where before they had had no rights and dignities whatsoever.
These new states had grown populous and prosperous under that Union to which they had surrendered nothing of independence and from which they had received all they had of statehood and sovereignty. Very naturally, then, their attitude toward the Union was quite different from that of the older states. That Union which the older states had always regarded as their creature, owing its very existence to their grace, the new states looked upon as their creator to whom they owed all that they enjoyed of liberty-giving autonomy.
In the newer states particularly, but in the older states also, there had grown up a new conception of the dignity and permanence of the National Union. That which had been originally regarded as a doubtful venture had little by little come to be looked upon as a thing established and glorious. The national idea had taken a new and deeper hold upon men's minds and affections. Vast material and moral interests had grown into sturdy self-consciousness under its beneficent rule. That Union which had been entered upon with so much doubt and hesitation and with so many precautionary stipulations had become one of the great nations of the earth, strong at home and everywhere respected abroad. It had a history in war and peace which was a precious possession of all the people alike.
Proud, loving memories clustered about the story of its career. The victories of New Orleans, and Buena Vista, and Chapultepec, the sea conquests of Porter and Perry and the rest, had been added to the stories of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Camden and Yorktown, as fireside tales with which the grandfathers made the eyes of a younger generation of Americans glisten with patriotism. And achievements of peace equally notable—stories of what Morse, Henry, Fulton, Peter Cooper, Daniel Boone, Bowie, Kit Carson, Fremont, Sam Houston, General Gaines and a multitude of others had accomplished—were equally stimulating to the pride and patriotism of the youth of the thirty-three states.
And there were heroic tales told of Indian wars in which Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, Sam Dale, the Mississippi Yagers, Col. Dick Johnson, and other veritable heroes of romantic daring had figured. All these and scores and hundreds of other tales of patriotic heroism were then familiars of the fireside as illustrations of American pluck and American achievement.
There was the country's expansion, too, to glory in. The Louisiana purchase had added an empire of vast extent and of inestimable productive possibilities to the national domain, the development of which, even before 1861, was a romantic wonder story of history. The Mexican war had brought with it another accession of incalculably rich territory such as no nation in all history except our own had ever added at a single stroke to its domain.
Where the Spanish gold-seekers had galloped for centuries in search of the precious metal, finding it not, an American had quickly discovered a new Golconda, an Ophir, an Eldorado so rich in its productiveness as for a time to threaten the stability of gold as an accepted measure of values among men. Vast regions that had remained for generations the haunt of savages and wild beasts, with only here and there a mission station of adobe huts to offer hope of better things in some far distant future time, became, within a brief while populous territories ready to take their place in the Union as important American states. Better still, a new and matchless fruitfulness had been discovered in vast valleys and upon far-reaching mountain sides that had been previously typical of hopeless sterility and desolation.
All these things had mightily stimulated the American imagination and all of them had contributed incalculably to the strengthening of the national spirit and to the upbuilding of a new and controlling sentiment of loyalty to the Union under which all this actual greatness had been achieved and all this potential greatness was confidently promised.
In still other ways the sentiment of nationality had been strengthened. The orators of the land had for generations mightily exalted the horn of the Nation in eloquent speeches which all the schoolboys in all the states grew enthusiastic in declaiming. All the literary men of the land had celebrated the country's glories in prose and verse that filled the school books and set juvenile patriotism aflame with ardor.
All this patriotic awakening had for its object of worship the glories of the Nation, and not at all the narrower achievements of particular states or sections. All of it referred itself to the Union as the commonwealth. Neither literature, nor eloquence, nor familiar household narrative concerned itself in the least with any of those jealousies which had prompted the original states to hesitate to enter the Union. None of them recognized even in the remotest way, those questions of conflicting powers and dignities, those anticipations of encroachment on the part of the central power, or those jealous guardings of the rights of individual states which had played so large a part in the settlement of the original problem of a Federal Union.
In brief, the people had outgrown and forgotten the doubts and fears of the earlier formative time. In the main they knew nothing about such things and cared nothing for them. They knew only that they were citizens of the greatest, freest and strongest nation on earth, and that its history was a heritage of glory to all of them alike.
Lawyers' quibblings, logic chopping, and all arguments drawn from history meant nothing to the great majority of a people who had been born and bred under the Union and had imbibed with their mothers' milk a sentiment of undying loyalty, not to any state or any doctrine or any theory, but to the Nation in whose history they regarded themselves as entitled to feel personal and ancestral pride and affection.
Thus while the historical argument was clearly with those who maintained the right of the states to assert their authority as superior to that of the Union, that argument was addressed in large part to ears that had been rendered deaf to it by the echoes of the national glory. While the Union had indeed been at the first a hesitating experiment, it had become by time and by national achievement a nationality for the maintenance of which vast populations were ready and willing and even eager to risk their lives.
If we would understand the war and the conditions in which it came about, we must first clearly realize the change that had occurred in popular sentiment, and especially the growth of that national feeling which had slowly but surely replaced the old hesitation and jealousy of the states. Only the circumstance that slavery existed and was defended in one part of the Union and that it was antagonized in the other part on grounds of policy, conviction, and morality, kept alive the old sentiment of state sovereignty and made the war possible. That sentiment of the dominant right of the states was strongly asserted on both sides and insisted upon both in behalf of slavery and in antagonism to it until war resulted. The history of that controversy must be the subject of a separate chapter, in which its irritating character as well as the difficulties that statesmanship encountered in dealing with it, may be set forth without undue elaboration but with sufficient detail to render the result easily enough understood.
CHAPTER III
The "Irrepressible Conflict"
There is no possibility of doubt that, but for the slavery controversy, that growth of an intense national feeling which has been mentioned would have rendered the war of 1861–65 impossible.
That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive, except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed, if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time. The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall, which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that were not in accordance with the Constitution,
