefferson was to become the leader. It was largely composed of
the men who had backed the Articles of Confederation, and who were
sorry to see them abandoned.
50 The Price of Union

Henry Adams has summarized the views of this dissenting group as

follows :

At the bottom of its theories lay, as a foundation, the historical fact

that political power had, in all experience, tended to grow at the ex-
pense of human liberty. Every government tended towards despotism;
contained somewhere a supreme, irresponsible, self-defined power called
sovereignty, which held human rights, if human rights there were, at
its mercy. Americans believed that the liberties of this ^continent de-

pended on fixing a barrier against this supreme central power, called

national sovereignty, which, if left to grow unresisted, would repeat
here all the miserable experiences of Europe, and, falling into the grasp
of some group of men, would be the center of a military tyranny; that,
to resist the growth of this power, it was necessary to withhold authority
from the government, and to administer it with the utmost economy,
because extravagance generates corruption, and corruption generates
despotism; that the Executive must be held in check; the popular branch
of the Legislature strengthened, the Judiciary curbed, and the general
powers of government strictly construed; but, above all, the States
must be supported in exercising all their reserved rights, because, in the
last resort, the States alone could make head against a central sovereign
at Washington. These principles implied a policy of peace abroad and
of loose ties at home, leaned rather toward a confederation than toward
a consolidated union, and placed the good of the human race before
the glory of a mere nationality. 10

This was the philosophy of government of the men who wrote the
"radical" state constitutions and who lamented the passing of the old
Confederation. It would be difficult to find a theory more sharply opposed
to that of George Washington, John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, and
the majority of the delegates at Philadelphia. Yet it was consistent with
the words of the Constitution, and it made such an appeal to the American
heart that it was soon to be given a trial at the demand of the people.
Indeed, it has never been relinquished as an ideal and a hope. It was
perhaps unfortunate for the theory, with its emphasis on "loose ties" and
"a policy of peace," that it was first tested during the Napoleonic wars;
but it might not have survived at any time in this stormy world, for a
government which insists that its duty is to be weak is likely to find itself
incapable of governing. It was not Jefferson's fault that he was obliged as
President either to abandon the national interest, which he would not do,
or to use powers more autocratic than any which he had decried in his
predecessors.
The other theory, the theory of most of the delegates and of The
Federalist, was that man can be protected from despotism and the sup-
pression of his rights, not by denying power to government but by enforc-
ing constitutional controls.
Hi. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 51

In the twenty-eighth number of The Federalist Hamilton dealt as fol-

lows with the question whether government should be allowed to maintain
an army in time of peace :

Independent of all other reasonings upon the subject, it is a full

answer to those who require a more peremptory provision against mili-
tary establishments in time of peace, to say that the whole powers of
the proposed government is to be in the hands of the representatives of
the people. This is the essential, and, after all, only efficacious security
for the rights and privileges of the people, which is attainable in civil
society.

The Jeffersonians did not feel it was an "efficacious security." They

wanted to have the "whole powers" of government in the hands of the

representatives of the people; but they also wanted to have the "whole
powers" so unpowerful that they could not be distorted into tyranny even
if the representatives were willing.
Government, replied Hamilton, must be strong, and the people must
be protected against government by due process of law rather than by a
denial of necessary powers. In the fifty-first number of The Federalist
either Hamilton or Madison* wrote "In framing a government which is
:

to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this you :

must enable the government to control the governed, and in the next
first

place, oblige it to control itself." Hamilton and his friends, who were soon
to become a political party, put the emphasis on the first part of the diffi-

culty: enabling the government to control the governed. They believed

that the quickest route to tyranny was a government incompetent to for-
ward the public business.** Jefferson and his friends, who were soon to
become the opposition party, put the emphasis on the need to compel
government to control itself. They were so impressed by the tendency of
power to breed corruption that they were prepared to risk inefficiency,
and even disunion, rather than to permit a concentration of power in the
hands of the rulers.
The form of corruption they most feared was the unjust use of the
powers of government to help commerce and industry and finance at the
expense of agriculture. For the most part, the interests of the Jeffersonians
lay in the land, of the Hamiltonians in the cities. An economy of factories
and shipping lines and commercial paper needs the support of government
more than an economy of land and horses and crossroads blacksmith
shops. The former wants a strong government to enforce contracts; the
latter prefers a weak government which will let it alone.
The American people have usually followed Jefferson in their hearts,
* This is one of several numbers of The Federalist whose
authorship is in dispute.
** "The
public business must, in some way or other, go forward." (The Federalist,
no. 22.)
52 The Price of Union

but they have often followed Hamilton in their deeds; for the hard fact
remains that "the public business must go forward." The tendency of all
governments is to grow stronger, because in each new crisis new powers
seem needed for the emergency. They are more easily given than with-
drawn.

Jefferson and Hamilton each a luminous representative of his own view

:

of life; each essential for the health of the republic; and each forever
opposed to the other. It is doubtful if in all their lives they could have
found one point of agreement, except the need for American independ-
ence. They were such perfect opposites that to this day most Americans
make a cult of the one or the other; few are able to do justice to both.
The fact that Washington put these two men into his Cabinet shows the
strength of feeling against political parties. It was thought to be the duty
of every man to serve the government and to refrain from faction. Hamil-
ton and Jefferson might as well have been asked to refrain from breathing.
Each thought that the other would destroy the Constitution and drag
down the country; in honor^ each was compelled to say so and to act
accordingly.
Jefferson was the first great American to apply the optimism of the
natural-rights philosophy: optimism as to man's nature, as to his future,
as to the inevitability of progress, and therefore as to the help man would
need from the institutions of society. He might have subscribed without a
qualm to the hopefulness of Shelley:

The world's great age begins anew.

The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

It is no censure of Jefferson to say that he held these views. For a hundred

years his faith seemed to be justified, and it was fortunate for America
that in her youth she had a leader to give wings of words to the faith. It
was also fortunate that she had another leader who took a more somber
position. Hamilton wrote: "Have we not already seen enough of the
fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us
with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses, and
evils incident to society in every shape?" And in the same essay he warned
that it would be dangerous "to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive,
in. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 53

and rapacious." 11If Hamilton had wished to give thanks in verse for the
death of the old age, and to salute the new, he would have chosen the
careful language of the seventeenth century:

All, all of a piece throughout:

Thy Chase had a Beast in View;

Thy Wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New.

He would have added that the new age would soon be as disheartening
as the old unless man built strong institutions to curb his ambition, vin-
dictiveness,and rapacity.
There could be no compromise between those who felt that man need
only be freed from restraint in order to move toward perfection, and those
who felt that the wisest and most unchallengeable restraints could barely
save man from wasting all that the painful ages had built. Looking into
the future, the Jeffersonians feared the corruption of power; the Hamil-
tonians feared the corruption of human nature. The first believed that if

man could be saved from tyranny he would take care of himself; the
second believed that if man could be saved from himself a great society
would arise in America. The first were necessarily for a frugal govern-
ment, which would do as little as possible; the second were necessarily for
an active, creative government, which would bend events to the purpose
of the wise rulers.*
The spiritof America, the hope and faith in man that put zest into
building a new worldin a wilderness, were given by Jefferson and his
followers; the economic core of America, the hard sense and the tough-
ness, were given by the Hamiltonians. Without the commercial and indus-
trial competence of the latter, and the financial daring, America would
not have been able to grow and prosper; without the spirit and the opti-
mism of the former, she might not have cared to do so. Since both are
necessary neither is unworthy, and neither should be described as better
or worse than the other. Dry den is not better than Shelley; the Romantic
Revival is not better than the Restoration. Both are needed in the life of
a great people; but each is likely to speak unkindly of the other.
* In 1773 and
1774, when Hamilton was sixteen and seventeen, he kept a volume
of "school exercises" in which he copied his favorite passages from the books he was
reading. From the First Philippic of Demosthenes he copied the following: "As a
general marches at the head of his troops, so ought the politicians ... to march
at the head of affairs; insomuch that they ought not to wait the event, to know
what measures to take ; but the measures which they have taken, ought to produce
the event" It would be hard to find a clearer statement of the theory of government
which Hamilton followed and which Jefferson hated.
54 The Price of Union

Just as the exact powers of the Executive were left vague in the Consti-
tution, so were the exact powers of the Judiciary. Article III, Section 1,
reads: "The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one
supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from
time to time ordain and establish. . ." Section 2 reads: "The judicial
.

power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Con-
stitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall
be made, under their authority." The first question to arise was whether
the Supreme Court has the power to declare acts of Congress null and
void if they are found to be inconsistent with the Constitution. This power
was soon assumed by the Court; yet because of the ambiguity of the writ-
ten document it has always been challenged by those who are dissatisfied
with a decision.
It was wise for the delegates to leave this, like so many other problems,
to be settled by life rather than by words. And in this case the verdict of

experience has been exactly what the delegates expected. In spite of con-
tinual complaint, the Court has exercised the power they intended it to
exercise; and because of continual complaint, the Court has usually exer-
cised the power with discretion. If the Constitution had been more precise
in conferring the power, the discretion with which it has been used might
have been less noteworthy.
Yet most of the strong and popular Presidents have fought the Supreme
Court, and have sought either to deny or to curb its powers. It is therefore
worth noting that the makers of the Constitution were clear in their own
minds that the Court must have such powers. During the debates at Phila-
delphia, Madison said "A law violating a constitution established by the
:

people themselves, would be considered by the judges as null and void."

Luther Martin said: "As to the constitutionality of laws, that point will
come before the judges in their proper official character." There were no
recorded objections to these flat statements. What else could a people
believe, who had quoted Justice Coke against the Stamp Act?*
* In his
very old age Madison stated that he had always thought the supremacy
of the federal judiciary essential. Dealing with this weighty question, Professor
McLaughlin (The Foundations of American Constitutionalism, pp. 154-55) calls
attention to the second paragraph of Article 6 of the Constitution "This Constitu-
:

tion, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof;
and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United
States, shall be the supreme law of the land ; and the judges in every state shall be
bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary
notwithstanding." This paragraph, he points out, rests on the old principle, so often
argued during the days of the Revolution, that "any legislative act beyond the
iii. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 55

While urging the Constitution upon the people of America, during the
period of ratification, Hamilton wrote :

The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly

essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I under-
stand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative
authority; such, for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of attainder,
no ex-post-facto laws, and the like. Limitations of this kind can be pre-
served in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of
justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest
tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of par-
ticular rights or privileges would amount to nothing. . . .

It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a

repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional
intentions of the legislature. .The courts must declare the sense of
. .

the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL

instead of
JUDGMENT, the consequence would be ... the substitution of their
pleasure to that of the legislative body. The observation, if it prove
anything, would prove that there ought to be no judges distinct from
that body. 12

Some of the most interesting storms in American history have arisen

because the people felt the courts were exercising "will" instead of "judg-
ment." Hamilton had foreseen the danger and had decided it was un-
avoidable. It is implicit in the nature of a written constitution, and we
shall not understand American history, or American government, unless
the danger with all its implications is kept in mind.

In his pamphlet, Common Sense,* Thomas Paine wrote: "Yet that we

may not appear defective in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart
for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth, placed on the divine
law, the work of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world
may know that so far as we approve of monarchy, in America the law is
competence of a legislative body is not law. The reign of law, the fundamental
. . .

principle which we have seen to be a part of the old compact-philosophy and of

Puritan theology the principle which was the basis of Revolutionary argument
against the Parliament was now made the essential principle of federalism. The
states were to be held together, the Union was to be conserved, and essential har-
mony of the system was to be maintained, not by a new doctrine, but by the old.
The courts of the states and (it would seem as a logical sequence) the courts of the
Union are bound by law not to give their assent to 'acts of pretended legislation'
those words which appear in the Declaration of Independence as the groundwork
of the charges against George HI."
*
January, 1776.
56 The Price of Union

king." Paine's words are an amusing prophecy of what has happened. The
American people have put the Constitution on an altar, and have wor-
shiped it with incense and song and the sacrifice of innumerable goats.
They have worshiped it rather more diligently than they have read it.
Many of them assume it is a precise document laying down a precise order
of government from which no good man would care to deviate. Except
for the various amendments* they assume that it stands unchanged,

embodying the deathless wisdom of the Fathers. Yet it is a question

whether the massive party system which was soon to develop, and which
was unforeseen by the Fathers, is not more important in determining the
form of government than the Constitution itself. Perhaps it is for this
reason that a Harvard professor annually warns his class in Constitutional
Law not to read the document, since it would only "confuse their minds." 13
One result of the deification of the charter is that political strife in
America tends to take the form of a debate as to whether or not certain
powers are permitted. From Washington to Franklin Roosevelt, every
strong president has been accused of seeking to overthrow the Consti-
tution. And whenever the Supreme Court declares a popular law null and
void attacked on the ground that a group of wicked old men are
it is

imposing view upon the country in the name of the sacred text. The
their

argument is not so barren as it sounds, for it makes for caution and con-
servatism, qualities which are perhaps essential if a country the size of the
United States is to maintain both unity and free government.
Some of the attributes of the American government which are most
often satirized at home and abroad can be understood and perhaps for-

given if we keep in mind the difficulty, for any political society, of being
not only united and free but also huge. When a nation divides horizontally,
on class lines, it runs the risk of revolution. When it divides vertically, on
sectional lines, it runs the risk of secession, of breaking into pieces. All
nations are threatened with the first division, which must be the primary
care of any government; but only nations of a very large size are steadily
threatened with the second division. In an immense country the economic
interests of the sections must often clash. If the will and the self-interest
of a distant majority are imposed upon a minority region, the first impulse
is withdraw from the Union. The problem of maintaining unity, in a
to

large free country, is as constant as the problem of avoiding class strife. It

can only be met by compromise, by a tenderness for minority interests
even when the minority lives thousands of miles away, even when it is
obstructive and tiresome, even when the majority has the legal "right" to
insist on its decision.

* The first ten amendments, declared in force November 3, 1791, comprise the
Bill of Rights. These amendments were requested by several of the states at the time
of ratification.
Hi. The Constitution: Written and Unwritten 57

The American political system, especially the party system, has assumed
its present form
largely because of the need to insure such compromise.
The result is a clumsy, slow, self-thwarting system, easy to criticize but
hard to improve. After bitter experience, it has solved the problem of
unity and liberty over an imperial area. It has been helped until recently
by America's remoteness from the world's worst strains and pressures. If
itneeds reform today in the way of speed and efficiency, so that the public
business may go forward on time in an age when there is very little time,
we should at least understand why it has grown into its present shape, and
why it has proved a blessing, even if an awkward blessing.
It was the political system, the party system., which achieved these
results.As we proceed down the decades it will become more and more
important to distinguish between the reality of the system and the theory
of the Constitution. The system makes the Constitution work. The system
is abused and the Constitution is revered, just as in a limited monarchy

the government is abused and the king is revered; but it is the system
which we must study if we are to understand America.
 IV

The First President

JLHERE WERE almost four million people in the United States when
Washington became President; most of them were farmers, and most of
the white farmers were freeholders. Among the New England States,
slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts and Vermont, while in New
Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, less than ten per cent of the
people were slaves. The same was true in the so-called Middle States:
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The southern boundary of
Pennsylvania, which separated that state from Delaware and Maryland,
was the Mason and Dixon line. It was the boundary between the farming
and commercial states to the north, and the plantation states to the
south. Within a few years it became the boundary between the free and
the slave states.* South of the Mason and Dixon line, slaves formed from
thirty to fifty per cent of the population in most of the heavily settled
districts.

Although agriculture was everywhere the main occupation, trade was

not negligible. Exports, during the first decade of the new government,
amounted to forty-five million, and imports to fifty-five million dollars.
Most of this commerce was in the hands of New England, where the
climate was harsh, the soil poor, and the harbors excellent. "God per-
formed no miracle on the New England soil," writes Samuel Eliot Mori-
son. "Pie gave the sea. Stark necessity made seamen of would-be planters."
1

The two dominant, expansive forces in American life the Industrial

Revolution and the winning of the West had scarcely made themselves
felt in 1789. It was still possible for wise men to assume that America
would remain an agrarian country, taking many generations to populate
the seemingly vast stretch from the mountains to the Mississippi. Only in
Kentucky were there considerable settlements west of the mountains, and
there the density of population ranged from two to seventeen per square
mile. In the entire country there were only six cities with more than eight
* West of
Pennsylvania, the Ohio River became the dividing line between freedom
and slavery. The new states north of the line (and cast of the Mississippi) were free
from the time they were created. All of the old states north of the line, except New
Jersey, had adopted gradual abolition by 1799. New Jersey had adopted it by 1821.
The Mason and Dixon line takes its name from the two English surveyors who ran
it in 1763.
55
iv. The First President 59

thousand inhabitants; Philadelphia was the leading city, with about sixty
thousand.
It was not yet certain that the white man could
conquer the vast and
gloomy forests of the West. It was not yet certain, if he did so, that the
West would remain part of the Union, since its natural outlet (the mouth
of the Mississippi) was in the hands of Spain. It was still believed by many
Englishmen that Britain might break up the Union with a combination
of tariff wars, navigation acts, and special concessions to discontented
states. Three quarters of America's commerce was with Britain, and it
was only a few years since Vermont had been negotiating for a separate
return to the Empire.*
Foreign travelers were inclined to rate America's chances low, and her
amenities nonexistent. They gave a depressing picture of bad roads, filthy
inns, ugly houses, inefficient agriculture, and quarrelsome people. Yet
there was something wrong with the picture. The plain people of America
would not have known what the pessimists were talking about, and if they
had known they would not have cared. Indeed, it was the self-confidence
of these plain people which the foreign traveler found peculiarly irksome ;

for there was already at work the force (was it climate, diet, landscape, or
the idea of liberty?) which was to make generations of immigrants from
the worst slums and ghettos of Europe into sanguine patriots as soon as
they landed and breathed the new air.
Henry Adams describes the impatient surprise of foreigners in the face
of this irrational hope :

"Look at my wealth!" cried the American to his foreign visitor. "See

these solid mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold !

See these magnificent cities scattered broadcast to the Pacific! See my

cornfields rustling and waving in the summer breeze from ocean to
ocean, so far that the sun itself is not high enough to mark where the
distant mountains bound my golden seas! Look at this continent of
mine, fairest of created worlds, as she lies turning up to the sun's never-
failing caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk
for her hundred million children See how she glows with youth, health,
!

and love!" Perhaps it was not altogether unnatural that the foreigner,
on being asked to see what needed centuries to produce, should have
looked about him with bewilderment and indignation. "Gold! Cities!
cornfields! continents! Nothing of the sort! I see nothing but tremen-
dous wastes, where sickly men and women
are dying of homesickness
or are scalped by savages! mountain ranges a thousand miles long, with
no means of getting to them, and nothing in them when you get there !

swamps and forests choked with their own rotten ruins! nor hope of
better for a thousand years! Your story is a fraud, and you are a liar
and swindler!" 2
* Vermont was still London for recognition as an independent state.
negotiating at
60 The Price of Union

There was something else wrong with the pessimistic picture, beyond
the failure to make allowance for the New World's dazzled hope. A cul-
ture can be judged by its style more accurately than by the impressions of
a tourist. In spite of the bad roads and inns and sanitation, in spite of the
litter in and the stumps in the cornfield, the style of the
the back yard
men who built America was good. There were in fact two styles the style :

of romantic republicanism, of those who saw freedom in every blue hill on

the horizon; and the style of tolerant realism, of those whQ met at Phila-
delphia and who explained their plans in The Federalist. The style of
Jefferson and John Taylor, and the style of Hamilton and John Marshall.
Both styles were later to be debased by a superstitious faith in progress,
which was perhaps always implicit in romantic republicanism; but it was
not only in America that they were debased. In France, the home of
romantic republicanism and of tolerant realism, of Rousseau and of Mon-
tesquieu, the spell of the progress-myth became so strong that Victor Hugo
could write :

Oh! L'avenir est magnifique!

Jeunes Frangais, jeunes amis,
Un siecle pur et pacifique
S'ouvre a vos pas mieux affermis.
Chaque jour aura sa conquete.
Depuis la base jusqu'au faite,
Nous verrons avec majeste,
Comme une mer sur ses rivages,
Monter d'dtages en etagcs
L'irresistible liberte!

This was only a few years before Europe began her trek back toward
blood, barbarism, slavery, and rubble. If the nineteenth century could
weaken a Frenchman into such words, who can blame the lucky children
of the West for thinking progress (steady, inevitable progress) a reasonable
hope?

The first task of the new government was to set some precedents and to
fill in the blank spots of the Constitution.
To begin with, what was to be done about the heads of the Executive
departments the men who have since come to be known as the President's
:

Cabinet? Congress might have made them responsible to itself; instead,

it the Secretaries of State and of War responsible to the President
made
alone,an example which was followed (except in regard to the Treasury
Department) when new Cabinet posts were created.
iv. The First President 61

Congress could not decide whether the Secretary of the Treasury was
the servant of the Executive or of the Legislature. Elbridge Gerry of
Massachusetts felt that the Secretary ought "to recommend general
systems of finance without having anything to do with actual administra-
tion of them, because if he engages in the executive business, we shall
be deprived of his talents in more important things." There was also long
debate as to whether the Secretary should report in person on the floor
of Congress, or whether he should send his recommendations in writing.
In the end, all was left ambiguous.* The bill creating the department was
amended so that instead of requiring the Secretary to "digest and report
plans for the improvement and management of the revenue," it required
him to "digest and prepare plans." Since nobody knew what that meant,
nobody was dissatisfied until Alexander Hamilton sought to impose his
own creative interpretation on the words.
Another vital decision of the first session was the Judiciary Act of
September 24, 1789. This act created a Supreme Court consisting of a
chief justice and five associate justices; thirteen district courts, each with
a single federal judge; and three circuit courts consisting of the district
judges in the circuit plus two Supreme Court justices. The act also laid
down the procedure for judicial review, and the conditions under which
disputes may be taken from the state courts into the federal courts. This
latter section is as essential to the federal system as the Constitution itself.
"Without it, every state judiciary could put its own construction on the
Constitution, laws, and treaties of the Union. With it, a case involving
any of these three factors may originate either in the state or lower federal
courts; but its final determination belongs to the Supreme Court of the
United States." 3
Two other precedents of great importance were established during
Washington's presidency. The first concerns the Senate and its character-
crankiness. According to the Constitution, the President has the power
istic

to make treaties, appoint foreign service officers, Supreme Court judges,

and other major officers of the United States "by and with the advice and
consent of the Senate." It was hoped this might lead to the use of the
Senate as a privy council, thus building a bridge between the Executive
and the Legislature and reassembling in practice some of the powers which
had been divided in plan.
Washington tried to make such use of the Senate. For example, he
entered the chamber one day and took the Vice- President's chair, saying
he had come for their advice and consent regarding an Indian treaty, and
that he had brought with him General Knox, the Secretary of War, who
knew all about the treaty. Knox produced the papers, which were read;
*
Fifty years later Congress was still debating whether the Treasury was an
"executive" department.
62 The Price of Union

Washington then waited for some advice or some consent. The Senate
was unwilling to give either in the presence of the President and his Cabi-
net Minister. The feeling seemed to be that the Senators were under pres-
sure, and that their dignity was being violated.
After delay and awkwardness, a motion was made to refer the matter to
a committee. Washington "started up in a violent fret," according to
Senator Maclay. "This defeats every purpose of my coming here," he said,
adding that he had brought General Knox so that the Senate could learn
everything that had been done, and why it had been done, and could then
advise in the light of complete knowledge. He was prepared to postpone
consideration, he said, but he could see no point in referring the matter to
a committee. The Senate did not want information from General Knox it ;

wanted to be left alone to act in its own inscrutable fashion. "We waited
for him to withdraw," wrote Senator Maclay. "He did so with a discon-
tented air."*
The discontent was so extreme that Washington soon gave up trying to
treat the Senate as a privy council. He
did what all other Presidents have
had to do: he made his treaties first and then submitted them to the
Senate, to be accepted or rejected or mangled, on the basis of some knowl-
edge or none, but at least with no infringement of the Senate's rights. This
does not seem the ideal way to conduct foreign relations. The day came
(May 27, 1898, during the Spanish- American War) when John Hay, Am-
bassador to England and Secretary of State under President McKinley,
wrote to Henry Adams: "The weak point ... is the Senate. I have told
you many times that I did not believe another important treaty would ever
pass the Senate. What is to be thought of a body which will not take Ha-
waii as a gift, and is clamoring to hold the Philippines? Yet that is the
news we have today." 4
On another occasion John Hay said that the clause requiring the con-
currence of two thirds of the Senators present, for the ratification of a
treaty, was the "irreparable mistake" of the Constitution. It is interesting
to recall why the "mistake" was made. The authority to ratify treaties was

given to the Senate, rather than to the entire Congress, in the hope of mak-
ing the Senate a privy council and in the belief that the treaty-making
power concerned the states rather than the people. The states had equal
representation in the Senate, the people in the lower House. And ratifica-

* That
night Senator Maclay wrote in his Journal: "I cannot be mistaken, the
President wishes to tread on the necks of the Senate. Commitment will bring the
matter to discussion, at least in the committee, where he is not present. He wishes
us to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of his Secretary only. The Secretary
to advance the premises, the President to draw the conclusions, and to bear down
our deliberations with his personal authority and presence." This is not the attitude
of a normal man, possessed of normal abilities, when approached for advice and
offered all the relevant information.
iv. The First President 63

tion was made subject to concurrence by two thirds of the Senators present
in order to insure a minority veto over treaties. At the time the Constitu-
tion was made, one section of the country was deeply concerned to secure
the right to navigate the Mississippi, and another section was deeply con-
cerned over the right of New Englanders to their fisheries. Neither section
would have accepted the Constitution if a mere majority of the states had
the power to make a treaty bartering cither of these interests in order to
secure the other. 5 It did not seem to the Fathers that they were making an
"irreparable mistake" by including this clause, and permitting a sectional
veto, since it did not occur to them that the United States would develop
political parties. Only when the certainty of a partisan vote is added to the
possibility of a sectional vote does it become obstructive to allow each vote
in the negative to carry twice the weight of each vote in the affirmative.
It was this certainty which John Hay faced.
The first effort to make a working team of the Executive and the Legis-
lature had failed. One effect of the failure was to add to the prestige of the
Cabinet. Professor Ford writes:

It was generally supposed at the time of the adoption of the Constitu-

tion that the administration would practically consist of the President
and the Senate acting in conjunction. If the President had found in the
Senate a congenial body of advisers, so that treaties and appointments
to officewould have been made in conference with it, so much of the
policy of the administration would thus have been brought within the
habitual purview of the Senate that the natural tendency would have
been to draw in the rest likewise. The language of the Constitution
would favor that tendency, while on the other hand the Constitution is
altogether ignorant of the President's Cabinet, which actually became
his privy council. The idea that the heads of executive departments are
the personal appointees of each President, the chiefs of party adminis-
tration, did not at first exist. It was assumed that their position was non-
partisan and that their tenure of office would be the same as that of
other officials, which was then regarded as one of permanency during
6
good behavior.
Ford adds, in a footnote:

This explains neither Jefferson nor his opponents thought there

why
was anything dishonorable in his retention of office while stirring up

opposition to the policy of the administration. Jefferson continued in

office from a sense of public duty for some time after he wanted to retire.
The idea that by so doing he precluded himself from carrying on an agi-
tation in support of his views of public policy did not occur to him or to
his friends, even the most high-minded of them. The same obser-
. . .

vations apply to Hamilton's conduct in maintaining a secret control over

Adams's administration by his influence with the Cabinet officials.
64 The Price of Union

The Senate had overreached itself. The Cabinet became the President's
council, with the result that by 1795 Washington had decided that he
would not "bring a man into any office of consequence knowingly, whose
political tenets are adverse to the measures which the general government
are pursuing." This became the presidential practice; but it was not
Washington's view in 1789.*
The second effort to bring the Executive and the Legislature together,
%
so that the public business might go forward, was made by Hamilton, and
was defeated by the House of Representatives. During the first session
Congress asked Hamilton to prepare a financial program. At the beginning
of the second session Hamilton was ready to report. Ignoring the fact that
the Secretary of the Treasury was authorized to "digest and prepare
plans," rather than to "digest and report" them, Hamilton assumed that
he would appear in person before the House to defend and explain his
proposals. The House thought differently, and after a brief debate decided
that the report should be made in writing. This was a momentous deci-
sion. Professor Binkley comments:

We reach the fundamental question here involved Shall the leader-

:

ship of Congress be provided internally or shall that body frankly accept

leadership from without? The agrarians, including Jefferson, who was
soon to be their chieftain, were not even aware of the existence of this
problem. They believed that public policies were to be evolved from the
free and unrestricted discussions of the Committee of the Whole. . . .
The Federalist leaders, Washington, Hamilton, Marshall, and Ames,
both in word and deed, were giving expression to a more realistic and
businesslike view of the necessities of the case. They would have pre-
ferred the frank and free appearance of the secretaries before the Con-
gress in order to keep responsibility in the full light of publicity and dis-
7
courage intrigue and backstair methods.

The decision to exclude the Secretaries was not immediately harmful;

for Hamilton, denied access to the House, met with a caucus of his Con-
gressional supporters and persuaded them to enact his financial plan. He
kept his control long enough to lay the economic foundations on which the
United States have since reposed; yet his daring program soon bred an

Opposition. When became

the Opposition organized, the formation of
national parties had begun. When the Opposition became strong enough
to thwart his measures, Hamilton resigned. It did not seem worth his while
to continue preparing plans which he was not allowed to defend, or even
to explain to the hostile majority.
The second attempt to unite the Executive and the Legislature had
* At a time of mortal danger, President Franklin Roosevelt put members of the
opposition party at the head of both War and Navy Departments ; but there was no
political controversy as to the need for national survival.
iv. The First President 65

failed. As
early as 1794, the House had stopped calling upon the Executive
departments for help and guidance in formulating measures. For a time
the Representatives floundered about in the Committee of the Whole; in
1795 they began to develop special standing committees to do the work
which they would not allow to be done by the competent agencies. These
committees are of such importance in determining the real ( as opposed to
the written) government of America that their history must be told in
some detail.
The
First Congress set up only one standing committee in the House of

Representatives that on elections.* The recommendations of the Presi-

dent and the reports from heads of departments supplied the subjects for
legislationduring these early years. The House of Representatives con-
sidered the recommendations and reports in Committee of the Whole.
When the sense of the House became clear, a select committee was ap-
pointed to prepare the bill. This made for close relations between the
House and the Administration; but the House, as we have seen, soon came
to resent the closeness, feeling that it was too much influenced by the
Executive.
The Third Congress had only two standing committees elections and
claims; but the Fourth Congress (meeting in December, 1795) added two
more. And in 1796, when the breach between the House and the Adminis-
tration was complete, the Standing Committee on Ways and Means was
created to watch over the national finances. Thenceforth, the proliferation
of committees was rapid. Under Jefferson and Madison, when the House
was alleged to be the seat of administration, the list of standing committees
grew to cover every Executive department and every function of the gov-
ernment (such as Indian Affairs, Foreign Affairs, etc.). Meanwhile, the
appointment of these all-important committees was vested with the
Speaker of the House.
The Senate, being less unwieldy and less concerned (during the early
years) with originating legislation, did not appoint standing committees
until 1816. Thereafter the system grew as rapidly in the Senate as it had

grown in the House, with the difference that the Senate appointed its own
committees in party caucus, refusing to hand this vast power to one man.
All these committees were the result of the jealous tension between
Executive and Legislature. The tension was bound to develop, since the
Constitution made possible a legislature with a majority hostile to the

* A is one appointed under standing regulations, and there-

standing committee
fore regularly formed at the beginning of each new Congress. A select committee,
appointed on a particular subject of current interest, expires with the Congress that
appointed it. A joint committee, composed of members of both the House and the
Senate, is appointed to iron out differences between the two Houses on a specific
bill. It may also be appointed to report on policy, as in the case of the Joint Com-
mittee on Reconstruction, created by the 39th Congress in 1865.
66 The Price of Union

Executive. A parliamentary government, as in England, has one large

strong committee (the ministry of the day) which is backed by the ma-
jority of the legislature, and which controls all the more important business
and shapes the important legislation. Such a government has no need for
a mass of standing committees. But as Lord Bryce points out, when the
attempt to produce an unofficial parliamentary government, in spite of the
Constitution, broke down in America, there were only two courses pos-
sible first, to create a ruling committee of the majority pa^ty which would
:

act like a ministry; second, to "divide the unwieldy multitude into small
bodies capable of dealing with particular subjects." 8 A "ruling committee"
would have been hated as undemocratic and tyrannical, so the second
choice had to be made.
The standing committees, unhappily, combine power with irresponsi-
bility. A bill presented to the House, for example, will be given its first and
second reading without debate and will then be referred to a committee.
The committee can amend the bill, or report it favorably or adversely, or
delay reporting it until too late in the session, or not report it at all. The
committee's decision is usually final, although the House can move for a
report at any moment, and can amend or restore the bill at its will. But the
House seldom has time. Yet the committee, in theory, is simply the agent
of Congress, appointed for its convenience; so the committee has no re-
sponsibility.And since the committee, being one of scores of similar com-
mittees, cannot be carefully watched by press or citizen, the public seldom
knows where to attach praise or blame.
Lord Bryce comments:

through these committees chiefly that the executive and legisla-

It is
tivebranches of government touch one another. Yet the contact, al-
though the most important thing in a government, is the thing which the
nation least notices, and has the scantiest means of watching. 9

And he quotes from Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government:

Constituencies can watch and understand a few banded leaders who

display plain purposes and act upon them with promptness; but they
cannot watch or understand forty-odd standing committees, each of
which goes its own way in doing what it can without any special regard
to the pledges of either of the parties from which its membership is
drawn. . The more power is divided, the more irresponsible it
. .

becomes. The petty character of the leadership of each committee con-

tributes towards making its despotism sure by making its duties unin-
10
teresting.

Yet the work of the Congress does go forward, and in spite of the seeming
chaos with fair efficiency. And we shall see that the committee system
dilatory and irresponsible as it is has made possible the incessant delicate
iv. The First President 67

compromise between regions and interests upon which the life of the huge
American Commonwealth depends.
When the committees first developed, when they first set themselves up
as policy-makers in rivalry with the Executive, they
were viewed with a
natural alarm by the supporters of the Administration. In 1797 Fisher
Ames, who had refused re-election to the House and was about to retire,
wrote to Hamilton :

The efficiency of government is reduced to a minimum the prone-

ness of a popular body to usurpation is already advancing to its maxi-
mum; committees already are the ministers; and while the House
indulges a jealousy of encroachment in its functions, which are properly
deliberative, it does not perceive that these are impaired and nullified
by the monopoly as well as the perversion of information by these com-
11
mittees.

Fortunately for the life of the Republic, Ames's predictions were usually
too gloomy even for the world of politics; but this time he was right. It
took thirty years for the House to prove, to the people's satisfaction, that it
was constitutionally incapable of making policy except at the cost of weak-
ening the government beyond the danger point. By that time the original
plans for building a working unit had been broken. Something new had to
be devised. It turned out to be the most far-reaching, professional party
system ever seen in a free country.

Since Washington did not know that the Cabinet was to become a group of
party leaders responsible solely to the President, he chose in 1789 to have a
representative Cabinet: representative of the geographical regions and of
the main currents of political thought. General Henry Knox of Massa-
chusetts, who had been Washington's chief of artillery, was given the War
Department; Edmund Randolph, ex-Governor of Virginia, was made
Attorney General; Thomas Jefferson, still Minister to France, was asked to

become Secretary ofState on his return home and on the advice of Rob-
;

ert Morris,*Alexander Hamilton of New York was put in charge of the

Treasury. Two Northerners, two Southerners; two centralizers, two be-
lievers in states' rights.

Washington sought advice as to the Treasury because that department

was of prime importance during the formative days. He was doubtless
to him
pleased with the advice he received, for Hamilton had been close
during the war and had a mind which he trusted and respected. This mar-
*The able finance minister of the Confederation. He financed the Revolution
and the Revolution financed him.
68 The Price of Union

velous youth (he was thirty-two when he became Secretary of the Treas-
ury) was born in the island of Nevis.,* in the Leeward Group of the West
Indies. At the age of twelve he became a storekeeper's clerk at St. Croix.
Three years later the Leeward Islands were devastated by a storm; Hamil-
ton wrote a description which so impressed his relatives that funds were
raised to send him to the mainland for an education. He spent a year at a
grammar school and then entered King's College (now Columbia) in New
York City. This was in 1773, two years before the outbreak. of the Revolu-
tion. Hamilton was sixteen. After three years at college, where he seems to
have won his mastery over the problems of government and finance (unless
he learned it all as clerk in a store) he was made captain of a New York
,

company of artillery. The next year he was appointed A.D.C. and Military
Secretary to General Washington, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He
stayed with Washington until 1781, when he insisted on returning to active
duty. He was in time to play a splendid part in the capture of Yorktown.
During the war Hamilton found time to marry a daughter of General
Schuyler, thus securing his social position in New York, and to write a
number of political pamphlets, including a memorandum to Robert Morris
on the establishment of a national bank. He was twenty-six when the war
ended, thirty at the time of the Philadelphia Convention and the first
numbers of The Federalist, thirty-one when single-handed he secured the
ratification of New York State for the new Constitution. This latter deed
is a sign of his
power over the minds of men he never tried to assert
power over their affections.
If New York failed to ratify, the federal government would collapse, for
the Union would be divided into two parts, separated from each other by
Hamilton's state. All the years of fighting and planning, all the work at
Philadelphia, would go to waste. The states would lapse into disunity and
weakness; they would probably fall one by one into the hands of foreign
powers. Yet when the New York Convention met, Hamilton knew that
more than two thirds of the delegates were against ratification.** Gover-
nor Clinton was also against it, a strong and stubborn politician who con-
trolled forty-six votes, against nineteen on which Hamilton could count.
Hamilton fought every point; yet for weeks he was always beaten. He
spoke for hours on end, with the force and wisdom he had shown in The
Federalist; yet the vote stayed forty-six to nineteen. Twice the Convention
voted for absolute rejection; but somehow Hamilton kept the delegates in
session and kept them listening to his arguments. He told a friend, "The
Convention shall never rise until the Constitution is adopted." That was
easy to say; no one has ever explained how it was accomplished.
* He wasof illegitimate birth.
** the foreign danger seriously; they did take seriously the
They did not take
danger of strong government.
iv. The First President 69

Finally a few of the forty-six were won over; but Hamilton was still in a
minority. His last hope lay in holding the Convention until news came of
the decision of Virginia, where the immense influence of Washington was
fighting against many of the state's most popular leaders. The Convention
did not rise until word arrived that Virginia had accepted; then, after five
and a half weeks of seemingly hopeless defensive fighting, Hamilton won
by three votes. It was a victory of will power and persuasion on an occa-
sion which may have decided the fate of the nation, for in retrospect one
cannot see much hope of a second chance if the states had taken the wrong
turning in 1788. Only a few years later they were face to face with Napo-
leon (more formidable than the brothers Howe and the sickly George
Germaine), who had planned to rebuild the French Empire in the West,
and who had therefore taken from Spain the vast lands across the Missis-
sippi. It seems unlikely that he would have relinquished this prize to a
League of quarrelsome neighbors. And if France had still held Louisiana
at the time of the Congress of Vienna, it seems even more unlikely that it
would have been conferred upon the universally disliked democrats across
the Atlantic. Without Louisiana, where were the United States?

Such was the young man who set himself to build a financial system on
the chaos leftby the Confederation, and an economic system which would
give power and permanence to the frail Union. Although he had worked
harder to secure ratification than any other man, Hamilton was convinced
the Constitution would not endure unless it was made stronger by interpre-
tation, and unless it was buttressed by all the wealth and influence in the
community. At the Philadelphia Convention he had said :

One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they
are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest and it will ever
;

be the duty of a wise government to avail itself of those passions in order

to make them subservient to the public good. ... All communities
divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and
well-born ; the other the mass of the people. . Turbulent and chang-
. .

ing, they seldom judge and determine right. Give therefore to the first
class a distinct, permanent share in the Government.

This is exactly what Hamilton did, and by so doing he probably saved

the Union; but it is easy to see why he did not win the hearts of the de-
mocracy.
The First Congress under the new Constitution met for its second session
on January 7, 1790. On the fourteenth, the House of Representatives took
70 The Price of Union

up Hamilton's report, which was chiefly concerned with the support of the
At the time, neither the national nor the state governments
public credit.
could be said to possess credit. Hamilton asked that the federal debt, for-
eign and domestic, should be funded at par, and that import duties and
excise taxes be provided to meet interest and amortization.* Further, he
asked that the war debts of the states be assumed by the federal govern-
ment, in order to bind the creditors of the states to the national interest.
Finally, he asked that a Bank of the United States be created, with powers
similar to those of the Bank of England except that it should be allowed to
establish eight branches.** By the summer of 1791 the entire program had
been accomplished ; United States securities, which had been almost worth-
less, were selling above par in London and Amsterdam.
When the bills for funding the debt came before the House of Repre-
sentatives the two great partners of The Federalist papers began to be

aligned against each* other. Madison, representing a typical agrarian dis-

trict in Virginia, led the opposition to parts of Hamilton's plan. It was

Madison, after all, who had instructed the Constitutional Convention on

and class interest. He saw
the deeper facts of the relation between politics
at once what Hamilton was doing but he could not educate his followers
;

in time.
The assumption of the national debt went through easily; but the bill for
the assumption of the state debts caused a sectional division. On the face
of it, the plan was unfair to the South. The federal government would
assume $18,000,000 of state debt, two thirds of which was owed by the
Northern and would then tax the whole country for interest and re-
states,
payment; but this was only the superficial injustice. If the South had
understood the plan more fully, it would have felt more aggrieved for the ;

assumption of the state debts was urged partly for honor and the public
credit, and largely to build a centralized money-power. The latter is pre-
cisely what the Jeffersonians did not want yet Jefferson became an agent
;

in promoting the plan. He thought the minor hardship to the South, re-
sulting from the payment of more than its share of the debt, could be
remedied by bartering one favor against another. So he urged the South-
erners to accept assumption in return for a promise that the new capital
city would be built on the banks of the Potomac.
Later, when he had learned more about Hamiltonian finance, Jefferson
* In other
words, the government should offer to redeem its debt, and to pay
interest,not at the market price but at the price of issue. This would make a num-
ber of people rich, and well disposed to the new federal state.
** The Bank of the United States had its main office at
Philadelphia. The gov-
ernment was its principal client. One fifth of its ten million dollars of capital was
subscribed by the government the rest by private investors. The Bank could
issue notes up to the amount of its capital. It could carry on a commercial bank-
ing business but could not deal in commodities or real estate. When Congress re-
fused to renew its charter in 1811, the Bank paid off its shareholders above par.
iv. The First President 71

was "twenty millions of stock divided

said the result of the Assumption Bill
among the favored states and thrown in as
pabulum to the stock-jobbing
herd." This was a harsh description of the bargain; yet it expressed a
truth.* Hamilton's economics had a political aim: to bind the moneyed
classes to the central government, to persuade them that the security of
their property depended on the federal rather than the state power. Ac-

cepting the doctrine of The Federalist, that power follows property and
cannot be dissociated from it, Hamilton hoped to ensure that property
would be on the side of the Union. He could do no other, since he and all
his moneyed friends believed that strong central government was the one

hope for America, and since it was clear that there would be no strong
government if property looked to the states for support.

A few months after his financial plan had been accepted by Congress,
Hamilton submitted to the House of Representatives his famous Report on
Manufactures.** This was his plan for industry, intended to supplement
his financial measures and to lead to the same end. It was an end which a

growing number of representatives from rural areas had come to under-

stand and to abhor, Hamilton did not want a quiet agrarian America
slowly filling up its empty spaces he wanted a dynamic, aggressive Amer-
;

ica, quickly exploiting its resources while offering opportunities to its more
able citizens and security to all. He believed in liberty, but he did not be-
lieve in equality.*** He would have agreed with "Paddy Divver": "All
men are born equal, but some of them are lucky enough to get over it."
In order to help them get over it as fast as possible, Hamilton proposed
a system of duties for industry; bounties for agriculture; roads and water-
ways to be built or improved by the national government generous copy-
;

right laws for inventors inspectors of produce to ensure the highest quality
;

* There is no
truth, however, in Jefferson's statement that he had been innocently
misled by Hamilton. It is doubtful whether Jefferson was ever innocent; it is
certain that he knew as much about politics as anyone in American history, with
the possible exceptions of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew
exactly what he was doing when he made the bargain with Hamilton. "In the
present instance," he wrote to Monroe, "I see the necessity of yielding for this
time to the cries of the creditors in certain parts of the union for the sake of the
union, and to save us from the greatest of all calamities, the total extinction of our
credit in Europe." While agreeing to save his country from "the greatest of all
calamities," he managed to extract for his own region a very handsome plum. We
shall see more of this type of innocence when we come to Jefferson's presidency.
**
December, 1791.
*** At the would
Philadelphia Convention Hamilton said that "an inequality
exist as long as liberty existed,and that it would unavoidably result from that
liberty itself."
72 The Price of Union

of goods; and a national board with ample funds to promote agriculture,

industry, commerce, and the arts. His program was a combination of eight-
eenth-century mercantilism and twentieth-century planning. His Report
has been used ever since as a mine for arguments favoring tariffs and other
forms of paternalism.
Since Congress had accepted the first half of Hamilton's plan, it might
have done better to accept the whole and give it a fair trial; but by 1792
the Jeffersonians were strong enough to defeat this far-reaching govern-
ment intervention. Hamilton thought that the government should act as
the trustee for the people; the Jeffersonians thought that the more the
government acted the more the people must suffer. Government inter-
ference, they said, will benefit a privileged class at the expense of the rest.
Jefferson had seen the slums of Paris and London and was frightened at
the thought that such afflictions might spread to his own country; Hamil-
ton had never been abroad and was eager to make America into a larger
and more prosperous England. Each represented one of the new forces, as
yet scarcely understood, which were to form the nation's future; and each
to his misfortune ignored the other force. Hamilton was the harbinger of
the industrial and financial revolutions but he knew nothing of the demo-
;

cratic way of life, the pattern of a new society, which was coming into

being along the frontier. Jefferson knew and loved that life he had grown
;

up on the edge of the frontier; he feared the coming of factories and the
"dark Satanic mills," but he did not understand them and could never
control or combat them successfully. For the time being, however, he and
Madison and their friends defeated Hamilton's plan for federal encourage-
ment of business. They were less successful in suggesting an alternative,
since their negative attitude became increasingly vain with the spread of
industrialism and the wars of Napoleon. Yet they found a brilliant de-
fender for their doomed cause in Jefferson's guide and friend, John Taylor
of Caroline County, Virginia.
Taylor was one of the best farmers in the South. He spent most of his life

on his plantation, improving the methods of agriculture and brooding over

the sad state into which industry and finance were plunging his people. In
1 794 he made an attack on the Hamiltonian system which gave arguments

and a philosophy to the whole opposition. In 1814, when it was too late, he
published his great work: An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the
Government of the United States. The book had little practical effect; but
the author was the soul and brains of the Southern agrarians.
John Taylor was at one with The Federalist on the relation between
property and power. "Wealth," he said, "like suffrage, must be consider-
ably distributed, to sustain a democratic republic; and hence, whatever
draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it.
As power follows property, the majority must have wealth or lose power."
iv. The First President 73

The Federalists agreed, concluding that the majority must lose power;
Taylor concluded that the majority must have wealth. Hence his fear and
detestation for large-scale industry, for finance and banking, for centralized
power, for everything which supported what he called the "aristocracy of
paper and privilege." The life of democracy depended on the wide dis-
tribution of "natural" property: land for the farmer, tools for the crafts-
man, a ship for the trader. Tariffs would destroy the farmer and deprive
him of his land big industry would destroy the crafts and make the artisan
;

a wage slave ; finance would drive the little man out of commerce. It was
all true; but Taylor was unable to suggest a remedy except the repeal of

the whole Hamiltonian plan. For this, it was too late the Industrial Revo-
;

lution was on the side of Hamilton, and nobody could repeal that singular
event.
John Taylor's deepest rage was reserved for those who used the sacred
word "property" for the new
pieces of paper, the apparatus of high fi-
nance, which were destroying his "real" property. "If the fruit of labor is
private property," he wrote, "can stealing this fruit from labor, also make
private property? By calling the artillery property, which is playing on
property, the battery is masked. Tythes and stocks, invented to take away
private property, are as correctly called private property, as a guillotine
could be called a head." And again, "We know death very well, when kill-
ing with one scythe, but mistake him for a deity, because he is killing with
four."
What could they do about it the agrarians who joined Jefferson in
creating an Opposition? The event proved that they could do very little;
yet they had to try. They felt that Hamilton's plan would turn America into
an economic copy of the Old World. They saw slipping from under them
what they believed to be the one solid basis for a free society. They put the
blame on the use by selfish men of the too-great powers of the central
government. They thought Hamilton's talk of trusteeship and enlarged
opportunity nothing but a mask for the plots of the money-power.* They
thought Hamilton himself had been bought and corrupted. The works of
John Taylor of Caroline explain the fierce passion with which the Jeffer-
sonians organized, fought Hamilton, seized the national government and
then found themselves unable to make the necessary reforms.
In the summer of 1792 Washington made a last effort to reconcile the
two fiery opponents, who were both still members of his Cabinet. In reply,
Jefferson again asked to resign,** and added that he did not wish his re-
tirement "to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the
* Hamilton described his national bank as a device for uniting "the interest and
credit of rich individuals with those of the State." (Works, III, p. 332.) To him this
seemed plain common sense; to the agrarians it seemed cynicism bordering on
dishonor.
** He was not allowed to do so until the last day of 1793.
74 The Price of Union

moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machina-

tions against the liberty of the country which has not only received and

given him bread, but neaped its honors on his head." Yet in 1816, long
after Jefferson had retired from the presidency, when Congress was at last

beginning to enact Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, Jefferson wrote :

"Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our

independence as to our comfort." He saw at last that the agrarian paradise
of his hopes had been doomed by life itself, not by the plots of Hamilton.

It is hard, in writing of this period, to do sufficient justice to the personal

influence of Washington, which was exercised with such dignity and such
aloofness that it is often overlooked. We have seen that during the revo-
lutionary war there might have been no army without Washington. Simi-
larly, there might have been no Constitution, at least in 1787, without his
weight on the side of those who favored a federal government. In the fol-
lowing year, Virginia would probably not have ratified the Constitution,
and the new government would thus have been still-born, except for Wash-
ington's influence in that state. And the men who breathed life into the
written document during the decisive first four years, the men who passed
the laws and made the administrative decisions upon which the country's
life rests, would have wasted most of their energy in fighting each other if

Washington had not held them to the task of building a nation.

When we speak, therefore, of "Hamilton's financial policy," we must
remember that not one word of it would have been written into law if it
had not been Washington's financial policy as well. The Jeffersonians
railed at Washington for being under Hamilton's influence but it has yet
;

to be shown that he was ever under any man's influence. He had a slow
and accurate mind, with unsurpassed judgment. He listened to both sides;
he solicited the opinions of Hamilton's foes; and he concluded that Hamil-
ton was right, that the country needed the strengthening of government,
the centralizing of influence, for which Hamilton's measures were de-
signed. Hamilton's brilliance in argument would have availed him nothing
if the Congress had not known that Washington was behind him.

In the field of foreign affairs, where Washington had to make the most
painful and unpopular decisions of his life, the two men also saw alike.
And here, too, there was a sharp and bitter difference between Hamilton
and Jefferson. Indeed, the passions and prejudices stirred by the foreign
relations of America were identical with the passions and prejudices stirred

by domestic policy. From the spring day in 1793 when news arrived (three
months late) that France had killed her king and had declared war on
iv. The First President 75

England and Spain, it was inevitable that men who believed human nature
could only be saved by wise paternal government and conservative customs
should turn toward England, and that men who believed human nature
would save itself if freed from shackles and discouragement should turn
toward France. Furthermore, since three quarters of America's commerce
was with England, and ninety per cent of her imports came from England,
the capitalist and commercial classes naturally favored the British cause,
while for precisely the same reasons the Southern agrarians hated Britain,
and hence favored France. British merchants were as unpopular among
the Southern planters after the War of Independence as they had been
before; the London factors were still felt to be distant anonymous ex-
ploiters, knocking down the price of farm goods and providing manufac-
tured necessities on their own terms.
The caused by these divisions on foreign policy, coinciding with
strife
divisions which had already arisen at home, was intensified by two facts :

first, the United States had made a treaty with France in 1778 which, if

applied literally, would bring her into the war against England; and sec-
ond, the deeds and manners of the British Government were such that it
was hard for England's friends to defend her effectively.
The first crisis came with the arrival of Citizen Genet as Minister from
the French Republic, an event which coincided with Washington's neu-
trality proclamation.* Genet's instructions were to use America as a base
for privateering, and to recruit troops for the conquest of Louisiana and
Florida, "and perhaps Canada." Luckily he was a silly man who
. . .

overplayed his hand and tried openly to turn the American people against
Washington and against the neutrality proclamation. Had he been wiser
he might have created enough trouble to make war with England a cer-
tainty; but within a few months even Jefferson turned against him, fearing
that he might discredit the whole anti-Hamilton party if they allowed him
to attach himself to their cause. In August, 1793, the Cabinet voted unani-

mously to request his recall. Since the French Government showed that it
would be pleased to execute him, he was allowed to settle in New York
state, where he married the daughter of Governor Clinton.
Jefferson was firm for the policy of peace, knowing that America might
be destroyed if she went to war divided and weak, and with her new gov-
ernment not yet strongly founded but he was equally firm for the cause of
;

France, which he called "the most sacred cause that ever man was engaged
in." Hamilton, on the other hand, saw the French Revolution as the re-
turn of anarchy and night. He feared Jefferson would create a similar
*
April 22, 1793. The Administration accepted Hamilton's thesis that the French,
having changed their form of government and killed their king, could not demand
the fulfilment of contracts made with the abolished government and the murdered
king. Jefferson, although he persuaded Washington not to use the word "neutrality,"
agreed that the United States should not go to war to help France.
76 The Price of Union

chaos in America, if he were allowed to try out his theories as to man's

natural goodness; whereas Jefferson feared the Federalists would create a
miserable copy of the mother country king, aristocracy, national debt,
military burdens, and hopelessness for the poor. Only the presence of
Washington prevented the immediate clash of parties.
Meanwhile, it was a question whether England would allow Washington
to have peace, would allow America the necessary years to found herself
solidly. The British Government did not want war, but scorned incapable of
behaving toward America in a way to make peace possible. If the British
had planned to reconquer America they might have been wise to hamper
American commerce with irritating restrictions, to impress American sail-
ors, to insult American diplomats, and in general to keep the pot of hatred
boiling; but the British did all these things, not as a policy, but as a man-
nerism. They simply could not bring themselves to take the ex-colonies
seriously, which was a pity, because there is no one who would rather be
taken seriously than an ex-colonial unless it be a colonial.
Similarly, if had planned to reconquer America they might
the British
have been wise behave as they did about the Northwest army posts. Ac-
to

cording to the Treaty of 1783, the British were to evacuate these posts at
once. They had not done so by 1794. They had excuses for remaining,
since the Americans had also failed to live up to all the terms of the treaty.
Nevertheless, it was not wise to remain unless they wanted war, for so long
as British troops were in those posts the Indians would feel encouraged to
resist the encroachment of the white man. If the world were the just world
of Jefferson's imagination, no people would ever treat their neighbors as
the Americans treated the Indians but the world is cruel. It was clear that
;

the Indians were doomed to suffer the customary fate of the weak, and that
the Americans intended to take from the Indians any land they wanted at
any time. Indian resistance could only take the form of occasional mas-
sacre and torture; by clinging to the frontier posts for a few years the
British gave courage to the Indians and thus increased the frequency of
such outbreaks. It was not the way to improve Anglo- American relations.
For reasons such as these Washington saw little hope of peace unless he
could negotiate a fair treaty with the British. In the spring of 1794 he sent
John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States and one of the authors of
The Federalist, as envoy extraordinary to the Court of St. James's. It was
not an ideal choice. Jay was a good and wise man; but he was vain and
easily flattered, a defect in a diplomat. The British report on Jay said: "He
can bear any opposition to what he advances, provided that regard is
shown to his abilities. Mr. Jay's weak side is M
r. Jay" Taking advantage

of this information, and of some wholly unauthorized statements made by

Hamilton to the British Minister at Philadelphia, the British negotiated a
treaty which was a victory for their diplomacy and which has harmed the
iv. The First President 77

relations between the two countries ever American

since, for it started the
legend that English diplomats are inhumanly competent and never to be
trusted.
The treaty did secure the evacuation of the Northwest posts; it wisely
referred boundary problems, uncollected debts, and British spoliations on
American commerce to settlement by mixed commissions; but it said noth-

ing about impressment, or about indemnity for slaves seized during the
Revolutionary War, or about the Orders in Council whereby the British
exercised the right to capture French property in American vessels and the
right to treat food as contraband. It was these Orders in Council which
seemed, to the pro-French party in America, to make the United States an
unwilling ally of Britain in her war upon the Revolution. The Jay Treaty
was harsh. It would not have been accepted by a nation which felt itself
strong enough to fight. Washington had to make a grim decision before
submitting it to the Senate.
He knew that if he did so the Francophiles would accuse him of treason,
and many moderate men would accuse his Administration of incom-
petence. The people sensed that the summer of 1794 was a favorable time
for making a treaty with England, because her war against France was
going badly. If an onerous treaty emerged from a promising situation, it
must be somebody's fault; and there was no doubt who would be blamed.
Yet Washington feared that if he suppressed the treaty and announced
that it was unacceptable war would result. He was doubtful whether his
five-year-old country could survive a war. "Sure I am," he wrote, "if this
country is preserved in tranquillity twenty years longer, it may bid defiance
in a just cause to any power whatever; such in that time will be its popu-
lation, wealth and resources."
In sadness, and in knowledge of what was to come, he sent the treaty
to the Senate. Needless to say, although the Senate met in secret the terms
were quickly divulged. A cry of rage and pain went up from the country.
Washington was execrated; Jay was burned in effigy; Edmund Randolph,
who had succeeded Jefferson as Secretary of State, opposed ratification.

Bad as the treaty was [writes Henry Adams], both in its omissions and
in its admissions, as a matter of foreign relations, these defects were al-
most trifles when compared with its mischievous results at home. It
thrust a sword into the body politic. . .
Nothing could have so effec-
.

tually arrayed the two great domestic parties in sharply defined opposi-
tion to each other, and nothing could have aroused more bitterness of
personal feeling. In recent times there has been a general disposition to
explain away and to soften down the opinions and passions of that day;
to throw a veil over their violence. Such treatment of history
. . .

makes both parties ridiculous. The two brilliant men who led the two
great divisions of national thought were not mere declaimers; they
78 The Price of Union

never for a moment misunderstood each other; they were in deadly

earnest, and no compromise between them ever was or ever will be pos-
sible. Mr. Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democ-

racy, and he would rather have let the world perish than that this
principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail.
Mr. Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop
its progress. The partial truce which the first Administration of Wash-

ington had imposed on both parties, although really closed by the re-
tirement of Mr. Jefferson from the Cabinet, was finally broken only by
the arrival of Mr. Jay's treaty. 12

In the end, the majesty of Washington's influence prevailed. The treaty

was accepted by the Senate, but without a vote to spare. The treaty, how-
ever, contained provisions which could only be carried out by an appropri-
ation from Congress. The House of Representatives caused a constitutional
crisis by claiming the right to refuse the appropriation unless it too were

satisfied that the treaty, though harsh, was a necessity. Here was one of the
weak points in the theory of the division of powers. According to the Con-
stitution,Congress possesses all legislative powers; but the President, with
the consent of the Senate, has the power to make treaties which, like the
laws of Congress, are the supreme law of the land. So it would seern that
the Congress does not possess all legislative powers. As Albert Gallatin
said during the House debate on the Jay Treaty, in March, 1 796:

If the treaty-making power is not limited by existing laws, or if it

repeals the laws that clash with it, or if the Legislature is obliged to re-
peal the laws so clashing, then the legislative power in fact resides in the
President and Senate, and they can, by employing an Indian tribe, pass
any law under the color of a treaty.
The argument could not be met, so for the time being it was dodged.
After months of wrangling, the House passed the necessary appropriations.
It was not until 1868, when the treaty for the purchase of Alaska came be-
fore the House on the question of appropriating the necessary money, that
the constitutional point was settled. The Administration in 1868 admitted
the right of the House of Representatives to call for papers, to discuss the
merits of the treaty, and to refuse appropriations if it considered the treaty
inconsistent with the Constitution or with the policy of the country.* Pre-
sumably the precedent stands. Presumably the outside world, which was
surprised in 1919 to learn that the President could not make a treaty alone,
may one day have to acquire the further knowledge that the President and
the Senate cannot make a treaty together, if enabling legislation is re-
quired.
*
Washington's Administration had tried, inconclusively, to stand on the assertion
that "The House of Representatives have nothing to do with the treaty but provide
*
for its execution.'
iv. The First President 79

The Jay Treaty was negotiated in November, 1794; it received the

assent of the Senate in June, 1795; the House voted the necessary ap-
propriations at the end of April, 1796. During all those months George
Washington was repeatedly accused of having betrayed his country. To-
day,we can salute the President who chose to be called a traitor rather
than risk needless danger for his country. What shall we say of the British
statesmen who thought it clever to put George Washington in such a posi-
tion? We shall see other examples of this cleverness; but we shall never
know what trouble the world might have been spared if Parliament had
followed the younger Pitt in 1783, immediately after the War of Inde-
pendence, when he introduced a bill for unconditional free trade between
England and America. If relations had begun with such a brilliant gesture
of friendship there would never have been a Jay Treaty; there might never
have been a War of 1812; there would probably never have been an anti-
British tradition in America.*

In the fourth summer of his first term, Washington wished to announce

that he was not a candidate for re-election. He wrote Madison a letter out-
lining the message he would like to give to the country, and received a long
reply. His friends and advisers then persuaded Washington to accept a
second term. Four years later he sent to Hamilton his original letter, and
also Madison's reply, asking Hamilton to draft a message. In the end
Hamilton made two drafts, one with the help of Jay. Washington preferred
the first, and after further corrections and omissions he issued his Farewell
Address on September 17, 1796.** In these last words of advice to his
people, Washington makes clear the main dangers which the new govern-
ment had met.
* The
Jay Treaty did one favor for Washington : it secured him a satisfactory
treaty with Spain. Ever since the close of the Revolutionary War, Spain had denied
America's right to navigate the Mississippi, and of course had denied the right of
deposit and reshipment in the Spanish port of New Orleans. The result was a
western discontent so violent that it threatened to lead either to secession or to a
war with Spain. Jay's treaty made the Spaniards fear that Britain and America
might one day get together to attack Spain in the New World. So in 1795 Godoy,
the prime minister, made a treaty granting the right of navigation, and even the
right of deposit for three years with the stipulation that if the latter right should
be withdrawn in New Orleans, Spain would assign to the Americans "on another
part of the banks of the Mississippi, an equivalent establishment." This calmed the
fears of the Westerners until France appeared at New Orleans with a new and
more deadly threat.
** It is interesting that the three authors of The Federalist collaborated once
again on this remarkable document, although Madison and Hamilton were now in
opposite camps. The ideas in the address were all chosen and imposed by Washing-
ton, yet Hamilton must have agreed on every point.
80 The Price of Union

The first was the danger of secession.

It is of infinite moment [he says] that you should properly estimate

the immense value of your national union to your collective and indi-
vidual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and im-
movable attachment to it ; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of
it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for

preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may

its

suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and in-
dignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate
any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties
which now link together the various parts.
The second was the danger of weakening the central government.

Remember especially [he says], that for the efficient management of

your common interests in a country so extensive as ours a government of
as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is in-
dispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers
properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little
else but a name where the government is too feeble to withstand the

enterprise of faction, to confine each member of the society within the

limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and
tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

The third was the danger of political parties.

I have already intimated to you [he says] the danger of parties in the
State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical
discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn
you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit
of party generally. ... It serves always to distract the public councils
and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with
ill-founded jealousies and false alarms ; kindles the animosity of one part
against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

The fourth was the danger of playing favorites among foreign nations.

Permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations [he says],

and passionate attachments for others should be excluded. ... In
place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated.
The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an
habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity
or to its affection, each of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its
duty and its interest. Against the insidious wiles of foreign influ-
. . .

ence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free

people ought to be constantly awake. But that jealousy, to be use-
. . .

ful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influ-
ence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. ... The great rule
iv. The First President 81

of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our com-

mercial relations to have with them as little political connection as pos-
sible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be
fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. ... It is our true

policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the

foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it.

These are not the sole themes of the Farewell Address; but they are the
major themes. We have seen that each of them is based on the experience
of Washington's two terms. The advice could not be literally followed.
America has not been spared secession, or weak government, or party pas-
sion, or foreign entanglements of a type to create disunity at home. But
in her earliest, weakest days Washington prevented any of these dangers
from destroying her. The West did not secede; the powers of the central
government were not diminished; the country was not distracted by party
hatreds before she had the strength to resist those fierce fires; and neither
worship for France nor suspicion for England was allowed to create a
needless war. Washington gave America the time to grow, to find herself,
which he so clearly saw she required. He thus became the father of his
country in peace as well as in war.
On March 4, 1797, Washington attended the inauguration of John
Adams as President, and five days later he left Philadelphia* for Mount
Vernon. The following year, when war with France threatened, Washing-
ton accepted the appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the American
Army; but the war did not come, so Washington had no further military
duties. He gave the last two years of his life to restoring order on his
estates.
In December, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he developed an inflam-
mation of the throat, following on a bad cold. Within two days he was
dead.
*
Congress adjourned at New York in the summer of 1790, and met for the first
time in Congress Hall, Philadelphia, in December, 1790. Philadelphia remained
the capital city until November, 1800, when the government moved to the emptiness
and mud of Washington, on the Potomac. The city had been planned on an imperial
scale by Major L'Enfant, a French engineer; but in 1800 it was still a clearing be-
tween the forest and the river, with one wing of the Capitol finished, a few brick
houses, and a scattering of wooden huts: "This famed metropolis," as Tom Moore
called it, "where fancy sees Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees."
 V

The Birth of Parties

JL HE CONSTITUTION, as we have seen, was made at Philadelphia by men

who had a common economic interest. They were mostly merchants, ship-
pers, lawyers, planters, speculators in land and in paper. Such men prefer
a government with sufficient authority to enforce contracts at home, and
with sufficient standing abroad to raise loans and make commercial
treaties. The frontiersmen and the small farmers (who were usually in

debt) were satisfied with the weak Confederation; but they were little
represented at Philadelphia, and their efforts to defeat ratification were a
failure.
The economic interests of the constitution-makers were not identical.
They clashed at many points; but the delegates were astute enough "to
disregard differences and concentrate on the one thing essential to their
several purposes, in this case an integrated, national, economic society of
which the sine qua non was the central authority the Constitution pro-
vided." 1 The disregarding of differences lasted until the Constitution was
ratified and the government was safe. Then new alignments began to form
the sign being Madison's opposition, in the House of Representa-
first

tives, to the plans of the co-author of The Federalist.

Such opposition need not have bred political parties. Madison, who
feared parties and thought them unnecessary, knew that there could be no
free government without pressure groups; but he thought the groups
would form brief coalitions to deal with issues on which their interests
were alike, and would then dissolve the partnership, ready for new align-
ments and new issues. He hoped that the clash of sectional interests be-
tween the pressure groups would make it impossible to form a coalition for
radical aims. The size of America would enforce conservatism, for by the
time each group in a coalition had made the compromises which were
necessary for unity the surviving program would be cautious and un-
alarming.
Such were the hopes not only of Madison but of the majority of the
Fathers.They were right in predicting loose associations of pressure groups
and regional interests; they were right in predicting that such associations
would make for conservatism but they were wrong in thinking that when
;

82
v. The Birth of Parties 83

a group had come together to form a majority for a single bill or a single
protest it could then afford to dissolve. Because of the growing power of
the presidency, and the need to control that office if a national policy was
to be defended or defeated, the groups found that they had to maintain
their uneasy partnerships, that they had to form permanent parties, each
with own traditions, its own saints and martyrs, its own
its fierce battle-
cries. The centrifugal forces in American life were so strong that nothing
could have held these groups together except the prize of power, the
knowledge that if they did not compose their differences and find a
common ground they would never control the Administration and never
get even a fraction of a loaf. The same knowledge kept them from forming
many parties, and held them to two. For if the President was an astute
politician (as often happened) he could gather into the party which was
in power such a coalition of interests that it could not be upset except by a
coalition of all the dissenting interests. And it soon became clear that a
successful party, in spite of its saints and slogans, must be so flexible, so
little committed to dogmas or to programs, that it could accommodate
any group which was willing to make concessions to the prejudices of the
other groups in order to acquire or to retain office.
Conservatism, compromise, deference to regional bias, these were the
prerequisites for a successful national party. The local groups which com-
posed the party might be as extreme as they liked in their own districts;
but whenthey joined with the other local groups to act nationally they had
to leave their fanaticisms athome. This was the price of unity in so huge
a nation. By learning to unite themselves, the parties learned to preserve
the Union. When the party compromises broke down in the name of prin-
ciples, the Union was shattered.

The made by the gentry, and the Administrations of

Constitution was
Washington and Adams were the rule of the gentry. Had it been possible
for this class, which had seized power with the conservative reaction of
1785 to 1788, to "keep the people in their place," to repel successfully the
new forces of democracy, the country would soon have known civil war.
America was saved by a split within the ruling class itself, and the conse-
quent birth of an opposition party. "It was the great unconscious achieve-
ment of Thomas Jefferson," writes Henry Jones Ford, "to open constitu-
tional channels of political agitation, to start the processes by which the
2
development of our constitution is carried on." Immediately the tensions
and the regional grievances, which might have bred revolution, found re-
lief in party activity. Both parties were soon bidding for democratic sup-
84 The Price of Union

port. "This was the salvation of the government. Change became possible
without destruction." 3
Jefferson sensed all this, at least by the year 1 790. He was not disturbed
by the violence of party politics, because he felt confident that so long as
opposition was not suppressed the violence would resolve itself in moderate
action and in compromise. He was almost alone, however, in his refusal
to be alarmed. Most of the
leaders of the day agreed with Vice- President
Adams when he "There is nothing I dread so much as the division
said :

of the Republic into two great parties, each under its leader. . This, in . .

my humble opinion, is to be feared as the greatest political evil under our

Constitution." 4 Since the first warning of the coming division was the ap-
pearance of a rancorous political journalism, the Fathers can be excused
for some of their fears.
The trouble began in the autumn of 1790, when the Virginia Assembly
adopted a resolution opposing the assumption by the federal government
of the wartime debts of the states. Patrick Henry introduced the resolu-
tion, denouncing assumption as "repugnant to the Constitution of the
United States, as it goes to the exercise of a power not expressly granted
to the general government." This was followed a few days later by an even
stronger Protest and Remonstrance, which said that all powers not ex-
pressly given in the Constitution were reserved to the states. "In an agri-
cultural country like this," said the Remonstrance, ". to erect, and
. .

concentrate, and perpetuate a large monied interest, is a measure which

your memorialists apprehend must in the course of human events produce
one or other of two evils, the prostration of agriculture at the feet of com-
merce, or a change in the present form of federal government, fatal to the
existence of American liberty."
Here was the first revolt of Virginia, directed against the first act of the
Hamiltonians a clear statement of the conflict between South and North,
:

the farmers and the slaveholding planters against the merchants and bank-
ers, the men with a feudal disdain for money against the men who
understood business, credit, finance. Hamilton saw at once the farthest
implications of the Virginia Remonstrance. This was nullification, the
doctrine that each state can decide for itself whether an act of the federal
government is constitutional. The sanction for nullification is secession:
war, or the death of the federal plan. Hamilton wrote to Chief Justice
John Jay of the Supreme Court: "This is the first symptom of a spirit
which must either be killed, or it will kill the Constitution of the United
States. I send the resolutions to you, that it may be considered what ought
to be done." Jay did nothing. There was nothing he could do ; but he com-
forted himself (and vainly sought to comfort Hamilton) with the thought
that such talk would weaken the influence of the states rather than of the
federal government. He did not know that nullification, and "strict con-
v. The Birth of Parties 85

struction" of the Constitution, were to be rallying cries for the political

party which Jefferson was building and which Hamilton regarded as a
deadly threat to America.*
In the same autumn of 1790, Hamilton took steps to counter the threat.
In October of that year, and again in January, 1791, Hamilton's cash
book shows loans of $100 to a certain John Fenno, editor of the Gazette of
the United States. Shortly thereafter Fenno began to receive Treasury
contracts for government printing. 5 The Gazette, which had been founded
in 1789, was supposed to be a semi-official newspaper, devoted chiefly to
government affairs. Before the end of 1791 it had become a defense of
Hamilton and his works and plans, and thus an attack on Jefferson and
Madison.
In May, 1791, Jefferson wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph, enclosing
a copy of the Gazette, which he described as a "paper of pure Toryism, dis-
seminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of
the influence of the people." He added that he and Madison were trying
to persuade Philip Freneau, the poet, to move to Philadelphia and set up
"a weekly or half-weekly paper" in support of their program. They were
successful, and Freneau became editor of the National Gazette. He also
became a clerk at the Department of State, with a salary of $250 a year.*"*
There was now a party press, although there were as yet no official
parties. With the advent of political journalism, all restraint and all
politeness departed from politics; minor differences became major; small
hostilities became lifelong feuds; the genial air of Philadelphia was poi-
soned by pumped-up hatreds. Washington saw the deterioration with sad-
* For the most
part, the group which is out of power in America tends to favor
"strict construction." (New England talked nullification and threatened secession
when Jefferson became President.) A written, federal constitution, which divides
power between local governments and a limited central government, incites the
Opposition to declare that every act it dislikes is unconstitutional. If such an act is
disliked by a majority throughout a state or region, the temptation is strong for the
citizens to say that they will disobey the act, not out of lawlessness but out of a
special reverence for law, out of zeal to protect the Constitution. Yet the lesson of
the ruinous Civil War has been so well learned in America that it is many years
since regional discontents have led to talk of secession. The political parties have
learned to minimize such discontents, sometimes by concessions, sometimes by
ignoring the evasion of the law. As usual when a political problem has been allayed,
the absence of friction is now taken for granted. The party system is given no credit;
it is merely abused for the delays, the seeming inefficiencies, the endless regional

compromises, which are the cost of exorcising the demon of secession.

** The Gazette
of the United States was founded in 1789 and moved from New
York to Philadelphia with the federal government. At first it was a semi- weekly ; but
in December, 1793 (after two months of suspended publication because of yellow
fever in Philadelphia), it became a daily. The maximum circulation was about
1400. The year it moved to Philadelphia the Gazette was printed in three columns
on a single sheet of paper, 17 by 21 inches. Freneau's National Gazette, first issued
on October 31, 1791, was a semi-weekly with a maximum circulation of about
1500. In the year 1790 there were 92 newspapers in the United States, of which
8 were dailies; in 1800 there were 235 newspapers, of which 24 were dailies.
86 The Price of Union

ness, and with forebodings of trouble; but not even Washington's influence
could prevent party strife or could make such strife pretty. Only Jefferson,
who understood politics by instinct, knew that the turmoil and the abuse
would diminish tensions and make for peace, not anarchy.
In the summer of 1792 Hamilton himself turned journalist and wrote
savage attacks on Jefferson, which appeared in the Gazette of the United
States. He was quickly answered by Madison in the National Gazette. Al-

though both men used pseudonyms the public was not fodied; it watched
with mixed emotions while the Secretary of the Treasury made vicious
accusations against the Secretary of State, and was answered with equal
viciousness by the co-author of The Federalist, now the most important
member of Congress.* When Washington sought to impose a little dignity
on the brawl,Jefferson and Hamilton offered to resign. They were with
persuaded to continue serving the President whom they both
difficulty
honored; they could not be persuaded to pretend agreement with each
other.
Under such conditions nothing but dictatorship could have prevented
the birth of parties. The opposed interests existed ; the opposed theories of
federal government existed; the natural leaders (also opposed in tempera-
ment and in philosophy of life) existed; and foreign relations, which might
have cut across domestic feuds, in fact exacerbated them. The only re-
maining problem was how the parties would be organized, and when. The
answer was determined by the fact that New York State became the first
critical battleground.

It was clear that Virginia would follow Jefferson and the agrarians who
feared a strong central government it was clear that Massachusetts would
;

follow Hamilton and the friends of commerce and capitalism. Much of the
South could be expected to go along with Virginia, and much of New Eng-
land with Massachusetts. In Pennsylvania there was a majority of true
democrats, who understood what Jefferson meant, and there was one great

* Years
later, Madison explained the split with Hamilton on the ground that
the latter had made plain "his purpose and endeavour to administrate the Govern-
ment into a thing totally different from that which he and I both knew perfectly
well had been understood and intended by the Convention which framed it, and
by the people adopting it." (Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 457.) This is
doubtless true. Hamilton on the one side, Jefferson and Madison on the other, felt
that the nation's life depended on molding the federal government according to
their own theories. There could be no better ground for disagreement; but only
the rash and irresponsible childhood of journalism could explain the fury with which
the disagreement was expressed.
v. The Birth of Parties 87

who became Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury.

leader, Albert Gallatin,
But what of New York? As usual, the politics of that state were involved
and murky a fact which did not trouble Jefferson, for he was as com-
fortable in the midst of political complications as Br'er Rabbit in the midst
of a briar patch.
The two Senators from New York were Rufus King, a wise and mod-
erate Hamiltonian, and General Schuyler, Hamilton's father-in-law. Their
votes were vital for the support of the Treasury measures in Congress. In
the spring of 1791, General Schuyler (who by lot had drawn the short
term when the Senate first met*) expected to be reappointed by the New
York legislature. To everyone's surprise, and to Hamilton's fury, Schuyler
was rejected and Aaron Burr "the Mephistopheles of politics," the man
who was to be the central figure in the two great political melodramas of
Jefferson's presidency was chosen in his place. Hamilton assumed that
this mortal threat to his program must be the result of plots and tricks by
Burr. He responded with a violence which led by successive steps to his
own death, in 1804, on the dueling-ground at Weehawken.
What had happened, in fact, was something very simple, and very char-
acteristic of New York State politics the powerful Livingston clan, who
:

had supported Hamilton in the fight against Governor Clinton for ratifica-
tion of the Constitution, and who had hitherto backed his bills in Congress,

changed sides because they had not received the patronage they expected.
Rufus King, instead of a Livingston, had become the second New York
Senator; John Jay, instead of a Livingston, had become Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court. The family felt neglected even in local appointments;
so with the help of a little urging by the wily Burr they struck at Hamilton

through Schuyler, joining hands with his old enemy, the Governor.
As a result of this turnabout by one of the baronial houses, the spring of
1791 saw two factions of almost equal importance in New York State: the
aristocratic faction of the De Lanceys, the Van Rensselaers, and General

Schuyler; and the somewhat more professional faction of Governor George

Clinton, the Livingstons, and Aaron Burr. The second group was both
anti-Hamiltonian and discontented, and thus of double interest to Jeffer-
son.Although Clinton was governor, his opposition to the Constitution
(and to Hamilton personally) had been so inveterate that he received no
patronage from Washington's Administration. He was prepared, therefore,
put his new party into power in return for a reasonable
to help Jefferson
share of loaves andfishes. So in the summer of 1791, Jefferson and Madi-

son took what they described as a "botanizing excursion" up the Hudson

* The Constitution
required that one third of the Senate be chosen every second
year; so the first Senate had to divide itself into two-year men, four-year men, and
six-year men.
88 The Price of Union

river the river of New

York politics which runs from Albany (the state
capital) in the north to Tammany Hall in the south.* There they laid
the foundation for the longest-lived, the most incongruous, and the most
American history: the alliance of southern
effective political alliance in

agrarians and northern city bosses.

Jefferson and his Virginians stood for a theory of government; so did
Massachusetts and the Hamiltonians but New York, as Henry Adams
;

points out in a famous passage,

cared little for the metaphysical subtleties of Massachusetts and Vir-

. . . New York was indifferent whether the nature of the United
finia.
tates was single or multiple, whether they were a nation or a league.
Leaving this class of question to other states which were deeply inter-
ested in them. New York remained constant to no political theory.
There society, in spite of its aristocratic mixture, was democratic by
instinct; and in abandoning its alliance with New England in order to
join Virginia and elect Jefferson to the Presidency, it pledged itself to
principles of no kind, least of all to Virginia doctrines. The Virginians
aimed at maintaining a society so simple that purity should suffer no
danger, and corruption gain no foothold; and never did America wit-
ness a stranger union than when Jefferson, the representative of ideal
purity, allied himself with Aaron Burr, the Livingstons and Clintons, in
the expectation of fixing the United States in a career of simplicity and
virtue. George Clinton, indeed, a States'-rights Republican of the old
school, understood and believed the Virginia doctrines; but as for Aaron
Burr, Edward Livingston, De Witt Clinton, and Ambrose Spencer
young men whose brains were filled with dreams of a different sort
what had such energetic democrats to do with the plough, or what share
had the austerity of Cato and the simplicity of Ancus Martius in their
ideals? The political partnership between the New York Republicans
and the Virginians was from the first that of a business firm; and no
more curious speculation could have been suggested to the politicians
of 1800 than the question whether New York would corrupt Virginia, or
Virginia check the prosperity of New York.
6

Was Jefferson wrong in seeking help from men who pledged themselves
"to principles ofno kind, least of all to Virginia doctrines?" The question
may be put another way would Jefferson have been right to prefer purity
:

to power, when he believed that his country's fate was at stake? Pending
an answer to the riddle, it is worth noting again that the coalition of local
groups which Jefferson created is the standard pattern for American po-
litical parties.The national party is always a loose alliance of local parties,
* Aaron Burr was already discovering the possible political uses of the Sons of
St. Tammany. Tammany had begun as a benevolent organization. Burr induced it
to become less benevolent and more of an organization. Although never a member
he controlled Tammany from 1797 until his removal from politics, teaching it how
to "get out the vote" and how to circumvent property qualifications for voters.
v. The Birth of Parties 89

held together precariously by self-interest or by a shared hostility. In every

presidential election countless votes are determined by state politics,
neighborhood politics, church, trade union, or racial-minority politics
none of which may have any bearing upon the alleged issues of the cam-
paign.The President, after he is elected, must do his best to impose upon
innumerable local groups (chiefly concerned with their parochial troubles,
demands, and hatreds) a policy which is in the national interest.
This conflict between central authority and local government is a prob-
lem in all free countries; but it is a problem of special acuteness in the
United States because the size and the federal structure of the nation
make for the autonomy and the self-absorption of state and county ma-
chines. Also, the American Constitution denies to the President authority
over his party-associates in Congress. He is the chief executive, and he is
charged with recommending national policy; but he has no official power
recommendations. The members of Congress represent par-
to enforce his
ticular districts, or particular states. They are elected by the local party,
not by the national party. It is their business to know the local problems,
not the national problems. The best policy for the nation may be a trouble-
some and unpopular policy in certain districts. In that case the members
for those districts will either oppose the policy or they will cease to repre-
sent the districts. From Jefferson (the first party manager) to Franklin
Roosevelt (the most ingenious), all Presidents have struggled to find a
working relationship between the national view and the views of the Con-
gressional districts. To help them in this Sisyphean task they have a loose
party machine and loose party discipline.

On December 31, 1793, Jefferson at last resigned from the Cabinet, and
thenceforth gave all his time to political organization. The following year

Hamilton resigned. He was a poor man and he wished to return to his law
practice in New York. He also wished to have more freedom for the active
work of politics. He knew that his useful days in the Cabinet were done.
Meanwhile, as soon as it had become clear that the Jeffersonians would
have a majority in the lower House when the Third Congress convened in
March, 1793, Hamilton's enemies began an attack against him* which
* William Branch Giles of
Virginia, who was to quarrel with all men but Jefferson,
and who in his last days was to betray even that loyalty, introduced the famous
House resolutions inquiring into Hamilton's conduct of the Treasury (January 23
and February 27, 1793). The resolutions were drafted by Jefferson, and one of
Giles's major points was based on a memorandum by Madison. (Schachner,
Alexander Hamilton, pp. 312-13.) The result was a complete vindication for Hamil-
ton, but also a heavy burden on his time and health. If the Virginian trio could
not disgrace him, they intended at least to wear him down.
90 The Price of Union

must be admired for power and unscrupulousness, and which did not
its

slacken until its office. The purpose of the attack was

victim retired from
both to blacken Hamilton's character and to prevent him from doing his
work. The Jeffersonians in Congress harrassed the Treasury with demands
for information, and with investigations for incompetence and thievery;
they carried on a whispering campaign against Hamilton's honor; they
accused him of turning the country into a monarchy, of turning himself
into a Prime Minister, and of destroying the federal system with his un-
constitutional money bills. If the fury and the vindictiveness seem strange
today, it is only because we have forgotten the stakes.
The real object of the attack was the Executive, of which Hamilton was
the symbol. Sensible politicians who were seeking the votes of their neigh-
bors did not often attack Washington by name; but Hamilton was of
foreign and illegitimate birth; he was openly contemptuous of the masses;
and he was domineering toward his opponents. He also held the most im-
portant executive job under Washington, so he became the ideal target.
Hamilton and his friends believed that the government must fail with-
out effective, concentrated leadership; they believed that the heads of
departments under the President should constitute a ministry and should
give policy guidance to the Congress. Such guidance, they thought, would
receive full publicity, full criticism from the Congress and the public, and
would thus attain to full responsibility. Any other form of liaison between
Executive and Legislature must take place in the darkness or semi-dark-
ness, must consist of political pressures, promises, or deals, and must there-
fore be irresponsible. This was the Federalist solution to the problem of
enforcing national policy upon a parish-minded Congress.
During Washington's first term the Jeffersonians were slow to see the
dangers of the Federalist doctrine. They did not fear a powerful Executive
until Hamilton proved what the Executive could do for commerce and
finance. When they woke to their danger, Hamilton's plans were half-

completed but the agrarians were in time to prevent the second half the
;

plan for industry. They then sought to ward off future surprises by de-
manding that Congress become the policy-making body. They wanted the
federal government to be inactive. They did not want its help; they
wanted to be safe from its harm. They felt that Congress, composed of the
representatives of innumerable communities, would be a passive policy-
maker, would be laissez-faire, whereas the Executive had already proved
itself centralizing, dominating, and aggressive. So by way of breaking the

power of the President and his Cabinet they undertook to break Hamilton.
Such were the motives for the fierce onslaught. The stakes were the con-
trol of the federal government during its formative years. Each side felt
that if it could hold power it could set the pattern for the American
future. Life was not in fact so simple, nor the future so easy to control;
v. The Birth of Parties 91

but neither group can be blamed for straining to seize what seemed a
magic chance. Against the background of such a hope, the passions of
those days of party-building are not inordinate.

The presidential election of 1796, the third such election, was the first to
be contested by formal, or semi-formal, parties with regular party candi-
dates. There were no official nominations. The candidates were chosen by
consultation among the national and state leaders; the gentry, in other
words, were still in control. The anti-Hamiltonians were now officially
known as Republicans (or Democratic-Republicans) ; they supported
Jefferson and Burr for President and Vice-President. The Hamiltonians,
who kept the name of Federalists, nominated John Adams of Massachu-
setts and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. In so far as there was a
popular campaign issue, it was Jay's treaty, which the Federalists defended
and which the Republicans called a national disgrace.
Legally, the members of the electoral college had freedom of choice; but
it was impossible for them to exercise that choice if there were to be effec-

tive parties, so it was expected that men nominated by Federalist legis-

latures would vote for Adams and Pinckney, while men nominated by

Republican legislatures would vote for Jefferson and Burr. The plain pur-
pose of the Constitution was already disregarded. The first step had been
taken toward making the President, not the choice of an oligarchy, but
the tribune of the people. This was not yet understood ; indeed, the party
organization was still so primitive that Jefferson told Madison he preferred
not to have the nomination in case the decision had to be made by the
House of Representatives. 7 He was afraid his party might not be well
enough knit to bear the burden of government after so close an, election.
Onthe basis of this half-acknowledged party system, Adams won the
presidency with seventy-one electoral votes; but some of the second votes
of Federalist electors had been wasted on local favorites, instead of going
to Pinckney, so Jefferson received the next largest number of votes, and
became Vice-President.*
* See
Appendix for the constitutional provisions for the election of Vice-Presi-
dents. These provisions were changed, by constitutional amendment, in 1804.
 VI

The Failure of the Federalists

o,"N MARCH 4, 1797, when John Adams was inaugurated President of

the United States, Washington's noble bearing overshadowed the dumpy,
pompous little lawyer from Massachusetts. Yet Adams was undoubtedly
the second most important man in the making of the Revolution and the
winning of independence. And he shared with Washington a burning faith
in American destiny, not as an idle hope, but as a call to work and to re-
sponsibility. "The people in America," Adams wrote in 1787, in the
preface to his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United
States of America, "have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust
in their hands that Providence ever committed to so small a number since
the transgression of the first pair; if they betray their trust, their guilt will
merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the
indignation of heaven."
Adams's Puritanism, though seemingly typical in its effect on his char-
acter, was by no means orthodox Calvinism it was closer to the Unitarian-
;

ism of the younger generation in New England. At the age of twenty he

wrote in his diary:

. .
spent an hour in the beginning of the evening at Major Gardiner's
.

where it was thought that the design of Christianity was not to make
men good riddle-solvers, or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good
magistrates, and good subjects, good husbands and good wives, good
parents and good children, good masters and good servants. The follow-
ing questions may be answered some time or other, namely Where do
we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convo-
cations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscrip-
tions? and whole cartloads of other trumpery that we find religion
encumbered with in these days.

The passage is Miltonic in its rejection of institutions and its insistence on

an individual approach to the Bible. And in the letters of his old age,
after he had renewed his long-lapsed friendship with Jefferson, he wrote :

You and I have as much authority to settle these disputes as Swift,

Priestley, Dupuis, or the Pope; and if you will agree with me, we will
issue our bull, and enjoin it upon all these gentlemen to be silent till they
92
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 93

can tell us what matter

is, and what spirit is, and in the meantime to ob-
serve the commandments, and the sermon on the mount.
It is clear that no reverence for other men's opinions would restrain
John Adams from revolution.

Adams was born in 1736, in Massachusetts, where a certain Henry Adams

had been granted land a hundred years before. For three generations the
family had bred competent yeomen, but with John Adams it became a
nursery of greatness. During the next hundred and fifty years it produced
in direct descenttwo of America's chief statesmen, one of her leading
diplomats, and a great historian. And from John Adams to his great-
grandson they have had a common character: sarcastic, self-critical and
equally critical of others, learned, tireless in work, thin-skinned, stubborn,
suspicious, disinterested in public service.
John Adams was graduated from Harvard in 1755. He was intended for
the Church, but his temperament was wholly secular, and his distaste for
ecclesiastical forms or tradition would have made him a recalcitrant mem-
ber of the ministry. He chose the law instead. A few years later he married
Abigail (Quincy) Smith a woman of learning, humanity, spiritual eleva-
tion. She had powerful family connections, so the law practice began
also
to prosper. Adams would soon have grown rich something which none of
his descendants for the next two generations could take time from the
public service to accomplish if all his energies had not soon been ab-
sorbed in the quarrel with England.
In 1 765 the courts were closed as a result of a protest against the Stamp
Act. Adams wrote in his diary:

I was but just getting under sail and an embargo is laid upon
. . .

the ship. Thirty years of my life are passed in preparations for business;
I have had poverty to struggle with, envy and jealousy and malice of
enemies to encounter, no friends, or but few to assist me, so that I have
groped in dark obscurity till of late, and had but just become known,
and gained a small degree of reputation, when this execrable project
was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of America in general, and of
Great Britain.

It is amusing to compare this outburst with the facts: Adams had re-
ceived the best education Massachusetts could offer and had married the
most remarkable woman in the colony. He had rich friends and patrons.
England, having asked for aid from the colonies and having received noth-
ing, was trying (unwisely, to be sure) to raise money to help carry her
94 The Price of Union

debt of 140,000,000 much of it incurred in the defense of the American

colonies.But to John Adams it was all a plot on the part of King and
Parliament to frustrate his young career, already hideously handicapped
by "envy and jealousy and malice of enemies." Such are the suspicions and
easy grievances which create a good leader of revolution.
In 1774 Adams attended the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia,
where was accomplished except the Declaration of Rights and a non-
little

exportation, non-importation, and non-consumption agreement. Adams

was impatient of such moderation, and fiercely impatient of the long-
drawn-out debates. "I am wearied to death/' he wrote, "of the life I lead.
The business of the Congress is tedious beyond expression. This assembly
is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man, an orator,
a critic, a statesman; and therefore, every man upon every question, must
show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities. The consequence
of this is, that business is drawn and spun out to an immeasurable length."
This seems a fair description of all political meetings, in spite of Adams's

hopeful statement that it was "like no other that ever existed." Yet the
talk and the lack of action were almost more than he could bear. "Should
the opposition be suppressed," he wrote, "should this country submit,
what infamy and ruin! God forbid! Death in any form is less terrible." In
a letter to his wife he says :
"Frugality, economy, parsimony must be our
refuge. . . . Let us eat potatoes and drink water. Let us wear canvas and
un-dressed sheepskin, rather than submit to the unrighteous and igno-
minious domination that is prepared for us."
Adams curbed himself as best he could during the meetings of the First
Congress. He knew that the other colonial leaders were not so impetuous
as himself and that he might scare them into inaction if he kept reminding
them that they were headed for war. The following year, when the Second
Continental Congress met and he could at last talk openly of independ-
ence, Adams became the leader of the war party. He was a member of the
committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence, and although he
suggested that Jefferson with his ready pen should do the writing, Adams
himself was the strength of his side in the debate. He then commented
characteristically :

you imagine that I expect this Declaration will ward off calamities
If
from this country, you are much mistaken. A bloody conflict we are
destined to endure. ... If you imagine that I flatter myself with happi-
ness and halcyon days after a separation from Great Britain, you are
mistaken again. I do not expect that our new government will be so
quiet as I could wish, nor that happy harmony, confidence and affec-
tion between the Colonies, that every good American ought to study and
pray for, for a long time. But freedom is a counter-balance for poverty,
discord, and war, and more.
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 95

Adams's expectation of trouble and pain was never an expectation of

failure. On the strong rock of his pessimism he built a faith in the possi-
bilities of the future; but he knew that good could only be attained
by
hard and bitter work. He did not want his fellow countrymen to have too
much help in their travail, for fear they should not learn the lesson of
such work. In May, 1777, months before the British defeat at Saratoga
and the consequent French alliance, he wrote from Philadelphia:

I must confess that I am at a loss to determine whether it is good

policy in us to wish for a war between France and Britain. ... I don't
wish to be under obligations to any of them, and I am very unwilling
they should rob us of the glory of vindicating our own liberties.
It is a cowardly spirit in our countrymen which makes them pant
with so much longing expectation after a French war. I have very often
been ashamed to hear so many Whigs groaning and sighing with
despondency and whining out their fears that we must be subdued un-
less France would step in. Are we to be beholden to France for our
liberties?

He wantedthe Americans of his time to feel responsibility not only for

their country's freedom but for its farthest future. In his Defence of the
Constitutions, written when he was the first American Minister in London,
he describes the huge and populous country which he foresees, adding:

When we recollect that the wisdom or the folly, the virtue or the vice,
the liberty or servitude, of those millions now beheld by us ... are cer-
tainly to be influenced, perhaps decided, by the manners, examples,
principles, and political institutions of the present generation, that mind
must be hardened into stone that is not melted into reverence and awe.

There was small room for relaxation or delight in the world of John
Adams.

must study politics and war [he wrote from Paris in 1780], that my
I
sonsmay have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons
ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history
and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study
painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

It is
typical of the Puritan to feel that the arts are a decoration to life,
which may be studied after the hard work has been done, rather than a
revelation of the spirit and the needs of man, without a knowledge of
which the study of politics may prove
unrewarding. Poetry precedes prose
in the history of civilizations; a painting and music, a little tapestry
little

and porcelain, might have given to John Adams and to his heroic son the
two qualities they lacked humor, and sympathy for the frail flesh.
:
96 The Price of Union

After a brief trip to France in 1777-78, where he decided that Benjamin

Franklin needed no help in representing America, Adams became en-
grossed in the work of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. He
was largely responsible for the constitution which was accepted by the
citizens of his state in 1780, and was almost wholly responsible for its Bill
of Rights. Three years later the supreme judicial court of the state de-
clared that by virtue of the first article in that bill of rights slavery could
no longer exist in Massachusetts.
Late in 1779 Adams returned to France, thinking that peace negoti-
ations might soon be opened. When this proved a vain hope he went to
Holland, where he was recognized as Minister from the United States.
This was an important diplomatic victory which gave a new standing to
America in the eyes of Europe. In 1783 the peace conference was finally
convened and Adams returned to Paris, where he headed the American
mission which included Franklin and John Jay. Adams discovered that
hisFrench allies, who had been glad Empire, did
to help split the British
not wish the ex-colonies to grow too Their policy, he said, was "to
great.
deprive us of the grand fisheries, the Mississippi river, the western lands,
and to saddle us with the tories." So he ignored the French, whom he had
been told to consult on every point, and made a very favorable peace. The
terms are surprising in view of the fact that the British Navy still ruled the
seas and the British Army held New York, Charleston, Savannah, and
seven northwestern posts. Although several boundary lines were drawn
vaguely and ignorantly (and thus caused subsequent trouble), the Amer-
icans secured the Mississippi as their western boundary and the fishing
privileges in the waters of British North America which they had enjoyed
as British subjects. For this point Adams
fought long and alone, and his
victory made him a hero in New
England.
Adams's next mission was to make a commercial treaty with the British.
The negotiations were unsatisfactory; but in 1785 he was appointed
American Minister at the Court of St. James's.* He was treated coldly,
for he was not only an ex-rebel but he represented a government which, in
its foreign relations, was absurd. The hostile British Ministers could fairly

raise the question whether America under the Articles of Confederation

was a government at all, or whether Adams was merely the agent of a
league of jealous states. One thing only was clear: Whether America was
a nation or league, whether Congress was a government or a group of
* There is a plaque today on the bomb-ruined house at the northeast corner
of Grosvenor Square where Adams, the first American Minister, lived.
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 97

ambassadors, the Confederation was bankrupt, a fact which added to the

troubles of Adams and sharpened the contemptuous manners of his British
hosts. Yet Adams combated England's official attitude as fiercely as if he

represented the greatest power on earth which he probably did, in his

own mind, for he never forgot those countless millions who were to inhabit
the country in the future and whose welfare was "to be influenced, per-
haps decided, by the manners, examples, principles, and political institu-
tions of the present generation."
and after nine years abroad, Adams re-
In 1 788, at the age of fifty-three
turned to America, arriving in time to be chosen Vice-President in the
first election held under the new Constitution, and also in time to endanger

the plans and ambitions of Alexander Hamilton. Circumstances had

doomed Adams and Hamilton to rivalry., and their own characters made
certain that the rivalry must be bitter. Each man expected, for what
seemed to him good reasons, to be the second figure in the country,
subordinate only to George Washington; and there was not room for two
second figures. When Adams landed after his long exile, Hamilton was
already Washington's favorite, and was hoping to become chief adviser
and to mold the institutions of the nation according to his own clear plans.
His foreign birth would prove a bar to the presidency;* but he intended
to dominate the politics of America and to make himself the unofficial if
not the prime minister for as long a time as Washington would stay
official
in office. John Adams, by his mere existence, was a threat to all these
hopes.
Hamilton could not expect to sweep Adams into his train through the
clarityand precision of his own political thinking. Many men followed
Hamilton almost with a sense of awe, because he could make easy the
tortuous subjects of government and finance; but Adams was not given to
awe in the presence of his neighbors, rather to a crabbed criticism. And
he had his own sharp views on government, just as clear as Hamilton's
and more deeply based in knowledge of the past.
The two men agreed on the need for a strong state, with a very strong
Executive, and with a financial system which would make the well-to-do
identify their own security with that of the Union. They also agreed on a
pessimistic view of man's nature. This pessimism led them both to favor
rigid institutions in order that man might be protected from himself.

I think with you [wrote John Adams to his cousin Samuel, in October
1790], that knowledge and benevolence ought to be promoted as asmuch
possible ; but, despairing of ever seeing them sufficiently general for the
security of society, I amfor seeking institutions which may supply in
* Not a constitutional bar (since Hamilton was a citizen of the United States
at the time the Constitution was adopted), but a political bar, another argument
for his enemies to use.
98 The Price of Union

some degree the defect. . All projects of government founded in the

. .

supposition or expectation of extraordinary degrees of virtue are evi-

dently chimerical. . .
. Human appetites, passions, prejudices, and
self-love will never be conquered by benevolence and knowledge alone,
introduced by human means.

In a similar mood he had written a few months earlier to his old friend,

Benjamin Rush :

I own that awful experience has concurred with reading and reflec-
tion to convince me that Americans are more rapidly disposed to cor-
ruption in elections than I thought they were fourteen years ago.

With all of this Hamilton agreed. The chief difference was that Adams
had as little faith in the rich as in the poor, whereas Hamilton did not
seem to fear the aggressions of the wealthy as much as the follies of the
masses. "As to usurping others' rights," wrote John Adams, "they are all
three (i.e., the democratical, aristocratical, and monarchical portions of
society) equally guilty when unlimited in power." Hamilton thought that
a strong capitalist state, insuring the prosperity of the few, would auto-
matically insure at least the reasonable well-being of the many, whereas
Adams felt that there could be no justice and no stability unless each class
were prevented from exploiting the other. Adams was an intense believer
in divided powers, in setting one group to watch another so that none
could ever use the government for its own unhindered purpose. His
lengthy Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States
of America was a defense of the balance of powers which Adams himself
had written into the Constitution of Massachusetts.*
Discussing the danger of a legislature with a single chamber, Adams
would always dominate such an assembly.
said the well-to-do

The only remedy [he wrote] is to throw the rich and the proud into
one group, in a separate assembly, and there tie their hands ; if you give
them scope with the people at large or their representatives, they will
destroy all equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of
the people themselves. . But placing them alone by themselves, the
. .

society avails itself of all their abilities and virtues; they become a solid
check to the representatives themselves, as well as to the executive
power, and you disarm them entirely of the power to do mischief.
* The first volume of this work, which was published in London in 178788,
reached America at the time the Constitutional Convention was assembling at
Philadelphia; so Adams may be said to have had an indirect part in those famous
debates. Benjamin Rush wrote to Richard Price: "Our illustrious minister in this
gift to his country has done us more service than if he had obtained alliances for
us with all the nations of Europe."
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 99

This may not seem, especially in its last clause, an accurate description of
the modern American Senate; but it shows the faith which Adams, and
indeed most of the makers of America, had in the power of the machinery
of government to affect the behavior of man. If the political mechanism
were correctly constructed, they believed that many of the faults and fail-
ures of the past could be avoided. There is a passage in the same volume
where Adams gives classic expression to this faith:

The first magistrate [he writes] may love himself, and family, and
friends better than the public, but the laws, supported by the senate,
commons, and judges, will not permit him to indulge it ; the senate may
love themselves, their families, and friends more than the public, but
the first magistrate, commons, and judges, uniting in support of public
law, will defeat their projects ; the common people, or their representa-
tives, may love themselves and partial connections better than the whole,
but the first magistrate, senate, and judges can support the laws against
their enterprises; the judges may be partial to men or factions, but the
three branches of the legislature,* united to the executive, will easily
bring them back to their duty.

In retrospect this may seem rather too simple, and rather too hopeful for
so unoptimistic a writer; yet it is a statement of the faith which has been
held by most Americans from that day to this, and it is not possible to
understand the people or their government without keeping the faith in
mind.

Longitude [wrote Adams], and the philosopher's stone, have not been
sought with more earnestness by philosophers than a guardian of the
laws has been studied by legislators from Plato to Montesquieu; but
every project has been found to be no better than committing the lamb
to the custody of the wolf, except that one which is called a balance of
power.

This is the basic political dogma in the American mind. The fact that it

may be untrue has no effect upon the importance of the dogma in history.
The dogma explains the cry of alarm which goes up each time the Presi-
dent forced by circumstance to exert new powers and thus to threaten
is

the balance;it explains the cry of alarm which goes up each time the

Supreme Court is attacked, as it has been attacked by almost every strong

* Adams includes the President in "the three branches of the
legislature," because
the President has the veto power and must therefore pass upon every law. Adams
believed that the President's power of veto should be absolute, and that the Con-
stitution did wrong in giving to the Congress the power to pass, by a vote of two
thirds of both Houses, a bill which the President had rejected. (Letter to Roger
Sherman, July 18, 1789.) He also believed the Senate should not have the power to
veto the President's appointments to office. (Letter to Richard Rush, May 14, 1821.)
100 The Price of Union

President from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt; it explains the cry of

alarm which goes up whenever the powers of the states are diminished
for the American feels that his liberties are safeguarded almost as much

by the balance between the state and federal authorities as by the balance
within the federal authority itself.

In 1792, when Washington was persuaded to accept a second term, Adams

was re-elected Vice-President, receiving a little more than half the elec-
toral votes;* Washington again received them all. The reorganization of

Washington's Cabinet which took place during this term had a profound
and evil effect on Adams's political future, and on his relations with
Hamilton.
The reorganization was made necessary by the resignations of Jefferson
and Hamilton, and by Washington's own disagreements with Edmund
Randolph, who at first took Jefferson's place. When Randolph left the
government, Washington wrote to Hamilton: "What am I to do for a
Secretary of State? I ask frankly, and with solicitude, and shall receive
kindly any sentiments you may express on the occasion." Hamilton sug-
gested Rufus King, who refused the job; he then suggested Timothy
Pickering of Massachusetts, who had succeeded General Knox as Secre-
tary of War. Pickering accepted, and at once asked Hamilton's help in
choosing his own successor at the War office. Hamilton nominated James
McHenry of Maryland, one of his closest friends since the days when he
and McHenry served together on Washington's staff. These two men,
along with Oliver Wolcott, who had been made Secretary of the Treasury
on Hamilton's advice, turned to Hamilton for guidance and instruction
on all public matters. This gave a curious and hitherto unknown unity to
the opinions of the Cabinet; but it did not make for tranquillity after
Washington had retired and the same Cabinet served John Adams.
At the election of 1796, Hamilton had schemed among the electors with
the hope of preventing Adams from becoming President. Hamilton wanted
Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, instead of Adams. He dared not
come out openly for Pinckney, for fear of splitting the Federalist Party in
New England but he tried to have Pinckney's election appear an accident
;

a chance result of the constitutional provision that the electors were to

vote for two candidates without specifying which was intended for Presi-
dent and which for Vice-President. Hamilton's plot failed; but it led to

* As a result of the Jefferson-Madison "botanizing excursion" up the Hudson

River, New York (in addition to Virginia and North Carolina) gave her second
electoral votes to George Clinton.
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 101

Adams being elected by a very few votes. Also, as a result of the double-
dealings within the Federalist Party, Thomas Jefferson, leader of the
Opposition, became Vice-President. So on the day of the inauguration, in
addition to feeling wounded because the people so obviously ignored him
in favor of Washington, Adams was full of rancor against the chief figure
in his own party. The rancor would have been far greater if Adams had
known the relations between Hamilton and the Cabinet.
The Constitution of the United States says nothing about a Cabinet; it
merely remarks that the President "may require the opinion, in writing, of
the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any sub-
ject relating to the duties of their respective offices." We have seen that
the Congress made the executive departments responsible to the President,
with the exception of the Treasury Department, which had an ambiguous
status; and we have seen that with the refusal of the Senate to act as a
privy council the President turned more and more to his Cabinet for ad-
vice and help. In 1797, however, no one knew whether the Cabinet should
be regarded as a body of civil servants, holding office during good be-
havior and removable only by impeachment, or whether they were the
President's personal appointees, representatives of the major regions and
interests within the party. If they were the latter, they would go out of
office with the President; if they were the former, they would be a

bureaucracy of experts, able to serve any administration but owing per-

sonal loyalty to none.
When Adams decided to keep Washington's Cabinet he must have
thought he was setting a precedent which would make for good govern-
ment by diminishing party spirit. He must have thought that the Cabinet
was composed of non-partisan civil servants; in fact it was composed of
bigoted Hamiltonians intent on carrying out the policies, not of the
President, but of the ex-Secretary of the Treasury. Adams's first act was
to ask these men for their opinions on America's relations with France
the problem which was to plague his Administration.
By 1797, Dan ton and Robespierre, friends of America, were dead;
France was under the Directory, venal and aggressive. She regarded the
United States Government as an enemy, or at best as a willing tool of
England. She thought the Jay Treaty, whereby America agreed to order
French privateers out of her harbors, was the sign of an Anglo-American
entente. She did not know that the treaty was accepted out of necessity,
with a bitter heart, and with a resentment toward England which was to
fester for a century.
To make matters worse, the JefFersonians had not yet learned that
France had changed, that the sentimental transatlantic ties of the early
revolution had been broken ; they thought Washington and Adams and all
the Federalists were needlessly suspicious of a friendly government, and
102 The Price of Union

they thought the reason was pro-British bias. In their rage, some of the
extremists urged the French Minister at Philadelphia to persuade his gov-
ernment to attack the shipping of Federalist New England. The suggestion
appealed to the Directory; so the French began seizing American mer-
chantmen on a scale which made the depredations of the British seem
trivial.

Finally, when Adams came to power there was no American Minister in

France, for Washington had withdrawn Monroe in 1796 $,nd the Directory
had refused to receive a successor. So the new President turned to his
Cabinet for advice, and his Cabinet turned at once to Hamilton. It was
perhaps fortunate that they did so, for on this occasion Hamilton was mod-
erate whereas the members of the Cabinet if left to themselves would have

urged hostilities. Hamilton wanted to send a commission to France, making

one last effort to avoid war. McHenry relayed Hamilton's suggestions to
Adams, almost word for word; but Wolcott and Pickering were inclined
to argue back, for they knew that many of the extreme Federalists wanted
war and that some were even talking secession, and a return to the Em-
became too pro-French. 1 Hamilton, how-
pire, in case the Jeffersonians
ever, remained firm and the two Cabinet members gave way to the private
citizen, Wolcott writing a remarkable letter of submission in which he
said: "I am not so ignorant of the extent of your influence upon the
friends of government, as not to be sensible, that if you are known to favor
the sending of a commission, so the thing must and will be."
And so the thing was. Adams sent Elbridge Gerry, John Marshall, and
C. C. Pinckney to France, and there was a relaxation of tension until the
strange news of their reception reached America. Also, the Cabinet made
no further efforts to resist the directions of Hamilton. When the President
asked for advice on what to do in case the mission failed, McHenry and
Pickering gave exact copies of the letters they received from
him almost
their master in New
York.
The American commissioners reached Paris in October, 1797, when the
Directory had just made peace with Austria. The unacknowledged war
against American shipping was profitable, and Talleyrand, the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, was avaricious so he sent three negotiators, referred to as
;

X, Y, and Z, to demand a loan of ten million dollars for France and a

bribe of $250,000 for himself as a prerequisite to further talks. When the
money was refused the Americans were threatened with the power of the
French party in their own country, and it was vaguely hinted that the days
of French Empire in North America were not necessarily ended. After
some months of useless talk, Marshall and Pinckney returned home to re-
port to the President. Their dispatches were made public in April, 1798.
The on public opinion appeared to be a triumph for the Adams
effect .

administration and the Federalist Party; but the triumph was brief.
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 103

Hamilton advised his friends in the government to prepare for war, to

begin fighting back on the sea, and to wait for a declaration of hostilities
from France, which he felt sure would come and which would unite the
country. Congress created the Navy Department, put three frigates into
service, bought some smaller ships, and abrogated the treaties with France
of 1778. War began on the sea, chiefly a war against merchant shipping,
though in February, 1799, the American frigate Constellation captured
the French frigate L'Insurgente.
So far, Hamilton's desires were similar to those of John Adams; but
when it came to military preparations at home a rift appeared which was
to end in the destruction of the Administration. Acting on the advice of
Hamilton, Congress increased the regular army, and made plans for a
large emergency army. Washington agreed to head the army, on condition
and that he should not take
that he be allowed to choose his general staff
active command till war broke. This meant that the second in command
would in fact be in charge of the army. McHenry and Pickering persuaded
Washington to nominate Hamilton for this position. Adams rebelled, but
Washington was induced to write a letter suggesting that he would resign
his own commission unless he were allowed to choose his generals.
At last Adams awoke to what was happening. The whole of his Cabinet
served Hamilton, not the President; the Federalist leaders in Congress
served Hamilton, and conferred with Hamilton, not with the President.
Under pressure from all these friends of Hamilton, Washington too
ignored the man who had once made him Commander-in-Chief and did
the bidding of the New York lawyer. Adams had to give in, allowing
Hamilton to become the actual commander of the new army; but the
Federalist Party was broken. The strife between the titular leader and the
real leader was thenceforth steady, and open, and implacable. No party
under such conditions could hope to hold the presidency against an op-
position headed by the suave Thomas Jefferson.
The one thing which might still have saved the Federalists was a
declaration of war from France but Talleyrand was not interested in sav-
;

ing the Federalists, or in providing England with a new ally.* He induced

the Directory to explain away the X, Y, Z episode as a mistake, to stop the
attacks on American shipping, and to make plain their willingness for
peace. Nothing could have been more frustrating to Hamilton, who by
this time had dreams of leading his army against New Orleans, seizing the
mouth of the Mississippi, and dividing with Great Britain the spoils of
Spanish America. None of these spirited events could take place unless the
* It is possible that war with France, instead of uniting the country behind the
Federalists, might have destroyed the Union. The extreme Hamiltonians were plan-
ning repressive measures against their pro-French neighbors in case of war. A
little
too much of the strong hand might have broken the frail ties which held the new
country together.
104 The Price of Union

French were willing to provide a war. The extreme Federalists might have
tried to force the French to oblige but not John Adams. Military ad-
venture made no appeal to him. He believed in a strong government; but
unlike Hamilton he did not think that a standing army constituted
strength. Now that he saw what had been going on behind his back, and
who had been making policy, he felt that his country was threatened with
a needless war. Without warning, with one dramatic gesture, he destroyed
the war party and broke the power of the Hamiltonian wing of the
Federalists. He did so by sending to the Senate on February 18, 1799, the
nomination of William Vans Murray as minister to the French republic.
In view of the recent friendliness of the Directory it was obvious there
could be no war if America was willing to reopen negotiations. No one,
therefore, dared reject the nomination outright; but Hamilton's friends
in the Senate substituted a commission for the single envoy and then de-
layed the sailing so that the commissioners did not reach France until
1800, when they were received by Napoleon as First Consul. They signed
a commercial agreement, and for a time there was peace.
In a letter to Benjamin Rush, in December, 1811, Adams referred to
"the partial war with France, which I believed, as far as it proceeded, to
be a holy war." He felt that the firmness of the United States after the
X, Y, Z incident, and the undeclared naval warfare, had made peace
possible; there was no act of his life of which he was more proud than
the nomination of Murray and the averting of further hostilities. There
was probably no act for which he received less immediate credit; instead
of a war- President's popularity he won for himself the anger of his own
party and the derision of his opponents. As he neared the end of his first
term he had only one hope left: if he were re-elected he might redeem
the negative record, rid himself of the incubus of Hamilton, and build
a party which truly represented his high principles of government. He
had already reorganized his cabinet, dispensing with McHenry and Pick-

ering but retaining Wolcott, who had betrayed Adams so skillfully that
he was still thought to be a friend.
It was too late. Although Adams became the Federalist candidate for
a second time, Hamilton saw to it that he was defeated by publishing
an arraignment of the Administration 2 which clearly implied that Adams
was unfit for public office. Seventy-three electors voted for Jefferson and
Burr, sixty-five for Adams, and sixty-four for Pinckney. That Adams should
have done so well, in spite of Hamilton's quaint contribution to the cam-
paign, suggests that his character and his devotion to public service were
better understood by the people than by the Federalist leaders. The people
were represented by the state legislatures which named the Adams electors;
the leaders would have been glad to drop Adams altogether.
During the campaign Adams had been caricatured as a puffed-up
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 105

tyrant, a monarchist at heart, whose one was the accumulation

interest
of honors. Unaccustomed to the new
ferocity of politics, Adams took
this to heart. In his grief he felt that Jefferson had betrayed the past, and
all the years of their generous work together. He sat signing documents
until the last hour of his presidency, and then left Washington* at dawn,
to avoid his old friend's inauguration.**
Among the final acts of his administration was one of the most im-
portant which Adams ever performed, and one of the most annoying to
Jefferson. After his dismissal of Pickering, Adams had appointed John
Marshall Secretary of State; then, toward the end of his presidency, he
made Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The last Federalist
President thus insured that for the next thirty-five years an arch-Federalist
would mold and interpret the Constitution. Adams knew exactly what
he was doing. He had first offered the chief justiceship to John Jay, writ-
ing: "In the future administration of our country, the firmest security
we can have against the effects of visionary schemes or fluctuating theories
will be in a solid judiciary." Jay refused, on the ground that the whole

system of government had proved so defective that the courts would

not be able to supply "the energy, weight, and dignity which are essen-
tial."*** Marshall accepted the post and proved that Jay was wrong. Mr.
James Truslow Adams writes: "By his nomination of Washington as
Commander-in-Chief, Adams had made a nation possible. By his nomina-
tion of Marshall he gave, for centuries following, the fundamental law
to that nation."

The Federalist Party lingered on as the only opposition until it destroyed

itself during the War of 1812. During these years it continued to win local
elections, especially in NewEngland; but its great days on the national
stage were ended in 1801. There were several reasons for the decline.
In the first place, the Federalists did not believe in political parties and
were thus handicapped when it came to building an effective one. They
organized only under pressure from the Opposition, and never as well
* The government had moved from Philadelphia to Washington in
November,
1800.
** Time was to soften his feeling about Jefferson. On Christmas Day,
1811,
Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush: "You exhort me to *forgiveness and love of ene-
mies,' as if I considered, or had ever considered, Jefferson as
my enemy. This is not
so; I have always loved him as a friend. If I ever received or suspected any injury
from him, I have forgiven it long and long ago." Shortly afterwards he wrote to
Jefferson, suggesting that they might renew their old friendship. The result was an
interesting and touching correspondence which lasted until 1826.
*** John Jay had already served as Chief
Justice from 1789 to 1795.
106 The Price of Union

as the Opposition. Also, the party was dominated by a ruling class which
was certain of its own right to rule, and equally certain that the humble
voter should be pleased and proud to take orders. In Massachusetts,
for example, the Federalist members of the legislature appointed the
county committees, which in turn controlled the town committees and
thus the nominations to office. The organization was kept secret, since
the Federalistscondemned the Jeffersonians for their party machine;
so the voter merelyknew that from time to time he was told to vote for
someone chosen by his lords and masters. This did not make for solidarity,
or party loyalty. Jefferson could produce equally autocratic results while
allowing the people to feel they were in control.
Until after the turn of the century, however, the Federalists were able
to hold their working-class support in New England, and the support
of the Negroes in New York City, where the recently freed slaves held
the balance of power in a close election, and where they voted for the
party of the masters who had liberated them and against the party of the
Jeffersonian workingmen who had fought abolition on the ground that
they did not want to meet the competition of the Negro. Jefferson's phrases
about "the mobs of great cities," whom he called "panders of vice,"
and who, he said, "add just so much to the support of pure government,
as sores do to the strength of the human body," were used against him
with some success by the Federalists in the Northern towns. Also, in New
England the ship caulkers and many other artisans were inclined to vote
Federalist on the ground that the prosperity of the merchants and ship-
pers meant the prosperity of the worker.
These advantages were slowly frittered away as the ruling Federalist
gentry proved that in an era of change and upheaval they thought so-
ciety should be changeless. They also proved that they had no knowledge
of the West except as a vague place where the workman could take up
land if he was dissatisfied at home. The failure to court the West, or to
find new recruits anywhere, doomed the Federalist Party in a rapidly

expanding nation. The Federalists might hold all their original strength
and still be ruined, if they allowed the Jeffersonians to get the new voters.

The Federalists left behind them in 1801 a working government machine,

far more durable than they thought, fully impervious to the "visionary
schemes or fluctuating theories" of their enemies. They left behind them
a constitutional theory (as to the powers of the federal government and
the responsibilities of the Supreme Court) which for the most part has
prevailed to this day. They did not, however, succeed in establishing
vL The Failure of the Federalists 107

their view or any view of the relation between the executive and the
legislature, a relation which was not defined in the Constitution and
which presumably was not definable. Here was a problem which had to
be solved by experience and the Federalists failed to solve it. Their plan
was to give to the department heads, and thus to the Executive, the
initiative in the making of policy and the shaping of laws. It seemed a
workable plan so long as there were no political parties it might have led
;

to an American form of parliamentary government, with the President

less important than at present and the cabinet far more important.
The plan became discredited, partly because of the rise of parties
(since the Constitution made possible an Executive belonging to one
party and a legislature belonging to another), and partly because of the
failure of the Federalists to understand politics and to respect the Op-

position. To them the Opposition was little better than a band of rebels,
to be treated firmly and if necessary roughly; so the people began to look
upon the Federalists as would-be autocrats. Their plan for concentrating
energy and responsibility in the executive was interpreted as a threat to
the people's liberties. Colonial experience had made Americans feel that
the Executive was the natural tool of tyranny, the local legislature the
natural friend of the people. Some of the Federalist measures seemed to
support this theory.
In 1794, for example, they made an immense show of power to put
down a minor uprising in western Pennsylvania known as the Whisky
Rebellion. The one way to transport and sell the surplus corn of the
Westerners was to distill it and sell it as whisky; so Hamilton's excise tax
of 1791 seemed as unjust beyond the mountains as the British stamp
tax had seemed to the colonies of the seaboard. The law was resisted,
and a federal marshal at Pittsburgh was prevented from serving writs
against distillers. The revolt created an interesting problem for Wash-
ington, since the essence of the new federal government, as compared to
the old confederacy, was its power to operate directly upon the individual
and not merely upon the state. Hamilton, always eager for a show of
strength, urged Washington to use the authority given him by Congress
and to call out the militia of four states. This was done; fifteen thousand
militiamen were marched across the mountains and the authority of
the central government was established; but the Federalists paid a heavy
price. Such an army, sent to quell so small a revolt, seemed to confirm
Jefferson's repeated charge that the Federalists were "monocrats" bent
on using the Executive to enslave the people. The Opposition never al-
lowed the charge to rest, never allowed "Hamilton's army" to be forgotten.
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were even more harmful to the
Federalist cause than the Whisky Rebellion. These were passed at the
height of the French crisis, when it was feared that in case of war the
108 The Price of Union

more violent Jeffersonians might give aid to the enemy.* The Alien Act
gave the President power to expel foreigners from the country by Execu-
tive decree. The Sedition Act provided stiff penalties for conspiracies,
or libels on high officials, and declared that any speech or writing against
the President or the Congress "with intent to defame," or to bring them
"into contempt or disrepute," was punishable by fine or imprisonment.
A number of Republican editors were convicted under this act, a sign
of the inability of the Federalists to distinguish between political oppo-
sition and treason.**
This time the extreme Jeffersonians did more than call the Federalists
names: they threatened revolution. They declared, in effect, that it was
the duty of the states to resist these laws of the central government.
Their protest took the form of two sets of resolutions in the year 1798
one drafted by Jefferson and offered to the Kentucky legislature by John
Breckenridge, the other drafted by Madison and offered to the Virginia
Assembly by John Taylor of Caroline County. It would not have been
possible to find four men who carried more weight in the South.
The resolutions charged the federal government with a dangerous
usurpation of power; they declared that "the States composing the
United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited
submission to their general government" ; 3 and they concluded that when
the central government overstepped its powers the states were the
proper authorities to decide that the Constitution has been violated. What
then was to be the redress? Kentucky called upon her fellow states to
"concur ... in declaring these acts" void and "in requesting their repeal";
Virginia talked about "interposing" state authority between the citizen
and the unconstitutional acts of his federal government.
The replies from other states were not favorable; but Kentucky was
undeterred, and in the following year adopted a further resolution which
stated "That the several states who formed that instrument [that is, the
:

Constitution] being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable

right to judge of the infraction; and, That a nullification of those
sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instru-
ment is the rightful remedy" In Virginia, in 1798 and 1799, there were
preparations for resistance by force. Characteristically, the most extreme
view was taken by young John Randolph of Roanoke, who first stepped
upon the national stage in the latter year, standing for Congress on a
platform which demanded armed resistance if the laws were not re-
pealed. He made a speech at Charlotte Court House, where he boldly
* strong government, disapproved of these
Hamilton, for all his belief in acts,
describing them as "violence without energy."
** The First Amendment to the Constitution, drafted to protect critics of the
government, and declared in force December, 1791, forbids Congress to pass a law
abridging freedom of speech or of the press.
vi. The Failure of the Federalists 109

opposed the dying Patrick Henry. In a last great speech, Henry warned
his statenot to lift her hand against the national government. Henry
had disliked the Constitution on the ground that it took too much power
from the states; but he also disliked civil war. He warned his Virginians
that Washington himself would lead an army against them if they resisted.
"Where is the citizen of America," he asked, "who will dare lift his
hand against the father of his country? No! you dare not do it! In such
a parricidal attempt, the steel would drop from your nerveless arm!"
John Randolph long to be the scourge of every compromiser and the
center of every resistance to federal power won the election with his
radical views."* Henry, who was a Federalist candidate for the State Senate,
was also elected;** but he died a few months later.
The problem raised by the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, like
most of the important problems of government, can never be solved. It
can only be allayed. In a federal union the central government has cer-
tain clear powers and the states have certain clear powers; but there is
a shadowy and ill-defined borderland between the two. An aggressive
majority, especially a majority of reformers, will be tempted to encroach
on this borderland in the name of efficiency, saying that only the federal
power can act throughout the country with speed; but when such a
majority makes laws which are felt to be hurtful by a region, the region
will appeal to states' rights, will discover that the laws are unconstitutional
and that it is a duty to resist. Within a few years of the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions, the Federalists of New England, feeling themselves
harmed by President Jefferson, were quoting his resolutions back at him,
threatening to nullify, threatening to secede.
States' rights are the support of a minority in resisting the will of a
distant majority. There can be no federal government without states'
rights, or with too much states' rights; and no one has ever been able
to define what "too much" means. Only compromise, delay, inefficiency,
the willingness of a minority not to obstruct beyond the limits of human
patience, only such fruits of political experience can make a large federal
system work. Nothing is more fatal to federalism than the insistence on
* We shall hear much of this during the next few years. A Virginian,
young man
and a distant cousin to Jefferson, he was not yet twenty-six when he faced Henry at
Charlotte Court House. When the JefTersonians came to power in 1801, Randolph
was appointed chairman of the standing committee on ways and means, and be-
came in effect the administration leader in the House. Brilliant, erratic, arrogant,
incapable of compromise, Henry Adarns called him "a Virginian Saint Michael
almost terrible in his contempt for whatever seemed to him base or untrue." He was
an "old Republican" with all his passionate being, believing utterly in the prin-
ciples of the Resolutions of 1798, and in the promises made by the JefTersonians in
1800. His break with Jefferson, in 1806, because that practical leader was prepared
to compromise, was one of the stormiest episodes in early American history.
** Distaste for the French Revolution, and perhaps his growing fortune from law
practiceand land speculations, caused Henry to change parties in his old age.
110 The Price of Union

logic and definition; for not logical to seek to divide power, and it is
it is

not possible to define with clarity the areas of division. The problems of
federalism cannot be solved; but subtle, human, compromising, undog-
matic, and boldly illogical political parties can sometimes allay them.
This they have done in the United States since the end of the Civil
War; this they will cease to do the day they become clear and exclusive
in their ideas, rigid in their principles, impatient in their desire to do
good without delay. Jefferson was the natural politician who could make
a federal system work because he did not expect it to work reasonably;
John Randolph was the natural reformer who would drive his country
toward civil war rather than allow it to rest in its imperfections.
 VII

Mr. Jefferson and His Methods

AHE JEFFERSONS were among the early settlers in Virginia; but they
remained relatively obscure until the time of Peter Jefferson, the father
of Thomas, who acquired fourteen hundred acres of land in the wilder-
ness at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and who then married
Jane Randolph, thus allying himself to one of the leading families in the
colony. ThomasJefferson, the third child but eldest son of this marriage,
was born in 1743. His earliest years were spent at "Tuckahoe," the Wil-
liam Randolph estate on the James River; but at the age of nine he
moved to his father's land in what was then the wild West: only a hun-
dred miles from the coast, yet inhabited by backwoodsmen to whom
democracy was not a theory of politics but an inescapable fact. To the
end of his fastidious and privileged life, Jefferson was influenced by the

egalitarianism of these early surroundings.

As he grew toward manhood he became a member of the democratic
group in Virginia, which was led by Patrick Henry. The strength of the
democrats came from the twenty-one western counties and from minor-
ity groups in the conservative East: "small farmers along the upper
rivers, tobacco-growers from the ridges between, hunters and trappers
from the slopes of the Alleghenies, and the hitherto inert and unorgan-
ized mass of small proprietors and slave-owners from the old counties." 1
Jefferson's father died in 1757, and the boy of fourteen inherited 2750
acres. Three years later he entered William and Mary College, and began
to enjoy life among the planters of the Tidewater. In appearance, Jef-
ferson was a blend of the border and the planter types. He was well over
six feet tall, and ungraceful. On horseback he was splendid; in the

drawing-room he stood, or sat, awkwardly. His forehead and his cheek-

bones were high (the Randolphs had Indian blood) his mild eyes were
;

blue; his hair sandy, verging on red; his mouth large and sensitive. He
was negligent in his dress (carefully so, according to his enemies) but ;

his dignity was deep and unshakable, and his cold reserve with strangers
was a surprise to those who idealized him as the great democrat. He
never sought to mix with the public; indeed, he was seldom seen in
public except on horseback. He never sought to move his fellow men by
oratory; his voice was weak and hoarse; his shyness made public speaking
112 The Price of Union

hateful. He was a democrat in all his public deeds, in all his policy; at
home, he was a quiet, friendly patrician.
At college Jefferson perfected his knowledge of the classics and laid
the basis for a love of modern letters. In mind and temperament he be-
longed to the pleasant band of eighteenth-century dilettanti: the men
who thought it possible to have a knowledge of all art, all literature, all

applied science. With his exuberant health, his power for day-long, year-
long application, Jefferson made his dilettantism a form of genius. Most
men who sought to know so much, so gracefully, would never know
anything well; but in literature, politics, architecture, agriculture, me-
chanics, Jefferson had a mastery which time has only made more evident.
And in several branches of science, such as paleontology and botany, he
was a pioneer.
After leaving college Jefferson studied law, and was soon earning a
good income. He also made a profit from his farms, having greatly in-
creased his landholdings and become the master of fifty- two slaves.* In
1772 he married Martha (Wayles) Skelton, a twenty-three-year-old
widow. Her father soon died, leaving her a considerable property in land,
but also leaving large debts which were a permanent burden to her hus-
band.
At the age of twenty-six Jefferson became a member of the Virginia
House of Burgesses. He soon joined the more aggressive rebels against
British policy, and in 1774, unable because of illness to attend the Vir-

ginia Convention on colonial grievances, he forwarded the paper which

was published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
It was an eloquent expression of the faith in natural law which was to

govern Jefferson's life and to inspire his most famous deed: the Declara-
tion of Independence. The Summary View ended with some comments
to the King:

These are our grievances, which we have thus laid before His Maj-
esty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a
free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature,
and not as the gift of their Chief Magistrate. Let those flatter who fear:
it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due might

be well from the venal, but it would ill beseem those who are asserting
the rights of human nature. They know, and will, therefore, say that
Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.

The Summary View was not kindly received in London, where Jef-
name was included
ferson's Yet for all his strong
in a bill of attainder.
words he still felt that American independence was unnecessary. Two
* A little later in his owned 10,000 acres and considerably more
life, Jefferson
than a hundred slaves.
viL Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 113

years later, long after John Adams had known that war, hard war, was
ordained, Jefferson could write to his Randolph relative, the loyalist
Attorney General of Virginia: "I would rather be in dependence on
Great Britain, properly limited, than on any other nation on earth, or
than on no nation." By "limited" dependence he meant self-government
within a commonwealth of nations, a federal empire. No such plan was
possible in London, so there was no stopping short of war; but the ever-
sanguine Jefferson preferred to hope for peace. It was a hope which he
indulged in later life with startling results.
In June of 1775 Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress
at Philadelphia The impatient and sarcastic John
his first trip north.
Adams was charmed by him. "Though a silent member in Congress,"
said Adams, "he was so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive upon com-
mittees and in conversation not even Samuel Adams was more so that
he soon seized upon my heart." There were no differences, in 1775,
between the two men who were to become bitter political foes. During
the previous years, Adams, like Jefferson and James Wilson, had pub-
lished articlesdemanding for the colonies a status almost as free as that
of Dominions in the modern British Empire. 2 He was not disturbed to
find that Jefferson thought such a policy consonant with peace, because
he knew that Jefferson would abandon peace, rather than the policy,
on finding that he could not have both.
In 1776, when independence had finally to be proclaimed, the Con-
tinental Congress appointed a committee to draft a statement of the
colonial case, addressed to all men and to all times. The committee asked
Jefferson to do the writing. His draft received a number of minor cor-
rections from Adams and from Franklin. Adams then defended it on the
floor of Congress with such eloquence that again the great work was not

importantly altered. One of the changes made by Congress was to strike

out a passage denouncing George III for the slave trade a fortunate
excision, since the trade was carried on by New England shipowners and
supported by Southern slaveowners.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, a new constitution was being made for a new
and sovereign state. From Philadelphia, Jefferson sent home a draft em-
bodying his own far-reaching hopes. "Our revolution ." he said many
. .

years later, "presented us with an album on which we were free to

write what we pleased. We
had no occasion ... to investigate the laws
and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We
appealed to those of
nature, and found them engraved on our hearts." What Jefferson found
engraved on his heart was an annually elected lower House with repre-
sentation in proportion to population and with the duty of choosing
the senate and the governor. The plan was not adopted. In the end, the
new constitution left the rich eastern part of the state overrepresented
114 The Price of Union

as compared with the frontier west, left power concentrated in the

hands of property and privilege, and defeated the first chance to create
a model democracy in America.
Jefferson's reply to the failure of his proposals was to resign from the
Congress, return to Albemarle County, and become a member of the
Virginia House of Delegates. There he fought for the changes which his
constitution would have made inevitable. He did away with entails and
with primogeniture; he was partly successful in removing the privileges
of the established church. He failed in his two remaining efforts: to
found a system of free public schools and to secure the gradual abolition
of slavery.* Without free schooling, he felt, democracy would not have a
fair chance; and without the abolition of slavery, the freedom-loving
men of the western counties would one day find themselves defending an
obnoxious form of property.

In 1779, after his work in the Virginia legislature, Jefferson became

**
governor of the state. He served for two terms, attempting the thankless
task of finding men, arms, money, and provisions for Washington's armies
outside the state, and at the same time making Virginia strong to re-
sistBritish invasion. The latter was impossible; at least it was impossible
for Jefferson, who lacked ruthlessness, quick decision, and military knowl-

edge. Thestate was overrun by the British Jefferson himself was almost
;

captured, and one of his plantations was plundered. He was a feeble

war governor.
After these disheartening years Jefferson withdrew to his plantation.
Like Washington, he far preferred the running of his own farms to the
grandeurs and miseries of public life; and like Washington, he was an
agricultural reformer, feeling that there was no more useful work than
the improvement of a nation's husbandry. When making a list of his
major achievements, he included the disestablishment of the church in

Virginia, the ending of entails, the drafting of the Declaration of Inde-

pendence, and the importing of olive plants from Marseilles and of
heavy upland rice from Africa.
His retirement to the land brought him no peace on this occasion; for
his wife, having given birth to her sixth child, became seriously ill and
soon died. This was a heavy grief to Jefferson, who was already sadly
familiar with death, since only two of his children survived infancy.
* This was to be combined with a gradual deportation.
** Each term was a in length.
year
viz. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 115

Three daughters and a son died; two daughters remained. After the
death of his wife, Jefferson took charge of the education of the girls.
He wished them to be prodigies of learning and of charm, of worldly
graces and of unworldly goodness. Astonishingly, his wishes were in large
part granted.*
In the summer of 1 784,
Jefferson went as special envoy to Paris, where
he succeeded Franklin as American Minister. It was while he was
later
in France that his bill for establishing religious freedom, which had been
introduced into the Virginia House of Delegates in 1779, was finally
passed.** Jefferson always felt that the statute was one of
his chief con-
tributions to history; it stated that the mind isnot subject to coercion,
that "rights" are not dependent on opinions, and that opinions are not
the concern of civil government.
Jefferson's duties in France were undemanding, so he spent much time
traveling the country, sometimes to study architecture, sometimes to study
the tragic needs of the nation.*** "Of twenty millions of people sup-
posed to be in France," he wrote, "I am of the opinion there are nineteen
millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human
existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole
United States."**** By the time Jefferson left France, in 1 789, his belief
in American isolationism had become a passion. If the liberties of the
New World were to be preserved, if the corruptions of the Old were
not all to be repeated, America must keep herself clear of Europe and
must keep Europe clear of the western hemisphere.
In 1785 he wrote Charles Bellini:

You are, perhaps, curious to know how this new scene has struck a
savage of the mountains of America. Not advantageously, I assure you.
I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. The truth
of Voltaire's observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here
must be either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that
country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are
to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned
trampled under their feet.

* One of the daughters, Maria, died in April, 1804. "I, of my want," he wrote
sadly, "have lost even the half of all I had."
** Madison was
largely responsible for getting the bill through the House of
Delegates.
*** He former on an unsuccessful
also visited England and northern Italy, the
mission to help Adams negotiate a treaty.
**** This was not a
snap judgment, for Jefferson had studied France as he stud-
new that came his way. We find him advising Lafayette to
ied everything learn more
about his own countrymen,to "ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done,
look into their kettels, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretense of resting
yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft."
116 The Price of Union

The fear of contamination with which Jefferson viewed Europe was not
lessened by his love for the beauties of that continent. In the same letter
to Bellini, he said:

Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture,

sculpture, painting, music, I should want words. It is in these arts they
shine. The last of them, particularly, is an enjoyment the deprivation
of which with us cannot be calculated. I am almosjt ready to say it is
the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which, in spite
of all the authority of the Decalogue, I do covet.

Jefferson will not be understood neither his foreign nor his domestic
policies, hishopes nor his wounding disappointments unless this dread
of Europe and her poisons be kept in mind. He almost despaired of
Europe; he thought America the last hope of man; he believed that the
hope would be extinguished if America saw herself as a copy, or even as
a potential partner, of Europe; he was willing to be deprived of the joys
of Old- World art for as long as necessary, rather than run the risk of
Old- World contagion. In 1820 he wrote to William Short:

The dayis not distant when we may formally require a meridian of

partition through the ocean which separates the two hemispheres, on

the hither side of which no European gun shall ever be heard, nor an
American on the other; and when, during the rage of the eternal wars
of Europe, the lion and the lamb, within our regions, shall lie down
together in peace. . The principles of society there and here, then,
. .

are radically different, and I hope no American will ever lose sight
of the essential policy of interdicting in the seas and territories of both
Americas, the ferocious and sanguinary contests of Europe.

And in 1823, when President Monroe asked him whether the United
States should join with England in opposing the intervention of the Holy
Alliance in South America, Jefferson wrote:

The question presented by the letters you sent me is the most mo-
mentous which has ever been offered to my contemplation since that
of Independence. That made us a nation; this sets our compass and
points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time open-
ing on us. ... Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to
entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer
Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. One nation, most
. . .

of all, could disturb us in this pursuit; she now offers to lead, aid, and
accompany us in it. ... Great Britain is the nation which can do us
the most harm of any one, or all, on earth; and with her on our side
we need not fear the whole world. . The war in which the present
. .

proposition might engage us, should that be its consequence, is not her
war, but ours. Its object is to introduce and establish the American
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 117

system, of keeping out of our land all foreign powers, of never per-
mitting those of Europe to intermeddle with the affairs of our nations.
It is to maintain our own principle, not to depart from it.

Jefferson's isolationism, his longing that America should be let alone

to build a new and better life, was honorable, and sensible, and doomed.
It was seem reason for thinking that "the prin-
sensible because there did
and here are radically different," and it did seem
ciples of society there
true that America was a safe distance from the Old World. Morally,
the hope seemed justified, since it was based on a wish for self-improve-
ment, so that America could help her neighbors by example. And physi-
cally the hope seemed possible. The industrial revolution was to change
both appearances. The difference between "there and here" turned out
to be one of good fortune, not of morals or of economic wisdom; and
the size of the Atlantic turned out to be negligible.
America was luckier than Europe. Her neighbors were weak and
therefore unrapacious; her natural resources were large; her politics,
being freshly made, took advantage of the past two hundred years of
European thought and work in the cause of freedom; but her economics
were the same as other people's. She enjoyed no special favors there,
save size and wealth, which are also special temptations. She had to face
the dangers of the industrial revolution on the same terms as everyone
else: its destruction of social relationships, its frustration of the spirit, its

tendency to make men cruel and to make them shortsighted, so that

slavery seems justified by the production of wealth, and the pillaging
of the resources of one's own country seems justified by the gaudiness
of the spoils. Here America was on an equal footing with her neighbors.
And here she did no better and no worse than the rest. And here she lost
her youth and her Jeffersonian dream. The industrial revolution, as ac-

cepted and applied, quickly made impossible the America which Jeffer-
son preached when he became president. And within a century or a cen-
tury and a half some time between the sinking of the Maine and the
ruin of Hiroshima it made impossible the isolation which Jefferson

preached he died: the deep, the decent wish to escape "from the
till

contagion of the world's slow stain." It is no wonder that the wish lingered
for a few years, beyond hope or reason.

When he returned home in 1789, Jefferson thought it was only for a visit;
but Washington persuaded him to become Secretary of State. As we have
seen, he was not long in the Cabinet before he felt impelled to build a
political party to oppose the Hamiltonians.
Years later, in The Anas
118 The Price of Union

papers, Jefferson recalls his disillusionment when he first landed from

Prance :

The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the

circle of principal citizensapparently with welcome. The courtesies of
dinner parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed
me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder
and mortification with which the table conversations filled me.
Politics were the chief topic, and a preference *of kingly over re-
publican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate
I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most
part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless
among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from
the legislative Houses.

This picture of official society was doubtless distorted; but it was not
the years which had caused the distortion, it was a quality in Jefferson's
mind which translated any slighting remark about the Constitution, or
about the people, into a request for a king. He coined a language of his
own to express his distaste for the crypto-monarchists he imagined all
about him: the "monocrats," he called them; the "Anglomen." Wash-
ington tried to assure him that the town was not really filled with such
monsters; but not even Washington could quiet his fears. So he set to
work building his party with the zest of a man who felt he was rescuing
the people from slavery. He called it the Republican Party, for he felt
that he and his followers were the sole friends of the republic.
"The Republican party"* [in Congress], he wrote to Washington in
1792, "who wish to preserve the government in its present form, are
fewer in number than the monarchical Federalists. They are fewer even
when joined by the two or three or half-dozen anti-federalists,** who
though they have not owned it are still opposed to any general govern-
ment: but being less so to a republican than to a monarchical one, they
naturally join those whom they think the lesser evil." Putting aside Jef-
ferson's extreme fears of "Anglomen," it is
typical of American politics
that the Republicans should describe themselves as the men "who wish
to preserve the government in its present form." It is the result of a
written constitution that political controversies become an argument as
to who is saving, and who is debauching, the sacred text. Crawford of
Georgia commented on this in the Senate, in 1811. "It has become so
extremely fashionable," he said, "to eulogize this Constitution, whether
* Later the
party became known as the Democratic-Republican Party. In the
time of Andrew Jackson the word "Republican" was finally dropped, and from that
day to the present it has been the Democratic Party.
** The anti-Federalists had been
opposed to the adoption of the Constitution,
preferring to continue under the Articles of Confederation.
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 119

the object of the eulogist is the extension or the contraction of the powers
of the government, that whenever its eulogium is pronounced I feel an
involuntary apprehension of mischief."
Fortified by his conviction that the life of the nation was at stake,
Jefferson built his party, took advantage of the Federalist war between
Hamilton and Adams, and won the election of 1800. The farsightedness
of his "botanizing" trip of 1791 was shown by the fact that the New
York City elections, in the spring of 1800, decided who was to be made
President the following autumn. The electors were still chosen by the
legislatures of the several states, so a Federalist legislature meant electors
presumably pledged to Adams, a Republican legislature meant electors
* The two
certainly pledged to Jefferson. parties were so equal that the
electors of New York State were expected to decide the result; the
electors would be Federalist or Republican, depending on who held the

majority in the legislature, and that majority depended on the vote of

New York City in May. There Hamilton and Burr were again pitted
against each other, knowing that their struggle was the turning-point
of American political history for a generation.
In the local elections of 1799 Burr and Tammany Hall had been beaten
by Hamilton and the Federalist merchants. Confident that he could win
again in 1800, Hamilton allowed his hatred for Adams to push him into
a rash act: instead of choosing the strongest possible Federalist candi-
dates for the legislature, Hamilton chose candidates who would take
orders from himself.He thought he could win with these candidates, keep
the Federalists in power, and contrive to make Pinckney of South Caro-
lina the President instead of Adams. It was dangerous to seek so much,
to grasp at such a complicated victory, when dealing with Aaron Burr.
In opposition to the colorless candidates of Hamilton, Burr persuaded
the best Republicans in the city to offer themselves. He not only per-
fected the organization of Tammany, but he saw to it that a number of
voteless members were given sufficient property to qualify as voters. When
all plans were laid, Matthew Davis wrote to Gallatin, Jefferson's leader
in Congress: "Never have I observed such an union of sentiment, so
3
much zeal, and so general a determination to be active."
On the day of the election Hamilton rode a white horse from polling

* The distinction is
important. Candidates were chosen at a meeting of the Con-
gressional representatives of each party known as a party caucus. Early in 1800 it
was clear that the Republican caucus would nominate Jefferson, and probably Burr
for Vice-President. The Federalist caucus would nominate Adams, and C. C.
Pinckney of South Carolina; but the strife within the Federalist Party was so in-
tense that the Hamiltonian faction, if they saw a chance for victory, would try to
persuade one or two electors to vote for some local favorite instead of Adams. In
that case, so long as everyone made Pinckney his second choice, Pinckney would
become President for the electors merely chose two men; they did not say which
man was for which office,
120 The Price of Union

booth to booth, exhorting the voters; Burr stayed in his office, making
sure that the Tammany men did their duty. Davis wrote to Gallatin
that the election "will decide in some measure on our future destiny. The
result will clearly evince whether a republican form of government is
worth contending for. On this account the eyes of all America have been
turned toward the city and county of New York. The management and in-
dustry of Colonel Burr has effected all that the friends of civil liberty
could possibly desire." 4 The rest of the letter is a plea that Burr should
be rewarded with the nomination for the vice-presidency.
The next day Gallatin was sent the good news: complete Republican
victory.

That business [wrote been conducted and brought

his informant] has
to issue in so miraculous a manner that I cannot account for it but
from the intervention of a Supreme Power and our friend Burr the
agent.
On the day on which we learned the vote of the city of New
. . .

York [wrote Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, in 1811], which it was well

known would decide the vote of the state, and that, again, the vote
of the Union, I called on Mr. Adams on some official business. He
was very sensibly affected, and accosted me with these words: "Well,
I understand that you are to beat me in this contest, and I can only say
that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have."
"Mr. Adams," said I, "this is no personal contest between you and
me. Two systems of principles on the subject of government divide
our fellow-citizens into two parties. With one of these you concur, and
I with the other. As we have been longer on the public stage than
most of those now living, our names happen to be more generally
known. One of these parties, therefore, has put your name at its head,
the other mine. Were we both to die today, tomorrow two other names
would be in the place of ours, without any change in the motion of
the machinery. Its motion is from its principle, not from you or myself."

Jefferson undoubtedly believed these words. He undoubtedly thought

his electionwas the triumph of good principles over bad, and that such
a triumph was ordained by Providence. Yet he never made the mistake
of trusting Providence to do its own work without the help of someone
like "our friend Burr the agent." Nine years before the election he
saw that the hurt feelings of the Livingston family might one day be
turned to account, so he began to inflame and to flatter those feelings.
Despising Aaron Burr, prepared in the course of time to break Burr's
power arid drive him into virtual exile, he nevertheless realized that
Burr's manipulation of Tammany Hall was something from, which a
wise Providence might profit. Playing every card astutely, writing from
his Vice- President's chair endless letters to politicians great and small,
viL Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 121

lettersof help, encouragement and sage guidance, taking advantage of

every local quarrel or prejudice, of every folly on the part of his oppo-
nents, JelTcrson managed to win by 73 votes to 65. And then he told
the sardonic John Adams that "the motion of the machinery ... is from
its principle, not from you or myself." And he believed it; and it was
partly true, though the historian may be pardoned for pointing out that
it was not the whole truth and that the
tendency among Jefferson's
enemies to call him a hypocrite can at least be understood.

There was one point on which Providence and Mr. Burr may not have
seen eye to eye: when the electoral votes were counted it was discovered
that the Republican candidates for President and Vice- President had
the same number of votes; but according to the letter of the Constitution
there were no such things as candidates for President and Vice-President.
The electors were to vote for the two best men, "of whom one at least
shall not be an inhabitant of the same state as themselves." In case
two men
turned out to have a majority, "and an equal number of votes,
then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot
one of them for President." So it was still possible that "our friend Burr
the agent" had overdone his helpfulness and had made himself President.
The decision would have to be made, not by heaven, but by the Federalist
majority in the House of Representatives. This majority naturally saw
that it would be a pleasing political joke to put Aaron Burr, whom no-
body wanted, in the presidency, and to send Jefferson, the creator of
his party,back to the obscurity of the Vice-President's office. Hamilton,
however, was still capable of large-mindcdness on a matter that did not
concern Adams, so he used his influence to help Jefferson's election. In
doing so he took one more step toward the fatal field at Weehawken.*
While urging Jefferson's cause, Hamilton gave a description of the
mind and character of his old adversary which displays the passions of
the day but which also displays the Ilamiltonian realism in judging po-
litical action.

I admit [he wrote] that his [Jefferson's] politics are tinctured with

fanaticism, that he is too much in earnest with his democracy; . . .

that he is crafty and persevering in his objects; that he is not scrupulous

about the means of success, nor very mindful of the truth, and that
he is a contemptible hypocrite. But it is not true, as is alleged, that
* The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, proposed in 1803 and ratified in
1804, provides that the electors shall name the person voted for as President, and
the person voted for as Vice-President. The confusion of 1800 cannot recur.
122 The Price of Union

he is an enemy to the power of the executive. . While we were in

.

the Administration together, he was generally for a large construction

of the executive authority and not backward to act upon it in cases
which coincided with his views. ... I have more than once made the
reflection that, viewing himself as a revisioner, he was solicitous to
come into the possession of a good estate. Nor is it true that Jefferson
is zealot enough to do anything in pursuance of his principles which

will contravene his popularity or his interest. He is as likely as any

man I know to temporize to calculate what will b likely to promote
his own reputation and advantage; and the probable result of such
a temper is the preservation of systems, though originally opposed,
which, being once established, could not be overturned without danger
to the person who did it. ... Add to this that there is no fair reason to
suppose him capable of being corrupted.
It is interesting to compare this with John Marshall's picture of Jeffer-
son's political character. Hamilton asked Marshall, who was then Secre-

tary of State, to use his influence with the House of Representatives to

make Jefferson President instead of Burr. Marshall refused.

Mr. Jefferson [he wrote in explanation] appears to me to be a man

who will himself with the House of Representatives. By weaken-
embody
ing the office of President, he will increase his personal power. He will
diminish his responsibility, sap the fundamental principles of govern-
ment, and become the leader of that party which is about to constitute
the majority of the legislature.

The two estimates appear to be contradictory; yet within a few years

they were both proved to be true. Jefferson did, seemingly, "diminish his

responsibility" and "embody himself with the House of Representatives" ;

but he also showed himself capable of "a large construction of the ex-
ecutive authority and not backward to act upon it in cases which coincided
with his views." He came to office as leader of a party which fiercely con-
demned the Federalists for saying that the Executive should make policy.*
Yet his Administration was faced with the relentless fact that the public
business must somehow go forward. If the Executive did not make policy,
who would? If the separation of powers were taken literally, and if the

Republican talk about legislative policy-making were taken literally, where

would the government of the United States reside?
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives consisted
* Article
II, Section 3, of the Constitution says that the President "shall from
time to time . recommend to their [the Congress's] consideration such measures
. .

as he shall judge necessary and expedient." According to the Federalists, this meant
that the President should control and direct policy. According to the Republicans,
it meant that he should occasionally report on the state of the Union, and make
such suggestions as he chose. But he should not then use the patronage, or any other
power, to press for action. Luckily for the country Jefferson, while talking like a
Republican, controlled policy like a Federalist.
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 123

of a swarm of undisciplined individualists who had neither the unity of

interests,nor the knowledge of administration, which had given cohesion
to the Federalists. Journalists and politicians might talk about the "con-
stitutional duty" of returning control over policy to the House; but when

Jefferson surveyed the House he did not see anyone to whom he could
return anything. He saw a number of talkative and touchy men, self-
assured, steeped in the prejudices and problems of their districts, intent
on staying in office by airing the prejudices even if they could not solve the
problems. How was policy, national policy, to emerge from the frictions of
such a group? The question did not dismay Jefferson, for he had a short-
term political answer. Pie knew how policy would be made during his own
administration, and he was content to leave problems in the theory of
government unexamined, at least until he had retired from the practice.
In his first Inaugural Address, Jefferson spoke the appropriate party
language. "Nothing," he assured the Congress, "shall be wanting on my
part to inform, as far as in my power, the legislative judgment, nor to
carry that judgment into faithful execution." Here, it seemed, was the
division of powers in all its naivete. The President, if asked a question by
the Congress, would do his best to answer it (he might even volunteer in-
formation from time to time) and the President, if Congress passed a bill,
;

would do his best to execute it. For the rest, all was apparently to be left
to "the legislative judgment": but only in appearance, not in fact. We
have seen that Jefferson would not trust Providence to win an election
without the help of Mr. Burr; similarly, he would not trust "the legislative
judgment" until he or his friends had told the legislature what to judge.
When the new House of Representatives had organized itself, the world
noticed that the Speaker and the committee chairmen were all aids and
close associates of Jefferson. He did not appoint them; he merely saw to
it that they were appointed. He did this, not as President, but as leader of

the party. The Federalists, for all their administrative competence, had
failed to find a workable relation between President and party perhaps
because they did not believe in parties. Washington behaved like a re-
luctant, short-term, constitutional monarch, and he allowed Hamilton to
behave like a far from reluctant Prime Minister. No one could usurp
Washington's position, or in any way diminish his authority, so the ar-
rangement was satisfactory during his two terms; but John Adams, who
still tried to pretend there were no parties, awoke one day to find that
Hamilton was running his Administration because Hamilton was the party
boss. Vice-President Jefferson, presiding over the Senate, writing his end-
less political letters, compiling his Manual of Parliamentary Practice,

blandly watched the Federalists attack each other, and thereby learned
that the head of the Administration and the leader of the party must be
the same man. From that day on, all successful Presidents have filled the
124 The Price of Union

two roles.In 1801 the parties began their long and never-ending task of
reassembling the powers which the Fathers in their wisdom had sundered.
This is exactly what John Marshall feared. As a Federalist, he agreed
that the powers had to be reassembled if government was to function; but
he thought it should be done openly, by a general admission that the
Executive should make policy subject to the criticism and the permission
of the legislature. He feared a system whereby the Executive would make
policy in the darkness, by intrigue, by party pressure,* by the quiet and
irresponsible use of personal influence. Such policy-making could not be
criticized effectively, because it could not be discovered in time. Yet this
was Jefferson's system. "What is practical must often control what is pure
theory," he wrote in 1802. The pure theory, in his case, was the complete
division of powers whereby the Congress made laws in one vacuum and
the President administered them in another. Jefferson saluted the theory
in public; but in private he turned to "what is practical." In private he
told the Congress what laws the Administration wanted, and did not want.
"His whole system of administration," wrote John Quincy Adams in his
Memoirs, "seems founded on the principle of carrying through the legisla-
ture measures by personal or official influence." And Senator Pickering
said that Jefferson tried "to screen himself from all responsibility by calling

upon Congress for advice and direction. Yet with affected modesty
. . .

and deference he secretly dictates every measure which is seriously pro-

5
posed."
There was one flaw to Jefferson's plan : it was not a permanent system
of government; it could only be worked by one remarkable man, the like
of whom has never been seen again. "This well-organized system," writes
Professor Binkley, "worked with almost infallible precision, despite the
fact that themachinery and its operation were concealed from the public.
Through a hint dropped here, a diplomatic letter sent there, and a sug-
6
gestion made to another the President had his way." The virtuosity was

admirable; yet the Federalists were right in pointing out that their re-
jected system would work without a magician in the White House, and
would work in broad daylight where the whole country could watch. They
were also right, or at least very human, to be annoyed at the readiness with
which the Republicans took over Federalist methods which they had
criticized unmercifully. The new Secretary of the Treasury was soon being
consulted by Congress as Hamilton had been consulted, and was soon
steering his bills through the House of Representatives with a Hamiltonian
authority. Also, the Republicans made effective use of the much-abused
caucus the device for bringing together President, Cabinet, and party
members of Congress to decide on policy and to frustrate the constitutional
division of powers. When Jefferson's party caucus approved a measure,
and Jefferson's party floor leader was on hand to make sure that wavering
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 125

members voted correctly or suffered the swift consequences of Jefferson's

displeasure, there was little danger that "the legislative judgment" would
either surprise or pain the president.*

James Madison became Jefferson's Secretary of State, and Albert Gallatin

his Secretary of the Treasury. Gallatin was Swiss. He had moved to Amer-
ica at the age of nineteen., and had finally settled in western Pennsylvania.

Although descended from a proud and ancient family in Savoy, he was

both a natural and an intellectual democrat; he had Jefferson's purity of
motive without the guile; he had Hamilton's clarity of mind without the
arrogance. And like Hamilton he was a nationalist before he was a local
patriot. Perhaps this was because both men were born abroad. No early
memories no spires, no farms, no "blue remembered hills" anchored
them to a state rather than to the nation. They were Americans who
happened to live in New York or Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvanians or
New Yorkers who happened tohave joined a federal union.
Gallatin was elected to the Fourth Congress, taking his seat in 1795 and

serving until he became Secretary of the Treasury in 1801. A

foreigner,
with a foreign accent, representing a frontier district at a time when the
nation was still sending many of her best men to Congress, Gallatin within
two years became Republican leader of the lower House, taking that posi-
tion without contest when Madison resigned in 1797. He did this by the

power of his mind, and by the goodness and restraint of his character.
Gallatin had exact knowledge, where most of his confreres had vague
prejudice; Gallatin was disinterested, balanced, calm, where a man like
Giles (who became party leader in the House in 1801) was unfair, parti-
san, and noisy.** It is a tribute to the JcfTersonians in the Fifth and Sixth
Congresses that they naturally took Gallatin as their leader.
During the first year of his Congressional service he began to train his
the Republican creed. With
party in the financial ideas which underlay
the whole of his mind and spirit he believed in Jefferson's "frugal govern-
ment." As strongly as Hamilton stood for binding the rich to the govern-
rnent through public debt and through privilege, Jefferson and Gallatin
stood for a government which should get along on its annual revenue, and

* There seems to be no
proof that Jefferson himself ever attended a caucus, al-
though the Federalists accused him of doing so as if it were a crime. But the impor-
tant point is that whether or not he was present his plans were accepted and his
influence was paramount.
** William Branch Giles of Virginia retired from Congress in October, 1798, and
did not return until 1801. He retired again, because of ill health, in 1802. In 1804,
he became Senator from Virginia, serving until 1815.
126 The Price of Union

which should make sure that the revenue was as modest as possible, so that
"labor may be lightly burdened." They agreed that payment of the public
debt should have precedence over any other expenditure. This, they
thought, was the one road toward equal rights, economic justice, and the
abolition of special privilege. It was worth paying any price in commercial
inconvenience, and in temporary humiliation abroad, to be allowed to
travel this road.
Like Jefferson, Gallatin believed in an almost Arcadian isolationism.

Arguing against appropriations for a navy in 1798, he said:

I know not whether I have heretofore been indulging myself in a

visionary dream, but I had conceived, when contemplating the situation

of America, that our distance from the European world might have
prevented our being involved in the mischievous politics of Europe, and
that we might have lived in peace without armies and navies and with-
out being deeply involved in debt. It is true in this dream I had con-
ceived it would have been our object to become a happy and not a
7
powerful nation, or at least no way powerful except for self-defence.
And years later he wrote to Jefferson, almost in despair, when it was be-
coming plain that the demands of ''self-defence" alone were enough to
thwart all their hopes for Republican purity:
I cannot, my dear sir, consent to act the part of a mere financier, to
become a contriver of taxes, a dealer of loans, a seeker of resources for
the purpose of supporting useless baubles, of increasing the number of
idle and dissipated members of the community, of fattening contractors,
pursers, and agents, and of introducing in all its ramifications that sys-
tem of patronage, corruption, and rottenness which you so justly ex-
8
ecrate.

Here is the basic faith of the triumvirs who were now to rule the coun-
try: Jefferson and Madison and Gallatin. Simplicity, thrift, and the
liquidation of debt at home, isolation (and if necessary the acceptance of
insult) abroad, untilAmerica had shown that a new type of nation, a new
type of Great Power, could exist. It was to establish this faith that the three
leaders had sought office; it was because the people believed their prom-
ises (as well as because of Jefferson's extreme political dexterity) that the

party had been put in power. "A wise and frugal government," they
promised again in Jefferson's First Inaugural, "which shall not take
. . .

from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." They stressed frugality,
not because they were misers but because they were moral philosophers.
They believed that debt, public or private, leads to the vices associated
with the rule of the "mere financier"; above all they believed that debt,
public or private, tends to concentrate property and power in the hands of
a small group.
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 127

To the Federalists, of course, the whole Republican faith was absurd.

No nation could survive, they said, in this harsh world, except by the
sword. No weak government could escape robbery abroad and disorder at
home. America was capable of being strong but she would perish if Jeffer-
;

son imposed weakness upon her. To this the triumvirate answered that
there was more than one type of strength with which to impress the out-
side world, and that order at home depended less on power than on the
consent of the governed. To strengthen and secure this consent they
proposed (as soon as the national debt was so reduced that its extinction
became a certainty) vast public works to help both the body and the brains
of the nation. Early in Jefferson's second term it seemed that the great
plan might succeed. In 1806 the President was able to tell Congress that
the debt would soon be gone, and that then, with only the lightest of tax
burdens, he planned to build roads and canals running from Maine to
Georgia, and connecting the eastern rivers with the Mississippi, and that
he planned also to build a great national university.*
A prosperous rural community ( "the encouragement of agriculture, and
of commerce as its handmaid," in the words of Jefferson's First Inaugu-
ral), and an educated public: these, said the Republican leaders, were the
basis for a free state. These, and not the sword, could save America. A

great and pure society which might reform the world by its example; a
nation capable of choosing happiness and knowledge instead of armed
power for what else was the new republic given her isolation, given her
:

resources, given her faith in natural law? Was nothing new intended?
Was nothing new ever to be tried? The world had grown gray watching
the results of pure force. From the eagles of Rome to the eagles of Napo-
leon, everything that could be done by the sword had been done, and it
was not enough. Poverty and ignorance still ruled the world; but accord-
ing to the Jeffersonians they need not rule America.
The Federalists replied that it was a good and decent dream, but still
a drearn that nations were ruled by circumstances, not by principles, and
;

still less by hopes; and that the circumstances which were personified in

Napoleon and George Canning did not make for Arcadian tranquillity, or
democratic purity, or freedom from debt.
A few months after Jefferson laid his noble hopes before Congress, the
friendly Charles James Fox died, and the next year Canning became
British Foreign Secretary. Henry Adams comments :

Fromthe moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power, the
fate ofMr. Jefferson's administration was sealed; nothing he could do
or could have done could avert it; England was determined to recover
* amendment would be
Disagreeing with Gallatin, Jefferson felt a constitutional
needed to authorize this program; but he thought that the amendment would be
easy to procure.
128 The Price of Union

her commerce and to take back her seamen, and America could not
retain either by any means whatever; she had no alternative but sub-
mission or war, and either submission or war was equally fatal to Mr.
Jefferson's Administration.*

Not only was either choice fatal to the Administration, it was fatal to the
whole Republican theory of government, to the hope that the new country
might find a substitute, in human relations, for force.

When Jefferson came to power in 1801 he was the leader of an odd as-
sortment of interests and groups the small farmers of the South and of the
:

western borders everywhere many of the great Southern landowners and

;

slaveowners (notably the arch-conservative seaboard aristocracy of South

Carolina, who had been alienated by Hamilton's financial system) many ;

of the mechanics in the northern towns, to whom Jefferson had to explain

that he had meant only the European laborers when he wrote about "the
mobs of great cities"; and the Clinton-Burr-Livingston machine in New
York State.
If New York
voted for this coalition because it wanted spoils and power,
and South Carolina joined (in spite of deploring the ideas in Jefferson's
if

Declaration of Independence) because it feared the aggressiveness of

Northern capitalism, Pennsylvania supported Jefferson for the eccentric
reason that she believed in him. She believed in that same Declaration
which made the lords of South Carolina shudder, and the lords of the
Hudson Valley laugh. "In Pennsylvania," said Albert Gallatin, "not only
have we neither Livingstons nor Rensselaers, but from the suburbs of
Philadelphia to the banks of the Ohio I do not know a single family that
has any extensive influence. An equal distribution of property has rendered
every individual independent, and there is among us true and real equal-
"
ity
Jefferson referred to his election as "the Revolution of 1800"; but it is
easy to understand, after making a list of his supporters, why the revolution
was not very revolutionary. The immense conservative influence of Amer-
ican parties, deriving from the fact that they are always coalitions of local
*
Canning was probably unaware that such a thing as Jefferson's theory of gov-
ernment existed, or could exist. He sensed that America was reluctant to fight for
her interests, and the knowledge may have increased his rudeness though it did not
affect his policy. This was based on the sensible conviction that in order to beat
Napoleon England must strengthen her commerce and take back every deserting
seaman. If this meant injustice toward America, so much the worse for America.
If she wished to save her money, and the lives of her young men, she could not
expect delicate treatment in the midst of world carnage.
vii. Mr. Jefferson and His Methods 129

interests,was never better shown than in these first years of the first well-
organized party. Jefferson was able to impose his money-saving, debt-
paying financial policies he was able, in the face of heavy protest, to get
;

rid of a small number of Federalist civil servants and to install some of

his own clamoring friends; he was able to send the much-abused Federalist

Navy to fight the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, thus abandoning

the ancient and shameful system of paying tribute to those thieves; but
there was nothing very shocking or upsetting in any of this. The old ladies
in New England who hid their Bibles at the inauguration of the Infidel,
and the businessmen who would have liked to hide their gold, found that
lifeproceeded with a surprising tranquillity and absence of change.
The same discovery w as made by the more sincere and whole-souled of
r

Jefferson's followers. The reassurance of the Federalists was paralleled by

the disillusionment of men like John Randolph and John Taylor of
Caroline, who expected an agrarian anti-capitalist economy to be sub-
stituted for the Hamiltonian "aristocracy of paper and privilege." They
did not understand the party which they had helped to build. They did
not see that the price of power in the United States is eternal compromise,
for any attempt to force a radical program will mean that the coalition of
regional groups will break. Then the party will go out of power or the
states will cease to be united. Jefferson knew this instinctively. He led his
curious team with unhurried confidence. "His academic views," writes
Charles A. Beard, "assiduously circulated by his partisans pleased the tem-
per of the agrarian masses and his practical politics propitiated rather than
alienated the capitalistic interests." 9 If the foreign world had left Jefferson
alone, his administrations would have been tranquil and widely popular;
but his presidency lay in the years between Marengo and Wagram. It was
not a happy time for the heads of states. Jefferson had hardly come to
office before Napoleon began plotting his ruin.
 VIII

The Tyranny of Circumstance

AN THE YEAR 1801, Lucien Bonaparte was sent as French Ambassador to

Madrid. His first act was to negotiate a treaty, the sixth article of which
provided that the retrocession of Louisiana to France should be carried
out at once. Later in the year Napoleon signed preliminary articles of
peace with Great Britain, putting an end for the time being to war on the
seas. He was now ready for Talleyrand's most cherished project, ready to

regain the lost glories of the French Empire in North America. Europe
was to have a rest from carnage the sufferings of the United States were
;

to begin. Preliminary to this vast plan, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law,

General Leclerc, with a large army, to break the power of the Negro,
Toussaint L'Ouverture, and to re-establish France and the institution of
San Domingo. The expedition sailed toward the
slavery on the island of
end of 1801.
In the years before the French Revolution, "nearly two thirds of the
commercial interests of France centered in San Domingo." 1 Only the small
western end of the island belonged to France but even so it was the most
;

valuable of her colonial possessions. There were about six hundred thou-
sand inhabitants of San Domingo, five sixths of whom were Negro slaves.
During the Revolution they revolted and massacred the whites. The
French National Assembly then abolished slavery, with the result that the
native genius., Toussaint, took service under the Republic. He soon sub-
dued and controlled the island, and was made a general by the National
Convention in Paris. In 1795, Spain ceded her part of San Domingo to
France; but for years Toussaint was inevitably let alone, and he came to
think of himself as the ruler of a sovereign state. When Napoleon rose to
power, Toussaint refused to take his orders and defied him to restore
slavery. Toussaint claimed independence, counting on the breadth of the
sea to save him from Europe's master; but San Domingo was essential to
the building of a new French empire. Without the island Napoleon could
not support his troops in Louisiana, so Toussaint had to be destroyed.
Early in 1802, the world began to realize what a fateful decision rested
with the Negro leader of the little West Indian island. "If he and his
blacks," writes Henry Adams, "should succumb easily to their fate, the
wave of French empire would roll on to Louisiana and sweep far up the
130
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 131

if San
Mississippi; Domingo should resist, and succeed in resistance, the
recoil would spend its force on Europe, while America would be left to
2
pursue her democratic destiny in peace." After three months of bitter
fighting, which destroyed one French army, Toussaint was taken prisoner
by trickery and sent to Europe to die in the cold of the Jura Mountains.
It seemed that Napoleon had once again triumphed. He gave orders to
return the Negroes to slavery and prepared an expedition, ostensibly for
San Domingo, but in reality to occupy Louisiana. France was about to
become the greatest power in the New World as well as in the Old.
Jefferson saw the deadly danger to America, and in April, 1802, he
wrote to Robert Livingston, the American Minister at Paris :

It [the cession of Louisiana to France] completely reverses all the

political relations of the United States. . . . There is on the globe one
single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.
It is New
Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our
territory must pass to market. . .The day that France takes pos-
.

session of New Orleans ... we must marry ourselves to the British

fleet and nation. We must turn all our attention to a maritime force, for
which our resources place us on very high ground; and having formed
and connected together a power which may render reinforcement of her
settlements here impossible to France, make the first cannon which shall
be fired in Europe the signal for the tearing up any settlement she may
have made, and for holding the two continents of America in sequestra-
tion for the common purposes of the united British and American
nations.

Those are bold words; but they would have had small meaning if ten
thousand veteran troops under a marshal of France had been stationed on
the Mississippi. In October, 1802, Jefferson learned that the Spanish
governor had withdrawn the American "right of deposit" at New Orleans.
Three months later James Monroe was sent as envoy extraordinary, to join
Robert Livingston at Paris. His instructions were to buy New Orleans and
the Floridas, or New Orleans alone, or some other space on the east bank
where the Americans could transship their goods. If all was refused, Mon-
roe should press for a perpetual guarantee of the rights of navigation and
deposit; if that too failed, he was to open conversations with the British.
Bold words again; but their strength depended, not on anything which
Jefferson could do, but on the Negroes of San Domingo.
The expedition to Louisiana, headed by a general of division and three
generals of brigade, was to have sailed in September, 1802. It did not sail
because "as fast as regiments could be named they were consumed in the
fiery furnace of San Domingo." The treacherous capture
3
of Toussaint
had not ended the war; it had only made the fighting more bloodthirsty.
In January, 1803, news reached Paris that General Leclerc was dead, that
132 The Price of Union

fifty thousand French troops and vast supplies had been consumed in a
year of slaughter^ that San Domingo was ruined, its plantations destroyed,
its population returned to barbarism. The French army now dreaded
service in that cursed island, whence no man came home, and where
money accomplished nothing but to increase the ruin.* Napoleon waited
another three months, while the news grew more savage and more bloody :

the white men burning Negroes, and Negroes massacring the whites; then
he abandoned his imperial dream, telling Talleyrand to sell Livingston the
whole of Louisiana. This was the week in which Toussaint L'Ouverture
died in his mountain dungeon.

Toussaint [wrote Henry Adams] never knew that San Domingo had
successfully resisted the whole power of France . . .
; but evenwhen
shivering in the frosts of the Jura, his last moments would have glowed
with gratified revenge had he known that at the same instant Bonaparte
was turning into a path which the Negroes of San Domingo had driven
him to take and which was to lead him to parallel at St. Helena the fate
of Toussaint himself at the Chateau de Joux. . . The prejudice of
.

race alone blinded the American people to the debt they owed to the
desperate courage of five hundred thousand Haytian Negroes who
would not be enslaved." 4

On April 30, Livingston and Monroe bought the province of Louisiana

for sixty million francs ($1 1,250,000) , the United States Government agree-
ing to assume an additional twenty million francs of debts which were owed
by France to American citizens ($3,750,000) The boundaries of Louisiana
.

were not defined, and the treaty of cession contained the promise that "the
inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the
United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the prin-
ciples of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, ad-
vantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States." Monroe had
been instructed by Secretary of State Madison to make no such promise,
on the ground that it would be unconstitutional; but the dazzled envoys

did not dare prolong the negotiations, lest haggling should cause Napoleon
to change his mind once more. Soured by the losses in San Domingo, and
bored at the thought of further waiting, he had suddenly abandoned
Talleyrand's policy of peace in Europe and expansion in North America;
but if the next ship brought good news from the West Indies, he might as

suddenly take it up again.

* General who succeeded must have 35,000
Rochambeau, Leclerc, wrote that he
frosh troops at once, to save the island.
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 133

It was this sense of urgency when dealing with an erratic tyrant which
led Jefferson to confirm the purchase without waiting for a constitutional
amendment. He believed that the act was unconstitutional, since it in-
volved a far-reaching change in the relations between the states and in the
balance of power within the country. It also involved an interpretation of
the treaty-making power which would permit the President and Senate to
annex the whole of Europe. Jefferson, who had recently been pleading for
the strictest of strict constructions of the Constitution, rightly ignored
logic in order to make sure of Louisiana but he wished to repair the dam-
;

age by asking for a constitutional amendment after the fact. Both Gallatin
and Wilson Gary Nicholas* thought this unnecessary but Jefferson stuck
;

to his point, writing to Nicholas on September 7, 1 803 :

When I consider that the limits of the United States are precisely
fixed by the treaty of 1783, that the Constitution expressly declares it-
self to be made for the United States ... I do not believe it was meant
that [Congress] might receive England, Ireland, Holland, etc., into it,
which would be the case on youi construction. ... I had rather ask an
enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than
to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless.
Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let
us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the
opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as
boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. 5

In spite of this clear statement, Jefferson in the end allowed his friends
to persuade him to do nothing, to accept the annexation without raising
the question of constitutional propriety. He abandoned what he described
as his country's "peculiar security" he acquiesced in making blank paper
;

of the Constitution. And the following year he went even further in re-

pudiating the ideas of 1798, of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, by

accepting a bill creating a territorial government in which the people of
Louisiana were to have no share. According to this bill, the governor and
secretary of Louisiana were to be appointed by the President, the legis-
lative council was to be appointed by the President, and the judges were
to be appointed by the President.

John Quincy Adams, in the Senate, raised the awkward question

whether the Constitution gave the federal government power to tax the
citizens of Louisiana without their consent. The question was ignored. The
"inalienable rights" of 1776 were apparently not shared by French
Catholics.

Within three years of his inauguration [wrote Henry Adams] Jeffer-

son bought a foreign colony without its consent and against its will,
* Senator from
Virginia and one of Jefferson's close friends. Jefferson had con-
sulted with Nicholas when framing the Kentucky Resolutions.
134 The Price of Union

annexed it to the United States by an act which he said made blank

paper of the Constitution; and then he who had found his predecessors
too monarchical, and the Constitution too liberal in powers he who
nearly dissolved the bonds of society rather than allow his predecessor
to order a dangerous alien out of the country in time of threatened war,
made himself monarch of the new territory, and wielded over it, against
6
its protests, the powers of its old kings.

Strict construction had been abandoned, for the best of reasons, without
apologies, by an Administration of strict-constructionists. The theory that
the government must be kept weak, as a protection to liberty, that the
powers of the central government must be severely limited by the most
rigid interpretation of the written document, has never wholly recovered
from this event. If Jefferson and his Virginian Republicans could not ad-
here to the theory, nobody could. The theory has been revived many times
by minorities that have felt themselves oppressed it is the theory on which
;

the Southern Confederacy was built yet for better or worse the dominant
;

American practice has been to construe the Constitution broadly, to find

therein the powers deemed necessary. Sometimes the Supreme Court has
speeded this development; sometimes it has stood in the way; but when
the Court has aggrandized the power of the federal government, as it did
under Chief Justice Marshall, the new power has never been withdrawn ;
whereas when the Court has restricted the power of the federal govern-
ment, as it did under Marshall's successor, Chief Justice Taney, the re-
strictions have not endured. The tendency to find more and more leeway
within the Constitution has triumphed; and the moment when this first
became a predictable development was 1803-04, when the JefTersonians
found they could not meet the responsibilities of office if they held to their
constitutional theories.
The Louisiana Purchase was the most popular act of Jefferson's presi-
dency. It ensured the allegiance of the Western country, and hence the
dominance of the new party. The Western states of those days were
Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. They were democratic communities,
Jeffersonian in principle and practice; but they would not have been
Jeffersonian on election day if the Republicans had allowed legal theory
to interfere with buying the port of New Orleans. Free navigation of the

Mississippi, and the right of deposit, were essential to the

existence of the
Western by acquiring Louisiana and the great port of New Orleans
states ;

Jefferson consolidated his party and began the alliance of South and West
which was to dominate politics for more than half a century. He also
doubled the size of the country. He also sacrificed his favorite theory on
the cruel altar of necessity. The Supreme Court was soon to show the
importance of the sacrifice.
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 135

In the dying days of the Adams Administration, Congress increased the

number of federal courts, and reorganized the judiciary in the District of
Columbia. The President quickly filled the new places with judges who
were strongly anti-Jeffersonian, and as we have seen he gave the chief
justiceship to Jefferson's deep enemy, John Marshall* After the "Revolu-
tion of 1800," therefore, the Republicans who had come to power found
their opponents securely in control of one main branch of the government.
In their annoyance they repealed the act creating the new federal judge-
ships, and they refused to deliver the commissions of the four new justices
of peace for the District of Columbia.
These appointments had been made on March 2, 1801, and confirmed
by the Senate on March 3 the last day of office for John Adams. The
commissions had then been signed by the President, and sealed by Marshall
as Secretary of State; but they had not been delivered. They were found in
the Department of State, and Jefferson ordered that they be withheld.
The four appointees then applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of
mandamus, to compel Madison (the new Secretary of State) to deliver
the commissions. The basis of the application was Section 13 of the
Judiciary Act of 1789, which authorized the Supreme Court to issue such
a writ "to officers of the United States." The case was presented in the
name of William Marbury, one of the plaintiffs, and thus became known
as Mar bury v. Madison.
The unanimous decision of the Court, written by John Marshall, was
given in February, 1803. The first question was whether Marbury had a
right to the commission. The Court found that he had such a right. The
second question was whether the laws provided a remedy for the violation
of this right. The Court found that the laws did provide a remedy, and
that the writ of mandamus was the proper form of remedy. The third
question, which contained John Marshall's joker, was whether the Su-
preme Court had the authority to issue such a writ. The authority was not
conferred by the Constitution, which was precise in its grants of original
jurisdiction to the Supreme Court. "In all cases," says Article III, Section
2, "affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in
which a state shall be a party, the Supreme Court shall have original
jurisdiction. In all other cases before mentioned the Supreme Court shall

* Marshall assumed the new office on February 4, 1801, He continued as Secre-

tary of State until the end of the Adams Administration, though he did not draw
the salary of that office.
136 The Price of Union

have appellate jurisdiction. . .." The

power to issue a writ of mandamus
rested solely on the Judiciary Act of 1789, and Marshall held that Congress
was not permitted by the Constitution to expand the original jurisdiction
of the Court. Section 13 of the Judiciary Act was invalid, since an act con-
flicting with the Constitution could not become the law of the land. The
writ, therefore, could not issue from the Supreme Court.
Politically and legally, this was a remarkable decision. By holding that
Marbury had a right to his commission, Marshall washable to admonish
the President and the Secretary of State, picturing their deed as both
illegal and unjust. By holding that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction,
Marshall was able to combine a seeming act of restraint with a real asser-
tion of power. At the time, the chief interest centered on the statement
that Jefferson had no legal right to withhold the commissions; but the
drama of the case for later generations was that it affirmed for the first
time that the Supreme Court might declare an act of Congress null and
void.The decision "brought to the support of the Union, while the
memory of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions was still green, the
ineffably important proposition that the Constitution has one final inter-
7
preter, at the same time seizing for the Court its greatest prerogative."
The power then seized has never been withdrawn, although several of the
strongest presidents have fought to curb it.
We have seen that the members of the Constitutional Convention were
in apparent agreement that the Supreme Court should possess this power.
Ever since the adoption of the Constitution, state courts had undertaken
to declare state laws invalid, and in colonial days the acts of the assem-
blies had been subject to disallowance by the courts. Most modern scholars
would probably agree with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who stated
bluntly in 1927 that "research has shown and practice has established the
futility of the charge that it was a usurpation when this court undertook
to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional." 8 Nevertheless, this was not
the popular view at the time of the campaign of 1800, and it was certainly
not the view of Jefferson. As Senator Beveridge pointed out in his life of
Marshall, there was much discussion in 1800 as to what power, if any,
could annul acts of Congress. "During these years popular opinion became
ever stronger that the Judiciary could not do so, that Congress had a free
hand so far as the Courts were concerned, and that the individual states
might ignore national laws whenever those states deemed them to be in-
fractions of the Constitution." 9 That was the theory which underlay the
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798; it must lead to a weak central
government, and perhaps in the end to disunion. It was the theory to
which Jefferson hoped to return, even after his immense assumption of
federal power in the Louisiana Purchase. It was the theory which Marshall
felt he must scotch if the nation was to survive.
viii. T'he Tyranny of Circumstance 137

Marshall had been a member of the Virginia Assembly from 1782 to

1 784. Professor Corwin writes :

This was the period when governmental power was concentrated in

the state legislatures; and they speedily forfeited the confidence of those
elements of society whose views or interests transcended state lines, play-
ing fast and loose with the treaty obligations of the Confederation,
starting commercial wars among the states, and finally becoming in the
majority of instances the abject tools of the numerous but bankrupt
small-farmer class. 10

It was to save society from the radicalism and the debtors' laws of those

days that men like Marshall, Washington, and Hamilton had fostered the
conservative movement which ended in the making of the Constitution.
If the Constitution itself was now to be annulled or overridden by the
state legislatures, Marshall felt the entire effort would have been vain.

Having power of his Court to annul acts of Congress, he

established the
went on to establish the same power to annul acts of the states when they
~ ~
x
conflicted with the written document. Only then did he feel that the
nation was safe. The Supreme Court and not the states, the Supreme
Court and not the Congress, would decide what powers the central gov-
ernment possessed. And so long as John Marshall influenced the Supreme
Court, those powers would be sufficient.
The measures which spelled safety to Marshall spelled tyranny to Jeffer-
son and his friends. They wanted freedom, not order; individualism, not
authority; agrarian self -sufficiency, not the centralizing march of com-
merce and finance. And they were in power after 1801. So Beveridge was
right in saying that the issue raised by the Jeffersonians whether the
Supreme Court could enforce the essentially conservative and authori-
tarian Constitution, or whether radical state legislatures or a radical Con-
gress could ignore it "must be settled at the time or abandoned perhaps
forever. The fundamental consideration involved must have a prompt,
firm, and, if possible, final answer. Were such an answer not then given,
it was not certain that it could ever be made. For the reasons stated,
. . .

Marshall resolved to take that step which, for courage, statesmanlike fore-
sight, and, indeed, for perfectly calculated audacity, has few parallels in
11
judicial history." And a few pages later Beveridge describes the opinion
in Marbury v. Madison as "a coup as bold in design and as daring in exe-
cution as that by which the Constitution had been framed."
This was precisely Jefferson's view of the decision, only it moved Jeffer-
son to hatred, not to praise. Marshall had staked his claim; but the
* M'Culloch v.
Maryland, 1819. The second power was implicit in the first. In
this decisionMarshall also gave a very broad, Hamiltonian interpretation to the
powers of the central government.
138 The Price of Union

decisive battle with the President was still to come. Beyond all other cen-
what he once described as "the consolida-
tralizing forces, Jefferson feared
tion of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming
instrumentality of the Supreme Court." And Jefferson's opinion of his
cousin, John Marshall, was such that he dared not hope the Court would
be restrained by reason or by scruples. "The judge's [Marshall's] in-
veteracy is profound," he wrote to Gallatin in 1810, "and his mind of that
gloomy malignity which will never let him forego the opportunity of
satiating it on a victim." Nothing but a final test of strength would decide
between these two great Virginians, both with Randolph blood. If it was
a question of "the noiseless and unalarming" use of power, Jefferson
should have been at his most formidable ; yet strangely he failed.
Jefferson thought his election marked a revolution. He thought he and
his Republicans could cancel the evil precedents of the Federalists, re-

directing the government toward that decentralization, political and eco-

nomic, which he believed to be the one hope for democracy. Clearly, after
Marbury v. Madison, none of this would be possible unless Jefferson could
either reform or diminish the Supreme Court. The Jeffersonians were
temporary; but the decisions of the Court were permanent. Short of revo-
lution, they could only be undone by another Court. If Jefferson truly
meant to set the republic on a new track, he must either procure another
Court or curb the newly claimed powers of the existing one.

The question how to deal with the Judiciary [wrote Henry Adams]
was, therefore, the only revolutionary issue before the people to be met
or abandoned; and if abandoned then, it must be forever. No party
could claim the right to ignore its principles at will, or imagine that
theories once dropped could be resumed with equal chance of success.
If the revolution of 1800 was to endure it must control the Supreme
Court. The object might be reached by constitutional amendment, by
impeachment, or by increasing the number of judges. Every necessary
power could be gained by inserting into the United States Constitution
the words of the Constitution of Massachusetts, borrowed from English
constitutional practice, that judges might be removed by the President
on address by both Houses of the Legislature. 12
Federalists would say this was revolution; but what of it? Jefferson claimed
that his party came to power in order to change the whole Federalist plan
of government. "Serious statesmen could hardly expect to make a revolu-
tion that should not be revolutionary."
The easiest of the three methods of attack would have been to increase
the number of judges, thus swamping the Federalist members of the
Court. Jefferson could have done this, or he could have amended the Con-
stitution, at any time between 1801 and 1804, when his power was at its
height. Randolph and John Taylor of Caroline urged him to radical
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 139

action; but all that happened was the impeachment of inebrious Judge
Pickering* in 1803. The next year
the House voted articles of impeach-
ment against Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court> a violently
indiscreet and overbearing enemy of Republicanism. The case did not
come to trial before the United States Senate until February, 1805, in the
last hours of the first term, when it was already too late for unity among
the Republicans. And Randolph overbearing, eccentric, and intolerant
was put in charge of the Administration forces Randolph, who was per-
:

haps the only man in public life as indiscreet, and as happy to make ene-
mies, as Justice Chase himself. Furthermore, Jefferson's "judge-breaking"
friends began to talk about impeachment as "an inquest of office," which
suggested that if they were successful with Chase they would make a clean
sweep of the Court.
At the time of the trial, twenty-three votes in the Senate were needed
to convict. The Republicans had twenty-five Senators, the Federalists nine.
Five Republican Senators were doubtful, chiefly because the loose talk of
the Virginians made it clear that Chief Justice Marshall was the real
object of attack, rather than Associate Justice Chase. Having chosen a
bad battleground, a bad time, and a bad leader, the Jeflersonians had to
abide by the result. The Chase trial decided for a long time to come
whether the Supreme Court should keep the powers John Marshall had
won for it. The decision was in favor of the Court; the Senate said, in
effect, that it was not prepared to remove a judge because his manners
were bad or his rulings unpopular. The Senate refused to become a court
of appeals.
The Chase trial was a grievous blow to Jefferson's theory of govern-
ment. The Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath had weakened the
theory; but the acquittal of Justice Chase ruined it. "Chief Justice
Marshall at length was safe; he might henceforward at his leisure fix the
principles of Constitutional law. Henceforward the legal profession
. . .

had its own way in expounding the principles and expanding the powers
13
of the central government through the Judiciary."
In 1820 Jefferson made his final comment on the failure of 1805.

The
Judiciary of the United States [he wrote] is the subtle corps of
sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine the
foundations of our confederated fabric. , . . Having found from ex-
perience that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scarecrow,
they consider themselves secure for life: they skulk from responsibility;
... an opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps by a majority of one,
delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or
timid associates, by a crafty judge who sophisticates the law to his mind
14
by the form of his own reasoning.
* district court in New
Judge of a federal Hampshire,
140 The Price of Union

Such appears have been Jefferson's view from the beginning of his
to
life. For years Jefferson enjoyed as much
presidency to the end of his
power as any man ever held in America yet it was not until the power had
;

begun to wane that he took action against the Court. It was not until the
power was wholly gone, in the final days of the embargo fight, in 1807 and
1808, that Jefferson took the obvious course of proceeding against the
Court by constitutional amendment. Introduced in both houses and en-
dorsed by many state legislatures, the amendment provided that federal
judges should hold office for a term of years, and should be removed by
the President on address by two thirds of both houses. Nothing happened ;

the amendment died of the general inertia which had fallen upon the last
days of Jefferson's second term.

Early in 1804, when it became obvious that Jefferson would be elected

for a second term, some of the Federalist leaders grew desperate. Justice
Chase announced that freedom and property were about to be destroyed ;
and Timothy Pickering, the senior Senator from Massachusetts, wrote:
"The people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views and interests
with those of the South and West. The latter are beginning to rule with a
rod of iron." Pickering wished to move at once toward disunion; but the
wiser leaders of New England, such as George Cabot and Justice Parsons,*
knew that it was not yet possible to carry the people with them. They told
Pickering to wait, assuring him that bad as things were they would soon
be worse, and that only then could the misguided common folk be turned
from Jefferson. "A separation is now impracticable," wrote Cabot to
Pickering in February, 1804, "because we do not feel the necessity or
utility of it. The same separation then will be unavoidable when our loy-
alty to the Union is generally perceived to be the instrument of debase-
ment and impoverishment. If it is prematurely attempted, those few only
will promote it who discern what is hidden from the multitude."
The soundness of Cabot's judgment was shown later in the year, when
Massachusetts and New Hampshire voted for Jefferson. There was not yet
sufficient discontent to make secession popular. Pickering, however, was
unconvinced by Cabot's letter. He saw that he could not go the whole way
toward secession without the support of the great leaders in his own sec-
tion; but he went part way, dabbling in the tenebrous politics of New
York, encouraging Aaron Burr in the plot that ended with the death of
Hamilton.
*
Theophilus Parsons, who became chief justice of Massachusetts in 1806, was
one of the most learned lawyers in America. Like Pickering, he was an Essex
County man and a devout Federalist.
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 141

Burr was Vice-President in the spring of 1804. The Virginians had

still

paid him and adroitness in helping them to win the elec-

for his efficiency
tion of 1800; but they did not like him or trust him. They knew that his
ambition was fierce and they suspected that his scruples were nonexistent.
He was also a threat to Jefferson's plan to elect Madison as his successor,
thus keeping the presidency in Virginia for at least sixteen years. As early
as 1802 Jefferson and his friends were suggesting to the Clinton family*
that the vice-presidency could be theirs after the next election, if they
would be kind enough to break Burr's power in New York State. The
Clinton newspaper** then set about Burr with a violence and a lack of
scruple which was unusual even for the political journalism of those days.
In January, 1804, Burr went to Jefferson and offered friendship or enmity.
He intended to retire as Vice- President in 1805, he said; but he wanted
Jefferson to appoint him to some important office. Jefferson refused, and
Burr turned to the intrigues of Pickering.
The plan was a simple one if the Federalists could help Burr to become
:

governor of New York, Burr might then be able to take his state out of the
Union and to join it to New England in a Northern confederacy. Burr
could not hope for the Republican nomination in New York, since the
*~>arty machinery was in the hands of the Clintons and Livingstons; so his
friends in the state legislature held a caucus and named him an inde-
pendent candidate. Pickering and his New England Federalists then
sought to persuade the New York Federalists to vote for Burr. The party
was disorganized in that state, and without a candidate; also many of the
Federalists liked Burr because he was hated by Jefferson and the Vir-

ginians. The plan was partly successful and might have been wholly so
except for Burr's old, implacable enemy.
When Hamilton heard what was afoot he was alarmed and angry. He
*
George Clinton, many times governor of New York State, vigorous opponent of
the Federal Constitution and therefore of Hamilton, Vice-President of the United
States during the second term of Jefferson and the first term of Madison; and
De Witt Clinton, the nephew of George, who retired from the United States Senate
in 1803 in order to become mayor of New York City and who succeeded his uncle
as the most powerful political leader in the state. He was the farsighted promoter of
the Erie Canal, on which so much of New York's prosperity was built, and Professor
Dixon R. Fox has described him as "perhaps the most effective personal force for
public education in the history of the state." He was also a ruthless friend of the
spoils system in state politics. As we have seen, the Clintons joined with Burr and
the Livingstons in 1800 to put Jefferson's party in power; but by 1804 Burr was
excommunicated by the Clintons and Livingstons, and by 1807 De Witt Clinton
and the Livingstons were again enemies, and by 1812 De Witt Clinton was himself
allied with the New England Federalists, who would have elected him President if
they could have won the state of Pennsylvania. The politics of New York were not
always easy to predict.
** The American Citizen, a daily newspaper run by James Cheetham, in part-
nership with a cousin of De Witt Clinton's. Cheetham was an Englishman who had
been forced to leave his country at the time of the Manchester riots of 1798.
142 The Price of Union

thought Burr was a cheap demagogue whose rise to power would encour-
age all the worst vices of democracy. And he thought his New England
friends were wrong to attempt secession, which would make for weakness,
and then anarchy, and in the end for the ruin of the whole American
cause. A few hours before he died he wrote to his friend Theodore Sedg-
*
wick of Massachusetts, one of the Federalist leaders: 'Dismemberment of
our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without
any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to 0ur real disease,
which is democracy; the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be
the more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.'*
The enemy, in other words, was not union, but democracy; the remedy
was not secession, but oligarchy.
Feeling as he did, Hamilton must fight the Burr plot. At a Federalist
meeting in Albany he explained with clarity and violence why no man
should help Burr; yet it was obvious that a majority of Federalists intended
to reject his advice. This only spurred him to harsher measures. Through-
out the election, wherever Hamilton went, he denounced Burr unrestrain-
edly. Whether or not as a result, Burr was beaten by the Clinton-
Livingston candidate, in April, 1804. This was the end of Burr, politically.
He had no future in the Republican Party, because Jefferson and tM
Clintons feared and hated him; he had no future in the Federalist Party,
because Hamilton barred his way. He might have been elected President
in 1801 by the Federalist House of Representatives; but Hamilton had

begged his friends to support even Jefferson rather than Burr. He might
have been elected governor in 1804, and then become president of the
Northern states but Hamilton had argued tirelessly with every Federalist
;

not to trust this adventurer. It is no wonder that the adventurer felt

aggrieved.
On June 18, Burr wrote Hamilton a brief letter, calling attention to
some of the expressions which Hamilton was said to have used about him,
and adding, "You must perceive, sir, the necessity of a prompt and un-
qualified acknowledgment or denial." Two days later Hamilton answered,
without giving Burr the denial he sought, and ending with the ominous
words, "I trust on more reflection you will see the matter in the same
light with me if not, I can only regret the circumstance, and must abide
;

the consequences." These were the words with which men made clear
that they were willing to accept a duel.
The duel took place early in the morning of July 1 1, across the Hudson
River from New York, under the heights of Weehawken. As clearly as any
Northern soldier in the Civil War, Hamilton fought for the Union. He
believed that if he refused the duel his own political influence would be

destroyed, and that at some future date Burr might break the nation. He
believed that if he accepted the duel but refused to fire, and if Burr then
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 143

killed him, Burr would ruin himself as well. So he went to Weehawken,

and threw away his fire, and died from Burr's first bullet.* He had been

right in one belief: Burr fled the state, never to have political influence
in New York again.**
Hamilton died at the age of forty-seven. He may well have been the
greatest genius of his time and country not the greatest character, who
was certainly Washington and not the greatest political leader, who was
;

certainly Jefferson; but the greatest genius in government, in law, in eco-

nomics. Talleyrand, in his Etudes sur la Republique, makes a larger claim.
"Je considere Napoleon," he wrote, "Fox, et Hamilton comme les trois

plus grands hommes de not re epoque, et si je devais me

prononcer entre
les trois, je donnerais sans hesiter la premiereplace a Hamilton. II avait
devine PEurope." He had divined more than Europe. After a few years
as a shop assistant, and before the first copy of Adam Smith had crossed
the Atlantic, he had divined the science of economics; and after a little
schooling and a few years in the army, he had divined political philosophy,
and the art and practice of government; after a few months of study, he
had divined the law. Chancellor Kent*** once referred to his "mighty
mind"; it was the speed as well as the power of that mind which made
his genius.
The New England where they had refused his
Federalists, especially in
advice, felt Hamilton
that the death of was the death of hope. From that
moment they were as despairing before Jefferson, as the Irish were before
Cromwell after the death of Owen Roe O'Neill; and they mourned Hamil-
ton with as wild a melancholy:

Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen? why did you die?

* Hamilton left a
paper explaining his intention to waste his first shot. Nathaniel
Pendleton, his second, testified that Hamilton did not fire until after he had been
hit, when an involuntary tightening of his finger set off the pistol. The leaves of the
tree above him showed the erratic course of the bullet. Hamilton admitted that he
might have injured Burr unduly, which is why he "reserved" his fire. He did not
seek death, but he knew that if it came Burr's power to do harm would die also.
**He presided as Vice-President, over the trial of Justice Chase. After finishing
his term of office, he went down the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers on his mysteri-
ous mission to detach the western states from the Union. In 1807 he was tried for
treason, was acquitted, and then sought exile in France.
***James Kent, the first professor of law at Columbia University (1793-98;
1824-26), author of the famous Commentaries on American Law, chief justice of
the Supreme Court of New York State, and chancellor of the New York Court of
Chancery. He has been described as "practically the creator of equity jurisdiction
in the United States." He thought Hamilton the greatest lawyer he had known. "I
have little doubt," he wrote, "that if General Hamilton had lived twenty years
longer, he would have rivalled Socrates or Bacon, or any other of the sages of an-
cient or modern times, in researches after truth and in benevolence to mankind."
144 The Price of Union

The more extreme may well have persuaded themselves that

Federalists
Jefferson was Cromwell, and that it would not be long now
as ruthless as
before the massacres began. In fact, the good days were almost over for
that gentle philosopher-president, not because he was about to war on his
enemies but because France and England were about to war on him and to
expose the weakness of all his hopes and plans for government.

After the death of Hamilton a number of minor troubles beset Jefferson,

leading up to the major trouble that was to overthrow his system. First
came the failure of the Chase trial, which meant victory and power for
John Marshall; then came the West
failure of a dubious effort to acquire
Florida by stealth.
From the beginning, Jefferson had been discontented with his bargain
on Louisiana. He did not foresee the effect of the Industrial Revolution
upon westward expansion in America, so he did not believe this new land
would be needed within measurable time. He was interested in it as a
geographer, and as an amateur of natural history; he knew the importance
of the Mississippi, but not of the immense country beyond. He would have
preferred to have bought the little strip of Spanish land known as West
Florida, which included the good harbor of Mobile Bay and the lower
courses of the rivers that drained the Mississippi Territory. He tried, un-
successfully, to persuade Spain that West Florida was part of Louisiana
and had already been sold; then he tried, unsuccessfully, to buy or to
threaten the Spanish into parting with the territory. Finally, he hit upon a
plan which did justice neither to his brains nor to his morals: he under-
took to bribe Napoleon into extorting West Florida from the Spaniards
and handing it to America. For this, he wanted a secret appropriation of
two million dollars.
Nothing was more remarkable about Jefferson than his capacity for
adapting principles to reality without cynicism and without pain. A sincere
believer in strict construction and the least possible government, he was
prepared to stretch the Constitution to the breaking-point in order to seize
the powers necessary for the Louisiana Purchase; a sincere believer in
economy, he was willing to spend money faster than the Federalists when
it seemed to him wise; a sincere believer in simple and open government

which all men could understand and criticize, he was willing to keep the
House of Representatives in secret session for two months in order to
wring a furtive appropriation from his reluctant followers; a sincere be-
liever in the separation of powers, he was not only willing to guide the

Congress at every point, promoting the faithful and diminishing the dis-
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 145

obedient with suave efficiency, but he often seemed incapable either of

permitting a rebellion or of noticing that he was suppressing it. This time,
however, he had to notice what he was doing, for the Two Million Act led
to a major revolt by John Randolph of Roanoke, the Administration
leader in the House.
To understand the seriousness of such a revolt, we must recall Ran-
dolph's dazzling success, in 1804 and after, in defending the cause of
principle against party expediency over the labyrinthine Yazoo claims.
The claims went back to 1795, when the Georgia legislature authorized
the sale of thirty-five million acres of western land to four companies, for
five hundred thousanddollars.* It was then proved that every member of
the legislature who
voted for this bill, except one, had been corrupted and
had a personal interest in the sale. The citizens of Georgia were annoyed.
They elected a new legislature, annulled the sale, expunged the sale from
the record, and by means of a special convention made the expunging act
a part of the state constitution. Meanwhile the four companies had paid
their money and sold large tracts of the land to unsuspecting citizens

throughout the Union. In many cases these buyers had resold the land; so
the vengeance of the Georgians against their venal legislature created a
nice problem for the courts. Some of the purchasers surrendered their
titles and were paid back their money; others did not.

The case soon became far more tortuous, for the United States Gov-
ernment intervened as protector of the Indians who in fact owned and
occupied most of the land in question. In 1802 Georgia ceded to the fed-
eral government her nebulous rights over this area, which now comprises
most of the states of Alabama and Mississippi; she also ceded the privilege
of settling the claims of the purchasers who had retained their titles. Years
later the Supreme Court declared in favor of these titles, saying that the

rescinding act of 1796 impaired the obligation of contract and was there-
fore invalid under the Constitution of the United States. Meanwhile, al-

though Jefferson and his Cabinet did not believe the titles were good, they
wished to make a settlement to quiet the political uproar of the claimants.
The importance attached to a settlement is shown by the fact that the
commissioners for arranging terms were the Secretary of State, the Secre-
tary of the Treasury, and the Attorney General. These eminent men
agreed that five million acres should be put aside to settle all claims. So
when the Yazoo question came before the House in 1804 in the regular
course of business, the whole force of the Administration was behind a
quick and quiet compromise except John Randolph. He attacked the
report of the three commissioners on moral grounds, saying
that the

Georgia legislature did not have the power to alienate territory except "in
* The claims received their name from the Yazoo River, which ran through part
of the territory.
146 The Price of Union

a rightful manner and for the public good." He offered a long series of
resolutions directed toward destroying the compromise. Alone, against a
and irritated House, against the entire Administration of which he
hostile
was a leading member, he succeeded in postponing the question for an-
other year.
When the matter came up again in 1805, he returned to the attack with
a violence the House had never yet heard, and which it has seldom heard
since. The whole government, he said, was being corrupted by these mon-
strous frauds. All the vices which the Republicans had come to office to
abolish were refreshed by such compromise with sin. The unhappy Post-
master-General, who had undertaken (unwisely) to act as agent for the
claimants, was pictured as the worst man alive. "His gigantic grasp," said
Randolph, "embraces with one hand the shores of Lake Erie, and stretches
with the other to the bay of Mobile. Millions of acres are easily digested
by such stomachs! The retail trade of fraud and imposture yields too slow
and small a profit to gratify their cupidity. They buy and sell corruption
in the gfoss, and a few millions, more or less, is hardly felt to the ac-
count." 18
Amazingly, he again postponed legislation for a year, and in 1806 he
procured the rejection of the bill. In 1810, in the case of Fletcher v. Peck,
Supreme Court Justice Marshall held in favor of the claimants and their
property rights. And at last, when Randolph was absent from Congress in
the session of 1813-15, the House of Representatives passed the measure
for the Yazoo compromise. Such was the man a fury and a confusion of
energy and moral reprobation who prepared to turn from the Adminis-
trationwhen Jefferson asked for secret money to buy West Florida.
Jefferson got the two million dollars, and Randolph for the most part
confined his opposition to the secret sessions but this was the last breaking
;

of the strict Republican code which theVirginian purist would per-

fiery
mit. The two no good, and the next time the Adminis-
million dollars did
tration asked for something which Randolph regarded as unprincipled he
went into opposition and attacked with maniac rage. The break came on
the Non-Importation Bill, a mild effort to retaliate against Great Britain
for her impressment of American sailors and her interference with Amer-
ican trade. This was avowedly a halfway measure which would lead to
nothing except further talk, and Randolph despised all halfway measures
just as he despised all compromise. "A milk-and-water bill," he called the
Non-Importation Act; "a dose of chicken broth."
Either America meant to go to war, he said, in which case she was
betraying Republican principles, or she didn't mean to go to war, in which
case she was either lying or fooling by such pinprick measures against
Britain. Speaking four and a half months after the battle of Trafalgar,

Randolph asked with reason, "Shall this great mammoth of the American
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 147

and plunge into the water in a mad contest

forest leave his native element
with the shark? Let him stay on shore, and not be excited by the mussels
and periwinkles on the strand!" So far he was on sure ground, and might
have won his case, and might even, because of his large influence in Vir-
ginia, have been forgiven but before he sat down his pent-up rage led him
;

to abandon safety and to attack Jefferson's whole method of conducting

the government :

I have protested, and I again protest, against secret, irresponsible,

overruling influence. The first question I asked when I saw the gentle-
man's resolution was, Is this a measure of the Cabinet? Not of an open
declared Cabinet, but of an invisible, inscrutable, unconstitutional Cab-
inet, without responsibility, unknown to the Constitution. I speak of
back-stairs influence of men who bring messages to this House, which,
although they do not appear on the Journals, govern its decisions.. . .

When I behold the affairs of this nation instead of being where I

hoped, and the people believed they were, in the hands of responsible
men committed to Tom, Dick, and Harry, to the refuse of the retail
trade of politics, I do feel, I cannot help feeling, the most deep ana
serious concern. ... I know, sir, that we may say, and do say, that we
are independent (would it were true!) , as free to give a direction to the
Executive as to receive it from him but do what you will, foreign rela-
;

tions, every measure short of war, and even the course of hostilities,
depends upon him. . . You give him money to buy Florida, and he
.

purchases Louisiana. You may furnish means; the application of those

means rests with him. Let not the master and mate go below when the
ship is in distress, and throw the responsibility upon the cook and the
cabin-boy! I said so when your doors were shut; I scorn to say less now
they are open.

This seems a far cry from the gentle words of the First Inaugural, in
which Jefferson told Congress that "nothing shall be wanting on my part
to inform, as far as in my power, the legislative judgment, nor to carry that
judgment into faithful execution." Randolph was complaining that Jeffer-
son had done exactly what John Marshall predicted he would do: under
the guise of careful adherence to the separation of powers, the government
had become "invisible, inscrutable . . without responsibility." Randolph
.

did not suggest what else could happen, short of returning to the Federalist
theory of Executive responsibility. Randolph was never willing to subject
theory to fact, principle to circumstance. Jefferson was always willing. He
did it so easily that he seemed not to notice he was doing it, which irri-
tated his opponents almost beyond endurance ; but for a grateful posterity
the important point is that he did it.
As the debate on non-importation proceeded, Randolph grew wilder
and wilder. Tall and thin and gawky, with a dead-white desperate face
148 The Price of Union

and he seemed to be whipping himself to madness. At last, on

shrill voice,

April 7, 1806, he made the fatal break. "I came here," he said, "prepared
to co-operate with the government in all its measures. I told them so. But
I soon found there was no choice left, and that to co-operate in them
would be to destroy the national character. I found I might co-operate,
or be an honest man. I have therefore opposed, and will oppose them."
There is something frightening about the quiet way in which, when
Randolph made this final challenge, Jefferson took up the fight and broke
the strength of his former, and formidable, ally. The day before his April
7 speech, Randolph was a hero in Virginia, a great party leader, a man
who stood for principles and possessed power, a man with a boundless
future. Within a few weeks of challenging Jefferson, he was left with half
a dozen disgruntled followers, no power, and no hopes. Joseph Nicholson,*
the most important man who went into opposition with Randolph, was
gently detached by Jefferson and given a seat on the Bench as judge of the
Sixth Maryland Circuit. And when the Ninth Congress came to an end,
in 1807, Randolph was deposed as chairman of the Ways and Means Com-
mittee.
What else could the President do? The
first duty of a government is to

govern. The riddle of politics is how

keep both principles and power.
to
Randolph's method made it easy to keep principles but impossible to keep
power. Assuming that he wished to accomplish something in public life,
other than the proof of his own virtue, his method was self-defeating.**

The failure of the Chase impeachment, the failure to acquire West

Florida, the Randolph schism, the ambiguous but alarming Burr con-
spiracy all these were but preludes to the final heartbreak of Jefferson's
second term. In April, 1807, while the Burr trial for treason was still under
way, the nation's attention was distracted from that singular event by
something far more striking and more dangerous. The American frigate
Chesapeake, under orders for the Mediterranean, shortly after leaving
Norfolk Roads with her decks littered with stores and few of her guns
* A
Marylander of high character, and Randolph's closest friend in the House.
Like Randolph and John Taylor, he was an "old Republican'* ; i.e., he believed in
the principles of 1798 and the promises of 1800.
** It is interesting that
Jefferson, who could so quickly break Randolph's na-
tional influence, had no control over his position in his own Virginia district. Ex-
cept for the session of 1813-15, when he was defeated because of opposition to the
war, Randolph remained in Congress until he resigned voluntarily in 1829. He was
a lone voice, without power and without patronage; but he pleased his district and
his district was faithful to him. The autonomy of the local groups which compose a
national party has seldom been better shown.
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 149

mounted, was attacked by the British frigate Leopard and forced to strike
her flag. The
attack took place because the Leopard's commander believed
that there were British deserters aboard the Chesapeake and the American
commander would not permit a search.* It seemed that the old problem
of impressments might have to be settled at last. Had Jefferson called a
special session of Congress he could have had war for the asking; and it
would have been a more reasonable and a more defensible war than the
one which finally came in 1812.
Jefferson, however, believed he could get redress without war, by the
use of purely commercial weapons. This was a favorite theory with him
and with Madison and he advanced almost gaily to the test that was to
break him. He told Monroe, who was in London,** to demand reparation ;

but he made reparation from the stubborn Canning impossible by adding

that the United States would accept nothing less than the end of the
system of impressment. Jefferson thought he was playing a strong hand. "I
verily believe," he wrote at the time, "that it will ever be in our power to
keep so even a stand between England and France as to inspire a wish in
neither to throw us into the scale of his adversary." 16 This might have
been the case if Jefferson had spent the previous six years building frigates
instead of gunboats, and if he had been pouring money into the army in-
stead of proving how cheaply a government could be run. As it was, he had
nothing with which to oppose the British or the French except commercial
threats and moral lectures.

Whatever the errors or faults of Mr. Canning may have been [wrote
Henry Adams], timidity was not one of them, and the diplomatic in-
genuity of Mr. Jefferson, with its feeble attempts to play off France
against England and England against France, was the last policy he was
likely to respect. Even the American who reads the history of the year
1807, seeing the brutal directness with which Mr. Canning kicked Mr.
Jefferson's diplomacy out of his path, cannot but feel a certain respect
for the Englishman mingled with wrath at his insolent sarcasm. 17

The first step in "kicking Mr. Jefferson's diplomacy out of his path" was a

royal proclamation of October 17, 1807, directing the navy to intensify in

every way possible the impressment of British sailors from neutral shipping.
The second was the Orders in Council of November 11, 1807 (designed
as reprisals against the Continental System of Napoleon) , which subjected
* There was one British deserter
aboard, also three Americans who had been
falsely impressed by the British and who had escaped and returned to their own
service.
** Monroe was Minister Resident in London. He and William
Pinkney of Mary-
land, a special envoy, had negotiated a treaty with the British in the autumn of
1806. The treaty had been intended to afford relief from commercial restrictions
and from impressments. It was so unsatisfactory that Jefferson did not send it to
the Senate.
150 The Price of Union

the whole of American shipping to British control. As Spencer Perceval,

the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pointed out:

British produce and manufactures, and trade either from a British

port or with a British destination, is to be protected as much as possible.
For this purpose, all the countries where French influence prevails shall
have no trade, but to or from this country or from its allies. 18

The British did not choose to argue the legal basis of 4heir action they
;

merely pointed out that they meant to win the war against Napoleon and
that in order to win they must protect British commercial shipping which
was suffering both from the French regulations and from the American
competition. England intended, as we have said before, "to recover her
commerce and to take back her seamen." What would America intend?
Jefferson had three choices: he could fight; he could try his commercial
intimidation; or he could admit the British thesis that the war on
Napoleon was a war for mankind and that America should not be too
touchy about her "rights" until that war was won. The third course, which
doubtless seemed reasonable in London, was unthinkable in Washington.
American politics had long been distorted by the loves and hates inspired
by the politics of Europe. Since the outbreak of the French Revolution the
United States had divided into two camps those who saw France as the
:

hope of the world, and England as monarchical reaction; and those who
saw France as anarchy and irreligion, and England as the hope of the
world. News was not only slow but sparse in those days. Long after France
had become a military dictatorship, her lovers in America thought of her
as the symbol of freedom, her detractors as the symbol of anarchy. Long
after England had become the last defender of the liberties of Europe, she
was regarded by her enemies in America as the bulwark of privilege and
corruption. The fact that there was little information on which these
passions could feed helped them to remain more passionate. No Adminis-
tration could afford to be convicted of subservience to either group. The

charge was always made; but it would be fatal if the charge could be
proved. It was a political necessity to try to hold the balance even between
France and England, to assert America's rights equally against both
even if the assertion must be made in words, not deeds. So the third course
was impossible to Jefferson, as it would have been to any president at that
time. He was left with war, or with commercial retaliation.
He refused war on the ground that "peace is our passion." No ruler has
ever proved a better right to make that boast. Jefferson chose peace, and
clung to it in the face of the most wounding injuries from both the war-
ring powers injuries made worse by impudence from France, by arro-
gance from England. He not only chose peace; he succeeded in persuading
the quick-tempered American people to choose it with him.
vlii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 151

In December, 1807, Jefferson asked the Congress for an absolute em-

bargo on all American commerce no vessels were to clear for any foreign
:

port,* no exports were to move by sea or by land. The Senate debated for
one day, the House for two days; both met in secret session. The bill passed
on the twenty-first of December, and Jefferson signed it on the twenty-
second. Henry Adams comments: "Of all President Jefferson's feats of
political management, this was probably the most dexterous. On his mere
recommendation, without warning, discussion, or publicity, and in silence
as to his true reasons and motives,** he succeeded in fixing upon the coun-

try, beyond recall, the experiment of peaceable coercion. His triumph was
almost a marvel; but no one could fail to see its risks. ... If Jefferson's
permanent embargo failed to coerce Europe, what would the people of
America think of the process by which it had been fastened upon them?
What would be said and believed of the President who had challenged
so vast a responsibility?" 19
The Embargo did not coerce Europe; and what the American people
thought may be inferred from the measures which had soon to be taken
to enforce this law. Gallatin,with his usual prescience, had urged that a
time-limit be put on the Embargo. He knew that if it did not bring results
quickly it must cause trouble at home. "In every point of view," he wrote
to the President on December 18, "privations, sufferings, revenue, effect
on the enemy, politics at home, &c., I prefer war to a permanent embargo.
Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calcu-
lated and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard
;

to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than

themselves." He was overruled; and it was not long before Gallatin, who
had always preached and practiced that the least government was the best,
found himself enforcing rules so oppressive that Napoleon might have
hesitated to impose them.
The first effect of the Embargo was to do for Canning precisely what
he had undertaken do for himself: diminish American shipping and
to

commerce,*** force American sailors into British employ, and generally

rehabilitate British merchant shipping. It also provided a certain amount
of amusement abroad. Napoleon confiscated all American ships that put
into French ports, saying that he was helping Mr. Jefferson to enforce his
law; and when the American Government approached the British Gov-

* To avoid retaliation, foreign ships in harbor at the time were allowed to depart.
** The President said he wanted the Embargo "to aid him in the negotiations
with England." (J. Q. Adams, Diary.)
*** Canning did not wish to destroy all American shipping and commerce, but
only that part of it which was inconvenient to Great Britain. Under the Orders in
Council there was much trade still open to Americans who would accept British
inspection and license, which explains the special hatred for the embargo on the part
of the New Englanders whose interests it was designed to protect.
752 The Price of Union

ernment with an offer to withdraw the Embargo if the British would

withdraw the Orders in Council, Canning regretted that he could not do
so, adding that His Majesty "would gladly have facilitated [the Embargo's]
removal as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American
people."
The second effect of the Embargo was the partial ruin of Virginia.
Jefferson's own state obeyed the rules loyally; but the plantation society,
the easy hospitality, the four hundred thousand slaves who had to be fed,
who could not be laid aside like farm machinery until good times returned,
the dependence of the tobacco-growers on the foreign market all con-
spired to make her the chief sufferer. The old life of Virginia was under-
mined; Jefferson himself did not recover financially from the disaster of
those two years.
The third effect of the Embargo was
breed corruption, repression,
to
and political hatreds. This is it was to evade such evils
interesting, because
that Jefferson chose peace instead of war. He believed that a free country,
if it accepted war, must lose its liberty and its civic virtue either in victory

or defeat. The chief reason for his rooted isolationism was his conviction
that America must become as miserable as Europe unless she could escape
the eternal wars of Europe. He was prepared, in order to prove war un-
necessary, to meet New England's evasions of the Embargo with force and
to endure political hatreds ; he was not prepared for the discovery that the
corruption and crime attendant on his peaceful coercion were comparable
to the corruption and crime accompanying war. He gave up all his theories
of government for peace, and peace betrayed him. The triumvirate of
Jefferson and Madison and Gallatin, who had set out to prove that govern-
ment could be frugal, that government could leave men alone, found
themselves interfering grossly with business and commerce, bankrupting
themselves and their neighbors, jailing their constituents and all for
nothing, because the Embargo did not work. It did not coerce France or
England though one may argue that if it could have been given a longer
trial it might eventually have succeeded.
The dilemma which faced the triumvirate, and the bravery with which
they met it, is shown in the following two letters.

I am
perfectly satisfied [wrote Gallatin to Jefferson on July 29, 1808]
that the embargo must be persisted in any longer, two principles must
if

necessarily be adopted in order to make it sufficient: First, that not a

single vessel shall be permitted to move without the special permission
of the Executive; second, that the collectors be invested with the general
power of seizing property anywhere, and taking the rudders, or other-
wise effectually preventing the departure of any vessel in harbor, though
ostensibly intended to remain there and that without being liable to
personal suits. I am sensible that such arbitrary powers are equally
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 153

dangerous and odious; but a restrictive measure of the nature of the

embargo, applied to a nation under such circumstances as the United
States, cannot be enforced without the assistance of means as strong as
the measure itself.

Jefferson replied:

I am satisfied if Orders and Decrees are not repealed,

with you that
and a continuance embargo is preferred to war (which sentiment
of the
is universal here) Congress must legalize all means which may be neces-
5

sary to obtain its end. 20

The last, and the most Embargo was to force New

derisive, effect of the
England into the position of Virginia and Kentucky in 1 798, and to induce
the Republican Party to sponsor an Enforcement Act* which made the
Alien and Sedition Laws seem niggardly in their grants of authority. The
Federalists now
flung back at Virginia the state rights doctrines of Jeffer-
son and Madison; the Virginians now insisted on a use of power which
Justice Joseph Story** of the Supreme Court later described as "a meas-
ure which went to the utmost limit of constructive power under the Con-
Because of the Embargo and the necessary rigors of the
stitution."
enforcement act, Pickering was able to stir the New England town meet-
ings to bitter protests and to threats of disunion; the New York legislature
nominated Vice- President George Clinton for the presidency as an anti-
Embargo Republican; John Randolph's group in Virginia nominated
Monroe as an an ti- Administration Republican. Jefferson's party seemed
in tatters asit approached the election of 1808; but Jefferson's candidate,

Madison, was saved because the opposition was divided into three parts
the Federalists having failed to get together with the dissident Re-
publicans. Madison's victory was thus assured but it seemed that he might
;

find himself head of a broken federation.

Three days before he left office, Jefferson bowed before the storm of
protests and signed the repeal of the Embargo. The whole of his first term
had been blessed by good fortune and the whole of his second term had
been poisoned. The four lean kine, said John Randolph, ate up the four
fat kine. The failure was by no means so absolute; but it must have seemed
absolute to Jefferson as he rode horseback through the snows of March
toward his much-loved Monticello.*** He lived for another seventeen
*
January, 1809.
**
Joseph Story of Massachusetts, author of the famous Commentaries, was ap-
pointed to the Supreme Court by Madison in 1811, when he was thirty-two years
old. He was a Republican in politics, but during the one session he served in Con-
gress (1808-1809) he urged the repeal of the Embargo on the ground that it had
failed of its object. Jefferson accused him of being personally responsible for the
repeal: "I ascribe all this to one pseudo-Republican, Story."
*** His home in Albemarle County, Virginia.
154 The Price of Union

years; he continued to give advice and direction to his followers, while pro-
fessing to have no part in politics and to disbelieve in leadership; he was the
guide and philosopher for the next two presidents; but he never again went
outside his own corner of Virginia. He died on the Fourth of July, 1826, the
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams died
a few hours later on the same day.

There was not much left of Jefferson's political philosophy by the time of
his death. He had been forced to override all his own theories of govern-
ment, and to watch history override all his plans for maintaining re-
publican liberties. He was opposed to the concentration of wealth and
power; but such concentration, which has been one of the most notable
features of American life, was under way by 1826. He was opposed to gov-
ernment interference with the economy, confident that such interference
must always be in the interest of one class and at the expense of the com-
monwealth; but he lived to see the revival of Hamilton's bank and the
application of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures. He almost lived long
enough to see the famous Tariff of Abominations. He was opposed to the
growth of cities, and feared the effect of city "mobs" on political virtue;
but he was forced to admit that America, to save her life in a brutal world,
must promote manufactures. He was opposed to slavery; but he lived to
see King Cotton breathe new life into the slave system. He was the prophet
of democracy, political and economic. He knew that the first was unlikely
to flourish without the second; but it was his fate to watch America, under
the influence of his own ideas, move steadily toward the first, and under
the influence of the Industrial Revolution move steadily away from the
second.
Jefferson knew only one weapon with which to fight the tendency of
the new industrialism to breed new forms of oligarchy and political cor-
ruption. The weapon was education, free education for the masses. The
most important work of Jefferson's last years was the founding of the Uni-
versity of Virginia, which was chartered in 1819. This was a lifelong
ambition, for it was part of his creed that men could not be free if they
were denied knowledge. He did more than any other man to induce the
Virginia legislature to create and support the University. He selected the
best teachers he could find, in the United States and in Europe, for the
first professorships; and he was largely responsible for the design and for

the location of one of the finest and most appropriate groups of buildings
in North America. The University was opened in 1825.
The Rotunda, which he modeled on Palladio's Villa Rotunda at
viii. The Tyranny of Circumstance 155

Vicenza, and the colonnades with alternating two-story and one-story

buildings which form the east and west boundaries of the lawn at the
University, are Jefferson's design. Here, in these lovely neo-classic forms,
here and in his prose style, can the spirit of the man be traced. It was a
cool spirit, benevolent and intelligent and calm, without the deep passions
of Washington, without the alarming intellectual intensity of Hamilton.
Professor Becker writes as follows of the style of the Declaration :

One might say that Jefferson felt with the mind,

as some people think
with the heart. He had was enthusiasm engendered
enthusiasm, but it

by an irresistible intellectual curiosity. He was ardent, but his ardors

were cool, giving forth light without heat. All his ideas and senti-
. . .

ments seem of easy birth, flowing felicitously from an alert and ex-
peditious brain rather than slowly and painfully welling up from the
obscure depths of his nature. There are in his writings few of
. . .

those ominous overtones charged with emotion, and implying more than
is expressed.

And again :

If the style is always a bit fragile, and sometimes in danger of becom-

ing precious, is it not because the thought is a bit fragile also, too easily
satisfied open and visible, and therefore lacking depth and
with what is

must be ignored if the life of man is to be

subtlety, ignoring all that
understood and described, even with the felicity of genius, at the level
of common sense? 21

This does not do full justice. No one has described Jefferson's elusive spirit
with full justice; but some of its refreshing quality can be felt by anyone
who will sit on the steps of his Rotunda and contemplate the colonnades
and the lawn of his design. It is the spirit of the Enlightenment, of
eighteenth-century liberalism, charming even in the harsh glare of today.
 IX

The Frustration of a Foreign Policy

JL N THE LAST exhausted days of Jefferson's second term, when Congress

was struggling with the repeal of the Embargo, when the faithful Jeffer-
sonians were reeling under attacks by Randolph, by half their Northern
friends, and by the revived Federalists, Josiah Quincy* of Massachusetts
wrote: "Jefferson is a host; and if the wand of that magician is not
broken, he will yet defeat the attempt." The magician was tired. He was
discouraged by failure. He no longer waved a wand; from the moment
the election was decided he refused responsibility and put the whole bur-
den of policy-making on his unhappy successor.
Nobody could accuse James Madison of being a host, or a magician.
He was a learned and industrious man who knew everything about gov-
ernment except how to govern. At the Constitutional Convention he was
a hero; in the Executive Mansion** he was almost a nonentity. As a result
of his weakness, the weakness of the Republican theory was displayed.
Now that there was no magician and no wand, the Administration could
no longer make policy; the Congress attempted to take over that task and
almost ruined the country in the process of proving that such was not its
function. The first step was to deny Madison the excellent Secretary of
State whom he had chosen, and to foist upon him a nonentity. John
Quincy Adams, who had resigned as United States Senator from Mas-
sachusetts the previous year, left an account of this episode.
Madison^ he wrote,
had wished and intended to appoint Mr. Gallatin, who had been Secre-
tary of the Treasury during the whole of Jefferson's Administration, to
* The gay and charming young Federalist from Quincy, Massachusetts. He was
elected to the House of Representatives in 1804, at the age of thirty-two. He
quickly became the minority leader, opposing the Embargo and Non-Intercourse
Acts as cowardly, useless, and unconstitutional. He and John Randolph became fast
friends. They were nominal opponents; but they shared a love of letters, a firm
belief in states' rights and fear of centralized government, a distaste for Jefferson
and for democracy, and an irritating habit of applying logic to politics just when
their leaders were prepared for a vast and salutary act of inconsequence. Hating
and opposing the war, Quincy resigned from Congress in 1813 to serve happily in
local Boston politics and as of Harvard College. He lived to support
^resident
Lincoln and the Civil War, dying on July 1, 1864.
** It did not come to be called the White House until after it had been burned
by the British, and repaired.
156
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 157

succeed himself in the Department of State, and Mr. Robert Smith,

who had been Secretary of the Navy, he proposed to transfer to the
Treasury Department. He was not permitted to make this arrangement.
Mr. Robert Smith had a brother in the Senate. Mr. Madison was
. . .

given explicitly to understand that if he should nominate Mr. Gallatin

he would be rejected by the Senate. Mr. Robert Smith was appointed
[Secretary of State].

J.Q. Adams then compares "this dictation to Mr. Madison, effected

by very small knot of association in the Senate," to the intrigues which
a
had destroyed his father's Administration.

In both instances [he adds], it was directly contrary to the spirit of

the Constitution, and was followed by unfortunate consequences. In the
first it terminated by the overthrow of the Administration and by a gen-
eral exclusion from public life of nearly every man concerned in it. In
the second its effect was to place in the Department of State, at a most
critical period of foreign affairs and against the will of the President, a

person incompetent, to the exclusion of a man eminently qualified for

the office. Had Mr. Gallatin been then appointed Secretary of State,
it is highly probable that the war with Great Britain would not have

taken place ... If the people of the United States could have realized
that a little cluster of Senators, by caballing in secret session, would
place a sleepy Palinurus at the helm even in the fury of the tempest,
they must almost have believed in predestination to expect that their
vessel of state would escape shipwreck. And he ends by saying that
even when these conspiring Senators had made such pests of themselves
that the people forced their retirement, "they left behind them practices
in the Senate and a disposition in that body to usurp unconstitutional
control, which have already effected much evil and threaten much

The failings of Madison as a political leader were an invitation to "much

more" of such evil.

When Jefferson had made it clear that he intended to enforce the suc-
cession of his Secretary of State,* John Randolph's bitter protest con-
tained the following comment on Madison's career: "We ask for energy,
and we are told of his moderation, we ask for talent, and the reply is his
unassuming merit, we ask what were his services in the cause of Public

Liberty, and we are directed to the pages of The Federalist." The indict-
ment is not so harsh as Randolph took it to be, for the pages contributed
* When
Washington retired from the presidency at the end of his second term,
he did so on the grounds of health and personal inclination; but when Jefferson
retired, also after two terms, he did so on the ground that he thought no president
should serve for more than eight years. He established a precedent which was
followed until 1940.
'758 The Price of Union

by Madison to The Federalist are an achievement of rare worth. They are

an education in the economics of politics and in the relation between eco-
nomics and history; they are remarkable for their steady grasp of reality,
their avoidance of the usual abstractions about government; they are a
steady warning against the danger of tyranny inherent in popular rule,
and against the danger to liberty of an economic system in which fewer
and fewer people owned real property.* Their hard matter-of-factness,
their bluntness about the nature of man, and about the ftature and temp-
tations of power, would seem to fit their author for the work of govern-
ing just as the sentiment of the Declaration of Independence, the aspir-
ing hopefulness as to life and reality, suggest the amateur rather than the
party organizer. Yet Jefferson seldom made a mistake in the handling of
men, and Madison seldom made anything else.
In 1811, Washington Irving attended a presidential reception and wrote
the following impression of the Madisons "Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly,
:

buxom dame, who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody. Her
sisters, Mrs. Cutts and Mrs. Washington, are like the two Merry Wives
of Windsor; but as to Jemmy Madison Ah! poor Jemmy! he is but a
withered little apple- John." The description was unkindly true. Madison
was a neat, modest little man in black breeches and black silk stockings.
He seemed to shrink from asserting himself in action. His writings were
clear and exact and authoritative; but he showed no such qualities as
President during three years of drifting into war and two and a half years
of misdirecting it.

The Madison family had settled in Virginia in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. James Madison's father made his home in Orange County,
where the boy was later to inherit the twenty-five-hundred-acre estate
of Montpelier. At school he was taught the classics, French, and Spanish;
in 1769, at the age of eighteen, he went north to the College of New Jersey
(later Princeton University) After finishing the classical course, he stayed
.

on for a year studying Hebrew and ethics under President Witherspoon,

and also studying Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes, and James Harrington.
It was a good course for the future maker of governments; and John

Witherspoon, with his impatient Scots emphasis on common sense and

practicality, was probably a good guide. After this northern interlude
Madison returned home, where he continued his studies in theology and
Hebrew.
* On the relations between
power and property, Madison (like most of the
Americans of his day) agreed with Harrington's Oceana.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 159

In 1776, Madison was a delegate to the Virginia Convention to make

a new constitution. He became a member of the first Assembly under that

constitution, and failed of re-election the following year according to

tradition, because of his refusal to distribute rum and punch. He became
a member of the governor's council, and a delegate to the Continental
Congress, where he stood firmly for securing the free navigation of the
Mississippi a fight which he never abandoned and which won him the
loyalty of the Western country. He returned to Montpelier in 1783 and
was at once elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he opposed
paper-money inflation and the attempt to prevent the payment of pre-

Revolutionary debts to British creditors. He also secured the passage of

Jefferson's bill for freedom of religion and for the final disestablishment
of the Anglican Church. During this period in the House of Delegates
he learned the need for greater unity among the thirteen states, if they
were not be ruined and reabsorbed by Europe. He took an important
all to

part, therefore, in the series of conferences which led to the Constitutional

Convention at Philadelphia in 1787.
Just before the coming together of this convention, Madison returned
to the Continental Congress for a few months in order to combat what
he decribed as "Mr. Jay's project for shutting the Mississippi." number A
of Northern states had voted,
in 1786, to authorize John Jay,* in dealing
with the Spanish Minister, to offer to forego the use of the Mississippi
for twenty-five years in order to gain commercial concessions useful to
these states. Madison secured the defeat of this plan. If he had not done
so the United States might have been split in two almost before they
began their national life, for the western settlers cared more about their
use of the Mississippi than about their nebulous ties with the friends they
had left behind, east of the mountains.
At the Constitutional Convention, as we have seen, Madison became
the leader of the group favoring a strong government. From May 25 to
September 17, he was in daily attendance, seldom missing so much as
half an hour. His notes on the debate, first published in 1840, are by far
the best record of those secret meetings. And he was second only to Hamil-
ton in the subsequent work to secure ratification. Not only did he make a
momentous contribution to The Federalist; but in the Virginia Convention
he played a leading part, with George Washington, in persuading that
powerful state to join the Union. Without Virginia, as without New
York, there could have been no attempt at building a new country.

*
Jay was Secretary of Foreign Affairs from 1784 until after the new government
was organized under the Constitution. Then he administered the Department of
State until March, 1790, when Jefferson took over as the first Secretary of State.
160 The Price of Union

Madison served in the first House of Representatives. We have seen that

he quickly understood the meaning of Hamilton's measures and that
before the end of the First Congress he had become a recognized leader
of the agrarian opposition to the capitalistic, centralizing plans of the Sec-
retary of the Treasury. It was the capitalism of the Federalists that drove
Madison into Opposition, not their tender care for property. On the latter
point he was in agreement only, as a Virginia gentleman, he thought of
property in terms of land and animals, not in terms of pieces of paper.
In 1794, Madison married Dorothy Payne Todd, a young widow from
Philadelphia. This was the "fine, portly, buxom dame" of Washington
Irving's description. It was a completely happy marriage; Dolly Madison
had a social charm which more than compensated for the mousiness of the
"little apple- John." Since Jefferson was a widower, she was the First Lady

in Washington society throughout his two terms as well as throughout her

husband's, and she did much to make that desolate and fever-ridden clear-
ing in the forest seem habitable.
In 1797, Madison retired voluntarily from Congress, expecting (like
Washington and Jefferson before him) to lead the life of a Virginia
planter, overseeing his twenty-five hundred acres and his more than a
hundred slaves,* giving his mind and energies to the development of scien-
tific agriculture, for his own pleasure and for the good of the community.

But it was not the time for rural peace. The next year he was writing those
Virginia Resolutions which, with Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, de-
fined the principles of 1798 which the "Old Republicans"** defended all
their lives, and which they were to accuse Jefferson and Madison of be-

traying. Many years later, when the doctrines of 1798 were used by South
Carolina to justify nullification and even secession, Madison insisted that
there was no threat of nullification, and no suggestion of the use of force,
in the Resolutions. Yet Kentucky, in Jefferson's words, declared her de-
termination "tamely to submit to undelegated and consequently unlim-
ited powers in no man or body of men on earth," adding that acts of

undelegated power, "unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive

these states into revolution and blood." And Virginia, in Madison's words,
said that "in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of
other powers not granted by the said compact, the states, who are the
parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for
* Madison's father did not die until
February, 1801; but the administration of
Montpelier was already in Madison's hands.
** Such as John Randolph, John Taylor, Joseph Nicholson.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 161

arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their re-
spective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them."
This was the essence of the Republican doctrine: that there existed a
force to prevent the steady growth of power at the center of government,
that the states were the custodians of that force, and that the states had
the right, and were "in duty bound" to take action when they found
the central government using "undelegated and consequently unlimited
powers." This was the meaning of the dispute between Jefferson and
Marshall, between Madison and Hamilton. The Jeffersonians believed
that if the central government were allowed to define its own powers (or
if a Federalist Supreme Court were allowed to define them) America
must repeat the old story of corruption, usurpation, and tyranny which
had been the normal lot of man. It is hard to see how they could believe
that the states had a "right" to prevent this, unless the "right" had a
sanction of force. A right without such sanction is no right at all. What-
ever Madison may have thought in his old age, this was the view of Vir-
ginia in 1798 and 1799, where preparations were afoot for armed resist-
ance to the "tyranny" of the government of John Adams.*

The "Revolution of 1800" brought Madison back into public life. Even
before the outcome of the election was known, Jefferson had asked him if
he would become Secretary of State. It was a natural appointment be-
cause of Madison's vast knowledge of government and complete agree-
ment with Jefferson on matters of political principle but it was an ap-
;

pointment which led to divisions within the party divisions which were
to embitter, almost to destroy, Madison's presidency, but which were kept
quiet so long as the wand of the magician ruled at Washington.
There were two reasons for the anti-Madison faction among Republi-
cans. Men like Randolph and the noisy William Branch Giles of Vir-
* In
January, 1817, John Randolph who was first elected to Congress as an
enthusiastic supporter of this resistance said: "There is no longer any cause for
concealing the fact that the grand armory at Richmond was built to enable the
state of Virginia to resist by force the encroachments of the then administration
upon her indisputable rights." (Henry Adams, John Randolph, p. 28.) Madison and
Jefferson, unlike Randolph, did not reach spontaneously for the sword; but they
used strong words at times. They may have thought that power can be controlled
by strong words. If so, this would explain the failure of their foreign policy; for
power can only be controlled by stronger power. If the states truly had a "right" to
resist the Alien and Sedition Acts, it was a duty to build and at need to use, the
;
grand armory at Richmond. The "natural right" of Americans to leave the Empire
was stated in the Declaration of Independence; but it did not exist in fact until
after Saratoga and York town.
162 The Price of Union

ginia, who hadreturned to the House and was soon to move to the
Senate, distrustedhim because of his old association with the men who
wanted a strong government. How, they wondered, could the same Madi-
son who had framed the Constitution, and who had collaborated with
Hamilton in writing The Federalist, draft the Virginia Resolutions of
1798? They decided that he was still a crypto-Federalist, and they blamed
him for the moderation of Jefferson's program. Instead of rooting out
the Federalist heresies, and establishing an Arcadian, agrarian, anti-
was administering the govern-
capitalist, states'-rights paradise, Jefferson
ment as if it made little which party was in power. Madison
difference
could have told them why this was happening, and why he was not to
blame. It was Madison who had explained to the Constitutional Conven-
tion that although a nation-wide coalition of local groups and interests
may sound dangerous and radical in opposition, when it comes to power
its members can agree only on a moderate program. In opposition, they

can add together all the grievances of all the regions, and make a tremen-
dous noise; in power, they can only add together the very few policies on
which all the regions and all the interests agree. It was not the Federalist
background of his Secretary of State which made Jefferson move cau-
tiously, it was the conservative influence of the size and diversity of
America.
The second reason for the anti-Madison faction was that he, like Albert
Gallatin at the Treasury, refused to remove as many Federalist office-
holders as the hungry Republicans wished. Especially bitter on this point
was William Duane* of Philadelphia, editor of the Aurora, the most
powerful of the Jeffersonian papers. When the Republicans came to
power Duane descended on Washington, urging sweeping removals from
office and a full-fledged spoils system. "He was coldly received at the State
and Treasury departments, which gave him contracts for supplying paper,
but declined to give him offices; and Duane returned to Philadelphia
2
bearing toward Madison and Gallatin a grudge which he never forgot."
His paper became the organ for Madison's enemies, a group which was
soon to be strengthened by the able Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland
("rather mischievous than alarming," according to Henry Adams) and
his commonplace brother, Robert, "the sleepy Palinurus" who was to
become Secretary of State as part of the revenge against Madison.**

* Duane was born in northern New

York, of Irish parentage. He drifted to India,
where he founded a paper and whence he was deported. He became a parliamen-
tary reporter in London, then moved to Philadelphia and helped Benjamin Frank-
lin Bache to edit the Aurora, a daily paper. When Bache died, Duane married his
widow, who was the owner of the Aurora.
** Duane
may also be responsible for the hostility of Michael Leib (Representa-
tive from 1799 to 1806, and Senator from 1809 to 1814), who shared with Duane
the political dictatorship of Philadelphia.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 163

During Madison's years in the Department of State he showed small

initiative. Jefferson was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, for
the unsuccessful efforts to acquire West Florida, and for the Embargo.
Madison agreed on all points; he wrote a number of able arguments
against the depredations of the British and the French one of which was
described by John Randolph as "a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight
hundred ships of war"; and he gave support to Jefferson's belief that
France and England were acutely in need of the commerce of the United
States. It was on this faith that they built the embargo policy. In January,

1801, Madison wrote to the incoming President that England, "however

intoxicated with her maritime ascendency is more dependent every day
on our commerce for her resources, must for a considerable length of time
look in a great degree to this Country, for bread for herself, and absolutely
for all the necessaries for her islands. . Besides these cogent motives to
. .

peace and moderation, her subjects will not fail to remind her of the great
pecuniary pledge they have in this Country, and which under any inter-
ruption of peace or commerce with it, must fall under great embarrass-
3
ments, if nothing worse."
This did not prove to be true. The whole plan for "peaceful coercion"
was dismissed by Canning with sarcasm and rude scorn. The question
arises, Why should two sensible statesmen have believed it to be true? We
should remember that Madison was one of the first writers on govern-
ment to keep always in the front of his mind the economic springs of
action; this habit may have misled him in judging the course of a great
nation in the midst of a war for survival. And Jefferson's burning belief
that America must have peace, in order to save herself and the world, may
have helped him to think that America would therefore be allowed to
have peace. Madison's realism and Jefferson's hopefulness may have led
to the same conclusion.

The election of 1808, as we have seen, was Jefferson's last success. He

easily had his way with the Republican caucus in Congress, which duti-
fully nominated Madison : and he was able to elect his candidate because
the anti-Madison Republicans put two men in the field,* and because
the efforts of the Federalists to get together with one of these men failed.
Jefferson then tried to put the burdens of government upon Madison
before Madison was inaugurated, with the result that for a time there
* Vice-President
George Clinton of New York, and James Monroe of Virginia.
Missing the presidency, Clinton was nevertheless re-elected Vice-President. So
Madison had an enemy presiding over the Senate.
164 The Price of Union

was no government at all, except such as could be contrived by the

unruly Congress, where the Republicans were divided into the friends
of Madison and Gallatin, and the friends of Giles, Clinton, Duane, and
the brothers Smith with John Randolph circling the two camps like a
wild Indian, emitting occasional war whoops and poisoned arrows.
The Federalists of New England, meanwhile, were again flirting with
secession, under the old leadership of Timothy Pickering. Although the
movement did not come to a crisis for several years, a series of town meet-
ings throughout New England early in 1809 adopted resolutions violently
opposing the Embargo and the anti-British policy of the government, and
in many cases pointing out that if such policies were continued patriotic
citizens would be driven to consider disunion. "Oppression did sever us
from the British Empire," said a petition from the town of Alfred, in
Maine, "and what a long and continued repetition of similar acts of the
government of the United States would effect, God only knows." Such
was the state of the nation which Madison faced on March 4, 1809.
"Under such circumstances," wrote Henry Adams, "until then with-
out a parallel in our history, government, in the sense hitherto under-
4
stood, became impossible."
When the Embargo was repealed on March 1, 1809, the Non-Inter-
course Act was put in its place. This prohibited trade between the United
States and France or England, or any of their colonies or dependencies;
but American goods and ships were otherwise free. The Non-Intercourse
Act was to expire in the spring of 1810, at the end of the next session
of Congress. The Act diminished the discontent in New England, where
ships were no longer compelled to rot at their wharves; but it did little
to help Virginia whose best tobacco markets were still denied her. George
Washington Campbell,* who had succeeded to Randolph's position as
chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, opposed the bill eloquently
on the ground that it was a sectional bribe.

The non-intercourse [he said] would press most severely on the South-
ern and Western states, who depend chiefly on the immediate exchange
of their productions for foreign goods, and would throw almost the
whole commerce of the nation into the hands of the Eastern states,
without competition, and also add a premium on their manufactures
at the expense of the agricultural interest to the South and West. For-
eign goods being excluded, the manufacturing states would furnish the
rest of the Union with their manufactured goods at their own prices.

*
Campbell was born in Scotland, son of a physician. His family brought him to
North Carolina when he was three years old. He was educated at Princeton,
then studied law and moved to Tennessee. He entered the House of Representatives
in 1803, resigned in 1809, and in 1811 returned to Congress as a Senator. Toward
the end of the war he served briefly and unsuccessfully as Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1818 he was appointed Minister to Russia.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 165

The argument could not be answered; it was merely ignored. The Con-

gress was
afraid of war, afraid of decisiveness. The Administration, which
for eight years had disciplined the unruly and taught the rest to obey,
suddenly refrained from leadership. The hungry sheep looked up, and
were not As in the poem, they soon began to "rot inwardly, and foul
fed.

contagion spread." Non-intercourse must ruin the South; non-intercourse

was a bribe to quiet the revolt of the New England townships, at the
expense of the rest of the country; yet non-intercourse was supported by
forty-one Southern members, and by only twelve New Englanders. Some-
times, apparently, men do not vote from economic interest, or from any
motive which can be made intelligible; sometimes they seem to vote from
helplessness, from weakness and confusion, and a wild wish to do some-
thing, anything. Sometimes, to return to Milton, the sheep became "swol-
len with wind, and the rank mist they draw," and then there is no telling
what will happen.*
Among all the ironies and inconsistencies of those years, the most unex-
pected was that Jefferson should become the chief promoter of the Indus-
trial Revolution in America. Jefferson, who hated factories as a Puritan
hates a witch, who felt that if Americans became crowded into great cities
they would repeat in their green and pleasant land all the dismal experi-
ences which had ever degraded the race, who fought Hamilton chiefly
because Hamilton fostered industry and its handmaid finance, Jefferson
was compelled, in order to keep America pure from war, to infect her
with manufactures.
Never in the days of McKinley and Mark Hanna, never even in the
mad nineteen-twenties, did the manufacturing interests dare to ask for
such protection as was thrust upon them by the Embargo and the Non-
Intercourse Act. The most selfish capitalist who ever trod Wall Street
never suggested that the whole of the South should reduce itself to poverty
in order to confer a monopoly upon his factories. Yet this is \Vhat the
South did, in response to the pleading of her greatest and her most
favored son. Then came the war, to prolong the period of complete pro-
tection for another two and a half years. By that time the balance of

strength was determined. The South was growing poorer and the North
was growing richer. Agrarianism was on the defensive and capitalism was
dominant. New England was by no means grateful, for New England did
not yet see what was happening. Another decade passed before New Eng-
land understood that her industry was to outstrip her commerce in the
production of wealth.
Another odd result of the Non-Intercourse Act was the pleasure it gave
in London. Under the guise of retaliation for the Orders in Council, the
* Or was the
Deep South already eager for war with England, and her ally
Spain, in order that Florida might be seized? This seems unlikely as early as 1809.
166 The Price of Union

Act was a complete submission to those orders.* "I conceive that great
advantage may be reaped from it by England/' wrote Erskine, the British
Minister at Washington, "as she has command of the seas and can pro-
cure through neutrals any of the produce of this country, besides the
immense quantity which will be brought direct to Great Britain under
various pretences; whereas France will obtain but little, at a great expense
and risk." Perhaps the one inconvenience of the Act to Great Britain was
that it permitted American ships to sail the seas once more, thus diminish-
ing the incentive which had been driving American sailors into the
British marine. Canning, however, did not complain.

In spite of non-intercourse and the follies of Congress, Madison's Adminis-

tration appeared to open with a triumph. On April 7, when the President
had been in office a month, the British Minister in Washington received
from Canning instructions which he took to be conciliatory. David Mon-
tague Erskine, Minister Plenipotentiary, was the son of the famous orator
and Lord Chancellor, Thomas Erskine; he had married the daughter of
General John Cadwalader of Philadelphia. With a Whig background and
an American wife, Erskine was eager to settle the differences between the
countries. He had been appointed in 1806 by Charles James Fox,, who

sincerely wished to improve relations, and he did not seem to know the
change that had come over British policy with the death of Fox.
Interpreting his new instructions freely, and assuming that he was to
offer redress of outstanding American grievances in case the United
States would lift all restrictions on trade with England and retain the pro-
hibition on trade with France, Erskine quickly and easily reached an
agreement with Secretary of State Smith.** On April 19, he informed the
Department of State that he was "authorized to declare that His Majesty's
Orders in Council of January and November, 1807, will have been with-
drawn as respects the United States on the tenth of June next." Smith
replied that the President's proclamation in regard to British and French
* British Orders in Council are executive
edicts, in the name of the King, "by
and with the advice of his privy council." They have the force of law unless super-
seded by acts of Parliament. The Orders in Council of January 7, 1807, put French
commerce under a blockade and forbade neutrals to trade from one port to another
under French jurisdiction. The Orders of November 11, 1807, far more dubious in
international law, said that neutral ships might not enter any ports from which the
British flag was excluded, "and all ports or places in the colonies belonging to his
majesty's enemies, shall, from henceforth, be subject to the same restrictions . . .
as if the same were actually blockaded by his majesty's naval forces, in the most
strict and rigorous manner."
** The Non-Intercourse Act allowed the President to restore trade relations with
whichever belligerent first withdrew its Orders or Decrees.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 167

trade would be issued immediately; two days later the proclamation and
the Smith-Erskine notes were published.
The long trouble appeared to be at an end. The United States had in
effect become a silent partner of Great Britain. Without admitting it
openly she seemed to have accepted the thesis that Britain's victory was es-
sential for the liberties of Europe; and in return England seemed willing
to forego the destruction of American commerce. It was assumed that she
needed the goods and was therefore willing to permit the trade. It was
assumed that the Embargo and Non-Intercourse policies must have been a
success after all, and that it was only the presence of the Francophile Jef-
ferson which had prevented an accommodation with England. The Erskine
agreement would doubtless mean war with France but the Americans did
;

not seem to care. They were happy to be on cordial terms with England.
Federalists and Republicans alike congratulated Madison; for a few de-
luded weeks he was the most popular President the country had known.
The
Erskine dispatches, containing the good news, reached Canning
on May 22, 1809. On May 25, Canning recalled his Minister and re-
pudiated the agreements. Erskine's disgrace could be explained on the
ground that he had gone far beyond his authority; but it is not easy to see

why Canning turned down a settlement which had already made America
a passive ally and must soon make her an active one. The repudiation was
accompanied by a deed equally hard to explain, except on the ground of
inveterate enmity the appointment of Francis James Jackson* as the new
:

Minister to Washington, in Erskine' s place. Commenting on the harsh and

peace-defying terms of Jackson's instructions, Henry Adams wrote :

While England waited impatiently for news from Vienna, where

Napoleon was making ready for the battle of Wagram, Canning drew
* Rufus
King, the most moderate-spoken and one of the wisest of the Federalists,
was American Minister in London in 1802, when it seemed possible that the British
were about to appoint Francis James Jackson to Washington, instead of Anthony
Merry. King wrote to Secretary of State Madison: "It was not without some regret
that I heard of the intention to appoint Mr. Jackson in lieu of Mr. Merry. ... I
have been led to make further inquiry concerning their reputations, and the result
has proved rather to increase than to lessen my solicitude. Mr. Jackson is said to be
positive, vain, and intolerant. He is moreover filled with English prejudices in re-
spect to all other countries, and as far as his opinions concerning the United States
are known, seems more likely to disserve than to benefit a liberal intercourse be-
tween them and his own country." Jackson's wife was a Prussian baroness, whom he
had married while he was Minister at^Berlin. Her "opinions concerning the United
States" were even more likely to "disserve a liberal intercourse" than were her
husband's. It was Jackson who had been sent with the British fleet to deliver the
ultimatum at Copenhagen before the bombardment; Canning supplied him with
instructions for his trip to America which were scarcely more ingratiating than his
instructions for Denmark. He was to propose nothing whatever, and he was not
even to refer back to London any American proposals which did not bind the
United States to serve the policy of Whitehall. Under such conditions a man of
gentler manners than Jackson, and with warmer feelings toward America, might
have had trouble in reaching an agreement.
168 The Price of Union

up the instructions to Jackson the last of the series of papers by which,

through the peculiar qualities of his style even more than by the violence
of his acts, he embittered to a point that seemed altogether contrary to
their nature a whole nation of Americans against the nation that gave
them birth. If the famous phrase of Canning was ever in any sense true
that he called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the
old it was most nearly true in the sense that his instructions and letters
forced the United States into a nationality of character which the war
5
of the Revolution itself had failed to give them.

Jackson reached Washington September 8. The President was at Mont-

pelier, and did not return until October 1 Immediately thereafter, Jackson
.

and Robert Smith began negotiations; but the Secretary of State was so
incompetent that the President had to take charge, writing all of Smith's
notes himself. He soon reached the only conclusion which was possible
in dealing with Jackson, whose instructions forbade conciliation even if
his charactermade it possible. On November 8, the President wrote, and
Secretary Smith forwarded, the final note "Sir :
Finding that in your
. . .

reply of the fourth instant you have used a language which cannot be
understood but as reiterating and even aggravating the same gross insinua-
tion, it only remains, in order to preclude opportunities which are thus
abused, to inform you that no further communications will be received
from you."
While refusing to argue further with Jackson, Madison expressed his
continuing desire to establish friendly relations with Great Britain. There
was no official change in relations, therefore. The American Government,
lacking Executive or any other leadership, remained unable to act; and
the British Government continued to seize American trade and sailors.
Not until the Congress which was elected in 1810 came together in the
spring of 1811 did the new mood of hostility find expression in deeds.
Thereafter, the march toward war was steady. It was also unnecessary,
for the British had done their worst and were soon to improve. Canning
was out of office by September, 1809, and an adjustment might have
become possible; but as British folly diminished, American folly took hold.
The arrogance of Canning was to give way to the boastfulness and land-
greed of the frontier. Whatever might have been done with better men
or better luck, the Erskine disagreement was in fact the decisive moment,
the point from which there was no returning. After the Erskine case, each
government ascribed bad faith to the other. Madison felt he had been
trapped into showing that he would go to almost any length for British
friendship, and had then been struck in the face. The British felt that
Madison had deliberately cast a spell over Erskine and persuaded him to
exceed his authority. It was Jackson's repetition of this charge this "gross
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 169

insinuation/' as Madison called it in the final note which brought to an

end his relations with the Department of State.

Meanwhile, something had to be devised to take the place of the Non-

Intercourse Act, which would expire automatically at the end of the exist-
ing session of Congress. Madison seemed unable or unwilling to make a
suggestion; but Gallatin tried to supply the leadership which the chief
Executive shunned. In December, 1809, Nathaniel Macon, of North
Carolina,* chairman of the committee on foreign relations, reported a bill
which had been inspired by Gallatin and which would exclude all French
and British ships from American harbors, and restrict all importations of
French and British goods to ships owned wholly by American citizens.
The bill authorized the President to remove the restrictions against either
country, if that country should first remove the hostile decrees or orders
in council. Non-exportation had failed; non-importation had failed; so it
was now proposed by Gallatin to try a strict navigation act. The bill
passed the House but was defeated in the Senate by a combination of the
Federalists with Gallatin' s personal enemies: Smith, Giles, and Leib,
backed by Duane and the Aurora. Once again, Congress had failed either
to follow the Administration or to produce a policy of its own. The country
was wobbling toward war, while government seemed powerless either to
prevent the war or to prepare for it.
In the last days of the session Congress passed an act known as Macon's
Bill No. 2.** This repealed the Non-Intercourse Act, leaving American

shipping to go where it could, and authorized the President to reimpose

non-intercourse with either Great Britain or France in case the other
should cease to interfere with American commerce. It was a silly act, lack-
ing in dignity, lacking in courage, and strong only in its power to create
mischief. It handed American trade to Great Britain on her own terms,
* An
"old Republican" who supported Randolph's revolt in 1806, but who soon
made friends again with Jefferson. Educated at Princeton, Macon studied law in
North Carolina, entering state politics in 1781. He was opposed to the Constitution
of 1787, but accepted a seat in the Federal House of Representatives in 1791. He
served until 1815; then he was transferred to the Senate, where he served until
1828. He was known as the greatest economizer and the greatest opponent of new
legislation who had ever sat in Congress. He was said to have voted "no" more
often than any ten other members. He was a strict and devout Jeffersonian who
really believed in the least possible government; he was also a thorough supporter
of the Jefferson-Madison foreign policy.
** It was not prepared by Macon, or even approved by him. He merely reported
it, as chairman of the relevant committee. It was passed on May 1, 1810.
170 The Price of Union

abandoning all resistance and all restrictions, and it thereby tempted

Napoleon to make a dupe of Madison by pretending to revoke the French
decrees.
On August 5, 1810, the American Minister in Paris was informed that
the Berlin and Milan decrees would cease to have effect on November
1 on the understanding, of course, that the United States would then
reimpose non-intercourse with Great Britain.* John Quincy Adams warned
the President that this was a trap, but Madison walked into it obstinately,
and on November 2, he announced that non-intercourse would be revived
against England if she did not repeal the Orders in Council within three
months. The British Government pointed out that there was no evidence
the French decrees were really repealed, that American ships were still

being seized and sunk by French authorities and French privateers, and
that Napoleon did not even pretend to have repealed the Rambouillet
Decree, which was perhaps the most burdensome to America but Madison
;

insisted on being gulled, and in February, 1811, he forbade all trade with
Great Britain.
This time, by chance, non -intercourse became a serious blow to Britain.
Napoleon's power was at its height and the trade of Western Europe was
denied England; warehouses were crowded and factories were closing; a
crop failure led to food shortage during the winter of 1811-12. The result
was heavy pressure on the British Government to withdraw the Orders in
Council and revive the American trade. On June 16, 1812, the House of
Commons heard the Orders would be withdrawn ; but two days later, long
before this news had crossed the Atlantic, the American Congress declared
war on England.
Jefferson had embittered his country and ruined his popularity in order
to show that peaceful coercion would work; but it didn't work. Then a

floundering Congress passed a law which has been described as having

"strong claims to be considered the most disgraceful act on the American
6
statute-book," and a floundering president allowed the French emperor
to trick him, and suddenly peaceful coercion had the effect which was
intended five years before. But by that time the needless war had started.
The declaration was received with indignation in London. The British
could not believe that Madison had truly been fooled by Napoleon. It
seemed to them that Madison had seized the thinnest of excuses for
forcing a war at the time of Britain's greatest need, when she was defending
* This was the "Cadore letter."
Napoleon's Continental Decrees were the Berlin
Decree of November 21, 1806, which imposed a paper blockade of the British Isles;
the Milan Decree of December 18, 1807, which declared that ships submitting to
the British Orders in Council became lawful prey; the Bayonne Decree of April 17,
1808, wherein Napoleon pretended that he was helping Jefferson to enforce the
Embargo by seizing all American ships in French ports; and the Rambouillet De-
cree, effective on March 23, but published on May 14, 1810, which legalized the
seizing of American shipping in retaliation for the Non-Importation Act.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 171

Europe. Wellesley, who had succeeded Canning as Foreign

The Marquess
Secretary, said in Parliament "that a more unjust attack was never made
upon the peace of any nation than that of the American Government
upon England," and that "the American Government had long been
infected with a deadly hatred toward this country, and (if he might be
allowed an unusual application of a word) with a deadly affection toward
France."
This was what the Federalists of New
England had been telling their
British friends for years : and Madison were irrationally pro-
that Jefferson
French, and therefore anti-English; but it was not true. Madison's willing-
ness to throw himself into England's arms at the time of the Erskine agree-
ment is proof that it was not true. Until that tragedy of crossed purposes
and disappointed hopes, England could have had America's glad friend-
ship in return for a politeness, a little respect. After the Erskine
little

failure, new men with new

ambitions seized control of Congress men who
:

wanted war. They represented a small minority; but they had their way
because every injury received from Britain had been exacerbated by
sarcasm and contempt. A young, weak country is naturally sensitive to bad
manners. The French had done America more harm than the British; but
there was no Canning in Paris to rub gunpowder into every small wound.
For years the United States could have gone to war justly, with either
of her tormentors or with both; in the end she went to war unjustly, with
the nation which had at last decided to cease doing her harm. If the
Britishmust be blamed for the embittered emotional background which
made this possible, the Americans must be blamed for the leaderless chaos
of government which allowed a few young men to push their country into
an unwanted fight.

In February, 1810, when Senators Leib and Smith and their friends were
emasculating Macon's Bill No. 1, young Henry Clay from Kentucky rose
to urge strong measures. Not yet thirty-three years old, Clay had been sent
to fill an unexpired term in the Senate. His remarks on Macon's bill struck
the note which was to be dominant in the next House of Representatives,
where Clay himself was to be elected Speaker.

The conquest of Canada [he told the Senators] is in your power. I

trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily
believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place
Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet. ... I call upon the mem-
bers of this House to maintain its character for vigor. I beseech them
not to forfeit the esteem of the country. Will you set the base example
172 The Price of Union

to the other House of an ignominious surrender of our rights after they

have been reproached for imbecility and you extolled for your energy?

It was time to extol energy, and to condemn the imbecility of Congress;

but where did the conquest of Canada fit into an argument over impress-
ments and orders in council? The surprising answer is that the young men
of the West were land-hungry. Although the country had recently been
doubled in size by the Louisiana Purchase, they wanted Canada to the
north and Florida to the south in order to have room to expand.* And
they wanted Canada for still another reason: the Indians east of the
Mississippi and north of the Ohio were at last organizing themselves into
a desperate confederacy, trying to save the remnants of their hunting
grounds. The Westerners believed that the British in Canada were supply-
ing the Indians with arms and with moral backing. So the war to protect
the New England merchants and sailors (who did not want protection,
who saw their trade and their livelihoods ruined equally by embargo and
by was changing into a war to take Canada and the Floridas.
fighting)
TheCongressional elections of 1810-11 removed almost half of the
absurd House of Representatives which had passed Macon's Bill No. 2,
substituting a young and pushing membership. This was the start of a
new age, when the men who were assuming leadership could scarcely, if

at all, remember the Revolution. Gerald W, Johnson comments:

The first three Presidents all dealt with a country dominated, and
largely inhabited, by men who were familiar, through personal experi-
ence, with the horrors and dangers of war against a powerful enemy.
Madison was the first to face a different population, a people who were
born freemen and emotionally conditioned to regard the republic, not
as a strange and doubtful experiment, but as part of the natural order
of things. They knew nothing else, and only by a deliberate effort could
they imagine anything else. It never occurred to them that the United
States of America existed, so to speak, only by sufferance and that it
could be expected to survive only as long as it carefully avoided the
shock of battle. 7

Chief among the new men, and the first to assume very high position,
was the young and charming and still impetuous Henry Clay, who had
left the Senate at the end of the Eleventh Congress and had returned to
assume the House leadership in the Twelfth. Clay was thirty-four, a
Virginian by birth, who had followed his mother and stepfather to Ken-
tucky in 1797. First, however, he had spent four years in the office of

* This is not as
silly as it sounds. The pioneers were woodsmen. Neither their
tools nor their training were yet adequate for the treeless prairies of Illinois and the
trans-Mississippi. Their way of life was to waste land fast, and then find some more.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 173

Chancellor George Wythe, at Richmond. Wythe was the teacher and

friend of Jefferson, Marshall, Monroe; he was one of the makers of the
Federal Constitution and one of the greatest of Virginians. Among all
the lawyer-politicians who went out from Wythe's office to build and to
preserve the new nation, none was more promising, and none more quickly
famous, than Henry Clay. After fourteen years in the untamed West, he
was sent back East to Washington with a reputation for irresistible success,
and was at once elected Speaker of the House. His first act was to use his
power of appointment to organize the main committees for war.*
On the Committee of Foreign Affairs Clay placed three men whom he
could trust to support strong action: Felix Grundy, brought up on the
Kentucky frontier and recently moved to Tennessee; Peter Buell Porter,
an ardent "war hawk" who had moved from Connecticut to the banks
of the Niagara River in western New York; and John Caldwell Calhoun
from the South Carolina uplands, a man whose life, like that of Clay
himself, was to color the life of his country for the next forty years.
These young men from the West had no concern with the sea; they had
never been incommoded by orders in council; but they intended war.**
John Randolph complained that their speeches lacked variety: "like the

whip-poor-will, but one eternal monotonous note Canada! Canada!

Canada!" Faced with Madison, such men were certain to get what they
wanted: a war for Canada and Florida (though ostensibly for the rights
of the seamen), and a war in which Congress (at least at first) assumed
no unpopular burdens of taxation or preparedness. On February 7, 1812,
the President wrote to Jefferson: "The newspapers give you sufficient
insight into the measures of Congress. With a view to enable the executive
to step at once into Canada, they have provided, after two months' delay,
for a regular force, requiring twelve [months] to raise it, on terms not
likely to raise it at all for that object." Yet Madison, who saw that he
would soon be fighting, not a defensive war against British outrages, but
*
James Bryce, in The American Commonwealth (2d edition, 1889, vol. I, p.
136), wrote that the Speaker of the House of Representatives has a "power which
in the hands of a capable and ambitious man becomes so far-reaching that it is no
exaggeration to call him the second, if not the first political figure in the United
States, with an influence upon the fortunes of men and the course of domestic
events superior, in ordinary times, to the President's, although shorter in its dura-
tion and less patent to the world." There were three reasons, in Bryce's day, for
this immense power: first, the Speaker had been authorized, since 1790, to appoint
the standing committees of the House, and also to appoint their chairmen; second,
the Speaker had been a member, since 1858, of the Committee on Rules (which de-
termines what business may come before the House ) , and was usually chairman of
the committee; third, the Speaker had the right to recognize or refuse to recognize
members seeking to address the House a right which was only qualified, as Bryce
explained, by "the line which custom has drawn between ordinary and oppressive
partisanship."
** Some of the Westerners blamed the
agricultural depression which had begun
in 1808 on England's interference with American trade.
174 The Price of Union

an offensive war to dismember two empires, did nothing to secure ade-

quate forces.
In January, 1812, Gallatin asked for a war budget. The Congress de-
bated his request, off and on, until June 26, eight days after the declaration
of war; it then decided to postpone the matter until the next session. The
previous year, February, 1811, the Senate had been divided evenly on
Gallatin' s recommendation to recharter the national bank. In spite of the
fact that the Secretary of the Treasury believed the impending war might
be a financial disaster without this bank, Vice- President George Clinton
cast the decisive vote in the negative, and the President did nothing to
rescue Gallatin, who was the one man he thoroughly respected in the
entire Administration. No wonder that Randolph said Madison was a

"president de jure only," and that Professor R. V. Harlow wrote "Madi- :

son could hardly have played a less important part during those eight un-
comfortable years if he had remained in Virginia." 8
The declaration of war was supported by 79 votes to 49 in the House,
and by 19 votes to 13 in the Senate. The only New England state which
lacks a sea coast is Vermont, which was the only New England state to

give a majority for war. The rest were strongly for peace. New York, New
Jersey, and Delaware, also sea-faring states, were for peace. Congressional

majorities from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South

Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and the new state of
Louisiana were for war. Josiah Quincy was accurate in stating, "This war,
the measures which preceded it, and the mode of carrying it on, were
all undeniably Southern and Western policy, and not the policy of the
commercial states."
A war in 1807 would have been popular, and perhaps right; a peace in
1812 would have been sensible, and easy. The popular war was refused
by Jefferson, out of his magnanimous strength; the sensible peace was
sidetracked by Madison, out of his weakness. When it was clear that the
evil must come, Gallatin wrote to Jefferson: "Our hopes and endeavors
to preserve peace during the present European contest have at last been
frustrated. I am satisfied that domestic faction has prevented that happy
result." Domestic faction would have been powerless, had Madison been
9

a President de facto as well as de jure.*

* In
1836, Madison told George Bancroft, the historian, that in 1812 he had
known the unprepared state of America, "but he esteemed it necessary to throw
forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and de-
fend it." (Letter from Bancroft, quoted by Henry Adams, Gallatin, pp. 460-61.)
Madison was eighty-six when he made this statement, and he may have confused
the year 1809, when the war would still have been just and when Madison would
have been prepared to go forward if Congress had not held back, with the year
1812, when the war had become an excuse for land-grabbing and when Congress
"pressed onward" without any pushing from Madison. "Our President,"
wrote Cal-
houn at the time, "though a man of amiable manners and great talents, has not I
fear those commanding talents, which are necessary to control those about him."
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 175

Two months before the declaration of war, Congress admitted the state
of Louisiana to the Union. This was a more important act than the war
itself. For the first time the Union accepted into membership and full

equality a state carved out of territories which had not belonged to the
Union at the time it was formed. It was thereby decided, irrevocably, that
stateswould multiply throughout the vast Louisiana Territory, that the
new states would soon outnumber and outvote the old, that the American
empire (at least within the continental boundaries) would offer federal
union to its colonial areas.
The precedent was not accepted lightly. A number of Eastern states
protested that such a momentous act should not be done by a mere
majority vote, without at least the consent of all the original thirteen states.
Josiah Quincy went so far as to say that if Louisiana were admitted with-
out such consent, "I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion
that .the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the states
. .

which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that as it
will be the right of all, so it will be duty of some to prepare definitely for
a separation amicably, if they can; violently, if they must." Quincy's
argument was logical; when the Constitution was adopted, and the
federal Union formed, it was known that the land which then belonged
to the Union (between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi
River) would one day be divided into states and welcomed into member-
ship but if the same was to be done with the measureless land beyond the
;

river, and with any other land which might be acquired by the greedy
Westerners, the nature of the Union was indeed changed. Yet the good
sense of the people rejected the logic, rejected the impossible demand for
unanimous approval, and welcomed the unacknowledged birth of a fed-
eral empire.
A week later Congress did something even more high-handed, this
time with Spanish territory instead of American. We have seen that
Jefferson and Madison tried to pretend that they had bought West
Florida* along with Louisiana. When Spain objected, they tried to buy
West Florida again. When Spain refused, they tried to bribe Napoleon
into giving it to them. When this failed, they were obliged to wait until
Napoleon reached such a point in the rape of Spain that it was safe to
* The
territory along the Gulf of Mexico, from the Mississippi River on the west
to the Perdido River on the east, but not extending south of the Iberville River and
Lake Pontchartrain : in other words, the Gulf coast as far east as the Perdido, but
not including the strip of land immediately north of New Orleans, between the
Mississippi and the two lakes.
176 The Price of Union

East and West florid* IJS3 - J

^sj Seized ty U.$. in ,

jHH Seized by U.S. in

seize the territory by force. The time had now arrived. In 1810 a section
between the Mississippi River and the Pearl River had been incorporated
by presidential proclamation into the Territory of Orleans, soon to become
the state of Louisiana. And on April 14, 1812, Congress formally divided
West Florida into halves at the Pearl River, annexing the western half to
the new state of Louisiana. A month later the eastern half was added to
the Mississippi Territory, and the following year an American army forced
the Spanish garrison at Mobile to surrender, and took possession formally.
A touch of gallantry was added to the scene by the fact that the American
general was the fabulous Wilkinson, who had long been in the pay of the
Spanish king.* And in 1819, to complete the curious picture, this land,
*
James Wilkinson of Maryland first showed his style during the Revolutionary
War, when he was forced out of his post as clothier-general because of serious ir-
regularities in his accounts. After the war he drifted west to Kentucky, then down
the river to New Orleans, where in order to acquire a trading monopoly he took an
of allegiance to the Spanish king. He convinced the Spaniards that he would
path
induce Kentucky, and perhaps other Western states, to secede from the Union; in
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 177

which according to the Americans had already been bought once and
seized once, was ceded to the United States by Spain, along with East
Florida, in return for five million dollars. One way or another the territory
today belongs to the three states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama;
but nobody knows how.

10

Madison was renominated for the presidency by the congressional caucus

of his party in May, 1812. The Federalists insisted, then and thereafter,
that Clay and his friends had made the President promise to send a war
message to Congress as the price of nomination. The story is still repeated
in history books, but it does not seem to be true. 10 Madison had two
rivals for the nomination: De Witt Clinton (whose uncle, the Vice-

President, had died in office on April 20, 1812) and James Monroe (who
,

had recently deserted Randolph, rejoined the orthodox Republicans, and

become Secretary of State in place of the absurd Smith ) .* It is not
necessary to assume a blackmail plot in order to explain why the caucus
would choose Madison in preference to either of those men. Monroe, as
Secretary of State, would presumably have his chance in 1816; and
Clinton although he had been nominated, unofficially, by the Republi-
cans in the New York State legislature was known to be flirting with
the New England Federalists, posing in that region as an enemy of war.
In September, 1812, an unpublicized Federalist convention, meeting in
New York, endorsed Clinton as a lesser evil than the President.
Madison won by an electoral vote of 128 to 89, in spite of losing all the
votes east of Delaware except the eight from Vermont. If Pennsylvania
had voted with New York, New Jersey and New England, Madison would

return, he was granted an annual salary of two thousand dollars. He continued to

draw this after he had become the senior general in the American
money long
army. He was also involved in the obscure Burr conspiracy, and in the end betrayed
Burr. He was three times tried by courts-martial, but never convicted. When in
1814 he was finally relieved from active duty, the American army became a safer
place. In the last year of his life, at the age of sixty-eight, he represented the
American Bible Society in Mexico City, where he managed to obtain an option on
Texas lands for himself.
* Monroe later returned to the fold. In regard to Madison's troubles with his
first Henry Adams, in the Formative Years, vol. II, p. 588, com-
Secretary of State,
ments: "The more he had to do with Robert Smith, the more intolerable became
the incubus of Smith's incompetence. He had been obliged to take the negotiations
with Erskine and Jackson wholly on his own shoulders. The papers drafted by Smith
were, as Madison declared, brought from the Department of State in a condition
'almost always so crude and inadequate that I was, in the more important cases,
generally obliged to write them anew myself, under the disadvantage sometimes of
"
retaining through delicacy some mixture of his draft.'
178 The Price of Union

have been beaten and "Mr. Madison's war" (as it was called in Massa-
chusetts) would have ended almost before it got under way. The new
Vice-President was Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, one of John Adams's commissioners at the ill-fated "X, Y, Z"
negotiations in France, and famous in history as the father of the gerry-
mander.*
The sectional nature of the opposition to Madison at the election of 1812
was a warning of what was to come. Massachusetts in particular was be-
ginning to question the worth of the Union. She did not yet know that the
new factories which were being forced upon her by the commerce-killing
policies of the Virginians would one day be more profitable than all her
ships, than all her fisheries; and she was contemptuous of the Westerners
who talked about the impressment of her sailors when they meant the con-
quest of Canada. Josiah Quincy referred to the invasion of Canada as
a "cruel, wanton and wicked attack .
upon an unoffending people,
. .

bound to the Americans by ties of blood and good neighborhood."

Furthermore, the war was wretchedly mismanaged. The militia of
Kentucky, to Henry Clay's chagrin, proved very unlike the conquering
armies of Napoleon, and the militia of other states did not resemble armies
at all. "In the conduct of this strange contest," according to Charles A.
Beard, "the United States called out about fifty thousand regulars, ten
thousand volunteers, and four hundred and fifty thousand militiamen to
cope with the British forces which at the moment of greatest strength did
not exceed seventeen thousand disciplined soldiers." Yet the British army
was not destroyed in fact, it captured and burned the federal capital. And
;

no part of Canada was ever conquered. The only resounding victory

was won by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans; but this was after peace
had been signed.
On the sea, the tiny American navy and the numerous privateers did
superbly well but the result was to rouse the British Admiralty to blockade
;

the Atlantic coast. Until 1814 Massachusetts was exempted from this
blockade, on the ground that New Englanders were more friends than foes,
and that they might return to their British allegiance.
Angry at her financial losses, disgusted by the hypocrisy of the war-
makers, half-pleased and half-pained at the humiliating failure of the
war, Massachusetts at last seemed ready to listen to Timothy Pickering.
In the spring of 1813 the legislature attacked the federal government for

* In
February, 1812, when Gerry was governor of Massachusetts, the state was
redistricted so as to insure more Republican state senators than Republican votes
would justify. It was not a new idea to distort the shape of an election district in
order to secure party advantage; but no one had previously gone to such absurd
lengths. Among the new districts was an unusually odd one in Essex County, which
was drawn by a cartoonist to resemble a flying monster, and named the gerry-
mander. ,
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 179

itsinjusticetoward England and its partiality toward France, and a few

days later acommittee of the state senate brought out a strange report on
a naval victory by Captain James Lawrence. The senate, said the report,
must refrain from approving Lawrence's success lest it seem to encourage
an unjust, unnecessary, and iniquitous war. "And to the end that all mis-
representations on this subject may be obviated," continued the report:

Resolved^ as the sense of the Senate of Massachusetts, that in a war

like the present, waged without justifiable cause, and prosecuted in a
manner which indicates that conquest and ambition are its real motives^
it is not becoming a moral and religious people to express any approba-

tion of military or naval exploits which are not immediately connected

with the defense of our seacoast and soil.

Town meetings, as in the early months of 1809, adopted resolutions

against the government; but this time the tone was more bitter. The temper
of Boston was shown in April, 1814, when government brokers were trying
to float a new loan authorized by the Treasury. Advertising the loan in the
Boston Chronicle, the brokers promised that the names of subscribers would
be kept secret! On the same day the Boston Gazette wrote: "Any man who
lends his money to the government at the present time will forfeit all
claim to common honesty and common courtesy among all true friends
to the country." New England contributed less than three million dollars
in loans during the war, while the rest of the country contributed thirty-

eight millions.
In view of such a mood, and of the continued failure of American
armies, it is not
surprising that Pickering and his friends thought the
time was ripe to take New England out of the Union. The first attempt
to accomplish this, in 1804, had ended in the death of Alexander Hamilton,
the Federalist Party's hero and philosopher. The second attempt, in 1814,
ended in the death of the Federalist Party itself, for the timing of events
was unfortunate.
In October, 1814, Massachusetts sent an invitation to the other New
England states for a meeting to discuss the war, and to plan their future
course in case the federal government became so discredited or so defeated
that it could no longer protect its members. The result was the Convention
which met at Hartford, Connecticut, on December 15 Massachusetts
sending twelve delegates, Connecticut seven, Rhode Island four, New
Hampshire two, and Vermont one. Every delegate was a Federalist. The
cautious George Cabot was made president, so there was no likelihood of
extreme measures; nevertheless, the Convention recommended a series of
far-reaching constitutional amendments, among which were the following:
that no new state be admitted to the Union without the concurrence of
two thirds of the members of both houses of Congress; that Congress
 The Price of Union

should not have the power to lay an embargo for more than
sixty days;
that the concurrence of two thirds of the members of both houses should
be necessary to pass an act for commercial non-intercourse with
any nation,
or to declare war except in case of actual invasion; and that "the same
person shall not be elected president of the United States a second time;
nor shall the president be elected from the same state two terms in succes-
sion."The Convention also resolved that if nothing was done about these
amendments, and the war dragged on unsatisfactorily, ^another convention
should meet at Boston the following June "with such
powers and instruc-
momentous may require."
tions as the exigency of a crisis so

January 1815, the Hartford Convention adjourned. The legislatures

5,
of Massachusetts and Connecticut approved the
proposed amendments and
sent commissioners to Washington to urge their adoption. The com-
missioners set out in the hope of arriving at the capital of a beaten and
discredited government. Napoleon was on the island of Elba, and
Welling-
ton's veterans were free to pay attention to the United States; the blockade
had become absolute; the British held part of the Maine coast (which
still
belonged to Massachusetts) and the island of Nantucket; also, it was
known that a large British force had either attacked New Orleans or was
about to attack it. The Administration of "the withered little apple-John"
seemed undone, and the New Englanders thought they could extort any
promise they wished.* So the Hartford commissioners took their way at
leisure and did not arrive in the
capital until after February 13. There
they discovered, to paraphrase Professor Samuel Morison, that their
mission was abortive and themselves ridiculous. For on February 4, word
had come of the immense American victory at New Orleans,** and a week
later it was learned that peace had been signed, on the
day before Christ-
mas, at Ghent.
The
Federalist Party did not recover from the Hartford Convention,
for leaders could thereafter be accused, plausibly if not fairly, of
its

plotting treason. In the election of 1816 it played a negligible part; and

it played no
after that part at all on the national scene. Its economic plans,
itsview of the nature of the federal government, its methods of administra-
tion all these survived
unimpaired; but they were to be defended by
new leaders, under new names. And the Federalist contempt for democ-
racy, the proud and open demand for government by an elite, dis-
appeared from New England with the Federalist Party. Thenceforth, in
the land of Fisher Ames, Quincy, and Pickering, those who despised
democracy either dissembled their feelings or refrained from politics.
* "If the British succeed in their
expedition against New Orleans," wrote Picker-
ing, "and if they have tolerable leaders I see no reason to doubt their success I
shall consider the Union as severed."
**The battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 181

11

A strange, anomalous peace had been contrived at Ghent, ending an

anomalous war. The American negotiators were John Quincy Adams,
Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, Jonathan Russell of Rhode Island (the
American Minister at Stockholm), and James Asheton Bayard of Dela-
ware, a moderate Federalist. The British began by offering conqueror's
terms, which the Americans, according to their instructions, could not
even discuss. The Americans were told to insist on satisfaction in regard
to impressments, which the British would not discuss. Then the American
delegation split on sectional lines (over the relative importance of the
Newfoundland fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi), and in the
end spent more energy contending with itself than with the British.
The Treaty of 1783, at the insistence of the elder Adams, had secured
for Americans the right to fish on the Grand Bank, on the other banks of
Newfoundland, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, "and at all other places in
the sea where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time hereto-
fore to fish." In return for this large concession, the treaty also provided
that "the navigation of the river Mississippi, from its source to the ocean,
shall forever remain free and open to the subjects of Great Britain. ." . .

By 1814 the Mississippi had become a wholly American river, with the
result that the Westerners, represented at Ghent by Henry Clay, objected
to renewing the British right of navigation. Yet the New Englanders,

represented by Adams, objected to abandoning the fisheries. And the

British, naturally, objected to discussing either right except in connection
with the other.
Albert Gallatin, soothing and patient, first persuaded his fellow delegates
and then persuaded the British to say nothing about either the fisheries
or the Mississippi. This singular system was later applied to all points of
disagreement, with the result that the treaty settled no problems, answered
no questions, but merely said that hostilities were to cease. Every claim on
either side was left open for future discussion, while four commissions were
created to determine the boundary between Canada and the United States.
This was an odd conclusion to a war which should not have happened;
a war which few people wanted, which nobody won, which began after
the chief casus belli had been withdrawn, and which ended before the
chief battle was fought.*
* It was
predicted in both countries that such an inconclusive treaty must lead
to a new war. Yet with time every problem was settled peacefully. In 1817, the
Rush-Bagot Agreement provided for naval disarmament on the Great Lakes, where
each side had been busily building warships in 1815. The eastern boundary, be-
tween Maine and New Brunswick, was settled by the first of the treaty commissions.
182 The Price of Union

Yet the Peace of Ghent brought joy to America. The treaty which
settled nothing was received with an enthusiasm suitable for Athens after
Marathon, Rome after Zama. The Americans felt, correctly, that at last
they were escaping from Europe. Nothing could give more pleasure than
such a release. For twenty-six years, ever since Washington's first term,
domestic politics had been distorted and embittered by foreign affairs.
Many nations would have accepted this as the normal fate of man; but
it did not seem normal to the United States, whose lucky citizens

believed with Jefferson that their fate was to go their own way, and
find their own salvation, at peace, protected by the broad seas. Yet
whenever America had tried to go her own way she had been prevented by
some new explosion in Europe. These interferences, she sensed, were now
to end, at least for a long time. It was natural that she should ascribe her
new freedom to the Peace of Ghent, that she should decide the war had
been a great victory, and that in the flush of victory she should temporarily
forget sectionalism, condemn the Hartford Convention, and unite in a
national pride which would have pleased George Washington. In one
important sense, true American history (as opposed to colonial history)
begins with the Treaty of Ghent.
Perhaps victory was a useful illusion. Perhaps it is well that no one told
America that her new freedom depended not on the Treaty of Ghent,
but on the Treaty of Paris which had been signed on May 30, 1814,
after Napoleon's abdication at Fontainebleau.* It was not the little war

against Englan^d which won for America the blessing of being let alone it ;

was the enormous war against Europe's conqueror. With Napoleon beaten,
and England supreme at sea, the world was to know relative peace for a
hundred years; and within that peace the United States was safe, and
grew strong. She made the mistake of thinking the safety was conferred
by nature, rather than by the vigilance of men. She was therefore surprised
to find, when new conquerors arose in a new century, that her strength
did not keep her isolated and comfortable, any more than her previous
weakness.

The northern and western boundaries of Maine caused trouble, and were not set-
tled until 1842. The third boundary commission made a satisfactory arrangement
as far west as Lake Superior. Their line was carried to the Lake of the Woods in
1842. From there, the Convention of 1818 had made the forty-ninth parallel the
boundary as far west as the "Stony Mountains" (i.e., the Rockies), and had agreed
to leave the question of Oregon open for future debate. There was much debate, as
we shall see, and almost a war; but that, too, was settled in 1846. The Newfound-
land fisheries were dealt with, imprecisely, in the Convention of 1818. This led to
the usual result of imprecision in diplomacy: long and needless recriminations. The
question of British rights on the Mississippi River settled itself by default. The prob-
lem of impressments did not arise again ; and the problem of "neutral rights" on the
high seas had a future which was more pleasing to the satirist than to the moralist.
* The Hundied Days did not until March 1815; they had no effect on
begin 1,
the mood or the fortunes of America.
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 183

12

For the time being, the War of 1812 brought the ruin of the "Old
Republican" resistance, and of the Jeffersonian hopes for simple govern-
ment. The measures to avoid the war had been harmful to these hopes,
but the measures to fight the war were worse. Sixteen years of rule by
the authors of the Kentucky and the Virginia Resolutions had brought
concentration of power instead of diffusion, a larger (though still
trifling)
national debt instead of economy, a free and easy stretching of the Con-
stitution instead of strict construction, the beginnings of industrialization
instead of the triumph of agrarianism, a reluctant use of authority instead
of a mild government which should put to shame the authors of the
Alien and Sedition Acts. After such an experience, the youth and bloom
had gone from the Republican dream. John Randolph of Roanoke and
John Taylor of Caroline might go on pretending that the United States, if
she were not perverted by wicked rulers, could become an Arcady; but
most politicians, when they had struggled with harsh fact in the person
of Napoleon, with cruel circumstance in the shape of the British fleet,
found themselves driven to respect the old forms of power, the Hamiltonian
power which they had derided. From the simple standpoint of survival^
it seemed clear that the future did not belong to agrarianism and purity

of heart, but to nationalism and the Industrial Revolution.

In his message to Congress on December 5, 1814, Madison recommended
liberal spending for the army, navy, and military academies, a protective

tariff, a national bank, a budget of twenty-seven million dollars instead of

the ten millions his party had once thought ample. This was a Hamiltonian
program, and the Republican Congress responded with an enthusiasm
which would have made Hamilton surprised but proud. His once-rejected
Report on Manufactures was revived, and from it his old enemies learned
the arguments for their new policy. The tariff bill was signed by Madison
on April 27, 1816. The rates were low but high enough to whet the
appetite of industry for further favors. Early in the same month the Presi-
dent had approved the bill for a new national bank,* and before the
close of the month the Congress appropriated a million dollars a year for
three years, to build ships-of-war. This was perhaps the most drastic break
of all with "Old Republican" principles.
In the following December, John Caldwell Calhoun soon to be the
*
Cp. Binkley, American Political Parties, p. 98: "Republican newspapers in
1816 reprinted in support of the second Bank of the United States Hamilton's
argument for the first bank. Thus cavalierly was Jefferson's historic opinion
. . .

against the chartering of the first bank, including his classic statement of the dogma
of strict construction, given the coup de grace by his own disciples."
184 The Price of Union

prophet of a revived states* rights, nullification, and if need be secession

introduced a bill for internal improvements at federal expense. He warned
America that her size exposed her to "the greatest of all calamities, next
to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences disunion" The
bill passed both houses of Congress; but characteristically Madison chose

this moment to do one last deed for the "Old Republican" cause. It was
one of most important deeds and one of his most baneful he vetoed
his :

Calhoun's bill, in language which recalled the arguments of 1798.

I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and

the improved navigation of water courses [he said at the end of his veto
message], and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for
them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity.
But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution,
and believing that it cannot be deduced from any part of it without an
inadmissable latitude of construction and a reliance on insufficient prec-
edents; ... I have no option but to withhold my signature from it.

Madison must have known as much about the Constitution as any man
alive, and his interpretation was doubtless logical. Yet Madison was
Secretary of State at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, for which no one
even pretended there was written constitutional authority; he was Sec-
retary of State at the time of the Embargo Act, which with its enforcing
legislation strained the Constitution to bursting-point; he was President
when Louisiana became a new state on terms which seemed to violate the
original compact, and which according to Josiah Quincy dissolved the
Union. If he did not boggle at any of these acts, he was crotchety to veto
a bill setting aside the Bank bonus of a million and a half dollars, and
the future dividends from Bank stock, as a fund for building roads and
canals. One cannot help feeling that he was performing an act of puri-
fication, rather than of statesmanship, that he was burning a little incense
at the altar of the lost cause a pretty gesture, but in this case an expensive
:

one, for the veto imposed new burdens and in the end a new inferiority
upon the South, the unhappy South which had been so grievously hurt by
the Embargo.
New York, with the help of De Witt Clinton and his friends, was able to
promote her own internal improvements and to build the Erie and the
Champlain Canals which were to bring her exhaustless treasure. Penn-
sylvania, likewise, could find the money to build her own roads and canals,
and so could Massachusetts; but the South was too poor to equip herself
for the competition which was about to begin. The new trade routes were
to have a determining effect on the westward march of empire, and that
vast expansionwas to breed many of the new problems which would soon
torment America. The South, with help from the federal government de-
ix. The Frustration of a Foreign Policy 185

nied her on constitutional grounds, was to become an

underprivileged
region, seemingly dependent on slavery for her waning economic strength.
It was a pity that a Virginian President could
accept the Embargo, which
impoverished the South, but not Calhoun's bonus bill, which might have
brought new strength to the region. "We are under the most imperious ob-
ligation," said Calhoun in defending his bill, "to counteract every tend-
ency to disunion." And again, "Little does he deserve to be entrusted with
the liberties of this people who does not raise his mind to these truths."
The veto message was sent to Congress on March 3, 1817; it was Madi-
The next day he attended Monroe's inauguration;
son's last official act.
then shortly he retired to Montpelier, where he lived in peace for another
nineteen years. Like Jefferson, he became an elder statesman whose views
were often sought. Like Jefferson, he was deeply interested in the
founding
of the University of Virginia, and served as its rector. Also like Jefferson,
he was nearly ruined by his own
Virginian hospitality;* but he managed
to avoid the complete collapse that overtook his friend's fortunes. He lived
to see the rebirth of sectionalism in 1820, and the rebirth of nullification
and secession threats between 1828 and 1832. During the latter crisis he
claimed that his famous Resolutions of 1798 gave no support to the doc-
trines of Calhoun. This was not a claim which could be defended in
logic.
* In
1820, Mrs. Madison wrote to her sister: "Yesterday we had ninety persons
to dinewith us at one table, fixed on the lawn, under a large arbour."
 X

The One-Party Period

A HE DEFEAT of Napoleon, with the consequent easing of European

pressure on America, marked the end of the days when domestic politics
were twisted and embittered by foreign affairs. Americans no longer called
each other "Anglomen," or "Gallomaniacs"; they were free at last to
concern themselves exclusively with their own interests and problems.
This they gladly did. New and vastly upsetting forces were at work
throughout the land, and the next twenty years would display with copy-
book clarity the influence of economics upon politicians. Fiery nation-
alists would become equally fiery nullifiers, pompous secessionists would
become equally pompous defenders of the Union, following the shifting
business interests of their communities.
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the new West were the two
mightiest forces of the day. They had long been gathering; but men's at-
tentions had been turned abroad, so the full impact had not been felt.
Generous efforts were now made to harness industry and westward expan-
sion to the new nationalism; but it soon became sadly clear that both
were fated to promote sectional bitterness industry because it demanded
:

tariffs which would hamper the crop-exporting states, and the westward
march because it created rich new areas for whose control the older
regions must contend. The precarious balance of power between the
regions was threatened each time a new state grew to manhood, and
the insoluble problem of minority rights was posed in a fresh form each
time Northerners and Southerners brought their differing institutions
to the same frontier.

The Industrial Revolution first came to the South in the form of the
world-upsetting cotton gin. The inventor, Eli Whitney of Massachusetts,
had been gifted with mechanic's fingers from the time he was little. He
was useless on his father's farm; but he repaired violins, and made nails,
and before he was eighteen had almost cornered the hatpin business
in his district. After graduating from Yale College he went to Georgia
186
x. The One-Party Period 187

as a private tutor. While visiting on a friend's plantation he discovered

the need of a machine to separate the seed from short staple cotton (or
green seed cotton). This was in the early winter of 1793. Southern agri-
culture was in its customary state of depression, and the ingenious Yankee
was told by his Georgian friends that such a machine would save the
region. The long-staple, or sea-island, cotton had been grown along the
Carolina coast since about 1778; but it would not grow far from the
sea, and the short-staple cotton which flourished inland could not be
cleaned at a profitable price: a slave could only separate one pound of
lint from its seed in the course of a day.
In England, meanwhile, the cotton textile business had become the
most dynamic part of the Industrial Revolution. The demand for the
new cheap cloth seemed insatiable, although England's imports of raw
cotton rose from about 5,000,000 pounds in 1775 to 56,000,000 in 1800.
Most of this came from Brazil, the West Indies, and the Middle East.
So Georgia and the Carolinas were faced with the irritating combination
of an immense demand for a crop which they could grow, and an in-
ability to market the crop at a fair price. When all this had been explained
to Eli Whitney, he designed a cotton gin within less than a fortnight;
and within two months he built a machine which could clean fifty
pounds of cotton a day. He then hoped to return to his quiet life, and
to preparation for the law; but he had harnessed forces which were to

destroy the quiet of much of the world, and he was to have no more
tranquil studying. In 1794, the year Whitney patented his gin, the
southern states of America produced about 2,000,000 pounds of cotton;
in 1826 the South (including the new states of the Southwest) produced
330,000,000 pounds, and within a few years this was increased to 450,-
000,000 pounds.*
No such fierce change can take place politely, or without wide de-
struction of human values. The first subversive effect of the cotton gin
was to turn slavery from a dying to a vigorous institution. Less was heard,
thenceforth, about slavery as a transitional state for the Negro; more
and more, at least in the South, it came to be looked upon as his per-
manent lot. With the exhaustion of the land in tidewater Virginia, and
with the ruinous effect of the Embargo even upon the inland districts,
slavery had in many cases become a burden on the masters. The old
Virginia planter was being bankrupted: witness the financial troubles
of Jefferson and Madison, and the still greater disaster that overtook
Monroe, John Randolph prophesied the time was coming when masters

*
Whitney, needless to say, made little money from his invention. He soon turned
to the manufacture of firearms, wherein he perfected the system of interchangeable
parts. The idea of interchangeability may have been Whitney's own,
or it may have
come from another Connecticut arms manufacturer, Simeon North.
188 The Price of Union

would be running away from their slaves and the slaves would be ad-
vertising for them in the newspapers. The sudden new cotton prosperity
did not affect the Virginians directly, for they lived too far north to grow
this crop; but it offered them a market for their surplus slaves, and it

tempted the more adventurous to move with their human capital to

the fabulously rich lands along the Gulf.
As we shall see, most of these lands belonged to Indians, and some of
the Indians were irritatingly peaceful and civilized, so that it was hard

to find excuses for defrauding them. Nevertheless, the speed and rapacity
with which they were expelled parallels the speed and rapacity with
which England's green and pleasant land was turned black in order
that the factories might expand as fast as the cotton fields. The betrayed
and banished Cherokees, the Negroes who would now not be freed, the
English farm families driven from their lands into the dark satanic mills,
all were caught up in the stream of power liberated by the young Yankee

visitor who only wanted to be helpful to his hosts. Meanwhile, the

price of cotton goods was rapidly lowered, a fact which may or may not
outweigh the honor of the American Government and the happiness
of the English workman. And in the Southern states, political leadership
followed economic leadership from Virginia to the Deep South; Craw-
ford of Georgia and Calhoun of South Carolina replaced Washington,
Jefferson, Madison. Monroe, a Virginian, remained President; but for
the time being makers of opinion and of domestic policy were in Congress,
not in the White House.*

In the North, during the same years, the Industrial Revolution was sow-
ing another crop of dragon's teeth. The Embargo and the war had not
only stimulated manufacturing,** it had also depressed shipping to the
point of extinction. By the eighteen-twenties, the mercantile interest
was waning, and by the end of that decade New England and Pennsyl-
* The leader of the
Cherokees, in their peaceful resistance to plunder, was the
astonishing John Ross, whose father was a loyalist Scot who had settled among the
Cherokees during the Revolutionary War, and whose mother was also a Scot, but
with one fourth Cherokee blood. Ross won every legal and diplomatic engagement,
but was defeated in the end by the refusal of President Jackson to put force behind
the decisions of the Supreme Court. So he had to lead his people away from their
rich, well-watered country, across the Mississippi, beyond Arkansas, out to the edge
of the Great Plains where the timber and the water disappear and there is nothing
left but land. The white man could not farm this land until he had invented barbed
wire and the metal windmill, so for a few years the Cherokees had only the savage
nomads of the plains to fear: the Apaches and the terrible Comanches.
** In 1807 there were 8000 cotton
spindles in the United States; in 1815 there
were 500,000.
x. The One-Party Period 189

vania had discovered their industrial future and were uniting behind a
demand for high tariffs just when the South had come to believe that
its hope lay in free trade. The South wished to sell raw cotton un-

hampered to the world; New England wished to prevent the world from
selling finished cotton unhampered to the United States. The South
wished to buy manufactured goods at the lowest possible world price;
New England and Pennsylvania wished to sell manufactured goods at
the highest possible domestic price. The politicians were to have trouble
in reconciling these wants.*
At the same time, to the west of theAppalachian Mountains, the In-
dustrial Revolution was bringing an even more startling change. In 1811
the first steamboat had been launched in the western waters. By 1825,
the Erie Canal was completed, connecting the East, via the Hudson
River, with the West, via the Great Lakes. The flow of population into
the Ohio Valley became a torrent; the mountains were no longer an
unconquerable barrier to trade.
Kentucky and Tennessee, which are western extensions of Virginia
and North Carolina, had become states while Washington was still Presi-
dent; so had Vermont, after settling its relations with New York and
New Hampshire. Between 1803 and 1819, six more states were added to
the Union: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama along the Gulf of
Mexico; Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois along the Lakes. This made twenty-
two states: eleven to the north of the Mason and Dixon line, eleven to
the south. The agrarian slaveholding South and the capitalist North
were thus evenly balanced in the Senate. Each district had western ap-
pendages which might break off and form new alliances; but so far, if
the slave issue should arise, the new Northwest and the new Southwest
would vote with its eastern neighbors, from whom most of its immigrants
had come. Whenever a twenty-third state were to apply for admission
to the Union, this equilibrium must be broken.** And in addition to

exacerbating the slave issue and upsetting the balance of power, the
rise of the new West forced upon the country another explosive problem:
the disposition of the imperial public domain.

* One
way of reconciling them would have been to promote industry in the
South, making of that region a mixed economy, capitalist and agrarian. This seems
to have been Calhoun's plan in 1816. It was defeated in part by Madison's constitu-
tional scruples (which frustrated the first effort to equip the South for the new
form of competition), in part by the difficulty of creating an industrial proletariat
side by side with agricultural slave labor, and in part by the English country-gentle-
man ideal which was for years accepted by most Southern leaders.
** In 1820 the
population of the United States was 9,638,453. The most popu-
lous state was New York (1,372,812); the most populous southern state was Vir-
ginia (1,065,366) ; the most populous state west of the Appalachians was Kentucky
(564,317). Since 1790 the center of population had moved from a point east of
Baltimore to a point in West Virginia.
190 The Price of Union

Ever since the birth of the republic there had been two main attitudes
toward the Western lands. Hamilton and his friends, eager for the rapid
growth of manufactures and for a society of the conventional European
type, wished to retard the settlement of the West until the East was
fully populated and its potential wealth fully exploited. They thought
the federal lands should be sold sparingly, in large units, and at a high
price. Democrats like Jefferson and Gallatin, on the other hand, felt
that the health and liberty of the country depended on creating a maxi-
mum of agricultural freeholders; they thought the federal lands should
be made available to any genuine settler, at a price which would not
discourage the pioneer. Each group attracted selfish interests: some
manufacturers, fearing that wages must rise if the discontented had a
place of refuge, wanted the lands withheld; some speculators, confident
of their own ability to get the better of farmers and pioneers, wanted the
lands offered cheaply and in large quantities. In spite of such camp fol-

lowers, however, this division on policy was simply another form of the
honest and deep division, symbolized by Hamilton and Jefferson, through-
out American life.
The first Land Act passed by the new government, in 1796, was a
compromise. The Act applied to most of the territory in the present state
of Ohio. The township six miles square was made the unit of public
land, each township being divided into 36 sections of one square mile,
or 640 acres. One township was to be sold in sections of 640 acres and
the next in lots of eight sections each, or 5120 acres. All land was to be
sold at public auction, with a minimum price of two dollars an acre. It
was hoped that this price would be too high for the speculator; in fact
it was too high for the settler.
In 1800 Congress lowered the size of the minimum tract to 320 acres,
and gave four years' credit. In 1804 the unit of sale was made a hundred
and sixty acres; and finally in 1820, the price was reduced to a dollar and
a quarter and the minimum tract to eighty acres.* The same system of
land sale had meanwhile been extended to each new acquisition of land
from the Indians, and to the Louisiana Purchase. Also, when Ohio was
admitted to the Union in 1802, the federal government set the precedent
of retaining title to all unsold land within the state, except for one section
in each township which was given to the state as an endowment for edu-
cation.
The general pattern for an orderly disposal of the lands had thus been
* This law of 1820 also
put an end to the credit system established in 1800.
x. The One-Party Period 191

set by 1800. With the reduction, in 1820, of the minimum unit to eighty
acres the really poor settler was for the first time given a chance. It only
remained, if the policy of promoting rapid settlement for the sake of
democracy and freedom was to be a success, to lower the price still further
and to find some form of land tenure which would be a protection against
the speculator. Good land at a dollar and a quarter an acre was a bless-
ing for the speculator, who could afford to wait for a profit running
from a hundred a thousand per cent; but such a price was not cheap
to
for the man with a family and a wagon and a few farm animals, who
wished to try the great Western adventure. In many cases such a man
had no cash and if he began his adventure by borrowing, the result was
;

likely to be that the moneylender inherited the land. Free land, com-
bined with tenure laws to thwart speculation, would have made for free
farmers and democracy; but land at a dollar and a quarter an acre, with
no protective tenure laws, was bound to make land speculation (and its
consequent rural booms and collapses) a national vice.
The problem was soon to be posed in an interesting form, for the
national debt was about to be extinguished. What, then, should the
government do with its profits if it continued to sell land? Should it give
the land away, and if so, to whom, and on what conditions? Or should
it return to the Hamiltonian plan and withhold land sales, at least until

the older parts of the country were settled? Since the acreage involved
would have made several good-sized nations, the avarice and acrimony
which were aroused gave a new meaning to Hamilton's comment that
a national debt is a national blessing. Had the nation remained in debt,
had the government needed the money from land sales, it might have
continued to evade the awkward political issue; but when the govern-
ment did not need the money, and dared not face the issue, one more
sectional trouble arose, and one more source of corruption. The evil
would be felt from the days of Andrew Jackson to the days of Ulysses
Grant.

The nationalism, the pride in continental unity and in strong government

with which Monroe's Administration began, was for the most part short-
lived; but it was not short-lived in John Marshall's Supreme Court. Long
after sectional strife had returned to plague the politics and the economics
of the country, long after the arguments of 1798 were being revived by
Galhoun with clearer logic and more unyielding passion, Marshall and
his Court were still quietly building the legal foundations for the Amer-
ican nation of today. As Jefferson feared, they were "ever acting with
noiseless foot and un-alarming advance, gaining ground step by step
192 The Price of Union

.
engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that
. .

which feeds them/' James Bryce gave a more friendly description of the
same process when he said of John Marshall, "No other man did half
so much either to develop the Constitution byexpounding it, or to secure
for the judiciary its rightful place in the government as the living voice
of the Constitution." 1
In 1819 the "living voice" announced an opinion which has had as
much influence on American government as any deed by President or
Congress. The opinion concerned the Second Bank of the United States,
which had been chartered in 1816 and which began business in 1817.
The Bank's powers were similar to those of the First Bank of the United
States (which had expired in 1811) except that the capital (and the
was increased from ten to thirty-five million dollars.*
limit for note issue)
The Bank was allowed to establish branches in the main towns. These
branches were feared by the state banks doing business under state
charters. The Maryland legislature taxed the notes of the Baltimore
branch of the Bank of the United States, planning to drive it out of busi-
ness. The tax was upheld, as constitutional, by the state court of appeals
and the problem was then taken to the Supreme Court of the United
States. The case was McCulloch v. Maryland; it gave Marshall his chance
to intervene in the states' -rights controversy, putting the slow but weighty
influence of the Supreme Court on the side of centralized government.

counsel for the State of Maryland [wrote Marshall] have deemed

The
it of some importance,
in the construction of the Constitution, to con-
sider that instrument not as emanating from the people, but as the
act of sovereign and independent states. The powers of the general
government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are
truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states,
who alone possess supreme dominion.
This was the view of Jefferson and the Virginia school. It was to be-
come the view of Calhoun and the South Carolina school, and finally
of the Southern Confederacy. It was not the view of John Marshall. "It
would be difficult," he wrote, "to sustain this proposition"; and he pro-
ceeded to demolish it, so far as the Court was concerned, by pointing
out that although the convention which framed the Constitution was
elected by the state legislatures, "the instrument, when it came from
their hands, was a mere proposal, without obligation, or pretensions to it."
The instrument was then submitted to the people who assembled in
conventions.

It is true [said Marshall] they assembled in their several states; and

where
else should they have assembled? No
political dreamer was ever
* See
above, for the First Bank. The new bank, like the old, had a twenty-year
charter.
x. The One-Party Period 193

wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the
states, and of compounding the American people into one common
mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their states. But
the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the
measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the state
governments.
From these conventions [concludes Marshall] the Constitution de-
rives itswhole authority. The government of the Union, then
. . . . . .

is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in

substance it emanates from them, its powers are granted by them, and
are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.

No statement could have been more hateful to Jefferson or to John

Randolph. If the people of the national community are sovereign, and
not the separate states, it follows that the states have no right to nullify
an act of Congress. If such an act is constitutional, it is binding; if it is
not constitutional, the Supreme Court must so decide.
Having disposed of states' rights to his own satisfaction, Marshall at-
tacked the doctrine of "strict construction." Discussing the constitu-
tionality of the act creating the Second Bank, Marshall relied on the
arguments used by Hamilton in 1791. At that time, as we have seen,
Madison and Jefferson were bitterly opposed to the First Bank although
Madison was to sign the bill for the Second Bank, in 1816, with the
strange explanation that he yielded to an overwhelming "public judg-
ment, necessarily superseding individual opinions."* The original argu-
ment against the Bank had been that the power to charter such a corpo-
ration is not expressly granted by the Constitution and cannot be
inferred from the clause in Section 8, Article I, which gives Congress
permission "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for
carrying into execution the foregoing powers . ."A national bank, said.

and his is clearly not necessary, even if some

Jefferson Virginian friends,
people may consider it useful. In meeting this argument Marshall made
two statements which have not been successfully challenged, and which
have therefore determined one aspect of America's constitutional growth.
The first statement dealt with the "implied powers" of Congress.

Let the end be legitimate [wrote Marshall], let it be within the scope
of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are
plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with
the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.

This goes a long way; but it also raises the question, who is to decide
whether the end is "within the scope of the Constitution," and whether
the means "are plainly adapted to that end"?
* This if such it was given years later.
justification, be,
194 The Price of Union

Marshall's second statement answers the question.

Should Congress [he wrote] in the execution of its powers, adopt

measures which are prohibited by the Constitution; or should Con-
gress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws
for the ac-

complishment of objects not intrusted to the government, it would

become the painful duty of this tribunal, should a case requiring such a
decision come before it, to say that such an Act was not the law of the
land. But where the law is not prohibited, and is really calculated to
effect any of the objects intrusted to the government, to undertake
here to inquire into the degree of its necessity, would be to pass the
line which circumscribes the judicial department, and to tread on
legislative grounds.

This is clear, and it seems to follow logically from the existence of a

written constitution; yet it
suggests that the nature of the American
government depends upon the opinions and the principles of the men
who constitute the Supreme Court. The scope within which the Congress
may operate, the means which it may choose, are to be decided by those
men. Since they are men, not gods, they are presumably subject to mun-
dane influences, and a study of American government must therefore
include a study of the tastes and temptations of judges.
Having dissolved states' rights and strict construction, Marshall con-
cluded by declaring the law of the state of Maryland, imposing a tax
on the Bank of the United States, unconstitutional and void, on the
ground that "the states have no power by taxation or otherwise, to retard,
impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the con-
stitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into execution the powers
vested in the general government." McCulloch v. Maryland, from be-
ginning to end, was one continuous refutation of the Virginia and Ken-
tucky Resolutions of 1798. The "Old Republican" creed of government
states' rights, strict construction, nullification, and if need be secession
could not finally be defeated by a court which disposed of no physical
power. John Marshall could only say what he believed the law to be; it
took the armies of Grant and Sherman to establish what the law was.
And even then, even after the final sanction of force, local rights and
decentralization proved so necessary to a land the size of America that
we shall find the political parties devising new ways, unwritten ways,
of restoring to the states some of the power of resistance which was taken
from them by McCulloch v. Maryland, followed by Shiloh, Gettysburg,
and Appomattox.
In addition to its nationalizing tendencies Marshall's Court was notable
for its defense of property rights. For example, in Fletcher v. Peck ( 1810) ,
Marshall had undertaken to settle the Yazoo land fraud which was driving
x. The One-Party Period 195

John Randolph to the verge of mania. The Constitution provides that

no state shall pass a law imparing the obligation of contracts; it was the
unanimous opinion of the court, therefore, that Georgia had no right
to rescind her corrupt sale of western lands.- The state of Georgia had
entered into a contract with the land companies, and these in turn
had sold much of the land to innocent men and women. These private
purchasers would be defrauded if Georgia were allowed to declare her
contract void.
This was the first case in which the Supreme Court had held a state
law void because it conflicted with the Constitution.

Georgia [wrote Marshall] cannot be viewed as a single, uncon-

nected, sovereign power, on whose legislature no other restrictions are
imposed than may be found in its own constitution. She is part of a
large empire; she is a member of the American union; and that union
has a constitution, the supremacy of which all acknowledge, and which
imposes limits to the legislatures of the several states.

In a similar case a few years later, Marshall decided that the legislature
of New Hampshire had no right to rescind the prerevolutionary royal
charter of Dartmouth College and to place the college under state con-
trol. The opinion that a corporation charter is a contract, and thus un-

breakable by a state legislature, has been important both for good and
ill in American economic history. It was modified by Marshall's successor;

but even in its limited form it remained a vital influence.

The world has often wondered that a country seemingly so volatile, a
country whose national life is rooted in revolution, should be as politically
conservative as the United States. For this there are several reasons,
most of them connected with the size of the nation and with the party
system which has been developed to deal with the problems of federalism
and of bigness; but one simple reason is that the Constitution, until
amended by the people, is what the Supreme Court says it is,* and that
the legal mind is conservative and tends to cherish the rights of property.

James Monroe, under whose presidency these forces of division and of

consolidation developed without hindrance, or guidance, or any sign
of Executive leadership, was the last of the "Virginia dynasty." Born in
Westmoreland County in 1758, he went to William and Mary College
at the age of sixteen, but soon left to join the War of Independence. He
* Charles Evans
Hughes, before he became Chief Justice of the United States,
made this statement in almost these words.
196 The Price of Union

became a lieutenant in a Virginia regiment and saw much fighting for

three years. In 1780 he retired to the study of law.
When the war ended, he was sent to the legislature of the Confedera-
tion, where he became chairman of the committees dealing with Western
interests: the committee on the free navigation of the Mississippi, and
the committee on forming a temporary government for the Western
lands. In the course of his duties he made two long trips to the trans-
Appalachian country. His knowledge of that country, and the faith of its
people that he understood their needs and hopes, helped him through-
out his career; for the conflict within his own state of Virginia between
the democratic men of the mountains and the great slaveholders of the
East, which was one day to split the commonwealth in two, was bitter
from the beginning. Yet Monroe's most enduring act during his three
years in the Congress of the Confederacy was more pleasing to his Eastern
friends than to his Western. It was a negative but decisive act: he was
absent on the famous occasion when the attempt to bar slavery forever
from all the West failed by a single vote. "Heaven was silent," wrote
Jefferson, "in that awful moment." So, unfortunately, was James Monroe.
Monroe did not attend the Philadelphia Convention of 1787; but he
was a member of the state convention called to ratify the Constitution
in 1788. He opposed the new form of government, but accepted defeat
tactfully, and in 1790 was appointed to the Senate of the United States
by the Virginia legislature. He quickly became a leading opponent of
the Hamiltonian plan, and a personal enemy of its author. Yet in 1794
Washington appointed him Minister to France. Madison and Livingston
had refused the mission, and Washington wished to send a member of
Jefferson's pro-French party. In Paris Monroe was well liked, with his
democratic ideas, and his undisciplined habit of explaining that Wash-
ington and Hamilton and their friends did not represent the "real" (and
Francophile) feelings of America. In 1796 he was recalled, under some-
thing of a cloud.
The state of Virginia, where the majority shared Jefferson's friendli-
ness toward Monroe, assuaged his hurt feelings by electing him governor
for three successive terms. Then Jefferson sent him back to France,
early in 1803, to help Robert Livingston negotiate for the purchase of
New Orleans. By the time he arrived, Livingston had already been offered
the whole of Louisiana. Instead of thanking Toussaint and the other
unconquerable Negroes of San Domingo for this startling good fortune,
Jefferson seems to have given credit to his friend Monroe. So the
next year he sent Monroe to Madrid, with instructions to produce another
miracle by duping or frightening Spain into giving up the Floridas. The
mission failed, and in 1805 Monroe was transferred to London on an
even more hopeless task. Here he was joined by William Pinkney of
x. The One-Party Period 197

Maryland. As we have seen, their effort to make a treaty which would

settle the problem of impressments was defeated largely because of the
death of Fox and the imminent reappearance of Canning at the Foreign
Office. Monroe's latest biographer writes:

Something like a panic seems to have seized [Monroe and Pinkney]

as the Tory Majority in Parliament rapidly increased. Aware of the
futility of insisting upon the ultimatum he had been directed to present,
Pinkney seems to have taken the part of encouraging Monroe to
abandon even the slight advantages he had wrenched from Fox. Thus
it was that on the last day of December, 1806, Monroe and Pinkney
affixed their signatures to a treaty wholly incompatible with the in-
structions both had received. 2

Jefferson rejected the treaty out of hand; yet Monroe had probably
secured all that could be won from the British Government at that mo-

ment. Lord Holland, with whom he negotiated, believed that if the

treaty had been accepted the War of 1812 would not have occurred.
Lord Holland's opinion of Monroe was that "he was plain in his man-
ners and somewhat slow in his apprehension; but he was a diligent,
earnest, sensible, and even profound man." This is very far from the
impression of flightiness which he had made in Paris ten years before.
Monroe, in the meanwhile, had experienced almost every form of public
service and had developed into one of the first of America's national
politicians who could be called a professional. Public employment was
his chief source of livelihood. Political leadership was soon to pass from
the gentry to the professionals, and Monroe was a transition figure. He
belonged to the gentry, and he could live without office; but he could
live better with it. His years in office were not an interruption to what
he considered his real life; his years out of office were the interruption.
After working with Monroe for eight years, John Quincy Adams de-
scribed him in the famous diary as having "a mind anxious and unwearied
in the pursuit of truth and right, patient of inquiry, patient of contra-
diction, courteous even in the collision of sentiment, sound in its ultimate
and firm in its final conclusions." This is notable praise from
judgment,
J. Q. Adams, and the praise seems deserved. Monroe possessed
neither
the imagination of Jefferson nor the knowledge of Madison; but he de-
veloped into an experienced and reliable public servant. Even in his
youthful army days Washington had called him "a brave, active and
sensible officer." He seems to have lacked humor, charm, and any form
of impressiveness ; yet the great men of his day not only honored and re-
spected him, they liked him.
In 1807 Monroe once more returned to the United States in an ag-
grieved mood, feeling that his good work abroad had been misrepresented
198 The Price of Union

and underestimated. Yet he must have known that the results of his

diplomacy were not impressive.

His disasters [wrote Henry Adams] came, not in any ordinary form
of occasional defeat or disappointment, but in waves and torrents of
ill-luck. ... In many respects Monroe's career was unparalleled, but
he was singular above all in the experience of being disowned by two
presidents as strongly opposed to each other as Washington and Jef-
ferson, and of being sacrificed by two secretaries as widely different as
3
Timothy Pickering and James Madison.

Smarting from these rebuffs, Monroe allowed the dissident Repub-

licans of the Randolph and Taylor faction to supporthim for the presi-
dency in opposition to Jefferson's candidate. As usual with those who
opposed Jefferson, he was badly defeated; and also as usual, Jefferson
made every effort to placate him and to bring him back into the fold as
soon as the defeat was consummated. Monroe had never spoken or felt
with Randolph's utter bitterness, so it was easy for him to return to good
relations with Jefferson. In the autumn of 1810 he served again in the

Virginia House of Delegates, and in the following year became governor

for a fourth term. This puzzling man, who seems so colorless in retro-
spect, and whose diplomatic career was so unfortunate, had never the
least trouble in obtaining high appointive office from his friends or high
elective officefrom his public.
Madison and Gallatin, meanwhile, were being driven beyond their
gentle patience by the ineptitude of Robert Smith, the Secretary of State.
In March, 1811, Gallatin forced the issue by resigning from the Treasury.
Madison refused the resignation and at last brought himself to defy the
Senate cabal and to discharge Smith. As we have seen, during two vital
years this foolish, bumbling man had held the most important office
in the state, next to the presidency, because the President was afraid
of Giles of Virginia, Leib of Pennsylvania, Samuel Smith of Maryland,
and Vice- President George Clinton. Jefferson, if thwarted by such peo-
ple, would have broken them almost before they knew he had given
them his attention; but Madison allowed them to poison his Adminis-
tration and to endanger the country because he did not know how to
meet their plots. He could write a constitution of divided powers, but
he could not administer one.
Needing Monroe's help and influence in Virginia to offset these newly
challenged enemies, Madison offered him the Department of State, and
with it the prospect of succession to the presidency. Monroe resigned
from the governorship in order to accept.The appointment of the new
Secretary, the new heir apparent, did not mean a new policy; it merely
meant a new efficiency in one part of Madison's ramshackle Adminis-
x. The One-Party Period 199

tration. Monroe had some months been explaining away his con-
for
nection with Randolph, that should impede his return to high office;
lest
he had been making it clear that he was no longer an "Old Republican"
of 1798, but a practical man of 1811, ready to accept everything Ran-
dolph hated: war, loans, a navy, conscription. He had gone so far in
these explanations that Randolph had broken with him in two char-
4
acteristically bitter letters.
During the war Monroe hoped for a military command; but he could
not be spared from Washington, where he and Gallatin were the only
competent administrators.* After the burning of Washington, in the sum-
mer of 1814, Madison dismissed General Armstrong, the Secretary of
War, and allowed Monroe to run the War Department as well as the
Department of State coming just in time for Monroe to re-
the change
ceive credit for the victories withwhich the war ended. In spite of this
good fortune, and in spite of receiving the support of both Jefferson and
Madison, Monroe was nearly defeated for the presidential nomination
by William H. Crawford of Georgia. In the Congressional caucus of 1816,
Monroe won by only eleven votes. The caucus, which in the days of the
magician from Monticello had been used to serve and strengthen the
Executive, was about to try to make the executive the servant of Congress.

Crawford of Georgia was a veteran of a rough school of politics. A brilliant

young lawyer from the uplands, he became a leader of the conservative
faction in his state, supported by the planters of the coast and the wealthy
farmers inland. He was hated by Governor John Clark, an almost illiterate
demagogue, defender of the Yazoo men, and idol of the small farmer and
the frontiersman. An attempt was made to kill Crawford in a duel, or a
series of duels. The first man who tried was killed himself; then Clark

challenged, and wounded Crawford seriously. The following year Craw-

ford was sent to the comparative safety of the United States Senate, where
he became one of the most popular members and a special favorite of John
Randolph because of his and- Yazoo record.
He was a huge, genial man, and an amusing storyteller. He was also
efficient and hard-working, with an understanding of finance which made
him a help to Albert Gallatin at the Treasury. When Vice-President Clin-
ton died, in 1812, Crawford was elected president pro temper e of the
Senate. The following year he was sent as Minister to France, and from
1815 until the end of Madison's Administration he was Secretary of the
Treasury. His popularity with Congress was so great that he could have
* After
May, 1813, Gallatin was abroad on diplomatic missions.
200 The Price of Union

had the caucus nomination in 1816, and with it the election, if he had
been willing to oppose Monroe. He felt, however, that Monroe was the last
of the Revolutionary worthies with a claim to the presidency, and he be-
lieved (mistakenly) that he himself would have time to become President
later; so he told Monroe's friends to announce publicly that he was not a
candidate. Nevertheless, he received 54 votes, and Monroe 65.
The Federalists, meanwhile, nominated their last presidential candidate,
Rufus King. Monroe and Governor Tomkins of Ne\v York (the Re-
publican candidate for Vice-President) received the electoral votes of
every state except Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware: 183 votes,
to 34 for Rufus King. This was the end of the Federalist Party, and the

beginning of the so-called Era of Good Feelings. For more than eight
years there was no official opposition; but every ambitious man conspired
stealthily for his own advancement, hating his rivals with a fury which
made party bitterness seem affectionate: Since there was no opposition,
there could be no party discipline, which meant that the President had no
control over Congress. A member of the lower House expressed the general
disregard of the Executive as follows:

We have lately given a pretty strong proof of the little influence pos-
sessed by the Administration over the House of Representatives by the
passage of the Army Bill. The Secretary of War and all his friends, in
and out of doors, opposed by every expedient in their power the
President was known to be against it and probably other members of
the Cabinet but it was carried notwithstanding many defects in the
details of the bill by an overwhelming majority. A similar proof was
given last year in the refusal of the House to proceed with the Yellow
Stone Expedition, after the President had informed us that it was a sub-
ject of very great importance in which he took a particular interest and
was willing to incur great responsibilities to secure its success. 5

This is the language of a schoolboy rejoicing at having discomfited the

Latin master; but more serious men observed the same lack of co-ordina-
tion in government and were not amused. John Quincy Adams quotes
Clay as saying that
he considered the situation of our public affairs now as very critical and
dangerous to the administration. Mr. Monroe had just been re-elected
with apparent unanimity, but he had not the slightest influence on
Congress. His career was considered as closed. There was nothing
further to be expected by him or from him. Looking at Congress, they
were a collection of materiels, and how much good and how much evil
might be done with them, accordingly, as they should be well or ill
directed. But henceforth there was and would not be a man in the
United States possessing less personal influence over them than the
President. 6
x. The One-Party Period 201

Crawford spoke of the deadly atmosphere, "with ambitious and crafty and
disappointed men on the watch for every mischief, and welcoming every
disaster," and Adams wrote in his diary that "the rankling passions and
7

ambitious projects of individuals, mingling with everything, presented a

prospect of the future which I freely acknowledged was to me appalling."
8

Here was a result of that freedom from party spirit which the Fathers in
their innocence had desired, and which John Quincy Adams still thought
must somewhere, somehow, lead to purity in public life. The illusion died
hard. After Monroe had been elected President, Andrew Jackson wrote
him:

Now is the time to exterminate the monster called party spirit. By

selecting characters most conspicuous for their probity, virtue, capacity
and firmness, without any regard to party, you will go far to, if not en-
tirely eradicate those feelings, which, on former occasions, threw so
many obstacles in the way of government; and perhaps have the
pleasure of uniting a people heretofore divided. . . . Consult no party
in your choice. 9

consulted no party. He chose the best men he could find, and

Monroe
although Clay and Jackson refused his offers he appointed a very good
Cabinet: John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State; John Caldwell Cal-
houn, Secretary of War; William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury;
B. W. Crowninshield of Massachusetts (a temporary holdover from Madi-
son's Cabinet), Secretary of the Navy; and William Wirt, Attorney Gen-
eral.*
Yet this Cabinet of high talents was effective only in foreign affairs
(where the interference of Congress was not constant, and therefore not
quite disastrous), and in political intrigue. "Petty factions grouped them-
selves about Crawford, Clay, Adams, Calhoun, De Witt Clinton, and
General Jackson, and political action was regulated by antipathies rather
than by public interest. If any one of these leaders seemed to be gaining
an advantage, the followers of all the others combined to pull him
down." 10
The personal and the jockeying for position
bitterness, the intrigues
among members of the same government, the decline in the authority of
the Executive, all were the result of the absence of party opposition. In-

* Son of a Swiss
tavernkeeper who lived at Bladensburg, Maryland, Wirt moved
to Virginia at the age of nineteen and practiced law in Culpeper County. Author of
the immensely popular Letters of the British Spy (1803), Wirt was a gregarious,
humorous, much-loved minor figure in literature and the law. In 1816 Madison
appointed him United States attorney for the district of Richmond, and the next
year Monroe made him attorney general. He held this office for twelve years, under
Monroe and John Quincy Adams. He was one of the few men in high position dur-
ing the Era of Good Feelings who did not make bitter, vindictive enemies.
202 The Price of Union

stead of dividing the country, as Jackson thought, the political parties had
canalized discontents, discouraged their own extremists and perfectionists
in order to hold together as many interest groups as possible, and given
form and order to the government. Instead of uniting the country, the
decline of the Federalist Opposition led to a chaos from which only
tyranny or the reappearance of parties could rescue the state.*
Whenthere is no Opposition there is no incentive for politicians to co-
operate on a consistent policy. Each man is free to maintain his popularity
at home, among his own voters, by stating the extreme demands of his
region or his interest group. When there is no Opposition, discipline is
impossible and the President cannot require the support of his party
members in the legislature, neither can the legislature impose sufficient
unity upon itself to make or carry out policy. A
tyrant can demand unity
from his servants and can abolish the Opposition; but in a free system
unity is achieved only when disunity means the loss of power. When there
is an orderly and effective alternative, the government must either dis-
cipline itself, and hold together, or accept defeat. When there is no alter-
native, no threat of defeat, there is no incentive to hold together, and in
the end no policy, merely a scramble for special privileges. The members
of Monroe's Administration had nothing to fear except each other, so they
spent their time seeking to frustrate each other's hopes and plans. The
result was interesting, but it was not useful.
It is equally true, of course, that free institutions will not work unless
the parties agree on fundamental aims. An Opposition which seeks to
destroy the foundations of the state can only provoke a civil war. So free
government requires at least two parties, both of which are competent to
take over the Administration and neither of which aspires to revolution.
The United States, in Monroe's day, was threatened not with revolution,
but with constitutional collapse for lack of an Opposition. Only the birth
of a vigorous party system could supply the government with enough
strength to govern. The first step was the creation of a single, strong, pro-
fessionally organized party. The politicians who were excluded were then
driven by the instinct for survival to build another party of their own.
The new party which began to form toward the end of Monroe's eight
years was built in the name of Andrew Jackson, who had advised Monroe
"to exterminate the monster called party spirit." It was built by men who
did not care in whose name they organized, but who understood the
virtues of organization for its own sake. They had no cause, no plan for

saving or remodeling the country; they merely had a plan for putting
themselves into office. They had learned in local government how to build
a political machine, and how to defeat opponents who did not possess such
*
"Party organization," said Walter Bagehot, "is the vital principle of representa-
tive government."
x. The One-Party Period 203

a machine, or who did not keep it in good order. They had also observed
that the gentry, who had long run the federal government, were losing
touch with the constantly expanding electorate, and that a new type of
popular leader was needed. After the election of 1824 they found the
leader, built the first national political machine, won power within four
years, and incidentally restored health to the government.

Meanwhile, during the years of drift, during the cantankerous Era of

Good Feelings, history was not marking time while America learned her
political lessons. The West and the Industrial Revolution continued
to expand, breeding new dangers incessantly. The first explosion came on
the frontier, across the Mississippi, when in 1819 the legislature of Mis-
souri applied for admission into the Union as a slave state. This not only
disturbed the balance of power in the Senate, where there were eleven
Northern and eleven Southern states, but it raised the question whether
slavery was to be allowed throughout the Louisiana Purchase. The Ohio
River had become the boundary between freedom and slavery in the old
West; but there was no boundary in the new West, beyond the Mississippi.
Which set of institutions was to inhabit that empire? Missouri lay far
north for a slave state. Would her admission mean that Southern ways,
and the Southern economic system, must expand at the expense of the
Northern?
The question had not yet become moral and impassioned; it was still
chiefly a struggle for power. Aggressive industrial capitalism did not wish
to be outvoted in the Senate by an agrarianism made newly aggressive

through the cotton gin and its rehabilitation of slavery. Wherever slavery
spread, the Southern way of life went with it; if Missouri were admitted,
might not the whole West be overrun by the land-hungry planters? It was
already known and one-crop cotton culture were having
that slave labor
a deadly effect on Southern land. The cotton kingdom was exporting its
top-soil to Liverpool, along with the ever-mounting millions of pounds of
fiber. If slavery was to remain profitable, it must expand; if cotton was to

supply the South with a counterpoise to the new manufacturing wealth of

the North, it must cross the great river. This knowledge fired both South-
ern and Northern representatives during February, 1819, when the bill
to admit Missouri came before the House. When the North supported an
amendment offered by a New York member, providing for the gradual
abolition of slavery in Missouri, Cobb of Georgia prophesied: "You have
kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which

seas of blood can only extinguish." 11 The House, nevertheless, passed the
204 The Price of Union

bill thus amended; but the Senate rejected it, and since Congress dissolved
in March, the question was held over until the next session.
During the summer and autumn the Missouri problem was debated
bitterly by the people, with many threats of secession from the North and
from the South. Senator James Barbour of Virginia proposed to call a
convention of the states to dissolve the Union and to agree upon the
terms of separation and the disposal of the public debt and public lands.
And J. Q. Adams, convinced that slavery must be abolished if thenation
were to survive, wondered whether a temporary dissolution of the Union
could be arranged, until such time as the South would free its Negroes. 12
In March, 1820, the new Congress accepted a compromise. The dis-
trict of Maine, which had detached itself from Massachusetts, was ad-
mitted as a free state, and Missouri was admitted as a slaveholding state,
thus keeping the balance even. Also, slavery was prohibited in any other
part of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 30'; that is, north of
the southern boundary of Missouri. Many fiery Southerners, including his
son-in-law, urged the President to veto the compromise on the ground
that Congress had no constitutional right to ban slavery in the territories.
Although he prepared a veto message, Monroe finally signed the bill
March 6, 1820, rather than risk civil war. "The President," wrote J. Q.
Adams in his diary, "thinks this question will be winked away by a com-
promise. But so do not I. Much am I mistaken if it is not destined to sur-
vive his political and individual life and mine. ... I take it for granted
that the present question is a mere preamble a titlepage to a great tragic
volume."
Henry Clay, who was still Speaker of the House, was responsible for
the success of the Compromise Bill. He had learned a lot since the con-
fident days of 1811 when he
believed in pushing issues to a clear-cut con-
clusion, even though the conclusion should be war. He had watched his
country driven not only to the edge of defeat, but to the edge of disunion
and treason, by the rash policy of his Western War Hawks, and he had
seen the value of compromise if the great regions of America were to live
together in amity. "All legislation," he was to say years later, "all govern-
ment, all society is founded upon the principle of mutual concession,
politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these everything is based. . . . Let him
who elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities,
its wants, its necessities, say, if he never will compromise but let
pleases, I ;

no one who is not above the frailtiescommon nature disdain com-

of our
13
promise." So Clay put his strength and his cunning behind the Missouri
bill (securing a vote of 90 to 87 in the House), not because he thought

that it would settle the slave question, or that it was eternally "right," but
because he hoped it would diminish tension, creating an atmosphere in
which the problems of the federal empire could be discussed in friendli-
x. 1 he Une-farty renod

ness.The contrast between Jefferson and Randolph, the politician and the
dogmatic perfectionist, was scarcely more sharp than the contrast between
Clay and John Quincy Adams.
On March 3, the day after Clay had persuaded the House to accept the
compromise, Adams devoted pages of his diary to clarifying his own views.

The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this dis-

cussion [he concludes] is that the bargain between freedom and slavery
contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and
politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our
Revolution can be justified ; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains
of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate
the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by ad-
mitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property
to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be repre-
sented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly
a double share of representation*. ... I have favored this Missouri
Compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the
present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union
at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder
course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should
have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the
Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or
fourteen states unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object
to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other states by the
universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved,
slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.

The moral issue had played a very small part in public discussion of the
Missouri question; but the leaders were aware of the issue and rightly
feared it, for if the day came when the nation was split along moral and
economic lines which coincided, the bonds of union would dissolve.

Monroe took no part in the Missouri controversy. Although deeply

troubled over the future of the country, he did not feel the Executive
should attempt to lead, or to make domestic policy. This was probably
just as well, for the Congress was in no mood to listen to Monroe and the
breakdown of party discipline had left him without power to command a
hearing.
In foreign affairs, however, the Executive was forced to accept leader-
* Article the slaves
I, Section 2, of the Constitution provides that three fifths of
shallbe counted in apportioning representation.
206 The Price of Union

ship. Not even Monroe with his Virginian scruples could deny that the
Constitution expected the President to be responsible for foreign relations ;
if he had sought to deny it, he would have met resistance from his able and

pushing Secretary of State. John Quincy Adams had inherited his father's
belief that since America was destined to be strong, she was in fact strong,
and that the great powers should treat her as an equal. Thewas not
belief
shared abroad; but it gave to Adams's dispatches a unique flavor, a com-
bination of power and impertinence.
In February, 1819, Adams finally persuaded Spain to cede the whole of
the Floridas to the United States. As we have seen, America had been
taking progressive bites out of West Florida ever since 1810. East Florida,
meanwhile, was so poorly governed by Spain that it had become a refuge
for escaped slaves and a base from which Indians could attack the white
men who were steadily forcing the Creeks out of their lands between
Georgia and the Mississippi. The Americans took the view that if Spain
was unable to govern Florida she should leave it to someone who could,
and in 1817 Monroe gave General Andrew Jackson permission to pursue
marauding Indians into Spanish territory.* Jackson did not need to be
prodded into offensive action. He crossed the Florida border with his
Tennessee militia, seized St. Marks, hauled down the Spanish flag, hanged
two Indian chiefs, and also executed two Englishmen who had been en-
couraging the Indians. He then marched on to Pensacola and removed the
Spanish governor.
In London this typical outburst of Jacksonian energy might have led to
war; but fortunately Lord Castlereagh was Foreign Secretary, and after
examining the reports he decided that Jackson's two victims "had been
engaged in unauthorized practices of such a description as to have de-
prived them of any claim on their own government for interference."** In
Washington the news from Florida shook Monroe's Cabinet; but in the
end J. Q. Adams had his way and was allowed to justify every act of
Jackson on the ground of the failure of Spain to keep order in her colony.
There was small enthusiasm for this view in Madrid; but even there it
was recognized that America would not much longer refrain from East
Florida and that the province had better be sold unless Spain was prepared

* Monroe later denied that he

gave permission for Jackson's invasion of Spanish
land; but Congressman John Rhea swore that he himself carried the President's
message to General Jackson.
** Morison and
Commager, The Growth of the American Republic , vol. I, p. 347.
Commenting on Lord Castlereagh, the authors say that he "coined no phrases about
Anglo-Saxon solidarity during his long career. In England his achievements were
eclipsed by the plausible Canning; in America he is known chiefly through Byron's
savage verses. Yet, judged by his deeds, this great and silent statesman must be
placed beside Washington, Hamilton, Peel, and Bright as a promoter of Anglo-
American concord. He was the first British statesman to regard friendship with
America as a permanent British interest." (Ibid., pp. 341-43.)
x. The One-Party Period 207

both to govern it and to protect it. Ruined by Napoleon, struggling help-

lessly against the loss of her whole South American empire, Spain was in
no state for extra effort, so she relinquished all her lands east of the Missis-

sippi, together with her nebulous claims to the Oregon country, for five
million dollars.* The treaty also provided that the southwestern boundary
of the United States should leave Texas within Mexico. For this reason the
Senate held up the treaty for two years but it was finally ratified in Feb-
;

ruary, 1821. A year later President Monroe recognized the independence

of the Latin American republics which had formed the Spanish Empire.
The destruction of that empire in the Americas was complete,** unless
Spain could persuade a great power to intervene and win back the colo-
nies.
When France invaded Spain in 1823, to "save" Ferdinand VII, and
when the French were welcomed by the Spanish people, it seemed to
many observers that a Franco-Spanish invasion of Latin America might
follow. This would have been equally unwelcome in Washington and in
London, where George Canning had returned to power after the death of
Castlereagh. Canning had not recognized the new American republics, and
was in no hurry to do so; but he meant to keep Spain and France from
re-establishing a colonial monopoly in lands where England hoped to ex-

* Adams's official note to the American Minister at Madrid (Department of

State, 28 November, 1818), defending Jackson and putting the blame for every
unpleasantness upon Spain, is one of the most charming examples of self -righteous-
ness in diplomatic history. National pride backed by a New England conscience
produced a masterpiece of pained superiority. "Is this narrative of dark and com-
plicated depravity," he asked, "this creeping and insidious war . these political
. .

filters to fugitive slaves and Indian outlaws, these perfidies and treacheries of vil-
lains incapable of keeping their faith even to each other ... is all this sufficient
to cool the sympathies of his Catholic Majesty's government, excited by the execu-
tion of these two 'subjects of a Power in amity with the King'?" And in conclusion,
after the moralistic surprise, the cold threat: "If the necessities of self-defence
should again compel the United States to take possession of the Spanish forts and
places in Florida, we declare, with the frankness and candor that become us, that
another unconditional restoration of them must not be expected; that even the
President's confidence in the good faith and ultimate justice of the Spanish govern-
ment will yield to the painful experience of continual disappointment; and that,
after unwearied and almost unnumbered appeals to them for the performance of
their stipulated duties in vain, the United States will be reluctantly compelled to
rely for the protection of their borders upon themselves alone. You are authorized
to communicate the whole of this letter, and the accompanying documents, to the
Spanish government. ..."
The Spanish Government, in had given many strange excuses for the
its time,
seizing of many people's lands. The one
thing that would have surprised them about
John Quincy Adams's note would have been the knowledge that he meant exactly
what he said. He really thought America was wholly right, Spain wholly wrong.
His father, after all, had written on the day before the Declaration of Independence,
"Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom." Few men, especially
in tired, cynical Spain, could hope to inhabit so clear a world.
**
Except for the valuable islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico which Spain held
until 1899.
 208 The Price of Union

tend her trade. So in August, 1823, Canning asked the American Minister
in London, Richard Rush,* whether the United States would
join with
Great Britain in ordering France to leave Latin America alone.
Rush preferred not to answer the momentous question (especially since
Canning refused to recognize the South American republics)., so he re-
ferred it to Monroe, who in turn referred it to Jefferson with the suggestion
that the answer should be yes. We have already seen Jefferson's reply;
the high priest of American isolationism was willing, in such a caue, to
urge an Anglo-American alliance. So, too, was Madison, whom Monroe
had also consulted; but not John Quincy Adams. The
suspicious and
fiercely patriotic Secretary of State did not believe there was danger of
French intervention. In this he was right, for in October, 1823, while the
ex-presidents were consulting together, France had renounced all designs
against Latin America.** Furthermore, Adams felt that the real threat to
the United States came from Russia in the Pacific, not from France in the
Atlantic where British power was supreme. And lastly, as he told the
Cabinet, he did not think it fitting to the dignity of the United States "to
come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war." So Adams
urged an independent American statement which would concentrate on
the problem of Russian expansion down the Pacific coast, from Alaska
into the Oregon territory. Adams wished to embody such a statement in
one of his own thorny notes to the Russian Government.
In the end Monroe compromised. He agreed with Adams on a separate
American statement; but he insisted that it include the problem of Euro-
pean intervention in Latin America, and instead of making the statement
in a note to a foreign power, he chose the quieter method of
inserting it
into his annual message to Congress, on December 2, 1823. In two widely
separated passages of this message the President laid down what has come
to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. Early in that document, while
discussing American relations with Russia, he said that "the American
continents, by the free and independent condition which they have as-
sumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for
future colonization by any European power." And in the
closing para-
graphs he dealt with the Spanish colonies, saying that, since the political
* Rush was one of the most
pleasant and unambitipusly able men of his day. A
Philadelphian, a Princetonian, son of a famous physician, he had been attorney-
general of Pennsylvania, Attorney General of the United States (under Madison),
Secretary of State for a few months while Monroe waited for John Quincy Adams
to return from Europe, and then Minister to Great Britain. He was the first Ameri-
can Minister to the Court of St. James's who was both efficient and well liked.
Later he served as Secretary of the Treasury for J. Q. Adams, and as Minister to
France for President Polk. Aside from a quarrel with John Randolph, who said
his appointment to the Treasury was the worst appointment since Caligula made
his horse a consul, Richard Rush led a tranquil, uncontentious, gratifying life.
** This was the
Polignac Agreement, made under British pressure.
x. The One-Party Period 209

system of the powers composing the Holy Alliance differed radically from
that of America,

we owe it to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the

United States and those powers, to declare that we should consider

any attempt on their part to extend their political system to any por-
tion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the
existing colonies and dependencies of any European power we have not
interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have
declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independ-
ence we have, on great consideration and just principles, acknowledged,
we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them,
or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European
power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly
disposition towards the United States.

The statement wasreceived with great enthusiasm in America, and with

distaste inEurope. To many Europeans it seemed a gratuitous insult, for
the message was directed against an imaginary menace. "Not one of the
Continental powers cherished any designs of reconquest in the New
World in November or December of 1823." 14 In his history of the Monroe
Doctrine, Professor Dexter Perkins says that the Europeans,

innocent of nefarious designs . .could hardly be otherwise than

.

resentful of the imputations of the President. Without any preliminary

warning or exchange of views, without any effort to establish the facts, in
a document intended only for the American national legislature, Mon-
roe and Adams had laid down the principles on which they expected the
policy of the Old World to be governed in relation to the New. These
doctrines were nothing more nor less than a challenge to the monarchies
of Europe. . . .
"Blustering," "monstrous," "arrogant," "haughty,"
15
"peremptory" these were some of the terms applied to the message.
The importance of the Monroe Doctrine lay chiefly in the future; but
even at the time, even though there was no genuine danger to overcome,
the statement of a clear and popular foreign policy, which soon became so
widely accepted that no later President could retreat from it, was a
weighty deed. Itwas this which Adams and Monroe intended, and which
they achieved. They also achieved something which they did not intend,
and which was they helped to mislead the American people
less useful:
as to the relationbetween policy and power. For many decades the chief
guarantee of the Monroe Doctrine was to be the British fleet. The nations
of Europe refrained from colonial experiments in South America, not be-
cause a President and a Secretary of State had admonished them, but
because they knew the British would fight rather than lose those new
expanding markets. In his nationalistic pride, Adams had concealed from
210 The Price of Union

the American public the dependence of the Doctrine on British sea

power; by so doing he made it easier for Americans to believe that foreign
policy can be created by speeches and pronouncements, or by mere be-
nevolence. The delusion was to prove baneful in the future.*

10
%

In the election of 1820, meanwhile, Monroe had received every electoral

vote but one a sign of public indifference rather than of praise. The
election came shortly after the fiery conflict on the Missouri question, and
it came after a financial panic which shocked and scared the country dur-

ing 1819 and 1820. Yet there was no demand to turn Monroe out, not
because the country trusted him, but because it knew he had nothing to
do with the making of domestic policy. The country did not care whether
Monroe was President or not. Public interest, for the time being, centered
on Congress, and especially on the House of Representatives where policy
was made, or where it failed to be made.** The JefFersonian theory (but
not practice) of Congressional government, of executive self-denial, was
now fully applied the result was to show the incapacity of the representa-
;

tive assembly to direct a government. The Administration of John Quincy

Adams was soon to show the incapacity of the Executive itself to govern
in the absence of a party system and party discipline. Then, with the
coming to power of the Jackson men, the lessons of the twelve years
following 1817 were applied; the government and the uses of the Con-
stitution were radically changed.
* The South Americans were not fooled.
They knew they owed their safety to
the Polignac Agreement, and thus to British power.
** "In the first three decades of national history," writes Allan Nevins (Ordeal
of the Union, vol. I, pp. 163-64), "when the Senate was too small to carry great
weight and the House was still a truly deliberative body, public interest had cen-
tered in the lower chamber. It was in the House that Madison and Gallatin, Ran-
dolph and Webster, Clay and Galhoun, had won their first parliamentary fame.
But the debates on the Missouri Compromise in 1820-21 had signalized a shift
in popular attention. The Senate had by that time risen to a membership of forty-
four. William Pinkney of Maryland, Rufus King of New York, and others had
given it lustre, while before long Clay and Webster would enter it, and Calhoun
would preside over it as Vice-President. For the next forty years, down to the Civil
War, the Senate enjoyed a much greater prestige than the House."
 XI

The President Without a Party

k5iNCE THE PUBLIC in 1820 had no strong feelings about Monroe, his

jealous heirs did not mind leaving him in office for another four years.
If he was not an asset, neither was he a menace, and he could be counted
on to depart politely when the time came. In 1824 the time had come.
Even if the country had wished to keep Monroe as a symbol of concord,
the two-term tradition made this impossible; so the political malice which
had been seething for eight years in the hearts of the ambitious was at last
released. There were no parties in the campaign; there were supposed to
be no issues and no disagreements; but there were four bitter candidates,
each with numerous bitter friends.
Crawford of Georgia should have been the strongest candidate. He had
refused the caucus nomination in 1816, out of respect for Monroe. In the
midst of the new nationalism he had adhered to the states' rights of 1 798
and the doctrine of nullification, so he was supported by Randolph and
by the powerful Representative Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina. He
had been a faithful servant of the Virginia dynasty, so he was supported by
Madison, and had the benevolent approval of Jefferson. He had kept the
good will of the planters, as a "safe" Southerner; and on the ground that
he was the most "JefTersonian" of the candidates he was backed by Martin
Van Buren, the future President, who had come to Washington in 1821 as
junior senator from New York.* Hoping to please his Northern followers
without alienating the South, Crawford had modified his states' -rights
position by endorsing a mild tariff and the national bank. His popularity
seemed secure and his friends were confident. He was so far the favorite
that he was attracting the united hostility of all the other candidates,
when suddenly, in the autumn of 1823, he was stricken with paralysis. For
a year he was almost blind, and helpless, and although he then grew
better he was never again well. In spite of the disaster his friends per-
suaded the caucus to nominate Crawford in 1824; but only 68 senators
and representatives voted, while 261 abstained.
*
Cp. Van Buren's Autobiography, pp. 139-40, and p. 131. Van Buren was
already a leader in the "Albany Regency," the New York State political machine
which was so smooth and effective that it had acquired national fame. His support
brought into the Crawford camp other Regency leaders, such as William L. Marcy:
the future Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Governor of New York.
221
xi. The President Without a Party 213

This was not only the end of Crawford's hopes; it was the end of the
caucus system. Jefferson had used it to secure his own nomination in 1804,
and then to impose Madison as his successor in 1808; but with the decline
of the Federalist Opposition the Republican caucus became too powerful.
Its nominee automatically became the President, and there was no
appeal
from its decision, since the majority in the electoral college could only
ratify what its party leaders had done. The makers of the Constitution had
turned down the suggestion that the legislature should elect the President,
on the ground that the Executive would become subservient. The system
which they had rejected was establishing itself by accident, in spite of the
danger that if the caucus chose the Presidents, the caucus would some day
choose their policies as well. We have seen that the caucus had already
been accused of such usurpation of demanding that Madison promise to
declare war on England before granting him a renomination.
Of all possible ways of solving the basic constitutional problem, of re-
assembling the powers which the Fathers had divided, the worst would be
to reassemble them in the hands of Congress. The inability of that large
amorphous body to make and administer policy had been shown during
the Administrations of Madison and Monroe. From 1809 to 1812, faced
by a hostile France and England, the country drifted and whirled like a
barge in a tidal rip then a new and seemingly strong Congress decided on
;

war. The Congress found that it could compel a war but could not get
ready to fight, that it could compel the invasion of Canada but could not
provide an army capable of invading a rabbit-hutch, that it could compel
the spending of much money but could not bring itself to raise the needed
taxes.
When America by magic or by the grace of Providence avoided defeat,
avoided disunion, and achieved the Treaty of Ghent, her troubles were no
longer mortal but they were still acute. New forces had bred new problems
which should have been faced during the eight drifting years under
Monroe, instead of being postponed until they became uglier. Yet except
for the Missouri Compromise, when Congress was compelled to act be-
cause the nation had come again to the brink of secession, nothing hap-
pened outside of foreign affairs except an occasional negative deed by the
President. Just as Madison had unhappily vetoed the bill for internal im-
provements, so Monroe roused himself to veto the Cumberland Road Bill,
also on constitutional grounds. Although feeling was high, and the West
believed its economic hopes were at stake, the Congress could neither pass
the road bill over the President's veto nor arrange for a constitutional
amendment.* When the Executive fails to make policy, the Congress is

* The road had been completed as far as Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in what
was then the state of Virginia but is now West Virginia. The proposal was to
extend the road to the Mississippi, which would have given the West its first com-
mercially practical land route to the Atlantic.
21 4 The Price of Union

not qualified to take on the burden. Left to itself, it can obstruct but it
cannot create; it becomes "a scuffle of local interests," in the words of
Professor Ford.
After sixteen years of weak or negative presidents, there was little popu-
lar support for the system of nomination by Congressional caucus. None of
the rival candidates, therefore, felt that the caucus nomination of Craw-
ford in 1824 was decisive, or that there was an obligation to withdraw.
Each of them allowed his friends to "nominate" him in state legislatures
or in mass meetings. This was an admissible system only because there
were no national parties the presidential electors could declare for which-
;

ever candidate was the favorite in their own state, or (as in the case of
New York) they could divide their votes among the favorites of the local
factions.As soon as disciplined parties were reborn, it was necessary to
find a more orderly method of nomination, so that the full party strength
could be put behind one man.

Next to Crawford, the candidate with the strongest claims in 1824 was
John Quincy Adams. Like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, he had
served as Secretary of State, and unlike the two latter, he had served with
high distinction. "Of the public history of Mr. Monroe's administration,"
Adams wrote to his wife on October 7, 1822, "all that will be worth telling
to posterity hitherto has been transacted through the Department of
State." The claim may have been immodest but it was largely true. Adams
was fifty-seven ; rue had been steadily in the public service for thirty years,
since Washington had appointed him Minister to the Netherlands in 1794.
Relying upon he expected the presidency to be conferred as a
this record,

right. He was not prepared to ask for it. His wife wrote him that friends
in Philadelphia thought he should visit that town for a week, in order to

gain new supporters. He treated the suggestion as if it were somehow dis-

honorable, writing to his wife to tell the unfortunate Philadelphians "that
I am not bound to be President of the United States, but that I am bound
to perform the duties of Secretary of State so long as I hold that office, and
that Washington and not Philadelphia is the place where those duties
must be performed." If his friends replied that he must make concessions
to public opinion, "Tell them that I am going by another road and to
another temple."*
The third candidate was Henry Clay of Kentucky, with a program
* October 1822. Unfortunately for Adams's peace of mind, it was not entirely
7,
another temple. He very much wanted to be President ; he was, therefore, at least
in part, seeking the temple of worldly ambition. It is an attractive temple; but it
is not easy to attain, or to abide in, if it is mistaken for something else.
xi. The President Without a Party 215

which he called the "American System" and which he thought would

unite the major sections. The plan was simple a protective tariff, plus a
:

widespread building of highways and canals (to be financed by the pro-

ceeds of the tariff) The purpose was to promote industry and to enlarge
.

the home market for farm goods. The wool, hemp, and flax of the Middle
States and of Kentucky wanted protection; so did the iron of Pittsburgh
and the cotton mills of New England. All the farmers everywhere wanted
better communications, to enlarge their markets and lower their costs.
Clay's plan was a politician's catch-all; but this time it caught very little.
The nationalism of 1816 was already giving way to revived sectional
jealousies which bred fear of internal improvements at federal expense.
The New England shipping interests were still more powerful than the
manufacturers, so Daniel Webster,* the mirror of Massachusetts, an-
nounced coldly that he could see nothing "American" about Clay's plan.
Even the West did not rally wholly to the Kentuckian, for the West was
producing a more popular and more Western candidate: Andrew Jackson.
In 1821, when General Jackson saw himself mentioned as a possibility,
he exclaimed, "Do they think I am such a damned fool as to think myself

* Parts of the career of Daniel Webster

might have been written by an artless-
German professor, to prove the economic theory of politics. Born in New Hamp-
shire and educated at Dartmouth College, Webster was admitted to the bar in 1805.
A strong Federalist, he was sent to the House of Representatives, where he refused
to vote taxes for the War of 1812 and denounced the Conscription Bill as uncon-
stitutional. If it were passed, he thought the states should nullify the law, "to
interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power." In 1816 he voted against the
Bank of the United States, and he opposed the protective duties of the tariff bill
of that year. New England was still a free-trade shipping region, in favor of states'
rights as a protection against the "tyranny" of the Jeffersonians. Webster then
moved to Boston and for a time dropped politics for the law, becoming one of the
leading practitioners before the Supreme Court. He returned to the House of Rep-
resentatives in 1822, and in 1824 again opposed protection, and with it the whole
of Henry Clay's "System." By 1828, however, Massachusetts had decided that pro-
tected factories would bring more wealth than ships, so Webster, by now in the
Senate, argued that the tariff, whether good or bad in theory, must not be dimin-
ished. When Jackson attacked the Bank, Webster was its most active supporter, and
also one of its pensioners. And when Calhoun revived nullification to defend a
Southern interest, Webster, whose constituents now wanted the largest possible
domesti* market, became a moving and eloquent defender of the Union.
This bald recital is, of course, unfair to Webster, who, as we shall see, had great
deeds to his credit. Yet the obvious economic base for his policy, and the bland
shamelessness with which he often acknowledged it, may explain why he was not
loved as Clay was loved, or trusted as Calhoun was trusted. Like sensible politicians,
all three of these men changed their ideas to fit the economic needs of their con-
stituents; but Webster alone seemed to revel in the fact. "His character was com-
plex," writes Gerald W. Johnson (America's Silver Age, p. 110), "but not his
ideas. He was frankly the servant of big business, but he served it excellently, and
there is no conclusive evidence that there was any conscious hypocrisy in his course."
The unforgiving John Quincy Adams commented on the same qualities less kindly,
in 1841. "Such is human nature," he wrote in his Diary for September 17, "in the
gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart
of Daniel Webster."
216 The Price of Union

fitfor the presidency? No sir, I know what I am good for. I can command
a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be a president." 1 A year
later he had changed his mind, and when he failed of election in 1824 he

spoke as if the dearest and the wisest hope of the American people had
been thwarted.
The
panic of 1819, and hard times lasting until the election, had given
Jackson his first chance, and his first taste of the sparkling delights of

political hero-worship. High prices after the war of 1812, plus the fbur-
year credit offered by the Public Land Act of 1800, plus the pressing sales-
manship of the speculators, had led settlers to push into the West faster
than the roads or the markets could follow them. They borrowed money
from "wild-cat" local banks, which in turn were in debt to the Bank of the
United States. The latter did nothing to discourage reckless Western
loans until the end of 1818, when it ordered its branches to present
all state bank notes for payment and to renew no mortgages. Within
a few months, inevitably, the depression came; the Western banks col-
lapsed, and vast tracts of land became the property of the Bank of the
United States. It was at this moment that John Marshall's Supreme Court
gave the decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, affirming the constitution-
ality of the Bank, and forbidding the states to tax it out of business. To
the West, the Bank became "the Monster," engulfing all men's property
and hopes. Not only the Supreme Court, but the old ruling class, the
gentry, were felt to have betrayed the interests of the common man. A
new type of popular leader, a new type of noisy appeal, suddenly became
possible. Among the first men to know it were the Tennessee politicians
who put forward Andrew Jackson as the champion of the people, the
friend of the oppressed.*

* Thomas Hart
Benton, who in his unregcnerate Tennessee youth had tried to
killJackson, and who later, as the famous senator from Missouri, became Jackson's
floor leader in the "war" on the Bank, was first elected to the Senate in 1820 and
took his seat in 1821. Describing the state of the nation when he arrived in Wash-
ington, he wrote (Thirty Years' View, vol. I, pp. 5-6) "The Bank of the United
:

States was chartered in 1816, and before 1820 had performed one of its cycles of
delusive and bubble prosperity, followed by actual and wide-spread calamity. The
whole paper system, of which it was the head and citadel, after a vast expansion,
had suddenly collapsed, spreading desolation over the land, and carrying ruin to
the debtors. . No money, either gold or silver: no paper convertible into specie:
. .

no measure, or standard of value, left remaining. The Bank of the United

. . .

States, created as a remedy for all those evils, now at the head of the evil, pros-
trate and helpless, with no power left but that of suing its debtors, and selling their
property, and purchasing for itself at its own nominal price. No price for property,
or produce. No sales but those of the sheriff and the marshal. No employment
. . .

for industry no demand for labor no sale for the product of the farm no sound
of the hammer, but that of the auctioneer, knocking down property DIS- . . .

TRESS, the universal cry of the people RELIEF, the universal demand thundered
:

at the all legislatures, state and federal."

doors^of
The description shows what the West thought of Eastern finance, and of the old
ruling class. It shows the mood in which the Jackson men built their new party,
xi. The President Without a Party 217

Jackson was a national figure because of the battle of New Orleans;

but he was the special hero of the West because of his hatred of the
Indians, his rough treatment of the Spaniards and the British in Florida,
and his own frontier youth. He had no strong convictions in politics; but
he was disinterested, and he had prodigious powers of leadership and of
stubbornness. The people was their friend, and that he would
believed he
be a hard man he alone could beat the foreign
to fool or to coerce. If
enemies, perhaps it was he alone who could defeat hard times at home.
He was the first popular hero in American politics, and he was destined
to transform the presidency. Jefferson had been revered and obeyed; but
Jackson was loved.
In New York, Vermont, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and
Louisiana the members of the electoral college were still appointed by the
popular enthusiasm could not yet express itself with
state legislatures, so
full force in a
presidential election. Nevertheless, Jackson led the field in
1824, receiving 99 electoral votes to Adams's 84, Crawford's 41, and
Clay's ST.* Adams had captured the whole of New England, 26 out of 36
votes in New York, part of Ohio and of Maryland. Jackson's vote came
from the West, the upland South, and parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Since no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, the choice
of President devolved upon the House of Representatives, where each state
cast one vote. Since the House must choose among the three highest candi-
dates, Clay was out of the running; but as Speaker of the House, and its
most influential member, he could decide the contest. As a Western man,
he was inclined toward Jackson; but John Quincy Adams's domestic
policies were almost identical with Clay's American System, so in the end
he supported the New Englander, who was thereupon elected.
Jackson's friends at once raised the cry that the people had been cheated
out of their choice. But when, according to the Constitution, did "the
people" come into the picture? What had they to do with the choice of
President? They had thrust themselves into the picture most unconstitu-
tionally, and because of Andrew Jackson they were soon to solidify thei(
position.

John Quincy Adams, born in 1767, was the eldest son of John and Abigail
Adams. At the age of eleven he began to accompany his father on hazard-
ous wartime trips to Europe. Precocious both in learning and in maturity

and it explains why one of the most popular acts of the party was its attack on the
Bank.
* Calhoun was elected Vice-President,
218 The Price of Union

of mind, he worked hard during these travels, becoming a good classical

student and learning to speak French, Dutch (and later Italian) fluently.
When he was fourteen he spent a year at St. Petersburg as secretary to the
American Minister. In 1783 he joined his father in Paris. John Adams,
after wrangling all day with the British peace commissioners, spent the

evenings teaching his son geometry, trigonometry, conic sections, and the
differential calculus.
On graduating from Harvard, John Quincy studied law and waS ad-
mitted to the Massachusetts bar. In 1791 he attacked the views of Tom
Paine in a series of articles. Paine, defending the sovereignty of the ma-
jority, had written: "that which a whole nation chooses to do, it had a
right to do." John Quincy opposed this by appealing to natural law much
as Antigone had appealed against the commands of the tyrant. It was the
task of the statesman, said Adams, to learn and apply this higher law;
therefore, he could not bow to the whims of the people who put him in
office. "The eternal and immutable laws of justice and morality/' he
wrote, "are paramount to all human legislation. The violation of those
laws is certainly within the power, but is not among the rights of nations."
These articles pleased Washington, who appointed the twenty-seven-
year-oldAdams as American Minister to The Hague. He was later sent to
London on a diplomatic mission, where he married the daughter of the
United States consul. When John Adams became President, Washington
wrote him expressing "a strong hope that you will not withhold merited
promotion from Mr. John [Quincy] Adams because he is your son. For
^without intending to compliment the father or the mother, or to censure
others, I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valu-
able public character we have abroad, and that there remains no doubt in
my mindthat he will prove himself to be the ablest of our diplomatic
corps." So John Quincy spent four years as Minister in Berlin, returning
home in 1801, after his father's defeat for re-election. He was soon sent to
Washington as United States senator from Massachusetts.
Ignoring party and to the rage of the Federalists who had given
politics,
him office, John Quincy voted with Jefferson's followers on the Louisiana
Purchase and the Embargo Bill.* Timothy Pickering, the other Senator
from Massachusetts, denounced Adams and persuaded the Massachusetts
legislature to elect his successor nine months ahead of time. The legislature
also adopted resolutions against the Embargo, making it clear that they

expected Adams to vote as he was told. Adams immediately resigned.**

"As to holding my seat in the senate of the United States," he wrote^
* Adams voted for the
appropriation to pay for Louisiana, although the other
Federalist Senators opposed it, and although he himself condemned the plans for
governing the new territory and felt that the acquisition was unconstitutional. The
vital point, he felt, was to get the territory while Napoleon was still willing to sell it.

**June8, 1808.
xi. The President Without a Party 219

"without exercising the most perfect freedom of agency, under the sole
and exclusive control of my own sense of right, that was out of the
question."
In an autobiographical letter to Skelton Jones (April 18, 1809) Adams,
wrote :

In the Senate of the United States, the part which I acted was that of
an independent member. My fundamental principles, as I have told
1

you, were Union and Independence. I was sworn to support the Consti-
tution of the United States, and I thought it my duty to support the
existing administration in every measure that my impartial judgment
could approve. I discharged my duty to my country, but I committed
the unpardonable sin against Party. ... It was not without a painful 1

sacrifice of feeling that I withdrew from the public service at a moment

of difficulty and danger, but when the constituted organs of that coun-
try, under whom I held my station, had discarded me for the future,,
and required me to aid them in promoting measures tending to dissolve
the Union, and to sacrifice the independence of the nation, I was no
representative for them.

Adams was acting precisely as the men who made the Constitution ex-
pected good Americans to act, with the result that he was driven from
all

office. When he became President he acted in the same way, again ignor-

ing party politics, with the result that his Administration was hamstrung
and he himself was denied re-election.
A year after Adams resigned, President Madison appointed him Minis-
ter to Russia. The Senate refused confirmation, ostensibly because the mis-
sion really because Adams was now a man without a
was unnecessary, but
party, hated by the Federalists and suspected by the Republicans. Madi-
son, however, taking advantage of his own brief days of popularity wheru
the Erskine Agreement had seemingly put an end to strife with England,
sent Adams's name to the Senate a second time. In the benign mood of
those happy deluded days the Senate confirmed the nomination, showing
once more the good will that followed on the settlement which Canning so
coldly disavowed.
In 1814 John Quincy left St. Petersburg for Ghent, where he presided
over the American peace commission. The result was the peace that set-
tled nothing, except that it freed both countries from an unpromising war.
Adams and his fellow commissioners did well to win such a treaty, as the
Marquess Wellesley testified when he said in the House of Lords that the
Americans "had shown a most astonishing superiority over the British
during the whole of the negotiations."
Like his father in 1783, John Quincy became the first American Minis-
ter to the Court of St. James's after the making of the peace. In 1817,
220 The Price of Union

when Monroe asked him to become Secretary of State, he at last returned

home to stay. He was fifty years old, and since the age of eleven had lived
half his life abroad. Perhaps this is why his intense patriotism was always
national, never local, and why his plans and policies were always intended
to serve every region, not merely New England.

Adams's Cabinet appointments, in 1825, gave immediate notice to the

country that he would not admit the existence of party strife, or ask for
party support in his Administration. He revived Washington's theory of a
Cabinet, and sought the men of greatest capacity irrespective of their
opinions or their political associations. The result, as every politician fore-
saw, was frustration.*
Adams wanted Jackson as Secretary of War, in spite of Jackson's belief
that Adams and Clay had made an "unholy coalition" ; and he offered to
make Crawford, another defeated candidate, Secretary of the Treasury.
Both men refused, so Adams brought Richard Rush home from the Lon-
don mission to the Treasury, made Senator James Barbour of Virginia
Secretary of War, and kept Monroe's Secretary of the Navy (Samuel
Southard of New Jersey), Postmaster General (John McLean of Ohio),
and Attorney General (William Wirt).** The most interesting appoint-
ment was McLean a good man, who was well known to be a friend of
Jackson, and who was soon using his official position to work against the
President and in favor of his chief rival. The most damaging appointment,
however, was perhaps the best and strongest from the point of view of the
public interest: Henry Clayfor Secretary of State. Adams knew that the
Jackson men were saying he made a "corrupt bargain" with Clay, promis-
ing the Department of State in return for the necessary votes in the House
of Representatives. He ignored the gossip for no better reason than that it
was untrue, a which has little relevance in politics, as the Jacksonians
fact

quickly proved. For four years they never let up on the reiterated slander
that Clay had sold himself to Adams and that the two men had flouted the
will of the "sovereign people." Clay asked for an investigation, but it was
not granted the Jackson forces preferring to let the charges fester.
* Adams took the same
non-partisan view of all federal appointments, saying he
was determined "to renominate every person against whom there was no complaint
which would have warranted his removal." He was disgusted at the suggestion of
certain Senators "to introduce a principle of change or rotation in office. . . .

which would make the government a perpetual and unintermitting scramble for
office. A more pernicious expedient could scarcely have been devised."
** Although the office of Postmaster General was created by Congress in 1794,
it was not officially a Cabinet position until 1829, when Jackson invited the Post-
master General to Cabinet meetings.
xi. The President Without a Party 221

The on the new Administration was not a purely cynical and

attack
negative act. The
politicians gathering from every state under the banner
of Jackson were of course seeking office; but they were also seeking a more
effective way of organizing the government. The methods of nomination
and election in 1824 were clearly impossible. They were bound to create
the maximum of envy and malice among the country's leaders. The ha-
treds established that year, between Galhoun and Adams, Jackson and
Adams, Jackson and Clay, Crawford and Calhoun, embittered politics for
a generation and prevented America from getting the best service from
these men. The Federalist Party had at least been decently interred; but
the Republican Party, unopposed and therefore unhealthy, was dying in
the streets and becoming a nuisance. It had long been kept alive by the
magic of Jefferson's name and by his mysterious influence. Jefferson was
now in the last year of his life and neither the magic nor the mystery
would any more suffice. A new type of party was needed. It might use
Jefferson's name but it could not use his methods they were methods ap-
;

propriate to an oligarchy, not to a people's party. The members of an

oligarchy could maintain the needed unity by writing letters to each other ;
but a popular movement, to be effective, needs discipline, needs imposed
loyalty, needs an organization strong enough to reward the faithful and
punish the dissident, to fatten the sheep and starve the goats. It also needs
the worldly wisdom to define sheep as tolerantly as possible, and to wel-
come home, at the first sign of softening, even the most obdurate goat.
In the spring of 1825 the Jackson men undertook to build such a party.
Had Adams been willing, he and Clay could have done the same and
thereby saved their program from destruction. They had many skillful sup-
porters, like the young Thurlow Weed who was to become a dictator in
New York State politics and who worked devotedly for the Adams cause
from 1824 until after the disaster of 1828. Weed, who was allied with the
conservative forces of the state, had prevented Van Buren from delivering
the state to Crawford in 1824 and had held 26 electoral votes for Adams.
Van Buren, with his Albany Regency, then began to move toward the
Jackson camp.* If the New York conservatives were to make way against
this formidable combination, they needed patronage and encouragement
from the federal administration. Weed made two trips to Washington,
* The
Albany Regency was a tightly knit, well-disciplined caucus. It was a cen-
tral organization at the state capital, with no subsidiary branches in the counties
or the precincts. It was so well disciplined that the members supported each deci-
sion unanimously, even if there was strong difference of opinion in the caucus.
Among the chief members of the Regency were Martin Van Buren, William Marcy,
Silas Wright, and Edwin Crosswell (editor of the Albany Argus). For years the
Regency ran the state, distributed offices, directed the dominant party. Thurlow
Weed, the most powerful adversary of the Regency, said (Autobiography, p. 103) :
"They were men of great ability, great industry, indomitable courage and strict
personal integrity."
222 The Price of Union

where he got little help from Clay and none from Adams. "Mr. Adams,"
he commented sadly, "during his administration failed to cherish,
strengthen, or even recognize the party to which he owed his election nor ;

so far as I am informed, with the great power he possessed did he make a

single influential friend." The Adams men, and the other an ti- Jackson
2

groups, had to wait until John Quincy was out of the White House before
they could attempt a serious organization, whereas the General's friends
set to work vigorously, even before Adams was inaugurated, to build the
disciplined party which took the name Democratic.*
They defined their task clearly: first, to reach the plain man with the
message that Adams's election had been a fraud, that the people had been
cheated, that Jackson was their friend, and that in the interest of democ-
racy Jackson must be elected the next time second, to organize in every
;

district of thecountry a group of men who were prepared (in the hope of
future favors) to work for Jackson throughout the whole four years of
Adams's presidency. They undertook, that is, to build a party of common
soldiers to take the place of the party of generals and other high officers
which was that Jefferson had attempted.
all
The number of common soldiers available for such a party had been
greatly increased during the previous fifteen years. Beginning with Mary-
land in 1810, there had been a movement among the older states to wipe
out the property qualifications for the franchise. Connecticut, New York,
and Massachusetts soon followed Maryland's lead, and the new Western
states, as they entered the Union, helped to spread electoral democracy.
By 1828 the country was well on its way toward white adult male suf-
frage.** And at the same time, the state legislatures were ceasing to ap-
point the presidential electors and were arranging for them to be chosen by
popular vote. By 1824 only six states preserved the older method; by 1832
only one South Carolina. Inevitably this increased the people's feeling
that the President was their own man.
Long before the end of Adams's four years, the Jackson men had built a

* The Democrats claimed descent, of course, from the Jeffersonian Republicans,

and since in the end the Opposition contained most of the old Federalists the claim
was reasonable. The Adams-Clay followers were for a while called National Repub-
licans; but after Jackson was elected a second time they chose the name Whig, on
the ground that the eighteenth-century Whigs had fought King George III and
the new Whigs would fight King Andrew.
** Vermont had universal male
suffrage from the beginning. By 1830, Maine had
the same; Maryland, New York, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Alabama
had universal white male suffrage; Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsyl-
vania, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had a tax-paying
qualification; Tennessee had a light property qualification; only South Carolina,
North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey and Rhode Island maintained a heavy prop-
erty qualification. In 1790, on the other hand, before Vermont was officially admit-
ted, all but three states had a heavy property qualification, and those three had a
.tax-paying qualification.
xi. The President Without a Party 223

party able to keep close and steady contact with the new mass of voters :

through a party press, through local clubs and committees under the lead-
ership of men who were hungry for federal patronage, through the wide
distribution of speeches made in Congress for the purpose of being read in
the constituencies rather than for the purpose of being heard in the
Capitol. This new national machine, however, was really a bundle of
local factions and local machines, prepared to co-operate in national poli-
tics under the pressure of strong leadership and large favors but otherwise
fiercely protective of local interests and pride. The same has been true of
every major party in America from that day to this.
Propaganda and discipline were the cement for this imposing structure.
The propaganda could be supplied by the leaders the discipline had to be
;

improvised. The quickest way to do this was by appealing to self-interest,

which is why the Jackson men practiced "rotation in office," or the spoils
system. From the days when Jefferson complained that very few office-
holders died and none resigned, the political uses of patronage* had been
admitted. John Quincy Adams might refuse to soil his mind with such
thoughts but ;
men who were building a nation-wide party could not be so
disdainful. They had gathered an army which was expected to do hard
and steady work in the districts. To keep the soldiers on their toes, to keep
them from straying off into rival camps, it was necessary to offer them re-
wards. So the Jacksonians accepted as inevitable, and defended as good,
the system of political appointments in the civil service. They themselves
used the promise of patronage sparingly; later Administrations were less
restrained.

At the very best, a contest between the amorphous Adams following and
this new machine must have resembled a contest between a rabbit and a
weasel; but the odds became even more unequal when John Randolph,
greatest of free-lance fighters, flung himself with lunatic rage against the
Adams men. Randolph had scorned the elder Adams and he deplored the
son; but these were mild emotions compared with his hatred for Henry
Clay. Ever since the Missouri Compromise Randolph had dreamed of
uniting the South, on the basis of states' rights, to resist Northern inter-
ference with slavery. This was a consistent plan. He had fought for states'
rights since 1 798, implacably and without compromise ; now at last he saw
a chance to convince his neighbors that only by states' rights could they

*
Patronage federal and local includes all forms of largesse at the disposal of
officeholders: jobs, contracts, and personal favors such as tickets to a convention
or the quashing of a police charge.
224 The Price of Union

save their property and their way of life. The chief danger to this, his earli-
est and was Henry Clay of Kentucky, whose immense
his latest cause,

popularity divided the South, winning many of her most influential citi-
zens away from states' rights, away from regional unity, toward national-
ism, a tariff, and internal improvements at federal expense. Clay was a
formidable opponent, for Kentucky united within herself the South and
the West, and Clay, with his Virginia background and his expansive man-
ner, was equally the Southerner and the Westerner. He was equally at
home in the land of the mint julep and dueling sword, or in that of the
coonskin cap and long rifle. If he could hold South and West together in
his "American System," if he could step from the Department of State to
the presidency as four of his predecessors had done, there would be no
room in the future for Randolph's extreme states' rights. So Randolph set
himself to break Clay, who could not fight back from his new office with
the deadly competence he would have shown as Speaker of the House of
Representatives.
When James Barbour of Virginia became Secretary of War, Randolph
was sent to the vacancy in the Senate. There he launched his attack.
fill

The myth of a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay was well con-
trived to undo Randolph's wandering judgment; brilliant and desperate
and by thistime half -deranged, he was the man to believe such a libel and
to enlarge it in words which could not be forgiven. Soon, in the course of a
debate on the President's nomination of envoys to a proposed Congress of
American Nations at Panama, Randolph whipped himself into a fury,
attributing every bad motive and every meanness to the President and to
the Secretary of State, referring to them as "the coalition of Blifil and
Black George the combination, unheard of till then, of the Puritan and
the blackleg."* In conclusion he lamented that Clay's parents had brought
into the world "this being, so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten
mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks." Clay challenged Randolph to a
duel, but only succeeded in shooting him through the coat, or rather
through the white flannel wrapper which he strangely wore.**
In the face of such tactics, against an Opposition which combined every
strength, from that of the disciplined machine to that of the wild guerrilla,
the Adams Administration foundered. In his Inaugural Address the inno-
cent President had said: "There remains one effort of magnanimity, one
sacrifice of prejudice and passion, to be made by the individuals through-
out the nation who have heretofore followed the standards of political
party. It is that of discarding every remnant of rancor against each other,

* The allusion to
Fielding was borrowed from Lord Chatham.
** The United States was not
represented at the Panama Congress. The Senate
reluctantly and belatedly approved an American mission. One delegate died en
route. The other arrived after the meeting was over.
xi. The President Without a Party 225

of embracing as countrymen and friends, and of yielding to talents and

virtue alone that confidence which in times of contention for principle was
bestowed only upon those who bore the badge of party communion." The
pathetic wrongness of this hope, the vanity of this desire, explains the fail-
ure of every measure upon which Adams had set his heart.
In his first annual message to Congress he announced that "the great
object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the
condition of those who are partners to the social compact." He asked for a
system of roads and canals which "by multiplying and facilitating the com-
munications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of
men, are among the most important means of improvement." Such public
works, he felt, would lead to an increase in the price of federal lands which
would make possible an endowment of education and science on a scale
never previously dreamed by man. He foresaw a republic of informed men
and women administered by trained and conscientious servants such as
himself; and though his Adams pessimism must have kept him from be-
lieving in this vision completely, he felt that he could surely lead the na-
tion toward a fairer future. "While foreign nations," he said in the same

message, "less blessed with that freedom which is power than ourselves are
advancing with gigantic strides in the career of public improvement, were
we to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world
that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast
away the bounties of providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferi-
ority?"
Here was the most vigorous challenge to strict construction ever issued;
here was a proposal to strengthen the federal government beyond the
hopes of Hamilton or Marshall. It was a brave plan, which might have
been accomplished by a strict party machine backed with the popularity
of a Jackson or a Roosevelt. Proposed by a man without a party and with-
out a large personal following, it merely became a rude joke to the Oppo-
sition. Especially funny and foolish seemed the President's request for a
national university and an astronomical observatory. The practical men
from the local political clubs, who had set themselves to destroy Adams,
could hardly believe their luck when they heard him say: "While scarcely
a year passes over our heads without bringing some new astronomical dis-
covery to light, which we must fain receive at second hand from Europe,
are we not cutting ourselves off from the means of returning light for light
while we have neither observatory nor observer upon our half of the globe
and the earth revolves in perpetual darkness to our unsearching eyes?"
This, they felt, was not the stuff of which votes are made.
226 The Price of Union

Denied all of the measures which he hoped would heal antagonisms and
advance the health of the nation, Adams was presented by his Congress
with one major deed: the "Tariff of Abominations." This ugly miscar-
riage of an act was the cause of the chief disunion crisis between* the
Hartford Convention and the Civil War.
The first protective tariff, in 1816, was largely the work of Lowndes*
and Calhoun, both from South Carolina. It was then thought that the
South, with waterpower and cotton, would profit from industry at least as
much as New England. Slave labor, however, proved a bar to Southern
industry; by 1820, when an attempt was made to raise the rates, the South
was weakening on protection, and by 1824, when a new act proposed
duties on hemp and cheap woolens, the South began to talk about "injus-
tice" and "unconstitutionality." John Randolph put the case with his
usual violence:

We [of the South] are the eel that is being flayed, while the cookmaid
pats us on the head and cries, with the clown in King Lear, "Down
wantons, down!" ... If, under a power to regulate trade, you pre-
vent exportation: if, with the most approved spring lancets, you draw
the last drop of blood from our veins . . what are the
. checks of the
Constitution to us? A fig for the Constitution! When the scorpion's sting
3
is
probing us to the quick, shall we stop to chop logic?

During these years Calhoun was being driven from protection to free
trade, step by step, while Webster of New England was being driven from
free trade to protection; but Calhoun, after 1825, was fortunate in being
the presiding officer of the Senate, where he need not express an opinion
day by day. Then in 1828 came the Tariff of Abominations, the first
purely politician's tariff to insult the statute books. The Jackson men,
heedless of commerqe, industry and agriculture alike, hoping to force the
Administration to defeat its own plans for protection, piled higher tariffs
on raw materials than on manufactures. If this absurdity was defeated, it

* William Lowndes was first sent to the House of

Representatives in 1810, along
with Calhoun. Like Calhoun, he became a leading "war hawk" and an intense
nationalist. Six feet six in height, grave and dignified, he was one of the few men
in America who could debate even the slave question dispassionately. It was his
habit in the House, before giving his own cool logical arguments, to present his
opponent's case so fairly that on one occasion John Randolph said, "He has done
that once too often; he can never answer that." He had ill health all his life, and
died at the age of forty, a heavy loss to the nation. Henry Clay said, in his old
age, "I think the wisest man I ever knew was William Lowndes."
xi. The President Without a Party 227

was thought that industry would blame the President. Reluctantly, how-
ever, the Adams men accepted the bill rather than deny aid to Eng- New
land at the very moment when her leading citizens were turning to
industry instead of commerce. "Its enemies," said Daniel Webster of this
ridiculous act, "spiced it with whatever they thought would render it

distasteful; its friends took it, drugged as it was."*

From South Carolina, in June 1828, came a cry of revolt which boded
ill for America:

The day of open opposition to the pretended powers of the Constitu-

tion cannot be far off. ... If you are not prepared to follow up your
principles wherever they may lead, to their very last consequence if
you love life better than honor prefer ease to perilous liberty and glory,
awake not! stir not! . Live in smiling peace with your insatiable
. .

oppressors, and die with the noble consolation that your submissive
patience will survive triumphant your beggary and despair!

This was the first startling speech of Robert Barnwell Rhett, the original

fire-eater, "the father of secession." It was sad that the Administration of

Adams, whose life was based on love of the Union, should have produced
a bill so biased that it made sectional hate seem almost sensible.**
The Tariff of Abominations, which made Webster a nationalist, finally
drove Calhoun to the defense of states' rights. The wasteful cotton culture,
which was ruining South Carolina and driving her most ambitious sons to
the new Southwest, could not support this final burden of a subsidy to the
North. Anonymously, Vice-President Calhoun wrote the South Carolina
Exposition, in which he developed the doctrines of 1798 to their extreme
limit. Jefferson and Madison had recommended a collective nullification,

whereby a number of states would resist the encroachment of the federal

government. Calhoun proposed nullification by a single state, on the

ground that the sovereignty of the original states was indestructible, that
the federal government could never be more than the agent of the states,
and that the deeds of the agent could always be disallowed. The South
Carolina Exposition was a plan for the future; Calhoun urged his state to
take no immediate action, since Jackson would soon replace Adams and
might prove a friend of the South.
* Morison and The Growth of the American Republic, vol. I, p. 372.
Commager,
The "friends" of this tariff may not have been as reluctant as Webster would like
us to think. When the bill was before Congress, Abbott Lawrence, a Massachusetts
manufacturer, wrote to Webster: "This bill if adopted as amended will keep the
South and West in debt to New England the next hundred years." As Professor
Walter Prescott Webb comments (Divided We Stand, p. 19) "The hundred years
:

have passed and the prediction has been fully confirmed."

**
Graven, The Coming of the Civil War, pp. 63-64. The name was Robert Barn-
well Smith in 1828; it was changed to Rhett, the name of a distinguished ancestor,
in 1837, at the instance of Robert Barnwell's brothers.
228 The Price of Union

The election of 1828 had been lost by Adams in 1825, when he decided to
make no political appointments, to build no party, to oppose the combina-
tion of democracy and smooth professionalism with the other-worldliness
of a Platonic philosopher-king plus the prickliness of a churl. During *the
election, the friends of Adams in the local districts vied with the friends of
Jackson in disgracing free institutions by their wild talk and their un-
worthy charges; but the friends of Adams were discouraged by four years
without patronage, whereas the friends of Jackson were on tiptoe with the
eager hope of spoils. There were no issues, only the scurrilous attacks on
the two candidates. The result was more favorable to the somber and
much-abused President than might have been expected Adams won pop-
:

ular majorities in New England, New Jersey,Maryland, half of New York,

northern Ohio, southern Louisiana, and parts of Kentucky. Jackson won
the rest, including the whole of Pennsylvania and almost the whole South
and West. Adams won 44 per cent of the popular vote but in the electoral
;

college he had only 83 votes to 178 for Jackson.*

When the election returns were in, Adams felt despairing. He knew his
friends believed he had ruined them by refusing to adopt the new methods
in the use of patronage, and he probably knew he could have made a
better fight if he had possessed more personal charm, if he had been less
"reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding," as he once called himself in his
diary. The weight of his grief was not caused by personal failure, by the
loss of office or fame; it was caused by the country's dismissal, almost with

contempt, of his vast plan for internal improvements. He wanted a second

term so that he could build those roads and canals without which he
feared America must decline into weakness and civil war, so that he could
promote science and education, without which he feared free government
must fall into disgrace.
* At which arranged for electors to be chosen by popular
first, many of the statrs
vote provided that they should be chosen by districts, like members of the House of
Representatives. According to this system, the electoral vote of a state could be
divided. Soon, under pressure from the dominant party in each case, the states
began choosing electors by a single popular vote, with the result that all the elec-
toral votes of the state go to the candidate who has a majority of one. By 1828,
Maryland was the only state to preserve the older system of district voting. This
explains the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral vote which is
so common in American politics. In 1828, for example, Adams won nearly half the
vote of New York State, but he lost the whole of the vote in the electoral college ;
1828, incidentally, was the first year in which the people of New York voted for
members of the electoral college. In 1947 and 1949 a bill was introduced into the
Congress, but not passed, providing that each state's electoral vote be divided in
proportion to the popular vote of the state.
 '::."'. v '-'.'.".:.' -v^?.

Presidential Election
oflSZS
~ NAT. REPUBLICAN

wzm'. Jackson- DEMOCRAT

NEW YORK Adams l6 Electoral votes Jackson ~ 20 -Electoral votes

MAINE - Adams ~ 5 Electoral votes Jackson- n -Electoral votes

MARYLAND- Adams -6 Electoral votes Jackson ~ S ~ Electoral votes
230 The Price of Union

In 1837, he wrote to Charles Upham, a Salem clergyman who had

asked for material on his life :

The great effort of my administration was to mature into a perma-

nent and regular system the application of all the superfluous revenue of
the Union to internal improvements. ... In ten years from this day
the whole Union would have been checkered over with railroads and
canals. It may still be done half a century later and with the limping
gait of state legislature and private adventure. I would have done it in
the administration of the affairs of the nation. . The great object of
. .

my life, therefore, as applied to the adminstration of the government of

the United States, has failed. The American Union, as a moral person in
the family of nations, is to live from hand to mouth, and to cast away
instead of using for the improvement of its own condition, the bounties
of Providence. 4

All the rest of his life Adams held to the heartbreaking faith that it

might have been done, that if he had been a better man he might have be-
queathed to his beloved country wisdom and health and wealth and peace.
A few days before he died he was still lamenting in his diary that his in-
tellectual powers had not been equal to the task.

should [he wrote] have been one of the greatest benefactors of my

I

country and of mankind. But the conceptive power of mind was

. . .

not conferred upon me by my Maker, and I have not improved the

5
scanty portion of His gifts as I might and ought to have done.

It was reflections such as these which caused him to be haunted through-

out the year 1829 by a song from the opera, Coeur-de-Lion, which he had
heard forty-five years before in Paris :

O Richard! O, mon Roi!

L'Univers t'abandonne.

In 1830 the voters of the Plymouth District in Massachusetts asked him to

be a candidate for the House of Representatives. He said he would be glad
to do so on two conditions first, that he should never be expected to ask
:

for their votes, and second, that if elected he would do and say exactly
what he chose and would not feel himself under obligation to follow the
whims or to consult the wishes of the men who elected him. On these
terms he was chosen by a great majority (1817 votes, out of a total of
2565), and was kept in Congress until the day of his death. This was a
deep joy to Adams. "My election as president of the United States," he
xi. The President Without a Party 231

wrote, "was not half so gratifying to my inmost soul. No election or ap-

pointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure."
6

Adams's free-lance career in Congress won him more influence on the

public mind, at least in the North, than he had attained as President. He
worked unceasingly for education and for science; he urged Congress to
create a naval academy, and he continued to urge his observatory. He also
became a center of resistance to the slave power. When Southern members
forced through a "gag- rule" that petitions against slavery should be laid
on the table without being printed, or referred, or acted upon in any way,
Adams led a long fight against the restriction; and in 1845, when he was

seventy-eight years old, hehad the rule repealed. As a result of this battle,
Adams, who was not an abolitionist, received anti-slavery petitions from
all over the country, and his insistence on presenting them made him an

object of hate in the South.*

Even when he had passed the age of eighty, nothing could keep Adams
from Washington when Congress was in session. There he continued until
the end, fighting alone for the ways of a vanished America: the America
of his father and of George Washington, ruled by an oligarchy, fearful of
political parties, fearful of the rude democracy which was coming into its
own with Andrew Jackson, but strong with patriotism and the sense of
public duty. On the twenty-first of February, 1848, John Quincy Adams
lost consciousness while trying to rise from his seat in the House of Repre-
sentatives. Two days later he was dead.

* His
position was that which he had taken at the time of the Missouri Compro-
mise: that slavery was a curse, but a constitutional curse, which could not lawfully
be interfered with in the old states but which should be kept out of the new terri-
tories so far as possible. Adams was such a hard and bitter fighter in the House
that Ralph Waldo Emerson described him as "an old rou6 who cannot live on slops
but must have sulphuric acid in his tea."
 XII

Jackson and the New Type of Presidency

JLXNDREW JACKSON was born in 1767, on the frontier the upland coun-
try at the dividing line between North and South Carolina.* His parents
were Scotch-Irish immigrants. His father died a few months before Jack-
son was born. His mother was left with no money and three children, so
the young Jackson saw backwoods life at its hardest.
He also saw the Revolutionary War at its hardest. His eldest brother
was killed in action; he and the other brother were captured by the British
after taking part in a local battle; they both caught smallpox in jail, and
the brother died. Then in 1781, Jackson's mother, who had gone to
Charleston to nurse the sick, died of prison fever. Jackson was alone in the
world at the age of fourteen, alone with his hatred of the English. This
hatred had been made personal and abiding when, as a prisoner, the boy
was beaten across the face with the flat of a sword because of his distaste
for cleaning an officer's boots. Andrew Jackson became a vindictive man;
he could not pursue the officer, but he pursued the British army. He had
the satisfaction, at New Orleans in 1815, of killing more than two thou-
sand veterans of Wellington's army with the loss of thirteen of his own
troops.**

* Both states have claimed

him; but it seems that he was born on the South
Carolina side. Gp. Marquis James, Andrew Jackson, the Border Captain, p. 12.
**
Implacable hostility toward the English was in any case a tradition among
Jackson's ancestors. Large numbers of Presbyterian Lowlanders went to Ireland at
the time of the Ulster Plantation, in 1610. After the Revolution of 1688 another
50,000 Scotch Presbyterian families poured into Ulster. Not only did they have to
pay tithes in support of the Established Church, whose ministrations they neither
desired nor received, but they were forbidden, after 1699, to export manufactured
wool; most forms of linen export were denied them; hempen manufacture was dis-
couraged until it ceased; and after 1717 and 1718 (when the original leases began
to fall in) the tenant farmers were rackrented by their landlords. Naturally, and
in spite of prohibitions, they began to escape to America, taking with them an
enduring load of hatred. Thirty-eight ships sailed from Ireland to New England
between 1718 and 1720. The famine years of 1740 and 1741 increased the emigra-
tion from Ulster to about 12,000 annually. Most of the latter group made for Penn-
sylvania, whence they pushed their way south along the Shenandoah, the Valley
of Virginia. They became hardy upland farmers who found the crudest frontier
life an improvement upon Ulster. As Lecky wrote: "They went with hearts burning
with indignation, and in the War of Independence they were almost to a man on
232
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 233

In 1787, the year of the making of the American Constitution, Jackson

was admitted to the bar in North Carolina. He knew little law, but during
his two hard years as a student he had become an authority on horse-

racing, cock-fighting/ and shooting. He had also acquired a horse of his

own. A horse, and no family, and no possessions: it was easy for Jackson,
in 1788, to move west across the Appalachian Mountains to the new fron-
tier in the wilderness which would soon become the state of Tennessee. He
was then twenty-one, and he became a frontier hero. He had every quality
which men in such surroundings admire. He was brave, loyal, impetuous,
and revengeful. He was quarrelsome, honest, sentimental, and indiscreet.
He accepted and lived the simple morality of a simple people. He was a
gambler; fighting came naturally to him, whether in duels or brawls or
warfare. He showed early in his career that when provoked he was pre-
pared to kill. Because of this he has often been misjudged. Jackson was not
a border ruffian; he was not a wild man from the frontier. He was a man
born to command, with the dignity inseparable from the birthright; but no
man could command on the frontier who did not possess the virtues and
the severity of the hero in a primitive epic.
In his old age, when he was President of the United States, Jackson was
furious because a member of his Cabinet left Washington to avoid a duel
with another Cabinet officer. "What a wretch!'* cried Jackson. "My creed
is true there was never a base man a brave one." There was another side
to this hardness when one of his major policies was under attack, after he
;

had left the presidency, Jackson wrote to his successor, "I say, lay on; tem-
porize not, it is always injurious." The sentence is a summary of Jackson's
career. He invariably laid on; he could not temporize. There may be a
relation between this trait and the love which the American people felt for
him.
"He and gave proofs of his sincerity,"
called himself the people's friend
said a Senator to a German visitor who was
perplexed by this hero-wor-
ship. "The people believed in General Jackson as the Turks in their
prophet. With this species of popularity it is vain to contend; and it be-
the side of the insurgents. They supplied some of the best soldiers of Washington."
(Quoted by Henry Jones Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America, p. 208; and cp. pp.
165-208.) Jackson became not only the representative but the hero of these unfor-
giving Scotch-Irish, "these bold and indigent strangers," as Penn's agent called
them in 1724, complaining that they all asserted "it was against the laws of God
and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it
to work on and to raise their bread." The ease with which the followers of John
Knox identify their well-being with "the laws of God and nature" is not unimpor-
tant in American history.
In spite of this heritage, and in spite of his childhood experiences and his vin-
dictive nature, Jackson's rancor toward the English subsided in middle age. As
President, he was notably friendly to Great Britain.
-

* Senator Benton
(Thirty Years View, vol. I, p. 737) claimed that Jackson was
9

never interested in cock-fighting; but the weight of evidence is against the Senator.
234 The Price of Union

trays little knowledge of the world and the springs of human action to be-
lieve that those who possess it [are] men of ordinary capacity." And
1

Thomas Hart Benton, describing the scene when Jackson left the Capitol,
onhis way to final retirement after eight years in the presidency, says that
when the General started toward his carriage a great shout came from the
crowd, a cry "such as power never commanded, nor man in power re-
was the affection, gratitude, and admiration of the living age,
ceived. It

saluting for the last time a great man. It was the acclaim of posterity,
2
breaking from the bosoms of contemporaries."
No man in politics could inspire such love without inspiring hatred also.

With the possible exceptions of General Washington and Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Jackson was the best-abused President; but the plain people
knew he was their friend. They had been in awe of Washington; they
never saw Jefferson, the most withdrawn of presidents; but Jackson was
their own man. They knew he could not equivocate or trim; they knew he
was disinterested; so he became the spearhead of the change from oli-
garchy to democracy, a change which revolutionized the office of Presi-
dent.*
At the beginning of that revolution,America was already a land which
George Washington would not have recognized. He had ruled over a na-
tion of four million people; when Jackson became President there were
more than twelve million. The Industrial Revolution was in full blast. Al-
though there were only twenty-three miles of railway in the United States
in 1830, there were two thousand eight hundred in 1840, and nine thou-
sand in 1850. When Washington gave his Farewell Address, westward
expansion was still so slow that a thousand years might have been con-
sumed in filling the country east of the Mississippi; yet by 1821 there were
two flourishing states on the far side of the river. And in addition to in-
dustry and the winning of the West, immigration, the third great force that
was to alter the old America, was booming by 1830. Between 1789 and the
year Jackson went to the White House, there had been less than 400,000
immigrants into the United States; in the next decade there were 599,000;
between 1840 and 1850, there were 1,713,251; and between 1850 and
1860, more than two and a half million. These new citizens went to the
North and West, avoiding the slave-ridden South.
* The feltthemselves sorely in need of a friend. The Industrial
people, by 1830,
Revolution was producing its firstcrop of woes for labor: slums and long hours
and insecure jobs. The old ruling class was not interested, any more than it was
interested in the sorrows that followed on imprisonment for debt. The gentry were
out of touch with the masses who were beginning to vote. A new type of leadership
was wanted.
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 235

Tennessee became a state in 1796, and Jackson quickly rose to power in

the new community. By 1806 he had been a judge on the Tennessee Su-
perior Court and had represented his state first in the lower House in

Washington and later in the Senate. His appearance was in keeping with
his character. He was tall and very thin, with a long stern face and lantern

jaw, high cheekbones and a strong mouth. His deep-set blue eyes were ter-
rifying in anger. His face was crowned with a shock of intractable hair,
soon to turn gray. His whole person expressed strength of passion and re-
solve, but not great physical strength, for he was flat-chested and had a
slight stoop. He suffered throughout life from the effect of gunshot wounds
acquired during his various fights.
In 1 792 he married. His wife had been married before, and it had been
reported that her husband had divorced her in Virginia. Two years later
the report was proved to be untrue. The injured husband then sued suc-
cessfully for divorce on the grounds of his wife's adultery with Jackson.
Thereafter a second marriage took place. Jackson was devoted to his
Rachel with all the strength and sentiment of his nature. There is no doubt
he acted in good faith at the time of his first marriage; but the episode,
and the rude comments which were often made upon it, rankled through-
out his life. He killed one man for referring to the Jackson "adultery" and
fought many others. He was an easy man to anger. In 1813, when he was

forty-six,he got into a brawl in a Nashville tavern with the Benton broth-
ers. They fought with pistols and knives, and with the help of the by-
standers they nearly exterminated each other. Jackson was seriously hurt,
and this injury, added to many previous ones, plagued him the rest of his
life. Neither wounds nor age, however, nor the opposition of the most

powerful men in the country, ever halted him in his implacable drive to
get his own way. Since he had the power of attracting popular worship, it
is a lucky thing for America that on the whole his own way was good.
During the War of 1812, Jackson first led Western militiamen against
the Indians of Georgia and Alabama. He was then made a major general
in the Regular Army and put in charge of the defense of New Orleans.
Here he became a national hero by destroying General Sir Edward Paken-
ham and his troops. In 1818 came his stormy invasion of Florida, which
almost provoked war with both England and Spain. And again in 1821,
when Jackson was military governor of Florida (which by that time be-
longed to the United States), he had trouble with the civil authority. On
both these occasions he was saved by John Quincy Adams.
In 1824, therefore, when he first became of major importance in na-
236 The Price of Union

tional politics, Jackson was a war hero to the people at large and a veteran
of government, law, and fighting in the state of Tennessee. If he had a
reputation for rashness which might excuse his more cautious fellow citi-
zens for viewing him with fear, he also had a reputation for success. In
addition, his struggle for worldly goods was behind him; Jackson was no
longer one of the unprivileged. Tennessee had grown from a frontier into
a settled, prosperous state, and Jackson had become a ruling landowner,
with two plantations, many slaves, and financial connections of themost
conservative and respectable order. In border language, he had become a
"nabob," having begun as a "leathershirt." If he had any political opin-
ions, they were probably conservative, for he had aligned himself with the
conservative group in his own state. Yet the people were right in sensing
that his opinions were important than his prejudices, and that his
less

prejudices were popular: he hated Indians,* Englishmen, people who

thought themselves superior, and institutions (whether legal, financial, or
social) which tended to regiment life or to diminish freedom of choice and
conduct. This was an agreeable set of hatreds, to the mind of the new
democracy.

In his Autobiography, Martin Van Buren wrote:

Within three months after the commencement of Mr. Adams's ad-

ministration [I decided] that as Mr. Crawford was removed from fur-
ther competition by the state of his health my next candidate would be
Andrew Jackson. ... By adding the General's personal popularity to
the strength of the old Republican party which still acted together . . .

we might, I thought, be able to compete successfully with the power and

3
patronage of the Administration.

This decision on the part of the "Red Fox" of New York State was one
of the most fortunate events in Jackson's long and lucky career.
Van Buren was of Dutch descent. He was born at Kinderhook, near
Albany, New York. When he joined the camp of General Jackson he was
forty-three years old, and the most successful of the political bosses whose
struggles for power had made the politics of New York State too compli-
cated for the average citizen to follow. He was as suave as Aaron Burr,
* In
1796, as Tennessee's first member in the House of Representatives, Jackson
made himself popular at home by securing compensation for militiamen who had
marched under Sevier of Tennessee on an Indian raid which was not only un-
authorized by the government but which had actually been forbidden. "This accom-
plishment," said Mr. Abernethy in his article on Jackson in the Dictionary of Ameri-
can Biography, "must have required some ability."
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 237

without the tormenting ambition or the twisted sense of honor; he was

as forceful as the Clintons, without their tendency to make enemies and
generate friction. Short and straight and very correct in his dress, wary
and self-contained in his expression, yet friendly and amusing, he never
grew angry or emphatic. And he never argued. John Quincy Adams, an-
noyed at Van Buren's caution and his refusal to make enemies, called him
"I'ami de tout le monde" which is perhaps not as bad a fault as Adams
thought. He was the first of the new type of political organizer to move
from state politics to the national stage. He would have come to power
with Crawford in 1825, had not fate intervened. He chose Jackson as the
next best hope.
He chose Jackson cold-bloodedly, believing that there was nothing
against him, and confident that he could be made into a popular myth.
Jackson was a weapon with which to beat Adams, and also a center
around which to build a new and properly conducted party. Van Buren,
as a professional, deplored the inefficiency of the Adams Administration,
and he was also opposed to the Adams plan for internal improvements
at federal expense whether on constitutional grounds, or because such
improvements would detract from the monopolistic advantages of New
York's Erie Canal, no one will ever know. One of Van Buren's amusing
qualities was his refusal to explain, to retract, or to deny. When his
enemies accused him of malfeasance, he smiled cheerfully and continued
to treat them as friends. Silence and indifference, he discovered, were
more disconcerting than the best-reasoned reply. *
This was the man whose serene touch brought New York into the Jack-
son fold, soothed Calhoun into postponing his fierce ambitions and accept-
ing second place on the Jackson ticket, charmed the Jeffersonians of Vir-
ginia and the planters of South Carolina into forgetting their fears of the
wild Westerner on horseback, and (most marvelous of all) persuaded
Macon of North Carolina and John Randolph the two men who were
always opposed to everything to serve the General's cause.** Nobody
with Van Buren's orderly mind would have expected such a team to hold
together for long; but he had to conjure them into a brief unity before he
could start on his main design, which was to create a national party as

* In his
Autobiography (p. 367) he speaks of "the course which I have always
preferred, that of living down calumnies unsupported by proof, instead of attempt-
ing to write them down." One charge, however, he denied indignantly (Autobiog-
raphy, p. 199) : the charge that when asked whether the sun rose in the East he
had answered that he presumed so, but, as he invariably slept until after sunrise,
he could not speak from his own knowledge.
** In the
long irony which was Randolph's life there was nothing more cruel
than the fact that he had to help Andrew Jackson in order to hurt Henry Clay.
As the true meaning of the Jacksonian revolution emerged, Randolph found that
he had helped the man who was to abolish the America in which Randolph be-
lieved and for the sake of which he had turned against all his friends.
238 The Price of Union

frictionless and Albany Regency. To do this he must con-

effective as the
trol thepatronage, and to control the patronage he must put his candi-
date in the White House. So the first step was to win an election by any
means available hence the strange coalition which he briefly used. As
soon as possible he would impose party discipline, say farewell to anarch-
ists like Randolph, accept good-naturedly the secession of all who re-

fused to conform, and build a government capable of carrying out a

policy. Incidentally he and his friends would transform the President into
a tribune of the people a change which was only possible because Jack-
son was a born master of men. We do not know when Van Buren realized
that he had an untamable leader on his hands; but we know that the
discovery did not frighten him, or make him jealous, and we also know
thatwhen he first dropped Crawford and turned to Jackson he saw the
General as a man who stood for almost nothing except integrity and mili-
4
tary success.
In the work of electing Jackson the first time, of creating the coalition
which made possible the new party and the new era, Van Buren had the
help of three men from Nashville who banded together as early as 1821
to make their beloved general President, and who secured his first nomi-
nation by the Tennessee legislature: John Overton, William Berkeley
Lewis, and John Henry Eaton. Overton was a year older than his hero.
He had left Virginia for Kentucky in 1787, then moved to Nashville,
where he found himself not only in the same boarding-house but in the
same bed with Andrew Jackson. He became Jackson's partner in land
speculation, and before long he was the richest citizen of Tennessee.*
From 1821 until the triumph in 1828, Overton gave his time, money, and
driving energy to making Jackson President. He then refused all favors
and remaining an adviser and a friend until his death but never
all jobs,

sinking into the swirl of mere followers.

The other two members of the Nashville trio, Lewis and Eaton, were
many years younger. They were brothers-in-law, their wives being wards
of General Jackson. Eaton wrote a second-rate life of Jackson in 1817;
the next year he went to the United States Senate, where he arrived just
as his hero burst into Florida, carrying fire and sword against Indian, Eng-
lishman and Spaniard. Eaton remained in the Senate until after Jackson's
election, becoming liaison officer between the Nashville clique and the
Eastern politicians. During this period his first wife died, which was a pity,
for his second wife became a national joke and a tempest in the Washing-
ton pot.
Lewis, the last of the faithful three, had been Jackson's quartermaster

* In 1819 Overton and who had bought land along the Mississippi
Jackson,
River, founded the city of Memphis, which grew into the largest town of Tennes-
see. In 1940 it had a population of over 330,000.
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 239

during the Indian campaigns of 1812 and 1813. He was the first man to
suggest Jackson for President, and he became a combination of secretary,
errand boy, and political "fixer" for the Jackson men. From his earliest
days in politics he was a friend and admirer of Van Buren, and he may
have helped to bring that smooth and imperturbable boss into the alliance.

It was easy for these enthusiastic Westerners to believe, in 1825, that their
candidate had been cheated of office by a corrupt bargain between Henry
Clay and a man from Massachusetts. They hated Clay because he sought
to divide the West with their candidate; and they expected no good from

Massachusetts, which from earliest days had been willing to sacrifice the
Mississippi Valley for the sake of her own fishing rights. With the help of
Van Buren (who did not ask whether a story was true, but only whether
itwas useful) they made the fight to oust Adams a personal fight, to undo
a personal wrong which had been inflicted by the gentry upon the
people's friend. This was an issue which had wider appeal than the prob-
lems of a tariff or a national bank.*
An immediate result of the new type of campaign was the defeat of
the Administration in the mid- term elections of 1826. For the first time
in American history the House of Representatives had a strong majority

against the President and his policies. There followed a futility which was
shocking, even to a nation inured to governments which could not govern.
Ever since the breakdown of responsible leadership under Madison, the
Washington scene had been one continuous proof of Hamilton's statement
to the New York Convention, when fighting for the ratification of the
Constitution "There are two objects in forming systems of government
:

safety for the people, and energy in the administration. ... If the latter
object be neglected, the people's security will be as certainly sacrificed as
by disregarding the former." Since the repeal of the Embargo in 1809 the
American Government had displayed no "energy in the administration,"
with the result that the nation blundered into an unnecessary war, blun-
dered into an increase in sectional tension, and finally, under Adams,
failed either to accept the Administration's plans for internal improve-
ments and the use of the public lands, or to put other plans in their place.

* There is no doubt that

Jackson believed the story of a corrupt bargain, for
which a strong case can be made, as may be seen in Marquis James's Andrew Jack-
son: Portrait of a President. Glyndon Van Deusen makes an equally strong case
against the story in his Life of Henry Clay. Since there is little written evidence
unless some is contained in the Adams papers which are still withheld by the fam-
ily one can only judge by a knowledge of the people concerned, and such a knowl-
edge makes the tale seem wildly improbable.
240 The Price of Union

The American taste for weak government had been indulged too thor-

oughly.
Commenting on Hamilton's remarks to the New York State Conven-
Henry Jones Ford writes:
tion,

Hamilton held that since in every form of government power must

existand be trusted somewhere, able to cope with every emergency of
war or peace, and since the extent of emergency is incalculable, there-
fore, public authority is not really susceptible of limitation. If limita-

tion be imposed, the effect is not to stay the exertion of power under
stress of public necessity, but is rather to cause it to become capricious,

violent, and irregular. The true concern of a constitution is therefore

not limitation of power, but is provision of means for defining responsi-

bility. The
constitutional ideal aimed at by Hamilton may be fairly
described as plenary power in the administration, subject to direct and
continuous accountability to the people, maintained by a representative
5
assembly, broadly democratic in its character.

As we have seen, Congress refused to allow Hamilton to propose and

defend his Treasury measures in the open, with full responsibility, on the
floor of the House, and drove him to meet and plan secretly with a party
caucus. A little later Jefferson carried the irresponsible making of policy
behind closed doors to its extreme, presenting Congress with conclusions
to be accepted, not criticized.* The system broke down when the trium-
virate of Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin failed to find a policy which
could meet the French and British threats. Thereafter Jefferson bowed
himself out; Madison and Monroe refused to make policy; the Congress
refused to allow Adams to make policy; and for a period of twenty years
the government drifted, or in moments of necessity or anger it committed
sudden acts which can fairly be described as "capricious, violent, and ir-

regular."** The chief exception was in the field of foreign affairs, when
*
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution
of the United States (1833), argued that the exclusion of Cabinet members from
the floor of Congress made for back-stairs government. "If corruption ever eats its
way silently into the vitals of this government," he wrote, "it will be because the
people are unable to bring responsibility home to the executive through his chosen
ministers." And he added that without the right to urge its measures openly before
the Congress, "the executive is compelled to resort to secret and unseen influences,
to private interviews, and private arrangements . . instead of proposing and sus-
.

taining Its own duties and measures by a bold and manly appeal to the nation in
the face of its representatives. .Measures will be adopted or defeated by private
. .

intrigues, political combinations, irresponsible recommendations, and all the blan-

dishments of office, and all the deadening weight of silent patronage."
**
Cp. the War of 1812; the self-defeating conflict between nationalist legislation
and a states'-rights veto in 1816; the similar conflict between Monroe's Cumberland
Road veto and the nationalism of Marshall's Supreme Court and of Henry Clay;
the stagnation of government under Adams, with the exception of the Tariff of
Abominations. When the President, as in 1825, had a clear plan, the Congress
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 241

Adams was Secretary of State and Monroe made some useful and far-
reaching decisions.
The government had been rejected the
Federalist plan for working the ;

had broken down; the modesty and weakness of Madi-

Jeffersonian plan
son and Monroe had exposed the fact that neither Congress as a whole nor
the standing committees of that body were capable of making policy so
the third, or Congressional, plan was also discredited. What next? The dis-
order of the Adams Administration could not long endure. A
government
whose most constructive act was the Tariff of Abominations could scarcely
expect to survive. Fortunately, the new forces of democracy were to pro-
vide a partial answer. By seizing the presidency and rejuvenating its
powers they were to make possible new forms of growth within the old
Constitution. And by building political parties of a size and complication
never before imagined, they were to create an agency for reassembling the
scattered parts of government and for supplying (at least occasionally)
Hamilton's "energy in the administration."
The first step was to elect Jackson, "the people's friend." In 1828, as
we have seen, he had an easy victory in the electoral college; but the sign
of his coming strength was the aggregate popular vote throughout the
country, which in four years had tripled. In 1824, 361,120 votes were cast;
6
in 1828, 1,155,340. The concentration of popular interest on the presi-
dential election had begun. During the years between Jefferson and Jack-
son, the Congressional election had been the important event; but from
1828 the question of who was to be President overshadowed the rest of
politics. This is interesting, since in 1828 no one had the least idea what
Jackson stood for; the people merely knew he was their "friend," that he
had been "betrayed," and that they must undo the wrong. The Jackson
men had invented the modern presidential campaign: a combination of
sport, cynicism, and zeal.
"It was a proud day for the people," wrote Amos Kendall* when the

would permit nothing; when the Congress, as in 1816, had a policy, the President
vetoed it and the Congress accepted the check. If this is division of powers, it is
also neurosis. The government of the United States might have cried with En-
dymion :

Do gently murder half my soul, and I

Shall feel the other half so utterly.
Hamilton was right: because there was no "energy in the administration," there
was no "safety for the people," who got nothing from this long chaos but the
wounding financial crisis which began in 1819 and the negative pleasure of not
being governed too much.
* Kendall was the chief figure in Jackson's "kitchen cabinet." Born on a Massa-
chusetts farm, educated at Dartmouth, he moved to Kentucky in 1814 and became
a newspaper editor. He supported Clay until 1826, when he joined the Jackson
camp, helping to carry Kentucky for the General in 1828. He then moved to Wash-
ington, and was given a job in the Treasury. In 1835 he became Postmaster Gen-
eral, rescuing that department from incompetence and corruption. His chief work,
242 The Price of Union

returns were in; "General Jackson is their own president." Justice Story
4
took a different view. "The reign of King Mob' seemed triumphant/' he
wrote. Both statements were true. Jackson was indeed the people's Presi-
dent, and the people are indeed a mob if one chooses to regard them as
such. The on the March day in 1829 when Jackson
interesting question,
was inaugurated, was whether the American people (or the American
mob) were capable of self-government. Many of the revered founders of
the Republic had thought they were not; and the base tone of the r828
election would have made the founders shiver. But the people had laid
their hands upon the presidency, and they were never to relinquish that
hold. It was not then known that the change was irreversible, that it was
part of a movement toward democracy throughout the Western world
which must either justify itself or bring ruin, that there was no road back
toward the oligarchies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The firstsign of the political revolution was the open acceptance of the
spoils system,* or rotation in office. This was not a new idea; it had been
recommended for centuries as a cure for political corruption. Harrington's
Oceana (a book which influenced most of the Constitution-makers) pro-
posed that every executive and representative should be returned to private
life for a term of years equal to his term in power, and Jefferson himself

had favored rotation in office as the best way to prevent the rise of bureauc-
racy. In 1820 Congress passed the Four Years Act, establishing a fixed
term for numerous federal officials. This helped the Jackson men to speed
the turnover in office and to fix party regularity as the price of favors,
thus welding their discordant followers into an effective team.

The wrangling factions [writes Professor Ford] were rapidly aligned

in party ranks. There was no opening for an independent role. Factions
had to choose one side or the other, or be cut off from present enjoy-
ment or future possibility of office. Appropriate party issues were shaped
by executive policy. The administration of the patronage on party
grounds carries with it the power of defining party issues, for it implies

however, was as private adviser, and as drafter of speeches, for Jackson. In the last
year of Van Buren's Administration, Kendall resigned to become once more the
editor of a newspaper. Silent and audacious, with a brilliant pen and an utter devo-
tion to General Jackson, he had been a major power in the capital for eleven years.
* William L.
Marcy, Van Buren's colleague in the Albany Regency, gave the
system its name. Marcy was sent to the United States Senate in 1831. There, while
defending Van Buren against the charge of having debauched the public service,
he somewhat incautiously remarked that he and his friends could see "nothing
wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy."
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 243

on the part of the appointing power a conception of what constitutes

party membership. . Dissenters may contend that they represent
. .

the true party tradition, but that does not help their case. They must
submit or go into opposition. 7

In spite of the effectiveness of the system, the first large-scale removals

from office caused shrieks of anger and pain. Van Buren thereupon inter-
vened to make the machine work more smoothly, by which he meant more
secretly. As Marquis James points out in his biography of Jackson, Van
Buren "regarded all this clatter attending Federal removals as the clumsy
work of amateurs. In New York thrice as many public servants as Jackson
had sent on their way might vanish into the void without awakening so
much as an echo. Moreover, small as the number of Federal replacements
had been, too many offices had fallen to the friends of John C. Calhoun."
So Secretary of State Van Buren began to teach the uncouth Westerners
how to bathe the machinery in oil. The noise of friction hurt his ears; it
was a sign that somebody was doing a job awkwardly. Suavity and silence
were his ideal: never answer questions, never make excuses, never get
angry. When a delegate from the Florida territory protested to Jackson
that twelve good officials had been turned out to make way for worthless
men, Jackson hotly replied that no man had been turned out except for
oppression or defalcation. The delegate took this story to Van Buren, ask-
ing what crime the twelve men had committed. Van Buren blandly re-
plied, "The President's recollection must be at fault. We
give no reasons
for our removals."
There were fewer removals after Van Buren took charge but each one ;

counted. And the friends of Calhoun Van Buren' s obvious rival for the
succession to the presidency began to find it hard to get jobs, and impos-
sible to get explanations for their unemployment.
So far numbers were concerned, the Jackson record was moderate.
as
A hostile Senator, in a speech attacking the "proscription," charged that
there had been nineteen hundred and eighty-one removals in twelve
months. The Administration press replied that there had been only nine
hundred and nineteen removals in eighteen months. At the most this
would be one in six of the civil service jobs available a figure which later
Administrations would have thought Utopian in its restraint.* Senator
Benton claimed that even in the executive departments at Washington
Jackson left a majority of his opponents in office; nevertheless, he made
enough changes to establish discipline in his party by proving that the
Administration could both reward and punish, and he thereby fastened
the system of spoils upon the country.
*
According to Professor Erik Eriksson, Jackson during his eight years replaced
only one fifth of those whom he found in office.
244 The Price of Union

Van Buren's appointment as Secretary of State caused no surprise, for

the "Little Magician" was the most powerful of Jackson's backers. John
McLean, who had supported Jackson while serving as Postmaster General
under Adams, refused to stay in the Cabinet because of the wholesale
political removals; he was therefore made Associate Justice of the United
States Supreme Court, and his place was given to William T. Barry of
Kentucky, who had deserted Clay and helped to carry the state for the
new President.* Jackson's old friend, John Eaton, became Secretary of
War, and the other posts were distributed among Calhoun's followers.
Since Calhoun, as Vice- President, was Van Buren's rival for the succes-
sion, the Cabinet broke into two factions. Strife between these factions was
soon exacerbated by the farcical social war against Eaton's second wife.
A few months before his inauguration Jackson had been consulted by
Eaton, who wanted to marry the beautiful, notorious Peggy O'Neale.**
Believing that Jackson planned to offer him a Cabinet position, Eaton
wanted to know whether the marriage would stand in his way. Naturally,
he pictured his loved one as a misunderstood and maligned woman. Jack-
son's own wife, Rachel, was still shocked and wounded from the gross
treatment she had received during the campaign; so Jackson attached
Peggy O'Neale, turning his rage against those whose
all his fierce loyalty to
evil tongues were "wronging" her. He told Eaton that of course he must
marry the woman, if he loved her. Eaton cheerfully acted on the advice.
Mrs. Eaton was then received by Rachel Jackson, which in the General's
eyes bestowed the final mark of goodness. Shortly thereafter Mrs. Jackson
died, and her husband's wrath against gossip-mongers grew still more
bitter, for he ascribed her death to the slanders of the political press. Im-
mediately after the inauguration, he appointed Senator Eaton Secretary
of War.
Peggy O'Neale had served as barmaid in her father's tavern in Wash-
ington. She had been married to a man called Timberlake, a drunken
purser in the navy, by whom she had three children. Timberlake cut his
throat in 1828, while on duty in the Mediterranean. Senator Eaton, who
had boarded at the O'Neale tavern since 1818, was said to have been
Peggy's lover both before and after the suicide. Mrs. Calhoun, a member
of one of the best families in Sbuth Carolina, refused to meet Mrs. Eaton,
and the Cabinet wives (whose husbands belonged to the Calhoun fac-
tion) followed her lead. There is no telling whether this conduct was
* It was
Barry from \vhose administration Kendall rescued the post office in 1835.
** Her name is sometimes
spelled O'Neil or O'Neill.
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 245

caused by a passion for virtue or by the hope of driving John Eaton,

Van Buren's best ally, out of the Cabinet. If anyone indulged the latter
hope, he did so out of an ignorance of Andrew Jackson. The General,
feeling that he was championing his own departed angel, would not hear
of Eaton's resignation, but undertook to force the unwanted Peggy upon
Washington society.
The headlong tactics that had triumphed in Indian warfare and border
raids proved ineffective in social combat. Jackson held a Cabinet meeting
at which he announced presumably as official policy that Mrs. Eaton
was "as chaste as a virgin" ;* but still the women would not call on her.
Even the President's niece, Mrs. Donelson, who lived with Jackson and
acted as his hostess, would not call. She left the White House rather than
abandon the pleasures of sanctified impoliteness. There was only one per-
son for whom all the nonsense was delightful: Van Buren, a widower,
who really liked to treat men and women with courtesy, and who also liked
to make his political rivals look silly. Van Buren enjoyed being kind to
Mrs. Eaton, and he enjoyed watching Jackson's wrath at the Calhouns
(and at their friends and their friends' wives) grow until the South Caro-
linian had lost all hope of the royal favor; then he intervened to settle the

problem, lest the country should decide that Jackson and his friends were
a joke.
In April, 1831, Van Buren resigned, making it clear that he did so in
order to help the President get rid of a cantankerous Cabinet. Then Eaton
resigned. Then it was easy for Jackson to force Calhoun's friends to fol-
low; so by the summer he was free to start afresh, with no Peggy Eatons
to plague him and no warring sects within his family. Van Buren was sent
as Minister to England, and at that point Calhoun made a mistake which

kept him from the presidency. While Van Buren waited gratefully in Lon-
don, the Vice-President conspired in the Senate to produce a tie vote on
confirming the appointment, and then cast his deciding vote for rejection.
Not content with ruining himself once, Calhoun arranged for the vindic-
tive show to be repeated. "It will kill him, sir, kill him dead," he exulted,
unaware that the pronoun applied to his own presidential hopes. 8 Senator
Benton, a smaller but wilier statesman than Calhoun, commented as fol-

lows:

I was opposed to Mr. Van Buren's going to England as minister. He

was our intended candidate for the presidency, and I deemed such a
mission to be prejudicial to him and the party, and apt to leave us with
a candidate weakened with the people by absence, and by a residence
at a foreign court. I was in this state of mind when I saw the combina-
tion formed against him, and felt that the success of it would be his
* "Age cannot
wither," said Henry Clay, "nor custom stale, her infinite virgin-
ity."
246 The Price of Union

and our salvation. Rejection was a bitter medicine, but there was health
at the bottom of the draught. 9

So Benton did not vote to save his friend, Van Buren, explaining, "I was
not the guardian of Messrs. Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, and was quite
willing to see them fall into the pit which they were digging for another."
The result, easily foreseen by the new school of professionals, was that
Van Buren returned home to be acclaimed in New York, and to be elected
Vice-President on Jackson's ticket in 1832, and President in 1836.*

One more change had to be made before Jackson's unwritten reform of

the Constitution was complete. It was clear that in the future each politi-
cal party, struggling for the great national prize of the presidency and held

together by federal patronage or the hope of patronage, must choose a

single candidate.There could be no return to the chaos of 1824, when the
anti-Adams votes were divided between Crawford and Jackson, with the
a candidate with no organization and a minority of supporters
result that
was The unified party which had since been built by the
finally successful.
Jackson men must compel a unified Opposition; yet the question re-
mained, How were the parties to choose their candidates?*' Nomination
3*'

by Congressional caucus was discredited; nomination by state legislatures

made for a scattering of strength; nomination by the President himself was
acceptable only to the gentry, and only when the President was Mr. Jeffer-
son who practiced an unknown sorcery upon his followers.
Jackson, of course, meant to choose and impose his successor, just as he
meant to impose Van Buren as Vice-President in 1832. Jackson was an
autocratic democrat, who believed that the people could have no greater
good fortune than that he himself should always get his way. Yet a cer-
tain concealment was needed, so the problem arose as to what machinery
he should use to gloss his autocracy. He wisely chose the machinery of the

*
Peggy O'Neale lived until 1879, her life remaining unusual until the end. After
suffering the disdain of Washington, she had four years of social triumph at the
Court of His Catholic Majesty at Madrid. She then returned home, and after the
death of Eaton she married an Italian dancing master, who not only stole all her
money but eloped with her granddaughter. Her last years were poor and angry;
but she left behind her an autobiography, published in 1932, which is a defense
of her honor and morals and an odd picture of Washington in the days of Andrew
Jackson.
** In
1836, the Whig Party put forward several candidates, in the hope of pre-
venting anyone from getting a majority, so that the election might be thrown into
the House of Representatives. This was a sign of weakness. Four years later, when
the Whigs had gathered strength they concentrated on one man.
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 247

nominating convention. Such conventions had been suggested in state

elections as early as 1792, but had been opposed on the ground that the
members of the convention would become all-powerful, dictating the
choice of the electorate. The growth of parties, however, disposed of the
naive theory that the voters could vote for anyone they chose. If they did,
they would disperse their strength and ensure perpetual defeat at the
hands of any unified minority. If the majority was to assert itself, the
majority must be organized, which meant it must accept orders (or at
least decisions) from the politician.
Galhoun saw exactly what was happening, and why it must happen it ;

was one of his reasons for deploring a "government of the numerical

majority." Under majority rule, he wrote, the parties would find it "in-
dispensable to success to avoid division and keep united; and hence,
from a necessity inherent in the nature of such governments, each party
must be alternately forced, in order to insure victory, to resort to measures
to concentrate the control over its movements in fewer and fewer hands,
10
as the struggle became more and more violent." It is not customary,

however, for democratic politicians to admit that they must seize more
and more power; they prefer to suggest that they are in fact conferring
more and more power upon the voters. So it was in 1832, when the Jack-
son men adopted the nominating convention. They did it in the name of
free discussion, but for the sake of party discipline. The Whigs (or Na-
tional Republicans) had held a loosely organized convention the previous

year, and had chosen Henry Clay

for their candidate. Following Cal-
houn's rule that "each party must be alternately forced to concentrate
control," the Jackson men created a far more efficient and tightly run
convention. Its avowed purpose was to secure a democratic representa-
tion of the party will its real purpose was to make sure that Jackson was
;

obeyed and that Van Buren was nominated for the vice-presidency. It
was here that the federal patronage counted. Since Jackson was certain
to be President for the next four years, his managers had only to suggest
that local organizations desiring federal favors had better vote for Jack-
son's friend. Van Buren was liked by the politicians and respected for his
success; but he was little known to the nation and would not have been
the free choice of the people. The power of the federal patronage and the
smoothness of the new machine were shown by the vote: Van Buren,
208; Philip Pendleton Barbour of Virginia, 49; Richard Johnson of Ken-
tucky, 26, Incidentally, Van Buren was the best man for the job.*

* A strong and
popular President, such as Jackson, can expect to dominate the
convention which meets at the end of his first term, since he is likely to be the
source of political favors for another four years. At the end of a second term, when
the convention is less easy to handle. The delegates are free to register a popular
the President is about to go out of office (or whenever the party is out of power),
248 The Price of Union

When Democratic Convention met, Jackson had already been

this first
nominated by and by popular acclaim, so aside from
state legislatures

choosing the Vice- President the important work was to adopt rules of pro-
cedure. The convention consisted of delegates from the local party ma-
chines, each state having been asked to send delegates equal to the num-
ber of presidential electors from that state.* The legislature of New
Hampshire issued the invitation for the first meeting, and every state re-
sponded except Missouri. The decisions of the convention were binding
upon nobody, except that the national leaders could withhold patronage
from the local groups who rebelled. This was a strong influence, but not
strong enough to force a state machine to accept a locally unpopular deci-
sion, or to work hard for a locally unpopular candidate; so early in their
history the conventions undertook the task of weeding out the men and
the issues that might cause dissent in any important region, of toning
down all demands which might lose votes anywhere, of ratifying the com-

promises and the diplomatic adjustments which make co-operation pos-

sible between local party machines in other words, of doing all the work
which Madison foresaw must be done in a large federal union, and which
he knew must make American politics cautious and conservative.
These balances and compromises, which find expression in the party
platform**" (or statement of party principles), plus the federal patronage,
plus the national popularity of the President or the candidate, are all that
hold the party together. For the rest, it is a congeries of local and state
groups, intent upon local and state interests, electing local and state can-
didates, from aldermen to United States senators. The national party
only elects two men: the President and the Vice- President.
The desire of the state organizations to be protected against a national

majority found expression in the rule that "two-thirds of the whole num-

are usually run by political bosses is perhaps more a sign of popular apathy than
of a defect in the system. Yet it is interesting that Senator Benton grew to hate
the nominating convention. He described it as "an irresponsible body juggled, and
baffled, and governed by a few dextrous contrivers, always looking to their own
interest in the game which they play in putting down and putting up men." (Thirty
3
Years View, vol. I, p. 122.) This is a fair description of what normally happens,
yet it seems that the voters could prevent it from happening if they took a lively
interest in their local party affairs. Failing such an interest, the political bosses do
a sensible job at balancing sectional antipathies and class or economic antipathies,
and at producing candidates and programs which annoy the least number of voters.
Such candidates and programs are not always heart-warming.
*
According to the Constitution, the presidential electors from each state shall
be "equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state
may be entitled in the Congress." Today, at the major party conventions, each state
has approximately twice as many delegates as it has members of the two houses
of Congress.
** The first Democratic Party platform was adopted in 1840. In 1848 the Demo-
cratic National Committee was created: a central party agency with the authority
to call conventions.
xii. Jackson and the New Type of Presidency 249

ber of votes in the convention shall be necessary to constitute a choice."

This rule, peculiar to the Democratic Party, was accepted by every con-
vention until 1936, when it was repealed at the request of Franklin Roose-
velt, the great centralizer of power. For over a hundred years, the two-
thirds rule gave to minorities the right to block a nomination, a right
which was sometimes used with startling results. Yet it is in keeping with
the spirit of American federal government, which tends to prevent action
in order to placate minorities, rather than to make action efficient or re-
sponsible.
With the growth of the convention system the thwarting of the consti-
was complete. The electoral college had
tutional plan for the presidency
become a party agency, automatically registering the party votes for the
candidates chosen by the party convention. The President, instead of
being selected by a few dozen wise men deliberating at leisure, was
chosen by the whole electorate from a list of two, or sometimes three,
candidates nominated by the party bosses. And the "whole electorate"
was no longer merely the well-to-do ; it was very nearly equivalent to the
adult white male population. The President had become the spokesman
of the will of the nation;* but he still lacked constitutional authority for
carrying that will into effect. A
popular President, in his first term, with
the full power of federal patronage and of public approval behind him,
might often get his way, especially if he had a genius for political combi-
nations. Otherwise, the written Constitution, devised to prevent action,
still
triumphed over the unwritten constitution, devised to make action
possible. As Professor Ford put it with careful understatement:

The nomination of a presidential candidate is accompanied by a

declaration of party principles which he is pledged to enforce in the
conduct of the administration; but no constitutional means are pro-
* There were four main
steps by which the people captured the presidency:
first,the members of the electoral college were forced by unwritten law to vote not
for the candidates of their choice but for the candidates of their party's choice. This
change was generally accepted by 1796, and was binding by 1800. It did not seem
important while the party's choice of candidate was still made by the gentry, either
in unofficial caucus or in correspondence with one another. Second, members of the
electoral college began to be elected by the voters instead of being appointed by
the legislatures of their several states. By 1832, only one state clung to the system
of appointment. This change gave to the voters the feeling that they themselves
chose the President, even if they had nothing to say about the candidates. Third,
the suffrage was steadily extended. By 1832 most of the adult white males could
vote. Fourth, the major parties adopted the nominating convention, which took the
choice of candidates away from the old ruling class and gave it to the democratic
politicians or, in theory, to the people.
Woodrow Wilson wrote that since the candidate chosen by the convention "is
the only man for whom the electors of his party can vote . . . the expression of
the preference of the convention of the dominant party is practically equivalent to
election, and might as well be called election by anyone who is writing of broad
facts, and not of fine distinctions." Cp. Congressional Government, p. 245.
250 The Price of Union

vided whereby he may carry out his pledges, and it is due solely to the
extra-constitutional means supplied by party organization that the presi-
dential office is able to perform the function imposed upon it of execut-
ing the will of the nation. Party organization acts as a connective tissue,
enfolding the separate organs of government, and tending to establish
a unity of control which shall adapt the government to the uses of popu-
lar sovereignty. The adaptation is still so incomplete that the adminis-
trative function is imperfectly carried on and the body-politic suffers
11
acutely from its irregularity.

These words were written years ago; but they are still largely true.
fifty
The adaptation is still incomplete and sometimes the body politic still
"suffers acutely from its irregularity." The talent for government with
which the Americans of the Jackson era changed a semi-oligarchy into a
full democracy., amending the written Constitution with unwritten and

extra-legal devices such as the party system and the nominating conven-
tion^ may need to be exercised still further in our time.
 XIII

The Jackson Men in Action

ONE EXCEPTION, Jackson's new Cabinet (appointed in 1831, after

the Peggy O'Neale excitement) was more peaceful than the old. Edward
Livingston* took Van Buren's place, Lewis Cass** became Secretary of
War., and Roger B. Taney, who was to play a stormy part in the war on
the Bank and to succeed Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
became Attorney General. Finally, in order to make room for Van Buren
in London, Louis McLane*** was recalled from that post and appointed
* Edward was the
younger brother of the Robert R. Livingston who was Ameri-
can Minister to France at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Edward served in
the House of Representatives from 1795 until 1801. It was this Livingston family
whose members became outraged because Washington did not give them high office,
and which changed camps in 1791, joining with the Clintons to make Aaron Burr
Senator instead of reappointing General Schuyler, the father-in-law of Hamilton.
Shortly after leaving Congress, Edward Livingston found his finances hopelessly
involved and went to New Orleans to recoup his fortune. This he did not do; but
he served as Jackson's aide-de-camp at the battle of New Orleans, and later made
himself a world reputation by the penal code which he constructed for the state
of Louisiana. In 1824 he returned to the House of Representatives, and in 1828 he
became United States Senator from Louisiana. He had worked for Jackson in
1824, and again in 1828, and was a natural candidate for office in the Administra-
tion. The renown of Livingston's contribution to penal law is shown by the oration
delivered before the Academy of the Institute of France at the time of his death:
"America," said Francois Mignet, the historian, "has lost her most powerful intel-
lect, the Academy one of its most illustrious members, and Humanity one of her
most zealous benefactors."
** Lewis Cass, born and educated in New
Hampshire, had been for eighteen
years governor of the Territory of Michigan when Jackson brought him to Wash-
ington as Secretary of War. He knew the old Northwest as few men have known it,
for he traveled as much as five thousand miles a year, mostly by canoe, through his
vast wild territory. His frontier life had made him an imperialist who felt there was
no limit to America's need for land, an enemy to all Indians who dared claim a
right to their ancestral hunting-grounds, and a bitter foe of the British. He lived
to become United States Senator from Michigan, presidential candidate for the
Democratic Party in 1848, and Secretary of State under Buchanan.
*** Louis McLane of Delaware was one of the Crawford men who switched to
Jackson after 1824. He had served in both the House and the Senate, where he
was known as a strong friend of the Bank of the United States. Since Jackson meant
to destroy the Bank, his choice of McLane as Secretary of the Treasury seems
eccentric. When the inevitable trouble came, McLane contrived an elaborate plan
whereby Livingston went as Minister to France, he himself became Secretary of
State, and the Treasury was given to William John Duane (son of William Duane
of the Aurora, Gallatin's inveterate enemy). This left Jackson as harassed as ever,
since young Duane also refused to make war on the Bank.
257
252 The Price of Union

Secretary of the Treasury. Yet, in spite of these more harmonious helpers,

Jackson continued to seek strength and encouragement and clarification
of his ideas and prejudices from unofficial advisers such as Kendall, and
Kendall's friend Frank Blair, whom Jackson had called from Kentucky
to edit the Washington Globe* It was these men who saw that the Gen-
eral's greatness lay in his sense of what the people wanted and his fiery
desire to procure them justice; it was these men who gave the aging au-
tocrat a philosophy of democracy and helped him to become a national
hero. They loved him because his heart was right, and they served him
by making him see the implications of that rightness. Inevitably, they met
the jealousy which follows royal favorites; they were reviled by Jackson's
foes, and appreciated only by the wisest of his political friends, such as
Ben ton and Van Buren.
With a reorganized Cabinet, a strengthened presidency, a party organ-
ization which gave some unity to the Administration^ an aroused public

opinion expecting great deeds in the name of democracy, what did the
Jackson men do? Strangely enough, they did very little of permanent
importance. Their mission was to create fresh institutions and a fresh
hope, not to solve the problems that bedeviled the country. Everything
they touched they left unsettled except the powers of the presidency.
One of the most explosive things they touched was the currency prob-
lem, which they made a popular issue through their battle against the
Bank. It was a battle in the old war between the "little man" and monop-
oly, and we may doubt whether Jackson would have been found on the
side of the little man if it had not been for the influence of his friends in
the Kitchen Cabinet.**
As we have seen, the charter of the First Bank of the United States
Hamilton's Bank expired in 1811, and Gallatin was unable to secure
a renewal. In 1816, the Second Bank was chartered for twenty years, with
a capital of thirty-five millions, of which the government subscribed seven.
The control was vested in a board of twenty-five directors, five of whom

* Francis Preston Blair founded the Globe in

1830, when he was thirty-nine
years old. Few political journalists have rivaled the influence wielded by Blair
between 1832 and the end of Van Buren's presidency in 1841. In his Autobiography
(p. 323), Van Buren complains of his troubles in persuading Jackson to keep any-
thing quiet until the appropriate time "He [Jackson] was entirely unreserved in his
:

public dealings the People, he thought, should know everything and 'give it to
Blair* (or Blar as he pronounced it) was almost always his prompt direction
whenever any information was brought to him which affected or might affect the
public interest." It is no wonder that Frank Blair was the envy of journalists. The
Globe "was a semi-weekly in 1830, and became a daily in 1833.
** In 1821 Jackson was
apparently in favor of the Bank, for in that year he
forwarded a petition for a branch of the Bank of the United States at Pensacola,
Florida. It was not until he had become the mouthpiece of the democratic move-
ment that Jackson began to think the Bank had too much power for an institution
which was in no way responsible to the popular will.
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 253

were appointed by the President of the United States and the rest by the
outside stockholders. The Bank was named as the depository of all gov-
ernment funds, though the Secretary of the Treasury had the right to put
funds elsewhere provided he gave Congress his reasons. The Bank paid
no interest on these funds but it gave the government a bonus of a million
;

and a half dollars/* and it was required to transfer the funds free of
charge. The Bank could issue notes, to be redeemed in specie on demand.
Such notes, like the notes of state banks which were redeemable in specie,
were receivable for government dues.
At the request of President Monroe, the elegant and brilliant young
Nicholas Biddle**" had accepted one of the five government directorships,
and in 1823, at the age of thirty-seven, he was elected president of the
board. By the time Jackson went to the White House, Biddle's Bank had
twenty-seven branches and agencies throughout the country. By devising
the system of "branch drafts" the Bank had taken to itself the power to
extend (or contract) the currency far beyond the limits which the charter
was meant to impose. In a nation which responded joyfully to the tempta-
tions of easy credit the Bank had become a dominant influence in indus-
try, commerce, and agriculture. Inevitably, the magnitude of this influence
made the Bank hated by all who suffered from the long depression of the
eighteeii-twenties. We
have already seen what Senator Benton thought.
In return for large powers the Bank had given good service, han-
its

dling the government's funds efficiently and providing a stable currency

for the first time in American history. The chief objection which could
be made was that the Bank's powers were not subject to control by gov-
ernment. The longer Biddle remained head of the Bank, the stronger this
objection became, for with all his graceful talents and his competence
Biddle was proud, strong-willed, and when hardened by power, ruthless.
In addition to the enemies which it earned, the Bank could also count
on the hostility of the strict construe tionists, who thought it unconstitu-
tional, and of the New Yorkers who hoped to make their city the financial
* This was the
money which Madison would not allow the Congress to spend
on internal improvements.
** This remarkable man became the center of such passionate hates and friend-
ships that his story has never been told convincingly. He always appears cither too
wise or too wicked for this world. Born in Philadelphia of an old Quaker family,
he went to Paris at the age of eighteen as secretary to the American Minister,
General John Armstrong. The following year he began extensive travels throughout
Europe, which ended in 1806 when he was called to London to be secretary of
legation under James Monroe. On returning home he studied law and was admitted
to the bar; but he gave most of his time to scholarship and to writing. He was
reluctant to accept the appointment in the Bank, having already refused to become
a director for the majority stockholders; but once he had taken the job he became
an expert on finance, and he seems to have found the immense power of his position
agreeable. He may have overestimated that power, or he may have underestimated
the tenacity of Jackson; in any case, he challenged the strongest man and the
hardest fighter in America, which proved a mistake.
254 The Price of Union

capital of the country, promoting Wall Street to the position which Chest-
nut Street* then held. It was suggested that Van Buren's distaste for the
Bank might have such roots.
The Bank's charter did not expire until 1836; but Biddle approached
the Administration in 1829 with an offer to help extinguish the national
debt within four years, in return for a new charter. This was a shrewd
plan, for the abolition of the debt was one of Jackson's dearest designs.
He hated speculation, and feared debt of all kinds, public and private^**
But he believed that the Bank's power over the paper currency was a
power to create or cancel debt, and that in private hands such power must

always be used to help the rich at the expense of the poor. He therefore
refused Biddle's offer, and in his annual message he warned the people
to consider carefully whether they wished such a privileged institution
as the Bank to survive.
The problem was what to put in its place. Granting that the Bank was
a dangerous monopoly, might it not be a necessary danger? In 1829 Jack-
son spoke vaguely of a "bank founded upon the credit of the government
and its revenues"; but when he asked J. A. Hamilton (son of Alexander
Hamilton, and an enemy of his father's favorite institution) to work out
a plan for such a bank, Hamilton could not do so. The government might
run a bank of deposit in which everyone would have confidence ; but what
was needed was a bank to advance credits as well as to receive deposits,
and Hamilton pointed out that such a bank in the hands of the govern-
ment could become a more tyrannous monopoly than the Bank of the
United States. If private bankers could play politics with the credit sys-
tem, so could the politicians. Early in 1831 Senator Benton attacked the
Bank as an autocracy with frightening power over the people and over
their servants. Yet Benton, also, had trouble finding a substitute he could ;

only suggest that paper money was not necessary, and that the country
could get along, for all common purposes of life, on gold and silver. By
"paper money" Benton and the other Jacksonians appear to have meant
actual paper bank notes, rather than commercial paper or credit money. ***
* In
Philadelphia, the headquarters for the Bank of the United States.
** His own
early experiences with gambling and speculation may have helped
breed this hate.
*** There are three types of money in common use. First, there is hard money
metallic coins the issuing of which is usually a government monopoly. Second,
there is the bank note, the "paper money" of Benton and the Jacksonians. This was
issued, in the eighteen-thirties, both by the Bank of the United States and by other
banks operating under state charters. The bank notes were supposed to be redeem-
able in specie; but since each state had its own banking laws, some of the local
banks were less than careful in maintaining a safe relationship between their paper
and their supply of gold and silver coins. Third, there is commercial paper or
check money, or credit money. During the financial revolution of the nineteenth
century this bank credit became a far more important part of the money system
than coin or notes. In the United States, for example, in 1934, there was about
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 255

"Note issue was regarded as the characteristic function of banks/' writes

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "and an attack on the 'banking system' or on
'banks' meant generally an attack on the power of private note issue. It
did not mean the elimination of the functions of discount or deposit." 1
It is easy to see why the notes of irresponsible state banks were feared,

especially by the poor and by people of small fixed income. "The working
classes," says Schlesinger, "believed that they were regularly cheated by
paper money. A good portion of the small notes they received in wages
were depreciated, worthless, or counterfeit. Unscrupulous employers even
bought up depreciated notes and palmed them off on their workingmen
at face value." 2 Such conditions were bad; but they were not the fault of
the Bank of the United States, which by its example and by the stability
of its own notes had a moderating effect on the state banks. Yet it was
doubtless inevitable that a revolt against the banking system should in-
clude a revolt against the most powerful and notorious example of that
system.
The arguments for and against the Bank were repeated in Congress,
in the press,and throughout the country. The Jacksonians could make
an emotionally effective attack, but only by attributing to the Bank of the
United States the evils which resulted from the misconduct of the local
banks. Biddle could make a sound defense; but he could not escape the
fact that in bad times his Bank was feared and hated, and blamed for
countless misdeeds which were none of its doing. Mean while a decisiont

had to be made. Since there seemed to be no answer in terms of logic

or science, the question became one of personalities and politics. Here the
Bank played its cards badly, in spite of having the advice of Henry Clay,
who in 1831 returned to Washington as senator from Kentucky.
Clay came back from two years' retirement to take charge of the
opposition to Jackson, confident that he could defeat his fellow Westerner
and capture the presidency. He wanted an issue, and it seemed to him that
the rechartering of the Bank would suit his purpose, for the business world
and most of the press favored the charter, the people seemed apathetic,
and the Administration had no sensible alternative. So Clay induced Bid-
die, in January, 1832, to ask Congress for an immediate recharter. In the
following July, Congress passed the required bill and sent it to the Presi-
dent, who decided to veto it. Attorney-General Taney worked on the veto
message; so did Amos Kendall; and so, at great length, did Jackson him-
self.

$40,000,000,000 of this credit money on deposit, as against about $5,000,000,000

of currency. Bank-credit had not reached such importance in the eighteen-thirties;
but it is surprising that the "hard-money" reformers did not take it into account.
They directed the whole of their attack against the irresponsible creation of bank
notes.
256 The Price of Union

Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government

[said the message]. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth, can-
not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the
gifts of heavenand the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue,
every man equally entitled to protection by law. But when the laws
is

undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinc-

tions ... to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the
humbler members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,
who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to
themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their govern-
ment. . There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist
. .

only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as

heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low,
the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act
before me, there seems to be wide and unnecessary departure from these
3
just principles.
This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, and so was the rejection of
Marshall's claim that the Supreme Court could decide finally on the
constitutionality of an
Jackson in his veto message declared flatly
act.
that the Bank was unconstitutional, although the Supreme Court had
already held the reverse. "Each officer who takes an oath to support the
Constitution," said Jackson, "swears that he will support it as he under-
stands it, and not as it is understood by others."
Biddle professed to be "delighted" with the message. "It has all the fury
of the unchained panther," he wrote, "biting the bars of his cage. It is
really a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat and Robespierre might have
issued to the mob St. Antoine; and my hope is that it
of the Faubourg
country from the domination of these miser-
will contribute to relieve the
able people." Biddle's defeat could have been predicted from that one
statement. He did not know that the days of Fisher Ames were gone
forever, that allusions to Marat made no man cringe, and that it was in-
expedient as well as demeaning to refer to the heroes of the new electorate
as "miserable people." Nobody so ignorant of politics should have at-
tempted to fight Andrew Jackson.
Webster in the Senate made a strong reply to the veto message, with
the result that his loan from the Bank was increased from twenty-two
to thirty-two thousand dollars.* Yet the veto was upheld, first by Con-

gressand later by the American people, who re-elected Jackson in 1832

with Van Buren as Vice-President. Henry Clay with his National Republi-
can Party was a very poor second.
* It is not unfair to recall this
fact, for Webster was consistently grasping in
his
relations with the Bank. At the height of the battle, in December, 1833, he wrote to
Biddle: "I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be
wished that myrelation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send
me the usual retainers. Yours with regard, Danl. Webster."
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 257

Strengthened by success, Jackson decided not to wait until the charter

expired but to deprive the Bank of government business at once. The
Secretary of the Treasury, Louis McLane, objected; so he was promoted
to the Department of State, and Duane was put in his place. Duane also

objected, so he was dismissed, and Taney was put in his place. Then at
last the President had his way, and the government ceased depositing
funds with the Bank of the United States. The existing balances were left
in the Bank until exhausted; but all new funds were deposited in state
banks.
At this point Biddle lost his head and began restricting credit, thus
promoting a panic. "Nothing," wrote Biddle to the head of his Boston
branch, "but the evidence of suffering abroad will produce any effect in
Congress. ... A
steady course of firm restriction will ultimately lead
to ... the recharter of the Bank." He was wrong for two reasons: first,
he was fighting a man who could not be frightened ; second, he was fight-
ing with weapons which justified the popular fear of the Bank. The good
will which the Bank had earned was nullified by a cold conspiracy to
induce a depression.
Biddle and his friends insisted that the collapse in values was the result
of Jackson's ignorant money by refusing the charter and with-
policy, that
drawing the funds he had forced the Bank
into a restrictive course. Count-
less petitions were sent to Washington by victims of the economic storm,
and delegation after delegation pleaded for a new policy. The reply was
characteristic: "Is Andrew Jackson to bow the knee to the golden calf?
I tell you, if you want relief go to Nicholas Biddle." Biddle' s comments
did not endear him to the country. "The Bank," he said, "has taken its
final course and it will not be frightened nor cajoled from its duty by any
small drivelling about relief." And again: "The Bank feels no vocation
to redress the wrongs of these miserable people. Rely upon that. This
worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and im-
prisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken."
After a few months of such talk, people who at first were undecided
agreed that the Bank might really be the "Monster" which Jackson
called it.

By June of 1834 the Bank was beaten. Admitting defeat, it relaxed the
credit policy, thus proving that the suffering and destruction had been
imposed upon the country from Philadelphia. Yet Jackson's victory was
negative. The Bank had behaved stupidly and had lost its fight; but the
Bank had been useful to the country, and its enemies had nothing with
which to replace it. The condition of the currency became alarming, for
there was no adequate control over the state banks. Paper money was
printed on little or no security or on the security of the country's faith
that tomorrow must always be richer than today.
255 The Price of Union

Land settlement and land speculation, canal-building in the twenties

and railway-building in the thirties these had formed the basis for an-
other boom. Between 1829 and 1837, bank loans increased from about
$14,000,000 to $525,000,000; note circulation increased from $48,000,000
to $149,000,000; the number of banks increased from 329 to 788. By 1836
the government was receiving $25,000,000 a year from the sale of public
lands. Foreign money was pouring into the country, adding to the instabil-

ity for the foreign money might be suddenly withdrawn because of con-
ditions at the other end of the world.
Even the rapid increase in real wealth could not keep pace with the
increase in paper money and in loans. Jackson realized early in 1836 that
the nation was moving toward disaster. 4 And Benton declaimed in the
Senate: "I did not join in putting down the Bank of the United States,
to put up a wilderness of local banks. I did not join in putting down the

paper currency of a national bank, to put up a national paper currency

of a thousand local banks. I did not strike Caesar to make Antony master
of Rome." 5 This was all very well; but Benton had in fact done exactly
what he said he did not do. And with all Caesar's shortcomings, he was
a better man than Antony.
The Administration unable to control the state banks directly, and
having destroyed the one agency which could influence them indirectly
decided that it must at least cease encouraging the state banks to specu-
late on the federal lands. Benton introduced a resolution requiring that all

payment for public lands be made in specie rather than in bank notes. This
was defeated in the Senate; but after the adjournment the President issued
the "specie circular" as an Executive order. This was a proper step for
anyone who believed, with Jackson, that hard money was the friend of
the plain man, and that speculation and a fluctuating currency were his
enemy; but the step, though proper, came much too late to restore finan-
cial health. It could only precipitate alpanic, which doubtless had to come
but which was now blamed on Jackson, his policies and his friends. The
crash began in May, 1837, when the New York banks suspended specie
payments. By that time the unhappy Van Buren was President. "Check
the paper mania," Jackson wrote him, "and the republic is safe and your
administration must end in triumph." The advice was good, but Van
Buren could not act upon it. He could make sure that the money issued
by the federal government was sound; but he could not interfere with
the state banks.*
When he destroyed the Bank of the United States, Jackson did away
* After the Civil
War, the Republican Party was able to tax the wildcat state
bank notes out of existence. It is unlikely, in view of the economic illiteracy of the
country in 1837 } that the Western states would have supported Van Buren in such
a measure.
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 259

with the only existing brake on credit expansion. When he removed the
federal deposits from Philadelphia and distributed them among state
banks, Jackson encouraged both a credit and a paper-money inflation.
When he and "Old Bullion.," as Benton came to be called, urged hard
money as the one cure, they were ignoring the fact that their cure would
not control the volume of credit money, or check money, and they were
also ignoring the fact that their cure could not be enforced upon the
states. So the destruction of the national Bank did as much harm as Jack-
son's enemies predicted, whereas the hard-money policy did very little

good. It was left to Van Buren to apply the latter policy under the most
trying conditions, with great bravery and stubbornness.
When the panic broke, Van Buren had three choices: he could do
nothing, leaving the federal funds with the incompetent state banks; he
could admit defeat for Jackson's dearest cause and restore the Bank of
the United States ; or he could make the federal government, its funds and
its currency, independent of all banks. He chose the third course. In a

message to Congress on September 4, 1837, he recommended that govern-

ment funds be stored in an "Independent Treasury" at Washington, and
in sub-treasuries throughout the country, and that the government issue its

own currency: gold and silver for small units, notes for large units.

By removing the public funds from the banks [writes Schlesinger], it

[the independent Treasury policy] reduced the amount of specie on
which paper could be issued and thus had a sobering tendency on the
economy. By rejecting bank notes in payment of the revenue, it consider-
ably restricted the power of the banks over the currency. By confining
banks to the needs of the commercial community, it held them to "legiti-
mate" economic operations and limited their capacity for redistributing
wealth in favor of a single class.

The less cheerful view. "The message

conservative press of the day took a
is a upon our most valuable and most cher-
heartless, cold-blooded attack
ished class of citizens," said the New York Gazette. And according to the
National Gazette of Philadelphia, "It is the incarnation of the Bentonian-
Jacksonism a sophistical sermon on the favorite text of 'Perish commerce
perish credit,' and an ungenerous appeal to the irrational passions of
7
the worst party in the country."
Conservative Democrats, combining with the Whigs, prevented the
passage of the Independent Treasury Bill until 1840. The following year,
the Whigs repealed the law; but the Democrats revived it in 1846 and it
remained in effect until the Civil War. If it was not a solution, at least it
was not an aggravation to the vexed money problem of a federal society
wherein banks operating under state charters could create a partial chaos
no matter how careful and how orthodox was the policy of the central
260 The Price of Union

government. In any case, whatever its merits, Van Buren's plan had an
interesting effect on the new political alignments, North and South.
Calhoun, as we shall see, had been flirting with the Whigs for several
years before 1837 ; but he had too clear a head to be happy in that camp.*
He knew the Whigs wanted a policy of centralized government and aid to

capitalism. He believed they were as dangerous to agrarianism as Hamilton

himself, except that their power for harm was mitigated by the woolliness
of their minds. Calhoun shared the Whig distaste for Jackson; yet he knew
that the South put the Whigs in power the South would be sorry. On
if

the other hand the Democratic Party under Jackson's leadership had shown
signs of believing in democracy, and this, he felt, was a fatal creed. The
word "democrat," he wrote to Robert Barnwell Rhett in 1838, "as usually
understood means those who are in favor of the government of the absolute
majority to which I am utterly opposed and the prevalence of which would
8
destroy our system and destroy the South."
What should Calhoun do? The old Democratic Party, built by Jefferson,
had at least affirmed states' rights (however much it betrayed them under
the pressure of events), and states' rights meant that the majority in one
community would be allowed to block the will of the national majority; but
Jackson's Democratic Party, with its immensely strengthened presidency,
seemed likely to assert the absolute power of the national majority. That
way, Calhoun felt sure, lay the death of the nation; but the other way,
the Whig way, lay triumphant capitalism and the subjection of the South
to the needs of Northern industry, Calhoun could not support either group

fervently; but after Van Buren's message to Congress in September, 1837,

he did support the Democratic money policy, thus giving unexpected aid
to his old rival. did this because he agreed with the New York and
He
Philadelphia newspapers that the system of divorcing the banks from the
state would prove bad for business. Anything which was bad for business
would diminish, he hoped, the pressure of Northern capitalism upon the
agrarian South.
The Independent Treasury policy also won for Van Buren the backing
of the Locofocos of New York.** Throughout the East, farsighted mem-

*
By 1833 and 1834 the National Republicans (who had held together since
John Quincy Adams's Administration in support of the "American System" ) plus ,

the states'-rights men who felt that Jackson was wrong on nullification, plus the
Northerners who opposed Jackson on the Bank, had become sufficiently numerous
and widespread to form a true national Opposition. They began during these years
to call themselves the Whig Party, and by 1836 the new name was accepted through-
out the country.
** The radical
wing of the Democratic Party in that state. In 1828 there had
come into being an amorphously organized Workingman's Party, asking for such
reforms as free education and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. Like all minor
parties, or parties seeking social legislation, this was hampered by the federal system.
Constitutionally, only the state legislatures could pass the type of law desired by
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 261

bers of the labormovement, and radicals in general, were in favor of "hard

money" on the sensible ground that a workman who was paid in state
bank notes might find that his wages had no purchasing power. The con-
servative New York Democrats, on the other hand, cared less for the
workman's wages than for the fact that they themselves had profited from
Jackson's deposit of federal funds in the state-chartered banks. They were
glad to destroy the Bank of the United States but a plan for really sound
;

money was going too far. Many of them left the Democratic Party in dis-
gust over Van Buren's policy, joining with the Whigs to elect William
H. Seward* governor of New York in 1 838. In the West, also, many of
the old Jacksonians opposed the Independent Treasury. They, too, had
profited from the lush days of paper inflation, and they deplored Van
Buren's notion that money should have a definable value. Like many of the
well-to-do in the East, they wanted to take their chance in a gambler's
economy. The industrial workers, and the men with small fixed incomes,
and the Southern agrarians, preferred "hard" money. Strangely, because
the Locofocos favored it, this became known as a "radical" demand.
Hard money was the nearest approach to a policy which the Jacksonians
produced. In so far as they stood for anything consistent, they stood for
helping the poor by hindering the money gamblers. And on this issue they
found their chief support in the industrial East, not the frontier West. As
Mr. Schlesinger has written :

Eastern ideas rose to supremacy in Washington as Jacksonianism

changed from an agitation into a program. The great illusion of
. . .

historians of the frontier has been that social equality produces economic
equalitarianism. In fact, the demand for economic equality is generally
born out of conditions of social inequality, and becomes the more pas-
sionate, deeply felt, and specific as the inequalities become more rigid.
The actual existence of equal opportunities is likely to diminish the
vigilance with which they are guarded, and to stimulate the race for
power and privilege. The fur capitalists of St. Louis and the land specu-
the Workingman's Party; yet only a national party could survive under the new,
rigid, presidential system which put more and more emphasis on "voting the straight
ticket." Hence the more practical and politically effective members of the Working-
man's Party in New York State merged with the Jacksonian Democrats and became
ardent supporters of the "hard-money" policy. In October, 1835, these radicals at-
tended a party caucus at Tammany Hall to protest against the "regular" candidates.
At the height of the meeting the gas lights were turned out: the normal Tammany
system for quieting dissent. This time the protesters were equipped with candles
and with the new friction matches, known as "locofocos." They lit their candles and
continued the meeting.
* The brilliant
young man from Auburn, New York, who was to become Lincoln's
Secretary of State. Seward was thirty-seven when he became governor. He was a
lawyer, and a friend and protege* of Thurlow Weed, the Whig "dictator" of New
York State. His family were Democrats ; but Seward had chosen the Whigs because
of his distrust of the Southern slaveholders, and because of his strong belief in
internal improvements at federal expense.
262 The Price of Union

iators of Mississippi were as characteristic of the West as Andrew

9
Jackson.

Jackson's second important effort, the fight on nullification, suffered from

the same weakness as the fight on the Bank Jackson knew what to attack,
:

but he had no remedy to offer. He could destroy the Bank, but he could
not build a just money system he could oppose nullification, but he could
;

not diminish the sectional injustices and jealousies which were poisoning
the national life. He did not know how to build a government which
would give enough power to the sections to protect them from oppression,
and yet leave enough power in Washington to conduct the public business.
Unhappily, the struggle over nullification was discussed in terms of
what was constitutional, not in terms of what was wise. The constitutional
argument could satisfy nobody, for it was well known that Jackson, like
Webster and like most Americans, was himself a nullifier whenever it
suited him as in the case of the unhappy Cherokecs. Relying on the
treaties which concluded Jackson's Indian campaigns in 1813 and 1814,
the Cherokees had settled peacefully on the lands left to them. Because of
their rapid advance in civilization and the arts of peace, and because the
cotton gin was giving a new value to their lands, they were soon hated
by their white neighbors. Hostile and savage Indians were a nuisance
but only a temporary nuisance, because they could be defeated and ousted.
Peaceful and friendly and settled and civilized Indians were more than a
nuisance, they were a catastrophe, for if they persisted in behaving them-
selves itmight be difficult to take the land which had been guaranteed
them by the United States Government especially since one of the fed-
eral treaties which gave this guarantee had been signed by Andrew
Jackson.
Just before Jackson became President, the state of Georgia tore up the
federal treaties and annexed the land of the Cherokees and the Creeks.
Mississippi and Alabama followed suit, expropriating the Choctaws and
Chickasaws. The Cherokees engaged William Wirt of Baltimore, former
Attorney General, to take their case before the federal court on the ground
that it is unconstitutional for a state to annul a federal contract, where-
upon Jackson made a trip into the Indian country to tell the chiefs that
their case was hopeless, that even if they won in the courts they would be
robbed by their white neighbors. It was a question of robbery with or with-
out murder, and a wise chief would choose the latter.

The Chickasaws and Choctaws gave in they abandoned seventeen mil-

;

lion acres of land in Mississippi and Alabama and moved west across the
river. The Cherokees put their faith in the Supreme Court of the United
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 263

States and stayed where they were. The state of Georgia extended its
jurisdiction over their territory. The Supreme Court upheld the rights of
the Indians and ordered Georgia to desist. Georgia paid no heed, and
neither did the President.
Another case, arising when Georgia for the second time extended its
power over the doomed Cherokees, came before the Supreme Court in
1832. The Court held that Georgia was without authority over the
Indians. It is on this occasion that Jackson is reported to have said, "John
Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." There is some
doubt as to this neat statement of the nullifier's creed; but there is no
doubt that Jackson wrote "The decision of the Supreme Court has fell
:

still born, and they find it cannot coerce Georgia to

yield."
It would seem to follow that if the federal government made a law, a

decision, or a treaty, which was disliked by the citizens of a state, those

citizens might refuse to obey and the President would do nothing. Yet
when Calhoun urged the South Carolinians to refuse to obey a federal
tariff, Jackson talked of treason and of hanging. The sanction of a law, in
other words, depended upon whether the President liked the law. Jackson
might have had trouble putting the idea into philosophic terms, yet it was
good American doctrine. Jefferson, Madison, Webster, Jackson, Calhoun
himself, all found that the demands and decisions of the federal govern-
ment were sacred when they agreed with them, tyrannous when they
didn't. Or to use the language of the American Revolution, they found
these demands and decisions backed by natural law when they agreed with
them, and opposed by eternal principles when they didn't.
The Tariff of Abominations, as we have seen, led Vice-President Cal-
houn to write the South Carolina Exposition; but he kept the authorship
secret and urged his followers to wait for an attempt at peaceful repeal.
He thought Jackson, the incoming President, would prove a friend and
ally, and it was two years before he knew he was wrong. Meanwhile, in
1829, the Exposition was defended in the Senate during a debate on
Western land.
The North and the South were bidding for Western votes the first to
maintain, the second to abolish, the tariff. The West wanted cheaper land,
or free land if possible. The North could not offer free land, for fear too
many of its own factory hands should turn pioneer; so it proposed as an
alternative to distribute the proceeds from land sales among the states,
with a bonus to those states wherein the lands lay. The ingenious Henry
Clay thought this would satisfy the West and at the same time get rid of
the surplus revenue, so that the high tariff could not be attacked on the
ground that brought in too much money. The South, on the other hand,
it

support the West in throwing open the public domain if the

felt free to
West would vote for a reduction in the tariff. "On the outcome of this
264 The Price of Union

sectional balance," wrote Professors Morison and Commager, "depended

the alignment of parties in the future even of the Civil War
: itself. Was
it to be North and West against South, or South and West against
North?" 10
In December, 1829, this momentous question came before the Senate.
Foot* of Connecticut suggested restricting the sale of public lands to those
already on the market. Benton of Missouri opposed the resolution as a
typical piece of Eastern hostility toward the West, and called upon* the
South for help. Hayne of South Carolina responded, precipitating the
most famous debate in Congressional history. Hayne quickly got away
from the problem of public land onto the problem of the Constitution. He
defended the Calhoun doctrine that a state may defy a federal law if it
is convinced that the law is unconstitutional. If the federal government

was the judge of its own power, argued Hayne, the states were impotent ;

and if the states were impotent a numerical majority of voters living in the
industrial Northeast might impose unbearable conditions upon the entire
southern region.
Here was the old problem which had called forth the resistance of Ken-
tucky and Virginia to John Adams, and the resistance of New England to
Jefferson: men might submit to a majority of their neighbors, but they
would not submit to a majority living a thousand miles away. "Of what
value is our representation here," said Hayne, attacking the tariff, when
"the imposition is laid, not by the representatives of those who pay the tax,
but by the representatives of those who are to receive the bounty?" South
Carolina, he argued, was trying to save herself from federal laws which
had wrecked her economy and which would soon reduce the South to
ruin. By devising means to frustrate an unjust majority, South Carolina
was safeguarding the Union.
On January 26, 1830, Daniel Webster replied. The power which Senator
Hayne would bestow upon the states, said Webster, belonged to the federal
Supreme Court. The Court alone should decide whether Congress had the
power to make a law, otherwise the federal government became a rope of
sand. In one state the tariff would be null and void; in another state it
would be legal; there could be no consistency, and in the end no Union.
Nullification was treason, and neither a state nor a man could commit
treason with impunity. Webster, whose amazing presence made his
speeches far more important than the arguments they contained,** con-
cluded with the peroration about "Liberty and Union, now and forever,
one and inseparable." Generations of school children were to recite those

* Senator Samuel
Augustus Foot, like his father before him, spelled the name
without a final e. His descendants have adopted the longer form.
**
Carlyle described Webster's "crag-like face; the dull black eyes under the prec-
ipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 265

sonorous lines. They helped to attach men's patriotism, in the North and

West, to the national rather than the local community. They may well
have helped to turn the sentimental Andrew Jackson from the support of
state rights; which he had once seemed to favor, to the support of the
Union.
On April 13, 1830, a few months after the Hayne- Webster debate, the
leaders of the Democratic Party attended a Jefferson Day dinner. It was
expected that Jackson, when he spoke, would make clear which side of the
debate he favored. The question was vital for the assembled politicians;
Jackson's choice would settle whether Calhoun was to be the next Presi-
dent, and whether for the immediate future the Constitution was to be
administered according to the logic of Webster or of Hayne. When the
time came for the President to give a toast, Jackson rose and pledged
"Our Federal Union, it must be preserved!" The nullifiers were undone.
Calhoun's plan to unite the South in resistance to centralization was de-
layed for twenty years, until the slave question had overshadowed the
problem of government. The Democratic Party was committed, tempo-
rarily, to a nationalism as complete as that of Clay and Webster and John
Quincy Adams.
Although Jackson's toast meant that Galhoun would not yet rule the
Democratic Party, he still ruled the state of South Carolina. Nullification
was defeated as a national solution to the problem of minorities; but it
was not defeated in its birthplace. During the summer of 1831 Calhoun
issued an Address to the People of South Carolina, a restatement of the

argument in the Exposition. When in July, 1832, Clay won the votes of
the West for a new high tariff, Calhoun abandoned passive resistance. In
the autumn elections the nullifiers swept the state. The legislature called
a convention which passed an "Ordinance of Nullification" declaring
that neither the "Tariff of Abominations" nor the new tariff of 1832 was
binding upon the people of South Carolina. The legislature also decreed
that if goods were seized by federal officers for nonpayment of duties, the
owners of the goods might recover twice their value from the officials who
seized them. The governor was authorized to call out the militia, and

early in 1833 he summoned ten thousand citizens to be ready to repel

invasion.
Jackson was the last man in America to be impressed by a threat of

mouth accurately closed." Robert Lytton saw Webster when he visited America as
a youth in 1850-52. Years later he wrote (Personal and Literary Letters of the
Earl of Lytton, vol. I, p. 32) "Webster I think on the whole the greatest speaker,
:

or rather the greatest orator, I ever heard. . He had a singularly musical and
. .

mellow voice. . . He had a wonderful, an awful, face, with eyes set in caverns,
.

and one might certainly say of him what Sydney Smith said of Lord Thurlow,
that the Almighty never made any man as wise as he looked." It was Fox, not
Sydney Smith, who made the remark about Lord Thurlow.
266 The Price of Union

force.He prepared the Navy and the Army, talked bravely about hanging
Calhoun,* and in December, 1832, issued his Proclamation to the people
of South Carolina (the work of Edward Livingston).

Admit this doctrine [said the Proclamation] and every law for raising
revenue may be annulled. ... I consider, then, the power to annul a
law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the
existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Con-
stitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on
which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it
was formed. . To say that any state may at pleasure secede from
. .

the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation. . Disunion
. .

by armed force is treason. Arc you really ready to incur its guilt? If you
are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful conse-
quences.
Those are strong words. They did not lead to strong deeds because the
country was averse to treating Calhoun and his followers as traitors. South
Carolina stood firm but the rest of the country was of divided mind. In
;

Virginia the powerful group represented by John Tyler was in sympathy

with the nullifiers. Opinion in New York was divided. Georgia,, Mississippi,
and Alabama would not have supported Jackson against South Carolina
had he not recently helped them nullify the federal treaties which favored
the Indians. Except for the fiery President, there were few who would
have executed the leaders of South Carolina with a clear conscience. The
country wanted a compromise.
Clay, the skilled and happy compromiser, used his influence to secure a
bill which would reduce the tariff over a period of nine years until it stood

at twenty per cent. At the same time, as a sop to the nationalists, a "Force
Act" was passed, giving the President authority to call out the army and
navy to enforce the laws of Congress. South Carolina, having won the re-
duction of the tariff, repealed her Nullification Ordinance but declared
the Force Act null and void. Temporarily the crisis was at an end.
The crisis was at an end, and there was no comment from John Ran-
dolph. For the first time in thirty-four years an important political event
was not annotated by that singular mind. Randolph of Roanoke was
dying. The most faithful of the "Old Republicans,'* he had broken his
career and denied his friendships out of loyalty to the principles of 1798.
All his life he had labored to weaken the power of the central govern-
ment,** and all his life he had watched that power grow sometimes at the
:

hands of his fellow Virginians, sometimes at the hands of a hated North-

*
Marquis James and Hugh Russell Fraser have shown that Jackson was not
the cheerful swashbuckler he has often been pictured, when he threatened to hang
Galhoun. On the contrary, he was much worried as to what might happen to the
country if he was driven to strong measures.
**
Except when he supported the Louisiana Purchase.
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 267

erner, but most of all at the hands of "this wretched old man," as he
described Jackson during the nullification fight. In his last days he saw
the start of a new challenge to central power, led by a man as implacable
as himself and far more competent. Perhaps he took hope from knowing
that the fight would go on; but probably not, since he had long foretold
that the fight was lost, that centralization must conquer, and that "rny
country," as he called Virginia, must fall. Nevertheless, he offered to join
the army of South Carolina if Calhoun went to war. Instead of such melo-
drama, he lived just long enough to see his detested Henry Clay make
another compromise. He was too tired to fight. We do not know what
baleful flashes of vision and of invective the nation was spared but we do
;

know that Randolph was not the man to praise a compromise.**

At the height of the conflict Calhoun had resigned the vice-presidency,
and in January, 1833, he replaced Hayne in the Senate. The day he took
his oath he was looked upon as a brave man who might soon pay with his
life for his opinions but two months later he
; emerged from the shadow of
the gallows with a new prestige. He also emerged as the ally of a new
With several of his disciples, Calhoun made overtures to
political party.
the Whigs. He was warmly welcomed by Henry Clay, for the only convic-
tion demanded of a Whig was that he should dislike Andrew Jackson.
Nevertheless Calhoun's association with the new party was to be brief and
embarrassed. As we have seen, it was virtually at an end by 1837.

Calhoun was born in the South Carolina uplands where Jackson had been
born fifteen years before. They both had the same dour Scotch-Irish blood.
Unlike the Jacksons, the Calhoun family had been settled for two genera-
tions and had begun to prosper. The ambitious boy, therefore, did not

push West but stayed at home and married his cousin, Floride, whose!
mother was Floride Bonneau of the tidewater aristocracy. Calhoun was
educated at Yale College and became a lawyer. After his marriage he had
enough money to devote himself to public life. He began his Congressional
career as a "war-hawk," a nationalist, a promoter of internal improve-
ments to avoid "that greatest of all calamities disunion." During the
. . .

eighteen-twenties he watched with distress the growth of economic and

cultural antagonism between North and South. He sought constitutional
means for protecting his minority region. With all his ardent being he still

hoped to hold the nation together but not at the sacrifice of South Caro-
lina. If nationalism meant the exploitation of the farm by the factory, he

* He was buried at Roanoke with his face to the West. According to legend,
this was so he could "keep an eye on Clay/'
268 The Price of Union

must abandon nationalism and give allegiance to his state. It was the
greatness of Daniel Webster that he could feel (and make others feel)
the beauty and the hope for man that lay in the federal Union; it was the
strength of Calhoun that when the choice had to be made his heart had
to be given to the hills and villages of his youth. For him, South Carolina
was the only unit small enough to be known the way a man should know
his country, small enough to be loved. And it may not be irrelevant that
the Union, for Massachusetts, meant wealth, but for South Carolina,
poverty. Or so it seemed to Calhoun, unless he could exempt his people
from the laws passed to benefit other regions, with other interests, climates,
institutions.*
He saw America as a nation of dangerous and growing diversity, stretch-
ing from the sub-tropical Gulf to the sub-arctic continental plains and
containing many races, religions, and economies. The clash of these inter-
ests must either split the Union, or subject some regions to a colonial
economic status, or else the clash must be restrained. It could not be re-
strained by force, since if the use of force were permitted those who con-
trolled it would run the country for their own advantage and suppress
dissent. How, then, could man's lust for power and wealth be kept from

ruining America? Only, he decided, by an agreement that each important

interest and each important region must consent to every act of govern-
ment which impinged upon its affairs. This might be done by giving to
each state the right to nullify federal laws which displeased it, or it might
be done by constitutional amendment. In either case, the result would be
what Calhoun called the rule of the concurrent majority: rule by the
agreement of all interested parties.
The fact that such a rule, embodied formally in the Constitution, would
thwart all government action did not bother Calhoun. As a traditional
American he that a government incapable of acting at all would be
felt
better than a government free to act as it chose especially if a mere nu-
merical majority was to do the choosing. ** In this, he was a devout "Old

* Calhoun
exaggerated when he spoke as if the South was suffering "oppression.'*
After the North had accepted Clay's compromise tariff bill of 1833, the South had
no serious economic grievance. And in any case, she was to control the federal
government most of the time until the Civil War. But Calhoun was alarmed by
the growing population of the North, and wished to ensure a minority veto for
his state or region while there was still time. In speaking of a future danger as
if it were already present, he had good American precedent. Colonial discontent,

beginning with the Stamp Act and culminating in the Revolution, was based more
upon fear of what Great Britain intended than upon anything that had been done.
Professor Samuel Eliot Morison writes (The American Revolution, 17641788,
Sources and Documents, p. xiv) "It is a fair question whether potential rather
:

than actual oppression did not produce the ferment in America."

** In the Address to the
People of South Carolina, July 26, 1831, he wrote that
the "dissimilarity and, as I must add, contrariety of interests in our country . . .

are so great that they cannot be subjected to the unchecked will of a majority of
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 269

Republican/' a faithful son of 1798. But he allowed his logic to triumph

over his political wisdom when he asked that the federal government
formally commit itself to impotence. The rule of the concurrent majority
is a fair description of how the government of a federal
empire must
operate ; it is a fair description, as we shall see, of how in normal times the
modern American Government does operate but only informally, only
by custom, and gentlemen's agreements, and the subtle refinements of the
party system. All these can be overridden in time of emergency; but in an
emergency Calhoun's rigid plan would have condemned the nation to
death. Calhoun was a doctrinaire, not a politician in the Anglo-American
tradition of practical compromise.
Calhoun was the stern, pessimistic leader of a doomed cause. He was
the sleepless enemy of Leviathan; but Leviathan could not be destroyed.
If Webster looked too wise for this world, Calhoun looked too tragic. It
was not a pose, for he foresaw accurately the ruin of his hopes. Henry
Clay pictured him as "tall, careworn, with fevered brow, haggard cheek
and eye, intensely gazing, looking as if he were dissecting the last and
newest abstraction which had sprung from some metaphysician's brain,
and muttering to himself, in half -uttered words, 'This is indeed a crisis!' "
Clay did not believe in crises or in abstractions. He did not believe in
the logic by which Calhoun learned that day by day the nation moved
closer to disunion. Clay was the assured politician, adept in the concili-
ations whereby "inevitable" crises were postponed, "inevitable" issues
evaded. This time he seemed to be wrong; this time the issue could not be
dodged. America was either a nation or a cluster of sovereign states, and
some day she must decide which. Yet even so, even where Calhoun's logic
was right, Clay was to triumph in the end by temporizing and compromis-
ing and denying the plain facts until it was too late for Calhoun to get his
way without force, and too late for the force to be effective. Calhoun
v/ould have had the South a free nation by 1850; but Clay and the other
compromisers postponed the issue until the North was strong enough to
win a civil war. Clay did not plan it He
merely planned to avoid
that way.
head-on collisions as long as possible, in the
hope that something might
turn up. By so doing he became a savior of the Union.

The problem of the public domain had been exacerbated rather than
settled by the Hayne- Webster debate. The Land Act of 1820, as we saw,

the whole without defeating the great end of government, without which it is a
curse justice."
270 The Price of Union

had allowed settlers to buy tracts as small as eighty acres, and for a dollar
and a quarter an acre. This was a victory for the Western school (which
wanted to dispose of the lands quickly, for the benefit of settlers and
speculators alike) over the school of John Quincy Adams (which wanted
to hold the lands for a fair price and to use the money for internal im-

provements and education). Yet even a dollar and a quarter an acre

seemed excessive to the West, as the day approached when the national
debt would be extinguished. According to the school of Benton, when the
federal government no longer needed the money it should either give the
land away or give the proceeds to the states. So in 1832 six states asked
Congress to sell them the public domain within their own borders and to
divide the money among all the states in the Union. The request led to a
show of political chicanery which was a warning to the new democracy.
The Jackson men in the Senate referred the matter to the Committee
on Manufactures, of which Clay was chairman, rather than to the Com-
mittee on Public Lands. "I felt," said Clay, quite correctly, "that the
design was to place in my hands a many-edged instrument which I could
not touch without being wounded." It was in this report that Clay, unable
to persuade his Eastern allies to lower the price of the lands, suggested

distributing the proceeds among all the states with a bonus to the states in
which the lands lay* The suggestion was ingenious; but the Jackson poli-
ticians had only played half their hand. When the Clay report was in, the
Seriate voted to refer the whole matter, for reconsideration, to the Com-
mittee on Public Lands, where it should have gone in the first place. That
committee brought in a report written by Thomas Hart Benton, attacking
Clay for putting revenue ahead of the interests of the settlers. The Benton
report said the price of the lands should be reduced to a dollar an acre,
and in five years to fifty cents an acre.

Clay defended his plan in a good speech, and again nothing was done
except to reduce the size of the minimum tract from eighty to forty acres.
The Jackson men, however, had procured a Clay- Whig report and a
Benton-Democratic report to circulate through the Western country, so
that the settlers could see which party was willing to offer them the best
terms. "The old school of politicians," wrote Claude G. Bowers in discuss-
ing this episode, "still gauged public opinion by the roll-calls of the Con-
gress. The new school, which came in with Jackson, were least of all
concerned with the views of the politicians at the capital. They were
interesting themselves with the plain voters, and were devising means for
11
reaching these in the campaign to follow." Unhappily, the "new school"
did not interest itself in the plain voters with an eye to what would do
them good, but with an eye to what would trick them into voting for the
members of the school.
Nothing useful resulted from the elaborate game which had been played
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 271

upon Clay. The moment when the proceeds from the public lands were
no longer needed to pay the national debt was the moment to face the
problem of a permanent land policy. Instead of seeking to deal with the
problem, the "new school" treated itself to some low japery and left the
matter where it was. Neither the Adams plan nor the Benton plan was
adopted. The lands were not used to endow a democratic educational
system for the entire nation. Neither were they made secure, at the lowest
price, forgenuine settlers. They were left at the mercy of the speculator.
And the land problem was left, like other major problems, to become en-
tangled with the slavery fight and thus help promote the catastrophe of
war.
As decade of 1840-50 the question of free land was discussed
late as the

apart from the question of slavery.

"Hayne of South Carolina, Thomasson
of Kentucky, Smith and Ficklin of Illinois, Murphy of New York, Mc-
Connell of Alabama, and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee all advocated the
principle in one form or another. The important point ... is that the
demand came from every quarter; but in the next decade the ques-
. . .

tion became strictly sectional." 12

In 1851, Andrew Johnson introduced a homestead bill* which was sup-
ported by thirty-three Southern members of the House and opposed by
thirty. In 1859 the same bill received only three Southern votes one each
from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. The merits or demerits of free
land no longer mattered. The Southerners were against it; the new Re-
publican Party was solidly for it; slavery had made even the use of land
into a sectional struggle. The reason usually given is that the South awoke
to the knowledge that the Homestead Act would favor the small farmer
rather than the planter, and thus encourage free labor rather than slave
labor. It is hard to see why this should have become clear in the eighteen-
fifties if it was not clear in the eighteen-forties. Professor Webb offers a

more plausible reason. Profitable large-scale slavery, on the whole, was

confined to the cotton plantation, and by 1850 the cotton kingdom in
its westward march had almost reached the 98th meridian that fateful
divide in American climate, geography, and life. West of 98 lay the
Great Plains, where there was no timber and the rainfall dropped to less
than twenty inches a year, and in places to less than ten. West of 98 the
animals, the plants, the Indians, the life of the white man, changed
radically; in fact, the white man jumped this vast region at first, carrying
the frontier straight to the Pacific Ocean, not seeking to settle the Plains
until he had devised new institutions and new machinery: the cattle
ranch, the stock farm, barbed wire, the tin windmill, and the Colt six-
shooter.
There was no place for the cotton kingdom, with its pampered institu-
*
Granting free land to genuine settlers.
Physical Geoqrnpkf
cfthe United States
Generalized mid-Mutton relief

QnatJtaint Os&gc fburu Highland Bam

Average Annual Rainfall

m the U.S
xiii. The Jackson Men in Action 273

tion of slavery, in the rough world west of 98 and the cotton plantation
;

was already prevented from spreading north, both by law and by climate.

Thesouthern opposition to the Homestead Act [wrote Professor

Webb] grew out of the fact that it was to apply in a region from which
plantations, andtherefore, slaves, were barred by the laws of nature. By
1850 the cotton kingdom had expanded about as far as it could go to
the West. ... It was bounded on the north by cold; it was bounded
on the west by aridity. .. Had the southern portion of the Great
.

Plains been suitable to cotton, the South would have had possession of
it before an issue arose, and would have continued in favor of free land
as it was in the beginning. The point that has been overlooked is that the
land was useless to the South, even though it was free. 13

In 1832, however, the frontier was well east of the 98th meridian. In 1832,
the land question might have been solved forever, without sectional bitter-
ness, if the politicians had been less crafty.
When the South turned decisively against free land, in the eighteen-
the North espoused it. The long opposition of Eastern industry was
fifties,
silenced by the argument that free land was the price of Western votes for
a high "Vote yourself a farm" and "Vote yourself a tariff" became
tariff.

the campaign cries during the election which put Lincoln into the White
House. The South had bought almost thirty years of low tariff by offering
very cheap land; the North was now to buy generations of high tariff by
offering land for nothing. So the final alignment was North and West
against South an alignment which created desperation in the South and
:

thus made disunion more likely.* The difficulties of maintaining a federal

empire had been needlessly aggravated by the failure to deal with the
Western lands in time.

The first task of the politicians gathered about Jackson was to please as
many groups as possible in the loose coalition which had put the Demo-
crats in power. There was reason to hope that the Eastern workers, and
the poor in general, would be pleased by the war on the Bank, that the
North and most of the West would be pleased by the attack on nullifica-
tion, and that the West would also be pleased by the demagogic treatment
of the public land question. The planters of Alabama and of inland
Georgia were unquestionably pleased by the betrayal of the Indians; but
what of the tidewater planters, a number of whom Van Buren had lured
* As we shall see, this alignment was greatly strengthened by the Southern
compete with the North in railway-building.
failure to
274 The Price of Union

into the Jackson coalition? The further the President turned from states'
rights toward the Webster view of the Union, the more these men would
feel cheated. What could be done to cheer them? For the sake of party

unity and discipline Van Buren was ready to lose some of the original
Jackson votes, but never by default, never without making a fight to hold
them. The planters, with their immense social influence, represented many
votes and much power. Such a group must not be allowed to feel forgotten.
The best way to calm their fears at the drift away from states' rights would
be to perform some symbolic act in praise of states' rights such as the
veto of a bill for internal improvements at federal expense. For Jackson,
such a veto would have the added charm of undermining Henry Clay and
his American System.
Internal improvements, however, were popular among the Western
grain-growers, so the veto should apply to as small a project as possible :

something which would sound important in the South, unimportant in the

West. Such political gems are hard to find, so the search was assigned to
the past-master, Van Buren. "It was understood between us," wrote Van
Buren, "that I should keep an eye upon the movements of Congress and

bring to his [Jackson's] notice the first Bill upon which I might think his
interference would be preferable." 14
Biding Van Buren found the perfect
his time, article a bill authorizing
:

federal subscription of stock for a twenty-mile highway lying entirely in

Kentucky, Henry Clay's state. By ignoring the fact that the little "Mays-
ville Road" was intended to be a link in the long road to New Orleans,

Jackson could attack it as a selfish local project which could not possibly
come under the head of the "general welfare." The bill was so exactly
what the Administration wanted that Van Buren was afraid Clay's friends
would learn what was afoot and would "substitute a bill for a work more
national in its pretensions." 15 He begged the General for once to be dis-
creet, and three pages of his Autobiography are given to a description of
Jackson's droll but unsuccessful efforts to take his advice. The veto, never-
theless, was a success.* The Democrats lost votes to Clay in Kentucky and
Ohio; but most of the country was indifferent, and the Southern planters
were temporarily placated. Even Hayne of South Carolina spoke of the
veto as "the most auspicious event which had taken place in the history of
the country for years past." Van Buren had achieved the grand coup of
American politics he had gratified a powerful group of supporters, in an
:

important region, at the cost of a minimum of votes elsewhere, and with-

out disturbing the country as a whole. This is a maneuver which must fre-
quently be attempted by American national leaders. It is the price of such
unity as they can impose upon their precarious coalitions; but it does not
make for logic or consistency.
*
May 27, 1830.
Arm. The Jackson Men in Action 275

The Maysville Bill was one of twelve bills vetoed by Jackson. His six
predecessors, during a period of forty years, had vetoed only nine bills
between them. The change is a sign of the new type of people's presidency.
Jackson told the Senate that he alone was "the direct representative of the
people, elected by the people, and responsible to them," whereas the
Senate itself was "a body not directly amenable to the people." It followed,
in Jackson's mind, that he must if necessary protect the people from the
acts of the legislature; not merely from such acts as were unconstitutional
but from such acts as were unwise.
The Senate cried out against this novel view of the President's office;
but cried in vain. "Really and in practice," said Henry Clay a few years
it

later, "this veto power drew after it the power of initiating laws, and in its
effects must ultimately amount to conferring on the executive the entire

legislative power of the government. With the power to initiate and the
power consummate
to legislation, to give vitality
and vigor to every law, or
to strike it dead at his pleasure, the President must ultimately become the
16
ruler of the nation." And again he said, "the veto is hardly reconcilable
with the genius of representative government. It is totally irreconcilable
with it if it is to be employed in respect to the expediency of measures, as
Under such circumstances, "the govern-
well as their constitutionality."
ment have been transformed into an elective monarchy."*
will
Webster and Calhoun protested as bitterly, and to as little effect. What
Clay said about the power of the presidency was true, so long as the
people were willing to support the President as they supported Jackson.
The veto messages, written by the Kitchen Cabinet for popular consump-
tion, became an effective form of campaign literature and a device for

carrying the President's ideas into every cottage. No member of Congress

could command such an audience. If the Senate felt itself diminished by
the Jacksonian presidency, which in Clay's words was an "elective mon-
archy," the House of Representatives mourned its own decline with even
more reason.

The democratic revolution [wrote Ford] overthrew the pillars of its

greatness. It ceased to make Presidents; it ceased to control them. In-
stead of being the seat of party authority the motive force of the
administration it became in this respect merely a party agency. Na-
tional party purposes, having to seek their fulfilment through the presi-
dential office, had nothing to ask of the House but obedience to party
demands, and at once began the task of devising machinery to enforce
submission. 17
* President Franklin Roosevelt vetoed 631 Acts of
Congress.
276 The Price of Union

At the end of his second term, in 1837, Jackson retired to "The Hermit-
age," his farm near Nashville, Tennessee. He did not seek to maintain in
retirement the influence over his old associates which Jefferson had kept
up until the end. Perhaps he felt that his work was done, that his task*had
been to alter institutions, rather than to make policy. He and his friends
had remodeled the Executive and the political parties; they had changed
the nature of the American Government; but they had not succeeded in
using the new forms to deal effectively with the old problems. They failed
to solve the money question, though at least they prevented it from being
solved badly. They failed to solve the question that lay back of nullifica-
tion how to run a country the size of an empire, on democratic principles,
without sacrificing regional minorities to the greed of the people who can
muster the most votes. They failed to solve the tangled problem of the
public lands. And for the most part they failed even to admit the problem
of slavery.
One intangible asset they bequeathed to the future the symbolic figure
:

of Jackson. In the American mind the word "Jackson" means the buoyant
and hopeful youth of democracy. It means a fighting friend for the people,
a friend who could not be terrorized. It means a proper contempt for the

power of mere finance. Fromthe time of Jackson, no American has

doubted that a man working for the people's good can be as relentlessly
stubborn as any tyrant.
Andrew Jackson died in 1845. It is a legend in Tennessee that one of
his slaves was asked if he thought the General had gone to heaven. The

reply came without hesitation "Of course he went to heaven if he took

:

a mind to"
 XIV

The Rise of the Whigs

XHE ELECTION OF 1836 was unusual in several ways. The Democratic

nominating convention the second in the history of the party had been
held eighteen months before, during the spring of 1835. Jackson had in-
sisted on this because his health was declining and he feared that he might
soon be too tired to dominate his own party. State legislatures and state
conventions were already putting forward a variety of candidates; but
Jackson meant to prove that there was only one Democratic Party, of
which he was the master, and that the party had only one choice for the
presidency: Van Buren.
Strict discipline,backed by federal patronage, was imposed upon the
delegates. In theory, these delegates were "fresh from the people," repre-
senting the considered wishes of the electorate; in fact, they were a col-
lection of docile party workers, representing nothing but the orders which
the local machines had given them. The rule of 1832, that each state
should send as many delegates as it had presidential electors, was not ob-
served; each state sent as many delegates as could be trusted to do what
they were told. Maryland, for example, sent 181 delegates (out of a total
of 626), whereas Illinois, South Carolina, and Alabama sent none.*
Van Buren was unanimously nominated on the first ballot. Colonel
Richard Johnson of Kentucky,** his most powerful rival, was chosen for
* The convention met in Baltimore. The figures are taken from Frank Kent's
The Democratic Party.
**
Johnson was born in 1780, at Beargrass, a settlement on the site of Louisville,
Kentucky. He was one of the first national figures to be a native of the new West.
He went to the House of Representatives, where he supported the War of 1812.
During the war, as colonel of a regiment of mounted Kentucky riflemen, he was a
popular and successful leader. He was badly wounded at the battle of the Thames.
When he recovered he returned to Congress, serving in the House until 1819, and
then in the Senate until 1829. After 1825 he became a faithful follower of Jackson;
but he never did or said anything of importance. As a candidate for the presidential
nomination, he was chiefly interesting because of his illegitimate daughters by a
mulatto slave whom he had inherited from his father. Johnson, who was unmarried,
made no concealment of the affair. He brought his girls up as educated and
privileged young women. They both married white men, and inherited from their
father. As a result of this openness, Virginia disapproved of Johnson, even as a
vice-presidential candidate, and in 1836 he failed to get a majority of the electoral
vote. He thus became the only Vice-President ever elected by the Senate under
Article II. Section 1 of the Constitution. He served inconspicuously, and retired to
private life in 1841.
277
278 The Price of Union

the vice-presidency. There were no nominating speeches, the chairman

remarking that "the rule against them is intended to prevent any violent,
angry and unnecessary discussion that might otherwise arise." He flattered
the patient sheep, who had been sent to do Jackson's bidding, by assum-
ing that they could rouse themselves to violence or anger. Yet in spite of
the autocracy, and of the humbug inseparable from such a boss-ridden
convention, there is little doubt that Van Buren was the best man avail-
able. Jackson insisted on his own way to the end, and his own way* con-
tinued useful for the nation.
The Whigs, meanwhile, decided not to spend their frail strength on one
candidate, but to back a local favorite in several of the main regions. They
hoped to keep Van Buren from receiving a majority, and thus throw the
election into the House of Representatives. In the Southwest they chose
Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, an old friend and supporter
of Jackson who had been alienated by the dwindling of Western influence
in the Democratic Party, and by the ascendancy of the Easterner, Van
Buren, and of the radical Locofocos. In the Northeast, Daniel Webster
was the Whig candidate. In the Southeast, Calhoun was expected to be
cold to Van Buren even if he was not warm to the Whigs. And in the
Northwest, a truly remarkable candidate was unearthed: William Henry
Harrison, clerk of the court of common pleas in Cincinnati, a quiet, unsuc-
cessful gentleman of sixty-three who in 1811 had led a thousand troops

against the Indians at Tippecanoe Creek and had lost 188 of his own men
in the course of the indecisive engagement. This harmless ex- Virginian
\vas destined to become the symbol for all that was absurd in the new type
of democratic politics. No sooner had Harrison been nominated by his
friends, in the summer of 1835, than Nicholas Biddle wrote a set of in-
structions for the campaign:
"Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed
let him say nothing promise nothing. Let no Committee, no convention
no town meeting ever extract from him a single word, about what he
thinks now, or what he will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be
wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam."
Here was a course of action well suited to Harrison's taste and training.
He adopted it literally, and with striking success. Whereas White carried
only Tennessee and Georgia in the election, and Webster only Massachu-
setts, the silent and penless Harrison won seven states. This was not enough
to deprive Van Buren of a majority (he won 170 electoral votes to 124 for
all his opponents) ; but it was plenty to set the politicians thinking about
the value of a candidate so little known that nobody disliked him
who was
and so ambiguous thatnobody could attack him with clarity. It had
hitherto been assumed that popularity was useful in a candidate; it now
dawned on the professionals that the absence of unpopularity might be
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 279

more important. The new party machines could "get out the vote" for any-
one who was not actively disliked, and by the simplest process of ballyhoo
they could make a nonentity into a national figure within a few months.
Failing an uncommonly popular candidate like Jackson, whose friends
were so numerous that they could overwhelm his foes, might it not be
better to have a synthetic candidate like Harrison, with no friends and no
foes? Might it not be better to elect a Harrison, who could be invented to
suit the needs of the moment, than a Clay or a Webster men of recalci-
trant reality, who were widely known, widely loved, and widely hated?
The questions were to be well explored in 1840.*

Van Buren's Inaugural Message was a gentle and sensible sermon in praise
of democracy, combined with an attempt to persuade both North and
South that there was no reason why they should not live together
amicably. Van Buren was to show courage and character when he finally
came to see that the slave question could not be dodged; but in 1837 his
political training still made
it impossible for him to believe that both sides

would not compromise properly soothed and flattered. At the famous

if

Jefferson Day dinner during the nullification crisis (when Jackson de-
clared his enmity to Calhoun and the South Carolina doctrine by the toast,
"Our Federal Union, it must be
preserved") Van Buren's toast had been,
,

"Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions." In this he was true to

his calling. It is a major task of American
politics to promote reciprocal
concessions.
In addition to his faith that good politics meant avoiding crises, Van
Buren held that good government meant doing as little as possible. In his
message to Congress on the Independent Treasury Bill (September 4,
1837), he wrote:

Those who look to the action of this Government for specific aid to
the citizen to relieve embarrassments arising from losses by revulsions in
commerce and credit lose sight of the ends for which it was created and
the powers with which it is clothed. It was established to give security
to us all in our lawful and honorable pursuits. ... It was not intended
to confer special favors on individuals or on any classes of them, to

* "Since
1840," say Professors Morison and Gommager (The Growth of the
American Republic, vol. I, pp. 451-52), "successful presidential candidates have
not been prominent and experienced statesmen, but military heroes or relatively
obscure men who have not had time to make enemies. Only by inadvertence, as in
the case of Lincoln and the Roosevelts, did the President prove to be a man of
put-
standing ability." This is a sobering thought. The same system of party politics
which gives untold powers to the President tends to insure that the President shall
280 The Price of Union

create systems of agriculture, manufactures, or trade. . . . All com-

munities are apt to look to government for too much. Even in our own
country, where its powers and duties are so strictly limited, we are prone
to do so, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress.
But this ought not to be. The framers of our excellent Constitution and
the people who approved it ... wisely judged that the less government
interferes with private pursuits the better for the general prosperity.
... Its real duty that duty the performance of which makes a good
government the most precious of human blessings is to enact arid en-
force a system of general laws commensurate with, but not exceeding,
the objects of its establishment, and to leave every citizen and every
interest to reap under its benign protection the rewards of virtue, in-
dustry, and prudence.
This is It is the doctrine implicit in the optimistic
pure Jefferson.
philosophy of natural rights. This philosophy denies that man is by nature
given to evil and to error, denies that he can only be saved by institutions
and by authority; it affirms that he is sufficiently endowed with reason and
with conscience so that if government will let him alone (will confer upon
him "the blessings of liberty") he can find his own way to a good life.
Liberty, for the eighteenth-century believer in natural rights, meant civil
liberties and the absence of government interference. It meant, in Carl
Becker's words, "the happy idea that the best way to serve the inalienable
rights of man is just to leave the individual as free as possible to do what
he likes, and that accordingly no form of government can secure them so
well as the one that governs least." 1 This "happy idea" grew up in the
pre-industrial world, when man suffered more from the officiousness of
church and state than from the insecurity, the unemployment, and the
breadlines which have accompanied the machine age. Van Buren was the
first American President to learn that in a time of fear and want men do

not appreciate lectures on laissez-faire.

The Panic of 1837 lasted throughout Van Buren's term, which explains
why he found it necessary to protest that people "are apt to look to gov-
ernment for too much." Van Buren sat tight, divorced the government
from all connection with the banks, and hoped that his party organization
would see him through. He went much farther than Jackson in the use of
federal patronage, and in readiness for 1840 he prepared an elaborate,
smooth, and disciplined machine.
be unfit to use them; yet powers are not conferred upon anybody
in that case the
else, so it is no wonder the public business sometimes lags. By a remarkable
if
series of accidents the system has so far worked without disaster, for not only did
Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt turn out to be strong when they were expected to be
feeble, but Theodore Roosevelt was put into the White House by the accident of
death, and James K. Polk, a typical politician's "dark horse," proved a winner. It is
a question whether the United States should continue to stake the future on such
haphazard strokes of good fortune.
xlv. The Rise of the Whigs 281

The Democratic Party had become more homogeneous, more easy to

manage, since the days when Van Buren had built it out of whatever bits
and pieces were available. The party had begun as a crazy coalition of
anti-Adams men who were prevailed upon to vote for Jackson, not be-
cause they liked him but because they thought he might beat the New
Englander. Little by Jackson defined his views, he lost sections of
little, as

knowledge of the people's mind, and of their hopes,

his following; but his
was so acute that he never lost ten votes without winning a dozen. His
party was stronger than ever when he stepped down, and more united.
He lost the missionaries and the Quakers when he betrayed the Indians;
he lost more ardent friends of internal improvements with the Mays-
the
ville veto; he lost the followers of Calhoun when he made Van Buren his

heir; he lost the states'-rights men in Virginia, and many of the planters
throughout the seaboard, when he made bitter war on nullification; his
hard-money policy lost him all the gamblers who had supported the attack
on the Bank because they preferred a wildly fluctuating currency. The
same money policy, however, won him the mass of the new urban work-
ers; the Indian policy won him the Northwestern wheat farmers as well as
the inland Southern planters; the fight against nullification won him the
many simple Northerners and Westerners who were growing steadily more
distrustful of the slave power. Without intending it, Jackson was building
a farmer-labor party, a party predominantly of the plain people. When
Van Buren went "locofoco" with his Independent Treasury Bill, this class
alignment became clearer; the Democrats were the party of the poor, the
Whigs the party of property. Within a very few years, however, regional
strife was to prove stronger than the economic bond of interest, and was
to break the Jacksonian alliance.
"Jacksonian Democracy," as a people's movement, was born about the
time of the destruction of the Bank, after the election of 1832; it was dead^
or dying, by 1844, when the Democratic National Convention refused to
endorse the Declaration of Independence in the party platform. The
Declaration, as an epitome of the natural-rights philosophy, had been the
battle cry of the Jacksonians. In 1840, Van Buren and the Locofocos could
still force it into the national platform; but it was not praised again by

the Democratic Party until long after the Civil War. By the end of the
decade, the farmer-labor party of Jackson had been captured by the slave
power and made to serve a cause that would not have been owned by the
author of the Declaration. Jacksonian Democracy perished; but the Demo-
cratic Party machine remained.*

Party organization was by this time completed. Except for the addition
of women, it has changed little from Van Buren's day to the present. The
* In 1932 and 1936 the Democratic
Party of Franklin Roosevelt had many
resemblances to that of Jackson.
282 The Price of Union

essential feature of the party machines was that they operated in three
spheres simultaneously the federal sphere, the state sphere, and the munic-
:

ipal or county sphere. Nothing should be said or done in any one sphere
which would prejudice the party's chances in either of the other spheres.
Hence the preference for saying and doing very little. At every moment
the professional party worker had to consider national interests, parochial
interests, regional interests, and class interests. Nobody could reconcile
these interests completely; but it was the task of the politician to reconcile
as many as possible, or better still to alienate as few as possible. Victory
would belong to the party which either appealed to the maximum of
interests in the maximum of regions, or which succeeded in annoying
nobody, so that it received the votes of all the people who disliked any
part of the opposition program. On the whole, the politicians felt safer in

this negative position. They felt could go wrong. Hence the charm
that less

of a candidate such as William Henry Harrison. Since he did not, in any

real sense, exist, he could be "filled in" by the local party workers to fit
the emotions of the day and the place. A man like Clay even a man like
the tranquil Van Buren after he had been long in public was known
life

to have certain ideas and plans. There was no use promising that he would

go counter to all the causes for which he had stood; but in the name of a
man like Harrison, who stood for zero, anything (and indeed everything)
could be promised. The strength of a Harrison depended on his capacity
to keep quiet, and on the energy and inventiveness of the local party
workers.
Theparty workers, meanwhile, were becoming steadily more numerous
as the new state constitutions created more and more elective offices, and
in many cases decreed shorter and shorter terms of office.* The more jobs
were available, and the more rapid the turnover in each job, the easier it
was to hold the machine together and to reward the faithful. Also, the

system of the nominating convention was being extended into local politics,
with useful results in the way of multiplying jobs and titles.

Local caucuses sent delegates to county conventions for nominating

candidates to county office; county conventions sent delegates to state
conventions for nominating state candidates, and to district conventions

*It is no wonder that Bryce, writing in 1887, was struck by the number of people
in America who made political work the chief business of their lives. He estimated
that there were hundreds of thousands of such people ( there would of course be far
more today), whereas in England (including editors and other political writers) he
thought there were about 3500. The chief reason for the difference is that a rigid
and numerous political organization is needed to make the American Constitution,
with its division of powers, workable, and that the only device which has been
found for holding such an organization together is the spoils system, which produces
even more politicians than axe needed.
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 283

for nominating congressional candidates; state conventions sent dele-

gates to the quadrennial national conventions for nominating the presi-
dential candidates and drafting the platform. .
Every state had its
. .

captains of hundreds and captains of thousands, working for the party

2
every day in the year, and looking for reward to the spoils of victory.

William Henry Harrison was born in Charles City County, Virginia, in

1773. On both sides of the family his ancestry was distinguished. His
father was Benjamin Harrison, a member of the Continental Congress,
a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and three times governor
of Virginia. Harrison was educated at Hampton-Sidney College, and
then studied medicine under the famous Dr. Benjamin Rush at Phila-
delphia. His father died in 1791. Finding himself in financial difficulties,
Harrison entered the army as an ensign. He had an uninspired but blame-
less military career, in the course of which he married Anna Symmes

daughter of the pioneer, John Cleves Symmes, who was largely respon-
sible for the founding of Cincinnati. In 1798, having risen to the rank of

captain, Harrison resigned to become Secretary of the Northwest Terri-

tory. The next year he was elected the territory's first delegate to Congress.
As chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, he reported the
bill which became the Land Act of 1800.
The year the bill became law, John Adams appointed Harrison gov-
ernor of the Indiana Territory, an office which he held until 1812. He
was expected by the federal government to look after the interests of
the Indians and at the same time to make sure that they ceded as much
land as possible to the United States. He can scarcely be blamed for
failing in this double task and for incurring the hostility of the Indians
whom he had done his best to help. When the Indians attempted to form
a league to fight for their lands, Harrison led a combined force of militia
and regular troops against them. The result was the battle of Tippecanoe,
famous in politics but inconclusive in warfare, for although the Indians
withdrew they reoccupied the land a few months later.*
War of 1812, Harrison rose to the rank of major
In the course of the
general and to the command of the Army of the Northwest. In September
and October, 18 13^ troops under his command reoccupied Detroit and
won an important victory against Major General Proctor on the River
Thames. It was at this battle that Colonel Richard Johnson of Kentucky,
*
During the period when he was governor of the Indiana Territory, Harrison's
eldest son was born a boy who was to have a minor political career and to became
the father of the twenty-third President of the United States.
284 The Price of Union

Van Buren's Vice-President, made his name. Harrison's reputation was

not enhanced, although the criticisms brought against him may have
been unjust* In any case, he soon fell out with the Secretary of War
and resigned from the Army.
After the war Harrison settled at North Bend, on the Ohio River
below Cincinnati, where he ran his farm and engaged in a number of
unsuccessful commercial ventures. From 1816 to 1819 he served incon-
spicuously in the House of Representatives, and in 1825 was elected to the
United States Senate. Three years later President Adams made him
the first United States Minister to Colombia. In 1829, after Jackson had
sent a successor to take his place, he stirred up so much trouble that the
Colombian Government threatened to arrest him. Returning to Amer-
ica, he retired once more to North Bend where he suffered further finan-
:ial reverses, becoming dependent for a
living on his farm and on his
>alary as clerk of the court of common There seemed every reason
pleas.
;o think that his modest career was an end; but suddenly the Whigs
at
inearthed him to serve as their Northwestern candidate in 1836.**
As we have seen, he won seven states and seventy-three electoral votes.
Fie and Clay were therefore the
leading candidates when the next Whig
lominating convention met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December
1839. The party was unencumbered with ideas or principles. It was de-
moted to the single and simple task of rounding up everyone in the country
vho could be induced to vote against Van Buren just as the Jackson men
n 1828 had been devoted solely to collecting the enemies of John Quincy
Vdams.
Clay was too well known, too strong a leader, too positive a character,
o satisfy the party bosses at Harrisburg. They were afraid that Clay
night alienate somebody, somewhere, who might otherwise cast a Whig
rote. And they knew that Clay would talk, if he were nominated. He
vould make speeches; he might even put something in writing. Every
ime a candidate said anything which could be understood, he was likely
o lose somebody's vote. If Van Buren had been a popular and dynamic
igure, it might have been necessary to oppose him with a man like Clay;
mt Van Buren was a pedestrian President, burdened with the long de-
>ression which had begun in 1837. He had nothing but his party ma-
:hine to help him, and in a contest of machines the Whigs preferred
lot to be handicapped by a candidate with a known record. Under the

guidance of Thurlow Weed of New York (the Whig counterpart of

* The
Dictionary of American Biography deals with them in the following
autious words: "He was not a great general, but he served to the best of his ability
n the face of great difficulties and the controversies over his valor and ability
;
. . .

vere regrettable rather than conclusive."

** Presumably they chose him because his name was linked with the Land Act
>f
1800, a famous and popular measure in the Northwest.
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 285

Van Buren), they chose the mouselike Harrison.* For the vice-presidency
they nominated John Tyler of Virginia, a leader of the states' -rights
group who had opposed Jackson's removal of the bank deposits, and also
his stand on nullification, and who was therefore considered an honorary
Whig.

Needless to say, the campaign of 1840 was absurd. Neither Harrison nor
any party leader was to say "a single word about what he thinks now or
will do hereafter" ; so it was necessary to find some other topic for speech-

making. This was supplied by a Democratic editor. The farmhouse where

Harrison had been living for ten years had formerly been a log cabin,
and the General was said to drink cider with his meals. So a foolish Balti-
more newspaper called him the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate.
Delighted with the phrase, the Whigs pictured Harrison as a son of toil
who could be trusted to understand all humble men, and whose life
proved how cynical was the suggestion that the Whigs favored the
moneyed classes. On the contrary, the Whigs were happy only in the
simplest surroundings and with the simplest drinks.
Not only was Harrison made into the frontiersman's friend, but he
became a military hero. It seemed that the battle of Tippecanoe was
the crisis in American history. "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," was the chief
campaign slogan, varied at times with the more practical statement:
"Harrison, two dollars a day, and roast beef." The campaign songs were
on the order of the following:
LetVan from his coolers of silver drink wine
And lounge on his cushioned settee.
Our man on his buckeye couch can recline,
Content with hard cider is he,
The iron-armed soldier, the true-hearted soldier,
The gallant old soldier of Tippecanoe!

Or, more briefly:

Farewell, dear Van,

You're not our man;
To guide the ship
We'll try old Tip.

* Webster had withdrawn his name before the

convention, knowing^ that he had
no chance. Clay sat drinking and cursing in a Washington hotel, waiting for the
bad news. When it came he cried out, "My friends are not wOrth the powder and
shot it would take to kill them!"
286 The Price of Union

The fact that Harrison had been born into the wealthy planter class
in Virginia, his family had held the highest positions for gen-
and that
erations, did not interfere with the success of the log-cabin nonsense.
Nobody knew anything about Harrison and nobody ever would, if the
Whigs had their way. A committee was set up to answer all his letters,
and to make sure that the answers were meaningless. When the old gentle-
man appeared in public, which was seldom, he put aside his silk hat and
wore a broad-brimmed rustic model. 3 Having contrived, by persistent in-
ability, to sink from the top of the pile to well down toward the middle,
Harrison found himself transformed into a proof of how men rise by merit
in America. Van Buren, meanwhile, was transformed into an aristocrat
-who scented his whiskers with cologne, drank nothing but champagne, and
laced himself in corsets. Yet Van Buren's father had been a tavern keeper
at Kinderhook, without the means to give his son an education.
At the age of fourteen, Van Buren had begun to study law in his spare
time. At the age of nineteen he went to New York City, where he suffered
from extreme poverty, until at twenty-one he was admitted to the bar
and began to make a difficult living. In 1807, at the age of twenty-five,
he married his childhood sweetheart, who died in 1819 after bearing four
sons. In the year after his marriage Van Buren got his first political job.
Thereafter his rise was rapid, as state senator, attorney-general for New
York, member and then leader of the "Albany Regency," United States
Senator, and finally backer of Andrew Jackson. He was in fact the self-
made "man of the people" that Harrison was praised for being; he was
also the inventor of the political methods which the Whigs were turning
against him. He had played all these tricks, and more, on John Quincy
Adams; yet there is no record that he was amused to have them played
on himself.
The result of the lying, diverting, irrelevant campaign was that Har-
rison received 234 electoral votes and Van Buren 60.* J. Q. Adams's
comment was as follows: "If Harrison is not found time-serving, dema-
gogic, unsteady, and Western-sectional, he will more than satisfy my
present expectations." Adams knew more about Harrison than most of the
voters, for Adams (at Clay's request) had sent him to Colombia.
The world has seen many curious campaigns since 1840, but nothing
quite like this. The entire performance might have been invented by a
satirist to show how silly democratic politics can be. Every weakness
of the American party system was exaggerated: the tendency to choose

* The Van Buren machine had not done as badly as the electoral votes suggest.
Van Buren lost Pennsylvania by 349 votes out of more than 287,000. He lost Maine
by 401 votes out of 93,000; New Jersey by 2317 votes out of 64,385; and New York
by 13,000 votes out of half a million (figures compiled by Hugh Russell Fraser).
So a change of about 8000 votes would have made the electoral college result: Van
Buren 154; Harrison 140.
xw. The Rise of the Whigs 287

inconspicuous and feeble candidates; the tendency to substitute songs,

or other loud noises, for a discussion of issues; the tendency to promise,
in private, all things to all people, while avoiding in public any language
which could be construed to mean anything, in the hope that commitments
made to New England manufacturers will not be heard south of the
Potomac, while commitments made to the planters will never reach
the West; the swirling, roaring atmosphere of circus, football game, and
county fair; the joyful feeling that the election matters more than any-
thing else in the world, combined with the still more joyful feeling that
it isjust a sport and does not really matter at all. The Harrison campaign
was the first to combine all these features, and it combined them in a
more preposterous form than has ever since been attained. Perhaps this
is because America has never again been quite so lighthearted. The

many unsolved problems, whose existence the politicians denied, pro-

duced a mounting tension after 1840. The country could no longer ignore
all the storm warnings. And after the storm had passed, after the Civil

War, the country had lost its innocence. There were to be many imitations
of 1840; but they did not seem so exuberant or so funny.

What was the Party which won its first victory through these comic-
Whig
opera methods? Apartial answer may be found by asking, who was left
out of the loose alliance which formed the Democratic Party? Who
felt

threatened, or challenged, by the mildly radical mass-movement of the

Jacksonians?
First and most obvious, there were the old followers of Adams and
Clay, who had begun to call themselves National Republicans before the
election of 1828. They became the solid center of the Whig Party, for
they were not merely and- Jackson men. They believed in something
positive, the "American System":
a tariff to help the Eastern manufac-
turer, and internal improvements (financed by the tariff) to bind the
country together and incidentally to help the farmer reach the growing
urban markets. The well-to-do grain growers; the sheep and cattle farm-
ers of the Northwest; the tobacco farmers of Tennessee and Kentucky; the

sugar planters of Louisiana these had remained faithful to the "Amer-

ican System," and when added to the Eastern manufacturers they made
a good beginning for a party.
They were only a beginning, however, as had been shown in the election
of 1832 when the National Republicans fought their last campaign. Henry
Clay was the candidate, and he challenged Jackson on the Bank charter.
He thought he had found a popular issue, yet he did less well than John
288 The Price of Union

Quincy Adams had done in 1828. The party of the "American System"
clearly needed new allies, if not a new name.
A number of the allies were attracted, as we have seen, on negative
grounds. They were people who disliked something Jackson had done,
rather than people who had a plan of their own. Some of them thought
"King Andrew'* was making himself a tyrant, which was untrue, and that
he was upsetting the balance of the American Government, which was
a fact. Some of them, like Tyler and his states' -rights Virginians, thought
he was too much of a nationalist. Some of them, like the coastal cotton
planters (the old Crawford men whom Van Buren had wheedled into
the Jackson camp) thought he was too much of a radical; they were dis-
,

gusted with the talk about the Declaration of Independence, and about
man's natural rights. Some of the Whigs were angry because Jackson
had destroyed sound money by his attack on the Bank and by distributing
the Treasury surplus among the state banks; others were angry because
he had destroyed unsound money with his "specie circular" and his en-
couragement of Van Buren in Locofoco Independent-Treasury heresies.
Little by little, the anti-Jackson group grew. Each time it absorbed a
new set of allies, it had to say less about its policies for fear of losing some
of the old allies. This is typical of American parties. If the men who like a
fluctuating currency are to be kept in the same fold with the men who
like a steady currency, the less said about the money problem the better.
And if the men who dislike Jackson because he is making himself a
dictator are to work happily with the men who dislike Jackson because
he believes in democracy, the less said about theories of government the
better. In the end there is not much to discuss, except an old man's love
of log cabins.
As the party grew, and began to prepare for the election of 1836, the
Southern planters refused to call themselves National Republicans. They
didn't like the word "national." It reminded them of the Adams family
and the Federalists. They began calling themselves Whigs, and within a
few years the name was established. It suggested patriotism, and a dis-
taste for tyranny; and it had the advantage of meaning nothing definite.
It could not frighten the most delicate voter.
During Van Buren's presidency the Whigs acquired the last, the strong-
est, and the strangest-named of their converts: the Anti-Mason Party.
In September, 1826, a brick and stone worker called William Morgan,
who had promised to publish the secrets of the first three degrees of
Masonry, disappeared from the town of Canandaigua* in western New
York and was never seen again. He was thought to have been murdered
by vengeful Masons. The prosperous farmers of the neighboring counties
were inclined to be anti-Mason in any case, since most of them were
* He had been taken there, under false arrest, from his home in Batavia.
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 289

of New England descent and their Puritan background gave them a

prejudice against secret societies. Also, they favored the "American Sys-
tem/' because they wanted canals and roads to take their goods to market,
and a tariff to maintain high prices. Furthermore, it happened that Jack-
son was a Mason, whereas John Quincy Adams, the friend of the "Amer-
ican System," was not. Out of these seemingly unrelated facts, politicians
were able to build a local political movement which combined the eco-
nomic with the religious appeal, offering the delights of intolerance in
addition to a program of government aid. Thurlow Weed at once saw
the possibilities in the new party, and set to work wooing the anti-Masons
into the Adams camp.
With new allies,
these the National Republicans (later the Whigs)
began to win elections in New York. We have already seen that in 1838
the Whigs made William H. Seward governor, with the help of disgruntled
conservative Democrats who abandoned Van Buren to his Locofoco
friends. It was the anti-Masons who really turned the election, and from
that time on they were completely absorbed into Thurlow Weed's Whig
Party. They brought with them not only a majority of voters in western
New York, but an important group of Scots and Germans in Pennsylvania,
who were anti-Mason for religious reasons, and a number of temperance
enthusiasts from New England who disapproved of wine-drinking at
Masonic meetings. The history of the party is a lesson in how the pro-
fessional politician can find uses for the most unlikely causes and the most
unusual prejudices. 4
The Whig Party was now
complete. It was a typical collection of re-
gional special-interest groups which were prepared
to collaborate so long
as each group received an agreed favor. In return for this favor, each
group refrained from demanding other favors which would upset the
balance and make compromise impossible. The East was to receive a
tariff and a revived National Bank; the West was to receive internal

improvements, plus the suppression of the specie circular (which would

encourage cheap paper money) ; Louisiana was to receive a tariff for
her sugar, a National Bank to help her large commercial interests, and
the pleasure of ousting the friends of Andrew Jackson, who had left a
bad name behind him in New Orleans;* the Eastern planters were to re-
ceive a market for their cotton in New England, favorable prices on
the cotton textiles sold them by New England (a promise easier to make
than to keep), and the support of the national Whig Party against the
"leveling" tendencies of the Jacksonians and against anybody anywhere
who raised the slave question.
New England was so closely tied to the planters that her Whigs came
to be known as "Cotton Whigs." Her textile mills received their raw
* After the
War of 1812 he had ruled the city as if it were- a conquered province.
290 The Price of Union

material from the cotton kingdom, and sold a large part of their cheap
goods to the plantations. Her bankers financed the profitable trade, and
her shippers, along with those of New York, flourished on the two-way
traffic. "Cotton thread holds the union together," wrote Ralph Waldo
Emerson. "Patriotism [is] for holidays and summer evenings with rockets,
but cotton thread is the union." Calhoun had not yet convinced his
Southern friends that they must be the losers in any political bargain
with the business world. The rich planters believed that "cotton was
king" ; they believed their Northern allies would always treat them gently,
for the sake of what they bought. Until well into the eighteen-forties, they
were Whigs to a man.*

When the precarious alliance of local groups which made up the Whig
Party examined, the campaign of 1840 becomes comprehensible. There
is

were two interests unrepresented in the Whig camp, and both had to be
placated. The first was the states' -rights interest in Virginia, led by John
Tyler. The Whigs dared not pretend that they stood for the principles
of 1798, for if they were overheard in the North they might lose their
business and banking associates. Having nothing to offer the Virginians
in the way of policy, the Whigs offered them the vice-presidency which
was accepted with thanks. This seemed a harmless way out of the trouble ;
but itproved to be the death of the Whig hopes.
The second unrepresented interest was that of the plain people, who
were unfortunately very numerous. In New York State Thurlow Weed
understood the plain people, and he was able to give the Whig Party
a solid foundation of working-class votes. In New York City, oddly
enough, the Negroes who had once voted Federalist now voted Whig,
on the grounds that the Democrats were the party of the immigrant
laborer who resented and ill-treated the Negro, not being in a position to
ill-treat anyone else. And in New England the native workman was in-
clined to vote Whig as a sign of his superiority to the Irish immigrant
who was sure to vote Democratic. Yet this was not enough. It might serve
to win New York and Massachusetts; but if the poor elsewhere were faith-
ful to the Jacksonians, the Whigs would lose the election. Hence Har-
rison and the mad campaign of 1840. Log cabins instead of democracy;
hard cider instead of radicalism; songs instead of natural rights. The
Whigs were rich and they spent a fortune on sheer entertainment dur-
ing the campaign. The people had great fun out of the fireworks and
* When Varina Howell of Mississippi met Jefferson Davis, whose wife she was to
become in 1845, she wrote that he was the first Democrat she had seen who was
a gentleman.
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 291

the blarney. Van Buren was beaten partly by the depression, partly by
his own laissez-faire philosophy which kept him from offering aid to
the victims of the depression, partly by the sensible votes of the Whigs
who knew and approved their own program, and partly by the bemused
votes of people who had been taught that Van Buren lived in oriental
splendor and selfishness, whereas Harrison gave laborious days to think-
ing how to help the poor.
The election re-established the normal pattern of American politics.
Jacksonian Democracy had shown signs of developing into a class party,
cutting across regional lines; but it lacked a philosophy of class warfare,
and it lacked a class-conscious electorate. After 1840 the party went back
to the usual of seeking votes by regional bribes and balances,
method
and of bolstering the Union by regional compromise. The economic
struggle between the sections was still the most acute, dangerous strug-
gle, and was about to impose a truce between the classes within each
major section.
It was perhaps just as well that the economic and political problems
of the Industrial Revolution could be temporarily shelved, for in neither
party did the leaders show a capacity for thinking about democracy in
a machine age. The founders of America, as we have seen, had a real-
istic basisfor their politics. They believed there was a direct relation
between power and property, and thus between political responsibility
and property. Most of them, like Adams and Hamilton (and Madison
in The Federalist), believed that the mass of mankind must always be
without property; so they believed that the same mass should be with-
out political power. Others, like Jefferson and John Taylor, believed
that America could become a nation of small property holders, and could
thus spread political power safely. These are sensible beliefs, relating to
sensible premises, and admitting of many applications including the
application that in an industrial, proletarianized society all property
and thus all power should be given to the state. Since the days of Ham-
ilton and Jefferson, however, two changes had occurred: first, America
was committed to becoming a great industrial power, which meant that
she was committed to becoming a nation with a large class of factory
workers owning no part of the means of production. (They might
own a house, or a horse; but they wouldn't own anything with which
they could earn a living like a farm, or a machine shop.) And second,
America was committed to becoming a political democracy. She had
gone so far along the road to universal white male suffrage that there was
no returning.
Both the Federalist and the Jeffersonian philosophies had thus been
denied. The one said there could be no democracy because there could
be no widespread ownership; the other said that there must be wide-
292 The Price of Union

spread ownership because there must be democracy. So America com-

promised by adopting political democracy from the Jeffersonians and
adopting the factory system from Europe. Already by the eighteen-forties,
it was too late to undo either. It was impossible to take the vote away from

those who had received it; and it was impossible to cancel, or even
control, the Industrial Revolution. It was also impossible, therefore, to
derive further help or counsel from the wisdom of the Fathers. Everything
which they feared, and against which they had warned the nation, had
come to pass. The new America was on her own; she had to find a new
way of reconciling power and property in the world of the machine. She
had made a political democracy and she was making an economic oli-
garchy, and what was she to do with them?
Fortunately, the problem was not yet acute; for the Jacksonians had
no answer except a few simple reforms (they advocated the ten-hour
day, and permission for the workers to build unions) and the Whigs
;

not only had no answer, they had no question. They did not admit that
a problem had arisen. In order to maintain this innocence of mind,
they created a social picture of America which was so unreal, but so
pleasing to contemplate, that it has handicapped the conservative cause
to this day. The new Whig sociology was based on three assertions first, :

that it was wrong to think there could be any difference between the in-
terests of the propertied and the unpropcrtied classes; second, that it
was wrong to think there were any classes in America at all, since every-
one was both a capitalist and a worker (unless he was a Negro slave,
who didn't count) third, that it was wrong to agitate for what they
;

called "external reform," since the only reform worth a wise man's at-
tention was inner, or spiritual, reform. Mr. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., com-
ments: "This complex of attitudes the identity of interests between the
classes, the unimportance of class, the non-existence of class, the superior
happiness of the laborer, the necessity for internal reform satisfied the
feeling of the business community in all the shades of ambivalence, from
the compulsions toward power to the lurking intuitions of guilt."
It was just as well, since this was the level of her political thinking,
that America could postpone class problems for the time being and de-
vote herself to the familiar problem of sectional strife.*
* The class
problems, however, were not far below the surface. Professor Allan
Nevins writes (Ordeal of the Union, vol. I, p. 56, note) "When Jackson entered
:

the White House, hours of labor in America had averaged twelve and a half a day.
By 1850 at least a third of the population were working only eleven hours a
day. One student who has investigated the question of vacations concludes that
very few enjoyed such a luxury in this period. . . Thomas Low Nichols wrote
.

in Forty Years of American Life: 'In no country are the faces of the people fur-
rowed with harder lines of care. In no country that I know of is there so much
labour: in none so little of the recreation and enjoy-
" unremitting
hard, toilsome,
ment in life.'
xiv. The Rise of the Whigs 293

One important legacy of the Jacksonians was the result of chance during :

the eight years of the General's presidency, seven justices of the Supreme
Court died and one resigned. Jackson appointed what was almost a new
court. Like the Federalists in 1800, he left behind him men who were to
determine the law of the land for the next generation.
The most important appointment was that of Roger Brooke Taney to
succeed John Marshall as Chief Justice. Taney had been born on a to-
bacco plantation in southern Maryland in 1777. On both sides of his fam-
ily he came from the privileged class. He was a Roman Catholic, a lawyer,
and a politician who had begun his career as a Hamiltonian Federalist.
After the death of the Federalist Party, Taney became a supporter of
Andrew Jackson, joining his Cabinet as Attorney General in 1831. Dur-
ing the war on the Bank Taney was among the most aggressive of the
Jacksonians, urging the President to veto the new charter, and accept-
ing an interim appointment as Secretary of the Treasury in order to
insure that future government funds should be deposited in the state
banks. He thus became the symbol of radical Jacksonism. The Senate
refused to confirm his appointment as an Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court, and refused to confirm his appointment as Secretary of the Treas-
ury. But number of new Democratic Senators were elected and
in 1836 a
the next year Taney was accepted as Chief Justice.
The Whigs mourned the appointment as loudly and as bitterly as
Jefferson had mourned the appointment of John Marshall. They thought
the last stronghold of conservatism had fallen to the Jacksonian mob. And
Taney's first opinion as Chief Justice strengthened their fears, for he
liberalized John Marshall's definition of contract.
Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution says: "No state shall.
pass . .

any . . . law impairing the obligation of contracts." In the famous Yazoo

case, Fletcher v. Peck, we have seen Marshall decide that a state might
not rescind any of its grants, and in the Dartmouth College case he added
that a charter is a contract as understood by the Constitution. In a rela-
tively static economy these decisions might have been harmless; but in
the midst of the first wild rush of the Industrial Revolution they could
have put the American business system into a strait-jacket. What would
happen, for instance, if a stagecoach company possessed a charter to
carry passengers between two cities and a railway company requested a
charter for the same route? An analogous problem came before the
Supreme Court in the Charles River Bridge case.
In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature had granted to the Charles River
294 The Price of Union

Bridge Proprietors the right to build and maintain a toll bridge between
Boston and Charlestown. In 1792 the charter was extended for seventy
years. In 1828 the legislature granted to the Warren Bridge Company
the right to erect a bridge a few rods from the first. The Warren Bridge
was to become free to the public within six years. The Charles River
Company at once sued on the ground that the competing bridge con-
stitutedan impairment of contract.
The case was first carried to the Supreme Court of the United Statfes
in 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall presiding. Marshall wished to hold
the second grant invalid; but because of absences from the Court, and
because of disagreements, no decision was made until 1837, when Taney
had succeededto Marshall's position. With two dissenting votes the Court
now upheld the constitutionality of the charter. The minority opinion,
which would have been Marshall's opinion, was written by Justice Story,
and stated that the action of the legislature was confiscatory and a
breach of contract. Taney, speaking for the majority, upheld the new
charter on the ground that rights granted by charters must be narrowly
construed and that no charter could imply powers which were clearly
opposed to the public interest. "While the rights of private property are
sacredly guarded," he said, "we must not forget that the community
also have rights, and that the happiness and well being of every citizen

depends on their faithful preservation." This rule that corporate charters

are to be construed with an eye to the public interest has proved a
blessing in American constitutional law. It is only by accident, however,
that the case was not decided in 1831, with the rule in reverse. The
Charles River Bridge case is an interesting gloss on the statement that
the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.
On the whole, in spite of Whig fears, the new Chief Justice proved
cautious, intelligent, and statesmanlike. On the whole, he turned out to
be a Maryland gentleman with the states' -rights and anti-Negro prejudices
of the South, rather than the wild Jacksonian radical of Whig imagining.
In this he was a true representative of his time. Sectional interests and
the race question were more important than the division into Left and
Right, and the decision which will be forever associated with Taney' s
name was one of black reaction, in which he sought to render meaning-
lessthe "natural rights" clauses in the Declaration of Independence in,

order that Negroes might be defined as simple property.

 XV

New Alignments and New Passions: 1844

AHE WHIG PARTY asked only two favors of Harrison: that he say nothing
and that he stay alive. The first he could grant; but the second was not
for him On April 4, 1841, a month after taking office, the
to decide.
new President died of pneumonia. But even before this crowning act
of inconvenience, Harrison was making trouble for his masters. Having
been silent during the campaign, he seemed to think free speech was
restored to him by the election. To the surprise of the men who had in-
vented him, and who thought he could not move unless they wound
him up, he wrote a florid inaugural address all by himself. He not only
wrote it, he became fond of it, and he baulked when told it had to be re-
written. It was with difficulty that Daniel Webster got permission even
to revise this inflated work. After a day at the task, he arrived late and
weary to a dinner party. When his hostess asked whether anything had
happened, he answered, "Madam, you would think something had hap-
pened, if you knew what I have done. I have killed seventeen Roman
proconsuls as dead as smelts!"
Behind the demise of the proconsuls lay plans and ambitions which
1
might have changed history; for Webster and Clay put into Harrison's
weak hands an address which would have meant constitutional revolu-
tion if the old man had lived. The new
type of presidency, the privileges
and the prestige gathered into the office all were repudiated.
by Jackson
Congress was handed back the power to control policy which the im-
patient Westerner had wrested from it. If Harrison had ruled for eight
years, instead of the stubborn Tyler and the strong-willed Polk, the
President might not have become the tribune of the people and the
dispenser of party favors ; the presidential form of government might not
have developed in the United States; and the states might not now be
united. Of Harrison, as of few men, it can be said that the one important
thing about him was the date of his death.*
The Webster-Clay-Harrison Inaugural Address said that "the great
danger to our institutions appears to me to be ... the accumulation
. . .

*
Jackson's comment on Harrison's death was characteristic: "A kind and over-
ruling Providence has interfered to prolong our glorious Union. . . .
Surely Tyler
[will] stay the corruptions of this clique which has got into power by deluding the
people with the grossest of slanders . . . and hard cider."
295
296 The Price of Union

in one of the departments of that which was assigned to the others."

The address pointed out that many patriots feared the government was
moving toward monarchy, and admitted that "the tendency for some
years past had been in that direction." But the danger was now at an
end; Harrison would not aggrandize the presidency; on the contrary, he
would undo the recent damage. "It is preposterous to suppose," he said,
"that a thought could be entertained for a moment that the President,
placed at the capital, in the center of the country, could better under-
stand the wants and wishes of the people than their own immediate
representatives who spend a part of every year among them." Jackson's
behavior in regard to the Bank and the federal funds was condemned.
"The delicate duty of devising schemes of revenue," said Harrison, "should
be left where the Constitution has left it with the immediate repre-
sentatives of the people." And again, referring to Jackson's removal of
Duane and the appointment of Taney as Secretary of the Treasury:
"It was certainly a great error in the framers of the Constitution not
to have made the officer at the head of the Treasury Department en-
tirely independent of the Executive. He should, at least, have been re-
movable upon the demand of the popular branch of the legislature. I
have determined never to remove a Secretary of the Treasury without
communicating all the circumstances to both houses of Congress."
No wonder a modern historian has written, "In this inaugural address
are passages which raise the suspicion that designing Whig leaders may
have practically persuaded the aged President-elect to prepare a mortgage
of his office to Congress." 2

John Tyler was born in 1790, in Charles City County, Virginia. His
father was a man of position, and the boy was educated at William and
Mary College. He finished his course at the age of seventeen, and two
years later was admitted to the bar. He soon became a member of the
Virginia House of Delegates and of the Council of State. During the
War of 1812 he served briefly as captain of a company of volunteers, but
saw no action. In 1816 he was sent to the House of Representatives in
-
Washington. Here he rivaled John Randolph in the firmness of his states'
rights views. He was opposed to the Bank of the United States, to a
protective tariff, and to Calhoun's bill for internal improvements at
federal expense. He was also opposed to the Missouri Compromise, on
the ground that the federal government had no right to control slavery
in the territories.
In 1821 Tyler left Congress because of ill health; but he continued
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 297

to take part in state politics. In 1824 like most of the old Jeffersonians
and states' -rights men in Virginia he supported Crawford for the presi-
dency. In 1825 and 1826 Tyler was governor of Virginia, and the next
year he was sent to the United States Senate to succeed Randolph of
Roanoke. He
supported Jackson in 1828, and again in 1832, as the
"least objectionable" candidate; but he was never a Jacksonian. He
favored the Maysville veto and the war on the Bank; but he opposed the
Nullification Proclamation as subversive of the Constitution; he was the
only Senator to vote against the Force Bill;* and he bitterly attacked
the removal of the deposits by Jackson and Secretary Taney. He backed
the Senate resolution censuring the President for this act, and in 1836
he resigned office rather than follow the instructions of the Virginia legis-
lature to reverse his stand.
No man ever made a more consistent record. The Whigs who nomi-
nated Tyler for the vice-presidency had no excuse for misunderstanding
him. From his first to his last public deed, he had proved that states'
rights wereguiding star, and that for him states' rights meant oppo-
his
but the most limited use of federal power. It was not presi-
sition to all
dential power he disliked, but centralized power, whether in the hands
of President or Congress. And the Whigs would discover to their chagrin
that there was one Jacksonian power which Tyler wholly approved: the
power to deny, to use the veto.**
The first sign that Tyler was to be a disappointing substitute for the
pliant Harrison came with his insistence that he was President of the
United States, and not merely Vice-President filling in for the remainder
of the term.The Constitution is perhaps ambiguous on this point;*** and
in view of the number of Presidents who have since died in office the
precedent set by Tyler was important. The Whig leaders thought he
should have been content with the more humble position; yet they tried
to take comfort from a passage in his Inaugural Address which said :

In view of the fact, well attested by history, that the tendency of

all human institutions is power in the hands of a single
to concentrate
man, and that their ultimate downfall has proceeded from this cause,
I deem it of the most essential importance that a complete separation

* The other
opponents of the bill discreetly left the chamber.
**
John Quincy Adams, who detested Tyler, at least understood that the new
President was not a back-sliding Whig but an old-fashioned Republican. "Tyler is a
political sectarian,"wrote Adams (Diary, April 4, 1841), "of the slave-driving,
Virginian, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement, with all the
interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political con-
stitution."
*** The relevant
passage, from Section 1, Article II, of the Constitution, reads:
"In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or
inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve
298 The Price of Union

should take place between the sword and the purse. No matter where
or how the public money shall be deposited, so long as the President
can exert the power of appointing and removing at his pleasure the
agents selected for their custody the commander-in-chief of the army
and navy is in fact the treasurer.

Webster and Clay hoped this meant that the Whig Congress would
have a free hand to make financial policy; but in fact it meant that {he
new President would be vigilant at every point to construe the powers
of the government narrowly. He believed in a diffusion on power, not in
Executive abdication to the Senate. When he realized that Clay intended
to introduce bills reviving the whole "American System," Tyler asked
the Kentuckian to a conference, hoping to avoid a public break. But
Clay pushed on with his program, saying "I'll drive him before me." He
could not believe that behind Tyler's mild manners and aristocratic calm
a gentleness found in many of the "Old Republicans" of Virginia
lay a strength of will which made him one of the hardest men to "drive"
in all America. Clay had bad luck with his presidents; his attempts to
break Tyler's stubbornness were as futile as his previous assaults on Jack-
son.

Tyler signed a bill abolishing Van Buren's sub-treasury system, and he

accepted an upward revision of the tariff.* This was as far as he would
go to redeem Whig promises few of which had been made in the open.
He vetoed all bills for internal improvements, or for harbor works. He
vetoed a bill for a new Bank of the United States, and when the bill
was rewritten to meet his constitutional objections he vetoed it again.**
The Whig program was in ruins. Tyler's own following in Congress was
soweak that it was known as "the corporal's guard"; but there were
enough old Jacksonians to support his vetoes. In January, 1842, Clay,
in despair, proposed a constitutional amendment empowering Congress
to pass a bill over the President's veto by a majority vote. He argued,
with force, that the veto as used by Jackson and Tyler made the Presi-
dent "the ruler of the nation"; but he received no popular support. The
people, it seemed, were content to have the President rule the nation.
In 1844, the Democratic platform approved the veto power, and the
Whig platform dared do no more than urge "a reform of executive usurpa-
tions." That was the end of political attacks on the Jacksonian use of the

on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of re-
moval, death, resignation or inability, both of the President and Vice President,
declaring what officer shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accord-
ingly, until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected."
* The tariff
compromise of 1833, which ended the nullification crisis, applied
only until 1842.
**
September 9, 1841.
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 299

veto. The power to veto is the power to compel alternatives. Thenceforth

a popular President was equal in legislative strength to anything short
of a two-thirds majority of both Houses.
Tyler, meanwhile, was having almost as much trouble with Daniel
Webster in the Cabinet as with Clay in the Congress. The new President
had retained the whole of the Harrison Cabinet, including Webster as
Secretary of State. At the first full meeting, Webster said: "Mr. Presi-
dent, it was the custom of our cabinet meetings with President Harrison
that he should preside over them. All measures relating to the admin-
istration were to be brought before the cabinet and their settlement was
to be decided by the majority of votes, each member of the cabinet and
the President having but one vote." Here was the Whig theory of the
presidency in extreme form: the President was chairman of his Cabinet;
he had a vote like everyone else, but no authority, no command over the
party machinery, no power to make policy and to enforce it. If Tyler
accepted the proposal, the Jacksonian changes in the government would
be canceled.
Jackson and his friends had called in the people to upset the balance
of power and to give the President strength to enforce policy: the peo-
ple, plus the political machine. Were the Whig leaders to undo this work,
through a palace revolution? With Harrison to take their orders they
would have turned the country back to government by Congressional
committee, which had proved itself to be government by drift and log-
jamb. But Tyler, to their rage, refused to play the part allotted him.
Although he preferred a weak central government, sharing Jefferson's
faith that the least government was the best, he knew that within even
the weakest government the Executive must lead. "I am the President/*
he replied to Webster; "and I shall be held responsible for my adminis-
tration."
In September, 1841, after five months of Tyler's presidency, the whole

Whig Cabinet resigned, except for Webster. The resignation was a protest
against the veto of Clay's second bill for a National Bank. Webster re-
mained in office, partly to show that he was independent of Clay, and
partly because he was deep in negotiations with the British.
The boundary between Maine and Canada had been vaguely defined by
the Treaty of 1783, and as always in diplomacy the vagueness had made
trouble. In 1814 the Treaty of Ghent created a joint commission to settle
the trouble; but the commission failed. The King of the Netherlands was
asked to arbitrate; but the compromise he recommended was refused by
America. The problem was then neglected until 1837, when rebellion
broke out in Upper and Lower Canada against the British Government.
America saw the rebellion as a repetition of her own fight for freedom.
Along the border, therefore, the rebels were given illegal and unneutral
300 The Price of Union

aid. Then the rebellion quieted; Lord Durham, sent from England, con-
tributed his famous report, and the experience of 1763 to 1775 bore fruit.
The British Empire began its evolution toward a Commonwealth of
Nations.
The border incidents, however, left hard feelings behind them, and the
situation was not improved by the presence of Lord Palmerston at the
Foreign Office. Whenever that interesting character lacked larger or more
dangerous game, he amused himself by bearing down on the Americans.*"
Under such conditions the old boundary dispute became a danger to
peace, so Tyler pressed for a new effort at settlement. His chance came
when the Melbourne Ministry resigned, in August, 1841^ and Sir Robert
Peel became Prime Minister with Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign Office.
Early in 1842 Aberdeen sent Lord Ashburton to Washington, and within
a few months the Webster-Ashburton Treaty had been negotiated, es-
tablishing the present boundary and settling other minor disputes.
When it came to explaining the compromise to a belligerent Senate and
an irascible Parliament, the treaty was saved by the famous "battle of the
8
maps." Through strange good fortune Webster possessed an early French
map which was assumed to be the one mentioned by Franklin at the time
of the peace negotiations and which justified the extreme British claim,
whereas the Foreign Office possessed a map formerly belonging to George
III which justified the extreme American claim. Each side, therefore,
could happily pretend that it had cheated the other. When Palmerston
attacked the "Ashburton capitulation," he was shown the British map;
when the ever-restive Senate sought to reject the treaty, it was shown the
American map. The real map, meanwhile, had been seen by nobody. Years
later, when it was discovered in Spain, proved that America had re-
it

ceived less than had been intended in 1 but at the time of the settle-
783 ;

ment everyone was satisfied, since everyone thought he was getting the
best of his neighbor.
*
Palmerston, for example, was justly annoyed at slave traders who claimed
immunity under the American flag. In August, 1841, he insisted on the "right of
visit" in regard to such ships. There is little doubt that America would have fought
rather than admit this "right" ; but Palmerston left office before the month was out,
and the new ministry dropped the claim. In his chapter on Palmerston's foreign
policy in Crimean War Diplomacy, and other Historical Essays, Gavin Burns
Henderson writes: "To Palmerston the sense of power was always more important
than the purpose for which that power was being exercised; and contemporaries
and posterity, in praising Palmerston, have praised him not for himself but for his
incarnation of Britain at her peak of glory." As we shall see when discussing the
next election, "Britain at her peak of glory" was cordially disliked in the United
States during the early forties; and Palmerston, with his simple pleasure in power
for power's sake, was wholly indifferent to what America did or didn't like. As a
result, there was real danger of war. The agreement reached between Tyler and
Webster on the one hand, and the Peel Ministry on the other, was a triumph of
diplomacy over human folly. Such triumphs are rarely praised.
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 301

The resignation of the Cabinet left Tyler a President without a party.

After twice supporting Jackson for the presidency, he had turned against
the Jacksonians; and now that his new friends, the Whigs, understood
what Tyler had turned against him. When he ap-
really thought, they
pointed his ownCabinet, contained
it three Southerners who felt as

strongly as Tyler himself about states' rights. This was the camp where
he belonged: not with the radical Jacksonian Democrats, not with the
business-and-banking Whigs, but with the remnant of the "Old Republi-
cans," the men who had preserved Jefferson's philosophy of government
without his belief in natural rights. This group was about to receive a
large increment in strength. As Jacksonian Democracy weakened under
the pressure of revived sectionalism, the states'-rights men were to take
over the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, in 1842, that party won a majority
in the House of Representatives. The next year, Webster finally left the
Cabinet, and after a brief interval John Caldwell Calhoun became Secre-
tary of State. The appointment completed the political upset which had
begun with the death of Harrison.*
In 1841 the Whigs had come to power after an overwhelming victory.
Three years later they found themselves with a President who had in fact
returned to the Democratic Party, a Secretary of State who had not only
returned to the Democratic Party but was dominating the thinking of that
party, a Cabinet which would follow the lead of these two Democrats, and
a Democratic majority in the House. Not a single important law proposed
by the Whigs had escaped the President's veto. And to complete the con-
fusion, the Democratic Party which was coming to power in this unusual
manner had little except the political machine to identify it with the party
which had so recently triumphed under Jackson. The brief alliance of
Locofocos and Southern and Western farmers had lost control of that
machine; it was to be taken over by a new alliance, contrived by Calhoun.
Calhoun had long been working toward two ends: to capture the
Democratic Party for the states'-rights group, and to bring all the leading
Southerners, especially reformed party. The first
all the planters, into this

aim was now virtually accomplished; the second was under way, although
a majority of the great Southern landowners still called themselves Whigs.
For them the Democratic Party was still tainted with democracy, with

* Abel Parker
Upshur of Virginia succeeded Webster as Secretary of State ; but he
died the following February in an accident on board the battleship Princeton.
Calhoun succeeded him in March, 1844.
302 The Price of Union

Jeffersonian natural rights and Jacksonian urban radicalism. Calhoun's

mission, from 1844 until his death, would be to persuade the Southern
Whigs that the South could not be defended against capitalist aggression
unless Southerners united and took the leadership of the dominant Demo-
cratic Party. Many of the Whig planters accepted Calhoun's teaching when
they discovered, at the time of the Tyler crisis, that Clay and Webster
meant to restore a Hamiltonian Bank, a Hamiltonian tariff, and a more
than Hamiltonian program of federal expenditures. The rest of the South-
ern Whigs joined Calhoun after the Texas question and the Mexican War
had made slavery the dominant and inescapable issue.

During the years between the death of Jefferson, in 1826, and the ap-
pointment of Calhoun as Secretary of State, in 1844, the South had
changed radically. Because of his long fight against power and privilege in
Virginia, and indeed throughout the country, Jefferson was disliked by
many of the old Tidewater families yet on the whole he had been a hero,
;

during his lifetime, throughout the South. The great majority of Southern
people had thought themselves followers of Jefferson, accepting his hope-
ful view of human nature and his optimism about the future of democ-

racy. They had even believed that in a short while they would follow his
teaching on the Negro question.
The South, after all, was a land of small farmers, most of them poor.
Andrew Jackson and John Caldwell Calhoun were the sons of such
farmers in the South Carolina uplands; Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson
Davis were the sons of such farmers in Kentucky. Except for slavery, which
was assumed to be dying, Western egalitarianism was more characteristic
of the South, in 1826, than the privileged life in the mansions along the
Potomac. And the South of the small farmer seemed more likely to sur-
vive than the aristocratic South, for the old families of the tidewater were
falling on bad were losing fertility; their slaves were
times. Their lands

multiplying so fast that no profitable employment could be found for the

surplus yet they all had to be fed. When man-made disasters such as the
Embargo and the War of 1812, or the depression of 1819, were added to
the disasters provided by nature, the Old South seemed doomed. Until the
imperial booty of rich soil was taken from the Indians in Georgia, Ala-
bama, and Mississippi, the once rich slaveowners could not even emigrate
unless they abandoned most of their human property. They were not
allowed to take slaves into the country north of the Ohio, and neither the
Appalachian uplands (where corn and wheat were the usual crops), nor
the valleys of Kentucky and Tennessee (where tobacco-growing was
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 303

established), lent themselves to the plantation type of agriculture with its

hordes of slaves.
The South seemed on its way to becoming a land of poor farmers and of
moderate-sized plantations, with slavery moribund. Soil conservation be-
gan to be practiced, and plans were laid for the introduction of small-
scale industries and the diversification of the region's economy. Then, in
the twenties and the thirties, came the change we have already seen: the
*
plantation system renewed its youth with the theft of the Indian lands.
But the departing red man left behind him a curse from which his dis-
possessors have not yet wholly recovered. Soil conservation became less
interesting when abundant new land was offered for destruction. Diversi-
fication of the economy ceased ( a decision which proved fatal to the South
between 1861 and 1865) when a profitable outlet for capital was found
in the service of King Cotton. Negroes were no longer a liability to their
seaboard masters; the more they multiplied the better, for they could be
sold on a rising market. By 1850 the value of a strong, healthy Negro had
risen to fifteen hundred dollars, so the attempt to deal with slavery was

postponed.
An unusual type of emigrant left the southern seaboard for the new
cotton country during these years. Some were the unsuccessful or the
naturally adventurous; some were the hopelessly poor, who moved from
shiftlessness rather than ambition; but a considerable number were the
well-to-do (or the children of the well-to-do) taking with them a fortune
,

in slaves. They were accustomed to gracious living and to a high cultural

standard. They were either learned themselves, or they had respect for
learning. Almost overnight they produced a sumptuous life in the wilder-
ness a life notable for the sense of security that seemed to rise out of that
:

rich soil.**Yet the system, though spectacular, was brief. It was based
not only on the wasteful institution of slavery, but on a destruction of the

* The settling of the state of Louisiana also helped, and in the forties came the
vast new opportunities in Texas.
** Compare the story of Thomas Dabney, who left Virginia for the Southwest in
the middle thirties. "He had been one of the most successful wheat and tobacco
farmers in his part of the state. But the cost of living in the Old Dominion, for
a man with a growing family and many slaves, was too heavy. Therefore, Thomas
made a trip through a large part of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, and finally
bought from a half dozen small farmers a tract of four thousand acres in Hinds.
County, Mississippi. Returning home, he called his Negroes about him and offered
to buy or sell where intermarriage on neighboring estates threatened to divide
families. No one, he announced, was to leave Virginia who did not wish to do so.
Such careful preparations for the removal were made that the long trip was com-
pleted in comfort and health. Old lands were planted at once and a hundred new
acres cleared each year. Cotton crops ran a bale and a half to the acre. The Dabney
plantation, with a well-organized labor force competing for prizes and assigned to
tasks according to ability, raising its own stock and provision, and widening its
acres as opportunity offered, became a model in the kingdom of cotton." (Avery
Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, p. 108.)
304 The Price of Union

land so ruthless and so short-sighted that even without the Civil War the
new cotton kingdom would have been in ruins within seventy years of its
birth. Had it possessed endless space across which to expand, it might
have had a long if migratory history moving ever westward and leaving
behind it the disgrace of ruined fields. But we have already seen that by
the fifties the cotton planters were face to face with destiny "bounded on :

the north by cold and bounded on the west by aridity." Unless they
embarked on overseas colonial adventures they had all the land, suitable
to their system, which they could ever acquire. And they had not learned
to use it without
consuming it.
These few thousand plantation owners, with their tens of thousands of
slaves, not only bequeathed to the world its picture of the Old South but
during their short day of power they fastened their views, their prejudices,
and their desires upon the entire region. By the middle forties they and
their kinsmen along the seaboard had given the South a new philosophy
and a new political faith. They had brought the back-country farmers, the
men from the hills and the remoter valleys who had been born to distrust
and oppose the coastal aristocrats, to unlearn their Jeffersonian princi-
ples and to accept the leadership of an oligarchy. The South had never
before been a unit; it had been a society divided against itself, largely on
class lines; but these men made it a unit in defense of the institution of
slavery. They probably would not have succeeded if the Northern aboli-
tionists had been less bitter and less provoking in their attacks on all things
Southern.
The new were seeking a revolu-
leaders did not hide the fact that they
tion in thought, that theywere tearing up the teachings of the "Virginia
dynasty." In 1838, Chancellor William Harper of the Supreme Court of
South Carolina said of the Declaration of Independence :

not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born
Is it
free and that no two men were ever born equal, than to say that all men
are born free and equal? . Man is born to subjection. The procliv-
. .

ity of the natural man is to domineer or to be subservient. ... If

there are sordid, servile, and laborious offices to be performed, is it not
better that there should be sordid, servile, and laborious beings to per-
form them?

Already in 1837 Calhoun had stated bluntly that he held slavery to be a

positive good and that the South should cease apologizing for it. And as
early as 1832 Thomas R. Dew, in Richmond, had put the new creed force-
fully:

The exclusive owners of property have ever been, ever will and per-
haps ever ought to be the virtual rulers of mankind. It is the order
. . .

of nature and of God that the being of superior faculties and knowledge,
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 305

and therefore of superior power, should control and dispose of those who
are inferior. It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave
each other as the animals should prey upon each other.

When the poor men's churches went over to slavery and to the anti-
democratic philosophy, the great change was complete. In 1846 the
Methodist Church split on the slavery issue, the Southern Methodists
forming their own organization. The same split had already come to the
Baptists.Even among the poor, no one could hold his job as a Christian
minister if he defended the brotherhood of man. The South had been
changed into a complacent oligarchy.
It was this new, proud, briefly prosperous, anti-democratic South which
Calhoun finally united in the Democratic Party. It is unlikely, however,
that either Calhoun or the pressure of economic interest could have
reconciled the Scotch- Irish of the back country to the lordly slaveholders
of the coasts if it had not been for the violence of Northern abuse.

At the time of the Missouri Compromise there was little moral passion in

the anti-slavery argument. The discussion, for the most part, dealt with
the cold-blooded problem of preserving the balance of power in the Senate
so that neither the Northern nor the Southern interest could command a
majority. Yet there was talk on both sides of secession, and Senator Rufus
King of New York appealed ominously to the higher law, saying that "no
human law, compact, or compromise can establish or continue slavery."
This welding of morals and economics, on a sectional issue, frightened the
aging Jefferson. He had made a revolution himself he knew the strength
;

of the explosion which follows when personal interest and eternal princi-
ples are fused.
Soon another fiery element was added to the mixture, as industrial dis-
contents made the Northern public more quarrelsome, readier to throw
stones at its neighbors. With the spread of the factory system many manual
workers felt their security threatened and their hopes for the future
dimmed.** It was natural, as tensions in the North increased, that cranks
* The
misery was acute in many Northern cities. Describing New York during
the depression of 1837-43, Horace Grceley wrote (Recollections, p. 145) :"I saw
two families, including six or eight children, burrowing in one cellar under a stable,
a prey to famine on the one hand and to vermin and cutaneous maladies on the
other, with sickness adding its horrors to those of a polluted atmosphere and a
wintry temperature. I saw some men who each, somehow, managed to support his
family on an income of five dollars a week or less, yet who cheerfully gave some-
thing to mitigate the sufferings of those who were really poor. I saw three widows,
with as many children, living in an attic on the profits of an apple stand which
306 The Price of Union

and busybodies should increase also. And when neither the women's-rights
movement nor the pacifist movement nor the temperance movement nor
Owenism nor prison reform nor the Fourier phalanx showed signs of
making life more agreeable, it was natural that the South and its peculiar
institution should receive increasing c.ensure. The appeal for emancipa-
tion within reasonable time began to give way to the clamor for abolition
at once. It was the clamor of a small minority, yet by the eigh teen-thirties
it came with troubling eloquence from such men as William Lloyd Garri-
son in New England and Theodore Weld in the Northwest. The first
issue of Garrison's Liberator,* after appealing to the Declaration of Inde-

pendence for authority, continues in these words:

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. thisOn

subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No!
No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell
him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell
the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it
has fallen ; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the pres-
ent. I am in earnest I will not equivocate I will not excuse I will
not retreat a single inch AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of
the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to
hasten the resurrection of the dead.

One may admire the language and applaud the sentiments while
recognizing that they are the language and sentiments of war, not of
democratic politics. These are not the terms in which men argue with
each other, or persuade each other; they are the terms in which they
prepare to kill each other. Long before Garrison and his followers were
taken seriously in the North, they had changed the tone of the discussion
in the South. While the "Cotton Whigs" of Boston were dismissing Aboli-
tion contemptuously as another crotchety movement, like Prohibition, and
Peace, the South responded as men always respond when they are simul-
taneously called immoral and threatened with the loss of property: The
South replied that it was morally superior to its neighbors, and that it
would hold on to its property. If the South was morally superior, then
slavery must be a positive good, instead of the misfortune which it had
long been thought; and if the South was to hold on to its property, then
slavery must be a permanent institution, and not the transition stage

yielded less than three dollars a week, and the landlord came in for a full third of
that. But worst to bear of all was the pitiful plea of stout, resolute, single young men
and young women We do not want alms ; we are not beggars ; we hate to sit here
:
*

day by day idle and useless" ; help us to work, we want no other help ; why is it that
we have nothing to do?' As usual during such periods, the nascent labor unions
withered away and collective bargaining was abandoned.
*
Boston, January 1, 1831.
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 307

which it was once considered. Hence the new anti-Jeffersonian philosophy,

and the new unity throughout the southern region.
Since Garrison appealed to the Declaration of Independence, the South
denied its validity, denied that it was part of the American political system^
and finally attacked the whole theory of natural rights either on the
ground that such rights were "glittering generalities," or on the subtler
ground that natural law if properly understood would lead to a respect
for slavery. The latter doctrine, characteristically, was the work of Cal-
houn.

It is a great and dangerous error [he wrote in the Disquisition on Gov-

ernment] to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is
a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all
alike; a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous
and deserving; and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too igno-
rant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or enjoy-
ing it. ... An all-wise Providence has reserved it, as the noblest and
highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intel-
lectual. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law. . . .
The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the
scale of liberty, is necessarily slow; and by attemtping to precipitate it>
we either retard, or permanently defeat it." 4

In any case, whether natural rights were nonexistent or whether their

nature had been misunderstood, Jefferson and his Declaration were wrong*
On that, the entire South seemed agreed.

The new Southern unity in defense of the slave system was first proved by
the harassing problem of Texas. In 1836 Texas had seceded from Mexico,
and the same year a small Texan army led by Sam Houston defeated a
Mexican army and captured its commanding general, Santa Anna. Hous-
ton was elected first
president Star Republic. He secured
of the Lone
American recognition, and would have asked for annexation to the United
States had not President Van Buren discouraged him. Texas, if she entered
the Union, would bring a huge new area where slavery and the plantation
system could prosper. Texas was so large that she might be carved into
half a dozen moderate-sized states, upsetting the Senate balance between
the North and South permanently. At first nobody wished to force the
issue, lest compromise prove impossible. Then in 1843 it was rumored that

England might lend money to Texas, and that both England and France
planned an alliance with the new republic guaranteeing her independence.
Large and dangerous hopes were stirring in the minds of Aberdeen, and
308 The Price of Union

Guizot, the French Prime Minister. If Texas could be made permanently

independent, and guaranteed against the United States, a balance of
power in North America might be created, the further expansion of the
United States might be thwarted, and an independent source of supply
for cotton and tobacco might be found a source closely bound by self-
interest to the two European powers. In 1844 France and England ap-

proached Mexico with a plan for a joint guarantee of both the independ-
ence and the boundaries of Texas and Mexico against the United States
and all the world; but Mexico foolishly refused to recognize Texas as an
independent state, thus losing her last chance to keep the United States
from dismembering the Mexican Empire. Yet as late as June, 1845, after
the annexation of Texas was a certainty, Guizot returned to Talleyrand's
old dream of thwarting the expansion of the United States. "France has a
lasting interest," he said, with obvious reference to Texas, "in the main-
tenance of independent states in America, and in the balance of forces
which exists in that part of the world."*

By 1844, therefore, the South could no longer assume that Texas must
some day inevitably join the Union, so Secretary of State Calhoun ne-
gotiated a treaty of annexation.** The treaty was defeated in the Senate,
so the Texas question became the leading issue in the presidential cam-
paign. And the question who was to run the Democratic Party Calhoun
or Van Buren, the Southern planters or the Northern radicals was
settled at the same time.
In spite of his defeat in 1840, Van Buren remained a leading candidate
for the next nomination. His hold over the machine was such that he was
almost sure to be chosen unless he said something indiscreet, something
which would be unpopular in one of the major regions. Since it was his
habit to say nothing at all, this seemed unlikely until the Texas question
rose to destroy him. Shortly before the Democratic Convention met in
Baltimore, in 1844, Van Buren was asked by his political enemies where he
stood on Texas. Passions were so high that he could not refuse to answer.
If he opposed annexation, he would lose the South; if he favored it, he
would lose his own supporters in New York State, where politics were as
complicated and as bitter as usual and where Van Buren's long association
with the Jacksonians had broken his ties with the conservative wing of the
party and left him dependent on the Locofocos of the city and on their
rural allies, known as Barnburners.
The Barnburners were the reform element within the state party. They
were deeply in earnest hence their name, given them by derisive oppo-
* The balance of forces to which Guizot referred had already ceased to exist; but
if Mexico had been less stubborn or self-assured in 1844 she might have altered
the course of modern history.
** Most of the work had
already been done by Secretary of State Upshur; but
Calhoun concluded the arrangements.
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 309

nents who said they were such fanatics for reform that they could only be
compared Dutch farmer who burned down his barn to kill the rats.
to the
They were originally formed to combat the indifference to public welfare
of Van Buren's own Regency.' No Democrat could count on carrying New
5*'

York State in 1844 without the Barnburners, and they would support no
one who favored annexing Texas. They represented the serious, con-
scientious, anxious group in the North which would not follow the abusive
abolitionists but which would no longer tolerate the extension of slavery.

They became one of the ancestors of the Republican Party which elected
Abraham Lincoln.
Since one of Van Buren's few firm beliefs was his opposition to the
spread of slavery, and since his remaining supporters in New York State
felt the same way, he answered the question about Texas by saying (with
as many qualifications as possible) that he opposed annexation. The
South turned strongly against him. Even his loyal friend Andrew Jackson
cried, "I wish to God I had been at Mr. V. B.'s elbow. ... I would have
brought to his view the proper conclusion. We are all in sackcloth and
ashes." The old General then called James K. Polk and other friends to
"The Hermitage," where he announced that Van Buren had killed himself
politically, that the party must have a candidate from the Southwest who
stood for annexation, and that Polk was the man.
Van Buren's last hope was that his friends might rescind the two-thirds
rule at Baltimore. His friends tried; but Robert J. Walker of Mississippi,
a party manager almost as able as Van Buren himself, defeated the at-
tempt. Walker also induced Tyler to withdraw as a candidate and to lend
his strength to Polk. Although Van Buren had a majority of the votes on
the he lost ground steadily on each succeeding ballot, and on
first ballot,

the ninth Polk was nominated.** Walker then contrived a regional com-
promise which was a masterpiece of American political art. Jacksonian
Democracy had been an alliance of Northern radicals with farmers
throughout the Mississippi Valley. The rejection of Van Buren and the
choice of a pro-Texas man from Tennessee clearly endangered the alli-
ance. How could it be revived? Walker's answer was to attack Great
Britain and to offer an enlarged Oregon territory as a prize to the North,
balancing the Southern prize of Texas. Fortunately for the plan, the
Canadian- American boundary in the far Northwest was undetermined it ;

was still possible to push the claims of the United States hundreds of miles
* Their
opponents, the "practical" wing of the party the remains of the old
Regency led by Marcy and supported by Tammany were known as Hunkers,
on the ground that they hungered, or "hunkered," after office. It was chiefly
Van Buren's hard-money policy and his Independent Treasury Bill which lost him
the Hunkers and won him the Barnburners and Locofocos.
** The first
telegraph line in America carried the news of the nomination from
Baltimore to Washington.
310 The Price of Union

v'f ;::''/ /!*; 'P^ Oregon '

Controversy
'&>$ ''$""-
'
''' ''''
'''.' .' .
*

'
(Unshaded area indicates
-i:^ '.
'';!';.*.;'//;.' .'
natural extent of Oregon, Country)

to the north, while complaining about British selfishness and British ag-

gression. This would please the expansionists of the West; it would please
the Irish of Tammany Hall; and it would please the farmers of York New
and the upper Ohio Valley who were in revolt against the British Corn
Laws which shut their grain out of England and which they blamed for
the lean years of the long depression. It was not the old Jacksonian alli-
ance; but it appealed to the same sections, and Walker hoped it would
suffice.
"The ^annexation of Texas and the ^occupation of Oregon" was
Walker's slogan for the Democratic campaign. The two prefixes were in-
tended to suggest that Texas had been included in the Louisiana Pur-
chase and then basely abandoned to Spain by John Quincy Adams in his
Florida Treaty of 1819, whereas Oregon had been American by manifest
destiny until the British came perfidiously upon the scene.* Senator Allen
* The land known as
Oregon included British Columbia plus the present states
of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and a bit of Wyoming and Montana. England and
America both claimed the whole of this territory, the northern boundary of which
was latitude 54 40', at which point Russian Alaska began. By the treaty of 1818
the two countries occupied Oregon together. John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of
State and as President, had three times offered to accept latitude 49 as the
boundary; but the British refused to settle. By actual occupation they had a valid
claim as far south as the Columbia River; on the other hand, the longer they
waited to make a final settlement, the larger the American population would
xv. New Alignments and New Passions: 1844 311
5
of Ohio "Foghorn Bill/ one of the silliest senators ever to become chair-
man Committee on Foreign Relations heightened the slogan for
of the
the Middle West by cutting it to "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight." This left out
the delicate problem of Texas, while strengthening the anti-British appeal.
Finally, having contrived an "issue" which might help the Northern Demo-
crats to forget that they were electing a Southern President pledged to
annex an empire of slave land, Walker completed his diplomatic task by
giving the vice-presidential nomination to George Dallas, a high-tariff
man from Pennsylvania, who was considered the ideal running-mate for
Polk, a low-tariff man from Tennessee.
While the Democrats were producing this triumph of double or triple
dealing, the Whigs were nominating Henry Clay for the presidency, in
spite of the fact that he took the same stand as Van Buren on Texas. This
willingness to annoy the slaveholders showed that the Whigs now felt their
strength lay in the North. Southern Whigs, taking note of the fact, pre-
pared to follow Calhoun's advice and join the Democratic Party. Hoping
to hold these Whigs, Clay hedged on Texas. In the course of the campaign
he made it clear that he was both for and against annexation depending
on what his audience preferred. He did not, thereby, win the votes he
wanted in the South but he lost the votes he needed in New York, where
;

a group of anti-slavery Whigs turned to a third-party candidate.* Clay lost

New York State, and with it the election, by five thousand votes.
become. Webster and Ashburton discussed the matter in 1842, but came to no
agreement. The next year "Oregon fever" struck the northwest frontier, and the
caravans of covered wagons a hundred strong began the long haul from Inde-
pendence, Missouri.
*
James Gillespie Birney, of Kentucky, an ex-slaveholder who had first worked
to make the institution more humane, and who later advocated gradual emancipa-
tion and colonization. Finally, and reluctantly, he had become a moderate aboli-
tionist never violent enough to be trusted by Garrison. The Liberty Party, which
nominated Birney for the election of 1844, received 62,300 votes.
 XVI

Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850

JAMES KNOX POLK was born in North Carolina in 1795. When he was
eleven his parents crossed the mountains into Tennessee. His adolescence
was spent on the frontier but when he was ready for college he went back
;

east to the University of North Carolina. After taking his degree he studied
law in Nashville, Tennessee, and was admitted to the bar in 1820. Three
years later he began his political career in the state legislature.
During the presidencies of John Quincy Adams, Jackson., and Van
Buren, Polk was a dull and diligent member of the House of Representa-
tives at Washington. He proved a faithful partisan of Jackson, and was
made the Administration leader in the lower House during the war on the
Bank. From 1835 to 1839, he was Speaker of the House. He was then per-
suaded, somewhat against his will, to become candidate for governor of
Tennessee, as the only man who could "redeem" the state from the Whigs.
He won the election, but was defeated in 1841 and went into retirement,
to emerge as the successful "dark horse" of the convention of 1844. In

spite of his long career as a "safe" party man, Polk had no national fame
at the time of his nomination. The convention which chose him not only

passed over an ex- President and the President then in office, but refused
John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass of Michigan, and Silas Wright, who had
been Senator from New York since 1833 and who was about to be made
governor of that state.*
"Who is James K. Polk?" was the campaign cry of the Whigs. It is a
question that many Americans .today might echo if they chanced to hear
the name. Although some of the most important episodes in the nation's
history took place during his Administration, and as a result of his policies,
and although he was a strong, stubborn, and dominating man, he was so
colorless that he nothing behind him but a few facts. He was without
left
intimate friends and without charm. Formal and punctilious in bearing,
stiff and angular in appearance, he looked as insignificant as people mis-

takenly believed him to be.

* Unlike the
others, Wright did not want the nomination. He was an ardent
Jacksonian, a member of the radical wing of the Democratic Party, a close friend
and adviser of Benton and Van Buren. He had just refused an appointment to the
United States Supreme Court and was campaigning for Van Buren's nomination,
convinced that only by maintaining the Jacksonian alliance of Western farmers
and Eastern radicals could the party save itself and the nation.
312
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 313

A month
after the election, Polk wrote to a friend that he
hoped for
party harmony, but "in any event I intend to be myself President of the
U. S." He appointed James Buchanan of Pennsylvania Secretary of State,
Robert J. Walker Secretary of the Treasury, William L. Marcy (the
leader of the Hunkers) Secretary of War, and George Bancroft, the his-
torian, Secretary of the Navy. Years later, Bancroft wrote that on the day
of the inauguration Polk said he had four clear objectives : to reduce the
tariff, to re-establish the Independent Treasury (which had been sup-
pressed by the Whig-Tyler Administration), to settle the Oregon bound-
ary, and to acquire California. Three of these aims were accomplished
within a year. The fourth took a little longer, since California belonged to
Mexico and could only be had by war; yet before the end of Polk's term
California was American property. This Administration, wrote Bancroft,
"viewed from the standpoint of results, was perhaps the greatest in our
national history, certainly one of the greatest. He [Polk] succeeded because
he insisted on being its center and in
overruling and guiding all his secre-
produce unity and harmony."
taries to act so as to
The Independent Treasury Bill of 1846 revived Van Buren's favorite

plan and displeased the New York Hunkers. They were placated by an
extra share of the federal patronage. The Walker Tariff Bill of the sarne
year put import duties on a revenue basis. Webster and his friends insisted
that it would ruin industry and bankrupt the Treasury. In fact, it was a
financial success ; yet it was disliked by many Northern Democrats who de-
scribed a cotton planter's measure and a sign of Southern dominance
it as
in the party. *The repeal of the English Corn Laws,** however, delighted
the Northern grain-growers, with the result that in 1857 another Demo-
cratic Administration was able to make America a truly free-trade nation.
"Wheat and cotton might have kept her in that column through the nine-
teenth century, had not the secession of the Southern states given the
protectionists a new opportunity."
1

The Oregon boundary was settled in the same momentous year of 1846,
and too was settled in a fashion that did not please the North. After all
it

the rant about "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight," and after an inaugural ad-
* The vote on the bill was
ominously sectional. Regardless of party, not a single
Congressman from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, or New Jersey
supported it, and only one from Pennsylvania. Fifty-seven Southern Democrats
voted for the bill, and one against. The West supported the South in the expecta-
tion of return favors.
** 1846. Duties on wheat entering the United Kingdom were reduced immedi-
and it was provided that they were to become purely nominal by 1849.
ately,
314 The Price of Union

dress title to the country of the Oregon is clear and

which stated that "our
unquestionable," Polk told Secretary of State Buchanan to suggest to
Great Britain that the territory be shared by extending the forty-ninth
parallel as the boundary all the way to the Pacific. The British Minister,
Pakenham, refused the offer. Polk reasserted America's claim to the whole
of Oregon, and war seemed probable. The British Government then dis-
avowed Pakenham's act, offering to accept the Polk plan with the proviso
that the island of Vancouver was to remain British. The treaty was signed
in June, 1846.
It was a good settlement; but it had a rough passage in the Senate.
Western expansionists attacked Polk for sacrificing their interests and for
being a tool of the planters. They had been promised Oregon as a reward
for allowing the South to have Texas. They had been cheated of their
prize ; but the South had already received full payment for after the elec-
tion of Polk, in the last days of Tyler's Administration, the annexation of
Texas had been authorized by a joint resolution of both houses of Con-
gress, and on July 4, 1845, the Texas legislature had agreed to join the
Lone Star Republic to the American Union.*
"Oh, Mountain that was delivered of a mouse!" cried Thomas Hart
Benton, "Thy name shall be fifty-four forty." And Senator E. A. Han-
negan of Indiana proclaimed that "Texas and Oregon were born the same
instant, nurtured and cradled in the same cradle the Baltimore Conven-
tion and they were at the same instant adopted by the Democracy
throughout the land. There was not a moment's hesitation until Texas was
admitted; but the moment she was admitted the peculiar friends of Texas
turned and were doing all they could to strangle Oregon." In the end the
treaty was accepted. Polk had assured this by suddenly and surprisingly
treating the Senate as a privy council and asking its advice in advance as
to whether he should decline England's reluctant offer to accept the forty-
ninth parallel as the boundary. The Senate dared not advise rejection, at
the possible cost of war, and was therefore denied the pleasures of indefi-
nite delay and inordinate abuse when the treaty came before it for ratifica-
tion. This was the first time the Senate had been consulted in such a
fashion since Washington's unhappy experience. It was characteristic of
Polk to seize all means, new or old, to impose his will.
As the Northerners and Westerners well knew, beyond Texas Polk saw
California, which he intended to take. And between Texas and California
lay an enormous Mexican province, seven hundred miles wide, which he
would have to take too, and most of which would make slave states if the
Missouri Compromise line were extended to the Pacific. The breaking of
Walker's bargain between the sections was good foreign politics, for Polk
could scarcely have afforded two wars at a time; but it was bad domestic
* Formalities were
completed on December 29, 1845.
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 315

politicsand the North and West retaliated after the Mexican War by acts
which helped to split the nation in two.*
The West soon acquired another grievance. When she gave her votes for
the Walker Tariff she understood that the South would support improve-
ments at federal expense for Western harbors, rivers, and roads. Senator
Hannegan had sent word to Galhoun that if the South would promise this
help, the West would "go with the South on the tariff." So in 1844 Cal-
houn argued strongly for the improvement of the navigation of the Missis-
sippi, insisting that the federal government could do this under the power
to regulate commerce. He had also renewed his support for the Western
plan to reduce the price of public lands. In the summer of 1846 a river and
harbor bill passed Congress, providing for large improvements on the
Great Lakes and on Western rivers. In spite of Calhoun, the South did not
rally to the support of this bill and as if to discredit Calhoun, Polk vetoed
;

it on constitutional
grounds. Calhoun's program was ruined. He had
stretched his strict-construction conscience to the breaking point in order
to outbid the North for Western support, and the President had made him
The Western press was furious and Western
look like a crooked dealer.
Congressmen began plotting revenge. They had been fooled on Oregon;
they had been cheated on internal improvements; but the South had been
paid in full, with Texas and with the Walker Tariff. "Hereafter," wrote
the Chicago Democrat, "the West must be respected, and her commerce
must be protected as well as that of other portions of the Union and the :

iron rod wielded over her by Southern despots must be broken." 2

Step by step, the South's ability to barter for Western votes was being
diminished. All she had left to offer was free land, and we have seen that
in the next decade this offer was withdrawn. The long contest between
North and South for the allegiance of the new third region was ending in
Southern defeat. Incidentally, Polk was the third Southern President to
frustrate the hopes of his section by vetoing an internal improvements bilL
The first and the last of those bills had been backed by Calhoun. The in-
ventor of "rule by concurrent majorities" knew that the South could not
ask for a veto to protect her own interests unless she was ready to confer
positive favors upon the interests of others.

* Galhoun must have foreseen this

danger, for he warned against the war of ex-
pansion which was so popular in the South. "Mexico is to us the forbidden fruit,"
he said in the Senate, whither he had returned after his service in the Tyler Cabinet ;
"the penalty of eating it would be to subject our institutions to political death." In
this (and perhaps in this alone) he agreed with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who de-
clared that "Mexico will poison us."
316 The Price of Union

Since the late eighteenth century the merchantmen of Massachusetts had

been trading with California, exchanging anything from Chinese fireworks
to New England rum for hides and tallow whose cheapness more than re-

paid the long voyage. In the early years the trade had been illegal and
irregular; but after 1822, when California revolted from Spain and be-
came a province of the Republic of Mexico, the trade was legitimate.
Meanwhile the growth of a shoe-manufacturing industry in New England
increased the demand for hides. Yet Mexican duties were from eighty to a
hundred per cent, and Mexican regulations were onerous, so it seemed
clear to Polk that destiny intended the United States to own this rich and
underpopulated country.
After telling the American consul on the Pacific coast that the United
States would protect the people of California if they cut loose from Mex-
ico, Polk turned his attention to acquiring the land between Texas and
California. This could only be done by purchase or by war. Mexico refused
to selland was reluctant to fight, in spite of the annexation of Texas. Polk
hesitated as Bismarck or Cavour might have hesitated to attack Mexico
on the bare and open ground that he wanted to steal her land. Fortunately
for Folk's plans, there was a dispute as to the southern boundary of Texas
the Texans claiming it was the Rio Grande, the Mexicans claim-
ing it was the Nueces, which lay considerably farther north. The facts were
disappointingly pro-Mexican, for until the young Republic of Texas made
her large claim the Nueces River had been the established boundary of the
province for a hundred years. Polk, however, ordered General Taylor to
lead an American army across the Nueces and to occupy the left bank of
the Rio Grande. Even then the exasperating Mexicans would not start a
war.
Early in May, 1846, Polk told his Cabinet that he was about to send a
war message to Congress. The United States had some claims against
Mexico for repudiated bonds and damage to American property during
civil disturbances. When Mexico, being virtually bankrupt, suspended pay-
ment on these claims, Polk prepared to use them as an excuse for war. He
had first tried to force Mexico to cede all the land he wanted in return for
a cancellation of the claims and a payment of fifteen or twenty million
dollars. The Mexicans refused to sell their country and insisted on men-

tioning honor, a point of view which seemed both obstructive and back-
ward to Polk. The claims, when they were finally adjudicated in 1851,
amounted to a little more than three million dollars.
The Cabinet agreed to Polk's message, but regretted that Mexico had
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 317

not committed some overt act, for as things stood American benevolence
might be questioned by a cynical world and the war might be thought
aggressive. That very afternoon, the welcome news arrived that a Mexican
force had crossed the Rio Grande and killed some American soldiers. Polk
could go ahead happily. "The cup of forbearance had been exhausted," he
told Congress, "even before the recent information from the frontier. . . .

But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has invaded our territory
. . .

5
and shed American blood upon the American soil.' Congress promptly
declared that "by the act of the Republic of Mexico, a state of war exists
between that Government and the United States."
This was not a triumph of duplicity, but of bigoted stubbornness. It is
hard to convey the combination of smallness and strength, triviality and
importance, that went to the making of James K. Polk. Bernard De Voto
writes :

Polk had come up the ladder, he was an orthodox party Demo-

crat. But sometimes the belt line shapes an instrument of use and
. . .

precision. Polk's mind was rigid, narrow, obstinate, far from first-rate.
He sincerely believed that only Democrats were truly American, Whigs
being either the dupes or the pensioners of England more, that not
only wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies but honor
and breeding as well. "Although a Whig he seems a gentleman" is a not
uncommon He was pompous, suspicious,
characterization in his diary.
and he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw
secretive;
spooks and villains. But if his mind was narrow it was also power-
. . .

ful. ... If he was orthodox, his integrity was absolute and he could
not be scared, manipulated, or brought to heel. No one bluffed him, no
one moved him with direct or oblique pressure. Furthermore, he knew
how to get things done, which is the first necessity of government, and
he knew what he wanted done, which is the second. 3

If Polk could not attribute patriotism, or even good manners, to an Ameri-

can Whig, the thought that a Mexican might have rights which should be
honored and protected could clearly find no lodgement in his narrow
brain.
The Americans in California, meanwhile, had taken Polk's hint and had
declared themselves an independent state. The Mexican War, to which the
Whig was
minority in Congress bitterly hostile, was brief and successful,
the American Army proving a more useful force than it had been during
the last expansionist attempt in 1812. Early in 1848 Mexico accepted a
peace which recognized the annexation of Texas and ceded to the United
States the provinces of Upper California and New Mexico a territory
larger than France and Germany combined.* The United States paid fif-
* This included the New
present states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona,
Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
318 The Price of Union

teen million dollars and assumed the damage claims. At the time the treaty
was being prepared, gold was discovered in California.
On accepting the nomination in 1844, Polk said that he had "a settled
purpose of not being a candidate for re-election." Much to everyone's sur-
prise, this was still his purpose when his first term drew to an end. On
March 4, 1849, he left Washington for his home in Nashville. Three
months later he was dead.

Polk was accused by the Whigs of forcing a war in order to extend the in-
stitution of slavery, and many Americans were sick at what they took to be
their country's dishonor. When Lewis Cass claimed the nation needed
more room, Thomas Gorwin of Ohio attacked him in the Senate. "This,"
said Corwin, "has been the plea of every robber chief from Nimrod to the
present hour. ... If I were a Mexican, I would tell you, 'Have you not
room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine,
we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable
"
graves.' Herman Melville, bitter at the smugness with which his country-
men condoned aggression, compared them unfavorably to the honest can-
nibals of the South Seas. And Abraham Lincoln, serving as a young Whig
Congressman from Illinois, asked that the President indicate the exact spot
where the war began, so the nation could decide for itself whether the
United States had been invaded. And on January 3, 1848, Lincoln voted
for a resolution which referred to the war as "unnecessarily and unconsti-
tutionally begun by the President of the United States."
Unnecessary the war may have been, but only on the assumption that
there was no need for the United States to have more land. Polk was not
bent on extending slavery, but on extending America. He had caught the
expansionist fever* which raged through the West in the middle forties,
and since he was a President of rare force he had his way both with Mex-
ico and with Congress. He not only, as Bancroft said, imposed his will
upon his Cabinet, but he imposed it upon his legislature, which is more
difficult for an American President. He was the strongest man in the

* De Veto (The Year of Decision, pp. 8-9) lists the obvious economic reasons
2nd then wisely adds: "Expansionism contained such other and un-
for this fever,
analyzable elements as romance, Utopianism, and the dream that men might yet
be free. It also contained another category of ingredients such as the logic of
geography, which the map of January 1st, 1846, made quite as clear to the Ameri-
cans then as it is to anyone today. You yourself, looking at a map in which Oregon
was jointly occupied by a foreign power and all the rest of the continent west of
Texas and the continental divide was foreign territory, would experience a feeling
made up of incompletion and insecurity. . The Americans had always devoutly
. .
 xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850

White House between Jackson and Lincoln. He consolidated the

Jackso-
nian changes in the presidency and made certain that
they would endure.
There have been many weak Presidents since his day, who dared not use
the formidable power that had been handed them but for all who wished
;

to use it, the power was there.

Polk, incidentally, was the first President to reassert the Monroe Doc-
trine, thus helping to establish
it in the
public mind as permanent national
policy. His own
plans for acquiring territory in North America were so
ambitious that there was obviously no room for other nations. In a mes-
sage to Congress on December 2, 1845, he not only reaffirmed the Doc-
trine, he stretched it to apply to any European protectorate or to any
foreign interference with the dealings between American nations. Having
in mind Guizot's provocative statement of the
previous June, Polk wrote :

the different sovereigns of

Jealousy among Europe ... has caused
them anxiously to desire the establishment of what
they term the "bal-
ance of power." It cannot be permitted to have any application on the
North American continent, and especially to the United States. We
must ever maintain that people of this continent alone have a
right to
decide their own destiny. Should any portion of them,
constituting an
independent state, propose to unite themselves with our Confederacy,
this will be a question for them and us to determine without
any foreign
interposition. We can never consent that European powers shall inter-
fere to prevent such a union because it
might disturb the "balance of
power" which they may desire to maintain upon this continent.

The final step in the annexation of Texas was about to take place, and
France and England had clearly decided not to interfere, so the words at
the time seemed uncalled-for; but later, when the United States had more
power with which to back such words, the fact that they had been spoken,
and repeated, became important.

The steady attacks upon Polk by the Whigs, the repeated statements that
his use of the presidential authority was unconstitutional, led to a stern

believed that the superiority of their institutions, government, and mode of life
would eventually spread, by inspiration and imitation, to less fortunate, less
happy
peoples. That devout belief now took a new phase: it was perhaps the American
destiny to spread our free and admirable institutions by action as well as by example,
by occupying territory as well as by practising virtue. . . For the sum of these
.

feelings, a Democratic editor found, in the summer of '45, one of the most dynamic
phrases ever minted, 'Manifest Destiny.'" This is true; yet one may regret that
"the logic of geography" so often leads to theft and battle,
320 The Price of Union

reply. In his last annual message to Congress Polk read that body a lecture
on the Executive office.

Any attempt [he said] to coerce the President to yield his sanction to
measures which he cannot approve would be a violation of the spirit of
the Constitution. The people by the Constitution have com-
. . .

manded the President as much as they have commanded the legislative

branch of the Government to execute their will. If it be said that
. . .

*
the Representatives in the popular branch of Congress are chosen di-
rectly by the people, it is answered, the people elect the President. . . .

The President represents in the executive department the whole people

of the United States as each representative of the legislative department
represents portions of them.

It was this last statement, when made by Jackson, which infuriated the
Senate and drove Clay to his loudest cries of protest. Yet it was simply the
truth. The people had seized the presidency and made it the agent of their
will. They had circumvented the Constitution, substituting popular elec-
tion of the President for the elaborate scheme of the Fathers, and thereby
giving to the office a direct representative character. No speeches by Whig
Senators could undo that fact. So long as the people supported the Presi-
dent, he could make policy and he could defeat a Congressional policy of
which he disapproved. Without the strong support of the people, he could
defeat Congressional policy but he could do nothing positive. Professor
still

Ford writes :

The agency of the presidential office has been such a master force in
shaping public policy that to give a detailed account of it would be
equivalent to writing the political history of the United States. From
Jackson's time to the present day it may be said that political issues have
been decided by executive policy. . While all that a President can
. .

certainly accomplish is to force the submission of an issue to the people,

yet such is the strength of the office that, if he makes a sincere and reso-
lute use of its resources, at the same time cherishing his party connec-
tion, he can as a rule carry his party with him, because of the powerful
interests which impel it to occupy the ground taken for it by the ad-
ministration. ... If, in default of a definite administrative policy vig-
orously asserted, Congress is left to its own devices, issues are compro-
mised and emergencies are dealt with by makeshift expedients. . . .

The evidence which our history affords seems conclusive of the fact that
the only power which can end party duplicity and define issues in such
a way that public opinion can pass upon them decisively, is that which
emanates from presidential authority. It is the rule of our politics that
no vexed question is settled except by executive policy. 4

The President, according to this statement, must "cherish his party con-
nection" if he is to exert his strength. This was the second part of the
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 321

Jacksonian revolution: not only was the new power of the popularly
elected President asserted, but a new form of
party organization was built
to help the President to exercise the power in concert with the legislature.
As Professor Ford comments :

Party organization continues to be the sole efficient means of adminis-

trativeunion between the executive and legislative branches of the
government, and . whatever tends to maintain and perfect that
. .

union makes for orderly politics and constitutional progress; while what-
ever tends to impair that union, disturbs the constitutional poise of the
government, obstructs its functions, and introduces an anarchic condi-
tion of affairs full of danger to all social interests. This is the cardinal
6
principle of American politics.

It is a principle which first became clear in the

days of Jackson and his
friend Polk. Thenceforth the President, to be
successful, must not only
represent the people as a whole, defending the national interest against
sectional and class interests, he must also guide and control and wheedle
the party leaders who are the representatives of sectional and class inter-
ests. Theparty leaders, in Congress and in the state machines, know the
compromises which must be made if national policy (however necessary)
is not to breed bitterness and disunion. The President knows the
compro-
mises he dare not make if the nation is to be served. Yet it is not
enough to
win a majority of all the people to his support; he must also win the
specially affected local majorities and class majorities forit is the
repre-
sentatives of local and economic interests who will his measures
pass upon
Farm Senators or Labor Senators or South-
in Congress. Silver Senators or
ern white-supremacy Senators may have to be placated before a bill desired
by most of the voters can pass. If they are not placated, if they are merely
overridden by the will of a distant and unknown majority, the American
federal system may begin to break.
It not easy to be the one national leader in a country the size of
is

America, the one man elected by all the people and expected to under-
stand their common needs, and at the same time to be the party leader,
presiding over the incessant and essential party compromises never
giving more than necessary, but never giving less. Yet this is what a
successful President must attempt, which is why the American Govern-
ment seldom runs well or easily. Yet one tribute must be paid to the system
which developed during the Jackson days: it can be worked successfully
by any very able and very popular politician. The system devised by Jeffer-
son, on the other hand, could only be worked by himself. And the no-party
system, envisaged by the Constitution, cannot be worked at all.
322 The Price of Union

The first of the Northern retaliations against Southern expansion, fore-

seen by Calhoun, came in 1846. During the discussion of an appropriation
bill for "extraordinary expenses" that is, for inducing Mexico to cede
land Representative Wilmot (a Pennsylvania Democrat) offered an
amendment providing that no territory acquired from Mexico should be
open to slavery. The Wilmot Proviso was accepted by the House but not
by the Senate. The Proviso was reintroduced in 1847, and was again de-
feated in the Senate. The country was divided and angry, North against
South; the final struggle had begun.* Meanwhile, the time approached
for the next presidential campaign.
Undeterred by their recent experience with Tyler, the Whigs nominated
another strong-willed man: General Zachary Taylor, the hero of the
Mexican War. They sought to compensate by giving him the weakest pos-
sible running-mate Millard Fillmore of New York State. Taylor, who was
:

sixty-four years old, was born in Orange County, Virginia. His father, who
had been a colonel in the War of Independence, moved to Kentucky, near
the present Louisville, when the boy was a year old. Zachary grew up on a
small, not very successful, plantation, and received almost no formal edu-
cation. When war with England threatened, and the Army was being en-
larged, Taylor was given a commission as first lieutenant in an infantry
regiment. At the end of the War of 1812 he left the service with the rank
of major; but he returned to it in 1816. At the time of the Black Hawk
War in 1832, he was in command of a regiment. About this time a young
officer in the regiment, named Jefferson Davis, fell in love with the
colonel's daughter. Taylor forbade the marriage; the girl went to visit an
aunt in Kentucky; Davis resigned his commission, followed Miss Sarah
Taylor to Kentucky, and there married her. They set out at once for
Davis's plantation in Mississippi; but the romance had a bad ending, for
Sarah Davis died of malarial fever three months after her marriage.
In 1845 Taylor was stationed in Louisiana and had become a brigadier
general and the owner of an unprosperous plantation in Mississippi. In
that summer he received orders from President Polk to march his troops
into Texas, across the Nueces, and in 1846 he was told to advance to the
Rio Grande. In the war which ensued he became a major general and
conquered the northeastern states of Mexico. He was liked by his troops,
* On January 4, 1847, the day the Proviso was reintroduced, Polk wrote in his
diary: "The slavery question is assuming a fearful and a most important aspect."
He added that if the Proviso was pushed it "will be attended with terrible con-
sequences to the country, and cannot fail to destroy the Democratic party, if it
does not ultimately threaten the Union itself."
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 323

who called him "Old Rough and Ready," and his success made him a
hero with the people. Since he was a Whig in politics, and since the wily
Thurlow Weed had begun to push him for the presidency as early as
1846, his popularity may not have pleased Polk. In any case, Winfield
Scott was sent to take Mexico City and Taylor's army was depleted to
supply Scott with troops. Taylor believed this was a plot to break him. If
so, the plot misfired, for when Taylor's force had been reduced to 5000
men it was attacked by Santa Anna with 20,000. Taylor made a magnifi-

cent stand in the glaring heat at Buena Vista February, 1847 finally
beating off the Mexicans and adding the finishing touch to his own repu-
tation. Within a month, a Whig convention in Iowa had nominated him
for the presidency.*
Taylor, though a Whig, had never voted for a President or taken an
active part in politics. At first he was unwilling to accept the nomination,
but he gave in to the flattering popular clamor. He insisted that he did not
want to be a party candidate, but he discovered there was no other kind.
He was emphatically the people's choice, the politicians (except for Weed)
being afraid of him. He had dogmatic views in private but the public was
;

not told of them. And the Whigs were careful not to handicap him by
expressing any opinion or suggesting they had any policies or plans for the
future. Taylor ran, and triumphed, as a military hero whom the people
wished to reward. He could count on his full party strength in the North,
outside of Ohio and Indiana, and as a slaveowner and the father-in-law of
Jefferson Davis he could hope to hold some of the Southern Whigs whom
Galhoun was luring into the other camp. Nevertheless, the Democrats
might have won the election had they been able to hold their party to-
gether and sidestep the slavery issue. They failed to do either of these de-
sirable things largely because of Van Buren.
The Barnburner faction of the Democratic Party in New York State
controlled the legislature and in 1844 had elected the governor, Silas
Wright.** Because they approved the Wilmot Proviso, the federal patron-
age was withdrawn from the Barnburners by Polk's Administration. The
jobs all went to Hunkers, and with the help of this patronage the Hunkers
were able to run the New York State Democratic Convention at Syracuse,
in 1847. The conventionrejected a Barnburner resolution expressing "un-
compromising hostility to the extension of slavery into territory now free."
The Barnburners thereupon seceded and called their own meeting at
* Another future President established a national reputation at Buena Vista.
Colonel Jefferson Davis of the "Mississippi Rifles" had saved the day with a
gallant defense against a Mexican cavalry charge, and his name was almost as
widely applauded as his general's.
** Among their other leaders were "Prince John" Van Buren, the ex-President's
son, and Samuel J. Tilden of post-Civil-War fame. Wright failed to be re-elected
governor in 1846.
 324 The Price of Union

Herkimer, New York, to discuss their wrongs and to plan their future. This
Herkimer meeting is the first step toward the creation of the modern Re-
It agreed on a blunt statement that the New York State
publican Party.
Democracy would not vote for any presidential candidate who favored the
extension of slavery into the territories.
In 1848 the Barnburners met at Utica to choose delegates to the Demo-
cratic National Convention. They issued a statement the work of the
two Van Burens and of Tildcn affirming that slavery contradicted tlje
principles of the Democratic Party and the traditions of the American
people. Meanwhile, the Hunkers chose their own delegates; so when the
National Convention met at Baltimore (in May, 1848) two sets of dele-
gates appeared from New York State. The convention offered to let each
of them cast half the state's vote; but the compromise was refused by both
groups. The Barnburners withdrew. The convention then nominated
Lewis Cass of Michigan the man who had become Jackson's Secretary of
War after the resignation of the too-much-married Eaton. The party plat-
form said nothing about the slavery issue, but spoke highly of the late war
with Mexico and referred disparagingly to European monarchs.
Cass was America's leading imperialist. After he had failed to receive
the presidential nomination in 1844, the Michigan legislature appointed
him to the United States Senate. There he favored appropriating most of
the North American continent. The annexation of Texas he of course ap-

proved. "The Oregon claim," he said, "is all Oregon, and no vote of
I

mine in this Senate will surrender one inch of it to England." Similarly,

the Mexico he claimed appeared to be all Mexico, for in 1847 he an-
nounced, "We must continue our occupation of Mexico, and push the
invasion still farther." He was opposed to the Wilmot Proviso, and antici-
pated the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" which was later put forward
by Stephen A. Douglas. "Leave to the people who will be affected by this

question," said Cass, "to adjust it upon their own responsibility and in
their own manner."
With these views, Cass was acceptable to the South, but not to the
Barnburners. After walking out of the Democratic Convention at Balti-
more they called for a convention to meet at Buffalo, in August, 1848, in-
viting all who were opposed to the further extension of slavery. Van Buren
sent a letter inwhich he reviewed the long argument as to whether Con-
gress had the power to exclude slavery from the territories, urged forcefully
that it had, and asserted that he could not vote for Lewis Cass. The
Buffalo Convention thereupon created the Free Soil Party, nominating
Van Buren for President and Charles Francis Adams (the son of John

Quincy Adams) for Vice-President. There were four main planks to the
party platform the prohibition of slavery in the territories, the free dis-
:

tribution of public lands to actual settlers, internal improvements, and a

xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 325

protective tariff.* The Barnburner Convention not only assured the defeat
of the Democratic Party in 1848, it led to the birth of the Republican
Party a few years later. When that party came to power in I860, it was
with the four planks from the Free Soil platform plus the Whig demand
for a National Bank.
Van Buren, as Free Soil candidate, won about 300,000 votes but no
electors. In New York State he got 121,000 votes against 114,000 for Cass.
General Taylor got 218,000 votes in New York. Cass might have won the
state if it had not been for the Free Soil Party, and if he had won New
York he would have won the presidency.** So Van Buren, the inventor of
party "regularity," had broken his party. The first "organization man"
had betrayed the organization which he himself had built. No one could
be more cool or forgetful than Van Buren toward a man who did not
"play the game" in politics, so he cannot have been surprised to find him-
self reviled by his old friends. In 1833 Van Buren was the favorite of the

all-conquering Jackson; Calhoun was in danger of being hanged for a

traitor. In 1848 Van Buren was the party apostate, with no political

future; Calhoun was master of the South, and the South was master of
the Democratic Party. The stage was set for the last great effort of the
Cotton Kingdom to control the nation's destiny. "A population of two
and a half millions in the lower South," writes Professor Dodd, "with only
a tenth of them directly connected with slavery, would guide a nation of
twenty millions, nine tenths of whom were cither outspoken or silent op-
ponents of slavery and all it connoted."
Van Buren played no further part in high politics. He returned to the
Democratic Party in 1852, but could do nothing to prevent the mistakes
which he felt the party was making. He lived to see the outbreak of the
Civil War, dying at Kinderhook in 1862.

The second Whig President lived alittle longer than the first, but not
long
enough to matter. Taylor's Inaugural Address was a proper, self-denying
Whig document.

The Executive [he said] has authority to recommend (not to dictate)

measures to Congress. Having performed that duty, the Executive de-
partment of the Government cannot rightfully control the decision of
* A neat combination of sops to the East and to the West.Van Buren had not
submerged cunning in his new righteousness.
his old
** That is, if he had held Indiana and Ohio. It is probable that without a Free
Soil Party Taylor would have taken these states, and thus the election.
326 The Price of Union

Congress on any subject of legislation until that decision shall have been
officially submitted to the President for approval. The check provided
by the Constitution in the clause conferring the qualified veto will never
be exercised by me except in the cases contemplated by the Fathers of
the Republic. I view it as an extreme measure, to be resorted to only in
extraordinary cases, as when it may become necessary to defend the
executive against encroachments of the legislative power or to prevent
hasty and inconsiderate or unconstitutional legislation.

This was all very well, and Taylor undoubtedly meant it, for he had
expressed the same opinions in letters to Jefferson Davis and others in
1847; but the presidency had by this time become an office in which it was
difficult to refuse power. No strong-willed man like General Taylor, accus-
tomed to rule, could any longer be a Madisonian President. Taylor was
faced immediately with the Wilmot Proviso, which he had thought was an
unimportant issue in the days when he was only a general. He now found
it of vital importance, and on
studying it he discovered that he was in
total disagreement with the leaders of the Whig Party. If a bill containing
the Wilmot Proviso was presented him, he would sign it. He told the
Northern people that they "need have no apprehension of the further
extension of slavery." When Southern Congressmen threatened secession,
he told them he would take the field in person and hang anyone guilty of
rebellion. Clay and Webster were soon as bitter against Taylor as they had
been against the previous Whig President. And Taylor had begun to un-
derstand why the country laughed when he urged Congress, in his first
message, to "abstain from the introduction of those exciting topics of sec-
tional character which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in
the public mind."
While learning that the major problem in American life could not be
dissolved in words, he was also receiving instruction in one of the minor
problems of politics. Like most amateurs, Taylor had been contemptuous
of all forms of jobbery, and as a candidate he insisted he saw no reason
why Whigs should be preferred to Democrats when it came to making ap-
pointments. On taking office he was quickly shown that he must be either a
John Quincy Adams, virtuous and impotent, or he must be a party leader,
maintaining party discipline and thus securing Congressional help for his
measures.And how, he was asked, would he maintain party discipline if
he refused to distribute the patronage among his loyal followers?
The heads of the large custom houses and post offices, the federal at-
torneys, marshals, and land officers, the lucky recipients of government
printing contracts which often yielded fifty per cent profits these were
the men (or the friends of the men) who manned and directed the state
and city machines, dominated the state conventions, selected many of the
candidates for House and Senate. If the President and his executive aids
xvL Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 327

did not appoint their friends to these positions, how could they expect
And if they did appoint their friends to
faithful support for their policies?
the top posts, how could they object if the thousands of minor jobs were
distributed for the same purposes and in the same fashion? Because of the
size and diversity of the country, the national party was nothing but a
skeleton organization, a communications center for the powerful state and
city machines. If the state and city leaders were dissatisfied, the national
party fell to pieces and the Administration could not govern. Even with
the firmest discipline and the strongest party machine, and even when the
President's party had majorities in both Houses, Congress could be counted
on to water down the Administration measures, to delay almost unbear-
ably, and to introduce many regional and special-interest compromises.
This was proper; it was an intentional result of the federal system and the
division of powers; it was a needed protection against government by a
mere majority. But it was one thing for Congress to impose delay, to im-
pose compromise, to insist on a hearing for every economic and regional
interest; it was another thing for Congress to refuse all Executive leader-
ship and even advice, and to revert to the chaos of government by stand-
ing committees. Yet this was what happened whenever the President
failed to "cherish his party connection."
These facts were explained to the innocent General Taylor, with the
result that during his first few months in office 3400 Democratic office-
holders were replaced by Whigs.
On July 4, 1850, Taylor became a victim of the Washington climate.
At a public ceremony in the boiling heat he drank too much cold water.
He contracted a fever, and in five days he was dead. It is possible that his
death was a blessing both to himself and to his country, for he was on the
verge of a Cabinet scandal involving a lightheartcd attitude toward the
public funds on the part of the Attorney General, the Secretary of the
Treasury, and the Secretary of War, and he was also on the verge of a sec-
tional conflict which might well have led to fighting. On July 5 Taylor
would have sent to Congress a message demanding the immediate admis-
sion of California and New Mexico as free states, and the settlement of
the border dispute between Texas and New Mexico in favor of the latter,
if necessary with the help of federal troops. Professor Allan Nevins com-

ments :

Had Taylor lived, his defiant message on the dispute with Texas
would have gone to Congress. He would have remade his Cabinet with
a decided Northern preponderance. Conflict in the Southwest,
. . .

coupled with a general Southern revolt against the naked California

and New Mexico bills, would have given the country stormy months
and perhaps bloody scenes. It may be said that a stern Jacksonian policy
in 1850 would perhaps have cowed the secessionists into submission, and
328 The Price of Union

thus possibly have averted the Civil War which came a decade later.
But this seems so unlikely that we may well rejoice that death inter-
vened that the clash of two civilizations was postponed until the North
;

was relatively much stronger, and a far wiser leader sat in the White
House.

Taylor had been opposed to dodging the issue presented by the Wilmot
Proviso. In this he was supported by John C. Calhoun, who also did not
want a compromise. Calhoun pressed for a final decision as to where the
South stood. Superficially, the problem of the new territory seemed to
have settled itself by 1850, for by that time New Mexico was known to be
a dry land where no slaveholder could prosper, and California had de-
clared her desire to be a free state.* But Calhoun was looking to the
future. He countered the Wilmot Proviso with the doctrine that Congress
had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, since slaves were
common-law property. It was Congress's duty, he said, to protect the law-
ful property of American citizens, not to take their property away from
them. If this doctrine were accepted (and in 1857 it was endorsed by the
Supreme Court), the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited
slavery in the territories north of 36 30', would become null and void.
Calhoun knew he would raise a storm in the North; but he wished to
force the issue, being prepared for one of two results: secession (before
the North was too strong to be resisted), or a constitutional amendment
which would insure what he called "the rule of the concurrent majority."
He wished to make certain that the South, which was already heavily out-
numbered, could never be subjected to the domination of a numerical
majority resident elsewhere. One way to accomplish this, he believed,
would be to create a dual Executive: one President elected by the North
and another by the South, each with a legislative veto. If this were deemed
impractical, the South would accept any constitutional change which
made sectional compromise a necessity.
Such compromise, Calhoun felt, was the dominant theme in American
political life, and the unique contribution of the United States to the
political thought of the free world; but the South could no longer count
on the political good sense of the North to insure compromise. The ravings
of anti-slavery fanatics had clouded that good sense and the South must
now insist on a form of protection which was written into the constitu-
* The South had
hoped, originally, that California might be divided in two,
the southern half of it being saved for the plantation system.
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 329

tional bond. This was her last chance. The North was far more wealthy
than the South and far more populous.* In a few years the railways would
have built a new Northwest, tied to the Northeast by lines of commerce
and by a common aversion to the "peculiar institution" of slavery. When
that happened^ the North would win final control of the government at
Washington and would reinstate all the Hamiltonian policies, meanwhile
interfering in every possible way with the slave system. To Calhoun this
meant the doom of Southern agriculture and Southern life. If Southern-
ers waited for secession until all this had happened, they would find them-
selves too weak, and would be constrained to remain in the Union under
Northern domination. Now was the time to force a decision. If Union
sentiment in the North was strong enough to secure a constitutional
amendment protecting the South forever against exploitation, so much
the better. That was the one compromise the South could afford to accept.
The argument was logical, but fatally doctrinaire and unbending.
Unfortunately for Calhoun's plans, a very different compromise was
accepted. Henry Clay, who had patched up the sectional quarrel in 1820,
and again in 1833, returned to the Senate to face the new crisis and pro-
duced his last and greatest effort. In January, 1850, he brought forward
compromise resolutions containing prizes and bitter pills for both sides.
California was to be admitted at once as a free state, and the slave trade
in the District of Columbia was to be stopped. Those were the Northern

prizes. They were balanced by two other

resolutions that the rest of the
:

land taken from Mexico was to be organized into territories with no pro-
vision as to slavery or its absence, and that a more strict fugitive-slave law
was to be passed.*"* A week later Clay defended the proposals in two of his
finest speeches. He begged the North to understand the South's pride and
the South's fears, and to accept the substance of the Wilmot Proviso with-
out insisting that it be written into law. He begged the South to remember
the benefits of Union, and not to forget that secession must mean war
"furious, bloody, implacable, exterminating." The millions who lived in
the upper Mississippi Valley, he said, would never permit the mouth of
that river to be held by a foreign power. Throughout the long debate he
returned to these points disarmingly and beguilingly. It was obvious why
the public had loved him beyond all his contemporaries. In July he made
the last great speech of his career.
Early in March Calhoun made his reply to the proposals. He was a
dying man, and his cause was dying with him. He was so weak that he had
*In 1850 there were 23,191,876 people in the United States. Of these, the
eleven states which were to form the Southern Confederacy had seven and a
quarter million.
** There was a fifth
resolution, that the boundary dispute between Texas and NeW
Mexico be settled, with assumption of the Texas debt by the federal government.
330 The Price of Union

to grimly watching while his speech was read by Senator Mason of Vir-
sit

ginia. In the early days of the Union, he wrote, there had been an equal
distribution of power between the North and the South. That equality was

gone. In wealth and population the North had forged ahead, and the
disparity would grow greater. The change had not come for natural
reasons, but because of three pernicious policies of the federal govern-
ment: first, the exclusion of slavery from most of the territories (under the
Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise) with the result that
,

the Southern economic system had been deprived of its proper chance to
spread; second, the protective tariff, making artificially high prices for
what the South had to buy, and subsidizing the Northern factory; third,
the consolidation of power in the hands of the federal government, with
the result that any regional majority which took charge at Washington
would find an all- too-efficient weapon for oppression.
To new
grievance had been added the anti-slavery
these old wrongs a :

agitation which openly sought to overturn the social system of the South.
Unless scotched at once, this must grow stronger as the North grew
stronger, until the South was forced to choose between abolition and
secession.
And why should the South be forever on the defensive? The South was
not seeking to impose adverse economic conditions on other regions; she
was only seeking to keep other regions from imposing such conditions upon
herself. The South was not trying to change the social system of Boston,
or to improve the lot of wage-slaves in the factories of Fall River; the
South was asking to be let alone.
Henry Clay's compromise met none of the Southern grievances. The
North had taken the offensive, and that offensive must cease. If the South
were given protection against exploitation or interference from without,
the Union could endure forever, and for the good of all. If the South were
denied this protection, she must secede.
Until the publication of his posthumous books, this was the last word
from Calhoun. He died within the month. He is said to have died mur-
muring, "The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of
her!" One of the South's devoted sons commented in 1939:

What has become of her? God knows! She went out to battle and she
felL She has lain in economic bondage longer than the republic had
lasted when Calhoun was in his prime. She has felt the lash of the task-
mastera and has made bricks without straw. She has been perverse, and
froward, and indomitable, foul and magnificent. She has produced
Robert E. Lee and Huey Long, Deep River and Tobacco Road, John
Wilkes Booth and Sergeant York, Woodrow Wilson and The Memphis
Blues. In the matter of Negro enfranchisement she has defied the Con-
stitution of the United States and she has flung her sons by thousands
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 331

on the bayonets of its enemies. She has given us lessons in

lynching and
courtesy. Distracted, violent and tender, she is filled with loveliness and
horror and drives her sons to revile while they adore her. 7

The was made by Webster on the seventh of March.

decisive speech
New England would never accept a new and more punitive Fugitive Slave
Act unless it were backed by the whole power of Webster's prestige. And
if the Fugitive Slave Act were rejected, the South would
reject the rest of
Clay's measures and Calhoun would have his way. Webster's first sentence
showed that he favored the proposals "I speak today for the preservation
:

of the Union. Hear me for my cause." This speech, and the arduous subse-
quent debates, were to be his last great effort also. The speech was given
added dignity by the knowledge that the men of letters and the younger
men of politics in the North would turn on Webster and call him traitor
for recommending the Compromise. Once again the Senate was under the
spell of that conquering presence. Old age had destroyed none of Webster's
impressiveness and when, with a weakened voice but undiminished
;

oratory, he pleaded for conciliation in the name of patriotism, it must have

been hard even for a Southerner to remember the reasoning of Calhoun.
"No speech more patriotic or evincing a higher degree of moral courage
had ever been made in Congress," writes Professor Nevins. "For once
Webster rose to the highest level of statesmanship. In the fierce light of the
history written by events during the next generation, hardly a line of his
address failed to meet the test of truth and wisdom." 8
Webster, nevertheless, did not reach men's hearts as Clay had reached
them. For too many years Webster had made a parade of his service to
business. When he talked of the glory of the Union, his enemies had
learned to compute the dividends the Union was paying to the Cotton
Whigs of Massachusetts. In 1850 those dividends were high. Both mari-
time and manufacturing Massachusetts flourished on the Southern trade.

Year by year [writes Samuel Eliot Morison] the wealthy Cotton Belt
wore out more boots and shoes, purchased more cottons for her slaves,
used more Quincy granite in her public buildings, and consumed more
Fresh Pond ice* in her mint juleps. The New England mills, on their
part, were calling for more cotton; and every pound of it that they re-
ceived, before the Civil War, came by sailing vessel from Charleston,
Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. The factory hands were equally
hungry for cheap food. ... In the period from September 1, 1841, to
May 1, 1842, one-quarter of the lard,more than one-quarter of the
flour, nearly half the pork and more than half the corn shipped out of
New Orleans went to Boston. 9

*The trade in ice (cut from New England ponds) with the South, the West
Indies, and even the Orient, was an interesting example of Yankee enterprise.
332 The Price of Union

Yankee ships aiso toon cotton from New Orleans to Lancashire, Nor-
mandy, Flanders, Prussia, and the Baltic Provinces. Cotton, in fact, had
become

the most important medium in our carrying trade, replacing colonial

rum and codfish, and the Oriental goods of Federalist days. Few con-
verts were obtained by the abolitionists in Boston counting-rooms.
Society, business,and politics in Massachusetts were dominated by a
triple entente between "the Lords of the Lash and the Lords of the
Loom" and the Lords of the Long Wharf. 10
In 1850, with the relatively low Walker Tariff and with hopes for a still
lower tariff if the Democrats returned to power, this two-way trade
profited the South as well as New England; but Southerners knew that
Webster's ideal Union would be one in which Massachusetts sold her
manufactures to the Cotton Kingdom at artificial high-tariff prices and
bought her raw materials from the South at world prices. The South saw
the threat of economic colonialism in Webster's Union the Northern Free
;

Soilers saw the shadow of State Street across Webster's noble sentiments.
These suspicions do not diminish the splendor and the truth of the seventh
of March speech; but they do explain why many good citizens refused to
be moved by it.
Senator Seward of New York represented the younger generation of the
North in the great debate. He spoke for the future: the ominous future,
foreseen by Calhoun, wherein the South must choose abolition or secession.
Seward spoke for the "Conscience Whigs," as opposed to the "Cotton
Whigs"; he spoke for the Barnburners; he spoke for the men who were to
form the Republican Party. He admitted that under the Constitution Con-
gress could allow slavery in the territories "but there is a higher law than
the Constitution which regulates our authority over the domain." "A
higher law" America was back again at her beginnings, back with Jeffer-
son, and Locke, and Blackstone. "This law of nature dictated by . . .

God himself .
binding
. . over all the globe ... no human laws are of
any validity, if contrary to this." It is hard to argue with people who know
that their deeds correspond to the "higher law," And it is impossible to
compromise with them.
Such certainty was not yet the mood of the majority, North or South.
A number of influential Southerners, such as Alexander Stephens and
Robert Toombs, were still in the Whig Party and worked loyally for the
compromise.* After months of debate the necessary measures passed in
* In 1852 both
Stephens and Toombs joined the Democratic Party. In the same
year, Henry Clay died and those of his followers who had remained with the Whigs
out of personal loyalty felt free to join the Democrats. At last, Calhoun's work
of uniting the Southern leaders in a single party was accomplished posthumously
and too late.
xvi. Calhoun and the Meaning of 1850 333

September, 1850. Calhoun had died meanwhile; and a Southern conven-

tion had met in Nashville to decide whether to take Calhoun's advice and
demand special guarantees as the price of staying in the Union. Nine states
were represented. South Carolina and Mississippi were for strong meas-
ures; but the majority chose moderation, and in the end the convention
merely asked that the o]d Missouri Compromise line be extended to the
Pacific.
It was fortunate for the Compromise that Zachary Taylor took his over-
dose of ice water while the debates were still in progress. He had come
under the influence of Senator Seward, and he threatened to veto any
agreement which did not contain the Wilmot Proviso. Clay protested that
the President and his friends had declared "war, open war, undisguised
war" against the Compromise. Fillmore, on the other hand, had said that
in case of a tie vote in the Senate he would exercise his privilege as Vice-
President and cast the deciding vote in favor of the Compromise. Once
again, therefore, the death of a Whig President meant a reversal of Execu-
tive policy.* On succeeding to office Fillmore at once changed the course
of the debate by urging that Texas be paid ten million dollars for her
boundary claim against New Mexico. Texas state securities, which were
well distributed throughout the country, rose nine hundred per cent in
value,and a new set of pressures were brought to bear on Congress. "The
Texas Surrender Bill," wrote Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, "was
passed by the influence of the new administration which is Hunker and
Compromise all over. The message of Fillmore . . . did the work." 11

Calhoun's predictions as to what would happen were so accurate that

some have blamed him for the subsequent tragedy, as if he had brought
it to
pass by mentioning it. Others have felt that the great Compromise
was the culprit, and that Calhoun's proposal for a constitutional amend-
ment should have been accepted. Yet this would only have aggravated
what we have already seen to be a main problem of the American form of
government the problem of getting positive action in time. The govern-
:

ment was devised to prevent action. With great difficulty and ingenuity
(and with the able help of Marshall's Supreme Court and Jackson's ad-
visers) it had cast off some of its chains, gained a little freedom and
strength. Calhoun would have riveted the chains back on, and added a few
more for safety. His "rule of the concurrent majority" meant that each
* The first time the
change had been a\vay from Whig Party policies, the second
time it was toward them. The death of Taylor was almost as much of a blessing
for the party leaders as the death of Harrison had been a calamity.
334 The Price of Union

major region, class, or economic interest must have a formal, constitutional

right to veto action.
Like Jefferson and like most Americans of the early days Calhoun was
certain that increased powers for the government meant decreased liber-
ties for the people. Hence his fear of the Mexican War and of the doctrine

of "manifest destiny" of America's mission to spread liberty even by

force. War kills liberty, said Calhoun. So does the rule of an unchecked

majority. Liberty can only flourish when man is protected from the rulers
of his own choice. 12 The ruled, therefore, must be given "the means of
making peaceable and effective resistance." And the one effective resist-
ance is for each major interest and each section to have a veto. Obviously,
if this were accepted, government would become impossible. Only in

a system work.
Jefferson's lost Arcadia could such
The nation was wise, therefore, to reject Calhoun's constitutional
amendment. And it was also wise to adopt extra-constitutionally, in-
formally many of Calhoun's proposals. The dilatory rule of the concur-
rent majority isa fair description of how, in normal times, the American
party system operates. Out of the continent-wide welter of hopes and
desires the parties build a compromise on which many diverse interests
can agree. They do not ignore minorities, they incorporate and placate
them. Each major party, in fact, is a league of minority groups class,
race, and regional. Such parties cannot afford to have hard and fast ideas,
or to be Left, or Right, or even Middle. They must be all three at the same
time, in different parts of the country. And they must make gentlemen's
agreements (and committee rules) in Congress to prevent coalitions of
enthusiasts from brushing aside minority protests. So, in truth, the party
system provides for concurrent majorities, but in a subtler and more flex-
ible form than Calhoun demanded.
Government by concurrent majority, however, would be death if it
were written into the Constitution, for it must always break down at two
points: it cannot act fast (so it must be overridden in an emergency) and ,

it cannot deal with a conflict of principles. It can ward off unnecessary

conflicts of principles. It can even pretend for a very long time that a
conflict which clearly exists, and which cannot be dodged, does not exist
at all thus aggravating the problem deplorably. But it is a negative
system, a system of inaction. And matters of principle, if they are so im-
portant that they must be settled, cannot be settled by inaction. This is
what Jefferson feared, when he said that if the day came when a disagree-
ment on moral principle was also a disagreement between sections the
nation might fall.
PART TWO
1850-1909
 XVII

The Parties on the Verge of Failure

JLHE COMPROMISE OF 1850 was the valiant last effort of the Webster-
Clay generation to avoid disunion. It seemed to succeed. Threats of seces-
sion seemed to be overwhelmed by a renewed national goodwill. The
Compromise was celebrated throughout the land as a glorious victory;
yet within a few years it broke, and shortly thereafter the Union also
broke. The divisive forces which are active in any large, rambling federal
structure had triumphed over the forces making for prudence and conces-
sion. The party system had temporarily failed.
In seeking the reasons for failure 1 we should remember that the United
States had never known a time of rest, of calm self-possession. Whenever
the young nation seemed about to reach an equilibrium of forces, the cir-
cumstances shifted and the balance was again upset. From the day of her
birth America lived among storms which she could neither control nor
dodge. The storms of Napoleon coincided with her childhood, and were
succeeded by the storms of the Industrial Revolution. Uneasy and in-
secure as the world may always have been, the United States surely faced
uncommon troubles when she sought to found her new political and social
institutions at a time when the conditions of life were changing more
radically in a than they had previously changed in a
single generation
thousand years. Throughout the Western world for several decades each
new invention brought a confused swirl of blessings and woes, until life
lostwhatever stability it had known. And if this was true even in Europe,
the ferment must have been at its greatest in America, where the all-
changing magic of the new technology was revealed during a period of
wide westward expansion and of heavy immigration. The United States,
for example, had by no means digested or even explored the whole of the
Louisiana Purchase when the empire of Texas was added to the Union^
and then Oregon, and the vast booty of Mexico, At once, gold in Cali-
fornia, and discontent in Europe following the outbreaks of 1848, in-
creased the torrents of new settlers. During the eigh teen-forties the coun-
try received 1,713,251 immigrants; during the fifties 2,598,214.
This was exciting and inspiring, but it did not make for ease or political
rest. Meanwhile the spoils of Mexico, as Emerson and Calhoun predicted,
came close to poisoning the land for with every new push toward the
337
338 The Price of Union

West, every new territory opened for settlement, tfre rivalry between
Northern and Southern institutions was revived, and either the fear or the
stubborn defense of slavery was strengthened. And then, at last, under a
President who praised the Compromise but failed to grasp its spirit, the
lust to reach the gold fields of California in a hurry spurred on a sectional

struggle for control of the first transcontinental railway which helped to

explode the long-restrained hatreds. Yet the federal system as it had de-
veloped by 1850, with the party machinery which had been invented to
make it work, might have preserved the Union for many years, half slave
and half free, and might even have allowed the slow forces of social and
moral pressure to dispose of slavery and dissolve the tragic tension, if the
country had remained relatively quiet, subject only to normal vicissitude.
But in the boiling, churning welter of change which America had in fact
to endure, no palliatives could cloak the ever-renewed divisions, no con-
cessions were given time to diminish ill will. This need not mean that the
Civil War was inevitable. Bonar Law may have been right when he said,
"There is no such thing as inevitable war. If war comes it will be from
failure of human wisdom." Nevertheless, among the reasons for the failure
of American wisdom during the eighteen-fifties, one of the most com-
pelling may be that the rate of change had for some time been too rapid
forman-made systems to control.
The same hurry, the same derangement of inner peace, sharpened and
made dissonant the "cultural federalism" of America. When the United
States spread across thousands of miles of land, pushing into strange
climates and into regions like the Great Plains, which are so dry and high
and few plants or animals from the humid forest-country
difficult that
could (and no white men, until they invented new machinery
settle there
and new methods), the cultural similarity of the old seaboard days was
broken. And when non-English immigrants (chiefly the Irish, the Ger-
mans, and the Scandinavians during the forties and fifties) began in some
sections to outnumber the "native" stock, there ceased to be a solid cul-
tural similarity to break.*

The task of the political leaders, therefore [writes Professor Roy

Franklin Nichols in defining the problems of cultural federalism], was
more subtle than keeping slave and free states in a political union; it
was the task of finding ways and means to hold citizens dominated by a
variety of attitudes in one body politic. Politicians must forever be
. . .

* The word
"non-English" might suggest that the original citizens of the United
States were overwhelmingly of English blood. This was not the case. In colonial
days the New World was already a "melting pot." The Dutch were there in con-
siderable numbers, and the French, the Welsh, the Swedes, the Irish, the Scotch-
Irish, the Germans. Yet during the first thirty years of her independence only about
a quarter of a million immigrants reached America. And during the next decade
only 143,439. So the growth in population, from about three millions at the time
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 339

busy composing formulas, organising through legislation, patronage,

and power, political combinations strong enough to insure continued
2
cooperation in the federal union.

To combat the forces of division which were latent in cultural federal-

ism politicians recommended a variety of cures, among which three were
outstanding. Any one of the cures might in itself have been helpful; but
the three taken together made everything worse. The first was an ardent
nationalism which transcended state allegiance gallantly preached by
Webster. By the time the great orator died millions of his fellow-citizens,
mostly but not solely in the North and West, had learned to base their
patriotism and pride upon America as a whole, and upon American
destiny.
Side by side with this, however, the eighteen-forties and fifties saw a
strengthening of regionalism under the influence of the logical Galhoun.
This, too, was an attempt to save the Union a last effort to prevent
secession. Calhoun was as firm a patriot as Webster. But he did not think
the United States could survive the unchecked tendency toward concen-
tration of power. So he made his rigid plans for fastening upon the Con-
stitution for all time what he took to be the undefiled federalism of the
Fathers. He wished to preserve the Union, not merely by reversing the
drift of history, but by making the act of reversal everlasting. He chose to
face the crisis in his country's life with the absolutism of a Plato (who
never tried to govern) rather than with the give-and-take of a politician
who has known the shifting sands of power. Daniel Webster was a weaker
character than Calhoun, with a mind less cold and clear; but he under-
stood better than his adversary the need for fluidity and imprecision if a
federal system is to endure.*
This revived regionalism and this waxing nationalism might have con-
flicted in any case; but the conflict was made sure by reason of the third
idea put forward for the preservation of the Union: the idea of democ-
racy, or majority rule. As Professor Nichols points out, the ambiguous

of the Revolutionary War to more than twelve millions by 1830, came almost
wholly from the reproduction of "native" stock. And although these "natives" were
themselves of mixed blood, their institutions derived mostly from England and their
culture was an American development from an English archetype. The language
of England, the literature, the prayers, the nursery rhymes, the common law, the
many shared political beliefs and practices, the background of a century and a half
of political association all these make it reasonable to speak of the early America
as chiefly English, in spite of the rich variety of stock. Since the presidency of John
Quincy Adams the country never again has been so homogeneous. (Gp. Professor
Carl Wittke, We Who Built America, pp. xvi, 3-97, 101.)
* Neither
regionalism nor nationalism, of course, was invented as a "cure" by
Calhoun or Webster. Each, from earliest days, had been a strong force in the life
of the nation. Each was now praised and put forward as the answer to the nation's
troubles if everyone would only agree upon it. But everyone refused to agree.
340 The Price of Union

word "democracy" was used in the early days of the republic to describe
a political party rather than a national way of life: Jefferson's "Demo-
cratic-Republicans" forexample, or Jackson's "Democrats," or "the
American Democracy" as a name for Jackson's party. In most of the
states, meanwhile, both life and politics were growing steadily more demo-
cratic, not in the party sense, but in the sense of manners and of popular
government. Yet even as late as the age of Jackson popular government,
or majority rule, was regarded as a matter concerning the states, and ohly
the states as a form of suffrage and a way of using their local powers
which the states might adopt or reject, as they saw fit. No one had dared
suggest that federal decisions should rest on nation-wide head-counting;
the Senate alone seemed sufficient protection against such heresy. Then in
the eighteen-fifties "democracy" began to assume new meanings, all dis-
tasteful to the South. Some suggested that the vexed question of slavery
in the territories should be settled on democratic principles, rather than
by federal bargains that the settlers should be allowed to decide for
themselves, by majority vote, whether this type of property was to exist.
But many Southern leaders objected that under the Constitution no man
could be deprived of property in any form, in any of the land which was
held as a common trust. If a man from Ohio could take his horse into the
territories, a man from Georgia could take his slave.*
Finally, and most bitter of all to the regionalists, radicals in some of the
populous Northern states began to suggest that the federal Union was
itself a "democracy" in the sense that the will of the national majority

should prevail. "Pleas were heard," writes Professor Nichols, "for the ac-
ceptance of the democratic principle as the means of substituting fair play
for the fractious negativism of minorities. . Such sporting words, how-
. .

ever, did not make southerners forget the warning of the census. If the
voice of the majority became the will of the Republic, they might well be
at the mercy of their free-state neighbors. They feared the tyranny of
numbers." 3
People on all sides of the debate seem to have forgotten that a federal
statemust be an ever-renewed compromise between "the fractious nega-
tivism of minorities" and "the tyranny of numbers." If the majority de-
mands its way too harshly the federal principle is broken, for the essence
*
During the campaign of 1852, John A. Quitman of Mississippi, who had re-
cently served as governor of that state and who had told the legislature that "prompt
and peaceable secession** was better than acceptance of the Compromise of 1850,
wrote that a slaveholder had a right to take his human property into any territory
and to demand federal protection. Congress, he said, should "pass such laws as may
be necessary to protect such property as well as any other. When the common
government refuses such protection, it would disregard the object which called it
into existence.'* As Professor Nevins points out, such a demand would seem "pre-
posterous and horrifying" to many Northerners; yet in the South it was soon to be
accepted as normal and moderate.
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 341

of federalismis the
power of regional minorities to protect their interests.
Yet the minorities are too tediously fractious, they too can destroy
if

federalism by abusing their privilege of obstruction. No group, whatever

its constitutional "rights," can afford to forget the Hamiltonian maxim
that the public business must somehow go forward. Throughout the
eighteen-fifties in America the balance of forces, the delicate federal equi-
librium between the power of the many to insist and the power of the few
to deny, was increasingly threatened. The attempts to find a cure only
made matters worse. Nationalism led to a strengthened regionalism;
regionalism led to a demand for democracy; and the mere mention of
democracy led the South to new insistence upon minority rights and local
veto powers.

With the nation's mind so bedeviled, and with vast new lands to quarrel
about (in addition to the old quarrels which had made trouble from the
beginning), it seemed that the political parties with their nation-wide
membership were the chief safeguard of the Union and that if they should
break the Republic must be destroyed. Yet few men foresaw that they
were in danger of breaking, for the party machinery seemed formidably
strong in 1850 both Whigs and Democrats having perfected party or-
ganization in almost its modern form. A complete hierarchy of conventions
had been established, beginning with ward and precinct conventions, pro-
ceeding through county and state conventions, and culminating in the
National Convention which met every four years to select the party's
leader and to write its platform. The Democrats had begun issuing a party
platform in the campaign of 1840, and the Whigs in 1844.
By 1848 the Democrats had invented a hierarchy of committees,
ostensibly to act as the party executive at every level of politics. Each
ward and precinct had its committee, each county and state, and the na-
tional party was served by a national committee/* The President, or in the
case of the Opposition the most recent presidential candidate, is the head
of the party. If the President is the head in fact as well as in name, if he
is and so popular with the country that he can unite
so gifted politically
and control ungainly machine and keep it lumbering in the general
this
direction toward which he wishes it to go, he can conquer the Congress
and impose a policy. But if he cannot control his party, or if the majority
* the National Committee consists of one man and one woman from each
Today
state and from most of the territories. The chairman and a small executive com-
mittee are the effective members. The new Republican Party copied this committee
system from the Democrats during its first presidential campaign in 1856, and both
parties have maintained it ever since.
342 The Price of Union

in Congress does not belong to his party, there can usually be no domestic

policy and there may be no foreign policy either a situation which would
not have troubled eighteenth-century Americans, who feared government
more than they feared anarchy, but which sometimes causes qualms today.
Since the breakdown of the party system during the eighteen -fifties was
the prelude to the Civil War, and since the system was restored after the
war and gradually reassumed its old form, learning to perform ever more
smoothly its old functions, it may be useful to state as
clearly as may be
the structure of these unique machines. 4 As often happens in government,
the chart of organization is wholly misleading. The pyramid of committees
and conventions may suggest that authority and discipline flow downwards
from the party chief. But in fact, instead of autocracy, logic and order, the
American political party is a chaos of democratic confusion. The Na-
tional Committee, for example, which forms the crown of the pyramid, is
an advisory agency with no power to dictate to the state committees. The
chairman of the National Committee, who would seem from the chart to
be the executive head of the party, cannot send orders to the rank and file,
or to the county and state committees. He cannot send orders to anybody,
except himself and his private secretaries. Yet his importance is in-
calculably great. On his wisdom and experience may depend not only the
election of the presidential candidate but the success of the Administra-
tion. Without co-operation between President and Congress the Adminis-
tration stalls; without the repeated skillful greasing and mending of the
party machine no co-operation is possible. And the greasing is primarily
the job of the chairman of the National Committee.*
His strength lies in his friendships. He has no power; but as the servant
of a popular President he has vast influence, which cannot be used effec-
tively on the bristling and jealous leaders of the state and city machines
unless he is known and liked and trusted by those leaders. He can offer
not only jobs and prestige but policy concessions to their local needs which
may help them to remain in power. He must learn from them what the
nine-and-ninety machines making up the national party want, and he
must try to persuade the President to adopt policies which will not over-
ride too many of those wants. If local bosses become bitter and obstructive
because the Administration neglects them, he must either woo them back
to the fold or he must conspire with other factions within their feudal
territories and seek to drive the dissident bosses from power a maneuver,
incidentally, which rarely succeeds. And all this he must do without au-
thority. His office is a communications center through which the lines of
power run ; but it does not possess power, except the power to destroy the
party by annoying too many of the great lords of the cities and the states.
*
Today, when his party is in power, the chairman of the National Committee
is usually made Postmaster General.
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 343

The national party is a ramshackle alliance, held together by prayers and

promises. The essence of the chairman's job is to build a network of
personal friendships throughout the country. His informal private organi-
zation, resting upon these friendships, will have a unity and a temporary
effectiveness which the formal party structure cannot attain.
The members of this private organization the true state leaders and
the true leaders of the city machines are not necessarily the men whose
titles would mark them for eminence. One of the most trying tasks for an

observer of American politics is to learn who belongs to this private organ-

ization. The man who knows knows everything though he will need
that,
to freshen his knowledge continually, for the members change from year
to year if not from month to month. The question is, whose advice does
the national chairman take on all matters affecting a state (or city) party;
with whom does he "clear" all decisions of patronage? It may be the Sena-
tors from that state, or some member of the House of Representatives, or
the governor, or the chairman of the state committee, or a boss who is
known to the public. If the Administration works with tolerable
little

smoothness, the national chairman and the President are consulting the
right people; if it jerks and grinds and backtracks, they must have got
athwart too many local leaders, ignored too many prejudices, overridden
too many interests. They are being punished, and the country with them.
All this, which may sound bizarre, is a logical result of federal politics.
The Opposition often amuses itself by attacking the President for his
dependence on bosses or on selfish state leaders. The people grin and do
not listen, because they know it is like attacking the President for breath-
ing or for requiring food. He cannot do his job if he alienates the state
machines. The nature of those machines is not his business; it is the busi-
ness of the citizens of the states. He may quarrel with one or two of the
most obnoxious bosses, and seek to supplant them with his own friends;
but if he quarrels with all the politicians whom sensitive reformers dislike
he had better resign his office, for he can be only a nuisance to the coun-
try. During his first term,
for example, Franklin Roosevelt (and the na-
tional chairman, James Farley) not only stood aloof from the high-flavored
machine of Curley in Massachusetts, but fought the Huey Long machine
in Louisiana. They denied patronage to Senator Long and to either of
all

his henchmen They gave aid and encouragement to

in the lower House.
all who opposed the Senator on his home ground. Yet they never weak-

ened Long's position in his state. He remained not only Senator but na-
tionalcommitteeman, to say nothing of popular hero. The quarrel was
settledby an assassination which even the genial Mr. Farley must have
had difficulty in condemning. If Mr. Roosevelt had made similar war on
Tammany in New York, on Boss Hague in Jersey City, on Kelly-Nash in
Chicago, on Crump in Memphis, and so on round the country, he would
344 The Price of Union

have hamstrung his Administration, ruined his relations with Congress,

and presumably failed of re-election in 1936. As a contribution to "clean
government" the gesture would have been inadequate.
Later, Mr. Roosevelt's strength with the country became so great that
he was able without injury to break with James Farley, his national chair-
man. Normally such a break would be most harmful, since the real na-
tional machine is built on the friendships and personal dealings of the
chairman and must begin to disintegrate when he leaves his post. But
when Mr. Roosevelt stood for a third term, in 1940, the Democratic Party
stood or fell with him. No one could take his place. It had not been pos-
sible for an alternative leader to grow up under the shade of that great
oak. Revolt was impossible, except by party suicide; so the machine was
handed from Mr. Farley to Mr. Flynn and continued to function, if not
happily at least with fair effect. Yet the disgruntled memoirs which have
lately begun to appear show the hazards of such a transfer, hazards which
no one less popular than Mr. Roosevelt would willingly incur.
The power to give orders, therefore, the effective discipline, lies not with
the national machine but with the many local groups which compose it.
There, in the states and the cities, is the rigid organization, the system of
rewards and punishments, the insistence on obedience and "regularity,"
which only a genius like Thomas Jefferson has been able to impose at the
center and which not even Jefferson could maintain for eight years. Judg-
ing by the results of such local discipline, the amorphousness of the na-
tional party may have been a blessing. "The strength of our local party

organization," writes Professor Herring, "is in marked contrast to the

protean character of the party viewed nationally. We
have escaped in this
wider realm the rigidities that have made democracy a mockery in our
5
cities."
The price of escaping centralized party control from the top down is
the unbuttoned inefficiency which surprises many newcomers to Washing-
ton. When Lord Elgin was negotiating a reciprocity treaty in 1854 he
wrote home: "There was no government to deal with. ... It was all a
matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the other." And many
a President, coming to his intricate task from the simpler world of war,
or of diplomacy, or of state management, has been surprised to learn
not only that there is no "government" in the British sense, but that there
is no party only an aggregation of parties, each stubbornly clinging to
its local pride and privilege. To call the national machine a loose alliance

isto exaggerate its unity. Instead of resembling the cruel car of Jugger-
naut beloved by the cartoonists and feared by the fathers of the republic,
the machine is so fragile that it almost ceases to exist (except in a crisis)
unless tended by the most delicate diplomacy. It is a typical American
creation, for by its very nature it is a guard against the centralizing pull
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 345

of power. Although, when united, it can help the President to rule, it

will not be united unless the President, or his national-committee chair-

man, woos and pleases all (or nearly all) its constituent parts. So the pol-
icy which it helps him make must be a common factor, a
to federal bar-
gain. This is another reason why the politics of the United States tend
toward conservatism. No major party can be truly radical, any more than
a common factor can be immoderate.
A skillful President may often pretend to rule his party and to get what
he wants, when content to want what he gets. For the masters
in fact he is

of the state and the city machines can for the most part only be cajoled
when they need favors, or when they need the President's help for their
local candidates.* They live by local victories, not national. They join
together nationally, not to serve a political theory but to win jobs. In
many states they prosper even if the national party is out of office for
twenty years so even a President from their own party has no hold over
them except through his control of the patronage. If this were taken from
him, as many desire, the American Government might become unwork-
able. Professor Patterson, who deplores what he calls "this extra-constitu-
tional system of government," comments as follows:

As long as he [the President] undertakes to control the Congress in

legislative matters he must haveimportant positions with which to pur-
chase .
support. Public works and unearmarked appropriations may
. .

also be necessary. The main reason why we do not have a real merit
system in national administration is that the President must have con-
trol of these positions to enable him to play a role which the Constitu-
tion does not provide for him. He was not intended to be a prime
minister, a chancellor of the Exchequer and the real head of all the
executive departments. 6

Whatever one may think of the presidential form of government, the

system rests heavily on the man who must be both the constitutional and
the political Executive, both the head of the state and the head of the
party, both the king and the prime minister. And unfortunately, as we
have seen several times already, the same system which imposes this re-
sponsibility tends to ensure that the man chosen for President shall not
be capable of exercising it. Woodrow Wilson said of the American Gov-
ernment, "its President is chosen, not by proof of leadership among the
men whose confidence he must have if he is to play an effective part in the
making of affairs, but by management the management of obscure men
and through the uncertain chances of an ephemeral convention which
has no other part in politics." 7 Yet the national nominating convention,
which has been condemned by political leaders from Thomas Hart Benton
*Or when the nation faces (and knows that it faces) a dire emergency.
346 The Price of Union

to the present day, should not be dismissed too cavalierly. The fact that it
has survived these repeated attacks, and that no one has presented a plaus-
ible alternative, suggests that it has virtues as well as weaknesses.
The convention mirrors the anomalous character, the conflicting inter-
ests, and the divided counsels of the party. It is a "parley of state bosses

accompanied by their henchmen carrying with them local jealousies and

favoritisms." 8 Its chief job is to find a candidate who is not too much dis-
liked by any of the state, city, or county machines but it has three impor-
;

tant subsidiary jobs. First, must

try to unify the party, at least until the
it

following November when the election takes place. Since normally the
party has no unity of ideas and principles, these must be kept as far as
possible in the background and the stress must be on common loyalties,
common prejudices and ambitions, common distaste for the other party.
Second, it must give to the rank and file a sense of taking part in great
enterprises taking part with their hearts and all their emotions as well
as with their physical presence. The simple followers of a cause are held
by enthusiasm and a sense of self-importance quite as much as by a sense
of self-interest. When men have met and sung and conspired and abused
the enemy together, they can return to their villages and prairies, their
factories and mines, two thousand miles apart, and still feel a residue of

unity. Third, the convention must catch the interest of the whole people
and direct it upon the selection of a presidential candidate. It is not easy,
even in the days of radio and television, to make a nation of a hundred
and fifty millions pay heed to what you are doing and it was perhaps
more difficult before these inventions to be noticed by even forty mil-
lions. Yet if a party's candidate is launched quietly and with dignity in
the dark, he will sink forever. It is this that makes irrelevant some of the
complaints against the clownishness of conventions. They are meant to
attract attention and they succeed in doing so.*
Once the purposes of the convention are understood its methods appear
less ludicrous. This is especially true of the party platform, the insincerity
and flabbiness of which are a stock subject for sarcasm. If the platform
were as meaningless as it sounds, the politicians would not strain over it
so tensely. But the meaning is lost if the platform is taken literally as the
program for the party. It must be read first as a picture of who is up and
who is down in the struggle for dominance between the interest groups,

and second as a sign of who has made bargains with whom. All this be-
comes clear when the party is seen, not as a group of like-minded men
united to forward an idea, but as a jumble of representatives from diverse
* Woodrow Wilson
suggested a national primary election as an alternative to the
nominating convention. This might prove a satisfactory way of choosing among the
candidates, and it might even attract sufficient attention; but it would do nothing
to unify the party and nothing to give the men and women who carry on the dreary
daily work a sense of participation.
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 347

interests, occupations, classes, climates and philosophies, assembled in

order to help each other to office.
The platform tells, not what a party will do, but who is pushing and
pulling for what, and with how much success. It explains, to those who
can read its cryptic language, the equilibrium which the leaders have es-
tablished among the warring energies and ambitions represented at the
convention. It may even forecast the name of the candidate who has yet
to be chosen, for if the platform leans unexpectedly far in one direction
it is
possible that the candidate will lean unexpectedly far in the other.
It is not unusual for a conscientious nominee, in his acceptance speech,
to repudiatesome part of the platform. But even if he does not, nobody
expects him
be bound by the document.
to
The reason for constructing the platform first, and choosing the candi-
date later, is that thus the writing of the platform offers the widest possible
scope for making bargains. Bargains must be the food and drink of a con-
vention which is designed, among other things, to bring unity where chaos
previously ruled. In a free world, where the gallows and the concentration
camp are ruled out as persuaders, bargains are the price of agreement.
A Senator, or a state legislator, or a city boss, can go proudly home to his
people as a power in the party, as a man who must still be reckoned with,
if he can show that although he did not
get the presidential or the vice-
presidential candidate of his choice, his favorite "plank" was included in
the platform.
The alternative to this odd system of conventions which are a combi-
nation of bazaar and sporting event, and of national parties which are
held together by incantation, compromise, and the hope of favors, would be
a disciplined authoritarian machine, able to impose its will from the top
so long as most of the voters support it. Such a machine would tell the
state parties what to do, instead of wheedling them; it would select the
most strong-minded and able candidate for the presidency, instead of the
man who can best unite the wrangling factions and who is least likely to
annoy an organized group of voters; it would write a platform which was
a clear statement of policy to be imposed by the party leader with the help
of the party whip. This would be efficient, orderly, and easy to understand.
It would be what many Americans are in fact recommending. Yet the

price of making policy by such methods might prove too high, since it
would mean bowing to that unchecked rule of a national majority which
the American people have so long fought and feared.
Up to the present, however, in view of the party structure which has pre-
vailed, and of the uses to which the conventions have been put, it is not
strange that the average presidential candidate is less than a heroic figure.
Yet the problem of selecting better candidates cannot be solved by making
fun of the convention system. Perhaps (like many problems of govern-
348 The Price of Union

ment) it all. So long as the United States remains a

cannot be solved at
rambling, easygoing and enormous federation, it is doubtful whether the
parties can nominate first-class candidates except by mistake. The num-
ber of such mistakes in the past has been notable; but unhappily for the
Union there was no mistake in the year 1852, or in 1856. At the time of
the nation's greatest stress the party system produced masterpieces of
"availability" and weakness.

In 1852 the Democratic Convention at Baltimore astonished itself by

nominating Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. The plan had been to
nominate James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; but it was one of those plans,
dear to politicians, which are so intricate and so dark that they easily undo
themselves.
9
No one was much concerned at the undoing, because
Buchanan had been picked for his pliability and it was clear that Pierce
would comfortably meet the requirement. He had no enemies and almost
no convictions. He was graceful, attractive, kind, and softly inebriate.
At a time when the nation and the party needed a firm, calm hand, this
was not the ideal candidate.
Franklin Pierce, whose father was a farmer, an officer in the Revolu-
tionary Army, and two times governor of New Hampshire, was born in
1804. He was educated at Bowdoin College, Maine, and was admitted
to the bar at the age of twenty-three. In 1833 he went to the House of

Representatives, and in 1837 to the United States Senate. When he re-

signed in 1842 partly because of his wife's health and partly because the
drinking temptations of Washington were too compelling he had shown
himself a Yankee with an unusual respect for Southern interests. He
served inconspicuously in the Mexican War, and on returning to New
Hampshire became a supporter of the Compromise of 1850, including the
hated Fugitive Slave Law. When the leading candidates at Baltimore had
frustrated each other, and the elaborate Buchanan plan failed, Pierce
emerged as so dark a horse that even the nominee for the vice-presidency
was vexed at such a running-mate, and complained, impolitely, against
the tendency of the convention system to choose men who are unfit for
the job.
Pierce made no
speeches during the campaign and appeared to have
no he possessed a belief of any sort aside from that respect for
plans. If
the Southern point of view which had won him the nomination it was
the un-Jacksonian conviction that the Executive should be retiring and
meek. "The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general gov-
ernment of a confederacy so vast as ours," he said in his Inaugural
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 349

You have a right, therefore,

Address, "are too obvious to be disregarded.
to expect your agents in every department to regard strictly the limits
imposed upon them by the Constitution of the United States."* This was
good Whig doctrine; but it came strangely from the leader of the party
of Jackson and Polk. In fact, the Democratic Party in the last sad years
of drift toward war rejected the new tools for power and efficiency which
had been devised during the age of Jackson. The Southerners who mas-
tered the party and its mild Northern Presidents from 1853 to 1861 dis-
trusted the Jacksonian methods, which were democratic and nationalistic.
The strength which Jackson and his friends had given the presidency
was the strength of a popular national leader. But the South was con-
vinced that it could only protect itself by regionalism and by resisting pop-
ular rule. Calhoun, when dictating his book on government, told his secre-
tary that if the North would read this disquisition, "then we shall never
have any more unmeaning talk about the false assertion that the majority
shallgovern" To the followers of Calhoun, the Jacksonian presidency
was the enemy. It was the people's centralizing weapon, to impose their
majority will. So during the years when the Southerners controlled the
Democratic Party, they made sure that there were no Jacksonian Presi-
dents.

The Whigs in 1852 were unable to profit from the weakness of Pierce,
for their own inner struggles led them to choose a candidate equally un-
fit. The only Presidents they had ever elected were generals, and
although
both had quickly died the Whigs stubbornly decided to nominate a third.
This time the general survived; but the Whig Party didn't.
The convention was a melancholy autumnal meeting for those who had
known the great days of the party. Henry Clay, their hero and their much-
defeated candidate, lay dying in Washington. Webster, who in Fiilmore's
Cabinet had once more become Secretary of State, had only a few months
to live, and those months were to be poisoned by his old hope for the
nomination and his old disappointment. He thought Fillmore would step
down in his favor, and that the President's following among the Southern
Whigs would join with his own following in New England to bring him
at last to the White House the prophet of Union, the nation's answer to
:

all radicals whether of the North or of the South. But first-term Presi-
dents do not often step down, and Fillmore was no exception. His friends
told him that he could have the nomination for the asking, and although
* Like most weak
men, Pierce could not be consistently unassuming. Suddenly,
and at the wrong time, he would become rashly vigorous.
350 The Price of Union

his friends were wrong the mere fact of his candidacy dashed Webster's
chances.
Millard Fillmore, an obscure ex-Congressman from New York State,
had been nominated for the vice-presidency in 1848 as a concession to the
friends of Henry Clay, who were in a vengeful mood when General Tay-
lor was given the first place on the ticket. Since hardly anyone had heard
of Fillmore it was assumed that he would not lose the party many votes.
He was a large man with a big, smooth, kindly face and impressive man-
ners. He looked like a President and much to his surprise he had become

one, and he did not see why he should give way to Webster.
Fillmore was not gifted with political insight. After the election of 1848,
when the country was torn with the most intense strife it had known, he
said: "I regard this election as putting an end to all ideas of disunion. It
raises up a national party, occupying a middle ground, and leaves the
fanatics and disunionists, North and South, without the hope of destroy-

ing the fair fabric of our Constitution." Later, as we have seen, he did his
best to make these cheerful words come true by giving to the great Com-

promise the full support of his Administration, and he thought the party
should therefore help him to a second term. The convention thought
otherwise. For fifty- two ballots Fillmore and Webster divided the moderate
pro-Compromise vote. Neither could win and neither could hand his fol-
lowing to the other. So in the end the Seward Whigs (the "Conscience
Whigs/' who were soon to become Republicans) were allowed to nomi-
nate Winfield Scott, the general who had led American troops to Mexico
City.*
Fillmore was to make one last eccentric appearance on the national
stage in 1856, and was then to retire into innocuous philanthropy in
western New York. Perhaps his most striking and unusual act came in
1855, refused the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University on
when he
the ground that he had no literary or scientific attainments.
The South distrusted General Scott because of Seward's backing, yet so
far as politics and opinions were concerned he seemed as colorless as a
man may be. It was for this that the convention accepted him, and this
was the sum of the Whig hopes: that nobody would discover whether
Scott stood for anything at all, and that the people might be content to
vote for him because of his war record. But the Whig Party was dying,
along with the two men who had made it great. Clay, who might have put
spirit into the slack campaign, died on June 29. Webster, who had repudi-
ated Scott's nomination and prophesied his party's doom, died on October
*On the first ballot Fillmore received 133 votes, Scott 131, and Webster 29.
The vote remained much the same until the break on the fifty-third ballot. There
were 396 delegates, and since the Whigs nominated by a simple majority 149 votes
were needed for a choice. If Fillmore and Webster could have come together,
either could have been nominated.
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 351

24. Boston mourned him, and most of Massachusetts; but throughout the
nation there was no such wave of tenderness and respect as had been
roused by the death of Clay.
Webster had left instructions for a simple funeral. "My heart swelled/*
wrote one of his friends, "when I saw the eminent men all passed by, and
six plain men of Marshfield called out to be pallbearers. Was not that
beautiful?" It would have been well for Webster's career if he had made
the gesture while he was still alive. Truly, he might have claimed to be a
friend of the plain men of Marshfield most of his days, for he had long
defended the Union, which was the hope of democracy; but while breath
was in his body Webster could not pass by the eminent men. The new
leaders of industry, the factory-rich, were his clients, and the masses may
be forgiven for thinking that where his fees lay, there lay his heart. Yet
even the masses, who had judged him coldly, may have felt forsaken at
times during the autumn of 1852. Clay and Webster had gone with Cal-
houn to the grave. These were the men who had given strength and con-
tinuity and many a touch of grandeur to the politics of the country ever
since the far-off days of the second war with England ever since Amer-
ica grew up and cut loose from Europe and set out in isolation on west-

ward-walking paths to follow her strange new destiny. "Eastward I go

only by force," said Thoreau; "but westward I go free. ... I must walk
toward Oregon and not toward Europe." Yet the Oregon Trail could be
lonely lonelier than ever when the old leaders had departed. Fillmore
and Pierce and Scott were no substitute, nor Seward with his "higher
law," nor the rising star of Illinois: Stephen A. Douglas. In the nation's
life it was one of the hours of low vitality, during the midnight watch,

when man is shaken with fears he does not own.

Even before election day of 1852 the Whig Party was crumbling. General
Scott's Northern friends induced him to say nothing in his acceptance let-
ter about the Compromise of 1850 although the platform had promised
that the entire Compromise, including the Fugitive Slave Law, would be
accepted and maintained. At once an important group of Southern Whig
Congressmen, led by Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens of Geor-
gia, rejected Scott and seceded from the party. This was an act of decisive
importance because of the character of the two leaders. Toombs and
Stephens between them had been the symbols of Union sentiment in the
Deep South. They were moderate Whigs who could work loyally with
Webster of Massachusetts. They were opposed to expansion at the expense
of Mexico; but when the war had been fought and won, and an attempt
352 The Price of Union

was then made by means of the Wilmot Proviso to prevent the spread of

slavery into any part of the new land, both men insisted that such an act
must lead to secession. They were serving in the House of Representatives,
and they warned the Northern members. "Appropriate this common prop-
erty to yourselves/' said Toombs, "it is then your government, not mine.
Then I am its enemy, and I will then, if I can, bring my children and
my constituents to the altar of liberty, and like Hamilcar I would swear
them to eternal hostility to your foul domination." And Stephens said that
if the Proviso passed, the result would be "desolation, carnage and blood."

The two Georgians worked for the Compromise measures of 1850, and
when these were passed they joined with the moderate Democrat, Howell
Cobb, to beg their state to accept this triumph for the Union. A conven-
tionhad been summoned with power to take any action it chose, including
secession; but because of the work of Toombs, Stephens, and Gobb the
convention had a great majority of Union delegates. It accepted the Com-
promise, reserving the right to secede later in case Congress or the North-
ern states sought to weaken or to reinterpret the document. While win-
ning this victory the three friends formed a new state organization, the
Constitutional Union Party. The party sent Toombs to the Senate, but
shortly thereafter collapsed. Both Toombs and Stephens returned to their
former allegiance until the nomination of General Scott.
When these two Union patriots joined Cobb in the Democratic Party,
Calhoun's plan had at last triumphed. Most of the leading cotton-state

Whigs had finally become Democrats, giving to the South the intellectual
and political control of the party for so long as she could hold the numer-
ous Northern voters in line. This was not long. Within less than a decade
of their break with the Whigs, Toombs was the Confederate Secretary of
State and Stephens the Confederate Vice- President.
While the South was deserting the Whig Party on the ground that Gen-
eral Scott had free-soil tendencies, a number of Northerners were desert-

ing it on the ground that he was a tool of the slave power. They joined
a new group, under the leadership of Senator Charles Sumner of Massa-
chusetts and Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, which called itself the
Free Democratic Party. In their 1852 platform they stated:

Thatthe Free Democratic party is not organized to aid either the

Whig or Democratic wing of the great Slave Compromise party of the
nation^ but to defeat them both ;
That slavery is a sin against God
. . .

and a crime against man . .

; and that Christianity, humanity, and
.

patriotism, alike demand its abolition. That the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850 is repugnant to the Constitution, to the principles of the common
law, to the spirit of Christianity, and to the sentiments of the civilized
world. We therefore deny its binding force upon the American People,
10
and demand its immediate and total repeal.
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 353

In the election the Democrats carried twenty-seven states for Franklin

Pierce and the Whigs four for General Scott: Massachusetts, Vermont,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. The popular vote was not so one-sided, for the
Whigs were less than 300,000 behind in a total vote of about three million.
Yet it was clear that the Whigs were perishing as a national party. In
order to hold such Northern members as Seward and Thurlow Weed and
Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who refused in any case to
accept the Compromise with its Fugitive Slave Law, they had rejected
"honest, commonplace Fillmore," and had thereby lost their best friends
in the South. But the Whigs were the parents of the Compromise and
they could not disown it. They could not make a deal with men who
would rather break the Union than return one Negro to captivity any
more than with fire-eating Southerners who preferred secession to agree-
ing that there were limits to the slave empire.
No national party in America has room for men who hold one sacred
belief to which must bow. When the issue arises (as it may always
all else

and honorably arise) on which men feel too deeply to compromise,

they are obliged to put their own will first and the Union second. The
"Conscience Whigs" preferred their conscience to the Whig unity, which
was surely their privilege, but which consigned them to membership in a
sectional group. They belonged where they were going with Sumner and
Chase and the Free Democrats into a new party which was to be purged
of all friends of slavery. They had become unbending, not from self-right-
eousness, but because they felt they had made the last concession which
their faith in man permitted. The Whig Party asked its Northern mem-
bers to accept the ugly sight of fugitives chained and returned to slavery.
As more and more Northerners found they could not do it, they were
forced to abandon the party. And as the party leaders sought by worldly
shifts and evasions to persuade them that they need not leave, that per-

haps the Fugitive Slave Act did not mean quite what it said, the South-
erners also became outraged and began to desert. The more the party
strained for a formula which would satisfy both groups, the more it has-
tened its demise. By the time of President Pierce's inauguration in March,
1853, he and his Democratic Party were the one remaining hope of the
Union.
The hope seemed by no means desperate. During the election even the
fierce Southern-rights Democrats of Mississippi and South Carolina had

quietly accepted the Compromise, the nomination of Pierce, and the

party's promise to prevent further agitation of the slave question. The Free
Democrats, meanwhile, had polled only 150,000 votes, and a secessionist
candidate in the South only 3500. The country longed for harmony. In the
midst of a gold boom and of a vast railway revolution, the country wanted
to build and to grow rich, not to quarrel. A majority was in favor of en-
 354 The Price of Union

forcing the Compromise and saying no more about it. That act of assuage-
ment had Whigs because large numbers in the Northern and
killed the
Western wings of the party resented it. They felt they had been over-
whelmed by the august names of Clay and Webster. Some Democrats felt
the same but not the Democratic majority. They and the remaining
faithful Whigs were grateful for the Compromise and would abide by it
so long as no man dared reopen the fighting subject. But it is never as
it sounds to let sleeping dogs lie. It is a task for a
easy as political wizarti
to keep them asleep. The task was beyond the powers of poor vacillating
Pierce, who not only woke them up but gave them insomnia.
Perhaps it was in any case too late. Perhaps the time had arrived when
the wages of slavery must be paid. "For it must needs be that offenses
come, but woe to the man by whom the offense cometh." Perhaps, as
John Quincy Adams had written in 1820, "the seeds of the Declaration
of Independence are yet maturing. The harvest will be what West, the
painter, calls the terrible sublime." Yet the student of politics may reason-
ably ask whether a wiser and stronger President might have saved the day.
The slave issue could not break the Union until it had broken the Demo-
cratic Party. If Pierce and his successor had been true leaders, they might
have made such use of party loyalty as to preserve the peace.
Loyalty to an irrational party which lives by barter and by ignoring
both logic and principles may be derided. Yet when men belong to an
organization which has lasted a long time, to which they have given their
hopes and their work, and from which they have won the gift of comrade-
ship, of being members of one another, a sense of faithfulness arises, a
fidelity with which it is vain to quarrel. Party loyalty is a refuge not only
from the hurtful confusion of life but from the self-interest which turns
man's hand against his friend. Within the magic circle of fealty men will
compound their differences, or if that is impossible they will do their best
to forget them. Loyalty may win concessions which would not be granted
to logic. If a nation had to fight a civil war each time it faced an issue
that could not be solved, the life of man would be more perilous than the
jungle.
The parties in a free country depend for their health on those who
understand the machine and use it with some detachment; but they de-
pend for their lives on those who will vote as their fathers voted so long
as the trust is not too grossly strained. Without the floating vote free poli-

tics would become corrupt; without the loyal vote free politics would dis-
solve in chaos.*
* In
1938, after thirty-five years in Washington and forty-five years in elective
office,Vice-President John Nance Garner remarked that there are about fifteen mil-
lion voters in each party "who will never scratch the party ticket and they serve a
great purpose of stability. You have another fifteen million who swing often or
occasionally, or go fishing or stay at home on election day, and these fifteen million
xvii. The Parties on the Verge of Failure 355

The American Union was an abstraction to many of the simpler citizens

in 1852 and 1856, especially to the small farmers of the South and to the
newest immigrants. But the Democratic Party was not an abstraction. In
the big towns of the North, on the frontier, and in the upland country
of the South, millions had lived in it, worked in it, triumphed and failed
in it. To be sure, the party used different arguments in different states, but
the name was honored everywhere, and the heroic (if unexamined) past
of Jefferson and Jackson. For the sake of party unity and party victory
these millions might have been persuaded to give the Compromise of 1850
a fair chance. But party loyalty was not invoked. Neither Pierce nor
Buchanan could conjure that mighty spell. As we shall see in a later
chapter, when the break came in 1860 Democratic "loyalty" was to the
state or section not to the national party which had won power in 1800
and which, under many forms and disguises, with many philosophies and
systems, had ruled the nation during most of the intervening years.

serve a great purpose, too." (Gp. Garner of Texas, by Bascom Timmons, p. 236.)
All the party combinations, all the desperate search for ideas which will please as
many interests as possible and for candidates who will make as few enemies as
possible, are directed toward these last fifteen million. Mr. Garner put the per-
centage of floating voters higher than many observers; but since he has hardly ever
been wrong in predicting an election, his opinion has authority.
 XVIII

The Fruits of Executive Weakness-I

1853-1857

ALL PRESIDENTS, I suppose none [was] more insignificant than Mr.

Pierce, who was occupying the White House at the time of our visit."
Such was the judgment of Laurence Oliphant, 1 who accompanied Lord
Elgin in 1854 on his mission to
make a treaty of reciprocity between the
United States and Canada. The insignificance which the Englishman
noted had been shown on the first day of the new President's Administra-
tion, when he made his undistinguished Inaugural Address and announced
his distinguished but incompatible Cabinet.
The election of 1852 had shown that although the big majority was
eager to give the Compromise a trial,, strong-willed and bitter minorities
did not intend that it should last. The best-loved leaders of New England
thought the Fugitive Slave Act was immoral and that no good citizen
should accept Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, called it a law
it.

"which no man
can obey or abet the obeying, without loss of self-respect
and forfeiture of the name of a gentleman." And in the South the extrem-
ists were waiting for the first sign that Emerson's advice was to be fol-

lowed, for the moderates would then be discredited. In the autumn of

1852 the governor of South Carolina told his legislature that recent North-
ern politeness to the South would not last. When the inevitable "aggres-
sion" occurred (such as a refusal to obey the Fugitive Slave Act), he
hoped that the South would either compel respect for her rights or else
insist on taking her place as a new nation. Two months before this dis-

turbing message, Howell Cobb (the Union Democrat who had done so
much to bring the state of Georgia to accept the Compromise) received
a letter offoreboding from a friend :

You well know that it has been my conviction for the last two or three
years that nothing we could do, short of general emancipation, would
satisfy the North. Your idea was that the measures of the Compromise
would substantially effect that object, and you went for them for that
reason chiefly, I think. Should it turn out that I am right and you are
wrong it will not be long before it must be known. And it is, therefore,
now time for you to be making up your mind for the new "crisis." 2
356
 The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 357

The letter goes on to predict that Northern Whigs would soon join the
Free Soilers, with the result that the anti-Southern party must control the
North. And then? The writer makes a forecast which is remarkable for
its pessimistic accuracy:

The Democratic party there [in the North], in conjunction with pretty
much the whole South,, may be able to make one fight, say in 1856 a
grand Union rally but then the thing will be out. Is it not so? You
must have thought of all this. Have you made up your mind as to what
is to be done?

Presumably Howell Gobb had faced these chances, and had decided ex-
actlywhat to do, for a few years later he was a major general in the Con-
federate armies.
With the country in such a mood, restless with such fears, the hope for
the Compromise lay in strong leadership. The President should have said
that the health of the nation depended on the great settlement, that it
must be treated as irrevocable, that arguments about slavery must now
cease since every acre of land under the American flag had been awarded
either to the Northern or the Southern system, and that he would there-
fore give office to no man who did not promise to make the Compromise
work. The Free-Soil Democrats in the North and the fire-eaters in the
South would have protested; but the people had dismissed both groups
in the election, and if no new hate-provoking deeds had been permitted
the Union might have found time to heal its wounds, to diminish its
rancors, and to seek an evolutionary cure for the race problem. The nam-
ing of Pierce's Cabinet put an end to such hopes.
Instead of insisting on men who upheld the Union and the election
promises, Pierce put into his Cabinet able and forceful representatives of
every diverse opinion. So his Administration was doomed to become a
minor civil war within itself. And if one side conquered in the family
quarrel, it would impose fresh disturbances at a time when the country
craved and deserved a rest.*
Perhaps the wisest man in the new Administration was the Secretary
of State, William L. Marcy. But unhappily he was not the most pushing.
Marcy was an old Jacksonian and a lover of the Union, an old friend of
Van Buren and a founder of the Albany Regency. We have seen him as
the author of the political maxim that "to the victor belong the spoils of
the enemy." He had been three times governor of New York, and Secre-
tary of War in the Cabinet of Polk. He was efficient, companionable,
amusing, and a lover of good literature. He belonged to the wing of the
* Pierce had followed normal
practice in seeking to appease all party dissidents
by his cabinet appointments. But Pierce was so weak that he could not control his
own servants and the country was so shaken that it could not endure another up-
roar. So normal practice proved a disaster.
358 The Price of Union

party from which the whole of the Cabinet should have been chosen. He
could have worked creatively with the Union Democrats who had defeated
the secessionists in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. But he was
not a ruthless fighter, and when Jefferson Davis was made Secretary of
War, Marcy could neither collaborate with him nor impose his own will
against that of the domineering Southerner. He was a good Secretary of
State, but he could not perform the President's proper task of bringing
unity into the government. Neither could he stand against Caleb Gushing
of Massachusetts, who allied himself with Davis to win the battle of the
Cabinet and to destroy all hopes of appeasement.
Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808, not far from where
Lincoln was born a year later. His father had been an officer in the Revo-
lutionary Army, his grandfather a Welsh immigrant. He was the tenth
child in a very poor family and his prospects were small but when he was
;

still an infant the family moved to Mississippi and the eldest son began

to prosper. Jefferson was given a good education at Transylvania Univer-

sity and at West Point, where he was a contemporary of Robert E. Lee.

He then served for years as an officer at tiny Western posts, until his un-
happy romance with the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor, which led
him to resign from the army and return to Mississippi. During the next
ten years ( 1835-45) he was a planter. With the help of his brother Joseph
and of a small inheritance from his father, he bought and cleared new
land and became one of the founders and leaders of a new state. He de-
veloped an intense local patriotism and a love for the easy life and patri-
archal ways of the well-to-do in the Deep South. He worked hard during
these years, both in the fields and in the library. His plantation prospered
and he became learned in history and politics. His slaves were cared for
with affection. They were lazy because of the climate, inefficient because
of the slave system, and moderately content because Davis was a just man.
If he and his beloved Mississippi and his regressive social system had been
let alone, he might have become a mild and scholarly country gentleman ;
but he was stubborn as well as just, egotistical as well as affectionate, and
when the abolitionists began to abuse the planters and their social system
incontinently, Jefferson Davis responded with an equal scorn.
In 1845 he married Varina Ho well (a famous beauty and a daughter
of the ruling aristocracy) and the same year he began his political career
in the House of Representatives. If Mississippi and her planters were to
be attacked and traduced, Davis meant to see that the defense was not
lacking. When the Mexican War broke out he resigned from Congress to
command a regiment of volunteers from his own state. He became a minor
national hero at the battle of Buena Vista and was sent back to Washing-
ton as Senator. In 1851 he left the Senate to seek the governorship of
Mississippi. His opponent was a Compromise-man, whereas Davis was a
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-I: 1853-1857 359

Southern "nationalist" that ; is, he was opposed to the fire-eaters who were
ready to secede when only two or three states would move, but he was
prepared if tension grew worse to try to unite the entire South and take
it out of the Union in a single coup d'etat. Defeated by less than a thou-

sand votes, Davis returned to his plantation until Pierce called him to
Washington in 1853 to be Secretary of War. The appointment seemed
providential in view of his longing to strengthen the South. At once he
pushed for a Pacific railway along the Mexican border, tying the Gulf
states to the coast of California and opening the trade of Asia to the
slave society. To make the railway feasible he induced Pierce and Marcy
to buy a tract of land from Mexico, known as the Gadsden Purchase. The

treaty had a rough time in the Senate which objected to paying ten mil-
lion dollars for a territory on which, according to Thomas Hart Benton,
not even a Wolf could find a living.* But Davis and his Southern im-
perialistic friends were able to force ratification.
other strong man of the Cabinet and defender of the Southern
The
cause was the enigmatic Caleb Gushing of Essex County, Massachusetts
the county which had produced so many leaders of the once great Federal-
istParty. Secession was perhaps not a frightening word in that county,
for in the days of Timothy Pickering the "Essex Junto" had toyed with

taking New England out of the Union.

Gushing was a man of high talents who had made many enemies and
was accused of many faults, but never of cowardice. He had a gift for find-
ing and defending unpopular causes, and he seldom failed to bring them
luster. He was born in 1800, was graduated from Harvard with high dis-
tinction in 1817, was admitted to the bar in 1821, and a few years later
became a state senator. He supported John Quincy Adams against Jack-
son the first and not the worst of his lost causes. In 1834 he went to
Washington as a Whig member of the House of Representatives. Al-
though he joined with Adams in defending the right of his constituents
to petition Congress against slavery, he also joined with Webster and the
"Cotton Whigs" in decrying all efforts to interfere with Southern rights
and customs thus insuring the maximum of unpopularity from all sides.
As a protege of Webster, however, he had a secure political future, and
for a time he was the heir apparent. But when President Harrison died
and President Tyler fought the Whigs who had elected him (destroying
the program of their hero, Henry Clay) Gushing became a member of the
,

hated "Corporal's Guard" and moved with Tyler toward the Democratic
Party. The Senate refused to ratify his appointment as Secretary of the
Treasury, so in 1843 Tyler sent him to China to make America's first com-
* The wolf would not have done
badly, for the Purchase secured 45,535 square
miles of land, much of whichis today good cattle country. Tucson, Arizona, is in
the Gadsden Purchase.
360 The Price of Union

mercial treaty with that sprawling empire. He arranged for the opening
of five Chinese ports to the Americans and for the rights of "extra-terri-
toriality" whereby American citizens in China became subject solely to
American laws and officials.
Needless to say, with the coming of the Mexican War Gushing was one
of the few important New Englanders to support President Polk. He raised
a regiment and led it to the Rio Grande. Before the war ended he was a
brigadier general, and the subject of one of James Russell Lowell's bitter-
est attacks in the Biglow Papers:
Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man;
He's ben on all sides thet give places or pelf;
But consistency still wuz a part of his plan
He's ben true to one party and thet is himself. . . .

Gineral C. he goes in fer the war;

He don't vally principle more'n an old cud;
What did God make us raytional creeturs fer,
But glory and gunpowder, plunder and blood?

In 1852 Gushing was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention

and worked for the nomination of Pierce. He became Attorney General
in the new Cabinet, an ally of Jefferson Davis in defense of Southern
interests, a strong unshakable supporter of the act which was soon to de-

stroy the Compromise of 1850. Until the day of South Carolina's seces-
sion he worked with the extreme wing of the Southern Democrats. He
then returned to Essex County, joined the Republican Party, and asked
permission to fight.
When compared with the benign Marcy and with these two powerful
and stubborn men, the rest of the Cabinet was of light weight. Its im-

portance lay in the fact that it was disunited, and that the men who stood
by the Union were no match for the men who
stood by the South. Ben-
ton said that the subsequent four years should not be known as the Pierce
Administration, since Pierce could never control his own followers. It was
u
an Administration in which he was inoperative, and in which nullifiers,
and renegades used his name and his power for their own
disunionists,
audacious and criminal purposes."

Into this precarious situation, already threatened by obstinate ambitious

men, a President who confused charm with statesmanship, and a Senator
who confused bravery with strength, dropped the most unsettling problem
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-I: 1853-1857 361

which had yet bedeviled the republic. We have seen that Jefferson Davis
meant to build his Pacific railway through Texas to El Paso, and then
along the southern border of New Mexico and the valley of the Gila River
to California. The chief advantage to the route was that it lay through

country which was already organized under territorial government,

whereas the rival routes of the Central West and the Northwest were
controlled by Indians and had few white settlers and no government. It
was widely believed that only one transcontinental railway would be built,
so the Senators and Congressmen from the Middle West fought to keep
the South from becoming the favored section. Not only were regional
jealousies involved, but also the greed of land speculators, for it seemed
likely that the city chosen for the eastern terminal of the railway would
become a metropolis.
Beginning in 1850 bill after bill was introduced to create a territory of
Nebraska. The Southern members of Congress blocked each attempt, both
because they wished to save the railway for their own section and because
the proposed territory lay north of the Missouri Compromise line and
must one day increase the number of free states. The chairman of the
Senate Committee on Territories was Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic
hope of Illinois, a bouncing, forceful Midwesterner as stubborn as Jeffer-
son Davis and even harder to pin down than Caleb Cushing. Douglas did
not intend to see his section lose the golden railway prize. He set himself
to lure theSouth into accepting a Nebraska bill. He was willing to pay a
high price; but even Douglas would have flinched if he had known the
price which destiny was to exact.
On January 4, 1854, Douglas reported a Nebraska bill which by impli-
cation repealed the Missouri Compromise, abolishing Henry Clay's great-
est triumph, the nationally accepted trans-Mississippi frontier between
freedom and slavery. The bill was based on the idea of "popular sover-
eignty" or "squatter sovereignty" whereby the people of the new terri-
tory were to settle the slavery question for themselves. Lewis Cass had
suggested such a plan in 1847; and in the course of the Compromise
measures of 1850 the territories of Utah and New Mexico were organized
without the prohibition or the protection of slavery. In due time they were
to be admitted as states, with or without slaves, according to the will of
their citizens. This was the answer of Clay and Webster to the Wilmot
Proviso, which would have excluded slavery from all the spoils of Mexico.
Northerners were persuaded to swallow that part of the Compromise on
the ground that slavery could not live in arid lands. But much of the
proposed Nebraska territory lay east of the fateful ninety-eighth meridian,
where the dry country begins. East of 98, the rainfall is above twenty
inches and slave agriculture might prosper. Douglas made a mistake when
he thought the North would permit the introduction of slaves or even
 362 The Price of Union

the threat of such introduction next door to Missouri or across the river
from Iowa. It was a typical mistake, for it was grounded in moral
obtuseness.*
Stephen Arnold Douglas was born in 1813 in Vermont. His father, a
doctor, died when Douglas was an infant, and the boy was later appren-
ticed to a cabinetmaker. When his mother remarried he followed her to
western New
York, where he began to study law. At the age of twenty he
went further west: to Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois. He was atl-
mitted to the bar before he was twenty-one and became a judge of the
state supreme court at twenty-seven. Politics, however, was his true love,
and law a mere convenience for forwarding that career. In his youth he
had seen politics at its height of organized efficiency in the New York
state machine of Van Buren and Marcy. He grew up with the Democratic
machine of Illinois, and he was one of the first to urge the creation of
county and state conventions. He was soon a member of the state legis-
lature and at the age of thirty he went to the House of Representatives at
Washington. He was an odd figure: five feet tall, with weak little legs, a
big round head, a bull neck, and the chest and shoulders of a wrestler. He
had a voice that beat upon the air like the deep notes of a tuba. He was
known as "the Little Giant."

Douglas distinguished himself in the House as an expansionist and a

defender of the Mexican War. In 1847 the legislature of Illinois trans-
ferred him to the Senate, where he was at once made chairman of the
Committee on Territories. The following year, on the death of his father-
in-law, his wife fell heir to property in North Carolina and Mississippi
and to a hundred and fifty slaves. Douglas was accused of Southern sym-
pathies as a result of the inheritance; but his willingness to tempt the
South with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise came not from sym-
pathy but from rivalry. In 1847 Douglas moved north to the little village
of Chicago which had been founded fourteen years before at the portage
between the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes waterway and the vast system of
the Mississippi River. Jolliet and Marquette, exploring the wilderness for
the King of France, had used this portage in 1673 and had urged the
building of a canal. Their plan was accomplished in 1848, the year after
Douglas moved to Chicago. It seemed clear to the ambitious Senator that
if the village which presided over this superb water connection were also

to become the terminus of the Pacific railway, the future would be secure
and affluent. So he invested in Chicago real estate and bribed the South to
support his Nebraska bill.
The South, however, was not satisfied with an implied repeal of the
Missouri Compromise. The idea of "popular sovereignty," with its sugges-
* For the true
dividing line between more and less than twenty inches of rain,
see themap on page 272.
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 363

tion of democratic control, was displeasing to the fire-eaters and they

would only accept it if combined with an explicit statement that the law
of 1820 was dead. They could then make their final demand: that the
federal government must protect slave property in the territories whether
the inhabitants liked it or not. On January 22, 1854, a conference of
Democratic leaders at the White House altered the bill to provide for
open repeal and also to divide the land into two territories: one west of
Missouri to be called Kansas and the other west of Iowa to be called
Nebraska. Under pressure from Jefferson Davis and his friends President
Pierce put the force of the Administration behind the Kansas-Nebraska
Act. By so doing he assumed responsibility for the woe which followed.
The Southerners who took part in this conference did not care what
trouble came, since if they could not get their way they would be glad of
the excuse to secede. But it is strange that none of the Northerners knew
they were stirring the ugliest forces in American life deep hates and fears
:

which the most careful statesmanship had coaxed into a fitful sleep but
which were now never to rest until the nation had been torn apart and
rebuilt by the sword. Pierce may have been too dull to understand, and

Marcy may have been disregarded, and Gushing was on the side of the
Southern cause; but how could Stephen A. Douglas have been fooled?
He knew politics the way a skilled mechanic knows the engine in his
charge. He could take the machine to pieces, and put it together, and he
loved each smooth well-fitting part; but he did not sense that a political
machine may have morals, and a soul, and even a heart.

What remains mysterious, in even the most sympathetic view of his

motives [writes Professor Nevins], is his attitude toward free soil opinion;

an attitude curiously blind and callous, a mixture of incomprehension

and indifference. For thirty-three years the Missouri Compromise had
truly been enshrined in Northern hearts. Did he not realize that any
sudden attempt to overthrow it would raise the greatest storm of the
generation? ... It was impossible for such a man to comprehend the
fervent emotion with which millions of freedom-loving Northerners re-
garded the possibility that half the great West might become a land of
slaves for devote Kansas to slavery, and Colorado, New Mexico, and
Arizona (to use present-day names) might all conceivably follow. When
indignation welled up like the ocean lashed by a hurricane he was
amazed. The fact that the irresistible tidal forces in history are moral
3
forces always escapes a man of dim moral perceptions.

The New England men of letters who molded and expressed the con-
science of their region doubtless seemed silly to the proud Senator who
knew all there was to know about handling Congress and bullying weak
Presidents. Lowell and Melville and Whittier, Emerson and Thoreau it
was easy to dismiss them as sentimentalists when it came to framing a law;
364 The Price of Union

yet Douglas was to find that such men spoke for more than half the coun-
try, and that their moralizings were backed in Congress by some of the
most relentless fighters ever to perturb those contentious halls. Even be-
fore the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was presented to the Senate, six members
of Congress issued an attack which, for timeliness, for bitterness, and for
scornful insolence, has not been surpassed. This "Appeal of the Inde-
pendent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States" was
chiefly the work of Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio soon to becomes a
member of Lincoln's Cabinet; but it was also signed by Senator Sumner
of Massachusetts and by four members of the lower House. The "Appeal"
was exaggerated in its wrath, unfair in its ascription of motives, and an
ugly forecast of the wild words and wilder deeds to come. Yet Professor
Binkley calls it "the most successful single piece of propaganda in Amer-
ican party history," and Senator Beveridge wrote that "its inflammable
sentences fell like sprays of oil upon the fires which 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'
had started in every northern community." 4 Douglas was burnt in effigy
throughout the Northern and Northwestern states, and every day the vil-
lage churches and the town halls were filled with anxious men and women
forming anti-Nebraska groups under a variety of names. They were all
soon to coalesce in the Republican Party.
Douglas had known, of course, that he would be attacked by the aboli-
but he did not foresee that his Kansas-Nebraska Act would make
tionists ;
abolitionism respectable. The men who signed the "Appeal" were ex-
tremists who had little hold on the nation until Douglas made them popu-
lar. Their document was reprinted in every important newspaper
throughout the North. Clergymen read the "Appeal" from their pulpits.
Men who had thought that the doctrines of abolition were almost treason
began to wonder whether slavery was indeed a system which must grow
and grow, corrupting the continent, if it were permitted to live at all. So
instead of sweeping from his path a few wild and well-tried enemies whom
he despised, and at whom the country laughed, Douglas found himself
facing a conscience-troubled public which wondered whether it had
laughed unwisely.
The extravagance of the "Appeal," however, and the inaccuracy of
many of its statements, and the answering bitterness which it roused in
Southerners who might not otherwise have come to Douglas's support,
gave the Administration its chance to carry Congress. This was to prove a
bitter and contaminated victory; but at the time Douglas only saw that
Chase had called him a liar, a man who sold his honor for the hope of
the presidency, so he leaped gladly into battle. All through the month of
February, 1854, he defended his bill with superb address. If the moral
issues and the resulting emotions were ignored, he had a strong case. His

opponents had put themselves in the wrong and he hammered them with-
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 365

out Before he was through he had extracted an apology from Chase,

pity.
and an apology from Seward. Even Sumner was reduced to silence,
half
the only form of politeness which he knew. And Douglas's power over the
party machine was such that he could force Congress to forget the storms
that were rising through the country. The Senate passed the bill on March
3, and the House on May 22 by 113 votes to 100. The President meekly

signed. "Douglas," wrote Salmon P. Chase at the beginning of the strug-

gle, ". has out-southernized the South and has dragged the timid and
. .
;

5
irresolute administration along with him."

In the course of defending his Act before the people of Illinois, Douglas
had his first disquieting encounter with Abraham Lincoln. On October 4
in Springfield, and on October 16 in Peoria, Lincoln took the Douglas

arguments to pieces and exposed them as callously unmoral. When a

politician appeals to morals the public expects intolerance and over-
statement, and perhaps a harsh demand for some reform which would
involve setting the world on its head. So the public tends to be suspicious.
As Big Tim Sullivan of Tammany Hall said in his gentle way, "God and
the people hate a chesty man." But no one was ever less "chesty" than
Lincoln, or less intolerant, or more cautiously conservative. He could use
moral arguments humbly and simply (he could even use them unfairly at
times), and because his soul was not swollen the people would listen.

I think I have no prejudice against the southern people [said Lincoln

in his reply to the well-polished defenses of Douglas]. They are just what
we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them,
they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not
instantly give up. ... If all earthly power were given me, I should
it

not know what

to do, as to the existing institution. But all this, to
. . .

my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into

our free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade by
law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa ; and that
which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, could hardly
be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former
could find as plausible excuses as that of the latter. . . .

But Nebraska is urged as a great Union-saving measure. Well, I too,

go for saving the Union. Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the
extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would
consent to any great evil, to avoid a greater one. But when I go to
Union saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have
some adaptation to the end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adap-
tation.
366 The Price of Union

"It hath no relish of salvation in it." It is an aggravation, rather, of

the only one thing which ever endangers the Union. When it came upon
us, all was peace and quiet. ... In the whole range of possibility, there
scarcely appears to me to have been any thing, out of which the slavery
agitation could have been revived, except the very project of repealing
the Missouri Compromise. Repeal the Missouri Compromise re-
. . ,

peal all compromises repeal the Declaration of Independence repeal

all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the
abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out*of
the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak. . . .

In our greedy chase to make profit of the Negro, let us beware lest
we "cancel and tear to pieces" even the white man's charter of freedom.
. .Let us turn slavery from its claim of "moral right" back upon its
.

existing legal rights, and its arguments of necessity. Let us return it to

the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace. ... In
his [Senator Douglas's] view, the question of whether a new country
shall be slave or free is a matter of as utter indifference as it is whether
his neighbor shall plant his farm with tobacco or stock it with horned
cattle. Now, whether this view is right or wrong, it is certain that the

great mass of mankind take a totally different view. They consider

slavery a great moral wrong; and their feeling against it is not evanes-
cent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice;
and it cannot be trifled with.

It to "the great mass of mankind" that Lincoln spoke. He seemed

was
to muse
aloud, arguing with himself, seeking firm ground in a slippery
world. Yet he was a deadly opponent, for while putting the worst possible
construction on the pro-Nebraska arguments, he tested them by the princi-
ples of the American Revolution, by the faith in natural law on which the
nation rested. More than six years later, on his way to his first inaugura-
tion, after the Deep South had seceded and formed the Confederate States
of America, Lincoln spoke at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

All the political sentiments I entertain [he said] have been drawn, so
far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which origi-
nated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a
feeling politically that did not spring from the Declaration of In-
. . .

dependence. ... It was that which gave promise that in due time the
weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. ... I would
6
rather be assassinated on the spot than surrender it.

Here, indeed, was a new note, a relief from the logic-chopping about
states' rights and property rights. Here was the combination of moral
fervor and conservatism that Lincoln was to make his own. Slavery was
wrong because the Declaration of Independence was right. Nothing,
therefore, could justify a permission for slavery to extend. Yet slavery ex-
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-I: 2853-1857 367

isted, and no man knew howto end it wisely, so nothing could justify the

hate-provoking rant of the abolitionists. In the Peoria speech Lincoln

said:

Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration, lest they be
thrown in company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old
Whig to tell them good humoredly that I think this is very silly? Stand
with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and
part with him when he goes wrong. Stand WITH the abolitionist in
restoring the Missouri Compromise and stand AGAINST him when he
;

attempts the repeal of the fugitive slave law. ... In both cases you are
right. ... In both you stand on middle ground and hold the ship level
and steady. In both you are national and nothing less than national.

If the Presidents of the United States had taken this stand strongly,
from 1853 onwards, the federal system might not have collapsed. But in-
stead of morals and firm conservatism the Presidents tried expediency
tempered by sudden deeds of rashness. The first fruit of this policy was
"Bleeding Kansas."

As soon as Douglas's ill-fated bill became law the sectional struggle for
the territory of Kansas began. Slaveholders from Missouri (and to a small
extent from the whole South) sought to seize the new country for their
own "peculiar institution," while free settlers poured in from the old
Northwest. In New England emigrant-aid societies were formed to finance
the anti-slavery migration which for the most part went to the Kansas
Valley, while the Missourians and other Southerners took their land along
the Missouri River.* In November, 1854, there was an election for a terri-
torial delegate to Congress, and the following spring for a territorial legis-
lature. Much voting took place on both sides; but the Missourians
illegal
had the advantage of living next door, so the pro-slavery group won both
elections. The results were not accepted by public opinion. "Squatter sov-

ereignty" could not fraudulently settle a problem on which the passions of

the nation were aroused.
Later, when
the anti-slavery Northerners had attained a clear majority,
they sought admission to the Union as a free state. This was blocked by
Southern members of Congress, and the bitter feeling in that body led to
Sumner's speech, "The Crime Against Kansas." Charles Sumner of Mas-
sachusetts had been in the Senate for five years. He was a learned man,
* See
map, page 212.
368 The Price of Union

handsome and cold and bitter. He was the hero of the abolitionists in New
England, and his life was a picture of the wrong way to bring morals into
politics.
He was the opposite of Lincoln intolerant, cocksure, humorless,
:

and hate-ridden. High principles, for Sumner, were not an incentive to

understand and pity his neighbor, but an excuse for calling those who
disagreed with him bad names. In the Kansas speech he outdid himself.
The Slave Power was accused of all the crimes which Sumner could re-
member from his classical and historical reading. This the Senators Ex-
pected, and received with a minimum of resentment. But in his long
rhetorical peroration he turned from the abuse of regions and institutions
to the abuse of men especially Douglas, and the much-loved Senator
Butler of South Carolina, whom he accused of being a liar and a fool.
Three days later Senator Butler's nephew, Preston Brooks, a member of
the House of Representatives from South Carolina, attacked Sumner at
his desk, striking him many times on the head with a cane. Sumner was
badly hurt and was unable to attend the Senate for several years. In his
absence the Massachusetts legislature re-elected him, and the empty desk
at Washington did more harm to the Southern cause than the loud self-
satisfied words had ever done. Yet Brooks became a hero throughout the
South. A Richmond newspaper referred to this "elegant and effectual
caning," while in the North mass meetings described the deed as barba-
rism. The two regions could no longer comprehend each other.
Meanwhile, matters in Kansas grew rapidly worse. Douglas blamed the
fraud and the fighting (the breakdown of his hopes for popular sover-
eignty) on the organizations in distant states which sought by promoting
immigration to control the destiny of Kansas. He might have blamed his
own folly for not knowing that when national passions were aroused the
decision would never be left to temporary local majorities. For a short
time the Missourians might flood across the border and falsify every elec-
tion but the real decision as to Kansas had been made years before by the
;

population figures, and the North did not intend to see that decision chal-
lenged. In Nebraska, where there was no hope of Southern control, popu-
lar sovereignty worked smoothly, and, as Douglas pointed out, "the stream
of immigration was permitted to flow in its usual and natural channels."
But the unhappy first settlers in Kansas lived at the center of stresses
which were nation-wide and which they could not hope to control. Pro-
men might burn and riot, and the mad John Brown might seek to
slavery
promote God's vengeance by murdering five Southerners; but the deci-
sions had been made elsewhere and were enforced by a majority which
could not be slain. The battle for Kansas was really won in 1787 when the
men who formed the Ohio Company petitioned the Congress of the Con-
federation for an ordinance which would forever forbid slavery in the old
Northwest. As a result of that brave beginning there were too many free-
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Wcakness-1: 1853-1857 369

soil statesby 1855, and too many willing free-soil pioneers, for the South
to capture Kansas by force.
Another factor in the battle for Kansas, and a decisive factor in the
Civil War which that battle foreshadowed, was the development of the
east-west railway lines. In 1852 the United States had less than 11,000
miles of railway; in 1860 it had more than 30,000. And most of the new
lines were tying the Northwest and the Middle West to the East, contra-

dicting the river system which had long tied the West to the South. By
1855 the eastern seaport towns of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore
had built railways across the mountain barrier of the Alleghenies into the
great central valley. These lines ran north of the Ohio River, and as soon
as they had pierced the mountains they began reaching farther into the
Middle West, the Northwest and always at the end of the rainbow lay
the Pacific. On
Washington's Birthday in 1854, there was celebrated at
Rock Island, Illinois, the opening of through traffic from the Mississippi
River to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a railroad to take Free-Soil settlers
to Kansas. There was no similar road from the South.
The burst of railway-building which changed the habits of the nation
during the eighteen-fifties was made possible by federal land grants and by
abundant immigrant labor. In 1850 Senator Douglas and his Illinois dele-

gation in Congress passed a law setting aside tracts of public land for the
encouragement of railway expansion. The Illinois Central Railroad was
given two and a half million acres, and within four years it had built a
line from Chicago in the north of the state to Cairo at the junction of the
Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There was no bridge across the broad Ohio
at that point, so the new line did not tie southern Illinois to Kentucky but
to the fabulous city of Chicago. In 1850 Chicago was not on the railway
at all; in 1855 it was the terminus of 2200 miles of new roads and had
become one of the largest grain-exporting towns in the world. By 1856
five lines ran from Chicago to the Mississippi River, diverting the traffic
of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Central Illinois the whole
northern valley from the old north-south river route to the new west-east
route of the railways. Situated at the southern tip of Lake Michigan,
which bounds the prairies like a wall three hundred miles long, Chicago
with her railways became a natural center for lake traffic as well. "The
parallels," writes Allan Nevins, "had conquered the meridian lines of com-
merce. Had the South developed its manufactures, had New Orleans
pushed its railroads to the northward energetically, had St. Louis flung a
line into Iowa, the story might have been different. As it was, by 1860 the
Northwest and Northeast marched arm in arm." 7
The South had not been pushed aside without a struggle. By 1858
Memphis on the Mississippi had been joined to Charleston on the Atlantic,
and also to Richmond. And as early as the eighteen-thirties a heroic effort
'.'*,' *''*..**'''."'"*! "','

*1
k
- -'"- '
-r'^sC2?^K
*J V*^?V
- .
* .
ifY/iln"^
^J* -*r

in 1$SO
Existing

Proposed Louisville, Cincinnati

& Charles ton R. R.

5//B
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-I: 1853-1857 373

had been made a road from Charleston to Louisville and to Cin-

to build

cinnati, thus tying the Deep South to the Middle West and eventually to
the Northwest. But the panic of 1837 with the accompanying cotton
slump, and the untimely death of Senator Hayne who was one of the
chief promoters, frustrated the plan. This was a disaster for the Southeast.
Hayne's Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railway Company might
have prevented the isolation of that section and kept alive its strong na-
tionalist tradition. But the attempt was made before the era of federal land

grants; Northern capital was not interested and Southern capital was not
available in the needed quantities. The slave system was failing economi-
cally as well as in the moral sphere.*

An unforeseen result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the welding to-

gether of all who opposed the spread of slavery into a new Republican
Party a party "sectional in membership, national in politics," as Senator
Beveridge called it, "a combination of moral and economic forces, of
ancient partisanship and racial prejudice, of industrial philosophy and re-
ligious exaltation." We have already seen that the Whig Party was dying
and that effective leadership in the Democratic Party had passed to the
pro-Southern group) either real Southerners like Davis, or "northern men
with southern principles" (popularly known as "doughfaces") like Caleb
Gushing and President Pierce. The materials were at hand for a new alli-
ance of interests and ambitions; but before the Republicans could seize
the chance there arose from the general shifting and disintegrating of
allegiances a brief but sinister party known as Native Americans, or Know-
Nothings.
The immense increase in immigration which came in the forties and
fiftiesled naturally to "nativist" movements. Most of the new immi-
grants were Germans or Irish, and most of the Germans and Irish were
Catholics. To the fear of the foreigner was added the fear of a strange
religion. The Irish, who were adroit politicians, settled mostly in the large
* The era of federal land grants, which began with Douglas's coup in 1850, con-
tinued until long after the Civil War and produced some of the thorniest prob-
lems in American history. The opportunities for corruption were among the grossest
ever unfolded before man's dazzled eyes, yet the desire of each western state not
to be left behind in the race for quick transport was so intense that men were
willing to sell not only their souls but their earthly inheritance to the much-feared
giant corporations rather than allow a neighbor state to gain a temporary lead.
Between 1851 and 1858 the federal government gave twenty-one million acres of
land to railway corporations in the Mississippi Valley. This, as we shall see, was
but a small beginning.
The proposed Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railway route is shown on
the map on page 372. The route is now used by the Southern Railroad.
374 The Price of Union

Eastern cities where the Democratic Party had long been the party of the
poor; their political abilities thus became an affront to the Whigs, pre-
disposing that moribund coalition to join with the nativists. The laxness
with which immigration laws were administered in the seaport towns
added sensible grievances to those of mere jealousy and meanness. New
Orleans was even worse than New York in encouraging Europe, not
only to
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

but quite literally to send "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore" in
the person of criminals, lunatics, and the incurably diseased.* So the first
successful Native American Party started in Louisiana in 1841. The move-
ment spread north under a variety of names "Sons of '76," "Druids,"
"Foresters," and the like electing a mayor in New York and a Congress-
man in Philadelphia in 1844. In 1852 and 1853 these quaintly named and
pernicious bands came together into a national party, calling itself the
Native Americans or the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. The rest of
the country called it the Know-Nothing Party, because it was said to be a
secret order whose members were sworn to answer all questions with the
words, "I know nothing about it." Know-Nothings were pledged to vote
only for "natives," to demand that immigrants should spend twenty-one
years in the country before they
could become naturalized, and to work
against the influence of the Catholic Church. For a few years it seemed as
if they might draw a national majority into their strange and novel net.

Prohibitionists had a tendency to sympathize with the Know-Nothings

because the Irish Catholics of the big cities, and the German Catholics
who were filtering into the Middle West, regarded prohibition as a form
of insanity. Anti-slavery men in the North had a weakness for Know-
Nothings because the newest immigrants, being the poorest of the poor,
could usually be stirred to oppose emancipation. The immigrants who
moved West to the land became staunchly anti-slavery; but those who
stayed in the slums of the big Eastern cities preferred to have some class
of Americans whose lot was clearly inferior to their own. And the rich
conservative Whigs, the class-conscious followers of Webster, the Lords of
the Loom who had long been in alliance with the Lords of the Lash, and
* On the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are the following
lines by Emma Lazarus:
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost, to me!
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 375

in general all "sound" men of property, had a tendency to look with alarm
at the unkempt foreigners who were flooding the land.*
Among their other shortcomings, many immigrants were suspected of
"radical" ideas derived from the revolutionary fervor of Europe's 1848.
So a temporary alliance was formed out of the anti-drink, anti-slave, anti-
radical, and anti-immigrant enthusiasms. It was not a true basis for an
American political party, because none of the groups had anything to offer
in the way of bargains or concessions. Each wanted its own peculiar

way, with the result that the party was far too rigid. As soon as this was
proved in action, the Know-Nothings disintegrated; but meanwhile they
astonished the nation with their success. In 1854 they won control of
Massachusetts and Delaware, and in alliance with the Whigs carried
Pennsylvania. About seventy-five Congressmen elected that year had
Know-Nothing affiliations. In
855 the Know-Nothings elected nine gov-
1

ernors.**" But the next year, meeting in convention in Philadelphia, they

split on the question of slavery and the Nebraska Act. Southern delegates
insisted on endorsing the Act, with the result that twelve Northern states
seceded and demanded the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, thus
moving toward the program of the infant Republican Party.
In 1856 poor harmless Millard Fillmore became the presidential candi-
date of the Southern Know-Nothings. He received 875,000 votes and car-
ried only the state of Maryland. Thus ended the party of intolerance, the

party described by one indignant Southern believer in freedom of religion

as a "stupendous and far-reaching leprosy." The year 1856 also saw the
end of the Whigs, whose dejected remnant had held a convention in Bal-
timore in September and had endorsed Fillmore as the candidate least
likely to disturb the peace of the nation. In
the election some of the Whigs
voted for Fillmore, some for Buchanan (the Democratic candidate), and
many for the new Republican Party. Fillmore's utter defeat meant that in
the future such
Whigs wished to play a serious part in
as politics must join
the Democrats or the Republicans.

The Republican Party was the chief beneficiary of the collapse of the
Know-Nothings. The Republicans could make no place for the nativist or
the pro-slavery elements of that abortive coalition; but they found room
for all the others. Professor Binkley describes the party in its youth as "an

aggregation of Free-Soilers, Independent Democrats, Conscience Whigs,

* Some of this latter
group would soon be encouraging immigration in order to
keep down the price of labor.
** the states of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Con-
They won
necticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, California.
376 The Price of Union

Know-Nothings, Barnburners, abolitionists, teetotalers." We have seen

8

each of these groups in action independently; we must now trace how they
came together for victory, what bargains they made with one another, and
what prizes they offered to the professional leaders without whom a lasting
is
party impossible.
In February, 1854, several months before the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was
passed (but a month after it had been reported to the Senate) a group of
,

Whigs, Free Soilers, and anti-slavery Democrats met at Ripon, Wiscorfsin,

and resolved if this measure was pushed through the Congress "to throw
old party organizations to the winds and organize a new party on the sole
basis of the non-extension of slavery." They claimed to be the true de-
scendants of Jefferson, who had backed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787
whereby slavery was banished from the land north of the Ohio River and
east of the Mississippi. So they took the name of Jefferson's party and
called themselves Republicans. Five months later, after the hated bill had
become law, an anti-Nebraska state convention at Jackson, Michigan,
chose the same name for the same reasons. And on July 13, the sixty-
eighth anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance, state conventions in In-
diana, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin accepted the new name and de-
manded a party pledged to prevent the extension of slavery. Thus far the
movement was merely one branch of the widespread agitation against the
Nebraska Bill. Few would have predicted the birth of a new major party.

Everyone knew the Whigs were dying but most people assumed the Know-
Nothings would take their place.
One of the first to sense the true drift was Thurlow Weed of New York,
the old political master. After the defeat of the Democrats in the mid-
term election of 1854, Weed guessed that in the victorious coalition the
infant Republican Party would outlast the Know-Nothings, the Con-
science Whigs, and the other anti-Nebraska groups. He began to maneuver
his New York Whig machine toward the camp of the future conquerors.
This was clever of Weed, for at the time it still seemed to most observers
that the Republicans must fail for lack of a national leader. Salmon P.
Chase of Ohio, whose "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" had
lighted the raging anti-Nebraska fires, was not acceptable to Whig con-
verts, for he had attacked them too often and too bitterly. Sumner of
Massachusetts was so steeped in moral superiority that he could never
head a popular movement. Seward of New York was disliked by the
Know-Nothing converts, because under the expert guidance of Weed he
had befriended the Catholics and the new immigrants in the hope of
winning them from the Democratic Party. And Abraham Lincoln had not
yet even joined the Republicans. His deep conservatism, and his distaste
for the abolitionists, kept him among the dwindling Whig forces until
1856.
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 377

Another handicap for the Republicans was their taint of eccentricity

and "reform." In this they were most unlike their predecessors, the worldly
Whigs, who were never connected with anything socially odd. At first the
more conservative Whigs turned their backs on these curious people who
consorted with prohibitionists, and even abolitionists. Furthermore, with
the help of Horace Greeley and his New York Tribune (whose European
correspondent was Karl Marx), Northern labor began to join the Repub-
lican camp. And as the Democrats under Southern leadership became
more conservative, the Republicans won converts from the radical wing
of that party: the Locofocos, and the Barnburners, and the so-called "heirs
of Jackson" under the leadership of Jackson's friend and party editor,
Francis P. Blair. Blair was the permanent chairman of the first Republican
National Convention, which met in Pittsburgh in February, 1856, and a
member of the Republican National Committee.
first

All this to make a victorious party, as the election of

was not enough
1856 showed. The Republicans, so far, were scarcely more than a reshuffle
of the Know-Nothing coalition, with labor taking the place of the fanatical
"nativists." Since this was a Northern-and- Western sectional party, which
could count on the united hostility of the South, it could not afford to lose
the populous states in its own region. Yet it had nothing in its program or
its membership to appeal to the business interests of New York, Pennsyl-
vania, and Massachusetts (who were certain to be suspicious of the appeals
to labor) and nothing to win the farmers in the southern fringe of Middle-
,

western states, along the Ohio Valley, many of whom were Southern by
blood and most of whom traded with the slave society. By 1860, a combi-
nation of good luck and superb political leadership had repaired this
weakness; but in 1856 it seemed as if the party might disintegrate under
defeat as quickly as the Know-No things.

The Democratic National Convention met at Cincinnati in June, 1856.

The candidates for the nomination were President Pierce, James Bu-
chanan, Lewis Cass, and Stephen A. Douglas. The two-thirds rule was
maintained. Although at the end of his first term the President in office
can normally control the convention, Pierce failed completely. He began
with almost as many votes as Buchanan, but after a few ballots his South-
ern friends began to desert him for Douglas. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill
which had brought such woe to the country had been intended to flatter
the South, and the South now sought to repay its author. But Northern
hostility to Douglas was too great. The North stood steadily for Buchanan,
and since he was known to be another "doughface," another Northern
378 The Price of Union

man with Southern principles, the South was happy to take him as a
compromise. Like Pierce, he was pliable but unlike Pierce he was prudent,
;

and it was thought he could be counted on to do nothing, rather than to

make positive mistakes. "Nothing" was precisely the policy desired by the
South and by the Northern conservative converts to the Democratic Party.
James Buchanan was a Pennsylvanian, born in 1791 of Scotch-Irish
stock. He went to a local school and to a small college, and like most

politicians in America he studied law. After serving an apprenticeship in

local politics he was sent to Congress by the Federalists in 1820 one of
the last victories of that once-formidable party. A few years later he joined
the Jackson men, retaining his place in Congress and helping to elect
Andrew Jackson in 1828. Thereafter he served as Minister to Russia, as
United States Senator, and as Secretary of State to the dynamic James K.
Polk during the years of expansion and of Manifest Destiny. When the
Democrats returned to power in 1853, Buchanan (who had expected the
presidency) was sent as Minister to England. There he showed himself a
disciple of the imperialist Polk by joining with the American Ministers at
Madrid and Paris in signing the "Ostend Manifesto" of 1854.
This was not in truth a manifesto. It was a confidential report to the
Department of State, in which Buchanan and his fellow ministers argued
that if Spain refused to sell Cuba (for which the Pierce Administration
was willing to offer $130,000,000), the United States would be justified in
"wresting" the island from its owners. When the "Manifesto" became
public* the Administration was embarrassed; but the South, which had
long coveted Cuba, was pleased to find in Buchanan another amiable
"doughface" who might be counted on to take orders from the Southern
Democrats at least as humbly as Pierce and perhaps more efficiently.
The feelings of Spain were ignored. These were the great days of the
pax Britannica. Secure behind the British fleet, American politicians could
forget politeness, convention, and all the normal usages of foreign rela-
tions, abusing or flattering the sovereign states or the revolutionary fac-
tions of Europe with no thought beyond the next election. Later, in a less
safe world, the habit of a hundred years proved hard to break.

The Republican Convention met at Philadelphia, also in June. There was

no "logical candidate," for the party had no national leader. Not a single
delegate appeared from the Deep South, and only a small unrepresenta-
tive group from the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and

* The
press published so many garbled versions that Congress released the origi-
nal in March, 1855.
xviii. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-1: 1853-1857 379

Kentucky. Since they were a sectional party, the Republicans were not
forced to make the usual concessions to unity. Their chief problem was to
keep the abolitionists from spoiling the party's chances, even in the North.
There was a tone to the meeting that the more professional and nationally
representative conventions lacked.

The
Philadelphia scene had a pristine freshness, a bright hopefulness,
an which made it wonderfully refreshing. Its debates
evangelistic verve
throbbed with feeling its speeches struck fire. Here were qualities
which went back, somehow, to the Declaration of Independence, to the
old bill of rights, to the passion of the English-speaking folk in bygone
centuries for adventures in justice and freedom. 9

The platform showed that the party stood for little except opposition
to the spread of slavery although it did call for the immediate construc-
tion of a railway to the Pacific "by the most central and practical route,"
and did attack the Ostend Manifesto as "the highwayman's plea that
it
"
'might makes right.' This did not sound like a broad enough base for a
national coalition. The Republicans still looked like the typical "third
party," with one main excellent idea. They might have remained a third
party, and have faded as such parties fade, except that the demise of the
Whigs had left many experienced professionals without a job, organ-
izers in search of something to organize. Before long they had shown the

Republicans how to spread a wider net, and how to avoid losing old
converts while gaining new and contradictory ones. Thereafter, the Re-
publicans had less "pristine freshness" but more success.
The first Republican candidate was John Charles Fremont, the so-called
"Pathfinder of the Rockies," the son-in-law of Senator Thomas Hart
Benton. It is hard to do justice to Fremont's services and at the same time
to his follies and extravagances. The first half of his life was mostly
romance and success, the last half a long and sometimes sordid anticlimax.
And 1856 was the dividing line.
Fremont was the illegitimate son of a Frenchman who taught school in
Richmond, Virginia, and a Mrs. Pryor of that city. Brave, good-looking,
and energetic, Fremont was an adventurer who followed his destiny into
adventure's natural home: the unexplored West. A lieutenant in the
United States topographical corps, he married Jessie Benton, who was
almost as Byronic as himself. His powerful father-in-law, the Senator who
had long wanted to seize the entire West, put him in charge of two explor-
ing expeditions. Fremont's reports, written with his wife's masterly help,
brought the Oregon Trail and the western mountains into splendid life
for stay-at-home readers and incidentally they made Fremont a national
hero. He played a dubious but popular part in the conquest of California,
from which he emerged with mining properties worth ten million dollars
380 The Price of Union

and a court-martial which in January, 1848, found him guilty of "mutiny,

disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to order." The public was on his
side (the public and Thomas Hart Ben ton), so he resigned from the Army
without discredit and devoted himself to further explorations, to European
travel, to his adoring Jessie, and to a brief term in the United States
Senate. When the Kansas fight began, he declared himself a Free-Soiler
and an enemy of the Fugitive Slave Law. Since these were his only known
views on politics he was a good candidate for the new party. 10
When the Republicans had made their choice, the Northerners who had
left the Know-Nothings when the South insisted on a pro-slavery resolu-

tion met in convention, called themselves the North American Party, and
endorsed Fremont. So there were three important candidates in 1856:
Buchanan and the Democrats Fremont and the Republican-North Amer-
;

icans; Fillmore and the Know-Nothings plus the remaining Whigs. We

have already seen that Fillmore carried the state of Maryland, Buchanan
carried nineteen states with 174 electoral votes, Fremont eleven states
with 114 electoral votes. Buchanan received 1,838,169 popular votes,
Fremont 1,341,364.* New England and New York and the northern
Middle West had gone to the Republicans; but Pennsylvania, New Jersey
and the southern counties of Indiana, and Illinois had stayed with Bu-
chanan, and of course the entire South and California, which had its
own reasons for disliking Fremont and which Buchanan had wooed with
the impossible promise of a Pacific railway at once. The victory was for
conservatism, for dodging trouble, for the Union and for peace, even if
peace meant appeasement.
The prediction made to Howell Cobb by his farsighted friend had come
true one more rally of all the forces of conservatism and compromise had
:

produced one more victory for the Democrats. What would they do with
this, their last chance?
* So Buchanan had 59
per cent of the vote in the electoral college but only
45 per cent of the popular vote. Fr6mont had 30 per cent of the popular vote and
Fillmore 25 per cent.
 XIX

The Fruits of Executive Weakness II

1857-1861

ACCORDING TO THE STANDARDS of the twentieth century Buchanan's

campaign was a simple affair; but at the time it seemed elaborate, costly,
and perhaps corrupt. The candidate stayed at home in Lancaster, Penn-
sylvania, seeing visitors and answering letters. The Democratic National
Committee appointed a sub-committee to raise money and a so-called
"resident committee" in Washington to write pamphlets and send out

speakers and if necessary indulge in modest bribery. The Republicans,

meanwhile, broke the painfully learned rules of federal politics by taking
a positive stand. There were no compromises in their program, no vague
words, no attempts to occupy several contradictory positions at the same
time.
The Republicans could be brave because they were a sectional party
and because they were young. The Democrats, who were neither, felt that
such tactics were unfair. Also, the Democrats were fighting themselves.
Their party had repudiated a first-term President. On the good and sensi-
ble grounds that he was incompetent, the machine had turned against its
own boss. This did not make for harmony between the friends of Bu-
chanan and the friends of Pierce. And it did not promise peace within
the state organizations when the new Administration came to distributing
jobs. In fact, the fierce quarrels which ensued consumed much of the
attention and energy which might have been given to the problem of
preserving the Union.
Buchanan saw himself, inaccurately, as a politician of rich experience
and wisdom. He had been in public service for almost forty-two years and
he mistakenly believed that he had been learning all that time. He was
distressed at the planless discord of the Pierce Administration. He felt that
as soon as his own trained hand took the helm there would be no more

yawing and jibing. Added powers was a

to this confidence in his political

deeper and truer self-distrust which plagued Buchanan all his life. He
never married and he never had an intimate friend of either sex. He took
refuge from personal relations in a dignity which seemed put on, like a
suit of armorj instead of being an expression of his spirit. Six feet tall, with

381
382 The Price of Union

abundant white hair, a high collar and broad white neckcloth, he was
pompous rather than impressive, stubborn rather than resolute. And un-
derneath the layers of protection he was timid. When hard-pressed his
refuge was irresolution. It is a pity that at the age of sixty-six, after ten
years of ill health, at a troublesome time in his country's history, he should
have insisted upon pushing himself into the presidency.
Buchanan did not know it was a bad time. He thought a little sound
management would bring peace and quiet an opinion which alone y^as
enough to convict him of overconfidence, obsolescence, and thorough mis-
reading of the country's mood, North or South. As a first step toward
sound management he sought to build a Cabinet which would have none
of the faults of Pierce's mismated team. He wanted all the regions of the
country represented, but not the quarreling groups within the party.
all

He a victory for conservatism, and he

rightly interpreted the election as
planned a strong conservative Administration. Unhappily, he and his
friends did not seem to know many strong conservatives.
For Secretary of State Buchanan took the aging Lewis Cass of Michi-
gan, who was about to leave the Senate. We have seen Cass as an extreme
American imperialist and a hater of England. Buchanan did not like him
or trust him indeed, he made it a condition of the appointment that Cass
;

should suppress his anti-British feelings and accept an assistant whom the
President would name and who was to do all the work. Presumably, Cass
took the appointment on such terms because he was too old to care for
anything except employment. "At seventy-four," writes Professor Nichols,
"senility was creeping up on the obese, indolent Lewis Cass. He was
. . .

a constant trial as an adviser, because he could not make up his mind and
was glad to be made the mouthpiece of others." 1
The Postmaster General, who controlled most of the patronage, was a
Southerner with little national experience but a good knowledge of what
the South wanted. The Secretary of the Navy was a careerist from Con-
necticut who was careful never to disagree with Buchanan and who did
no noticeable harm. The Secretary of War was ex-Governor Floyd of Vir-
ginia, a bigoted states'-rights man of good family.
"He was not particu-
larly intelligent, energetic, efficient, or interested . . ." says Professor
"
Nichols; 'Careless' is the word that describes him. Buchanan was to have
2
many anxious moments because of Floyd's unfitness for his position." The
Secretary of the Interior was a narrow-minded self-made Mississippian
who had forced his way to success during the early unregulated youth of
the state. The Attorney General was a Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanian the
one effective man in the Cabinet who was neither a Southerner nor a
"doughface." And the Secretary of the Treasury was the charming Ho well
Cobb of Georgia, the baby of the Cabinet, only forty-one years old. He
had many virtues and talents, but a knowledge of finance was not among
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 383

them. A Union man from Georgia, a conservative who believed in the

was a suitable member of the Admin-
true spirit of federal compromise, he
istration; but Buchanan was perhaps wrong to give him the Treasury.
Next to the Post Office, thatwas the department most concerned with
patronage and here Cobb must be a liability in his own region, for the
fire-eaters hated him and whatever he did they would claim they were
betrayed.
By and large, the Cabinet was a faithful mirror of the President. Most
of it was old and unaware of the perilous mood of the country. None of it,

with the exception of Gobb, was notably able. None of it could provide
leadership at Cabinet meetings. If Buchanan went wrong there was no one
to help. If he tried to evade decisions there was no one to compel action.
It is pathetic to think of this tired, sick man, with his too dignified deport-
ment masking the self-distrust which kept him from delegating power,
working till late hours night after night in the White House, poring over
a multitude of papers which he insisted on reading but which he failed to
understand.

In his Inaugural Address Buchanan said that the country was on the verge
of a long period of internal peace. Everything was working out well.
There was no longer any reason for a sectional party, such as the Repub-
licans. He intended to allay sectional strife and to make the Union secure
forever. He also recommended economy, the payment of the public debt,
and an increase in the Navy. On military grounds he recommended build-
ing a "road" to California (presumably the railroad of his campaign
promise to that state), so that soldiers and supplies could move easily; but
he gave no hint as to how to break the deadlock in Congress between the
friends of Jefferson Davis's southern route and the friends of Douglas's
Nebraska route. In general, the address proved Buchanan a strict-con-
structionist who refused to assume leadership even in such a vital political

question as the tariff.* In foreign affairs, though he talked of peace and

friendship, he managed to suggest that he still favored Southern expan-
sion presumably toward the Caribbean from which the slave system

might refresh itself.

The most important sentences in the Inaugural Address dealt with

* Buchanan went further than
any President since Monroe in praise of strict con-
struction and a weak government. In a letter written in 1852 he said that the
"ancient principles of 1798" in Virginia could alone save the country from wasteful
extravagance and from a loose interpretation of the central powers. This is Jeffer-
son before he came to office; this is John Randolph and the "old Republicans."
This is nostalgia for the innocent youth of the nation charming, but inadequate
for a chief executive during the fateful fifties.
384 The Price of Union

Kansas, slavery, and the territories. The whole explosive question, said the
President, was now "happily a matter of but little practical importance,"
because the Supreme Court would soon "speedily and finally" settle it.
"To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully
submit." This was an odd statement from a follower of Andrew Jackson,
who had denied the power of the Court to settle matters of public policy.
It was an odd statement from anyone who had watched the dire effects
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the rise of the Republican Party, and the
clear repeated proof that the North would accept no decision, by Presi-
dent, Congress, or Court, which allowed slavery to spread beyond the
Missouri Compromise line. On this issue Buchanan was as morally insen-
sitive as Douglas -and as politically blind if he thought a group of
judges could calm the storm. And his statement was odd for still another
reason. He said he would "cheerfully submit" to the decision of the Court,
and he exhorted "all good citizens" to do the same. The implication was
clear that he would obey the Court whatever it might rule in the pending
Dred Scott case. He did not add that he had been told what the ruling
would be.

Dred Scott was a Negro slave in Missouri who sued for his freedom on the
ground that with the consent of his master he had lived for years in
Illinois and in the unorganized territory across the Mississippi lands
where slavery was forbidden cither by the Missouri Compromise or by the
Northwest Ordinance. This was a familiar type of case. Between 1822 and
1837 eight similar cases had been decided in favor of slaves; but Dred
Scott's suit forfreedom began in 1846 when the approaching Mexican
War had already sharpened and made bitter all questions touching slav-
ery. The case was heard and appealed and re-appealed, with judgment
sometimes in Scott's favor and sometimes against him, until at the end of
six years it was carried to the federal courts. In 1854 the United States
Circuit Court of Missouri ruled that since Scott was a Negro he was not a
citizen of Missouri and not entitled to sue in federal courts. The case was
then appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Six of the seven jus-
tices who formed the majority wrote individual opinions, coming on the
whole to similar conclusions by a variety of routes. The opinion of Chief
Justice Taney the most outrageous of all from the Northern point of
view is commonly known as "the Dred Scott decision." It was delivered
on March 6, 1857 two days after the inauguration. Taney's argument
may be summarized under three headings :

First, no Negro could be a citizen, since citizenship derived from the

federal government, and at the time when the Constitution was adopted
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 385

Negroes were regarded "as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit
to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations." At
that time, he added, Negroes "had no rights or privileges but such as those
who held the power and the government might choose to grant them."
Second, even if one dismissed the question as to whether a Negro could
ever be a citizen, it was obvious that a slave could not be a citizen. Dred
Scott was a slave. He had not become free by residence in territory covered
by the Missouri Compromise, since the Missouri Compromise had been
unconstitutional from the beginning. Congress had no power, while gov-
erning a territory, to interfere with the property of a slaveowner, any more
than it could interfere with a man's peaceful enjoyment of his property in
pigs. "An act of Congress," wrote Taney, "which deprives a citizen of the
United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself
or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States,
and who had committed no offense against the laws, could hardly be dig-
nified with the name of due process of law." Therefore, since Dred Scott
was still a slave he was not a citizen, and could not sue in the federal
courts. The argument was that it not only made
interesting part of this
the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional but the Republican Party as
well since that party was founded for the main purpose of preventing
the spread of slavery into further territories. *
Third, even if one dismissed the question as to whether the Missouri
Compromise could make Dred Scott free while he lived in territory north
of 36 30', had voluntarily returned to Missouri
the fact remained that he
where was determined by Missouri law. The courts of Missouri
his status
had held that he was still a slave. Therefore he was not a citizen and could
not sue in a federal court.
The Northern press abolitionist and moderate Republican fell upon
the Dred Scott decision with a howl of fury. The New York Tribune
called it "this wicked and false judgment" made by "five slave-holders and
two doughfaces," and added that the decision was "entitled to just as
* In 1856 the
Republican platform had anticipated Taney in his appeal to the
"due process" clause of the Fifth Amendment. But Taney emphasized the property
which should not be taken from the master, whereas the Republicans emphasized
the liberty which should not be taken from the man. "As our Republican
fathers ..." said the platform, "ordained that no person shall be deprived of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to main-
tain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the pur-
pose of establishing slavery in the territories of the United States."
As we shall see in Chapter XXVIII, "due process of law" is one of the most
ambiguous phrases in American history. When Professor Edward Corwin was a
student he asked his teacher (the famous Andrew McLaughlin) what Taney meant
by "due process" in the Dred Scott decision. "I don't know," said McLaughlin,
and the young Corwin reflected that in that case nobody knew. He decided to try
to find out. The results of his work appeared almost fifty years later in a fascinating
book, Liberty Against Government: The Rise, Flowering and Decline of a Famous
Juridical Concept.
386 The Price of Union

much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those con-

gregated in any Washington Barroom." Taney was vilified throughout

the North, and the six justices who agreed with him. It was accepted that
they had made the Supreme Court an agent of Southern expansionism.
No decision has ever done the Court more harm, or shown a more danger-
ous judicial ignorance of the mood of the day.

Buchanan and the politically naive judges were disappointed in their hope
that the most vexed of questions could be solved by a court decision. The
Union was not saved but greatly endangered, for the rancorous discussion
which followed made war more Perhaps the only man who was
likely.
clearly helped by the Dred Scott was Abraham Lincoln, whose com-
fiasco
bination of caution and simple inflexible morality was what the North
wanted to hear. And the rough, insensitive Douglas soon gave Lincoln the
ideal foil for his best qualities.
Senator Douglas was asked by his constituents what had become of
popular sovereignty, in the light of Dred Scott. He replied that popular
sovereignty was untouched. Of course a citizen had a right to take his
slaves to a territory; but that was "a barren and worthless right unless
sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and
local legislation, prescribing adequate remedies for its violation."* Unwisely

perhaps lured by the pleasure of insisting that his Republican enemies

were unconstitutional Douglas went on to praise the decision and to
insist that what the Court said must be accepted. "Whoever resists the
final decision of the highest tribunal," he said, "aims a deadly blow at our
whole republican system of government." This was the type of bombast
that Lincoln enjoyed destroying. He quoted Andrew Jackson's message
disregarding the Supreme Court's decision on the Bank, adding, "again
and again have I heard Judge Douglas denounce that bank decision and
applaud General Jackson for disregarding it." He pointed out that the
Supreme Court had often overruled its own decisions, and said the Repub-
licans would do what they could to have it overrule this. Then he turned
to his favorite problem: how to reconcile slavery and the Declaration of
Independence. There had been a time when the Declaration was sacred.
"But now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and
eternal, it is assailed and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and
torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all
recognize it." What did the authors of the Declaration mean when they
said all men were created equal?
*
Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 12, 1857.
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 387

They meant up a standard maxim for free society, which could

to set
be familiar to and revered by all.
all, .The assertion that "all men
. .

are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation

from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that,
but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now
proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek
to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They
knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when
such should reappear in this fair land and commence their vocation
they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.
The whole of this speech was printed in the New York Times. Lincoln
was becoming a national figure. It was just a year since he had cautiously
and with misgivings joined the Republican Party pushed by William
Herndon, his law partner. The first Republican state convention in
Illinois was to meet at Bloomington in May, 1856. In April Herndon and
a few friends called a county convention in Springfield to select local
delegates. Although Lincoln was away attending court, Herndon signed
his name to the call. Thus there came into the party the man who was
to give it not only the most careful and expert political guidance, but also
a soul.

Buchanan's luckless Administration, which had begun with the Dred

Scott decision challenging Stephen A. Douglas on his favorite ground of
popular sovereignty, soon found itself wholly at odds with that powerful
and contentious Democrat. In the autumn of 1857 a convention at Le-
compton, Kansas, attended solely by the pro-slavery minority in the
territory, framed a constitution for a state government, to be submitted
to the voters in a so-called referendum. The constitution contained an
article declaring slave property inviolable. The voters might take the
constitution with or without that article; but they could not reject the
constitution as a whole, and even if they rejected the article there could
be no interference with slave property already in Kansas, and no amend-
ment before 1865. The free-state men in Kansas declined to vote, and on
December 21 the constitution was approved, with slavery. In January,
1858, the legislature in control of the Free Soil Party arranged for a
referendum on the whole constitution. This time the pro-slavery men
refused to vote and the constitution was rejected. After this fraud and
confusion, and in spite of the clear will of the majority in Kansas,
Buchanan recommended to Congress that it accept the Lecompton Con-
stitution and admit Kansas as a slave state. Douglas had stated in Decem-
ber that he thought the Lecompton Constitution a travesty on popular
388 The Price of Union

sovereignty. When the Administration backed it, Douglas turned against

Buchanan with all his implacable force.
The President who had once expected to heal the party breaches
made by the amateurish Pierce fought back. Douglas's friends were
turned out of office. Douglas himself was denied all further patronage.
The party press attacked him with vicious abuse the Republicans watch-
ing with wide-eyed pleasure. The one pushing and popular Democratic
leader in the North had broken with the dominant pro-slavery faction,
and the party seemed to lie in ruins. The Democratic state convention
behind Douglas, who had built a local machine so
in Illinois stood firmly

strong that the President could not break it. Buchanan forced the Senate
to accept the Lecompton Constitution; but Douglas (with the help of the

Republicans and a few Know-Nothings) contrived its defeat in the House.

The torn,, unhappy territory of Kansas did not become a state until Janu-
ary, 1861.
In the midst of this warfare Douglas sought re-election to the Senate.
Eastern Republicans wished to widen the split in the Democratic Party
by endorsing Douglas; but Illinois Republicans said it was "asking too
much for human nature to bear, to now surrender to Judge Douglas . . .

to quietly let him step foremost in our ranks and make us all take back
3
seats." So they put forward their own party candidate: Abraham Lin-
coln of Springfield. Douglas was in Washington when he heard the news.
He said to his friends: "[Lincoln] is the strong man of his party full of
wit, facts, dates and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and
dry jokes, in the West."
Magnanimously, since Lincoln could command no such audiences as
the "Little Giant," Douglas accepted a challenge to debate in seven
Congressional districts. As a result, Lincoln became a major national
figure and a candidate for the presidency. In the debate at Freeport,

Douglas was forced to restate his belief that in spite of the Dred Scott
decision slavery could be kept out of the territories by police regulations.
This set the Southern fire-eaters against him and led in 1860 to the break
in the Democratic Party. For the rest, the debates are disappointing. They
show the ability of both speakers to set traps and to avoid them. And they
show that there was little difference between the candidates in regard to
slavery. Both put the preservation of the Union above all other causes.
Douglas believed that popular sovereignty would ensure freedom in all
the territories north of the Compromise line. Lincoln believed that popu-
lar sovereignty might never be given an honest chance and that the deep

perturbation of the people could only be met by a prohibition against new

slave lands. Before the debates began, Kansas had been saved from
slavery by Douglas's valiant fight against the Lecompton Constitution.
Later, when the nation had broken, Douglas defended Lincoln in the
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 389

Senate and stood strongly behind him in upholding the Union. The chief
difference between them was whether the opposition to slave-expansion
should be put on moral or on legal grounds.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the debates was the number
of problems which were ignored. The nation had just suffered a severe
economic depression. Yet, as J. G. Randall points out, there was not a
word about unemployment, the condition of factory workers, the tariff,
immigration, railroads and federal land grants, homesteads and the pro-
tection of public lands against greedy plunder, agriculture, or banking, or
any of the agrarian grievances which were soon to rend the nation.
Lincoln, of course, centered the debates on Kansas-Nebraska in order to
hold the Illinois Republican Party together until other issues could be
agreed upon, and until the loyalties arising from repeated campaigns
could make themselves felt. He had to satisfy (and to keep in a loose
precarious alliance) conservative Whigs like himself, abolitionists whom
he regarded as a radical nuisance, Middlewestern Germans who distrusted
Know-Nothings, and Know-Nothings who distrusted all immigrants. He
divined that freedom in the territories was common ground, and from
that he would not budge. Douglas was trapped and dared not introduce
new issues, since Lincoln had already accused him of dodging and of
inferior moral sense. In the election, Lincoln's tactics almost succeeded.
The Republicans won a majority of the votes, but only a minority of
seats in the next state legislature. So in January, 1859, when the two
houses met in joint session, Douglas was elected Senator by fifty-four
votes to forty-six.*He returned to Washington to find himself an outcast
in his own which was now wholly in the hands of the Southerners.
party,
He was deposed from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories.
Under pressure from Jefferson Davis (who had returned to the Senate
after the demise of the Pierce Administration) he was soon forced to meet
the Southern attack and to declare himself opposed to any federal pro-
tection for slave property in the territories. The split in the party was
complete. It only jteeded to be ratified by the next national convention.

While Lincoln had been talking cautiously in Illinois, seeking a position

which might keep Whigs and abolitionists united, and which might sat-
isfy the North's anxieties without provoking fear or rage among moderate
Southerners, the Pennsylvanians had been making party policy with less
* The Senators, of course, were still chosen by the state legislatures under Article
I, Section 3 of the Constitution. Lincoln and Douglas were canvassing for party,
not personal, votes.
390 The Price of Union

restraint. They were concerned with business and the depression, not
with the Declaration of Independence. The iron industry of Pennsylvania
had been heavily hit. Manufacturers blamed the "doughface" President
from Pennsylvania who had allowed Secretary of the Treasury Cobb to
recommend and secure the passage of the Tariff of 1857, which came
close tomaking America a free-trade nation. The ironmakers won some
support in Massachusetts, and from Greeley's Tribune; but Republicans
on the whole still dodged protection as an election issue. So the high-
tariff men in Pennsylvania gave money and leadership to a local "People's

Party" a coalition of Republicans and anti-Buchanan Democrats. Re-

freshed by the rain of cash, the People's Party, in 1858, elected eighteen
of the state's twenty-five Congressmen. The Republicans were forced to
pay heed, for they could not win in 1860 without Pennsylvania, and it was
clear that they could not have Pennsylvania without protection. Reluc-
tantly, they passed a tariff bill through the House of Representatives. It
was defeated in the Senate; but the new party now had a new cause.*
And when, in the following year, President Buchanan vetoed a homestead
bill on constitutional grounds, the long reluctance of Eastern business was
overcome by this rich chance for vote-getting, and the Republicans de-
clared themselves for free land. "Vote yourself a farm," and "Vote your-
self a tariff," were campaign cries in 1860.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was trying to dissuade other party leaders from

taking stands which might disrupt the Republicans before they had built
a true national machine. His job, he said to a friend, was "to hedge
against divisions in the Republican ranks generally and particularly for
the contest of 1860." There were many such divisions which Lincoln,
with his hard political sense, deplored. His worries during 1859 and 1860
are an index to the problems of party-building in America. Know-
Nothing Republicans in one state, abolitionist Republicans in another,
were an equal bother.

Massachusetts Republicans [wrote Lincoln] should have looked be-

yond their noses, and then they could not have failed to see that tilting
against foreigners would ruin us in the whole Northwest. New Hamp-
shire and Ohio should forbear tilting against the Fugitive Slave law in
such a way as to utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charges of
enmity to the Constitution itself. Kansas, in her confidence that she
can be saved to freedom on "squatter sovereignty," ought not to forget
that to prevent the spread and nationalism of slavery is a national con-
cern and must be attended to by the nation. 4
* The
Republicans in this back-handed fashion were committed to one of the
few policies which in the period after the Civil War distinguished them sharply
from the Democrats. Until the days of Franklin Roosevelt, for reasons which will
become clear, the Democrats on the whole wished lower tariffs than the Republi-
cans although from 1865 onwards they were never again a free-trade party.
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-H: 1857-1861 391

While Lincoln was struggling to prevent the destruction of the Repub-

lican Party from within, America's leading fanatic very nearly destroyed it
from without. In the middle of October, 1859, the furious John Brown
declared private war on the institution of slavery and invaded the South
with a tiny army of liberation. He intended a series of raids along the line
of the Allegheny Mountains, liberating slaves and endowing the con-
quered territory with a government which he and his friends had in-
vented at a conference in Canada. Harper's Ferry in Virginia (now West
Virginia) was selected for the first attack. It was the site of an armory
and arsenal, and it was a gateway to the South. Brown's "army" con-
sisted of seventeen white men and five Negroes. They may have hoped to
stir a slave rebellion; but nobody lifted a helping hand. The raiders were

driven into a fire-engine house and there killed or captured by United

States Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and
Lieutenant "Jeb" Stuart. John Brown and six other survive rs were hanged
at the near-by county seat.*
The storm raised by this not very menacing foray was a sign of the
tension under which the country lived. John Brown's chief crime was that
he killed a most promising movement for conciliation and the union which
had developed during 1858 and 1859 in the border states, led by such
men as Crittenden of Kentucky and Rives of Virginia. After the raid their
work was discredited. The South, which had long believed that the aboli-
tionists meant to provoke a slave insurrection, enjoyed a shivering horror
in recalling the bloody deeds of San Domingo. Northerners living in the
South found themselves watched like enemy aliens. And in the North all
the forces of conservatism threatened to turn against the Republican
Party, which had reluctantly made room for the more conciliatory aboli-
tionists, and some of whose national spokesmen (such as Seward and
Greeley) might be blamed for inflaming the unbalanced mind of Brown.
Many Northern writers and preachers were in favor of the raid; but the
politicians drew back, sensing that praise of John Brown meant the loss
of the next election. And if the Republican candidate in 1860 did less
well than Fremont in 1856, the party would follow the Know-Nothings
into oblivion.

* In his last
speech John Brown denied that he had intended to incite slaves to
murder. He said he only meant to set them free and take them away from Virginia.
And he added: "This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law
of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the
New Testament. That teaches rne that all things whatsoever I would that men
should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to 'remember
them that are in bonds, as bound with them.* I endeavored to act up to that in-
struction. ... I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of
persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely
admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.
... I feel no consciousness of guilt."
392 The Price of Union

HH PreeStaUs
?>
Slave States
^H|
free Territories
I |
Free and Slave Areas
Slave Territories
1&60
Open depending on vote
to slavery or free
of the inhabitants by Kansas -Nebraska. Act
of l$54

Ralph Waldo Emerson called Brown "a new saint awaiting his martyr-
dom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the
cross." Thoreau called him "an angel of light," and Wendell Phillips
declared that he carried "letters of marque from God." The politicians
were less lyrical. All the Republican leaders with hopes for the presidency
vied with each other in condemning the raid. They knew that John
Brown had brought war closer, and that the people of America, though
half-agreeing with the New England authors, did not choose to bleed in
the cause of the Negro. Even Seward, whose "irrepressible conflict" and
"higher law" had seemed to ask for violence, made a conciliatory speech
in the Senate and for once refrained from denouncing slavery. And in
February, 1860, Lincoln visited New York City and talked so conserva-
tively at the Cooper Institute that he himself said the people of the West
were disappointed and he did not blame them. But an enthusiastic young
Republican from Wall Street wrote to Lincoln: "You and your western
friends, I think, underrate this speech. It has produced a greater effect
here than any other single speech. It is the real platform in the eastern
states, and must carry the conservative element in New York, New Jersey,
and Pennsylvania." 5
The speech concentrated once more on the federal control of slavery
in the territories.There was no suggestion that the Republicans had been
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-ll: 1857-1861 393

so worldly as to consider a tariff for manufacturers, or the gift of free

land to the settlers. And the control of slavery was discussed reassuringly,
with an obvious lack of rashness or of radical bias. The audience must
have felt that a man with such sound common sense would of course agree
with themselves on all unmentioned matters. The capacity to remove
anxieties and at the same time to flatter the conscience was one of Lin-
coln's leading assets. So far from being an angry and turbulent party, he
said, friendly to disastrous follies such as John Brown's raid, the Repub-
licans asked only that the people of America return to the attitude toward

slavery which was expressed by the fathers of the Constitution in the

eighteenth century:

As those fathers marked it, so let it again be marked, as an evil not to

to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and
so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protec-
tion a Let all the guarantees those fathers gave it, be, not
necessity.
grudgingly, but fully and fairly, maintained. For this Republicans con-
tend, and with this, so far as I know or believe, they will be content.

Discussing the fears of the Southern people, he tried to be soothing

and conciliatory.

You we [Republicans] have made the slavery question more

say
prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more

prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you,
who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist,
your innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the
question. Would you have that question reduced to its former propor-
tions? Go back to that old policy. What has been will be again, under
the conditions. If you would have the peace of the old times,
same
readopt the precepts and policy of the old times.

Finally, he made a strong plea for the Union which to many of his
hearersmeant a plea for not interfering with the business relations be-
tween North and South.

A
few words now to Republicans [said Lincoln]. It is exceedingly
desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and
in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have
it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion
and ill
temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as
listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them
if, our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.
in Wrong as
. . .

we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because
that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in
the nation.
394 The Price of Union

These calming words were believed by the audience because Lincoln

had always opposed the abolitionists, defended the Fugitive Slave Law,
and put the preservation of the Union ahead of any plans for dealing
with slavery. He had made no inflammatory statements. His most disturb-
ing speech, to the ears of the South, had been at the Republican State
Convention of Illinois in 1858, when he quoted

Ahouse divided against itself cannot stand, [and went on to say:]

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and
place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course
of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall
become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new North as well
as South.

Many Southerners interpreted this to mean that Lincoln was in favor of

extinguishing slavery by force. All his deeds as well as all his words prove
them wrong; yet the important fact is not that they were wrong but that
they distrusted Lincoln. The wisest, most patient, most tolerant man in the
North could no longer persuade them of his good faith. But he could
persuade the conservatives in his own section, when Seward and Sumncr
and Chase and the other candidates could not, and by so doing he could
save the party as well as forward his own cause. Once more his luck had
held. In the midst of trouble he alone grew taller.Even Old John Brown
had done Lincoln good.

When the Republican National Convention met at Chicago in May,

1860, the feud between Stephen A. Douglas and the Buchanan Adminis-
tration had already led to a split in the Democratic Party. It seemed clear
that there would be several candidates in the field, and the chief Demo-
cratic hope was that no one would get a majority in the electoral college.
The House of Representatives would then choose the next President, and
although the Republicans had a majority in the House they did not con-
trol a majority of the state delegations. The Constitution provides that
when the election is thrown into the House "the votes shall be taken by
6
states, the representatives from each state having one vote." So the
divided Democrats might still win, and there was an intense feeling at
Chicago that nothing should be done which could alienate a single vote.
The platform was the first fruit of this feeling perhaps the cleverest
platform ever devised. "Here was that political maturity," writes Pro-
fessor Craven, "which blends ideals and materialism without conscious
7
effort." It begins by asserting that the Republican Party is permanent.
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 395

The nation needs it, and the party

will not dissolve like the evanescent

Know-Nothings. The platform then quotes the "unalienable rights" from

the Declaration of Independence, and pledges the party to maintain these
principles, to defend the Union, to prevent
the spread of slavery, to admit
Kansas as a free state, and to treat the Dred Scott decision as "a danger-
ous political heresy . . .
revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of
the peace and harmonyof the country." Then the party turned to more

practical matters: to luring the old "American Plan" Whigs, the west-
ward expansionists, the rural settlers among the immigrants, the new
manufacturers, while losing none of the free-soil enthusiasts and as few as
possible of the abolitionists. No gentler words
have ever been found for
describing the high tariff so dear to Pennsylvania "an adjustment of
: . . .

imports," said the platform, and a "... policy of national, exchanges,

which secures to the workingmen liberal wages, to agriculture remunera-
tive prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their
skill, labor, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and

independence." Who would guess that the happy dwellers in this Garden
of Eden had ever heard of an iron manufacturer?
Finally, the platform asks for a homestead act, easy naturalization laws,
river and harbor improvements at federal expense, and "immediate and
efficient aid" by the federal government in the building of a railway to the
Pacific in other words, enormous land grants.
The South, by ruling itself out of Republican consideration, made pos-
sible thismasterpiece of concessions and compliments between the North-
east, the Northwest, and the Middle West. Nobody was forgotten, and
none of the plums conferred upon one group was likely to irritate another
group unduly. Party managers from that day to this have dreamed in vain
of another such platform. It had Hamilton's appeal to intelligent selfish-
ness and good sense, combined with Jefferson's optimism and abstract
moral excitement.
Lincoln was nominated for the presidency on the third ballot, for the
reasons we have already seen. He was the only Republican who could win
votes in the southern counties of Indiana and Illinois (where the settlers
were mostly of Southern blood and still felt kindly toward their neighbors
across the Ohio), thus ensuring victory in these two vital states. And he
was the only Republican who might hope to win not only the old Jack-
sonian Democrats in the Northeast (who were disgusted at the "dough-
face" Administration), but also a number of the old conservative Whigs,
especially in rural areas. There was nothing about him to frighten a
Pennsylvania manufacturer, or a New England factory hand, or an
Indiana farmer whose grandfather came from the South. As for the
abolitionists who disapproved of Lincoln's caution, they had to vote for
him anyway, or stay at home. And the fact that he was not very well
396 The Price of Union

known did him as much good as harm, for the politicians knew that if he
had made more fame and friends he must also have made more enemies.
They knew that Lincoln was canny, and careful, and unlikely to put a
foot wrong in the campaign there is no sign that they knew he was wise,
;

long-suffering, and illustrious in spirit.*

Neither Eastern conservatives [writes Professor Hesseltine], giving

lip-service to homesteads and humanitarianism, nor Western radicals
with their tongue-in-cheek endorsements of a protective tariff dom-
inated the party. It was a situation in which each faction could claim
a share of the victor's spoils and each could assume a mandate for its
principles. Few of those who planned to claim the victory considered
that Abraham Lincoln might have a mind of his own. 8

When the Democratic Convention met at Charleston on April 23, the

delegates knew that Stephen A. Douglas was their logical candidate and
that if they nominated him they would win. They knew that if the Re-
publicans were beaten again in 1860, the party might dissolve before it
had time to build abiding loyalties. And in any case, with another Demo-
cratic Administration at Washington, no Southern state except fiery
South Carolina would consider secession. So Douglas meant the salva-
tion of the Union. Yet the stubborn, vindictive Buchanan Administration
used all its strength against him not for the sake of the President, who
had he did not want a second term, but in order to "punish" Douglas
said
for opposing the Lccompton Constitution and for asserting that the Dred
Scott decision did not make slavery safe in a territory if the inhabitants
refused to support it with police power.
The fire-eaters and the "doughface" leaders did not choose to notice
that in punishing Douglas they were punishing if not destroying the party
and the nation. Buchanan and his advisers had at last been trapped by
the extreme Southerners, who were glad to break the Democratic Party as
a step toward breaking the Union, and who felt they had been duped by
Douglas into accepting popular sovereignty and then duped again when
Douglas insisted that the sovereign people had a right to make Kansas
free.
Aside from the "doughfaces," Northern Democrats were as strong for
rewarding Douglas as the Southerners were for punishing him. They still
*
Writing to an Ohio delegate before the convention, Lincoln said "My name :

is in the field, and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great
new
many. .Our policy, then, is to give no offense to others leave them in a
.

mood to come to us if they shall be compelled to give up their first love."

xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 397

thought in terms of an election, not of a revolution, and they felt it would

be agreeable to win. They were a majority in the convention and they
rejected the Southern demand for federal protection of slavery in every
territory. Such a platform, they knew, meant handing the whole North
to the Republicans. The spokesman for the South was William Lowndes
Yancey of Alabama. He said all the trouble and the bitterness had come
because Northern men refused to defend slavery. "If you had taken the
position directly that slavery was right . . ." he cried, "you would have
triumphed, and anti-slavery would now be dead in your midst." Thus
Yancey justified Lincoln's remark in the Cooper Institute speech that

every argument must in the end come back to the ethics of slavery:
"Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact
upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do,
they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but
thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes
with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and
political responsibilities can we do this?" At the Charleston Convention,
Senator Pugh of Ohio gave Yancey the answer that Lincoln would have
given. "Gentlemen of the South," he said, "you mistake us you mistake
us we will not do it."
And the majority did not do it. They refused to commit the party to
the protection of slavery in the territories, whereupon Yancey and the
cotton-state delegates walked out. A few days later the convention ad-
journed with nothing done. "The great Democratic Party, one of the
last truly national institutions in a dividing nation, had split. A sectional

party for the South, comparable to the Republican Party at the North,
was now possible." 9 "We are for principles," said a Mississippi delegate
to a conciliatory Northerner; "damn the party." What he meant was,
"damn the federal Union."
The convention adjourned to Baltimore, where on June 23, the North-
ern delegates made Douglas the official nominee of the Democratic Party
with a platform promising that the party would stand by the Dred Scott
decision or any future Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of
property in the states and territories." This was the typical noncommittal
5*'

evasive plank upon which party promises must rest. The rejection of such
compromise meant the rejection of federal politics in favor of logical,
sectional, irreconcilable parties. A
week later the seceding Southerners
met at Richmond and nominated Buchanan's Vice-President, John C.
Breckinridge of Kentucky, with Joseph Lane of Oregon for his running-
mate. The platform affirmed the extreme Southern position put forward
by Yancey.
* The convention did not nominate a vice-presidential candidate but the Demo-
;

cratic National Committee later named Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia.

398 The Price of Union

Meanwhile, on May 8, a last sad remnant of conservative Whigs and of

Know-Nothings met at Baltimore and took the name of the Constitu-
tional Union Party the short-lived Georgian Party which had been
founded by Stephens, Toombs, and Cobb in support of the great Com-
promise. The new Constitutional Unionists nominated John Bell of
Tennessee for President and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-
President. They stood on the vague platform: "The Constitution of the
Country, the Union of the states, and the enforcement of the laVs."
These were the older men among the disciples of Clay and Webster: the
enemies of nullification, the friends of compromise, the Whig planters
who still found it impossible to join the Democrats.
Such were the fruits of eight years of weak, relaxed, irresponsible,
leaderless politics, of "doughface" Administrations under Presidents who
had been chosen because they were so unimportant that nobody disliked
them, of rash and ill-advised and sudden raids against the public welfare
by Senators and others who hoped to call attention to their strength:
the Nebraska Bill, Bleeding Kansas, Sumner-Brooks, John Brown, and
at last the rise of not one but three sectional parties. And the old order

upheld by a few old and dying Whigs.

Stephen A. Douglas might be insensitive, but he was everlastingly brave.

Against the custom of the day he campaigned actively, especially in the
South, where he met every challenge boldly. He told the Southerners that
if he were President he would put down secession by force, and he
begged
them to remember that the whole Northwest felt the same. In North
Carolina he put the case bluntly: "Do you think that a citizen of Illinois
will ever consent to pay duties at the custom house when he ships his
corn down the Mississippi to supply the people there? Never on Earth!
We shall say to the custom house gate keeper that we furnish the water
that makes the great river, and that we will follow it throughout its whole
course to the ocean, no matter who or what may stand before us." 10 His
hearers may have remembered Henry Clay's somber warning, during the
great debates of 1850, that the upper Mississippi Valley could never allow
the lower valley to pass to foreign hands.
Yet Douglas received a light vote in the South. He was respected for
his courage; but the real contest was between Breckinridge and Bell:
between the fire-eaters and the conservatives who still believed in Union.
These long-time foes did not stop to notice that while fighting each other
(and distributing the Democratic vote among three men) they were help-
ing Lincoln. "Not until the last few weeks of the campaign," writes.
xix. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 399

Professor Craven, "did it dawn upon them that, regardless of which group
triumphed in the South, the Republican Party would triumph in the
nation. Some even accused the radicals of fostering division in the inter-
ests of election and the opportunity to secure secession
Lincoln's
11
thereby." Last-minute efforts to agree on one of the candidates so that
the South and the Northern conservatives might again defeat the Repub-
licans were a failure. The South walked stubbornly to her doom, lulled
by boasts about the need of France and England for her cotton and the
willingness of these Powers to bid for a Southern alliance.*
Lincoln took small part in the campaign. Even when rallies were held
in his home town of Springfield, he usually did not attend. The Repub-
lican Party workers went back to the methods of the Harrison-Tyler

campaign of 1840. They relied on bands and songs and torchlight

parades by the young "Wide- Awakes," rather than discussions which
might bring out the divisions within the party. For the party had as yet
no true national organization, and no true national identity. Even more
than is usual, the election depended on state campaigns.

No political party had ever before been so largely a coalition of state

parties [writes Professor Hesseltine]. The Republican victory in No-
vember could not be attributed to the national committee it was weak,
:

impoverished, and ineffective. Nor could it be credited to Abraham

Lincoln: he was acceptable, but inarticulate bound by tradition to
hide his political skill and bide his days in almost monastic seclusion.
... In the end the governors won their state campaigns, and their
combined successes put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. 12

Ironically, it seems that while the South ignored the coming Repub-
lican victory, Lincoln himself ignored the danger of secession. A
politician
from Ohio who visited Lincoln shortly after the election was disturbed
by this seeming blindness.
I soon discovered [he wrote] that this strange and strangely gifted
man, while not at all cynical, was a skeptic. His view of human nature
was low, but good-natured. I could not call it suspicious, but he be-
lieved only what he saw. This low estimate of humanity blinded him to
the South. . Mr. Lincoln did not believe, could not be made to
. .

believe, that the South meant secession and war. When I told him,
subsequently to this conversation, at a dinner table in Chicago . . .

that the southern people were in dead earnest, meant war, and I
doubted whether he would be inaugurated at Washington, he laughed
* Conservatives in the North made a last-minute effort to throw the election into
the House of Representatives where the Republicans controlled a minority of states.
In New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, the sup-
porters of Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell made fusion tickets of presidential elec-
tors, so that they could appeal to the merchants and the Cotton Whigs for money.
They received a large sum; but it was not enough.
xlx. The Fruits of Executive Weakness-11: 1857-1861 401

and said the fall of pork at Cincinnati had affected me. I became some-
what irritated, and told him that in ninety days the land would be
whitened with tents. He said in reply: "Well, we won't jump that ditch
until we come to it," and then, after a pause, added, "I must run the
machine as I find it." 13

The map of the voting in 1860 is a portrait of a nation breaking in two.

The whole tier of Northern states (including Oregon and California)
voted for Lincoln; the whole tier of cotton states voted for Breckinridge ;

Douglas had the southern counties of the Middlewestern states and a few
spots in the Far North and the Far South; Bell had the planters along the
Mississippi, the tobacco-growers of Kentucky and Tennessee, the moun-
taineers in western Virginia and North Carolina, and the state of Mary-
land all the Southerners who still preferred the Union. Lincoln had
over 1,800,000 votes; Douglas almost 1,400,000; Breckinridge more than
800,000; and Bell a little less than 600,000. The three anti-Republican
candidates combined received a million more votes than Lincoln, yet
Lincoln would still have been elected if all those votes had gone to one
man! Lincoln received 180 electoral votes; Douglas, 12; Breckinridge, 72;
and Bell, 39. This is a sign of the electoral-college strength of the free
states, where Lincoln won by moderate or narrow majorities, while his

opponents received all the Southern votes. In ten Southern states not a
single man voted for Lincoln.*
In his speech at the Cooper Institute early in 1860, Lincoln had said
to the South:

There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation,

which cast at least a million and a half votes. You cannot destroy that
judgment and feeling that sentiment by breaking up the political
organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and dis-
perse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your
heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing
the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-
box, into some other channel?

The answer must have seemed obvious to Lincoln, which may be why
he could not believe in secession. But Lincoln, as his friend from Ohio
said, "while not at all cynical, was a skeptic." He did not believe that
enthusiasm and romance could overcome the mundane logic of numbers.
The youth and chivalry of the South in 1860 had been brought up on
"Lara," "The Corsair," and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." The spirit
of those pleasing poems the thought that bravery and love and adven-
* In South
Carolina, one of the ten states, the electors were still appointed by
the legislature. There was no popular vote.
402 The Price of Union

ture can (or at any rate should) conquer not only infused the leaders,
but by some miracle of shared pride it extended to the led, to the great
mass of yeoman farmers who were the strength of the South and of the
Confederate armies. Lincoln could have told them, before they seceded,
that life was not and unaccountable, that war was a dreary, deadly
so gay

balancing of accounts, and that the balance was against the South. It was
against her physically, because she had kept her capital in slaves and
cotton and so did not have the industrial plant or the railways * for
modern war. It was against her morally because she had abandoned the
Jeffersonian view that slavery was an evil which must be brought to the
earliest possible end, and had embraced the heresy that slavery was a good
which must be everywhere protected. The moral weakness would discour-
age France and England from intervening to save the Confederacy and
balk the power of the United States. The physical weakness would prevent
the South's impetuous valor from triumphing over valor that was more
calculating.
There was of course a chance that the North might defeat herself, if
Lincoln failed to heal the deep divisions in his party, or if he behaved
carefully and constitutionally when faced with a mortal threat. But if he
could bring unity to his strange alliance of protectionists, abolitionists,
homesteaders, railroad barons, and simple folk who knew that the Union
was the guardian of democracy, and if he could seize power boldly and
illegally in order to save a government which denied itself such power,
then no amount of Southern suffering or bravery or military brains would
suffice. Lincoln could save the Confederacy if he made a mistake; other-

wise, the cause had been lost long before, when the decisions were taken
which made the factories in the South so few, and slavery a growing rather
than a waning system,*
* In 1860 the South turned out about
eight per cent of the manufactured
produce of the United States.
 XX

"Preserve, Protect, and Defend"

A HE MONTHS between the election in November and Lincoln's inaugura-

tion in March were a time of fear and anticlimax. Decisions had been
made; yet the results were in abeyance while Buchanan lingered in the
White House, fumbling and inconclusive. His temperament and his politi-
cal opinions would not let him accept secession, or prevent it, or prepare
to meet it after it had taken place. General Scott warned him in October
that the election would be followed by an attempt to destroy the Union,
and that he should strengthen the garrisons in Southern ports. Buchanan
did nothing, and in his paradoxical message to Congress on December 1,
he continued to do nothing, denying the right of secession and denying
that the government could do anything about it. The Congress, he thought,
should decide whether to change the laws so that the nation might save
its life. But Congress preferred to leave the thorny trouble to the Execu-

tive. Since the last great federal compromise had been sacrificed by two
soft Presidents, even Henry Clay might have had trouble in inventing a
new one. "The Buchanan administration," writes Professor Swisher, "ex-
engaged in futile speculation as to its own powers."
1
pired while
It very nearly expired before its time, for members of the Cabinet began

resigning within a few weeks of the election. Ho well Cobb for so long the
faithful Unionist went on December 2 because the President had denied
the right of secession. The Secretary of State, Lewis Cass, resigned on
December 12 because the President did not reinforce the forts in Charles-
ton Harbor. Floyd of Virginia, the incompetent Secretary of War, resigned
on December 29, ostensibly because his delicate spirit could no longer bear
association with a dishonored regime, but really because he was about to
be charged with fraud and treason neither of which he probably planned,
but both of which he permitted. Professor Nichols's description of the
Secretary three days before his resignation suggests the murky atmosphere
of the time:

When Floyd presented himself at the White House ... he had just
been exposed as a careless, if not dishonest, administrator who was about
to be indicted by the District grand jury for conspiracy to defraud and
for malfeasance in office. He was to be accused of treason because of his
403
404 The Price of Union

foolhardy gesture in trying to ship heavy guns into the South. The night
before, Senator Wigfall and others had urged him to join a plot to kid-
nap Buchanan and make Breckenridge President; this he had refused
to do. Also he had become suspicious of a large order for converted
muskets which he had approved ostensibly for the Sardinian govern-
2
ment; that order he would countermand.

These were no days for the decrepit, like Cass, or the trivial, like FJoyd
and Buchanan. And Washington was no longer the place for Southern
patriots like Gobb. A new cast was about to take that stage the days of the
;

"doughfaces" and their proud masters were done.

On December 20, 1860, a convention in South Carolina voted to secede.

Within six weeks Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and
Texas had followed. In all these states, with the possible exception of
South Carolina, there was a strong Unionist minority perhaps in some
cases even a majority. This group urged that Lincoln's Administration be

given a fair trial, asking what would be gained by breaking the Union
until the North proved that it meant to attack and oppress the South.
But there were many secessionists who had long felt the Union a burden
an economic threat as well as a moral reproach and this time they did
not mean to be balked. With stormy talk of "Black Republicans," of slave
insurrections, and with many reminders of the insults abolitionists had
thrown against the South, they stirred the people until Alexander Stephens
admitted that "they are run mad." "They are wild with passion and
frenzy," he added, "doing they know not what."*
The pity was that to the minds of many middle-of-the-road Southerners
the fire-eaters now seemed justified. In 1860 the country was back again
to the arguments of 1850, or of the Wilmot Proviso; but during the inter-

vening years the great Compromise had been tried and had failed. The
extremists who had said it must fail were therefore strengthened. In 1850
they had been silenced by the moderates; in 1860, at least in the cotton
South, they were in control. Men like Cobb and Stephens and Toombs
could no longer restrain them. These brave defenders of the Union were
captured by the forces they had long fought, but which their local patriot-
ism now bade them serve. On February 3, 1861, delegates from the seven
seceded states met at Montgomery, Alabama. Five days later they formed
the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis provisional
President and Alexander Stephens Vice-President. Toombs, as we have
* Professor G. Randall believes a minority forced secession upon the South.
J.
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 405

seen, entered the Cabinet, and Howell Gobb the army of the Confederacy.*
The arguments put forward by the seven state conventions to justify
secession were arguments in defense of slavery and in denunciation of the
North for acts inimical to the institution :
"enticing" slaves, ignoring the
Fugitive Slave Law, excluding slavery from the territories, plotting slave
South Carolina complained, candidly and simply, that the
insurrections.
North had "denounced as sinful the institution of slavery [and] . . .

united in the election of a man

to the high office of President of the
United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." The
long and bitter wrangle, in other words, had so frayed the nerves of the
South Carolinians that they would no longer associate with men who
thought slavery wrong. None of the conventions mentioned economic
oppression as a cause for disunion. There was doubtless fear of such
oppression, now that a Northern sectional party was about to take power;
yet the South still had a tariff after her own heart, and she might long
have continued to frustrate the hopes of Pennsylvania if she had not split
the Union.
There was of course no question in the minds of Southern leaders about
the "right" to secede. That "right," first proclaimed by John Taylor of
Caroline County, later developed by the Federalists of New England,
later still perfected in all its legal subtleties by John Caldweli Calhoun,
had been accepted both as truth and as treason by each section of the
country in turn, depending on whether its interests were temporarily
served by affirming or by denying the sovereignty of the central govern-
ment. History cannot compose the quarrel; but it can note that the bind-
ing test of sovereignty is power. If Buchanan had been President after
1861, the "right" to secede would doubtless have been established. Since
Lincoln was President, and since enough people followed his lead in fight-
ing for the Union, the "right" proved nonexistent. The question was too
intricate for the lawyers; only soldiers could decide.

Meanwhile, federal property in the South was with no finger lifted

seized,
in defense. South Carolina took Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney in
December. Georgia took Fort Pulaski at Savannah on January 3, and
Alabama took Fort Morgan at Mobile on January 4. At Pensacola, in
Florida, the Union held Fort Pickens but the federal navy yard and Fort
;

Barrancas were seized by Southern troops. Louisiana confiscated the mint

* Davis was
inaugurated as provisional President on February 18. A regular
electionwas held in accordance with the new Confederate Constitution in October,
1861. Davis was elected President for a term of six years. He was then inaugurated
(or re-inaugurated) on February 22, 1862.
406 The Price of Union

at New Orleans, and throughout the cotton states federal cutters, federal
post officesand custom houses, were passing into rebel hands thus creat-
ing the problem of Fort Sumter for Lincoln. By the time of the inaugura-
tion, Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor was the most important post still
held by the Union in the Deep South. Buchanan had agreed not to rein-
force Fort Pickens at Pensacola so long as it was not attacked; but in a
nervous moment of energy he had tried to reinforce Sumter. He had failed,
because the Union ship, the Star of the West, had been fired on by the
South Carolina batteries. So the nation, North and South, could not help
but judge the intentions of the new Administration by what was done
about Sumter.
Although Lincoln had said little during the campaign or after, anyone
in touch with him must have known what he would recommend. But the
decision to use or to abandon force was not truly his; it lay with the
people of the North. No President could compel them to war with their
fellow Americans, although a bolder, kinder man than Buchanan might
have helped them face the tragic choice more rapidly. Leaderless, they
groped for months through the mist, while Lincoln watched impotently,
waiting to do what proved possible.
At first the Republican radicals (who cared nothing for economic or
patriotic ties with the South) were confident the new Administration
would be a Free-Soil, Barnburning, Old Jacksonian, secession-defying tri-
umph. They formed a committee to urge abolitionists for the Cabinet.
But powerful business interests, led by Pennsylvania and by Thurlow
Weed of New
York, thought the Republicans were merely the appeasing
Whigs revived. On the eve of the election Andrew Gregg Curtin, the new
Republican governor of Pennsylvania, spoke in Boston without mention-
ing slavery. For him the tariff was the issue, and he told his audience that
to be good Republicans they must vote for men with sound Whig records.
Victory at the polls merely made sharper the conflict between the Re-
publicans who wouldabolish slavery and the Republicans who would
ignore it. Neither group gave heed to Lincoln's cautious and increasingly
popular view that the task was to keep slavery from spreading and to save
the Union; but both sent leaders to Springfield to tell the President-elect
what he should think and do. Lincoln listened and said nothing.
In December the last-ditch compromisers tried to force the issue. Thur-
low Weed called a meeting of the state governors to form a conciliatory
policy and to impress it on the Congress and on Lincoln. And in the
Senate Crittenden of Kentucky sought to revive the old assuaging magic
of Henry Clay. He proposed several amendments to the Constitution for ;

example, a restored but weakened Missouri Compromise, whereby latitude

36 30' should divide freedom from slavery in all the territories, and
whereby a territory on assuming statehood might decide for itself on
 3'
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend 407

slavery;and a guarantee of slavery where it already existed for so long as

the people of each state might desire it. Lincoln roused himself to send
word to the governors and the Congress that he disapproved of extending
the Missouri line for the territories and that he would reject any form of
squatter sovereignty which might permit another slave state. "On that
point hold firm/' he said, "as with a chain of steel."* For the rest, he
would commit himself to nothing except Jackson's old toast "Our Federal :

Union, must be preserved."

it

The wisdom of Lincoln's caution, of his refusal to push the people

faster than they had yet prepared themselves to go, was shown by the
situation in New York City, which had heavy investments in the South
and in New England textile industries. New Yorkers were also annoyed
with the government at Albany for interfering in their local administra-
tion and for raising too much of the state's revenue at the expense of their

flourishing town. So in a message to the common council on January 7,

1861, the Democratic mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, calmly recom-
mended that in case of Southern secession New York City should also
leave the Union, setting itself up as a free port and a taxless Paradise.

With our aggrieved brethren of the slave states [he said] we have
friendly relations and a common sympathy. have not participated We
in the warfare upon their constitutional rights or their domestic institu-
tions. New York has a right to expect, and should endeavour to
. . .

preserve, a continuance of uninterrupted intercourse with every sec-

tion. .. should not New York City, instead of supporting by her
.
Why
contributions two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become
also equally independent? As a free city, with but nominal duty on
imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation

upon her people. When Disunion has become a fixed and certain
. . .

fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a
venal and corrupt master to a people and a party that have plundered
her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power
of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was
the proud Empire City?

Mayor Wood admitted that he did not see precisely how this was to be
done; but the fact that a vote-loving politician thought the message worth
delivering is a sign of the magnitude of Lincoln's task.
While waiting for the months to pass, helpless to intervene, Lincoln
began to build his Cabinet and thus to bind some factions of the restive
party to his own will, and to his support when a decision might at last
be made. He had early decided to offer the secretaryship of state to
* The words
quoted were said on December 13, five days before the Crittenden
Resolutions were put forwardbut they express Lincoln's view on every compromise
;
408 The Price of Union

Seward, and he was half-bound by the promises of his managers at the

nominating convention to make the conservative Caleb Smith of Indiana
Secretary of the Interior, and the angry unscrupulous Senator Simon
Cameron of Pennsylvania Secretary of War. He allowed the Vice-Presi-
dent-elect (Hannibal Hamlin of Maine) to choose a New Englander for
Secretary of the Navy. Hamlin named Gideon Welles of Connecticut,
famous for his enormous beard. Welles was a Democrat who broke with
his party over slavery. He knew nothing of the sea, and has been described
as "venerably insignificant." Yet he proved a good administrator and a
vindictive diarist. The old-fashioned Whigs were awarded Edward Bates
of Missouri as Attorney General, and the Jacksonian converts were given
Montgomery Blair of Maryland, son of Francis Preston Blair of the
"Kitchen Cabinet," as Postmaster General. The Free-Soilers won Salmon
P. Chase of Ohio as Secretary of the Treasury.
The manysidedness and incongruity of the new party was mirrored in
this group. The members did not like or trust each other, and most of
them did not respect Lincoln. Each of them had bitter enemies among
rival factions within his own state which proved a help to Lincoln, for
it enforced a semblance of
loyalty, at least while the patronage was being
distributed. These were the first federal plums ever awarded by a Repub-
lican President, and Lincoln strained to use them to build the nucleus of
a national party. Boldly, he ordered that all applicants must be endorsed
by their Congressmen not by their governors or local leaders thus help-
ing the infant federal machine at the expense of the states.
The appointment of the tough unprincipled Cameron (which Lincoln
regretted but could not evade) brought no peace to Pennsylvania. Cam-
eron and the new governor Curtin had detested each other for years.
Neither could control the state alone, yet either one might spoil the
party's chances at the next election. But Cameron and Curtin were united
on one point: greed for a high tariff. Their powerful state could be saved
for the party of freedom by no other measure. So during the last days
of Buchanan, when most of the Southern Democrats were gone from
Congress, Cameron was encouraged to force the adoption of the Morrill
Tariff by brusque and open blackmail. He made it plain that this was the
price of loyalty in Pennsylvania. The Republicans in Congress passed the
bill, and the inexplicable Buchanan, who had recently signed the lowest
of now meekly signed its antithesis.*
tariffs,
anti-war governors, who had been vainly assembled by Thurlow
The
Weed, were for the most part leaving office in January. By the middle of
that month, when the newly elected group had been installed, there were

* The tariff named after

Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont had
been passed by the House in May, 1860. The Senate held it up until February,
1861. Buchanan signed it on March 2.
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 409

only three compromisers left among the Northern state executives. The
rest of them were for coercion in one degree or another for war if

necessary, and in many cases for abolition. In default of national leader-

ship the people began to rally round these positive, self-confident men.
On February 11, when Lincoln set out on his long, roundabout trip to
Washington, it was already probable that if he stood firm the citizens
would back him in saving the Union. Yet he was still unwilling to declare
a policy. "My friends ." he said to his neighbors from the rear plat-
. .

form of the train at Springfield, "to this place, and the kindness of these
people, I owe everything. ... I now leave, not knowing when or whether
ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested
upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever
attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. ." . .

That was a charming good-bye; but it did not answer the anxious
politicians waiting to hear what Lincoln intended. And on
who were
the trip although he spoke at more than a dozen cities, and to the legis-
latures of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Indiana he
was no more informative. At his first stop, at Indianapolis, he told the
people, "It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty
for yourselves, and not for me." At every stop he said the same, in one
form or another. He was seeking to learn from the people, not yet to
guide them; but he seems to have been reassured by what he found.
Ten days before the inauguration he met at Washington with the so-
called Peace Conference delegates from twenty-one states who had
gathered in a last hope to restore unity without resort to force. The Ver-
mont delegate reports that William Dodge of New York told Lincoln, "It
is for you, sir, to say whether the whole nation shall be plunged into bank-

ruptcy; whether the grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cit-

ies." The report continues:

A
sad but stern expression swept over Mr. Lincoln's face. "I do not
know that I understand your meaning, Mr. Dodge," he said, without
raising his voice, "nor do I know what my acts or my opinions may be
in the future, beyond this. If I shall ever come to the great office of
President of the United States, I shall take an oath. I shall swear that
I will ... to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States. ... It is not the Constitution as I
would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended. The Consti-
tution will not be preserved and defended unless it is enforced and
obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so
respected, obeyed, enforced, and defended, let the grass grow where
it may."
410 The Price of Union

The Washington which Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4 was

in
slightly improved over the distressing sea of mud to which poor John
Adams had been forced to move in 1800; but it was still a wretched place.
There were 61,000 inhabitants, 15,000 of whom were Negroes. An OJiio
Congressman wrote that it was

as unattractive, straggling, sodden a town, wandering up and down

the left bank of the yellow Potomac, as the fancy can sketch. Penn-

sylvania Avenue stretched drearily over the mile between the un-
. . .

finished Capitol and the unfinished Treasury building on Fifteenth

Street where it turned north for a square and took its
. . .
melancholy
way to Georgetown. ... It was the only paved street in the town. . . .

As may be supposed the Capital of the Republic had more malodors

than the poet Coleridge ascribed to ancient Cologne. There was then
the open canal, a branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio, from Rock
Creek to Anacosta, breeding malaria, tadpoles, and mosquitoes. . . .

Politically, the city the fixed population was intensely Southern,

as much so as Richmond or Baltimore. Very few men of culture, and
none below that grade, were Republicans at the advent of "Lincoln and
3
his Northern myrmidons," as they were called in 1860-1861.

In his Inaugural Address Lincoln said that legally and historically "the
union is perpetual," since it is older than the Constitution, older than the
states, older even than the Declaration of Independence. "It was formed,"
he claimed, "by the Articles of Association in 1774." This is dubious his-
tory, and in any case unimportant, since the problem of the permanence
of the Union would be settled by the strength and the will of the North,
not by research. Yet Lincoln's exegesis is interesting, for it is a tribute
to the deep need of English-speaking peoples to feel that the law is on
their side. The fathers of the Republic claimed they were defending the
true British Constitution in their revolt and when Parliament denied this,
;

they appealed to natural law against a seemingly unnatural king. Similarly,

both Jefferson Davis and Lincoln, taught respectively by Calhoun and
John Marshall, were convinced that in making war upon one another
they were backed by the Constitution of the United States and the obvious
facts of history.*
The new President then disclaimed any intention of interfering with
slavery in the states where it existed, and argued against the "right" of

*
Davis, in truth, seems to have had the best of the barren argument in his
message to the Confederate Congress of April 29, 1861.
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 411

secession. Toward the end of the address he rose to the serene simplicity
which he alone could attain.

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We

cannot remove our re-
spective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between
them. A
husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence
and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our
country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and inter-
course, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it
possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more
satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier
than friends can make laws? . . .

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
it. Whenever
they shall grow weary of the existing government, they
can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolu-
tionary right to dismember or overthrow it. ... Why should there not
be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there
any better or equal hope in the world?

Jefferson Davis would have answered that he and his people were
merely seeking to exercise "their revolutionary right to dismember" the
United States. Lincoln must have denied that right to a sectional ma-
jority, although he affirmed it for a national majority.
The Inaugural Address then asks for patience from the South, on the
characteristically American ground that the government did not have
sufficient power to do much harm :

By the frame of government under which we live, this same people

have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief;
and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to
their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their
virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness
or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of
four years.

The South would have answered that Lincoln's constituents had lost
"their virtue and vigilance," and that nothing could now restrain the
government from doing what it chose. Ironically, although the Southerners,
were wrong about the people of the North, they were right about the
government, as Lincoln was about to prove. All the shoots of presidential
power, large or small, which had been planted and nurtured by his prede-
cessors, Lincoln was to bring to full growth. When he died the presidency
was supreme above the states. "A new nation," writes Professor Hessel-
4
tine, "had been erected on the ruins of the old federal union." So far
did the change go that the people became uneasy, and the party system
was called upon after the war to undo some of the centralization, and to
412 The Price of Union

rebuild some of the obstructive strength of sectional minorities until a

new crisis caused another President to revive the immense powers un-
covered by Lincoln. *
4

In conclusion, the Inaugural Address puts the burden of choice upon

the Southerners. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and
not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will
not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the
aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern-
ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and
defend' it."

In the course of preserving, protecting, and defending the Union, Lin-

coln decided that he must defend Fort Sumter. He has been accused of
taking the offensive by this act; but it seems that he was trying to preserve
the status quo as nearly as possible. 6 The purpose of the relief expedition
under Captain Fox was to supply food to the garrison. Reinforcements
were not to be landed unless the ships or the fort were attacked. There
was no attempt at surprise. Notice of the expedition and a promise of its
pacific purpose were sent to the governor of South Carolina. Yet, as
Professor* Randall says, "that purpose was not understood in the south-
ern states and under these circumstances the decision to relieve Sumter
was one of the most far-reaching and fateful acts in American history." **
At four- thirty on the morning of April 12, 1861, by authority of Briga-
dier General Beauregard of the Confederate Army, the batteries in
Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. On April 14 Major An-
derson of the Union Army surrendered the fort. The next day Lincoln
issued a proclamation calling out 75,000 militia to suppress the rebellion,
the North responding with an enthusiasm which showed he could have
had many times the number. Stephen A. Douglas made a strong statement
in support of the President, and shortly afterward offered to tour Illinois,
where the southern counties were still disaffected, and sound the call of

the Union. Lincoln accepted gratefully, and Douglas set out on his last

* The how much power a government needs and how that power can
question of
be reconciled with freedom and the allied question, also posed in the Inaugural
Address, of when a people may exercise their "revolutionary right" bothered Lin-
coln steadily. In his message to the special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, he
.saidthat the war "presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few
in number to control the administration according to organic laws in any case, can
always, upon the pretences made in this case, or any other pretences . break up
. .

their government ... It forces us to ask Is there in all republics this inherent and
:

fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of
its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?"
** It was made by Lincoln himself, against the advice of his Secretary of State
who wished to hold Fort Pickens but to surrender Sumter. But the Secretary of
State, as we shall see, was at this time in a whirl of crazy plans, including the inter-
esting notion of bringing the South back to the Union by declaring war on France,
Spain, and possibly England.
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 413

trip home. He
spoke several times en route and on April 25 at Spring-
he made a speech which has been called his greatest. A
field, Illinois,
few days later he broke down. He was said to have rheumatism, and de-
veloped a high fever, and on June 3 he died. He was forty-eight years old.
He left the Democratic Party without a national leader, and with only
fourteen members in the Senate (including Andrew Johnson of eastern
Tennessee who refused to secede with his state) and forty-four in the
House.
Two days after Lincoln's call for troops, Virginia seceded, followed
quickly by North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Delaware and Mary-
land, Kentucky and Missouri, were split into bitter factions at home; but
none of these border states officially left the Union. If Kentucky had
gone, the war might have been lost before it started, for the frontier
would then have been the broad and turbulent Ohio all the way from
Cincinnati to the Mississippi River. Even as it was, with Virginia and
Tennessee seceding, the Confederacy was a formidable country to invade.
On May 15, 1861, a Virginian who had tried to help avoid the war
wrote to a friend: "My maxim has always been to choose among the evils
around me and do the best I can. I think the annals of the world fur-
nish no instance of so groundless a war but as our nation will have it
if no peace can be made let us fight like men for our own firesides."
So groundless a war? Perhaps wiser guidance during the ten previous
years might have made it groundless indeed; perhaps the Compromise
of 1850 might have been enforced; but by the time Lincoln became
President the leaders of the Deep South were set to leave the Union.
He had no choice but to let them go in peace, to attack them as traitors,
or to attempt a policy of evasion and delay which might allow the con-
servatives to regain control and reverse the decision to secede. The
latter seems to have been Lincoln's purpose; but if he abandoned the
last federal forts he would defeat the purpose and encourage rebellion.
And if he held the forts he would give the Southern extremists a chance
to provoke war. He decided to hold the forts, and his intentions were mis-

construed, and the war began.

As all the world knows, the President to whom this calamity came had
been born and raised in the utmost poverty. We have seen that his Ken-
tucky birthplace was a few miles from that of Jefferson Davis, whose
more prosperous family went south to Mississippi while the Lincolns, who
weredestitute, moved across the Ohio River into Indiana. Lincoln's father
(whose people had come to Massachusetts from Norfolk in 1637) was a
414 The Price of Union

typical shiftless frontier failure. He left Kentucky in 1816, when the

boy was seven. And he left Indiana for Illinois in the year Lincoln came
of age. He was not the man to urge a child toward self -improvement. "I
suppose Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication," he said years later
when Abe had left home to make his own way. "I tried to stop it, but he
had got that fool idea in his head, and it can't be got out."
Perhaps the "fool idea" came from his mother, Nancy Hanks, the il-
legitimate daughter of a Virginian. Little is known about Nancy (hot
even the name of her father) except that she was illiterate, that she had
two children (Abraham and Sarah) and that she died in 1818 when the
boy was nine years old. The father soon married again, and his second
wife seems to have been in every way his better. Lincoln was fond of his

stepmother, who backed him in his strange addiction to books. Although

he had less than twelve months of schooling, his little, typical frontier

library was a good basis for straight thinking and a clear prose style: The
Bible, Pilgrim's Progress^ Robinson Crusoe, Aesop's Fables^ and Parson
Weems's Life of Washington.
The hard work of farming and of clearing fresh land, fencing it,
building new cabins turned Lincoln into a physical giant: over six
feet four in height and with a strength that became legendary even in
the rough West. But he never lost his desire to learn. He would walk
miles to borrow a book and what was far more unusual, having bor-
rowed it, and read it, he would actually think about it. He was one. of
the very few people who could go on thinking after he had stopped read-
ing or talking. He never learned to turn his back, except briefly, on the
great defeating questions of life and death and destiny. This may be why
he was unhappy, and why he was great. He was oppressed by the mystery
but never frightened; so in his long days alone as a boy on the frontier
or on a river-boat, as a man driving his buggy across the empty prairies
from one county courthouse to another he did not close or distract his
mind or his spirit. He continued his rapt, sometimes morbid, search for
understanding and one day (although he never knew it) he became the
wisest man in America. A fellow lawyer described Lincoln in court when
he was lost in thinking: "He seemed to be pursuing in his mind some
specific painful subject, regularly and systematically through various
sinuosities; and his sad face would assume, at times, deeper phases of
grief. No relief came till he was roused by the adjournment of court, when
he emerged from his cage of gloom, like one awakened from sleep."
During such hours of abstraction, which came upon him from the
time he was a child, Lincoln was not pursuing a mystic trance: he was
trying to think. This is perhaps the most difficult of undertakings, and
the rarest. Lincoln's addiction to it may explain why all his life he grew
in mercy and in understanding. At forty he was a leading Western lawyer
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 415

and an unsuccessful Congressman; at fifty he was not only a national

figure,but in his own section he was an important moral force; at fifty-
six, when he was murdered, he was one of the masters of his age. He
was mourned in Europe and Asia by men who knew nothing about him,
or about America, except that someone good had gone from the earth.
The accidents of politics may make a man world-famous; but only rich-
ness of spirit can make him world-respected. In Lincoln the richness came
from thought, from his painful prolonged brooding, "wrapped in ab-
straction and gloom." He had no clear religious faith. He believed in
God, but seemingly in an unconsoling God. He said it was his destiny to
live in twilight, feeling and reasoning his way through life. He said he
was like the man in St. Mark: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief."
If Lincoln's "feeling and reasoning" made him wise, pious, and subtle,
it also made him irreverent, bawdy,
impudent, ribald, and cruelly funny.
He was the best storyteller in the West and the best mimic. He found it
seductively easy to make an opponent look absurd; but he seldom used
this power in court against a witness. He saved it to torment his po-
litical foes. His broad and racy laughter was probably his salvation. "Lin-

coln's humour," wrote Francis Grierson, "was the balance-pole of his

genius that enabled him to cross the most giddy heights without losing
his head."*
Flatboatman on the long trip to New
Orleans; clerk in a country store,
and later joint owner of a store that failed and left him burdened ; captain
of a local band in the Black Hawk
Indian War; unsuccessful Whig can-
didate for the state legislature, and then successful candidate for four
terms on end Lincoln tried all these jobs. In 1836, in the middle of his
term in the state legislature, hebegan the practice of law. Here was work
suited to his tastes and talents. He rose to the front rank in the Illinois
bar yet his true love was politics. Although surrounded by fierce Jack-
sonian Democrats, Lincoln remained a Whig perhaps because his po-
litical passions were first fired by Henry Clay, or perhaps because of his

cautious, conservative bent. On the frontier, a man could honor the

leveling doctrines of the Declaration of Independence and still be a con-
servative, an enemy of all sudden or extreme change. This was becoming
difficult, if not impossible, among the Eastern banks and factories. The
Republican Party might have been riven to its foundations if Lincoln
had lived to fight for his Western brand of conservatism after the war,
In 1859, for example, when he was unable to speak at a festival in Bos-
ton, he sent a letter in which he put his egalitarian faith briefly: "The
principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of a free society.
* The
Valley of Shadows, 1948 ed., p. 196. Grierson's long-ignored classic, con-
sisting of "recollections of scenes and episodes of early life in Illinois and Mis-
my
souri," was published in 1909. It gives far the best picture of the Western men to
whom Lincoln first became a hero.
416 The Price of Union

And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One
dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities'; another bluntly calls them
'self-evident lies'; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only
to 'superior races.' We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us."
. . .

This was carrying the fight home to his friends, for the man who had
called jthe Declaration of Independence "glittering generalities" was Rufus
Choate, the famous Whig lawyer of Boston.
In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd of Kentucky. Much dubious
legend surrounds the marriage. It is true that Mrs. Lincoln's temperament
was difficult; and so was her husband's; but there is small ground for be-
lieving that life in the Lincoln home was as unhappy or as odd as it has
been pictured. There were four sons, only one of whom grew to maturity.
Between 1847 and 1849 Lincoln served a term in Congress, where he
was the only Whig from Illinois. A loyal party worker, he opposed the
Mexican War. On January 12, 1848, he made an anti-war speech which
could well have been revived by any Southerner to justify secession. "Any
people anywhere/' he stated, "being inclined and having the power,
have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and
form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most
sacred right. .Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole
. .

people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion

of such people that can, may revolutionize." This is strong doctrine,
though natural for a child of 1776. It seems that the young Lincoln, like
Jefferson and Jackson and most Americans, approved resistance to the
state when the state was "wrong" that when it was opposed to his
is,

views. Or perhaps he was simply toeing the Whig Party line. In any
case, his opposition to the Mexican War was so unpopular at home that
he was accused of pleading the enemy's cause and denied re-election. He
returned to his successful law practice at Springfield, and for five years
was inactive in politics, though not in thought.
He was forever turning over and puzzling the entangled problems of
slavery and Union. There was nothing impractical or softly emotional
about Lincoln's distaste for slavery. He was not so foolish as to think that
because a course was good it was therefore possible. He was never moved
to ignore or deny the dangers in the path of emancipation so he was
not an abolitionist, and in no hurry to free any of the existing slaves.
For this he was abused and called heartless; but in fact he was one of the
few Northerners to think honestly about the plight of the Negro. He
knew that a huge effort and a huge sum of money were needed if the
Negro was to be freed without imposing upon him another miserable
lot. The black man had been the victim of greed, and Lincoln did not

choose to cure that wrong by making him the victim of sentimentality.

Hence his statement in 1854: "When southern people tell us they are
xx. "Preserve, Protect, and Defend" 417

no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge

the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very
difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and ap-

preciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I
should not know how to do myself."
While in Congress he introduced an unsuccessful bill for gradual eman-
cipation in the District of Columbia the only slave territory which the
federal government controlled. Children born of slave mothers after 1350
were to be free, although during their minority they were to be apprenticed
to their mothers' owners. And owners who might wish to emancipate
their slaves were to receive "full value" from the United States Treasury.
The act was to be submitted to the free white citizens of the District in
a referendum. As Professor Randall says, this was typical of Lincoln's
"conservatism, his patience in letting a process work itself out over the
years, his lack of antagonism toward the South, his regard for the rights
of slaveholders, his attention to legal details, and his valuing of popular
and democratic processes." 7 But for all his caution and his patience, there
was one step Lincoln could never permit the infection of new lands with
:

the curse which was so hard to cure. On this he was confident and un-
relenting. The more clearly he saw the problems of emancipation, the
more bluntly he must oppose the planting of such problems on the ter-
ritories. "We must give them a clean bed," he said, "with no snakes in it."
On one other point Lincoln was positive: whatever he might have
said or written about man's "right" to revolution, he knew that no such

right existed unless it could be enforced. The only sanction of a revolu-

tion, as of a legitimate government, is power. And Lincoln had slowly,
painfully, made up his mind that the North ought to use power, if nec-
essary, to save the Union. In this he was a true son of the West like

Henry Clay, like Stephen A. Douglas, like Vinton of Ohio, the Whig
Congressman who proclaimed, "Massachusetts and South Carolina might,
for all I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory
to them, but, sir, they can find no such line to which the western country
can assent." This was not only because the West refused to give the mouth
of its great river into foreign hands; but also because the whole vast
region was the Valley of Democracy, almost the only place on earth where
the new creed was lived as well as talked. If the Union fell, democracy
might be discredited, and for the West that was a deplorable thought.
When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, therefore, and the re-
sulting uproar led to new demands for secession, every political belief on
which Lincoln had built his life was challenged. When he returned to
politics after his five years in the wilderness he became the perfect spokes-
man of his region. When he joined the new party in 1856 he gave it
strength and sanity. In his hands it would never be weakened by radical-
418 The Price of Union

ism, or stray far from the simple and popular issue of preventing slavery
in the territories. Wehave seen how he pinned Douglas to this issue,

forcing him to discuss it in lieu of all else during the famous debates of
1858.
Grierson gives us a first-hand picture of Lincoln in the last of these de-
bates:

And now Abraham Lincoln, the man who in 1830 undertook to split
for Mrs. Nancy Miller four hundred rails for every yard of brown jean
dyed with walnut bark that would be required to make him a pair of
trousers, the flatboatman, local stump-speaker and country lawyer, rose
from his seat, stretched his long bony limbs upward as if to get them
into working order, and stood like some solitary pine on a lonely
summit, very tall, very dark, very gaunt, and very rugged, his swarthy
features stamped with a sad serenity. Every movement of his long,
. . .

muscular frame denoted inflexible earnestness, and a something issued

forth, elementaland mystical, that told what the man had been, what
he was, and what he would do in the future. Douglas had been. . .

theatrical and scholarly, but this tall, homely man was creating by
his very looks what the brilliant lawyer and experienced Senator had
failed to make people see and feel, 8
 XXI

Lincoln and the "War Powers"

fT"1
XHE ROAR of the batteries beside Charleston Harbor .
[writes Pro-
. .

fessor Ralph Henry Gabriel] announced the defeat of American political

democracy. If political democracy be defined as government by consent
of the governed, the shells over Sumter made clear that a large minority
among the American people had withdrawn their consent from the exist-
ing federal institutions. If the definition be that democracy is government
by discussion among free men, the arguments of statesmen were silenced
by those of the cannon. If democracy is merely government by the ma-
jority, the American majority in 1861 was seeking to enforce, at the point
of the bayonet, its will upon a recalcitrant and determined minority. By
1
any definition, political democracy had, for the time being, lapsed."
In 1860, the federal government which was to preside over this tem-
porary lapse was by modern standards a very simple affair. Its methods
and its problems were similar to those of Washington's day, although the
nation which it served had grown enormously. The population had in-
creased from about 4,000,000 to about 31,000,000,* the area from 820,000
square miles to 3,000,000, and the states from 13 to 33. As a result, the
Senate had 66 members in 1860 and the House 237; yet this inflated
Congress still dealt almost exclusively with the problems which had
harassed from the beginning: the tariff, slavery, the disposition of pub-
it

lic and internal improvements at federal expense. Although on

lands,
these perennial subjects the negative policies long favored by the South
were about to be abandoned, the government was still innocent of plans
for social or economic legislation, and its tax program suggested the
Arcadian youth of the world rather than harsh modernity.
Jackson and Polk had long since shown the latent powers of the Exec-
utive and Lincoln was about to transform the office wholly; but before
1861 no President had in the modern sense imposed strong leadership
upon Congress, and the Executive departments which served the Presi-
dent would scarcely be adequate to staff a modern bank. The Department
of State, for example, consisted of the Secretary of State with a salary
of $8000, an assistant secretary with a salary of $3000, a chief clerk with
* Nine million in what was to become the Confederate
South, 22,000,000 in the
North.
419
420 The Price of Union

a salary of $2200, and two minor aids with salaries of $2000. The War
Department had no Assistant Secretary; but it had one aid with a salary
of $2200 and eight other employees who received $1800 apiece. The
Post OfficeDepartment was more regal. It had three Assistant Postmasters
General whoreceived $3000 each, and three other officers whose salaries
averaged $2500. Today, as Professor Swisher points out, "the annual ex-
penditure on the New York Police Department alone approaches the
amount of the entire annual expenditure on the government of the United
States in I860." 2
The most arresting sign of simplicity in the federal government of
Civil Wardays was the absence of the so-called "fourth branch." Gov-
ernment still consisted of an Executive, a Legislature, and a Judiciary,
as originally planned. There was as yet no federal regulation of private

enterprise, so there were no independent regulatory commissions, no

ambiguous agencies with part-administrative, part-legislative, and part-
judicial powers. The American people had not yet lost their fight to main-
tain a government with strictly limited powers. They were about to dis-
member their country because to a large minority even the small powers
which existed had come to seem oppressive; but in their worst night-
mares they could not yet imagine the national state which the Industrial
Revolution and the Civil War were to bring to birth. Lincoln, who began
by pointing out that the public servants had "but little power for mis-
chief," was soon compelled to extend that power for good or evil until
the old America could scarcely recognize the new.

For a third time in a hundred years [writes Professor Dunning] the

conviction of a fact beat down the obstacles of established forms. The
revolution of 1776 secured liberty; that of 1789 secured federal union;
and that of 1861-67 secured national unity. In each case traditional
principles were felt to be incompatible with existing facts, and the old
gave way to the new. The question presented to the administration
by the commencement of hostilities was Has this government the power
:

to preserve its authority over all its territory? The answer of the old
school of constitutional lawyers was: "Yes, so far as it is conferred
by the constitution and the laws"; but the answer we derive from the
actual conduct of the war is "Yes" without qualification. 3

Here lay the difference between Lincoln and Buchanan. Following cor-
rectly the precedents of seventy years, Buchanan decided that a state had
no right to secede and that the federal government had no right to keep
it from seceding. The relative and
strength of federal state sovereignty
had been left vague in the Constitution wisely, for it could only be
defined by force. In 1832, during the nullification crisis, Calhoun raised
the question in all its perilous logic; but Henry Clay sidestepped it so
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers39 421

skillfully that no one could say which side had won or what had been
agreed. The nation returned to its healthy habit of evasion.

The only constitutional course [writes Dunning] in case of a conflict

of the "sovereignties" was to deny that such a thing was possible,
eulogize the constitution as the greatest extant production of the
human intellect, point out the dreadful consequences that would follow
the recognition of supremacy in either claimant, and end by compro-
mising the difficulty in such a way as to furnish precedents for both
sides in the future. It would be erroneous to maintain that this method
of action was as unprofitable as it was illogical. On the contrary, it
was probably the only course that could have brought the United States
intact through to the year eighteen hundred and sixty. But more than
one of the nation's true statesmen foresaw that it was only a question
of time when "dodging the issue" would cease to give satisfaction as a
4
principle of constitutional construction.

When that time came, Buchanan clung to the old ambiguities even
though they threatened the life of the Union. But in Lincoln's mind "the
conviction of a fact beat down the obstacles of established forms." When
the people of the North had made clear that they would follow him, he
announced that the federal government was sovereign and that the states
were not. "What is
'sovereignty' in the political sense of the term?" he
asked in his message to the special session of Congress on July 4, 1861.
"Would it be far wrong to define it as 'a political community without a
political superior' ?" Since the Union was sovereign in this sense, the states
could not be sovereign. By seceding they had forced a final clarification.
When they lost the war they lost the ancient argument. Thenceforth they
would have certain powers conferred upon them by the Constitution; but
the federal government would be supreme.
The American political democracy whose temporary defeat was an-
nounced by the shells over Fort Sumter would one day be restored but
never in the form which it had known for the previous seventy years. A
precious equivocation, a freedom-giving obscurity, was gone.

Lincoln's insistence that the North was fighting to save the Union, and
thus to save the world's faith in democracy, did not please the radicals in
his own party.* They were fighting to destroy slavery some of them
*
During the war and the Reconstruction, the so-called "radicals" were those
who wished to uproot the historic South and plant in its place something nearer
to their own desires. They believed in a policy of "thorough." Their motives were
various and their political abilities noteworthy.
422 The Price of Union

because they saw it as the greatest of evils, and others because they saw
itas the keystone of the Southern economy. Good men who only wished
to help the Negro worked closely with men who only wished to break
the South financially, so as to break her politically and ensure a long
rule for the Republicans. Both the selfless and the selfish radicals found
Lincoln a steady and a wily foe which was fortunate for their own cause,,
because if they had imposed their way at any time before the summer
of 1863 the war would have been lost. Few Northern states would have
voted for an abolitionist war, and the whole Border would have joined
the Confederacy if such a war had been proclaimed. Yet there were many
who sought to proclaim it.
In July, 1861, John G. Fremont was appointed to command in Missouri,
Fremont's great days were done, but his ambitions were as pushing as ever,,
and his jealousy of Lincoln (who had replaced him at the head of the
Republican Party) was cruel. When Fremont's shady friends were charged
with corruption, and the powerful Blair family pressed for his removal,
he tried to win favor with the radicals by declaring that all slaves of
Southern sympathizers in Missouri were free. Lincoln, with his eye on
the border states, asked Fremont to recall his order. Fremont refused, so
Lincoln recalled the order and the general at the same time. The radicals
now had an abolitionist hero, a victim of Lincoln's conservatism. Thence-
forth, the more foolish of them hoped to replace Lincoln with the "Path-
finder" at the next election.
In December, 1861, the radicals in Congress set up a joint Committee
on the Conduct of the War, ostensibly to inquire into the management of
hostilities, but really to harry generals who were not sufficiently pro-

Negro, to give leadership to the drive for abolition, and to prepare men's
minds for a ruthless post-war policy toward the South. Although the radi-
cals were still a small minority, in a few years they were to inherit the fruits
of Lincoln's caution. They could not have won the war; but they proved
competent to stain the peace.

Had radicals like John Andrew* [writes Professor Hesseltine] taken

the pains to analyze the political situation in 1861, they would have dis-
covered that, outside New England, only the Iowa Republicans had
proved strong enough to win without Democratic support. Such an
analysis might have indicated that Lincoln's cautious policy, his con-
ciliation of border-state unionists, and his support of War Democrats
met the approval of the Northern voters. But cautious analysis was
not the forte of the radicals; their strength lay in their determination
to crush slavery and subjugate the South. The party, the army, and
the national government were but tools for their purpose, and Lincoln's,
5
moderate program only an obstacle before their goal.
*The governor of Massachusetts.
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers" 423

Yet the situation in Kentucky alone should have been enough to make
them pause.
Lincoln hadtruly said that "to lose Kentucky is nearly ... to lose the
whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think,
Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for
us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the sur-
render of this capital." Heedless of these facts, the radicals would have
driven Kentucky into the Confederacy. The governor's sympathies were
with the South, the legislature's with the North. The people were sharply
divided, except on two points: they did not wish to see their slaves con-
fiscated, and they did not wish their farms and villages to become the
battleground for the nation. So long as the war was for the Union, and
not for abolition or the subjugation of the South, and so long as Lincoln
promised to send no troops through Kentucky, that state would remain
"neutral" that is, she would not leave the Union, and she would compel
;

her Confederate sympathizers to do their fighting elsewhere. This would

suffice to ensure a Northern victory; but this the radicals would have

prevented.
In May, 1862, in spite of Lincoln's treatment of Fremont the previous
year, General David Hunter, commanding the Department of the South,
issued an order freeing all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and
Florida. Lincoln again declared that the general had exceeded his author-
ityand that the order was void; and the abolitionists again attacked the
President for moral cowardice. In the following month the New England
governors met at Providence, Rhode Island, to devise means for forcing
the President's hand. They wanted a change of generals, a change in the
Cabinet, and a change in Lincoln's policy toward slavery. The war had
been going badly and discontent was inevitable. Lincoln would have to
yield somewhere. He had already gladly rid himself of the undesirable
Cameron, sending him as Minister to Russia. Edwin McMasters Stanton
of Ohio became Secretary of War a lifelong Democrat who was ap-
proved by the radicals. Stanton had served as Attorney General during
Buchanan's last months, and was one of the ablest lawyers in the country.
He had a rough harsh manner and a parade of efficiency. Unhappily, he
was as bad an administrator as Cameron, and far more self-satisfied; but
at least he was honest, so one source of scandal was eliminated.*
The Providence meeting was followed in September by a meeting of
the Union governors at Altoona, Pennsylvania. Under pressure from the
radical New Englanders there might have come a demand for far-
* Even as
temperate a critic as Hamilton Fish, who agreed with Lincoln's war
aims and his mild policy of Reconstruction, felt the Administration was lax in its
^

handling of the huge war appropriations. He saw waste and thievery, speculation
and special privilege, corroding the nation's character. "Some people are making
lots of money," he wrote disgustedly, "and they are some other people's friends."
424 The Price of Union

reaching changes in war aims. There might even have come a demand for
putting Fremont in charge of the Northern armies a ready and easy
6
device for losing the war. But Lincoln outmaneuvered the governors. The
day before the Altoona meeting, the preliminary Emancipation Proclama-
tion was announced in the press. This conceded very little, yet it deprived
the radicals of their most useful complaint,
Lincoln had done all in his power to avoid emancipation by federal fiat.
He had labored, as his latest biographer 7 says, with "pathetic earnestness"
to have the slaves set free by state action, with federal compensation to
their owners. But when the war dragged on miserably and unsuccessfully,

foreign opinion alone required that something be done to prove that

Northern victory meant the end of the disgrace of human bondage. As
Kentucky might have been the loss of English working-
fatal as the loss of
class support, for at least until 1863 the rulers of England were playing
with the thought of announcing that Jefferson Davis had built a nation.
Such recognition would have broken the Northern blockade, and would
either have lost or dismally prolonged the war. In July, 1862, therefore,
Lincoln decided that after the next victory in the field he would declare
freedom for the slaves of all who persisted in rebellion. He could not do
more, for he had no power over private property in the loyal slave states.*
And he could scarcely do less, for his proclamation had no effect in the
states where it was alleged to apply. Yet it seized men's minds, and to this

day the world thinks of Lincoln, not as the savior of the United States,
but as the Great Emancipator.
On September 17, 1862, the battle of Antietam (which nobody won)
was followed by General Lee's withdrawal from Maryland. This seemed
the best Lincoln could expect for the time being, by way of a victory; so
while the dissatisfied governors were assembling in Pennsylvania the
President bewildered them by announcing that "persons held as slaves"
within areas "in rebellion against the United States" would be free on and
after January 1, 1863. He repeated that Union was the sole war aim, and
that he still hoped and wished for compensated emancipation. He dodged
the constitutional problem by treating his Proclamation as a war measure,
a penalty for rebellion which anyone could avoid by ceasing to rebel dur-
ing the hundred days between September and January. The document
was wholly in keeping with his famous letter to Horace Greeley of August,
1862, in which Lincoln wrote:

Myparamount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not

either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without free-
ing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the
* and West Virginia after June, 1863,
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri
when the mountain counties of the Old Dominion formed themselves into a new
and loyal slaveholding state.
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers" 425

would do it and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving

slaves, I ;

others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the
coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and
what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save
the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing
hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing
more will help the cause.

If, as seems clear, Lincoln believed that to help the cause he must keep
the impetuous governors quiet and keep the workingmen of England
friendly, his preliminary Proclamation (which was followed by the final
deed on January 1) succeeded. The governors, instead of blasting his
Administration and his generals, sent him a humble message of thanks and
of "most loyal and cordial support." And the workingmen of Manchester,
assembled at the Free-Trade Hall, sent him the noble Address in which
they welcomed the hardships they endured because of the blockade on
Southern cotton, and only implored Lincoln,

for your own honor and welfare, not to faint in your providential mis-
sion. While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high,
let the work be finished effectually. Our interests
. . . .are identi-
. .

fied with yours. We are truly one people, though locally separate. And
if you have any ill-wishers here, be assured they are chiefly those who

oppose liberty at home, and that they will be powerless to stir up quar-
rels between us, from the very day in which your country becomes, un-

deniably and without exception, the home of the free.

Lincoln in his answer said he knew the South had counted on a demand
from Manchester that the blockade be broken in order that the textile
mills should reopen.

I know and deeply deplore [he wrote] the sufferings which the
working-men and in all Europe, are called to endure in
at Manchester,
this crisis . . . Under the circumstances I cannot but regard your de-
cisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian
heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.

The Proclamation, though timely and useful, roused bitter feeling at

home. Northern Democrats who had supported the war felt betrayed.
They would fight for the Union, they said angrily, but not for the de-
struction of other men's property. The legislature of Lincoln's own state
resolved that the Proclamation was

a gigantic usurpation, at once converting the war, professedly com-

menced by the administration for the vindication of the authority of the
Constitution, into a crusade for the sudden, unconditional and violent
liberation of 3,000,000 Negro slaves; a result which would not only be a
total subversion of the federal Union but a revolution in the social or-
426 The Price of Union

ganization of the southern states, the immediate and remote, the present
and far-reaching consequences of which to both races cannot be con-
templated without the most dismal foreboding of horror and dismay.

The wide acceptance of this conservative view, and thus the folly of the
radicals in urging a war for abolition, was shown in the mid-term elections
of 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation (in spite of its mildness), war

weariness and the continued Northern defeats, difficulties in raising troops

and the knowledge that the Administration would soon adopt the hated
draft all this made for Republican weakness. Ohio and Indiana and

Pennsylvania held Congressional elections in October. The Democrats won

heavily in the first two states, and in the last they elected half the new
Congressmen. In November, therefore, troops were sent home from the
field to vote Republican in the critical states; but still the Democrats won
Illinois and Wisconsin. They might have won control of Congress, they

might even have compelled a negotiated peace, had not the border states,
soothed by Lincoln and patrolled by troops, and diligently combed of
anti-war voters under Lincoln's suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, re-
turned enough Republicans to ensure a small majority. "The lesson was
clear enough," writes Professor Hesseltine. "The governors had lost the
power to control their states ; they could neither deliver men to the armies
nor voters at the polls. Only the President could preserve the party and
he could save it only through the methods that had been tested in Missouri,
8
Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware." Since those methods combined the
maximum of concession and of emphasis on the Union with the maximum
of repression against those who could not be wooed or wheedled, and since
the Republicans barely succeeded even so, it is plain why Lincoln grew
impatient when the radicals insisted upon a different and an impossible
war.
The elections of 1864 were an even clearer proof of the wisdom of the
middle-of-the-road policy, and of the fact that no one but Lincoln could
hold together the confused, war-weary North. Before the end of 1863 the
long tide of military defeat had turned, with the result that the weakness
and quarrels within the Administration, which had been based upon fail-
ure, were replaced by larger weakness and bitterer quarrels based upon
the expectation of success. The radicals became far more intractable when
they felt victory in the air. So in December of '63, as a preliminary to what
he knew would be a stern struggle for control when the conventions and
the campaign drew near, Lincoln announced his post-war program for
the Reconstruction and readmission of the rebel states. The program
 39
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers 427

fitted the temper of the war which Lincoln had fought and defended. But
did not fit the war of Charles Sumner, who was
it prepared to postpone
the rebuilding of the Union until the Negro was everywhere acknowledged
as the social and legal equal of the white man. And it did not fit the war of
Thaddeus Stevens, the lame, vindictive invalid from Pennsylvania, who
was ready to poison the future rather than permit the Democratic Party to
riseagain to power.
Stevens was one of the most forceful men ever to sit in Congress. James
A. Elaine called him "the natural leader, who assumed his place by com-
mon consent." 9 Yet as he grew older he grew steadily more bitter, and by
the eighteen-sixties he could only harm whatever he touched. His wish to
help the Negro brought fresh woe to that betrayed race.
Stevens was born in Vermont, in 1782, of very poor parents. He was
educated at Dartmouth College and then moved to Pennsylvania where
he became a lawyer and a partner in an iron business. He was first a
Federalist, then an Anti-Mason, then a Whig being drawn to protection
and the National Bank by his business interests. Always he fought with
bitterness and wrath for the unprivileged, and in his youth his tongue was
not yet so noxious as to undo his good intentions. In 1834 and 1835, for
instance, he helped to win a free-school system for Pennsylvania. In 1848
he went to Congress, where his true passion for the oppressed led him into
the anti-slavery fight. He was so skillfully offensive that every time he
spoke he brought war nearer. Later, he helped found the Republican Party
in Pennsylvania. He hoped for Cameron's post in Lincoln's Cabinet, but
had to be content with the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Com-
mittee in the House, where he was useful in pushing the wartime revenue
bills. This was the sole field in which he helped the Administration, for his

views on the war were the reverse of Lincoln's. He wanted to arm the
slaves, expropriate the whites, reduce the South to "hopeless feebleness,"
desolate the region, exterminate the rebels, erase the state lines, and re-
10
colonize the entire district.
Stevens had no compassion, no understanding of man's divided heart.
He could only hate, and persecute, and use his wide learning as a quarry
for unrivaled abuse. He hated the sinner more than the sin, the slaveowner
more than slavery, and his hate extended to all Southerners and thence to
all Democrats. Inevitably, he stirred a resistance more implacable than
his own dark soul. "Yes," wrote a Georgian to Stevens in 1866, "I am dis-
loyal to any damned Government ruled by such men as you, and 'glory that
"u
I still live The Negro was, and is, the chief sufferer from
to hate you.'
the curse that Thaddeus Stevens laid upon the South.
The first question which the President had to face in his plan for Re-
construction was whether the states which had seceded were still states
under the original compact, or whether (as Sumner was to contend) they
428 The Price of Union

had committed suicide and were to be considered territories, subject to the

rule of Congress. Lincoln's answer was clear. In his Inaugural Address he
had said that the Union could not be broken by a pretended act of seces-
sion. In a proclamation of August, 1861, he had said that the people of
the Confederacy were in rebellion, not the states of the Confederation.
In all his deeds and speeches, Lincoln held to this view. The rebellion*
was blamed upon groups of conspirators, not upon states with the result
that Southerners who would rebuild the Union could be treated, jiot as
members of a hostile nation, but as so many steadfast Abdiels, loyal in
spite of the wiles of Lucifer:

Among the faithless, faithful only he;

Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.

This was gratifying for Lincoln, who liked his fellow men; but for
Sumner, who merely wished to improve them, it would not do at all.
Sumner knew that the Abdiels of the South did not mean to make the
freedmen members of their clubs. So he did not admit a distinction be-
tween those Southerners who would be loyal to the Union and those who
hated it. "He would shed tears," writes Professor Dunning, "at the bare
thought of refusing to freedmen rights of which they had no comprehen-
sion, but would filibuster to the end of the session to prevent the restora-
tion to the southern whites of rights which were essential to their whole
12
concept of life." Yet Sumner was something of a humanitarian and some-
thing of a gentleman. Thaddcus Stevens, who was neither, had still less
thought of admitting that the South contained even a single "flaming
Seraph, fearless though alone."
On December 8, 1863, when Lincoln issued his proclamation, he as-
sumed that certain state governments had been subverted by persons in
rebellion and that some of these persons now wished to restore loyal gov-
ernments "within their respective states." So he announced that with the
exception of important civil and military officers of the Confederacy any-
one would be granted an amnesty who took an oath of allegiance to the
United States. And when ten per cent of the people of any state had taken
the oath, they might hold elections and establish a state government. The
radicals, of course, deplored this act, for such a prompt amnesty meant the
restoration of confiscated property (other than slaves), and it meant that
there could be no vengeance. If the states had committed suicide, as
Sumner believed, or if they were conquered provinces, as Stevens con-
tended, the Congress could do as it pleased both with Southern property
and Southern people. But if the states were still alive, with their local
* The words "rebel" and "rebellion" are used
throughout, not invidiously, but
The difference between a rebel and a father of his
because the South lost the war.
people is a matter of success.
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers" 429

powers of government intact, Congress would have to keep its hands off
the Southerners who
returned to an honest loyalty, and off their goods,
and would even have to allow them the dangerous right of voting for the
Democratic Party if they so chose.
The extreme radicals were not yet in charge of Congress; but they were
able to pass a bill which made the conditions of pardon far more stringent,
and which declared that Congress, not the Executive, must decide the time
and the manner of Reconstruction. This was the Wade-Davis Bill, named
after the coarse, noisy Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio and the

polished but hate-ridden Representative Henry Winter Davis of Mary-

land. Davis was the author of the bill. Like Thaddeus Stevens, he was a
disappointed candidate for the Cabinet. He also hated Lincoln for seizing
so much power and for brushing aside the Constitution on the plea of
necessity as in the suspension of habeas corpus and the imprisoning of
thousands without trial.

Congress adjourned within ten days of passing the Wade-Davis Bill, so

under the Constitution the President could kill the bill merely by with-
13
holding his signature. This he did. And when he issued another procla-
mation renewing his promise of recognition to seceding states if loyal
citizens would quickly reform their governments, the helpless radicals

raged.* Even before the "pocket veto" some of them had been looking for
a candidate to replace Lincoln in the campaign. Their choice had been
the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio; but Lincoln had
eliminated this rival with little trouble. At the Baltimore Convention
in June, where the party had been careful to conceal the name "Re-

publican" and to refer to itself only as the Union Party, the delegates had
renominated Lincoln without discussion and had obeyed his wish to drop
Vice-President Hamlin and to substitute Andrew Johnson of Tennessee
thus making the party seem less sectional, and paying tribute to Southern
friends of the Union. A few weeks later Chase had been removed from the
Cabinet and Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine took his place.**
Foreseeing the defeat of Chase, another group of radicals had com-
bined with Western war Democrats and nominated General Fremont.
Since the election looked close Lincoln decided to get rid of Fremont. He
made a bargain of some sort with the radicals perhaps promising to re-
move the ultra-conservative Montgomery Blair from the Cabinet in return
for Fremont's retirement. This was the end of the "Pathfinder," who on

September 22 withdrew ungracefully into a private life which was thence-

*
Characteristically, Lincoln also declared that the Wade-Davis plan was a
"proper" one, and that he would welcome back any states which wished to return
to the Union by that plan. He must have been trying, as usual, to soften antago-
nisms; but in this case his enemies would not be softened.
** In
October, when Roger Taney died, Lincoln made Chase Chief Justice of the
United States.
430 The Price of Union

forth onlyredeemed by the affection and support of the ever-faithful, ever-

competent, and ever-romantic Jessie.*
A third effort to rid themselves of Lincoln was made by the radicals in
August, 1864. Although the election was hard upon them, and defeat
more than possible, Wade and Davis were so angry when their bill was
allowed to die without even the dignity of a veto message that they issued
a manifesto attacking the President's "executive usurpation," which they
said was "a studied outrage on the legislative authority." With the support
of Horace Greeley, whose political judgment was the worst available, they
suggested to the Republican politicians that a new convention be held to
reconsider Lincoln's candidacy. This final revolt against the President's
conservative leadership broke against the hard unwelcome truth that the
very men who led the revolt might lose their jobs unless Lincoln led the
ticket. So with ill grace, but with sufficient energy to save their party

standing, the radicals (including Wade and Davis) at last accepted

Lincoln and closed ranks for victory.
Victory seemed far from certain in the late summer of 1864. In spite
of his hold over the army (where the men in the ranks knew him for
a natural democrat) in spite of Sherman's capture of Atlanta on Septem-
,

ber 1 (and the seeming certainty of Northern victory), in spite of steady

hard work by all the receivers of patronage and all the beneficiaries
of the Republican tariff, the Republican Homestead Act, and the new
Republican National Bank, Lincoln still felt in danger. And indeed with-
out the soldier vote he might have lost. 14 Certainly, if the party had been so
foolish as to repudiate Lincoln, it would have been ruined. In 1860, as
Professor Hesseltine points out, the governors and the state organizations
elected Lincoln; but in 1864 Lincoln elected them.
The Democrats had met at Chicago in August and nominated General
George B. McClellan for the presidency. McClellan was certainly the most
learned, and was in many ways the most expert, of the Union commanders
with whom Lincoln struggled and suffered until he found Grant. Robert
E. Lee thought McClellan the best of the Northern generals. Yet he
seemed temperamentally averse to action. The question which shadowed
his reputation at the time, and which has not been answered yet, was

put to him by Lincoln in October, 1863: "Are you not overcautious

when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing?"
After many heartbreaking delays, demotions, and reinstatements, Lincoln
retired him forgood in November, 1863. The troops liked McClellan, and
* The radical Senator Zachariah Chandler of
Michigan, in his letters to his
wife, claimed to have arranged the Blair-Fremont bargain. Burton J. Hendrick
(Lincoln's War Cabinet, pp. 457-59) is inclined to dispute the claim, and to
explain Blair's resignation on the ground that it had been requested by the Union
National Convention. In any case, Fremont did give up his candidacy the day
before Blair gave up his Cabinet post.
xxL Lincoln and the "War Powers" 431

he gave a high tone and competence to his army; yet Lincoln may be
excused for wondering whether, by McGlellan's methods, the war could
ever end.
The Democratic Party which nominated McClellan in 1864 was held
together by nothing but hope for office. It had lost most of its trained
political brains when the Southern states seceded, and the rest of them
when Stephen A. Douglas died. When Congress met in special session in

July, 1861, the Democrats did not even hold a caucus and name a candi-
date for Speaker. They joined with the Republicans to form a new party
of the Union, and there they might have remained throughout the war
except that Lincoln did not have enough important jobs to go round.
Before long, therefore, some of the Democratic leaders reminded them-
selves that it is the duty of an Opposition to oppose. Yet Lincoln held

many of the "War Democrats" to the end. Some of them stayed with the
Republican Party in the post-war period, after it emerged from its Union
phase. Others drifted back to the Democrats during the fight over Re-
construction. And a fair number left Lincoln while the war was in progress,
and joined the "Peace Democrats" in opposing the unconstitutional acts of
the President. Thus the party of Andrew Jackson found itself attacking an
Old Whig for his use of dictatorial powers!
The peace Democrats known as "Copperheads," and sometimes as
"Butternuts" did not favor secession; they merely opposed war. They
hated the abolitionists, whom they blamed for all the woe. They believed
that the South could never be conquered, which was a possibility. And
they believed that the Union could be restored by negotiation, which was
absurd. A partial explanation for this faith may be found in the economic
interests of the Copperheads. Fernando Wood of New York, for example,
was mayor of a city whose merchants were owed a hundred and sixty-nine
million dollars by Southern customers. It would not be reasonable to ex-
pect him to join with Thaddeus Stevens in demanding the ruin of the
South. Similarly, the most famous of the Copperheads, Clement L.
Vallandigham of Ohio, represented a section which would be equally hurt
by secession or by armed opposition to secession. In Vallandigham's words,
they wanted "the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was" and they
wanted it so badly that they persuaded themselves they could have it, if
only Lincoln would stop fighting.
We have seen many times that the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana
and Illinois tended to vote in sympathy with the South. The early settlers
had been of Southern stock, with Southern prejudices about slavery; but
more important, the district was tied to the South by trade.

Wheat, flour, beef, pork, lard, whisky, and manufactured products

W
[writes Professor Binkley], particularly from Cincinnati, the abash and
432 The Price of Union

Illinois valleys, had passed down the Mississippi River and were, in no
small degree, paid for by the counter traffic in molasses, sugar, and
cotton. The loss of their bacon market alone in the South because of
the war was estimated at $6,000,000. Only a few days before Lincoln's
inauguration the Cincinnati Enquirer was insisting that the prosperity
of the entire lower West depended on the Southern trade and the con-
tinued culture of cotton in the South through slave labour. 15

These were Vallandigham's people, to whom he was a true and fearless

friend. No wonder he had a large following. And since, in addition to

being fearless, he was wholly without judgment, and without restraint in

his use of invective, no wonder he landed in jail, exile, and conspiracy.
When the Democrats nominated McClellan they did not choose to
attack the Republican (or Union) tariff, although by the time the war
ended the average rates were forty-seven per cent more than double the
average for 1857. And they did not choose to attack the Republican (or
Union) banking system set up by the Acts of 1863 and 1864, although the
party of Andrew Jackson might have found something to say about the
concentration ofmoney in the Eastern cities, especially in New York. And
they did not choose to attack the Homestead Act,* or even the Acts of
1862 and 1864 which donated more than thirty million acres of public
all this they were wise. The war was the
lands to the Western railroads. In
issue,not yet the domestic economy. The Democrats must stand or fall
by what they said about the war. It is instructive to study what they did
say, and astonishing to remember that until the last month of the cam-
paign they looked very strong.
The platform attacked the Administration for the suspension of habeas
corpus and for all the other violations of civil liberties, for the use of
troops to police and influence border-state elections, and for the vast in-
crease of federal powers (especially of Executive powers) which Lincoln
had brought to pass in the name of the emergency. These were true
grievances against the war. The platform then stated, in all its pathetic
absurdity, the Vallandigham peace policy :

Resolved, That this convention does explicitly declare . . . that

after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of
war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-
*
Signed by Lincoln on May 20, 1862. The hope of westward-moving pioneers
throughout two centuries was thus finally attained. The Act gave to the head of a
family (or to anyone who was of age and a citizen, or about to become a citizen)
the right to obtain a hundred and sixty acres of land free of charge, by living on it
for five years and meeting reasonable conditions of cultivation. This was a size
of farm suitable to the regions of good rainfall, whereas most of the lands which
were still free after 1862 lay west of the ninety-eighth meridian. The frontier line
was leaving the timber for the open country, leaving the humid lands of agriculture
for the arid lands of grazing and the stock farm.
 9
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers' 433

power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been
disregarded in every part .
justice, humanity, liberty, and the pub-
. .

lic welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for the cessation of

hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the states, or other

peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment,
peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the states.
This was the triumph of hope over truth. The South had seceded the ;

North had fought during bitter bloody years to restore the Union; the
Democrats then proclaimed that if the North stopped fighting the Union
would restore itself. Such was not the view of Jefferson Davis, who on
August 29 sent word to Lincoln: "I shall at any time be pleased to receive
proposals for peace on the basis of our Independence. It will be useless to
approach me with any other." And it was not the view of the Democratic
candidate, George McClellan. He asked for votes on his record as a gen-
eral which meant that if he were elected he would seek victory in the
field, not in the realm of dreams.
Yet the politicians were merely following their normal course. They
needed the votes of the people who thought the war was a failure, so the
platform called it a failure. They needed the votes of the people who
thought the war was a sacred cause, so the candidate was a leading Union
general. And above all they needed the votes of the people who were tired
and lazy and who wanted the fruits of victory a "federal Union of the
states" with no further strain; so they announced that the Union could
be restored simply by stopping the fighting and calling a convention. One
might have thought this was carrying cynicism too far. Yet the Democrats
received 1,802,000 votes. Lincoln received 2,213,000 votes. In the electoral
college Lincoln had 212 votes and McClellan 21. The figures sound over-
whelming; yet, as late as September the Republicans feared that if the
army were not sent home to vote where needed, and if fraud were not
practiced where all else failed, McClellan might win.
In retrospect, we can see that the frauds and intimidations practiced by
the Union Party in 1864 were unnecessary. Lincoln would have won any-
way, even if no "steps" had been taken. Yet it is interesting that Lincoln
did not choose to run the risk. He allowed the small frauds, as he had al-
lowed the steady unconstitutional pressure on the border states through-
out the war, not because he felt superior to the people, but because he felt
he knew their needs and must safeguard their future. This is a perilous de-
cision for the head of a free state. Lincoln made it in silence and on his
own responsibility, as he made all the basic decisions of the war: to rein-
force Sumter; to suspend habeas corpus and pay no heed to the protests
of the Chief Justice; to ask for troops without authority; to start the fight-
ing before he called Congress in 1861, so that he could present that body
with a war which was already under way and which must be won; to
434 The Price of Union

build for the first time in American history a national army serving the
national state, instead of depending on local forces which had long been
thought the safeguard of republican freedom.
President Madison very nearly lost the War of 1812 rather than over-
ride the prejudice against a draft and a national army. He would have
lost if the British had been more alert and the Union would then have
perished, if the Hartford Convention had its way. But when Lincoln de-
cided to fight he decided to win. As Alexander Stephens, his admiring
enemy, said "The Union with him, in sentiment, rose to the sublimity of
:

religious mysticism." Yet the Union might have perished because of the
eccentric workings of the electoral college. This was more than Lincoln
would permit.
New York one of the six crucial states allowed its soldiers to vote in
the field. Each party sent three commissioners to supervise the voting; but
the Democratic commissioners were put in jail in Washington, and Mc-
Clellan votes were switched when necessary. Lincoln won New York by
368,000 votes to 362,000. In Connecticut, where Lincoln won by 2400
votes, and in Maryland where he won by 7000, there seems little doubt
that fraud and the army helped to carry the day. In Ohio whose soldiers
also voted in the field and might have voted for Ohio's General McClellan,
the methods used to insure acceptable results remind one of the twentieth
16
century.
Assuming that they were necessary for victory, were these thefts wrong?
Assuming that Lincoln had lost all the states where frauds were permitted,
he would then have lost the electoral college, and thus the election but he
;

would still have had a majority of the votes. His own followers plus the
War Democrats made a huge majority for victory; but the war would still
have been lost. The Democrats were pledged to a peace conference, and
once the war stopped no one could start it again. Hundreds of thousands
of young men had died, in the armies which Lincoln had assembled, for
the cause which Lincoln had defined. They had almost won their war.
Should Lincoln now give it away for an eighteenth-century plan of choos-
ing presidents a plan which had been abandoned in spirit before that
century was out? How could he do the least harm by cheating, or by
allowing accidental circumstances to cheat? All these questions like that
of the morality of seizing "unconstitutional" powers are implicit in the
very idea of civil war.
We have no record of what Lincoln thought, only of what he did. He
builta temporary dictatorship, brushing the Constitution aside when he
thought necessary, and custom and legality as well. He changed the balance
of powers within the government. Thenceforth, on a plea of emergency, a
popular President could rule more authoritatively than Andrew Jackson
had dared to dream. And the world was presently to move into a phase of
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers 33 435

almost permanent emergency. Before those days came, Lincoln had given
hiscountry not only a renewed Union but a federal government which was
admittedly supreme over the states, and a presidency which had been
made (and could again be made) supreme over the Congress. We do not
know whether he approved the latter change, or whether, like doctoring
the soldiers' votes from New York, he merely did it to win.

In April, 1865, the Confederate Government was at last driven from

Richmond. Within a week General Lee had surrendered to General Grant
at Appomattox, and on April 26 General Johnston surrendered the last

important Southern army to General Sherman.* The war was over. It had
accomplished its purpose; but like all wars it had raised more questions
than it settled. The Union was saved but it was not the federal Union of
;

old. It was a national state wherein the central government alone had

sovereignty. Yet the citizens of America were by no means reconciled to

such a change, and were soon found devising methods for creating un-
officially the system of concurrent majorities which Calhoun had wished to
write into the Constitution. And slavery was abolished; but what of the
freedmen? And what of the broken South? What of the balance of power
at Washington, where the agrarian statesmen had long held aggressive

capitalism at bay? Since the agrarian leaders were dead or banished, was
the simplicity and idealism of the young republic to be swamped in mil-
lionaires? And above all, what of the strife between the men who wanted

punishment and plunder, and the men who followed Lincoln in seeking
justice? Was America to go forward, as Lincoln asked in the second
Inaugural Address, "with malice toward none, with charity for all ... to
bind up the nation's wounds"? Or was she to be subjected for a time to an
alliance of moral prigs, vindictive politicians, and greedy businessmen?
The problem was exacerbated by John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln
on the evening of April 14, 1865, at Ford's Theater in Washington. Booth
was an actor who had played Brutus once too often. Born and raised in
Maryland, he saw the war neatly and simply as a strife between the wicked
North and the chivalrous South. He and some friends had planned to kid-
nap Lincoln and deliver him to Jefferson Davis at Richmond but their ;

*
Jefferson Davis, hoping to escape to the Southwest and carry on the war by
sheer will power, was captured on May 10. The last Confederate force surrendered
on May 26. Davis was sent to prison at Fortress Monroe, and released after two-
years on the grounds that the federal lawyers had failed to find a charge on which
they thought it safe to try him. He lived for another twenty-two years farming,
writing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and refusing to ask for
the federal pardon which would have allowed his state to send him back to Wash-
ington as Senator.
436 The Price of Union

first attempt fell through and the war ended before they could prepare

a second. So they decided to murder the President, the Vice-President, and

the Secretary of State all on the same evening. Booth did his work tragi-
cally well, but his assistants bungled theirs.
The radicals of course claimed that themad crime was a plot by the
South, promoted by Jefferson Davis. They staged a "trial" that will for-
ever disgrace them, wherein the defense was bullied and the prosecution
suppressed Booth's diary because it proved that the charges against Davis
and the South were monstrous nonsense. They did their best to stir the
North to the most barren and hurtful of passions revenge. They did their
:

best to make Lincoln's life vain and his death dishonored.

At Cabinet meeting, on the day he died, Lincoln showed that he

his last
knew the dangers which came with long-desired peace, and that he hoped
to surmount some of them. According to the Secretary of the Navy, who
was present, Lincoln said that "he thought it providential that this great
rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned, and there were none
of the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us. If we
were wise and discreet, we should reanimate the States and get their gov-
ernments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union re-
established, before Congress came together in December."* These were
strange words from the defender of American democracy. "So long as the
people's representatives are absent," he seemed to be saying, "there is
reasonable hope of doing what is right. If we work quickly and present
Congress with a peace that cannot be poisoned just as we presented it,
in 1861, with a war that could not be stopped all may yet be well."

Had Lincoln been so long accustomed to a dictator's power that he

feared returning to the slow process of persuasion? Or was it merely the
"disturbing elements of that body" which he had in mind when he spoke
of Congress the malignant, the mean of spirit and black of heart? He
had fought and mastered those elements when they would have prevented
the victory. Was he afraid that he could no longer control them now that
they sought only to destroy the peace? We do not know; but at the same
Cabinet meeting he said he hoped there would be no persecution, no
bloody work after the war was over. Such hopes died with Lincoln, and
* Gideon
Welles, "Lincoln and Johnson," in The Galaxy, April, 1872, p. 526.
In his Diary for April 14, 1865, Welles also noted that Lincoln "was glad Congress
was not in session." (Vol. II, p. 281.) And Nicolay and Hay describe the last Cabi-
net meeting in language similar to that of Welles in his Galaxy article. (Vol. X,
p. 283.) There seems no doubt that Welles gave an accurate description of Lincoln's
remarks.
xxi. Lincoln and the "War Powers" 437

so did the hopes for an honorable solution to the racial problem., whereby
the Negro could quickly become a first-class citizen. Lincoln was gone but
Thaddeus Stevens lived.
It was an enigmatic spirit which was taken from America in the hour
of her great need. Lincoln never sought to explain or excuse himself, only
to make lucid the cause for which he lived. Grierson describes a pioneer
woman of Illinois, a contemporary of Lincoln's, in these words:

Moulded and subdued by the lonely days, the monotonous weeks, the
haunting hush of the and the same thoughts and images
silent nights,

returning again and again, she appeared as one who had conquered the
world of silence. . . Hers was a freedom which was not attained in a
.

single battle the conflict was begun by her ancestors when they landed
at Plymouth Rock. In the tribulations that followed the successive
generations were stripped of the superfluities of life. One by one vanities
and illusions fell from the fighters like shattered muskets and tattered
garments. Each generation, stripped of the tinsel, became acquainted
with the folly of plaints and the futility of protests. Little by little the
pioneers began to understand, and in the last generation of all there
resulted a knowledge too deep for discussion and a wisdom too great for
idle misgivings. 17

Lincoln belonged to this "last generation of all" ; he too "had conquered

the world of silence." He knew that he must stand alone, decide alone,
suffer and be blamed alone. He was gentle, unyielding, devious. Free from
vanities and illusions, he had time to think. He saw so many levels deep
into the motives and meanings of life that only his broad humor kept him
from cynicism or despair. He knew far too much for comfort. He was a
melancholy skeptic who seems to have understood that the world cannot
be saved on its own terms and that to resist one wrong in the realm of
politics, by the use of force, is but to substitute another. "Each looked for
an easier triumph," he said, referring to the North and South in his second
Inaugural Address, "and a result less fundamental and astounding. . . .

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been an-
swered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." Nevertheless, Lincoln
admitted that political parties must be organized, elections won, male-
factors opposed, and sometimes wars fought, not because the results would
be what anybody wanted or intended, but because man was not created to
bow before iniquity. He must resist, although in the end he will be con-
quered if not by the evil he is fighting, then by the evil which rises from
the fight itself.

Jefferson, in spite of his magician's power in politics, was too bland, too
enlightened, too thoroughly eighteenth-century, for such stormy truth to
reach the surface of his mind. Jefferson lived contentedly with the most
worldly myth that has ever lulled man's intelligence, hiding the disappoint-
438 The Price of Union

ment of the next step, of any next step on the material plane the myth of :

humanism, of culture without religion, morality without a moral sanction,

peace based on reason and freedom on utility. Lincoln lived in the world
which had taken that particular step. He knew the glad tidings of the
Deists were false; but what was true? His sad eyes watched and his heart
shared the troubles of man adrift, generous and selfish, magnanimous and
venal, but adrift, with no compass, a forgotten port, and a strong cold
wind. He saw so much so quietly, accepting it without complaint or pre-
tense, and still relishing the strife of the presidency. Like all the important

Presidents he expanded the office; but he expanded himself still more.

Most men rattle about inside the job; but Lincoln transcended it. Some-
times he seemed about to break its earthly bonds and seize the truth toward
which he was groping. But he could not. He knew the vanity of this world.
He knew that every secular victory must be soiled. So he could not fulfill
himself in politics. And he could find nothing beyond. This is the burden
of modern man at his wisest, which may explain why Lincoln was sor-
rowful.
 XXII

Congress versus the President

'HEN THE WAR ENDED, the South was ruined physically but by no
means deprived of hope. Two hundred and sixty thousand men had died
in the Confederate armies, out of a white population of about six million. 1
A quarter of the white men of productive age were either dead or in-
capacitated. The
long blockade, the fact that most of the righting was on
Southern the careful destruction of towns, roads, bridges, and rail-
soil,

ways by the Northern armies, the loss of almost two thirds of the livestock
and of slave property worth $2,000,000,000, the repudiation (imposed by
the North) of the entire Confederate debt all this meant an equality of
poverty and a return to the simplest survival-standard of life. Yet the land
was still there, and the rivers, and the sun and rain and the Negro, al-
though he had lost his cash value. The South was mostly a rural economy
which could not be scared or starved by a breakdown of industry or of
communications. If Northern politicians had kept their hands off, the
South might have recovered quickly and with little bitterness. Indeed, her
worst non-political disasters made for a renewed sense of kinship with the
North, for when famine conditions threatened in some of the towns, North-
ern charity was quick with relief, and also when a yellow-fever epidemic
began in the lower Mississippi Valley. The two chief Northern generals,
Grant and Sherman, had been chivalrous in their terms of surrender in
fact, the terms that the latter arranged had been repudiated by Congress
on the ground that they were overfriendly.
The South, during the war, had been too concerned with her own
problems to notice the changes in the Northern government. She did not
understand that the Union to which Lincoln invited her to return differed
sharply from the Union she had deserted. Power, which had been concen-
trating in Washington, remained widely diffused in the South. The
preamble to the Confederate Constitution proclaimed the sovereignty of
the states.The "Old Republicans" of 1798 would have signed it joyfully,
whereas ever since Jefferson and Hamilton first disputed with each other
in Washington's Cabinet, the preamble to the Federal Constitution had
been a source of discord. "We the people of the United States," it begins,
"in order to form a more perfect union ... do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America." Did this mean that all
439
440 The Price of Union

the people joined together in one political body to form a nation? Or did
itmean that the people, meeting in their several sovereign states, and act-
ing through the representatives of their states, ordained the new govern-
ment? Nobody knew. Possibly, nobody was intended to know. The fathers
of the Constitution were not so foolish as to make clear troublesome state-
ments when they might remain soothingly obscure.
There was no obscurity, however, in the Confederate document. "We,
the people of the Confederate states," it says, "each state acting in ats
sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent fed-
eral government ... do ordain and establish this Constitution. ." . .

The South was handicapped throughout the war by her decentralized gov-
ernment; but she accepted the handicap rather than permit that concen-
tration of power against which Southern leaders had so long fought.* She
was by no means prepared, therefore, to discover that while her back was
turned the old federal Union had abandoned even the polite fiction of
divided sovereignty and had made the states little more than administra-
tive units, possessed of many important powers of government but clearly

subject to the nation. An administrative unit cannot set its will against
the central power and say that the Constitution has been misinterpreted
by that power and that it will therefore disobey the law. In the future,
regional and economic interests wishing to obstruct a distant majority
would be forced to find subtler means than nullification.**
The South did not at first know this but her ignorance need have been
;

no bar to Reconstruction. She would have accepted (soon instead of

slowly) the war-born changes in the living Constitution, and she would
have set herself (at once, instead of after barren resentful years) to devise
new methods for warding off outside interference with her daily life, even
if her economic fate must now be subject to faraway control. But the price

of such creative reconstruction was that Abraham Lincoln's views and

methods should prevail. And so far as the South knew, during the first
* Robert E.
Lee, for example, was not appointed General-in-Chief of the Con-
federate armies until February, 1865. Up to that time the governors insisted on
having final word as to the use of troops raised in their states. And the central
government at Richmond did not get authority to control the railroads for military
purposes until February, 1865.
**
Aside from making explicit the sovereignty of the states, the Confederate Con-
stitution closely follows the Constitution of the United States. Three features of
the Southern document, however, were intended as improvements based on the
experience of seventy years ; first, the President was allowed to veto individual items
in an appropriation bill, instead of having to accept or to reject the entire lump;
second, each bill passed by Congress was to deal with only one subject, and the
subject was to be clearly defined in the title; third, Congress was authorized to
permit by statute the heads of the executive departments to sit in Congress and
take part in the discussion of measures affecting their work. As we have seen, this
was Alexander Hamilton's view of the proper relation between the executive depart-
ments and the legislature. Unfortunately, the Confederate Congress never passed
the authorizing act.
xxii. Congress versus the President 441

strange hushed weeks after surrender, the spirit of Lincoln survived.

Returning to Washington after Appomattox, and finding the city gay
with celebration, Lincoln had made his last public speech. It was a simple,
urgent plea that men begin to think at once and magnanimously about
Reconstruction. He begged his hearers not to bother their minds with
theories as to whether the seceding states had committed suicide or had
merely been absent for a time. The point was to get them back into the
Union comfortably and quickly. "Finding themselves safely at home," he
said, "it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.
Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical
relations between these states and the Union and each forever after inno-
;

cently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the
states from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance,

they never having been out of it."

We need not speculate whether the nation would have followed such
leadership, since it was not given the chance. But the South chose to be-
lieve as long as possible that what Lincoln said would prevail, and during
those hopeful deluded days she showed that her own internal divisions had
survived the war and that if she were allowed to return to the Union with-
out bitterness she would return with a two-party system. The first post-
war elections in the South showed the revived strength of the Whigs who
had opposed secession, but had supported the war out of patriotism. The
Republicans were wrong in assuming that the South would vote solidly
Democratic. The South as a whole felt no debt to the Democratic Party
of the North. Southern Whigs would have joined a moderate Union Party,
such as Lincoln desired, and the region would have been saved from the
seventy-year-long curse of a one-party system. But the radical Republicans
drove all respectable white Southerners into the Democratic Party by
identifying Republicanism with a policy that only the outcasts of the white
world could support only the deserters, and the disaffected "poor
whites," and carpetbaggers, and those who thought to better themselves by
2
betraying their neighbors.
Unquestionably, among those evil-doing radicals were men of rigid prin-
ciple, like Sumner, who thought that whatever the cost in hatred or in
pain their methods were right because they would help the Negro. Only a
subtle and humble mind can combine rigid principle with politics. The
self-satisfied, the priggish, the morally superior, are more dangerous than
the men who treat politics simply as a livelihood. The latter at least under-
stand that politics is the pursuit of the possible, not of the ideal. They at
least refrain from doing needless harm in the name of perfection. But the
Sumners, the credulous, high-minded Sumners, are not only the victims
of political vandals like Thaddeus Stevens, but of pride, the first of the
deadly sins. The greater the ruin that surrounds them, the more they
442 The Price of Union

preen themselves as members of a dwindling band that "sticks to prin-

ciples."
If the South had been revived withits old two-party system, normal

political rivalry and search might have enfranchised the Negro

for votes
within a decade. Sumner preferred to enfranchise him at once which
meant depriving him of his vote for two generations and debauching
Southern politics by preventing the growth of an Opposition.

When war ended, the North was tired and overprosperous hence
the
morally Her losses had been heavy about three hundred and sixty
slack.
thousand dead, out of a white population three and a half times that of
the South. But the war had proved an economic stimulus. Government
contracts and the high tariff were more than a substitute in most cases for
the loss of Southern trade. Meat-packers of the Middle West and the shoe
manufacturers of New England could not keep pace with army orders;
and although cotton declined because of the shortage of raw ma-
textiles
the manufacture of woolens increased inordinately. The infant oil
terials,

industry was stimulated. Bankers did well out of war bonds, and the new
national banking system promised to end the paper-money fantasies of the
state banks.Farmers were helped both by the insatiable hunger of the
armies and by several years of bad wheat crops in Europe.
There was of course another side to the picture. The federal debt was
more than $2,600,000,000. Labor had shared little in the new prosperity,
sufferingfrom high prices, high taxes, military service (since the poor
could not take advantage of the clause in the draft law which allowed a
man to be released on payment of $300) , and after 1864 from the system
of "contract labor." By an act of that year, aKen labor contracts were made
enforceable in the courts. Thismeant that American employers could hire
foreigners abroad for next to nothing, bring them to America, and make
them work for the derisory terms which they had accepted. The American
workman was threatened by cheap foreign competition, whereas the
American manufacturer was protected more thoroughly each year. This
was one of the jokers which sometimes made the system of "free enter-
prise" less benign than sounded in the textbooks.*
it

Also, the new bankingsystem was scarcely a boon to the people in the
back-country. "Though it had some merit/' writes Professor J. G. Randall,
"it created an inelastic currency, tended toward the concentration of bank
resources in New York [and] opened the way for serious abuses in the

*The law was repealed in 1868; but the practice continued until forbidden by
the new law of 1885. It was not wholly abandoned until 1907.
xxiL Congress versus the President 443
8
speculative exploitation of bank funds. . . ," Yet the system was a bless-
ing compared to that which preceded it. From the days when Jackson and
Van Buren destroyed the National Bank, but failed to find a substitute >
the country had been at the mercy of state banks. Sometimes the state was
the sole owner, sometimes a part owner; but more often the banks were
chartered by states and privately owned. In South Carolina, Missouri, and
Indiana the system worked admirably. In Massachusetts the private banks
supervised themselves extra-legally, and with fair success. But for the
most part the state-chartered private banks were not supervised at all and
were a danger to the economic and political stability of the country. The
worst of them, mostly in the West, were known as "wildcat banks," be-
cause in order to make the presentation of their notes for redemption as
hard as possible they settled in the most inaccessible spots out among the
wildcats. With little specie, with capital based on promissory notes, with
loans based on land speculation, they nevertheless issued "money," and
many people were so unfortunate as to have their wages or their bills paid
in such "money."
In 1863 and 1864, under pressure from the exasperated business com-
munity, Congress passed acts "to provide a national currency, secured by
a pledge of United States stocks, and to provide for the circulation and
redemption thereof." Banks which were organized under the safeguards of
these acts were subject to federal supervision. They might issue notes
secured by federal bonds and engage in commercial banking. At last the
nation would have a circulating medium with some stability. In 1865,
Congress imposed a tax of ten per cent on the circulation of state bank
notes, thus driving the majority of sound banks to take national charters
and subject themselves to federal control. By 1913, when the Federal Re-
serve Act superseded the Act of 1864, 7509 national banks carried on most
of America's commercial banking business.
The national banking system, however, had one serious flaw which re-
mained uncorrected perhaps because the new masters at Washington
profited thereby. The system was supposed to distribute bank-note circula-
tion with reference to need ; yet a few years after the war

Woonsocket, Rhode Island, had more national circulation than North

and South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas; Waterville, Maine, had
nearly as much as Alabama. The per capita figures are just as
. . .

astonishing. Rhode Island had $77.16 for each inhabitant, Arkansas had
13 cents. . .Not a single southern state had obtained, by October,
.

1869, its legal share of the $150,000,000 which was to have been appor-
tioned according to existing banking capital, wealth, and resources.
Louisiana was entitled to $7,200,000 on this basis, and received $1,094,-
589; Georgia was entitled to $4,470,000 and received $1,234,100; South
4
Carolina was entitled to $4,185,000 and received $192,500.
444 The Price of Union

These figures are a forecast of the chief domestic issue in America from
the Civil War to the time of Franklin Roosevelt: the issue of economic
colonialism. How can the provinces especially the South and West
save themselves from what is popularly known as "Wall Street"? Recon-
struction is but a phase of this issue; Populism springs from it, and
Bryanism, and the trust-busting talk of Theodore Roosevelt, and such dis-
tortions of the American dream as Huey Long and Senator Bilbo, and
such applications of it as the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson. The
problem was stated clearly by John Taylor of Caroline in the eighteenth
century but it did not develop its full potential danger until the Civil War
;

had the capitalists unchallenged at Washington.

left
Yet in spite of the national debt, and the unfair distribution of benefits
both among the classes and the sections, the wealth and productive power
of the North had increased immensely. The Industrial Revolution had
been somewhat delayed in America, partly by lack of capital, partly by
the nation's preoccupation with the troubles that led to war; but now it
was to come with a rush. Ten years after the surrender at Appomattox
the North was a great industrial power and the old America of small-scale
production was gone forever. The growth of the Northern munitions in-
dustry during the war had been a presage of what was about to happen.
When the fighting began there were two national armories, one at
Harper's Ferry, Virginia, the other at Springfield, Massachusetts. The
armory in Virginia was quickly destroyed to prevent its capture by Con-
federate troops so the Union began the war with a single armory, able to
;

turn out about eight hundred muskets a month. During the first year,
therefore, most of the Northern munitions were bought in Europe. For a
time the federal and state governments were bidding against each other,
until the War Department persuaded the state purchasing commissions to
withdraw. By August, 1861, every munitions factory in Birmingham and
London, with one exception, was working to fill orders from Ohio, Massa-
chusetts, and Connecticut. Yet by the end of that year American produc-
tion had been so expanded that it could meet all the needs of the Union
armies.
Small-arms production at Springfield had increased from 800 a month
to 10,000, and during the second year of the war the armory produced
200,000 muskets while private contractors produced half a million. Most
of this production was in the Northeast for example, Colt's Armory and
Sharps' Rifle Works were at Hartford, Connecticut; Remington was at
Ilion, New York, and the Burnside Factory was at Providence, Rhode
Island. At Bridesburg, Pennsylvania, the Alfred Jenks Company con-
verted a plant for making textile machinery to the manufacture of rifles.
After the first year there was never a problem of quantity in armaments;
but quality was another matter. The superiority of breechloading carbines
xxii. Congress versus the President 445

had been clearly proved; yet the Army refused to give up the old muzzle-
loading muskets. Not until the war was in its final stages did the North
begin to make breechloaders, and then only in small numbers.
The war was chiefly a battle between infantrymen. More than four
million muskets were issued to the Union armies, and only 7892 cannon.
The largest supplier of heavy ordnance was the Fort Pitt Foundry at Pitts-
burgh. Inevitably the production of iron was greatly increased, Cleveland
and Buffalo being the chief manufacturing centers. And while the North
was discovering its industrial strength and learning to produce on a giant
scale, the South had to depend largely on captured arms and on foreign
purchases run through the blockade. The Confederacy began the war
with one foundry that could cast cannon and one small powder mill, and
although it built new arsenals and mills it was never able to come measur-
ably close to supplying its own needs. At the end of the war its small in-
dustrial plant was in ruins, whereas the North was getting ready to

challenge England as the workshop of the world.

When the war ended, the ancient rivalry between the Congress and the
Executive was acute. For four years the President had gone his own way,
appealing to Congress from time to time to validate his acts. Reluctantly,
and often very slowly, the Congress had done what it was told. In the
case of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the President or the
officials acting under his order might have been subject to heavy damage
suits if the courts had ultimately decided that the suspension was illegal.
Yet it was March, 1863, before Congress could bring itself to agree on a
bill which protected the Executive and gave him permission to continue
what he had so long been doing. *
Lincoln, as we have seen, was glad that the Confederacy collapsed at a
time when Congress was in recess but his pleasure was not shared by the
;

Congressmen. They felt they had been unimportant long enough. To be

sure, the Committee on the Conduct of the War had been able by enor-
mous effort to do minor damage to destroy the reputations of a few good
generals, and to upset a few useful plans. But for the rest Congress had
been powerless to make policy during four years. It had no intention of
remaining powerless. Furthermore, the discordant groups which composed

* Lincoln derived what he called his "war

power" from two clauses in the Con-
stitution : which made him Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and that
that
which declared it was his duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

(Cp. Article II, Sections 2 and 3.) Putting these two clauses together, it seemed
to him he had the power to do whatever was necessary to win a civil war.
446 The Price of Union

the Union Party had no intention of remaining peacefully under the

same roof.
The temporary chairman at the convention that renominated Lincoln
had said in his introductory speech, "As a Union party I will follow you
to the ends of the earth and to the gates of death; but as an Abolitionist

party, as a Republican party, as a Whig party, as a Democratic party, as

an American party not follow you one foot." This was a popular
I will

statement in 1864; but in 1865 the war was ended and Lincoln was dedd,
and the Union Party was dead with him. After Appomattox, no threat
from the outside held radicals and conservatives together. And after the
fatal night of April 14 there was no leader for the conservative cause.
Within a few hours of Lincoln's death the Congressional radicals held a
caucus. They agreed to work an entire change of Cabinet, and for an
for
entire change of policy toward the South. They thought President Andrew
Johnson would be their man, because he had once belonged to the Com-
mittee on the Conduct of the War. Coarse Ben Wade spoke to the new
President for the Committee in these words: "Johnson, we have faith in
you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government."
As usual, Senator Wade was wrong.
Fate had brought to the White House a Southerner, a Democrat, a
states'-rights enthusiast and one of the stubbornest men ever seen in Wash-
ington. Andrew Johnson, although very able, was also sadly stupid when
it came to dealing with the cantankerous and touchy men of Congress.

"Your President," he dared to say, "is now the Tribune of the people, and
thank God I am, and intend to assert the power which the people have
5
placed in me." This is not the mood in which a wise President would
approach Congress especially a President who had come to power by
accident, who could not claim to be the people's choice, and who had
inherited a long-contained but deeply burning quarrel. At the beginning
of a first term, or in the midst of a well-recognized danger to the nation,
a vastly popular President should act like a tribune of the people, but he
should never admit it. Johnson was really serving another man's second
term; and instead of being in the midst of danger, he was in the midst of
a carefree celebration because danger had passed. It was a time to tread
softly and to attack his enemies with gentle stealth, as Jefferson would have
done. Yet Johnson seemed to prolong in his own mind the mood of war,
acting as if the fate of the nation still depended on strong Executive meas-
ures which were to be obeyed without question.
In defending his temporary dictatorship Lincoln had said :

Myoath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of pre-

serving by every indispensable means the nation of which the
. . .

Constitution was the organic law. ... I felt that measures, otherwise
xxii. Congress versus the President 447

unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the

preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.
ground and now avow
6
Right or wrong, I assumed this it.

This was bold talk. Lincoln was upheld because most people believed the
nation might die if he was opposed. But when Johnson came to the White
House people believed the nation was safe, and that the time had come
when Executive acts should once more be subject to criticism by Congress.
Lincoln had set an example which would be followed by other Presidents
in other emergencies but he had not established an irresponsible govern-
;

ment in which a "tribune of the people" decides what is good for the
people and then goes his way.
And there was another reason why Johnson if politically wise might
have chosen to move quietly and with conciliation. Congress was itself the
scene of a relentless struggle for power, and a prudent President might
have won to his support all members who were opposed to extreme meas-
ures. He wouldhave had to give ground; he would have had to pretend
to be converted by the wisdom of his advisers in Congress he would have
;

had to help rebuild the impaired dignity of that sensitive body. All this
Jefferson could have done in his sleep; but Jefferson cared only for the
substance of power and preferred to have other men enjoy the trappings.
The radicals did not yet control Congress in fact, they were frightened
;

that they never would. They had a clear, militant program. They believed
(wrongly) that they had won the war. They were prepared to use all their
formidable talents to impose their will. And they were strengthened by
having no scruples, and by the fact that their policy was directed against
men whom they despised or hated and whom they proposed to deprive
of the vote. Yet they were still in a minority, and an adroit President might
have marshaled against them all the leaderless conservatives: the ex-
Whigs, most of the ex-Know-Nothings, the war Democrats who had joined
the Union Party under Lincoln's persuasion, and even a scattering of the
early Republicans, such as the powerful Seward and his friend Thurlow
Weed. If these men had stood together on a merciful program they might
have won public support in the mid-term elections of 1866. And America
would have been saved much sorrow.
The radicals intended to keep the South a conquered province as long
as possible. Some of them hoped thereby to help the Negro, by giving him
control of what was left of the South and allowing him time to become at
home in his political liberty, while the Southern whites were kept down.
Some of them hoped to acquire Southern property for themselves, and to
setup absentee ownership of a revived industrial and financial system. But
most of them hoped only to protect and prolong the rule of their own
party. They did not wish a Union Party. They did not wish a party which
448 The Price of Union

was the heir to the conciliatory and careful Whigs. And especially they
did not wish a strong Democratic Party with Southern membership in
Congress increased by the freeing of the Negroes.* What they wanted was
a party of aggressive capitalism which could promise that no regional or
class interest would be allowed to interfere with the free use of the nation's
resources by the new brood of Northern and Middlewestern millionaires.
And they intended that this party of aggressive capitalism should also be
a party of aggressive cruelty toward Southern rebels ostensibly for the
sake of the Negro and for the punishment of past misdeeds, but really to
make certain that the Democratic Party did not soon revive.
In spite of the high political abilities of many radicals, and in spite of
their formidable double argument of humanity to the Negro and of pun-
ishment to the rebels who had made the war, and in spite of the appeal to
the most forceful and ruthless economic group in the country, it is doubt-
ful whether this program could have received the support of the un-
vindictive and unrapacious American people if it had been opposed
quietly and persuasively and with the moral insight which Lincoln could
have brought to the task. But President Johnson defended the good cause
with many mistakes in taste and judgment, hardening the moderate men
in Congress against him, and finally alienating the public. Each mistake
was used by his enemies with expert skill.

Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. His father,
a bank porter, died three years later, leaving Johnson in a state of extreme
poverty. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to a tailor, and at sixteen he
moved to Greeneville in eastern Tennessee. When he was eighteen he mar-
ried the charming and superior Eliza McCardle, daughter of a Scottish
shoemaker. They had not a penny between them; but Johnson set up a
tailor shop, and his wife undertook to widen his knowledge of books. This
was not hard, for he had hitherto barely learned to read and write. At
Greeneville there was a little college which allowed Johnson to attend
debating classes, and thus he began to prepare for politics. Meanwhile his
shop prospered and he acquired a small farm and several slaves. His
leisure was given to the Democratic Party, which was then being shaped
and organized by the master politicians who served Andrew Jackson.
* Under Article
I, Section 2 of the Constitution, five slaves counted as three
persons in apportioning representation in the lower House. But in December, 1865,
with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery was abolished every-
where within the United States. Thereafter five southern Negroes counted as five
persons, so if the South were allowed to return to normal political life it would
have more representatives than before the war.
xxii. Congress versus the President 449

After a few years as alderman, and a term as mayor, Johnson was sent to
the Tennessee legislature in 1835. In 1841 he moved to the state senate,
and in 1843 to the House of Representatives at Washington, where he
served for ten years on end. He then had two terms as governor of Tennes-
see and in 1857 was chosen for the United States Senate. This remarkable
and steady rise puzzled observers at the time, and has puzzled biographers,
because Johnson had a talent for making important enemies. Although he
was a steady party man in his voting, he could not abide most of the
Democratic leaders and they could not abide him. He quarreled, not only
with anyone who put on airs, but with anyone who had the manners and
graces of privilege. He was class-conscious in an aggressive, hostile sense,
resenting the rich planters of western Tennessee, and indeed the well-to-do
everywhere. In part, this may have been because of untrue rumors that
he was illegitimate, and in part because a poor farmer in a slave-owning
state had none of the rewarding and warming experience of democracy
which Lincoln found in Illinois.
Yet Johnson was a notable vote-winner. He came from a poor man's
district where his blunt democracy won favor to say nothing of his at-
tacks on the rich. He wished to amend the Constitution to provide for
direct election of senators and federal judges, and to abolish the electoral

college but his great cause throughout the years in House and Senate was
;

the Homestead Act, providing free land in small holdings for actual set-
tlers. Twice he saw his favorite measure defeated by his own party in the
Senate in 1853 and by presidential veto in 1860. When at last the Re-
publican-Union Party passed the bill in 1 862, and Lincoln signed it, John-
son had a right to feel that the long-delayed victory was in good part his.
Although an extreme democrat and a dangerous leveler in the eyes of
most Southern politicians, Johnson never favored the freeing of the slaves
and was a strong foe of the abolitionists. He was in no sense a demagogue.
He merely lacked judgment and charity, so that his remarks about the
rich and the socially pretentious sounded unbalanced. They probably
would have been more extreme, and more hurtful to his career, if his wise
and gentle wife had not been always at his side. But what endeared John-
son to his own constituents, in spite of roughness and seeming coldness,
was his clear pure faith that America could be made a land of boundless
opportunity for all. His own life gave substance to the faith, and he in-
sisted steadily that the remaining barriers to true democracy must be
removed except the barrier of slavery, which as a Southerner he did not
notice.
In the campaign of 1860 Johnson deplored the schism in the Demo-
cratic Party but supported the Southern candidate, Breckinridge. Never-

theless, during the interval before Lincoln's inauguration he sought to

avoid secession by compromise, aligning himself with Senator Crittenden
450 The Price of Union

of Kentucky. And December, when South Carolina was seceding, he

in
made a strong speech for the Union. Southerners called him a traitor, and
he answered with eloquent violence in speeches that made him famous
throughout the North. He had taken his stand, like Lincoln, because he
believed theUnion was the safeguard of democracy. Defeat of the Union,
he thought, would mean defeat for the democratic movement everywhere.
He did not know, as perhaps Lincoln did not know, that victory for the
Union would raise up a new threat to democracy in the form of a greedy
and ravenous capitalism. He hated privilege; yet it was his fate to see the
party of Union victory conquered and enslaved by the abounding privilege
of corporate industry. "Twenty years after the attack on Fort Sumter the
railroads alone represented a greater investment and concentration of
power than had ever the slave interest, and their influence in politics and
in the economic activities of men were scarcely less far-reaching." 7 As

Henry Nevinson said, "the battle of freedom is never done, and the field
never quiet."
During the special session of Congress in July, 1861, the Senate adopted
Johnson's resolution that the war was not for conquest, or for interference
with the rights or institutions of seceding states, but for the defense of the
Union and the Constitution. That was what Lincoln believed until he
died, and what Johnson believed when he became President. That was
what many soldiers believed, especially the men from the Middle West.
But it was not what the politicians who were to rule Congress believed, so
it was not true.

In March, 1862, just before his belated triumph with the Homestead
Act, Johnson was appointed military governor of Tennessee. His views on
the war were so close to Lincoln's that he had often been consulted on the
handling of the border states. Thus, when the North had conquered a
sufficient section of Tennessee so that a government might be installed,
Lincoln sent Johnson to take charge. The post was dangerous for a
Southerner; but Johnson was as brave as he was quarrelsome. His own
eastern Tennessee, Unionist in sympathy, was held by the Confederates.
Johnson had to set up his government in hostile, secessionist Nashville,
where he was despised as a traitor. He ruled firmly, at times harshly; but
he succeeded in building a civil government. Before the war ended,
Tennessee which had been omitted from the Emancipation Proclamation
of January 1, 1863, because it was no longer officially in revolt held a
constitutional convention, abolished slavery, and was ready to re-enter the
Union as a loyal state.
We have seen that Lincoln chose Johnson for the vice-presidency in
1864 because he wanted a Union Democrat who would broaden the base
of the party. On Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, Johnson was ill and
wished to postpone taking the oath. Lincoln was opposed to delay so John-
xxii. Congress versus the President 451

son hurried to Washington. On a doctor's advice he took whisky to fortify

himself against the weather and against exhaustion. He was not used to
drinking and he took too much, with the result that he talked boastfully
and cheaply, giving his enemies a rich theme for future slander.

Although Johnson angered the radicals by keeping Lincoln's Cabinet in-

tact, he also gave them hope during his first days by some very wild talk.
"Treason is a crime and must be punished/' he is reported to have said,
". . and traitors must be impoverished." 8 But he quickly abandoned
.

this attitude and turned to carrying out Lincoln's plans.* By April, 1865,

provisional governments had already been established in Tennessee,

Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia. On May 29 Johnson issued a new
amnesty proclamation which was almost the same as Lincoln's proclama-
tion of December 8, 1863 except that Johnson included among those
who needed special and separate pardon all the ex-rebels who had a tax-
able property of more than $20,000. The new President's distaste for the
rich was undying.
On the day of his proclamation Johnson set up a provisional govern-
ment for North Carolina, and by the end of July all the ex-Confederate
states had been given temporary governors. These governors called state
conventions which were elected by the white men who had been allowed
to take the oath of allegiance. The conventions amended the old state
constitutions, abolished slavery, repudiated the Confederate war debts,
and undid the acts of secession. Elections were then held, and by the
autumn of 1865 new governments were at work in all the rebel states ex-
cept Texas. It was these summer elections, incidentally, which first showed
that the South might have returned to the Union with her two-party
political life intact.
By December the Southern states had ratified the Thirteenth Amend-
ment, which made slavery contrary to the federal Constitution. Unfor-
tunately, they had also passed a series of black codes, defining new rights
and restrictions for the freedmen. These varied in harshness; but in no
case were the freedmen allowed the vote or made eligible for juries. In
some states the penalties for vagrancy, and the apprenticeship laws, were so
framed that they could have led to a form of peonage. Northern friends of
the Negro were outraged, and the radical enemies of Johnson's program
were strengthened. "We tell the white men of Mississippi," said the
*
Blaine, who regretted Johnson's conversion from vengeance to forbearance,
puts the blame for this outbreak of humanity on Secretary of State Seward. Cp.
Twenty Years of Congress, vol. II, pp. 80-86.
452 The Price of Union

Chicago Tribune, "that the men of the North will convert the state of
Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow any such laws to dis-
grace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over
which the flag of freedom waves."
The South would have benefited herself and the nation if she had fol-
lowed Johnson's advice and given the vote to a few educated Negroes. Yet
the testimony is clear, from black man and white man alike, that what the

Negro wanted was not the vote but land and education. While serv-
first

ing as an officer in the Union Army, the grandson of John Quincy Adams
wrote "My impression from what I see, is that emancipation as a govern-
:

ment measure would be a terrible calamity to the blacks as a race. . . .

The blacks must be cared for or they will perish, and who is to care for
them when they cease to be of value?" And the same point was made by
Frederick Douglass, one of the bravest Negro leaders and most fiery
abolitionists, who wrote after the war that the Negro was "free from the
individual master but a slave of society. He had neither money, property,
nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but
the dusty road under his feet. . .He was turned loose naked, hungry,
.

and destitute to the open sky."

Land could have saved him, now that he had "ceased to be of value"
land and education. He longed for both, and begged for both. The
Freedmen's Bureau established hundreds of schools, and Northern charity
helped, and free state education (such as it was in the impoverished
South) was made available for Negroes as well as whites; but nothing was
done on a scale commensurate with the problem. And in regard to land
nothing was done at all. All over the South the ruined planters were sell-
ing their great holdings at bargain prices. The small yeoman farmers and
even the poor whites were buying. Congress had a chance to create eco-
nomic democracy between the races. If the Negro had been made a
property-owner, and if his thirst for learning had been slaked at federal
expense, he would have become a truly free man. As Professors Morison
and Commager say, "a government which found it possible to give forty
million acres of public land to a single railroad might well have purchased
ten million acres for the freedmen."* 9 But neither the Northern capitalist
nor the Republican politician would be helped by making the Negro free
and independent. So they left him "a slave of society," with "nothing but
the dusty road under his feet." And for comfort they gave him the vote,
and sent swarms of "friends" to make sure that he used it the right way.
Troubled by the outcry against the black codes and knowing he would
have a fight when Congress met, President Johnson sent various agents to
study the South in the autumn of 1865 and to tell him what they found.
* From The Growth of the American Republic by Samuel E. Morison and Henry
Steele Commager. Copyright, 1930, 1937, 1942 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
xxii. Congress versus the President 453

With one exception the reports bear out the wisdom of the Lincoln-
Johnson policy. General Grant, for example, wrote as follows :

I am mass of thinking men of the South accept the

satisfied that the

present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have

heretofore divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections
slavery and state rights, or the right of a state to secede from the Union
they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal
arms that man can resort to. I was pleased to learn from the leading
men whom I met that they not only accept the decision arrived at as
final, but, now that the smoke of battle has cleared away and time has
been given for reflection, that this decision has been a fortunate one for
the whole country. . The citizens of the southern states are anxious
. .

to return to self-government, within the Union, as soon as possible.

. .
They are in earnest in wishing to do what is required by the gov-
.

ernment, not humiliating to them as citizens, and ... if such a course

were pointed out they would pursue it in good faith.

We know today that General Grant was right. The South had accepted
defeat, with no thought of revenge or further war. All she wanted was
"self-government, within the Union, as soon as possible." She was not a
Poland, or an Ireland, harboring eternal wrath, eternal purpose to be
free. In 1865 no Southerner would sing a reborn Confederacy with the

implacable hate which burns in the Irish ode to "Dark Rosaleen" :

Oh! the Erne shall run red

With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal and slogan cry,
Wake many a glen serene
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
The Judgment Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you shall fade, ere you can die,

My dark Rosaleen!
The South was prepared to let the Confederacy die, and was even pre-
pared (as Grant said) to admit that her defeat may have been "fortunate
for the whole country" until the North imposed a peace more bitter than
war. The radicals are responsible for the legend of the Lost Cause.
When Congress reassembled on December 4, 1865
by which time Lin-
coln had hopedhave rebuilt the Union so solidly that not even the
to

legislators could undo it Johnson seemed almost to have succeeded in his

great conciliatory task. Reconstruction appeared to be complete. With
454 The Price of Union

one exception, the South had done what was expected of her, and the
North seemed pleased, and the radicals seemed on the defensive. The
black codes were the exception but if the Congress had been interested in
;

the Negro the codes could have been countered by land and education.
"Power follows property/' The family which owns its farm, and lives off
it, is free. And the free man who knows more than his neighbor is

strong. A two-party South would quickly have been bidding for the votes
of property-owning and instructed Negroes. But Congress provide4 a
South wherein ignorant and destitute f reedmen were supported by North-
ern troops in their "right" to vote the Republican ticket.

The first decision of the new Congress was to refuse to hear even the
names of the members-elect from the ex-rebel states. A Joint Committee
of both Houses was then appointed to deal with Reconstruction. It was
dominated by Thaddeus Stevens, who for the next two years imposed his
will upon the nation. He was very old, very near the grave, and was about
to earn the epitaph that his days of power were the most disgraceful in his

country's history.
The Joint Committee gave proof of its sharp wits by inventing a theory
of Reconstruction which allowed it to deny representation to the Southern
states while proclaiming the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by
the governments of those states. Others had thought that the states must
either be in the Union or out of it. If in, they should be represented; if
out, they should not lend their names to an amendment. But the Joint
Committee put forward the "forfeited rights theory/' according to which
no state had ever left the Union, but the people of the rebel states had
lost their political rights just as an individual may lose his civil rights by
committing a crime. This left the Congress supreme, and the Southerners
at the mercy of that erratic body. Congress could confer upon the citizens
of Georgia the "right" to ratify an amendment and deny them the "right"
to be represented. As for the states, they were not dead, yet they did not
seem to be alive. Strangely, uncannily, they lived in a Miltonic limbo,
where
The unaccomplished works of nature's hand,

Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,

Dissolved on earth, fleet hither, and in vain,
Till final dissolution wander here.

Yet Johnson might still have snatched control from the Joint Committee
if he had possessed the guile of Jefferson or the common touch of Lincoln.
xxii. Congress versus the President 455

The came on a bill to extend the Freedmen's Bureau which had

first test

been up by Congress, under the War Department, on March 3, 1865.

set
The Bureau had been authorized for only a year, and although it had
been staffed hastily and often unworthily it had done some useful work.
The freedmen should obviously not be left to their own devices or to the
mercy of the black codes. Until Congress was prepared to plan something
genuinely helpful for the Negro, the Bureau was better than nothing, even
though it was degenerating into a machine to get out the Republican vote.
Johnson was ill-advised to veto the bill, in spite of the fact that the con-
servatives in Congress sustained him. And shortly thereafter he made a

stupid speech abusing the Congressional radicals and alienating his friends
for after four years of humbly serving Lincoln, all members of Congress
would stand together against Executive arrogance.
In March, 1866, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act to protect the Negro
against the black codes and to secure him the vote. The act was perhaps
unconstitutional, since it asserted that the civil rights of the citizen were
to be protected by the federal courts against the laws of the state in which
he lived. Johnson, with his states' -rights views, was forced to veto the bill;
but Congress, with more than a two-thirds majority, overruled him. In
July, a second Freedmen's Bureau Bill was also passed over his veto; and
the Fourteenth Amendment (which in effect would put the Civil Rights
Bill into the Constitution) was drafted by the Joint Committee. The
Southern states whose representatives elected under the President's Re-
construction plan were still waiting at the doors of Congress were told
that the ratification of this amendment was the price of readmission.
Tennessee ratified at once and was grudgingly allowed back into the Union
on July 24, 1866. But the rest of the South rejected the amendment, and it
was rumored that this was on the advice of President Johnson.* If so,
the advice was bad, for the problem of Reconstruction was about to be
put to the people in the dramatic mid-term Congressional elections of 1866.
The radicals took the Fourteenth Amendment for their platform. They
should not have been allowed so good a cause.
The Fourteenth Amendment is the most momentous in the history of
the Constitution, not only because it was the excuse for the defeat of the
Lincoln- Johnson plans for Reconstruction, but because it was later used
by the Supreme Court as a bulwark for corporate property against the

people's efforts to control the new forms of capitalism. Yet the amend-

ment, which was in four sections, sounded innocent and was intended
to be helpful. The first section states that anyone born or naturalized in
the United States is a citizen, and that "no state shall make or enforce

* from Wager Swayne to Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, which

Cp. the letter
says that ratification failed in Alabama because the people were told the President
was against it. Diary and Correspondence of S. P. Chase, pp. 516-17.
456 The Price of Union

any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of

the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws." This was an honest
effort to confer civil rights upon the freedmen, under the protection of
the federal government. It was intended to be revolutionary, to change
the legal relation between the federal government and the states. It was
unsuccessful because it failed to protect the freedmen, and before long
we shall find the Supreme Court returning the enforcement of civil rights
to the states. There they can be enforced only in accordance with the will
of the community, and the radicals had by that time done all in their

power to harden the will of the South against the long-betrayed Negro.
Yet this revolutionary, inefficient section of the amendment, which did
the Negro no good, became an inverted Bill of Rights for monopoly capi-
talism. It was interpreted to mean, not that the federal government should

protect the freedmen, but that it should protect corporations whose

property rights were threatened by state laws. We shall discuss later
whether this was intended by the men who framed the amendment. It
was certainly not intended by most of the men who urged the amendment
upon the public.
The second section says thatif a state denies the right to vote at an

election "to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one
years of age, and citizens of the United States . .the basis of representa-
.

tion therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of

such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-
one years of age in such state." Nothing could be clearer. The radicals
intended that if the South should disfranchise the Negro (that is, the
Republican voter) the Democratic Party would be penalized by a re-
duction of Southern membership in the House of Representatives. Yet in
large parts of the South the Negro has been disfranchised for two gen-
erations, and nowhere has Southern representation been diminished.
The third section of the amendment disqualifies from office, federal or
state, anyone who had held office before the Civil War and who neverthe-
less helped the rebellion. This was meant to put the governments of the

Southern states in the hands of the Negroes, the carpetbaggers, and the
few white natives who opposed the Confederacy. For a short time, with
the help of federal troops, it succeeded. Section Four makes illegal the
payment of any part of the Confederate debt, and adds (perhaps un-
necessarily) that the public debt of the United States "shall not be ques-
tioned." This is the only part of the amendment which has had the in-
tended results.
xxii. Congress versus the President 457

In preparation for the autumn elections of 1866, the friends of conserva-

tive Reconstruction held a meeting at Philadelphia on August 14. It was
called the National Union Convention. It had been planned by Secretary
of State Seward and Boss Thurlow Weed, and the call went out under
the name of the national chairman of Lincoln's Union Party. Under such
auspices the gathering should have been smoothly professional; but it
was muddled and amateurish. Famous and discredited "peace Demo-
crats," or "Copperheads" (like Fernando Wood and Vallandigham ) ,

were first allowed to attend and were later sent away because the pub-
licity had become damaging thus ensuring the worst of both worlds.
Also, there were too many "war Democrats" present, in proportion to
famous Republicans like Seward and Weed. Although the convention
used the name which had been chosen in 1862 by Lincoln's party, and
endorsed the Reconstruction program of Lincoln and Johnson, the radi-
cals in Congress were able to persuade their capitalist friends that a

victory for the National Union Party was really a victory for the Demo-
crats, for the old alliance of rural South and rural West. Such an alliance
might give the public lands to the people instead of to the railroads; it
might resist a quick return to the gold standard and a quick deflation of
the war-swollen currency; it might lower the tariff wall which now sur-
rounded the country; it might refuse to give federal protection to the
Northerners who were buying the South.
Thurlow Weed should have known better than to allow his enemies
to create a confusion of issues. He should have stuck to the one question
which was embodied in the name of the party: was the nation to restore
the Union in dignity and friendship? The currency and the public land
and the tariff could be dealt with later, when America was herself again ;

but Reconstruction, and thus the Negro question, would go wrong for
a long time if they went wrong that year. Yet the National Union Con-
vention was so foolish as to frighten the more aggressive capitalists into
the radical camp. The people were not given a chance to vote for the
simple decency they would perhaps have chosen.
Even more remarkable for so experienced a group, the National Union-
ists made no attempt to capture the local party machines to oust the
radicals from control of the Republican machines wherever possible, and
to oust the Copperheads from control of the Democratic machines. The
voters therefore were faced, in far too many districts, with the choice
between a radical Republican who had fought for the Union and a
458 The Price of Union

"peace Democrat" who called himself a Unionist. The handicap was in

any case too great; but the President made it greater by a campaign trip
in which he repeatedly abused his opponents, argued with hecklers, and
boasted of the poverty from which he had risen.. The realignment of
parties, which had seemed imminent, was halted. Republicans voted for
the radicals, and Democrats for the Unionists. Since Southern Democrats
were not allowed to vote, the radicals in Congress won the two-thirds
majority which enabled them to deprive the President of power, even
the power of the veto.
After the election when was lost Thurlow Weed tried to use the
all
federal patronage to build a Union Party machine. For a time the Presi-
dent co-operated; but it was much too late. A year later, in a letter to
Seward, Weed put the full blame for failure on Johnson. "I followed
the President into the Ditch," he wrote. "I destroyed the consistency of
a long political life. The President for the first month or two of his ad-
ministration had the people warmly with him. He could have overwhelmed
the Radicals. But he has thrown it all away." 10 This was true but in-
complete. The President made every possible mistake; but so did his
friends. If Andrew Johnson had been served as was Andrew Jackson if

a Van Buren and a Blair and a Kendall had been at hand, to organize and
to advise and to write speeches the radicals would have had to meet not
only courage and goodness (which are seldom enough in politics) but a
skill as careful as their own.

The rest of the tale can be Thaddeus Stevens ruled Congress

briefly told.
as an unofficial
prime There
minister.was in effect no President, since
Johnson could be disregarded. The radicals undid the whole of his Re-
construction and started afresh as if the war had just ended. In March,
1867, they passed an act which said there was no legal government in the
South outside of Tennessee. The land was divided into five military dis-
tricts, each under a major general who was responsible for life and prop-

erty. Any state would be readmitted to the Union when it set up a

government based on universal male suffrage and ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment. Since the amendment disqualified from officeholding the
whole of the old political class in the South, voters were to have the
privilege of choosing Negroes, Northerners, or white men who had taken
no part in public life.
At once, military rule replaced the governments which had been elected
in the summer of 1865. Office holders who would be disqualified under
the Fourteenth Amendment were removed by the generals to make room
xxii. Congress versus the President 459

for Negroes or carpetbaggers. Civil courts gave way to military courts,

and the laws of the states were remade by military fiat.
In Washington, meanwhile, a revolution at least as daring was at-
tempted. In spite of the Constitution, the President was deprived of con-
trol of the Army. It was decreed that all military orders must be issued

through a general who could not be removed or suspended by the Presi-

dent. And by means of the Tenure of Office Act, the President was
denied the right to remove civil officials, including the members of his
own Cabinet, without the consent of the Senate. If these laws were to
prevail, the President could not control his own Administration, since
he would have no patronage at his disposal, and was no longer Com-
mander-in-Chief of the Army. Congress was king. And to make the point
clear, when Johnson tried to remove his Secretary of War in defiance of
the Tenure of Office Act the House of Representatives voted to impeach
him.
UnderArticle II, Section 4, of the Constitution, the President can be

impeached for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

And under Article I, Section 3, "the Senate shall have the sole power
to try all impeachments. . . . When the President of the United States
the Chief Justice shall preside: and no person shall be convicted
is tried,

without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present." Eleven

charges were drawn up, ten of them referring in one way or another to
the Tenure of Office Act, and the eleventh accusing the President of at-
tacking Congress in his speeches!
The trial began on March with one of the most able and conserva-
13,
tive corporation lawyers of the day, William Evarts, among the counsel
defending the President. The radicals had at last overplayed their hand.
They had gone too far for their associates in the world of big business.
If Johnson was removed, he would be succeeded under the statute then
in force by Ben Wade, the president pro tempore of the Senate. Senator
Wade, for all his unpleasant manners, was an honest radical. He had not
joined that camp merely to seize power or to betray the South. He
wanted free land for the Negroes, and women's suffrage, and a money
policy which would help the farmer rather than the capitalist. Even
Thaddeus Stevens had disappointed his more rapacious and inexperienced
business friends by intervening to slow down deflation lest the rural Re-
publicans be driven into Johnson's camp. So the business world began
to wonder whether it wished to destroy the presidency and to set Con-

gress free. Presumably, no one really thought Johnson was guilty. The
Supreme Court has since upheld him not only on the Tenure of Office
Act but on the reasoning in his strong, much-hated veto messages. The
question was not whether Johnson had committed "high crimes and mis-
demeanors," but whether the Senate would dare to break him.
460 The Price of Union

On May 16 a vote was taken on the eleventh charge, and ten days later
on the second and third. Each time the radicals had one vote too few
for conviction. Seven Republicans voted with the twelve Democrats in
support of Johnson, and nineteen votes was enough. The attempt to undo
the presidential form of government, and to establish Congress as the
sole policy-maker, had failed. In view of the policy which Congress was
then busily making, the failure may be considered a blessing. The repre-
sentatives of geographic regions and of class interests, meeting together
to barter with one another, can prevent policies which are harmful to
their constituents and can resist mere numerical majorities; but there
has never been a sign in American history that they are capable of mak-
ing, and administering, and maintaining over a sufficient time, a truly
national policy. For those who believe in Congressional rule, the record
of the post-Civil War Congress is even more discouraging than the
record of the Congress which seized power from the weak hands of Madi-
son and made (and almost lost) the War of 1812. The nation then suf-
fered a long period of Congressional government while Presidents Madi-
son and Monroe watched benignly; but nothing occurred to recommend
the system. And in the years after the Civil War America was to undergo
another such period, beginning with the ignoble rule of Thaddeus Stevens.
Once again, there was nothing reassuring in the experience.

Secretary of State Seward played a wise and dignified part in the melo-
drama of these years. Perhaps he was responsible for converting Johnson
to Lincoln's policy, as Elaine charged; in any case, he backed that policy
steadily. And he wrote some of Johnson's best veto messages. And he
made many public speeches supporting the President during the critical
campaign of 1866 meanwhile earning his country's gratitude by adroit
handling of the French invasion of Mexico.
Yet Seward, as we have seen, began his secretaryship eccentrically on
April Fool's Day, 1861, by recommending that Lincoln restore the Union
through the unusual device of making war on most of the Great Powers
simultaneously. He urged that the United States demand immediate ex-
planations (on matters which were nowhere critical) from France, Spain,
Russia, and Great Britain. And if the explanations of France and Spain
were not satisfactory he would at once declare war. He seemed to feel
that the Confederacy would not be able to refuse so pleasing a suicide
and would at once rejoin the family.
Even after Lincoln had calmed him down from this delirium, Seward
could not resist a minor brush with Spain. On May 19, 1861, five weeks
xxiL Congress versus the President 461

on Fort Sumter, Spain suddenly reannexed the Republic

after the firing
of San Domingo from which she had been expelled in 1821. Seward
protested with a clear and able statement of the Monroe Doctrine. But
he was overemphatic at the end.

With profound regret at this unhappy state of affairs [his note con-
cluded], the undersigned has now to fulfill the duty imposed upon him
by the President, and in the name of the government of the United
States of America solemnly protests against the assumption or exercise
of Spanish authority in the island of San Domingo; and this protest
the United States in every case will expect to maintain.

These were stirring words. Since the armies of the two portions of the
once United States were at that time assembling for the first battles of
a mighty war, Spain was not impressed. Furthermore, because of the
Mexican War and all the subsequent talk of further expansion, and in
the light of the Ostend Manifesto, Europe was not inclined to listen grace-
fully to the combination of moralism and bluster with which America
chose to conduct her foreign affairs. Spain therefore replied to Seward
that the people of San Domingo had consented to rejoin the Spanish
Empire which was true, but irrelevant, since the voting had been a
farce and that as for the so-called Monroe Doctrine, this was the first

that the Spanish Government had officially heard of it.

The Government of the Queen neither accepts nor declines this

policy; it limits itself to saying that it does not think this an opportune
time to discuss it, because it does not see the usefulness or convenience
of entering at present into such an examination. 11

Seward was to blame for this rebuff and could do nothing but accept
it. The armies of his own government were learning, at the first battle
of Bull Run, that they could not yet coerce the Confederacy, let alone
the empire of Spain. As had happened once before, however, the black
men and mulattoes of San Domingo now rescued the United States from
a difficult position. Rising in revolt and fighting a savage guerilla warfare,
they destroyed the armies of Spain as they had once destroyed those of
the first Napoleon. By the time the Civil War was ending in America,
Spain was withdrawing from San Domingo.
Seward learned from this experience. In later and far more dangerous
encounters his truculence was suppressed and there came a steady growth
;

in the dignity and strength with which America's views were stated. In
November, 1861, when an enthusiastic Union captain seized two South-
ern diplomats and their secretaries from an English ship at sea, Seward
surrendered them to the British Government, although if he were still
yearning for another and larger war this was his chance. And he was
462 The Price of Union

skillful inwarding off French and English intervention on the side of

the South, especially in making use of the Emancipation Proclamation
to help the Northern cause in Europe. But his real triumph came after
the war was ended, when he gave to the tormented Johnson Administra-
tion its one clear victory. No one could have prevented the French in-
vasion of Mexico; but it took patience and tact and quiet firmness to
get Napoleon III to withdraw peacefully. If Seward had treated that
capricious emperor the way he treated Spain, he might have provoked
a useless war in 1866,
One reason for Napoleon's adventure was the belief throughout most
of Europe that if someone did not bring order and strength to Mexico the
United States would annex it. As early as 1855 the French Minister in
Mexico was writing that Russia and the United States were the two threats
to peace. "Russia," he said in a dispatch on May 15, "aspires to dominate
in Europe in the name of despotism, and the United States to dominate
in America in the name of liberty. The principle of monarchy, imposed
with all its exaggerations and abuses by the sabre of the Tsar and the lance
of the Cossacks, and the democratic principle, imposed by the rifle of
Yankee adventurers, end in the same results, absolutism and tyranny.'* It
seemed to many foreign statesmen that the Americans were as strong as
they had any need to be, that further expansion would endanger the
world, and that the way to prevent such expansion was to block America
from taking Mexico.
This was clearly the view of Napoleon III. As early as 1859, urged by
ill-informed Mexican exiles, he was dreaming of establishing a monarchy
next door to the United States, under the protection of French arms. He
could take no steps while France was deep in the war of Italian liberation;
but the longer he waited the better the excuses which Mexico offered for
intervention. Soon she could pay neither her foreign debts nor the indem-
nities for outrages against foreign citizens.
In the autumn of 1861, France, England, and Spain decided to inter-
vene and collect their money. England insisted that the United States be
asked to join; but the United States refused. Early in 1862, when the
magnitude of French ambitions became clear, the Spanish troops and the
seven hundred English marines were withdrawn. Napoleon alone at last
with his dream still seemed to believe that a monarchy would be popu-
lar in Mexico. He reinforced his armies, and in the summer of 1863 cap-
tured Mexico City. He then offered the crown and the title of Emperor
to the unfortunate Maximilian, younger brother of Francis Joseph of
Austria.
After much thought, and the rejection of much good advice, Maximil-
ian accepted the throne. In May, 1864, he landed at Vera Cruz on a
daring, improbable adventure. He was dependent on the support of French
xxii. Congress versus the President 463

arms; but the French people deplored their Mexican policy. The United
States was biding its time to make trouble. Sooner or later Napoleon must
withdraw; and the Mexicans, who took an unrivaled pleasure in killing
their own rulers, could scarcely be expected to refrain from killing foreign
ones.
In the summer of 1865 with the Civil War won General Grant sug-
gested sending an army against Maximilian. Seward restrained him, know-
ing that the French who opposed Napoleon's policy might turn to his
if their pride was roused. Steady diplomatic
support pressure, he said,
combined with growing discontent at home, must force Napoleon out. All
through the summer he kept reminding the French Government that "the
sympathies of the American people for the Republic of Mexico are very
lively, and that they are disposed to regard with impatience the continued
intervention of France in that country." 12 In January, 1866, the matter was
settled. The French troops were on their way home in the autumn of that

year. Maximilian refused to leave with them, so he was captured and exe-
cuted by the armies of the Mexican Republic.
Thus ended two challenges to the Monroe Doctrine. The Civil War
was clearly the time for European intervention in the Americas. France
and Spain took advantage of their opportunity, but only half-heartedly.
By the time they had both returned home, no foreign office could usefully
pretend that the Monroe Doctrine was unknown. The world had heard
of it, and understood that the Americans meant it, and that they had the

power with which to support it. The doctrine no longer depended entirely
on the British fleet, for although the United States soon reduced her
armies to the size of a small police force, the world did not forget what
those armies had been or what they had accomplished.
 XXIII

Grant Obeys the Senators

JtjEFORE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of 1868, the Republicans wanted

as many Southern states as possible to be reconstructed under the new
plan with the maximum of whites disqualified and with all the blacks
voting. During the summer of 1867, therefore, the generals in charge of
the "conquered territory" hurried to enroll new electorates, which could
choose new constitutional conventions, which in turn could set up new
governments. In were more Negro voters than white on
five states there
the lists; numbers were even; and in four the whites had a
in one the
majority.* The Negroes had been slaves less than three years before. The
whites divided into several groups: Northerners who had moved south
since the surrender; Southern Unionists from the poor districts (like
Andrew Johnson's eastern Tennessee) who had no happy memories of the
old order; and Southern Unionists of the professional and business classes,
who had withdrawn from politics when their Whig Party disappeared and
who were the only substantial, experienced, and well-thought-of citizens
who were now allowed to vote. The same groups were represented at the
conventions, to which only South Carolina sent a majority of Negroes.
By the summer of 1868 all but three states had been readmitted, and
were presumed to be ready, under the eyes of Northern troops, to give
large Republican majorities. (Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia were still
in limbo. And Georgia was soon to be cast out once more, when she re-
fused to allow the Negro members of her legislature to take their seats.)
Each of the restored states had to vote in favor of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment, which was declared ratified on July 28.
The new constitutions, written by the "black-and-tan" conventions,
were on the whole good. In most cases they provided for a more demo-
cratic government than of old, for free-school systems, property rights for
women, tax reforms, state charitable institutions, and the abolition of
imprisonment for debt. A high tribute to these constitutions is the fact
that they were not abolished when the last Northern troops were with-
drawn in 1877 and Southern whites were once more in undisputed control.
* There were eleven states in the
Confederacy ; but Tennessee is omitted from
the present discussion because Tennessee was allowed back in the Union after
ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866.
464
xxiiL Grant Obeys the Senators 465

The same is true of many laws passed during the years of so-called "black
Reconstruction."
Even the extravagance of the Negro governments had its useful side.
Reconstruction would in any case have been expensive, and state bonds
would in any case have had to be floated in the North at ruinous dis-
counts. But the spending was so wild, and fraud so open, that when South-
ern white men regained control they felt justified in repudiating most of
the obligations. More than a hundred and twenty-five million dollars of
debt was shrugged off in this fashion.
It is not the deeds or plans of the "black Reconstruction" which should
be deplored, but the aftermath. And this is less the fault of the men who
sat in the conventions and legislatures than of the members of Congress
who put them there. The American political system has not yet recovered
from that act of malicious folly. If we would understand some of the sys-
tem's eccentricities, we must remember how the Congressional radicals
forced the South into that one-party mold which is only now beginning
to show the first faint signs of breaking.
Under the Lincoln- Johnson Reconstruction, party lines in the South
followed their pre-war pattern. Old-fashioned Unionists mostly Whigs
who had voted for Bell and Everett in 1860 formed the most important
group of white men whose loyalty was accepted by the two Presidents. In
1866 a "Conservative Union Party" was emerging, and would undoubt-
edly have joined with the party of Lincoln if Lincoln had lived. Deprived
of most of their old leaders, blamed for secession, war, and failure, the
Democrats were by no means the dominant party. Yet the strong efforts
of the Republicans to build a Southern organization in 1865 and 1866
failed chiefly because of the threats and abuse poured forth by the radi-
cals in Congress. No Southern white manwho did not hate his neighbors
could be expected to ally himself with a group which gave power to Thad-
deus Stevens. There was, however, a fair number of "radicals" in the
South, in 1866, who wished to move quickly toward Negro suffrage and
toward true economic freedom for the ex-slaves. These might have been
the wisest, most helpful friends of the Negro. They were a minority, but
they were respected. They were not yet associated with the Northern radi-
cals.
After the Reconstruction Acts of March, 1867, and the complete de-
power and prestige, all this changed. Agents
struction of the President's
of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union Leagues took charge of the
enfranchised Negroes and hurried them into the Republican Party, which
at once became thoroughly organized throughout the South. Many South-
ern radicals followed the freedmen, thus destroying their influence for
good among their white neighbors. A Southern organization for bringing
the Negro to full citizenship was permissible, and respectable, and might
466 The Price of Union

have done much good. But white Southerners in the party of Stevens and
Ben Butler could only add to the bitterness of life. So long as the Butlers
set the tone of Reconstruction, affiliation with Republicans was taken as

proof that the purpose was not to raise the Negro but to degrade the white.
In any case, after the Congressional elections of 1866 after the tri-
umph of the radicals and the quick destruction of Johnson there was no
national Union Party which the Conservative Unionists of the South
could join. There were only the Republicans, who were preparing to rule
the South by means of the Negro, and the Democrats, who naturally be-
came more friendly each time the radicals became more ferocious. So
the remaining Southern Whigs, who had withdrawn from public life
rather than join the Democratic Party, were left with nowhere else to go.
By the end of the Reconstruction era the whole South had been forced
into that party except the Negroes, the carpetbaggers (good and bad),
a few poor whites who had been too much oppressed, a few rascals who
hoped to hold office long enough to profit from plunder, and some of the
pro-Negro Southern radicals who ought to have been helping the freed-
man instead of ruining him. Not only had the entire respectable white
South been forced into a single party, but that party had been forced into
a mood of strong reaction. Many years were to pass before an idea which
might be described as "radical" would receive fair treatment in the South,
or before the white electorate was ready to distinguish between treating
the Negro like a citizen and insisting that the Negro dominate.
The more one understands that on the whole the Negro in his sudden
and that among the discredited whites who
brief responsibility did well,
worked with him were honest humanitarians who might have helped him
if wisely guided, the more heartbreaking becomes the treatment of the

Negro by the radicals. He was never given a chance. Innocent, ignorant,

propertyless and hence subject to economic blackmail, abandoned by the
best men North and South and corrupted by the worst, an ugly future was
ensured for him by the Congressmen who took orders from Thaddeus
Stevens, and after the death of Stevens in 1868 from Benjamin Butler of
Massachusetts, who according to Lincoln was "as full of poisoned gas as a
dead dog."
It was wicked to force the Negro to rule the disfranchised white man,
when everyone knew the positions would be reversed as soon as Northern-
ers grew sick of governing their fellow Americans with the sword. It was
wicked to turn the Negro free without property, without security, without
education, without a thought for his future except that he must be bought
or bullied into voting Republican. It was extra wicked to commit both
these cruelties at the same time. No one who wishes to understand politics
should be easily alarmed at human iniquity; but there is a limit beyond
which only mad moralists and the truly corrupt will go. It was the fate
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 467

of the Negro, at the hour of his deliverance, to be sacrificed to an alliance

between those two. He didn't want to run the South. He wanted to learn
how to read, so that the long-forbidden magic of books might be open to
him especially the Bible, whose store of lamentations had already inspired
him to a new literature of song.* And he wanted a few acres of land, with
laws to protect his ownership until he had learned to look after himself.
But his Northern friends wanted to prove their political theories, or they

simply wanted his vote. The moralists thought he could eat freedom, and
live in it, and cover himself with it against the cold, and against unkind-
ness. And the others didn't think at all, beyond the next election. But of
course he gave them his vote, since they asked for it. And the white South
has not forgiven him in eighty years. He still remains the freedman who
was never set free. His own hymns are the best words to do justice to such
misfortune :

Nobody knows the trouble Fve seen;

or,
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land.
Tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go;

or the simple cry for deliverance,

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Coming for to carry me home.

Republicans and Democrats would have been equally glad to appropriate

Grant in 1868. In so far as he had been anything during his curious past,
he seems to have been a Democrat. He had voted against the Republicans
in 1856 on the excellent grounds that he knew Fremont. In 1860 he did
not vote, and in 1864 he supported the Union Party of Lincoln and John-
son. The fact that McClellan's platform condemned the war was probably

enough to turn Grant against the Democratic Party. In January, 1868, he

had an unpleasant public disagreement with President Johnson, and im-
mediately the radical Republicans courted him and flattered him. They
* Booker T.
Washington, who had been a slave, wrote (Up From Slavery, pp.
29-30) "Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any
:

exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an educa-
tion. ... It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and
none too old, to make the attempt to learn. The great ambition of the older
. . .

people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died.'*
468 The Price of Union

soon had him lobbying for them, seeking to persuade Senators to vote for
Johnson's guilt. So when the Republican Convention met at Chicago in
May, Grant was nominated on the first ballot. Ben Wade, who was to be
deprived of the interim presidency by the Senate's refusal to convict John-
son, was denied the vice-presidential nomination. He led for four ballots;
but the prize was then given to Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, Speaker of the
House of Representatives. The extreme radicals were still powerful in Con-
gress and were still allowed to torment the South; but the new rich East-
ern lords of the party viewed them with some alarm. The men of business
naturally preferred Colfax, whose only shortcoming was a tendency to
acquire money in unusual ways.
The platform showed how thoroughly the party was being remade to
meet the issues of a new day. There was little continuity either in doctrine
or in members. Professor Binkley points out that among thirty-four Repub-
lican leaders in the House and Senate at this time, nineteen had once been
Democrats and only fifteen were former Whigs. 1 The post-war party was
to be radical in Reconstruction, generous in favors to industry, and con-
servative in matters of finance. Nothing was said in the platform about the
tariff, for fear of annoying the farmers who did not need protection; but
the silence meant that there would at least be no lowering of the rates.
Reconstruction was to go forward on extreme radical lines; immigration
was to be encouraged so that the price of labor might not too quickly rise
to meet the price of protected commodities; and the party pledged itself
to "hard money," and against the plan to pay off government bonds in
irredeemable notes. Yet this plan, known as the "Ohio Idea," was so popu-
lar in the Middle West that Republicans throughout that region ignored
the platform.
Here was the first sign since the war of the cheap-money problem which

was to trouble the country for fifty years. Rural America especially west-
ern and southern America had not the capital to finance the vast expan-
sion and the which engrossed the post-war generation.
vast reconstruction
The money came largely from the East, or from Europe. And the debtors
burdened at best, and crippled in bad times did not want to pay their
debts in money which was more valuable than the money they had bor-
rowed. All nations face this problem but very large nations face it in an
;

acute form. For if an entire region becomes a debtor, it will probably be-
come a economy as well especially if the lending region is the
colonial
chief industrial centerand has the power to impose tariffs, subsidies, and
a money-system favorable to its own interests. From the days of John
Taylor and the "Old Republicans," this is what the South feared. And
this is what came to pass with overwhelming finality during the Civil War
and the Reconstruction. In fact, Reconstruction was only a new type of
war in \vhich the South faced heavier odds than in the war of blood and
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 469

iron. The stakes of Reconstruction were the economic rules and devices
which Northern business and finance had fixed upon the country while
other men were fighting.
If conservative support was withdrawn from the radicals, and the Dem-
ocratic Party allowed back to power, tariffs would be lowered, land grants
to railways diminished or abolished, and the policy of deflation reversed.
The South must have known that she was abandoning Washington to the
capitalists when she went to war and withdrew her agrarian Senators and
Representatives. Those that take the sword have often perished by the
sword, so perhaps the white South had no just ground for complaint. But
the black South might complain at having its future debauched for the
sake of an economic system pleasing to Northern business. And the West
(still largely rural), which had helped to win the war, might complain at

being subjected to the same colonial status as the South. In fact, the West
did complain. Its loud reproaches are a major note in politics from Grant
to Franklin Roosevelt.
Before turning to the cheap-money problem in the form it assumed in
1868, we should remind ourselves that the troubles of the South and West
were genuine. They varied from the annoying to the desperate the former
in times of relative well-being, the latter in times of crisis. In 1938, describ-

ing the entire period from the Civil War to President Hoover, Professor
Donald Davidson wrote :

Does the northeasterner exclaim in horror at the spectacle of southern

lands eroded and worn-out, at the devilish one-crop system and the
tenant system, at the burned and cut-over mountain slopes, the illiterate
and diseased population, the fierce despair or the terrifying apathy of
large districts, rural and urban? Let him never think that these sins
against good order were always wilfully committed or arose from human
sloth and malignity alone. The ravaged lands of the South are, rather,
a mute testimony, indeed a fearful accusation, against a distant tyranny
of money which the South did not have and was forced to try to
gain. .The southern planter or farmer (and not the southern one
. .

only ) gullied and exhausted his lands, sold his timber, held his tenants
!

pinned with a dollar mark, not because he was a limb of Satan but be-
cause money had to be forthcoming. . .The old outcry against Wall
.

Street is an outcry against a regional foe symbolized by a single institu-

tion. It means that the towers of New York are built upon southern and
western backs. 2

The facts to support this indictment have been collected by Professor

Walter Prescott Webb. He points out that at the end of the Civil War the
South was kept quiet by force, the West was kept quiet by free land, and
the North reveled in the privileges it had long desired a high tariff, in-
:

ternal improvements (that is, railroads) at national expense, abundant

470 The Price of Union

immigrant labor, and a banking system which helped to centralize the

money power.* Quoting Charles Sumner, Professor Webb says that in

Reconstruction days the South was tabula rasa, a clean slate whereon a
Congress of Northern men might write what it chose.

At the end of the War [he adds] the West was also tabula rasa, not
because it had been conquered, but because it had not been developed.
It remained primitive, occupied by wild Indians, buffalo and a few
traders for not yet had the cowboys come swinging their ropes on theft
;

"paint" horses from Texas. The West was still territory, and as such was
subject to Congress, composed of and controlled by men from the North.
Like the South, it, too, was a clean slate. 3

These "clean slates" were a prize worth seizing.Between them they con-
tained the most valuable natural resources that mankind had yet uncov-
ered. To
develop the resources fast, outside capital was needed. America
was in a mood
for speed and sudden wealth, so it is doubtful whether the
natives of the South and West would have protested at being financed
from "Wall Street" even if they had been given the chance. But in any
case the West had too few people to protest, and the South was held down
by Reconstruction ; so absentee capital and ownership became the rule. In
the lively image of a modern writer, the natives of these areas resemble
the runt pig in the litter, which gets only the hind tit.
There was a post-war recession, or small depression, in 1868, which led
as usual to an agrarian demand for inflation. Since the Republican Con-
vention said "No," the Democrats who met six weeks later in New York
felt they should say "Yes," at least in their platform. Undismayed by their

long championship of "hard money" (since the days of Jackson, Benton,

and they turned to the "Ohio idea" which had been popu-
the Locofocos) ,

larized by "Gentleman George" Pendleton of Cincinnati. The idea was a

simple one. During the war the federal government had printed about
$450,000,000 of fiat money, known as "greenbacks." It also issued a
number of United States bonds which were redeemable after five, and
payable after twenty, years. These bonds carried no specific promise of
redemption in gold, so Pendleton and his friends urged that they be re-
deemed at once with new greenbacks. Like the original greenbacks, these
should be legal tender for all debts public and private within the United
States except import duties. The proposal had a double charm to its back-
ers it was inflationary, and it would retire a tax-free investment on which
:

the "money power" was receiving interest in gold. And behind this plan
lay the more widespread "greenback movement," which long outlived the
* The
North, as Professor Webb uses the word, means the war-time Union north
of the Ohio River and excluding the West coast; the South means the Confederacy,
including eastern Texas; the West means the region from the Great Plains to the
Pacific.
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 471

"Ohio idea." This movement welcomed the fact that depreciated green-
backs had been the standard of value since they were first issued in 1862,
and opposed all plans either to reduce them in number or to appreciate
them by resuming specie payments for all paper money.
The Democratic Convention, meeting at Tammany Hall in New York,
adopted the "Ohio idea" and attacked the Republicans for their conduct
of Reconstruction.

After the most solemn and unanimous pledge of both Houses of Con-
gress [said the platform] to prosecute the war exclusively for the main-
tenance of the government and the preservation of the Union under the
Constitution, it has repeatedly violated that most sacred pledge, under
which alone was rallied that noble volunteer army which carried our
flag to victory.
Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved
it, and subjected ten states, in time of profound peace, to military des-
potism and Negro supremacy.

Something might have been made of the Reconstruction issue, but only
under the leadership of a man willing to campaign on the charge that the
Republicans, who claimed to have saved the Union, were in fact dividing
it. This was risky doctrine, and the more cautious leaders were
probably
wise in thinking that the less said about the war and its results the better.
In that case cheap money would seem to be their chance, with "Gentle-
man George" playing the role of an early and uninflammatory Bryan. But
the money question, as we shall see again and again, was so sectional in its
appeal that it divided the parties against themselves rather than against
each other. The Republican platform, for example, favored sound money;
yet the Republican state machines in the Northwest and Middle West let
it be known that they were really for the "Ohio idea." Similarly, the Dem-

ocratic platform favored inflation; yet in order not to throw away the
votes of the populous Northeast the Democrats nominated for the presi-
dency ex-Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, who not only opposed
the "idea" but repudiated that part of the platform.
In spite of this battle among themselves the Democrats might have done
well if they had not given the Republicans too many excuses for "waving
the bloody shirt."* First, the convention at New York City was attended
by two of the Confederacy's most famous cavalry generals (Nathan Bed-
ford Forrest and Wade Hampton) and by Robert Barn well Rhett, "the
father of secession." This may have shown a Christian spirit; but it did not
show political brains, especially since the convention was to condemn
Negro suffrage. Second, the candidate for the vice-presidency was Fran-
cis Preston Blair, Jr., the youngest son of Andrew Jackson's Blair, who had
* This
phrase, which appears to have been imported from Scotland, refers to all
furious oratory designed to revive the hatreds and bitterness of the Civil War.
472 The Price of Union

served brilliantly both as a Congressman and as a Union major general

with Sherman's armies. In a famous letter to a friend who had helped him
save Missouri for the Union, Blair attacked the program of the radicals
as both disastrousand wicked, adding that the people must elect a Presi-
dent who would declare the acts of the Congress null and void, "compel
the army to undo
its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpetbag state

governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own governments

and elect senators and representatives." But the presidential nominee did-
not care to press this issue, and such strong views from a mere vice-presi-
dential candidate allowed the Republicans to suggest conspiracy. "If you
want another Civil War," wrote the New York Tribune, "vote the Blair
ticket."
With Blair, Forrest, Wade Hampton, and Barnwell Rhett to shoot at,
and with a lively desire to avoid stressing the money question for fear of
losing the Middle West and Northwest, the Republicans concentrated on
appeals to war-born hatreds, to patriotism, to gratitude toward "the party
that saved the Union," and to the fear of losing not only office but all the
recent bonanzas such as tariffs and land grants in case "black Reconstruc-
tion" was undone. They had a very strong case so strong that it is sur-

prising how nearly they lost.

There was nothing about Horatio Seymour to excite the country or add
to Republican fears. He was a conservative lawyer who lived at Utica,
New York, and had long refused to take part in federal politics because
he thought both the opponents and the defenders of slavery were too ex-
treme. Under the expert guidance of William L. Marcy, however, he
learned the methods of the Albany Regency and became a useful compro-
miser and appeaser in the Democratic feuds which wracked the state. In
1852 he was elected governor of New York, serving only one term; but in
the midst of the Civil War he was elected again. He became the leader
of the opposition to Lincoln's assumption of emergency powers, and to
the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1868 he did not want the nomination,
and hiscampaign suggests that he did not particularly want the presi-
dency. Yet he was very nearly given it.
The vote was 3,012,833 for Grant, 2,709,249 for Seymour. In the elec-
toral college the vote was 214 for Grant, 80 for Seymour. Grant received

700,000 Negro votes; yet his popular majority was only 300,000. Forty-
one of his 214 electoral votes carne from states in the late Confederacy.
Six of those states were controlled by troops and by oppressive laws: few
Democrats could vote, but all Republicans. Three other Southern states
(where radical rule was not yet established) were still excluded from the
Union. So Seymour might have come close to a popular majority (al-
though he would have lost the election in any case) if the South had been
running its own affairs. In view of the confused, self-contradicting Demo-
4
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 473

campaign, and the emotional and economic appeal of the Republi-

cratic
can arguments, this disappointing result suggests that the Grand Old
Party, "the party of patriotism," was not yet firmly founded. With the
use of force, intimidation, and every available Negro, the Republicans had
elected Grant, a conquering hero. What would happen when they lost
their black allies? They could not keep troops in the South forever; and
even in the North, Republican states were relapsing from the strict radical
creed on race relations. Absurdly, at the height of the "black Reconstruc-
tion," Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas had refused to extend the
suffrage to the Negro. If this trend continued, where were the votes of
gratitude to be garnered in the future?
Such thoughts led to the Fifteenth Amendment, which was proposed by
Congress to the state legislatures in February, 1869. "The rights of citizens
of the United States to vote," says the amendment, "shall not be denied
or abridged by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition
of servitude." This was not what the radicals would have chosen, for it
did not confer the vote finally and forever on the Negro; but it was the
best they could get. Even the Northern states objected to federal inter-
ference with suffrage laws, and the Constitution did not provide for
amendments which would only affect the South.In this negative form the
amendment was useless. Like the other devices for securing the black
man's rights, it was soon nullified.

On the day Grant became President, the American people watched and
waited almost with a sense of awe. After Lincoln, here was the greatest
man the North had discovered during the war: strong, stubborn, quiet,
and of pure integrity. The country believed that the wrangles of the John-
son regime would be succeeded by order and firmness within the Repub-
lican Party, by order and firmness and kindness in dealing with the South,
by smoothness and speed in cleaning up the debris of long years of fight-
ing, and above all by
"reform." The nation was in a mood for more seemly
government, aware that the public finances were chaotic, the tariff a
scandal of special privilege, and the civil service inefficient even by the
modest standards of American politics. All this, men thought, would be
put right by an honest President who could not be frightened and who
knew how to insist on his own way. Seldom has there been such a "tidal
wave of expectation," as Henry Adams described it, and never has a wave
withdrawn more rapidly, or left behind a sorrier detritus: le souvenir
cuisant de son limon amer.
In a sense, the disappointment was the people's own fault. Grant pos-
474 The Price of Union

sessed all the qualities that were ascribed to him, and upon which so many
hopes were built; but the qualities were pathetically insufficient for his
new job. Once and for all, in the harshest and most expensive school, the
United States was to be taught that a good President must be a good
politician, that politics is a subtle and difficult profession, and that one
way to unfit a man for the profession is to train him to be a soldier. Gen-
eral Washington was not really an exception, for he had rather less mili-
tary training than many civilians in the modern world. General Jacksoft
was not really an exception, for he was a leader of frontier militia, which
means simply a leader of men; and in the White House he surrounded
himself with a band of sensitive politicians. They taught the aging autocrat
what the people wanted, and he taught the "Kitchen Cabinet" how to use
the presidency to accomplish the people's will. But poor muddled Grant
did not even know what a President was intended to do, and if he had
known he could not have done it. Both by training and temperament he
was doomed to be the dupe of special interests, and of the trickiest men in
Congress. He never could take advice. He never could regard even the
smallest opposition from his supporters as anything but treason as if an
officer in the midst of battle had begun to query his orders. He never
could understand the nature of political pressures. He never could be-
lieve that a corrupt and faithless man might meet him smilingly and

betray him with praise. He suspected his real friends because they argued
with him; he trusted his enemies because they told him he was right. Few
men have been more easily disarmed by flattery.
The first decisive act of a new President is the choice of his Cabinet. As
we have seen many times, this is a delicate task, requiring expert knowl-
edge of the rivalries (and of the relative weight of opposing factions) in
the state machines. Grant had no such knowledge; but he had a store of
good will upon which he could have drawn if he had been willing to ask
for help. He consulted nobody in many cases not even the people he
intended to name. The result was a list of appointments which at once
told the Congress all it wished to know (and more than it had dared to
hope) about Grant's incapacity to govern. No man who could select such
a Cabinet could build a strong Administration, or uphold the national
interest against the scuffling of class lobbies and local machines. Congress
relaxed, happy in the knowledge that it would not have to conquer a
popular President before continuing its own wayward rule.
There was nothing bad about Grant's selections, except that they did
not compose a political Cabinet at all. They were merely a group of friends
and benefactors whom he was pleased to reward. There were men of
ability on the strange which was given to a startled country two days
list,

after the inauguration. And

there were no downright rascals. Later, with
morse experience, Grant was to do much worse, and to appoint men who
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 475

were both incompetent and deeply corrupt; but never again would he
alarm his friends so thoroughly as with this first revealing deed.
The President's choice for Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Stewart
of New York, was a sample of his political folly. Stewart was a native of
Northern Ireland who had settled in America at the age of twenty and
become the owner of the largest retail store in the world. Very rich, very
charitable, and very niggardly with his employees, Stewart had contrib-
uted heavily to Grant's campaign expenses and to a fund for buying Grant
a house. There is no reason to think he would have been a good Secretary
of the Treasury, and he could bring no political strength or experience to
the Administration; but he would have been honest and able. Unfortu-
nately, he was ineligible. The law of 1789 which created the Treasury
Department forbade a man engaged in business from holding the post of
Secretary.
When Grant was told of the law he asked Congress to repeal the section

disqualifying Stewart. Congress refused, precipitating the first disaster of

the Administration for the low politicians wanted George S. Boutwell at
the Treasury. An extreme radical, a bitter enemy of the South, and either
dishonest or stupid to the point of disgrace, he could be counted on to
forward their plans. While Grant was confused at the loss of Stewart, the

spoilsmen closed on him and flattered him into appointing their man.
Within a few months Boutwell of Massachusetts, who had taken a leading
part in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, allowed the Treasury and
the dazed President to be caught in the "Black Friday" shame, of which
Henry Adams wrote: "The worst scandals of the eighteenth century were
relatively harmless by the side of which smirched executives, judici-
this,

ary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and people, all the great active
forces of society, in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption." 5
Grant was more fortunate in his second thoughts on the Department of
State. He began by nominating an old friend who had helped him to his
first command in the Civil War, and who only wanted the appointment

for a few days. Then, after some wavering and crossed purposes, he set-
tled on Hamilton Fish of Garrison, New York, a man who revived in his
own person the golden youth of the Republic. Learned, urbane, aristo-
cratic,with a mind of excellent shrewdness, he remained as Secretary of
State to the end of Grant's two terms. To a Cabinet which was forever
changing, and usually for the worse, he gave continuity. To a party which
seemed bent on throwing away the gratitude of a nation, he gave unfal-
teringly wise advice on domestic as well as foreign affairs, and the price-
less asset of success in at least one field. He brought no political strength
at the time of his appointment; but before his long term was out the
weight of character and of disciplined mind had earned him authority to
reach outside his own department, and sometimes to save the Administra-
476 The Price of Union

tion from mistakes even more gross than those which were committed.
Thequestion has been raised how such a man could endure such sur-
roundings. The answer lies in the splendor of the hopes which inspired his
foreign policy. The relations between the United States and England were
dangerously bad when he came to office, and they were degenerating
under the influence of plans for the acquisition of Canada, cherished by
the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, Charles
Sumner. Eight years later the relations between the United States and
England were based firmly on good sense and good deeds, cemented by the
most successful and delicate arbitration of modern history.
All men have their ideals [writes Allan Nevins] whereby we judge
them. Zach Chandler had seen the vision of 200,000 American veterans
marching into Montreal. To Sumner had come a vision of his statue
rising above the St. Lawrence, the architect of Manifest Destiny and the
grand reviser of international law. The simple, unimaginative gentle-
man from Garrison had formed a simple, unimaginative ideal, devoid
of martial pomp, personal vanity, or nationalistic glory: the ideal of not
two but three great kindred democracies at peace, their differences
justly settled, their paths stretching side by side into the remotest
future. 6

In such a cause a good man could bring himself to breathe the air of
Grant's Washington, and thus to purify it somewhat, for the influence of
one such man passes understanding.

Long before the presence of Hamilton Fish could make itself felt, the
worst of the Congressmen had begun to take over the Administration.
Grant was just what they wanted: an incompetent popular hero. For a
time at least, the magic of his name would disinfect their crimes, while
the abundance of his ignorance would ensure that the crimes went un-
challenged.
Even if Grant had known the forces which surrounded him, and the
laws to which those forces moved, he would have been vulnerable to
pressures from Congress for two reasons. First, he had
been trapped by the
radicals into lobbying for their cause against Andrew Johnson, thus weak-

ening himself as a representative of the nation against their local greeds

and fanaticisms. Second, in so far as he had any political ideas, he seems
to have accepted the old Whig doctrine of the supremacy of the legisla-
ture in making policy. The moderate and sensible Senator John Sherman
of Ohio, younger brother of the Union general, put the doctrine suc-
cinctly: "The executive department of a government like ours should be
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 477

subordinate to the legislative department. The President should obey and

enforce the laws, leaving to the people the duty of correcting any errors
committed by their representatives in Congress." 7 This is as misleading as
some of Jefferson's remarks on the same subject; but Sherman meant what
he said, whereas Jefferson did not. Jefferson was never content to recom-
mend a policy, and then to wait for Congress in its wisdom to decide. He
knew that "the people" were helpless to correct "any errors committed by
their representatives in Congress," unless they could speak with the voice
of the President or of the national party for which the President is
spokesman. Otherwise they had no voice at all, as a nation. They had only
the many voices of their local communities. And if the people of Kansas
and Nebraska and Iowa were outraged by the dominating voice of Penn-
sylvania and New York, they had nowhere to turn except toward the
White House, or toward a man whom they hoped to put in the White
House.
When Victor Emmanuel opened the Piedmontese parliament on Janu-
ary 10, 1859, prepared at last to fight for a united nation, he said that he
could no longer ignore il grido di dolor e the cry of pain that came to
him from all parts of Italy. This was the traditional use of monarchy.
There was no one to hear that cry if the throne was unwilling. And in
America there is no one to hear it when the White House is deaf. All great
Presidents must carry through their four-year terms the burdens of a
democratic minister and the burdens of a people's king as well. Jefferson
knew this; but John Sherman and President Grant did not. They thought
that out of goodness of heart Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania or Senator
Conkling of New York would be moved to legislate, not in the interests of
his own career or even of his own constituents, but in the interests of
people who lived thousands of miles away. Or else they thought that the
humble voters of the empty West or the impoverished South the farmers
and the country lawyers and the merchants at the crossroads stores could
bring as much pressure to bear upon Congress as could the lordly Senators
of the Eastern plutocracy.
Representative George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts described the po-
which Grant soon found himself.
sition in

The most eminent senators [he wrote], Sumner, Conkling . Fre- . .

linghuysen, Simon Cameron . . would have received as a personal

.

affront a private message from the White House expressing a desire that
they should adopt any course in the discharge of their legislative duties
that they did not approve. If they visited the White House, it was to
give, not to receive advice?

Andrew Jackson would have ridden down these "eminent senators," to

the applause of the large and decent majority who did not want a policy
478 The Price of Union

of ravage but who were helpless under a President incapable of "express-

ing a desire." Jefferson and Lincoln would have outcontrived them, de-
stroying the few who stood to fight but bringing the rest amiably into their
own camps. Washington would have been so surprised at their lack of
moral accountability that he might have shocked them into grace, or at
least into silence. But Grant became their false front and their tool. His
best instincts, and many of his most high-minded servants, were sacrificed
to these men. The tariff policy of his Administration was a sad example%
The conflict between the national interest and special local interests
becomes clear in every tariff debate. Unless the President stands for the
nation, no one with sufficient power will do so. When Grant became Presi-
dent he inherited an ill-planned, hurried, wartime tariff structure which
everyone who understood the subject knew was excessive. The country was
still accustomed to thinking in terms of a moderate tariff. The Middle-

western farmers, and consumers everywhere, and such important news-

papers as the New York Post and the Springfield Republican, were asking
for reductions. Furthermore, Grant had inherited from Lincoln's Admin-
istration the many-sided, expert and persuasive David A. Wells, Special
Commissioner of Revenue. Wells' s annual reports exposed with fresh lucid-
ity the evil of the existing tariffs and their tendency to breed monopoly.
Although his own views went further toward free trade than a Republi-
can Administration could be expected to go, he was not making policy he ;

was exposing facts, and doing it with a combination of clarity, knowledge,

and ardor which is seldom found in the field of taxation.
Grant could have earned the nation's gratitude by supporting a moder-
ate downward revision. But Boutwell wanted an increased tariff for his
friends in industry, and so did most of the "eminent senators." As a result,
not only did the Act of 1870 increase many of the most indefensible rates,
but the President abolished the office of Special Commissioner of Revenue,
so that the intelligent and informed Wells could no longer harass the
lobbyists with information. Grant thereby set the pattern for many dis-
tasteful tariffs which were to follow, not designed to meet the proper
needs of industry, or to serve the national community, but to enrich small
groups of men who could be counted on to repay the favor. One need not
explore the merits of protection or of free trade in order to feel sure that
this is no way to make laws. Yet this is the way which Congressmen choose
unless a popular President, in control of the party machine, steadily insists
that they lift their thoughts above the demands from the home district and
consider the fate of the nation and of the world. It is not reasonable to
criticize a Congressman, who elected to represent his district, for repre-
is

senting it. Perhaps it is equally unwise to criticize a President, who is

elected to represent the nation, for doing so. If he refuses, who else can
attempt the task?
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 479

An even sorrier example of the betrayal of presidential duty was Grant's

attitude toward the South. He had received many votes from the follow-
ers of Lincoln, who thought the war had been fought for the Union (and

also, in the end, for the abolition of slavery), not for the animosities of
Stevens andWade and Sumner. These voters felt, like theDemocrats, that
they wanted peace with the South, and an end to the sordid buying of
votes at the price of stored-up hatreds against the Negro. They expected
Grant to be firm, and to accept no "black codes" that might restore a
semi-slavery; but they also thought he meant what he said in his letter
accepting the nomination for President: "Let us have peace." The big
majority deplored the injection of poison into old wounds. In April, 1869,
when Grant recommended to Congress that Virginia and Mississippi be
allowed back into the Union on terms that would not discriminate against
former rebels, the country was glad. Grant was praised, and Congress acted
at once. For three months the mephitic atmosphere of Washington seemed
cleaner, and the nation dreamed it could find its way back to the mood
of Appomattox. Then Grant the strong, the stubborn, the man who
could do what he wanted and who held the hearts of the people bowed
to the radicals.The hopes of reconciliation and of goodness vanished.
On July 13, at a Cabinet meeting, the pressure began to descend upon
the President. Cries of distress had come from the carpetbag governments
which would be ousted if the South were allowed to go free, and more
cries from the party machines in the North who knew the Republicans
might soon lose a national election if the white South could vote. So at
the meeting in July, Boutwell attacked the recent steps toward concilia-
tion. Grant was strengthening the Democratic Party, he said, and North-
ern Republicans were angry. All through the summer the pressure on
Grant increased. Professor Nevins points out that the good men in the
Cabinet represented only themselves, with no backing from party ma-
chines, and that "the moderate press was asleep to the danger; the
moderate voters were unorganized. But the Radicals attacked in battal-
9
ions, and with the weight of the whole party mechanism behind them."
By December, when the Congress met, the President had once more
been conquered. He allowed the harshest conditions to be attached to the
re-entry of Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas and of Georgia, who had
been to all intents admitted, and then expelled again when she expelled
the Negro members of her legislature. Furthermore, a proclamation of
general amnesty which Grant had been planning for months was now in-
definitely shelved.
The national community and the national interest had been denied a
voice. There was no cause for surprise that the little leaders of the state
and city machines should put the success of their party before the moral
health of the nation. They were busy with local jobs and local interests,
480 The Price of Union

neither of which seemed to require a national view. But the President was
not "getting out the vote" for an alderman or a police-court magistrate ;
he was not seeing to it that the flow of small favors to families in the
poorest districts was sufficient to engender gratitude. That useful work had
to be done, and there were men to do it ably and with enthusiasm. The
President's work was also important, and there was no one else to carry it
on. // grido di dolor e the South cried for relief and the nation for mag-
nanimity; but the "eminent senators" had persuaded Grant that he shouljl
leave policy to the Congress.

Grant was born in 1822 in an Ohio village. His father owned a tannery
and a farm. During his ten years at school Grant spent his spare time
working on the farm, chiefly in charge of the horses. By his own testimony
he understood horses better than people, and it seems fair to add that he
also liked them better. He had a distaste for killing or wounding horses
which did not influence his relations with men.
When he was seventeen his father got him an appointment to the
United States Military Academy, where he was undistinguished as a
scholar but outstanding as an equestrian. Perhaps because of this he was
assigned to an infantry regiment. Soon the Mexican War gave him a
chance to practice his profession but although he was an excellent officer
;

he did not like the Army and he did not approve of the war. "I have never
altogether forgiven myself for going into that," he wrote in his old age. "I
do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the
United States against Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a
youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign."
The first rumors of Grant's heavy drinking date from the Mexican War.
Lonely, shy, uncompanionable, moody, taking no pleasure in the work
which he did well, he seemed fated to become a hard drinker. Marriage
might have saved him. At the end of the war he did marry the girl to
whom he had been engaged for four years; but they were soon parted once
more by the demands of army life. Julia Grant gave birth to a son, and
when Grant was ordered to the Pacific coast via the plague-infested Isth-
mus of Panama the trip seemed too dangerous for her to take. So Grant
found himself in a series of desolate posts, still lonely and bored, and with-
out even hard work to keep him busy. In 1854, having been promoted to a
captaincy, he drank himself out of die Army. He borrowed money for his
passage East from his classmate, Simon Buckner, whose troops he was to
capture in his first great battle of the Civil War.
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 481

The next seven years were the strangest even in Grant's astonishing life.
He joined his family at St. Louis, where he gave every sign of being a
broken man. He tried to farm, but couldn't. He tried to sell real estate,
but couldn't. He was finally given a job by his two brothers who kept a
leather store in a small town in Illinois. Even as a clerk he was no good.
Yet when the war came, this half-alive failure, whose mind and soul had
seemed asleep for thirty-nine years, woke like the prince in a fairy tale
from whom an old enchantment has been struck. Nobody knows what
woke him. He did not like war. He hated armies. Years later he was to
astonish Bismarck at a military review by saying, "I never went into the
army without regret and never retired without pleasure." He had no po-
litical opinions, even about slavery. His wife owned two slaves, and in 1862

he wrote to his father: "I have no hobby of my own in regard to the

Negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage." Perhaps it
was the attack on the Union that brought Grant to life.
At first it seemed as if he had awakened too late. His request to the
adjutant-general at Washington for command of a regiment went un-
answered. But his friend Elihu Washburne Republican Congressman,
and a leading citizen of the town where Grant worked as a clerk took
him to the state capital and induced the governor to make him a colonel.
Two months later Washburne persuaded Lincoln to make Grant a briga-
dier general. This is the man whom Grant in 1869 appointed Secretary of
State "for a few days." If Washburne had wanted the job for a few years
he would doubtless have had it; but he preferred to be Minister to France.
From the day Grant rejoined the Army his fortunes improved, though
if it had not been for Lincoln this second chance would also have ended

badly. In February, 1862, Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee

River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland the keys to the line guard-
ing the enemy's supply depot at Nashville. In April he moved south
through Tennessee to fight the battle of Shiloh, which almost ruined him.
He knew that a large, well-led Confederate army was near, yet he allowed
himself to be surprised. He was saved by lucky reinforcements and by the
death in the midst of the battle of Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the
great men and great generals of the South.
The Shiloh were severe. The press and the politicians turned
losses at

against Grant, revived the story of his heavy drinking, and raised a clamor
for his removal, or for his summary dismissal from the Army. In Congress
the lone voice of Washburne supported him. Alexander McClure (the
Pennsylvania politician who had helped effect Lincoln's nomination in
1860 and who was a wise and cautious influence in the party) called at
the White House to add his voice to the general censure. He found the
President worn out, but ready as always to listen.
482 The Price of Union

appealed to Lincoln for his own sake [wrote McClure years later] to
I
remove Grant at once, and, in giving my reasons for it, I simply voiced
the admittedly overwhelming protest from the loyal people of the land
against Grant's continuance in command. I could form no judgment
during the conversation as to what effect my arguments had upon him
beyond the fact that he was greatly distressed at this new complication.
When I said everything that could be said from my standpoint, we
had
lapsed into silence. Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very
long time. He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a torife
of earnestness that I shall never forget: "I can't spare this man; he
10
fights."

Lincoln was accustomed to generals who did not fight, but who talked,
"I don'tknow what to make of Grant," he said on another occasion; "he's
such a quiet little fellow." Grant was five feet eight, and slightly stooped.
He had cold blue eyes and a big jaw hidden behind a scrubby, messy,
light-brown beard which went well with his scrubby, messy uniform. Lean
and tough, he weighed only a hundred and forty pounds.
No wonder Lincoln found Grant inscrutable. As in his youth, he was
still unsocial uncommunicative, an enigma in mind and soul.
and retiring,
The most devoted members of his staff did not know what he was think-

ing, or whether he was thinking. Years later, in Washington, Henry

Adams wrote :

A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the
fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but
one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type Garibaldi. Of
the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in
both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted. The
type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to
the cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man. 11

The emphasis on energy was doubtless correct; yet if Grant's mind was
primitive, it was also clear as icewhen it dealt with military problems.
When the armies were struggling and dying at Shiloh, in April, 1862,
Admiral Farragut was forcing the river defenses of the lower Mississippi.
On May 1 New Orleans fell to the Union troops which Farragut had
transported. The unhappy town was occupied and governed by Ben
Butler, who for the time being was a general. This left Vicksburg a
hundred and fifty miles to the north the last rebel stronghold on the
Mississippi River. If Vicksburg were conquered the Confederacy would
be cut in two. For twelve months Grant tried plan after plan against the
strong defenses, but was always thrown back. Finally, with grim daring,
he crossed the river, moved his army south of the town, and recrossed into
enemy territory with inferior forces and no communications. Rear Ad-
xxiii. Grant Obeys the Senators 483

miral Porter, meanwhile, had run the batteries of Vicksburg with his gun-
boats and transports or Grant would have been marooned on the west
bank.
The great gamble succeeded. On July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered;
"the Father of Waters again went unvexed to the sea"; Grant became a
national hero, a major general in the Regular Army, and shortly there-
after the commander of the Northern forces from the Allegheny Moun-
tains to the Mississippi. One of the armies he inherited was being starved
into submission at Chattanooga. Grant not only freed the army, but on
November 25, at near-by Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, his
troops won a victory which opened the road for Sherman toward Atlanta.
Grant was now commissioned a lieutenant general and put in command
of the armies of the United States. He made a single plan for the scattered
Union armies, and at last the war was fought with co-ordination. In May,
1864, the Army of the Potomac attacked General Lee, the Army of the
James attacked Lee's communications, and the Army of Tennessee set out
for Atlanta. Thenceforth the hammering was steady and increasingly
harsh. Slowly, Grant cut the Confederacy into pieces and kept its armies
so busy that they could not reinforce each other but were destroyed one
by one. Lee frequently outmaneuvered him and sometimes outfought him;
but after the spring of 1864 Lee never had the initiative.
When the end came, in April, 1865, Grant was at his splendid best:
chivalrous and soldierly. He had already shown, at the fall of Vicksburg,
his good temper and his pride in protecting the feelings of beaten men.
His conduct at Appomattox has become one of the legends which gives
the country strength. "He went as to his own surrender," writes Lloyd
Lewis, "dust and ashes over his mussy uniform, a private's stained overcoat
upon his back, looking, as he entered, like a Missouri farmer who had by
mistake crawled into a blouse that carried, unnoticed, three little silver
12
stars on its shoulders." Finding Lee in full-dress uniform with shining
sword, Grant explained (not sarcastically, but simply) that he had been
too hurried to dress properly. Then he wrote out his terms the officers to
:

keep their arms, the men to surrender them; all to give their paroles and
to go home, not to be disturbed so long as they honored their word. Lee
asked if the cavalrymen and artillerymen who owned their horses
might keep them. Grant said he would "let all the men who claim to own
a horse or mule take the animals home with them." "This will have the
best possible effect upon the men," said Lee. The Union rations were then
shared with the Confederate troops and the brave part of the war was
ended.
484 The Price of Union

It is good to recall at least these outlines of the years of Grant's greatness,

lest too much injustice be done by concentrating on the years of his failure.
After Appomattox the fire which had burned so bright, so briefly, began
smoldering again. The enchanted prince went back to sleep. He was re*
placed by the man who had been unable, before the war, to hold the
humblest job except by nepotism. The Grant of the Civil War did not
reappear until as an old man he sat down to write his Memoirs while
dying of cancer. His son had become involved with a scoundrel and had
started a banking and brokerage firm to which he had persuaded the
General to lend his name. The firm failed for sixteen and a half million
dollars. Ferdinand Ward, the partner, was sent to prison for ten years.
Grant lost everything he owned, and everything his family owned, and the
savings of many old soldiers who had invested in the glory of his legend.
"I have made it the rule of my life," he said pathetically, "to trust a man

long after other people gave him up; but I don't see how I can trust any
human being again."
Destitute in his old age as he had been in his youth, Grant was told to
his surprise that he could make money for his family by writing an auto-
biography. Tormented by pain from cancer in the throat, miserable in his
disillusion, he suddenly revived the old magic of energy and of clear
thought. Almost five sixths of the Memoirs are devoted to the Civil War.

Nobody, reading them, can believe there was anything accidental about
Grant's success. The accident, the inexplicable accident, is the magnitude
of his many failures. To some of these we must now return.
 XXIV

Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making

JL HE FRAUDS and Grant era have been described so often

thefts of the
that there is no need Yet the major scandals must be
to review the details.
mentioned, for they help us to understand a breakdown in government
which came close to discrediting American institutions.
We have already mentioned "Black Friday," a disaster which Boutwell
permitted to smirch the Administration in the autumn of its first year.
The Friday was the twenty-fourth of September, 1869; it marked the
climax of an effort by Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr. the most unseemly
of the New York money-men to corner the ready supply of gold in the
United States. Gold, as a currency, had been almost driven out of circu-
lation by the depreciated greenbacks; but there was trade in gold on the
New York Exchange, since it was needed by businessmen for their dealings
abroad. The New York banks held only $14,000,000 in gold. A corner in
the commodity seemed easy, if the United States Treasury would refrain
from interfering. So Grant's brother-in-law, who was part of the plot, in-
troduced the New York gamblers to the President.
Perhaps because of his unhappy past, the mere sight of a very rich man
was a pleasant experience for Grant. Gould and Fisk were intolerable,
even to the unexacting society of New York; but Grant enjoyed their
company. In June, 1869, he was entertained by these rococo knaves on
one of Fisk's steamboats. He showed no resentment although he did not
answer when they tried to learn from him the future gold policy of the
United States Government. In the same month^ Gould persuaded the
President to appoint Daniel Butterfield an old friend of the financier's,
but a man with no qualifications whatever to the assistant-treasuryship,
in charge of the New York sub-treasury. Confident that Butterfield would
stay with them to the end, reassured by the President's mildness when they
sought to extract government secrets, and doubtless still more reassured by
the wide incompetence of Boutwell, the conspirators went ahead. It seems
incredible that they should have tried to corner gold without definite as-
surances from the Treasury, which could of course break them at an hour's
notice. It is now clear that the only government official they had bought
was the unhappy Butterfield, who could not make policy, though he might
briefly delay its execution. They must have assumed that the President
485
486 The Price of Union

and the Secretary of the Treasury were too fuddled or too stupid to under-
stand what was happening. To the alarm of the nation, they were very
nearly right.
On September 2, Gould began buying gold. On the fifteenth Fisk joined
in with heavy purchases. By the twenty-third they had lifted the price
from 134 to 144.

Bankers' bills . were offered without takers at 105*/i; merchants'

. .

billswere unsaleable at any price. This meant that the foreign trade of
the nation had come to a dead stop; that commodities offered for ex-
port could not be sold; that goods ready for shipment could not be
shipped; that vessels half-laden received no more cargo; that clerks,
warehousemen, stevedores, sailors, and the rest of the great army em-
1
ployed in our export trade were being thrown into idleness.

Meanwhile, ten days before matters had reached this stage, Greeley's
New York Tribune foretold the plan and called on Boutwell to intervene,
adding that it was the duty of the Treasury to sell
gold and break the plot.
Boutwell visited New York and discovered that the Tribune was right in
its facts. He felt, however, that it was the "duty" of the Treasury to keep

hands off; so he went back to Washington, leaving the nation at the

mercy of the two millionaires. By Friday, the twenty-fourth, they had
driven gold to 160. Hundreds were ruined, thousands grievously hurt, and
in every trading community across the world the livelihood and security
of harmless men was damaged.
At last Grant and Boutwell acted. The Treasury telegraphed an order
to sell four million dollars of gold, and within a few minutes the price was
back to 135. Butterfield may have warned Gould, who sold in time. Fisk
was caught, but repudiated his contracts. Nothing could lower his reputa-
tion or that of his friends; but the renown of the President of the United
States was grievously hurt.
The next scandal concerned the greatest engineering feat in American
history: the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Work had
begun in 1864, under two companies: the Central Pacific working east
from Sacramento and the Union Pacific working west from Omaha. In
1869 the roads met at Promontory Point, 53 miles west of Ogden. The
Union Pacific had built 1086 miles of track hastily graded and ill-bal-
lasted as compared with the Central Pacific, but still workable. The conti-
nent had been bound together with steel and the nation was proud until
it discovered how the Union Pacific had been financed.

The federal government had given the railroad 13,900,000 acres of land
along its right of way (an area more than two and a half times the size of
Massachusetts), and had loaned it $27,000,000 in addition. This loan, plus
the sale of first-mortgage bonds, provided the company with more than
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 487

enough to pay for the whole construction; but men were avid gamblers in
those days and such conventional financing did not satisfy them. The pro-
moters of the Union Pacific bought a Pennsylvania corporation which had
a charter permitting it to do almost anything, changed its name to the
Credit Mobilier, and made a contract with themselves to build the Union
Pacific at a price that allowed them a notable profit. This might have
caused no comment, and no investigations, except that a government loan
was involved. Even so, the company felt safe, for one of its chief officers
was Oakes Ames of Massachusetts, a member of the House of Representa-
tives. When Congress began to criticize, Ames took 343 shares of Credit
Mobilier stock and sought to divide them among Senators and Repre-
sentatives. He sold the stock at par value, although it was worth twice as
much. If a favored Congressman was short of money, he was told he could
pay out of dividends an accurate statement, since in the year 1868 the
dividends came to 805 per cent. Only 60 per cent was in cash, the rest in
Union Pacific stock and first-mortgage bonds.
In January, 1868, Ames wrote to his associates, "I don't fear any inves-
tigation here. I have used this [the shares] where it will produce most good
to us, I think." And later he added, "I have found there is no difficulty
in inducing men to look after their own property." He was probably right.

Congress would probably have remained quiet. But a quarrel among the
promoters, and an attempt at blackmail, ended in a leak to the press. By
that time the company had wound up its affairs, with a profit of $23,000,-
000 on an investment of about a million. The results of the belated investi-
gations by Congress were summed up in the Nation in January, 1873:
"Total loss, one senator; badly damaged and not serviceable to future
political use,two vice-presidents and eight congressmen. The condition of
Ames's reputation language is inadequate to describe." The Vice-Presi-
dents were Schuyler Colfax, who served during Grant's first term, and
Henry Wilson, who served during his second.* Colfax was the more
serious casualty, for he had not only accepted the bribe, and then lied
about it, but in the course of the investigation it turned out that years
before, when he was Speaker of the House, he had sold his influence to a
manufacturer of envelopes for the United States Post Office. The ruined
Senator was unimportant but among the damaged members of the lower
;

House was James A. Garfield, soon to become President. The Nation, as

often happens to the high-minded, had overestimated either the length or
the severity of public censure. Yet in all conscience the damage was suffi-
cient, for the building of one single-track railway.
The public, of course, was the final and the chief loser, for what really
happened was that "the managers stripped the Union Pacific of what
Congress had intended should be a permanent endowment, and placed it

* Wilson died of a stroke in 1875.

488 The Price of Union
2
in their own pockets." The public land was the basis of this endowment:
the land which John Quincy Adams had thought should be used to endow
education and science; the land which Jefferson and a host of followers
(including the ill-fated Andrew Johnson) had thought should be used to
endow democracy, by providing a basis of small property-holders on which
America's freedom might rest secure. All told, between 1850 when Stephen
A. Douglas's friends got the first grant for the Illinois Central and 1871
when the system was brought to an end, 131,000,000 acres of public land
were given to the railways. This is an area almost the size of France.* It
isnot surprising that some men made money out of the railroads, or that
the settlers in the Western states and territories did not regard these men
as benefactors. William Allen White, who was a baby in Kansas when the
Union Pacific was finished, describes the so-called years of empire-building
as follows: "The West was going under
the plow, but just behind the
plow were flocks of evil birds of railroad promoters, political
plunder
shysters, real-estate swindlers, fattening on the farmers' seed and on the
worms and slugs in the new furrows." 3
By 1874 Grant had a Secretary of the Treasury called W. A. Richardson.
He proved even more bothersome than Boutwell. Congress discovered that
Richardson had given a friend contracts to collect overdue internal reve-
nue taxes at a commission of fifty per cent. The Treasury had virtually
told its own collectors to leave as many taxes as possible in arrears, so that
the friend might have a restful and profitable life. Worst of all, Congress
proved that Richardson was acting in collusion with Benjamin Butler of
Massachusetts, once a general in charge of New Orleans, now a member
of the House of Representatives. The Secretary of the Treasury resigned;
the Congressman was defeated for re-election; the Administration sank a
little farther into the mire.
The next Secretary of the Treasury, Benjamin Bristow of Kentucky,
proved disconcertingly honest, for he unearthed a long-standing scandal
which involved Grant's private secretary, Brigadier General Babcock, and
a number of Treasury officials. Early in Grant's first term there had de-
veloped (out of small beginnings in Johnson's days) a conspiracy between
whisky-distillers and officials of the Internal Revenue Department to
divide illegal abatements of taxes. By 1874 St. Louis alone was defrauding
the government of $1,200,000 in revenue, and the "Ring" had spread to
Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, and many other towns. This was
thievery on a scale to attract important people. Unhappily, when Bristow
broke the "Ring," Grant refused to believe Babcock guilty, testified in
writing to that effect at Babcock's trial, and treated Bristow so coldly that
he too soon resigned.** The result was to give enemies of the Administra-
* France contains
136,151,680 acres.
** against Babcock
Although the grand jury at St. Louis returned a true bill
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 489

tion the false impression thatGrant himself might have been involved.
No
sooner had Brigadier General Babcock escaped jail than Grant was
called upon to help Brigadier General Belknap, Secretary of War, in a
similar predicament. Belknap was exposed as having accepted payments
of some $6000 a year in return for an appointment to a post-tradership in
Indian Territory a total of $24,450. Hearing he was about to be im-
peached, Belknap rushed to the White House with his resignation which
Grant accepted! This was fortunate for the accused, because at the im-
peachment trial twenty-two Senators took the view that the resignation
put Belknap outside their jurisdiction. The matter was dropped, Belknap
pleading that his wife had done the buying and selling, although he had
continued to receive the inexplicable income after her death.
The Belknap trouble had barely subsided when the President's own
brother became similarly involved. Orvil Grant testified to a Congressional
committee that he had asked the President for a license as an Indian
trader and had been told that four traderships would soon be available.
He had applied for the four separate licenses and somewhat to his sur-
prise had received them all. He had not really wanted to trade himself, so
he had placed a "partner" in each post and had appropriated a large
share of the profits. He gave no time or labor to the business, and almost
no money. In fact, he was receiving a good income simply because of his
influence with the President. According to the Nation, the difference be-
tween the President and the ex-Secretary of War was "that while Belknap
allowed his wife to sell traderships and apply the money to his household
expenses, the President allowed his brother to sell them and keep the
money himself."
"What a nasty crew to have about one!" wrote Hamilton Fish in No-
vember, 1873. "Drunken, stupid, lying, venal, brainless. Oh! that 'Some-
4
body' were rid of such surroundings!" Yet the President liked his crew,
and as its was exposed he seemed chiefly annoyed at the people
nastiness
who dragged the facts into the light. Life would be easier to understand if
men like Grant, who attract and enjoy thieves, were themselves always
thievish. But it is not true. Fish, who saw the worst of Grant, and suffered
him the longest, never doubted that the President was wholly honest.
Years later he wrote, "I think he [Grant] was the most scrupulously truth-
ful man I ever met."
The was how someone who was not corrupt could
interesting question
bear to have such people near him. But the question applies to the Ameri-
can public as sharply as to the President. The nation was largely to blame,
even for events in Washington, because the nation gave every sign of

"for conspiracy to defraud the revenue," Grant's deposition at his trial secured his
acquittal but not his rehabilitation, either in the public mind or in the White
House. Babcock soon retired permanently from view.
490 The Price of Union

viewing the spectacle with an indulgent disgust. "Rich and poor," wrote
Henry Adams, "joined in throwing contempt on their own representa-
tives. Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own
5
failure."

Why should the sudden plague of rascality have cursed America? One
answer suggested by the fact that the plague receded after 1873, with
is

the coming of a long and bitter depression. Some of the scandals were
unearthed in later years; but most of the stealing had been done during
the post-war boom. May not the explanation lie in the simple truth, men-
tioned long ago, that it is hard for a camel to squeeze through the eye of
a needle? The nation was too much tempted by easy wealth. For the first
time in American history it was possible for a great many men to make a
great deal of money with very little trouble provided they abolished all
rules for the time being. Delicious incitements to greed were offered to

every man who would take a vacation from morality the joy of plundering
:

a recent enemy in the South, the joy of stealing a virgin empire in the
West, the joy of grabbing the vast quick profits of new industry in the
East. As Milton remarked of the delicacies spread before the Saviour in
His desert trial:
Alas how simple, to these Gates compared,
Was that Crude Apple that diverted Eve!

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the Americans proved frail when
Satan led them to the mountaintop and repeated:

Money brings Honour, Friends, Conquest, and Realms . . .

Riches are mine, Fortune is in my hand;

They whom I favour thrive in wealth amain,
While Virtue, Valour, Wisdom sit in want.

As the presidential campaign of 1872 drew near, politicians agreed that

in spite of the absurd Cabinet, the emerging scandals, and the growing

unpopularity of his policy toward the South, Grant was the only regular
Republican who could be elected. The party had not done too well even
in 1868, with everything in its favor. After four years of "Grantism" the
one hope was to close ranks and to pray for the Opposition to commit
some vast folly. The Negro vote was for Grant, and the business and bank-
ing interests, and all the machine leaders whom he had served well and
who would now return the favor. The Republican rank and file would
follow the leaders, barring some unimaginably shocking exposure at the
last minute.
xxiv. "Grautism" and Congressional Policy-Making 491

Grant's Opposition was not merely the Democratic Party. His first term
had been so squalid that many of the best Republicans had turned from
him the men who remembered the party in its early ardent days. Grant's
abuse of the civil service lost him some of these party heroes, his cowardice
on the tariff lost him others, his betrayal of his own generosity toward the
South lost him still more. The list of the disillusioned reads like a blue
book of the party founders. When they seceded, and met in convention at
Cincinnati (under the name of Liberal Republicans), they were embar-
rassed by the numbers of their candidates for the presidency. Since the
Democrats were ready to endorse whomever the Liberal Republicans
chose, it is a pity that their embarrassment drove them to the most un-
suitable man in the field.
The Cincinnati Convention was heterogeneous even for an American
party meeting. The delegates had nothing in common except a large dis-
taste for Grant. The platform, for example, had to please high protec-
tionists like Horace Greeley and free traders like the discharged David A.
Wells. In the end, the convention agreed on demanding civil service re-
form, the resumption of specie payment for all paper money, a universal
amnesty for ex-Confederates, and a withdrawal of troops from the South.
This was harmless if unexciting. Nobody could say the same for the choice
of candidate.
The delegates passed over Charles Francis Adams, son of the sixth
President and grandson of the second, a man of brains, character, and
high service to the Republic. They passed over Salmon P. Chase, Chief
Justice of theSupreme Court; and David Davis, Associate Justice. They
passed over manyothers who longed for the nomination and who might
have had some chance of being elected with the help of the Democrats.
They chose one of the few famous Americans who must certainly lose:
Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, "impulsive and unpredictable,
6
ambitious and intriguing, vain and vindictive." Hamilton Fish wrote that
there was no other intelligent and honest man who could make so bad a
President as Greeley. Eastern business at once rallied to Grant, for in
addition to his other handicaps Greeley had been a supporter of Fourier
"communism," vegetarianism, spiritualism, and prohibition. He was not
the man to make Wall Street feel at ease.
The Democrats were even less pleased than the men of money at the
thought of Horace Greeley, who for thirty years had been the sharpest-
tongued abuser of the South and of the Democratic Party. Yet they had
to take him. Their chance (their duty, as many thought) was to tie them-
selves to the Republican revolt and build that clean, moderate Union

Party which Lincoln had dreamed. So they accepted the candidate of the
Liberals, and were heavily defeated. The figures were 2,834,125 votes to
3,597,132; 66 electoral votes to 286. Although Grant had been saved
492 The Price of Union

chiefly by the folly of the Opposition, he took the result as a vindication.

The campaign had been bitter, even for American politics. Three weeks
after his defeat Greeley died, heart-broken; so not only was an election
lost, and a chance to build a better party, but a good editor and a useful
citizen was destroyed. No one knows why the convention made its fatal
choice; for this was no dark horse: ambiguous, unknown, suave, and sup-
posedly harmless. Greeley was one of the nation's leading characters:
cranky and able and cantankerous, and no more capable of politics ihan
of handling a clipper ship in a typhoon. The professionals knew this, and
so did most of the amateurs. Yet in a burst of shared madness they com-
bined to choose him. It was not even a gay gesture of revolt against expe-
diency, because within half an hour the delegates were sorry. Perhaps
there are no lessons to be learned from 1872, except that in politics all
things are unpredictable, and that we should beware of the folklore which
says that free people will find the right man in an emergency. Grant was
an emergency if America ever saw one and the people knew it, or there
would have been no coalition between the Democrats and the Republican
purists. Yet all the people found was Horace Greeley.

Six months after the election of 1872 Chief Justice Chase died. The last of
the dominating figures of Lincoln's Cabinet, he had done his best work in
the Supreme Court. As Chief Justice his intense ambition was almost satis-
fied, though even in his last years he was never
free from a nagging desire
to become President. He had been
a Democrat, an Independent Democrat,
a Republican, a Democrat again in 1868, and a Liberal Republican in
1872. Every four years since 1856 he had sought the nomination, in vain.
"It seems to me," he once wrote, "that if the most cherished wish of the

people could prevail, I would be nominated." He never deviated from

7

this faith.
Chief Justice Chase had succeeded Taney, who had succeeded John
Marshall, who had been appointed by John Adams, the second President
of the United States. The whole life of the Republic was symbolized by
these three men. Where would Grant find a fourth who could be matched
with them? As we have seen many times, the appointment of a Supreme
Court Justice is a fateful task, for the President molds and often remakes
the living Constitution through the men he appoints. All forceful Presi-
dents, if they have been lucky enough to find vacancies, have used this
power aggressively and for their own ends. Even weak Presidents like
Grant have used it to meet a political demand for revising the ancient
text. Any theory of American history which denies the President's duty to
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 493

exert political influence upon the Supreme Court is

unworthy of its ma-
jestic theme. The Opposition will describe such influence as impious and
the Administration will insist it is unthinkable ; but it is nevertheless essen-
tial to good government in the United States.

Fortunately for Lincoln, five vacancies occurred during his four years
in office. The constitutional revolution which Lincoln brought about in
the powers of the presidency and of the central government might have
been frustrated if he had not appointed a majority of his own Court. He
chose only strong nationalists, strong anti-slavery men, and (he thought)
strong believers in the power of Congress to issue fiat money and to make
it legal tender. If the matter came before the Court he
expected his judges
to support the greenbacks, to support the Emancipation Proclamation, and
even more important, to support the use of emergency powers to win the
war, whether strictly constitutional or not.
The Prize Cases of 1863, argued after Lincoln had made his first three

appointments, showed his need for a Court which would put "the logic of
facts" above the written document. As we have seen, Lincoln raised troops
and began fighting without authority from Congress. And he imposed a
blockade upon part of his own country an act which presupposes war,
although Lincoln insisted that no war was taking place, merely an insur-
rection. When Congress met in special session in July, 1861, it passed laws
which were intended to legalize the state of affairs, retroactively. But what
of the merchant vessels which had been captured as prizes by the Union
Navy before Congress acted? The position of the government would be-
come untenable if the Court took a narrow view of this and similar cases.
There seems little doubt that the previous Court would have been hostile,
since even with the help of his three new justices Lincoln won the Prize
Cases by a mere five-to-four decision.
When Chief Justice Taney died Lincoln had a choice between three
members of his Cabinet: Chase, Stanton, and the faithful Montgomery
Blair. Blair was eliminated by the unwritten law that a President must

always be kinder to his enemies than to his friends since the former may
upset the precarious balance of power by which he rules, whereas the latter
can be relied upon, at least for grudging help, no matter what happens.
According to George Bout well's Reminiscences, Lincoln was refreshingly
frank in discussing the appointment. "We wish for a Chief Justice who
will sustain what has been done in regard to emancipation and the legal

tenders," Boutwell quotes Lincoln as saying; "we cannot ask a man what
he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise
him for it. Therefore, we must take a man whose opinions are known." 8
Whether the President said exactly this or not, he probably thought it. And
ifhe did, Chase was clearly his man. For Chase was so firm on emancipa-
tion that long before the war he had been known as "the attorney-general
494 The Price of Union

of the fugitive slaves." And Chase was the Secretary of the Treasury who
had issued the legal tender notes. In any case, he was appointed.
The most careful presidential foresight, however, cannot assure that a
Supreme Court Justice will preserve his opinions unchanged as Theo-
dore Roosevelt was to learn on a famous occasion. Lincoln had done his
best to choose "a man whose opinions are known"; yet they proved un-
known. In 1870 Chief Justice Chase wrote the majority opinion which
declared the legal- tender legislation unconstitutional He did not qilestion
!

the power of the government to issue greenbacks, but only its power to
make them legal tender for the payment of debts, especially for the pay-
ment of debts contracted before the fiat money was printed. The Court
decided against the greenbacks by five to three; but one of the five (who
was senile) resigned before the opinion was announced, leaving the align-
ment four to three. The opinion was politically untenable because of the
West, where the demand was for more inflation, not less.
The most that could be hoped by financial conservatives was to prevent
the issuance of further greenbacks, until such time as the country could
resume specie payment. No Middlewestern or Northwestern politician
would care to defend the thesis that the old greenbacks must be deprived
of their legal-tender status. Yet Chief Justice Chase was doubtless right
in saying that the Constitutional Convention had discussed the matter
carefully, and that "the power to make notes a legal tender" was "abso-
lutely excluded from the Constitution."* Here was a clear conflict between
the written document of 1787 and the political necessities of 1870. The
speed with which the conflict was resolved and the text reviewed in the
light of Realpolitik is a proof of the flexibility of a seemingly rigid system.
Congress had diminished the Supreme Court from nine members to
eight during the fight with Andrew Johnson, so that the unhappy Presi-
dent would not be allowed to nominate even one friend. It now quickly
restored the earlier number, which meant that with the resignation of the
ancient Justice Grier, Grant had two vacancies to fill. Since the decision
against the greenbacks was four to three, two vacancies should suffice. On
the very day when the adverse decision was announced, Grant sent the
names of the new members to the Senate. This time there was no mistake.
One of the new justices had given a decision in favor of the Legal Tender
Act while on the bench in Pennsylvania, and the other had defended the
Act at the bar. Over the protest of the four members who had made the
majority in 1870, the Court reopened the question of constitutionality the
following year, reversing the decision of Chief Justice Chase and finding
that the Congress could after all make greenbacks legal tender.
When the names of Grant's new justices had gone to the Senate, the
* The
quotations are from his dissenting opinion of 1871, not from his majority
opinion of 1870.
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 495

Washington correspondent of Greeley's Tribune wrote that they were

being carefully studied with an eye to the legal-tender decision, since the
Republican radicals "demand that the President appoint to the Supreme
Court none but men about whom there is not the shadow of doubt." And
when Hamilton Fish, some years later, urged Grant to declare that he had
not "packed" the Court, Grant said "it would be difficult for him to make
a statement; that although he required no declaration from Judges Strong
and Bradley on the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act, he knew
Judge Strong had on the bench in Pennsylvania given a decision sustain-
ing its constitutionality, and he had reason to believe Judge Bradley's
opinion tended in the same direction; that . . while he would do noth-
.

ing to exact anything like a pledge or expression of opinion from the

parties he might appoint to the bench, he had desired that the constitu-
9
tionality should be sustained by the Supreme Court. . .."

In the light of this calm avowal it seems a waste for historians to argue
that the Court reversed itself by accident, not by design. And the argu-
ment does less than justice to the strength of a political system which can
bend without breaking, in spite of a written document which seems to
make bending impossible. The Constitution is what the Supreme Court
says it is, and the Supreme Court is what the Presidents make it.
The legal-tender justices were so successful politically, and did what was
expected of them so smoothly, that Grant may have thought the finding
and appointing of judges an easy task. If so he was soon disillusioned. The
tale of his nine months' efforts to find a successor for Chief Justice Chase
is at once a parable and a satire on politics in those disordered days. The

first man to whom Grant offered the appointment was Senator Roscoe

Conkling of New York: a pure spoilsman, a man who knew nothing of

the philosophy of law or politics, nothing of the fierce economic upheavals
which accompanied the march of industry and the mechanization of agri-
culture. His spirit was bounded by the New York Custom House on the
south and by the state capitol at Albany on the north. He was a chief of
the arrogant Senate oligarchy which had seized the powers of the Presi-
dent from Johnson and had discovered delightedly that Grant did not
want them back. As we shall see, Conkling attained such capacity for
mischief that he had to be broken before the American Government could
work smoothly again; but positive abilities he neither possessed nor de-
sired. He was good-looking, and unlike most Senators took pride in his
athletic figure. His torso and his control over the New York state patron-

age were his major interests. James G. Elaine once referred to Conkling's
"haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent,
overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut." He had won his leadership in the
New York Republican Party by becoming an extreme radical, a blind fol-
lower of Thaddeus Stevens, when Seward defended the policies of John-
496 The Price of Union

son and Lincoln. He had confirmed his leadership with spoils. Perhaps
the wisest and most gracious act of his life was the refusal of the chief
justiceship on the ground that he did not have the temperament of a
judge.
Grant then asked Fish to take the job; but Fish also refused. Next, at a
Cabinet meeting, the President suggested Caleb Gushing the learned and
:

brilliant fighter, the defender of lost causes, the man of many enemies.
The Cabinet insisted that Gushing could not be confirmed. Without fur-
ther consultation Grant appointed a man as unsuitable as Conkling
though not as unpleasant: Attorney-General George Henry Williams of
Oregon, who was so incompetent a lawyer that he could not even win the
government's case against the Credit Mobilier and who in any case was
about to be charged with fraud by the Senate. Williams was compelled to
withdraw his own name, and Grant then insisted on nominating Gushing.
As the Cabinet had predicted. Gushing was not acceptable to the Senate.
He had fought on almost all sides of almost all subjects and his abilities
were so formidable that whomever he fought he hurt. His long- accumu-
lating enemies now had their revenge.
Nine months had passed, and still no Chief Justice. "It has been a
hard parturition," said Hamilton Fish. At last Grant consulted his friends
in the Senate and nominated a harmless man whom they suggested and
who was at once confirmed: Morrison Waite of Ohio. As compared
with his predecessors he was not reassuring; but as compared with
Conkling or Williams he was indeed a Daniel.
The whole silly story was pure Grant. No harm was intended: the
President suggested as many good men as bad. No intelligence was used :

the President did not know what political intelligence was. The result
was mediocre; but it might just as well have been a catastrophe, or (if
Fish had accepted) a blessing. Politics under Grant was a lottery in which
the bad prizes were more frequent than the good. The innocent Presi-
dent blandly drew the numbers and was shocked at the hatred with which
some of them were greeted. No wonder Henry Adams found that "Grant's
10
simplicity was more disconcerting than the complexity of a Talleyrand."

Meanwhile, both before and after the election of 1872, life grew steadily
darker in the South. As Professor Randall writes, "the worst abominations
of reconstruction came after the readmission of the states to represen-
tation in the Federal Congress, a process mainly achieved in 1868 and
11
completed in 187 1." The moment of greatest danger was when the
white South lost hope of rescue by politics, or by due process of law.
xxlv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy- Making 497

In December, 1869, when Grant was for the second time subdued by
the radicals, after his brief flurry of magnanimity, the hope of restoring
free politics to the South seemed indefinitely postponed. And the courts
had been a frail protection since 1867, when the Supreme Court wel-
comed an Act of Congress curtailing its jurisdiction, in order that it
should not have to pass upon the most dubious of the Reconstruction laws.
In 1869 the lower House showed the length it was prepared to go in
terrorizing, or if necessary destroying, the Supreme Court in order to
maintain Republican rule in the South. By a vote of 99 to 50 the House
passed an amendment to a judiciary bill, providing that any judge might
retire on full pay at seventy, if he had served ten years, and that if he
refused to retire the President might appoint an additional judge with
the same powers and duties. In other words, if the old men became
troublesome they could either be pensioned off or outvoted by new men
who would do the will of Congress. The amendment was later dropped
from the but it had done its work in warning the Court not to
bill;
interfere with Reconstruction much as a similar proposal by Franklin
Roosevelt in 1937 was to help bring a change in the Court's attitude
toward the New Deal.
As despair spread through the South the appeal to force and fear
spread also. The Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations were born
and flourished. At their best they were vigilante committees, at their
worst terror gangs. Their purpose was to restore white rule by the only
means permitted. Although the Klan had been formally disbanded in
the spring of 1869, its organization and its methods survived and its
underground membership grew. For some years the North sought to meet
force with force, which is easy for an occupying Power in wartime but
not easy in days of so-called peace. Between 1870 and 1875 Congress
passed four laws to compel recognition of the Negro's civil and political
rights. If these could be enforced, and if the disfranchisement of many
white men under the Fourteenth Amendment could be prolonged, the
Republican Party should continue to win elections. The laws permitted
the use of federal courts, marshals, district attorneys, and troops to en-
force penalties on states or individuals; and they provided for election
supervisors appointed by the federal government, and for the reimpo-
sition (if necessary) of martial law in the South. The last of these
"Force Acts," passed on March 1875,* as a memorial to Charles Sum-
1,

ner, conferred social equality upon the Negro and declared he must be
treated exactly like a white man in theaters, public conveyances, hotels,
restaurants, and other places of amusement.

* This was the

dying Act of the House of Representatives which had been elected
in 1872. The new Congress, elected in the autumn of 1874, would have a Demo-
cratic lower House.
498 The Price of Union

The issue was now joined. The South had been driven into open revolt,
based on violence, and the North had passed laws to suppress the violence.
There could be only one end. A large Northern army would be needed
to patrol the South; and since the policy of the radicals was at last be-
coming unpopular even in the North, no such army could be raised.

Having done everything possible to poison the Negro's freedom, having

failed to provide him with land or with education, having ruined his
relations with his neighbors and used him for eleven years as the tool of

political corruption, there was now nothing for the radicals to do except
abandon the black man to his fate. The wretched retreat began in 1876,
and was completed in 1894.
As early as 1874 most reasonable men knew that the Republican policy
toward the South had failed. Yet as the mid-term Congressional elections
approached, the party wished to evade the money question (which merely
divided Republicans against themselves) and to distract the country from
the contemplation of scandals. The conduct of foreign affairs by Hamil-
ton Fish was the only constructive achievement which might have been
discussed; but it was not thought sufficiently interesting to win votes.
So the attempt was made to squeeze one more victory out of "rebel out-
rages," "southern lawlessness," "the oppression of the Negro," and the
other stereotypes dear to the orators of the bloody shirt. The attempt
failed. The North was waking to the fact that the scandals in Washing-
ton under Grant were nothing compared to the scandals of federal con-
trol in the South. The strange and daring experiment of compelling racial

equality by the use of arms might have won Northern support for a
few years longer if the federal officials imposed upon the South had been
the wisest and the ablest men available. As the news spread that they
were rogues, knaves, thieves, and incompetents, the voters lost heart. They
did not demand a better enforcement of the policy. They merely wanted
to forget the whole thing to get out of the South no matter what fester-
ing troubles they left behind them.*
So the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in 1874.

They also lost several senatorships, and the governorship of York. New
The only comfort their leaders could find was that Representative Ben-
jamin Butler a Republican, but hated equally by all parties was de-
feated in Massachusetts. "Butler defeated, everything else lost," tele-
graphed one Republican on the night of the election.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, had also begun to undermine the
work of the radicals. The essence of radical Reconstruction (not the pur-
pose, which was to keep the Republicans in power, but the means) was the

* There were also economic in the North which were impatient for an
interests
end to radical Reconstruction textile-mill owners, for example, and investors who
wanted to put money in the South.
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 499

insistence that the federal government should control race relations.

This was the meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and
of the punitive enforcement laws. Yet between 1876 and 1883 the Su-
preme Court declared the severest of those laws unconstitutional, re-
verting to Calhoun's position that the racial problem must be left to the
local community. It does not seem likely that the decisions were com-

pelled by law or abstract logic. The Constitution could presumably have

been stretched to cover the Reconstruction Acts if the national will had
demanded it; but then the national will must also have demanded large
and permanent armies to rule the South. Since there was no such will,
the Court, as a matter of common sense, admitted that Washington did
not possess the power to enforce a code of conduct in a Florida theater,
or in a Texas bar.*
The vital decision, which set the white South free and was the prelude
to a new oppression for the Negro, was given on October 15, 1883, in
the Civil Rights cases. This disposed of the "Sumner memorial law"
which decreed equal privileges for the two races in inns, public convey-
ances, and theaters by ruling that the Constitution did not give Congress
the power to legislate on such matters. The Fourteenth Amendment, to be
sure, prohibited a statefrom denying equal privileges; but the amend-
ment did not apply to individuals. If innkeepers or theater managers
in the South treated the Negro unjustly, that was a matter for the local
authorities, not for the Congress or the federal marshals.
By this decision, writes Professor Gabriel,

the Court, in effect, turned over to local Southern communities the

solution of the all-important race problem, subject to the limitation
that chattel slavery should not be re-established. .The mass of the
. .

Northern people acquiesced. The reason for this approval was to be

found in the fact that, as early as 1883, Northern folkways in the matter
of race relations were developing similar, though not identical, patterns
to those of the post-war South. In both regions a caste system had
12
crystallized. The Court's decision was a tacit recognition of this system.

The political as opposed to the legal retreat from Reconstruction had

begun in 1877, when for reasons which we shall discuss in the next chap-
ter the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South. At once there
began the sad process of building a new set of codes, unwritten laws, and
disciplines to enforce the subordination of the Negro. All hopes of a
happy evolution from slavery to true freedom had been ruined by 1877.
The Negro was now to be made politically impotent and economically

unprivileged to an extent that would have broken the hope of any less
hardy people. And the American idea was incidentally to be betrayed
*
Cp. below the influence upon radical Reconstruction of the Supreme Court's
decision in the Slaughter House Cases (1873).
500 The Price of Union

to an extent which has at times almost destroyed its power in world affairs.
By the eighteen-nineties, in North and South alike, although the Negro
was legally free, he was socially, economically, and politically confined
to a point little short of servitude. At the best, from that day forward,
he might be described as a third-class citizen.
While all this was happening Republican leaders continued to talk
as if the Negro was their daily care. And at every presidential election
the Republican Party Platform promised a faithful enforcement of the
Reconstruction Amendments. As late as 1904, for example, the plat-
form says "we favor such congressional action as shall determine whether
by special discrimination the elective franchise in any state has been un-
constitutionally limited, and, if such is the case, we demand that repre-
sentation in Congress and in the electoral college shall be proportionately
reduced as directed by the Constitution of the United States."
This was nonsense. Everybody knew that the Negro had been denied
the vote in the South. Everybody knew
that Congress would not dare re-
duce Southern representation in accordance with the Fourteenth Amend-
ment. Senator Benjamin Tillman "Pitchfork Ben" of South Carolina,
one of the first and worst of the new breed of Southern demagogues sired
by Reconstruction out of scalawags had put the truth brutally. "The
brotherhood of man exists no longer," he said in the Senate, "because you
shoot Negroes in Illinois when they come in competition with your labor,
and we shoot them in South Carolina when they come in competition
with us in the matter of elections." 13
Here was the result of that vulgar use of morals for an electoral ad-
vantage which was the meaning of the Stevens- Wade-Butler radicalism.
And sharing in the shame was the entire system of Congressional govern-
ment. Congressional policy-making. For once, Congress imposed its will
effectively and steadily, and this is what happened. The American form
of government must take great blame for the betrayal of the people's good
will by radical Reconstruction.

The contrast between the social consequences of emancipation in the

West Indies [wrote Professor Ford], as guided by British statesmanship,
under conditions of meagre industrial opportunity, and the social con-
sequences of emancipation in the United States, affords an instructive
example of the complicated evils which a nation may experience through
14
the sheer incapacity of its government.*

The final effort to keep at least one promise to the Negro was made
by Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts. He prepared a bill
which would empower the courts to appoint officers from both parties
* From The Cleveland Era THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,
by H. J. Ford, vol. 4,
copyright Yale University Press.
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 501

to supervise elections, and which in case of a disputed election would

allow the federal circuit court to intervene and to award a certificate to
one of the contestants. The bill was favorably reported in August, 1890,
but was laid aside forever during the following session. This was the last
of the Force Bills. In 1894 the remaining statutes for protecting the po-
litical privileges of the freedmen were repealed.

Another reason for Republican losses in the election of 1874 was the
panic of '73, which was a prelude to the worst depression the nation had
known. All economic depressions have their political influence. The one
which began in 1819 was an aid to the rise of Jackson. The depression of
1837 prevented Van Buren's re-election three years later. The depression
of 1857 turned much of the industrial East toward the young Republican
Party, which could promise a high tariff^ whereas the Democratic Party
under Southern leadership could not.
Foreign as well as domestic dislocations were responsible for the col-
lapse in 1873. The Prussian wars and the railway expansion in Europe
paralleled the war and the railway boom in the United States; but cur-
rency and credit inflation was greater in America than elsewhere, and
so was overinvestment. The blow fell in September, with a series of
failures notably the failure of Jay Gooke and Company, private invest-
ment bankers of Philadelphia and Washington, who had recently opened
a house in New York. Jay Gooke had handled the controversial govern-
ment war bonds, the "five-twenties" which the Greenback Party wanted
to retire, and in the public mind the firm was closely associated with
the Treasury. Heavy advances to railways, especially the Northern Pacific,
brought the house down in '73. Before the storm receded, a majority of
the nation's railroads had gone bankrupt and more than two thirds of
the iron mills and furnaces were idle. Within a year the building of new
railway lines fell to less than a third of the average of the five preceding
years. Almost half a million men lost their jobs from this cause alone.
And the trouble grew steadily worse. During the years 1876 and 1877
more than 18,000 businesses failed.
Next came the usual wage reductions which led to class bitterness, and
the usual deflation which led to sectional bitterness. The coal and textile
strikes of 1875 to 1878, and the fiercely violent railway strike of 1877,
seemed to accomplish little at the time; yet they prepared the way for a
new type of labor movement. Similarly, the Western demand for in-
flation was resisted in 1874; but the demand was a prelude to Populism,
and thus to the great Bryan campaign which was to rend the country in
502 The Price of Union

1896. And behind the demands of labor, and the demands of the debtors,
lay a new concept of the role of government. During the depression of
1857, responsible people in all classes and sections agreed that the federal
government could do little except wait and suffer with the public. But
now, because of the wartime legislation favored by the rich, Washington
had direct control of the volume of currency. Furthermore, Washington
had begun to subsidize private industry on a large scale directly through
the land grants to railways, and indirectly through the high Republican
tariff.Obviously, if the currency could be contracted for the sake of
creditors it could be expanded for the sake of debtors; and if the con-

sumer could be made to pay higher prices for the benefit of the iron man-
ufacturer, the farmer might also demand a bounty, and the factory
worker. For the first time since Jackson won his war against Nicholas

Biddle, the sectional pressure for cheap money which accompanies all
depressions was directed at Congress, rather than at the state capitals
or the banks. And for the first time in the history of the country Congress
also felt a sustained class pressure for public works to offset unemploy-
ment and for such forms of relief as a moratorium on eviction for non-
payment of rent.
It had long been orthodox American doctrine that if government could
be prevented from taking steps to help the rich (especially the manu-
facturers and bankers) at the expense of the rest of the community, all
would be well. Whether right or wrong, that doctrine was now irrelevant.
Since the destruction of the planter interest, government was becoming
a welfare agency for capitalists. And once the politicians were embarked
on large-scale positive interferences with the economy, it was not easy
to argue that they could only interfere on the side of the privileged. The
end of an era and the start of a strange new world was foreshadowed
when respectable Americans admitted that the federal government might
have to take positive steps to protect the poor and that it might even
have to protect them against the results of its own tariffs and subsidies
for business. The day was coming when politicians would heed Lord
Acton's statement that "Laws should be adapted to those who have
the heaviest stake in the country, for whom rnisgovernment means not
mortified pride or stinted luxuries but want and pain, and degradation and
risk to their own lives and to their children's souls."
That day, however, was still in the future. It would not dawn until the
new monopoly capitalism made the old arguments against interference
with the economy seem foolish, and until labor unions became strong
enough to weather bad times. In the seventies and eighties, Rockefeller
was building the first giant Trust, and the unions were local organizations
with no resources to meet long unemployment or else they were part
of the "one big union/' the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. The
xxiv. "Gr autism" and Congressional Policy-Making 503

Knights included farmers and intellectuals, white men and Negroes,

males and females, skilled and unskilled workers. This was brotherly;
but it made for diffusion of interests and power, looseness of organiza-
tion, vagueness of demands.
The best unions of trained craftsmen held aloof from the Knights of
Labor. These unions were moving toward national federations in each
trade, with policy-making powers vested in the federal headquarters,
and with membership dues high enough to build a large reserve fund.
And in addition they were moving toward a super-federation of all the
separate federated craft unions a holding company for labor's elite.
When this finally came into being, in 1886, as the American Federation
of Labor, it held to collective bargaining on wages, hours,
itself strictly

and working conditions, and refused to become involved with a po-

litical party, or with large programs for social or moral or economic

reform. Samuel Gompers of the cigar makers' union for years the chief
figure in the A.F. of L. held that whereas a specific demand for a wage
increase might succeed, a vague demand for a good society could pro-
duce nothing but words.
So out of the desperate and unsuccessful strikes of 1873-77 came the
American Federation of Labor practical, exclusive, and for its own skilled
:

members effective. But for the most part workers in the new huge fac-
tories, and in the mines, remained unorganized and helpless.
While labor struck, and suffered, and prepared for the future, the
West fought vainly for inflation. Some Western Senators demanded the
reissue of the $44,000,000 of greenbacks which had been retired between
1865 and 1868, bringing the total back to $400,000,000. Others wanted
to go beyond $400,000,000. Still others asked that the national banks be
exempted from all reserve requirements, so that they might expand
credit indefinitely. Finally, in April, 1874, Congress passed an act to raise
the greenbacks to $400,000,000 and to issue an extra $46,000,000 of na-
tional bank notes. Grant vetoed the Act on the ground that the party
had promised to resume specie payments as soon as possible, and that the
promise was incompatible with such inflation. Congress not only ac-
cepted the veto, but in January, 1875 emboldened by the fact that the
Republicans were about to lose control of the House and wanted credit
for keeping at least one promise it
passed the long-delayed bill for
resumption. The greenbacks were to be reduced gradually to $300,000,-
000, and to become redeemable in specie on January 1, 1879.*
Meanwhile, by accident, the inflationists had acquired another griev-
ance and another fiery cause. From the time of Hamilton's Coinage Act

* In 1878
Congress halted the retirement of the greenbacks when there were still
more than $346,000,000; but resumption took place promptly at the appointed
time.
504 The Price of Union

in 1792 until 1873, the American money system had in theory been bi-
metallic. But in practice the ratio between gold and silver had never been

accurately fixed. Until 1834 silver was overvalued, for the mint ratio
between the two metals was fixed at 1 to 15, whereas in fact gold was
worth almost sixteen times as much as silver. So it paid to take silver to
the mint to be coined, whereas gold was more valuable if used as a metal
or if shipped to foreign countries. The United States was thus on a silver
standard in fact until a law of 1834 altered the ratio to 16 to 1. Gold,
instead of silver, was now slightly overvalued at the mint, with the result
that by the late forties silver had almost disappeared from circulation.
This was inconvenient; so the next step was the Coinage Act of 1853,
creating short-weight silver coins for small change of less than a dollar.
In effect (though not in theory) the country was now on a gold standard,
for the gold coins were the only full-weight currency in use, although the
law still allowed the free coinage of silver dollars. If silver should sud-
denly drop in price, so that it was worth more at the mint than it was
in the market, silver would once again be coined.
The fiat money of the Civil- War period drove gold coins, and the little
short-weight coins, into hiding. The country was on a paper, or greenback,
standard until January 1, 1879. Yet in 1873, as
a step in preparation for
returning to a metal standard, the coinage laws were revised. Because
bimetallism had never worked, and had been a bother ever since the
eighteenth century, it was abolished by the Act of February 12, 1873.
The silver dollar was removed from the list of coins which could be
freely struck at the mint. At the time, nobody paid any heed. The fight
for inflation was concerned with paper. The new coinage act had
still

been considered in five sessions of Congress and had been read and de-
bated repeatedly. Nobody saw sinister implications. Yet within three years
this innocent bill became known in the West as "the crime of '73," the
inflationists charging that it was a plot by English and American financiers
to put the country surreptitiously on the gold standard. The reason for
the excitement was that rich new silver mines had been discovered in
the mountain states. The price of silver had dropped. The Westerners
woke to the fact that silver might be a more practical form of inflation
than paper, if the full-weight silver dollar could be restored to the list
of coins which might be freely struck. And those inflationists who under-
stood politics saw a still more interesting fact: namely, that for the
first time the debtors had a group of rich men on their side. In 1874,
thirty-six million dollars' worth of silver was taken from a single mine
in Nevada. The return to bimetallism, to "the free coinage of silver,"
might raise the price of this metal by as much as ten per cent.
The advocates of "sound" money had won two important battles in
two years; but the cheap money forces had just begun to fight.
xxiv. "Grantism" and Congressional Policy-Making 505

While the Grant Administration guttered out, while the party sought re-
election on the promise that it would be as unlike its recent past as pos-
sible, one good deed partially redeemed the eight years from ignominy.
Hamilton Fish had made peace with England sensible, permanent peace
in spite of the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the
Senate, who seemed to insist on war.
The quarrel with England concerned the damage done by the Con-
federate cruisers which had been built, or equipped, in British ports. The
most famous of the cruisers, the Alabama, had been launched at Liver-
pool on May 15, 1862. Belatedly, the British Government sent orders that
she should not sail; but she escaped, and in the next two years she de-
stroyed more than sixty Union ships. John Bright in the House of Com-
mons applied to her the lines from Lycidas:
It was that fatal and perfidious Bark,

Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,

That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

She caused so much trouble that all the American grievances were
known as the "Alabama claims." In the minds of the self-righteous
finally
of whom Sumner was as usual the king these claims went far beyond
the money value of the destroyed commerce. They included the belief
that the Q ueen s '

proclamation of neutrality, which conferred belligerent

rights upon the South, was initself a deadly wrong and had greatly pro-

longed the war. Adding to this injury the harm done by the cruisers,
and by the other moral and material support which England had given
the Confederacy, Sumner decided that the United States was owed
$2,125,000,000 or half the cost of the war. This vast damage, he claimed,
could only be atoned if England ceded Canada to the United States. And
for a time the puzzled President seemed to agree.
If Sumner and Grant wanted war, this was the way to begin. If they

thought they could take Canada without a fight, they were rnad. And
in any case they were serving their country shabbily, for the precedent

they sought to establish might one day prove fatal to America. Pugnacious,
moralistic America, whose diplomatic aggressiveness was deplored by
every foreign office, might find herself a neutral in a European war.
And then, if Sumner's method of reckoning were applied, America's
habit of doing and saying exactly what she chose, confident that her light-
est whim represented the will of God, might lay her open to damages
which could only be repaid with the entire Western Hemisphere. If the
506 The Price of Union

Queen of Englandhad sinned by recognizing that the South was a

belligerent, what might not follow from the cheerful fecklessness with
which the American Congress welcomed and encouraged revolutions
in Europe?
was unpleasantly clear to Hamilton
All this Fish. Yet Sumner was
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. And for

twenty years, except for a brief period after Preston Brooks had beaten
him into silence, Sumner had been proclaiming that Truth was simple,
and and that he was its prophet. Luckily, his
single, intolerance was at
last tocause his downfall. Having blustered and abused his way through
every obstacle for decades, Sumner was now to quarrel with the President.
As Henry Adams wrote:

A quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be what-

ever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned,
but he was not a man whom a lightweight cared to challenge for a
fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight
in the Republican party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign
Relations. As a party manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen
men whose very names were unknown to him. 15
The break came over San Domingo, which Grant wished to annex.
Sumner quite properly opposed the annexation, and was able to thwart
it. But when
speaking on the subject he could not refrain from attacking
Grant as he had attacked so many enemies throughout his bitter life
as a man depraved beyond belief, stupid beyond describing. This time,
instead of being chastised with a cane, Sumner was deposed.
Grant's military mind did not take kindly to opposition from those he
considered his subordinates. And Grant's friends in the Senate were the
men whose names, according to Henry Adams, Sumner did not even know,
but who were the real party managers. So the last of the old Free Soil
founders of the Republican Party was brushed aside by the new group of
"stalwarts," the clique of spoilsmen whose power rested on patronage,
money, and well-run state machines. Grant asked the stalwarts to get rid
of Sumner, so they deposed him from his chairmanship. And Grant prob-
ably did not know enough politics to understand what a prodigious deed
he had accomplished. It is not often that Senators turn upon each other,
least of all at the bidding of a President. But Sumner had no friends. Yet
with all his faults he was a better man than the Senators who pushed him
out.

Henry Adams was right in saying that alongside the Department of

State, over which Hamilton Fish presided, "there had risen a department
of foreign relations over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at
the Capitol." The creation of such a department is always a possibility
xxiv. "Gr autism" and Congressional Policy-Making 507

under the American system. And if the man who presides over it hates the
Administration and is popular with some of his fellow Senators as in the
case of Henry Cabot Lodge he may help to destroy the world. He has
power without responsibility or knowledge. He does not study the reports
which come to the Department of State from every country. He does not
talk officially with the representatives of foreign governments, or negotiate
But he can rouse fear and hatred, at home and abroad. And he
treaties.
can make sure that no treaty is ratified.
When Sumner was deposed', Disraeli rejoiced that at last the Senator
had gone "from his seat of ceaseless mischief and malice." The whole
world might appropriately have joined in the rejoicing.
Fish could now proceed to make a settlement with England. In addition
to the Alabama was an unsettled northwestern boundary,
claims, there
and also the recurring problem of the Canadian fisheries. The Oregon
Treaty of 1846 had defined the water boundary between the United States
and British Columbia as the channel separating the continent from Van-
couver Island. Later, two channels were discovered. If the line ran through
the western channel, or Haro Strait, the island of San Juan belonged to
the United States but not if the line ran through the eastern channel.
This was important, because a fort built on the island would command the
shipping routes.
The fisheries dispute was more serious. Ever since 1783, the "liberty" of
American citizens to fish within the territorial waters of British North
America had been argued, contested, sometimes enlarged, sometimes
diminished, but never accurately and finally settled. Since the livelihood
of hard-bitten sailors was involved, the dispute was fruitful of local fights.
Whenever Anglo-American relations worsened, the fisheries question
became critical never more so than at the time of Sumner's departure
from his chairmanship.
Hamilton Fish and Lord Granville, the British Foreign Minister, agreed
to lay all three disputes before a joint commission. As a result, the Treaty
of Washington was concluded on May 8, 1871. First, the fisheries question
was put before a mixed commission which succeeded in quieting the dis-
pute until 1885, when it again became a nuisance. It was finally settled,
precisely and accurately, in 1910, by the Permanent Court of Arbitration
at The Hague. Second, the northwest boundary dispute was submitted to
the German Emperor, who found in favor of the United States in October,
1872. The line was to pass through the Haro Strait, and the island of San
Juan was to be American. Third, and far the most important, the Alabama
claims were referred to a board of five arbitrators: Italian, Swiss, Brazil-
ian, British, and American. They met at Geneva, and in September, 1872,
agreed that England had failed in her duties as a neutral and that she
should pay the United States fifteen and a half million dollars in gold, to
508 The Price of Union

compensate for the direct damages. The indirect claims were forever laid
to rest.
Like great triumphs, the Treaty of Washington, and the resulting
all

arbitrations, seemed easy once they had succeeded; but they were
threatened with failure at every step in the long, tortuous way. Negotia-
tions states were hard enough at best; but when
between touchy national
they were complicated by men like Sumner, and by the legacy of Manifest
Destiny which made many Americans feel that they had a duty to take
whatever they wanted, negotiations became almost impossible. Only a man
with the firmness, the patience, and the moral authority of Fish could have
made the English admit that they were wrong and the Americans admit
that there was a limit to what they might demand.

By a happy stroke of fate [writes Professor Nevins], at the moment

when the American Government sank to the very nadir of disrepute,
when greed and corruption seemed to sway most departments of Ameri-
can activity, there was reincarnated in the second officer of the republic
the high integrity, the selfless patriotism, the regard for principle, the
far-sighted judgment, which recalled the days when Fish's idols, Hamil-
ton and Jay, walked the earth, 16
 XXV

The Powers of the Presidency Revive

J.HE CAMPAIGN OF 1876 was the most important since 1864 and the most
fraudulent. Since the country was sick of Republican scandals and Repub-
lican Reconstruction, it seemed likely that the Democrats would win. This
had a good effect upon the nominations, but a bad effect on the election
itself.

The Republican Convention met on June 14 at Cincinnati. The favorite

candidate during the early ballots was James G. Elaine once of Penn-
sylvania, but now a resident of the state of Maine. Gay and impulsive and
much-admired, Elaine had been in the House of Representatives since
1863, and was about to move to the Senate. He had been Speaker from
1869 until the Democrats took over the House in 1875, when he became
leader of the Opposition. He was a bitter foe of Roscoe Conkling. The
rivalry between these men had divided the Congressional Republicans
into "stalwarts" (the supporters of Grant and of the Senators who con-
trolled Grant) and "half-breeds," of whom Elaine was the natural leader.
The struggle was merely for power, not for policy; eight years of Grant,
Conkling, and dishonorable chaos, had put the half-breeds in control of
the convention, and they would certainly have chosen their hero their

"plumed knight," as Elaine was called in the nominating speech except

for the unhappy incident of the "Mulligan letters" which had occurred a
fortnight before.
The letters concerned Elaine's relations, while Speaker of the House,
with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. Elaine had made a ruling
which saved a land grant for the railroad, and had subsequently been
given the privilege of selling the road's bonds. The commission must have
been generous, for Elaine quickly became rich. Nevertheless, he seems
always to have thought himself strictly, indeed quixotically, honest, on the
ground that he conferred a favor upon the railway before receiving any-
thing in return. This was not the view of the reform element in the Re-
publican Party, which had bolted in 1872, and which would do so again
unless the candidate was clearly unsullied by the recent grimy years.
Elaine got possession of the Mulligan letters on the promise to return
them. He did not return them; but he read extracts to the House of
Representatives in the course of a brilliant but defensive speech which
509
510 The Price of Union

aroused more suspicions than allayed. So the convention, reluctantly,

it

had to face the fact that nominated its favorite,, the man to whom
if it

its heart was given., the party would once more be split.

Senator Morton of Indiana was the candidate of the stalwarts. Charac-

teristically, he had rounded up the carpetbag delegates
from the Republi-
can provinces in the South. He therefore came next to Elaine during the
first few ballots. But if the half-breeds had to abandon their "plumed

knight" for the sake of party unity, they could not be expected to support
a stalwart. And the liberal Republicans, who had bolted in 1872, would
not take anyone too closely identified with Grantism. The convention
needed a man more honest than Blaine, less smirched than the friends of
Grant, yet not so ardently a reformer that the stalwarts would refuse to
work for him. Strangely and luckily, they had a man who fitted the pre-
scription exactly: Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio.
Hayes was born in 1822, the posthumous son of a farmer. A generous
uncle paid for his education. He went to Kenyon College in Ohio, and
then to Harvard law school. He was a Whig who had turned Republican
after the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and had supported Fremont. He first at-
tracted attention during the war, rising to the rank of brigadier general
and serving with distinction under Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.
In 1864 he was elected to the House of Representatives, but refused to
take his seat until the war ended. In 1867 he became governor of Ohio,
serving for two terms and then voluntarily retiring. In 1875, a bad year
for the Republicans, he was persuaded to try for a third term, and was
elected thus becoming a national figure. Although honest, and a sincere
reformer, he had stayed with the party and worked for Grant in 1872.
He was therefore acceptable to the stalwarts. He was so clearly "avail-
able" that his nomination had often been predicted. He was in no sense a
dark horse.
The Democratic Convention met at St. Louis on June 27, and on the
second ballot nominated Samuel Jones Tilden of New York. Eighteen
seventy-six was expected to be the year of Democratic triumph and vin-
dication; yet the convention turned (wisely, almost without dissent) to a
little, nervous, unimpressive corporation lawyer. This was a triumph of
intellect and of "reform" over the qualities which are supposed to bring

political success. The people had made plain their distaste for the rowdy
antics of the past few years.
Tilden was the son of a village postmaster in New York State. His child-
hood was itself a political education, for Van Buren, Silas Wright, and
William L. Marcy the great men of the Albany Regency were friends
of his father and frequent visitors. The boy's health was bad and he was
educated mostly at home; but he went to New York City to study law.
He was admitted to the bar in 1841. He made a brilliant success, and
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 511

within a few years had most of the great railway companies for his clients.
He became a friend and adviser of the Democratic chieftains in the state ;

so during Folk's Administration he had to face the harsh choice which

rent the party in New York. His father's friend, William Marcy, became
a "Hunker" who favored the Mexican War and the annexation of new
slave territory ; but his father's other friends, Van Buren and Silas Wright,
became "Barnburners," Free-Soilers, enemies of the expansion which was
so dear to the South. Tilden went with Van Buren. He did not later be-
come a Republican like many Free-Soilers and ex-Barnburners; but the
split in his own state party kept him from national prominence for many
years.
After the war, in which he took no part, Tilden became chairman of
the Democratic State Committee and quickly gained fame by opposing
and breaking the unspeakable Tweed Ring in New York City. William
Tweed, head of Tammany Hall, not only owned the government of the
city, but in 1869 elected one of his servants governor of the state. The
four chief members of the ring had for years been content to steal one
dollar for each dollar spent on genuine contracts or salaries. In spite of
this self-denying ordinance they made more than forty-five millions in
three and a half years. The money must have gone to their heads, because
they began inventing not only imaginary employees and contractors, on
whom to lavish the city's funds, but imaginary hospitals and charitable
institutions. They owned three judges and many Albany legislators, as
well as the governor, and they felt so safe that they challenged Tilden for
control of the state party. To the amazement and pleasure of the country,
and New York City taxpayers, Tilden destroyed them.
especially of the
The three judges were impeached, and Tweed died in jail. Tilden was
elected governor of New York.
The state capital provided him with another large, useful fraud which
he was able to expose and to abolish with much publicity. So in a year
when "reform" was nomination was almost unopposed.
in the air Tilden's

However, since Tilden was known "hard-money" man who wished

as a
an early return to specie payments, the convention selected Thomas A.
Hendricks of Indiana as vice-presidential candidate. Hendricks was a
"soft-money" man, or inflationist.
The campaign, in which neither Tilden nor Hayes took much part, was
unpleasant. The Republicans waved the bloody shirt and the Democrats
waved the abundant dirty linen of the Grant regime. The Republicans
called on the Grand Army of the Republic an organization of Union
veterans to promote philanthropy and pensions for "patriotic" riots and
the stirring of sectional hatred. The Democrats called on the various
terror organizations throughout the South to use any methods, including
murder, to prevent the Negroes from voting.
512 The Price of Union

The morning after election day, it was clear that Tilden had a popular

majority of 250,000 votes. In the electoral college, where 185 made a

majority, Tilden had 184 undisputed votes and Hayes 165. Twenty
electoral votes were disputed one in Oregon, and 19 in the states of
Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Obviously, if Southern white
men had been in control of these states, if they had all been allowed to
vote and to prevent their black neighbors from voting, Tilden would
have won. And if the Reconstruction laws had been enforced, if*the
Negroes had been protected in their civil rights, Hayes would have won.
But out of the chaos of blackmail, bribery, murder, martial law, and
competitive fraud, which was a Southern election under Reconstruction,
nobody knew at the time, and nobody knows now, what really happened.
One historian suggests that the Democrats stole the election in the first

place and that the Republicans then stole it back again. In any case, the
Republicans ended in full possession.
An electoral commission was appointed with five members from the
House of Representatives, five from the Senate, and five from the Su-
preme Court. The decision was given on March 2, two days before the
new President must be inaugurated. Eight members of the commission
were Republicans, seven were Democrats. By an eight to seven majority,
each of the twenty disputed electoral votes was awarded to Hayes. Feel-
ing ran high; but the South did not want another war and Northern
Democrats were not in a position to fight. Henry Watterson of the Louis-
Courier -Journal announced that a hundred thousand Kentuckians
ville
would see justice done to Tilden; but luckily he was wrong. Tilden
remained calm and conciliatory, earning the gratitude of his country for
all time. And Hayes allowed his friends to promise that the last troops of

Occupation would be withdrawn from the South if he were permitted to

assume the presidency in peace. This was decisive. A Republican Presi-
dent could end the immoral farce of Reconstruction more cleanly and
more quickly than a Democrat. The Negro had no hope anyway. The
question was whether he should be betrayed quickly or slowly, and there
was much to be said for speed.

The southerners saw their chance and seized it [writes the latest
biographer of Hayes], the disputed election was their golden opportu-
nity. They got more from Hayes than they could have obtained from
Tilden, for the latter could have withdrawn the troops from the three
states only with the greatest difficulty..
Indeed, here, as a dozen
. .

times before and after, northern and southern Democrats pursued

different purposes. The northern Democrats, in 1876, were bent on
obtaining control of the national administration. . The southerners
. .

. were concerned in having the troops removed from South Caro-

. .

lina, Florida, and Louisiana; and if this were done they did not greatly
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 513

care who was President, since they expected little federal patronage in
1
any event.

More important to the white South than the withdrawal of the troops
was the acknowledgment of states' rights which was forced upon the
electoral commission. In order to make sure of Hayes votes in Florida and
Louisiana, the Republican majority on the commission had to refuse to go
behind the returns of the state canvassing boards. Those boards were the
servants of the carpetbag governments, and with their help Hayes was
elected. But they were soon to become the servants of white, Democratic

governments. And no matter how much the Republicans in Congress

might wish to question the returns in the future, they could not, because
of the precedent of the electoral commission. The white Southerners had
made a good bargain. In return for allowing one more Republican
President to be elected with the help of Southern Negro votes, they not
only got rid of the troops but they won a victory for state control of
elections.

Incidentally, the nation had also made a good bargain, for Hayes at
once proved himself an able President. Such a man was overdue in the
White House.

The Cabinet appointments were as revealing in the case of Hayes as in

the case of Grant; but this time the revelation was cheerful. It was also
infuriating to the Congressional oligarchy which had broken Johnson
and ruled Grant, and which expected to find Hayes easy to control. An-
other weak President would have been ruinous at this time, for the
Congress was once more demonstrating that without Executive leadership
it becomes a rabble which is run by a few cynics for party, regional, or

class interests.* At the end of the first Congressional session of Grant's

Administration, Henry Adams described the chaos accurately.

In both houses all trace of responsibility is lost [he wrote], and while
the Executive fumes with impatience or resigns himself with the signif-
icant consolation that this is the people's government, and the people
may accept the responsibility, the members of the lower house are
equally ready with the excuse that they are not responsible for the
actions of the senators, and the senators, being responsible to no power
under Heaven except their party organizations, which they control,
*
Congressional leadership, to be sure, produced the excellent Compromise of
1850; but within four years Congress destroyed its own handiwork, in order that
one region should benefit by a railway.
514 The Price of Union

are able to obtain precisely what legislation answers their personal

2
objects or their individual conception of the public good.

By the time Hayes became President many observers thought the Senate
wished to upset the system of checks and balances and to substitute a
3
parliamentary form with the Chief Executive as a figurehead. If so, they
would have destroyed their country. A legislature representing the fierce
regional rivalries which then disturbed America could not make national
policy under a parliamentary system. Furthermore, a legislature domi-
nated by the men who ran the Senate in the seventies and eighties could
not make policy at any time or place. William Allen White described the
initiation to the Senate of Benjamin Harrison who was soon to become
President of the United States,

Judge David Davis of Illinois [writes White], an honest man with a

sense of humor, a statesman who had left the United States Supreme
Court to enter the senate, sat with Harrison the day he came into the
chamber to take his seat, and as the senators filed by, Davis called them
off as Adam named the animals in the morning of the world: There
came the jackal, the vulture, the sheep-killing dog, the gorilla, the
crocodile, the buzzard, the old clucking hen, the dove, the turkey-
gobbler. Then, as the big hulk of a greedy westerner coarse, devious,
insolent came swinging in heavily, Judge Davis pointed his stubby
forefinger at the creature and exclaimed: "A wolf, sir; a damned,
4
hungry, skulking, cowardly wolf!"

These were the men who had gained power during the years when
America was too much tempted, the years of post-war boom and easy
money and cheap immigrant labor and imperial land grants and a pros-
trate South and a whole new technology for spoiling the untouched West.
Sobered by the long depression, America would gladly have dismissed
some of this menagerie but Senators are not easy to oust once they have
;

seized firm hold on their state machines. There is often a lag of ten years
between a change of public opinion and a change in the temper of the
upper House. In 1877, President Hayes represented the new will for a
cleaner public service; but the Senate represented the roaring days of
Grant's first term. Conkling expected to see his man, Tom Platt, made
Postmaster General and lord of the federal patronage. Cameron wanted
his son continued in the Cabinet; and Blaine (who moved from the
lower House to the Senate after losing the nomination) had a candidate
whom he expected to foist on Hayes without argument. Between them
they would have given the new Administration a Cabinet to serve the
Congress, not the President. But Hayes had other plans.
For Secretary of State, Hayes chose William Maxwell Evarts of New
York, one of the nation's greatest lawyers who had twice been considered
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 515

for the chief justiceship of the Supreme Court and one of Conkling's
enemies. For Secretary of the Treasury, at a time when the silver problem
was acute, he chose Senator John Sherman of Ohio, brother of the general
and the most learned of American politicians in the theory of money. For
Secretary of the Interior he chose ex-Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri:
civil-service reformer, leader of the Liberal Republican revolt in 1872,
detested by the oligarchs. For Postmaster General, instead of a New York
spoilsman, he first intended to nominate Joseph E. Johnston of Virginia,
the most important of surviving Confederate generals. This would have
been a magnificent gesture of conciliation, and as a bonus it might have
killed Conkling; but the President was persuaded that the appointment
would stir too much trouble, so he chose a lesser Confederate for the Post
Office: David M. Key of Tennessee. Key was a Democrat and a valiant
soldier of the South. He had also served for two years as United States
Senator from Tennessee.
The rest of the Cabinet was good, except for the Secretary of the Navy,
who was a concession to the powerful Senator Morton of Indiana, de-
feated rival for the nomination and oligarch from Hayes's neighbor state.
Since there was virtually no navy, the Secretary could do little harm.
When the Cabinet nominations came from the White House the oli-
garchy did not know whether to laugh or be angry, since they did not
know whether the President meant to fight for this strange list of compe-
tent men or whether it was a political gesture in view of the campaign
promises for reform. In any case, they intended to refuse confirmation.
They sent the whole list including the name of John Sherman, their fel-
low Senator to the appropriate committees for examination and report.
The names were not expected to emerge from committee.
The power of the presidency was never shown more clearly than during
the next three days, when little Rutherford Hayes with his tarnished
title and his small fame conquered the ruthless, cynical, self-assured men
who dominated the Senate. The nominations for the Cabinet were good,
and the disdain with which the Senate buried them was insulting, so the
people rose to support their representative, the President, the only man
who stood for something larger than silver in the West, or tobacco in the
South, or steel in Pennsylvania, or lobsters in Maine. Telegrams and

letters,mass meetings, churches, newspapers, insisted on confirmation.

The startled Senate surrendered. If the Democrats had stood with Conk-
ling's crew in opposing the President, Hayes would have been beaten;
but the Democrats had been promised the withdrawal of the troops, and
were temporarily grateful. 5
How does a President win the backing of the people? Andrew Johnson
toured the country in a great cause, unselfishly, yet he annoyed his
audiences with rancor and cheap talk. And his friends, who sought to
516 The Price of Union

organize a Union Party to support him, made every silly mistake, while
his enemies made none. So Johnson was beaten. Grant was beaten before
he began, because he knew nothing about government and little about
civilian America. He was a great man in the wrong place, which is an
awkward sight. Hayes was not a great man, but he was in the right place.
He had dignity, which the people desire in their Chief Executive. He had
a clear, simple case, which the haughty Senators helped him to dramatize.
And for the moment the Democratic Opposition was friendly. He w#s
certain to win, if he dared to fight. Since he was trained in politics, he
knew when to fight
exactly just as Grant, who was trained at West
Point, knew when to fight on the battlefield, but not at Washington.

Hayes was soon in need of his political acumen, and of the strength which
came to him from having renounced a second term. When accepting the
nomination in 1876 he had said flatly that he would only serve for four
years. Since he meant what he said, none of the party oligarchs could
threaten him with reprisals at the next convention. This was fortunate,
for the beasts were soon closing on him Judge Davis* s jackals and wolves
:

and sheep-killing dogs. The President was to find that removing the
federal troops from the South was a far more ticklish process than order-
ing them there in the first place.
There were two governments in South Carolina, and two in Louisiana :

the government which had been declared elected by the Republican

canvassing board, and the one elected by the white men whose votes the
board had disallowed. The minute the Northern troops withdrew, the
carpetbag governments would be thrown out and the rival governments
installed. This was embarrassing to Hayes, for it was the carpetbag can-

vassing boards which had made him President. Seemliness required that
they be kept in power for at least a few weeks; yet delay was impossible,
for the local courts controlled by the Democrats had forbidden the banks
to pay state funds except on court orders, and the carpetbag governments
w ere therefore starving. Hayes either had to send more troops, and money
r

with them, or he had to live up to his promise and get out quickly. On
April 10 the last federal soldiers left South Carolina. General Wade
Hampton's government took over the state for the white men.
There was further delay in Louisiana, where the situation might have
been created by an unkind satirist to make Hayes ridiculous. The carpet-
bag governor, whose name was Packard, had done much better than
Hayes in the election. Yet Hayes officially won, and it was now necessary
that Packard should officially lose. In order to withdraw the troops,
<xv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 517

Hayes had to certify that "domestic violence" did not exist; yet Louisiana
*vould be nothing but domestic violence if the soldiers left and the carpet-

Dag governor remained. Packard must leave with the troops. But he did
lot want to leave. He felt he had done the Republicans a great service
which was true and that the least the party could do in return was to
ipare him a few regiments so he could go on being governor. He kept
Dointing out, rudely, that if he was not the duly elected governor then
Hayes was not the President of the United States.
In the end, Hayes appointed another commission like the commission
which had made him President, only this one was to unmake Packard.
Perhaps it was a humorless device; but it worked. The commission
reached Louisiana on April 5. Within less than three weeks the Packard
government was out and the troops had left New Orleans: that much-
tormented town which had known the cruel and unusual fate of being
governed by Ben Butler.
Florida had been "liberated" some time before, so the whole South
was now restored to white rule. Hayes had done what Grant should have
done, and what would never have needed doing if Lincoln had lived or
if
Johnson had made the people understand what was happening in their
name. Symbolically, as if to remind the country how the long disgrace had
started, Hayes's policy of conciliation was attacked by the following men :

Blaine of the bloody shirt, old Ben Wade who would have become Presi-
dent if the impeachment of Johnson had succeeded, Ben Butler (who to
the alarm of both parties had returned to the lower House), Boutwell of
''Black Friday" fame, and the two abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and
William Lloyd Garrison. Allies to the last, the moralists and the morally
infirm cried out against the ugly end of their ugly policy. Yet Hayes had
not only saved whatever could be saved in the South (nothing but long
and bitter years could revive the lost opportunities for the Negro), but he
bad saved the Republican Party. The bad conscience of the North would
probably have defeated the Republicans by 1880 if federal troops had
still been involved in the unholy struggles of Reconstruction.

Hayes saved the Republicans by abandoning radical Reconstruction

just in time; but he could not save the party in the South. It was one of
bis dearest hopes to create an honorable Republicanism in the old Con-

federacy and thus to protect that region from one-party corruption and
from the local tyrannies of one-party demagogues. This he could not
do. It was a noble plan. Lincoln might have carried it out, but Hayes
came too late. "In 1865," writes H. J. Eckenrode, "the South was
singularly lacking in feeling; in 1876, the land was consumed with
ill
6
hatred." Generations had to be born, "and till the soil, and lie beneath,"
before the name Republican could be anything but detestable to the

Confederacy.
518 The Price of Union

In his Inaugural Address Hayes promised civil-service reform "thor-

ough, radical, and complete," He promised appointments on the ground
of ability alone; security of tenure; and exemption of the civil servants
from the need to do party work. Hayes knew better than to think this
was possible. But he knew it was desirable and he intended to do the best
he could.
One reason why nothing "thorough" could be done was the number of
people who had to be paid off for procuring Hayes's election. Twenty elec-
toral votes, in four states, cannot be transplanted from the Democratic to
the Republican column merely by kindness.

Numberless promises had been made [writes Eckenrode] and the

President now proceeded to keep them. All the members of the Louisi-
ana canvassing board or relatives were granted federal jobs. Forty-
seven members of the disrupted Negro legislature of Louisiana were
taken care of, mostly in the treasury, which Sherman made a house of
7
refuge for discarded Republican politicians.

On a higher level there were men like ex-Governor Packard, whose serv-
ices had been invaluable and who was made consul at Liverpool, where
his fees (to say nothing of his freedom from the nightly threat of murder)
made up for his lost grandeur. On
a still higher level were the men who
had persuaded the state canvassing boards that they had better elect
Hayes, or heaven protect them. Three of these "visiting statesmen" were
made ministers to Great Powers, and a fourth was given John Sherman's
place in the Senate. It was not the moment for anything "radical and
complete" in civil-service reform.
In any case, even if Hayes had not come to office under odd circum-
stances, he could not have founded an uncontarninated merit system. A
President who abolished all Executive patronage would do more harm
than good, for he would reduce the power of his office dangerously. As
we have seen, the President has two weapons when dealing with the
state machines: public opinion and the patronage. Public opinion
cannot be mobilized for every minor issue, or every appointment. The
appeal to the people must be saved for great occasions. And during the
incessant little conflicts between the national interest and the wishes of
regional Representatives, the President must have some favors to offer in
return for the favors he asks. If a Senator who has been sent to Washing-
ton to get a higher tariff on wool, and whose re-election depends upon his
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 519

success, is merely told to stop asking for the tariff because it interferes
with national policy, he may join with other disappointed Senators in
polite blackmail: refusing to confirm appointments except at a price,
refusing to ratify treaties, etc. But if the President can offer him good
jobs for some of his constituents, thus helping him to remain a power in
his own state, the Senator's future becomes more secure and he may think
less about wool and more about world trade.
In 1877, however, after eleven years of the Congressional oligarchy,
most of the federal patronage had been seized by the Senators and was
used to strengthen the willfulness and selfishness of the state machines,
instead of being used to wheedle them into serving the national interest.
Also, Hayes faced a condition in the public service which was luckily
unique, which was nobody's fault, but which had to be changed if the
nation was to prosper. Throughout the Civil War the Republican Party
had ruled by whatever means seemed necessary. For the sake of victory
and the Union, the Constitution had been warped and disregarded;
border-state elections had been bought, or coerced by troops thousands of
;

"Peace Democrats" had been jailed and habeas corpus had been sus-
pended to keep them immured as long as was desired; the federal elec-
tions of 1864 had been "controlled" (unnecessarily, to be sure), so that
the voice of the people would speak correctly. These were rough deeds,
and rough men were needed to see them through; so in addition to the
financial dishonesty which wartime spending normally breeds, there

spread a new slackness and dishonesty in many public services. The

institutions on which the people's liberties depended were being perverted
in what seemed a good cause, and the men who did the more unpleasant
acts of perversion were promised safe jobs in return. Government offices
became a dumping ground for some very strange characters, and there
was a feeling that the worst of these men had earned their rest and should
not be expelled at least not by a Republican Administration.
By the time Hayes became President, however, these particular debts
had been abundantly paid. There could be no more excuses, based on the
Civil War, for degraded services, and the voters were showing that they
would not much longer be patient. Both parties had promised reform.
And although the Congressional oligarchy regarded the promise as a
joke, Hayes did not. The first step he took was to make his Cabinet Minis-
ters responsible for appointments in their departments. He asked Carl
Schurz and William Evarts to draft rules to guide the Ministers. Since this
was the passion of Schurz' s life, the regulations were drawn up quickly and
well. And on the whole they were followed, except in Sherman's Treasury

Department, which as we have seen was needed for other purposes.

Under the heroic Schurz, in the Department of the Interior, was lodged
the Indian Bureau: one of the most disgraceful government agencies in
520 The Price of Union

the long history of man's corruption. Schurz appointed an investigating

board in 1877, and the report stated that the six million dollars a year
which the government spent on the Bureau was mostly stolen. The Indian
agencies were described as "simply a license to cheat and swindle the
Indians in the name of the United States of America." Schurz cleaned
house, and for the first time introduced the concept of honor into the
nation's treatment of its wards; but he had no authority to make a per-
manent reform. Much of his work had later to be done again.
In trying to protect the Indian, Schurz found himself face to face with
the lumber pirates: the men who took their impious sawmills into the
great forests, destroying Indian reservations and the public domain alike,
with no license, no property rights, no permission, nothing but impudence
and a zest for imperial thievery. Schurz tried, says Eckenrode, "to check
the suicidal policy of denuding the forest areas of the West for no better
8
purpose than to make fortunes for scoundrels." Needless to say, he failed.
In the end the scoundrels drove him from public life. But here too his
work was not wasted. Forest conservation and an honest Indian Bureau
Were both to come, and so long as they endure they will be monuments to
a German immigrant who served his new country well.
While Schurz faced the large and little bandits of the empty West,
Hayes calmly undertook to clean out the New York Custom House, a
more than Herculean task. The Custom House was the center of Senator
Conkling's machine, the fortress in which his political workers took
refuge, the spoilsman's paradise. An investigating committee discovered
two hundred little politicians on the Custom House pay roll who were
doing nothing at all, except party work for Conkling. It also revealed that
goods landed in New York were habitually undervalued, so that importers
might be tempted to use that harbor. And of course it found that the sal-
aries of all employees were assessed for the party funds.

Hayes began the war by ordering that there should be no more political
assessments on salaries and no more political work by employees. Chester
Arthur, the honest but lazy collector of the port, and Alonzo Cornell, the
naval officer, defied the orders. Hayes asked for their resignations. When
they paid no heed, Hayes appointed their successors, one of whom was
the father of the future President Theodore Roosevelt. The Senate re-
ferred the names contemptuously to the Committee on Commerce, of
which Conkling was chairman. When the session ended, the committee
had taken no action. Imperturbably, Hayes sent the names back to the
next session, and finally Conkling's committee reported on them unfavora-
bly. After a bitter debate, in which some Democrats supported the Re-
publican President, confirmation was refused. Hayes wrote in his diary:
"In the language of the press, 'Senator Conkling has won a great victory
over the administration.' . But the end is not yet. I am right and I
. .
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 521

shallnot give up the contest." He waited until Congress adjourned, when

the stalwart Senators were temporarily helpless; then in July, 1878, he
dismissed Arthur and Cornell and appointed their successors.* So the
fight was revived at the next session, which opened December 2, when
the names of the new appointments came before the Senate.
The committee once more reported adversely; but during the full
debate Hayes sent a message attacking Arthur and Cornell as pure spoils-
men. Conkling then overplayed his indignation and his attacks on the
President, and the nominations were confirmed. As Eckenrode writes, "It
is hardly
possible for a congressman to win over a determined President
. . The long domination of the executive by the Congress was at an
.

end; the issue was settled that the appointive power rests in the Presi-
dent." 9
As a matter of fact, the battle against Conkling and the stalwarts had
to be fought and won a second time, by Hayes's successor. Then it was
ended forever.

While restoring home rule to the South and beating the proud leader of
the stalwarts, Hayes was also faced with the remaining major problem of
the day: cheap money. The depression which began in 1873 was still
severe when Hayes became President, and the demand for cheap money
from the West and South grew stronger as each successive season found
farm prices still low and the farmer's need for cash still desperate. Mean-
while, the East remained confident that the economy would never be
healthy until deflation had run its course, and that specie payments must
be resumed on January 1, 1879, so that American credit would rise in
Europe and capital might once more be attracted. This was a sectional
and not a party question. Republicans and Democrats from the West and
South wanted cheap money; Republicans and Democrats from the East
wanted gold. Hayes was a convinced "sound-money" man. He took the
unpopular side, the side of the rich Eastern "gold-bugs," at a time of
furious passions.
Agriculture was undergoing a revolution during these days, and the
farmer was bearing even more than his accustomed burdens. His trouble
was not that his money was "sound" or "unsound," but that he had no
money at all. Until that could be rectified he was sure to support any
program which would raise the value of his commodities and lower the
value of his debt.
The revolution which was ruining the farmer was commonly described

* The elder Roosevelt had died in the meantime.

522 The Price of Union

by the city-dweller as modern progress. It took two forms :

first, the open-
ing of vast new territory to the west, so that more land was brought under
cultivation between 1860 and 1890 than in the entire previous history of
the United States; and second, the introduction of expensive labor-saving
machinery, such as the reaper, the automatic self-binder, the corn-planter,
the tractor, and the railways and steamships to carry farm produce to the
ends of the earth. Once the overexpansion into virgin soils took place, the
older farms of the Middle West and East were driven toward bankruptcy.
And once the new machinery was invented, the growers of staple crops
had to buy it, since the price of such crops on the world market was set by
production-costs on mechanized farms. And progress in transport was
making the market for unprotected staples a world market.
Doubtless the new machinery saved much labor. But it also lost many
farms for when the landowner goes bankrupt he comes out with nothing
;

unlike the businessman, who often seems refreshed by the experience.

The revolution meant, as Professors Morison and Commager point
out, that "the average farm ceased to be a self-sufficient economic unit,
where a man and his family raised most of what they ate, wore, and used,
and provided their own amusement in neighborhood groups. It became,
like West Indian sugar plantations, a cog in an industrial system, devoted
to the raising of a staple crop, mechanized, and tied up with banking,
10
railroading, and manufacturing." The trouble with being "tied up with
banking, railroading, and manufacturing" is that in a time of long depres-
sion the farmer is
helpless. He cannot, as of old, reduce his cash purchases
and live off his own, for he is deep in a money economy. His crops have
become almost valueless, but his debts have not. He must pay them (in
cash which has a higher purchasing power every day) or he must lose his
farm. Hence the appeal of cheap money. We shall see the cause of free
silver inspire a dedication, a feeling of glory and of despair, which would
be absurd if men were merely discussing the relative virtues of two kinds
of coin. But in the words of the Declaration of Independence, they were
discussing "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." If we miss
that point we shall underestimate the hopes and the hatreds of American
politics between Hayes and McKinley.
We have seen the rise and defeat of the "Ohio idea," and the prolonged
effort of the Greenback Party to maintain the paper-money standard.
When Hayes was inaugurated, the Resumption Act of 1875 was on the
statute books; but nobody knew whether it would be put into effect in
1879. And the demand for paper money was beginning to give way to
the demand for a return to the free coinage of silver. "After all," thought
the Westerner, "silver at 16 to 1 is worth ninety cents on the dollar. Even
if the eastern
'gold-bugs' boggle at a paper coinage which is worth noth-
ing, they should be happy to compromise on silver which is worth 90 per
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 523

cent." The refusal of so mild a demand seemed to most of the farmers to

be sheer hard-heartedness.
The first problem for Hayes was the Resumption Act. "The way to
resume to resume.," said Secretary of the Treasury Sherman. Hayes told
is

him to go ahead, promising to veto all attempts to repeal the Act. Sher-
man had a reserve of 40 per cent against the
sold bonds for gold until he
greenbacks, and confidently waited for January 1. As he expected, since
the gold was available nobody wanted it. In New York, $135,000 of notes
were presented for gold, and $400,000 of gold were presented for notes.
The next problem was silver. The success of resumption was fatal to
the greenback movement; but it had no effect on the cry for free silver.
The Congressional leaders of the silver movement were Representative
Richard Bland of Missouri, a Democrat, and Senator William Allison of
Iowa, a Republican. ''Silver Dick" Bland was the more extreme. During
the summer before Hayes was elected, Bland had introduced a bill for
the free coinage of all silver brought to the mint, just as gold was freely
coined. In November, 1877, the bill passed the House by 165 to 34. But the
heart of the bill was removed in the Senate. Instead of the free coinage
of all silver
brought to the mint, the Senate provided that the Secretary
of the Treasury should buy between two million and four million dollars'
worth of silver bullion each month and should then coin it at approxi-
mately 16 to 1. The superior worldliness of the Senate is suggested by the
fact that the bill, as amended, helped the silver kings of Nevada and
Montana and California, but did nothing for the farmers. It would not
bringdown the price of money; but it might help to keep up the price of
silver.
In February, 1878, Bland attacked the amended bill in the House. "I
do not like this bill," he said; "it is not what the country expects." Yet he

urged that it should be passed, as a prelude to a bill for free silver. The

temper of the West is shown by his statement that if they could not get a
genuine free-silver bill soon, "I am in favor of issuing paper money
enough to stuff down the bond-holders until they are sick." So the Bland-
Allison Bill passed, and went to President Hayes. On February 28, he
returned it to the Congress with his veto. He pointed out that the market
value of the silver dollars for which the bill provided would be ninety
or ninety-two cents.

Thus the silver dollar authorized by this bill [he wrote] is worth eight
to ten per cent less than it purports to be worth, and is made a legal
tender for debts contracted when the law did not recognize such coins
as lawfulmoney. The standard of value should not be changed
. . .

without the consent of both parties to the contract. There is no

. . .

power to compel a nation to pay its debts. Its credit depends on its
honor.
524 The Price of Union

The South and West would have answered that the standard of value
was constantly changing without the consent of both parties to the con-
tract. For six years every penny they had borrowed had grown more
valuable before the day came to pay it back. Congress passed the Bland-
Allison Bill over the President's veto on the very day that he returned it.

Hayes was savagely attacked; but he had frustrated the inflationists at

least for the time. Bland might have persuaded a small majority in the
Senate to accept a bill for the unlimited coinage of silver; but he could
not persuade the two-thirds majority which was needed to override a veto.
Furthermore, business improved during 1878, and the following year
prosperity at last returned. So the final battle over silver, the most pas-
sionate political fight in American history, was postponed until the next
period of depression in the nineties.

As the problems of the Civil War receded, the problems of class conflict
took their place. The Hayes Administration saw the last sorrows of Re-
construction and the first premonitory strikes and also the series of mur-
der trials which ended the "Molly Maguires" in Pennsylvania. Life in the
anthracite country was bad, and bitterness unending. Most of the miners
were Irish, and thus not docile. When the depression of the seventies
drove starving men to take any jobs that were offered, the owners tried to
bring in cheap labor, and the miners changed their secret society of
"Molly Maguires" into a brotherhood for murder, sabotage, and in-
discriminate terror. Private war raged in the coal valleys. Strike-breakers,
owners, and superintendents were killed and maimed, and the companies
were not slow to retaliate. At last a Pinkerton detective contrived to join
the "Mollies" and to rise to a position of power. The murder trials for
which he gave evidence destroyed the secret band but they did not bring
;

peace to the coal fields.* As we shall see, one reason for the change of
immigration from northern and western, to southern and eastern,
Europe which began in the eighties, was the hope of the anthracite
owners to replace the Irish with cheaper and less quarrelsome workers.
In the same year, just after Hayes took office, the nation was stirred
by its first big railway strikes, which crippled most of the lines east of the
Mississippi. The depression had brought repeated wage reductions, and
when a final cut of ten per cent was imposed in July, 1877, trainmen on
the Baltimore and Ohio stopped work. The movement spread fast, with

* In order to
ingratiate himself the detective posed as a murderer, a counter-
feiter,and the holder of a war pension to which he had no right unusual creden-
tials, but they worked.
xxv. The Powers of the Presidency Revive 525

rioting and arson in the big towns. Then the bystanders grew bitter, for
the strikes interfered with business and with many people's convenience.
Class hatreds were probably stronger in the summer and autumn of 1877
than they had ever been in lucky America.
In West Virginia the governor called on the militia to break the strike;
but the militia refused. So the governor turned to President Hayes, who
perhaps unfortunately did not refuse. He sent a general and two hundred
federal troops, and was soon asked for similar aid by the governors of
Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Neither Hayes nor anyone else had faced the stormy problems involved
in the use of federal power during industrial disputes. The day had corne
when industries not only spread across state borders, but sometimes grew
richer and more powerful than the states in which they resided. Their
minor class wars could not be controlled by the local police. Yet the
immense, distant, impersonal power of the federal community was not
likely to be used with sympathy or restraint if invoked in the midst of a
was a new aspect of the old federal problem: to what extent can
strike. It

power be wisely used by a group of men who may never have come within
hundreds (or thousands) of miles of the community which is affected?
The militia of West Virginia probably understood their own B. and O.
trainmen, whose strike they refused to break; but General Hancock saw
nothing but a problem of "law and order."
Hayes felt he was right to "show firmness" and to send the troops. Al-
though the precedent proved unfortunate there is no doubt the people
backed Hayes at the time for the first big strikes frightened America and
;

the natural response of frightened people is to call for soldiers. Much

sophistication is needed, and much experience with the strange world of
mechanical progress, before strikes are taken stoically by the public as part
of the inconvenient climate of modern life. America was a long way from
such sophistication in the eighteen-seventies. The railway strikes bred a
dangerous reaction. Courts, and in some cases state legislatures, sought to
retreat into old doctrines of conspiracy. Labor for the first time began to
listen attentively to new doctrines of socialism. A few more outbreaks as

badly handled as the strikes of '77, and America might follow the pattern
of class struggles on the Continent of Europe.

Before Hayes had successfully ended his war with the Senate he began
a similar battle with the House of Representatives. The Democrats had
control of the lower House in 1878 and they undertook to force the repeal
of the remaining Reconstruction Acts the laws allowing federal super-
526 The Price of Union

vision of state elections. They attached the repeal as a series of riders to

appropriation bills. The Republican Senate refused approval; but in the
next Congress the Democrats had a majority in both houses. The money
bills, with riders attached, were passed and sent to the President, who re-
corded in his diary on March 9, 1879: "They [Congress] will stop the
wheels block the wheels of government if I do not yield my convic-
tions. It will be severe, perhaps a long contest. I do not fear it. ...
...
The people will not allow this revolutionary cause to triumph." *

The Democrats in the lower House excused their use of the riders on
appropriation bills by quoting "grievance before supply," that famous
phrase in the history of the English House of Commons. They said that
the lower House in America, also, was the popular agency of government,
and that its grievances must therefore be satisfied before it would vote sup-
ply. Hayes, who had studied constitutional law at Harvard under Justice
Joseph Story, wrote in his diary on March 23 "With the doctrine estab-
:

lished that the House may legitimately refuse to act unless the other
branches of the Government obey its commands, the House of Representa-
tives becomes a despotism." Hayes stood firm, and in the end the House
surrendered.
"The people of this country," said Hayes, "are unwilling to see the
supremacy of the Constitution replaced by the omnipotence of any depart-
ment of the Government." In his view that applied to the Executive as
well as to the Congress. Woodrow Wilson's remark that "the President is
at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can" would
have seemed to Hayes as unconstitutional as the behavior of his own Con-
gress. He would have agreed with Lord Bryce, who wrote that the Presi-
dent "does not sway the councils and guide the policy of those members
of Congress who belong to his own side. The expression of his wishes con-
veyed in a message has not necessarily any more effect on Congress than
an article in a prominent party newspaper. No duty lies on Congress to
take up a subject to which he has called attention as needing legislation." 11
This is a far cry from Wilson's words, and Wilson's practice; yet it is
an accurate description of the office, until a popular President chooses to
use its powers aggressively. Lincoln might have been the last strong Presi-
dent if Congress had been able to bully Hayes after ruining Johnson and
making a dupe of Grant. Since Hayes stood firm Congress waited grimly
for his successor. Gonkling and the stalwarts showed what they had in
mind when they decided on General Grant for a third term.
 XXVI

Civil Service versus the Stalwarts

JLowARD THE END of Hayes's term the position of the Republican Party
was slightly improved. The business revival helped; but more important
was the four-year-long proof that the party leadership did not consist
solely of political babes, like Grant, or of stalwart ruffians. Hayes was a
sensible and effective politician, but also an honest man. His Cabinet
would do honor to any political group at any time. The Democrats, mean-
while, had been in control of the lower House for six years and of the
Senate for two years. They appeared to have no policy, and their factional
spirit has been described as "violent and depraved." Although they had
long demanded home rule for the South and honest appointments in the
civil service, they did little to help President Hayes when he fought for
these reforms. So the record of Congress hurt the Democrats, while the
record of the Executive helped people to forget the years of Republican
shame.
The Republican National Convention met in Chicago on June 2, 1880.
There Elaine and Conkling fought each other in a battle so furious that it
is hard to remember they were fighting about nothing. Neither man had an

idea or a principle but each was consumed with malevolence toward the
;

other. The ill will had been building since 1866, when both were in the
House of Representatives and Blaine answered Conkling's arrogance by
laughing at his "turkey-gobbler strut." The votes of the New York machine
had helped to nominate Hayes in 1876; but the true purpose was to defeat
Blaine. And for the same reason, in 1880, Conkling proposed a third term
for Grant.
General Grant had recently returned from a two-year tour around the
world. His fame in foreign countries had pleased the American people
who found it easy to forget the black days of his presidency in the glory of
the war years. Grant was only fifty-eight. He wanted the nomination, and
he would probably have won it if Conkling had been a wiser man. The
tradition against a third term did not seem to hurt Grant. As Professor
Ford wrote, "it may be questioned whether this tradition does not owe its
strength more to the ambition of politicians than to sincere conviction on
the part of the people. . . . The reasoning of The Federalist in favor of
527
528 The Price of Union

continued re-eligibility is cogent in itself and is supported by the experi-

ence of other countries. ."** . .

Aside from Elaine and Grant (who was really Conkling in disguise) the ,

chief candidate was Hayes's Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman.

James A. Garfield, a popular party man with a good war record, and a
career in the lower House which had been slightly stained by Credit
Mobilier, was manager for Sherman. Conkling, sarcastic and over-
floor

bearing as ever, was floor manager for Grant. He had set the stage foi* the
last stand of the Old Guard, the final triumph of the men who had saved
the Union. The galleries were full of old soldiers; the delegations were stiff
with major generals; and the bands played all the Northern songs of the
war. If Conkling had confined himself to martial nostalgia and romance
he might have won; but he could not resist the pleasure of insulting his
neighbors. He fought every preliminary point on the seating of delegates,
on the rules for the convention with such arrogance and rudeness that he
had lost many votes for Grant before the nominations began. Then he
almost repaired the harm with one of the famous nominating speeches of
American politics.
He began by quoting in his rich voice :

If asked what state he hails from

Our sole reply shall be
He hails from Appomattox
And its famous apple tree!

This was good but ;

almost exhausted the subject. What more was there
it

to say about Grant? "His name is the most illustrious borne by living
man/' added Conkling. "Take the tried and true old hero with the Old
Guard behind him. Nobody now is really disquieted about a third
. . .

term except those who are longing for a first time." Doubtless very few
people were disquieted by a third term; but a great many were disquieted
by the Old Guard, which was all too literally behind Grant, and would
troop back into power with him. Not even the noble battle music could
lift men's hearts once they
began thinking about Boutwell, and Babcock,
and Belknap, and similar characters from the unlamented past.
Garfield made a good speech for his candidate, John Sherman. Then
the voting began. The real fight was between Blaine and Conkling, the
half -breeds and the stalwarts. The convention soon saw that neither could
win, because the hatred was so great that there could be no shifting of
votes between the two camps. For thirty-four ballots Grant's vote varied
between 302 and 313, Blaine's between 282 and 285. There were 756
delegates,379 being a majority.
* From The Cleveland Era THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,
by H. J. Ford, vol. 4,
copyright Yale University Press.
xx vL Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 529

Sherman had expected to benefit when the break came; but Sherman
was cold and unpopular, though everyone praised his ability. Garfield, on
the other hand, was one of the best-liked men in the party; so when the
delegates felt they had been faithful long enough they turned to him. The
stalwarts never broke; Grant had 309 votes at the end. Years later Sher-
man came to feel that his floor manager had been disloyal to him;
but there is no evidence that Garfield had planned or expected the
nomination, or that he did anything but accept a wholly unexpected
accident.
Knowing Conkling's vengeful temper, the convention sought to placate
him by naming his henchman, Chester A. Arthur, for the vice-presidency.
This was a wasted effort. The followers of Elaine and of Sherman worked
faithfully in the campaign but the stalwarts sulked until September, when
;

Grant, Cameron, and Conkling made their famous trip to Ohio to see
Garfield and repair the breach. Garfield wrote in his diary, "I had no
private conversation with the party." This was not the view of the others,
who insisted they received promises which were never fulfilled. So the

good-will ended by adding to a bitterness which was already wicked.

visit
The DemocraticParty, meanwhile, met in convention at Cincinnati and
nominated General Winfield Scott Hancock who had been a Union
commander at the battle of Gettysburg. Tilden refused to be a candidate
because of his age and health; and the party turned to Hancock (who
knew and cared nothing about politics) in order to prove that it was loyal
and that it, too, had generals.
The campaign was listless so far as the public was concerned, but

furious on the part of the politicians, who abused each other with more
than normal folly. The Democrats published (in a magazine humorously
called Truth) a forged letter from Garfield which endorsed the importa-
tion of cheap Oriental labor. The lie was successful, for Hancock won
five electoral votes in California. The Republicans retaliated with simple
and extensive bribery. Garfield won by only 10,000 votes in a total of more
than nine million.*

The new President, with a nice regard for American tradition, had been
born in a log cabin. His father, a pioneer farmer in Ohio, died when
Garfield was two years old, so the boy knew hard poverty in his childhood.
Yet by 1856, when he was twenty-five, he had worked his way through
Williams College and had gained a capacity for studying which was to be

* Garfield had
4,454,416 votes, Hancock 4,444,952. Garfield had 214 electoral
votes, Hancock 155.
530 The Price of Union

his strength throughout life. Unlike many politicians, he acquired knowl-

edge through books rather than people.
He married when he was twenty-seven, and the next year was elected
as a Republican to the state senate of Ohio. In the summer of 1861 he
raised a regiment of volunteers and became its colonel. He learned military
theory exhaustively and well from his books; the practice was soon pro-
vided by the enemy. Garfield was a brigadier general of volunteers when
he fought at Shiloh, the most deadly battle in the West. At Chickamauga
he was chief of staff to Rosecrans, and although the commanding general's
reputation suffered from that battle Garfield's was enhanced. He was
made a major general, but soonleft the army for the House of Representa-

tives, where he served for the next eighteen years. He and Blaine were the
dominant figures after Thaddeus Stevens died, and when Blaine went to
the Senate Garfield ruled alone. The House was by that time Democratic,
so he became leader of the Opposition.
Garfield's name was on the list of those to whom Oakes Ames distributed
Credit Mobilier stock. Garfield denied receiving it; but he could not deny
having taken a fee from a paving-block company which was seeking favors
from the government. His constituents, however, re-elected him in spite of
these disclosures, and in spite of the fact that he was a "sound-money"
man at a time when Ohio was for inflation. They were proud of his record
as a parliamentarian and as for his irregularities, they doubtless took the
;

view of the Milwaukee Sentinel which wrote in 1880 that Garfield's name
"is exceptionally clean for a man who has been engaged for twenty years
in active politics."
In 1880 the Ohio legislature promoted Garfield to the United States
Senate. His comment in his diary on January 28 would not have endeared
him to his new associates. "I have this premonition," he wrote, "that the
Senate is composed of old men whose ideas and opinions are crystallized
into fixed and well-nigh unchangeable forms. A decided majority of all my
associates who have gone from the House to the Senate have been

measurably lost in its silences. ... I enter the Senate with great doubt."
In fact he never entered it at all. He became President instead, and John
Sherman returned to the Senate.

As usual the appointment of the Cabinet was the first sign of the new
Administration's purpose. This time it was a sign of war literally to the
death. Garfield chose Blaine as Secretary of State, showing that he was
prepared to finish the battle against Conkling and the stalwarts which
Hayes had begun. The rest of the appointments are not important, since
xxvi. Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 531

Garfield was to be President so short a time; but they included a "sound-

money" Westerner as Secretary of the Treasury, and Robert Lincoln
(eldest and only surviving son of Abraham) as Secretary of War.
On March 23, less than three weeks after his inauguration, Garfield sent
to the Senate a list of appointments which included William Robertson
as collector of the port of New York. Robertson was an anti-Conkling New
Yorker, a "half-breed." The challenge was as sharp as when Hayes sought
to oust Chester Arthur. Garfield wrote:

This [nomination] brings on the contest at once and will settle the
question whether the President is registering clerk of the Senate or the
Executive of the United States. Summed up in a single sentence this
is the
question: shall the principal port of entry in which more than
ninety per cent of all our customs duties are collected be under the con-
trol of the administration or under the local control of the factional
senator. 2

As Professor Binkley pointsout, this letter is an adequate reply to those

who think that Garfield challenged Conkling by accident.
Conkling was not one to dodge a fight. He announced that the President
had made a declaration of war and had violated the promises given when
Grant and Gonkling visited Ohio during the campaign. He asked for the
rejection of William Robertson on the grounds of "senatorial courtesy,"
declaring once again that federal appointments in New York must be per-
sonally acceptable to the Senators from that state. Since the other Senator
from New York was known as "Me-too" Platt, this meant that appoint-
ments must be acceptable to Conkling.*
While taking this stand, Conkling persuaded many leading Republicans
5
to advise the President to compromise, so as to save the party. Garfield s
comment is interesting: "If it were a difference between individuals there
could be some sense in such advice. But the one represents a whole in-
dependent function of the government. The other is 1/76 of 1/2 of another
independent branch of the government with which compound vulgar
fractions the President isasked to compromise." 8 Clearly, the office would
lose none of its prerogatives while Garfield was at the White House. Ac-
cording to John Hay, the President said, "They may take Robertson out of
the Senate head first or feet first. I will never withdraw him."
What Conkling and his friends planned to do was neither to accept
Robertson nor to reject him not to carry him out head first or feet first,
:

but to leave him to die of old age. When this became obvious, Garfield
withdrew all the nominations except those for the Custom House. There
would be no appointments of any sort until the question of the President's
independence from "compound vulgar fractions" was settled.
* Thomas Platt was a hardened stalwart. He had been elected to the Senate
by
the New York legislature the previous January.
532 The Price of Union

Meanwhile, the "star route" frauds had been revealed to a public which
thought the days of such surprises were past. A ring of criminals in Wash-
ington had received contracts for delivering the mails on routes where
neither railways nor steamboats ran. They had hired local carriers to do
the work for a small sum, and received a large sum from the Post Office
for themselves. An ex-Senator and the Second Assistant Postmaster Gen-
eral were heavily involved. Although the evil centered in the Executive

Department, and the Assistant Postmaster General in question had been

active during the recent campaign, the tale smacked so of "Grantism" and
the Old Guard that it helped to turn the public against the stalwarts.
When Garfield insisted on vigorous prosecution he strengthened his posi-
tion in the country and the Senate saw that it would have to confirm the
appointments.
Gonkling had one last hope. He resigned his seat in May, after Robert-
son was accepted, and induced Platt (who had scarcely unpacked) to
resign also. The two of them then appealed to the New York State leg-
and re-election. "If they had been returned,"
islature for vindication
wrote John Sherman, "the President would have been powerless to appoint
anyone in New York without consulting the senators, practically trans-
4
ferring to them his constitutional power."
The struggle at Albany became intense and furious.
for rehabilitation
But Conkling had been losing strength at home ever since his first defeat
by President Hayes. In spite of all that Vice-President Arthur could do
the once pliant legislature of New York rebelled and neither of the Sena-
tors was returned. The country was startled but amused. Conkling dis-

appeared from politics.

Platt had still a long career ahead of him as Republican boss of New
York perhaps the strongest and certainly the most smooth and silent
manipulator of patronage the state has known. "He organised the . . .

alliance between politics and business," writes William Allen White, "a
necessary function in the clash between agriculture and industry that the
times were staging. . American capital had been struggling for three
. .

decades for just the privileges which in New York State Platt's leadership
was giving to capital."* The ex-Senator was far happier in this secret work

* William Allen
White, Masks in a Pageant, p. 56. On pages 46 and 47 of the
same book White gives a classic description of one type of state boss. "As a rule,"
he writes, "a man running for the legislature has no money to spend on his cam-
paign. Platt furnished the candidate with money for election expenses through the
agency of the State Central Committee. .
. Certain things in politics are change-
.

less. For instance, when the legislature is elected a legislator is inclined to abide

by the decision of the party caucus on questions that require his vote. If he bolts
the caucus, a new man often appears from his district the next session. If a cor-
poration, or an interested citizen or business concern has a bill pending before the
legislature, it is evident that the person to see about that bill is the man who con-
trols the party caucus. That man is he who sends the campaign expenses to the
xxvi. Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 533

than in playing "Me-too" to Conkling on the national stage. Nothing

disturbed him in his darkness until the end of the century when he had the
misfortune to collide with the rising young Theodore Roosevelt.
Garfield did not have time to enjoy the fall of Conkling. The vicious
personal bitterness which had stained American politics ever since the
murder of Lincoln, the degradation of great causes (indeed, of the Union
victory itself) for the sake of party triumphs and of spoils, finally bred a
deed of madness which marked symbolically the end of a bad era. On July
2, 1881, while Conkling and Platt were fighting for their jobs at Albany,
Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker, a lawyer named Charles
Guiteau. The assassin gave himself up to the police, who found the follow-
ing statement on his person: "The President's tragic death was a sad
necessity, but it will unite the Republican party and save the Republic.
... I had no illwill toward the President. His death was a political
necessity. ... I am
a Stalwart of the Stalwarts." 5 In other words, the
mad crime was done to put Chester Arthur in the presidency, because
Arthur was the henchman of Conkling. Presumably Arthur would not
interfere with the spoils system perfected by his master that man of
noble presence and commanding voice who had inherited all the evil of
the Vindictives (the radicals of Andrew Johnson's day) without even
their thin pretense of a principle. Guiteau had only carried into crazed,

logical action the language and the manners which had been made
fashionable by Conkling.
Garfield died after eleven weeks of pain. If he had served for two terms
he could not have done more for his cherished purpose of breaking the
hold of the spoilsmen. The stalwarts could no longer hope, as when Hayes
was President, through one honest Administration and then gaily
to sit

return to the pigsty. The

public at last was ready for civil-service reform.
When Conkling was asked if he would remain in public life he answered :

"How can I battle with a shroud? How can I speak into an open grave?
6
Silence is a duty and a doom."

candidates for the legislature. . . . From 1882 until 1902 that particular man to
see about New Yorklegislation was Thomas Collier Platt."
The state boss is likely to rule by being helpful to business or to strong pressure
groups. The city boss is likely to rule by giving private social services to families
who would otherwise be destitute, and who become properly grateful. In either
case the boss may be a blessing or a nuisance. The distinction between a good and
a bad machine is likely to depend upon the origin of the money which makes the
services possible. But good or bad, city or state, these are the machines with which
every President must deal. If he fights with too many of them his Administration
will fail, for the machines are likely to own (or to be owned by) members of Con-
gress. And even when he fights successfully, and gets rid of a Conkling, the next
stage is likely to be a Platt an improvement certainly, but still short of perfection.
534 The Price of Union

Chester Arthur could scarcely have become President under more distress-
ing circumstances. Guiteau had murdered Garfield in order to put an old-
fashioned spoilsman in the White House. Although there was no connec-
tion between the criminal and the Vice-President, vague, unpleasant talk1-

was inevitable. The country did not welcome Arthur. Also, the Senate
was so evenly divided that neither party could rule, and the small Re-
publican majority in the House was lost in 1882. Yet in spite of these
handicaps, Arthur was a good President. He could not impose his own
policies, since he lacked both the public and the party support which are
essential; but he maintained the dignity which Hayes had restored to the
White House, and falsified the hopes of his Gustom-House cronies as well
as the expectations of the demented Guiteau.
Arthur was born in 1830, in Vermont, the son of a Scotch-Irish Baptist
clergyman. He was educated at Union College, and soon moved to New
York City, where he became a successful lawyer. Shortly before the Civil
War he married a charming wife, the daughter of a naval officer. New
York State had a Republican government during the first two years of the
war, and Arthur became inspector general and quartermaster general
exacting and troublesome posts because of the system of recruiting. Volun-
teers were enlisted in their local communities, and were received and

equipped by their own state government. They were then turned over to
the federal authorities and the state was repaid for their equipment and
maintenance. No system could be more cumbersome or more conducive to
fraud. As always, Arthur was efficient in administration and accurate in
accounts. In 1863, when Horatio Seymour became governor, Arthur was
replaced. He retired with a vast accumulation, not of public funds, but of
knowledge about the politics and politicians in every district of the state,
This was to be his hobby: the handling of these devious characters, the
sorting and balancing and juggling of their strange rivalries and greeds.
While imposing the most rigid financial honesty upon himself, he seems
never (in his New York State days) to have cared how his companions
behaved.
Silently, and perhaps with the interest a botanist might feel in some
monstrous distortion of a flower, he watched the Tweed Ring at work, and
even held office under it. Slowly, he became one of the trusted and im-
portant figures in the state machine of Roscoe Conkling. In 1871 Grant
made him collector of the Port of New York, where again he saw to it that
no money was stolen, and also that none of the thousand employees wasted
xxvl. Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 535

too much time on the public business.* As we have seen, he and Alonzo
Cornell (the naval officer of the Port who was also state chairman of the
Republican Party) thought Hayes must be joking when he told the civil
no part in politics. When the Senate backed Hayes against
servants to take
Conkling, Arthur and Cornell were out of jobs. The latter became
governor of New York State, and the former Vice- President, When
Conkling and Platt resigned their seats, Arthur went with them to Albany
towork for their re-election, or "vindication." No wonder Guiteau thought
he was putting a reliable "stalwart" in the White House. Yet from the
moment he became President Arthur was a disappointment to his politi-
cal friends.
Whether he was shocked by the melodramatic end of Conkling's battle
with two Presidents, or whether he felt that the amused detachment with
which he had taken part in state politics was inappropriate to the Wash-
ington scene, he turned against the spoils system, against the Custom
House habit of padding the rolls, and against his Custom House friends.
Most daring of all, he attacked that monument of corruption and special
privilege, the Republican tariff. The public backed him on civil-service
reform; but on the tariff he could only help to prepare for a far distant
day.

In 1879, "Gentleman George" Pcndleton of Ohio was elected to the

United States Senate. We last saw him at the Democratic National Con-
vention of 1868, when he and his "Ohio idea" were candidates for the
nomination and for the platform respectively. The "idea" was put into the
platform; but the man was rejected in favor of Seymour. After years of
retirement, Pendleton returned to Washington resolute to improve the
tone of government. He believed as Alexander Hamilton and Justice
Joseph Story had fervently held that the needlessly sharp separation be-
tween Congress and the Executive was a chief cause of inefficiency. The
separation, as we have seen, was not made by the Constitution, but by the
will (or the jealousy) of Congress. Pendleton proposed a law to allow
Cabinet members to defend and debate the Administration's measures
on the floor of Congress.

This system [said the Congressional committee which reported the

bill] will require the selection of the strongest men to be heads of depart-

* There seems to have been an

accepted difference, in the code of those days,
between putting money in one's own pocket and bribing business men to use the
Port of New York by undervaluing their imports.
536 The Price of Union

ments, and will require them to be well equipped with the knowledge
of their offices. It will also require the strongest men to be the leaders
of Congress and participate in the debate. It will bring those strong
men in contact, perhaps into conflict, to advance the public weal, and
thus stimulate their abilities and their efforts, and will thus assuredly
7
result to the good of the country.

Blaine, who was about to become Secretary of State, and the Republican
Senators Allison of Iowa and Ingalls of Kansas, and the Democratic
Senator Voorhees of Indiana, backed Pendleton in this proposal, agreeing
it would be "the first step toward a sound civil service reform, which will

secure a larger wisdom in the adoption of policies." Nothing happened.

This is a plan which seems destined to be put forward in each generation,
tobe treated with respect, and then to be ushered back to the limbo from
which it briefly emerged.
While pressing for his major reform, Pendleton had also introduced a
bill for the merit system in the civil service. This was neglected during the

last days of the Hayes Administration, for Congress still hoped to revive
the worst excesses of "Grantism" as soon as Hayes retired to his farm. The
bill continued to be neglected while Garfield and Conkling fought each
other to extinction. But when Arthur became President he astounded his
friends and enemies alike became law
by supporting the Pendleton Act. It
on January 16, 1883. Although supplemented by many presidential rules
and orders, and by later Acts of Congress, it remains the basic statute to
this day.
There were three main points to the Pendleton Act. First, it forbade
political assessments on federal officeholders. There is so close a bond
between the spoils system and political assessments that the one will not
flourish without the other. To
the true spoilsman, public offices are part
of the assets of the machine. Officeholders, therefore, have a direct
financial interest in the success of the machine. They must contribute ac-
cording to a set scale usually from two to five per cent of their salary. If
:

the thousands, or tens of thousands, of appointees cannot help to fill the

party chest, and are not even allowed to do political work in their spare
time, is the use of giving them jobs?*
what
Manyyears were to pass, of course, before the prohibitions in the Pen-
dleton Act became wholly effective. And it was not until the Hatch Act
that every form of political work was forbidden to all federal employees
except policy-making officials. Then at last the civil servants, rio matter
how they may have acquired their jobs, were compelled to be neutral, and
thus useless to the machine.
* Under the Hatch Act
(1939), as interpreted by the Civil Service Commission
in 1940, federal employees may contribute to political parties but no one may con-
tribute more than $5000.
xxvi. Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 537

Second, the Pendleton Act provided for a Civil Service Commission* to

build and to administer a new type of service, on the merit system. At
first, only thirteen per cent of the federal jobs were affected; but the Presi-
dent could expand the classified service at his discretion. Most Presidents
have done so: especially Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and
Franklin Roosevelt. During the last year of President Hoover's term eighty
per cent of the federal civil service was under the merit system. Four years
later, in 1936, because the emergency New Deal agencies were not under
civil-service regulations, the percentage had dropped to sixty but by 1948 ;

it had risen again to eighty-three.

Third, the Act provided that
all appointments to jobs in the "classified"

services that
is, those coming under the merit system should be made
as a result of open competitive examinations. Appointments, however,
were to be apportioned among the states according to population: an
inevitable arrangement in a federal system, although reformers com-
plained. An impoverished state such as Mississippi, with an impoverished
educational system, could not be asked to support a civil service from
which her own citizens were virtually excluded.
In 1883, the spoils system was put on the defensive in Washington and
it has remained there ever since. Yet it has not been abolished, and is not

likely to be abolished, for two main reasons first, the usefulness of Execu-
:

tive patronage in a government of divided powers; and second, the

slightly disappointing results of civil-service reform. Security of tenure,

regularity of salary increases, promotion according to merit, and guaran-
tee of pensions, have not always attracted the ablest types of men from
business and the professions. Presidents with vast new federal agencies to
staffsometimes find they can do better on the patronage than on the
"merit" system. Men will work for the political cause, the party, or the
President himself, who would not want a permanent place in a bureauc-
racy.**
In the states, meanwhile, there has been no rush toward civil-service
reform. In the year of the Pendleton Act, New York passed a civil-service
law of its own, and about fifteen other states have since done the same.
The Acts are not everywhere well administered;*** and in the counties,
where the political machines have their true roots, the spoils system is
almost uncontaminated. There are 3056 counties in America, and forty of
them have adopted the merit system. In 1939 the forty-eight states con-
* This is the first of the new Executive under the
agencies under the President
President but not connected with a regular department.
**The federal civil service had about 3000 employees in 1800, and 2,090,732
in 1948.
*** In Louisiana, for
example, the civil-service system was recently wrecked by
a statute placing it practically in the hands of the governor and destroying the in-
dependence of the state commission.
538 The Price of Union

tained 175,000 local units of government, which employ more than 900,-
000 people altogether. So the machine still has jobs at its disposal.

President Arthur succeeded with the Pendleton Act because the public
was behind him; but he had no similar support in his other attempts at
reform. When he sought an appropriation to improve the Mississippi
waterways, Congress allowed him $4,000,000, but at the same time ap-
propriated another $14,000,000 for river and harbor schemes which he
did not want and which had no national value. This is a type of legisla-
tion which always threatens a large federal society, wherein the legislators
think of their own districts first and of the nation afterwards.* Arthur
wanted four million dollars to repair the waterway which served the vast
central valley of America. Congressmen from other regions said, in effect,
"Yes, you can have your money for your useful cause, so long as we get
something extra to fritter away at home. Our people would not like to pay
taxes to improve the Mississippi, unless they got a commission for them-
selves." By the time every member had added his bit, three and a half
times as much money was to be wasted as was to be used in the common
interest. "Thus," said the President in his veto message, "as the bill be-
comes more objectionable it secures more support." The excellence of the
epigram did Arthur no good, for he lacked a national following to which
he could appeal over the heads of the parochial representatives. The bill
was passed in spite of his veto.
Nobody wanted to waste fourteen million dollars. But once the game of
exchanging favors began, most Congressmen were willing to raise the
stakes, and raise them again, in order that they themselves might have a
share. When the crazy total was reached, nobody but the President could
even try to intervene. But the President's veto failed for the strength of
his office depends upon influence rather than authority, and the influence

depends upon circumstances, which were all unpropitious for Arthur. He

had cut himself off from his political friends by supporting the Pendleton
Act, so he had no normal channels for reaching the local machines, for
promising favors and asking favors in return. And the public as a whole
was worried about him not hostile, but certainly not friendly because
of his lighthearted past, and because of the unhappy way he came to
power. He was useless to the Congressmen in fighting their district battles :

the support of Chester Arthur did not bring votes. With no party to impose
* "A
Congressional district is sometimes a hard taskmaster/' said Vice-President
Garner after forty-six years in public life. "None of them ever reach a point where
"
they say: 'Just let our interests rock along and go be a national statesman.' (Gp.
Bascom Timmons, Garner of Texas, p. 286.)
xxvi. Civil Service versus the Stalwarts 539

discipline,and no public backing to inspire hope or fear, Arthur was help-

less.Fourteen million dollars was thrown away.
Yet the story has a happy ending. The clarity and intelligence of the
President's veto was more effective than the Congressmen thought. The
voters noticed that their tribune had tried to protect them, and had been
thrust aside. Senator Hoar, who favored the bill, says that "a large num-
ber of the members of the House who voted for it lost their seats," and
that it "cost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Repre-
sentatives." 8 This only meant that future vetoes by Arthur might be given
more weight, since he had proved that he could command a public hear-
ing. It did not mean that Congress would refrain from similar bills in the
future. It is in the nature of a Congress representing localities to pass such
bills.Except in foreign affairs in times of recognized danger most
Senators represent their states, or the great economic interests of their
region, and most members of the lower House represent their city wards,
their small towns, their rural counties, their trade unions. America would
suffer if this were not so. But America also suffers when the President's
influence declines so far that he cannot sustain his veto. In a huge federal
society, the secret of good government is often to prevent things from
happening.

Having and harbors, Arthur boldly turned to the most

failed over rivers
vexed issue of all: Here was the easy, long-unchallenged field
the tariff.

for the lobbying and jockeying and log-rolling which produces the type
of bill that gets more support as it becomes more objectionable. We have
seen how Grant feared to use his prestige for tariff revision when the
country had but recently abandoned free trade just as he had feared to
support the first faint efforts toward civil-service reform in 1871. By the
time Arthur faced the problem, vested interests had been accumulating
behind the tariff wall for twenty years, and if a single brick blew down
there came a cry for help. Yet Arthur had one point in his favor the gov- :

ernment was burdened with too much money. The annual surplus was
more than $145,000,000. In his message to Congress on December 4, 1882,
the President said "Either the surplus must lie idle in the treasury or the
:

government will be forced to buy at market rates its bonds, not then re-
deemable, and which under such circumstances cannot fail to command
an enormous premium, or the swollen revenues will be devoted to ex-
travagant expenditures, which, as experience has taught, is ever the bane
of an overflowing treasury."
Hoping to evade all talk of reducing the tariff which was even more
540 The Price of Union

regional and contentious in its benefits than the Mississippi River the
House passed a bill reducing internal revenue taxes, so that the surplus
might become less tempting and embarrassing. But the Senate, under its
power to amend money bills, added onto this simple bill a complete re-
vision of most of the tariff schedules. The two houses appointed a joint
committee which reported forty-eight hours before the close of the session.
The members of the committee had abandoned themselves to bartering
one favor for another. The statute on which they agreed was one of the
silliest in the history of the American tariff;
yet both houses passed it
without delay. There was no time for thought, and if action were post-
poned until the next session the President might marshal public opinion
behind the wise recommendations of his tariff commission, which gave no
special favors to districts with powerful or wily Congressmen.

Thus pressed for time [writes Professor Ford], Congress passed a bill
containing features obnoxious to a majority in both Houses and of-
fensive to public opinion. Senator Sherman in his Recollections ex-
pressed regret that he had voted for the bill and declared that, had the
recommendations of the commission been adopted, "the tariff
. . .

would have been settled for many years," but "many persons wishing to
advance their particular interests appeared before the committee and
succeeded in having their views adopted."* 9

Here are some examples of how they succeeded :

The office and duty of a conference committee [wrote a member of

the House of Representatives in 1884] is to adjust the difference be-
tween two disagreeing houses. This House had decided that bar-iron of
the middle class should pay $20 a ton; the Senate that it was to pay
$20.16 a ton. The gentlemen of the conference committee reconciled
this difference how? By raising bar-iron (of this class) above both
House and Senate to $22.40. The Tariff Commission reported that the
tariff on iron ore should be 50 cents a ton. The Senate said it should be
50 cents a ton. The House said it should be fifty cents a ton. Gentlemen
of the conference committee reconciled the agreement of the House,
Senate and Tariff Commission into a disagreement, and made the duty
on iron ore 75 cents a ton. The gentlemen of the conference did a
similar service for the great corporation of corporations, the Iron and
Steel Association, by giving it a tax of $17 on steel rails, which the
10
House had fixed at $15 and the Senate at $15.68 per ton.

The President accepted this inane bill, admitting that he thought it bad,
but seeing no reason to believe the public cared. And without the public
he could do nothing, because the Congress and the political parties only
wanted to dodge responsibility.
* From The Cleveland Era THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,
by H. J. Ford, vol. 4,
copyright Yale University Press.
 XXVII

Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire

IN JUNE, 1884, the Republican National Convention met in

Chicago. Chester Arthur hoped for the nomination and felt he deserved
it; but his only support came from the waning faction of stalwarts, and
even they were not enthusiastic since they rightly felt that Arthur had be-
trayed them by supporting the Pendleton Act. The friends of reform, who
should have been grateful to Arthur, had never trusted him. Men like
Senator Hoar, and the charming George William Curtis of Harper's
Weekly, and the young Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge,
gave their support to Senator Edmunds of Vermont, who had been in the
upper House since 1866 and who was a merciless, bitter foe of every type
of jobbery. But Edmunds never had more than ninety-three votes. Elaine
was once more the favorite of the convention, and this time he could not
be stopped. The Mulligan letters had undone him in 1876; Conkling, with
the help of Grant, had blocked him in 1880. But now Conkling was
ruined, and Grant was dying, and Garfield who had snatched the prize so
unexpectedly was dead. The first ballot showed that neither George Ed-
munds nor Chester Arthur had a serious following. On the fourth ballot
Blaine was chosen.
Before long the delegates were sorry for what they had done. Thousands
of Republicans were in no mood for Blaine. They wanted to forget the
bloody shirt, the feuds of stalwarts and half-breeds, the long disgrace of
the spoilsmen. But Blaine, with his Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad,
would not help them forget. If the Democrats should find a man with a
fresh, clean name, he might attract Republican votes. Strangely, they
possessed such a man in Governor Cleveland of New York. And even more
strangely, they had the wisdom to nominate him.
Stephen Grover Cleveland, son of a Presbyterian clergyman, was born
in a parsonage at Caldwell, New Jersey. He became a national figure not
because of brilliance but because of strong conscience and unbending
character, so it isinteresting to notice that during four generations his
family had bred ministers of the church.

So much has been made of the humble circumstances in which Grover

made Ford] that the unwary reader
his start in life [wrote Professor
might easily imagine the future President was almost a waif. Nothing
547
 542 The Price of Union

could be farther from the truth. He really belonged to the most au-
thentic aristocracy that any state of society can produce that which
maintains its standards and principles from generation to generation by
the integrity of the stock without any endowment of wealth.* 1

Cleveland's father died when the boy was sixteen, leaving the mother with
nine children on her hands, so Grover did not have the education which
was intended for him. After a few years of earning his living planlesslyt he
went to stay with his uncle at Buffalo, where he studied law and was ad-
mitted to the bar in 1859.
He was already a Democrat, although his uncle and patron was a Whig
who had become a Republican, and although the Republicans were the
strongest party in upper New York. Years later he said he chose to be a
Democrat because that was the party of solidity and conservatism, and
because he disapproved of Fremont as presidential candidate. This was
typical of Cleveland, the most guarded of men, bound to take offense at
the Byronic qualities of Fremont and wing of the
to resent the abolitionist

Republican Party. Yet as Allan Nevins were two Clevelands,

says, there
and it is easy to lose sight of the cheerful, amusing companion in the wary,
austere figure of the public man.

He was a hard-working young lawyer, spending incredibly long hours

at his desk and seeming to those who knew him but slightly to be grow-
ing into a stiff, heavy, and stern man. Many hasty observers spoke of his
impassivity and dignity. But he was also a roystering blade, who knew
the inside of dozens of saloons, led the chorus in lusty drinking songs,
and prided himself on feats of conviviality which sometimes, as he puts
caused him to "lose a day." The picture of Cleveland at 2 A.M.
it later,

laboring over his law books is strictly accurate; and so is the picture of
Cleveland at 2 A.M. in the back room of Diebold's, or SchwabPs, or
Louis Goetz's .
cafes, chanting "There's a hole in the bottom of the
. .

2
sea" with cronies as intent as himself on filling it up. . . .

At the age of twenty Cleveland began attending Democratic city con-

ventions and at twenty-five his party elected him ward supervisor. few A
months later he was appointed assistant district attorney, an office which
taught him all that a man should know about the unpleasant side of local
government. During the same year, 1863, his name was called under the
Conscription Act. He had the choice of serving in the army, or furnishing
a substitute, or paying a commutation of $300. Since he was without mili-
tary ambition and was helping to support his mother, he found a sub-
whom he paid $150.
stitute, to
Jn 1865 he was nominated for district attorney, but was beaten in the
* From The Cleveland Era THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,
by H. J. Ford, vol. 4,
copyright Yale University Press.
xxvii. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire 543

election.Except for purely party work, such as serving as delegate to the

state convention at Albany, he then refrained from politics until 1870,
when he accepted election as sheriff of Erie County. This was an office
which brought rich fees, and which again put Cleveland in touch with the
most unsavory aspects of government. Buffalo at the time was said to have
more saloons, brothels, and gambling houses than any other American
town of its size. The office of sheriff was not a sinecure. He served for three
years and then returned to the law until 1881, when he began the most
sudden and spectacular rise to high office in the history of American
politics.
Cleveland was forty-four in 1881, an unknown, middle-aged bachelor
of small means, with a respectable law practice. Three years later he was
elected President of the United States. His first chance came because of
his careful and painful knowledge of the Buffalo underworld, both crim-
inal and There was a sudden demand by citizens of both parties
political.
for a mayor who would reform the local government. The Democrats,
caring only for victory, nominated Cleveland, who was known to be
honest and who inspired trust on sight. He was elected, and at once set to
work to do precisely what he had promised. Unlike most reform mayors
he understood the secret ways of city government. The politicians were
soon eager for his term to end; but the taxpayers were pleased and his
reputation spread. Then came the astonishing accident, which not only
made Cleveland a national figure but which allowed Roscoe Conkling
(without knowing what he did) once more to frustrate Blaine.
When Conkling and Platt resigned from the Senate in 1881, and re-
turned to Albany for "vindication" and re-election, the governor was
Alonzo Cornell of Custom House fame. Like Arthur, he had turned a new
leaf, and he was making an excellent governor. He saw no reason why he
should stir himself to strengthen the Conkling machine so he did nothing
;

for the Senators who thereupon failed of re-election. Although Conkling

was ruined as a leader, he had enough strength to destroy Cornell,
still

whom he on the hill." With the help of President

described as "that lizard
Arthur, of all possible pressure from the Administration, and of consider-
able fraud, Cornell was defeated for renomination in 1882. The Re-
publican state convention chose Charles James Folger, Arthur's Secretary
of the Treasury, and thereby opened the governorship to Cleveland.
Folger had been a good Secretary of the Treasury. There was nothing
against him except his patrons; but that was too much. The ousting of
Cornell revived all the bitter memories of all the "stalwart" fights, and the
public was disgusted. George Curtis wrote in Harper's Weekly that
Folger's nomination "was procured by the combined power of fraud and
patronage, and to support it would be to acquiesce in them as legitimate
forces ina convention."
544 The Price of Union

The Democrats needed only an honest candidate. Their man did not
have tobe famous; but he did have to be clean and upright. Wisely, they
chose Grover Cleveland, and he was elected by 534,318 votes to 342,464.
At that moment his special qualities were exactly what was wanted for the
job. Ever since the days of Aaron Burr and the Clinton family, New York
State politics had been dark and complicated; but never more than when
Cleveland went to Albany in 1883.
Perhaps the largest swindles at the state capital were committed on Be-
half of business, but the most numerous were committed at the expense of
business, and were known as "strike" bills that is, bills which were intro-
duced for the purpose of being withdrawn after the payment of blackmail.
With his strength and good sense, with the help of reformers in both
parties,and with an abundant use of the veto, Cleveland found his way
through the fog of corruption and gave the people renewed hope that they
could understand and control the political machinery which surrounded
them. Incidentally, Cleveland won the hatred of John Kelly, boss of
Tammany Hall. And this, too, was to stand him in good stead.
The Democratic National Convention of 1884 met at Chicago, a month
after Elainehad been nominated. Because of the disgruntled Republicans,
who were prepared to desert their "Plumed Knight" for a man of unques-
tioned strength and honor, Cleveland was the obvious choice. Tilden once
more refused to be considered, and though Senator Bayard of Delaware
and ex-Senator Thurman of Ohio had strong claims on the party, Cleve-
land was nominated on the second The enmity of Tammany had
ballot.

helped him greatly, for the party outside New York City was tired of Tam-
many, with its endless, devious jealousies and feuds. And at this time
Tammany made itself more than usually hateful by conspiring with
Benjamin Butler! Having failed as a Republican, Butler had joined the
Greenback Party. Then he made overtures to the unhappy Democrats,
with whom he had begun his political life in 1853. In Massachusetts the
Democrats accepted him; but the thought that the most detested of the
Republican radicals and the ex-military governor of New Orleans should
seek favors from a Democratic National Convention would have made
anyone but Butler and Tammany Hall cringe. "We may be willing to eat
crow," said a Georgia delegate, looking disgustedly at Butler and perhaps
remembering 1872 and Horace Greeley; "but we'll be damned if we'll eat
turkey buzzard." General Edward Bragg of Wisconsin put the sense of the
convention when he told Tammany that the young men from his part of
the country "love Cleveland for his character, but they love him also for
the enemies he has made." Three times in four years in town, state, and
nation Cleveland was chosen because the spoilsmen hated him.
xxvii. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire 545

The nomination of Cleveland gave the anti-Blaine Republicans a cause

and a leader. What little they knew about Cleveland was good, and best
of all was the fame had been fast, and his record was
fact that his rise to
therefore short. He was
uncontaminated by the stale hatreds of the
previous twenty years. Elaine was steeped in those hatreds, and according
to Godkin had "wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool" ;

yet Elaine was widely popular. He could stir a mass enthusiasm which was
beyond the reach of the stolid Cleveland. And the Republicans who de-
serted him were more remarkable for their names than for their numbers.
Carl Schurz had turned against his party, and Benjamin Bristow (the
Secretary of the Treasury whom Grant had elbowed out because of his
inconvenient honesty), and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Leverett
Saltonstall, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and President Eliot of
Harvard, and a whole list of papers including Harper's Weekly, the
Nation, the Boston Transcript, and the New York Times. Significantly
and sensibly, ambitious young politicians like Roosevelt and Lodge, who
had fought against Elaine at the convention, did not join the "Mug-
wumps," as the seceders were called.*
There were no real issues between the parties. Both platforms avoided
saying anything sensible on either the tariff or the currency, and Elaine
was forced to go at least as far as Cleveland in promises for civil-service
reform. The Republican statement on the vexed question of money was a
masterpiece of evasion. "We have always recommended," said the plat-
form, "the best money known to the civilized world; and we urge that
efforts should be made to unite all commercial nations in the establish-
ment of an international standard which shall fix for all the relative value
of gold and silver coinage." The Democratic platform when referring to
the other major issue, the tariff, is almost as vague :

Knowing full well, however, that legislation affecting the operations

of the people should be cautious and conservative in method, not in
advance of public opinion, but responsive to its demands, the Demo-
cratic party is pledged to revise the tariff in a spirit of fairness to all
interests. .
Many industries have come to rely upon legislation for
. .

successful continuance, so that any change of law must be at every step

regardful of the labor and capital thus involved.
This not the stuff of which flaming speeches are made.
is

*
"Mugwump" was taken from Eliot's translation of the Bible into Algonkian
Indian, which was printed on a hand press in 1663. The word was applied to the
Independent Republicans of 1872, but was first made popular by Dana of the New
York Sun in 1884. In Algonkian, "mugquomp" means chief.
546 The Price of Union

The platforms were more sprightly when they turned to abusing the
enemy. "The Republican party," said the Democrats, "during its legal, its
stolen, and its bought tenure of power, has steadily decayed in moral char-
acter and in political capacity." "We denounce the fraud and violence,"
said the Republicans, "practised by the Democracy in southern states, by
which the will of a voter is defeated . . and we solemnly arraign the
.

Democratic party as being the guilty recipients of fruits of such fraud and
violence." These were the comprehensible statements, and the only ones
which were demonstrably true. But they did not lead to a high level of
debate. Emotion and personal attacks were clearly to be the staples of
the campaign; yet nobody realized, in the innocent days of June, 1884, just
how far the emotions or the attacks were to go.
The Mugwumps of New York sent a lawyer to Mr. Mulligan in Boston,
to see ifhe had any more incriminating letters from Blaine. Much to
everyone's surprise, he uncovered a whole new bundle. Mulligan had been
bookkeeper for James Fisher, Jr., a Boston businessman and an official of
the Little Rock Railway. It was to Fisher that Blaine wrote the unfor-
tunate letters which Mulligan preserved. Among the new batch pub-
lished in the middle of September were several that proved Blaine had
lied in his famous speech to Congress eight years before when he defended
himself against the implications of the first Mulligan letters. At that time
he said, "My whole connection with the road has been as open as the day."
Yet only a week before, he had written to his friend Fisher, at a false ad-
dress, and had telegraphed Fisher where to call for the letter. "I want you
to send me a letter such as this enclosed draft," Blaine had urged. And the
"enclosed draft" would have exonerated him completely. "Regard this
letter as strictly confidential," he added; "Do not show it to anyone." And
on the back he had written: "Burn this letter."*
If Blaine had made no explanations in the first place, he would have
been better off; his efforts to extricate himself were what hurt him, rather
than the fact that he had received some relatively harmless favors from a
railroad. He behaved like a man who had something to hide, so the public
assumed that he probably knew his own past and had reasons for his be-
havior. He should have remembered that few men admire self-righteous-
ness in politics, and that the Mugwumps had therefore no popular
following.They succeeded in proving that Blaine was what everybody had
always assumed him to be, a man of somewhat lax principle. But nobody
thought he would be dishonest in the White House, and one may doubt
whether all the roaring of the Mugwumps lost Blaine many votes. What it

* Blaine' s tribute to
Blaine, which Fisher was asked to copy out and sign, said
in part: "Your action was as open and fair as the day. . . . Your conduct was in
the highest degree honorable and straightforward." Apparently Fisher did not
agree. In any case, the heartfelt praise was never returned to its author.
xxvii. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Fair e 547

did accomplish, however, was to drive the Republicans to seek some un-
pleasant stories about Cleveland with which to retaliate. They did not
have to seek far.
Even before the publication of the second set of Mulligan letters the
Republicans had found, and revealed, what they smugly called "a terrible
tale"; namely, that Cleveland had an illegitimate son by a Mrs. Halpin,
and that the boy had been brought up in an orphan asylum. In fact, there
was some doubt about Cleveland's responsibility, for Mrs. Halpin had
been the mistress of several men at the time the child was conceived. But
she claimed that Cleveland was the father, and he accepted financial
responsibility. The mother became a drunkard, and was committed to an
institution, and the boy was sent to an orphanage at Cleveland's expense.
He was later adopted into a good family and had a distinguished career. 3
When this tale was given to the press there was woe among the right-
eous. But Cleveland was wiser than Blaine. Asked what the Democratic

Party should say in reply, he answered "Tell the truth." When the facts
were admitted, and simply stated, the vast and delicious fancies which
were gathering about the story disappeared. It is not likely that the inci-
dent did Cleveland harm. If the Mugwumps had been uninterrupted in
their campaign of moral superiority, they might have made him sound so
good as to be unsupportable. From that, at least, he was saved by Maria
Halpin.
More important than Blaine's bonds or Cleveland's babies was the influ-
ence of the Pensions Bureau, which almost won the election for the Re-
publicans, and of Parson Burchard, who finally contrived to lose it. Since
the Republicans had been in office ever since pensions for the Civil War
began, the Bureau had become little more than an adjunct to their na-
tional machine. Every four years the agents of the Bureau promised more

pensions if the Republicans were returned and threatened the decrease of

pensions if the Democrats won. In 1884 the head of the Bureau spent the
last two months of the campaign touring the Middle West asking the old
soldiers to vote for the Grand Old Party and pouring (according to the
report of his successor) "a tide of men and money" into the districts which
seemed doubtful. During the same two months the field expenses for
"special pensions examiners" rose from about $28,000 a month to $46,000.
This was a hard system to beat, especially when the work of the Pensions
Bureau was ably backed by the Grand Army of the Republic, the well-
organized association of Union veterans whose members were the re-
cipients of the pensions. The G.A.R. was officially non-partisan; but its
chief aim was to ask for higher pensions, and it may have felt it would
receive better treatment from the party which glorified the war than from
the party which had viewed it askance.
By the last week of the campaign everyone believed the vote would be
548 The Price of Union

close, and on the whole the Republicans felt confident. It now seems that

they were right, and that Elaine would have won if it had not been for
Burchard. On October 29 Elaine reached New York City, tired and bored.
He found he had to receive a delegation of second-string clergymen and
he can perhaps be excused for not listening too closely while their spokes-
man, the Reverend S. D. Burchard, droned through an address. But Elaine
should have had an assistant whose business it was to stay awake during
such affairs, for Parson Burchard remarked, "We are Republicans, and
don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party
whose antecedents are Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Elaine, since he
did not hear it, said nothing to disassociate himself from the apt allitera-
tion. This was unfortunate, because his chance for the election depended
on the Roman Catholic vote of New York. Elaine's mother was a Catholic,
and Tammany Hall still hated Cleveland, and the two facts were ex-
pected to help the Republicans in the Democratic city. Some of the Tam-
many braves, who could not go so far as to vote for Blaine, were helping
Ben Butler's Greenback Party in New York State in the hope that it
might win enough votes to ruin Cleveland. All such hopes were sunk for-
ever by Burchard. Although Blaine was not listening to the speech, the
Democrats were, for they had sent a shorthand reporter to take it down.
Within a few hours New York and all the Eastern cities were placarded
with "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."
Cleveland won New York State by 1049 votes out of a total of 1,125,159.
Without New York he would have lost the election. With 525 fewer votes
he would have lost New York. Throughout the nation, Cleveland had a
tiny lead, with 4,874,986 to 4,851,981 for Blaine. In the electoral college
Cleveland had 219 votes, Blaine 182. It had been the most abusive cam-
paign in American history, but not the most enlightening. Hardly any-
thing had been discussed except personalities yet this was proper enough,
;

since the parties did not differ on tariffs, or currency, or labor, or land

use, or civil service, or on any other matter of public policy.

The only difference, after all their rout,

Is, that the oneis in, the other out.

This was a more important difference than it sounds, if the two men are
taken as symbols. Blaine symbolized "Grantism," and Cleveland "reform."
And it may be just as well that Cleveland went to the White House with
no he had a divided Congress, the Republicans
clear policies to enforce, for

being in a majority in the Senate, theDemocrats in the House. Under such

conditions a President with a policy can only make trouble.
xxvii. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire 549

The and most frightening problem before Cleveland was that of ap-
first

pointments. The last Democratic President had been Buchanan, whose

major appointments were made in 1857. Although Cleveland had prom-
ised to continue civil-service reform, he could not simply ignore the hungry
hordes of Democrats infesting Washington. In particular, he could not
ignore those who were recommended to him by Congressmen. But neither
could he disappoint the pushful Mugwumps, who believed they had put
him in power and who now felt it their duty to keep watch over his po-
litical acts. Indeed, the unhappy Cleveland could not even wait until

he took office before facing his most painful problems: spoils, and cheap
money.
In 1885 the federal government had about 126,000 employees, of whom
16,000 were in the classified civil service. The remaining 110,000 were
appointed by the President or his aides, and traditionally they were ap-
pointed on political grounds. Within a month of his election, and three
months before taking office, Cleveland was half distracted by the clamor
of the men who wanted those 110,000 jobs for themselves or for their
friends.

I am sick at heart and perplexed in brain [he wrote to a friend on

Christmas Day, 1884] during most of my working hours. I almost think
that the profession of most of my pretended friends are but the means
they employ to accomplish personal and selfish ends. It's so hard to dis-
cover their springs of action and it seems so distressing to feel that in the
4
question of who shall be trusted, I should be so much at sea.

Partly to protect himself from the greedy hordes and from the pretended
friends whose motives he dared not trust, Cleveland arranged to receive a
letter from the National Civil Service Reform League in which Carl
Schurz, George Curtis and others pointed out that the triumph of a party
which had not controlled the Executive for a quarter of a century raised
the question of spoils in an acute form. Cleveland answered that he be-
lieved in the Pendleton Act and that he would enforce it. Furthermore, he
would follow the spirit of the law in appointments outside the classified
service, and would not remove able men on partisan grounds if their work
had nothing to do with the policy of the Administration. On the other
hand he would of course remove all who used their federal jobs to for-
ward the interest of the opposition party. He had the post offices chiefly
in mind when he made this reservation*
550 The Price of Union

In numerous instances [he wrote years later] the post-offices were

made headquarters for local party committees and organizations and
the centers of partizan scheming. Party literature favorable to the post-
masters' party, that never passed regularly through the mails, was dis-
tributed through the post-offices as an item of party service, and matter
of a political character, passing through the mails in the usual course
and addressed to patrons belonging to the opposite party, was withheld ;
disgusting and irritating placards were prominently displayed in many
post-offices, and the attention of Democratic enquirers for mail matter
was tauntingly directed to them by the post-masters. ... In some
5
quarters official incumbents neglected public duty to do political work.

In a sense, was lucky for Cleveland. It gave him a proper reason for
this

discharging a great many employees, especially fourth-class postmasters.

Without these vacancies he would have had little to give the faithful
party-workers, and would have become the most-hated President in his-
tory.
The suave and popular Adlai Stevenson, \yho had left Congress in 1881
and returned law practice at Bloomington, Illinois, was appointed
to his
first assistant postmaster general, with the task of making the necessary

removals. About 40,000 postmasters were retired as gently and politely as

possible; yet a certain uproar could not be avoided. The abuse heaped on
Cleveland for dismissing these men was small, however, compared to the
abuse he received from his own party for not dismissing a great many
more.
The civil-service letter was not the only unpopular move which Cleve-
land felt forced to make before he was inaugurated. The currency prob-
lem, which was to leave him a party outcast in the end, became acute in
the month before he took office. We have seen that under the Bland-
Allison Act of 1878 the Treasury was to buy between two and four million
dollars' worth of silver monthly. This was to be coined, and the Act de-
clared sixteen ounces of silver worth one ounce of gold. As a result, by
1885, the government had minted about 200,000,000 silver dollars. Their
proper market value was about eighty-five cents apiece. Naturally, since
these dollars were legal tender, debtors were inclined to pay the govern-
ment in silver while creditors were inclined to ask for payment in gold. Yet
a gold reserve of about $100,000,000 was needed to protect the resumption
of the greenbacks. This reserve was threatened so long as the Treasury
had to take in mostly silver and pay out mostly gold.
Cleveland's advisers, who were all "sound-money" men from the East,
told him that he should announce at once (in a letter) that he was op-

posed to coinage and that he wished to see the Bland-Allison Act

silver

repealed. The "cheap-money" Democrats in Congress warned him that if

he followed this advice h,e would split the party. Yet Cleveland followed
xxvil. Cleveland, Reform) and Laissez-Faire 551

it. As a result he was the President to be overridden by Congress even

first

before he took office. On February 26, two days after the appearance of
Cleveland's letter and six days before his inauguration, the House turned
down a bill to stop the coining of silver. Fifty-two Republicans joined 118
Democrats to save silver, whereas 64 Republicans and 54 Democrats voted
as Cleveland wished.
In the course of an interesting defense of Cleveland's anti-silver letter
of 1885,, Allan Nevins writes, "By its very vigor it put heart into frightened
bankers." This is precisely what the South and the West resented. They
preferred to keep their bankers frightened, in the hope that fear might
lead to thought. They themselves were frightened most of the time, fright-
ened of the grinding deflation that was taking away their land. If a cheap
dollar was not the proper answer, they said, let the bankers find some-
thing better; but do not let them sleep the long night through, dreaming
cheerfully of the rising price of money.

Cleveland's Cabinet was a credit to the party, but also a revelation of the
President's extreme conservatism. Cleveland was an enemy of the social-
service state, the paternal state. He believed that the government should
never interfere except for a negative end. He would not help to overcome
the woes of the farmer, but he would resist inflation. He would do nothing
to save the worker's wages in a depression ;
but he would use the Army to
break a strike. In this he represented the temper of the age the point of
view which has been described by Professor Hofstadter as "social Darwin-
ism": a confusion of evolution with mechanical progress and of "the
survival of the fittest" with the economic theories of laissez-faire. 6 The

high priest of this cult was Herbert Spencer, who for a number of years
was the chief influence on American political thinking. Whatever
Spencer's true faith may have been (and he seems to have been none too
clear in his own mind), it was transformed in America into a travesty of
conservatism. As Professor Hofstadter writes :

His [Spencer's] categorical repudiation of state interference with the

"natural" unimpeded growth of society led him to oppose all state aid
to the poor. They were unfit, he said, and should be eliminated. "The
whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them,
and make room for better." Nature is as insistent upon fitness of mental
character as she is upon physical character, "and radical defects are as
much causes of death in the one case as in the other." He who loses his
life because of his stupidity, vice, or idleness is in the same class as the
victims of weak viscera or malformed limbs. Under nature's laws all
552 The Price of Union

alike are put trial. "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do
on
live, and well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete
it is

to live, they die, and it is best they should die."

Thus Spencer deplored not only poor laws but also state supported
education, sanitary supervision other than the suppression of nuisances,
regulation of housing conditions, and even state protection of the
ignorant from medical quacks. He likewise opposed tariffs, state bank-
7
ing, and government postal systems. %

Here, with a little was the perfect creed for soothing the
deft selection,
consciences of millionaires, and it was widely used for that humane pur-
pose. With the help of Spencer, we find John D. Rockefeller comparing
his oil trust to a rose.

The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . .

[he said in a Sunday-school address]. The American Beauty rose can be

produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its be-
holder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This
is not an evil
tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law
of nature and a law of God. 8

And Andrew Carnegie in his Autobiography tells how Darwin and

Spencer rescued him from doubt. "Light came as in a flood," he wrote,
"and all was Not only had I got rid of theology and the super-
clear.

natural, but had found the truth of evolution. 'All is well since all grows
I

better,' became my motto, my true source of comfort." And in 1889, in

the North American Review, he brushed aside the critics of the law of
competition. "It is here," he wrote; "we cannot evade it; no substitutes
for it have been found and while the law may sometimes be hard for the
;

individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the
fittest in every department." All must indeed be well when the same "law"

which makes the rich richer insures that the poor grow steadily more fit,
more worthy to survive.
The world in which this "social Darwinism" was taken for granted was
the world from which Cleveland chose his Cabinet. The Secretary of State
was Senator Thomas Francis Bayard of Delaware. The Bayards were one
of the great political families of America. They were Federalists who had
joined the Democratic Party. Thomas Francis belonged to the fourth
generation of Bayards to represent his state in the Senate. He was Jeffer-
sonian in his fear of government and intensely conservative.
The Secretary of the Treasury was Daniel Manning of Albany, who had
risen from newsboy to proprietor of his own paper, and who had succeeded
Tilden as leader of the Democratic Party in New York State. His appoint-
ment pleased the friends of Tilden, and also the friends of gold, for he was
a strong conservative on money matters.
xxvii. Cleveland, Reform, and Laissez-Faire 553

The Secretary of War was William Crowninshield Endicott of Massa-

chusetts: a Whig who had become a Democrat when his party disinte-

grated, a rich man, a New

England patrician and scholar.
The Secretary of the Navy was William Collins Whitney, a very rich
and successful lawyer who had moved to New York City after graduating
from Harvard Law School and had married the sister of Oliver Payne, one
of John D. Rockefeller's partners in Standard Oil who was charged with
buying a legislature in order to put his father into the United States Sen-
ate. Whitney was a Tilden Democrat who had helped in the battle against
the "Tweed Ring," and who had just allied himself with Thomas Fortune
Ryan to acquire the Broadway Street Railway franchise by whatever
means might prove necessary. Although the appointment was criticized
by reformers, Whitney became a first-class Secretary of the Navy. Indeed,
he was in large part responsible for the fact that the United States began
once more to possess a navy.
Criticisms of Whitney were slight, however, compared to those lavished
on the new Secretary of the Interior, Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus
Lamar of Mississippi. Lamar was a scholar, a lawyer, an ex-professor of
metaphysics at the University of Mississippi, and a conservative on money
matters who had ignored the instructions of his own state legislature dur-
ing the free-silver debates of 1878. He was also the author of the secession
ordinance of Mississippi, and a Confederate lieutenant colonel and diplo-
mat. In 1888 he was to become a Justice of the United States Supreme
Court.
When Bryan rose to leadership a few years later, the character of the
Democratic Party changed sharply. It is interesting, therefore, to remem-
ber these men who gathered about Cleveland, and to remember that he
himself had first joined the party because he thought it more conservative
than the new group which named Fremont for President. This helps to
explain the tone of his Administrations.

When Cleveland departed as a leader of his party [wrote William

Allen White], with him went a host of gentlemen of the old school; rich,
respectable gentlemen, high-minded and courteous; men of family and
social distinction; the silk-stockinged men who placed principle far
above preferment men who in a changing era made the Demo-
. . .

cratic party in the United States the last stronghold of a political aris-
9
tocracy.

Cleveland, of course, was by no means "a silk-stockinged man," nor

rich,nor a scholar. But he was at home in the world represented by his
Cabinet, and wholly lost in the world which was about to conquer his
party: the world of men who expected government to redress their
wrongs, rather than to protect their natural rights. William Allen White
554 The Price of Union

describes Cleveland's appeal perfectly, in the last days of the old Democ-
racy:

He was plain-spoken. If he thought a proposition was a steal he said

so, and he used the short word. Arobber, a thief, a sneak, a liar, and a
cheat wore no perfunctory titles in the bright lexicon of Cleveland's veto

messages. Naturally the people were pleased. Nothing wearies the flesh
of the taxpayers so quickly as to find their servants putting in valuable
time arranging rhetorical feather-beds with which to break the fall of
scoundrels. Also, the people were tired of statesmen eternally saving the
country with their vote-getting plans for salvation. What the people
desired just then with a furious passion was a vigorous, uncompromis-
ing man without any plans, who would save the State from its states-
men. The times crying out for an obstructionist to stem corruption
found young Grover Cleveland. 10

As we have seen, the twenty years from 1865 to 1885 explain this "furi-
ous passion" adequately. For better or worse, however, it was a short-lived
passion. Cleveland's two terms of brave obstruction marked the end, not
only of the bad old world of spoilsmen and unabashed graft, but also of
what many regarded as the good old world of non-interference by govern-
ment. Until the strange, brief days of Calvin Coolidge, Cleveland was the
last purely negative President, who felt his duty was to prevent bad things
from happening, but not to make good things happen. There came to be
less and less room for the Jeffersonian, negative view, in that world which

was being remodeled by the friends and relatives of Cleveland's Secretary

of the Navy.
 XXVIII

The Old Order Changes

'W
WHHAT SHALL WE DO with our
r
great cities/
5
wrote the Reverend Ly-
man Abbott in 1891 "What will our great cities do with us? These are the
;

two problems which confront every thoughtful American." Yet only ten
years before, the cities had been no problem at all. According to the cen-
sus of 1880, there were fifty million people in America and nearly forty
million of them lived on the open land or in villages of less than four
thousand inhabitants. 1 Within the next decade the lure of the city became
the dominant note in the nation's life. In 1 880 one out of every five Mid-
dlewesterners lived in an urban community, and in 1890 one out of
every three. Chicago increased from half a million to almost a million
and a quarter; Minneapolis and St. Paul trebled in population; Detroit,
Milwaukee and Cleveland increased from 60 to 80 per cent. 2
The new immigration into the Middle West was so heavy that the cities
could grow without draining the countryside; but in the Northeast the
flight from the land was frightening.

In this great seaboard section [writes Professor Schlesinger], stretch-

ing from the Potomac to the St. Croix, the city had completed its con-
quest. Already in 1880 about half the people seven and a half millions
lived in towns or cities of four thousand or more inhabitants; within
a decade the proportion grew to nearly three fifths or eleven million.
In 1890 about two out of every three persons in New York and Con-
necticut were townsfolk, four out of every five in Massachusetts and
nine out of every ten in Rhode Island. . . . The eclipse of the Eastern
countryside had, of course, been long in process, indeed ever since the
old farming districts of the Atlantic states first felt the competition of
the virgin lands of the interior. 3

The concentration of wealth that accompanied this concentration of

people was one reason for the agrarian discontent. According to the cen-
sus of 1880, the farms of the country were worth about ten billion dollars,
and urban real estate was worth the same. In 1890, farms were worth
thirteen billion dollars and urban real estate about twenty-six billion. "If
personalty were included," adds Professor Schlesinger, "the contrast be-
tween city and country became even sharper, particularly since the tangi-
555
556 The Price of Union

ble personalty on the farms was in a considerable degree offset by mort-

4
gages held in the towns and cities."
This was not merely the town-versus-country problem which is so famil-
iar to the politics of Europe; for in the American Federal Union even
the rise of the cities became a struggle between regions. By the eighteen-
nineties, in the East and in the older Middle West, the discontented farm-
ers could no longer sway the majority of Congressmen from their own
The cities had grown so fast that the Senators from these regions rep-
states.
resented thenew industrial kingdoms, and most members of the House rep-
resented urban needs and wishes. This was shown dramatically in '93, when
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota the old "corn
where the new towns were multiplying voted in both houses of
belt" states

Congress against cheap money and in favor of repealing a Silver- Purchase

Act. Cleveland, as we have seen, had failed to get such a repeal in 1885.
And in 1868 Republicans in the Middle West had insisted that their party's
"sound-money" platform meant nothing, and that they really favored
greenbacks. But by 1893 the cities had imposed financial conservatism
upon these states. The solid regional votes for cheap money now came
from the Old South and from the New West beyond the Mississippi
beyond even Iowa and Minnesota where the prairies began to merge
with the high plains, where the spring wheat or the corn or the cotton
began to give way to sheep and cattle, to silver and gold and copper. This
was Bryan's West, known to itself as the Great West. Eastcners com-
plained that nobody could tell the truth about this region without lying.
Here the population doubled or tripled between 1880 and 1890. Here the
old cattle kingdom rose and fell, to be replaced (after the coming of
barbed wire and the cheap metal windmill for the timberless plains) by
the stock farm and the fenced ranch with fewer but better-bred cattle.
And here the fabulous mines were discovered, opened, emptied, and in a
few years abandoned. Here also, in Kansas and Nebraska, in North and
South Dakota, where the lands of adequate rainfall bordered on the lands
of drought and grass, farmers would prosper during a wet cycle, and bor-
row money, and then face ruin during the dry years, and detest the money-
lenders.

Except for the Mormon capital in Utah there were no real cities in all
this immense, self-confident country to spread the creditor's doctrine of
"sound money." And there were very few cities in the South, where indus-
tries at first grew slowly. The South was still the country of small farmers
who had acquired land at the break-up of the great plantations. Some
of them had done tolerably well; but most had either lost their farms to
an absentee owner or lost themselves in a helpless debt-peonage to local
merchants or bankers. In either case the need for cash pinned them to the
one-crop system which not only deteriorated the soil but left the farmer
55S The Price of Union

resourceless in bad times, with none of the normal rural self-sufficiency.

Here, then, was the solid sectional backing for the Populist-Bryan upris-
ing of the nineties: here in the dejected South and in the booming, bor-
rowing, Great West. When times were bad the ferment (and thus the
Congressional votes) would move eastward across the Mississippi and
encroach upon the urbanizing Middle West. When times were better the
discontent and the demand for money remedies were confined to two
regions: the old Confederacy and the newest (and last) of the many
American Wests which we have followed from the Piedmont of the eastern
coastal range all the way to the Pacific Ocean. If these regions, during
the depression of the nineties, had been able to bring Eastern labor into
their alliance, they would have ruled the country.

Meanwhile, "What shall we do with our great cities? What will our
great cities do with us?" remained the major questions in America and
throughout much of the Western world. No country today, and no civiliza-
tion in the past, has found an answer. This flight to the cities is the road
from which there is no returning. When it opens before man's astonished
eyes, he may complain, he may moralize, he may deplore the trend of the
times; but he moves down the road, if not with pleasure, at least with
fascination. All civilizations come to the many-millioned city in the end.
None has resisted the lure. "No wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a
clear vision of themadness of this development, avails to neutralize the
daemonic creations.
attractive force of these Here there is only for-
. . .

ward, never back. Long, long ago the country bore the country town and
nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country
dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams
of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste
of country." 5
The very words, "provincial" and "cosmopolitan/ are a sign that a
5

nation has entered a new stage of history. There were no cosmopolitans

in America in 1850, and thus no provincials. The words are meaningless
in a land of farmers and country towns. But by 1900 their meaning was
alltoo clear, except in the Great West. There, as on the sea, man's works
were still dwarfed by nature. There, in her last West, America made a rich
mythology out of the brief "cattle kingdom" the cowboys and the open
range and the longhorri drives. In fact, the cattle kingdom was born in
1865, when the Civil War ended, and died of barbed wire and the railways
within thirty years. But the myth was woven and cherished because the
West was a refuge from the most discouraging of class divisions: big city
and farm, the New Yorker and the hayseed. "All other contrasts pale be-
fore this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the
world." 6 A New Yorker may settle comfortably in Paris, France but
never in Paris, Kentucky.
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 559

This uprooting change, like so many others, had come to America in

a hurry: this fateful change from the market town which serves the
countryside to the steel or stone colossus which drains and despises the
surrounding land and which seeks to be its own world, its own law. "Thy
wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee," said the prophet
Isaiah to Babylon; "and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else
beside me." And he added a strangely modern note: "Desolation shall
come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know. . Thou art
. .

wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the star-
gazers, the monthly prognosticates, stand up, and save thee from these
things."
In America, it was not
"long, long ago" that the country bore the coun-
try town. America had charged headlong, in a hundred and fifty years,
through the whole cycle from primitive agriculture to Cosmopolis. In dis-
cussing the mistakes of the eighteen-fifties we pointed out that "the United
States had never known a time of rest, of calm self-possession." This was
even more true in 1900. America had done everything by 1900, except
compose her soul: an act which she omitted by necessity, not by choice.
In Jefferson's Arcadian plans, America was given a thousand years to
reach the Mississippi. In fact, she had fifty yeau> to reach the Pacific
Ocean and another fifty years to reach the great stone deserts of mass-
industry and finance. That was as far as any nation had ever gone. There
were no more precedents, and all the warnings were bad. The future must
be decline or innovation the old Caesarian wars which have marked the
:

end of many civilizations, or a step into a new world, with new methods,
illusions, hopes.

Creating and accompanying the vast cities were the vast industries and
monopolies. Standard Oil was founded in 1870. By 1878 it controlled
ninety-five per cent of the refining in the United States and virtually all
the transportation of oil.

One of the conditions which made monopoly certain lay in the rail-
way practices of the period. The grant of special rates to those shippers
who, by superiority of capital or enterprise, promised to supply the most
freight was general, and the great lumbermen, the meat packers and
others profited only less than Rockefeller. A measure of justification
existed for such favors since the large companies served as "eveners"
of traffic. In the oil industry the fluctuation of production and prices,
the uncertainty of the outlook three months in advance and the waste-
560 The Price of Union

fulness of small companies, all militated in favor of a large-scale busi-

7
ness. Monopoly was economical and efficient.

The argument might not have pleased the victims of monopoly; but it
was accepted at first by the country, or at least by the Congress, which
for a few years rejected all bills aimed at controlling such practices.
While one group of railways helped Standard Oil, another group helped
to monopolize anthracite coal. And all over the country railway pools *were
forming, to share the business of an area, and to maintain high rates. The
most ambitious of these pools was composed of the Erie Railroad, the
New York Central Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Balti-
more and Ohio. The four "competitors" agreed that on westbound traffic
from New York the Erie and the New York Central should each have
thirty-three per cent of the whole, the Pennsylvania twenty-five per cent,
and the Baltimore and Ohio nine per cent.
Meanwhile the age of iron was giving way to the age of steel. The
Bessemer process of making steel from iron was invented in England
in 1856 and brought to the United States after the Civil War. In 1868 the
open-hearth (or Siemens-Martin) process was also imported from Europe.
In 1875 American production of steel was about 380,000 tons; in 1900
it was 10,000,000 tons; in 1929, 56,000,000. Before the turn of the century

huge combinations controlled the entire process from the mining and
transportation of the ore to the production of finished materials. In 1901,
a gigantic consolidation encouraged by Andrew Carnegie who wished
to retire, and organized by J. Pierpont Morgan merged ten major com-
panies to form the United States Steel Corporation. The authorized capi-
talwas $1,404,000,000.* The corporation owned 149 steel plants, 250,000
acres of coal lands, 112 ships on the Great Lakes, and more than 1000
miles of railroad. It could have financed the United States Government
of Alexander Hamilton's days out of its petty cash.
Along with the turbulent new towns and industriescame a third change,
equally fateful for the nation a change in the volume and the source of
:

immigration. For this there were four main reasons. First, the mines and
factories, growing by geometrical progression, desperately searched for
cheap labor. Second, the transcontinental railways needed customers for
their enormous holdings of land. Unless the population increased with

quite abnormal speed, many of the railways would be bankrupt. Third,

the steamship companies were eager for steerage passengers. Their adver-
tisements, appealing to the poorer and more persecuted peoples of Europe,
reinforced those of the railways. According to testimony before the Immi-
gration Commission, two of the steamship lines had between five and six
* At the
time, this may have been almost half water but the assets of the cor-
;

poration were soon built up to beyond a billion and a half.

xxviii. The Old Order Changes 561
8
thousand ticket agents in Galicia in the year 191 1. Fourth, the anthracite
mine-owners of Pennsylvania wished to rid themselves of the recalcitrant
Irishmen who gave them such trouble at the time of the "Molly Maguires."
As a result of these forces and of the overpopulation and the racial
intolerance in southern and eastern Europe not only the number but the
nature of the American people was suddenly changed. The figures are
impressive. In the decade before the Civil War, the United States received
two and a half million immigrants. In the decade 1871 to 1880, the figure
had scarcely risen; but in the next ten years it was five and a quarter mil-
lions. Then there came a drop, because of the long depression of the nine-

ties; but between 1901 and 1910 almost nine million immigrants entered
the United States, and between 1911 and 1920, almost six million.*
Even more interesting than the rise in numbers was the change in
source. Until 1880, the large majority of immigrants came from northern
and western Europe. The American racial stock was still chiefly English,
Irish, Scotch, German and Scandinavian. But the change came with the
rise of the cities and of the new industry. Between 1881 and 1890, south-
ern and eastern Europe sent a million immigrants; between 1891 and
1900, two million; between 1901 and 1910, six million or seventy per
cent of the total immigration for the decade.
During the twenty years from 1891 to 1910, twelve and a half million
foreigners settled in America, and more than eight million of them were
the so-called "new immigration" from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia,
Slovakia, Croatia, Greece. The total population of the United States,
meanwhile, increased from about 63,000,000 to about 92,000,000; so the
immigrants alone, without considering their many American-born chil-
dren, accounted for more than three sevenths of the population growth.
The map on page 562, showing the percentage of foreign-born in America
in 1910, makes the figures look even more astounding. Here was a new

many-tongued nation, called into being overnight in order to nourish the

new industry and the new towns.
of the old immigration from northern Europe moved West and
Most
took up land, although many Germans settled in the Middlewestern
towns. The Irish were the exception; they tended to stay in the East and
to earn their living by unskilled labor and by politics. From the former
occupation but not from the latter they were ousted by the new immi-
grants, who were mostly unskilled workers and who were too poor in any
case to buy farms or farm equipment. They quickly sank to the bottom
of the labor market, in mines, factories, railway-construction camps, and
lumber camps. They were a formidable problem for organized labor,

*The total population of the United States was about 23,000,000 in 1850,
31,000,000 in 1860, 39,000,000 in 1870, 50,000,000 in 1880, 63,000,000 in 1890,
76,000,000 in 1900, 92,000,000 in 1910, and 106,000,000 in 1920.
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 563

which was struggling to build strong unions. Since they were separated
from the native Americans by language, customs, and religion, they
tended to stay together in colonies in the big cities. They had come from
the land, and most of them had seen enough of it, preferring even the
most dejected urban slums. In 1930, three quarters of the foreign-born
were gathered in towns and cities.
The one region where the new immigrants did not encroach upon the
lowest-paid jobs was the South. There the Negro maintained his melan-
choly right to the harshest forms of labor. The map shows the South
as almost untouched territory, except where the Mexicans streamed into
Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and where the Cuban and Puerto Rican
cigarmakers settled in Florida. A glance at the map will also suggest the
political intricacies that followed the new immigration, and some of the
reasons why national politicians do not oiler simple, lucid platforms, with
no hedging.
During the first hundred years of American independence the federal
government had left the control of immigration almost wholly to the
states at whose ports the immigrants landed. Then in 1882, Congress pro-
hibited Chinese immigration only for ten years, but the exclusion was
later made permanent. There were 150,000 Chinese in California when
this law was passed, and under the Fourteenth Amendment all of their
native-born descendants became American citizens.* President Theodore
Roosevelt sought to control Japanese immigration without such brusque
exclusion, by means of a "gentleman's agreement" between the two gov-
ernments; but the Pacific states were not satisfied until the Japanese were
kept out by law, under the Immigration Act of 1924.
While Asia was denied entry, the principle of selection was applied to
European immigrants. After 1882 the door was closed to more and more
groups which were considered undesirable: prostitutes, polygamists,
drunkards, anarchists, and the incurably diseased. In 1917 Congress went
still further, and in spite of Woodrow Wilson's veto passed an Act exclud-

ing all illiterate And a few years

immigrants over sixteen years of age.
later, at the end of the First World War, American people at last
the
decided on serious restriction.The Act of 1921 limited immigration from
any country in Europe, Africa, Australasia, or the Near East, to three per
cent of the number of people from that country residing in the United
States in 1910. In 1924 a more drastic law was passed: the annual quota
was reduced from three to two per cent, and 1890 was taken as the basic

*The amendment declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United
States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
of the state wherein they reside." In 1898 the Supreme Court confirmed this in the
case of a Chinese laborer, born in San Francisco, whose parents were ineligible to
Citizenship. Cp. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).
564 The Price of Union

year instead of 1910.* This was to favor the English, Irish, Germans, and
Scandinavians over the people of southern and eastern Europe.
In 1929 the total number to be admitted in any one year was reduced
to 153,541. The quotas from each country were to be in proportion to the
"national origins" of the American people in 1920. This gave Great
Britain and Northern Ireland about 66,000; Eire about 18,000; Germany
26,000; Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland combined 10,025, Po-
land 6524; Italy 5802; and the rest were nowhere.**
As Professor Wittke points out, we customarily speak of the year 1890,
when the Census Bureau announced that there was no longer a "frontier,"
as closing an epoch in American history. But "it is just as true to say that
the enactment of drastic, restrictive legislation against immigrants, follow-
ing the close of the [first] World War, brought to a close an equally im-
portant epoch in American and, perhaps, in world history." And he adds
that during the depression decade, following the Immigration Act of 1929,
more people left the United States than entered it. 9
One of the most rewarding experiences in the history of any land was
clearly at an end. For a hundred years no control over immigration had
been needed or wanted except here and there when harbor authorities
sought to impose a fifty-cent head tax to pay for the expense of handling
the traffic.*** Then the rise of the cities and of the giant corporations
made such a demand for labor that the immigrant stream became a river,
and the river a roaring waterfall. Then came control, under pressure from
union labor and from the world-malaise of racial theories. And then the
gate swung shut. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door," proclaims the
Statue of Liberty, still; but the golden door is closed.

During these same years the Supreme Court of the United States had
played a decisive part in encouraging that "rise of the cities and of the

giant corporations" which made the booming days of immigration. By an

ingenious use of the Fourteenth Amendment the Court set business free
to develop its new forms.
As we have already seen, the first section of the Amendment reads in
part: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the

* and some other parts of Asia, were

India, Siam, Indo-China, China, Japan,
now a barred zone.
** France, 3086;
Czechoslovakia, 2874; Russia, 2712; Switzerland, 1707; Aus-
tria,1413; Belgium, 1304; Yugoslavia, 845; Hungary, 869; Finland, 569; Greece,
307; Spain, 252; etc.
*** The
Supreme Court ruled the tax unconstitutional.
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 565

privileges or immunitites of citizens of the United States; nor shall any

state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws." The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution had long ago de-
clared that the federal government might not deprive a "person" of "life,
liberty or property without due process of law." The words sound simple;
yet they proved to be among the most complicated ever used by man. The
chief problems of interpretation were: first, what is a "person"; second,
what is meant by "due process" ; and third, what are the "privileges and
immunities" of a citizen of the United States?
The Supreme Court first began to deal with these problems in the
famous Slaughter House Cases in 1873. 10 The carpetbag government of
Louisiana had given a monopoly of the New Orleans slaughtering business
to a single corporation. The monopoly was challenged in the courts as a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the other butchers complaining
that when their businesses were taken from them they were deprived of
their "privileges and immunities," and also deprived of property without
due process of law. Justice Miller, delivering the majority opinion, said
in regard to all three of the Civil War amendments (Thirteenth, Four-
teenth, and Fifteenth) "On the most casual examination of the language
:

of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one per-
vading purpose found in them all ... and without which none of them
would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race,
the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection
of the newly made freeman and citizen. . ." It seemed to follow that
.

the amendments were not passed to protect the owners of slaughterhouses

from invidious laws.
Justice Miller spoke for a Court which was divided, five to four. The
majority believed it was their duty to save the ''federal equilibrium" from
the rough hands of the radical Republicans. As we have seen, the Four-
teenth Amendment was the heart of the radical program. "The debates
in Congress on the amendment," writes Professor Corwin, "leave one in
little doubt of the intention of its framers to nationalize civil liberty in the

United States, primarily for the benefit of the freedmen, to be sure, but in-
cidentally for the benefit of all. This would be done, it was calculated, by
converting state citizenship and its privileges and immunities into privi-
11
leges and immunities of national citizenship." The Court resisted such
far-reaching change by its doctrine that the "one pervading purpose" of the
amendment was "the freedom of the slave race." As for the "privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States," the Court decided that they
were few in number: the right to protection abroad, the right to visit the
seat of the government, the right to engage in interstate or foreign trade.
But the important rights and immunities of the citizen, the "civil rights" for
566 The Price of Union

which men had so long struggled, were conferred by state citizenship alone.
Professor Corwin points out that Justice Miller, whose interpretation
"stands substantially unimpaired today" ( 1948) really obliterated the priv-
,

ilegesand immunities clause from the amendment. "The Court felt that its
duty lay in endeavoring to assimilate the amendment to the constitutional
system as a whole, as it had come down from the past, and particularly to
the principle of dual federalism." 1 - Once this "duty" was done, the Court
was prepared to consider a definition of the word "persons" which wuld
make the amendment a protection to corporate business.
In 1882 Roscoe Conkling who, after his comic failure to return to the
Senate, had taken up the practice of law in New York City argued
strongly before the Supreme Court that the men who framed the Four-
teenth Amendment intended it to protect the property of corporations
from the folly of legislatures. 13 This contention has not been proved true;
and in any case there is no doubt that the Northern public thought the
amendment protected the freedrnen, and not the clients of Senator Conk-
14
ling. Soon, however, the Court came round to the Senator's point of
view. In 1886 Chief Justice Waite stated: "The Court does not wish to
hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any per-
son within jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these
its

corporations. We
are all of the opinion that it does." 15 This unanimous
opinion was contradicted by Supreme Court Justice Black as recently as
1938. Mr. Justice Black argued that the Court had long been wrong in
holding that corporations were among the persons protected by the Four-
teenth Amendment. Yet as Professor S wisher points out,

even if corporations had not been accepted as persons within the mean-
ing of the amendment, the courts could take jurisdiction over the sub-
ject matter through suits brought in the name, not of the corporation,
but of stockholders and bond-holders. Furthermore, the social philoso-
phy of the judges of the period, and their concern for the preservation
and promotion of economic enterprise which could be carried on only
through corporations, were such as to lead to the conclusion that, if
one channel was closed, another would be found through which the
courts could give protection to corporate interests. 16

This is unquestionably true. The courts were probably interpreting the

dominant public mood when they gradually developed a new Fourteenth
Amendment which would protect corporations against the acts of the rep-
resentatives of the people. Incidentally this was typical American practice:
instead of making the legislators responsible, and replacing them with
better men in case they behaved badly, the public condoned a set of inter-
pretations which left the Supreme Court in the position of a quasi-upper
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 567

chamber, intervening occasionally and erratically with a resounding "No."

Yet the desired end was attained, since the power of government to act
was sharply diminished.
Having made the corporations into "persons," the Court had next to
decide exactly what protections the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
conferred upon the property of these persons: in other words, what was
the meaning of "due process of law"? What was it that the legislators
might not do to such a "person" as Standard Oil, or United States Steel?
The phrase, "due process of law," has a venerable history. Again and
again the Supreme Court has said it was identical with "law of the land,"
as used in Magna Charta. "No freeman shall be taken," says that ancient
text, "or imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way
harmed nor will we go upon or send upon him save by the lawful judg-
ment of his peers or by the law of the land." And a statute of Edward III,

confirming Magna Charta, reads: "No man shall be put out of land or
tenement, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disherited, nor put to death
without being brought to answer by due process of law."
In England, and for a long time in America, the words were taken as
a restriction upon procedure. An act of government which affected the
rights or liberties of a freeman must be in keeping with the customs and
the legal machinery which have been accepted as the "law of the land."
The limitation fell chiefly upon the executive and judiciary, rather than
upon the legislature. Just before the Civil War there were two instances
where American courts held that "due process" implied a curb upon the
type of law that a legislature might enact. This did not become the pre-
vailing view, however, until a generation later. Justice Curtis in his dis-
senting opinion in the Dred Scott Case ( 1857) adhered to tradition when
he said "that the necessity of any law is necessarily a legislative question." 17
The new gigantic corporate persons of the 1880s could not accept this
view. How
could property be protected from the people, if the necessity
of any law is a legislative question? The state legislatures, and the lower
House of the federal Congress with its two-year term, were dangerously
susceptible to the opinions of the people. And those opinions were not
in all cases friendly to big business. Yet the dominant opinion (not neces-

sarily the majority opinion) was markedly friendly from the Civil War
until the turn of the century. Under the influence of "social Darwinism,"
it was that government should not interfere with business, that com-
felt

petition was the only effective regulator of enterprise, and that the con-
sumer must learn to protect himself instead of running to the government
for help. This view was taught in the colleges, mirrored in the press, and

widely regarded as plain common sense. Yet the people the consumers of
the new monopoly goods and services who felt the squeeze and who had
not read the textbooks kept asking awkward questions. What about rail-
568 The Price of Union

way when there was only one railroad, and no possibility of compe-
rates
tition? What about railway pools, which by agreement abolished compe-
tition? What about the monopolies in oil and anthracite, which appeared
to have repealed the law of supply and demand? If government confined
itselfto watching benignly and administering the police laws, one of these
vast new consolidations might buy it, and suppress it, like an inconvenient

patent.
The nextstep was for the states to begin regulating railway rates and
grain elevator rates. Almost all the grain from the West which was to be
sold in Europe or in the Eastern states passed through Chicago, where it
was usually unloaded and reloaded. Nine companies controlled the ware-
houses and elevators, and they of course made a "gentleman's agreement"
with each other and set their own prices. So the Illinois legislature passed
a law fixing maximum charges. The question of its constitutionality was
brought to the Supreme Court, where in 1877 it was settled along with the
so-called Granger cases, involving railway rates. The fundamental doc-
trine of the grain elevator case, Munn applied to them all.
v. Illinois,
Chief Justice Waite, for the majority, found the laws constitutional on
the ground that they applied to property which was "affected with a pub-
lic interest."

It has been customary in England [said the Chief Justice], from time
immemorial, and in this country from its first colonization, to regulate
ferries, common carriers, hackmen, bakers, millers, wharfingers, innkeep-
ers, etc., and in so doing to fix a maximum of charge. We think it
. . .

has never yet been successfully contended that such legislation came
within any of the constitutional prohibitions against interference with
private property. ... It is apparent that down to the time of the
adoption of the fourteenth amendment it was not supposed that statutes
regulating the use, or even the price of the use, of private property
necessarily deprived an owner of his property without due process of
law. Under some circumstances they may, but not under all. The amend-
ment does not change the law in this particular.

According to the majority of the Court, therefore, there was still a field
of private enterprise in which government might control prices without
depriving "persons" of their constitutional rights. "We know that this is
a power which may be abused," said the Chief Justice; "but that is no
argument against its existence. For protection against abuses by legisla-
tures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts." Nothing could
sound more reasonable; yet the position was soon abandoned. The future
belonged to the dissenting opinion of Justice Field, who was not con-
tent to allow abuses to be rectified at the polls, who insisted that the law-
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 569

makers should have no power to do wrong in the first place, and that it
was the business of the Supreme Court to detect "wrong" and to declare
it unconstitutional. Justice Field dissented strongly in Munn v. Illinois,

and even more strongly in the railway cases, where Chief Justice Waite
applied the same principles with the same results.

Of what avail [asked Field] is the constitutional prohibition that no

state shall deprive any person of his property except by due process of
law if the state can, by fixing the compensation which he may receive
for its use, take from him all that is valuable in the property? To what
purpose can the constitutional prohibition upon the state against impair-
ing the obligation of contracts be invoked, if the state can, in the face
of a charter authorizing a company to charge reasonable rates, prescribe
what rates shall be deemed reasonable for services rendered? That deci-
sion will justify the legislature in fixing the price of all articles and the
compensation for all services. It sanctions intermeddling with all busi-
ness and pursuits and property in the community, leaving the use and
enjoyment of property and the compensation for its use to the discretion
of the legislature. 18

Chief Justice Waite spoke good English doctrine when he said, "for
protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the
polls, not to the courts." But Justice Field had a deep American prejudice
on his side when he assumed that if Congress and the state legislatures
were allowed to make decisions affecting business, all "pursuits and prop-
erty" would soon be destroyed. "If this be sound law," he said in his dis-
senting opinion on Munn v. Illinois, "if there be no protection, either in
the principles upon which our republican government is founded, or in
the prohibitions of the Constitution against such invasion of private rights,
all property and all business in the state are held at the mercy of a major-

ity of the Legislature."

Within a very brief period the majority of the Supreme Court came
to agree with Justice Field, In so doing they worked a constitutional
revolution, which may have been for the best, and which was probably
inevitable, but which surely deserves more notice than it is usually ac-
corded.
The revolution made
overt what may always have been covert; namely,
that the Supreme Court may declare a law unconstitutional, not only on
the ground that the Congress had no power to legislate in a particular
field, but also on the ground that the legislation was unreasonable or un-

just. The earlier view, which prevailed for eighty years, was laid down
by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. And in Fletcher v. Peck, Mar-
shall declared that the Supreme Court had no right to inquire whether
570 The Price of Union

a from good motives or corrupt. This was the famous

legislature acted
case of the Yazoo land frauds which had almost driven John Randolph
daft. There was no doubt that most of the Georgia legislators had been

bought; yet Marshall ruled that since they had the power to authorize the
land grants, the contract stood, and the Supreme Court had no say in the
matter. But the followers of Justice Field took the view that if a legis-
lature did something of which they deeply disapproved, or which they felt
to be subversive of property rights, there must be some way of declaring
itunconstitutional or if not, the Constitution should be amended.
In 1889 the New
York Court of Appeals, following Chief Justice Waite's
reasoning in Munn
v. Illinois, held that a state law fixing the maximum

charges of grain elevators was constitutional, and gave the same answer
as the Supreme Court had given to the argument that such powers, if per-
mitted, might be abused: "There is a remedy at the polls, and it is an
efficient remedy." This led to a sense of despair on the part of those who
believed that such interference with private property was little better than
communism, and that legislatures, if allowed to fix the price of grain ele-
vators, would soon be interfering in every detail, public and private, of
every citizen's life. "The paternal theory of government is to me odious,"
said Justice Brewer, dissenting in the Budd case; and he went on to pre-
dict that if this was indeed the law of the land America would soon find
herself socialized according to thedreams of Edward Bellamy. And in
the following year a prominent New York lawyer published a most reveal-
ing article in the American Law Review, demanding a new constitutional
amendment for the protection of property. 19

A
learned ex- Judge of one of the federal courts [says the article] re-
marked on reading the opinions in Munn against Illinois: "If this
government is to endure, the views expressed in the dissenting opinion
of Mr. Justice Field must be adopted as the law of the land." . .But.

perhaps the subsequent decision ... by the New York Court of Ap-
peals will strengthen the opinion that the law is so clear both in judicial
expression and precedent that the courts have but little discretion in the
matter. .. An amendment to the federal and the state constitutions
.

is now necessary. . . .

It is perhaps in the natural course of things that the first great ques-
tion in American political history should have been the question of per-
sonal liberty and that the second great question is that now before the
American people, the question of private property. In the latter there
are elements which "could furnish forth" a history surpassing in impor-
tance that of the slavery question. The latter was a struggle between
sections.The property question must be a struggle between classes. In
the one, America as the civilized nation last to abolish her slaves closed
an epoch in history. In the other there is much to show that she will
open an epoch. Years ago the Supreme Court introduced the
. . .
xx viii. The Old Order Changes 571

slavery struggle with the Dred Scott decision. Today it may be that
ithas introduced the property struggle with the decision of Munn v.
Illinois.

Times have changed since the appearance of this article, and the reader
may have difficulty in remembering that the cause of the author's excite-
ment indeed, of his declaration of class war was the regulation of rail-
way rates and of the prices charged at grain elevators. In any case, he
need not have excited himself, because the "learned ex- judge of the fed-
eral courts" was about to have his way and "the views expressed in the
x

dissenting opinion of Justice Field" were to become the law of the land.
Already there had been signs of retreat from the position of Munn v.
Illinois. In 1886, Chief Justice Waite admitted there were sharp limits
to the regulatory power of the state, and he significantly did not repeat
his earlier advice that the victims of legislative abuse should seek redress
at the polls, not from the courts. On the contrary, he said: "This power
to regulate is not a power to destroy, and limitation is not the equivalent
of confiscation. Under pretense of regulating fares and freights, the state
cannot require a railroad corporation to carry persons or property without
reward; neither can it do that which amounts in law to a taking of private
property for public use without just compensation, or without due process
of law." 20 So Chief Justice Marshall seems to have been wrong when he
said it was not the business of the Court to inquire into the wisdom or

propriety of legislation. "It was now apparent," writes Professor Swisher,

"that the Supreme Court would keep a watchful eye over abuses which
it had previously threatened to ignore, and would give protection if neces-
21
sary."
In 1890 the Supreme Court went much farther, holding unconstitu-
tional a Minnesota law which provided that a state commission could rule
finally as to the reasonableness of railway rates. "It deprives the company
of right to a judicial investigation, by due process of law," said the
its

Court, ". and substitutes therefor, as an absolute finality, the action

. .

of a railway commission which, in view of the powers conceded to it by

22
the state court, cannot be regarded as clothed with judicial functions."
In a vigorous dissent on the part of three justices, it was argued that this
overruled Munn v. Illinois and the Granger cases, which had stated flatly
that the regulation of railway rates and similar charges was a power of
the legislature, not of the judiciary.The reasonableness of a charge, said
the dissenting justices, was a problem for the legislature, not for the courts.
But the majority ruled otherwise. Professor Swisher comments:

In arrogating to the judiciary the final determination of reasonable-

ness ingovernment price-fixing, the Supreme Court transferred tremen-
dous powers to that branch of the government. The next logical step
572 The Price of Union

was the holding that in order to be reasonable the rates fixed must be
such as to yield to owners a fair return on a fair value of the property
involved. The word "fair" and the word "value" like the word "rea-
sonableness," were terms of extremely indefinite content. The content
was left to be determined by the courts in each case. 28

Meanwhile, the state courts had been busily taking the next step invali-
:

dating laws which protected labor. In 1885 the New York Court of Ap-
peals overthrew a statute which forbade the making of cigars in tenements.
According to the unanimous court, not only was the cigarmaker's liberty
infringed, and the tenement-owner's property impaired, but the institu-
tion of the home was threatened. "It cannot be perceived," said this deci-
sion, "how the cigarmaker is to be improved in his health or his morals
by forcing him from his home and its hallowed associations and beneficent
influences to ply his trade elsewhere." 24
The decision had a result unforeseen by the learned judges, but not
unimportant in American history. One of the ardent champions of the
statute, the man who had persuaded Governor Cleveland to sign it in
1884, although it was poorly drawn, was young Theodore Roosevelt. He
had been appointed a committee of three to investigate conditions in
to
the tenement houses of City, and he took the work seriously. He
New York
had expected to oppose the law concerning cigarmakers, until he visited
the tenements.

In the overwhelming majority of cases [he writes] . . . these were

one-, two- or three-room apartments, and the work of manufacturing
the tobacco by men, women, and children went on day and night in the
eating, living, and sleeping rooms sometimes in one room. I have al-
ways remembered one room in which two families were living. On my
inquiry as to who the third adult male was I was told he was a boarder
with one of the families. There were several children, three men, and
two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere,
alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of
food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and
far on into the evening, and they slept and ate there. They were Bo-
hemians, unable to speak English, except that one of the children knew
enough to act as interpreter. 25

So Theodore Roosevelt was surprised when the Court of Appeals spoke

of the "beneficent influences" of those homes, and the folly of forcing a
man "to ply his trade elsewhere."

Itwas this case [he mildly remarks] which first waked me to a dim
and partial understanding of the fact that the courts were not neces-
sarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and indus-
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 573

trial conditions. I grew to realise that all that Abraham Lincoln had
said about the Dred Scott decision could be said with equal truth and
justice about the numerous decisions which in our own day were
erected as bars across the path of social reform. 26

During the next few years after the Jacobs case, the courts of Pennsyl-
vania,West Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas all declared void laws
which forbade mine owners and other employers from paying their men
in scrip instead of in currency. The scrip, except by special arrangement
with merchants, was payable only at company stores, where the company
might charge what it pleased. For years the unions had struggled against
this system; but when they obtained the laws for which they pleaded, the
courts held that such statutes infringed the right of contract. The Penn-
sylvania court found that the law was "an insulting attempt to put the
laborer under a legislative tutelage, which is not only degrading to his
manhood, but subversive of his rights as a citizen of the United States."
The Missouri court held that the statute said to the employee: "Though of
full age and competent to contract, still you shall not have the power to
sell your labor for meat and clothing alone, as others may." And the

Kansas court added that the law classified the workman "with the idiot,
the lunatic, or the felon in the penitentiary." "What right had the legis-
lature," the court continued, "to assume that one class has need of pro-
tection against another. . . , No class distinctions exist in this country." 27
In two of the above cases the state courts quote Chief Justice Marshall's
words in Brown v. Maryland (1827) "Questions of power do not depend
:

upon the degree to which it may be exercised. If it may be exercised at all

it must be exercised at the will of those in whose hands it is placed." This

would seem to mean that no labor legislation whatever must be permitted,

since otherwise the legislatures would be free to pass any labor laws they
chose. And indeed, the West Virginia court underlined the point, saying
that if "the legislature, without any public necessity, has the power to
prohibit or restrict the right of contract between private persons in respect
to one lawful trade or business, then it may prevent the prosecution of all

trades, and regulate contracts." Therefore the legislature must have

all

no power, for fear might have too much. For eighty years the courts
it

had followed John Marshall in saying that if the power to legislate on a

subject existed at all there could be no further question as to the consti-
tutionality of the statute. Now
the state courts appeared to be saying that
since there could be no further question, therefore the power to legislate
must not exist, and did not exist. Again they were giving expression to the
dominant mood, and it was not long before the Supreme Court itself fol-
lowed the states in their attitude toward labor laws. In 1905 Justice
Peckham wrote the famous majority decision in Lochner v. New York.
574 The Price of Union

The Supreme Court had recently upheld a Utah statute regulating the
hours of labor for men in dangerous industries. Emboldened by this prece-
dent the New York legislature passed a law providing for a maximum
sixty-hour week and ten-hour day in the baking trade. The Utah decision
seemed to settle the question of power to legislate, so the attorneys for the
defendant in the Lochner case argued that while laws for maximum
hours might be constitutional in a dangerous industry, they were unneces-
sary (and thus unconstitutional) in a trade where cleanliness and sanita-
tion were imposed by the nature of the job. The Supreme Court accepted
this reasoning, holding that the act did not come under the police power
of the state, as a proper regulation of the health, safety or morals of the

people, and that it was therefore a violation of the freedom of contract,

and of the liberty of the individual under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Statutes [said Justice Peckham] of the nature of that under review,

limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to
earn their living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the right of
the individual, and they are not saved from condemnation by the claim
that they are passed in the exercise of the police power and upon the
subject of the health of the individual whose rights are interfered with,
unless there be some fair ground, reasonable in and of itself, to say that
there is material danger to the public health, or to the health of the
employees, if the hours of labor are not curtailed. If this be not clearly
the case, the individuals whose rights are thus made the subject of
legislative interference are under the protection of the Federal Consti-
tution regarding their liberty of contract as well as of person; and the
legislature of the state has no power to limit their right as proposed in
this statute.

Justice Holmes, in his dissenting opinion, said in part :

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of

the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed
with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before
making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because
I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do
with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law. The . . .

fourteenth amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social

Statics.

This was a view which Justice Holmes was to express for many years
inmany famous dissents. In 1921, for example, when the Supreme Court
decided that no state could prevent its own judges from granting injunc-
tions in labor disputes, Holmes again protested:
There is nothing that I more deprecate than the use of the fourteenth
amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the
xxviii. The Old Order Changes 575

making of social experiments that an important part of the community

desires.

Yet this is precisely the way the Fourteenth Amendment was used
during most of Justice Holmes' s life upon the Court: as a substitute for
that "new amendment" to protect property which some hasty people felt
was needed when the new giant corporations rose to power about 1890.
As we have seen, instead of a new amendment the Court provided a new
theory; namely, that questions of constitutionality are not solely questions
of power to legislate but of the reasonableness of the legislation. Thus the
Court acquired veto powers not easily distinguishable from those of the
President, and like the President it became, in some of its functions, a
part of the legislature. More than ever, the Constitution was what the
Supreme Court said it was.More than ever, therefore, the President must
now pray that a sufficient number of justices die or retire during his term
of office, so that there may be reasonable agreement as to the nature of the
government he is administering. When a Court with these new powers
comes face to face with a popular President, intent on enforcing his own
policies, the results are bound to be interesting unless the President him-
self has the good fortune to appoint the Court. And even then he may
have some sharp surprises.

When Cleveland first came White House, all these tremendous

to the

changes were just beginning. When

he left in 1897, after his non-consecu-

tive second term, the vast monopolies and the vast cities dominated the

land, and the new immigration was flooding in to serve the one and to fill
the other. And the Supreme Court had taken unto itself its new powers,
which for the time being it chose to use in the defense of corporate prop-
erty but which, like all powers, might one day be used for any purpose
whatever. Industry and commerce and finance had never been more
dynamic than during the Cleveland years, and labor never more discon-
tented. America had never been changing more rapidly. And the federal

government inventing new forms of veto and delay to add to the old
had seldom been more negative, more faithful to the theory that a govern-
ment should do as little as possible. Yet the time was coming when the
continent-wide combinations of power would either take over government
and make it the servant of a single class, or government must find for
itself immense new powers not to say No, like the Supreme Court; but to
say Yes, like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But first the
greatest No-sayer of them all, Grover Cleveland, was to stand rock-like
576 The Price of Union

against spoilsmen, against pension-hunters, against cheap money, against

labor, against the Senate, and against the prevailing wicked system of
making tariffs.
America was not to look upon his like again. By the time Cleveland left

Washington, the power to do great good merely by negation was gone

with the quiet horse-and-buggy days.
 XXIX

Both Parties Sowing the Wind

CLEVELAND'S INSISTENCE on doing what he thought right, rather than

what the politicians thought possible, was brave but not always wise. He
could obstruct his enemies but he could not accomplish his own aims. He
;

destroyed the machinery of his party. "If it is the function of an American

statesman to search for the integrating ideas that make party combinations
tolerable," writes Professor Binkley, "then Cleveland does not answer the
description. One does not find him, like Lincoln, searching with superb
intelligence to discover the point of equilibrium among the conflicting
social forces of the nation and tolerant of all sorts and conditions of men." 1
Cleveland opposed not only the old abuses in government, which had been
growing since Lincoln's day, but also the new demands for help to the
unfortunate. Whether these were sectional demands sweeping from the
West, or class demands rising from the trade unions, Cleveland set him-
self to break them. And for a time he was successful.
The first fight of the new President was waged against the Senate. It
was the old fight which Grant had refused, but which Hayes and Garfield
and Arthur had accepted to their honor. At last, under Cleveland, the
Senate was shorn of the powers which it had taken during the war on
Andrew Johnson and which it had used unchallenged during the years
when Grant was the willing captive of the Stalwarts.
The Republicans had a majority in the Senate when Cleveland became
President. They meant to invoke the Tenure of Office Act to hamper the
Administration and to turn the presidency "into an office much like that
2
of the doge of Venice, one of ceremonial dignity without real power."
But they faced man
a on whom they could not practice their subterfuges
and their frustrating tricks. Cleveland did not like to be balked. He could
break out of any traps devised by politicians, not because he was ingenious
but because he was impervious and because (as William Allen White
discovered) he could summon "such virile hate, such courageous scorn,
such blustering bull-roaring indignation as would have made Washington
or Jackson in their profanest moments lift reverent hats in humble awe." 3
On the whole, these attributes are of small value to the leader of a
who should usually be conciliatory, tolerant of selfishness,
political party,
patient before the immodesty of little men. Rage and stubbornness delight
577
578 The Price of Union

the onlooker but fill the party worker with dread. This may explain why
Calvin Brice, chairman of the Democratic 'National Committee, said that
with all regard for Cleveland's lofty nature and noble character "in future
I prefer to look on at his proceedings from the safe summit of some neigh-
4
boring hill." But if the President's temperament made compromise diffi-
cult it also made senatorial dictatorship impossible.

The Senate Republicans planned to approve Cleveland's nominations

whenever the previous dismissal was satisfactory. Otherwise, they would
demand information upon the man who was discharged as well as upon
the man who was appointed hoping that they could then use a careful
selection of the facts to show that the President was dismissing officers for

political or personal or purely spiteful reasons. Cleveland's nominations,

therefore, were referred to the appropriate Senate committees, and the
committees called on the Executive departments for the information with
which to do their damage. Sternly the President told the members of his
Cabinet to refuse all information about dismissals, and to send only
strictly official papers dealing with appointments. The distinction was
vital the Senate had a right to official data on all appointments in which
:

the Senate, under the Constitution, must concur; but it had no right to
letters or memoranda in which facts or gossip about candidates had been

given to the President in confidence. If such matters were made public the
flow of private news would be stopped forever. And as for information
about dismissals, the Constitution gave the Senate no power over dis-
missals.
The Senate then chose a test case (in which the Attorney General had
refused to send documents about a suspension) and passed a resolution
ordering that copies of all the relevant documents be transmitted at once.
The Attorney General declined to obey. The Republicans in the Senate
moved to censure the Attorney General and resolved that they would no
longer confirm anybody nominated to succeed a dismissed officer unless
the reasons for dismissal were given. Seeking public support, the Senators
announced that the question was "whether it is within the constitutional
competence of either House of Congress to have access to the official
papers and documents in the various public offices of the United States,
created by laws enacted by themselves."
Cleveland met these efforts at obstruction the way a fighting bull meets
a horse. On March 1,1886, he published a message to the Senate which
the Republican members of that body would have preferred to ignore. He
ridiculed their statement as to the nature of the contest, pointing out that
while the Executive departments had been created by the Congress they
were not created for the Senate, which had no authority over them beyond
what was implied in the Constitution. . . . And he pointed out the ab-
surdity of saying that every irrelevant and unsolicited letter dealing with
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 579

an appointment was an "official document" simply because it was kept for

the time being in official files.

There is no mysterious power of transmutation in departmental cus-

tody [he said]. ... If the presence of these papers in the public offices
is a stumbling block in the
way of performance of senatorial duty it can
easily be removed. ... I consider them in no proper sense as upon the
files of the department but as
deposited there for my convenience, re-
maining completely under my control. I suppose if I desired to take
still

them into custody I might do so with entire propriety, and if I saw

my
fit to destroy them no one could complain.

Having shown his disregard for the Senators' arguments with heavy but
wounding sarcasm, Cleveland briefly rejeeted their demands.

My oath to support and defend the Constitution [he wrote], my duty

to the people who have chosen me to execute the powers of their great
office and not relinquish them, and my duty to the chief magistracy
which I must preserve unimpaired in all its dignity and vigor, compel
me to refuse compliance with these demands.

The people backed the President. Once again they showed that they
expected him to assert the national interest, just as they expected their
Congressmen to make sure that the home town gets its fair share of federal
spending. In 1886 they were more than usually likely to feel that the Presi-
dent, rather than the Senate, had the interests of the whole country at
heart, for the era of railroad-building, land-grabbing and trust-begetting
did not show the Senate at its best.

A
United States senator [writes William Allen White of those
. . .

roaring days] with few exceptions, represented something more than a

state, more even than a region. He represented principalities and pow-
ers in business. One senator, for instance, represented the Union Pacific
Railway System, another the New York Central, still another the insur-
ance interests of New York and New Jersey. Here, out of the West, came
not one but a group representing the Southern Pacific. The Santa Fe
divided, with the Gould system, an interest in another. Coal and iron
owned a coterie from the Middle and Eastern seaport states. Cotton had
half a dozen senators. And so it went. These senators either had cam-
paign contributions directly from the great business interests which they
openly championed; or the attorneys for these interests, controlling
state conventions and legislatures, named these senators, and so owned
them. It was a plutocratic feudalism, not rigidly organised, but
eminently respectable. The collar of any great financial interest was
worn in pride. No one wore his more proudly than he who represented
the New York Central, and Jim Hill's senators from the Northwest
580 The Price of Union

flaunted their golden chains. They were faithful. No one charged them
with duplicity or dishonor. Their status grew out of the manner, cus-
5
toms, needs, ideals of the times.

The President's message went to the country on March 1, and before

the month was out the Senate had capitulated. As a last protest, by a
majority of one, the motion to censure the Attorney General was adopted ;

but leading Republican Senators then told the newspapers there would .be
no more calls for information.
An ironic aspect of the story is that Cleveland, during his first years of
office, was the least inclined of all Presidents to quarrel with Congress
over a matter of power. Inexperienced in government, he came to the
presidency with the strictest views on the constitutional division of powers.
He made much trouble for himself by these views and in the end he had to
abandon them; but at the time the Senate challenged him and roused him
to a fight he was feeling as unaggressive as a man may be. Indeed his un-

willingness to interfere with Congress was the despair of his friends.

In his first annual message Cleveland said, "I recommend the suspension
of the compulsory coinage of silver dollars, directed by the law passed in
February, 1878." Since this was a major issue on which he had declared
himself even before his inauguration, the country expected him to use the
full power of the new Administration, party pressure and patronage alike,
to insist on repeal. But he did nothing. In fact, when the New York
Herald predicted that he would take a firm line he announced publicly
that he intended to do nothing. On January 4, 1886, he said to the press:

the most important benefit that I can confer on the country

I believe

by my presidency is to insist upon the entire independence of the execu-

tive and legislative branches of the government, and compel the mem-
bers of the legislative branch to see that they have responsibilities of
their own. ... I believe that this is an executive office, and I deem it
important that the country should be reminded of it. I have certain
executive duties to perform; when that is done my responsibility ends.

He was asked whether Congress would carry out his recommendations on

the tariff and on silver. He said he did not know. The matter was out of
his hands. He did not wish to influence Congress any further.
Cleveland meant exactly what he said. The party was therefore without
a leader. The President's enemies within his own camp were safe in their
obstruction; his friends were powerless and dejected. One Congressman
lamented :

If only Mr. Cleveland had been content to say nothing, he had the
game in his own hands. The opposition to his policy was melting away
like snow in a thaw. He need not have done anything, if only he had
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 581

said nothing. We should presently have had a united party, confident

and happy, with the President as our natural and proper leader. It
makes me sad for what he so needlessly said is a direct invitation to
confusion and discord. 6

The invitation was accepted. Confusion and discord reigned unham-

pered until the President changed his mind and his methods and began
using the powers of his office to compel action. Ignorant of federal govern-
ment as it is actually conducted, Cleveland had made the mistake of
reading the Constitution and it had confused his mind just as the Har-
vard professor whom we quoted earlier feared that it might confuse the
minds of his students. The harm the President had done to his party was
at once made clear. His wishes in regard to silver were brushed aside, and
even on the tariff issue he was treated with small respect.
Nobody in either party was so rash as to defend the existing tariff
schedules, which were unfair to the consumer, a nuisance to large sections
of industry, and productive of a Treasury surplus which was an invitation
to waste. Both parties had admitted that something must be done; but
the Democratic Party held the presidency and would thus take the sole
blame for inaction. On April 12, 1886, the Ways and Means Committee
of the House of Representatives reported a moderate and useful measure.
When nothing had happened by June, the President abandoned his hands-
off policy and sought to put pressure on wavering Congressmen. He was
too late. On June 17, by 157 to 140, the House voted not to consider the
measure. One of the members was quoted in the New York Herald as say-
ing:

It is a black eye for the President, and I for my part am not sorry for
him. If he had not declared in January that he took no interest in the
silver suspension question he could have carried that. He chose to go
back on his policy in that matter, and he ought to have kept out of this
He fancied he had some influence, and he brought pres-
tariff business.
sure to bear on some of us ... and got snubbed, as he deserved. Presi- A
dent of the United States ought to have great influence with his party,
but Mr. Cleveland deliberately threw his away, and he can't now pick
it up again.

After this rebuff Cleveland never again said, or thought, "I have cer-
tain executive duties to perform; when that is done my responsibility
ends." He now knew what happens when a President refuses to do more
than state his preferences. Characteristically, and to the alarm of his
friends, he began to assume forceful leadership on the tariff toward the
end of his first term, just at the time when wilier politicians are content
to coast along, praying for a minimum of discord until after the campaign.
582 The Price of Union

Whenever Cleveland turned from positive projects (such as a new tariff

or anew law for the currency) to some purely negative deed he was at
home, and strong, and successful. One of the bravest of his acts of negation
was his attack on the pensions frauds.
By a law of 1 862 all soldiers and sailors who had suffered any physical
disability as a result of their service were entitled to pensions, and so were
their widows, orphans, and other dependents. When Cleveland became
President the pensions cost more than sixty million dollars a year. And the
cost was mounting rapidly, because in 1879 President Hayes had approved
a law by which every claimant (no matter when his claim was made or ap-
proved) might recover the full amount owed to him from the day he was
mustered out. As a result claim agents traveled the country looking for
ex-soldiers who had something the matter with them and persuading them
to blame it on the war. By 1885, 325,000 pensioners were on the roll. The

pension authorities were lax and the list was growing rapidly; but the
authorities were not lax enough to satisfy the more sentimental or the more

vote-hungry Congressmen.
A veteran whose claim was too silly to be considered by the Pensions
Bureau would take it to his Senator or Representative, who would* intro-
duce a special pension bill. Such bills were sure to pass both Houses as a
matter of courtesy. On April 21, 1886, for example, the Senate passed
four hundred of them. It is safe to assume that three hundred were fraud-
ulent. Yet a Democratic President needed great courage to veto bills re-

warding men who had fought in the Civil War. During every campaign
the Republicans warned the members of the G.A.R. that if they allowed
a Democrat in the White House they would lose their pensions.
This was the type of challenge before which Cleveland never faltered.
If he believed something was wrong he would oppose it. And if everyone
he liked and respected told him it was right, he would still oppose it. So
he began sending back the worst of the pension bills with short and scorn-
ful messages. Many of the claims were so absurd that it was only necessary
to state them in order to destroy them. And always Cleveland harped
on the simple theme that Congress should either trust the Pensions Bureau
or reform it. There was no excuse, he reiterated, for a lawmaking body
to waste its time behaving like a court of appeals. Thus he called the na-
tion's attention to a and strengthened himself for his
senseless inefficiency,
stand against the last and most dishonorable stage of the pensions fraud.
This stage was reached in 1887 with the Blair Bill, the darling of the
Grand Army of the Republic. The bill provided that anyone with three
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 583

months' honorable service during the war, and who supported himself,
might have a pension if he suffered from any form of disability, no matter
how or when acquired, including the disability of old age. The bill also

pensioned the dependent parents of soldiers who had died in the war.
One Republican Senator with a gallant war record claimed that every
Union soldier should be pensioned, on the ground that every soldier came
out of the war weaker (or at any rate older) than he went into it. Cleve-
land vetoed the Blair Bill, and his message received such support from
the country that the matter was dropped until he left the White House.*

By the autumn of 1887 Cleveland seemed safe for renomination and re-
election the following year. He had already made up his mind, however,
to hazard his reputation on a renewed attack against the tariff. He be-
lieved that the heavy Treasury surpluses endangered the nation, and he
knew it was not fair to collect unwanted revenue
by a tax upon the
necessities of the poor. On December 6 he devoted the whole of his annual
message to this subject.
The surplus revenue in the fiscal year 1886-87 was about $103,000,000.
Customs duties for the year had been more than $217,000,000 and internal
taxes had been about $118,000,000. Since all agreed that the surplus was
a nuisance the easy vote-getting plan would have been to cut taxes on
whisky and tobacco at home, and to cut tariffs on such luxuries as wine
and silk, leaving the duties that protected American industry alone. Cleve-
land did the reverse. He would not touch internal taxes or luxury tariffs;
he demanded a heavy cut in the tariffs on necessities. These bore cruelly,
he said, upon the workman and the farmer. He ridiculed the "infant in-
dustry" theory in a nation whose major economic problem was the giant
trusts, and he showed that many of the tariffs merely gave these trusts
immoderate profits for which they did not even have to compete. "Our
progress toward a wise conclusion," he said, "will not be improved by
dwelling upon theories of protection and free trade. It is a condition which
confronts us, not a theory."

* In
1890, under President Harrison, a bill was passed giving pensions to Civil
War veterans incapacitated from any cause. In 1904 an administrative order made
the mere fact of being more than sixty-two a pensionable disability. By 1893 the
cost of Civil War pensions had risen to $159,000,000; by 1912, to $180,000,000; and
by 1923 (fifty-eight years after the close of the war) to $238,924,872. About eight
billion dollars were paid in Civil War pensions, and this vast redistribution of in-
come inevitably had a sectional bias. As Professor Walter Prescott Webb points out,
although the money was raised by taxation throughout the country, "about seven
billion dollars went to the North and about one billion dollars has been distributed
to the South and West combined."
584 The Price of Union

To a friend who urged him not to deliver this message Cleveland an-
swered: "What is the use of being elected or re-elected, unless you stand
for something?" And even after the harm had been done, and he and his
party had been defeated in the election of 1888, Cleveland was unre-
pentant.

They told me it would hurt the party [he said] that without it I was
;

sure to be re-elected, but that if I sent in that message to Congress, it

would, in all probability, defeat me that I could wait until after election
;

and then raise the tariff question. The situation as it existed was, to my
mind, intolerable, and immediate action was necessary. Besides, I did
not wish to be re-elected without having the people understand just
where I stood on the tariff question and then spring the question on
them after my re-election. Perhaps I made a mistake from the party
standpoint; but damn it, I was right.
7

This is a statement which has often been applauded as an example of

firmness in public life. Yet if the situation was in fact "intolerable" and if
"immediate action was necessary," Cleveland did the nation a disservice.
If he had produced his message a year sooner or a year later he might have
won the fight. By disregarding all political advice, by assuming that bold-
ness and stubbornness and the possession of a good cause would suffice,
he insured a Republican Congress at the next election and a tariff even
more obnoxious than the one he attacked. The type of reform for which
he pled so inopportunely was postponed for twenty-six years.
In July, 1888, the bill which Congressman Mills introduced as a result
of Cleveland's message passed the House of Representatives and was sent
to the Senate, which quietly consigned it to limbo. The long debates on
this Mills Bill had served one purpose: they had committed the Demo-
cratic Party to the theory of tariff reform, and the Republican Party to
the theory of higher and ever higher protection. From the end of Cleve-
land's first Administration to the end of Woodrow Wilson's second, those
who believed that the two major parties should be sharply distinguished
from one another could at least point to this one difference. As soon
as the debates began in the House, Cleveland deprived the high-tariff
Democrats of patronage, so that all but the most stubborn recanted; and
in order to make the most of the issue in the campaign of 1888 the Re-
publicans either silenced or exiled their Northwestern low-tariff wing.
This unaccustomed uniformity was possible because the issue was on the
whole vague. It was not a question of free trade versus protection, but
of a somewhat lower tariff versus a somewhat higher tariff.
Early in June, in the midst of the House debate on the Mills Bill, the
Democratic National Convention at St. Louis quietly renominated Cleve-
land. Although Tammany's old hatred still smoldered and led to some
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 585

was no serious opposition. Ex-Senator Allen Thurman

futile plots, there
of Ohio was chosen for the vice -presidency, probably because he disagreed
with Cleveland sharply on the money question and slightly on the tariff.
He was beloved by the party workers who knew him but he was seventy-
;

five years old and in bad health and could do nothing to

strengthen the
ticket nationally. The convention's platform committee, after an all-night
argument, repeated the tariff statements of 1884 but added significantly
that the convention "indorses the views expressed by President Cleveland
in his lastannual message to Congress."
OnJune 19 the Republican Convention met at Chicago. The big ma-
jority of the delegates once more wanted Elaine, who was in Europe at
the time and who had affirmed and reaffirmed that he would not take
the nomination. When the convention opened, therefore, the leading
candidate was John Sherman, whose managers were William McKinley
and Mark Hanna. In spite of such backing Sherman's coldness and re-
moteness stood in his way. For a romantic moment there was thought of
turning to the brilliant, dangerous Chauncey Depew of New York; but
Republican conventions are seldom swept by romance, so the decision was
reached to compromise on a man from the prosaic state of Indiana, whom
William Allen White described as "this rather circumspect, erudite, self-
willed, dainty little aristocrat, Benjamin Harrison." Harrison was an
ex-Senator, an ex-brigadier general with a good war record, and a high-
tariff man who had no marked talents, no bad habits, no taint of cor-

ruption. He was also the grandson of William Henry Harrison, who had
been President of the United States for a month in 1841.
Since an attack on Cleveland's tariff message seemed the only hopeful
campaign strategy, the Republican Convention ignored its Northwestern
dissenters and demanded the utmost in protection.

We are uncompromisingly in favor of the American system of pro-

tection [said the platform] ; we protest against its destruction as proposed
by the President and his party. They serve the interests of Europe ; we
will support the interests of America. . . The Republican party would
.

effect all needed reduction of the national revenue by repealing the

taxes upon tobacco. ... If there shall remain a larger revenue than is
requisite for the wants of the government we favor the entire repeal
of internal taxes rather than the surrender of any part of our protective
system.

The Nation said this platform was so at variance "with the report of
the Republican tariff commission only five years ago, and with the recom-
mendations of successive Republican Presidents and secretaries of the
treasury, that the party can only be likened to the man who made a mon-
ster of which he became the unhappy victim." Protection, however, proved
586 The Price of Union

a docile and friendly monster for a long time. It put the Republican Party
in power and kept it there for thirty-two out of the next forty-four years.
The high-tariff program, and the campaign of 1888, completed the
transformation of the party of Abraham Lincoln into the party of big
business. The program was not chosen deliberately. It was thrust upon
the party by Cleveland's belated message which offered a sudden chance
for victory where there had previously been no hope.* The program
was not even maintained deliberately. In September, 1901, President
McKinley announced in a speech that he had doubts about the high tariff
with which his name was associated; but the next day he was murdered
by an anarchist. The Republican Party has never since asked for a down-
ward revision of duties.

The campaign of 1888 proved once more the weakness of the American
form of government in dealing with foreign affairs. The old problem of
the Canadian fisheries had again become acute in 1885, when Congress
allowed the fishery article of the Treaty of Washington (1871) to lapse.
Thus the Americans lost valuable rights of inshore fishing in Canadian
waters, bait-buying, and transshipment of cargoes. In spite of bitter op-
position from the Republican majority in the Senate, President Cleve-
land arranged with Great Britain for a joint commission to make a new
treaty. After three months of negotiation a draft was agreed to in Febru-
ary, 1888. This was a fair and wise settlement of a dispute which threat-
ened the livelihood of 15,000 New England seamen and which since 1885
had repeatedly provoked bloodshed and dangerous border "incidents."
The Americans were awarded free navigation of the strait which flows
between Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia, the right to buy supplies
on homeward voyages, and in case the United States removed the duties
on fish the right to buy bait and fishing tackle and to transship their
catches.

* Even
during the campaign which was to commit them irrevocably, the Repub-
licans played both sides of the tariff question. In August, 1888, Senator William
Boyd Allison of Iowa offered a substitute for the Mills Bill which was far more
moderate than the Republican platform. The farmers of Iowa and Nebraska, of
Minnesota and Illinois, feared the high protectionist stand of Harrison and of the
platform ; but they liked the Allison Bill. And they wanted to be reassured that the
Republican Party would not simply defeat the Mills Bill and then go home and
do nothing, leaving the Treasury surplus as it was. So Congress remained in session
until two weeks before the election, pretending to be busy with the Allison Tariff.
In the Northwest it represented Republican policy, while in the manufacturing
East it was ignored and the platform was put forward as the party promise. As
soon as the election was over the Allison Bill was shelved.
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 587

This excellent treaty was sent to the Senate on the eve of the political
campaign. There was no pretense of considering it on its merits. A Re-
publican Senator told one of the British commissioners, "we cannot allow
the Democrats to take credit for settling so important a dispute." In
August, at the height of the campaign, the treaty was rejected: partly
to deprive the Democrats of credit and partly to please the Irish- American
voters who preferred to have the United States and Great Britain angry
at each other. As we have already seen, the vexed problem of the fisheries
was not settled until it was referred to the Permanent Court of Arbitra-
tion at The Hague in 1909.
Toward the end of the campaign Harrison received some unexpected
help from the dim-witted British Minister at Washington, Sir Lionel
Sackville-West. A
California Republican, who posed as a naturalized
Englishman by the name of Murchison, wrote to the Minister to ask how
he should vote in order best to serve the mother country. Sackville-West
walked blindly into the trap and answered that it would be best to
vote for the Democrats. The letter, which was made public on October
24, lost both Cleveland and Sackville-West their jobs. Harrison received
100,000 fewer votes than his rival; but the combination of Sir Lionel and
the Canadian treaty and the enmity of Tammany lost Cleveland the
state of New York, which was once more the decisive factor. Harrison
received 233 electoral votes and Cleveland 168.
"The
principles of tariff reform will surely win in the end," said the

outgoing President. In the very long run he was right; but in spite of
Woodrow Wilson's brief success there was no lasting tariff reform until
Franklin Roosevelt devised a system for depriving Congress (temporarily)
of its power to set rates.

Benjamin Harrison was born in Ohio in 1833. His ancestors had been
wealthy planters in Virginia. One of his great-grandfathers a governor
of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence was de-
scribed by John Adams as "an indolent, luxurious, heavy gentleman, of
no use in Congress or committee, but a great embarrassment to both."
Like most of Adams's judgments this was doubtless too harsh. In any
case, the governor's son and Benjamin's grandfather moved to Ohio and
became the ninth President of the United States. President William
Henry Harrison's eldest son served for a time in the House of Repre-
sentatives and was the father of Benjamin, the twenty-third President.
The boy was educated at Miami University in Ohio, was admitted to the
bar, and settled in the neighboring state of Indiana. He was among the
588 The Price of Union

first to join the new Republican Party, because of the slave issue, and he

soon gained a local reputation as a political speaker.

In 1862 Harrison helped raise an Indiana regiment and was appointed
colonel. After two years of hard work he and his surviving troops had
become disciplined veterans, fit for the fierce battles of Sherman's At-
lanta campaign. He ended the war as a brevet brigadier and at once
returned to his law practice. In 1876 he was defeated for the governor-
ship of Indiana but in 1880 the state legislature chose him for the United
States Senate. There he had a quiet career, favoring civil-service reform
and a liberal waste of the public funds on Civil War pensions. In 1886
the Democrats controlled the legislature of Indiana, so Harrison failed
of re-election. Had Elaine felt strong enough to accept the nomination
in 1888, this failure would have marked the end of a harmless little career
suitable to a harmless little man.
Honest and informed and hard-working, icy and haughty in his deal-
ings with most men, Harrison neither understood the forces that sur-
rounded him nor made any perceptible effort to master them. He seemed
to feel that so long as he kept himself clean and untouchable, preserving
the dignity of his great office, he should not be held responsible for the
behavior of the astonishing men about him. No administration has ever
been more responsive to pressure from the spoils-hungry machines, from
the pensions-hungry soldiers, or from the greedy rich. But Harrison ignored
the existence of such vulgarities. He had a touching quality of gentleness
and goodness which in an earlier, simpler, cleaner day might have made
him a useful President. William Allen White has described him with
charming sympathy :

Benjamin Harrison was physically a little man, five feet six or less,

bearded, soft-voiced, small boned meticulous of dress and in man-

. . .

ners, in speech, in thought. . . His desk was cleared at night, not as

.

the desk of a captain of industry, for there was nothing brusque, vigor-
ous or overwhelming about him. His desk was cleared as a gentle-
man's desk is cleared, with a certain deference to tomorrow. Personally
he was shy, most diffident and unassertive. All the altruism in our
. . .

politics was diffused in the heroic adventure that came when men
poured pell mell, helter-skelter over the Alleghenies into the Mississippi
Valley and up the slopes of the Rockies, dragging railroads, cities, col-
leges, factories, farm houses and equipment behind them. Harri-
. . .

son rose when that adventure was over, and for a moment glowed, a
8
cold, thin, white little flame of aristocracy in a sordid day.

He glowed for his friends, like William Allen White, but not for his
lamentable party associates. Not for James G. Blaine, his Secretary of
State, who imposed a rough chauvinism upon American foreign policy;
not fof John Wanamaker, his Postmaster General, who made a joke of
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 589

the platform promises of civil-service reform,

removing thirty thousand
postmasters in a year and inducing the President to suspend the civil-
service rules for the railway mail
workers; not for Tanner, the
James
who had been badly wounded at the second battle of Bull
ex-corporal
Run and who was now made Commissioner of Pensions. "God help the
surplus/' said Corporal Tanner as he waded in to raise as many disability
ratings as possible and to give "an appropriation to every old comrade
that needs it." Tanner could
scarcely be blamed, since the President him-
self had said
during the campaign that "it was no time to be weighing the
claims of old soldiers with scales."
apothecary's
The Executive Department, however, was seemly compared to the
new Congress which first met in December, 1889. We have already men-
tioned the Disability Pension Act of 1890 which
gave pensions to all
Union veterans who were incapacitated for any cause whatever. In the
same year came the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, one of the most
ambiguous
laws ever framed. Perhaps because
nobody could tell what it meant the
Act passed Congress by an almost unanimous vote.
We have seen that the Supreme Court, after a little wavering, decided
that corporations are "persons," and are thus entitled to the
protections
extended to "persons" under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
And we have traced the early stages of the growth of trusts. These trusts
were hated by labor for their size and impersonality, by small business-
men for their piratical methods, by economic theorists for their tendency
to destroy the system of
competition and enterprise, and by consumers
who had to accept monopoly prices. A number of Southern and West-
ern states had passed anti-trust laws and Cleveland had announced in
1888 that "corporations which should be carefully restrained creatures
of the law and servants of the
people are fast becoming the people's
masters." Both parties in the campaign of that year promised relief from
the burden of trusts and monopolies. The result was the Sherman Act,
which declared: "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or
otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the
several states, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be
illegal. . . ."
The Act contained no definition of "trust," or "conspiracy," or of the
unusual expression "trust or otherwise." The second section was directed
against monopolies; but that word also was left undefined. Some people
thought the purpose was to give to the federal courts common law juris-
diction over monopolies and acts in restraint of trade; yet according to
the common law only "unreasonable" restraints were illegal. Did the
Sherman Act go further than the common law?
In 1897 Supreme Court Justice Peckham took the view that the Act
must mean what it says, and that Congress intended to outlaw all con-
tracts in restraint of trade and not merely those which were unreasonable.
590 The Price of Union

Little by however, the Court began to apply the "rule of reason'

little,
and Act until it became almost meaningless as applied tc
to soften the
trusts. It remained hard and clear, however, as applied to trade unions
which were brought under its control by the mysterious words "trust 01
otherwise." By 1900 the Sherman Act had failed either to stop the growth
of trusts and monopolies or to impede their "unreasonable" restraints oi
trade. Matthew Josephson writes:

After the panic of 1893, a strong movement of consolidation, mainl)

led by J. Pierpont Morgan steadily eliminated the quarrelsome
. . .

"robber barons" in both the railroad and the industrial field. Judging
after November 3, 1896,* that all signs were propitious, Morgan boldl>
extended his operations beyond the railroad world that had been his
special province hitherto. In one great industry after another he
brought about "community of interests" by throwing together the lead-
ing corporations into great, centralized holding companies or trusts
McKinley's inauguration marked the beginning of the greatest move-
9
ment of consolidation in American business.

In the busy year of 1890 Harrison's Congress also passed the McKinle)
Tariff, which showed the Northwesterners what babies they had beer
to take comfort from the Allison Bill, put forward to distract them during
the campaign. The heavy popular vote for Cleveland suggested that the
country might not want a higher tariff; but the industrial and financial
interests demanded quick payment for their campaign contributions and
for their votes. To make sure of a Congressional majority for the McKin-
ley Tariff the Administration had to promise a new silver law to the West-
ern Republicans, They then forced through the highest rates the country
had yet seen, designed not only to protect old industries but to create
new ones. Professor Taussig comments:

This measure may fairly be said to be the direct result of Mr. Cleve-
land's tariff message of 1887. The Republicans, in resisting the doc-
trine of that message, were led by logical necessity to the opposite
doctrine of higher duties. . . . Notwithstanding grave misgivings on the
part of some of their leaders, especially those from the northwest, the
10
. . bill was pushed through after long and wearisome debates.
.

The "grave misgivings" were justified, for this rich man's tariff added
strength to the storm that was gathering in the West. Sensing the ominous
drop in the barometer, Cleveland had spoken of the Two Nations in his
last message to Congress.
The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widen-
ing, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and
* The
day on which McKinley was first elected President.
xxix. Both Parties Sowing the Wind 591

powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor. . The com-
. .

munism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening

cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and
integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism
of oppressed poverty and toil.

Congress hoped for the time being to distract the "oppressed poverty
and toil" of the Western farmer with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act
of 1890, which was the price of Western votes for the McKinley Tariff.
It provided that the Treasury should buy four and a half million ounces
of silver each month, at the market price, and pay for it with Treasury
note* which were redeemable in either gold or silver, "it being the estab-
lished policy of the United States to maintain the two metals on a parity
with each other upon the present legal ratio or such ratio as may be estab-
lished by law." Here was a triumph of Congressional policy-making and
Executive abnegation. The Eastern Republicans voted for a silver bill
which they feared would ruin the country, and in return the Western
Republicans voted for a tariff bill which they feared would ruin them-
selves.
The maneuver was too boldly absurd. In the mid-term elections of
1890 the country turned from the Administration, reducing the Repub-
lican majority in the Senate and electing 235 Democrats and 88 Re-

publicans to the House of Representatives. Congressman William McKin-

ley was retired briefly to private life.
The lastyear of the Harrison Administration was appropriately illu-
minated by the baleful fires of theHomestead Strike, when the Amalga-
mated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers were denied further
recognition of their union by the Carnegie Company at Homestead, Penn-
sylvania. A
small war resulted, involving workers, 270 Pinkerton detectives
hired by Henry Frick, and finally the state militia. The strike was broken,
with the result that many bitter destructive years were to pass before
unions could establish themselves in the new mass industries. The little
aristocrat in the White House could not understand such issues, and the
crass tradesmen who dominated the Congress did not choose to do so.

By the time the campaign of 1892 was well under way the West was
preparing for the great Populist uprising, while Eastern labor was feeling
beaten and vengeful. The next four years were to be the wildest in Amer-
ican history.
 XXX

Agrarian versus Capitalist

T .HE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION met at Minneapolis on June 7, 1892, and

renominated Harrison on the first ballot. Torn Platt and other Eastern
bosses were sorry, for they did not like the little man who looked at them
as if they were sub-human; but Harrison had been as good a President as
the party would permit and he could not be repudiated after only one
term.
The Democratic Convention met at Chicago later in the month and
renominated Cleveland on the first ballot, in spite of the fact that the
New York delegation was once more against him. Adlai Stevenson of
Illinois was nominated for Vice-President.
The unpopularity of the McKinley Tariff helped Cleveland to win
the nomination. Also, after four years of big-business Republicanism the
reformers and the enemies of "boss rule" were enthusiastic for his return.
And finally, the more intelligent conservatives of Wall Street were behind
him not the men who looked to Washington for special favors but the
men who looked for protection from the silver-heretics of the West. In
1891 Cleveland had issued another blast against the free-silver elements
in the party, and ever since leaving the White House in 1889 he had been

practicing corporation law in New York City and learning to feel at

home with the very rich. It was not by accident that William C. Whitney,
the partner of Thomas Fortune Ryan and the brother-in-law of Standard
Oil, guided and controlled the Chicago convention. Professor Binkley
comments :

Four years in the peculiar climate of opinion of the mighty metropolis

had given Cleveland a more pronounced capitalistic ideology than any
Republican President from the corn-belt except Grant. His, indeed,
was now a strange pattern of thought for a leader of the historic party
of the agrarians and the urban masses just at the moment when the
ferment of populism was turning the South and West into a madhouse
of radical discontent. No doubt the new Cleveland was as honest, con-
and courageous as
scientious ever, but he looked out upon the tumultu-
1
ous American scene through spectacles he had not worn before.
Before the convention opened, Henry Watterson of Louisville had warned
against a New York candidate. "If we go there for a nominee," he said,
592
 .
Agrarian versus Capitalist 593

"we shall walk through a slaughter-house into an open grave." By 1896

italmost seemed he had been right.
Much to Cleveland's displeasure, Watterson contrived to put a strong
and bitter anti-tariff statement into the platform. "We denounce Re-
publican protection as a fraud," it said, "a robbery of the great majority
of the American people for the benefit of the few. . We denounce the
. .

McKinley tariff law enacted by the Fifty-First Congress as the culminating

atrocity of class legislation . and we promise its repeal as one of the
. .

beneficent results that will follow the action of the people in intrusting
power to the Democratic party." Cleveland wanted a moderate tariff
plank. He was afraid these rash words would lose him the election. He
and Watterson quarreled and were never again on speaking terms.
The money plank in the platform was as meaningless as possible. It
favored bimetallism on condition that "the dollar unit of coinage of both
metals must be of equal intrinsic and exchangeable value, or be adjusted
through international agreement or by such safeguards of legislation as
shall insure the maintenance of the parity of the two metals and the equal

power of every dollar at all times in the markets and in the payment of
debts." The West was expected to accept this gibberish as favorable to
silver,and the East as an incantation for warding off bimetallism by nam-
ing prerequisites which could never possibly be met.
The election was expected to be close, but in fact it was a heavy defeat
for Harrison. His own party leaders were indifferent; labor tended to
blame the Republicans for Henry Frick and his hired gunmen; and the
Westerners who had been fooled and decoyed by the Allison Bill during
the previous campaign, and who were then fobbed off with the McKinley
Tariff, now turned against the party. Some of them voted for Cleveland;
but more than a million joined the Populists, thus defeating the Harrison
ticket in states which the Democrats could never hope to win. In Colo-

rado, Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming, for example, the
Democrats did not even nominate electors. They voted with the Populists
from the Republican column. The Populist
in order to take those states
candidate, James Baird Weaver of Iowa, won 22 electoral votes: all the
votes from Kansas, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada, and one each from
North Dakota and Oregon. Cleveland won 277 electoral votes, including
those of New York, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and California. Harrison
won 145 votes.

As we have seen repeatedly the anger and the political programs of the
Western farmer were related to the steady fall of agricultural prices and
to the steady suppression of competition by monopolistic agreements
594 The Price of Union

among railways, warehouses, the makers of farm equipment, and the

owners of grain elevators. The price-raising tariffs of 1883 and 1890
added to the burdens and to the discontent. The farmers of the trans-
Mississippi were almost wholly dependent upon outside markets. During
the Civil War food prices were high, and for a short time thereafter the
German wars in Europe prevented too fast a fall; yet for thirty years
the fall was continual, relentless. To pay off a mortgage in the eighteen-
nineties, a man needed three times as many bushels of wheat as he had
needed in 1865. No wonder he asked for cheap money, and anti-trust
laws, and lower freight rates, and warehouse and elevator rates made by
state authority and not by the agents of monopolies.
In Minnesota in the late sixties farmers began to form themselves into

Granges, to study and discuss their troubles. Quickly the study groups
changed into political action groups, to fight monopolies at the state
capitals and to experiment with co-operative buying and selling. When
they could get nothing from the Republican or the Democratic machines,
they set up "Independent" or "Anti-Monopoly" parties of their own. In
the eighteen-seventies, in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota they
achieved a series of "Granger laws" regulating railways and warehouses.
In 1877, as we have seen, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed
that these laws were constitutional.
During the eighteen-eighties two National Farmers Alliances were
formed. One alliance, centered in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and
Minnesota, becoming a loose federation of state machines to fight the
unfair railway rates. The other began in Texas and spread through the
South. Because of the one-party system in the old Confederacy the South-
ern Alliance had to work solely through the Democratic Party, which it
controlled in several states. Among the successful candidates in the elec-
tions of 1890, four Senators and about fifty Representatives were either

Alliance-Independents or Alliance-sponsored Democrats. Cheered by this

success the agrarian leaders undertook to build their own political party.
In 1892 the Grangers and the two Alliances and the remnants of the
Greenbackers and the Western free-silver men united to form the Peo-
ple's Party, or Populist Party, which in spite of its short life proved the
most influential "third party" in American history.* The Populists held
their first national convention at Omaha in July, 1892. The platform put
forward by that convention gives a picture of the farmer-labor grievances
of the time and a forecast of federal legislation from the days of Theo-
dore Roosevelt to the days of his distant cousin's New Deal. Indeed a
young Nebraska Populist of 1892 by the name of Arthur F. Mullen was

* Not
counting the Republican Party, which immediately established itself as one
of the two main groups and which never after 1856 had the characteristics of a
"third party."
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 595

floor manager for Franklin Roosevelt at the convention which first named
him for the presidency. In his autobiography Mr. Mullen calls the Popu-
list platform "a document that was the real
beginning of the Roosevelt
campaign of 1932. . . For those issues of 1892 which were not already
.

settled by fate or by incorporation into other party platforms remained

the issues of 1932." 2
"We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, po-
litical and material ruin/' said the People's Platform. "Corruption dom-
inates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even
the ermine of the bench. The newspapers are largely subsidized or
. . .

muzzled, public opinion silenced homes covered with mortgages,

. . .

labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capital-

ists. . From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we
. .

breed the two great classes tramps and millionaires." Arthur Mullen's
memories of youth in Nebraska make these hard words seem scarcely
his

exaggerated. "Nominally," he writes, "Nebraska was owned by its set-

tlers, most of them Civil War veterans who had taken advantage of the
Homestead Act. Actually, Nebraska was owned by the big insurance
. . .

companies of the East and by the railroads that traversed the country
between Kansas and South Dakota." These railroads "owned the execu-
tive, judicial and legislative branches of the state government lock, stock
and barrel. Entrenched in the security given them by this stranglehold,
they raised rates, dodged damages for their negligence, and generally
strangled the people." He points out that the Union Pacific Railroad
3

alone had been given by the federal government 4,845,977 acres of the
best land in Nebraska; every other section along its right of way for
twenty-four miles on each side of the track.*
After the angry Preamble came the far-seeing Populist program: "the
free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio
of 16 to 1"; a flexible currency controlled by the government and not
by the private banks, with the circulating medium "speedily increased
to not less than $50 per capita" (it had been $31 per capita in 1865, the
highest for thirty years) a graduated income tax; postal savings banks;
;

the restriction of immigration in order to raise the price of labor; the

eight-hour day; the direct election of Senators instead of election by
state legislatures; the Australian ballot (that is, compulsory secrecy in
* This is a tenth of the land in
Nebraska, which contains 49,331,680 acres. The
insurance companies to which Mullen refers were the holders of mortgages. Not
only was the entire trans-Mississippi a "debtor land," as William Allen White calls
it, with every town bonded for its public improvements and almost every
business
mortgaged, but enthusiastic settlers had pushed too far into the arid lands of west-
ern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, where the tall prairie grass gave way
ominously to the short grass of the plains. Here the farmers were at the mercy of
the ever-returning cycle of dry years. Such a cycle began in 1887. Between 1889
and 1893 eleven thousand farm mortgages were foreclosed in Kansas.
527
596 The Price of Union

the marking and polling of the ballot) ; the initiative and referendum
(that is, the process whereby legislation may be proposed by a vote of
the people, and whereby measures passed by the legislature may be re-
ferred to the people for approval or rejection) ; the return to the
gov-
ernment, to be held for "actual settlers/' of all land owned by aliens or
"by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs";
public ownership and operation of railroads, telegraph, and telephone,
since the latter are "a necessity for the transmission of news," and* since
"the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the
people or the people must own the railroads."
Except for free silver and the socialization of railroads and communi-
cations there is little in this program which has not been incorporated
either into federal law or into the law of many states.* Sometimes the

Republican Party has been the agent and sometimes the Democratic
Party. The function of the Populist Party, as of all "third parties," was
to bring forward the new ideas and to argue them
up and down the
country so that the people could know them and judge them. When
an idea which is thus proposed by a "third party" (or by a citizens' com-
mittee, a trade union, a church, or any other group) makes sufficient
headway, it will be adopted by one, or more often by both, of the major
parties. But it will not be adopted until all (or nearly all) of the regions
and the economic interests favor it. The "third parties" and the citizens'

groups play the part of enthusiastic youth promoting panaceas; the two
major parties, with their vast organizations extending into every district of
the land, are the bored and cynical elders who have seen
everything and
heard everything and do not believe that the troubles of life can be
cured. No one can persuade them of an idea, for they do not deal in
ideas; yet they will move with a certain stiff and elephantine alacrity
as soon as they are shown that a
program has become so popular that
section by section it will win more votes than it loses. It is the task of
the enthusiasts to preach the program until it reaches that stage; then
the professionals take over.
A President of the United States can of course do more than anyone
to hurry a program from the stage when only amateurs dare touch it to
the stage when the two party machines will make it their own. In the
case of the Populist program, for example, Theodore Roosevelt
adopted
some of it, and so did Taft, and so did Woodrow Wilson. Yet when
Franklin Roosevelt came to office in the midst of the great depression he
still found those "two
great classes tramps and millionaires." And he
spoke to the people in the spirit of the Preamble of 1892.

*By 1940, for example, twenty states had adopted the initiative and twenty- two
the referendum. South Dakota led the way by adopting both in 1898.
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 597

The first ardor and impatience was to put back into

result of Populist
the White House the most negative and conservative man in politics.
Cleveland's obliviousness to the excitements of Omaha was shown by his
new Cabinet. The Secretary of State, Walter Q. Gresham, who was not
a success in dealing with Congress or in strengthening the Administration
before the country, was chosen from the reform wing of the Republican
Party; the Secretary of the Treasury was a Kentuckian, John Carlisle,
one of the most brilliant and able men in Congress, although slightly
addicted to the bottle. He was a recent convert from silver to the gold
standard and was therefore feared by the Westerners. When someone
accused Carlisle of being too pliable, Cleveland defended him charm-
ingly: "We are just right for each other. He knows all that I ought to
know, and I can bear all that he needs to bear." The other influential
member was the Attorney General, Richard Olney
of the second Cabinet
of Massachusetts. He
was an ominous choice in a day when trusts and
organized labor were both on the warpath a learned, stubborn, fighting,
:

Yankee conservative, who had already shown in private practice that he

had a contempt for the Sherman Anti-Trust Law except as it could be
used against trade unions.
When Cleveland was inaugurated President on March 4, 1893, the
Democrats had at last achieved a working majority in both houses of
Congress. There was no excuse for not keeping their promises except
for the fact that they differed among themselves as to what the promises
were. Everybody knew that Cleveland stood for reforming the tariff and
the civil service, for preserving the value of the currency and for economy
in government. But many of the Democratic Senators were pleased
with the McKinley Tariff, most of them thought civil-service reform a
cranky nuisance, and those from across the Mississippi were almost unani-
mous for cheap money. It only needed the advent of hard times to expose
the hollowness of this alliance, and within two months of Cleveland's
inauguration the hard times came. The first big failures were among
the railroads, which were hurt by the agricultural depression in the
West, especially since 1887. The Reading, the Erie, the Northern Pacific,
the Union Pacific, the Santa Fe all went down. Then the banks felt the
strain and responded by calling in their loans and in many cases closing
their doors. In theSouth and West, during 1893, a hundred and fifty-
three national banks failed. Within a year there were four million in-
dustrial unemployed, out of a population of about sixty-five million.
The causes of the panic were doubtless multiform and world-wide,
598 The Price of Union

though Cleveland put the blame almost wholly on the Sherman Silver
Purchase Act, Huge British investments in the Argentine, and the sub-
sequent default of the Argentine Government, had led to the "Baring
Panic" of 1890-91, which halted the flow of foreign capital into Amer-
ican business. Most of America's westward expansion since the Civil
War had been too fast and too flimsily financed. The heavy expenditures
of the Harrison Administration ("God help the surplus") added to the
drain on the gold reserve caused by the redemption of the Sherman Act
notes. Rumors began to circulate abroad as well as at home that the
United States would be forced off the gold standard.* The rumors led to
a further sale of American securities held in Europe, to a further export
of gold, and to a partial market collapse in New York. Within a month of
Cleveland's return to the White House the Treasury's gold reserve had,
for the first time since its establishment, fallen below the accepted mini-
mum of $100,000,000.Meanwhile labor troubles, and the over-speculation
which accompanied the building of dozens of trusts and combines, added
to the insecurity.
Cleveland clearly oversimplified when he blamed the depression on the
Silver Purchase Act; but in one sense he was right. That fugitive and shy
commodity known as "business confidence" was in danger of going under-
ground. Bankers and manufacturers had been frightening each other with
grisly tales of revolution coming from the West. When Cleveland promised
resoundingly that gold payments would be maintained whatever hap-
pened, Andrew Carnegie wrote him that he had "saved this country from
panic and entire confusion in its industrial interests." In the light of recent
history it seems improbable that the silver experiments would have been
as harmful as men feared; but the mere fact of their fears might have
worked havoc upon the American economy. In any case, right or wrong,
Cleveland agreed with the men of business. He called a special session of
Congress in August, 1893, to repeal the Sherman law.
Throughout the East the press of both parties applauded Cleveland,
and he won support in the older Middle West. But in the South and
across the Mississippi the farmers were united to defend the Sherman Act
unless they were offered the free coinage of silver in its place. Their case
was argued in Congress by William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska and
"Silver Dick" Bland of Missouri. This was a sectional fight and a class
fight also agrarian against capitalist. It roused the passions of a religious
war.
On the one side, said Bryan, stood "the moneyed interest, aggregated
*
Legally, of course, the Treasury could redeem the Sherman Act notes in either
gold or silver; but if they were redeemed in silver the world would consider Amer-
ica a soft-currency country and a bad place for investments.
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 599

wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless. . . . On the

other side stand the unnumbered throng. Work-worn and dust-
. . .

begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for
help beat in vain against the outer walls." This was the oversimplified
faith of the agrarians to match the President's oversimplified belief in

gold. Bryan's followers thought themselves the victims of an international

plot to demonetize silver and to drive up the price of gold for the sake of
the "arrogant, compassionless" rich. They pointed out that Germany
turned to the gold standard in 1871 and that the Latin Union (France,
Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Greece) followed at once, and that two
years later the United States demonetized silver by the so-called "Crime
of '73." Later, Austria-Hungary and India stopped the free coinage of
During all these years the Sherman Act was the chief concession to
silver.

the "unnumbered throng" of sufferers. If that too were abandoned, the

agrarians predicted that commodity prices would fall until the American
farmer reached an Asiatic standard of life. And in the end mankind would
starve upon the altars of gold.
In August the Repeal Bill passed the House of Representatives. During
the debate Cleveland had been absent because of an operation for cancer
in the roof of his mouth. According to American custom the Vice-Presi-
dent was as strongly pro-silver as Cleveland was pro-gold, so if the Presi-
dent had died the repeal would never have gone through the Senate; but
on September 1 he was declared out of danger. A few days later he was
back in Washington with normal looks and normal speech, but doubtless
feeling a little strange with his artificial jaw of vulcanized rubber.* By
ruthless use of the patronage and by the force of his character Cleveland
won the votes of a majority of the Senate after two months' debate. Un-
happily the repeal did not restore prosperity, or have any perceptible effect
on the depression, although conditions might have grown even worse had
not the timorous men of business been reassured.

When Congress met in regular session, in December, 1893, Cleveland tried

to carry out the party promise of tariff reduction; but the bitterness roused

by the fight on silver made agreement Dick Bland had warned

impossible.
the President that the Western and Eastern Democrats had come to "a
parting of the ways." Discipline and loyalty no longer prevailed, and under
those conditions the American form of government simply ceases to func-
*
Although there were rumors at the time, the full story of Cleveland's operation
did not become known for almost twenty-five years.
600 The Price of Union

tion. The House passed a reasonably good bill which the Senate tore to

pieces. Many of the Eastern Democratic Senators were high protectionists,

and so were the Southern Senators from the sugar states. The latter now
took pleasure in frustrating Cleveland, who accepted a number of bad
amendments in the hope that the conference committee of the two houses
would remove them. But the Senate refused to back down even in com-
mittee, and after eight months of bitterness and futility the House accepted
the bill with more than six hundred Senate amendments most of* them
bad.
Cleveland, meanwhile, had allowed the publication of his letter to a
member of the House, in which he said "Every true Democrat and every
:

sincere reformer knows that the bill in its present form falls far short
. . .

of the consummation for which we have long labored. . Our abandon-

. .

ment of the cause or the principle upon which it rests means party perfidy
and party dishonor." For this he was savagely attacked by Senators in his
own party. In the end he refused to sign the wretched tariff act; yet he felt
it was probably better than the McKinley Act, so he also refused to veto

it. In accordance with the Constitution the bill became law without his

signature after the lapse of ten days.

The new tariff had started its stormy life as a bill for downward re-

vision, which would reduce the federal revenues, so it contained a pro-

vision for a two per cent tax on all incomes above $4000. As we have seen,
the demand for an income tax was part of the Populist revolt against the
concentration of wealth and power in the hands of capitalists. During the
Civil War, when Congress had imposed high tariffs it had also added an
income tax to reassure the West that the Easterners were paying their
share of the cost of battle. The tax had since been repealed; yet in 1880
the Supreme Court had unanimously declared it constitutional. Un-
deterred by this fact, a group of rich Easterners quickly brought a test
case against the new income tax and in May, 1895, by a five to four
decision, the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional.
This proved one of the most unpopular decisions in the history of the
Court. Not only Western agrarians but the Eastern poor believed it to be
an act of bitter class discrimination. The New York World wrote that "the
overthrow of the income tax is the triumph of selfishness over patriotism.
Great and rich corporations, by hiring the ablest lawyers in the land and
fighting against a petty tax upon superfluity as other men have fought for
their liberties and their lives, have secured the exemption of wealth from

paying its just share toward the support of the government that protects
it." The agitation against this decision never subsided until the Supreme

Court was overruled by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in

1913. It is interesting to note, however, that the majority of the Court
which was attacked for class discrimination believed that it was resisting
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 601

such discrimination and that an income tax is in itself a form of class war-
fare.

The legislation [says Mr. Justice Field in his concurring opinion], in

the discrimination it makes, is class legislation. Whenever a distinction
is made in the burdens a law
imposes or in the benefits it confers on any
citizens by reason of their birth, or wealth, or religion, it is class legisla-
tion, and leads inevitably to oppression and abuses, and to general un-
rest and disturbance in society. . .The present assault upon capital'
.

is but the be but

beginning. It will the stepping-stone to others, larger
and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the
poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitter-
ness.

The gold reserve, meanwhile, was still threatened in spite of the repeal
of the Silver Purchase Act. Holders of the large number of silver certifi-
cates which had been issued while the Act was in force began presenting
them to the Treasury and asking for gold. Cleveland and Carlisle felt they
must meet the demands or ruin the credit of the government. They began
to sell United States Government bonds for gold, and when the public was

apathetic they turned to the house of Morgan, which formed a banking

syndicate to absorb three bond issues: in January and November, 1894,
and in February, 1895. It was not until 1896 that the Treasury could
float an issue by popular subscription. And it was not until the bad

European harvest of 1897, which stimulated the export of American farm

products and the importation of gold, that the long depression was really
past and the Treasury crisis ended. By that time the unlucky Grover
Cleveland was out of the White House. Of all the actions forced upon him
by his faith in his rich Eastern friends, the most unpopular with the
agrarians was the selling of bonds to the New York bankers with the help
of J. Pierpont Morgan. And the most unpopular with labor was his in-
tervention in the Pullman strike.
The Pullman Company, like the railroads which used its cars, made
heavy wage cuts during the depression. By the spring of 1894 the cuts
came to twenty-five per cent; but there was no reduction in the rentals for
houses and rooms in the "model town" of Pullman, which was completely
owned by the company. One witness testified that after paying the rent the
workers had about seventy-six cents a day for food and clothing for an
entire family. Yet the Pullman Company had just paid more than $2,500,-
000 in dividends on a capital of $36,000,000, and held undivided surplus
profits of about $25,000,000. When George Pullman was asked by federal
602 The Price of Union

investigators whether he thought it would have been wiser, under these

circumstances, to pay his workmen a living wage, he answered: "I do not.
It would have amounted to a gift of money to these men it was simply a
;

matter of business."
In May, 1894, the men asked for lower rents or higher wages. They were
refused, and their spokesmen were discharged, so 2500 employees stopped
work and the shops were closed. The American Railway Union, with
which some of the men were affiliated, tried to arbitrate the differences;
but the company said there was nothing to discuss. The Railway Union,
a strong group led by Eugene Debs, then voted to boycott all Pullman
cars. When Pullman was supported by the newly formed General Mana-

gers' Association of Railroads, the strike spread rapidly from Chicago

throughout the West and then to the whole country. At this point Cleve-
land's Attorney General intervened with the vast powers of the federal
government.
Richard Olney was not only anti-labor by temperament, he was pro-
railway by profession. He had been attorney for the New York Central,
the Santa Fe, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and the Boston and
Maine. As recently as 1889 he had been a director of the Burlington and
a member of the General Managers' Association which had sprung to the
defense of Pullman. The President might have taken this into account
when Olney urged him to intervene; but the case was presented as a
matter of supporting the federal courts, and protecting the movement of
the mails, so Cleveland agreed to act.
Using a device which he had perfected in private practice, Olney ar-
ranged for the federal circuit court at Chicago to serve a "blanket in-
junction" on the officers of the American Railway Union against ob-
structing the railways or interfering with the mails. This was based in part
on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. If the injunction were obeyed the strike
would be broken. If the injunction were ignored (as in fact happened)
Olney could tell the President that the courts were being flouted and that
federal troops must go to the rescue. All happened according to plan, and
on July 4 Cleveland walked into the trap. With unaccustomed bombast he
said, "If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver
a post card in Chicago, that card will be delivered." He ordered a regi-
ment of regulars to the city to "restore law and order." The result, as
Professors Morison and Commager observe, "was like that of sending
British regulars to Boston in 1768." The troops stimulated the violence
which they were intended to stop, and which was nonexistent until they
arrived., On July 7 seven men were killed and many injured. On
July 10
Eugene Debs was arrested for obstructing the mails, and the strike quickly
collapsed.
The governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, had protested throughout
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 603

that he was ready and able to preserve order with the state militia. He sent
troops wherever they were called for, and kept a large force to put into
Chicago in case of riots. He objected to interference from Washington and
demanded vainly that the federal troops be withdrawn, pointing out that
they created disorder instead of quelling it. The Altgeld-Cleveland wrangle
strengthened labor's belief that the regulars were sent to break the strike
and not to keep the peace. If this was so the fault lay with the Attorney
General who had misinformed the President. The Pullman strike came
while Cleveland was absorbed in the fate of his tariff bill and was writing
his famous about "party perfidy." Some of his just but stifled in-
letter

dignation against the Congress may have found expression in his rant
about the army and the post card.
1894-95 was a bad year for Cleveland and for America. The depression
was at its worst, but the thought that the nation might have a duty to the
unemployed had not yet crossed the minds of America's rulers. Armies
of hungry men ranged the country, foraging or begging, living in hobo
camps, some of them marching on Washington to ask for help from a
government which was itself helpless. And behind the industrial unem-
ployed were the despairing farmers, with wheat at forty-nine cents a bushel
and cotton at five cents a pound. And beyond the breakdown of the
economic system lay the breakdown of politics. The great federal govern-
ment could frustrate the Pullman strike but it could not feed one starving
man. It passed an Anti-Trust Act, yet when the law was invoked against
the Whiskey Trust, and against the Sugar Trust which controlled ninety-
eight per cent of the refining of the country, the Supreme Court ruled that
no restraint of trade had been proved and Attorney General Olney wrote :

"You will observe that the Government has been defeated in the Supreme
Court on the trust question. I always supposed it would be, and have taken
the responsibility of not prosecuting under a law I believed to be no good."
Yet the law was good enough when turned against the American Railway
Union.* And the farce of the Sherman Act was repeated in the farce of
tariff reform, from which nothing resulted except an income-tax law

which was voided by the Supreme Court. The only positive deeds which
were carried out and which meant what they said were the repeal of the
Silver Purchase Act and the sale of bonds to Mr. Morgan to preserve the

security of gold. No wonder the Republicans won back their majority in

the House, in the mid-term elections of 1894, while the Populists increased
their vote to a million and a half. And no wonder 1896 saw the most
fateful presidential election since 1860.

* In 1908 the
Supreme Court held unanimously that the Anti-Trust Act applied
to labor combinations.
604 The Price of Union

Toward the end of May, 1895, the Secretary of State died. This was a
personal misfortune to Cleveland, who lost a friend. It became a mis-
fortune to the country as well when Richard Olney was given the vacant
post, for the United States was involved in a delicate negotiation with
England which the impatient Olney very nearly turned into a war. Ever
since the eighteen-forties Great Britain and Venezuela had differed as to
the boundary between the latter country and British Guiana. Neither
nation was greatly concerned, and in 1850 both agreed not to encroach
upon the disputed territory. There the matter might have rested but for
the discovery of gold in this tranquil no-man's-land. At once both nations
extended their claims far into the other's country. In 1886 relations were
broken off and the following year Lord Salisbury refused an American
offer to arbitrate.
The American offer was renewed in 1894, and was again refused.

During the next six months, partly through the efforts of a special agent
of the Venezuelan Government, the matter began to attract popular atten-
tion in America and to be related to the defense of the Monroe Doctrine.
When Olney became Secretary of State his combativeness was roused and
he drafted instructions to the American Minister in London which may
be described as unusual. Years later he defended himself on the ground
that "in English eyes the United States was then so completely a neg-
ligible quantity that it was believed only words the equivalent of blows
would be really effective." If any Englishman did think the United States
negligible, his opinion was perhaps not changed by this revelation that the
American Secretary -of State was ignorant of history and geography, and
was prepared to insult not only Great Britain but all his country's neigh-
bors to the north and to the south.
"Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,"
wrote Olney, "and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its
interposition." The statement seemed ridiculous to the Canadians and
arrogant to the jealous Latin Americans. "Distance and three thousand
miles of intervening ocean," said Olney, "make any permanent political
union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpe-
dient." This, too, was a surprise to the Canadians, and a surprise to Lord
who called attention to the large number of American territories
Salisbury
who found their union with Great Britain notably expedient and natural.
The Latin-American Republics, said Olney, were "by geographical prox-
imity, by natural sympathy, by similarity of governmental institutions,"
the "friends and allies" of the United States. Since the United States is
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 605

farther from a large part of Latin America than from Europe, since the
natural sympathy of Latin America turns toward the Mediterranean and
Catholic world, and since the chief similarity in governmental institutions,
between the United States and her southern neighbors, is the use of the
word "republic" to cover a multitude of institutions, nobody in the British
Foreign Office found this sentence "the equivalent of blows."
Behind the bad history, bad geography, and bad manners was a simple
and sensible request for arbitration. If it had been made without adorn-
ment, and if the question as to whether the Monroe Doctrine applied had
been omitted, Lord Salisbury might have given a soft answer. As it was,
after waiting rather too long he produced a masterpiece of condescension.
The worst faults of the American diplomacy had again been matched by
the worst faults of the British, and the result might have been another
needless and reprehensible War of 1812. The dispute, said Lord Salisbury,
did not in fact concern the United States. It was "simply the determina-
tion of the frontier of a British possession which belonged to the Throne
of England long before the Republic of Venezuela came into existence."
And as for the famous Monroe Doctrine:
I have argued on the theory that the Monroe Doctrine itself is sound.
I must not, however, be understood as expressing any acceptance of it
on the part of Her Majesty's Government. It must always be mentioned
with respect, on account of the distinguished statesman to whom it is
due, and the great nation who have generally adopted it. But ... no
statesman, however eminent, and no nation, however powerful, are
competent to insert into the code of international law a novel principle
which was never recognised before, and which has not been since ac-
cepted by the Government of any other country.

We are reminded of the days of Canning and Madison, except that

Madison was not hot-headed like Cleveland. On December 17, 1895, the
President sent to Congress a message which made public Olney's instruc-
tions to the American Minister in London and which would have led to
war had Great Britain been in a mood to fight. In that case history might
have had some difficulty in explaining what the war was about. Cleve-
land's message stated that if England continued to refuse to arbitrate the
United States would send a commission to judge the dispute independ-
ently and to report as quickly as possible.

When such report is made and accepted [the President said], it will,
in my opinion, be the duty of the United States to resist by every means
in its power, as a wilful aggression upon its
rights and interests, the
appropriation by Great Britain of any lands or the exercise of govern-
mental jurisdiction over any territory which after investigation we have
determined of right belongs to Venezuela. ... In making these recom-
606 The Price of Union

mendations I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and realize

all the consequences that may follow.

Carl Schurz referred to message as "a grievous break in Mr. Cleve-

this
land's otherwise so dignified and statesmanlike foreign policy." Perhaps an
even heavier condemnation is the fact that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
when asked how he liked the message, said that he was "bubbling over
with delight." Cleveland later excused himself on the ground that if Eng-
land and Venezuela had drifted into armed conflict Congress would have
intervened and forced a war. His own aim, he said, was by one sharp
stroke to compel arbitration and prevent Congress from intervening. This
is doubtless the exact truth; but it convicts Cleveland of a grave lack of

imagination and an unwise contempt for the usages of diplomacy. In

seeking peace he issued a threat of war unaware, apparently, of the
passions which such a threat would rouse throughout America.
Perhaps the long, bitter depression made people more than normally
willing to "let slip the dogs of war." In any case, the whole nation rose to
support Cleveland and to demand action, action, as if anything must be
The Irish National Alliance offered 100,-
better than their present plight.
000troops. The Washington Post cried joyously, "It is the call to arms!"
And one foolish Senator announced that "war would be a good thing even
if we
get whipped." As Cleveland should have known, these winds of
madness never blow themselves out harmlessly. Having tasted the guilty
excitement of a war scare, the American people remained more truculent
than ever before, more willing to find threats or insults behind harmless
gestures, more friendly to the thought of armed expansion. And within
three years they were at war.
Fortunately, the British in 1896 were not inclined to a similar excite-
ment. Lord Salisbury, as Professor Dexter Perkins writes, was "as little
prone to nervous agitation as any man in British public life." Seeing the
sad results of his exercise in sarcasm, and finding that public opinion
agreed with Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who said that
war between the English-speaking nations would be an absurdity as well
as a crime, Salisbury prepared to back down as quietly as possible. Just at
that moment came the Jameson raid into the Transvaal, and the telegram
from Kaiser Wilhelm II congratulating President Kruger on the repulse
of the British raiders. The press and public could thus vent their indigna-
tion on Germany while their government made peace with America. A
treaty was concluded with Venezuela appointing an arbitration committee
and setting a period of fifty years' occupation as making a good title. The
commission included the Chief Justices of Great Britain and the United
States. In 1899 a unanimous decision awarded England substantially her

original claim.
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 607

One useful result of the crisis was the beginning of the rehabilitation of
the United States Navy. In 1895 that navy possessed one modern battle-
ship, which might have found difficulty in holding the seas against "the
meteor flag of England." Congress quickly voted funds for three battle-
ships and ten torpedo and thereafter the public never wholly forgot
boats,
that the defense of the Monroe Doctrine must rest upon sea power. In
the past that power had been supplied by England; but in the future the
United States was to share the rule of the seas. These were the years when
America was taught the meaning of sea power by Rear Admiral Mahan.
The readiness to learn and the superb teacher coincided. Suddenly news-
papers, politicians, and lecturers all over the country were telling each
other how Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off
Ferrol, and Nelson before Toulon saved Europe from Napoleon: "those
far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked,
stood between it and the dominion of the world." Alfred Thayer Mahan
played a notable part in America's coming of age in world politics.
The Venezuela crisis was also the last dangerous conflict between Great
Britain and the United States. From the time McKinley became Presi-
dent, as we shall see, the two nations moved steadily closer in their world
interests and their foreign enterprises. No one in either country, except
local politicians seeking Irish or German votes, ever again tried to disturb
thismovement. Even Richard Olney repented and wrote in 1900 that
America must have England for a friend, since England alone could help
or harm the United States. 4 And Henry Adams, commenting on Olney 's
article, wrote:

My preference has always been for the alliance with France and the
Latin races. Still I admit that we have never succeeded in carrying
. . .

on the French alliance. We drift inevitably back to the British. Eco-

nomical and social interests are too strong. Our administration, whether
Olney or Hay run it, must be British; Bayard or Frelinghuysen or Fish
or Seward it is all the same. Even I who hate England and love every-
5
thing un-English, should have to do the same.

And a few years later, in 1905, Adams gave one of the reasons for this

steady drift:

We
have got to support France against Germany, and fortify an At-
lantic systembeyond attack; for if Germany breaks down England or6
France, she becomes the center of a military world, and we are lost.

The moment when twentieth century Americans could first admit to

themselves that a war in Europe might cause them to be "lost" was the
beginning of the end of irresponsibility in foreign affairs. Yet the old
mood lingered in men like Senator Lodge to plague another generation.
608 The Price of Union

The Congressional elections of 1894 showed that Cleveland's opposition

to silverhad split the party. If the friends of gold controlled the next
convention and wrote the platform and chose the candidate, the South
and the West would join the Populists, and the Democrats might Vither
away as the Whigs had withered in the eighteen-fifties. The fierce hard-
ships of the depression had turned the silver faith into a pure fanaticism.
Men no longer discussed trusts and tariffs and money policy and taxation
as the several parts of a much-needed reform. The battle between silver
and gold had become the one issue for the impoverished farmers. Silver
was a magic cure and gold the symbol of their suffering. A West Virginia
Congressman, after trying to argue with his constituents, said: "I have
never seen the masses of the people so wild over a question they know
little or nothing about. To reason with them is as impossible as to talk

down an angry cyclone." 7 Senator Tillman of South Carolina called

Cleveland "a besotted tyrant," and the Secretary of the Treasury "this
Judas from Kentucky," adding that "millions are on the march" and may
"come to Washington with rifles in their hands to regain the liberties
stolen from them."
In the spring of 1895 Bryan and Dick Bland issued an "Appeal to the
Silver Democrats," charging that the Easterners would reduce the people
to bondage. "We believe that it is the duty of the majority, and within
their power, to take charge of the party organization." At once the advice
was heeded; in every state the friends of silver united to seize the party
machinery. There were forty-four states in 1895, and within a year the
silver Democrats had captured thirty of them. The whole of New England
stood with Cleveland and the gold standard, plus New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, When the National Convention
met at Chicago in July, 1896, the silver delegates controlled the all-impor-
tant credentials committee and resolutions committee; they could write
their own platform and name their own candidate. So if anyone was to
secede itwould be the little group of Eastern "goldbugs." And if there
was to be a fusion with the Populists, the new party would have to merge
itself with the old.
When still had
the delegates reached Chicago the Easterners hopes of a
compromise. Within hours they were disillusioned. The implacable
six
mood of the back-country was revealed when the resolutions committee
reported. The proposed platform attacked with bitterness most of the
policies of the Cleveland Administration. Senator Tillman saluted the
platform and abused the Administration as "undemocratic and tyranni-
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 609

cal." "You ask us to endorse Cleveland's fidelity," he said. "In reply, I

say he has been faithful unto death the death of the Democratic Party!"
New York and Massachusetts answered South Carolina ably, defending
Cleveland and proposing a declaration in favor of gold. Thus far, the
speeches by the new masters of the party had been disappointing. The
agrarians had the votes and the loud indignation; but the East had the
best arguments. Then William Jennings Bryan made his way down the
aisle to close the debate: a tall, strong, young man with a handsome
actor's head and the most beautiful voice in America. Without rant, with

perfect courtesy, with audacity and with moral passion, he said at last
what the bewildered victims of falling prices and rigged markets and ab-
sentee ownership had been longing to hear. "As he confronted the 20,000
yelling, cursing, shouting men before him," wrote Professor Harry Thur-
ston Peck, "they felt at once the indescribable magnetic thrill which beasts
and men alike experience in the presence of a master. Serene and self-
possessed and with a smile upon his lips, he faced the roaring multitude
with a splendid consciousness of power." 8
"I come to speak to you," said Bryan, "in defense of a cause as holy as
the cause of liberty the cause of humanity." He told how he and his
friends had fought in every state and county of the nation to get control
of the Democratic Party. "With a zeal approaching the zeal which in-
spired the Crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit," he said, "our silver
Democrats went forth from victory unto victory until they are now assem-
bled, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already
rendered by the plain people of this country." He turned to the Eastern
delegates:

When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb
your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business
interests by your course.
We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man
too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is
as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town
is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a
great metrop-
olis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as
the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning
and toils all day . and who by the application of brain and muscle
. .

to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a

business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets
upon the price of grain. . . .

We
do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we
are fighting in defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We
have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have en-
treated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged,
610 The Price of Union

and they have mocked when our calamity came. beg We no longer; we
entreat no more; we petition no more. defy them! We

By that time each sentence was punctuated by a crash of applause,

followed by a deathly stillness so that no word would be missed. Bryan
then gave a long defense of the platform, criticizing the Supreme Court
for the income tax decision, and appealing to Andrew Jackson, Thomas
Hart Benton and Jefferson in support of his money theories.

If they ask us why it is that we say more on the money question than
we say the tariff question [he concluded], I reply that, if protec-
upon
tion has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thou-
sands. If they ask us why we do not embody in our platform all the
things that we believe in, we reply that when we have restored the
money of the Constitution, all other necessary reform will be possible;
but that until this is done, there is no other reform that can be ac-
complished. . . .

You come to us and

us that the great cities are in favor of the
tell

gold standard; reply we

that the great cities rest upon our broad and
fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your
cities will spring up again as if by magic ; but destroy our farms and the

grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. . . .

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold stand-
ard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind
us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the
commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere,
we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them:
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,
you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The platform which Bryan thus defended asked for "the free and un-
limited coinage of both gold and silver at the present legal ratio of 16 to
1"; it opposed "the issuance of notes intended to circulate as money by
National banks," since "Congress alone has the power to coin and issue
money"; it promised a tariff for revenue only and a stricter control of
trusts and pools; it denounced "government by injunction," the income
tax decision, the bond issues of the Cleveland Administration, and "the
importation of foreign pauper labor." The convention gave this platform
a large majority, and the following day it nominated the thirty-six-year-
old Bryan for the presidency.
The Eastern press talked as if the Democrats had chosen a man from
Mars, thus showing its ignorance of the rest of the country. For two years
Bryan had been touring the West and South, speaking to excited crowds,
building an organization, planning to seize the leadership of the anti-
Cleveland forces from the aging Dick Bland. His triumph at Chicago was
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 611

neither sudden nor accidental. He was the natural leader for a middle-
class revolt, representing every virtue and
aspiration of the small farmer,
the crossroads merchant, the lawyer or doctor in the little country town.
He had been born in such a town in southern Illinois, of Scotch-Irish and
English stock. He was educated in a rural college, joined the Presbyterian
Church, studied law, married an able young woman who also became a
lawyer in order to help him with his work, and moved West to the fron-
tier. He believed and practiced with utter sincerity the simple, strict

moral code of his time and class and section. He never doubted that morals
and politics were one and the same, and that the judgment of the un-
sophisticated majority would always be right. He had immense vitality, a
moderate store of information, and a friendly though sedate nature.
"Bryan's strength," wrote William Allen White, "was in his deadly seri-
ousness. From the caverns of his inexperience came no cackle of mirth at
his own presumption, such as invariably comes to a man of ripe phi-
9
losophy."
The Populist Party held their convention at St. Louis, endorsing Bryan
and his
money policy and reaffirming their belief in government owner-
ship of the railwaysand telegraph system. The Eastern gold-standard
Democrats repudiated Bryan and his platform, and nominated a candi-
date of their own. And a group of silver Republicans, led by Senator
Teller of Colorado, organized the National Silver Party in support of
Bryan.
The Republican Convention had met at St. Louis, three weeks before
Through the skillful work of Marcus Alonzo
the excitements at Chicago.
Hanna, a rich Ohio businessman who had taken to political management
in order to ensure that the country should be run by its business interests,
William McKinley was nominated for the presidency. Although the name,
McKinley, contained the promise of a high tariff, the Republicans ac-
cepted the currency as a major issue and declared in their platform: "We
are opposed to the free coinage of silver, except by international agree-
ment with the leading commercial nations of the earth and until such
. . .

agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be maintained.

All of our silver and paper currency must be maintained at parity with
gold." The true issue the first clean-cut issue since the Civil War was
symbolized by Mark Hanna and William Jennings Bryan: Should the
government be run by Eastern business or by the agrarians of the West
and South? The answer would depend upon whether Bryan, like Andrew
Jackson before him, could combine the agrarian vote with the vote of
industrial labor.
Bryan had a farmer-labor platform in the true Jacksonian tradition,
and he worked tirelessly to build a farmer-labor alliance. The negative
philosophy of Cleveland was repudiated. The party was pledged to action
xxx. Agrarian versus Capitalist 613

in the cause of social justice. The plutocracy was to be curbed in the

farmer and the factory hand. But somehow Bryan failed to
interest of the
win many labor votes. Perhaps some of the workers were intimidated, for
many businesses gave notice not to return to work on the day after election
in case Bryan won. The experienced Senator Teller was frightened by this
new type of campaign. "Boys," he said, "I am afraid it beats us. If I were
a workingman and had nothing but rny job, I am afraid when I came to
vote I would think of Mollie and the babies." But in most cases labor

appears to have distrusted the agrarians, and to have accepted the Repub-
lican argument that free trade and free silver meant unemployment. Bryan
lost every county in New England. He lost every Northern state east of
the Mississippi, in addition to the agrarian states of Iowa, North Dakota,
and Minnesota, where party loyalty must have outweighed economic in-
terest. He carried the late Confederacy and most of the West, receiving
six and a half million votes to McKinley's seven, 176 electoral votes to

McKinley's 271.

For a hundred years [wrote Henry Adams, who had annoyed his
friends by supporting silver] the American people had hesitated, vacil-
lated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply indus-
trial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.
. . The issue
.

came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared
itself, once and for all, in favor of a capitalistic system with all its

necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens, reformers,
churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force sub-
mission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of
mass. 10

From this decision there could be no quick returning. For many years
tocome the old agrarian order had lost its fight against the centralizing
power of money. Reformers would now turn their hopes toward the social-
service state.
 XXXI

Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition

A HE STRUGGLE between agrarians and capitalists in 1896 was in one sense

a by-product of the Homestead Act of 1862. When the Civil War ended^
hundreds of thousands of young veterans took their families across the
Mississippi, beyond the first tier of states, into the country which became
known as the Great West. As we have seen, if a man settled where there
was enough rainfall, his hundred and sixty acres of free land might pro-
vide a living; but if he pushed west of the ninety-eighth meridian, to the
edge of the Great Plains, ruin was almost certain with the next cycle of
dry years. In either case the first step was to borrow money, for scarcely a
homesteader possessed capital beyond his courage and his character and
the skill of his hands.
They mortgaged their farms as soon as they acquired them, in order
all

to fence the land and plant it and stock it with animals. State after state
was built on borrowed money. The Great West was the least self-sufficient
rural community in the world. Just as the one-crop system that dark
legacy of slavery pinned the Southern farmer to world markets and
falling world prices, so did mortgages pin the homesteader of the trans-
Mississippi to his ever-appreciating dollar payments. Greenbackers and
silver men, Grangers and Farmers' Alliances, Populists and Bryan Demo-
crats, they all stemmed from the rising price of cash, from which they
thought a friendly government could save them. We have seen their three
main demands, none of which had been met by 1896: more democracy
(such as the secret ballot, the initiative, and the referendum) more state
;

control (such as regulation of freight and elevator rates, or outright public

ownership) and more money (paper, silver, anything to lower the cost of
;

a dollar in terms of wheat or cotton) .

When the pitiful revolt failed, some timorous Easterners predicted vio-
lence, repudiation, even threats of secession. But America was spared such
trouble partly by good luck and partly by the leadership of two capable
politicians. The good luck was the discovery of large new gold deposits
in Alaska, South Africa, Colorado. Within a few years the demand for

cheaper money had been met. When the McKinley Administration passed
the Gold Standard Act of 1900 (which remained in force until 1933),
there was no outcry, for there was no grievance. During the presidential
614
xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 615

campaign of 1900 Bryan remained faithful to silver; but the public was
apathetic.
Yet the demands for more democracy and for more control over business
were strong in 1900, and still unmet. Indeed, when they were no
still

longer associated with the demands for cheap money, they won a broader
backing than in 1896. They required respectful treatment, although the
country was clearly not ready for new theories when McKinley first be-
came President, or even when he was re-elected. A few more years of
argument and pain were needed before the majority could shift from the
old concern for production and private freedom to the new concern for
distribution and social justice, for saving national resources and spreading
economic democracy. The last days of the old order and the transition to
the new might have been a time of discord, in fact the transition might
have been thwarted and the country might have taken the road toward
dull plutocracy, if Mark Hanna and William McKinley had not lifted

politics to a high level of competence.

The most famous cartoon of Hanna shows him in a suit covered with
dollar marks. This was true but unfair, like most good cartoons. Hanna
did, of course, confirm the alliance between business and politics. And he
did use a great deal of money, when necessary, to get his way.

His scheme was simplicity incarnate [wrote William Allen White]:

high tariffs keep foreign goods made by cheap labor out of American
markets. Politics controls Congress and Congress makes high tariffs.
. .Those who benefit by high tariffs should contribute the money
.

which influences elections and controls politics. ... So Hanna's idea

was not particularly Utopian. He was not tinkering at the abolition of
poverty, for instance. His was simply a device to provide for more work,
more sweat, more business, more dividends. 1

The last sentence is Hanna, and explains why he was not

the clue to
just another rich man buying his way
to power. As Herbert Croly pointed
out, "Mr. Hanna did embody the most vital social and economic tradition
in American history the tradition, that is, of the pioneer." The statement
was not meant as a paradox. "The keen, hardy frontiersman" who began
the pioneer tradition and "the affluent Cleveland^ merchant" who may be
said to have ended it had a similar view of the relation between politics
and business. The chief task of the pioneers was to take and develop the
land and resources of the continent. "From the beginning," wrote Herbert
Croly, "they recognized and acted on the theory that the individual and
social profits were indistinguishable. They conceived it to be the business
of their government, as the agent of social betterment, to assist them in
attaining their personal ends." After the Civil War, "Washington became
the headquarters from which was directed a comprehensive scheme of
616 The Price of Union

state-aided business." As we have seen, the farmers got their homesteads

and the manufacturers their high tariff; the prospectors and the lumber
kings and the railways got their free mines, timber, and land grants; cor-
porate property got its Supreme Court decisions plus its lax terms of
incorporation. "In return for all these privileges the various special inter-
ests were required only to make use of them. Public and private in-
. . .

terests were still conceived to be substantially identical, and the national

economic interest a comprehensive collection of special interests*." The
election returns of 1896 suggest that even after a cruel depression this was
the majority view.
The pioneer system contained its own doom, however.

Even endowed as the United States [wrote

in a country as richly
Croly], natural resources had a
limit. As soon as the process of their

appropriation had reached a certain stage and had given their proprie-
tors a certain advantage over their future competitors, the machinery
began to creak. Under such conditions the state encouragement of pri-
vate enterprise assumed a different appearance and began to look less
like a system of social and more like a system of individual benefits.
. . The balance of the whole system was upset as soon as natural
.

resources became even a little scarce and as soon as the corresponding

artificial opportunities, created by state law, became even comparativelv
2
inaccessible.

That day had arrived when Mark Hanna put McKinley into the White
House; but most of the country was not yet aware of it, not ready for a
wholly new relation between politics and business.
Herbert Croly's analysis, in fact, explains the trouble America still en-
counters in sloughing off the old pattern. Even after Bryan and Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had finished their work, the country half-
returned under Harding to a debased form of the system which, "danger-
ous as it is for both business and politics, lies deep ... in the American
democratic tradition." The nation was lucky that when the system first
began to break down, and before there was time to devise something bet-
ter, the "scheme of state-aided business" was in the hands of men who
believed in it unselfishly^ who did not see it merely as an excuse to make
their friends rich. Hanna and McKinley, of course, served the system un-

critically. Their views would soon have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned;

but they were the right men to preside over the transition. Without them
the "progressive era" might have been strangled in its cradle, to the pleas-
ure of the socialists and of the belated pioneers, the Left and the extreme
Right.
The proof that Hanna was sincere in thinking the old system could be
made to help everybody was his treatment of labor. Here he was so far
xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 617

ahead of his time and of his friends that his record is often ignored as
if itwere impossible. It was not ignored by labor in 1896, which is one of
the reasons McKinley was elected. Twenty years before this campaign
Hanna had a strike in one of his coal mines. The use of strikebreakers led
to violence, to the calling of the militia, and to the killing of at least one
striker. Hanna never forgot the bitter lesson. It taught him the need for

arbitration, for labor unions, and for a personal relation between employ-
ers and workers which would make such hatred impossible. He never had
another strike; but all his life, in speeches and articles, he referred to this
early failure and to his chagrin at having allowed what should have been
a negotiation to become a fight. The secretary of the Miners' National
Association in the year of that strike testified that Hanna "was the first
mining operator in the bituminous fields of the United States to recognize
the cardinal principle of arbitration in the settlement of wages disputes,
3
and the first to recognize the Miners' National Association." Incidentally,
the rioting miners were defended by young William McKinley in the face
of bitter community prejudice. Only one man out of twenty-four was con-
victed, and he was sent to jail for three years. Long afterward Hanna said
this was when he first saw McKinley's ability and courage.
Hanna has been accused of favoring labor unions because he found he
could get what he wanted from a few leaders more easily than from the
mass of workmen. Herbert Croly admits this may have been true, but adds
that it was irrelevant.

Economic radicals [he writes], who believe in the inevitability and

righteousness of class warfare, like to read into the mind of every repre-
sentative of wealth a "class consciousness" similar to their own, and
they insist upon interpreting every action of such a man as the result of
a more or less conscious purpose of exploitation. But "class conscious-
ness" of any kind was precisely the kind of consciousness which an
American like Mark Hanna did not have. There welled up in him a
spring of the old instinctive homogeneity of feeling characteristic of the
pioneer American. . .

He had always been sincere in his belief that business expansion and
prosperity would be of as much benefit to the wage-earners as to the
capitalists. But he was obliged to recognize that the former were not
satisfied with the share of the product which they received under com-

petitive conditions; and he came to realize that they were right in not
4
being satisfied.

It was this feeling about labor that led Hanna to make a scene in the
Cleveland Union Club at the time of the Pullman strike, cursing George
Pullman for refusing to arbitrate. Someone suggested that Pullman de-
served credit for his "model town." "Oh hell!" said Hanna; "Model !

Go and live in Pullman and find out how much Pullman gets selling city
618 The Price of Union

water and gas ten per cent higher to those poor fools!" Hanna never
deviated from his contempt for anyone "who won't meet his men half-
way." He was convinced of "the essential harmony between the interests
of business and that of the whole community." He feared that men like
George Pullman, denying or perverting that harmony, would end by dis-
crediting the entire system of production which for Hanna was the rock
on which the United States was built.
McKinley shared Hanna' s views on business and labor, and Hanna's
tolerance; but he had a subtler knowledge of the prejudices and interests
which moved the people in all regions and classes. He had held elective
office for thirty years and was perhaps the most experienced and careful
politician ever to live in the White House. He thought so steadily in terms
of politics, writes William Allen White, that

he lost his private life and

his private view. He played politics
. . .

with Congress. . . . He
played politics with the people always defer-
ring to them when he could not persuade them, using them with craft
rather than with force. He played politics with his Cabinet.
5
. . ,

After two terms of Cleveland and one of Benjamin Harrison, it was

well for the country to have a Presidentwho could get his way with
politicians. "One is
compelled go to back almost a
century President
to

Jefferson," writes Professor Binkley, "to find the prototype of President

6
McKinley as the gentle but undoubted leader of Congress. ." . .

Lincoln had held the rank and file of his party while losing the
in the end,
politicians. Cleveland's obstinate independence alienated,
both those elements in the Democratic Party. It was McKinley's unique
achievement to have captivated both. "We who know him regard
. . .

him as a man of extraordinary ability, integrity and force of character,"

wrote his intimate friend, John Hay, who had been Lincoln's private
secretary. And two weeks before McKinley's first election Hay added:
"There are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him." 7

The "idiots" must soon have been disabused. McKinley was too im-
personal for anyone to run him, whereas Hanna was sentimental and hot-
blooded.

He wore on his bones the clay of the inexplicable old Adam rich in
weakness and strength, graces and foibles. 8

Hanna loved McKinley and McKinley loved politics. And both served
the loved one well.
xxxi. Hanna9 McKinley> and the Transition 619

William McKinley was born in Ohio that prolific mother of Presidents

in 1843. He was the son of an iron manufacturer of Scotch-Irish de-
scent. Eighteen years old when the Civil War began, he enlisted as a

private in a local regiment. He ended the war as a brevet major the last
of the Union veterans to become President of the United States. After
leaving the army he studied law in the East, then returned to his native
state to practice, and to enter politics. In 1871 he married; but his wife
soon became an invalid and played no part in his impersonal public life.
He was sent to the House of Representatives at Washington in 1876,
where he rose to be chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Com-
mittee, Republican leader of the lower House, the sponsor of high tariffs,
and a half-hearted bimetallist half-hearted because his constituents lived
:

halfway between Grover Cleveland's New York and Bryan's Nebraska. At

the convention which first named McKinley for the presidency Hanna
amused himself by arranging for the Eastern delegates to "force" a gold
standard plank upon him. He knew there must be such a plank, and he
favored it; but he hoped to please the Easterners by letting them think
they had coerced him and to please the Westerners by letting them think
the McKinley-Hanna partnership might not be too immovably for gold.
Later, he remarked that "the whole affair was managed in order to suc-
3'
ceed in getting what we got.
Hanna and McKinley would have preferred to treat the money ques-
tion gently, and to concentrate on the tariff and "the full dinner pail";
but this was made impossible by events at the Democratic Convention.
The result of the Democratic platform and the Bryan nomination was "to
set up against a rich man's cure for the business depression a poor man's

cure, and thereby to convert a controversy over a technical economic

9
question into a sectional and class conflict." McKinley (and Hanna,
who was made chairman of the Republican National Committee) had to
accept the challenge; but they did their best to underline the sectional
demand for cheap money and to deny the class interest. If
interest in the

Bryan could turn the campaign into a contest between the poor and the
rich, the poor would win. So the Republicans under Hanna's and McKin-
ley's guidance sought to turn it into a conflict between the national inter-
est (represented by wage-earners and employers and farmers throughout
most of the country) and the local interest of the old Confederacy plus
the new homestead states.
This was sensible, and successful; yet it seems meager beside the exalta-
620 The Price of Union

tion of the Bryan Democrats, which we can recapture in Vachel Lindsay's

lament over the defeat:

There were real lines drawn

Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska's cry went eastward, against the dour and old,
The mean and cold

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,

Election night at midnight:

Boy Bryan's defeat.
Defeat of western silver.

Defeat of the wheat.

Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.

Defeat of the young by the old and the silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
The man without an angle or a tangle,
Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;

Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,

That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld, the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest. 10

There was a lot of nonsense talked and written during 1896 the worst
of it by some of the most respectable newspapers, and by men like Theo-

dore Roosevelt who should have known better.* But Hanna had no part
* "Messrs. and the rest," said Roosevelt in
Bryan, Altgeld, Tillman, Debs . . .

a campaign speech, "have not the power to rival the deeds of Marat, Barrere,
and Robespierre, but they are strikingly like the leaders of the Terror of France
in mental and moral attitude." And after McKinley's victory, the New York
Tribune wrote that Bryan "was only a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Alt-
geld, the anarchist, and Debs, the revolutionist, and the other desperadoes of that
xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 621

in the nonsense and no sympathy for his frightened friends who chattered
of "revolution." "You're just a lot of damn fools/' he told the shivering
members of the Cleveland Union Club. The speakers who covered the
country for the Republican National Committee were asked to talk sense
and to assume that the public was capable of thinking. The campaign
literature from headquarters was as reasonable as most literature dealing
with the emotional subject of money. Perhaps a number of voters were
convinced. Certainly the good harvest hurt Bryan, whose campaign de-
pended largely upon discontent. Hanna believed that if the election had
been in August or September the Democrats would have won. He be-
lieved that if his "damn fool" friends had made the campaign an orgy of
class hatred, the Democrats would have won. He and McKinley thought

they had saved the day by keeping calm, by arguing as if the people had
brains, and by insisting that the Republican Party stood for no class or
region, but for America. Since they believed that startling statement, they
probably convinced a number of voters. And at least they were not handi-
capped by lack of cash. The National Committee raised about $3,500,000
three million from New York and the rest from Chicago. The Repub-
licans may have been working devotedly for the nation; but one group
took a special pride in their efforts.

Mark Hanna refused a Cabinet appointment. He wanted to be a Senator,

so a place was made for him by naming the aged John Sherman as Secre-
tary of State. This provoked an outburst from Henry Adams. "John Sher-
man," he wrote, "otherwise admirably fitted for the place, was notoriously
feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal
of an old friend as well as of the state department. .
John Sherman
. .

must inevitably and tragically break down. The prospect for once was not
11
less vile than the men." Sherman was indeed ill fitted for the direction
of foreign affairs while the country was drifting toward war. He soon
resigned. In fact most of McKinley's first Cabinet gave way, under the
pressure of events, to abler men. By the time John Hay had become Sec-
retary of State, Elihu Root Secretary of War, and Philander Knox Attor-
ney General, the Administration could feel proud.
The new Congress passed the high tariff which businessmen expected,
type. . . . He
goes down with the cause and must abide with it in the history of
infamy." The
reason ex-Governor Altgeld of Illinois was so hated by the Republi-
cans, and so loved by Vachel Lindsay, was that he had pardoned three men, victims
of the "malicious ferocity" of a Chicago judge, and that he had protested against
Grover Cleveland's use of federal troops during the Pullman strike. It was easy to
become an "anarchist" in those days.
622 The Price of Union

and established the gold standard as soon as the recently discovered

mines had eased the pressure for cheap money. But aside from these
promised laws, the President and the Congress alike intended to let the
country alone, to let business create prosperity and prosperity create the
proper gratitude toward the Republican Party. McKinley, who repre-
sented a vanishing world in so many respects, was the last of the great
leaders who truly thought that the Grand Old Party and the United
States were one and the same, and that whatever helped either of those in-
stitutions must equally help the other. Since he also identified the party
with business enterprise he had no objection to the renewed vigor with
which the Morgan interests turned to the building of trusts. He agreed
with his friend Mark Hanna that labor should organize and demand a
fair share of the profits; but he was confident that the larger the profits
the better for everyone, since there would thus be more money to seep
down from the top and fill the nation's dinner pails. If he had been asked
how the farmer could profit from the granting of favors to the new giant
industries McKinley would have answered that high tariffs added more
to the riches of the country by stimulating production than they took from
consumers in terms of prices. Yet his enigmatic last speech, which he did
not live to explain, shows that he had begun to wonder whether trade,
instead of production, might not soon need government help. "The period
of exclusiveness is past/' he said. "The expansion of our trade and cfcun-
merce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. . . .

Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times. ... If
perchance some of our tariffs are no longer needed for revenue or to
encourage and protect our industries at home, why should they not be
employed to extend and promote our markets abroad?" This was strange
doctrine from the high priest of protection.

On one important policy the Administration, which otherwise moved so

smoothly, met sharp resistance. In spite of the appalling chaos in Cuba
McKinley wanted peace with Spain, and so did Mark Hanna, and so did
many responsible leaders throughout the country; but a noisy public
wanted war. It consisted mostly of people who had not yet calmed down
from the excitements of Cleveland's quarrel with England. Whipped on
by the new cheap press they wanted to fight somebody, and they wanted
America to start expanding again. And too many politicians aped the
language of the Hearst and the Pulitzer newspapers. Senator Cullom of
Illinois announced: "It is time someone woke up and realized the neces-

sity of annexing some property. We want all this northern hemisphere.'*

xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 623

And Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was ready to back any baleful foreign
policy. "From the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean," he wrote, "there
should be but one flag and one country." These people did not care which
nation was nominated for the enemy, so long as America fought some-
body and stole some land. At the time of the Venezuela crisis Theodore
Roosevelt wrote to Lodge: "The clamor of the peace faction has con-
vinced me that this country needs a war." And later, when he had become
Assistant Secretary of the Navy in McKinley's Cabinet, Roosevelt called
the President a "white-livered cur" for thinking twice before attacking the
Spaniards.
With such a public clamor to depend upon, the friends of violence
could always find "incidents" and prolong the uproar.* It was hard for a
gentle and politically sensitive President like McKinley to hold back. He
sought to ease his conscience by handing the decision to Congress, and in
April, 1898, Congress chose war. Ex- President Cleveland wrote gloomily:

With all allowances I can make ... I cannot avoid a feeling of

shame and humiliation. . . .
My only relief from the sick feeling which
these thoughts induce consists ... in the hope, almost amounting to
expectation, that we shall find Spain so weak and inefficient that the
war will be short and that the result may not be much worse than a
depreciation of national standing before the world abroad, and, at
home, a demoralization of our people's character, much demagogy and
humbug, great additions to our public burdens and the exposure of
scandalous operations.

With exception of the "great additions to our public burdens," every

troubled word came true.
The Cuban uprising against Spanish rule had begun in 1895. The war
was fought cruelly on both sides and the civil population suffered almost
as much as the military. American lives were endangered, and American
capital. More than
fifty million dollars were invested in Cuba, and the
annual trade between the island and the United States was more than a
hundred millions. It was proper that the Americans should wish the war
* The most
gory incident was the explosion of the United States battleship
Maine in Havana Harbor, in February, 1898. Two hundred and sixty lives were
lost. The Spaniards argued that the tragedy was caused by an internal explosion,
and the Americans that the explosions within the ship were started by an external
explosion, presumably by a mine. The mystery has never been solved; but it was
no mystery to Mr. William Randolph Hearst, or to Joseph Pulitzer. As Godkin
of the Nation complained, referring to Hearst, "a blackguard boy with several mil-
lion dollars at his disposal has more influence on the use a great nation may make
of its credit, of its army and navy, of its name and traditions, than all the states-
men and philosophers and professors in the country." Pulitzer later confessed that
he "had rather liked the idea of a war not a big one but one that would arouse
interest." Yet according to his biographer the war was a disappointment. "Dealers
failed to cut their orders between battles and the paper was swamped with returns.
Mr. Pulitzer lost interest in war and turned to urging an earlier peace."
624 The Price of Union

and it was natural that their

to cease, sympathies should be with the
Cuban rebels. But there was nothing in the situation that need lead to a
Spanish-American war. The demands made by McKinley upon Spain
were reasonable, and were receiving reasonable treatment. The President
asked that the rebels should be granted an armistice, that the hideous
concentration camps for Cuban civilians should be broken up, and that
Spain should accept American mediation to settle the quarrel.
Spain was slow in giving way; but McKinley kept up a steady and
polite pressure, in April, 1898, the government at Madrid capitulated.
and
The American Minister cabled McKinley that if he would continue to
treat Spain with courtesy he could obtain Cuban autonomy, or independ-
ence, or even annexation to the United States. Two days later McKinley
sent his message to Congress. He did not advocate war; but he wrote nine
pages of angry comment on Spain's behavior, and said "I have exhausted
every effort to relieve the intolerable condition of affairs which is at our
doors." At the end of the message, as if adding an unimportant footnote,
he remarked that Spain had lately yielded on every point. "This fact," he
wrote, "with every other pertinent consideration, will, I am sure, have
your just and careful attention in the solemn deliberations upon which
you are about to enter." Congress, which was feeling neither solemn nor
deliberate, at once chose war. McKinley had in fact given in to public
and losing the autumn elections.
pressure, for fear of disrupting his party
The pressure was very great. Congress might have insisted upon war no
matter what the President said. But McKinley would stand higher in his-
tory if he had refrained from the Pontius Pilate gesture of refusing re-
sponsibility.
Spain proved weak and inefficient, as Cleveland hoped. And there was
much "demagogy and*humbug . . and the exposure of scandalous op-
.

erations," as Cleveland feared. The War Department and the organization

of the army proved incompetent beyond anything which even Cleveland
could put into words; but the navy was less shocking, partly because if a
ship can put to sea at all it must be more adequate than a regiment sans
arms or equipment, and partly because of the foresight and energy of
Theodore Roosevelt. As Assistant Secretary he had prepared to attack
Spain in the Far East as well as the Caribbean, with the result that Mc-
Kinley soon faced another unpleasant decision Should the United States
:

annex the Philippines with their eight million inhabitants? He toured the
Middle West to see what the Republican voters felt, and they seemed to
feel that expansion was part of America's destiny. Then he examined his
own conscience, which on the whole agreed with the voters.

Late one night [he wrote] it came to me this way . . .

(
1 ) That we
could not give them [the Philippines] back to Spain that would be
xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 625

cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to
France or Germany our commercial rivals in the Orient that would
be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to
themselves they were unfit for self-government and they would have
anarchy and misrule worse than Spain's war; (4) that there was noth-
ing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate and uplift and
civilize and christianize them.

After this very practical communication from his better nature Mc-
Kinley telegraphed the commissioners of peace at Paris to hold the islands.
Spain was given twenty million dollars in compensation.
The Filipinos, however, had received a different guidance from that of
McKinley. They did not agree that "there was nothing left to do but take
them all." Several years of hard fighting far more savage than the ten
weeks' war against Spain had still to be spent in persuading them.
Meanwhile the Hawaiian Islands were annexed, partly because they
would be needed to defend the Philippines. Puerto Rico was also taken
in the peace treaty with Spain. And Cuba, which had been promised

political freedom, was given it conditionally after two years, and com-
pletely in 1934. Economically, however, she became the colony of a few
New York banks, who soon had investments in the island of more than
$1,500,000,000.
Thus the Americans who wanted to annex some property were satis-
fied. And were the people who merely wanted to fight. "It has been a
so

splendid little war," wrote John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt.

This was not the view of the whole country. In 1900, when news of
the fierce battling against the Filipinos reached the United States, a pro-
test against imperialism grew strong. Republicans like Senator Hoar and
Senator Edmunds joined with Democrats like Grover Cleveland and
Bryan. The attack was moral, economic, strategic, and constitutional. On
allthese grounds the anti-imperialists argued that the annexation of the
Philippines would prove an evil deed the constitutional case being that
there was no authority in the sacred text for taking and governing alien
peoples without their consent. The Supreme Court found ways of reject-
ing this argument, but not until after the elections had shown that the
anti-imperialists were a minority.

Bryan, who was renominated by the Democrats without opposition, made

imperialism the main issue in his campaign of 1900. The Republicans an-
swered with a slogan: "Don't haul down the flag." And they pointed with
pride, not only to the war and its stirring results, but to the many signs of
626 The Price of Union

America's new place in the world. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,
United States troops had been sent to the relief of the legations at Peking.
In the previous year Secretary of State Hay, with the support of the
British Foreign Office, had urged the "Open Door" policy in China upon
the Great Powers. Hay accepted the "spheres of influence" which had
lately been established; but he asked that there be no discrimination in
the treatment of trade. In the midst of the Boxer trouble he went further,
announcing that "the policy of the Government of the United States is
to seek a solution which may bring about permanent safety and peace to

China, preserve China's territorial and administrative entity, protect all

rights granted to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and
safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with
all parts of the Chinese Empire." The Powers reluctantly
gave verbal
assent; but neither Russia nor Japan paid any practical heed, and within
fifteen years the policy was abandoned. Yet it had a lasting effect upon
world because in return for John Hay's support of the Open Door
affairs,
in the East, Great Britain gave America a free hand in the Western
Hemisphere, and especially in the Caribbean.
At once the United States set about establishing the largest "sphere of
influence" ever attempted though reserving the right to criticize all
spheres of influence as immoral. And England, which had long been the
only great power with major interests in every continent, accepted^
markedly secondary position in the American Hemisphere. The world
had expected, and some of the world had hoped, that America's coming-
of-age would be accompanied by an Anglo-American war. Instead, the
years from McKinley's first inauguration until 1903 saw a series of peace-
ful accommodations between the two countries.

The withdrawal of the British Caribbean squadron to waters nearer

home [writes Professor William T. R. Fox], the dismantling of fortifica-
tions in theCaribbean and in Canada, the renegotiation of the Isth-
mian Canal question to permit the United States to build and operate
the Panama Canal alone, and finally the sacrifice of the Canadian
claim in the Alaskan boundary dispute, all were evidences of British
retreat. Henceforth, the way was open for Anglo-American collabora-
tion, especially since the United States did not challenge British
12
interests in Europe or other parts of the world.

Few people, of course, were aware in 1900 that this history-making

change was afoot, although the German Foreign Office sadly suspected it.
But the majority of Americans knew they were enthusiastic about the
policy their country was pursuing. There was more to this enthusiasm
than can be explained by the expanding economic interests of the nation.
For better or worse, after years of tranquillity and self-absorption, the
xxxi. Hanna, McKinley, and the Transition 627

Americans were waking to a deep on the world-stage.

desire to play a part
This desire was a help to the Republicans and a handicap to Bryan in
the campaign of 1900.
The real Republican argument in 1900, however, was McKinley. He
had never before been so popular. The war which he did not want had
been a delightful and easy success. The people were dazzled with victory
and with prosperity. The harmony between the President and the Con-
gress was complete. The only problem facing the Republican Convention
was how to replace the Vice-President, who had died. Theodore Roose-
velt, who had returned from the war a hero and become governor of New
York State, was disliked by Boss Platt, for reasons which we shall see.
Platt conspired with his fellow boss Quay of Pennsylvania to force
Roosevelt upon the convention as Vice-President, although neither
McKinley nor Hanna wanted him. Hanna might have induced McKinley
to intervene; but he made the mistake of thinking that Roosevelt was

merely a blusterer, and not the voice of a new spirit which would undo
the world of Mark Hanna.*
The two deluded bosses, Platt and Quay, had a few months of peace,
enjoying the discomfiture of Hanna and thinking they had buried
Theodore Roosevelt in the vice-presidency and need nevermore be
troubled by his brash commotion. Then McKinley was murdered, and
the new generation came to power. The men of the Civil War were gone
forever: the Union generals, the Vindictives, the Stalwarts and Half-
breeds, the robber barons and the first trust-builders. On the whole they
were a graceless lot. Yet among the many gaudy knaves were also many
patriots and unsung pioneers. The last of their leaders were the wisest and
the best. Their naive but not always harmful view of how a nation should
dispose of its natural resources was made to seem almost sensible by
McKinley and Mark Hanna.
* In 1899 Hanna had blocked Matt Quay's admission to the
Senate, so Quay
helped in forcing Roosevelt on the convention to annoy Hanna. When the deed
was done Hanna remarked, "Don't any of you realize that there's only one life
between this madman and the White House?" (Gp. Henry Pringle, Theodore
Roosevelt, pp. 221-23.)
 XXXII

(
I Did Greatly Broaden the
Executive Power"

JLJuRiNG THE YEARS from Grant to McKinley, Republican Presidents

had on the whole refrained from open and avowed policy-making. The
one Democratic President had fought a dogged drawn battle against
Congress. And it was the exception for either party to have control both
of the presidency and of the two houses of Congress. Under the circum-
stances the Speaker of the House of Representatives became an officer of
great importance indeed, during much of this time, the Speaker supplied
;

what little leadership existed in the federal government. The result might

have been a constitutional revolution. If there had not come a return

toward Executive leadership during the "progressive era" from Theodore
Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, the Speaker might have become an un-
official and inefficient prime minister inefficient because he could not act
as the political head of the government, using every party device to
impose his will, and at the same time maintain even the small shadow of
impartiality which is required of the Speaker under the American system.
Yet in keeping with the Hamiltonian thesis that by one means or another,
no matter what the Constitution provides, the public business must and
will go forward, the absence of leadership elsewhere compelled the
Speaker to assume wide powers.
These were the years which Lord Bryce had in mind when he wrote
that "it is no exaggeration to call him [the Speaker] the second, if not
the first political figure in the United States, with an influence upon the
fortunes of men and the course of domestic events superior, in ordinary
times, to the President's, although shorter in its duration and less patent to
the world." 1 The promotion of the Speaker to such power was the work
of one remarkable man.
Until Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed ("Czar Reed") undertook in
1889 to enforce order and authority, the situation in the lower House
was distressing. On the theory that Congress had the sole responsibility
for lawmaking, recommendations from any quarter were received without
discrimination. A
measure proposed by the President and his Cabinet was
628
 Cf 9
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power' 629

treated on a par with a measure proposed by a citizens' study-group in a

Nebraska village: each was sent to the appropriate committee, and in
each case the committee had the power to report in favor or disfavor, or
not to report at all. Party membership on a committee was in proportion
to party membership in the whole House. "Although the system was

originally introduced with the idea that it would give the House of Rep-
resentatives control over legislative business, the actual result has been
to reduce this body to an impotence unparalleled among national rep-
resentative assemblies in countries having constitutional government."* 2
The reason for the impotence was described by a Congressman from
Delaware in 1884.

The committees were formed [he wrote] they met in their respective
;

committee rooms day after day, week after week, working up the busi-
ness which was committed to them by this House, and they reported to
this House 8290 bills. They came from the respective committees, and

they were consigned to the calendars of this House, which became for
them the tomb of the Capulets; most of them were never heard of
afterward. From the Senate there were 2700 bills. *"*

Under such conditions (when it would have taken more than sixty-six
years to go through the calendars of one session if each member debated
each bill for a minute) the House had to give to some group the right to
decide which bills must die unheard. Inevitably, the Committee on
Appropriations received this power, since the appropriations had to pass
whatever else failed. A
motion to go into Committee of the Whole to
consider appropriation bills was thus always in order, and took preced-
ence over other similar motions. "For the last three Congresses," Thomas
Reed complained in 1885, "the 'representatives of the people of the United
States have been in irons. They have been allowed to transact no public
business except at the dictation and by the permission of a small coterie
of gentlemen. ..."
And on another occasion Reed declared that the
House was trying "to run Niagara through a quill."
From 1882 onwards Reed fought for a reform of the rules. For six
years nothing was accomplished except the scattering of the power of the
Committee on Appropriations among eight committees. This made the
confusion considerably worse. Protesting against the change a Kansas
Representative said "You do not propose to remedy any of those things
:

* From The Cleveland Era by H. J. Ford, vol. 4, THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,

copyright Yale University Press.
** In the British Parliamentary session of 1885, 202 public bills were brought in
and 279 private bills. One hundred and forty-four of the public bills passed the
House of Commons, and 203 of the private bills. Fortunately, less than one thirtieth
of the bills introduced in the American Congress in those years survived.
630 The Price of Union

of which you complain by any of the rules you have brought forward.
You propose to clothe eight committees with the same power, with the
same temptation and capacity to abuse it. You multiply eightfold the
very evils of which you complain." The comment is so obvious and so
true that it forces consideration of a further question: Why did the
Congress prefer to remain "in irons"? Why, for example, was there no
discussion of one easy way in which the House could regain freedom of
action "namely, by having the Administration submit its budget de-
mands and its legislative proposals directly to the committee of the whole
House. .
Congress would thus save the months of time that are now
. .

consumed in committee incubation and would almost certainly be assured

of opportunity of considering the public business. Discrimination in
legislative privilege among members of the House would then be abol-
ished, for every member would belong to the committee on appropria-
tions."* 3 This very suggestion was put forward in the Senate Report of
February 4, 1881, as a cure for the paralysis of Congress.
There are two reasons why the House gave no heed. In the first place,
the change would strengthen the President by requiring that his sug-
gestions be debated responsibly and in the open. In the second place, it
would make for a speed and efficiency in legislation which were contrary
to the whole American plan. The Constitution had decreed a division
of powers in order that the government should be weak, not strong.
During the long debates on the new rules proposed by Tom Reed, a Rep-
resentative from Pennsylvania said it was a good thing that the rules did
hamper action, and "that the country which is least governed is the
best governed." And Reed
himself pointed out that "all the rules of the
House were bent for the obstruction of action on the part of Congress."
Thus, since the House would not reform itself, and since all of the public
business could not be neglected all of the time, there only remained one
recourse: a strong Speaker must impose new rules by the power of his
will. This was done after the newly elected Republican House had met
on December 2, 1889, and had chosen Tom Reed for Speaker.

"Reed too clever, too strong-willed, and too cynical, for a bankers'
is

party," wrote Henry Adams in 1896 when Reed sought the presidential
nomination. The description was apt. Reed had for years been the
dominant Republican in the House; but not even to win the presidency

* From The Cleveland Era THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA,

by H. J. Ford, vol. 4,
copyright Yale University Press.
 Cf
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . , . Executive Power" 631

could he conceal his low opinion of most men. Pope's comment on Sir
Robert Walpole was applicable to Reed:
Would he oblige me? let me only find

He does not think me what he thinks mankind.

Yet he mastered the House of Representatives as it was never mastered
before. A scholar, a mordant wit, a brave, unbending character, he made
his way by strength and not by diplomacy. He was six feet three, and

weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. He had a smooth
round face that suggested good nature until he opened his mouth for one
of the brief, drawling, sardonic speeches that made him feared and fol-
lowed. In 1876, at the age of thirty-seven, he was sent to the lower House
to represent his native district of Portland, Maine. Within six years he
had become his party's leader in the House, retaining the position until
he resigned from politics. In 1889, when he won the speakership, the
Republicans has just captured the presidency and both houses of Con-
gress. Harrison made no effort to impose his will, but gladly accepted the
Whig doctrine of Congressional sovereignty. So if the party was not to
be disgraced the House of Representatives must be disciplined.
A quorum in the House was a majority of the whole membership. Ac-
cording to precedent if a member did not answer his name on the roll
call he could not be counted present. Since the Republicans in 1889 had

only three votes more than the necessary quorum, the Democrats could
often stop all action merely by remaining quiet. Reed put an end to this
by directing the clerk to record the necessary number of Democrats as
present even though they did not answer. For three days the House was
in an uproar; but Reed stood firm. He pointed out that the Constitution
authorized Congress to take steps to compel the attendance of members.
"Inasmuch as the Constitution only provides for their attendance," he
said, "that attendance is enough. If more was needed the Constitution
would have provided more."
This was an attack on the dearest possession of the House its facilities :

for obstruction. Yet Reed held fast and won his way. He also imposed
another fateful rule, that "no dilatory motion shall be entertained by the
Speaker." The preceding Congress had been blocked and bedeviled by
such motions. And a few years later, when a Democratic majority re-
pealed his rules, Reed made such use of the "silent quorums" that for
weeks the House could do no business. Then the Democrats reimposed
the "Czar's" system which they had abused so bitterly.
Under the new rules the Congress which assembled in 1889 had no
trouble in passing laws. In fact, it soon legislated its own majority party
out of power. This was the famous "billion dollar Congress" which (with
the help of Corporal Tanner) quickly disposed of the Treasury surplus.
632 The Price of Union

This was the Congress which passed the inscrutable Sherman Anti-Trust
Act. And this was the Congress which, in order to get Northwestern
votes for the McKinley Tariff, promised Eastern votes for the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act: thus ensuring that most Republicans should vote
for at least one important law which they believed would injure the
country. There was something to be said, apparently, for legislatures
which could not legislate.
Reed remained Speaker until the end of the century, supporting McKin-
ley (his successful rival for the presidency) until the Spanish- American
War. He opposed that war, and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands,
on the ground that the governing of subject peoples was alien to Amer-
ican character. "Tom Reed is playing the devil," wrote Henry Adams
in February, 1899. "In the next Congress, if he is Speaker, the Adminis-
4
tration will be at his mercy." But the next Congress had to do without
Tom Reed. After twenty-three years in the House he resigned in disgust
and turned to the practice of law in New York City.* He was soon suc-
ceeded by "Uncle Joe" Cannon, a Speaker in the Reed tradition, who
controlled the House with firm autocracy, but who could work (at least
for the first years) with Theodore Roosevelt a task which the sardonic
Reed would have found difficult. Reed and Roosevelt were friends; but
they were too strong-willed for team-mates. And Roosevelt was worried
by people who made fun of the verities. "Theodore," said Reed, "if these
is one thing for which I admire you, it is your original discovery of the

ten commandments."

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York in 1858. His father was
descended from one of the early Dutch settlers in what was then New
Amsterdam; his mother was a Georgian with Scotch-Irish and Huguenot
blood. He was a sickly child; but he set his mind on growing strong and
by the time he went to Harvard College he had repaired most of his
bodily weaknesses except the faulty eyesight which troubled him
throughout life. The year of his graduation he married Alice Lee of
Boston. He began the study of law, then dropped it to enter the New York
State legislature. This was an eccentric decision in the eighties for a well-
to-do youth of good family. His friends warned him that his associates
would be grooms, liquor dealers, and low politicians. "In that case," he
* William Allen
White, and others, claim that Reed knew McKinley and Hanna
were too strong for him, and that instead of the Administration being at his mercy
it was prepared to force him out. In any case, Reed resigned. (Gp. William Allen

White, Autobiography, p. 336.)

 33
xxxii. "I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power 633

answered, "they belong to the governing class, and you do not. I mean, if
I can, to be one of the governing class."
Roosevelt was a success in the legislature. In 1884, as we have seen,
he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention which nom-
inated Blaine. He opposed the nomination vigorously. When he decided
to support Blaine in the campaign, in spite of his personal distaste, he

may be said to have crossed the line which separates a professional in

politicsfrom an amiable amateur. "A man cannot act both within and
without the party," he announced. "It is impossible to combine the func-
tions of a guerrilla chief with those of a colonel in the regular army."
The decision to be "regular" was relatively easy for Roosevelt because
by nature he was a strong partisan. Unlike Tom Reed ("that fat, sarcastic
man," as Spring Rice called him), to whom even the Grand Old Party
was a joke, Roosevelt could not help feeling that God intended Repub-
licans to be better than Democrats. At the end of one of his mocking
letters, Reed said to Roosevelt, "I know that this frivolity will grieve you,
but I love you in spite of your seriousness." 5 The seriousness was a life-
long blessing. It liberated Roosevelt from the doubts that bedevil most
men, leaving him free to spend his vast energies in action.

The thing which the gods gave Roosevelt in excess was energy [wrote
his friend William Allen White]. He was Gargantuan in his capacity
for work. It was one of those utterly unthinkable coincidences . . .

that a man of Roosevelt's enormous energy should come to the Presi-

dency of exactly that country which at exactly that time was going
through a transitional period critical, dangerous, and but for him
terrible between an old, rural, individual order and a new highly
socialized industrial order.

And Henry Adams made the same comment in his less enthusiastic way:

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts,

and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy
was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living
within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality
that belongs to ultimate matter the quality that mediaeval theology
6
assigned to God he was pure act.

In the summer of 1884, before taking to the stump for Blaine, Roosevelt
went West to the Dakota Territory where he had bought two cattle
ranches. He wanted to think over his political future and to escape as
far as possible from his domestic past. His wife had died in February,
1884, after giving birth to a daughter. And on the same day his mother
died. Even Roosevelt's burning joy in life was for a time quenched. He

spent most of the next two years on his ranching ventures, losing almost
634 The Price of Union

fiftythousand dollars, which he could ill afford, but gaining a knowledge

of the West which was an asset both to him and to his country. Roosevelt
was the first President to know the Great Plains from intimate experience,
and there is perhaps no other way in which that dry land, so strange to
men who know only Europe or eastern America, can be understood.
In 1886 Roosevelt was married to Edith Kermit Carew, whom he had
known since early childhood. Ever since leaving Harvard he had been
giving his spare time to the writing of history, and by 1889 had published
seven books, including The Naval War of 1812, Thomas Hart Benton,
Gouverneur Morris, and the first two volumes of The Winning of the
West. Then, after five years away from his true and inevitable work, he
returned to politics.
When Benjamin Harrison became President he made Roosevelt a civil-
service commissioner, an appointment which had not amounted to any-
thing during the six years since the job was created. But Roosevelt
brought to this inconspicuous office a blaze of publicity and a continuous
bustle. He managed to get 20,000 federal employees transferred from
the spoils system to the civil service, and also to make the work of the
commissioners seem interesting to the public. Meanwhile he and his wife
were gathered into the social life of Washington, which was in one of
its happier phases during those years. John Hay and Henry Adams

formed the intellectual center, with the Cabot Lodges, the Roosevelt,
and Cecil Spring Rice of the British Embassy in constant attendance.
In 1895 Roosevelt returned to New York City to be president of the
Board of Police Commissioners. Even in this unpromising job his bub-
bling, noisy, strenuous administration brought wide publicity. Every
strife in which Roosevelt engaged became to him a battle in a glorious
war between right and wrong. If he dismissed a thieving policeman, he
somehow made it sound like a chapter in Pilgrim's Progress. With such
capacity for moral excitement he naturally flung himself into the cam-
paign of 1896, making (as we have seen) speeches which were more
flamboyant than logical. Neither McKinley nor Hanna was impressed.
Roosevelt's friends had to push and wheedle, and promise he would be
quiet, 'before he was offered the position of Assistant Secretary of the
Navy.
During the year of his return to Washington, before he went off to war,
he first met the Kansas editor who was to serve him and love him till he

died.

I met Roosevelt [wrote William Allen White years later]. I went

hurrying home from our first casual meeting ... to tell Sallie of the
marvel. ... I had never known such a man as he, and never shall
again. He overcame me. And in the hour or two we spent that day
at lunch, and in a walk down F Street, he poured into my heart such
 <e
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power" 635

visions,such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and
patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men
had. ... It was youth and the new order calling youth away from
the old order. 7

For those who felt his spell, Roosevelt ever roused such hopes and dreams.
For those on whom his magic was lost he was simply a rather pugnacious
adolescent. At the time he was filling William Allen White with rapture,
a Congressman from Pennsylvania noted sourly: "Roosevelt came down
here looking for war. He did not care whom we fought as long as there
was a scrap." His biographer puts the two impressions into one charming
sentence: "Theodore Roosevelt's life was the ultimate dream of every
typical American boy he fought in a war, killed lions, became President,
:

and quarreled with the Pope."* 8

In May, 1898, Roosevelt left Washington to raise a regiment of volun-

teer cavalry, the"Rough Riders": cowboys, ranchmen, college athletes,

and New York policemen, a summary of Roosevelt's life. Brave and
impetuous in war as in peace, Roosevelt the colonel was a daily front-page
story. He ended the war not only a hero but the people's delight. He was
promptly elected governor of New York after promising Tom Platt that
he would co-operate with the machine so far as his conscience per-
state
mitted. He proved a good administrator and a mild reformer, whose
cautious deeds were sometimes thought to be radical because of the furor
which accompanied them. The most modest reform, however, was too
much for Platt. When the governor contrived to put through a tax on
corporation franchises Platt decided to move him as far as possible from
Albany and from political power. Roosevelt himself said he had been
"entirely good humored .
[and] cool" in his dealings with Platt, and
. .

then added: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb:
"
'Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.' On this occasion he
went farther than Platt had planned.

Roosevelt became President on September 14, 1901. He knew that Hanna

had thought him a "madman" and that Wall Street suspected him of
liberalism. Hoping to calm all fears he asked McKinley's Cabinet to stay
with him and pledged himself "to continue, absolutely unbroken, the
policy of President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor
of our beloved country." In his first message to Congress, which he had

*The quarrel, in 1910, was really with the Papal Secretary of State, Merry del
Val, over an audience with the Holy Father which never took place.
636 The Price of Union

submitted toMark Hanna and other Senate conservatives, he was as sooth-

ing as McKinley, making clear that he expected the new Administration
to stand in the exact political center, not so reactionary as to annoy
labor nor so liberal as to bring sorrow to J. Pierpont Morgan. Corpo-
rations, he should be cautiously controlled, but not to the point of
said,
discouraging business confidence; labor must know that its rights entailed
heavy obligations; the tariff might be too high, but also it might not; and
as for McKinley' s suggestion of lowering the tariff by means of reciprocity

agreements, the idea should be commended, but "reciprocity must be

treated as the handmaiden ofprotection." Mr. Dooley summed up the
"
message sardonically: 'Th' trusts/ says he, 'are heejoous monsthers
built up be th' enlightened intherprise iv th' men that have done so much
advance progress in our beloved country, 5 he says. On wan hand I wud
c
to
"
stamp thim undher fut; on th' other hand not so fast.'
Yet in spite of his sincere, soothing words, men whose hearts were still
with the Civil War generation had good reason for distrusting Roosevelt.
A new age was struggling to be born; the people were giving their
allegiance to strange new creeds; and Roosevelt, even if he had tried,
could not help divining the people's mood. This was his third outstanding
gift, in addition to an energy surpassing mortal bounds and a sense of

publicity surpassing P. T. Barnum. The winds of doctrine were stirring

in 1901, and Roosevelt half-consciously sensed the breeze. The plans of
the Populists and of Bryan were becoming respectable, after ten years of
repetition and of reassuring proof that neither the Populists nor Bryan
would themselves gain power. The state of South Dakota had adopted the
initiative and the referendum. The state of Wisconsin had chosen Robert
La Follette for governor, that "strong, determined, indomitable man,"
to whom "reform" did not mean moral abstractions, but statistics,

economics, railway rates, and a concept of government's relations to busi-

ness which Mark Hanna could not be expected to enjoy. In other words,
the "progressive era" was being born. And Roosevelt, who did not yet
know what it meant or why it had come to pass, recorded the changing
climate as a seismograph records a quake under the farthest seas.
This is the virtuosity of the politician at its best. This is what White
meant when he said that Roosevelt saved America from "terrible" danger
during the transition from the old rural order of individualism to the
"new highly socialized industrial order." If men had known too clearly
what was happening they might have tried too strenuously to prevent it.
This could only have led to class or sectional war, for the decisive deeds
had been committed long before and society must move in the new
direction or perish. What the people needed was to be reassured, and
given a sense of continuity, while the ground changed under their feet.
If Roosevelt had known what Henry Adams knew he would have
 33
xxxii. "I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power 637

scared the nation out of its wits. But luckily Roosevelt did not
peer into
the future. He could catch men's thoughts clairvoyantly, but he was
spared Adams' knowledge of the woes to come. He believed (and made
others believe) that every trouble could be banished by optimism and
the ten commandments and a lot of exercise. After a few simple reforms,
he implied, the old America would be reborn miraculous, shining,
virginal. Meanwhile, with insatiable gusto and six young children, he
lived his private life in a whirl of publicity. The whole nation felt that it
took part in the uproarious fun at the White House.

During his seven years in office Roosevelt came to believe confidently in

more power for the central government as compared with the states, in
more power for the President as compared with the Congress, and in less
power for Wall Street as compared with Washington. He explained his
views on the latter point in 1905. "The great development of industrial-
ism," he said, "means that there must be an increase in the supervision
exercised by the Government over business enterprise." Government, he
explained, must make sure that the power of wealth is "used for and not
against the interests of the people as a whole. We do not intend
. . .

that the Republic shall ever fail as those Republics of olden times failed,
in which there finally came to be a government by classes, which resulted
either in the poor plundering the rich or in the rich . . .
exploiting the
poor."
This was the faith of the entire "progressive era": business should be
policed by government and compelled to work for the general welfare;
government should be made subject to popular control so that it could
not be corrupted by what Roosevelt called "the dull, purblind folly of
the very rich men, their greed and arrogance." Thus, thought the Pro-
gressives and the Populists before them, the benefits of a reformed and
socially directed big business would accrue to the whole of society; work
would become less burdensome; wages would increase; monopolies and
the "money-power" would at last be humbled by a government responsive
to the people; economic democracy (which had been preached for a
hundred years by the followers of Fourier and the Utopians, and which
had been attempted at Brook Farm, New Harmony, and similar settle-
ments) would be achieved.
In keeping with this creed, Roosevelt twice strengthened the Interstate
Commerce Commission, which had been created by Congress in 1887,*
* Article com-
I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress power to regulate
merce among the states.
 38 The Price of Union

but which did not have powers over the railroads to produce
sufficient
the desired results. laws gave the Commission control
Roosevelt's
over rate-cutting and rebates, and allowed it to set maximum rates and
to establish through routes. The Commission's orders were made binding
without court action. The second of these laws (the Hepburn Act of
1906) met sharp resistance from Congress. The President then declared
himself a convert to McKinley's last speech, wherein tariff reduction had
been hinted. He wrote, printed, and circulated among his advisers, a
message to Congress asking for a lower tariff. Speaker Cannon was so
alarmed that he offered to back the Hepburn Act if the President would
withdraw the message. This the President did, and the Act promptly
passed with only seven dissenting votes. In the Senate it was saved be-
cause the Democrats (urged by Tillman) helped the Roosevelt Repub-
licans against some of the most powerful leaders of the party.
Late in his second term Roosevelt's relations with Congress became
unhappy, probably because he had a view of the powers of the presidency
which no Congress can welcome. "I have a definite philosophy about the
presidency," he wrote to George Trevelyan, the historian. "I think it
should be a very powerful office, and I think the President should be a
very strong man who uses without hesitation every power that the posi-
tion yields." And in his Autobiography he wrote:

The most important factor in getting the right spirit in my adminis-

tration . . . was my upon the theory that the executive
insistence
power was limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions appear-
ing in the Constitution or imposed by Congress under its constitutional
powers. . . . Under this interpretation of executive power I did and
caused to be done many things not previously done by the President
and the heads of the departments. I did not usurp power but I did
greatly broaden the use of executive power.

No President with such views can expect a long peace with Congress.
In his last days Roosevelt received rebukes unknown since the times of
Andrew Johnson or of Andrew Jackson. Yet first he accomplished a great
deal a fact which tends to be forgotten because he asked for much more
than he got. He was always willing, as with the Hepburn Act, to make a
bargain, whether real or fictitious. And ever since 1903, when the auto-
cratic but mild-mannered "Uncle Joe" Cannon became Speaker, Roose-
velt had maintained with him one of the most successful relations between
Executive and Congressional leader that America has seen. The two men
often disagreed, and when that was the case the President was usually
But when they agreed, or when they could strike a bargain,
frustrated.
or when Roosevelt persuaded Cannon that the people could be roused
to back the President, there was a channel for Executive leadership
 39
xxxii. "I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power 639

which most Republican Presidents have failed to find. "Uncle Joe" (who
made full use of "Czar" Reed's rules) explained it as follows:

The chairmen of committees conferred with the Speaker as to legis-

lation before their committees and the Speaker could intelligently
. . .

present the majority opinion to the President. ... I think Mr. Roose-
velt talked over with me virtually every serious recommendation to
Congress before he made it and requested me to sound out the leaders
in the House, for he did not want to recommend legislation simply to
write messages. .. He wanted to know how to secure results with
.

the least friction. 9

Like all efforts to heal the division of powers, this finally broke down.
Under the presidency of Taft, in 1910, the House revolted against the
Cannon-Reed rules. A combination of Democrats and angry Republicans
enlarged the Committee on Rules, excluded the Speaker from member-
ship, and provided for the election of the committee by the House. This
did not make for efficiency.

Prior to 1910 the Speaker controlled the House in collaboration with

a coterie of trusted party lieutenants. Since 1910 the leadership of the
House has been in commission. The chief difference between the old
oligarchy and the new is that control of the House was formerly open,
centralized, and responsible, whereas today it is invisible, dispersed, and
irresponsible. Formerly the country could see the wheels go round, but
now it could not. 10

And after 1910 there was no one man with whom a President could deal.
Towardthe end of his second term, as he admits in his Autobiography,
Roosevelt could no longer work with the heads of Congress. "I was forced
to abandon the effort to persuade them to come my way," he writes, "and
I achieved results only by appealing over the heads of the Senate and
House leaders to the people, who were the masters of both of us." As a
matter of fact he accomplished little (in the way of legislation) at the
very end; but so long as the Roosevelt-Cannon alliance held he went
forward steadily with his middle-of-the-road, middle-class program of
mild reform. Only those who would have preferred revolution or bleak
reaction should feel that Roosevelt did very little. In addition to his
interstate-commerce laws, he secured an Employers Liability Act (an-
nulled by the Supreme Court in 1908) , a Pure Food and Drugs Act, and a
new approach to the vital problem of conserving the nation's resources.
And in 1903 he persuaded Congress to create a Department of Commerce
and Labor, headed by an officer of Cabinet rank and with certain powers
of supervision over corporations with interstate business.* And lastly, he
*
Later, under Woodrow Wilson, this was split into the Department of Com-
merce and the Department of Labor, each with a Cabinet officer at its head.
640 The Price of Union

succeeded in making known to the whole country a series of further

reforms which he himself could not procure from Congress, but which his
successors procured, and which had been regarded as dangerous Bryanite
radicalism until Roosevelt took them up. Commenting on the last angry
months of recriminations between the President and Congress, Henry
Pringle writes: "On the one hand, Roosevelt had defeated himself. On
the other, the very recklessness of his language advanced the day when
workmen's compensation, the inheritance tax, valuation of railroad prop-
erties, and the rest of the reforms were adopted. He made these heresies
familiar." 11

Meanwhile, as early as 1902, Roosevelt had begun to move against the

trusts. In February of that year Attorney General Philander Knox an-
nounced that the government would seek the dissolution of the Northern
Securities Company on the ground that it transgressed the Sherman Act.
This was a daring move because the Northern Securities Company (the
first of the great holding companies in America) could be defended as

reasonable and economical and in the public interest. Furthermore, ever

since the Supreme Court had decided in 1894 that the American Sugar

Refining Company was not a combination in restraint of trade, both

Cleveland's and McKinley's attorney generals had taken the view that
the Sherman Act could scarcely be made effective against trusts.* During
McKinley's years in office there was not one indictment under this Act.
In 1900, J. Pierpont Morgan, James J. Hill, and their associates con-
trolled the Northern Pacific, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and
the Great Northern Railways, while E. H. Harriman controlled the Union
Pacific. Seeking an entrance into Chicago, Harriman began a battle with
the Hill-Morgan interests. In 1901, after bidding the stock to $1000 a
share and causing the "Northern Pacific Panic" he got control of the
majority of the voting rights of that railway. Morgan threatened retalia-
tion, but also offered a friendly settlement, from which came the North-
ern Securities Company a merger of the three men's holdings in Great
Northern, Northern Pacific, and Burlington. The capital of the holding
company was put at $400,000,000. It would establish a railroad monopoly
in the Northwest, with peace and unification and sound finance instead
of the wars and the overexpansions of the robber barons. The hurried
construction of the Northern Pacific had dragged down Jay Cooke and
* When Olney became Secretary of State, in 1895, his successor as Attorney
General secured several convictions under the Sherman Act; but such efforts ceased
with McKinley.
 ff
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power" 641

set off the Panic of 1873. Morgan was shocked by such instability and
waste. He felthe was doing a public service by substituting order for the
old anarchy.
The Northern Securities group also had thoughts of linking the pro-
ductive centers of the Middle West with America's emerging imperial
markets in the Far East. After a transcontinental railway-monopoly, why
not steamships on the Pacific? Yet as Frederick Lewis Allen points out, it
an exaggeration to say that Morgan planned a railway or a steamship
it is

"empire." So far as we know he merely wanted enough power so that he

could prevent inefficiency, and so that he could insist on being consulted.

At the most, it amounted to a veto power over anything that he and

his colleagues regarded as hurtfully competitive or financially reckless;
at the least, it amounted to little more than an opportunity to keep in-
formed as to what was going on. In any case, it was sufficient to assure
that no new Jay Goulds or Daniel Drews could run amuck, and that
the management of American railroads would be more respectably and
responsibly conducted than in earlier years. . . He believed in order,
.

believed in reducing competition to a minimum, believed in protecting

12
the solvency of properties which he had backed.

All this seemed so reasonable to Morgan (and to many others) that he

could not understand a sane man attacking "his" companies, or even his
judgment. He realized that when he and Harriman had bid Northern
Pacific all the way up to 1000, they had in fact bought more common
shares than there were in the market, and that the brokers (who suddenly
saw they could not deliver the shares they had sold) had then dumped
their other stocks to raise cash for the day of reckoning. Hence the "North-
ern Pacific Panic." But Morgan and Harriman had promptly dispelled
the panic bymaking an agreement to save the short-sellers, to stop fight-
ing each other, to build a peaceful holding company. What could be
wrong with that? When Morgan received word that the government
planned to prosecute his company he turned from the telephone, writes
Mark Sullivan, "showing appalled dismay but little anger. In
telling the
news to his guests he dwelt on what he felt was the unfairness of Roose-
velt's action. Roosevelt, he said, ought to have told him, ought to have

given him the chance to make over

the Northern Securities Company, if
necessary, so as to conformwhatever Roosevelt thought was right.
to . . .

He had regarded Roosevelt as a gentleman." 13

Morgan hurried to Washington. "If we have done anything wrong," he
said to Roosevelt, "send your man [meaning the Attorney General] to my
man [meaning one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up." To which
Roosevelt's "man," Philander Knox, answered: "We don't want to fix it
up; we want to stop it." Then Morgan asked whether the President meant
642 The Price of Union

to "attack my other interests." "Certainly not," said Roosevelt, "unless we

find out . . .
they have done something we regard as wrong." After Mor-
gan had left Roosevelt said to Knox: "That is a most illuminating illus-
tration of the Wall Street point of view. Mr. Morgan could not help
regarding me as a big rival operator, who either intended to ruin all his
interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none."

Morgan, on the other hand, doubtless thought the President was an "il-
luminating illustration" of the political point of view, which thought
nothing of insulting a man of honor and upsetting an enterprise of prom-
ise just to please the public.
In his Autobiography, written some years later, when he had become
more accustomed to the language of progressivism, Roosevelt tells in detail
why the Northerri Securities Case seemed to him so important. He first
describes the state of the nation when he became President:

The total absence of governmental control had led to a portentous

growth in the financial and industrial world both of natural and of
artificial individuals that is, corporations. In no other country in the
world had such enormous fortunes been gained. In no other country in
the world was such power held by the men who had gained these for-
tunes. . The courts, not unnaturally, but most regrettably
. . had . . .

for a quarter of a century been on the whole the agents of reaction,

and by conflicting decisions which, however, in their sum were hostile
to the interests of the people, had left both the nation and the several
states well-nigh impotent to deal with the great business combinations.
. . Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar
.

is the
tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.
When I became President, the question as to the method by which
the United States Government was to control the corporations was not
yet important. The absolutely vital question was whether the govern-
ment had power to control them at all. This question had not yet been
decided in favor of the United States Government. ... A decision
of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness, settled that the
national government had not that power. * This decision I caused to be
annulled by the court that had rendered it. ... The representatives
of privilege intimated, and sometimes asserted outright, that in direct-
ing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect for the
Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue by a
vote of eight to one. ... It was necessary to reverse the Knight case
in the interests of the people against monopoly and privilege just as it
had been necessary to reverse the Dred Scott decision in the interest of
the people against slavery and privilege. . , .

By a five to four vote the Supreme Court reversed its decision in the
* The
Sugar Trust decision, known as "the Knight case." (U.S. v. E.G. Knight,
1895.)
 ef
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power" 643

Knight and in the Northern Securities case sustained the Govern-

case,
ment. After this latter decision
. . . suits were brought by my
. . .

direction against the American Tobacco Company and the Standard

Oil Company. Both were adjudged criminal conspiracies and their dis-
solution ordered."* 14

The Sherman Act had been brought back to life. Before he left the
White House Roosevelt started twenty-five proceedings which led to in-
dictments under this Act. His successor, President Taf t, began forty-five ;

and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson secured the passage of the Clayton Act and
the Federal Trade Commission Act, which greatly strengthened the gov-
ernment in its fight against monopoly. The Clayton Act forbade practices
which "substantially tended to lessen competition," such as discrimination
in prices, the acquisition of stock in one company by another, interlocking
directorates. It also prohibited the use of injunctions "unless necessary to

prevent irreparable injury to property, or to a property right . , . for

which injury there is no adequate remedy at law." At the same time the
Federal Trade Commission was set up to investigate businesses engaged
in interstate commerce, to determine whether there had been violations
*
of the an ti- trust laws, and when necessary to issue orders to 'cease and
desist,"

Again and again in the Autobiography we learn that Theodore Roosevelt

had no great respect for the Supreme Court. At times he seemed to feel
it was his
personal enemy. Naturally, therefore, he was even more blunt
than Lincoln and Grant in admitting that he hoped to put upon the Court
men who shared his views. And since an appointment was pending at the
time of the Northern Securities case, he took great pains to find a judge
with "correct" ideas.
"The President and the Congress are all very well in their way," ho
said in 1906. "They can say what they think they think, but it rests with
the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought." This was
scarcely tolerable to so strong-willed a man. "He was shaken to the
. . .

depths of his sometimes too vigorous nature," writes Henry Pringle, "by
the extent to which the courts nullified Rooseveltian conceptions of what
15
was right."
In 1902 Justice Horace Grey of Massachusetts retired from the Supreme
Court. Roosevelt thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes for the vacant place.
* The decree for the "dissolution" of the Standard Oil
Company of New Jersey,
issued by a circuit court in 1909, was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1911, while
Taft was President.
644 The Price of Union

Holmes was another Massachusetts man. His good record in the Civil War
attracted Roosevelt, and so did the breadth of his mind, for Holmes was
known not only as a legal scholar but as a student of literature, philosophy,
history. Yet the President had no intention of promoting him if he was
"wrong" on the Northern Securities case. He believed that four of the
justices were against the Administration, and that victory in the fight for
a stronger federal government might depend on who took Judge Grey's
place. Roosevelt was soon to write that the nation possessed "an inherent
power . outside of the enumerated powers conferred upon it by the
. .

Constitution, in all cases where the object involved was beyond the power
of the several states." Hamilton and Marshall, he said, had shown by their
deeds that they shared this view. If the Court were now to construe the
Constitution narrowly, America would be "at a great disadvantage in the
battle for industrial order." 10
The previous year, on the one hundredth anniversary of the day John
Marshall took his seat as Chief Justice, Holmes had made a speech which
bothered Roosevelt because it did not seem to show sufficient reverence
for Marshall's centralizing work. So the President wrote to Henry Cabot

Lodge for more information about Judge Holmes.

In the ordinary and low sense which we attach to the words "parti-
san" and "politician" [wrote Roosevelt], a judge of the Supreme Court
should be neither. But in the higher sense ... he is not in my judg-
ment fitted for the position unless he is a party man, a constructive
statesman, constantly keeping in mind . his relations with his fellow
. .

statesmen who in other branches of the government are striving . . .

to advance the ends of government. . Now I should like to know

. .

that Judge Holmes was in entire sympathy with our views, that is with
your views and mine and Judge Grey's, for instance. ... I should hold
myself as guilty of an irreparable wrong to the nation if I should put in
his place any man who was not absolutely sane and sound on the great
national policies for which we stand in public life.

The Lodge to show this remarkable letter to Holmes "if

President told
it becamenecessary." In this, Roosevelt went further than any of his pred-
ecessors in acknowledging that Supreme Court appointments are politics.
From the day when John Adams appointed Marshall, most Presidents
have of course put their own partisans on the Court. Lincoln and Grant,
as we have seen, said openly that they looked for men who would agree
with them on specific issues; but they both added that they would not ask
the men to promise agreement in advance. When Roosevelt told Lodge
that he might show the letter of inquiry to Holmes, he seemed to be hint-
ing that it would be well to get positive pledges. If so, he was right.
Lodge, presumably without showing the letter, reassured Roosevelt. Oliver
Wendell Holmes was appointed, and on March 14, 1904, joined the minor-
 33
xxxii. "I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power 645

ity who dissented from the Supreme Court's decision on the Northern
Securities case.* Roosevelt won the case but lost the edge of his pleasure
in Justice Holmes's company.**

Professor Binkley points out that between 1900 and 1912 Roosevelt ex-
perienced a "personal conversion" in social philosophy. He started as a
deeper conservative than McKinley or Mark Hanna, the former having
defended striking miners against angry local opinion as far back as the
eighteen-seventies, and the latter being the first leader in American busi-
ness to encourage trade unions. In those days Roosevelt was praising
Cleveland for sending federal troops against the strikers, and opposing
labor legislation with dogmas from John Stuart Mill. By the end of his
"conversion" he was asking for a high degree of paternalism in govern-
ment, and was endorsing not only the initiative and the referendum, but
the recall of elective officers by popular vote and even as a last resort

against obstruction the recall of state judicial decisions on constitutional

questions, and ifnecessary of state judges. This was farther to the left than
his old enemy Bryan. "We advocate ." said Roosevelt, "all govern-
. .

mental devices which will make

the representatives of the people more
17
easily and certainly responsible to the people's will."
Shortly before the Republican National Convention of 1904 (when
Roosevelt was renominated without opposition, since Hanna, his only
possible rival, had died four months before), the New York Sun wrote:

Why should people wonder that Mr. Bryan clings to silver? Has not
Mr. Roosevelt absorbed and sequestered every vestige of the Kansas
City platform [that is, the Democratic platform in 1900] that had a
thread of practical value? Suppose that Mr. Bryan had been elected
President. ... A regiment of Bryans could not compete with Mr.
Roosevelt in harrying the trusts, in bringing wealth to its knees, and
in converting into the palpable actualities of action the wildest dreams
of Bryan's campaign orators.

* A lower court in St. Paul had ruled for the government in 1903, and the case
was then appealed.
** In 1921, two after Roosevelt's death, Holmes wrote to Sir Frederick
years
Pollock, recalling that a Senator had told him, "What the boys like about Roose-
velt is that he doesn't care a damn for the law." "It broke up our incipient friend-
ship . ." said Holmes, "as he looked on my dissent to the Northern Securities
.

case as a political departure (or, I suspect, more truly, couldn't forgive anyone
who stood in his way). We
talked freely later, but it was never the same after
that. . . . He was
very likeable, a big figure, a rather ordinary intellect, -with
extraordinary gifts, a shrewd and I think pretty unscrupulous politician. He played
all his cards if not more. R. i. p."
646 The Price of Union

This was apparently what the Democratic Party thought, for in the cam-
paign of 1904 they opposed Roosevelt, not with the fiery Bryan, but with
the conservative Judge Alton Brooks Parker of New York. The result was
total defeat. Roosevelt received more than seven and a half million votes,
Parker five million. Roosevelt won 336 electoral votes, Parker 140.
One reason for the steady leftward shift in Roosevelt's opinion was his
sense of the public mood. He knew that the world was changing, not so
much because of what he saw or studied, but because he knew the% wants
of the people were changing. Another reason for his new and more radical
views may have been his fight against the forces of inertia within the gov-
ernment. These had thwarted many Presidents, but never before a Presi-
dent so impetuous. It was Roosevelt's nature to run faster when Congress
sought to clog his feet. And the more radical he became, the more impa-
tient; and the more impatient, the less successful in his mediatory task.
For not only did he have to conciliate Speaker Joseph Cannon of the
House of Representatives (into whose mind no hint of a changing world
would ever stray), and Republican leaders in the Senate to whom even
Mark Hanna seemed rashly modern, but throughout the country, while
the din of industrial strife grew louder, he had to make the "square deal"
(the moderate reforms which he hoped would not frighten any major
group) acceptable to a solid majority.
So long as the United States is a federal nation, this will be a main
task for all Presidents. No President has done it better than Theodore
Roosevelt, or been more abused for his success with the possible excep-
tion, in both cases, of his distant cousin. The classic attack on the first
Roosevelt was made by Robert M. La Follette, in his Autobiography:

Roosevelt's most savage assault upon special interests was invariably

offsetwith an equally drastic attack upon those who were seeking to
reform abuses demagogues and dangerous persons. In this way
. . .

he sought to win approval both from the radicals and the conservatives.
This cannonading, first in one direction, then in another, filled the air
with noise and smoke, which confused and obscured the line of action,
but when the battle cloud drifted by and quiet was restored, it was
always a matter of surprise that so little had been accomplished.

The description is exact. This is how Roosevelt held together his extraordi-
nary personal following and gave his country rest from too great anxiety
during a time of transition. "When the battle cloud drifted by" one thing
at least had been "accomplished" the nation was not divided into irrecon-
:

cilable classes or regions.

A third reason for Roosevelt's change in social philosophy was his ex-
perience with the immobility of the more backward business mind, which
made the immobility of Congress seem frisky. This experience began with
xxxii. "I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power" 647

the coal strike of 1902 in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, which

ever since the days of the "Molly Maguires" had contributed so much
blood and bitterness to American life.
Between 1897 and 1900 the United Mine Workers, led by John Mitchell,
had organized the anthracite miners. In the latter year, after a brief strike,
they won a ten per cent wage increase largely because of political pres-
sure by Mark Hanna upon the recalcitrant owners. But the union was
still outlawed, so in 1902 the miners struck again, both for better
wages
and for union recognition. The average wage was a little more than five
hundred dollars a year. The accident rate was terrifying. And there was
no workmen's compensation. The case for the owners was so bad that
J. Pierpont Morgan, Charles Schwab, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., were
on the side of Roosevelt when he finally intervened. The most talkative
of the mine operators was George F. Baer of the Philadelphia and Reading
Coal and Iron Company. "Mining," he said, "was a business not a . . .

religious, sentimental, or academic proposition." The interests of the

miners, he said, would be safe in the hands of "the Christian men to whom
God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests
of this country."
Six months before the strike began Mark Hanna tried to head it off,
asking Morgan to put pressure on the railroads which controlled the coal
Railroads and their affiliated companies would have listened to
fields.

Morgan ; but George Baer persuaded him that Hanna was wrong and that
nothing should be done. The men, he said, had no grievances. The United
Mine Workers were destroying the discipline essential to business. He
would not meet Mitchell. So the strike began in May, 1902. By the end
of the summer, with the mid-term elections and the cold weather sched-
uled for November, the mines were still closed.
In October, Roosevelt called representatives of both sides to a con-
ference. Baer stormed at the President for not sending federal troops, like
Cleveland, and for not prosecuting the miners' union under the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act. Mitchell said he would submit the case to an impartial
commission appointed by the President. Roosevelt said of Baer: "If it
wasn't for the high office I hold I would have taken him by the seat of
his breeches and the nape of his neck and chucked him out of the win-
dow." And Roosevelt said of Mitchell "There was only one man in the
:

conference who behaved like a gentleman and that was not I." 18 An arbi-
tration commission, for whatever it might be worth to the workers, was
made certain by Baer's treatment of the President.
Morgan now realized that Baer was a menace to sensible business men,
who did not wish to precipitate government ownership. He told the opera-
tors to accept arbitration, which they promptly did. Then at the last

minute, when the commission was being set up, Baer insisted that no
648 The Price of Union

laboring man would be acceptable, though he might be willing to pass

a "sociologist." Furthermore, and this must have surprised even Roosevelt,
the operators refused to accept Grover Cleveland on the commission.
Somehow they must have sensed the troubling truth that the old Presi-
dent, like the new one, was disgusted with their bad manners and their
stupidity.
Suddenly, as he later wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, it came to Roose-
velt that these odd people would "submit to anarchy rather than 4iavc
Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledce they would accept with
rapture. ... It gave me an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the
"
mighty brains of those 'captains of industry.' So Roosevelt appointed
a well-known labor leader to the commission under the title of "sociolo-
gist," and the man was accepted by the coal owners with no more trouble.
The commission gave the miners a ten per cent wage increase, dealt
fairly with a few of the abuses in work practices, but denied recognition
to the United Mine Workers. If this seemed a small reward for all their
sacrifices, the workers could congratulate themselves that Theodore Roose-
velt would thenceforth look with disillusioned eyes upon the representa-
tives of industry. "The last, lingering suspicions of the sapience of the
American industrialist must have vanished during those hours on the night
of October 15, 1902. Political expediency might, in the future, dictate
caution, but the nation's business leaders were not, after all, dangerous
foes." 19

When Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909 Robert La Follette paid the

following tribute to one part of his work :

There is the great and statesman-like movement for the conservation

of our National resources, into which Roosevelt so energetically threw
himself at a time when the Nation as a whole knew not that we are
ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can. This globe is
. . .

the capital stock of the race. It is just so much coal and oil and gas.
This may be economized or wasted. The same thing is true of phos-
phates and other mineral resources. . This immense idea Roose-
. .

velt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation until
the Nation heeded. He held it so high that it attracted the attention of
the neighboring nations of the continent, and will so spread and inten-
sify that we will soon see the world's conferences devoted to it. Nothing
can be greater or finer than this.

La Follette grudged praise, and on the whole disliked Roosevelt. But

he saw that the whole human race was in danger because of man's new-
 ff
xxxii. l Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power" 649

found ability to waste the earth with giant machines instead of with
simple hand tools. So he gave thanks that a man with Roosevelt's ability
to create drama and loud excitement had seen the danger also. Yet Roose-
velt might have been as blind as previous Presidents except for his years
of cattle-ranching in the dry West.
We have already seen that the federal government gave 137,000,000
acres of the public domain to the railways, or to the states for railway
building. Under the Homestead Act another 226,000,000 acres of land
passed to private ownership, much of it ending in the hands of large
corporations.* Land which was so easily acquired was naturally thought
to be "endless," and a large part of it was plundered. By 1890 wise men
had begun to understand that in the Mississippi Valley, with its harsh
"continental" type of climate, land must be even more carefully used
than in Europe or the whole top soil will wash into the rivers. Yet the
standard American practice had been to plow steep hillsides recklessly,
and to tear off the forests or grass as fast as possible, on the assumption
that there would always be more land. Then at last, in 1891, Congress
passed an Act allowing the President to set aside certain public lands as
forest reserves, withdrawing them from sale or any other form of private
use. Under the influence of his friend, GifTord Pinchot, head of the Forest
Service and a student of forestry in France, Germany, and Switzerland,
Roosevelt began to make large use of this Act. By 1909 he had increased
the forest reserves from 43,000,000 to 194,000,000 acres; in other words,
he had saved from rapid exploitation an area considerably larger than the
whole of France. And he had used his influence with Speaker Cannon to
aid the passage of a bill ( introduced by the Democratic Senator Newlands
of Nevada) for irrigation in the West. And he had set up a public lands
commission and an inland waterways commission. Railways, utility com-
panies, mining companies, and other private groups using the public lands,
were now regulated on the novel ground that the property of the people
should accrue to the benefit of the people. Finally, in 1906, the Forest
Service was enlarged and given new authority.
These acts did not go unopposed by the men who had learned to think
of the public domain as their own private plunder. But on a case contain-
ing so much drama Roosevelt was hard to beat. He roused the public with
his tale of scandal and his warnings of a diminished future. Although
no such fight can be won permanently, although much of Roosevelt's
work has had to be done over and over again, the cause has never been
wholly neglected since his day. It might never have been popularized in
time if Theodore Roosevelt had not been President.
Under pressure from local interests, Congress undertook to block this
* The combined area of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is

59,728,640 acres. The area of France is 136,151,680 acres.

650 The Price of Union

new national policy. A bill was passed (or was added as a "rider" to
a Department of Agriculture appropriation bill) forbidding the President
to reserve any more forest lands in six Northwestern states. Roosevelt sent
for a report on every foot of soil throughout these states that could possibly
grow a tree during the wettest cycle of years. He put the whole lot into
the reserve, and then signed the bill which denied him such powers for
the future. "When the friends of the special interests in the Senate . . .

woke up/' wrote Roosevelt, "they discovered that sixteen million^ acres
of timberland had been saved for the people . . . before the land-grab-
bers could get at them. The opponents of the Forest Service turned hand-
20
springs in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive."

10

The other field in which Roosevelt could act happily, and with small heed
for Congress, was foreign affairs. When he came to the presidency, Secre-

tary of State Hay was completing a treaty with Great Britain which super-
seded the Treaty of 1850 and allowed the United States a free hand to
build, maintain, and defend an isthmian canal between the Atlantic and
the Pacific. The Senate approvedthe treaty within a month, and the
following year Congress authorized a canal on the Panama route, rather
than the Nicaraguan, if Colombia would agree within "a reasonable
time." Roosevelt and Hay then drafted a treaty with Colombia which
was ratified by the American Senate but rejected by the government at
Bogota.
A French company already had rights in the canal, and the United
buy these rights for a fair sum. But the Colombians
States proposed to
whom Roosevelt impatiently dismissed as "inefficient bandits" wanted
some of the money for themselves. This was as frustrating to the French
company as to Roosevelt. In November, 1903, after a little judicious
prodding by the company's representatives, Panama suffered what Roose-
velt called "a most just and proper revolution." American warships were
on hand to see that the justice and the proprieties were not hampered by
Colombian troops. The new state of Panama was recognized an hour and
sixteen minutes after it was born, and eleven days later signed the treaty
which "the contemptible little creatures in Bogota" had refused. Congress
was none too happy at this display of American realism; but the Presi-
dent did not care. "I took the canal zone," he later remarked, "and let
Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also."*
* When Woodrow Wilson was President he made a
treaty offering Colombia
twenty-five million dollars and an apology. Henry Cabot Lodge prevented ratifica-
tion in the Senate. But in 1921, under President Harding, Colombia received her
money though not her apology. Oil had been discovered in the little Republic.
 {C 3'
xxxii. I Did Greatly Broaden the . . . Executive Power 651

In 1902, meanwhile, there occurred another Venezuela incident, when

European Powers began a "pacific blockade" in order to collect their
debts. There is still doubt as to what threats, if any, Roosevelt made to
Germany at this time, for his own memory appears to have played him
false. In any case, the foreign claims were compromised or sent to arbi-

tration, and the blockade was lifted. But a problem remained which
Roosevelt states succinctly: "If we are willing to let Germany or England
act as the policeman of the Caribbean, then we can afford not to inter-
fere when gross wrong-doing occurs. But if we intend to say 'hands off'
to the powers of Europe, sooner or later we must keep order ourselves."
The time had come, in other words, when the Monroe Doctrine must
either shrink or expand, and with Roosevelt there could be only one
answer. In 1904 the Dominican Republic, in financial trouble, was threat-
ened with intervention from Europe. After a little pressure from Wash-
ington, Roosevelt was invited to set up a financial receivership, with an
American to collect and spend the revenues of the Republic. The anti-
imperialists in the United States Senate were again displeased but helpless.
And once more they were helpless when Roosevelt, as a proof to the
Japanese of American power, sent the whole fleet into the Pacific, and
then round the world on a "practice cruise." Congress had to pay the bills
or allow the ships to rot quietly in some foreign port. The fourteen months'
tour was well organized and perfectly timed. One of Roosevelt's happiest
moments was when he welcomed the fleet home three weeks before he
left office. Well might he write "I did and caused to be done many things
:

not previously done by the President and the heads of the departments."

11

Henry Adams and John Hay had built themselves houses across Lafayette
Square from the White House, where the Hay-Adams Hotel now stands.
Roosevelt asked Adams to dinner on March 2, 1909, two days before the
inauguration of William Howard Taft. "After this spring," wrote Adams
in reply,"Andrew Jackson and I will be the solitary monuments of the
Square, and he will have to drop in to cheer me up.* I don't find the
prospect amusing. Andrew may beas handsome as you, but he is not as

good company no
at dinner. I feeldisposition to celebrate the occasion
in crowds, and still less to see others do it, so, if you please, I will play
cheerful as well as I can, on the 2nd. at dinner." Yet the misanthropic
Adams was drawn back on the last day (March 4) to shake hands again
with the President and tell him "I shall miss you very much." He had
already written to Sir Ronald Lindsay: "My last vision of fun and gaiety
* An in the center of the Square.
equestrian statue of Jackson is
652 The Price of Union

will vanish when my Theodore goes . Tout passe! tout casse! and
. .

now that Theodore has broken everything, tout lasse! Never can we re-
21
place him."
For once Henry Adams expressed the sentiment of the people. Anybody
who has traveled America widely, especially rural America, even thirty
years after Theodore Roosevelt's death, will have met scores of elderly
men and women whose greatest political excitement in all their lives was
once to have seen or heard "T.R." on the back platform of one* of his
campaign trains. The woeful intervening years are forgotten when they
recall that figure of abounding strength and hope. Some of the old faith
in the future, and in the American dream, is revived at the thought of the

boy who enjoyed life so much that he grew up to lead a cavalry charge,
kill lions, become President, and quarrel with the Pope.
CONCLUSION
 XXXIII

Some Modern Instances: I

w.'HEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT left the White House in 1909 the uses
of the American Constitution seemed to be set. At every crisis power
tended to consolidate, and the people seemed to welcome authority and
leadership from the President, while with the return of quiet times power
tended to become decentralized, and the people seemed content with the
delays, evasions, and compromises of Congressional policy. The system
suited the national preference for weak government and the need for
action in emergency. It had successfully met three emergencies the surge
:

of democracy at the time of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, and the
transition from laissez-faire to the beginnings of social control over industry
and finance. And the system had failed once, during the years between
the Mexican conquest and the fall of Fort Sumter. We cannot prove that
the failure was avoidable but we may note that it took place when a time
;

of great strain coincided with a time of weak Presidents.

"Our system," writes Professor Herring, "can respond quickly to
emergency conditions once the public is convinced of the need. Presiden-
1
tial leadership sustained by a united people has power for any crisis."
This is true; and we may add that if the people do not see the need, in
spite of warnings, they must pay the heavy cost of freedom. "The world
will never be safe for democracy," said Chesterton; "it is a dangerous
trade." And weshould also add that if the people do see the need, or are
capable of seeing it, but receive no presidential leadership, the system itself
has failed. Such a failure may occur at any time. Another crisis may be
met by another Pierce and Buchanan, since the method of selecting
Presidents favors men who are not too strong and whose ideas are not too
positive. Lincoln, who presided over one time of danger, was chosen
because he had the fewest enemies of any man available. And Theodore
Roosevelt, who presided over another, had been banished to the vice-
presidency and was only rescued by murder. Yet it is doubtful whether
any system of choice could discover, except by accident, the combination
of qualities that makes a good President. Political genius is needed (or the
highest political talent), and there is no school in which that can be
taught. Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts where did they learn to
cast spells over their fellow men?
655
656 The Price of Union

Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was the last of the Republican Presi-
dents to understand the nature of the job. He was a master of that "group
diplomacy" with which a President builds and maintains his inharmonious
party. He gathered behind him classes, races, economic interests which
had never before co-operated. He did it mostly by the methods which La
Follette condemned: by flattering and appeasing both the Left and the

Right, by making an immense commotion so that a great deal seemed to

be happening, and by preaching a simple "uplift" which reassured the
voters. As he said himself, there was nothing in his speeches "except a
certain sincerity and a kind of commonplace morality which put him
en rapport with the people."
The "commonplace morality" amused the more worldly members of his
Cabinet. "Knox," wrote John Hay, "says that the question of what is to
become of Roosevelt after 1908 is easily answered. He should be made a
bishop." Yet the "bishop" left behind him a smooth party machine which
had controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress for twelve
years and which had just been triumphantly re-elected for a new term.
Within two years of his departure the machine had stalled. The Republi-
cans had not only lost the House of Representatives, but they had begun
the quarrels which were to divide them, and to allow their enemies to
label them (unfairly but effectively) the party of mere wealth.

William Howard Taft, under whom this ruinous change began, was not
the choice of a venal or stupid convention. He was the choice of Theodore
Roosevelt. He had been Roosevelt's Secretary of War, and was hand-
picked as the man on the Square Deal. The genial,
best fitted to carry

intelligent, unassertive, rotund Tafta scholar in law and an experienced

administrator seemed just the man to soothe and please the public and
to win co-operation from Congress. But politics was not in his blood and
bones, as with Roosevelt. In spite of his learning in constitutional law he
knew nothing of the unwritten constitution or of the true powers of the
presidency. In 1916 he wrote:

The President can exercise no power which cannot be reasonably and

fairly traced to some power, or justly implied or in-
specific grant of
cluded within such express grant as necessary and proper to its exercise.
Such specific grant must be either in the Constitution or in an act of
Congress passed in pursuance thereof. There is no undefined residuum
of power which he can exercise because it seems to him to be in the
public interest.
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 57

If he had said this while serving Roosevelt he would not have become
President. The boisterous "T.R." would never have chosen as his heir a
man who spurned an "undefined residuum of power."
Taft suffered at once the fate of Presidents who treat Congress meekly.
The platform on which he was elected had promised a revision of the
tariff. For seven years Roosevelt had sidestepped this issue, lest it divide

the farm Republicans from the factory. But Taft bluntly asked in his
Inaugural Address for a new and lower set of duties which would merely
make up the difference between the cost of production at home and
abroad."* The House passed a tolerable bill and sent it to the Senate, where
the representatives of industry slaughtered it. Even Henry Cabot Lodge,
an expert in such matters, was surprised at what he called the "ruthless
selfishness" of the amendments. The Senate made 847 changes. The

Progressive Republicans of the Middle West, whom Roosevelt had kept

closely bound to the party, fought this tariff item by item in one of the
Senate's most venomous debates. Taft urged them on, and added his pro-
tests to theirs. Yet when they were beaten, he humbly signed the bill. The

split between the Progressives and the "Standpatters" had begun.** It

was soon made more bitter by the Ballinger incident.
Roosevelt's great drive for conservation had been made possible by the
zeal and skill of two men James R. Garfield, his Secretary of the Interior,
:

and Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the Forest Service. Roosevelt thought Gar-
field would remain in the Cabinet; but Richard Ballinger was appointed
in his place. Ballinger was more cautious than his predecessor and less
inclined to act without clear legal authority. The Progressives were soon
charging that Roosevelt's work was undone, and that the party was return-
ing to its old habit of giving away the national domain. The crisis came
when Pinchot and a young assistant charged Ballinger with letting the
Guggenheim interests appropriate public coal lands and power sites in
Alaska. The President asked for a Congressional investigation, which

* This
harmless-sounding phrase may justify any lengths of folly in tariff-making.
Professor Taussig (Tariff History of the United States, p. 364) comments: "In a
familiar passage of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith remarked that 'by means
of glasses, hot-beds, and hot walls very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and
very good wine can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which
at least equally good wine can be brought from foreign countries.' In the same
vein, it may be said that very good pineapples can be grown in Maine, if only a
duty be imposed sufficient to equalize cost of production between the growers in
Maine and those in more favored climes."
** This unfortunate bill was known as the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. Taft, who knew
better,was soon defending it as "the best tariff bill." Mr. Dooley commented: "Th'
Republican party has been thru to its promises. Look at th' free list if you don't
believe it. Practically ivrything nicessary to existence comes in free. Here it is.
Curling stones, teeth, sea moss, newspapers, nux vomica, Pulu, canary bird seed,
diwy-divvy, spunk, hog bristles, marshmallows, silk worm eggs, stilts, skeletons an*
leeches. Th' new tariff bill puts these familyar commodyties within th' reach iv all."
658 The Price of Union

found Ballinger guiltless. Pinchot was dismissed, and the Progressives raged.
So the party approached the Congressional elections of 1910 in a self-
destructive mood and only because the President could neither impose
his wishes nor explain his motives. Taft had wanted a lower tariff, which
would have satisfied the Westerners. And he was not opposed to con-
servation; in fact, he did much to carry forward Roosevelt's work. But he
allowed the extreme conservatives to claim him and to seem to speak for
him, and this offended powerful sections of the party. "Taft," said the
Progressive Senator Dolliver of Iowa, "is an amiable island entirely sur-
rounded by men who know exactly what they want."
In the election of 1910 the Republicans lost to the Democrats and the
"Standpatter" Republicans lost to the Progressives.* Thereafter, the Ad-
ministration was a small civil war against itself. In the new Congress the
Progressive Republicans held the balance of power. If they united with
Bryan's followers among the Democrats they could make a majority
against the conservative Republicans. It was just such a coalition in 1910
which had removed the Speaker from the Rules Committee of the House,
and stripped him of his power to appoint the Standing Committees and
their chairmen.** This was greeted as a Progressive gain; but in fact it
was a gain for disorder and inefficiency.
The Progressive balance of power, however, was often used wisely.
While Taft through his ineptitude was winning a reputation for extreme
reaction, the Congress was passing (and he was signing) a long series of
useful bills. The Interstate Commerce Commission was strengthened; a
postal savings bank and a parcel post were created publicity for campaign
;

expenditures was imposed by statute; the territories of New Mexico and

Arizona were admitted as the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states of the
Union; the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (permitting a
federal income tax), and the Seventeenth Amendment (providing that
Senators should be elected by the people, and no longer by the state legis-
latures) , were adopted by Congress. Both amendments were ratified by the
2
states in 1913.
Yet all this did the fumbling President no good. Instead of receiving
credit for the excellent laws, he quite unjustly got the reputation of being

opposed to them. And when he sought to repair the worst harm of the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff by making a reciprocity treaty with Canada, the
Progressive Republicans from the grain-growing states accused him of
selling the farmers to the trusts. Canadian food, they said, would destroy
the home market while American manufactures moved profitably into
Canada. With the help of the Southern Democrats the President pushed
* For won
example, in Kansas (a Republican state) the Progressives almost every
party contest for a nomination.
** The
power was given to a committee on committees.
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 659

his agreement through Congress, but there had been such insulting talk
during the debates that the Canadian Parliament rejected it. The only
result was to make deeper the division between the Eastern and Western

wings of Taft's party: the manufacturers and wage-earners on the one

hand, and the corn-and-wheat farmers on the other. This is the alliance
which Hanna and McKinley and Roosevelt had so skillfully nursed, the loss
of which must bring Republican defeat.

The
party was caught in the 1910-11 crisis [writes Professor Bink-
ley],without one of the specialists in group diplomacy such as Jefferson,
Jackson, Clay, Lincoln, McKinley, Hanna, or the Roosevelts. Taft had
a confessed distaste for party politics. Not one of the leaders just men-
tioned would have ignored the interests of the grain-growers, without
whom no party since the disappearance of the Federalists has remained
3
in power.

As a result of Taft's political folly, the National Republican Progressive

League was formed in January, 1911, at Senator La Toilette's house in

Washington, and the Senator was put forward as the Progressive candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination. The split within the party was
thus made official.

Theodore Roosevelt, meanwhile, had returned from hunting game in

Africa and making speeches in Europe. While traveling he had read
Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life, a book which recom-
mended a Hamiltonian centralization of power, not for the benefit of an
elite,but to give "democratic meaning and purpose" to the nation's life.
This was the "New Nationalism" which Roosevelt thenceforth preached,
and which lured some of the more adventurous men of Wall Street into
the Progressive camp. For according to the New Nationalism the great
trusts and corporations need not be outlawed; they could be made to serve
the emerging social and economic democracy. In his Autobiography
Roosevelt explained the difference between the old view and the new :

They [the advocates of the Sherman Act] tried to bolster up an

individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to
remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable
result of the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done by
the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying them and
restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of the
660 The Price of Union

nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and those who went into
it ... really represented a form of sincere rural toryism. . . .

On the other hand a few men recognized that corporations and com-
binations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. . Government must now interfere
. .

to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporations to the public wel-

fare, and to shackle cunning and fraud. . . .

Here was a program more friendly to big business than anything

preached by Bryan one of the "sincere rural tories." It could be made
acceptable to labor, and also to the Progressives (when combined with
the "commonplace morality" of which Roosevelt was master) But it made.

no appeal to President Taft, or to Senator Aldrich, or to "Uncle Joe"

Cannon. These men and their cronies were in charge of the Republican
machine. Roosevelt with his clairvoyance had found a unifying idea, with
which the party could win the next election. But the men who controlled
the party preferred defeat to the New Nationalism, and to its unpredict-
able inventor.
Shortly after his return from Europe, Roosevelt had said, "I stand for
the square deal. ... I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under
the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules
changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and
of reward for equally good service." "Changing the rules" was red revolu-
tion to Senator Aldrich and the Standpatters. And when Roosevelt had
handed the party leadership to Taft he had in fact handed it to the Stand-
patters.This knowledge probably did not improve his temper.
In any case, although he had promised repeatedly to stay out of politics,
Roosevelt was soon drawn into the leadership of the Progressives. In
February, 1912, he arranged to receive an open letter from seven Republi-
can governors, asking him to become a candidate for the presidential
nomination. The Progressives gladly deserted La Follette for the magic
of the Roosevelt name. Before the end of the month he announced his
candidacy, pledging himself to the New Nationalism and to such radical
plans as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall of judicial decisions.
He quickly proved that the mass of the Republican voters was behind him.
In the thirteen states which chose delegates to the convention at primary

elections, Roosevelt won 278 delegates and Taft 46. But the party bosses
and the local machines were with the President. They gave him most of
the delegates not chosen by the people. And they controlled the National
Convention, its chairman, and its major committees, and thus were able to
award almost all the disputed seats to Taft delegates. Seeing that Taft
was sure to be nominated, Roosevelt claimed that victory had been stolen
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 661

from him. He and his followers seceded from the convention. On August
5 they formed the Progressive Party, which at once nominated Roosevelt
for the presidency.
Describing the Progressive (or Bull Moose*) Convention William Allen
White wrote:

I have seen many a protest convention. As a boy I had watched the

Greenbackers. As a young man I had reported many a Populist con-
vention. Those agrarian movements too often appealed to the ne'er-do-
wells, the misfits farmers who had failed, lawyers and doctors who
were not orthodox, teachers who could not make the grade, and neurot-
ics full of hates. ... I knew that crowd well. But here was an-. . .

other crowd.
Here were the successful middle-class country-town citizens, the
farmer whose barn was painted, the well-paid railroad engineer, and
the country editor. Proletarian and plutocrat were absent, except
. . .

George Perkins, who was too conspicuous.** He and his satellites and
sycophants from Wall Street and lower Broadway, who had known
Roosevelt in Harvard, loved him and misunderstood him; but they had
4
their influence.

The master craftsman had collected a winning combination once again

only it had been backed by the national machine of a major party.

if

As it was, this helter-skelter party of middle-class enthusiasts from every

section of the country except the South did better than the regular ma-
chine and ensured the victory of the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Roose-
velt received a little more than 4,000,000 votes, Taft a little less than
3,500,000, and Wilson 6,296,574. In the electoral college Wilson had 435
votes, Roosevelt 88, and Taft 8.***
Many of the Progressives thought they had helped in the founding of a
new major party, and that the Republicans would now disappear like the
Federalists and the Whigs. When someone spoke thus hopefully to Roose-
velt, he was answered coldly: "I thought you were a better politician. The
fight is over. We are beaten. There is only one thing to do and that is to go
back to the Republican party. You can't hold a party like the Progressive
there are no loaves and fishes." What Roosevelt
5
party together . . .

understood instinctively was that in 1854 the Republican Party had been
created in (and by) the states, and had a proper foundation in local
organizations, and could therefore survive the defeat of 1856. But the

* When Roosevelt was a vice-presidential candidate in 1900 he told Mark Hanna

he felt "as strong as a bull moose." The phrase became his trade-mark ever after.
** Perkins had been a partner in the House of Morgan.
*** Utah and Vermont were faithful to Taft.
662 The Price of Union

Progressive Party was born at a national convention. It had no roots. It

could only live on victory. If the Progressives had won, they could have
taken over most of the local Republican machines; but since they lost
there was nothing to do but go back to the old party and wait to be for-
given.*

The history of Woodrow Wilson's nomination is an irony and a warning.

Although as a child Wilson had planned to become the American Glad-
stone and although he had studied law (presumably with an eye to
politics), he changed his mind in his middle twenties and decided to be a
scholar and teacher of government rather than a practitioner. In 1890 he
became professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton,
and in 1902 he was chosen president of the university. Because of his
struggles to make that privileged institution more democratic he won a
national reputation. He was also known as a severe critic of Congressional
government and an advocate of stronger powers for the President. His
politics during the Princeton years seemed to be those of a conservative
Southern Democrat. He opposed Bryan in 1896, and did nothing to help
him in 1900 or 1908. In fact he had written in 1907, "Would that we
could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan
once and for all into a cocked hat!" And in the summer of that year, in a
speech on "The Authors and Signers of the Declaration of Independence,"
he attacked government controls and defended the JefFersonian thesis
"that free men had a much more trustworthy capacity in taking care of
themselves than any government had ever shown or was ever likely to
show in taking care of them." 6
It is no wonder, therefore, that the conservatives of New York thought
Wilson might be the man to break Bryan's hold on the Democratic Party.
In 1906, when Roosevelt was "trust-busting" and talking about "male-
factors of great wealth," and when it was feared he would seek a third
term, George Harvey in an after-dinner speech proposed Wilson for

* Roosevelt's eldest
daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, explains in her remi-
niscences (Crowded Hours, p. 224) why the Progressive Party could not establish
itself: "It had a program, policies, ample financial backing, and a leader who in-
spired his followers. But it did not have the organization the plodding organiza-
tion in precinct, ward and county that is on the job in season and out, and that
seems to be essential to the existence of a political party. Without organization, no
party has a survival value." The Roosevelt revolt was a struggle between the con-
servative and progressive Republicans for control of the organization. And the con-
servatives remained in possession. They have not been ousted to this day, whereas
if Roosevelt had continued his fight within the party, instead of bolting, he would
doubtless soon have triumphed.
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 663

President. Harvey was editor of Harper's Weekly and friend of the great
men ofWall Street. He claims that in "discovering" Wilson he had the
backing of Thomas Fortune Ryan and August Belmont. But Roosevelt
refused another nomination, and the conservatives turned happily to Taft.
In 1909 and 1910, however, it seemed that Taft was doing so badly with
his first term that a Democrat might win in 1912. So the conservatives re-
newed their search for aman to displace Bryan. George Harvey an-
nounced, "We now expect to see Woodrow Wilson elected governor of the
state of New Jersey in 1910 and nominated for President in 1912 upon a
platform demanding tariff revision downward."
The politics of New
Jersey were as unseemly in 1910 as the politics of
New York had been in 1882, when Grover Cleveland was given his first
chance. In each case the state had been governed by a bi-partisan machine.
The bosses of the two parties were in secret alliance; they exchanged the
more valuable offices and divided spoils and patronage as they chose. This
is the most discouraging of all systems for the voter; but in New Jersey the
long corruption had at last bred a revolt. The time had clearly come for an
interlude of honesty. George Harvey explained this to ex-Senator Jim
Smith, the Democratic boss of New Jersey. Smith agreed, and undertook
to explain to the astonished delegates at the next state convention that

they would have to nominate Wilson, of whom many had never heard.
Smith described Wilson as "a Presbyterian priest," but admitted that only
such a man could be elected in that distasteful year of "reform."
Wilson was not only elected but he proved to have a natural political
genius and "to catch public opinion as by wireless." He broke the power
7

of Boss Smith, broke with George Harvey and his Wall Street friends,
broke with his own Jeffersonian notions of laissez-faire, forced through a
series of progressive laws, and emerged as the favorite of the Western,
Bryan wing of the party the very group which his discoverers had in-
tended him to defeat.
At the Democratic National Convention of 1912 it seemed that the
conservative Eastern Democrats and their allies were in a majority, and
would force the nomination of Champ Clark of Missouri. But Bryan
waged the greatest of his many convention fights. His language and his
audacity were so dramatic that he managed to get rank-and-file Demo-
crats from all over the country to telegraph their support. Slowly this took
effect on the assembled delegates. On the forty-sixth ballot Wilson won.
The platform denounced the tariff, denounced the existing currency and
banking laws, and promised strong measures in dealing with trusts and
monopolies. In his campaign Wilson made clear his conversion from
laissez-faire to a program of government control; but unlike Roosevelt he
did not plan to regulate monopolies and make them serve the public good;
he planned to abolish them, and then see that government enforced the
664 The Price of Union

rules of competition. This was the chief difference between Roosevelt's

"New Nationalism" and Wilson's "New Freedom."
"Essentially," writes Professor Hofstadter, "the New Freedom was an
attempt of the middle with agrarian and labor support, to arrest the
class,
exploitation of the community, the concentration of wealth, and the grow-
ing control of politics by insiders, and to restore, as far as possible, com-
petitive opportunities in business." And William Allen White (a delegate
8

at the "middle class, agrarian and labor" convention of the Progressives)

described the Roosevelt platform as follows:

The national income must be shifted so that the blessings of our

civilization should be more widely enjoyed than they were. To make
that shift, what Colonel Roosevelt called "predatory wealth" or "ag-
grandized capital" should have its claws pared, its greed checked, its
rapacity quenched so far as humanly possible. And the shift or redis-
tribution of national income should be achieved by using government
where necessary as an agency of human welfare. Lord, how we did like
that phrase, "using government as an agency of human welfare!" That
was the slogan, that was the Bull Moose platform boiled down to a
9
phrase.

In other words (and as usual in American politics) Roosevelt and Wil-

son were offering slight variations on the same theme to meet the same
shift in public opinion. Both the great leaders sensed that the vast middle
class (which was most of America) had moved slightly to the left to
about the position of the Populists in 1892. As recently as the days of
Cleveland and McKinley, most Americans would have agreed with John
Stuart Mill's statement in the Principles of Political Economy: "The great
majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than
the individuals interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to
be done, if left to themselves. . Laisser Faire, in short, should be the
. .

general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great
good, is a definite evil." And as recently as the days of Cleveland and Mc-
Kinley most Americans would have felt that the government should help
the private citizen to appropriate and exploit the national resources. Both
those opinions had changed. The majority now favored regulation and
conservation, and as a result so did the leaders of both parties.
The unconventional (and unfortunate) feature of 1912 was the split in
the Republican Party. The conservative wing controlled the machine but
only because Roosevelt had handed it to them by mistake when he backed
Taft in 1908. If Roosevelt had been patient, had been "regular" in 1912
(as he was in 1884, when he campaigned for Blaine) 3 he would have con-
trolled the party again by 1916. But when he bolted he ensured that for a

long time the party would be run by its extreme conservatives among
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 665

whom were those clumsy vulgarians who nominated Warren Harding in

1920.*

Wilson's following resembled the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson,

except that it was not so strong in the West and Middle West, but stronger
in the South. The South had of course become solidly Democratic since
Jackson's day, as a result of Reconstruction, whereas the prosperous farm-
ers of the grain-growing states ( at least as far west as the first tier beyond
the Mississippi) tended to vote Republican. Bryan's West (the "Great
West") was large, but relatively empty of votes. In the East the chief
Democratic strength was still the Irish and the newer immigrants in the
industrial areas. Because the party received virtually all the votes in the
South (and most of them in the new Southwest that is, Oklahoma, New i

Mexico, and Arizona) it did far better in the popular vote than in the
,

electoral college. If Wilson, a minority President, was to be re-elected in

1916, when the Republican Party would be itself again, he would need
an astonishing advance in popularity. In fact, he made an advance of
almost three million votes.
In character Wilson resembled Jefferson rather than Jackson. His well-
trained but rigid intellect did not fit him for rough-and-tumble politics,
and his cool aloof nature made it impossible for him to mingle with the
people, whom he loved in the abstract and served well. Jefferson, who
never appeared in public, who preferred to deal even with his friends by
letter, could nevertheless build and lead a party; but it was a small and

simple affair compared to the party which Wilson inherited. In Jefferson's

day most people were content to be guided unobtrusively by the gentry;
but by Wilson's time the very word would have been a vote-loser. "High-
minded and cold-blooded," was the description of Wilson by one member
of his Cabinet. And the gregarious William Allen White called him "a
cold fish," adding that "the hand he gave me to shake felt like a ten-cent
pickled mackerel in brown paper irresponsive and lifeless." Yet White
danced on and cheered when Wilson won the nomi-
his reporter's table
nation. 10
Wilson's conception of the presidency was clear and unconventional. He
believed that a modern state could only discharge its immense and increas-
ing responsibilities with strong Executive leadership. He believed that the
American Constitution, especially after it had been stretched to bursting-
point by Lincoln, permitted a strong President to take every power that
* Even after his bolt Roosevelt would
probably have prevented this last disaster
if he had not died in 1919.
666 The Price of Union

was needed. He believed that he himself was such a President, and he

planned to make himself master of the government. His success and his
failure were both beyond precedent.
In his Inaugural Address Wilson made clear that he intended a change
in the relations between the government and the world of business.

No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to
use the Democratic party [he said]. It seeks to use it to interpret a change
in its own plans and point of view. . We have been refreshed by a
. .

new insight into our own life. have made up our minds to
. . . We
square every process of our national life again with the standards we so
proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts.
[Then he listed some of the things that ought to be altered.] A tariff
which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world
. .and makes the government a facile instrument in the hands of
.

private interests; a banking and currency system based upon the neces-
sity of the government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly
adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial sys-
tem which 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; a body of agricultural
activities never yet served as it should be through the instru-
. . ,

mentality of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities

of credit best suited to its practical needs. . . .

The new President meant these words exactly. And he meant what he
had been preaching about Executive leadership. He delivered his messages
in person before the two houses of Congress something which had not
been done since the days of John Adams. He spent hours in the President's
room at the Capitol, pressing for action on his administration bills. He
learned rapidly from his Postmaster General the uses of the vast federal
patronage, and abandoned his early plans for making appointments with-
out consulting the Congressmen concerned. And when all else failed, at
exactly the right moment he appealed to the public over the head of Con-
gress.
On May 26, 1913, when the Senate showed signs of mutilating his tariff

bill, Wilson gave this statement to the press :

think that the public ought to know the extraordinary exertions be-
I

ing made by
the lobby in Washington to gain recognition for certain
alterations in the tariff bill. Washington has seldom seen so numerous,
so industrious or so insidious a lobby. . . . There is every evidence that
money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby and to create an
appearance of a pressure of public opinion. ... It is of serious interest
to the country that the people at large should have no lobby and be
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 667

voiceless in these matters, while great bodies of astute men seek to create
an artificial opinion and to overcome the interests of the public for their
. . .
private profit.

The public responded, and the Senate passed the Underwood Tariff,
reducing average duties to about twenty-seven per cent, greatly increasing
the free list, and providing for a tax on incomes of three thousand dollars
and over. The tax ranged from one to six per cent.
While the tariff was still under debate Wilson presented his plan for
banking and currency reform. "The great monopoly in this country is the
money monopoly," he had said in 1911. "So long as that exists our old
variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the
question." The Federal Reserve Act, which was promptly passed, divided
the country into twelve districts, each with a Federal Reserve Bank. These
were bankers' banks, to receive deposits, make rediscounts, and hold re-
serves for member banks. All national banks were compelled to become
members and state banks were permitted. A
Federal Reserve Board super-
vised the regional banks. The board
consisted of the Secretary of the
Treasury, the Comptroller of the Currency, and five others nominated by
the President. The twelve Reserve Banks were authorized to issue to the
member banks Federal Reserve notes secured by short-term commercial
paper and backed by a forty per cent gold reserve.
In 1908 Andrew Carnegie had called the American banking system "the
worst in the civilized world."The new Federal Reserve System was an im-
provement wherever it prevailed, bringing greater elasticity of credit, and
a far wider distribution of banking facilities. But the federal government
could not compel membership in its system, and too many little banks still
went their own strange ways. Between 1921 and the great collapse in 1933,
there was never a year with less than 367 bank failures, and the largest
number was 4004. Fourteen thousand eight hundred and twenty banks
failed during the thirteen years.
Everything that Wilson asked from Congress he received, usually on his
own terms, during these first magic years. We have already discussed the
Clayton Anti-Trust Act and the act creating the Federal Trade Commis-
sion. Congress also passed a Federal Farm Loan Act, a Workmen's Com-

pensation Act for the federal civil service, a Rural Credits Act, an act
providing for an eight-hour day on interstate railways, an act providing
millions of dollars for farm demonstration work in rural counties and all
under the direct, steady, forceful guidance of the Executive.
Perhaps the President's most surprising victory was in the matter of the
Panama Canal tolls. By treaty with England the Canal was "to be open
to British and American vessels on equal terms." But in 1912 Congress
passed a law exempting coastwise vessels of the United States from pay-
668 The Price of Union

ments. England protested, and when Wilson found he could win English
co-operation with his Mexican policy in return for the repeal of this law
he went before Congress and said frankly "I ask this of you in support of
:

the foreign policy of this Administration. I shall not know how to deal
with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence, if you
do not grant it to me." This is the type of
request which Congress enjoys
refusing. To
humiliate a President and complicate a foreign policy at the
same time, seems almost irresistible. Yet the repeal was passed within two
and a half months of Wilson's request.*

In the midst of the President's domestic triumphs the war began in Europe
and history entered a new phase. Even in the United States there were
many who knew that this was a fateful moment and who were "concerned
with what they believed to be a deliberate intention by Germany to wage
war at a moment so favorable that it might ensure German hegemony not
only in Europe but in the world. . .
. Far removed from the scene of con-
flict, the English-speaking peoples oversea believed that the triumph of
imperial Germany would have involved a fatal and irretrievable step on
a road that led to human bondage." 11 It was of course only the Dominions
among "the English-speaking peoples oversea" who believed this at once;
yet a surprising number of American leaders (including the President)
suspected that it might be true.
Colonel House, Wilson's closest friend and adviser, wrote him on August
22, 1914, that if Germany should win "we will have to abandon the path
which you are blazing as a standard for future generations . . and
.

build military machine of vast proportions." And the Colonel said in

up a
his diary that Wilson agreed. In July, 1915, he wrote again to the Presi-
dent: "I feel we are taking a terrible gamble ourselves in permitting our
safety to rest almost wholly upon the success of the Allies." And two
months later Wilson told House that "he had never been sure that we

ought not to take part in the conflict and, if it seemed evident that Ger-
many and her militaristic ideas were to win, the obligation upon us was
12
greater than ever." As we have seen, there had been support for such
viewsamong students of foreign relations ever since the eighteen-nineties,
when men like Henry Adams and John Hay began saying that America's
safety depended on an Atlantic community strong enough to keep Ger-
many from dominating France and England.
No matter what Wilson felt, however, there was no possibility at first
of his taking the American people into war. Aggressive isolationism, which
* The Canal had not been
completed, so no tolls had yet been charged.
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 669

had been diminishing, was still an important force; and throughout the
Middle West not only the German-Americans but the Scandinavian-
Americans denied that the Central Powers were a menace. Nevertheless,
in view of his opinions on Germany and his fears for America, it is odd that
Wilson issued the proclamation of August, 1914, urging the people to be
neutral in thought as well as in deed. Such a plea could only make sense
if there was no moral difference between the combatants and if America's

national interest was not involved. If Wilson had educated his public from
the beginning in simple geopolitics, he might not have had to present the
war later in language so emotional and moralistic that it returned to haunt
him. Most Americans thought that they finally entered the war for the
purpose of improving mankind, rather than of saving themselves from the
disaster of German victory. They were disillusioned, therefore, when man-
kind remained obdurately unimproved, and they did not even know they
had avoided a disaster.
In the midst of Wilson's vacillations on war and peace came the election
of 1916. Wilson won many new labor votes, and many new votes from the
prosperous farmers; but the two wings of the Republican Party had re-
united and the election was so close that the results were in doubt for
days. In the electoral college Wilson had 277 votes and Charles Evans
Hughes, the Republican, had 254. The Senate was held safely; but the
House was lost. With the help of nine independent members, however, the
House could still be controlled by the Democrats. Yet the Republican
candidates for Congress had received several hundred thousand more
votes than the Democratic candidates a warning for 1918.
If Wilson had been as wary as Franklin Roosevelt, when the war came
he would have drawn the Republicans into the closest non-partisan re-
sponsibility, so that they could not make politics out of the peace. Un-
happily he did just the reverse. Throughout the seventeen months of
America's participation in the war Wilson had received complete support
from both parties in Congress; nevertheless, a fortnight before the mid-
term elections of 1918 he issued the most unwise appeal in American
history.

My Fellow Countrymen [he said]. ... If you have approved of my

leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokes-
man in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express
yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic ma-
jority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives. . .
My
.

power to administer the great trust assigned to me by the Constitution

would be seriously impaired should your judgment be adverse. ... I
mean only that the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a
sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation should give its
undivided support to the Government under a unified leadership, and
670 The Price of Union

that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership. ... If the

control of the House and the Senate should be taken away from the
party now in power an opposing majority could assume control of legis-
lation and oblige all action to be taken amid contest and obstruc-
tion. . . .

They certainly could. And they certainly did. But no one has ever ex-
plained how the man who had been such a brilliant politician in 1913
could have made this blunder five years later. What had become ol his
power "to catch public opinion as by wireless"? The 1916 election sug-
gests that Wilson would probably have lost the House in any case; but
after this appeal he lost both the House and the Senate. The public did
not want the war to belong to one party. And not only did Wilson lose,
but the new Republican majorities felt they had been insulted and their
patriotism impugned. They returned to Washington ready for the maxi-
mum of "contest and obstruction." And finally, because of this foolish
plea the mid-term elections (which might otherwise have reflected local
issues) could be interpreted as a direct rejection of Wilson. The Re-
publicans were not slow to take this advantage. When Wilson sailed for
France on December 13, to attend the Peace Conference, Theodore
Roosevelt announced to "our allies, our enemies, and Mr. Wilson himself
that "Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American
people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated
by them. Mr. Wilson and his fourteen points and his four supplementary
points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any
shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American
people."
The good days were over for the President. He had lost his political
touch and his enemies were gathering to destroy him. His appointments
to the peace delegation were another sign of his declining tact: Robert
Lansing, the Secretary of State, an expert on foreign relations with no
political weight or knowledge; General Tasker Bliss, Chief of Staff, a good
soldier and a wise man with no political weight or knowledge; Henry
White, an experienced diplomat whom Theodore Roosevelt described as
"the most useful man my presidency and
in the diplomatic service during
for many White was vaguely a Republican, but he too had
years before."
no political weight or knowledge. These men would have been useful as
expert advisers; but their appointment to the delegation ensured a political
fight over the treaty. The last chance to undo the harm of his pre-election
message was to name at least two leading Republicans for the peace dele-
gation one from the Senate and one a national figure like Elihu Root or
:

ex-President Taft. When Wilson missed this chance, the treaty, and the
League of Nations, and the promises which Wilson had made in America's
name, became a matter of party politics. The Senators who were piqued at
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I Gil

Wilson's autocratic manners, and the few who were genuine isolationists,
and the many who merely wished to weaken a Democratic Administration,
combined to confuse the public. They roused the Italian-Americans
against the treaty because of Fiume, and the Irish-Americans because the
Commonwealth of Nations had five votes in the Assembly of the League,
and the German-Americans because the Fatherland was treated harshly,
and the anti-German-Americans because it was treated well. And even
more dangerous, they roused the Presbyterian stubbornness in Wilson, who
refused to accept moderate amendments to his handiwork. From October,
1918, when he made his appeal for a Democratic Congress, until Septem-
ber, 1919, when he suffered a stroke while defending the treaty on a
nation-wide speaking tour, Woodrow Wilson gave a long demonstration
of how a President of the United States should not behave. He seemed to
have forgotten that he was just a Democratic politician, and not a prophet.
Peremptory when he should have been persuasive, messianic when he
should have been offering worldly bargains, angry when he should have
been reconciling his foes, he met total defeat although there was never a
moment when a majority of the people and three quarters of the Senate
would not have accepted a League with minor amendments. 13
Before this sudden decline in his intelligence and thus in his power,
Wilson had ruled as a constitutional dictator. He not only took the full
"war power" of the President as developed by Lincoln; but he added im-
mense further authority which he persuaded Congress to delegate to him.
Whereas Lincoln preferred to meet his emergencies by lonely Executive
action, Wilson preferred to ask Congress for specific laws to stretch his
authority. In this way he gained a control over the nation's economy which
would have caused a second civil war if Lincoln had attempted it. Lindsay
Rogers described Wilson as a combination of King, Prime Minister in
control of legislation, Commander-in-Chief, party leader, economic dic-
14
tator, and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The Lever Act of
August, 1917, is an example of how Congress gave him his head.

Under the terms of this statute the President could regulate the
. . .

importation, manufacture, storage, mining and distribution of any

necessaries ; could requisition foods, fuels, and other supplies could . . .

purchase, store, and sell certain foods; could fix a reasonable and guar-
anteed price for wheat . could take over and operate factories,
. .

mines, packing houses, pipe lines . could fix the price of coal and
. .

15
coke and regulate their production, sale, shipment, distribution. . . .
672 The Price of Union

While still on the eve of war, after breaking diplomatic relations with Ger-
many but before the declaration of hostilities, Wilson came hard against
that formidable institution, the Senate filibuster. Even here he won a
He had asked the Congress for permission to arm
partial victory. Amer-
ican merchant vessels. On March 1, 1917, the House passed the bill by
403 votes to 14; but the session was to end on March 4, so a small group
of Senators decided to talk the bill todeath, preventing it from coming
to a vote. On the last
morning of the session seventy-five Senators an-
nounced that they favored the bill and would pass it if they were allowed
to vote. This was more than three fourths of the Senate membership yet ;

the filibuster continued to the end.

The President armed the merchantmen anyway. But he also issued the
following statement to the public:

In the immediate presence of a crisis fraught with more subtle and

far-reaching possibilities of national danger than any the Government
has known within the whole history of its international relations, the
Congress has been unable to act either to safeguard the country or to
vindicate the elementary rights of its citizens. . The Senate of the
. .

United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act
when its majority is ready for action. A
little group of wilful men, repre-

senting no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government
of the United States helpless and contemptible. . . .

The only remedy is that the rules of the Senate shall be so altered that
it can act. The country can be relied on to draw the moral. I believe

that the Senate can be relied on to supply the means of action and save
the country from disaster.

This brusque statement may explain some of the troubles of the Presi-
dent over the Versailles Treaty. The Senators have been a touchy and
unforgiving race (although highly privileged) ever since the days when
they suspected George Washington of seeking to override them. And of all
their privileges the one they have liked best (and with good reason) has
been the privilege of talking as much as they chose. Throughout Amer-
ican history this undemocratic veto, in a chamber which was undemo-
cratic by constitution, has been the last resort of threatened minorities. In
1 when the Senate had been organized for less than six months, one of
789,
itsmembers wrote "I gave my opinion in plain language that the con-
:

fidence of the people was departing from us, owing to our unreasonable
delays. The design of the Virginians and of the South Carolina gentlemen
xxxiii. Some Modern Instances: I 673
1
was to talk away the time, so that we could not get the bill passed."
And in 1841, when Henry Clay sought to impose a check on Senate
debates for the benefit of the Whig majority, Thomas Hart Benton said
that he and his friends in the minority would resort to "any possible ex-
17
tremity" to resist such action. The same view was expressed by Senator
La Follette on March 8, 1917, in answer to Wilson's demand for a change
in the rules :

... I shall stand while I am a member of this body against any

cloture that denies free and unlimited debate. Sir, the moment that the
majority imposes the restriction contained in the impending rule, that
moment you will have dealt a blow to liberty, you will have broken
down one of the greatest weapons against wrong and oppression that
the members of this body possess.

La Follette was an advanced liberal and a devoted servant of the people.

Such words from such a source show how rooted in American practice is
the fear of unchecked majorities. On this occasion, however, because of
the dangers of impending war, the Senate did accept a partial cloture
rule, which has been in force ever since. Under the rule sixteen Senators
can insist that there be presented for an aye-and-nay vote the question:
"Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate (upon any pending measure)
shallbe brought to a close?" And if there is a quorum, and if the question
is decided in the affirmative by two thirds of those voting, "then the
measure shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other busi-
ness until disposed of." And thereafter no Senator shall be entitled to
speak for more than one hour on the pending measure.
This is not a very strict cloture, since one third of the Senators present
can keep it from being invoked, and since in any case ninety-six hours,
or sixteen legislative days, may still be given to the debate. Yet if the
Senate were to accept cloture by a majority vote it would lose one of its
chief functions. It would no longer be a bulwark against the tyranny of
mere numbers. And in America it is not the powerful or the rich alone
who fear such tyranny. When Goolidge's Vice- President, Charles G.
Dawes, attacked the dilatory Senate rules and demanded a change, the
national convention of the American Federation of Labor unanimously
condemned this "campaign to abolish free speech in the United States
Senate . . . the Dawes scheme which does not come from the people but
emanates from the secret chambers of the predatory interests." The state-
ment continued: "For severalmonths the Vice-President of the United
States has conducted an agitation for the purpose of abolishing free speech
in the United States Senate, the only forum in the world where cloture
does not exist and where members can prevent the passage of reactionary
18
legislation. . . . It is a vicious idea, a vicious purpose. . . ,"
674 The Price of Union

One important and harmful precedent from the Civil War was rejected
by Woodrow Wilson. The Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the
War had been a minor nuisance to Lincoln for three and a half years and
a major nuisance to several generals whom it pestered with ignorant ques-
tions.* Several attempts were made by Congressmen to set up a similar
committee in the First World War. Wilson protested strongly and the plan
was dropped. 19 Then in January, 1918, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon
announced that government had broken down through inefficiency and
that a war Cabinet composed of "three distinguished citizens of demon-
strated ability" should be established. Theodore Roosevelt was to be one
of the "distinguished citizens," and the Cabinet was to take over the direc-
tion of the war. Since Roosevelt and Wilson disliked each other and un-
derestimated each other's abilities, and since neither was of a humble
nature, this might have meant German victory. But Wilson boldly asked
Congress to give to the President himself all the powers which had been
suggested for the war Cabinet. Congress obeyed, and on May 30, 1918,
authorized Wilson to reorganize the government and the administrative
agencies as he saw fit. Thenceforth, until his lamentable appeal for a
Democratic victory, his powers seemed absolute. Yet the suddenness with
which they fell from him when he began to lose public confidence proved
once more that the true strength of the office lies in its influence, not its
legal authority.
Throughout the summer of 1918 Wilson acted as King, Prime Minister,
Commander-in-Chief, and Foreign Secretary rolled into one. Yet in De-
cember of 1918 Theodore Roosevelt warned the world that Wilson still
the President, and with his emergency powers unrepealed had "ho au-
thority whatever." No wonder the world was confused.
* This was a
joint committee of the two houses formed in December, 1861, and
dissolved in June, 1865. Most of the members were Republican radicals who be-
came steadily more critical of Lincoln as the war progressed.
 XXXIV

Some Modern Instances: II

'LISOLATIONIST SENTIMENT [in 1919-20] was a product of the fight to pre-

vent American participation in world affairs/' wrote Alan Cranston; "it
was not the cause of it." 1 This is largely true. The old isolationism had
been weakening ever since the imperial excitements of the nineties. Most
people in 1919 probably wanted a Wilsonian policy; but they were tired
of Wilson and his prim didactic ways. Foolishly, they let themselves be
trapped by tawdry politicians into accepting an unworthy deed. Then
they sought to justify the deed by overpersuading themselves that the
United States could (and should) go her own way in safety and in honor.
Specious arguments could be found for the safety; but the honor was more
difficult. Only on the most material grounds could a nation so fortunate
and so rich refuse to associate with her neighbors in the hope of peace.
The most material grounds were therefore adopted, and the result was not
attractive, either morally or physically. The era was personified in Presi-
dent Harding simple and warmhearted, stupid and sensual, ignorant as a
pre-Columbian savage. And the era ended in the depression of 1929.
There is no need to linger over this horrid interlude, except to note that
as usual a period of strong Presidents relapsed into a period of Congres-
sional rule. Harding was slipped into the White House by a little clique of
Senators who were tired of living under the shadow of a great man. The
cynicism of the choice astonished the New York Times into putting its
editorial comment on the front page. "The nomination of Harding,"
wrote the staid and soft-spoken Times, "for whose counterpart we must go
back to Franklin Pierce if we would seek a President who measures down
to his political stature, is the fine and perfect flower of the cowardice and
imbecility of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management
of the Republican convention."
The cabal, in any case, got what it wanted a very weak President who
:

believed that "the party is bigger than any man," and who would never
give orders. Even from their partisan point of view they
were wrong to
want such a President. Eventhere had been no thievery, and no return
if

to the old Republican policy of giving away the nation's resources, they
were wrong (politically wrong) in trying to turn back the presidential
office to the days of Pierce or Buchanan. Professor Binkley comments:
675
676 The Price of Union

"So blind had Republican leadership become to the historical transforma-

tion of the presidency in the twentieth century, the fact that it had become
as never before the focal point of a major party's strength, that they could
not see how their emasculation of the great office was impairing if not
even dooming their party." 2 That is the lesson of the days of Republican
power after the First World War. Harding (except that he brought in his
train the maximum of dishonor) was scarcely more inadequate than

Coolidge, who brought rigid New England virtue or than Mr. Hoover,
who brought not only virtue but high intelligence and world-wide experi-
ence. They all had a conception of the President's office which did not
fit the times, so they were all
preparing their party to descend into the
minority role to which it has condemned itself for twenty years.

Harding and Coolidge, in their provincialism, may have thought Amer-

ica would never again be in danger, and that government could therefore
be weakened with impunity. But Mr. Hoover had seen beyond Ohio and
Vermont. And he became President in 1929, the black year. He cannot
have indulged such illusions. Yet he too behaved as if the presidency was
what Benjamin Harrison had thought it, or James Madison, and as if the
twentieth century had not seen the rise of the positive state. He thus did
honor to a great American tradition; but he neglected another tradition,
to the effect that while strong government is a nuisance it is sometimes a
necessity, and that the powers of the presidency must therefore be left
ambiguous so that they can be raised or lowered at will. There was noth-
ing ambiguous about the abdication in the twenties.
In 1932, toward the end of his unhappy term, while accepting a re-
nomination which did him no good, Mr. Hoover said "It does not follow,
:

because our difficulties are stupendous, because there are some souls
timorous enough to doubt the validity and effectiveness of our ideals and
our system, that we must turn to a State-controlled or State-directed
social or economic system in order to cure our troubles. That is not liberal-

ism; it is tyranny." And two years later, when his ideals and hopes for
America had become the subject of unworthy gibes, he repeated his faith.
"While I can make no claim for having introduced the term 'rugged
"
individualism,' he wrote, "I should be proud to have invented it. It has
been used by American leaders for over a half-century in eulogy of those
God-fearing men and women of honesty whose stamina and character
and fearless assertion of rights led them to make their own way in life. It
is they who have borne the burdens and given leadership in their com-

munities."*
Obviously, with such views, Mr. Hoover could not do much to mitigate

* A recent volume of speeches suggests that Mr. Hoover has slightly modified
his faith in "rugged individualism"; yet he would probably still wish to be known
as a strong defender of the old view of government.
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 677

the depression by federal paternalism, by heavy taxation and redistribu-

tion of incomes. He believed that savings and self-denial were the road to
security, and that if the state (instead of the individuals) did the saving
and the denying, the end would be worse than the beginning. With the
possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt and Taf t and Wilson, this would
have been the view of every previous President. But it was no longer the
view of the people, and in this the people were probably closer than Mr,
Hoover to the realities of modern life. During the forty years since
Benjamin Harrison had entered the White House, manufacture, distribu-
tion, and finance had organized themselves on a continent-wide scale, with
few concessions to laissez-faire. Labor had to some extent done the same,
and intended at any cost to finish the job. The problems of production
had largely been solved, by means which led to the problems of mass un-
employment. Local government had entered the public-utilities field, ac-
customing people to think of government as something which can provide
amenities and not merely policemen. The First World War had brought
government into every family's life through the draft, and into the life of
almost every business through the economic controls.
The draft, furthermore, had raised strange questions by showing that the
federal and state governments, instead of being sacred circles of power re-
volving in isolation, could co-operate to impose their will on the citizen.
State officers did most of the unpopular work for the federal government.
The draft was administered by 192,000 people working under state super-
visors and 429 people working under the federal provost marshal. If in

spite of state rights and all the theories of federalism a man's freedom of
choice could be taken from him by the two "separated" powers working in
concert, perhaps (in a depression) his lost security might be similarly re-
stored?
In 1929 the depression struck. "Everything nailed down is comin*
loose," as the Angel Gabriel said in Green Pastures. The people were in no
mood for lectures on individual responsibility such as Van Buren admin-
istered during the depression of 1837, or Grover Cleveland when he vetoed
a bill for sending seed-grain to drought victims in the Southwest.* The
people had been shown the vast powers of their government in 1918, so
they looked to Washington for help.
Mr. Hoover, in spite of his views, did more to fight the depression than
many Presidents would have approved. Federal aid was given to drought
victims and the farmer was helped to buy food for his cattle. Wheat was
distributed through the Red Cross; but Hoover was opposed to the dis-
tribution of money. In January, 1932, the Reconstruction Finance Cor-
* "I do not believe that the power and duty of the federal government ought to
be extended to the relief of individual suffering," wrote Cleveland in rejecting this
modest appropriation of $10,000 in 1887. "Federal aid in such cases . .weakens
.

the sturdiness of our national character."

678 The Price of Union

poration was created, with two billion dollars to lend to banks, insurance
companies, building and loan associations, railroads, agricultural credit
groups, and the like. This was a workable plan for bolstering the nation's
credit and thus creating employment; but since the Administration still
refused to provide money for the starving poor, the R.F.G. was named
"the millionaires' dole." Finally, in the summer of 1932, the government
undertook to lend $1,800,000,000 to states and and public
cities for relief
works. At the principle of federal responsibility to the hopelessly %poor
last
was accepted. The road was open for the New Deal.

Franklin Roosevelt's theory of government and of the presidential office

was the reverse of Herbert Hoover's. "History proves that dictatorships do
not grow out of strong and successful governments," said Roosevelt, "but
out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a
government strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their
democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient. Therefore,
the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough
to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well
3
enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government."
From the moment of Roosevelt's unprecedented flight to the Chicago Con-
vention to accept his nomination, there was to be no question whether a
President has the necessary powers to fight a depression.
Six weeks before his nomination Roosevelt had spoken at Oglethorpe
University, in Georgia. "The country needs and, unless I mistake its
temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is
common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and
try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want
will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are
within easy reach." This willingness to "try something" fitted the mood
of the country. So did the willingness to admit grave faults in American
life; for the masses were bored with hearing that fundamentally all was
well. "While my elders were talking to me about the perfection of Amer-
ica," said Franklin Roosevelt, "I did not know then of the lack of oppor-
tunity, the lack of education, the lack of many of the essential needs of
civilization which existed among millions of our people wht> lived not
alone in the slums of the great cities and in the forgotten corners of rural
America, but even under the very noses of those who had the advantages
power of Government in those days." And again, "If we do not
4
and the
allow a Democratic government to do the things which need to be done,
and if we hand down to our children a deteriorated nation, their legacy
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 679

will not be a legacy of abundance or even a legacy of poverty amidst

plenty, but a legacy of poverty amidst poverty." 5
The people enjoyed President Roosevelt's restlessness under delay
especially judicial delay. A federal system lives by delay, as we have seen,
but it also lives by the power to break restraints when the public im-
patience rises. This was the point of Justice Holmes's quotation from a
Senator: "What the boys like about [Theodore] Roosevelt is that he
doesn't care a damn for the law." And the boys liked the same quality in
the new Roosevelt when he let it be seen, which was never by accident.
He could wait imperturbably until his followers were maddened by the
inaction; or he could express the plain man's conviction that the law in
all its slow obscurity is an ass.

a civil war [he said] to gain recognition of the constitutional

It cost

power of the Congress to legislate for the territories. It cost twenty years
of taxation on those least able to pay to recognize the constitutional
power of the states to pass minimum wage laws for their protection.
. . . We
know it takes time to adjust government to the needs of
society. But modern history proves that reforms too long delayed or
denied have jeopardized peace, undermined democracy and swept away
civil and religious liberties. Yes, time more than ever before is vital in

statesmanship and in government, in all three branches of it.

We will no longer be permitted to sacrifice each generation in turn
while the law catches up with life. 6

"Many books will be written about Franklin Roosevelt," said his Secre-
tary of Labor, Frances Perkins, "but no two will give the same picture.
. . He was the most complicated
. human
being I The
ever knew." 7
prophecy, which was made in 1946, has already been fulfilled. Recent
books on Franklin Roosevelt seem to have been written about at least four
different men, none of whom were on good terms with each other. We do
not need to plunge into this discussion of the unknown, or into the ques-
tion whether the measures of President Roosevelt were well conceived but ;

important to see the place of the New Deal in American history and
it is

to understand its effect upon the form of government.

We
can now see that the "Roosevelt revolution" was no revolution
[wrote Professor Cornmager in 1 945], but rather the culmination of half
a century of historical development, and that Roosevelt himself, though
indubitably a leader, was an instrument of the popular will rather than
a creator of, or a dictator to, that will. Indeed, the two major issues of
the Roosevelt administration the domestic issue of the extension of
government control for democratic purposes, and the international
issue of the role of America as a world power emerged in the 1890's,
and a longer perspective will see the half century from the 1890's to the
8
present as a historical unit.
680 The Price of Union

Many people found the Roosevelt years shocking because they were so
unlike the tranquil, doomed period from Harding to Hoover. If the New
Deal had followed at once on Wilson's New Freedom the continuity
would have been clear. As we have seen, Roosevelt's floor manager at the
national convention which gave him his first nomination was an ex-
Populist from Nebraska who asserted that the platform of 1892 "was the
real beginning of the Roosevelt campaign of 1932."
With a Wilsonian view of the powers of the presidency, with a Jeffer-
sonian pliability of mind and taste for the politically devious, with a zest
for responsibility which recalled his fifth cousin, Theodore, and above all
with that complication of character which Frances Perkins remarked and
behind which he could rest himself from the loud, demanding world, the
new President was ready to meet the people's cry for action and for the
positive state. Again the emergency had been matched with the man. And
again the party system and the convention system do not seem to deserve
much credit. Luck seems to have played the major part as usual luck
and Mr. James Farley, who showed himself during the year before the
nomination to be the most tireless and ingratiating promoter of a candi-
date America had yet seen. But one may doubt whether Mr. Farley knew
what he was promoting.
Although Roosevelt had served Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, and had received his party's nomination for the vice-presidency,
and had been governor of New York State for two popular and successful
terms, few people in 1932 seemed to suspect his resolution, his tireless
strength, or his political magic. Perhaps the pain of the long fight against
infantile paralysis had put the unknown iron in his nature ; but the joyful
talent for politics must always have been there. Nevertheless, until the
Republicans began to see what he was doing to them towards the end of
the campaign in 1932, most people appeared to agree with Mr. Walter
Lippmann, who wrote that Roosevelt was "no tribune of the people . . .

no enemy of entrenched privilege ... a pleasant man who, without any

important qualification for the office, would very much like to be Presi-
dent." 9 A few years later the majority would have laughed at such conde-
scension, and the minority would have said it was far too kind.
By that time the nation's natural resources were being conserved and
rehabilitated on a scale which Theodore Roosevelt would have envied; the
federal government was committed not only to temporary work-relief for
the unemployed, and to the promotion and protection of trade unionism,
but to a permanent reform and social-security program public works for
:

"pump-priming" the economy, old-age pensions, public health, maxi-

mum hours and minimum wages, rural rehabilitation, and the future
promise of federal aid to the burdened school systems of the states. By
that time also, bank deposits had been insured the sales of securities had
;
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 681

been regulated; the dollar had been devalued and the country taken off
the gold standard; the farmers had been paid from the federal Treasury
not to grow crops which could not be marketed at satisfactory prices the ;

Tennessee Valley Authority had been created to develop the resources of

an entire watershed of forty thousand square miles,* to control floods, to
promote river navigation, to sell electric power in competition with private
business, and to discover whether the federal government, by altering the
economic climate, could lift a dejected region into ambition and hope,
could foster local private enterprise in business and on the farm, and could
thus build economic democracy. All things seemed to be changing during
these years except the depression, which sometimes dwindled but never
disappeared. Yet it had lost its terrors for the poor, since the government
offered everybody a job.
Whether these laws and plans and promises were well or badly chosen,
well or badly carried out, one thing seems sure the New Deal shifted the
:

balance of American government. It brought almost as sharp a concen-

tration of power from the state governments to the federal, and within
the federal government from the Congress to the President as did the
Civil War. The change had long been preparing and maturing. Big gov-
ernment developed in America almost fifty years after big business, and for
once it seems fair to say post hoc ergo pro pier hoc. Only if business (and
labor unions, and farm blocs) grow little, will government become simple
again, and decentralized, and unconcerned with economic problems.
Franklin Roosevelt did the inevitable in allowing power to concentrate;
yet after twelve years of deluded mooning it felt like a revolution.
"Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines!"
was Roosevelt's tribute to the post-war era during his 1936 campaign;
"Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair!" And he
added, "Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of govern-
ment with its doctrine that the Government is best which is most indiffer-
ent." The latter statement was just campaign talk; for the most striking
proof of the need for the New Deal was that the Republican platform in
1936 promised virtually the same aids and benefits to the same discon-
tented groups only the Republicans would do it with less waste, less
politics, fewer bureaucrats, less money, and less centralization. The people
seemed to feel this might prove difficult, for they gave Roosevelt twenty-
seven and a half million votes and the Republican candidate, Mr. Landon,
a little more than sixteen and a half.**
The unlucky Mr. Landon in 1936, and Wendell Willkie in 1940, and
Mr. Dewey in 1944, were blamed by some of their partisans (after losing
the elections) for not attacking the Roosevelt policies hard enough. They
* The area of England is 50,870 square miles.
** Electoral votes for
Roosevelt, 523; for Landon, 8.
682 The Price of Union

were called "me-too" candidates, because they had concentrated on saying

how much better, and with how many fewer inconveniences, they could
carry America toward the social-service state. But they were right and
they were in the main tradition of American politics to offer a slightly
different version of the New Deal and to insist that the New Deal would
be more agreeable if entrusted to them. If they had done anything else
they would have taken their party, not merely to defeat, but to ruin. Mr.
Hoover (if the party had wanted a policy all its own) would gladly have
attacked the New Deal root and branch; but after 1932 the leaders were
careful not to nominate him.
The people had turned their backs on the old order, after the calamities
of 1929 to 1933, and politicians who wanted to be elected must do the
same. The depression had put an end to the America in which a majority
could be persuaded that government was the greatest of evils. A privileged
minority could still afford that conviction, and those who did afford it

naturally blamed the New Deal, feeling themselves "borne darkly, fearfully
afar." They were right in so feeling. The America of their schoolbooks
was gone. Professor Corwin, commenting on the New Deal, concludes:
"And that these developments spell a diminished importance for the con-
ception of Constitutional liberty which we have heretofore stressed, which
10
is that of liberty against government, there can be no reasonable doubt."

This was the conception on which the Republic was founded, and its de-
feat might well be mourned.

Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great, is
passed away.

The pity was that the grief so often turned to hatred, a less dignified
memorial.
Mr. Roosevelt had not created the demand for the paternal state. The
proverbially wicked English had done that, by inventing the Industrial
Revolution. Yet one can understand the irritation of the Republicans.
Their party had kept a long lease on power (56 out of the previous 72
years) partly by giving the public domain to homesteaders, railway and
mining promoters, men, sheepherders, and lumber barons. Then
cattle
came the strange new doctrine of conservation, also invented by a Re-
publican, and also easy to translate into votes. Unhappily, however, in-
stead of standing by the Square Deal and moving to new strength in a
new world, the party under Warren Harding allowed a few thieves to
revert to the old policy and to give the navy's oil reserves to millionaires.
This started the voters thinking that the Grand Old Party might be a little
out of date; so when Mr. Hoover faced the depression with talk of
"rugged individualism" they were discouraged, and turned to the Demo-
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 683

crats. And at once the Democrats found something to give away even
more appealing than the public domain; namely, the federal taxes. As
these poured out to the fanners for not growing crops or for helping
in demonstrations of better farming and of land repair; to the unem-
ployed for building roads, bridges, post offices, housing projects; to the
young men in the Conservation Corps for preserving and restoring forests
and farm lands and national parks; to the South for the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority with its attendant cheap power, cheap fertilizer, and cheap
river transport the old Jacksonian party rose from the grave, the farmer-
labor alliance of Southern and Western agrarians with Eastern industrial
workers. And the Democrats had enough taxes left over for pensions to
the aged, for milk to the school children, and even for some honest slum
clearance for the Negroes.
The whole of this vast redistribution of income was directed by one
of the greatest opportunists and political strategists ever to reach the
White House. And worst of all (from the Republican point of view)
much was desirable or in any case was clearly and
of the redistribution
ardently desired by a large majority. Under the circumstances, Landon's
sixteen and a half million votes were impressive. And Willkie's twenty-
two million three hundred thousand votes in 1940 were a triumph for
the man, the party system, and the instinct of the American people not
to divide on class lines.* The sudden coming of the New Deal, with its

largesse for the poor instead of the rich, might have split the country
in terms of income and killed the American system of politics. But al-

though recent studies prove this has happened in a very small way, it has
not happened enough to matter. 11 It can be reversed the next time fate
gives the Republicans a master of "group diplomacy" a Lincoln, a Mc-
Kinley, a Roosevelt. It would never have happened in the first place if
Theodore Roosevelt had stayed with the party in 1912, or if he had lived
to fight for the nomination in 1920.** He would have picked up where
Woodrow Wilson stopped insisting, of course, that he was reversing the
New Freedom while in fact he completed it and anticipated the New
Deal by more than a decade.

How did the New

Deal fit itself into the Constitution and escape de-
struction at the hands of the Supreme Court? The Court began, inevi-
tably, by applying the restrictive view of federal powers which it had
* In 1940 President Roosevelt received about 230,000
27,243,468 votes less
than in 1936.
** He died in 1919 at the age of sixty.
684 The Price of Union

elaborated since the eighteen-nineties. Under the old theory of federal-

ism, the national government and the states were seen as rivals who
should be encouraged to frustrate each other. A chief duty of the Court
was to see that neither of the rivals was weakened, so that the frustration
might be as great as possible. And under the theory of the Separation of
Powers, the Legislature and the Executive were also seen as rivals who
should be helped to thwart each other. And liberty was defined chiefly as
liberty against government. This was all good American doctrine until
the people began to ask for economic help from Washington.
So in 1935 the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Re-
covery Act unconstitutional on the ground that it delegated too many
legislative powers to the President.* And in 1936 the first Agricultural
Adjustment Administration was declared unconstitutional on the ground
that the regulation of agriculture belonged to the states, and that the
payment of cash benefits to farmers was in fact coercive, since it at-
tempted to do indirectly what would not be lawful if it were done di-
12
rectly. And in the same year the Guffey Coal Act which regulated
wages, hours, working conditions, and prices in the coal industry was
found unconstitutional because the production of coal was not interstate
commerce and because too many legislative powers were delegated by
the act. 18
This was pleasing to many Republicans, for they had a brief hope the
whole New Deal might prove impossible just as the Democrats in 1857
hoped that the Dred Scott decision might abolish the Republican Party.
Already, however, there was a rift within the Court. The movement to
alter the interpretations to fit political reality had begun. In the case of
the AAA, Justice Stone wrote an angry dissent for himself and two others,
which included these statements :

Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed
to have capacity to govern. Congress and the courts both unhappily
may falter or be mistaken in the performance of their constitutional
duty. But interpretation of our great charter of government which pro-
ceeds on any assumption that the responsibility for the preservation
of our institutions is the exclusive concern of any one of the three
branches of government, or that it alone can save them from destruction,
is far more likely in the long run "to obliterate the constituent members"

of "an indestructible union of indestructible states" than the frank

recognition that language, even of a constitution, may mean what it
says: that the power to tax and spend includes the power to relieve a
nationwide economic maladjustment by conditional gifts of money.

* The act
provided for the formulation of codes of fair competition in each
industry,which would have the effect of laws when signed by the President. The
Court declared the act null in the case of U.S. v. Schechter, 295 U.S. 495.
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 685

If the Court had been unanimous against paternalism, and if the peo-
ple had rejected Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, the New Deal might have
been postponed. But since the Court was usually divided, and since the
people gave the President eleven million more votes than Mr. Landon,
there was no doubt that the obstructive justices must give way. The
President, however, would not wait for the capitulation. Cheered by his
immense victory he undertook the task which Jefferson had twice at-
tempted vainly. He tried to conquer the Court once and for all. In
February, 1937, he proposed a bill providing that for every justice of the
Supreme Court who failed to retire at seventy an additional justice should
be appointed, up to a total of fifteen. The country was not pleased. There
were few favors which Franklin Roosevelt would have been refused at
that moment; but he had chosen one of them. The proposal seemed
flippant and spiteful. After months of argument the Senate rejected the
bill, which had meanwhile become irrelevant, for the Supreme Court had

quietly and sensibly changed its own mind. Two justices who had usually
voted against the New Deal measures now usually voted for them. The
Constitution had been unofficially amended.
Later, because of deaths and resignations. President Roosevelt was to
appoint seven out of the nine members of the Supreme Court; but when
the great change came he had appointed none.
In April, 1937, the self-corrected Court found the National Labor Re-
lations Act constitutional, thus giving the federal government powers
14
over industry and over the relations between employer and employee.
And in May the Court accepted the federal old-age annuities plan. This
meant national and state co-operation in social services. Jealous federalism
had at last given way to co-operative federalism which we first saw in the
1917 draft law. As the Supreme Court had always foreseen, when the
federal and state governments began working together the central power
was strengthened. Similarly, federal control over industry and labor re-
lations meant that the Executive was strengthened. The President must
thenceforth have more to say about legislation, and must be allowed to
ask for greater delegations of power. What had previously been tolerated
during the emergency of war was now to become normal practice in
peace. And the "fourth branch" of government was to proliferate the
commissions and other regulatory agencies wherein legislative, executive,
and judicial powers were mingled inextricably.*
Summing up this change Professor Corwin writes :

The Court has discarded the idea that the laissez-faire, non-inter-
ventionist conception of governmental function offers a feasible ap-
* Franklin Roosevelt had nothing to add to the war powers developed by
Wilson, which were well-nigh absolute. It was the peace powers which Roosevelt
extended.
 '

686 The Price of Union

proach to the problem of adapting the Constitution to the needs of the

Twentieth Century. Rendered into the idiom of American constitutional
law, this means that the National Government is entitled to employ
any and all of its powers to forward any and all of the objectives of
good government. This fundamental point being established, however,
the principal doctrines of American constitutional theory .have be-
. .

come largely otiose and superfluous. . The Court appears at the

. .

present moment to be bent upon minimizing its own role in favor of

the political forces of the country and such wisdom, or unwisdom, as
these can muster to the task. ... So we emerge more and more upon a
scene dominated by the political process and political forces or more
concretely by electoral majorities, however contrived, however led;
a scene in which either we save ourselves through said electoral process,
in which as citizens and voters we all participate, or we go unsaved. 15

This sounds like majority rule on the English model, with a strong
Executive who is finally responsible only to the voters. Yet President
Truman's troubles with Congress in 1949 suggest that the American Gov-
ernment has not yet become so simple.
We have traced the failure of many efforts to stem the double con-
centration of power, first within Washington, and second within the
presidential office: the failure of states' rights, the failure of strict con-
stitutional construction, the failure of Congressional government, the fail-
ure of senatorial oligarchies, and the failure of the Speaker of the House.
Many Americans applauded each of the efforts; but history was on the
other side form of big business, big finance, big wars, big
history in the
depressions,and Manifest Destiny (which is a polite phrase for a big
head). Until the New Deal, one formal defense remained: the Supreme
Court. In 1937 even the Court half-abdicated; yet nothing fearful hap-
pened. Twelve years later, although neither federalism nor the separation
of powers nor the once-magic "due process" could prevent government
from making rules to guide much of the economy, an embattled minority
in Congress could still prevent the President from imposing his majority
plans.
How was this done, when every constitutional barrier had been weak-
ened? Only by the unwritten barrier, the party system, which the Fathers
feared as the enemy of balanced powers, but which has outlived all their
balances and is the last refuge of federal compromise. For the parties
are still true federations, with the maximum of home rule. Eastern Demo-
crats must still move more conservatively than they like if they want to
win national elections with the help of Southern votes. Eastern Repub-
licans must still pretend a liberalism which they may not practice if

they want to win with the help of Northwestern votes. The party ties
are so weak that whole blocs will join the Opposition whenever they feel
xxxiv. Some Modern Instances: II 687

themselves badly treated. Sometimes they do this publicly; but just as

often (and just as effectively) they do it in the Congressional committees.
Yet when the nation knows it is in danger they stop obstructing and give
strength to the President. This is indeed a flexible system, suitable to a very
large nation whose people want their government vigorous when neces-
sary but weak when possible. The American tends always to remember
that

The strongest poison ever known

Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
 XXXV
The Parties and the Union

UURING Grover Cleveland's first term in the White House, James Sryce
published his remarkable book, The American Commonwealth. Survey-
ing the party system from the English point of view, and with quiet sur-
prise, he made the classic statement of the difference between the
Republicans and the Democrats.

What are their principles [he wrote], their distinctive tenets, their
tendencies? Which of them is for free trade, for civil-service reform,
for a spirited foreign policy . . .for changes in the currency, for any
other of the twenty issues which one hears discussed in the country as
seriously involving its welfare? This is what a European is always ask-
ing of intelligent Republicans and intelligent Democrats. He is always
asking because he never gets an answer. The replies leave him in deeper
perplexity. After some months the truth begins to dawn on him. Neither
party has anything definite to say on these issues; neither party has
any principles, any distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. Both claim
to have tendencies. Both have certainly war cries, organizations, in-
terests, enlisted in their support. But those interests are in the main
the interests of getting or keeping the patronage of the government.
Tenets and policies, points of political doctrine and points of political
practice, have all but vanished. They have not been thrown away but
have been stripped away by Time and the progress of events, fulfilling
some policies, blotting out others. All has been lost, except office or the
1
hope of it.

This is a true description of the parties as they were, and as they still
are; but Bryce's explanation of how they came to be that way is mislead-
ing. He assumes that if the American parties were healthy they would
resemble the parties of Great Britain. They would have "principles" and
"tenets," and would thus be forced to take sides on all "the twenty issues
that one hears discussed." And he assumes that "Time and the progress
of events" have deprived the parties of their principles, leaving them
with nothing but "office or the hope of it." But this is too short a view;
Lord Bryce was confused by the brief history of the Republican Party,
which possessed principles in 1856 and none in 1886. He thought this
688
xxxv. The Parties and the Union 689

was a sign of failure and decay; but in fact it was a sign of health: 1856
had been the exception and the danger; 1886 was the reassuring norm.
The purpose the important and healthy purpose of an American
party is to be exactly what Lord Bryce describes, and by implication de-
plores. The party is intended to be an organization for "getting or keeping
the patronage of government." Instead of seeking "principles," or "dis-
tinctive tenets," which can only divide a federal union, the party is
intended to seek bargains between the regions, thfc classes, and the other
interest groups. It is intended to bring men and women of all beliefs,

occupations, sections, -racial backgrounds, into a combination for the

pursuit of power. The combination is too various to possess firm con-
victions. The members may have nothing in common except a desire
for office. Unless driven by a forceful President they tend to do as little
as possible. They tend to provide some small favor for each noisy group,
and to call that a policy. They tend to ignore any issue that rouses deep
passion. And by so doing they strengthen the Union.
The decisive American experience the warning against politics based
on principles took place between 1850 and 1860. A subtle and healing
compromise had been effected in 1850; yet year by year, whether through
fate or through human folly, it slowly disintegrated. The best men watched
in anguish but could not halt the ruin. In the name of principles and
distinctive tenets the Whig Party was ground to bits. A new party was
born which met Lord Bryce's requirements. The Republicans knew ex-
actly where they stood on the major issue and would not give an inch.
Finally, the same "principles" broke the Democratic Party, and the Union
of 1789 perished.
The lesson which America learned was useful: in a large federal na-
tion, when a problem is passionately felt, and is discussed in terms of
morals, each party may divide within itself, against itself. And if the
parties divide, the nation may divide for the parties, with their enjoyable
;

pursuit of power, are a unifying influence. Wise men, therefore, may

seek to dodge such problems as long as possible. And the easiest way
to dodge them is for both parties to take both sides. This is normal Amer-
ican practice, whether the issue turns section against section, like "cheap
money"; or town against country, like Prohibition; or class against class
like the use of injunctions in labor disputes. It is a sign of health when
the Democrats choose a "sound-money" candidate for the presidency
and a "cheap-money" platform, as they did in 1868; or when they choose
a "wet" Eastern candidate for the presidency and a "dry" Western can-
didate for the vice-presidency, as they did in 1924. It is a sign of health
when the Republicans choose a "sound-money" platform but cheerfully
repudiate it throughout the "cheap-money" states, as they did in 1868.
A federal nation is safe so
long as the parties are undogmatic and
690 The Price of Union

contain members with many contradictory views. But when the people
begin to divide according to reason, with all the voters in one party who
believe one way, the federal structure is strained. saw this in 1896, We
during the last great fight for "free silver." To be sure, there remained
some "gold Democrats" and some "silver Republicans" in 1896; yet the
campaign produced the sharpest alignment on principle since the Civil
War. And the fierce sectional passions racked the nation. Luckily, the
silver issue soon settled itself, and removed itself from politics, so the

parties could relapse into their saving illogicality.*

The faults of such irrational parties are obvious. Brains and energy
are lavished, not on the search for truth, but on the search for bargains,
for concessions which will soothe well-organized minorities, for excuses
to justify delay and denial. Unofficially, and in spite of any constitution,
successful federal politics will tend to follow Calhoun's rule of concurrent

majorities. Every interest which is strong enough to make trouble must

usually be satisfied before anything can be done. This means great caution
in attempting new policies, so that a whole ungainly continent may keep
in step. Obstruction, evasion, well-nigh intolerable slowness these are
the costs of America's federal union. And the endless bartering of minor
favors which we saw at its silliest in President Arthur's Congress is

also part of the price. And so the absence of a clear purpose whenever
is

the President is weak or self-effacing, since the sum of sectional and

not equal to the national interest, and the exchange of
class interests is
favors between blocs or pressure groups does not make a policy.
Yet no matter how high one puts the price of federal union, it is small
compared to the price which other continents have paid for disunion,
and for the little national states in which parties of principle can live
(or more often die) for their clearly defined causes. And the price is
small compared to what America paid for her own years of disunion.
The United States, of course, may some day attain such uniformity (or
have it thrust upon her) that she will abandon her federal structure;
but until that happens she will be governed by concurrent majorities, by
vetoes and filibusters, by parties which take both sides of every dangerous

* Vice-President Garner said in 1938: "This talk about dividing the country
into two political camps one progressive and the other conservative is all so
much stuff. . Each of the two parties is in a sense a coalition. Any party to
. .

serve the country must be a party of all sorts of views." To be sure, the people
who talk most about dividing the country into logical parties "one progressive
and one conservative" would regard Mr. Garner's distaste for their ideas as an
endorsement. Yet few men have seen so much of American politics. When he
retired in 1941, at the end of his second term as Vice- President, he had served at
Washington, in elective office, for one quarter of the entire life of the Republic.
He reviewed his length of service vividly when he said: "The cost of government
the year I went to Washington was $486,439,407. Any appropriation item that
small now is merely interim." (Cp. Garner of Texas, by Bascom Timmons, pp. 236
and 288.)
xxxv. The Parties and the Union 691

question, which are held together by the amusements and rewards of

office-seeking, and which can only win an election by bringing many in-
compatible groups to accept a token triumph in the name of unity, instead
of demanding their full "rights" at the cost of a fight.
The world today might do worse than study the curious methods by
which such assuagements are effected.

THE END
THE CONSTITUTION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
 The Constitution

PREAMBLE their respective numbers, which shall be

determined by adding to the whole num-
WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, ber of free persons, including those
in order to form a more perfect union, bound to service for a term of years,
establish justice, insure domestic tran- and excluding Indians not taxed, three
quillity,provide for the common de- fifths of allother persons. 1 The actual
fense, promote the general welfare, and enumeration shall be made within three
secure the blessings of liberty to our- years after the first meeting of the Con-
selves and our posterity, do ordain and gress of the United States, and within
establish this Constitution for the United every subsequent term of ten years, in
States of America. such manner as they shall by law direct.
The number of Representatives shall
not exceed one for every thirty thou-
Article I sand, but each state shall have at least
one representative; and until such
Legislative Department enumeration shall be made, the state
of New Hampshire shall be entitled to
SECTION 1. CONGRESS IN GENERAL choose three; Massachusetts, eight;
Rhode Island and Providence Planta-
All legislative powers herein granted
shall be vested in a Congress of the tions, one; Connecticut, five; New York,
United States, which shall consist of a six; NewJersey, four; Pennsylvania,
eight; Delaware, one; Maryland, six;
Senate and House of Representatives.
Virginia, ten; North Carolina, five;
South Carolina, five and Georgia, three.
;

SECTION 2. d. Filling vacancies. When vacancies

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES happen in the representation from any
State, the Executive authority thereof
a. Election and term of members. The shall issue writs of election to fill such
House of Representatives shall be corn-
vacancies.
posed of members chosen every second e. Officers; impeachment. The House
year by the people of the several States,
and the electors in each State shall have
of Representatives shall choose their
the qualifications requisite for electors Speaker and other officers; and shall
have the sole power of impeachment.
of the most numerous branch of the
State Legislature.
SECTION 3. THE SENATE
b. Qualifications of members. No per-
son shall be a Representative who shall a. Number and election of members.
not have attained to the age of twenty- The Senate of the United States shall
five years, and been seven years a citi- be composed of two Senators from each
2
zen of the United States, and who shall state, chosen by the legislature thereof,
not, when elected, be an inhabitant of for six years, and each Senator shall
that State in which he shall be chosen. have one vote.
c. Apportionment of representatives b. Classification. Immediately after
and of direct taxes. Representatives and they shall be assembled in consequence
direct taxes shall be apportioned among Changed by Amendment XIV.
the several States which may be in- ^his method of election has been changed by
cluded within this Union, according to Amendment XVII.
695
696 The Constitution

of the first election, they shall be divided tives shall be prescribed in each State
as equally as may be into three classes. by the Legislature thereof but the Con-
;

The seats of the Senators of the first gress may at any time by law make or
class shall be vacated at the expiration alter such regulations, except as to the
of the second year, of the second class places of choosing Senators.
at the expiration of the fourth year, and b. Meeting of Congress. The Con-
of the third class at the expiration of gress shall assemble at least once in
the sixth year, so that one third may be every year, and such meeting shall be
chosen every second year; and if vacan- on the first Monday in December, un-
cies happen by resignation, or otherwise, less they shall by law appoint a different
3
during the recess of the legislature of day.
any State, the Executive thereof may
make temporary appointments until the SECTION 5. RULES OF PROCEDURE
next meeting of the Legislature, which
shall then fill such vacancies.
a.Organization. Each house shall be
the judge of the elections, returns and
c. Qualifications of members. No per-
son shall be a Senator who shall not qualifications of its own members, and a
have attained to the age of thirty years, majority of each shall constitute a quo-
and been nine years a citizen of the
rum to do business; but a smaller num-
ber may adjourn from day to day, and
United States, and who shall not, when
elected, be an inhabitant of that State
may be authorized to compel the at-
tendance of absent members, in such
for which he shall be chosen.
d. President of Senate. The Vice manner, and under such penalties, as
each house may provide.
President of the United States shall be
b. Rules of proceedings. Each house
President of the Senate, but shall have
no vote, unless they be equally divided. may determine the rules of its proceed-
e. Other officers* The Senate shall ings, punish its members for disorderly
choose their own officers, and also a behavior, and, with the concurrence of
President pro tempore, in the absence
two thirds, expel a member.
c. Journal. Each house shall keep a
of the Vice President, or when he shall
exercise the office of President of the journal of its proceedings, and from
time to time publish the same, excepting
United States.
such parts as may in their judgment
/. Trial of impeachment. The Senate
shall have the sole power to try all im- require secrecy; and the yeas and nays
of the members of either house on any
peachments. When sitting for that pur-
question shall, at the desire of one fifth
pose, they shall be on oath or affirma- of those present, be entered on the jour-
tion. When the President of the United
nal.
States is tried, the Chief Justice shall
d. Adjournment. Neither house, dur-
preside; and no person shall be con-
victed without the concurrence of two ing the session of Congress, shall, with-
out the consent of the other, adjourn
thirds of the members present.
for more than three days, nor to any
g. Judgment in case of conviction.
other place than that in which the two
Judgment in cases of impeachment shall houses shall be sitting.
not extend further than to removal from
office,and disqualification to hold and
SECTION 6. COMPENSATION,
enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit
under the United States; but the party PRIVILEGES, AND RESTRICTIONS
convicted shall nevertheless be liable a. Pay and privileges of members. The
and subject to indictment, trial, judg- Senators and Representatives shall re-
ment and punishment, according to law. ceive a compensation for their services,
to be ascertained by law, and paid out
SECTION 4. HOW SENATORS AND of the Treasury of the United States.
REPRESENTATIVES SHALL BE They shall in all cases except treason,
CHOSEN AND WHEN THEY felony and breach of the peace, be privi-
ARE TO MEET leged from arrest during their attend-
ance at the session of their respective
a. Method of holding elections. The houses, and in going to and returning
times, places and manner of holding 3 The time of
meeting was changed 'by Amend-
elections for Senators and Representa- ment XX.
The Constitution 697
from the same; and for any speech or before the same shall take effect, shall
debate in either house, they shall not be approved by him, or being disap-
be questioned in any other place. proved by him, shall be repassed by two
b. Holding other offices prohibited. thirds of the Senate and House of Rep-
No Senator or Representative shall, dur- resentatives, according to the rules and
ing the time for which he was elected, limitations prescribed in the case of a
be appointed to any civil office under bill.
the authority of the United States which
shall have been created, or the emolu- SECTION 8. POWERS GRANTED
ments whereof shall have been increased TO CONGRESS
during such time and no person holding
;
The Congress shall have power
any office under the United States shall a. To lay and collect taxes,
be a member of either house during his duties,
imposts, and excises, to pay the debts
continuance in office.
and provide for the common defence
SECTION 7. MODE OF PASSING and general welfare of the United
LAWS States; but all duties, imposts and ex-
cisesshall be uniform throughout the
a. Revenue All bills for raising
bills. United States;
revenue shall originate in the House of b. To borrow money on the credit of
Representatives; but the Senate may the United States;
propose or concur with amendments as c. Toregulate commerce with for-
on other bills. eign nations, and among the several
b. How bills become laws. Every bill
States, and with the Indian tribes;
which shall have passed the House of d. To establish an uniform rule of
Representatives and the Senate shall, naturalization, and uniform laws on the
before it become a law, be presented subject of bankruptcies throughout the
to the President of the United States; United States;
if he approve he shall sign it, but if not
e. To coin money, regulate the value
he shall return it, with his objections to
thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix
that house in which it shall have origi- the standard of weights and measures;
nated, who shall enter the objections at /. To provide for the punishment of
large on their journal, and proceed to counterfeiting the securities and current
reconsider it. If after such reconsidera- coin of the United States;
tion two thirds of that house shall agree
g. To establish post offices and post
to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together
roads ;
with the objections, to the other house,
h. To promote the progress of science
by which it shall likewise be reconsid- and useful arts by securing for limited
ered, and if approved by two thirds of times to authors and inventors the ex-
that house, it shall become a law. But
clusive right to their respective writings
in all such cases the votes of both houses
and discoveries;
shallbe determined by yeas and nays,
f. To constitute tribunals inferior to
and the names of the persons voting for
the Supreme Court;
and against the bill shall be entered on
the journal of each house respectively. j. To define and punish piracies and
felonies committed on the high seas and
If any bill shall not be returned by the
offences against the law of nations;
President within ten days (Sundays ex-
have been pre- k. To declare war, grant letters of
cepted) after it shall
sented to him, the same shall be a law, marque and reprisal, and make rules
in like manner as if he had signed it, concerning captures on land and water;
unless the Congress by their adjourn- /. To raise and support armies, but
ment prevent its return, in which case no appropriation of money to that use
it shall not be a law.
shall be for a longer term than two
c. Approval or disapproval by the years;
President. Every order, resolution, or m. To provide and maintain a navy;
vote to which the concurrence of the n. To make rules for the government
Senate and House of Representatives and regulation of the land and naval
may be necessary (except on a question forces;
of adjournment) shall be presented to o. To provide for calling forth the
the President of the United States; and militia to execute the laws of the Union,
698 The Constitution

suppress insurrections, and repel inva- g. No money shall be drawn from

sions; the Treasury, but in consequence of
p. To provide for organizing, arming appropriations made by law; and a reg-
and disciplining the militia, and for gov- ular statement and account of the re-
erning such part of them as may be ceipts and expenditures of all public
employed in the service of the United money shall be published from time to
States, reserving to the States respec- time.
tively the appointment of the officers, h. No title of nobility shall be granted
and the authority of training the militia by the United States: and no person
according to the discipline prescribed by holding any office of profit or trust
Congress; under them, shall, without the consent
q. Toexercise exclusive legislation in of the Congress, accept of any present,
all cases whatsoever, over such district emolument, office, or title, of any kind
(not exceeding ten miles square) as may, whatever, from any king, prince, or for-
by cession of particular States, and the eign state.
acceptance of Congress, become the seat SECTION POWERS DENIED TO
10.
of the government of the United States,
and to exercise like authority over all THE STATES
places purchased by the consent of the a. No State shall enter into any treaty,
legislature of the State, in which the alliance, or confederation; grant letters
same shall be, for the erection of forts, of marque and reprisal; coin money;
magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and emit bills of credit; make any thing but
other needful buildings; and
gold and silver coin a tender in pay-
r. To make all laws which shall be
ment of debts; pass any bill of attainder;
necessary and proper for carrying into ex post facto law, or law impairing the
execution the foregoing powers, and all
obligation of contracts, or grant any
other powers vested by this Constitution title of nobility.
in the government of the United States, b. No State shall, without the con-
or in any department or officer thereof. sent of the Congress, lay any imposts or
SECTION 9. POWERS DENIED TO duties on imports or exports, except
what may be absolutely necessary for
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT executing its inspection laws; and the
a. The migration or importation of net produce of all duties and imposts,
such persons as any of the States now laid by any State on imports or exports,
existing shall think proper to admit, shall be for the use of the treasury of
shall not be prohibited by the Congress the United States; and all such laws
prior to the year one thousand eight shall be subject to the revision and con-
hundred and eight, but a tax or duty trol of the Congress.
may be imposed on such importation, c. No State shall, without the con-
not exceeding ten dollars for each per- sent of Congress, lay any duty of ton-
son. nage, keep troops, or ships of war in
b. The privilege of the writ of habeas time of peace, enter into any agreement
corpus shall not be suspended, unless or compact with another State, or with
when in cases of rebellion or invasion a foreign power, or engage in war, un-
the public safety may
require it. less actually invaded, or in such immi-
c. No bill attainder or ex post
of nent danger as will not admit of delay.
facto law shall be passed.
d. No capitation, or other direct, tax
Article II
shall be laid, unless in proportion to the
census or enumeration herein before di- Executive Department
rected to be taken.
e. No tax or duty shall be laid on SECTION 1.
articles exported from any State. PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT
/. Nopreference shall be given by
any regulation of commerce or revenue a. Term of office. The executive
to the ports of one State over those of power shallbe vested in a President
another: nor shall vessels bound to, or of the United States of America. He
from, one State be obliged to enter, shall hold his office during the term of
clear, or pay duties in another. four years, and together with the Vice
The Constitution 699
President, chosen for the same term, be be the same throughout the United
elected as follows: States.
b. Electors. Each State shall
appoint, d. Qualifications of the President. No
in such manner as the legislature thereof
person except a natural born citizen, or
may direct, a number of electors, equal a citizen of the United States, at the
to the whole number of Senators and time of the adoption of this Constitu-
Representatives to which the State may tion, shall be eligible to the office of
be entitled in the Congress; but no Sen- President; neither shall any person be
ator or Representative, or person hold- eligible to that office who shall not have
ing an office of trust or profit under attained to the age of
thirty-five years,
the United States, shall be appointed an and been fourteen years a resident within
elector. the United States.
Method ofelecting President and e. Vacancy. In case of the removal
Vice President. The electors shall meet of the President from office or of his
in their respective States, and vote by
death, resignation, or inability to dis-
ballot for two persons, of whom one at charge the powers and duties of the said
least shall not be an inhabitant of the office, the same shall devolve on the
same State with themselves. And they Vice President, and the Congress may
shall make a list of all the persons voted by law provide for the case of removal,
for, and of the number of votes for each ; death, resignation, or inability, both of
which list they shall sign and certify, the President and Vice President, declar-
and transmit sealed to the seat of gov- ing what officer shall then act as Presi-
ernment of the United States, directed dent, and such officer shall act accord-
to the President of the Senate. The ingly, until the disability be removed,
President of the Senate shall, in the or a President shall be elected.
presence of the Senate and House of /. The President's salary. The Presi-
Representatives, open all the certificates, dent shall, at stated times, receive for
and the votes shall then be counted. his services, a compensation, which shall
The person having the greatest number neither be increased nor diminished dur-
of votes shall be the President, if such ing the period for which he shall have
number be a majority of the whole num- been elected, and he shall not receive
ber of electors appointed; and if there within that period any other emolument
be more than one who have such major- from the United States, or any of them.
ity, and have an equal number of votes, g. Oath of Office. Before he enter on
then the House of Representatives shall the execution of his office, he shall take
immediately choose by ballot one of the following oath or affirmation: "I
them for President; and if no person do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I
have a majority, then from the five will faithfully execute the office of Presi-
highest on the list the said house shall dent of the United States, and will to
in like manner choose the President. the best of my ability, preserve, protect
But in choosing the President the votes and defend the Constitution of the
shall be taken by States, the represen- United States."
tation from each State having one vote;
a quorum for this purpose shall consist SECTION 2. POWERS OF
of a member or members from two THE PRESIDENT
thirds of the States, and a majority of
all the States shall be necessary to a
a. Military powers; reprieves and
choice. In every case, after the choice pardons. The President shall be com-
of the President, the person having the
mander in chief of the army and navy
of the United States, and of the militia
greatest number of votes of the electors
of the several States, when called into
shall be the Vice President. But if there
the actual service of the United States ;*
should remain two or more who have
he may require the opinion, in writing,
equal votes, the Senate shall choose of the principal officer in each of the
from them by ballot the Vice President. 4
executive departments, upon any sub-
c. Time of elections. The Congress
ject relating to the duties of their re-
may determine the time of choosing the
spective offices, and he shall have power
electors, and the day on which they
to grant reprieves and pardons for of-
shall give their votes; which day shall
fences against the United States, except
4
Changed by Amendment XII. in cases of impeachment.
700 The Constitution

b. Treaties; appointments. He shall Congress may from time to time ordain

have power, by and with the advice and and establish. The judges, both of the
consent of the Senate, to make treaties, Supreme and inferior courts, shall hold
provided two thirds of the Senators their offices during good behavior, and
present concur; and he shall nominate, shall, at stated times, receive for their
and by and with the advice and consent services, a compensation, which shall
of the Senate, shall appoint ambassa- not be diminished during their continu-
dors, other public ministers and consuls, ance in office.
judges of the Supreme Court, and all
other officers of the United States, whose SECTION 2. JURISDICTION OF THE
appointments are not herein otherwise FEDERAL COURTS *

provided for, and which shall be estab-

lished by law; but the Congress may by a. Federal courts in general. The judi-
law vest the appointment of such in- cial power shall extend to all cases, in
ferior officers as they think proper, in the law and equity, arising under this Con-
President alone, in the courts of law, or stitution, the laws of the United States,
in the heads of the departments. and treaties made or which shall be
c. Filling vacancies. The President made, under their authority; to all
shall have power to fill up all vacancies cases affecting ambassadors, other pub-
that may happen during the recess of lic ministers and consuls; to all cases
the commissions of admiralty jurisdiction; to contro-
Senate, by granting
which shall expire at the end of their versies to which the United States shall
next session. be a party; to controversies between
two or more States; between a State
SECTION 3. DUTIES OF and citizens of another State; between
THE PRESIDENT citizens of different States; between
citizens of the same State claiming lands
He shall from time to time give to the under grants of different States, and be-
Congress information of the state of the tween a State, or the citizens thereof,
Union, and recommend to their consid- and foreign states, citizens or subjects. 5
eration such measures as he shall judge
b. Supreme Court. In all cases affect-
necessary and expedient; he may, on ing ambassadors, other public ministers
extraordinary occasions, convene both and consuls, and those in which a State
houses, or either of them, and in case shall be a party, the Supreme Court
of disagreement between them with re-
shall have original jurisdiction. In all
spect to the time of adjournment, he the other cases before mentioned, the
may adjourn them to such time as he Supreme Court shall have appellate
shall think proper; he shall receive am-
jurisdiction, both as to law and fact,
bassadors and other public ministers; he
with such exceptions, and under such
shall take care that the laws be faith-
regulations as the Congress shall make.
fully executed, and shall commission all c. Rules respecting trials. The trial
the officers of the United States.
of all crimes, except in cases of im-
SECTION 4. IMPEACHMENT peachment, shall be by jury; and such
trial shall be held in the State where
The President, Vice President and all the said crimes shall have been com-
civil officers of the United States shall mitted; but when not committed within
be removed from office on impeachment any State, the trial shall be at such place
for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or places as the Congress may by law
or other high crimes and misdemeanors. have directed.

SECTION 3. TREASON
Article III
a. Definition of treason. Treason
against the United States shall consist
Judicial Department
only in levying war against them, or in
SECTION 1. THE FEDERAL COURTS adhering to their enemies, giving them
aid and comfort. No person shall be
The judicial power of the United convicted of treason unless on the testi-
States shall be vested in one Supreme 5 This clause has been
modified by Amend-
Court, and in such inferior courts as the ment XL
The Constitution 701

mony oftwo witnesses to the same overt States concerned, as well as of the Con-
act, or on confession in open court. gress.
b. Punishment of treason. The Con- b. Power of Congress over territory

gress shall have power to declare the and property. The Congress shall have
punishment of treason, but no attainder power to dispose of and make all need-
of treason shall work corruption of ful rules and regulations respecting the
blood, or forfeiture except during the territory or other property belonging to
life of the person attainted. the United States; and nothing in this
Constitution shall be so construed as to
prejudice any claims of the United
Article IV States, or of any particular State.

The Statesand the Federal SECTION 4. GUARANTEES TO THE

Government STATES
The United States shall guarantee to
SECTION 1. STATE RECORDS every State in this Union a republican
Full faith and credit shall be given in
form of government, and shall protect
each of them against invasion; and on
each State to the public acts, records,
and judicial proceedings of every other application of the legislature, or of the
executive (when the legislature cannot
State. And the Congress may by general
be convened) against domestic violence.
laws prescribe the manner in which such
acts, records, and proceedings shall be
proved, and the effect thereof.
Article V
SECTION 2. PRIVILEGES AND
IMMUNITIES OF CITIZENS Method of Amendment
a. Privileges. The citizens of each The Congress, whenever two thirds of
State shall be entitled to all privileges both houses shall deem it necessary,
and immunities of citizens in the several shall propose amendments to this Con-
States. stitution, or, on the application of the
b. Extradition. A person charged in legislatures of two thirds of the several
any State with treason, felony, or other States, shall call a convention for pro-
crime, who shall flee from justice, and posing amendments, which, in either
be found in another State, shall, on de- case shall be valid to all intents and
mand of the executive authority of the purposes, as part of this Constitution,
State from which he fled, be delivered when ratified by the legislatures of three
up, to be removed to the State having fourths of the several States, or by con-
jurisdiction of the crime. ventions in three fourths thereof, as the
c. Fugitive workers. No person held one or the other mode of ratification
to service or labor in one State, under may be proposed by the Congress; pro-
the laws thereof, escaping into another vided that no amendments which may
shall in consequence of any law or regu- be made prior to the year one thousand
lation therein, be discharged from such eight hundred and eight shall in any
service or labor, but shall be delivered manner affect the first and fourth
upon claim of the party to whom such clauses in the ninth section of the first
service or labor may be due. article; and that no State, without its
consent, shall be deprived of its equal
SECTION 3. NEW STATES AND suffrage in the Senate.
TERRITORIES
a. Admission of new States. New
States may be admitted by the Congress
Article VI
into this Union; but no new State shall
be formed or erected within the juris- General Provisions
diction of any other State ; nor any State a.Public debt. All debts contracted
be formed by the junction of two or and engagements entered into, before
more States, or parts of States, without the adoption of this Constitution, shall
the consent of the legislatures of the be as valid against the United States
702 The Constitution

under this Constitution, as under the right of the people to keep and bear
Confederation. arms, shall not be infringed.
b. Supremacy of the Constitution.
This Constitution, and the laws of the
United States which shall be made in Article III (adopted 1791)
pursuance thereof; and all treaties
made, or which shall be made, Quartering of Troops
under the authority of the United
No
soldier shall, in time of peace be
States, shall be the supreme law of the
quartered in any house, without the
land; and the judges in every State
consent of the owner, nor in time of
shall be bound thereby, anything in the
Constitution or laws of any State to the war, but in a manner to be prescribe*!
by law.
contrary notwithstanding.
c. Oath of office; no religious test.
The Senators and Representatives be- Article IV
fore mentioned, and the members of the (adopted 1791)
several State legislatures, and all execu-
tive and judicial officers, both of the Limiting the Right of Search
United States and of the several States, The right of the people to be secure
shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to in their persons, houses, papers, and
support this Constitution; but no reli- effects, against unreasonable searches
gious test shall ever be required as a and seizures, shall not be violated, and
qualification to any office or public trust no warrants shall issue but upon prob-
under the United States. able cause, supported by oath or affirma-
tion, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or
Article VII things to be seized.

Ratification of the Constitution

The ratification of the conventions of
Article V (adopted 1791)
nine States shall be sufficient for the
establishment of this Constitution be- Guaranty of Trial by Jury; Private
tween the States so ratifying the same. Property to be Respected
No person shall be held to answer for
a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment
AMENDMENTS of a grand jury, except in cases arising
TO THE CONSTITUTION in the land or naval forces, or in the
militia, when in actual service in time of
war and public danger; nor shall any
Article I (adopted 1791)
person be subject for the same offense to
be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb;
Freedom of Religion, Speech, and nor shall be compelled in any criminal
the Press; Right of Assembly case to be a witness against himself, nor
Congress shall make no law respecting be deprived of life, liberty, or property,
an establishment of religion, or prohib- without due process of law; nor shall
iting the free exercise thereof ; or abridg- private property be taken for public use
ing the freedom of speech, or of the without just compensation.
press; or the right of the people peace-
ably to assemble, and to petition the
government for a redress of grievances. Article VI (adopted 1791)

Rights of Accused Persons

Article II (adopted 1791) In all criminal prosecutions, the ac-
cused shall enjoy the right to a speedy
Right to Keep and Bear Arms and public trial, by an impartial jury of
A well-regulated militia, being neces- the State and district wherein the crime
sary to the security of a free State, the shall have been committed, which dis-
The Constitution 703
tricts shallhave been previously ascer- to any suit in law or equity, commenced
tained by law, and to be informed of the or prosecuted against one of the United
nature and cause of the accusation; to States by citizens of another State, or by
be confronted with the witnesses citizens or subjects of any foreign state.
against him ; to have compulsory process
for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and
to have the assistance of counsel for his Article XII (adopted 1804)
defense.
Election of President and Vice
President
Article VII (adopted 1791)
The electors shall meet in their re-

Rules of the Common Law spective States, and vote by ballot

for
President and Vice President, one of
In suits at common law, where the whom, at least, shall not be an inhabit-
value in controversy shall exceed twenty ant of the same State with themselves;
dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be they shall name in their ballots the per-
preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, son voted for as President, and in dis-
shall be otherwise re-examined in any tinct ballots the person voted for as Vice
court of the United States than accord- President, and they shall make distinct
ing to the rules of common law. lists of all persons voted for as President,
and of all persons voted for as Vice
President, and of the number of votes
Article VIII (adopted 1791) for each, which lists they shall sign and
certify, and transmit sealed to the seat
Excessive Bail, Fines, and Punish- of government of the United States, di-
ment Prohibited rected to the President of the Seriate ;

the President of the Senate shall, in the

Excessive bail shall not be required,
nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel presence of the Senate and House of
and unusual punishments inflicted. Representatives, open all the certificates
and the votes shall then be counted;
the person having the greatest number
of votes for President shall be the Presi-
Article IX (adopted 1791)
dent, if such number be a majority of
the whole number of electors appointed
Rights Retained by the People
;

and no person have such majority,

if
The enumeration in the Constitution then from the persons having the high-
of certain rights, shall not be construed est numbers not exceeding three on the
to deny or disparage others retained by listof those voted for as President, the
the people. House of Representatives shall choose
immediately, by ballot, the President.
But in choosing the President, the votes
Article X (adopted 1791) shall be taken by States, the representa-
tion from each State having one vote a ;
Powers reserved to States and quorum for this purpose shall consist of
People a member or members from two thirds
of the States, and a majority of all the
The powers not delegated to the
States shall be necessary to a choice.
United States by the Constitution, nor
And if the House of Representatives
prohibited by it to the States, are re- shall not choose a President whenever
served to the States respectively, or to
the right of choice shall devolve upon
the people.
them, before the fourth day of March
next following, then the Vice President
Article XI shall act as President, as in the case of
(adopted 1798) the death or other constitutional dis-
ability of the President. The person
Limiting the Powers of Federal
Courts having the greatest number of votes as
Vice President, shall be the Vice Presi-
The judicial power of the United dent, if such number be a majority of
States shall not be construed to extend the whole number of electors appointed,
704 The Constitution

and if no person have a majority, then choice of electors for President and Vice
from the two highest numbers on the President of the United States, Repre-
list, the Senate shall choose the Vice sentatives in Congress, the executive and
President; a quorum for the purpose judicial officers of a State, or the mem-
shall consist oftwo thirds of the whole bers of the legislature thereof, is denied
number of Senators, and a majority of to any of the male inhabitants of such
the whole number shall be necessary to State, being twenty-one years of age,
a choice. But no person constitutionally and citizens of the United States, or in
ineligible to the office of President shall any way abridged, except for participa-
be eligible to that of Vice President of tion in rebellion, or other crime, the
the United States. basis of representation therein shall be
reduced in the proportion which the
number of such male citizens shall bear
Article XIII (adopted 1865) to the whole number of male citizens
twenty-one years of age in such State.
Slavery Abolished
SECTION 3. DISABILITY RESULTING
SECTION 1. ABOLITION OF SLAVERY FROM INSURRECTION
Neither slavery nor involuntary servi- No person shall be a Senator or Rep-
tude, except as a punishment for crime resentative in Congress, or Elector of
whereof the party shall have been duly President and Vice President, or hold
convicted, shall exist within the United any office, civil or military, under the
States, or any place subject to their United States, or under any State, who,
jurisdiction. having previously taken an oath, as a
member of Congress, or as an officer of
SECTION 2. ENFORCEMENT the United States, or as a member of
Congress shall have power to enforce any State legislature, or as an executive
this article by appropriate legislation. or judicial officer of any State to sup-
port the Constitution of the United
States, shall have engaged in insurrec-
Article XIV (adopted 1868) tion or rebellion against the same, or
given aid or comfort to the enemies
thereof. But Congress may by vote of
Citizenship Defined
two thirds of each house, remove such
SECTION 1. DEFINITION OF disability.
CITIZENSHIP
SECTION 4. PUBLIC DEBT OF THE
All persons born or naturalized in the UNITED STATES VALID; CONFED-
United States, and subject to the juris-
diction thereof, are citizens of the
ERATE DEBT VOID
United States and of the State wherein The validity of the Public debt of the
they reside. No State shall make or en- United States, authorized by law, in-
force any law which shall abridge the cluding debts incurred for payment of
privileges or immunities of citizens of pensions and bounties for services in
the United States; nor shall any State suppressing insurrection or rebellion,
deprive any person of life, liberty, or shall not be questioned. But neither the
property, without due process of law; United States nor any State shall assume
nor deny to any person within its juris- or pay any debt or obligation incurred
diction the equal protection of the laws. in aid of insurrection or rebellion against
the United States, or any claim for the
SECTION 2. APPORTIONMENT OF loss or emancipation of any slave; but
REPRESENTATIVES all such debts, obligations, and claims
shall be held illegal and void.
Representatives shall be apportioned
among the several States according to
SECTION 5. ENFORCEMENT
their respective numbers, counting the
whole number of persons in each State, The Congress shall have power to
excluding Indians not taxed. But when enforce by appropriate legislation the
the right to vote at any election for the provisions of this article.
 The Constitution 705
Article XV (adopted 1870) Article XVIII (adopted 1919)
Right of Suffrage National Prohibition
SECTION 1. THE SUFFRAGE SECTION 1. PROHIBITION OF
The right of citizens of the United INTOXICATING LIQUORS
States to vote shall not be denied or
After one year from the ratification of
abridged by the United States or any this article the manufacture,
State on account of race, color, or pre- sale, or
vious condition of servitude. transportation of intoxicating liquors
within, the importation thereof into, or
the exportation thereof from the United
SECTION 2. ENFORCEMENT States and all
territory subject to the
The Congress shall have power to jurisdiction thereof for beverage pur-
poses is hereby prohibited.
enforce this article by appropriate legis-
lation.
SECTION 2. ENFORCEMENT
The Congress and the several States
shall have concurrent power to enforce
Article XVI (adopted 1913) this article by appropriate legislation.

Income Tax SECTION 3. LIMITED TIME FOR

The Congress have power to lay

shall RATIFICATION
and collect taxes on incomes, from what- This article shall be inoperative unless
ever source derived, without apportion- it have been ratified as an amend-
shall
ment among the several States, and ment to the Constitution by the legisla-
without regard to any census or enumer- tures of the several States, as provided
ation. by the Constitution, within seven years
from the date of the submission hereof
to the States by the Congress.

Article XVII (adopted 1913)

Direct Election of Senators
Article XIX (adopted 1920)
a. Election by the people. The Senate
Extending the Vote to Women
of the United States shall be composed
of two Senators from each State, elected SECTION 1. WOMAN SUFFRAGE
by the people thereof, for six years; and The right
of citizens of the United
each Senator shall have one vote. The
States to vote shall not be denied or
electors in each State shall have the
abridged by the United States or by any
qualification requisite for electors of the State on account of sex.
most numerous branch of the State leg-
islatures.
SECTION 2. ENFORCEMENT
b. Vacancies. When vacancies happen
in the representation of any State in the The Congress shall have power to
Senate, the executive authority of such enforce this article by appropriate legis-
State shall issue writs of election to fill lation.
such vacancies: Provided that the legis-
lature of any State may empower the
executive thereof to make temporary Article XX (adopted 1933)
appointments until the people fill the
vacancies by election as the legislature The "Lame Duck 39 Amendment
may direct.
c. Not retroactive. This amendment SECTION 1. TERMS OF PRESIDENT,
shall not be so construed as to affect the
election or term of any Senator chosen
VICE PESIDENT, AND CONGRESS
before it becomes valid as part of the The terms of the President and Vice
Constitution. President shall end at noon on the 20th
706 The Constitution

day of January, and the terms of Sena- President whenever the right or choice
tors and Representatives at noon on the shall have devolved upon them.
3d day of January, of the years in which
such terms would have ended if this SECTION 5. DATE EFFECTIVE
article had not been ratified; and the
Sections i and 2 shall take effect on
terms of their successors shall then
the fifteenth day of October following
begin. the ratification of this article.
SECTION 2. SESSIONS OF CONGRESS
SECTION 6. LIMITED TIME FOR
The Congress shall assemble at least RATIFICATION
once in every year, and such meeting %

shall begin at noon on the 3d day of This article shall be inoperative un-
less it shall have been ratified as an
January, unless they shall by law ap-
point a different day.
amendment to the Constitution by the
legislatures of three fourths of the
SECTION 3. PRESIDENTIAL several States within seven years from
SUCCESSION the date of its submission.

If, at the time fixed for the beginning

of the term of the President, the Presi-
dent elect shall have died, the Vice
Article XXI (adopted 1933)
President elect shall become President.
If a President shall not have been chosen
Repeal of Prohibition
before the time fixed for the beginning SECTION 1. REPEAL OF ARTICLE
of his term, or if the President elect
XVIII
shall have failed to qualify, then the
Vice President elect shall act as Presi- Theeighteenth article of amendment
dent until a President shall have quali- to the Constitution of the United States
fied; and the Congress may by law is hereby repealed.
provide for the case wherein neither a
President elect nor a Vice President SECTION 2. STATES PROTECTED
elect shall have qualified, declaring who
shall then act as President, or the man- The transportation or importation
ner in which one who is to act shall be into any State, territory or possession of
the United States for delivery or use
selected, and such person shall act ac-
therein of intoxicating liquors in viola-
cordingly until a President or a Vice
President shall have qualified. tion of the laws thereof, is hereby pro-
hibited.
SECTION 4.CHOICE OF PRESIDENT
SECTION 3. LIMITED TIME FOR
BY THE HOUSE
RATIFICATION
The Congress may by law provide for
the case of the death of any of the This article shall be inoperative unless
persons from whom the House of Repre- it shall have been ratified as an amend-
sentatives may choose a President, when- ment to the Constitution by conventions
ever the right of choice shall have in the several States, as provided in the
devolved upon them, and for the case of Constitution, within seven years from
the death of any of the persons from the date of the submission hereof to the
whom the senate may choose a Vice States by the Congress.
 Notes

CHAPTER ONE over a man's subsistence amounts

to a power over his will."
1. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Con- 3. Ibid., no. 10.
federation: An Interpretation of the 4. Allan Nevins, The American States
Social-Constitutional History of the
During and After the Revolution,
American Revolution, 17741781, p. 110.
P- 11. .
5. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Con-
2. According to John Adams's notes federation, pp. 3-4.
taken at the time. 6. James Bryce, The American Com-
3. Andrew G. McLaughlin, The monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I,
Foundations of American Constitu- p. 25.
tionalism, pp. 124-27. The whole 7. Ibid., p. 27.
of chapter five in this important 8. Andrew C. The
McLaughlin,
book deals with the background for Foundations of American Consti-
the American doctrine of judicial tutionalism, p. 162.
review. 9. Charles A. Beard, The Economic
4. F. S. Oliver, Alexander Hamilton t Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy,
pp. 20-21. p. 105.
5. Bernard Mayo, Jefferson Himself, 10. Henry Adams, John Randolph, pp.
pp. 50-5 L 33-34.
6. John Dickinson, Letters from a 11. The Federalist, no. 6.
Farmer in Pennsylvania to the In- 12. Ibid., no. 78.
habitants of the British Colonies. 13. Edward S. Corwin, Constitutional
7. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Revolution, Ltd., p. 130.
Independence, p. 95.
8. Ibid., pp. 203-07. CHAPTER FOUR
9. Kentucky Resolutions.
10. Thomas Dawes, Jr., quoted by 1. S. E. Morison, The Maritime His-
tory of Massachusetts, p. 11.
McLaughlin, The Foundations of
American Constitutionalism, p. 77. 2. Henry Adams, History of the
United States, 1801-1817, vol. I,
pp. 172-73.
CHAPTER TWO 3. S. E. Morison and H. S. Com-
1. F. S. Oliver, Alexander Hamilton, mager, The Growth of the Ameri-
can Republic, vol. I, p. 216.
p. 40.
2. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of
4. William Roscoe Thayer, The Life
Confederation, p. 176.
and Letters of John Hay, vol. II,
p. 170.
3. Ibid., p. 243.
4. James Bryce, The American Com- 5. Cp. John Sloan Dickey, "Our
monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I, Treaty Procedure Versus Our For-
p. 639. eign Policies/* in Foreign Affairs,
vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 357-77.

CHAPTER THREE 6. Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and

Growth of American Politics, pp.
1. Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and 79-80.
Growth of American Politics, p. 45. 7. Wilfred E. Binkley, President and
The quotations from the delegates' Congress, p. 35.
remarks at the convention are taken 8. James Bryce, The American Com-
from Madison's Journal. monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I,
2. The Federalist, no. 79: "A power p. 160.
707
708 Notes, Chapters V IX
9. Ibid., vol. I, p. 154. 2. Ibid., p. 391.
10. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 157 and 158. 3. Ibid., vol. II, p. 4.
11. Hamilton's Works, vol. VI, p. 201. 4. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 20-21.
12. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, 5. Ibid., vol. II, p. 90.
1943 edition, p. 159. 6. Ibid., vol. II, p. 130.
7. Edward S. Corwin, "John Mar-
CHAPTER FIVE shall," in Dictionary of American
Biography.
1. Wilfred E. Binkley, American Po- 8. Blodgett v. Holden.
litical Parties, p. 27. 9. A. J. Beveridge, John Marshall,
2. Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and vol. Ill, p. 104.
Growth of American Politics, p. 10. Edward Corwin, "Jotfn Mar-
S.
126. shall,*' in Dictionary of American
3. Ibid. Biography.
4. Wilfred E. Binkley, President and 11. A. J. Beveridge, John Marshall, vol.
Congress, p. 19. Ill, p. 133.
5. Nathan Schachner, Alexander 12. Henry Adams, History of the
Hamilton, p. 299. United States, 1801-1817, vol. I, p.
6. Henry Adams, History of the 256.
United States, 1801-1817, vol. I, 13. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 243-44.
pp. 113-14. 14. Ibid.
7. Wilfred E. Binkley, President and 15. Henry Adams, John Randolph, p.
Congress, pp. 78-79. 127.
16. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin , p.
356.
CHAPTER SIX 17. Ibid., p. 356.
18. Henry Adams, History the
1. Cp. manuscript letter of Uriah of
United States, 1801-1817, vol. IV,
Tracy to Hamilton, quoted in
Nathan Schachner, Alexander p. 98.
Hamilton, p. 363. 19. Henry Adams, The Formative
2. Alexander Hamilton, The Public Years, vol. I, p. 466.
Conduct and Character of John 20. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 490-91.
Adams, Esq. 21. Carl Becker, The Declaration of
3. Kentucky Resolutions. Independence, pp. 216-18, xiv-xv.

CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER NINE

1. W. E. Dodd, Statesmen of the Old 1. Quoted in Henry Adams, Albert
South, p. 19. Gallatin, pp. 390-91.
2. Novanglus papers. 2. Henry Adams, History of the
3. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, pp. United States, 1801-1817, vol. I, p.
236-37. 236.
4. Ibid., pp. 238-39. 3. Quoted by Julius W. Pratt: "Madi-
5. Quoted in R. V. Harlow, The His- son," Dictionary of American
in
tory of Legislative Methods in the Biography.
Period Before 1825, p. 175. 4. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, p.
6. W. E. Binkley, President and Con- 392.
gress, pp. 53-54. 5. Henry Adams, The Formative
7. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, pp. Years, vol. II, p. 573.
218-19. 6. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, p.
8. Ibid., p. 410. 416.
9. Charles A. Beard, The Economic 7. Gerald W. Johnson, America's Sil-
Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, ver Age, p. 59.
P. 467. 8. Quoted by W. E. Binkley, President
and Congress, pp. 59-60.
CHAPTER EIGHT 9. Henry Adams. Albert Gallatin, p.
455.
1. Henry Adams, History of the 10. Cp. W. E. Binkley, President and
United States, 1801-1817, vol. I, Congress, p. 58, for a recent version
pp. 378-79. of the story; and compare Henry
Notes, Chapters X XIV 709

Adams, Albert Gallatin, pp. 456- 5. H. J. Ford, Alexander Hamilton, p.

59, for a refutation. 364, and cp. p. 363.
6. Edward Stanwood, A History of the
CHAPTER TEN Presidency, vol. I, pp. 136, 148.
7. H. J. Ford, The Rise and Growth
1. James Bryce, The American Com- of American Politics, pp. 171-72.
3
monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I, 8. T. H. Benton, Thirty Years View,
261. vol. I, p. 219.
p.
2. W. P. Cresson, James Monroe, pp. 9. Ibid., vol. I, p. 218.
226-27. 10. Quoted by H. J. Ford, The Rise
3. Henry Adams, The Formative and Growth of American Politics,
Years, vol. I, pp. 417-58. p. 210.
4. Cp. Henry Adams, John Randolph, 11. Ibid., p. 215.
pp. 242-48.
5. William Plumer, Jr., quoted by
W. E. Binkley, President and Con- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
gress, p. 61. 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The
6. Ibid., p. 60. Age of Jackson, p. 525.
7. W. P. Cresson, James Monroe, p. 2. Ibid., p. 120.
351. 3. July 10, 1832. Cp. Documents of
8. Ibid. American History, edited by Henry
9. W. E. Binkley, American Political
Steele Commager, vol. I, pp. 270-
Parties, p. 99. 74.
10. Henry Adams, Albert Gallatin, p. 4. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of
562.
Jackson, p. 129.
11. W. P. Cresson, James Monroe, p. 5. Ibid.
342. 6. Ibid., p. 239.
12. J. Q. Adams, Diary, February 24, 7. Ibid., p. 236.
1820. 8. Ibid.,pp. 247-48.
in the
p. 209. On the other hand,
13. Speech Senate, April 8, 9. Ibid.,
1850. William A. Sullivan has shown that
14. Dexter Perkins, Hands Off: A His- Eastern labor was by no means
tory of the Monroe Doctrine, p. 50. wholeheartedly Jacksonian. Cp. Po-
15. Ibid., p. 58. litical Science vol.
Quarterly,
LXII, pp. 569-80.
CHAPTER ELEVEN 10. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager,
1. W. E. Binkley, American Political
The Growth of the American Re-
public, vol. I, p. 375.
Parties, p. 109.
11. Claude G. Bowers, The Party Bat-
2. Ibid., p. 112. Cp. Glyndon G. Van
tles of the Jackson Period, p. 199.
Deusen, Thurlow Weed, pp. 42-49. 12. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great
3. Henry Adams, John Randolph, p.
277. Plains, p. 405.
in Brooks Adams's intro-
13. Ibid., pp. 409-10.
4. Quoted 14. Martin Van Buren, Autobiography,
duction to Henry Adams, The Deg-
radation of the Democratic Dogma, p. 320.
15. Ibid., p. 323.
pp. 24-25. 16. H. The Rise and Growth
5. Ibid., p. 35.
J. Ford,
of American Politics, p. 182.
6. J. Q. Adams, Diary, November 6,
1830.
17. Ibid., p. 193.

CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1. Cp. Marquis James, Andrew Jack- 1. Carl Becker, Freedom and Respon-
son: Portrait of a President, pp. sibility in the American Way of
429-32. Life, pp. 15-16.
9
2. T. H. Benton, Thirty Years View, 2. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager,
vol. I, p. 735. The Growth of the American Re-
3. The Autobiography of Martin Van public, vol.I, p. 448.
Buren, p. 198. 3. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of
4. Ibid., p. 449. Jackson, p. 292.
710 Notes, Chapters XV X VIII
4. Gp. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thur- Democracy; William B. Hesseltine,
low Weed, chapters 3 and 4, and Lincoln and the War Governors;
W. E. Binkley, American Political Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course
Parties, pp. 158-59. of American Democratic Thought;
and Merle Curti, The Growth of
CHAPTER FIFTEEN American Thought.
2. Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of
1. According to Carl Schurz, Clay also American Democracy, pp. 2021.
took part in the revising. Gp. 3. Ibid., p. 40.
Schurz, Henry Clay, vol. II, p. 194. 4. The best picture of the reality as
2. W. E. Binkley, President and Con- opposed to the theory % of party
gress, p. 89,and cp. pp. 89-90 for structure is found in Pendleton
quotations from the address. Herring, The Politics of Democ-
3. Gp. S. E. Morison and H. S. Com- racy.
mager, The Growth of the Ameri- 5. Pendleton Herring, The Politics of
can Republic, vol. I, pp. 462-63. Democracy, pp. 21516.
4. John G. Calhoun, Works, vol. I, 6. Perry Patterson, Presidential Gov-
pp. 55-56. ernment in the United States, pp.
248-49, and cp. p. 96.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 7. The Public Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, vol. I, p. 342.
1. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, 8. Pendleton Herring, The Politics of
The Growth of the American Re- Democracy, p. 238.
public, vol. I, p. 458. 9. Gp. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the
2. Avery Craven, The Coming of the Union, vol. II, pp. 19-20.
Civil War, pp. 217-18; and cp. pp. 10. Platform of the Free Democratic
203-19, passim. Party, Articles XX, V, VI, and
3. Bernard De Voto, The Year of De- VII.
cision, 1846, pp. 7-8.
4. H. J.Ford, The Rise and Growth CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
of American Politics, pp. 279-83.
5. Ibid., p. 356. 1. Laurence Oliphant, Episodes in a
6. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union,
Life of Adventure, p. 51.
vol. I, p. 334. 2. Quoted in Avery Graven, The Com-
7. Gerald W. Johnson, America's Sil- ing of the Civil War, pp. 270-71.
ver Age, p. 270. 3. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union,
8. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. II, pp. 107-08.
vol. I, pp. 290-91. 4. W. E. Binkley, American Political
9. S. E. Morison, The Maritime His-
Parties, p. 192; A. J. Beveridge,
tory of Massachusetts, p. 298. Abraham Lincoln, vol. II, pp. 186-
10. Ibid., p. 299. 87.
11. W. E. Binkley, President and Con- 5. Diary and Correspondence of
gress, pp. 106-07. Salmon P. Chase, pp. 255-56.
12. Cp. the posthumous (1852) Dis- 6. Both the speech in Independence
quisition on Government, passim. Hall and the Peoria speech are
preserved in varying versions. The
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN quotations here used are from
Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches
1. Among recent important books and Writings, edited by Roy P.
dealing with the problem, or with Basler, 1946.
parts of it, are: Arthur Charles 7. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union,,
Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, vol. II, p. 227.
1850-1865; Avery Craven, The 8. W. E. Binkley, American Political
Coming of the Civil War, and The Parties, p. 206.
Repressive Conflict; J. G. Randall, 9. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union,
The Civil War and Reconstruction, vol. II, p. 461.
and Lincoln the President, vol. I; 10. For a somewhat less kindly account
Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, of Fremont in the West, see Ber-
two volumes; Roy Franklin Nich- nard De Voto, The Year of Deci-
ols, The Disruption of American sion, 1846, passim. A friendly and
Notes, Chapters XIX XXII 71 1

absorbing biography is Allan Nev- 2. t

Carl B. Swisher, American Consti-
ins'sFremont, the West's Greatest tutional Developments, p. 266; and
Adventurer, 2 vols. cp. pp. 264-65 for details of the
departments in 1860.
CHAPTER NINETEEN 3. William A. Dunning, Essays on the
Civil War and Reconstruction, pp.
Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of 15-16.
American Democracy, p. 78. 4. Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 79. 5. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and
Quoted by Avery Craven, The the War Governors, p. 288.
Coming of the Civil War, p. 390. 6. Cp. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln
Nicolay and Hay (ed.), Complete and the War Governors, chapter 13.
Works of Lincoln, vol. V, p. 136. 7. Professor J. G. Randall.
Quoted by W. E. Binkley, Presi- 8. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and
dent and Congress, pp. 227-28. the War Governors, p. 272.
5. Roy P. Easier, Abraham Lincoln: 9. James G. Blaine, Twenty Years in
His Speeches and Writings, p. 538. Congress, vol. I, p. 325.
6. Cp. Constitution, Article II, Sec- 10. Cp. Stevens's speeches in Congress
tion I. from January, 1862, through the
7. Avery Craven, The Coming of the end of 1864.
Civil War, p. 417. 11. Quoted by E. Merton Coulter,
8. William B. Hcsseltine, Lincoln and The South During Reconstruction,
the War Governors, p. 92. 1865-1877, p. 42.
9. Avery Craven, The Coming of the 12. William A. Dunning, Reconstruc-
Civil War, p. 416. tion, Political and Economic, p. 87.
10. Quoted by,W. E. Binkley, President 13. See Article I, Section 7 of the
and Congress, p. 205. Constitution.
11. Avery Craven, The Coming of the 14. Cp. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln
Civil War, p. 427. and the War Governors, p. 384,
12. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and note.
the War Governors, p. 74. 15. W. E. Binkley, American Political
13. P. M. Angle (ed.), The Lincoln Parties, p. 265.
Reader, p. 299. 16. Cp. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln
and the War Governors, pp. 380
CHAPTER TWENTY 84, and footnote, p. 384.
17. Francis Grierson, The Valley of
1. Carl B. Swisher, American Consti- Shadows, 1948 ed., pp. 48-49.
tutional Development, p. 257.
2. Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
American Democracy, p. 427.
3. P. M. Angle (ed.), The Lincoln 1. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager,
Reader, pp. 318-19. The Growth of the American Re-
4. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and public, vol. II, p. 4. The Dictionary
the War Governors, p. vi. of American History gives a smaller
5. Cp. J. G. Randall, The Civil War figure of deaths, based on a De-
and Reconstruction, pp. 233 ff. partment of War publication and
6. Jonathan Worth to T. C. and B. on T. L. Livermore, Numbers and
G. Worth quoted by Avery Craven,
; Losses in the Civil War in America.
The Coming of the Civil War, p. 2. Cp. E. Merton Coulter, The South
438. During Reconstruction, 18651877,
7. J. G. Randall, Lincoln the Presi- and William A. Dunning, Recon-
dent, vol. I, p. 17. struction, Political and Economic,
8. Francis Grierson, The Valley of pp. 199-201.
Shadows, 1948 ed., pp. 177-78. 3. J. G. Randall, The Civil War and
Reconstruction, p. 458.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 4. Manuscript of The National Bank-
ing System, 1865-1875: A Sectional
Ralph H. Gabriel, The Course of Institution, by George La Verne An-
American Democratic Thought, p. derson, University of Illinois Li-
111. brary; quoted by Professor J. G.
712 Notes, Chapters XXIII XXVI
Randall, The Civil War and Recon- 3. William Allen White, Masks in a
struction, p. 458. Pageant, p. 63.
5. Quoted by Perry Patterson, Presi- 4. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish, p.
dential Government in the United 684, quoting letter of Fish to Ban-
States, p. 122. croft Davis.
6. Nicolay and Hay (eds.), Works of 5. The Education of Henry Adams, p.
Abraham Lincoln, vol. X, pp. 65- 272.
66. 6. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager,
7. S. E. Morison and H. S. Gommager, The Growth of the American Re-
The Growth of the American Re- public, vol. II, p. 70.
public, vol. II, p. 3. 7. Henry L. Stoddard, It Costs to Be
8. Gp. J. W. Julian's Political Recol- President, p, 98.
lections, p. 257. 8. George Boutwell, Reminiscences,
9. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, vol. II, p. 29.
The Growth of the American Re- 9. Fish's diary, October
20, 1876;
public, vol. II, p. 21. quoted by Allan Nevins, Hamilton
10. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thurlow Fish, pp. 306-07.
Weed, p. 526. 10. The Education of Henry Adams, p.
11. Dexter Perkins, Hands Off: A
His- 276.
tory of the Monroe Doctrine, p. 11. J. G. Randall, in Dictionary of
111. American History, vol. VI, p. 426.
12. From the instructions to the Amer- 12. Ralph H. Gabriel, The Course of
ican Minister at Paris in August, American Democratic Thought, p.
1865, ibid., p. 132. 136.
13. H. J. Ford, The Cleveland Era, pp.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 3-4.
14. Ibid., p. 10, note.
1. W. E. Binkley, American Political 15. The Education of Henry Adams, p.
Parties, p. 271 and note. 276.
2. Donald Davidson, The Attack on 16. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish, p.
Leviathan, pp. 112-14. 911.
3. W. P. Webb, Divided We Stand, p.
11. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
4. G. N. Coleman, The Election of
1868, p. 363. 1. H. J. Eckenrode, Rutherford B.
5. The Education of Henry Adams, Hayes, p. 226.
pp. 271-72. 2. Henry Adams. The Sessions, p. 60.
6. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish, p. 3. Cp. W.
E. Binkley, President and
448. Congress, p. 151, and notes; Ecken-
7. Quoted by Perry Patterson, Presi- rode, Rutherford B. Hayes, p. 241.
dential Government in the United 4. William Allen White, Masks in a
States, p. 125. Pageant, pp. 72-73.
8. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of 5. Cp. Charles R. Williams, Life of
Seventy Years, vol. II, p. 46. Rutherford B. Hayes, vol. II, pp.
9. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish, p. 26-30.
290. 6. H. J. Eckenrode, Rutherford B.
10. Samuel McClure, Lincoln and
S. Hayes, p. 247.
Men of Wartimes, p. 196; quoted 7. Ibid., p. 257.
in P. M. Angle (ed.), The Lincoln 8. Ibid., p. 267.
Reader, p. 402. 9. Ibid., pp. 275, 277.
11. The Education of Henry Adams, p. 10. S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager,
265. The Growth of the American Re-
12. Quoted in P. M. Angle (ed.), The public, vol. II, p. 190.
Lincoln Reader, p. 513. 11. James Bryce, The American Com-
monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I,
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR p. 206.

1. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish, p. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

286.
2. Dictionary of American History, 1. H. J. Ford, The Cleveland Era, p.
vol. II, p. 85. 15 and note.
Notes, Chapters XXVII XXIX 713
2. Quoted by W. E. Binkley, President 11. Edward S. Corwin, Liberty Against
and Congress, p. 159. Government, p. 118.
3. Letter to John Hay, quoted by W. 12. Ibid., p. 124.
E. Binkley, President and Congress, 13. San Mateo County v. Southern Pa-
p. 159. cific Railroad.
4. Quoted by W. E. Binkley, ibid., 14. Cp. 'Truth and Fiction About the
p. 160. Fourteenth Amendment," by Louis
5. New York Herald, July 3, 1881. B. Boudin, in New York University
6. Quoted by Henry Luther Stoddard, Law Quarterly Review, vol. XVI
Presidential Sweepstakes, p. 87. (November, 1938), and "The Con-
7. Senate Report, no. 837, to accom- spiracy Theory of the Fourteenth
pany Bill S.227, 46th Congress, 3d Amendment," by Howard Jay
Session, February 4, 1881. Graham, in Yale Law Journal, vol.
8. Quoted by H. J. Ford, President XLVII (January, 1938) and vol.
and Congress, p. 33. XLVII (December, 1938).
9. Ibid., p. 38. Santa Clara v. Southern
15. County
10. Quoted by F. W.
Taussig, in The Pacific Railroad Company.
Tariff History of the United States, 16. Carl B. Swisher, American Consti-
p. 233, note. tutional Development, p. 405.
17. Cp. Louis B. Boudin, Government
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN by Judiciary, vol. II, pp. 37496,
for an outline of the history of "due

1. H. The Cleveland Era, process." And cp. Edward S. Cor-

J. Ford, p.
44. win, Liberty Against Government,
2. Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A passim.
18. Chicago, Burlington and Quincy
Study in Courage, pp. 57-58. Railroad v. Iowa (1877).
3. Ibid., pp. 164-66.
19. Charles C. Marshall, "A New Con-
4. Ibid., p. 192.
5. Grover Presidential
stitutional Amendment," American
Cleveland, Law Review, November-December,
Problems, pp. 42-43. 1890. Cp. Louis B. Boudin, Govern-
6. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwin-
ment by Judiciary, vol. II, pp. 399-
ism in American Thought, 1860-
1915. 404, which discusses the article in
detail.The quotations in the text
7. Ibid., p. 27. are from Boudin.
8. Ibid., pp. 31-32. 20. Stone v. Farmers' Loan and Trust
9. William Allen White, Masks in a
Company.
Pageant, p. 142. 21. Carl B. Swisher, American Con-
10. I bid., pp. 118-19. stitutional Development, p. 402.
22. Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Paul
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Railroad Company v. Minnesota.
23. Carl B. Swisher, American Consti-
1. Cp. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Development, p. 403.
tutional
Rise of the City, 1878-1898, p. 1. 24. New York 98.
In re Jacobs, 98
2. Ibid., pp. 57, 64.
25. Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiog-
3. Ibid., pp. 67-69. raphy, p. 82
4. Ibid., p. 77.
26. Ibid., pp. 82-93.
5. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of
27. Cp. Edward R. Lewis, A History of
the West, translated by Charles American Political Thought from
Francis Atkinson, vol. II, p. 102. the Civil War to the World War,
6. Ibid., p. 99. pp. 94-96. The quotations in the
7. Allan Nevins, The Emergence of text are taken from Lewis.
Modern America, 1865-1878, pp.
399-400.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
8. Quoted from Morison and Com- 1. W. E. Binkley, American Political
mager, The Growth of the Ameri- Parties, p. 310.
can Republic, vol. II, p. 178, notes. 2. H. J. Ford, The Cleveland Era, p.
9. Carl Wittke, We Who Built Amer- 54.
ica,pp. xvi xviii. 3. William Allen White, Autobiogra-
10. 16 Wallace 36 (1873). phy, p. 361.
714 Notes, Chapters XXX XXXIII
4. The Education of Henry Adams9 p. 9. Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo
320. Hanna, p. 205.
5. William Allen White, Masks in a 10. Collected Poems of Vachel Lind-
Pageant, p. 79. say, pp.99 ff.
6. New York Herald, Jan. 6, 1886; 11. Education of Henry Adams, p. 356.
quoted in Allan Nevins, Grover 12. William T. R. Fox, The Super-
Cleveland, p. 271. Powers, p. 30.
7. Quoted by Frank Kent, The Demo-
cratic Party, p. 302.
8. William Allen White, Autobiogra-
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
phy, pp. 358-60.
9. Matthew Josephson, The President
1. James Bryce, The American Com-
monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. I.
Makers, p. 6. 136.
p.
10. F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History 2. H. The Cleveland Era,
J. Ford, p.
of the United States, p. 256. 87.
3. Ibid., pp. 93-94.
CHAPTER THIRTY 4. Henry Adams, Letters, vol. II, p.
219.
1. W. E. Binkley, American Political
Theodore Roose-
5. Henry Pringle,
Parties, p. 312. 130.
velt, p.
2. Arthur F. Mullen, Western Demo- The Education
6. of Henry Adams, p.
crat, pp. 46, 58. 417.
3. Ibid., pp. 61-63. Collis P. Hunting- 7. William Allen White, Autobiogra-
ton of the Southern Pacific Rail-
phy, pp. 297-98.
road put the price of an Arizona 8. Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt,
legislature at about $4500. (Rocky
p. 101.
Mountain Cities, ed. Ray West, Jr., 9. Quoted by W. E. Binkley, Presi-
p. 219.) dent and Congress, p. 196.
4. Atlantic Monthly, March, 1900.
10. George B. Galloway, Congress at
5. Henry Adams, Letters, vol. II, p. the Crossroads, p. 117.
270. 11. Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt,
6. Ibid., vol. II, p. 461.
p. 485.
7. William L. Wilson, quoted by Allan 12. Frederick Lewis Allen, The Great
Nevins, Grover Cleveland, p. 693.
Pierpont Morgan, p. 98.
8. Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty 13. Quoted by F. L. Allen, ibid., p. 220.
Years of the Republic, p. 498. 14. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiog-
9. William Allen White, Masks in a
raphy, pp. 437-44.
Pageant, p. 250. 15. Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt,
10. The Education of Henry Adams, p.
p. 261.
344. Adams was commenting on
16. Ibid., pp. 260-61.
the repeal of the Sherman Silver
Purchase Act in 1893.
17. Speech at Columbus, Ohio, Feb-
ruary, 1912.
18. Cp. Matthew Josephson, The Presi-
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE dent Makers, pp. 132-38; Wilfred
E. Binkley,American Political
1. William Allen White, Masks in a 337-38; Henry Pringle,
Parties, pp.
Pageant, p. 206. Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 264-78.
2. Cp. Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo 19. Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt,
Hanna: His Life and Works, pp. p. 278.
465-73. 20. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiog-
3. Ibid., p. 94. raphy, p. 419.
4. Ibid., pp. 408-10. 21. Henry Adams, Letters, vol. II, p.
5. William Allen White, Masks in a 515.
Pageant, pp. 155 and 172.
6. W. E. Binkley, President and Con-
gress, p. 1 89. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
7. W. E. Binkley, American Political
Parties, p. 329. 1. E. P. Herring, Presidential Leader-
8. William Allen White, Masks in a ship, p. 141.
Pageant, p. 245. 2. Cp. Article V
of the Constitution.
Notes, Chapters XXXIV XXXV 715
3. W. E. Binkley, American Political 19. Gp. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow
Parties, pp. 344-45. Wilson, vol. VII, pp. 185-86.
4. William Allen White, Autobiogra-
phy, p. 483. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
5. Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt,
p. 571. 1. Alan Cranston, The Killing of the
6. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Peace, p. ix.
Wilson, Life and Letters, vol. Ill, 2. W. E. Binkley, President and Con-
p. 33. gress, p. 218.
7. G. E. Merriam, Four Political 3. "Fireside Chat" of April 14, 1938.
Leaders, p. 48. 4. Radio address to the Young Demo-
8. Richard Hofstadter, The American cratic Clubs of America, August
Political Tradition, p. 255. 24, 1935.
9. William Allen White, Autobiogra- 5. Address to American Retail Fed-
phy, pp. 487-88. eration, Washington, D. C., May
10. Ibid., pp. 479-80. 22, 1939.
11. Nicholas Mansergh, The Coming 6. Address on Constitution Day,
World War: A Study in
'of the First Washington, D. C., September 17.
the European Balance, 1876-1914, 1937.
p. 245. 7. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I
12. Gp. Richard Hofstadter, The Knew, pp. 3, 4.
American Political Tradition, pp. 8. Henry Steele Gommager, "Twelve
257-58 and note, for these House Years of Roosevelt," in Franklin
and Wilson quotations. Delano Roosevelt: A Memorial, p.
13. Cp. W. S. Holt, Treaties Defeated 215.
by the Senate, pp. 294-301, and 9. Quoted in Dixon Wecter, The Age
Alan Cranston, The Killing of the of the Great Depression, p. 50.
Peace, passim. All of which Frank- 10. E. S. Corwin, Constitutional Revo-
lin Roosevelt watched and remem- lution, Ltd., p. 114.
bered. 11. Cp. Elmo Roper's articles, "Why
14. Lindsay Rogers, "Presidential Dic- the Pollsters Went Wrong," New
tatorship in the United States," York Herald Tribune (Paris edi-
Quarterly Review, vol. CGXXXI tion), June 22 and 23, 1949.
(1919). Quoted by Clinton L. 12. U. S. v. Butler, 297 U. S. 1.
Rossiter, Constitutional Dictator- 13. Carter v. Carter Coal Company,
ship, p. 242. 298 U. S. 238.
15. Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional 14. N.L.R.B. v. Jones and Laughlin
Dictatorship, p. 243. Steel Corporation, 301 U. S. 1.
16. Senator William Maclay of Penn- 15. Edward S. Corwin, Constitutional
sylvania; quoted by George H. Revolution, Ltd., pp. 112-13, 116.
Haynes, The Senate of the United And cp. Corwin, Total War and
States, vol. I, p. 399. the Constitution, passim.
17. Ibid., p. 396.
18. American Federation of Labor In- CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
formation and Publicity Service,
October 17, 1925; quoted in 1. James Bryce, The American Com-
George H. Haynes, The Senate of monwealth, 2d ed., revised, vol. II,
the United States, vol. I, p. 416. p. 20.
 Bibliography

A HIS BIBLIOGRAPHY is limited to the books mentioned or quoted herein,

to the best biographies of the important characters, and to the memoirs,
letters, special studies, and general histories which have been used as
sources. Readers who want more information are referred to the follow-
ing:
1. The excellent bibliographies, divided chapter by chapter, in
the Morison and Commager history listed in Section I below.
2. Writings on American History, compiled by Grace C. Griffin
since 1906 and published among the Reports of the American
Historical Association.

I. GENERAL HISTORIES
Dictionary of American Biography. 22 Index. (From the beginning to 1865.)
vols. Published under the auspices of New York, 1905-1922. Index 1932.
the American Council of Learned Commager, Henry Steele, Documents of
Societies. Edited by Allen Johnson American History, 1492-1935. 2 vols.
and Dumas Malone. New York, in one. New York, 1935.
York and London, 1937. Hart, A. B., ed., The American Nation:
Dictionary of American History. 5 vols.
A History. 28 vols. (Covers period
and index vol., edited by James Trus- 1492-1917.) New York and London,
low Adams. New York, 1940. 1906-18.
The Morison, Samuel E., and Commager,
Beard, Charles A. and Mary R., The Growth Ameri-
Rise of American Civilization. 2 vols. Henry S., of the
can Republic. 2 vols. 3d edition. New
New York, 1927.
York, 1942. (The quotations in this
Bemis, S. F., and Griffin, G. G., Guide book are from the 2d edition, 1937.)
to the Diplomatic History of the V. L., Main Currents in
Parrington,
United States. Washington, 1935. American Thought. 3 vols. New York,
Cash, L., The Mint of the South. New 1927-1930.
York, 1941. Schlesinger, A. M., and Fox, D. R., eds.,
Channing, Edward, History of the History of American Life. 13 vols.
United States. 6 vols. and General New York, 1929-1948.

II. ECONOMIC AND LABOR HISTORIES

Beard, Mary, A Short History of the ern United States, 1620-1860. Wash-
American Labor Movement. New ington, 1925.
York, 1920. Callender, Guy S., Selections from the
Berle,A. A., Jr., and Means, G. C., Economic History of the United
The Modern Corporation and Private 1765-1860. Boston and New
States,
Property. New York and Chicago, York, 1909.
1932. Clark, V. S., History of Manufactures
Bidwell, P. W., and Falconer, J. I., in the United States, 1860-1916. 3
History of Agriculture in the North- vols. New York, 1929.

717
718 Bibliography

Commons, J. R., and others, History of King, W. I., The National Income and
Labor in the United States. 4 vols. Its Purchasing Power. New York,
New York, 1918-35. 1930.
Corey, Lewis, The Crisis of the Middle Laughlin, J. L., The History
of Bimetal-
Class. New York, 1935. lism in the United States. New York,
The Decline of American Cap- 1886 and 1900.
italism. New York, 1934. Mason, A. T., Organized Labor and the
Dewey, D. R., Financial History of the Law. Durham, 1922.
United States. New York, 1909. Meyers, Gustavus, History of the Great
Dorfman, Joseph, Thor stein Veblen and American Fortunes. Chicago, 1910.
his America. New York, 1934. Mitchell, Broadus, The Industrial Revo-
Faulkner, H. U., American Economic lution in the South. Baltimore and
History. 4th ed. New York, 1938. London, 1930.
Flugel, F., Readings in the Economic The Rise of Cotton Mills in the
and Social History of the United South. Baltimore, 1921.
States. New York and London, 1929. Perlman, S., A History of Trade Union-
Frankfurter, Felix, and Greene, N. V., ism in the United States. New York,
The Labor Injunction. New York, 1922.
1930. Rickard, T. A., A History of American
Gray, L. C., History of Agriculture in Mining. New York and London,
the Southern States to 1860. 2 vols. 1932.
Washington, 1933. Taussig, F. W., The Tariff History of
Hepburn, A. B., A History of Currency the United States. New York and Lon-
in the United States. New York, don, 1888.
1915. Watkins, G. S., An Introduction to the
Jenks, J. W., and Clark, W. E., The Study of Labor Problems. New York,
Trust Problems. Garden City, New 1922.
York, 1917. White, H., Money and Banking Illus-
Jones, Eliot, The Trust Problem in the trated by American History. Boston
United States. New York, 1921. and London, 1895.
Kemmerer, E. W., The A.B.C. of the H. P., The Federal Reserve Sys-
Willis,
Federal Reserve System. Princeton tem. Chicago, 1923.
and London, 1918.

III. FOREIGN RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY

Bailey, T. A., A Diplomatic History of Latane", J. H., A
History of American
the American People. New York, Foreign Policy. New York, 1927.
1940. Moon, Parker T., Imperialism and
Foster, J. W., American Diplomacy in World Politics. New York, 1926.
the Orient. Boston and New York, Perkins, D. T., Hands Off: A History
1903. of the Monroe Doctrine. Boston,
Griswold, A. W., The Far Eastern Pol- 1941.
icy of the United States. New York, Sears, L. M., A History of American
1938. Foreign Relations. New York, 1927.

IV. PUBLIC LANDS, THE FRONTIER AND THE PLAINS

Dale, E. E.,The Range Cattle Industry. Parkman, F., The Oregon Trail. Bos-
Norman, Oklahoma, 1930. ton, 1886.
Dick, E., The Sod House Frontier. New Paxson, F. L., History of the American
York and London, 1937. Frontier, 1763-1893. Boston and New
Gates, P. W., The Illinois-Central Rail- York, 1924.
road and Its Colonization Work. Cam- Pelzer, Louis, The Cattlemen's Frontier,
bridge, Massachusetts, 1934. 1850-1890. Glendale, California,
Hibbard, B. H., A History of the Public 1936.
Land Policies. New York, 1924. Riegel, R. E., The Story of the Western
Osgood, E. S., The Day of the Cattle- Railroads. New York, 1926.
man. Minneapolis, 1929. Robbins, R. M., Our Landed Heritage:
Bibliography 719
The Public Domain, 1776-1936. Rise of the New West. New York
Princeton and London, 1942. and London, 1906.
Stephenson, G. M., The Political His- Webb, W. P., The Great Plains. Boston,
tory of the Public Lands, 1840-62. 1931.
Boston, 1917. Wellington, R. G., The Political and
Turner, F. J., The Frontier in American Sectional Influence of Public Lands,
History. New York, 1920. 1828-1842. Cambridge, Massachu-
The Significance of Sections in setts, 1914.
American History. New York, 1932.

V. THE CONSTITUTION AND THE SUPREME COURT

Beard, Charles A., An Economic Inter- teenth Article of Amendment to the
pretation of the Constitution. New Constitution. Boston, 1898.
York, 1913. Hamilton, Alexander, and Jay, John,
The Enduring Federalist, edited and Madison, James, The Federalist.
and analyzed by C. A. B. New York, A Commentary on the Constitution
1948. of the United States, edited by P. L.
-The Supreme Court and the Ford. New York, 1898.
Constitution. New York, 1912. Horwill, H. W., The Usages of the
Beveridge, A. J., Life of John Marshall. American Constitution. London, 1925.
4 vols. Boston, 1917-19. Johnson, Allen, Readings in American
Boudin, Louis, Government by Judi- Constitutional History, 1776-1876.
ciary. 2 vols. New York, 1932. Boston and New York, 1912.
Cardozo, The Growth of the Law. New Johnson, A., and Robinson, W. A.,
Haven, 1931. Readings in Recent American Con-
The Nature of the Judicial Proc- stitutional History, 1876-1926. New
ess. New Haven, 1921. York and Chicago, 1927.
Corwin, Edward S., Liberty Against McLaughlin, A. C., A Constitutional
Government. Baton Rouge, 1948. History of the United States. New
-Constitutional Revolution, Ltd. York and London, 1935.
Claremont, California, 1941. The Foundations of American
-Total War and the Constitution. Constitutionalism. New York and
New York, 1947. London, 1932.
John Marshall and the Constitu- Pritchett, C. H., The Roosevelt Court.
tion. New Haven, 1919. New York, 1948.
The Commerce Power vs. State Story, Joseph, Commentaries on the
Rights. Princeton and London, 1936. Constitution of the United States.
-The Doctrine of Judicial Review. 2 vols. Boston, 1851.
Princeton, 1914. Swisher, C. B., American Constitutional
Curtis, Charles, Lions Under the Development. Boston, 1943.
Throne. Boston, 1947. Warren, Charles, The Supreme Court
Farrand, Max, ed., The Records of the in United States History. 2 vols.
Federal Convention of 1787. 3 vols. Boston, 1926.
New Haven, 1911. The Making of the Constitution.
Frankfurter, F., The Commerce Clause Boston, 1928.
Under Marshall, Taney, and Waite. Wilson, Wopdrow, Constitutional Gov-
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1937. ernment in the United States. New
Guthrie, W. D., Lectures on the Four- York, 1908.

VI. GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL THEORIES

Beard, C. A., The American Leviathan. Binkley, Wilfred E., American Political
New York, 1930. Parties. New York, 1943.
American Government and Poli- President and Congress. New
tics. New York, 1910. York, 1947.
Becker, C. L., Freedom and Responsi- Bryce, James, American Commonwealth.
bility in the American Way of Life. 2 vols., 2d revised ed. London and
New York, 1946. New York, 1889.
 720 Bibliography

Corwin, E. C., The President, Office Laski, Harold J., The American Presi-
and Powers. New York and London, dency. New York and London, 1940.
1940. Maclver, R. M., The Web of Govern-
Curti, M., The Growth of American ment. New York, 1946.
Democratic Thought. New York and Merriam, C. E., The American Party
London, 1943. System. New York, 1922.
Ford, H. J., Representative Govern- American Political Ideas, 1865
ment. New York, 1928. 1917. New York, 1920.
The Rise and Growth of Ameri- Ostrogorski, M., Democracy and the
can Politics. New York, 1898. Party System in the United States.
Gabriel, R. H., The Course of Ameri- New York, 1926.
can Democratic Thought. New York, Powell, E. P., Nullification and Seces-
1940. sion in the United States. New York,
Galloway, Congress at the
George, 1897.
Crossroads. New
York, 1946. Rossiter, C. L., Constitutional Dictator-
Haynes, F. E., Third Party Movements ship, Princeton, 1948.
Since the Civil War. Iowa City, 1916. Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West
Haynes, G. F., The Senate of the United (translated by C. F. Atkinson). 2 vols.
States. 2 vols. Boston, 1938. New York, 1926-28.
Herring, E. P., The Politics of Democ- Stanwood, Edward, A History of the
racy: American Parties in Action. New Presidency. 2 vols. Boston and New
York, 1940. York, 1916.
Presidential Leadership. New Stoddard, Henry L., It Costs to be
York, 1940. President. New York and London,
Hesseltine, W. B., The Rise and Fall 1938.
of Third Washington, 1948.
Parties. Presidential Sweepstakes. New
Hofstadter, Richard, The American Po- York, 1948.
litical Tradition and the Men Who Webb, Walter P., Divided We Stand.
Made It. New York, 1948. New York and Toronto, 1937.
Holt, W. S., Treaties Defeated by the Wilson, Woodrow, Congressional Gov-
Senate. Baltimore, 1933. ernment. Boston, 1885.
Jouvenal, Bertrand de, Power (trans- Wiltse, C. M., The Jeffersonian Tradi-
lated by J. F. Huntington). London, tion in American Democracy. Chapel
1948. Hill, North Carolina, 1935.
Laird, John, The Device of Govern-
ment. Cambridge, 1944.

VII. BOOKS APPLYING CHIEFLY TO THE YEARS 1763-1789

Abernathy, Thomas P., Western Lands federation. Madison, Wisconsin, 1940.

and the American Revolution. Uni- McLaughlin, A. C., The Confederation
versity of Virginia, 1937. and the Constitution, 1783-89. New
Becker, C. L., The Declaration
of Inde- York and London, 1905.
pendence. New
York, 1922. Miller, J. C,, Origins of the American
Burnett, E. C., The Continental Con- Revolution. Boston, 1943.
gress. New York, 1941. Triumph of Freedom: 1775-
Ford, H. J., The Scotch-Irish in Amer- 1783. Boston, 1948.
ica. Princeton, 1915, and New York, Morison, S. E., The American Revolu-
1941. tion, 1764-1788: Sources and Docu-
Fiske, John, The Critical Period in ments. Oxford, 1923.
American History. Boston and New Nevins, Allan, The American States
York, 1888. During and After the Revolution.
Jameson, J. F., The American Revolu- New York, 1924.
tion Considered as a Social Move- Van Tyne, C. H., The Loyalists in the
ment. Princeton, 1926. American Revolution. New York and
Jensen, Merrill, The Articles of Con- London, 1902.
Bibliography 721

VIII. BIOGRAPHIES, HISTORIES, MEMOIRS, ETC.,

APPLYING CHIEFLY TO THE YEARS 1789-1850
Abernathy, T. P., From Frontier to Bruce, W. C., John Randolph of Roa-
Plantation in Tennessee. Chapel Hill, noke. New York and London, 1939.
North Carolina, 1932. Channing, Edward, The Jeffersonian
Adams, C. F., ed., Works of John System. New York, 1906.
Adams with a Life. 10 vols. Boston, Chinard, Gilbert, Thomas Jefferson f the
1850-56. Apostle of Americanism. Boston, 1929.
Adams, John, and John Quincy, Se- Chitwood, O. P., John Tyler, Champion
lected Writings, edited by Adrienne of the Old South. New York, 1939.
Koch and William Peden. New York, Clark, B. C., /. Q. Adams. Boston, 1932.
1946. Cresson, W. P., James Monroe. Chapel
Adams, Henry, Life of Albert Gallatin. Hill,North Carolina, 1946.
Philadelphia, 1879. Davidson, Donald, Attack on Leviathan.
History of the United States, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1938.
1801-17. 9 vols. New York, 1889-91. De Voto, Bernard, The Year of Deci-
-The Formative Years. 2 vols. sion. Boston, 1943.
Boston, 1947. (The nine-volume His- Across the Wide Missouri. Bos-
tory cut to two volumes with an in- ton, 1947.
troduction by Herbert Agar.) Dodd, W. E., The Cotton Kingdom.
-John Randolph. Boston and New New Haven, 1919.
York, 1882. Statesmen of the Old South.
Adams, John Quincy, Memoirs and New York, 1911.
Diary. 12 vols., edited by C. F. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Suppression of
Adams. Philadelphia, 1874-77. the African Slave Trade. New York
Adams, J. T., The Adams Family. Bos- and London, 1896.
ton, 1930. Ford, H. J., Alexander Hamilton. New
Alexander, Holmes, The American Tal- York, 1920.
leyrand: The Career and Contempo- Ford, P. L., ed., The Writings oj
raries of Martin Van Bur en. New Thomas Jefferson. 10 vols. New York
York and London, 1935. and London, 1892-99.
Allen, G. W., Our Naval War with Ford, W. C., ed., Writings of J. Q.
France. Boston and New York, 1909. Adams. 1 vols. New York, 1913-17.
Ames, Fisher, The Works of Fisher Foreman, Grant, Indian Removal: The
Ames. 2 vols. Boston, 1854. Emigration of the Five Civilized
Bassett, J. S., The Federalist System. Tribes of Indians. Norman, Okla-
New York and London, 1906. homa, 1932.
Beard, C. A., Economic Origins of Jef- Fraser, H. R., Democracy in the Mak-
fersonian Democracy. New York, ing: The Jackson-Tyler Era. Indian-
1915. apolis and New York, 1938.
Beirne, F. F., The War of 1812. New Freeman, D. S., George Washington
York, 1949. (first two volumes). New York, 1948.
Bemis, S. A
Diplomatic History of
F., Fuess, C. M., Daniel Webster. 2 vols.
the United States. New York, 1936. Boston, 1930.
Jay's Treaty. New York, 1923. Goebel, D. B., William Henry Harrison.
Benton, Thomas Hart, Thirty Years' Indianapolis, 1926.
View. 2 vols. New York and Boston, Griffin, C. C., The United States and
1854-56. the Disruption of the Spanish Empire }

Billington, R. A., The Protestant Cru- 1810-22. New York, 1937.

sade, 1800-60. New York, 1938. Hamilton, H., Zachary Taylor. Indian-
Bowers, Claude G., Jefferson and Ham- apolis and New York, 1941.
ilton. Boston, 1925. Hamilton, S. M., ed., The Writings of
Jefferson in Power. Boston, 1936. James Monroe. 7 vols. New York and
The Party Battles of the Jackson London, 1898-1903.
Period. Boston, 1922. Hirst, F. W., Life and Letters of Thomas
Brant, Irving, James Madison: The Vir- Jefferson. New York, 1926.
ginia Revolutionist. New York, 1941. Hunt, Gaillard, ed., The Writings of
James Madison: The Nationalist. James Madison. 9 vols. New York,
New York, 1948. 1900-10.
722 Bibliography

Hunt, Gaillard, LifeThe of James Life and Labor Old South.

in the
Madison. New York, 1902. Boston, 1929.
Jacobs, J. R., Tarnished Warrior: Polk, J. K., Diary of a President, edited
Major-General James Wilkinson. New by Allan Nevins. London and New
York, 1938. York, 1929. (4 vols., unabridged edi-
James, Marquis, Andrew Jackson, the tion, Chicago, 1910.)
Border Captain. Indianapolis, 1933. Pratt, J. W., Expansionists of 1812.
Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a New York, 1925.
President. Indianapolis and New Roosevelt, Theodore, Gouverneur Mor-
York, 1937. ris. Boston and New York, 1888.

Johnson, Gerald W., America's Silver Schachner, Nathan, Aaron Burr. New
Age. New York and London, 1939. York, 1937.
Lodge, H. C., Daniel Webster. Boston Alexander Hamilton. New York,
and New York, 1883. 1946.
Works of Hamilton. 12 vols. Schlesinger, A. M., Jr., The Age of Jack-
New York and London, 1904. son. New York, 1945.
MacDonald, W., Jacksonian Democracy, Schurz, Carl, Henry Clay. 2 vols. Bos-
1829-37. New York and London, ton, 1887.
1906. Sears, L. M., Jefferson and the Em-
Mahan, A. T., Sea Power in Its Rela- bargo. Durham, 1927.
tions to the War of 1812. 2 vols. Bos- Shepard, E. M., Martin Van Buren.
ton, 1905. Boston and New York, 1888.
Sea Power in Its Relations to the Smith, J. H., The War with Mexico.
French Revolution. 2 vols. Boston, 2 vols. New York, 1919.
1892. Stephenson, N. W., Texas and the Mex-
Malone, Dumas, Jefferson the Virginian. ican War. New Haven, 1921.
(First of 4 vols.) Boston, 1948. Swisher, C. B., Roger B. Taney. New
Mayo, Bernard, ed., Jefferson Himself. York, 1935.
(Selected Writings.) Boston, 1942. Sydnor, C. S., The Development of
Meyers, G., History of Tammany Hall. Southern Sectionalism. Baton Rouge,
New York, 1917. 1948.
Turner, F. The United States, 1830-
Morison, S. E., Maritime History of J.,

Massachusetts, 1783-1860. Boston,

50. New York, 1935.
1921. Tyler, L. G., The Letters and Times of
the Tylers. 3 vols. Richmond and Wil-
McCormac, E. I., James K. Polk. Berke-
1922. liamsburg, 1884-96.
ley, California, Van Buren, Martin, Autobiography.
Osterweis, R. G., Romanticism and Na- Washington, 1920.
tionalism in the Old South. New Van Deusen, G. C., Thurlow Weed.
Haven, 1949. Boston, 1947.
Parton, James, The Life and Times of Werner, M. R., Tammany Hall. New
Aaron Burr. Boston, 1872.
York, 1928.
Paxson, F. L., The Independence of the Wiltse, C. M., John C. Calhoun, Na-
South American Republics. Phila- tionalist: 1827-1828. Indianapolis,
delphia, 1903. 1944.
Phillips, U. B., American Negro Slavery. John C. Calhoun, Nullifier:
New York and London, 1918. 1829-1839. Indianapolis, 1949.

IX.BIOGRAPHIES, HISTORIES, MEMOIRS, ETC.,

APPLYING CHIEFLY TO THE YEARS 1850-1909
Adams, C. F., Life of Charles Francis -Degradation of the Democratic
Adams. Boston and New York, 1900. Dogma. New York, 1919.
Adams, C. F., and Henry, Chapters of -"The Session," North American
Erie. Boston, 1871. Review, vol. 108, April, 1869.
Adams, Henry, Letters of Henry Adams, Angle, P. M., ed., The Lincoln Reader.
1858-91. 2 vols., edited by W. C. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1947.
Ford. Boston, 1930. Auchampaugh, P. G., James Buchanan
The Education of Henry Adams. and His Cabinet on the Eve of Seces-
Boston and New York, 1918. sion. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 1926.
Bibliography 723

Bancroft, Frederick, The Life of Wil- Coulter, E. M., The South During Re-
liam H. Seward. 2 vols. New York construction, 1865-77. Baton Rouge,
and London, 1900. 1947.
A Sketch of the Negro in Politics. Craven, Avery O., The Coming of the
New York, 1885. Civil War. New York, 1942.
Barnard, Harry, Eagle Forgotten: The The Repressible Conflict 1830-
Life of John P. Alt geld. Indianapolis, 1861. Baton Rouge, 1938.
1938. Croly, Herbert, Marcus Alonzo Hanna.
Basler, R. P., Abraham Lincoln: His New York, 1912.
Speeches and Writings. Cleveland The Promise of American Life.
and New York, 1946. New York, 1909.
Beale, H. K., The Critical Year. New Curti, M., Bryan and World Peace.
York, 1930. Northhampton, Massachusetts, 1931.
Beer, Thomas, Hanna. New York, 1929. Dennett, T., John Hay. New York, 1933.
Beveridge, Albert J., Abraham Lincoln. Dewitt, D. M., The Impeachment and
4 vols. Boston and New York, 1928. Trial of Andrew Johnson. New York
Blaine, James G., Twenty Years of Con- and London, 1903.
gress. 2 vols. Norwich, Connecticut, De Witt, B. P., The Progressive Move-
1884-86. ment. New York, 1925.
Boutwell, George, Reminiscences of Dubois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction.
Sixty Years in Public Affairs. New New York, 1935.
York, 1902. The Souls of Black Folk. Chi-
Bowers, Claude G., The Tragic Era. cagp,
1903.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1929. Dunning, W. A., Essays on the Civil
Bryan, W. J., The First Battle. Chicago, War and Reconstruction. New York,
1898. 1907.
Buchanan, J., Mr. Buchanan's Adminis- Reconstruction: Political and
tration on the Eve of the Rebellion. Economic. New York, 1907.
New York, 1866. Eckenrode, H. J., Rutherford B. Hayes.
Buck, J., The Granger Movement.
S. New York, 1930.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1913. Faulkner, H. U., The Quest for Social
The Agrarian Crusade. New Justice. New York, 1931.
Haven, 1920. Fite, E. D., The Presidential Campaign
Carnegie, A., Autobiography. Garden of 1860. New York, 1911.
City, New York, 1920. Social and Industrial Conditions
Cater, H. D., ed., Henry Adams and in the North During the Civil War..
His Friends (more letters). Boston, New York, 1910.
1947. Flack, H.
E., Spanish-American Diplo-
Chamberlain, J., Farewell to Reform. matic Relations Preceding the War of
New York, 1932. 1898. Baltimore, 1906.
Chase, S. P., Diary and Correspondence. Fleming, W. L., Documentary History
Washington, 1903. of Reconstruction. 2 vols. Cleveland,
Chidsey, D. B., The Gentleman from 1906-07.
New York: A Life of Roscoe Conk- The Sequel of Appomattox. New
ling. New Haven, 1935. Haven, 1919.
Clark, Champ, My Quarter Century of Flick, Alexander,Samuel Jones Tilden.
American Politics. 2 vols. New York, New York, 1939.
1920. Ford, H. J., The Cleveland Era. New
Cleveland, Grover, Presidential Prob- Haven, 1919.
lems. New York, 1904. Fuess, C. M., Carl Schurz. New York,
Cole, A. C., The Era of the Civil War. 1932.
Springfield, Illinois, 1919. Gompers, Samuel, Seventy Years of Life
The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850- and Labor. 2 vols. New York, 1925.
65. New
York, 1934. Gosnell, H. F., Boss Plait and His New
-The Whig Party in the South. York Machine. Chicago, 1925.
Washington, 1913. Grant, U. S., Personal Memoirs. 2 vols.
Coleman, C. H., The Election of 1868. New York, 1885-86.
New York, 1933. Greeley, Horace, Recollections of a
Coleman, J. W., The Molly Maguire Busy Life. New York, 1868.
Riots. Richmond, 1936. Grierson, F., The Valley of Shadows.
724 Bibliography

Boston, (Memories of a boy-

1948. Lynch, D. T., Boss Tweed. New York,
hood in Illinois in Lincoln's day.) 1927.
Harvey, R. H., Samuel Gompers. Stan- McElroy, R. M., Jefferson Davis, the
ford University, California, and Lon- Unreal and the Real. New York and
don, 1935. London, 1937.
Haworth, P. L., The Hayes-Tilden Dis- Grover Cleveland. 2 vols. New
puted Election of 1876. Cleveland, York and London, 1923.
1906. Mearns, D., The Lincoln Papers:. 2 vols.
Haynes, G. H., Charles Sumner. Phila- New York, 1948. (The story of the
delphia, 1909. collection, with selections to July 4,
Hendrick, B. J., Lincoln's War Cabinet. 1861.)
Boston, 1946. Merriam, C. E., Four American Party
The Life of Andrew
Carnegie. Leaders. New York, 1926.
2 vols. Garden New York, 1932.
City, Miller, A. B., Thaddeus Stevens. New
Hesseltine, W. B., Lincoln and the War York and London, 1939.
Governors. New York, 1948. Millis, W., The Martial Spirit. Boston
U. S. Grant. New York, 1935. and New York, 1931.
Hibben, P., The Peerless Leader. New Milton, G. F., Abraham Lincoln and
York, 1929. the Fifth Column. New York, 1942.
Hicks, J. D., The Populist Crusade. The Eve of Conflict. Boston and
Minneapolis, 1931. New York, 1934.
Hill, H. C., Roosevelt and the Carib- The Age of Hate. New York,
bean. Chicago, 1927. 1930.
Hirsch, M. D., William C. Whitney. Mitchell, W. C., A History of the
New York, 1948. Greenbacks. Chicago, 1903.
Hoar, George Frisbie, Autobiography Mullen, Arthur, Western Democrat.
of Seventy Years. 2 vols. New York, New York, 1940.
1903. Muzzey, D. S., James G. Elaine. New
Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism York, 1934.
in American Thought, 1860-1915. Nevins, Allan, Ordeal of the Union. 2
Philadelphia and London, 1944. vols. New York, 1947.
Horn, Stanley F., The Invisible Empire. The Emergence of Modern
Boston, 1939. America. New York, 1928.
Howe, G. F., Chester A. Arthur. New -Fremont, Pathmarker of the
York, 1934. West. New York and London, 1939.
Howe, M. A. DeW., ed., Home Letters -Hamilton Fish: The Inner His-
of General Sherman. New York, 1909. tory of the Grant Administration.
Howland, H. J., Theodore Roosevelt New York, 1936.
and His Time. New Haven, 1921. -Grover Cleveland. New York,
Jessup, P., Elihu Root. 2 vols. New York, 1932.
1938. -John D. Rockefeller. 2 vols.
Josephson, M., The Robber Barons. New York, 1940.
New York, 1934. ed., Letters of Grover Cleveland.
The Politicos. New York, 1938. New York, 1933.
The President Makers. New Nichols, R. F., The Disruption of Amer-
York, 1940. ican Democracy. New York, 1948.
Julian, G. W., Political Recollections. Franklin Pierce. Philadelphia and
Chicago, 1884. London, 1931.
Kent, Frank, The Democratic Party. Nicolay, J. G., and Hay, John, Abraham
New York and London, 1928. Lincoln. 10 vols. New York, 1890.
Kleeberg, G. S. P., The Formation of Ogden, R., Life and Letters of E. L.
the Republican Party as a National God kin. 2 vols. New York and Lon-
Political Organization. New York, don, 1907.
1911. Olcott, C. S., The Life of William Me-
La Follette, R. M., La Follette's Auto- Kinley. 2 vols. Boston and New York,
biography. New York, 1913. 1916.
Lodge, H. C., Early Memories. New Oliphant, Laurence, Episodes of a Life
York, 1913. of Adventure. New York, 1887.
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, Crowded Owsley, F. L., States' Rights in the Con-
Hours. New York and London, 1933. federacy. Chicago, 1925.
Bibliography 725

Peck, H. T., Twenty Years of the Re- Smith, W. E., The Francis Preston
public, 1885-1905. New York, 1906. Blair Family in Politics. 2 vols. New
Pinchot, G., The Fight for Conservation. York, 1933.
New York, 1910. Smith, T. C., The Life and Letters of
Pratt, J. W., Expansionists of 1898. Bal- James A. Garfield. 2 vols. New Haven,
timore, 1930. 1925.
Pringle, H. F., Theodore Roosevelt. Stephenson, G. M., A History of Ameri-
New York, 1931. can Immigration, 1820-1924. Boston
The Life and Times of William and New York, 1926.
Howard Taft. 2 vols. New York and Stryker, L. P., Andrew Johnson. New
Toronto, 1939. York, 1929.
Randall, J. G., The Civil War and Re- Tate, Allen, Jefferson Davis, His Rise
construction. Boston and New York, and Fall. New York, 1929.
1937. Thayer, William R., Life and Letters
Constitutional Problems Under of John Hay. Boston and New York,
Lincoln. New York and London, 1915.
1926. Ware, N. J., The Industrial Worker,
Lincoln the President: Spring- 1840-60. Boston and New York,
field to Gettysburg. 2 vols. New York, 1924.
1945. Washington, B. T., Up From Slavery.
Rhodes, J. F., History of the United New York, 1901.
States from the Compromise of 1850 Welles, G., Diary of Gideon Welles. 3
to 1877. 7 vols. New York and Lon- vols. Boston, 1911.
don, 1910. Werner, M. R., Bryan. New York, 1929.
Roosevelt, Theodore, Autobiography. White, William Allen, Masks in a
New York, 1913. Pageant. New York, 1928.
Roosevelt, T., and Lodge, H. G., Selec- Autobiography. New York, 1946.
tions from the Correspondence of Selected Letters, edited by Wal-
Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot ter Johnson. New York, 1947.
Lodge. 2 vols. New York, 1925. Williams, C. R., The Life of R. B.
Ross, E. D., The Liberal Republican Hayes. 2 vols. Boston and New York,
Movement. New York, 1919. 1914.
Sandburg, Carl, Abraham Lincoln: The Williams, C. R., ed., Diary and Letters
Prairie Years. 2 vols. New York, 1926. of R. B. Hayes. 5 vols. Columbus,
Abraham Lincoln: The War Ohio, 1922-26.
Years. 4 vols. New York, 1939. Williams, W.
C., William Jennings
Schlesinger, A. M., The Rise of the Bryan. New
York, 1936.
City. New York, 1933. Winston, R., Andrew Johnson, Plebeian
Schurz, Carl, Reminiscences. 3 vols. and Patriot. New York, 1928.
New York, 1907. Wister, O., Roosevelt: The Story of a
Seward, F. W., Reminiscences of a War Friendship. New York, 1930.
Time Statesman and Diplomat. New Wittke, C. F., We Who Built America.
York, 1916. New York, 1939.
Shannon, Fred Albert, Organization and Woodburn, J. A., The Life of Thaddeus
Administration of the Union Army. 2 Stevens. Indianapolis, 1913.
vols. Cleveland, 1928. Woodward, W. E., Meet General
Sherman, John, Recollections of Forty Grant, New York, 1929.
Years. 2 vols. Chicago and New York,
1895.

X. SINCE 1909BOOKS DEALING

WITH THE "MODERN INSTANCES" MENTIONED HEREIN
Only Yesterday. New York
Allen, F. L., Baker, R. S., Woodrow Wilson, Life and
and London, 1931. Letters.8 vols. Garden City, New
The Great Pierpont Morgan. York, 1927-39.
New York, 1949. Woodrow Wilson and World
Bailey, T. A., Woodrow Wilson and the Settlement. 3 vols. Garden City, New
Lost Peace. New York, 1944. York, 1922.
726 Bibliography

Baker, R. S., and Dodd, W. E., eds., Mowry, K., Theodore Roosevelt and the
The Public Papers of Woodrow Wil- Progressive Movement. Madison, Wis-
son. 6 vols. New York and London, consin, 1946.
1925-27. Notter, H., The Origins of the Foreign
Bell, H. C. F., Woodrow Wilson and Policy of Woodrow Wilson. Baltimore,
the People. New York, 1945. 1937.
Bowers, Claude G., Albert Beveridge Oliver, F. S., Alexander Hamilton. Lon-
and the Progressive Era. Cambridge, don, 1906.
Massachusetts, 1932. Paxson, F. L., American Democracy and
Corey, L., The House of Morgan. New the World War. 3 vols. Boston, 1936-
York, 1930. 38.
Cranston, A., The Killing of the Peace. Perkins, F., The Roosevelt I itnew. New
New York, 1945. York, 1946.
Farley, J., Jim Farley's Story: The Rauch, B., History of the New Deal,
Roosevelt Years. New York, 1948. 1933-38. New York, 1944.
Flynn, E. J., You're the Boss. New York, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, The Public
1947. Papers and Addresses of Franklin D.
Hacker, L., Short History of the New Roosevelt. 9 vols. (so far) New York,
Deal New York, 1934. 1933-40.
Hendrick, B. J., The Life and Letters Schriftgeisser, K., This Was Normalcy:
of Walter H. Page. 3 vols. Garden Party Politics, 1920-32. Boston, 1948.
City, New York, 1925. Seymour, Charles, American Diplomacy
Hoover, H. C., The Challenge to Lib- During the World War. Baltimore.
erty. New York and London, 1934.
1934.
House, E. M., and Seymour, C., eds., Seymour, C., ed., The Intimate Papers
What Really Happened at Paris: The of Colonel House. 4 vols. Boston and
Story of the Peace Conference^ 1918- New York, 1926-28.
1919. New York, 1921. Sherwood, R. E., Roosevelt and Hop-
Houston, D., Eight Years with Wilson's kins. New York, 1948.
Cabinet. 2 vols. Garden City, New Shotwell, J. T., At the Paris Peace Con-
York, 1926. ference. New York, 1937.
Hull, C., Memoirs. 2 vols. New York, Stimson, H. L., and Bundy, McGeorge,
1948. On Active Service in Peace and War.
Johnson, G. W., Roosevelt, Dictator or New York, 1948.
Democrat? New York, 1941. Tansill, C. C., America Goes to War.
Lindley, E. K., Half Way with Roose- Boston, 1938.
velt. New York, 1936. Timmons, B. N., Garner of Texas. New
The Roosevelt Revolution, First York, 1948.
Phase. New York, 1933. Wecter, Dixon, The Age of the Great
Link, A. S., Wilson-*-The Road to the Depression, 1929-41. New York,
White House. Princeton, 1947. 1948.
Malin, J. C., The United States After White, William Allen, A Puritan in
the World War. Boston, 1930. Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coo-
McAdoo, E. W., The Woodrow Wilsons. lidge. New York, 1938.
New York, 1937. Whitlock, Brand, Forty Years of It.
McAdoo, W. G., Crowded Years. Bos- New York and London, 1914.
ton and New York, 1931. Wilbur, R. L., and Hyde, A. M., The
Mansergh, Nicholas, The Coming of the Hoover Policies. New York, 1937.
First World War: A Study in Euro- Zevin, B. D., ed., Nothing to Fear. The
pean Balance, 1878-1914. London, selected addresses of Franklin Delano
1949. Roosevelt, 1932-45. Boston, 1946.
 Acknowledgments

A HE AUTHOR wishes to thank The American Mercury for permission to

quote from "Twelve Years of Roosevelt" in Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A
Memorial; The American Council of Learned Societies for permission to
quote from "John Marshall" by Edward S. Corwin in the Dictionary of
American Biography, published by them; the Associated Colleges at Clare-
mont for permission to quote from Constitutional Revolution, Ltd., by
Edward Corwin, published by them in 1941 Dodd, Mead & Company
S. ;

for permission to quotefrom Rutherford B. Hayes by H. J. Eckenrode and

P. W. Wight, 1930, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage by AHan

Nevins, 1932, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Adminis-
tration by Allan Nevins, 1936, Twenty Years of the Republic: 1885-1905

by H. T. Peck, 1906, Lincoln the President by J. G. Randall, 1945, Mr.

Franklin Ford for permission to quote from The Rise and Growth of
American Politics by Henry J. Ford; Wilfred Funk, Inc., for permission
to quote from Western Democrat by A. F. Mullen; Harcourt, Brace and

Company, Inc., for permission to quote from The Super-Powers by W. T.

R. Fox, The President Makers by Matthew Josephson, Theodore Roose-
velt, ABiography by H. F. Pringle; Harper & Brothers for permission to
quote from The Great Pierpont Morgan by F. L. Allen, America's Silver
Age by Gerald W. Johnson; D. C. Heath and Company for permission to
quote from The Civil War and the Reconstruction by J. G. Randall;

Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to quote from American Con-

stitutional Development by C. B. Swisher, The Great Plains by Walter P.

Webb, The Party Battles of the Jackson Period by Claude G. Bowers, The
Life of John Marshall by A. J. Beveridge, The Maritime History of Massa-
chusetts by S. E. Morison Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to quote
;

from Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life by Carl

Becker, The Declaration of Independence by Carl Becker, American Polit-
ical Parties by Wilfred E. Binkley, President and Congress by Wilfred E.

Binkley, Lincoln and the War Governors by W. B. Hesseltine, The Decline

of the West by O. Spengler, translated by C. F. Atkinson; Little, Brown &
Company for permission to quote from Year of Decision: 1846 by Bernard
DeVoto, Hands Off: A History of the Monroe Doctrine by Dexter Perkins,
The Age of Jackson by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr; Longmans, Green &
727
 725 Acknowledgments
Co., Inc., for permission to quote from The Coming of the First World
War: A Study in the European Balance 1878-1914 by N. Hansergh; The
Macmillan Company for permission to quote from Economic Origins of
Jeffersonian Democracy by Charles A. Beard, copyright, 1915, by The
Macmillan Company, 1943, by Charles A. Beard, The Emergence of
Modern America 1865-1878 by Allan Nevins, copyright, 1927, by The
Macmillan Company, The American States During and After the Revolu-
tion by Allan Nevins, copyright, 1924, by The Knights of Columbus, The
Rise of the City 1878-1898 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, copyright* 1933, by
The Macmillan Company, Essays on the Civil War and the Reconstruction
by W. A. Dunning, Statesmen of the Old South by W. E. Dodd, Collected
Poems by Vachel Lindsay, copyright, 1926, by The Macmillan Company,
Disruption of American Democracy by Roy F. Nichols, copyright, 1948, by
The Macmillan Company, Masks in a Pageant by W. A. White, copyright,
1928, by The Macmillan Company, Autobiography by W. A. White, copy-
right, 1946, by The Macmillan Company; New Republic for permission
to quote from Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Works by Herbert

Croly; New York University Press for permission to quote from The
Foundations of American Constitutionalism by Andrew C. McLaughlin;
Prentice-Hall, Inc., for permission to quote from We Who Built America
by Carl Wittke; Princeton University Press for permission to quote from
Constitutional Dictatorship by C. Rossiter; G. P. Putnam's Sons for per-
mission to quote from Alexander Hamilton by F. S. Oliver; Rinehart &
Co., Inc., for permission to quote from Divided We Stand by Walter Pres-
cott Webb, copyright, 1937, by Walter Prescott Webb; The Ronald Press
Company for permission to quote from The Course of American Demo-
cratic Thought by Ralph Henry Gabriel, copyright, 1940, by The Ronald
Press Company; Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to quote from The
Coming of the Civil War by Avery Craven, Alexander Hamilton by Henry
Jones Ford, The Ordeal of the Union by Allan Nevins, Autobiography by
Theodore Roosevelt; The University of North Carolina Press for per-
mission to quote from James Monroe by W. P. Cresson, The Attack on
Leviathan by Donald Davidson; University of Pennsylvania Press for per-
mission to quote from Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860-1915
by Richard Hofstadter; University of Wisconsin Press for permission to
quote from The Articles of Confederation by M. Jensen; The Viking Press,
Inc., for permission to quote from The Roosevelt I Knew by Frances
Perkins, The Killing of the Peace by Alan Cranston; and Mrs. Woodrow
Wilson for permission to quote from The Public Papers of Woodrow
Wilson published in 1927 by Harper & Brothers.
 Index

Abbott, Reverend Lyman, quoted on great dential candidate, 214, 217; background and
cities,555 career, 217-220; Cabinet appointments, 220;
Abolition. See Slavery Administration, 220-230; aims, 225, 230;
Acton, Lord, quoted on laws, 502 last years, 230-231; on William Henry Har-
Acts of Parliament, 6 rison, 286; on Declaration of Independence,
Adams, Abigail, wife of John Adams, 93 354
Adams, Charles Francis, 324, 491 Adams, Samuel, 15, 40, 113
Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 545 Address to People of South Carolina
the
Adams, Henry, 634, 668; quoted on radical (Calhoun), 265
view of Constitution, 50; on reactions of for- Agrarianism, influence of Embargo and Non-
eign travelers, 59; on Jay's treaty, 77-78; on Intercourse Act, 165; struggle with capital-
Jefferson's alliance with New York politi- ism, 614-615
cians, 88; on Jefferson and
England, 127-128; Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 684
on Napoleonic designs in North America, Agriculture, revolution of, 521-522. See also
130-131; on Toussaint, 132; on Louisiana Farmers
Purchase, 133-134; on control of Supreme Alabama, statehood, 189; expropriates Indian
Court, 138; on Jefferson's diplomacy, 149; lands, 262; secession, 404
on Jefferson's Embargo, 151; on conditions Alabama, Confederate cruiser, 505
faced by Madison, 164; on Canning, 167 Alabama Claims, settlement of, 505-508
168; on Monroe, 198; on Grant, 473, 482, Alaska, purchase of, 78; Guggenheim interests
496; on Black Friday shame, 475; on rascal- in, 657-658
ity under Grant, 490; on Sumner's quarrel Albany Regency, 21 In., 221, 238, 472 f

with Grant, 506; on Grant's Congress, 513- Aldrich, Nelson W., 660
514; on alliance with England, 607; on gold Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 107-108
standard, 613; on John Sherman, 621; on Allen, Frederick Lewis, quoted on Morgan,.
Reed, 630, 632; on Theodore Roosevelt, 633, 641
651-652 Allison, William, 523, 536
Adams, James Truslow, quoted on Washing- Allison Bill, 586n., 590, 593
ton and Marshall, 105 Altgeld, John P., 602-603
Adams, John, 9, 13, 19; quoted on Stamp Act, Altoona, meeting of Union governors at, 423-
6; use of American, 7; on Britain and Amer- 424
ica, 10; on republican government, 18; on Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and
formation of governments in colonies, 20-21 ; Tin Workers, 591
backs Washington for Commander-in-Chief , Amendments to Constitution, Bill of Rights,
28; on democracy, 40; on power, 42; inaugu- 56n.; First, 108n.; Fifth, 385n., 565, 567;
ration, 81; on political parties, 84; elected Twelfth, 121n.; Thirteenth, 448, 451, 454,
President, 91; described, 92-93, 95; back- 565; Fourteenth, 455-456, 458, 464, 497, 499,
ground and career, 93-97; political philoso- 500, 563, 564-567, 574, 575; Fifteenth, 473,
phy, 97-100; Vice-President, 97, 100; Ad- 499, 565; Sixteenth, 600, 658; Seventeenth,
ministration, 100-105, 123; relations with 658
Jefferson, 113, 120, 121 American, application of term to colonists, 7-8
Adams, John Quincy, quoted on Jefferson's American Citizen, The, 141n.
administration, 124; on Senate dictation American Commonwealth, The (Bryce), 688
to Madison, 156157; peace negotiator at American Federation of Labor, 503, 673
Ghent, 181; on Monroe, 197, 200; on Era of American Law Review, 570
Good Feelings, 201; Secretary of State, 201,
American Nations, proposed Congress of, at
206-210, 214; cited on slavery, 204; quoted Panama, 224
on Missouri Compromise, 204, 205; presi- American Railway Union, 602, 603

729
730 Index
American Revolution, motivating factors, 3-8; Balance, sectional, 263-264
Boston Tea Party, 8-9; political theories of, Balance of power, North American, 3; in
10-15, 17-19; radical and conservative inffu- Senate, 203, 204
ences, 19-22; loyalists in, 22-23; political Ballinger, Richard, Secretary of the Interior,
and social influences, 23-24; rebel fighting 657
forces, 28-29, 30; British strategy, 29-30; Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 560; strike of,
Treaty of 1783, 96, 181 524-525
American Sugar Refining Company, 640 Bancroft, George, 174n., cited on Polk, 318;
American System, Clay's, 215, 217, 224, 287, Secretary of the Navy, 313
288, 289, 298 Bank of the United States, First, 70, 192, 193,
Ames, Fisher, 64; quoted on democracies, 41; 252; Second, 192, 193, 194; Western Uoans,
on Congressional standing committees, 67 216; fight for, 252-259
Ames, Oakes, 487 Banking Acts, of 1863 and 1864, 432; Federal
Anas, The (Jefferson), 117-118 Reserve Act, 443, 667
Anderson, Major Robert, 412 Banking system, at end of Civil War, 442-443
Andrews, John, 422 Banks, state, 258-259, 443
Annapolis convention of 1786, 36 Barbary pirates, 129
Antietam, battle of, 424 Barbour, James, 204; Secretary of War, 220,
Anti-Federalists, 1 18 224
And -Mason Party, 288-289 Baring Panic, 598
Anti-Monopoly Party, 594 Barnburners, 308-309, 323-324, 377
"Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Barrancas, Fort, seized by Southern troops,
Congress to the People of the United States," 405
364, 376 Barry, William T., Postmaster General, 244
"Appeal to the Silver Democrats," 608 Bates, Edward, Attorney General, 408
Aquinas, Thomas, four types of law, 16 Bayard, James Asheton, peace negotiator at
Area, United States, 1860, 419 Ghent, 181
Argentina, default of Government, 598 Bayard, Thomas Francis, 544; Secretary of
Aristotle, quoted on particular and universal State, 552
law, 15-16
Bayonne Decree, Napoleon's, 170n.
Arizona, statehood, 658 Beard, Charles A., quoted on Convention
Arkansas, Secession, 413; postwar provisional leaders in new government, 49; on Jefferson,
government, 451 129; on War of 1812, 178
Armories, national, 444
Beauregard, General Pierre Gustave Toutant,
Armstrong, General John, Secretary of War, 412
199
Becker, Carl L., quoted on American privi-
Arthur, Chester A., Collector of Port of New
leges, 11; on Declaration of Independence,
York, 520-521; Vice-President, 529; succeeds
14, 155; on liberty, 280
Garfield, 533, 534; background and career,
534-535; Pendleton Act, 536-538, 541; Belknap, Brigadier General William Worth,
vetoes Mississippi waterway bill, 538-539; Secretary of War, 489
tariff revision, 539-540; fails of nomination, Bell, John, 398, 400, 465
541 Bellini, Charles, 115, 116
Articles of Confederation, 31-33, 36 Belmont, August, 663
Ash burton, Lord, 300 Benton, Jessie, 379-380, 430
Assessments, political, 520, 536 Benton, Thomas Hart, 216n.; cited on spoils
Assumption Bill, 71 system under Jackson, 243; quoted on Van
Atlanta, capture of, 430 Buren as Minister to England, 245-246;
Aurora, Jeffersonian paper, 162, 169 views on banking problem, 254, 258, 259;

Autobiography (John Adams), quoted, 20-21 opposes restriction of Western land sales,
264; report on sale of public lands, 270; on
Autobiography (Carnegie), 552
Autobiography (Roosevelt), 643; quoted, 638, Oregon boundary settlement, 314; cited on
639; on Northern Securities Case, 642-643; Gadsden Purchase, 359; father-in-law of
on New Nationalism, 659-660 Fremont, 379; quoted on Jackson, 434
Berlin Decree, Napoleon's, 170
Babcock, Brigadier General Orville E., 488- Bessemer process, 560
489 Beveridge Albert, J., quoted on Marshall's de-
Baer, George F., 647-648 cision inMarbury v. Madison f 136, 137; on
Bagehot, Walter, quoted on party organiza- "Appeal of the Independent Democrats,"
tion, 202r. 364; on Republican Party, 373
Index 731

Biddle, Nicholas, fight for Bank of the United Bryan, William Jennings, 556, 598, 636; Pop-
States, 253-257; instructions to Harrison, ulist movement, 558; "Appeal to the Silver
278 Democrats," 608; presidential candidate in
Bill of Rights, 56n. 1896, 609-613; renominated by Democrats,
Bimetallism, 504, 593 625-626; backs Wilson, 663
Binkley, Wilfred E., quoted on leadership of Bryce, James, quoted on Constitutional Con-
Congress, 64; on Jefferson, 124; on "Appeal vention, 37; on American Constitution, 45;
of the Independent Democrats," 364; on on Congressional committees, 66; on Mar-
Republican Party, 375-376, 659; on lower shall, 192; on President, 526; on Speaker of
West, 432; cited on Republicans in Con- the House, 173n., 628; on Republicans and
gress, 468;quoted on Cleveland, 577, 592; Democrats, 688-689
on McKinley, 618; on Theodore Roosevelt, Buchanan, James, 348, 375; Secretary of State,
645; on Republican leadership, 676 313; nomination and elections, 377-378,
Birney, James Gillespie, 31 In. 380, 381; background and career, 378; de-
Black, Justice Hugo, 566 scribed, 381-382; Cabinet, 382-384; Inaugu-
Black Friday plot, 475, 485-486 ral Address, 383-384; Dred Scott case, 384-
Black Hawk War, 322 386; feud with Douglas, 387-388; 394;
Black Republicans, 404 vetoes homestead bill, 390; weakness of,
Blaine, James G., 451n., 514, 517; quoted on 403-404; end of administration, 406; con-
Stevens, 427; on Conkling, 495; candidate trasted with Lincoln, 420-421
for nomination, 509-510, 527-529; Secretary Buena Vista, battle of, 323, 358
of State, 530, 588; presidential nominee, Bull Moose Party. See Progressive Party
541, 545, 546-548; Mulligan letters, 541, Bull Run, battle of, 461
546, 509-510 Burchard, Reverend S. D., 547, 548
Blair, Francis Preston, 252, 377 Burke, Edmund, quoted on Americans, 9
Blair, Francis Preston, Jr., 471-472 Burr, Aaron, Senator from New York, 87, 88;
Blair, Montgomery, 429, 493; Postmaster Gen- vice-presidential candidate, 91; Vice-Presi-
eral, 408 dent, 104, 119-121; intrigues of, 140-143;
Blair Bill, 582-583 tried for treason, 148
Bland, Richard P., 523, 598, 599, 608, 610 Butler, Andrew Pickens, 368
Bland-Allison Act, 523-524, 550 Butler, Benjamin F., 466, 488, 498, 517, 544
Bliss, General Tasker H., 670 Butterfield, Daniel, 485
Bonaparte, Lucien, 130 Butternuts, 431
Booth, John Wilkes, 435-436
Boston Tea Party, 8-9 Cabinet, role of, in new government, 60-61,.
Boutwell, George S., 493, 517; Secretary of 63-64, exclusion from Congress, 64;
101;
the Treasury, 475, 478, 479, 485-486 Whig theory of President as chairman, 299
Bowers, Claude G. quoted on public opinion, Cabot, George, quoted on democracy, 41;
270 on disunion, 140; presides at Hartford Con-
Boxer Rebellion, 626 vention, 179
Braddock, General Edward, 26 Cadore letter, 170n.
Bradley, Justice Joseph P., 495 Cadwalader, General John, 166
Bragg, General Edward, quoted on Cleveland, Calhoun, John C., 188, 191, 192, 237; member
544 of House Committee of Foreign Affairs,
Breckinridge, John C., 108; presidential can- 173; quoted on Madison, 174n.; introduces
didate, 397, 398, 400 bill for internal improvements, 183-185;

Brewer, Justice David J., quoted on paternal Secretary of War, 201; tariff views, 226, 263;
theory of government, 570 defense of states' rights, 227, 265-266; and
Brice, Calvin, quoted on Cleveland, 578 spoils system, 243; Vice-President, 244; hos-
Bright, John, 505 tility to Van Buren, 245; opposes nominat-
Bristow, Benjamin, 545; Secretary of the ing convention, 247; supports Democratic
Treasury, 488 money policy, 260; association with whigs,,
British Empire, colonists' theory of, 10. See 267; estimate of, 267-269; candidate for
also England President, 278, 312; Secretary of State, 301;
British Guiana, boundary question, 604 unites South in Democratic Party, 301-302,,
Broadway Street Railway, 553 305; cited on slavery, 304; quoted on slavery *
Brook Farm, 637 307; argues for improvement of Mississippi
Brooks, Preston, attacks Sumner, 368, 506 navigation, 315; master of the South, 325V
Brown, John, 368, 391-392 328-330, 333-334, 405; patriotism of, 339;
Brown v. Maryland, 573 on majority rule, 349
732 Index

Calhoun, Mrs. John C., 244 Chesapeake (U. S. Frigate), attacked by Leop-
California, annexation of, 313, 314, 316-318; ard, 148-149
statehood, 328, 329 Chesterton, G. K., quoted on democracy, 655
Cameron, Simon, 423, 477, 514; Secretary of Chicago, growth of, 369
War, 408 Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, 640
Campbell, George Washington, quoted on Chickasaw Indians, 262
Non-Intercourse Bill, 164 China, first commercial treaty with, 359-360
Canada, expulsion of French, 3, 4; British Chinese, in California, 563
commission in, 9; goal in War of 1812, Choctaw Indians, 262
171-173, 178; boundary question, 181, 507; Chronicle, Boston, 179
rebellion in, 299-300; Webs ter-Ashbur ton Church, disestablishment of, 19
treaty, 300; treaty of 1854 with, 356; plans Cigar making, statute on, 572-573
for acquisition of, 476; as settlement of Cities, problem of, 555-559
Alabama Claims, 505; fisheries Civil Rights Act, Congress passes, 455
question,
507, 586587; proposed Civil Rights cases, 499
reciprocity treaty
with, 658-659 Civil Service, reform of, 519-521, 536-538;
Canal (s), Washington's project for, 27, 34-35; Cleveland's appointment problem, 549-550;
Calhoun 's bill for, 184 Workmen's Compensation Act, 667
Civil Service Commission, 537
Canning, George, 127-128, 149, 151, 152, 163,
167-168, 197, 207, 208 Civil War, Confederacy formed, 404; early
Cannon, Joseph G., Speaker ol House of Rep- days 405-406; 412-413; Lincoln calls out
of,

resentatives, 632, 638-639, 646, 660 militia, 412; radicals in, 421-422; progress
of 422-426; surrender of Confederacy, 435
Capitalism, growth of, 165; government and,
502; struggle with agrarianism, 614-615
Civilian Conservation Corps, 683

Carew, Edith Kermit, wife of Theodore Claims, Standing Committee on, 65

Roosevelt, 634 Clark, Champ, 663
Clark, John, Governor of Georgia, 199
Carlisle, John, Secretary of the Treasury, 597,
601 Class conflict, problems of, 524-525

Carlyle, Thomas, quoted on Webster, 264. Clay, Henry, 178; quoted on conquest of Can-
ada, 171-172; Speaker of the House, 172-
Carnegie, Andrew, 560, 598; quoted on evo-
lution, 552; on American banking system, 173; peace negotiator at Ghent, 181; sup-
667 ports Missouri Compromise, 204-205; presi-
dential candidate, 214-215, 217, 247, 256,
Carnegie Company, 591
284, 287, 311; American System, 215, 217,
Carolinas, loyalists in, 23
224, 287, 288, 289, 298; Secretary of State,
Carpetbaggers, 459, 466
220; alleged bargain with Adams, 220, 224,
Cass, Lewis, 312, 318, 361; Secretary of War,
239; popularity of, 224; supports Bank of
251; presidential candidate, 324, 325, 377;
the United States, 255-256; effects compro-
Secretary of State, 382; resignation, 403, 404
mise on tariff, 266; as compromiser, 266,
Castle Pinckney, taken by South Carolina, 404
269; on Calhoun, 269; report on sale of pub-
Castlereagh, Lord, 206 lic lands, 270; stand on veto, 275, 298, 299;
Catholic Church, political agitation against,
reaction to Wilmot Proviso, 329; death of,
374
332n., 350
Caucus, party, 119n.; Congressional, 199,
Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 667
21 In., 213-214, 246
Cleveland, Grover, background and career,
Central Pacific Railroad, 486 542-544; nomination and election, 544548;
Chamberlain, Joseph, 606
problem of appointments, 549550, 578;
Chamberlain, Senator George Earle, 674
currency problems, 550551; belief in lais-
Champlain Canal, 184 sez-faire, 551-552; Cabinet, 552-554; fight
Charles River Bridge case, 293-294
against Senate, 577-580; coinage question,
Chase, Salmon P., 352, 353, 364, 365; "Appeal 580-581; tariff reform, 581, 583-584, 599-
of the Independent Democrats," 364, 376;
600; attacks pension frauds, 582-583; loses
Secretary of the Treasury, 408; Chief Jus- election of 1888, 584-585, 587; fisheries
tice, 429, 491, 493-494; death of, 492
treaty, 586-587; re-elected in 1893, 592-593;
Chase, Justice Samuel, 140; attempted im- second Cabinet, 597; Panic of 1893, 597-599;
peachment, 139 repeal of Silver Purchase Act, 598-599, 601,
Cheap money, problem of, 521-523, 550-551, 603, 608; bond issue, 601; intervention in
556 Pullman 601-602; British Guiana
strike,
Cheetham, James, 141n, boundary question, 604-607; quoted on war
Cherokee Indians, 188, 262-263 with Spain, 623
Index 733

Clinton, De Witt, 88, 141rc., 184; presidential Conscience Whigs, 353

candidate, 177 Conservation, Theodore Roosevelt's activities,
Clinton, George, 14 In.; Governor of New 649-650; doctrine of, 682-683
York, 68, 75, 87, 88; nominated for presi- Conservative Union Party, in South, 465
dency, 153; Vice-President, 163n., 164, 174, Conservatives, influence of, 1785-1788, 21-22;
198; death, 177 in Confederation of 1781, 32; influence of,
Cobb, Howell, 352, 356, 357, 380, 398, 404; on early state constitutions, 44
Secretary of the Treasury, 383-384, 390; Considerations on the Nature and Extent of
resignation, 403, 404; joins Confederate the Legislative Authority of the British
army, 405 Parliament (Wilson), 12
Coeur-de-Lion, Opera, 230 Constellation (U. S. frigate), 103
Coinage Acts, of 1853, 504; of 1873, 504 Constitution of the United States, 3, 33;
Coke, Sir Edward, quoted on Acts of Parlia- Philadelphia Convention of 1787, 36; prob-
ment, 6 lem of ratification, 36; debate on, 39-43,
Colfax, Schuyler, 487; Vice-President, 468 influence of state constitutions, 44-45; fed-
Colombia, rejects Panama Canal treaty, 650 eral and state sovereignty, 45-46; executive
Colonialism, economic, 34/1., 444 and democratic control, 46-49; radical and
Commager, Henry S., quoted on sectional bal- conservative views of, 49-51; Jeffersonians
ance, 263-264; on land for freedmen, 452; and Hamiltonians, 5253; Judiciary powers,
on agricultural revolution, 522; on New 5455; popular attitude toward, 56; ratifica-
Deal, 679 tion of, 68-69; treaty power, 78; economic
Committee system, Congressional, 65-67; re- interests of makers, 82; strict interpretation,
form of, 628-632 84-85, 193-194; strength of federal and state
Common Sense (Paine), closing words quoted, governments, 420-421; preamble, 439-440.
15; on law in America, 5556 See Also Amendments to Constitution
Commonwealth of Nations, British, 9 Constitutional system, central dogma of, 17
Compact theory of government, 17, 20, 21 Constitutional Union Party, 352, 398
Compromise of 1850, 329-334, 337, 338, 351, Constitutions, state, 20-21, 23, 32n., 43-45
354, 355, 356, 357, 361, 404 Continental Congress, 13, 19n., 20, 21, 27, 32,
Conduct of the War, joint committee on, 422, 94
445, 674 Contract labor, 442
Confederate States of America, formation of, Convention of 1787, meets at Philadelphia,
404; early days of war, 405-406, 412-^13; 36-38; debate on Constitution, 39-43. See
surrender of, 435; Constitution, 439-440. also Constitution of the United States
See also South, Secession Convention system, party, 246-250, 341, 346-
Confederation of 781, radical influences in, 347
19-21; democratic principles of, 31-32; state Cooke and Company, Jay, 501, 640
sovereignty, 32, 36; delegated powers, 33; Coolidge, Calvin, 676
western lands policy, 33-34; depression and Copernicus, Nicolaus, 16
devalued paper currency, 34; British view Copperheads, 431, 457
of, 96-97 Corn Laws, British, 310, 313
Confiscation, of Crown domains and Loyalist Cornell, Alonzo, 520-521, 535; Governor of
estates, 19 New York, 543
Congress, under Articles of Confederation, 31, Corwin, Thomas, quoted on power of state
32, 33; relations between President and, 49, legislature, 137; on Mexican War, 318; on
89, 239-241, 445-447, 535; development of Fourteenth Amendment, 565, 566; on New
standing committees, 65-67; caucus system, Deal, 682; on Supreme Court, 685-686
199, 21 In., 213-214, 246; in 1860, 419; joint Cotton gin, 186-187
Committee on the Conduct of the War, 422, Cotton textile industry, British, 187
445, 674; joint Committee on Reconstruc- Courier-Journal, Louisville, 512
tion, 454-455. See also House of Representa- Courts, federal, 135. See also Supreme Court
tives, Senate Cranston, Alan, quoted on isolationist senti-
Congressional Government (Wilson), quoted ment, 675
on Congressional standing committees, 66 Craven, Avery, quoted on Republican plat-
Conkling, Roscoe, 477, 495-496, 509, 520, 543; form of 1860, 394; on campaign of 1860, 399
in Campaign of 1880, 527-529; dispute Crawford, William Harris, 236, 238; quoted
with Garfield, 531-532; fall of, 532-533; on eulogizing Constitution, 118119; career
argues on Fourteenth Amendment, 566 of, 199-200; on Era of Good Feelings, 201;
Connecticut, slavery in, 58 Secretary of the Treasury, 201; presidential
734 Index

candidate, 211, 214, 217; refuses Secretary- for, 23; Jefferson drafts, 113; style of, 155;

ship of Treasury, 220 Jacksonian view of, 281

C*6dit Mobilier, 487-488 Declaration of Rights, 13, 14, 27
Creek Indians, 262 Defence of the Constitutions of Government
*^Csime Against Kansas, The" (Summer), 367- of the United States of America (Adams),
968 92, 95, 98
Crittenden, John Jordan, 406 Delaware, electoral college, 217; remains with
Crittenden Resolutions, 406, 407n. Union, 413
Croly, Herbert, quoted on pioneers, 615-616; Delegated powers, under articles of Confed-
on H anna, 617 eration, 33
Crown domains, confiscation of, 19 Democracy, post-Revolutionary movement to-
Crowninshield, B. W., Secretary of the Navy, ward, 23-24; under Articles of Confedera-
201 tion, 31-32; under Constitution, 39; prob-
Cuba, attempted purchase of, 378; uprising lem of, in framing Constitution, 39-43; as

against Spain, 623-625 majority rule, 339-341; Sumter and, 419,

Cullom, Senator, quoted on expansion, 622 421; economic, 637
Cultural federalism, problem of, 338-341 Democrat, Chicago, quoted on West, 315
Cumberland Road Bill, 213 Democratic National Committee, creation of,
Curley, James M., 343 248n.
Currency, paper, 7, 21, 34; Bland -Allison Act, Democratic Party, rise of, 221-223; Jefferso-
550; Wilson's reform of, 667. See also Cheap nian, 260; Jacksonian, 260, 281; in South,
money, Coinage Acts, Greenbacks, Hard 301-302, 305, 373, 466; machinery of, 341;
money weakening of in pre-Civil War years, 349;
Curtin,Andrew Gregg, Governor of Pennsyl- Compromise of 1850 and, 355; victory of
vania, 406, 408 1856, 380, 381; stand on tariff, 390; split
in Convention of 1860, 396-398; in Civil
Curtis, George William, 541, 549
War years, 431-435; Convention of 1868,
Curtis, Justice Benjamin Robbins, 567
471-^72; joins with Liberal Republicans in
Cushing, Caleb, 373; Attorney General, 358,
306, 361;background and career, 359-360, campaign of 1872, 491-492; Campaign of
1876, 510-511; Campaign of 1880, 529; Con-
363; Grant suggests for Chief Justiceship,
vention and campaign of 1884, 544-548;
496
Convention and campaign of 1888, 584-587;
Customs duties, for trade regulation and for
Convention and campaign of 1892, 592-593;
revenue, 11. See also Tariff
Convention of 1896, 608-610; campaign of
1904, 646; Convention of 1912, 663-664. See
Dabney, Thomas, 303n.
also Party system
Dakotas, National Farmers Alliance, 594
Dallas, George, Vice- President, 311
Democratic-Republicans. See Republican Party
Dartmouth College case, 195, 293 Department of Commerce and Labor, created,
639
Davidson, Donald, quoted on South, 469
Department of State, organization in 1860,
Davis, David, 491
419-420
Davis, Henry Winter, 429, 430
Davis, Jefferson, 290n., 323, 326, 373, 389; mar- Depew, Chauncey, 585
Depressions, political influence of, 501. See
riage to Sarah Taylor, 322; background and also Panics
career, 358-359; Secretary of War, 358, 359;
De Voto, Bernard, quoted on Polk, 317
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 359, 361-367; President
Dew, Thomas R., quoted on slavery, 304305
of Confederacy, 404, 405n., 410, 411; quoted
Dewey, Thomas E., 681
on peace proposals, 433; capture of, 435n.
Dickinson, John, 8, 13, 14; cited on customs
Davis, Joseph, 358 duties, 11, 12
Davis, Matthew, quoted on election of 1800, Government (Calhoun), 307
Disquisition on
119, 120 Disraeli, Benjamin, quoted on Sumner, 507
Davis, Sarah Taylor, wife of Jefferson Davis, District of Columbia, judiciary reorganized by
322 Adams, 135
Davis, Varina Howell, wife of Jefferson Davis, Dodd, W. E., quoted on South, 325
290n., 358 Dodge, William, quoted on Lincoln and de-
Dawes, Charles G. fense of Constitution, 409
Debs, Eugene, 602 Dolliver, Senator Jonathan Prentiss, quoted
Declaration of Independence, political the- on Taft, 658
ories of, 15, 14> 16, 17; disagreement on de- Dominican Republic, financial receivership in,
ductions from, 19; enthusiasm of masses 651
Index 735
Donelson, Mrs., 245 308, 319; Oregon boundary settlement, 313-
Doughfaces, 373 314; position on Civil War, 424, 425; inter-
Douglas, Stephen A., 351; doctrine of squat- venes in Mexico, 462; relations with, under
ter sovereignty, 324, 361, 367; Kansas-Ne- Grant, 476; Hamilton Fish settles quarrel
braska Act, 361-367, 368; background and with, 505-508; fisheries treaty with, 586-
career, 362; encouragement of railway ex- 587; British Guiana boundary question,
pansion, 369; presidential candidate, 377, 604-606; movement for closer relations
396-397, 398, 400; praises Dred Scott de- with, 607, 626; Panama Canal treaty with,
cision, 386; debates with Lincoln, 386-387, 650, 667-668; debt claims on Venezuela, 651
388-389; feud with Buchanan, 387-388, Entails, abolishment of, 19
394; re-elected to Senate, 388-389; tours Equilibrium, of states, 189
Illinois in support of Union, 412-413; Era of Good Feelings, 200-202
death, 413 Erie Canal, 141n., 184, 189, 237, 560
Douglass, Frederick, quoted on Negro, 452 Erie Railroad, 597
Dred Scott case, 384-386, 567 Erskine, David Montague, quoted on Non-
Druids, 374 Intercourse Act, 166; British Minister at
Dryden, John, 53; quoted on militia, 28-29 Washington, 166-167, 168, 171
Duane, William, 162, 164, 169, 257 Erskine, Thomas, 166
Due process of law, 385, 565, 567-568 Essex Junto, 4 In., 359
Dunning, William A., quoted on power of Etudes sur la Republique (Talleyrand), 143
government, 420; on conflict of sovereign- Evarts, William Maxwell, 459; Secretary of
ties, 421; 011 Sumner, 428 State, 514-515, 519
Durham, Lord, 300 Everett, Edward, 398, 465
Executive office, under Constitution of 1787,
East Florida, 177; ceded to United States, 48; relations with Congress, 49, 61-65, 89,
206-207. See also Floridas, West Florida 239-241, 445-447; decline of authority in
East India Company, 8-9 Era of Good Feelings, 200, 201-202, 210;
Eaton, John Henry, Jackson supporter, 238; party organization and, 320321; dual, pro-
Secretary of War, 244-245 posed by Calhoun, 328; Lincoln's reform of,
Eaton, Peggy O'Neale, 244-245 419, 420-421; patronage, 518-519; separa-
Eckenrode, H. J., quoted on South, 517; on tion from Congress, 535; Theodore Roose-
Haye's patronage, 518; on Schurz, 520 velt's theory of, 638-640

Edmunds, George Franklin, 541 Expansion. See Imperialism

Election, of President, 89, 213, 217, 222, 246- Exposition, South Carolina, 227, 263
250
Elections, Standing Committee on, 65 Farley, James A., 343, 344, 680
Electors, under Constitution of 1787, 47 Farmers, grievances against England, 6-7;
Elgin, Lord, 356 quoted on Government, 344 burdens and discontent, 593-594; form Pop-
Eliot, Charles William, 545 ulist Party, 594

Emancipation Proclamation, 424426 Farragut, Admiral David Glasgow, 482

Embargo, Jefferson's, 151-153, 164 Federal Farm Loan Act, 667
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted on govern- Federal Reserve Act, 443, 667
ment, 46; on cotton thread, 290; on Fugitive Federal Trade Commission, 667
Slave Act, 356; on John Brown, 392 Federalism cultural, 338-340; essence of, 340-
Employers Liability Act, 639 341
Enforcement Act, 153 Federalist, The, 68; quoted on Union under
Endicott, William Crowninshield, Secretary Articles of Confederation, 39-40; on prop-
of War, 553 erty and free government, 42-43; on peace-
England, conduct of Revolution, 29-30; po- time army, 51; on framing a government,
tential threat to Union, 59; American reac- 51; doctrine of power and property, 71;
tion to war with France, 75-76; Jay's treaty Madison's contribution to, 157158, 159

with, 76-79; Treaty of 1783, 96; Napoleon Federalist Party, 34; attitude toward relation-

signs peace with, 130; impressment

of Amer- ship of secretaries and Congress, 64; failure
icans, 148-149; American attitude toward, of, 103, 105-106, 119-121; errors and accom-
150; Jefferson's Embargo, 150-153; effect of plishment, 106-110; movement for seces-
Non-Intercourse Act, 166; War of 1812 de- sion, 140-143, 164; death of, 179, 180, 200,
clared, 170; conduct of War, 180; Treaty 202, 221
of Ghent, 180, 181-182, 219; cotton textile Fenno, John, editor of Gazette of the United
industry, 187; fear of France in
Latin States, 85
America, 207-208; designs on Texas, 307- Ferdinand VII, King of Spain,. 207
736 Index

Fcssenden, William P., Secretary of the Treas- 319; invades Mexico, 460, 462-463. See also
ury, 429 Napoleon
Fiat money, Civil War, 504 Franchise, See Suffrage
Field, Justice Stephen Johnson, opinion on Franklin, Benjamin, 9, 96, 113; position on
rate regulation, 569-570; quoted on class Stamp Act, 5; use of American, 7; quoted
legislation, 601
on political status of colonies, 12; on Con-
stitution, 43rc.; Minister to France, 115
"Fifty-Four Forty or Fight," 311, 313
Filibuster, Senate, 672-673 Free Democratic Party, 352, 353
Fillmore, Millard, Vice-President, 322; suc- Free Soil Party, 324-325, 357, 506
ceeds Taylor, 333; refuses Oxford degree, Freedmen's Bureau, 452, 455, 465
350; loses nomination, 350; Know-Nothing Fremont, Jessie Benton, 379-380, 430 ,.

candidate for president, 375; fails of re- Fremont, John Charles, 379-380, 422, 423,
election, 380 424, 429-430, 542
First World War, 668-674 passim Freneau, Philip, 85
Hamilton, 423rc., 495; Secretary of State,
French and Indian War, See Seven Years War
Fish,
475^476, 498; quoted on Grant's associate's,
French Revolution, 150; American reaction
on Greeley, 491; refuses to, 75-76
489; cited Supreme
Court appointment, 496; settles Frick, Henry, 591, 593
quarrel
with England, 505-508 Fugitive Slave Act, 329, 331, 351, 353, 356
Fisher, James, Jr., 546
Crabriel, Ralph Henry, quoted on fall of
Fisheries, Newfoundland, 181; problem of
with Canada, 507, 586-587 Sumter, 419; on Civil Rights cases, 499
Gadsden Purchase, 359
Fisk, James, Jr., Black Friday plot, 485-486
Gallatin, Albert, 119, 120, 133, 138, 162, 169,
Fletcher v. Peck, 146, 194, 293, 569
198, 199; quoted on treaty power, 78; Secre-
Florida, Jackson invades, 235; secession, 404
tary of the Treasury, 87, 125-126; on Penn-
Floridas, in War of 1812, 172, 173; negotia-
tions for, 196; ceded to United States, 206- sylvania, 128; on Jefferson's Embargo, 151,
152153; opposed as Madison's Secretary of
207. See also East Florida, West Florida
State, 156-157; on War of 1812, 174; rela-
Floyd, John B., Secretary of War, 382; resig- tions with Congress, 174; peace negotiator at
nation, 403-404
Ghent, 181
Folger, Charles James, 543 Garfield,James A., 487; election, 528-529:
Foot, Samuel Augustus, 264
background and career, 529-530; cabinet
Force Act, 266, 297, 497, 501
appointments, 530-531; dispute with Conk-
Ford, Henry Jones, quoted on Constitutional
ling, 531-532; star route frauds, 532; assas-
Convention, 40; on Senate and Cabinet, 63;
sination, 533
on Jefferson, 83; on Hamilton, 240; on spoils
Garfield, James R., Secretary of the Interior,
system, 242-243; on party organization, 657
249-250; on democratic revolution, 275; on
Executive office, 320; on party organization, Garner, John Nance, 690n , quoted on voters,
354~355n.; on Congressional districts, 538n.
321; on emancipation, 500; on third term
tradition, 527-528; on tariff bill, 540; on Garrison, William Lloyd, 306-307, 517
Cleveland, 541-542 Gazette, Boston, 179
Gazette, New York, quoted on independent
Foreign Relations Committee, Senate, 506-507
Forest conservation, 520 Treasury, 259
Forest Service, 649-650 Gazette of the United States, 85, 86
Foresters, 374
General Managers' Association of Railroads,
Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 471, 472 602
Four Years Act, 242 Genet, Citizen, French Minister to United
Fourier, Francois, 637 States, 75
Fourth branch, of federal government, 420 George III, King of England, 4, 8, 19, 113
Fox, Charles James, 127, 166, 179 Georgia, loyalists in, 23; Yazoo claims, 145-
Fox, William T, R. quoted on Anglo-Ameri- 146, 194-195; favors War of 1812, 174; elec-
can collaboration, 626 toral college, 217; expropriates Indian lands,

France, Seven Years War, 3, 4, 5; alliance with 262-263; secession, 404; re-entry to Union,
America, 10; American reaction to war with 479
England and Spain, 7475; threatened war Germaine, Lord George, 29
with, 101-104; American attitude toward, Germans, immigration of, 561, 373, 374
150; renounces designs against Latin Amer- Germany, debt claims on Venezuela, 651
ica, 207-208; designs on Texas, 307-308, Gerry, Elbridge, quoted on Secretary of Treas-
Index 737

ury, 61; commissioner to France, 102; Vice- and government, 69; Report on Manufac-
President, 178 tures, 71-72, 74, 154, 183; Jeffersonian op-
Ghent, Treaty of, 180, 181-182, 219 position to, 72-74; Washington's support of,
Giles,William Branch, 89n., 125, 161, 164, 74; reaction to French Revolution to, 75-76;
169, 198 drafts message for Washington, 79; on op-
Globe, Washington, 252 position to assumption, 84; relations with
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, quoted on Blaine, party press, 85-86; split with Jefferson, 86;
545 duel with Burr. 87, 141-143; resigns from
Gold, discovery of, in California, 318, 337, Cabinet, 89, 100; attacked by enemies, 89-
338; Black Friday plot, 485-486; reserve, 91; rivalry with Adams, 97-98, 104; infiu-
598, 601; battle between silver and, 504, ence of, in Adam's Cabinet, 100-103; fail-
550, 608-611. See also Silver ure of Federalist Party, 119-121; on Jeffer-
Gold Standard Act of 1900, 614, 622 son, 121-122; estimates of, 143; on objects
Gompers, Samuel, 503 in systems of government, 239
Gould, Jay, Black Friday plot, 485-486 Hamilton, J. A., 254
Gouverneur Morris (Roosevelt), 634 Hamlin, Hannibal, Vice-President, 408, 429
Grain elevator rates, 568-571 Hampton, Wade, 471, 472, 516
Grand Army of the Republic, 547, 582 Hancock, General Winfield Scott, Democratic
Granger cases, 568 nominee for President, 529
Granger laws, 594 Hanks, Nancy, mother of Lincoln, 44
Granges, organization of, 594 Hanna, Marcus Aloiizo, 585, 636; political
Grant, Julia, 480 manager for McKinley, 611, 615-622 pas-
Grant, Orvil, 489 sim, 627; death of, 645; in United Mine
Grant, Ulysses S., 463; Lee surrenders to, 435, Workers strike, 647
439; quoted on South, 453; presidential Hannegan, E. A., quoted on Texas and Ore-
nominee, 467-468; election, 472-473; in- gon, 314; on Walker Tariff, 315
capacity of, 473-474; Cabinet, 474-476; Hard money, 261, 468-471. See also Cheap
Black Friday plot, 475, 485-486; tool of money, Currency, Greenbacks
Congress, 476-480; background and career, Harding, Warren G., 675-676, 682
480-484; Credit Mobilier scandal, 486-488; Harlow, R. V., quoted on Madison, 174
collection of internal revenue taxes, 488; Harper, William, quoted on Declaration ol
Whisky Ring, 488-489; Indian post-trader- Independence, 304
ships, 489; rascality in Administration of, Harper's Ferry, Brown's raid on, 391
489-490; re-election, 490-492; Supreme Harper's Weekly, 541, 543, 545, 663
Court appointments, 494-496; quarrel with Harriman, E. H., 640, 641
Sumner, 506; seeks third term, 527-529 Harrington, James, 45, 242
Granville, Lord, British Foreign Minister, 507 Harrison, Anna Symmes, wife of William
Great Britain. See England Henry Harrison, 283
Great Northern Railroad, 640 Harrison, Benjamin, father of William Henry
Greeley, Horace, 353, 377, 390, 430; Liberal Harrison, 283
Republican presidential nominee, 491-492 Harrison, Benjamin, election, 585, 587; back-
Greenback Party, 501, 522, 548, 594 ground and career, 587-588; appointments,
Greenbacks, movement for, 470-471; Supreme 588-589; Congressional legislation under,
Court decision on, 494-495; in panic of 589-591; Homestead strike, 591; fails of
1873, 503; resumption of, 550 re-election, 592, 593
Harrison, William Henry, Whig candidate for
Habeas Corpus Act, Lincoln suspends, 426, President, 278, 282; background and career,
445 283-284; nomination and election, 284-287,
Half -Breeds, 509, 510, 627 290-291; inaugural address, 295-296
Halpin, Maria, 547 Hartford Convention, 179-180, 434
Hamilton, Alexander, 19; quoted on Union Harvey, George, 662-663
under Articles of Confederation, 39-40; Hatch Act, 536
theory of relationship between President Hawaiian Islands, annexation of, 625
and Congress, 49; on peacetime army, 51; Hay, John, 531, 634, 651, 668; quoted on
political philosophy, 51, 52-53, 71-72; on Senate, 62; Secretary of State, 621, 626, 650;
courts of justice, 55; tolerant realist, 60; on war with Spain, 625; on Theodore
Secretary of the Treasury, 61, 67, 69; finan- Roosevelt, 656
cial program, 64, 7071; background and Hayes, Rutherford B., presidential nominee,
early career, 68; secures ratification of Con- 510; election disputed, 512-513; Cabinet
stitution by New York, 68-69; on mankind appointments, 513515; removal of federal
758 Index

troops from South, 516-617; patronage, Hankers, 313, 323, 324

518-519; civil service reform, 519-521; Hunter, David, 423
cheap money and free silver, 521524; prob- Hutchinson, Thomas, quoted on Stamp Act, 6
lems of class conflict, 524-525; relations
with Congress, 525-526 Ice, New England trade in, 331r.
Hayne, Robert Young, 873; debate with Web- Illinois, statehood, 189; Granger laws, 594
ster, 264-265 Illinois Central Railroad, 369, 488
Hendricks, Thomas A., vice-presidential nom- Immigration, 1789-1830, 234; 1840-1860, 337,
inee, 511 338; increase of, in 1840's 373-375; change
Henry, Patrick, 15, 40, 111; opposes assump- in volume and source, 560-564
tion of state debts, 84; upholds national Immigration Acts, of 1921, 563; of 1924, 663-
government, 109 564; of 1929, 564
Hepburn Act of 1906, 638 Imperialism, eighteenth-century, 4-5; ques-
Herald, NewYork, 580 tion of, 622-623, 624-627; under Theodore
Herndon, William, 387 Roosevelt, 650-651
Herring, Pendleton, quoted on local party Impressments, problem of, 148149, 197
organization, 344; on Congressional system, Improvements, internal, John Quincy Adams's
655 aims for, 225, 230
Hesseltine, William B., quoted on Republican Maysville Bill, 274; vetoed by Polk, 315. See
Convention of 1860, 396; on Lincoln's elec- also Canals, Roads
tion, 399; on radicals in Civil War, 422; Income tax, 595, 600; Sixteenth Amendment,
on Lincoln and Republican Party, 426; on 658
Lincoln's election, 430
Independent Party, 594
Hessian mercenaries, 29n.
Independent Treasury Bill, 259, 279-280, 281,
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 545 313
Hill,James J., 640 Indian Bureau, 519-520
Hoar, George Frisbie, 500-501, 539, 541; Indian Territory, post-tradership in, 489
quoted on Grant, 477 Indiana, statehood, 189; state banks, 443
Hofstadter, Richard, quoted on Spencer, 551- Indians, American treatment of, 76; expul-
552; on Wilson's New Freedom, 664 sion from Gulf, 188; in Floridas, 206; ex-
Holland, Lord, quoted on Monroe, 197 propriation of lands, 262-263
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell, 574-575, Industrial disputes, federal power in, 525
643645; quoted on power of Supreme Industrial Revolution, 58, 73, 144, 154, 165,
Court, 136; opinion in Lochner v. New 183, 291, 292, 337, 682; in South, 186-188;
York, 574; on Theodore Roosevelt, 679 in North, 188-189; in West, 189; expansion
Holy Alliance, intervention in South America, of, 203;woes of, 234n.; in post-Civil War
116-117 North, 444
Homestead Act, 271-273, 390, 432, 449, 595, Industry, growth of, 559-560; Supreme Court
614, 649. See also Public lands in rise of, 564-576
Homestead strike, 591 Ingalls, John, James, 536
Hoover, Herbert C., 676-678, 682 Initiative and referendum; 596n., 636, 645
House, Colonel E. M., quoted on First World Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the
War, 668 Government of the United States, An
House of Representatives, under Constitution (Taylor), 72
of 1787, 47-48; Hamilton excluded from, Internal Revenue Department, conspiracy
64; early relations with Executive, 64-65; with distillers, 488-489
development of standing committees, 65-67; Internal revenue taxes, collection of overdue,
in Jefferson's Administration, 122-125; role 488; reduction of, 540
of Speaker, 173n., 628; early public interest Interstate Commerce Commission, 637-638,
in, 210n.; membership, 1860, 419; reform 658
of rules, 628-632, 639. See also Congress Iowa, Granger laws, 594
Houston, Sam, 307 Irish, immigration of, 373-374, 561
Howe, Admiral Richard, 29-30 Irish National Alliance, 606
Howe, General Sir William, 29-30 Iron industry, Pennsylvania, resists Tariff of
Howell, Varina, wife of Jefferson Davis, 290n., 1857, 390
Irving, Washington, quoted on the Madisons*
358
Hughes, Charles Evans, 195n.; Republican 158
presidential nominee, 669 Isolationism, 351, 675; Jefferson's belief in,.

Hugo, Victor, quoted on future in France, 60 115-117; in First World War, 668-669
Index 739

Jackson, Andrew, new type of presidency, 140; on Marshall, 138; hostility to Burr,
49; quoted on party spirit, 201; forms new 141; adaption of principles to reality, 144-
party, 202-203, 221-223; invades Florida, 145; seeks acquisition of West Florida, 144-
206, 235; rise of, 215-216, 217, 232-233, 235; 145, 146; Non-Importation Act, 146; break
refuses Secretaryship of War, 220; presiden- with Randolph, 146-148; threatened war
tialcandidate, 228; described, 233-234, 235- with England, 148-150; Embargo, 151-153;
236; campaign and election, 236-242; in- last years and death, 153154, 156; estimate
troduces spoils system, 242-243; Cabinet, of, 154-155; on Supreme Court, 191-192
244, 251-252; defends Mrs. Eaton, 244-246; Jensen, Merrill, quoted on colonial radical-
introduces convention system, 246-248; de- ism, 4; on state sovereignty under Articles
stroys Bank of the United States, 252-259; of Confederation, 32
hard money policy, 261; fight on nullifica- Johnson, Andrew, 413; homestead bill, 271;
tion, 262-266; public land question, 269- Vice-President, 429; succeeds Lincoln, 446-
273; exercise of veto power, 274-275; re- 448; background and career, 448451; am-
tirement and death, 276; Democratic Party nesty proclamation, 451; sends agents to
under, 281; Supreme Court appointments, study South, 452-453; vetoes Freedmen's
293 and Civil Rights bills, 455; impeachment,
Jackson, Francis James, British Minister at 459-460
Washington, 167-169 Johnson, Elka McCardle, wife of Andrew
Jackson, Rachel, wife of Andrew Jackson, Johnson, 448
235, 244 Johnson, Gerald W., quoted on populace un-
James, Marquis, quoted on spoils system un- der Madison, 172
der Jackson, 243 Johnson, Herschel V., 397n.
Jameson raid, 606 Johnson, Colonel Richard, Vice-President,
Japanese, immigration of, 563 277-278, 283-284
Jay, John, 96; negotiates treaty with England, Johnston, General Albert Sidney, 481
76-79, 101; Chief Justice of Supreme Court, Johnston, General Joseph E., 435, 515
84, 87; refuses re-appointment, 105; project Joint Committee, Congressional, defined, 65n
for closing Mississippi River, 159 Jones, Skelton, 219
Jay Treaty, 76-79, 101 Josephson, Matthew, quoted on growth of
Jefferson, Jane Randolph, mother of Thomas trusts, 590
Jefferson, 111 Judiciary, powers of, under Constitution, 54-
Jefferson, Martha Wales Skelton, wife of 55; reorganization of, in District of Colum-
Thomas Jefferson, 112 bia, 135. See also Supreme Court
Jefferson, Peter, Father of Thomas Jefferson, Judiciary Act of September 24, 1789, 61, 135,
111 136
Thomas, quoted on relation be-
Jefferson,
tween Britain and colonies, 8; political Kansas, struggle for, 367-369; Lecompton
philosophy, 51-53, 64,
9, 13, 15, 16, 32, 49, Constitution, 387388; refuses suffrage to
72, 477; on free government, 18-19; posi- Negro, 473; National Farmers Alliance, 594
tion on Declaration of Independence, 19; Kansas-Nebraska Act, 361-367
American Minister at Paris, 40; use of auto- Kelly, John, boss of Tammany Hall, 544
cratic powers, 50; romantic republican, 60; Kendall, Amos, 252, 255; quoted on Jackson's
Secretary of State, 67, 117-118; promotes election, 241-242
Hamilton's financial plan, 70-71; split with Kent, Chancellor James, quoted on Hamilton,
Hamilton, 72-74, 86; on Hamliton and 143
manufactures, 73-74; reaction to French Kentucky, 134, 189; western expansion, 58;
Revolution, 7576; attitude toward politi- population, 1820, 189*.; favors War of 1812.
cal parties, 84; relations with party press, 174; remains with Union, 413, 423
85-86; as political organizer, 88-90; resigns Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, 108-110, 136,
from Cabinet, 89, 100; Vice-President, 91, 160
101, 123; elected President, 104, 119-122; Key, David M., Postmaster General, 515
Kentucky Resolutions, 108-110, 160; back- King, Rufus, 200; Senator from New York,
ground and early years, 111-112; political 87, 100; American Minister in London,
career, 112-115; drafts Declaration of In- 167 n.; quoted on slavery, 305
dependence, 113; belief in American isola- Knights of Labor, 502-503
tionism, 115-117; builds Republican Party, Know-Nothing Party, 373, 374-375, 376, 398
118-119; administration of, 122-125, 126- Knox, General Henry, quoted on Revolu-
129; Louisiana Purchase, 131-134, 144; tionary radicals, 21; Secretary of War, 61-
struggle for control of Supreme Court, 135- 62,67
740 Index

Knox, Philander C., Att. Gen., 640, 641, 642, cal opposition to, 428-430; re-election, 430-
621 435; death of, 435-436; last Cabinet meet-
Ku Klux Klan, 497 ing, 436-437; estimate of, 437-438; rela-
tions with Congress, 445446; on preser-
Labor, Northern, at end of Civil War, 442; vation of Constitution, 446-447; appoint-
legislation, 572-574. See also Strikes ments to Supreme Court, 493-494
La Follette, Robert M., 636, 656, 659; quoted Lincoln, Mary Todd, wife of Abraham Lin-
on Theodore Roosevelt, 646, 648; on debate coln, 416
in Senate, 673 Lincoln, Nancy Hanks, 414, mother of Abra-
Laissez-faire, theory of, 551-552; Mill quoted ham Lincoln
on, 664 Lincoln, Robert, Secretary of War, 531 %

Lamar, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, Secre- Lindsay, Vachel, quoted, 620

tary of the Interior, 553 L'Insurgente (French frigate), 103
Land Act of 1796, 190; of 1800, 283; of 1820, Lippmann, Walter, quoted on F. D. Roose-
velt, 680
269. See also Homestead Act, Public lands
Landon, Alfred M., 681, 683
Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, 509,
541, 546
Lane, Joseph, 397
Livingston, Edward, 88, 266; of
Lansing, Robert, Secretary of State, 670 Secretary
Latin America, Monroe recognizes indepen- State, 251

dence of, 207 Livingston, Robert, 196; American Minister

at Paris, 131, 132
Law, Bonar, quoted on war, 338
Local government, conflict with central au-
Lawrence, Captain James, 179
thority, 89
League of Nations, 670, 671 Lochner v. New York, 573-574
Leclerc, General Charles, 130, 131
Locke, John, 44, 45; theory of natural law,
Lee, Alice, wife of Theodore Roosevelt, 632
16-17, 20
Lee, General Henry, 22; quoted on Washing-
Locofocos, 260-261, 308, 377
ton, 25
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 507, 541, 545, 606, 607,
Lee, Robert E., 358; in command at Harper's
634, 644, 657; quoted on expansion, 623
Ferry, 391; cited on McClellan, 430; sur-
Confederate Long, Huey, 343
renders to Grant, 435, 483;
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, quoted, 662w.
General-in-Chief, 440n.
Louisiana, 69; Napoleonic aims in, 130, 131-
Legal Tender Act, 494-495 132; favors War of 1812, 174; admitted to
Leib, Senator Michael, 169, 171, 198 Union, 175, 189; electoral college, 217; se-
L'Enfant, Pierre Charles, 8 In. cession, 404; confiscates mint at New Or-
Leopard (British frigate), attacks Chesapeake, leans, 405406; postwar provisional gov-
148-149 ernment, 451; federal troops withdrawn,
Lever Act, 671 516-517; civil-service system, 537rc.
Lewis, William Berkeley, Jackson supporter, Louisiana Purchase, 131-134, 144, 337; ques-
238-239 tion of slavery in, 203, 204
Liberal Republican Party, nominates Greeley, Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Rail-
491-492 way Company, 373
Liberator, Garrison's, 306 L'Ouverture, Toussaint, 130-132
Liberty Party, 31 In. Lowell, James Russell, quoted on Caleb Gush-
Lincoln, Abraham, quoted on state sov- ing, 360
ereignty, 32; knowledge of politics, 71n.; Lower Canada, rebellion in, 299-300
on Mexican War, 318; debates with Doug- Lowndes, William, 226
las, 365-367, 386-387, 388-389; Whig Party Loyalists, in Revolutionary period, 22-23, 29,
member, 376; joins Republican Party, 387, 30
390-391; Cooper Institute speech, 392-394, Lytton, Robert, quoted on Webster, 265n.
401; nominated for presidency, 395-396;
election, 399-402; awaits inauguration, 406- JVlcCardle, Eliza, wife of Andrew Johnson,
407; Cabinet, 407-408; journey to Washing- 448
ton, 409; Inaugural Address, 410-412; or- McClellan, General George B., presidential
ders out militia, 412-413; life and charac- candidate, 430-431, 432, 433
ter, 413-418; reform of Executive, 419, McClurc, Alexander, quoted on Grant, 481-
420-421; contrasted with Buchanan, 420- 482
421; conduct of war, 422-426; Emancipa- McCulloch v. Maryland, 192-193, 194, 216
tion Proclamation, 424-426; plans for Re- McHenry, James, Secretary of War, 100, 102,
construction, 426, 427-429, 436, 441; radi- 103, 104
Index 741

Machine, political. See Party system Martin, Luther, quoted on constitutionality

Machinery, labor-saving, in agriculture, 522 of laws, 54
McKinley, William, 165, 585, 591; nomina- Marx, Karl, 377
tion and election, 611-613, 616-621 passim; Maryland, commercial agreement with Vir-
background and career, 619; Cabinet, 621; ginia, 36; constitution, 45; favors War of
war with Spain, 622-
political views, 622; 1812, 174; remains with Union, 413
626 Mason, George, quoted on free government,
McKinley Tariff, 590-591, 592, 593 18; on ratification of Constitution, 36;
McLane, Louis, Secretary of the Treasury, quoted on people and government, 40
251-252, 257 Mason and Dixon line, 58, 189
McLaughlin, Andrew C., quoted on state and Masonry, 288-289
central powers under Constitution, 48 Massachusetts, constitution, 20, 44n., 45, 96;
McLean, John, Postmaster General, 220; As- government formed, 20; slavery abolished,
sociate Justice of Supreme Court, 244 58, 96; party trend, 86; Federalist Party in,
Macon, Nathaniel, 169, 211, 237 106; attitude toward Union, 178; opposes
Macon's Bill No. 1, 171; No. 2, 169-170, 172 War of 1812, 178-180; roads and canals,
Madison, Dolly, wife of James Madison, 160 184; trade with California, 316; Southern
Madison, James, quoted on Confederation of trade, 331; private banks in, 443
1781, 31; on suffrage, 42; on property and Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 462-463
free government, 42-43; on interior struc- Maysville Bill, 274
ture of government, 46; on law violating Melville, Herman, 318
constitution, 54; opposes Hamilton's fi- Memoirs (Adams), 124
nancial plans, 70; theory of pressure groups, Memoirs (Grant), 484
82; aids in establishment of National
Memphis, Tennessee, 238n.
Gazette, 85; New York trip with Jefferson, Mercantile system, 6
88-89; Virginia Resolutions, 108-110, 160- Merit system, See Civil service, 537
161, 162; Secretary of State, 125, 126, 135, Merry, Anthony, 167n.
161, 163; elected President, 153, 163-164; Mexican War, 315-318, 337-338
weakness of, 156-158; background and early Mexico, refuses to recognize Texan indepen-
years, 158; political career, 159-161;
Repub- dence, 308; French invasion, 460, 462-463
lican opposition161162; on British
to,
Michigan refuses suffrage to Negro, 473
dependency on United States, 163; first Milan Decree, Napoleon's, 170
term, 164-170; War of 1812, 170-175, 178- Militia, state, in Revolution, 28
179, 180-182, 434; second term, 177-178, Mill, John Stuart, 645; quoted on Laisse/-
183-185; last years, 185 faire, 664
Magna Charta, 567 Miller, Justice Samuel Freeman, 565-566
Mahan, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer, 607 Mills Bill, 584, 586n.
Maine, statehood, 204 Milton, John, 18, 45
Majority rule, democracy as, 339341 Minden, battle of, 29
Manning, Daniel, Secretary of the Treasury, Miner's National Association, 617
552 Minnesota, refuses suffrage to Negro, 473;
Manual of Parliamentary Practice (Jefferson),
Granger laws, 594; National Farmers Alli-
123 ance, 594
Manufactures, Hamilton's report on, 71-72, 186
and Minority interests, problem of, 56,
74, 154, 183; influence of Embargo
Mississippi, statehood, 189; expropriates In-
War of 1818 on, 165, 188-189
dian lands, 262; secession, 404; return to
Marbury, William, 135 Union, 479
Marbury v. Madison 135-136, 137, 138, 569
Mississippi River, as trade outlet, 36; naviga-
Marcy, William L., 242n., 472, 511; Secretary tion of, 79n., 181; project for closing, 159;
of War, 313; Secretary of State, 357-358,
movement for improvement of navigation,
363
315, 538
Marshall, John, 36, 64; attitude toward Ex-
com- Missouri, statehood, 203-205; remains with
ecutive, 49, 124; tolerant realist, 60;
missioner to France, 102; Secretary of State, Union, 413; state banks, 443
105; Chief Justice of Supreme Court, 105,
Missouri Compromise, 203-205, 314, 328, 330,
333; abrogated by Kansas-Nebraska Bill,
134; quoted on Jefferson, 122; establishes
361, 362-363
powers of Supreme Court, 135-137; inter-
venes in states'-rights controversy, 191193; Mitchell, John, 647
attacks doctrine of strict interpretation, Molly Maguires, 524, 561
193-194; defense of property rights, 194-195 Money, types of, in common use, 254-255w.
742 Index

See also Cheap money, Coinage Acts, Cur- National Republican Progressive League, 659
rency, Greenbacks, Hard money National Silver Party, 611
Monopolies, growth of, 559-560, 589-590 National Union Convention, 457-458
Monroe, James, Minister to France, 102, 196; Nationalism, rise of, 183, 186, 191; conflict
negotiates Louisiana Purchase, 131, 132; with regionalism, 339; New, of Theodore
Minister at London, 149; nominated for Roosevelt, 659-660. See also Imperialism
presidency, 153; Secretary of State, 177; Native American Party. See Know-Nothing
background and career, 195-199; Admini- Party
stration, 200-202, 205-210, 211 Natural law, doctrine of, in American inde-
Monroe Doctrine, 207-209, 604, 605, 651; pendence, 12-15, 17-19; development of
Polk reasserts, 319; challenges to, 461, 463 concept, 15-17 %

Montesquieu, Charles de, 44, 45 Naval War of 1812, The (Roosevelt), 634
Moore, Tom, quoted on City of Washington, Navy, rehabilitation of, 607
81n. Navy Department, creation of, 103
Nebraska, outside control of, 595; National
Morgan, Fort, taken by Alabama, 405
Farmers Alliance, 594
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 560, 601, 636, 640-642,
647 Negroes, Southern representation increased
Morgan, William, 288 by freeing of, 448n.; in postwar South,
Morison, Samuel Eliot, quoted on New Eng- 451-452, 454, 455-456, 499-501; suffrage,
land, 58; cited on Hartford commissioners, 464-467, 473; Force Act of 1875, 266, 297,
180; quoted on sectional balance, 263-264; 497, 501. See also Slavery
on New Englnad trade with South, 331; on Neutrality proclamation, Washington's, 75
land for freedmen, 452; on agricultural Nevins, Allan, quoted on early state govern-
revolution, 522 ments, 43-44; on Zachary Taylor, 327-328;
Morrill Tariff, 408 on Douglas, 363; on railway expansion, 369;
Morris, Gouverneur, quoted on domination of on Hamilton Fish, 476, 508; on pressure on
mob, 19; on vote, 41 Grant, 479; on Cleveland, 542, 551
Morris, Robert, 67, 68 New Deal, place of, in American history, 679
Morton, Oliver Perry, 510, 515 683; Supreme Court and, 683-687
Moultrie, Fort, taken by South Carolina, 405 New England, theory of government, 6; com-
Mount Vernon, 25, 26 merce, 58; slavery in, 58; Federalist Party
Mugwumps, 545, 546, 549 in, 105-106; movement for secession, 140
Mullen, Arthur F., quoted, 594-595 141, 153, 164, 178-180; reaction to Jeffer-

Mulligan Letters, 541, 546, 509-510 son's Embargo, 153; industrial develop-
Munitions, production of, in Civil War, 444- ment, 165; opposes War of 1812, 174; Hart-
445 ford Convention, 179-180; death of Feder-
Munn v. Illinois, 586-571 alist Party, 180; demands high tariffs, 188-

Murray, William Vans, 104 189; textile industry, 289-290; trade with
South, 331-332; meeting of governors at
Napoleon 69, 127, 129, 337; peace with
I, Providence, 423; New Freedom, Wilson's,
Britain, 130; seeks to regain French hold 664
in North America, 130-132; reaction to New Hampshire, constitution, 32n.; slavery
Jefferson's Embargo, 151; pretends
revoca- in, 58; Dartmouth College case, 195, 293
tion of Bjerlin and Milan decrees, 170; New Harmony, 637
defeat of, 182, 186. See also France New Jersey, loyalists in, 23; constitution, 32.;

Napoleon invades Mexico, 462-463

III, slavery in, 58; backs Wilson, 663
Nation, The, 545; quoted on Credit Mobilier New Mexico, acquisition of, 317, 328; organ-
investigation, 487; Indian post-traderships, ized as territory, 361; statehood, 658
489; on Republican platform, 585 NewNationalism,TheodoreRooseveltpreaches,
National Civil Service Reform League, 549 659-660
National committee, of political parties, 341* New Orleans, right of deposit and reshipment
342-343 in, 79n., 131; British defeated at, 180; ne-
National Farmers Alliances, 594 gotiations for purchase of, 196; battle of,
National Gazette, Philadelphia, 85-86; quoted 235; immigration to, 374; mint confiscated,
on independent Treasury, 259 405-406; federal troops withdrawn, 517
National Industrial Recovery Act, 684 New York Central Railroad, 560
National Labor Relations Act, 685 New York City, freed slaves in, 106; in elec-
National Republican Party, 256; succeeded by tion of 1800, 119; mayor recommends se-

Whig Party, 260w., 287-289 cession, 407

Index 743
New York Custom House, investigation of, Open Door policy, 626
520-521 Opposition, importance of political, 202
New York State, loyalists in, 23; constitution, Order of the Star Spangled Banner, 374
45; slavery in, 58; ratification of Constitu- Orders in Council, British, 77, 149, 152, 166,
tion, 68-69; development of political fac- 170
tions, 87-88; internal improvements, 184; Ordinance of Nullification, South Carolina
population, 1820, 189 n.; electoral college, passes, 265-266
217; civil-service law, 537 Ordinance of 1787, 33-34
Newfoundland fisheries, 181 Oregon territory, problem of, 309-311, 313-
Newlands, Senator Francis G., 649 314, 337
Newton, Sir Isaac, 16 Oregon Trail, 379
Nicholas, Wilson Cary, 133 Oregon, Treaty of 1846, 507
Nichols, Roy Franklin, quoted on cultural Orleans, Territory of, 176. See also Louisiana
federalism, 338-339; cited on democracy, Ostend Manifesto, 378, 379, 461
339-340; quoted on Cass, 382; on Floyd, 382, Otis, James, opposes writs of assistance and
403-404. Stamp Act, 5-6
Nicholson, Joseph, 148 Overton, John, Jackson supporter, 238
Non-Importation Bill, 146
Non-Intercourse Act, 164166, 169 Jtackard, Governor, of Louisiana, 516-517,
North, Industrial Revolution in, 188-189; bid 518
for Western votes, 263-264; retaliation Packenham, General Sir Edward, 235, 314
against Southern expansion, 322; at end of Paine, Thomas, 15; open letter to Washington
Civil War, 442--445 quoted, 22; quoted on law in America, 55-
North, Lord, cited on dispute with Britain, 56; J. Q. Adams attacks views of, 218
8; upholds American independence, 10 Palmerston, Lord, British Foreign Secretary,
North, Simeon, 187n. 300
North American Party, 380 Panama Canal, 650; tolls, 667-668
North American Review, 552 Panics, of 1819, 216; of 1837, 258, 259, 280,
North Carolina, constitution, 44; favors War 373; of 1857, 502; of 1873, 501-504, 521; of
of 1812, 174; secession, 413; postwar provi- 1893, 597-599, 603; of 1929, 677-678
sional government, 451 Parker, Judge Alton Brooks, presidential nom-
Northern confederacy, movement for, under inee, 646
Burr, 141 Paris,Treaty of, 96, 181
Northern Pacific Railroad, 501, 597-640 Parsons, Theophilus, 140
Northern Pacific Panic, 640-641 Party spirit, 201
Northern Securities Company, Theodore Roose- Party system, 5657; under Constitution, 39;
velt attacks, 640-643, 644-645 feeling against, 52; Washington's Farewell
Northwest, growth of, 329 Address quoted on, 80; theory of pressure
Northwest army posts, British occupation of, groups, 82; formation of, 83-86; establish-
76,77 ment of press, 85-86; in New York State,
Northwest Ordinance, 330 87-88; in election of 1796, 91; in Era of
Northwest Territory, organized by Ordinance Good Feelings, 200-202; operation of ma-
of 1787, 33-34 chines, 202-203, 281-283, 341-348, 536;
Nullification, doctrine of, 84; Jackson's fight platform, 249, 341, 346-347; Executive
on, 262-266. See also States' rights office and, 320-321; loyalty to, 354-355;
third parties, 594, 596; purpose of, 688-691.
\Jceana (Harrington), 242 See also parties by name
Ohio, 134; favors War of 1812,. 174; statehood, Patronage, presidential control of, 48, 345,
189, 190; refuses suffrage to Negro, 473 518-519, 537
Ohio Company, 368 Patterson, Perry, quoted on patronage, 345
Ohio Idea, 468, 470, 471, 522, 535 Payne-Aldrich Tariff, 657, 658
Ohio Valley, opening of, 189 Peace Conference, Lincoln meets with, 409
Oligarchy, colonial, 3-4 Peace Democrats, 431, 457
Oliphant, Laurence, quoted on Pierce, 356 Peck, Harry Thurston, quoted on Bryan, 609
Oliver, F. S., quoted on British sovereignty, 7 Peckhara, Justice Rufus Wheeler, 590; deci-
Olney, Richard, Attorney General, 597; in sion in Lochner v. New York, 573574
Pullman strike, 602-603; Secretary of State, Peel, Sir Robert, British Prime Minister, 300
604-605, 607 Pcndleton, George Hunt, 470, 471, 535-537
O'Neale, Peggy, wife of John Henry Eaton, Pendleton, Nathaniel, 143n.
244-245 Pendleton Act, 536-537, 541
 744 Index

Pennsylvania, loyalists in, 23; first constitution, 318; estimate of, 318-319; quoted on Ex-
44; slavery in, 58; party trend, 86-87; sup- ecutive office, 320
ports Jefferson, 128; favors War of 1812, 174; Pope, Alexander, 16
roads and canals, 184; demands high tariffs, Population, United States, in 1789, 58-59;
188-189; resists Tariff of 1857, 390 1820, 189n.; 1830, 234; of North and South
Pennsylvania Railroad, 560 in 1850, 329; 1860, 419; growth of urban,
Pensacola, navy yard seized by Southern troops, 555559; immigration in growth of, 561
405 Populism, 501, 558
Pension frauds, Cleveland attacks, 582-583 Populist Party, 636, 637; in election of 1892,
Pensions Bureau, 547, 582; Disability Act of 593; formation and platform, 594-595; Con-
1890, 583, 589 vention of 1896, 611
People's Party, Pennsylvania, 390 Porter, Rear Admiral David Dixon, 483
Perceval, Spencer, quoted on British trade, 150 Porter, Peter Buell, 173
Perkins, Dexter, quoted on Monroe Doctrine, Post, New York, 478
290; on Lord
Salisbury, 606 Post, Washington, 606
Perkins, Frances, quoted on F. D. Roosevelt, Post Office Department, organization in 1860,
679 420
Philadelphia, capital city, 81n. Postmaster General, office of, 220n., 342n.
Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Power, American jealousy of, 43; Federalist
Company, 647 doctrine of, 71; of federal government, 134;
Philadelphia Convention. See Convention of relationship with property, 291; decentrali-
1787 zation of, 655
Philippines, annexation of, 624-625 President, election of, 47, 213, 222; powers of,
Phillips, Wendell, 517; quoted on John Brown, 48-49; relations between Congress and, 49,
392 89; treaty power of, 78; nominating conven-
Pickens, Fort, held by Union, 405, 406 tion, 246-250; as party head, 341-345; need
for politician as, 474; appointments to Su-
Pickering, Judge, 139
Pickering, Timothy, quoted on military con- preme Court, 492-493; popular backing,
duct of rebels, 29; Secretary of State, 100, 515-516; leadership of, 655-656; Repub-
102, 103, 104; on Jefferson, 124; plots New lican conception of, after First World War,

England secession, 140-141, 153, 164, 170- 675-678. See also Executive office

180; denounces J. Q. Adams, 218 Presidential candidates, successful, 279-280w.

Pierce, Franklin, 373; background, 348; nom- Press, establishment of party, 85-86
ination and election, 348-349, 353-354; Ad- Pressure groups, theory of, among Constitu-
ministration, 356-357; Cabinet, 357-360; tion makers, 82-83
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 360-367; fails of re- Primogenitiue, suppression of, 20
election, 377 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 664
Pinchot, Gifford, Chief of Forest Service, 649, Pringle, Henry, quoted on Theodore Roose-
657-658 velt, 643
Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 119; cited on Private enterprise, federal regulation of, 420
property qualification for office and elec- Prize Cases of 1863, 493
tion of Representatives, 41-42; commission- Proclamation of 1763, 7; annulment of, 19
er to France, 102 Proctor, Major General, 283
Pinckney, Thomas, 91, 100 Progress, superstitious faith in, 60
Pinckney, William, 196-197 Progressive Party, 637; development of, 657
Pioneer tradition, 615-616 662
Pitt, William (the Younger), 79 Prohibitionists, sympathy with Know-Noth-
Planters, effect of mercantile system on, 6; ings, 374
hatred of Britain Promise of American Life, The (Croly), 659
Platform, party, 249, 341, 346-347 Property, discussion of suffrage and, at Con-
Plato, 18 stitutional Convention, 41-43; Federalist
Platt, Thomas, Republican boss of New York, doctrine of, 71; as qualification for fran-
514, 531, 532-533, 592, 627, 635 chise, 222; relationship with power, 291
Polignac Agreement, 208n., 210n. Property rights, defense of, by Marshall, 194-
Polk, James K., nomination, 309; background, 195
312; nomination and election, 312-313; Providence, meeting of New England gover-
Walker Tariff, 313, 315; Oregon boundary nors at, 423
settlement, 313-314; annexation of Texas, Public Land Act of 1800, 216
314; Mexican War and annexation of Cali- Public lands, sale of, 258; problem of disposi-
fornia, 314, 316-318; retirement and death, tion, 269-273; in railroad expansion, 369,
Index 745

432, 486, 487-488; federal grants of, 373n.; 454; joint Congressional Committee on,
movement for conservation, 649-650. See 454-455; National Union Convention, 457
also Homestead Act, Western lands 458; military rule, 458-460; party activities
Public Lands, Committee on, 270 in South, 464-467; financial problems of,
Puerto Rico, annexation of, 625 468-471; restoration of free politics in
Pulaski, Fort, taken by Georgia, 405 South, 496-501. See also South
Pullman Company, strike of, 601-602, 617- Reconstruction Acts, 465, 499; attempted re-
618 peal of, 525-526
Pure Food and Drugs Act, 639 Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 677-678
Putnam, General Israel, quoted on General Reed, Thomas Brackett, 633; Speaker of
Howe, 30 House of Representatives, 628-632
Referendum. See Initiative and referendum

Quay, Matthew Stanley, 627 Reformation, Protestant, 16

Quebec Act, 7, 19, 27 Regionalism, conflict with nationalism, 339
Quincy, Josiah, quoted on Jefferson, 156; on Reminiscences (Boutwell), 493
War of 1812, 174; on admission o Louisi- Removal, presidential power of, 48n.
ana, 175; on invasion of Canada, 178 Renaissance, 16
Quitman, John A., 340n. Report on Manufactures, Hamilton's, 71-72,
Quitrents, 6, 20 74, 154, 183
Republican Party, in election of 1796, 91;
JKacial problem, Supreme Court and, 498-499 Jefferson's,118-119, 183-184, 221; victory
Radicalism, colonial, 4 of, in 1800, 119-120, 122-123; Enforcement
Radicals, in American Revolution, 19-21; in Act, 153; creation of modern, 324-325, 373,
Confederation of 1781, 31-32; influence of, 375-377; in election of 1856, 378-380, 381;
on early state constitutions, 44; in Civil War stand on tariff, 390, 585-586, 587; platform
and Reconstruction, 421-423, 426, 428-430, of 1860, 394-395; nominates Lincoln, 395-
441, 447-448; reaction to Lincoln's death, 396; Lincoln's struggle for, 426; Union ele-
436; Republican, in post-Civil War period, ment in, 429, 431, 433, 446; National Union
458-460; failure of Republican, in South, Convention, 457-458; radicals in post-Civil
498-499 War period, 458-460, 498-499; post-Civil
Railroads, growth of, 234, 369-373; Pacific, War reorganization, 464-469; re-elects
Davis's plan for, 359, 361; donation of pub- Grant, 490-492; Campaign of 1876, 509-
lic lands to, 432, 486, 487-488; Credit Mo- 510; Campaign of 1880, 527-529; Conven-
bilier scandal, 486-488; in Depression of tion and campaign of 1884, 541, 545-548;
1873, 501; strikes, 524-525; role of, in Convention and campaign of 1888, 585-
growth of monopolies, 559-560; rate legis- 587; Convention and campaign of 1892,
lation, 568-572; in Panic of 1893, 597; 592, 593; Convention of 1896, 611-613; Pro-
Northern Securities Case, 640-643 gressives versus Standpatters, 656-662, 664;
Rambouillet Decree, Napoleon's, 170 election of 1916, 669-670; decline of, after
Randall, J. G., cited on Lincoln-Douglas de- First World War, 675-678, 682. See also
bates, 389; quoted on Sumter, 412; on Lin- Party system
coln, 417; on banking system, 442-443; on Republicanism, romantic, in building of
Reconstruction, 496 America, 60
Randolph, Edmund, quoted on state consti- Restoration, 53
tutions, 45; Attorney General, 67; Secretary Resumption Act of 1875, 522-523
of State, 77, 100 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution
Randolph, Jane, wife of Jefferson Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 227, 260, 471, 472
Randolph, John, 108-109, 110, 129, 138, 139, Rhode Island, slavery in, 58
153, 161, 164, 183, 195, 199, 211; leads re- Richardson, W. A., Secretary of the Treasury,
volt against TwoMillion Act, 145-146; 488
hostility to Jefferson, 146-148; quoted
on Richmond, Confederate Government driven
Madison, 157, 163, 174; on conquest of from, 435
Canada, 173; cited on slavery, 187-188; Right of deposit, at New Orleans, 131
hatred of Clay, 223-224; quoted on tariff, Rights of man, doctrine of, in American in-
226; supports Jackson, 237; death of, 266 dependence, 13-15
Randolph, Thomas Mann, 85 Roads, Calhoun's bill for, 184; Cumberland
Reading Railroad, 597 Road Bill, 213
Realism, tolerant, in building of America, 60 Robertson, William, 531-532
Reconstruction, Lincoln's plans for, 426, 427- Rockefeller, John D., 502; quoted on growth
429, 436, 441; provisional governments, 451- of business, 552
 746 Index

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 647 Saratoga, battle of, 10

Rogers, Lindsay, cited on Wilson, 671 Schlesinger, Arthur M., quoted on urban pop-
Romantic Revival, 53 ulation, 555-556
Root, Elihu, Secretary of War, 621 Arthur M., Jr.,' quoted on note
Schlesinger,
Roosevelt, Alice Lee, wife of Theodore Roose- on independent Treasury policy,
issue, 255;
velt, 632 259; on economic equality, 261-262; on
Roosevelt, Edith Kermit Carew, wife of Theo- Whig sociology, 292
dore Roosevelt, 634 Schurz, Carl, 545, 549, 600; Secretary of the
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 249, 596; knowledge Interior, 515, 519-520
of politics, 7 In.; relations with party ma- Schuyler, General Philip John, 68, 87
chine, 343-344; theory of government, 678- Schwab, Charles, 647
679; New Deal, 679-683; relation with Su- Scotch Presbyterians, immigration of, to
preme Court, 683-687 America, 232-233n.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 494, 541, 545, 563, 596; Scott, General Winfield, 323, 403; Whig can-
quoted on tenement conditions, 572; on didate for President, 350, 351, 352, 353
courts and social conditions, 572-573; on
Scrip, payment in, 573
war with Spain, 623; Assistant Secretary of Search warrants, 5
the Navy, 624; Vice-President, 627; back- Secession, Washington's Farewell Address
ground and career, 632-635; succeeds Mc- quoted on danger of, 80; Federalist move-
Kinley, 635; first message to Congress, 635- ment for, 140-143, 164; agitation for, in
637; political and social philosophy, 637, New England, 140-141, 153, 164, 178-180;
645, 646, 656; strengthens Interstate Com- of Southern states, 404-405; arguments for,
merce Commission, 637-638; relations with
405; early days of war, 405-406, 412-413
Congress, 638-640; attacks trusts, 640-643, Secretary of State, 60
644-645; attitude toward Supreme Court, on
Secretary of the Treasury, debate role of,
643-645; Northern Securities Case, 640-643;
61; business man barred as, 475
644-645; re-election, 645-646; intervenes in
miners' strike, 647-648; interest in con- Secretary of War, 60
Sedgwick, Theodore, 142
servation, 649-650; foreign policy, 650-651;
Sedition Act of 1798, 107-108
popularity of, 652; New Nationalism, 659- Select committee, Congressional, defined, 65n.
660; Progressive presidential nominee, 660-
Senate, role of, in new government, 61-64;
661, 664; quoted on Wilson, 670, 674
Ross, John, 188n.
development of standing committees, 65;
Rotation in office. See Spoils system
growth of, 210n.; membership, 1860, 419;
Foreign Relations Committee, 506-507; in
Rough Riders, Roosevelt's, 635 1870's and 1880's, 514; shorn of powers by
"Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," 548
Cleveland, 577-580; election of, 658; free
Rural Credits Act, 667
speech in, 672-673. See also Congress
Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 98, 104, 120, 283; quoted
Sentinel, Milwaukee, quoted on Garfield, 530
on revolution in America, 36-37
Seven Years War, 3, 4, 5, 26
Rush, Richard, Minister to London, 208;
Seward, William H., 333, 351, 353, 365, 377,
Secretary of the Treasury, 220
392, 447; Governor of New York, 261, 289;
Rush-Bagot Agreement, 18 In.
Russell, Jonathan, peace negotiator at Ghent,
quoted on slavery, 332; Secretary of State,
408; plans National Union Convention, 457;
181
conduct of foreign affairs, 460-463
Russia, 462; problem of Pacific coast expan-
sion, 208
Seymour, Horatio, Democratic nominee for
presidency, 471, 472
Ryan, Thomas Fortune, 553, 592, 663
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 53; quoted, 52
Oackville, Lord George. See Germaine, Lord Sherman, John, 585; quoted on Executive of-
fice, 476-477; Secretary of the Treasury, 515,
George
Sackville-West, Sir Lionel, British Minister at 523; presidential candidate, 528, 529, 530;
on Conkling and Platt, 532; Secretary of
Washington, 587
State, 621
Salisbury, Lord, 604, 605, 606
Saltonstall, Leverett, 545 Sherman, Roger, quoted on people and gov-
San Domingo, French defeat in, 130-132; re- ernment, 40
annexed by Spain, 461; Grant plans annex- Sherman, General William T., 430, 435, 439,
ation of, 506 483
Santa Anna, General Antonio L6pez de, 307, Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 589-590, 603, 640
323 Short, William, 116
Santa Fe* Railroad, 597 Silver, ratio to gold, 504, 550; movement for
Index 747
free. 523-524, 580-581, 598-599; battle States, 206-207; reannexes San Domingo,
between gold and, 608-611. See also Gold 461; intervenes in Mexico, 462; war with,
Silver Purchase Act, 550, 556, 591; repeal of, 622-626
598-599, 601, 603, 608 Speaker of the House, power of, 173.
Skelton, Martha Wayles, wife of Thomas Jef- Spencer, Ambrose, 88
ferson, 112 Spencer, Herbert, theory of laissez-faire, 551-
Slaughter House Cases, 565 552
Slave trade, 113 Spheres of influence, 626
Slavery, in 1789, 58; in San Domingo, 130, Spoils system, 242-243, 536, 537
131; influence of cotton gin on, 187-188; Spring Rice, Cecil, 634, quoted on Reed, 633
attempt to bar,lrom West, 196; question of, Springfield Republican, 478
in Louisiana Purchase, 203, 204; churches Squatter sovereignty, doctrine of, 324, 361,
and, 305; Northern agitation against, 305- 367
307; Southern unity in defense of, 307-308; Stalwarts, 509, 510, 627
Emancipation Proclamation, 424-426 Stamp Act, 93; resistance to, 5~6, 10; repeal
Smith, Abigail Quincy, wife of John Adams, of, 11
93 Standard Oil Company, 559-560
Smith, Caleb, Secretary of the Interior, 408 Standing committees, development of, in Con-
Smith, Jim, Democratic boss of New Jersey, gress, 65-67
663 Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 493; Secretary of
Smith, Robert, Secretary of State, 157, 162, War, 423
164, 166, 168, 177, 198 Star of the West (Union ship), 406
Smith, Samuel, 162, 164, 169, 171, 198 Star Route Frauds, 532
Smuggling, 5, 6 State constitutions, 20-21, 23, 32n v 43-45
Social Darwinism, 551-552 States, equilibrium of, 189
Sons of '76, 374 States' rights, problem of, 108-110, 161; Mar-
South, need for internal improvements, 184- shall and, 191-193; Calhoun defends doc-
185; influence of cotton gin, 186188; seeks trine of, 227
free trade, 189; bid for Western votes, 263- Statue of Liberty, inscription, 374n.
264, 316; changes in, 1826-1844, 302-305; Steel, age of, 560
unity in defense of slavery, 306-307; North- Stephens, Alexander, 332, 351-352, 398; quoted
ern retaliation against expansion of, 322; on secession, 404; Vice-President of Con-
trade with New England, 331-332; at end federacy, 404; on Union, 434
of Civil War, 439-442; postwar provisional Stevens, Thaddeus, 427, 428, 441, 454, 458,
governments, 451-454; military rule in, 459, 465, 466
458-460; readmission to Union, 464; post- Stevenson, Adlai, 550; Vice-President, 592
Civil War financial problems, 468-471; Stewart, Alexander, 475
Grant's attitude toward, 479; restoration of Stone, Justice Harlan Fiske, quoted, 684
free politics, 496-501; withdrawal of troops Story, Justice Joseph, 153, 526; quoted on
from, 512, 513, 516-517; National Farmers Executive and Congress, 240.; on Jackson's
Alliance, 594 election, 242
South America, intervention of Holy Alliance, Strict interpretation, doctrine of, 84-85; Mar-
116-117 shall attacks, 193-194
South Carolina, constitution, 32n.; supports Strike bills, 544
Jefferson, 128; favors War of 1812, 174; Strikes, railway, 524-525; Homestead, 591;
electoral college, 217; Ordinance of Nulli- Pullman, 601-602, 617-618; United Mine
fication, 265-266; secedes from Union, 404; Workers, 647-648
state banks, 443; federal troops withdrawn, Strong, Justice William, 495
516 Stuart, Lieutenant Jeb, 391
South Dakota, adopts initiative and referen- Suffrage, liberalization of colonial laws, 20,
dum, 596rc., 636 23; discussion of property and, at Consti-
Southard, Samuel, Secretary of the Navy, 220 tutional Convention, 41-43; qualifications
Sovereignty, state, under Articles of Confed- for, in states, 47; spread of white adult
eration, 32, 36; federal and state, 45-46; male, 222; universal male, 458. See also
popular, 361, 362-363; squatter, 324, 361, Negroes
367. See also States' rights Sugar Trust, 603
Spain, menace of, in Mississippi Valley, 36; Sullivan, Big Tim, quoted, 365
Washington's treaty with, 79n.; negotia- Sullivan, Mark, quoted on Morgan, 641
tions with, for West Florida, 144; cedes Summary View of the Rights of British Amer-
Floridas and Oregon country to United ica, A (Jefferson), 112-113
748 Index

Sumner, Charles, 352, 353, 364, 365, 376, 441, Taylor, John, 108, 129, 138, 183, 405; ro-
442, 497; "The Crime Against Kansas," mantic republican, 60; opponent of Ham-
367-368; attacked by Preston Brooks, 368, iltonian philosophy, 72-73
506; views on Reconstruction, 427, 428; Taylor, Sarah, wife of Jefferson Davis, 322
Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Com- Taylor, General Zachary, 316, 358; back-
mittee, 476, 505-507 ground, 322-323; nomination and election,
Sumner memorial law, 497, 499 322, 323, 325-326; Wilmot Proviso, 326;
Sumter, Fort, 406, surrender of, 412 Administration, 326-327; death, 327-328
Sun, New York, quoted on Theodore Roose- Tea Act of 1773, 8-9
velt, 645 Teller, Henry M., 611, 613

Supreme Court, 99; powers of, under Consti- Tennessee, 134, 189; favors War of 1812, 174;
tution, 54; creation of, 61; aggrandizement statehood, 235; secession, 413; postwar pro-
of federal power, 134; Jefferson's struggle visional government, 451; readmitted to

with, 135-140; nationalizing tendencies and Union, 455, 464n.

defense of property rights, 191-195; Taney Tennessee Valley Authority, 681, 683
succeeds Marshall as Chief Justice, 293- Tenure of Office Act, 459, 577
294; appointment of Justices, 492-494; Re- Texas, annexation of, 307-309, 314, 315, 337;
construction and, 497; Civil Rights cases, secession, 404; re-entry to Union, 479; Na-
498-499; in rise of cities and corporations, tional Farm Alliance, 594

564-576; Dred Scott case, 567; income tax Texas Surrender Bill, 333
decision, 600-601; Theodore Roosevelt's Thomas Hart Benton (Roosevelt), 634
attitude toward, 643-645; New Deal and. Thoreau, Henry David, quoted, 351; on John
683-687 Brown, 392
Swisher, Carl B., quoted on Buchanan Admin- Thurman, Allen G., 544; vice-presidential
istration, 403; on government expenditure
nominee, 585
in I860, 420; on corporate interests, 566; Tilden, Samuel Jones, 323rc., 529, 544; presi-

on Supreme Court, 571 dential nominee, 510-512

William Henry Har- Tilhnan, Benjamin, 500, 638; quoted on

Symmes, Anna, wife of
Cleveland's Administration, 608-609
rison, 283
Times, New York, 387, 545; quoted on Hard-
Symmes, John Cleaves, 283
ing, 675

Taft, William Howard, 596; described, 656- Tippecanoe, battle of, 283, 285
Titles of nobility, suppression of, 20
657; Payne-Aldrich Tariff, 657, 658; Bal-
Todd, Dorothy Payne, wife of James Madison,
linger incident, 657-658; legislation, 658-
160
659; fails of re-election, 661
Todd, Mary, wife of Abraham Lincoln, 416
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 102, 103, 130,
Tomkins, Governor, 200
132; quoted on Hamilton, 143
Toombs, Robert, 332, 351-352, 398, 404, 405
Tammany Hall, 88n., 119, 120, 310, 544, 548
Tories. See Loyalists
Taney, Roger Brooke, 257; Chief Justice, 134, Townshend, Charles, quoted on internal and
293-294; Attorney General, 251, 255; Dred
external taxes, 11
Scott decision, 384-386; death of, 429rc.
Townshend Acts, 1 1
Tanner, James, Commissioner of Pensions,
Township, unit of public land, 190
589
Trade, under new government, 58
Tariff, views of North and South, 189; first Trade laws, revolt against British, 4, 5-6
protective, of 1816, 226; of 1832, 263-264, Transcript, Boston, 545
265; Tyler accepts upward revision, 298; Travelers, reaction of foreign, in early days of
Walker, 313, 315; of 1857, 390; Merrill, 408; Union, 59
Republican, of Civil War years, 432;
Treasury Department, creation of, 61; fight
Grant's, of 1870, 478; revision of, under
for independent, 259-261, 279-280, 281, 313
Arthur, 539-540; Cleveland attacks, 581, Treaties, ratification of, by Senate, 62-63
583-584, 599-600; Republican Party and,
Treaty of 1783, 96, 181
585-586, 587; McKinley, 590-591, 592, 593;
Treaty power of President, 78, 133
Payne-Aldrich, 657, 658; Underwood, 667 Trevelyan, George, 638
Tariff of Abominations, 226, 241, 263
Tribune, Chicago, quoted on restrictions for
Taussig, Frank W., quoted on McKinley Tar- freedmen, 452
iff, 590 Tribune, New York, 377, 353, 390, 491; quoted
Taxation, revolt against British, 4, 5-6; in- on Dred Scott decision, 385386; quoted on
ternal and external, 10-12. See also Income Blair, 472; cited on Black Friday plot, 486
tax Trusts, growth of, 559-560, 589-590; Sher-
Index 749
man Anti-Trust Act, 589-590, 603, 640; Virginia, State Constitution, 20, 32n., 113;
Northern Securities Case, 640-643, 644-645 loyalists in, 23; commercial agreement with
Truth, 529 Maryland, 36; ratification ofUnited States
Tweed, William, 511 Constitution, 69; opposes federal assump-
"

Tweed Ring, 511, 534, 553 tion of wartime debts of states, 84; party
Two Million Act, 145 trend, 86; democratic group in, 111; favors
Tyler, John, 288, 290; Vice-president, 285; War of 1812, 174; population, 1820, 189n.;
background and career, 296297; President secedes from Union, 413; postwar provi-
at Harrison's death, 297-299; difficulties sional government, 451; return to Union,
with Cabinet, 299, 301; Webster-Ashburton 479
treaty, 299-300; deserted by Whigs, 301 Virginia Bill of Rights, 18
Virginia Remonstrance, 84
Underwood Tariff, 667 Virginia Resolutions of 1798, 108-110, 136,
Union Leagues, 465 160-161, 162
Union Pacific Railroad, 595, 597, 640; Credit Voorhees, Senator Daniel W., 536
Mobilier scandal, 486-488 Voters, floating, 354-355n.
Union Party, 429, 431, 433, 446, 447, 464, 465,
466, 491 Wade, Benjamin Franklin, 429, 430, 459,
Unions, movement toward federation, 503 468, 517; quoted on Andrew Johnson, 446
United Mine Workers, strike of, 647-648 Wade-Davis Bill, 429
v
United States Steel Corporation, 560 Waite, Morrison Reinick, Chief Justice of
Unity, problem of national, 56 Supreme Court, 496, 566; opinion on rate
University of Virginia, Jefferson founds, 154- legislation, 568-571
155 Walker, Robert J., 309-311
Upham, Charles, 230 Walker Tariff, 313, 315
Upper Canada, rebellion in, 299-300 Wall Street, 444, 592, 637, 659, 663
Upshur, Abel Parker, 30 In. Wanamaker, John, Postmaster General, 588
Utah, organized as territory, 361 589
War Department, organization in 1860, 420
Vallandigham, Clement L., 431-432 War of 1812, 105, 170-180; trend toward, 168-
Valley Forge, 30 170; Treaty of Ghent, 180, 181-182, 219;
Van Buren, John, 323n. aftermath, 183-185
Van Buren, Martin, 221, 511; Senator from Ward, Ferdinand, 484
New York, 211; works for Jackson's elec- Warren Bridge Company, 294
tion, 236, 237-239; described, 236-237; in- Washburne, Elihu, 481
tervenes in spoils system, 243; Secretary of Washington, Booker T. quoted on Negro de-
State, 244, 245; Minister to England, 245; sire for education, 467n.
Vice-President, 246, 247; independent Treas- Washington, George, 19, 49; use of American,
ury policy, 259-261, 279-280, 281; Mays- 7; political philosophy, 22, 64; influence,
ville Mill, 274; nomination and election, 25, 74; formative years, 25-27; canal scheme,
277-278; political philosophy, 279-280; as 27, 34-35; Commander-in-Chief, 27-28;
president, 284; background and career, 286; military capacities, 28, 29; quoted on land
fails of reelection, 286; seeks reelection, 308- values, 30; on retreat from New York, 30;
309; Free Soil candidate, 324-325 presides at Constitutional Convention, 36,
Vancouver, island of, 314 39; heads new government, 3738, 123; re-
Van Tyne, C. H., quoted on radicals and lations with Senate, 61-64; on political ap-
loyalists in Revolution, 22-23; cited 011 pointments, 64; Cabinet, 67, 100; foreign
loyalists in Revolution, 29 policy, 74-76; Jay's treaty, 76-79; accepts
Venezuela, British Guiana boundary question, second term, 79; Farewell Address, 79-81;
604-606; blockade of, by European Powers, last years and death, 81; in threatened war
651 with France, 103; on Monroe, 197; on John
Vermont, constitution, 23-24; slavery abol- Quincy Adams, 218
ished, 58; negotiations for return to Britain, Washington, Lawrence, 25
59; favors War of 1812, 174; statehood, 189; Washington, D. C., government moved to
electoral college, 217 81n.; burning of, 199; in 1861, 410
Versailles Treaty, 672 Washington, Treaty of, 507-508
Veto power, presidential, 48, 275, 298-299 Watterson, Henry, 512; quoted on tariff, 592-
Vice President, election of, under Constitution 593
of 1787, 47 Ways and Means, Standing Committee on, 65
Victor Emmanuel I, King of Italy, 477 Wr
eaver, James Baird, 593
 750 Index
Webb, Walter Prescott, quoted on southern 615; on McKinley",
618; on Theodore Roose-
opposition to Homestead Act, 273; on post- velt, 633,634-S35; on Progressive Conven-
Civil War period, 469-470 tion, 661; on Bull Moose platform, 664;
Webster, Daniel, 268, 269; career, 21 5n.; tar- on Wilson, 665
iff views, 226, 227; defends Bank of the White House, 156 .

United debate with Hayne, 264-

States, 256; Whitney, Eli, inventor of cotton gin, 186-187
265; presidential candidate, 278, 349-350; Whitney, William Collins, 592; Secretary of
revises Harrison's inaugural address, 295 the Navy, 553
296; Secretary of State, 299, 301; pleads for Wide-Awakes, 399
preservation of Union, 331; defender of Wilkinson, James, 176
nationalism, 339; death of, 350-351 Williams, George Henry, 496
Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 300 Willkie, Wendell, 681, 683
Weed, Thurlow, 221-222, 284, 289, 290, 323, Wilmot, David, 322
353, 376, 406, 408, 447; plans National Wilmot Proviso, 322, 323, 326, 328, 352, 361,
Union Convention, 457-458 404
Weld, Theodore, 305 Wilson, Henry, 487
Welles, Gideon, Secretary of the Navy, 408 Wilson, James, 9, 113; quoted on American
Wellesley, Marquess of, quoted on War of colonies and natural law, 12-13; cited on
1812, 171; on Treaty of Ghent, 219 state sovereignty, 32
Wells, David A., 491; Special Commissioner Wilson, Woodrow, 563, 596; quoted on Con-
of Revenue, 478
gressional standing committees, 66; on
West, expansion of, 58-59, 186, 189, 234; In- American Government, 345; conception of
dustrial Revolution in, 189; attempt to bar and
presidency, 526, 665-666; nomination
slavery from, 196; expansion of, 203; United election, 661-665; described, 665; tariff bill,
States Bank in development of, 216; post- 666-667; legislation, 667-668; First World
Civil War financial problems, 469-470; War, 668-669, 670-671, 672, 674; relations
fights for inflation, 503; growth
of urban with Senate. 672-673; second term, 669-
population, 556-559; burdens and discon- 670, 671
tent of farmers, 593-594
Winning of the West, The (Roosevelt), 634
West Florida, acquisition of, 144-145, 146,
Wisconsin, Granger laws, 594
175-177, 206-207. See also East Florida,
Wirt, William, Attorney General, 201, 202;
Floridas defends Cherokees, 262
Western lands, settlement forbidden, 7, 27;
Witherspoon, John, 158
opening of, 19; under Confederation of Wittke, Carl, quoted on immigration, 564
1781, 33-34; division of, into states, 175;
Wolcott, Oliver, Secretary of the Treasury,
disposition of, 189, 190-191, 263-264
100, 102
Western War Hawks, 204
Wood, Fernando, recommends secession of
Whig Party, rise of, 260, 287-292; turns
New York City, 407; Mayor of New York,
against Tyler, 301; Southern members join
431
with Democrats, 311; machinery of, 341;
decline of, 351-354, 373, 374; end of, 375, Workingman's Party, 260-261n.
376, 379, 398
Workmen's Compensation Act, for federal
civil service, 667
Whisky Rebellion, 107
Whisky Ring, 488-489 World, New York, quoted on income tax, 600
Whisky Trust, 603 Wright, Silas, 312, 323, 511
White, Henry, 670 Writs of Assistance, 5
White, Hugh Lawson, Whig candidate for Wythe, George, 173
President, 278
White, William Allen, quoted on empire- X, Y, Z episode, 102, 103, 104, 178

building, 488; on Harrison's initiation to

Senate, 514; on Cleveland, 553-^554, 577; Yancey, William Lowndes, Southern spokes-
on Senators, 579-580; on Benjamin Harri- man in Convention of 1860, 397
son, 585, 588; on Bryan, 611; on Hanna, Yazoo land frauds, 145-146, 194-195, 570
 &L>>yr,
Territorial Expansion of the
United States

/
r
^ ^ /^^Ni^^^SS^S
-j^fev:^3;^:-:->:--v}:-v^v:^a
:.-;: vi D
I
:
% './ .
- '

/..'... '.-''M
-

Oregon Territory acquired

by Treaty 1&46

Annexation of Texas 1&+5 ish Cession of 1&19 shown without dates of admission.
Original state

Vermont, Maine and West

Virginia, although not
Qadfden Purchase 1S53 Louisiana, Purchase i&o$ were carved out of territory
Original states, of
original states.
Area, of original thirteen states Ceded by Mexico 1646

---
Original unorganized territories
Of the United States Present siaU boundaries