THE AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
THE MIDDLE PERIOD
1817-1858
BY
JOHN W. BURGESS, PH.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW,
AND DEAN OF THE FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE,
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
WITH MAPS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
To the memory
of
my former teacher, colleague, and friend,
JULIUS HAWLEY SEELYE,
philosopher, theologian, statesman, and educator,
this volume is reverently
and affectionately
inscribed
PREFACE
There is no more serious and delicate task in literature and morals than that of writing the history of the United States from 1816 to 1860. The periods which precede this may be treated without fear of arousing passion, prejudice, and resentment, and with little danger of being misunderstood. Even the immaculateness of Washington may be attacked without exciting anything worse than a sort of uncomfortable admiration for the reckless courage of the assailant. But when we pass the year 1820, and especially when we approach the year 1860, we find ourselves in a different world. We find ourselves in the midst of the ideas, the motives, and the occurrences which, and of the men who, have, in large degree, produced the animosities, the friendships, and the relations between parties and sections which prevail to-day.
Serious and delicate as the task is, however, the time has arrived when it should be undertaken in a thoroughly impartial spirit. The continued misunderstanding between the North and the South is an ever present menace to the welfare of both sections and of the entire nation. It makes it almost impossible to decide any question of our politics upon its merits. It offers an almost insuperable obstacle to the development of a national opinion upon the fundamental principles of our polity. If we would clear up this confusion in the common consciousness, we must do something to dispel this misunderstanding; and I know of no means of accomplishing this, save the rewriting of our history from 1816 to 1860, with an open mind and a willing spirit to see and to represent truth and error, and right and wrong, without regard to the men or the sections in whom or where they may appear.
I am by no means certain that I am able to do this. I am old enough to have been a witness of the great struggle of 1861-65, and to have participated, in a small way, in it. My early years were embittered by the political hatreds which then prevailed. I learned before my majority to regard secession as an abomination, and its chief cause, slavery, as a great evil; and I cannot say that these feelings have been much modified, if any at all, by longer experiences and maturer thought. I have, therefore, undertaken this work with many misgivings.
Keenly conscious of my own prejudices, I have exerted my imagination to the utmost to create a picture in my own mind of the environment of those who held the opposite opinion upon these fundamental subjects, and to appreciate the processes of their reasoning under the influences of their own particular situation. And I have with sedulous care avoided all the histories written immediately after the close of the great contest of arms, and all rehashes of them of later date. In fact I have made it an invariable rule to use no secondary material; that is, no material in which original matter is mingled with somebody's interpretation of its meaning. If, therefore, the facts in my narration are twisted by prejudices and preconceptions, I think I can assure my readers that they have suffered only one twist. I have also endeavored to approach my subject in a reverent spirit, and to deal with the characters who made our history, in this almost tragic period, as serious and sincere men having a most perplexing and momentous problem to solve, a problem not of their own making, but a fatal inheritance from their predecessors.
I have been especially repelled by the flippant superficiality of the foreign critics of this period of our history, and their evident delight in representing the professions and teachings of the "Free Republic" as canting hypocrisy. It has seemed to me a great misfortune that the present generation and future generations should be taught to regard so lightly the earnest efforts of wise, true, and honorable men to rescue the country from the great catastrophe which, for so long, impended over it. The passionate onesidedness of our own writers is hardly more harmful, and is certainly less repulsive.
I recently heard a distinguished professor of history and politics say that he thought the history of the United States, in this period, could be truthfully written only by a Scotch-Irishman. I suppose he meant that the Scotch element in this ideal historian would take the Northern point of view, and the Irish element the Southern; but I could not see how this would produce anything more than another pair of narratives from the old contradictory points of view; and he did not explain how it would.
My opinion is, on the contrary, that this history must be written by an American and a Northerner, and from the Northern point of view—because an American best understands Americans, after all; because the victorious party can be and will be more liberal, generous, and sympathetic than the vanquished; and because the Northern view is, in the main, the correct view. It will not improve matters to concede that the South had right and the North might, or, even, that both were equally right and equally wrong. Such a doctrine can only work injury to both, and more injury to the South than to the North. Chewing the bitter cud of fancied wrong produces both spiritual misery and material adversity, and tempts to foolish and reckless action for righting the imagined injustice. Moreover, any such doctrine is false, and acquiescence in it, however kindly meant, is weak, and can have no other effect than the perpetuation of error and misunderstanding. The time has come when the men of the South should acknowledge that they were in error in their attempt to destroy the Union, and it is unmanly in them not to do so. When they appealed the great question from the decision at the ballot-box to the "trial by battle," their leaders declared, over and over again, in calling their followers to arms, that the "God of battles" would surely give the victory to the right. In the great movements of the world's history this is certainly a sound philosophy, and they should have held to it after their defeat. Their recourse to the crude notion that they had succumbed only to might was thus not only a bitter, false, and dangerous consolation, but it was a stultification of themselves when at their best as men and heroes.
While, therefore, great care has been taken, in the following pages, to attribute to the Southern leaders and the Southern people sincerity of purpose in their views and their acts, while their ideas and their reasoning have been, I think, duly appreciated, and patiently explained, while the right has been willingly acknowledged to them and honor accorded them whenever and wherever they have had the right and have merited honor, and while unbounded sympathy for personal suffering and misfortune has been expressed, still not one scintilla of justification for secession and rebellion must be expected. The South must acknowledge its error as well as its defeat in regard to these things, and that, too, not with lip service, but from the brain and the heart and the manly will, before any real concord in thought and feeling, any real national brotherhood, can be established. This is not too much to demand, simply because it is right, and nothing can be settled, as Mr. Lincoln said, until it is settled right. Any interpretation of this period of American history which does not demonstrate to the South its error will be worthless, simply because it will not be true; and unless we are men enough to hear and accept and stand upon the truth, it is useless to endeavor to find a bond of real union between us. In a word, the conviction of the South of its error in secession and rebellion is absolutely indispensable to the establishment of national cordiality; and the history of this period which fails to do this will fail in accomplishing one of the highest works of history, the reconciliation of men to the plans of Providence for their perfection.
I have not, in the following pages, undertaken to treat all of the events of our experience from 1816 to 1860. The space allowed me would not admit of that. And even if it had, I still would have selected only those events which, in my opinion, are significant of our progress in civilization, and, as I am writing a political history, only those which are significant of our progress in political civilization. The truthful record, connection, and interpretation of such events is what I call history in the highest sense, as distinguished from chronology, narrative, and romance. Both necessity and philosophy have confined me to these.
I cannot close these prefatory sentences without a word of grateful acknowledgment to my friend and colleague, Dr. Harry A. Cushing, for the important services which he has rendered me in the preparation of this work.
JOHN W. BURGESS.
323 WEST FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.
JANUARY 22, 1897.
CONTENTS
T
HE
N
ATIONALIZATION OF THE
O
LD
R
EPUBLICAN
P
ARTY
T
HE
A
CQUISITION OF
F
LORIDA
S
LAVERY IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES BEFORE
1820
T
HE
C
REATION OF THE
C
OMMONWEALTH OF
M
ISSOURI
T
HE
B
EGINNING OF THE
P
ARTICULARISTIC
R
EACTION
T
HE
P
RESIDENTIAL
E
LECTION OF
1824
T
HE
D
IVISION OF THE
R
EPUBLICAN
P
ARTY
D
EMOCRATIC
O
PPOSITION TO
I
NTERNAL
I
MPROVEMENTS AND
P
ROTECTION
T
HE
U
NITED
S
TATES
B
ANK AND THE
P
RESIDENTIAL
C
ONTEST OF
1832
N
ULLIFICATION
A
BOLITION
T
HE
B
ANK
,
THE
S
UB
-T
REASURY
,
AND
P
ARTY
D
EVELOPMENT BETWEEN
1832
AND
1842
T
EXAS
O
REGON
T
HE
"R
E-ANNEXATION OF
T
EXAS AND THE
R
E-OCCUPATION OF
O
REGON
"
T
HE
W
AR WITH
M
EXICO
T
HE
O
RGANIZATION OF
O
REGON
T
ERRITORY AND THE
C
OMPROMISE OF
1850
T
HE
E
XECUTION OF THE
F
UGITIVE
S
LAVE
L
AW
,
AND THE
E
LECTION OF
1852
T
HE
R
EPEAL OF THE
M
ISSOURI
C
OMPROMISE
T
HE
S
TRUGGLE FOR
K
ANSAS
T
HE
D
RED
S
COTT
C
ASE
T
HE
S
TRUGGLE FOR
K
ANSAS
C
ONCLUDED
T
HE
E
LECTORAL
V
OTE
IN D
ETAIL
, 1820-1856
T
HE
C
ABINETS OF
M
ONROE
, A
DAMS
, J
ACKSON
, V
AN
B
UREN
, H
ARRISON
, T
YLER
, P
OLK
, T
AYLOR
, F
ILLMORE
, P
IERCE
,
AND
B
UCHANAN
—1816-1858
LIST OF MAPS.
[FLORIDA AT THE TIME OF ACQUISITION]
[TEXAS AT THE TIME OF ANNEXATION]
[OREGON AS DETERMINED BY THE TREATY OF 1846]
[CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO IN 1850]
[NEBRASKA AND KANSAS, 1854-1861]
THE MIDDLE PERIOD
CHAPTER I.
THE NATIONALIZATION OF THE OLD REPUBLICAN PARTY
[General Character of the Acts of the Fourteenth Congress]—[Madison's Message of December 5th, 1815]—[Change in the Principles of the Republican Party]—[The United States Bank Act of 1816]—[Report of the Bank Bill by Mr. Calhoun]—[Mr. Calhoun's Argument in Favor of the Bill]—[Webster's Objections to the Bank Bill]—[Mr. Clay's Support of the Bank Bill]—[Passage of the Bank Bill by the House of Representatives]—[The Passage of the Bank Bill by the Senate]—[The United States Bank of 1816 a Southern Measure]—[The Tariff Bill Framed by the Committee on Ways and Means]—[The Tariff Bill Reported]—[The Character of the Tariff Bill]—[Mr. Calhoun's Speech upon the Tariff Bill]—[The Passage of the Tariff Bill]—[The Army and Navy Bills]—[The Bill for National Improvements]—[Mr. Calhoun's Advocacy of this Bill]—[The Opposition to the Internal Improvements Bill]—[Passage of the Bill by Congress]—[Veto of the Bill by the President]—[The Failure of Congress to Override the Veto.]
It is no part of my task to relate the events of the War of 1812-15. That has already been sufficiently done in the preceding volume of this series. I take up the threads of the narrative at the beginning of the year 1816, and my problem in this chapter will be to expound the acts and policies of the Fourteenth Congress in the light of the experiences of that War.
|
General character of the acts of the Fourteenth Congress. |
Those acts and policies were shaped and adopted under the influence of those experiences, and this influence was so predominant, at the moment, in the minds of the leading men in the Government and throughout the country as to exclude, or at least to overbalance, all other influences. This is especially manifest in the attitude of the statesmen of the slave-holding Commonwealths, and most especially in the attitude of their great leader, Mr. Calhoun, who was the chief champion of some of the most national measures voted by that Congress. A clear appreciation of his views and his acts at that period of his career will enable us far better than anything else to understand the terrible seriousness of the slavery question, which subsequently drove him into lines of thought and action so widely divergent from those upon which he set out in early life.
|
Madison's message of December 5th, 1815. |
It was the President himself, however, one of the chief founders of the "States' rights" party, Mr. Madison, who set the direction toward centralization in the Congressional legislation of 1815-17. In his annual message of December 5th, 1815, he recommended the increase and better organization of the army and the navy, the enlargement of the existing Military Academy and the founding of such academies in the different sections of the country, the creation of a national currency, the protection of manufactures, the construction of roads and canals, and the establishment of a national university.
This is a very different political creed from that promulgated by President Jefferson when the Republican party first gained possession of the Government at Washington. Then, decrease in all the elements of power in the hands of the central Government, and careful maintenance of all the rights and powers of the "States," were recommended and urged upon the attention of the national lawgivers.
|
Change in the principles of the Republican party. |
From a "States'-sovereignty" party in 1801, the Republican party had manifestly become a strong national party in 1816; that is, if we are to take the two Presidential messages, to which we have referred, as containing the political principles of that party at these two periods of its existence.