1 footnote 1 For the beginning of this period we have chosen the
Harrison-Tyler administration
As one who intends to travel a densely forested region should ascertain, if possible, the general trend of its mountains and watercourses, so one who enters upon the study of this tumultuous period should keep in mind some guiding outline of its historic events. Such an outline would be something like the following:
1. The rapid westward expansion of the nation; the formation of new states and territories; the enormous increase in material prosperity, with its stimulus and its danger. With the admission of new states arose the question of the so-called balance of power between the South and the North. We are concerned here, not with the question itself, but rather with its sad, disturbing implication, namely, that a great nation with the hope and expectation of mankind in its keeping had begun to split into two sections, divergent in their aims and antagonistic in their interests.
2. The sudden acquisition of a vast territory in connection with the annexation of Texas, the Oregon Treaty, and the war with Mexico. With this new territory plainly appeared two mutually hostile elements. The first was the apparent economic necessity of extending the area of slave labor to meet the increased demand for cotton in America and in Europe. The second was the growing conviction and determination that slavery must not spread to new territory but be confined to states where it already existed.
3. The years of political storm and stress, of struggle and compromise, which followed the attempt to reconcile the above irreconcilable factors. At the root of every struggle was the agitation of the slave question; at the heart of every compromise was the hope of preserving the Union. The various political organizations which appeared during this period may be grouped in three main classes:
a . The extreme proslavery party. This was composed of a relatively small but influential body of men, who held that slavery was an economic necessity; that it was justified by the laws of property and by the Constitution of the United States; that under slavery the negroes were happier and better protected than they could possibly be under any other system of labor; and that the slave system was, therefore, not only legally right but morally justifiable. The aim of this party was to extend slavery widely in the new territories.
b . The abolitionists and other extreme antislavery men, who regarded the slave system as a moral evil which could no longer be tolerated. They took no account of the difficulties and dangers involved in emancipation; they had small regard for economics, or even for the Constitution when it appeared to stand in their way. That the slave must be, and instantly, a free man was their only issue. This party was small and persecuted at first, but it made up in zeal and determination what it lacked in numbers.
c . The great body of moderate people, south and north, who regarded slavery as a "domestic institution," subject to state law and not to the national government, as Congress had repeatedly declared. The general method of this party was to compromise in view of the rights of others; its ideal was to hold all the states together in a harmonious development of the whole country; its immediate aim was to take the slave question out of national politics, where it was a perpetual source of discord and danger. Despite the earnest, patriotic efforts of this moderate party, the extremists on both sides made slavery the dominant national issue. It was violently agitated, in season and out of season, until it became, as the aged Jefferson had feared, like the wild ringing of a fire bell at night, and men rose in alarm to meet the crisis.
4. Secession; the terrible last resort to arms; the destruction of slavery; the reëstablishment of the Union on its old, unshaken foundations; the perils and hardships of reconstruction.
5. The astonishing recovery of the nation after the fearful loss and suffering of the war, and the orderly progress of Union and Democracy.
It needs only a glance to suggest that the history included in such a rugged outline cannot possibly be compressed into a few pages. We shall not, therefore, attempt to review the war, with its long chain of causes and consequences. Our interest in national literature leads us rather to examine the years of controversy which divided the country long before the call to arms had sounded. If we can enter for a moment into the excitement of this period, we may understand two classes of writing which appear in every time of turmoil: the minor literature, voicing the feeling of an hour or a party; and the major literature, which steadily reflects the unchanging ideals of the American nation.
Our pride and faith in a united country make it hard
for us now to understand the sectional strife and
bitterness of the twenty years before 1861. It was a
time of political upheaval, of violent debate ending in
threats or compromises, of sudden storm followed by a
calm as ominous as that in the center of a whirlwind.
The Wilmot Proviso, the Fugitive Slave Law, the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the Compromise of
180, the Great
Those were tumultuous times in which our greatest writers were growing up. Some of our poets, notably Whittier and Lowell, threw themselves into the strife of tongues; and in consequence a portion of their work is so partisan in spirit that it cannot be classed with national literature. Other young poets of brilliant talents turned from poetry to politics, as Trumbull and Freneau had turned aside in '76, and never fulfilled their early promise to our literature.
The two fundamental questions involved in all this strife concerned the matters of state rights and slavery. Both questions had been debated for the greater part of a century without ever furnishing an occasion for war; and they might still have found just and peaceable solution had not the country been inflamed by other matters: by the passionate, uncompromising methods of the abolitionists; by the zeal, no less passionate, of a few large slave-owners who were determined to extend their system in face of the growing moral conviction that slavery must be restricted; by the legal or personal encounters that followed the escape of slaves into free territory; and by a general newspaper campaign of misunderstanding and recrimination.
All these irritating matters complicated the main issue between the South and the North, and swept the country from calm deliberation into a heated controversy, which rapidly broke up the great moderate party into discordant fragments. In a single generation there appeared in the South eight or ten political organizations, most of which were divided into two factions, one advocating compromise and the other force in the pursuit of its immediate object. Meanwhile in the North there were Old Whigs and New Whigs, Republicans and "Black "Republicans, Democrats and Union Democrats, Free-soilers, Libertyites, Know-nothings, Abolitionists. And as the last-named reformers met to listen to the fiery denunciations of their orators, and to demand the immediate freedom of the slaves at any cost, presently a riotous mob would burst in upon them to smash the furniture, burn the building, and carry off the leader with a warning halter round his neck. With such conditions existing in the older, more conservative parts of the country, it seems only a natural consequence to find politics taking the form of anarchy and mob rule in the frontier settlements of "bleeding" Kansas.
Only as we remember this political babel, with its attendant emotional disturbance, can we understand the general uproar occasioned by the fanatic raid of John Brown, or the mighty wave of indignation which followed the melodramatic story of Uncle Tom's Cabin . It was as if a patient, suffering from fever, had suddenly developed a new symptom which alarmed the watchers beyond all reason, but which would hardly have produced a tremor if its psychological causes had been understood.
The general fever of the age, its political tumult, its
moral unrest, its ceaseless agitation, are all clearly
reflected in the minor and popular literature of the
Most of the minor works of the period have long since been forgotten; but one who reads them now begins to understand how armed conflict arose, not from inevitable necessity but from misunderstanding, between those who were born under the same flag, who worshiped the same God, and who honored the same virtues in man or woman. It was an age of agitation; the country was swept by wave after wave of emotional excitement; the voice of deliberation was lost in the louder cry of passion. The tumult reached its climax during the feeble administration of Buchanan, at a time when, if ever in its history, the ship of state needed a strong man at the helm; and then America, the peace-loving, was suddenly confronted by a terrible war which no sane person had ever desired or expected.
That war is still too near, too overwhelming in its impression of mingled horror and heroism, for us to treat it altogether dispassionately. The records of the period are all more or less partisan, reflecting a southern or a northern "view," because human judgment is easily affected by sympathy, and because our analysis of impersonal cause and effect is inevitably mingled with tender and sacred memories of the brave sires who died, of the gentle mothers who suffered in silence for the cause they loved. That the war revealed the indomitable will and the appalling fighting power of aroused America is now a matter of history. That it was all unnecessary may sometime be generally conceded. That it was fought on both sides by men who believed in the justice of their aims, who held honor dearer than life, and who heard above the shrilling of bugles and the roar of cannon the old Puritan battle-cry of "God for the right!" can no longer be doubted.