<h2><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P382"></SPAN></span><SPAN name="chapLX"></SPAN>LX<br/> THE EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES</h2>
<p>The region of the world that displayed the most immediate and striking results
from the new inventions in transport was North America. Politically the United
States embodied, and its constitution crystallized, the liberal ideas of the
middle eighteenth century. It dispensed with state-church or crown, it would
have no titles, it protected property very jealously as a method of freedom,
and—the exact practice varied at first in the different states—it
gave nearly every adult male citizen a vote. Its method of voting was
barbarically crude, and as a consequence its political life fell very soon
under the control of highly organized party machines, but that did not prevent
the newly emancipated population developing an energy, enterprise and public
spirit far beyond that of any other contemporary population.</p>
<p>Then came that acceleration of locomotion to which we have
already called attention. It is a curious thing that
America, which owes most to this acceleration in locomotion,
has felt it least. The United States have taken the railway,
the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth as though
they were a natural part of their growth. They were not.
These things happened to come along just in time to save
American unity. The United States of to-day were made first
by the river steamboat, and then by the railway. Without
these things, the present United States, this vast
continental nation, would have been altogether impossible.
The westward flow of population would have been far more
sluggish. It might never have crossed the great central
plains. It took nearly two hundred years for effective
settlement to reach from the coast to Missouri, much less
than halfway across the continent. The first state
established beyond the river was the steamboat state of
Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the
Pacific was done in a few decades.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P383"></SPAN></span>If we
had the resources of the cinema it would be interesting to
show a map of North America year by year from 1600 onward,
with little dots to represent hundreds of people, each dot a
hundred, and stars to represent cities of a hundred thousand
people.</p>
<p>For two hundred years the reader would see that stippling
creeping slowly along the coastal districts and navigable
waters, spreading still more gradually into Indiana, Kentucky
and so forth. Then somewhere about 1810 would come a change.
Things would get more lively along the river courses. The
dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the
steamboat. The pioneer dots would be spreading soon over
Kansas and Nebraska from a number of jumping-off places along
the great rivers.</p>
<p>Then from about 1850 onward would come the black lines of the
railways, and after that the little black dots would not
simply creep but run. They would appear now so rapidly, it
would be almost as though they were being put on by some sort
of spraying machine. And suddenly here and then there would
appear the first stars to indicate the first great cities of
a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities—each like a knot in the growing net
of the railways.</p>
<p>The growth of the United States is a process that has no
precedent in the world’s history; it is a new kind of
occurrence. Such a community could not have come into
existence before, and if it had, without railways it would
certainly have dropped to pieces long before now. Without
railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great
population of the United States of America has not only grown
outrageously; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has become more
uniform. The man of San Francisco is more like the man of
New York to-day than the man of Virginia was like the man of
New England a century ago. And the process of assimilation
goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by
railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast unity,
speaking, thinking and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon
aviation will be helping in the work.</p>
<p>This great community of the United States is an altogether
new thing in history. There have been great empires before
with populations exceeding 100 millions, but these were
associations of divergent <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P384"></SPAN></span>peoples; there has never been one
single people on this scale before. We want a new term for
this new thing. We call the United States a country just as
we call France or Holland a country. But the two things are
as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They are
the creations of different periods and different conditions;
they are going to work at a different pace and in an entirely
different way. The United States in scale and possibility is
halfway between a European state and a United States of all
the world.</p>
<p>But on the way to this present greatness and security the
American people passed through one phase of dire conflict.
The river steamboats, the railways, the telegraph, and their
associate facilities, did not come soon enough to avert a
deepening conflict of interests and ideas between the
southern and northern states of the Union. The former were
slave-holding states; the latter, states in which all men
were free. The railways and steamboats at first did but
bring into sharper conflict an already established difference
between the two sections of the United States. The
increasing unification due to the new means of transport made
the question whether the southern spirit or the northern
should prevail an ever more urgent one. There was little
possibility of compromise. The northern spirit was free and
individualistic; the southern made for great estates and a
conscious gentility ruling over a dusky subject multitude.</p>
<p>Every new territory that was organized into a state as the
tide of population swept westward, every new incorporation
into the fast growing American system, became a field of
conflict between the two ideas, whether it should become a
state of free citizens, or whether the estate and slavery
system should prevail. From 1833 an American anti-slavery
society was not merely resisting the extension of the
institution but agitating the whole country for its complete
abolition. The issue flamed up into open conflict over the
admission of Texas to the Union. Texas had originally been a
part of the republic of Mexico, but it was largely colonized
by Americans from the slave-holding states, and it seceded
from Mexico, established its independence in 1835, and was
annexed to the United States in 1844. Under the Mexican law
slavery had been forbidden in Texas, but now the South
claimed Texas for slavery and got it.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P385"></SPAN></span>Meanwhile the development of ocean
navigation was bringing a growing swarm of immigrants from
Europe to swell the spreading population of the northern
states, and the raising of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and
Oregon, all northern farm lands, to state level, gave the
anti-slavery North the possibility of predominance both in
the Senate and the House of Representatives. The cotton-
growing South, irritated by the growing threat of the
Abolitionist movement, and fearing this predominance in
Congress, began to talk of secession from the Union.
Southerners began to dream of annexations to the south of
them in Mexico and the West Indies, and of great slave state,
detached from the North and reaching to Panama.</p>
<p>The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension President
in 1860 decided the South to split the Union. South Carolina
passed an “ordinance of secession” and prepared
for war. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana
and Texas joined her, and a convention met at Montgomery in
Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis president of the
“Confederated States” of America, and adopted a
constitution specifically upholding “the institution of
negro slavery.”</p>
<div class="fig"> <SPAN name="img-385"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/img-385.jpg" alt="ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS" width-obs="600" height-obs="380" /> <p class="caption">
ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P386"></SPAN></span>Abraham
Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new
people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His
early years had been spent as a drifting particle in the
general westward flow of the population. He was born in
Kentucky (1809), was taken to Indiana as a boy and later on
to Illinois. Life was rough in the backwoods of Indiana in
those days; the house was a mere log cabin in the wilderness,
and his schooling was poor and casual. But his mother taught
him to read early, and he became a voracious reader. At
seventeen he was a big athletic youth, a great wrestler and
runner. He worked for a time as clerk in a store, went into
business as a storekeeper with a drunken partner, and
contracted debts that he did not fully pay off for fifteen
years. In 1834, when he was still only five and twenty, he
was elected member of the House of Representatives for the
State of Illinois. In Illinois particularly the question of
slavery flamed because the great leader of the party for the
extension of slavery in the national Congress was Senator
Douglas of Illinois. Douglas was a man of great ability and
prestige, and for some years Lincoln fought against him by
speech and pamphlet, rising steadily to the position of his
most formidable and finally victorious antagonist. Their
culminating struggle was the presidential campaign of 1860,
and on the fourth of March, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated
President, with the southern states already in active
secession from the rule of the federal government at
Washington, and committing acts of war.</p>
<p>This civil war in America was fought by improvised armies
that grew steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds of
thousands—until at last the Federal forces exceeded a
million men; it was fought over a vast area between New
Mexico and the eastern sea, Washington and Richmond were the
chief objectives. It is beyond our scope here to tell of the
mounting energy of that epic struggle that rolled to and fro
across the hills and woods of Tennessee and Virginia and down
the Mississippi. There was a terrible waste and killing of
men. Thrust was followed by counter thrust; hope gave way to
despondency, and returned and was again disappointed.
Sometimes Washington seemed within the Confederate grasp;
again the Federal armies were driving towards Richmond. The
Confederates, outnumbered and far poorer in resources, fought
under <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P387"></SPAN></span>a
general of supreme ability, General Lee. The generalship of
the Union was far inferior. Generals were dismissed, new
generals appointed; until at last, under Sherman and Grant,
came victory over the ragged and depleted South. In October,
1864, a Federal army under Sherman broke through the
Confederate left and marched down from Tennessee through
Georgia to the coast, right across the Confederate country,
and then turned up through the <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P388"></SPAN></span>Carolinas, coming in upon the rear
of the Confederate armies. Meanwhile Grant held Lee before
Richmond until Sherman closed on him. On April 9th, 1865,
Lee and his army surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and
within a month all the remaining secessionist armies had laid
down their arms and the Confederacy was at an end.</p>
<div class="fig"> <SPAN name="img-387"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/img-387.jpg" alt="ABRAHAM LINCOLN" width-obs="500" height-obs="722" /> <p class="caption">
ABRAHAM LINCOLN</p>
</div>
<p>This four years’ struggle had meant an enormous
physical and moral strain for the people of the United
States. The principle of state autonomy was very dear to
many minds, and the North seemed in effect to be forcing
abolition upon the South. In the border states brothers and
cousins, even fathers and sons, would take opposite sides and
find themselves in antagonistic armies. The North felt its
cause a righteous one, but for great numbers of people it was
not a full-bodied and unchallenged righteousness. But for
Lincoln there was no doubt. He was a clear-minded man in the
midst of much confusion. He stood for union; he stood for
the wide peace of America. He was opposed to slavery, but
slavery he held to be a secondary issue; his primary purpose
was that the United States should not be torn into two
contrasted and jarring fragments.</p>
<p>When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the
Federal generals embarked upon a precipitate emancipation,
Lincoln opposed and mitigated their enthusiasm. He was for
emancipation by stages and with compensation. It was only in
January, 1865, that the situation had ripened to a point when
Congress could propose to abolish slavery for ever by a
constitutional amendment, and the war was already over before
this amendment was ratified by the states.</p>
<p>As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1863, the first
passions and enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all the
phases of war weariness and war disgust. The President found
himself with defeatists, traitors, dismissed generals,
tortuous party politicians, and a doubting and fatigued
people behind him and uninspired generals and depressed
troops before him; his chief consolation must have been that
Jefferson Davis at Richmond could be in little better case.
The English government misbehaved, and permitted the
Confederate agents in England to launch and man three swift
privateer ships—the <i>Alabama</i> is the best
remembered of them—which <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="P389"></SPAN></span>chased United States shipping from
the seas. The French army in Mexico was trampling the Monroe
Doctrine in the dirt. Came subtle proposals from Richmond to
drop the war, leave the issues of the war for subsequent
discussion, and turn, Federal and Confederate in alliance,
upon the French in Mexico. But Lincoln would not listen to
such proposals unless the supremacy of the Union was
maintained. The Americans might do such things as one people
but not as two.</p>
<p>He held the United States together through long weary months
of reverses and ineffective effort, through black phases of
division and failing courage; and there is no record that he
ever faltered from his purpose. There were times when there
was nothing to be done, when he sat in the White House silent
and motionless, a grim monument of resolve; times when he
relaxed his mind by jesting and broad anecdotes.</p>
<p>He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the day
after its surrender, and heard of Lee’s capitulation.
He returned to Washington, and on April 11th made his last
public address. His theme was reconciliation and the
reconstruction of loyal government in the defeated states.
On the evening of April 14th he went to Ford’s theatre
in Washington, and as he sat looking at the stage, he was
shot in the back of the head and killed by an actor named
Booth who had some sort of grievance against him, and who had
crept into the box unobserved. But Lincoln’s work was
done; the Union was saved.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the
Pacific coast; after it the railways spread like a swiftly
growing plant until now they have clutched and held and woven
all the vast territory of the United States into one
indissoluble mental and material unity—the greatest
real community—until the common folk of China have
learnt to read—in the world.</p>
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