CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION

1. The Formation of a National Government.

It is of course impossible to understand the life of a politician in another country without study of its conditions and its past. In the case of America this study is especially necessary, not only because the many points of comparison between that country and our own are apt to conceal profound differences of customs and institutions, but because the broader difference between a new country and an old is in many respects more important than we conceive. But in the case of Lincoln there is peculiar reason for carrying such a study far back. He himself appealed unceasingly to a tradition of the past. In tracing the causes which up to his time had tended to conjoin the United States more closely and the cause which more recently had begun to threaten them with disruption, we shall be examining the elements of the problem with which it was his work in life to deal.

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The "Thirteen United States of America" which in 1776 declared their independence of Great Britain were so many distinct Colonies distributed unevenly along 1,300 miles of the Atlantic coast. These thirteen Colonies can easily be identified on the map when it is explained that Maine in the extreme north was then an unsettled forest tract claimed by the Colony of Massachusetts, that Florida in the extreme south belonged to Spain, and that Vermont, which soon after asserted its separate existence, was a part of the State of New York. Almost every one of these Colonies had its marked peculiarities and its points of antagonism as against its nearest neighbours; but they fell into three groups.

We may broadly contrast the five southernmost, which included those which were the richest and of which in many ways the leading State was Virginia, with the four (or later six) northernmost States known collectively as New England. Both groups had at first been colonised by the same class, the smaller landed gentry of England with a sprinkling of well-to-do traders, though the South received later a larger number of poor and shiftless immigrants than the North, and the North attracted a larger number of artisans. The physical conditions of the South led to the growth of large farms, or "plantations" as they were called, and of a class of large proprietors; negro slaves thrived there and were useful in the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, rice, and later of cotton. The North continued to be a country of small farms, but its people turned also to fishery and to commerce, and the sea carrying trade became early its predominant interest, yielding place later on to manufacturing industries. The South was attached in the main, though by no means altogether, to the Church of England; New England owed its origin to successive immigrations of Puritans often belonging to the Congregational or Independent body; with the honourable exception of Rhode Island these communities showed none of the liberal and tolerant spirit which the Independents of the old country often developed; they manifested, however, the frequent virtues as well as the occasional defects of the Puritan character. The middle group of Colonies were of more mixed origin; New York and New Jersey had been Dutch possessions, Delaware was partly Swedish, Pennsylvania had begun as a Quaker settlement but included many different elements; in physical and economic conditions they resembled on the whole New England, but they lacked, some of them conspicuously, the Puritan discipline, and had a certain cosmopolitan character. Though there were sharp antagonisms among the northern settlements, and the southern settlements were kept distinct by the great distances between them, the tendency of events was to soften

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these minor differences. But it greatly intensified one broad distinction which marked off the southern group from the middle and the northern groups equally.

Nevertheless before independence was thought of, there were common characteristics distinguishing Americans from English people. They are the better worth an attempt to note them because, as a historian of America wrote some years ago," the typical American of 1900 is on the whole more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman." In all the Colonies alike the conditions of life encouraged personal independence. In all alike they also encouraged a special kind of ability which may be called practical rather than thorough-that of a workman who must be competent at many tasks and has neither opportunity nor inducement to become perfect at one; that of the scientific man irresistibly drawn to inventions which shall make life less hard; that of the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community's need of lawyers and politicians.

On the other hand many of the colonists' forefathers had come to their new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions. This is a disposition not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform. The idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words, which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets down as insincere in others. Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America. New conditions in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers and bred a certain pride in novelty. An American economist has written in a sanguine humour, "The process of transplanting removes many of the shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older countries. In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and there

fore they are probably done in the best way." But a new country is always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main, advance) in the old world. The conservatism which these causes tend to produce has in any case been marked in America. Thus, as readers of Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of important literature, and still more of oratory, in America. Moreover, as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed as expressing the wisdom of the ages. An Englishman will quote Burke as he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible. In like manner political practices of accidental origin—for instance, that a representative should be an inhabitant of the place he represents-acquire in America something like the force of constitutional law.

In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they consequently brought with them. This heritage included a certain aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the Congregational Church system. It included also a great tenacity of the subject's rights as against the State-the spirit of Hampden refusing payment of ship-money-and a disposition to look on the law and the Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government. But it did not include-and this explains the real meaning of the War of Independence-any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which represented Great Britain only, and which had gained

its position even in Great Britain since the fathers of Virginia and Massachusetts left home. Nor did it include-and this was of great importance in its influence on the form of the Constitution-any real understanding of or any aptitude for the English Parliamentary Government, under which the leaders of the legislative body and the advisers of the Crown in its executive functions are the same men, and under which the elected persons, presumed for the moment to represent the people, are allowed for that moment an almost unfettered supremacy.

Thus there was much that made it easy for the Colonies to combine in the single act of repudiating British sovereignty, yet the characteristics which may be ascribed to them in common were not such as inclined them or fitted them to build up a great new unity.

The Colonies, however, backed up by the British Government with the vigour which Chatham imparted to it, had acted together against a common danger from the French. When the States, as we must now call them, acted together against the British Government they did so in name as "United States," and they shortly proceeded to draw up " Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union." But it was union of a feeble kind. The separate government of each State, in its internal affairs, was easy to provide for; representative institutions always existed, and no more change was needed than to substitute elected officers for the Governors and Councillors formerly appointed by the Crown. For the Union a Congress was provided which was to represent all the States in dealings with the outside world, but it was a Government with no effective powers except such as each separate State might independently choose to lend it. It might urge war with England, but it could not effectually control or regularly pay the military service of its own citizens; it might make a treaty of peace with England, but it could not enforce on its citizens distasteful obligations of that treaty. Such an ill-devised machine would have worked well enough for a time, if the Union Government could