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apprehend a bloody anarchy: I apprehend an anarchy in which property, not lives, will be sacrificed." And Fisher Ames wrote: "My health is good for nothing, but . . . if the Jacobins make haste, I may yet live to be hanged." In 1804, in a Connecticut town, an applauded Fourth of July toast to "The President of the United States" ran "Thomas Jefferson: may he receive from his fellow citizens the reward of his merit a halter!" (And see page 386.)

The gains in the Federalist period

These faults must not obscure the vast service the Federalists had rendered. Alexander Hamilton is the hero of the twelve-year Federalist period. He should be judged in the main by his work in the years 1789-1793. During that critical era, he stood forth as no other man of the day could have done as statesman-general in the conflict between order and anarchy, union and disunion. His constructive work and his genius for organization were then as indispensable to his country as Jefferson's democratic faith and inspiration were to be later. Except for Hamilton, there would hardly have been a Nation for Jefferson to Americanize. We may rejoice that Hamilton did not have his whole will; but we must recognize that the forces he set in motion made the Union none too strong to withstand the trials of the years that followed.

Those centralizing forces may be summarized concisely. The tremendous support of capital was secured for almost any claim the government might make to doubtful powers. Congress set the example of exercising doubtful and unenumerated powers; and a cover was devised for such practice in the doctrine of implied powers. The appellate jurisdiction conferred on the Supreme Court was to enable it to defend and extend this doctrine. Congress began to add new States, with greater dependence of feeling upon the National government. And the people at large began to feel a new dignity and many material gains from a strong Union.

PART VI-JEFFERSONIAN REPUBLICANISM 1800-1830

CHAPTER XVIII

AMERICA IN 1800

Lines of

FROM Jefferson to Lincoln, six great lines of growth mark American history: its territory expanded tremendously; the Americans won intellectual independence from Old World opinion; democracy spread and deepened; growth, the industrial system grew vastly complex; slavery 1800-1860 was abolished; and Nationalism triumphed over disunion. The first of these, territorial growth, was the warp through which ran the other threads of growth. The ex- Territorial pansion of civilization into waste spaces marked expansion world history in the nineteenth century. England and Russia led in the movement; but not even for them was this growth so much the soul of things as it was for us.

It made us truly American. Our tidewater communities remained "colonial" in feeling long after they became independent politically, still hanging timorously on OldWorld approval. Only when our people had climbed the mountain crests and turned their faces in earnest to the great West, did they cease to look to Europe for standards of thought.

It made us democratic. The communities progressive in politics have always been the frontier parts of the country, first the western sections of the original States, and then successive layers of new States.

It created our complex industrialism, with the dependence of one section upon another; and so it brought on our conflict between slave and free labor.

It fostered nationality. Europe is convex toward the sky. Mountains and seas form many walls and moats; and rivers

disperse from the center toward the extremities. And so fourteen nations there divide an area smaller than the Mississippi valley. America is a "vast concave. Its mountains guard the frontiers only. Its streams concentrate, and so tend to unity industrial and political. The original thirteen States, scattered amid the forests and marshes of the Atlantic slope, long clung to their jealous, separatist tendencies. But expansion into the Mississippi valley, wrought out by nature for the home of one mighty industrial empire, transformed that handful of jangling communities into a continental nation.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans exulted in their country's growth. Sometimes, it is true, this exulta

And American idealism

tion expressed itself clumsily, as cheap spreadeagleism or insolent jingoism; and well-meaning critics, more refined than robust, saw in the buoyant self-confidence of the people only vulgar and grotesque boastfulness about material bigness. For a time, American ideals were to become sordid, in a measure; but not until the last quarter of the century, when commercialism had replaced romance as the dominant note in our life. Through all the earlier period the plain people felt a truth that the cultured critic missed. They knew that this growth was not mere growth. For the creation of the nation, and for its proper life, the conquest of our proper territory from savage man and savage nature was first needful; and this Titanic conflict with a continent became idealized to the heart and imagination of a hardy race. This was the hundred year American epic - its protagonist the tall, sinewy, saturnine frontiersman with his long rifle and well-poised ax, and usually with his Bible, encamped in the wilderness to win a home for his children and for a nation. First among American writers, Lowell fixed that poem in words, and happily in the dialect of the original frontiersman :"O strange New World! That never yit wast young; Whose youth from thee by grippin' need was wrung; Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread,

PHYSICAL ADVANTAGES

And who grewst strong thru shifts, and wants, and pains,
Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains,
Who saw in vision their young Ishmael strain

In each hard hand a vassal Ocean's mane!
Thou taught by freedom, and by great events,

To pitch new States as Old-World men pitch tents!"

339

This larger America had marvelous physical advantages. For communication with the outside world, the two oceans and the Gulf give to the United States a coast line Physical equaled only by Europe's. Rivers and the shore of advantages the Great Lakes add 19,000 miles of navigable interior waterways,—a condition absolutely beyond parallel in any other equal portion of the globe. More than four fifths of these water roads are grouped in the Lake system and the Mississippi system. These are virtually one vast system, opening on the sea on two sides and draining more than a million square miles of territory-giving to cities a thousand miles inland the advantages of seacoast ports, and binding together, for instance, Pittsburg and Kansas City, on opposite slopes of the great valley a thousand miles across.

Above the limit of navigation, these streams, and others, furnish an unrivaled water power. Many years ago, Professor Shaler estimated that the energy already derived from the streams of this country exceeded that from the streams of all the rest of the world. This power was of particular importance in colonial days. Then, for a hundred years, it lost value, relatively, after the invention of steam. But now, with new devices to turn it into electric power, it looms again a chief factor in future wealth.

The Appalachian region contains rich deposits of coal and iron in close neighborhood; while the Great Lakes make communication easy between Appalachian coal and Lake Superior iron. Other mineral deposits needful in industry exist in abundance, well distributed over the country,copper, lead, zinc, building stone, gold and silver, salt, phosphates, clays, cements, graphite, grindstones, and a small amount of aluminum. In 1800, great forests still stretched from the Atlantic to Illinois, western Kentucky,

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