A history of the American people : illustrated with portraits, maps, plans, facsimiles, rare prints, contemporary views, etc
190 «/ t^tvyt., ^M 2_ja^2-»-w tft &Lstst***St**f\n^ /7s/ -fey- . ^ 4t<Uts(/t •<-<— ^/Aj»~ ^fcl- ;r : fU*-!^ J. ££^ MR. SEWARD'S SUGGESTION FOR THE CLOSE OF MR. LINCOLN'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS CLOSING PARAGRAPH, IN MR. LINCOLN'S HANDWRITING, OF THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Men of southern mettle could not disregard or de- cline it. Pride and self-vindication seemed the more impera- tively to command that it should be accepted by the southerners because of what their opponents had said, with sneer and taunt and bitter detraction, about the system of slavery, which they maintained and stood for. No man who candidly looked back to the indis- putable records of the colonial time could justly deem them responsible for its establishment. They had very earnestly and again and again protested against the traffic in slaves which the crown permitted, and the inevitable growth of servile labor which that hateful traffic brought in its train, to the thrusting out of white men and of the free labor which everywhere else gave dignity and efficiency to English communities; but the authority of king and parliament alike had forced and fostered it until it had seemed as if the entire slave trade of the world centred at their ports. Free hired labor had been once for all driven out, whether they would or no; the black people had multiplied among them until emancipation became a thing not to be vent- ured upon; work in the wet southern rice fields, upon the broad acres of tobacco, amidst the sugar cane, and out in the hot furrows of grain came at length, with long use and fixed custom, to seem a thing which only the African could stand. The northern States, ere separation from England set them free to be quit of slavery, if they chose, by emancipation, had diligently sought to rid themselves of the few negroes who had unsuitably found places of service in them by sending them also, as occasion offered, to the southern slave markets. Finally, when fate and slow habit and their 192 JAMES BUCHANAN IV.— 13 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE own very multitude had fixed them, millions strong, upon the South, a base and support upon which all society seemed to rest, their labor, already indispensable, became of a sudden immensely profitable in the blazing sun of the cotton fields by reason of the invention of Whitney's cotton gin. The system of slavery necessarily deprived the South of a body of small, yeomen farmers; but small farms abounded, nevertheless. A great majority of the south- ern farmers owned no slaves at all. If they could not afford to hire negroes from some neighboring planter who had hands to spare, they worked their fields them- selves, like farmers everywhere. If they could afford to hire a negro or two, they worked with them, side by side, in the fields. It was the accusation of moral guilt in the matter of slavery that stung the southern men most intolerably. They knew with what motives and principles they ad- ministered it, and felt to the quick the deep injustice of imputing to them pleasure or passion or brutal pride of mastery in maintaining their hold upon the slaves. Many a thoughtful man amongst them saw with keen disquietude how like an incubus slavery lay upon the South; how it demoralized masters who were weak, burdened masters who were strong, and brought upon all alike enormous, hopeless economic loss. Although the productive labor of the South was almost exclusively agricultural, more rich land lay waste and untilled there than in any other region of the country held in use and occupation. The indolent slaves did not work as free laborers would have worked, and could not be made to. Intensive methods of farming were out of the question. Land had first to be used, without artificial renewal, 194 ARMED DIVISION and then allowed long to lie fallow and get its recu- peration by the slow processes of nature. The narrow margin of profit under such a system of labor and till- age constantly threatened to disappear altogether. And ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON yet the care of the slaves, their maintenance like a huge family of shiftless children, remained a duty and a bur- den which the master could not escape, good season or bad, profit or no profit. Travelers could find whatever condition they looked 195 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE for among the slaves. Where it was necessary to as- semble and keep them hundreds strong upon remote plantations, lying in some malarial district upon the coast or in the river bottoms, where they could live but their master could not, they were often enough hard driven by brutal men, themselves mere hired drudges, who cared for nothing but to get the exacted stint of work out of them. But where the master was himself at hand there was almost always moderation, a firm but not unkindly discipline, a real care shown for their comfort and welfare. They were taught handi- crafts, because each plantation was of necessity, in respect of every simpler kind of work, a complete in- dustrial community. It was necessary that it should maintain its own shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, brick- layers, blacksmiths, and men of all work. There was seldom any town near at hand to supply even its com- moner wants. The punishments each master meted out he allotted rather as magistrate than as master. The offences which he punished would most of them have gone before a magi.strate had the offenders been freemen. " On principle, in habit, and even on grounds of self-interest, the greater part of the slave owners were humane in the treatment of their slaves, — kind, indulgent, not over exacting, and sincerely interested in the physical welfare of their dependants," said an eminent northern man of letters, speaking of what he saw in 1844. Domestic slaves were treated with affection and in- dulgence, cared for by the mistress of the household. The life of a southern planter's wrife was a life of execu- tive labor, devoted chiefly to the care and training of her .slaves. Social privilege and the proud esprit of 196 ARMED DIVISION their class bred in southern masters a sense of the obligations of station; and the spirit of the better men ruled the conduct of the less noble. The demoralizing influences of the system were checked as much as it was in human nature to check them. Southern gen- tlemen despised a slave trader as heartily as any north- ern man did, necessary though his occupation seemed to be ; sold and bought slaves by private arrangement when they could ; and sought in every way to keep the worst features of the system at a minimum. That very fact, their venT consciousness that they exercised a good conscience in these matters, made them the more keenly sensitive to the bitter attacks made upon them at the North, the more determined now to assert themselves, though it were by revolution, when they saw a party whose chief tenet seemed to be the iniquity of the South, about to take possession of the federal government. They had the inevitable haughty pride of a privileged class. Probably not more than one white man out of even' five in the South was a slave holder ; not more than half had even the use or direction of slaves. Hundreds of the merchants, lawyers, physi- cians, ministers who were the natural ruling spirits of the towns owned none. But the men who were slave owners were the masters of politics and of society. Their sensibilities were for all practical purposes the sen- sibilities of the South; and for close upon forty years now it had seemed as if at every turn of the country's history those sensibilities must be put upon the rack. The Missouri compromise of 1820 had treated the in- stitution of slavery which they maintained as an in- fection to be shut out by a line as if of quarantine. The alarming insurrection of the slaves of southeastern 197 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Virginia under Nat Turner in 1831; the English Act of Emancipation and the formation of the American Anti-slavery Society in 1833; the slow and dangerous Seminole war, which dragged from 1832 to 1839, and was as much a war to destroy the easy refuge of run- away and marauding negroes in Florida as to bring the Indians, their confederates, to submission; the critical Texas question; the Mexican war and the debatable Wilmot proviso; the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the "free-soil" campaign, the break-up of the Whigs and the rise and triumph of the Republicans: — it had been a culminating series of events whose wounds and perplexities were always for the South. Southerners might have looked upon the election of Mr. Lincoln as only a casual party defeat, to be outlived and reversed, had it not come like a dramatic denouement at the end of the series. As it was, it seemed the last, intolerable step in their humiliation. The North had not realized as the South did what the election of 1860 meant. Southern men had been keenly conscious that the issues of revolution hung upon it. That consciousness explained the votes of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, cast for Mr. Bell, the can- didate of the Constitutional Union party. In other parts of the South as well votes by the tens of thousands had been cast for the candidates of that party, by men who loved the Union, dreaded revolution, prayed for peace, and sought this means of escape from the fatal antagonisms of the regular parties. Northern voters, too, had been uneasy ; but the air of opinion about them had not been charged as the southern air was with the keen forces of passion put to its final test. There was not among them the universal feeling which stirred 198 ARMED DIVISION in the South, that politics had come at last to a break- ing strain. South Carolina, alone among the States, still chose her presidential electors through her legislature. Hav- ing chosen her eight electors upon the appointed day in 1860, and instructed them to vote for Mr. Breckin- ridge, her legislature remained in session to learn the result, prepared to take action at once should what it THE "GEORGE WASHINGTON" LOCOMOTIVE, 1835 feared come to pass. When the news came that a ma- jority in the electoral college had been secured for Mr. Lincoln, it immediately called a state convention, pro- vided for the purchase of arms, and adjourned. On the 20th of December following the convention which it had called, sitting in Charleston, adopted an ordi- nance which solemnly repealed the act of the conven- tion of the 23d of May, 1788, whereby the State had accepted the constitution of the United States as part of its fundamental law, together with all subsequent 199 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ratifications of federal constitutional amendments, and formally declared the union hitherto "subsisting be- tween South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America," dissolved and ended. By the first day of February following Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded. On the fourth day of February (1861) delegates appointed by the several conventions of the seceding States met in convention at Montgomery, Alabama, to frame a provisional con- stitution and choose a provisional executive for a separ- ate southern Confederacy. Mr. Jefferson Davis, until a few weeks before a senator of the United States from Mississippi, was chosen' provisional President, Mr. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, until two years before a member of the federal House of Representatives from Georgia, provisional Vice President. In March a per- manent constitution was adopted, to take effect the next year. True to their theory of government, the southern States had returned to the political methods of 1788. Each State had, not by popular vote, but by sovereign convention, withdrawn from the Union, as she had acceded to it. The same conventions that had chosen the delegates sent to Montgomery ratified the constitution which they framed, and authorized the inauguration of the new Confederacy. It was corporate action, taken with the initiative and promptness of men skilled alike in the theory and in the practice of constitutional action, as Mr. Calhoun and all southern statesmen expounded it. They as- sumed that, since each of their States had entered the Union of its own accord, as into a free partnership, and might have declined to enter it, it was clearly within 200 ARMED DIVISION VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, 1863 its privilege to withdraw when just cause for withdrawal seemed to exist. It was an assumption the theory of which would hardly have been seriously questioned while the generation lived which made the Union; though that generation would have been as ready as any that followed it, no doubt, to make protest, it might be of arms, against actual secession. Neither change of thought nor change of political conditions in the nation at large had altered the thought of the. South with regard to the character of the government; for she had not herself changed, and her own thought had kept steadfastly to the first conception of the Union. But to the rest of the country such a theoty had become little less than incredible, often as southern statesmen had expounded and pressed it. The constitution of a nation, though written, cannot remain a mere legal document. The life of each succeeding generation must inevitably be read into it, if only because it must be men of successive generations who read and interpret 201 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE it. They can but comprehend it in terms of their own lives. It must become the vehicle of their growing thought, if it is to suffice them ; must serve as the skeleton frame of a living organism. For a majority of the na- tion no conception of the Union was now possible but that which Mr. Webster had seemed to create and bring once for all to their consciousness in that debate with Hayne which had been a turning point in all men's thinking. A Union full of new States, themselves its own creation; a people recruited out of almost every civilized nation of the world, bound together by railway and telegraph, busy with enterprises which no State or section could imprison within local boundaries, quick and various, as in the old days, but now at last conscious of its unity and its organic integrity, could not turn • back to a particularistic creed which might make every jar of politics threaten to break its joints asunder. And so it happened that the action of the southern States took the North by surprise. Often as they had heard the doctrine of secession preached, the northern people looked upon it as a singular and novel thing when they saw it thus put into practice. The spir- it, precision, and concert, the despatch and radical thoroughness with which the southern men acted, as if upon a programme familiar and matter of course, filled the North for a little with mere dull amazement. Their quick pace in revolution, their confidence as of men who had no doubts or misgivings, confused and for a brief space dismayed those to whom the North naturally looked for counsel and guidance. The very month South Carolina seceded, before any other State had taken action to join her, she sent commissioners to 202 ARMED DIVISION Washington to arrange, as of course, for a division of the national debt and for the formal transfer of all national property lying within the State; and Mr. Buchanan knew not what to do. He promptly and unequivocally denied the right of the States to secede; but he knew, he said, no legal means of actually pre- venting their secession. The law officers of the gov- A SNAG BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER ernment could give him no light ; from no quarter came any clear counsel or unhalting judgment in the matter. Congress attempted measures of compromise. A Peace Conference assembled, at the suggestion of Virginia, to discuss plans of accommodation, and a committee of the Senate concurred in its recommendations : the ex- tension of the Missouri compromise line to the Pacific, the positive establishment of slavery by law south of that line, and compensation from the federal treasury 203 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE for all fugitive slaves rescued after arrest. But Con- gress seemed partially dissolved, ere the winter was over, by the withdrawal of members from the States which one 'by one seceded; nothing could be done while it seemed insecure of its very membership; there was nowhere agreement or coolness or courage enough to make any plan feasible. The southern men withdrew from the cabinet, as they withdrew from the House and the Senate; southern men by the score left also the lower ranks of the civil service and went home to offer their services to the new Confederacy ; southern officers withdrew from the army and the navy as their States seceded; the authorities of the newly federated States took possession, as they left the old Union, of the arsenals, forts, custom houses, and post offices within their territory. Before the au- thorities at Washington had made up their minds what to do every fortified place in the South was in the pos- session of the Confederacy except Fortress Monroe in Chesapeake Bay, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Fort Pickens at Pensacola, and the fortifications near Key West. All familiar things seemed dissolving, and Mr. Buchanan scarcely knew what government he had to handle. Some of the men about him upon whom he was obliged to depend believed that the southern states had a right to do as they were doing; others denied their right but knew not how to check them ; still others knew what ought to be done but had not the courage or the initiative to do it. All the country waited, the President himself included, to see what Mr. Lincoln and his Re- publican advisers would do. Men noted the sad and anxious eyes of the new Presi- dent; noted also, with a certain deep misgiving, his 204 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FORT SUMTER ON NOVEMBER IO, 1863 gaunt and uncouth figure, as of a man too new, too raw, too awkward, too unschooled in affairs for the terrible responsibilities and tangled perplexities of the great office he undertook. They did not know the mastery of the man; they did not see that the straight fibre of this new timber was needed to bear the strain of affairs grown exigent beyond all common reckonings. There was the roughness of the frontier upon him. His plain clothes hung unthought of on his big, angular frame; he broke often, in the midst of weighty affairs of state, into broad and boisterous humor ; he moved and did the things assigned him with a sort of careless heaviness, as if disinclined to action; and struck some fastidious men as hardly more than a shrewd, good natured rustic. But there had been a singular gift of insight in him from a lad. He had been bred in straitened, almost abject poverty; his shiftless father had moved from place to place in search of support and shelter for his growing family, and had nowhere got for them more than a bare subsistence; and yet this lad had made even that life yield him more than other boys got from a formal schooling. He matured as slowly as another ; 206 ARMED DIVISION his life quietly kept pace with the simple folk who were his neighbors, no vital sign of his special gifts giving noticeable prophecy of what he was to be; but there came a power of mastery into his mind, nevertheless. He took pains to get to the heart of what others about him but half understood; he used his wits for argument and observation as another lad might have used them for play, and made the use of words, the exact speech which hit his meaning always at the centre, his method of analysis. And so his mind had filled as each item of his experience made its record, as each glimpse of the world came to him. He had made a career for him- self in his State which culminated in his debate with Senator Douglas, to which all the country paused to listen; and he was ready to be President by the time he became President. He called both Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase, the hitherto accepted leaders of his party, into his cabinet, the one as Secretary of State, the other as Secretary of the Treasury; but he associated others with them who were of other views and of his own per- sonal choosing ; and he himself made his own choice of policy. His breeding among plain people like himself, ac- customed to respect law with simplicity and obey it without subtlet}^ gave him the direct vision which politicians lacked. He revered the constitution, had sworn to preserve and defend it, and would not "take an oath to get power and break the oath in using that power " ; but he viewed his duty in the large, and declared it his conviction that it would be breaking that oath, and not keeping it, if, "to save slavery or any minor matter," he should "permit the wreck of government, country, and constitution all together. " He sought 207 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to combine conciliation with this clear purpose to pre- serve the Union ; but while those about him swung from this measure to that and were wreak in their excitement, he was only patient and watchful, waiting for opinion and the right day of action. The time came when, early in April, 1861, word was sent from Washington to the governor of South Caro- lina that Fort Sumter would be reinforced and pro- visioned against seizure. The message was sent on April 8th. On the I2th fire was opened upon the for,t; on the 1 4th, ere reinforcements could reach them, its little garrison surrendered. On the I5th Mr. Lincoln called, by proclamation, for seventy -five thousand volunteers. Upon that signal, four more southern States seceded: Arkansas on the 6th of May, North Carolina on the 20th, Virginia on the 23d; and Ten- nessee on the 8th of June. Issue wras made up, and all men knew what it meant, — not compromise, but war. The southern leaders had not at first expected this. They had thought to bring on a constitutional crisis, but not a civil war. They had meant at any hazard to make good their rights under the federal arrangement, and had deliberately resorted to secession because they thought that better terms could be made out of the Union than in it ; but they had expected their opponents at the North to come to terms. Their people had follow- ed and upheld them upon that expectation, and would not willingly have followed them on any other. But when the sound of the guns at Sumter was heard it became at once another matter. The thrill of a new purpose and passion shot through the country, north and south. It was writh the one side as with the other. 208 SCALE OF MILES 0 50 100 200 300 400 500 ID STATES, ARMED DIVISION The southern people would not at the first choice have deliberately set themselves with open eyes to bring a war of revolution on; the people of the North, as con- servative of law and of right as the men of the South, drew back, at the first shock and surprise of secession, from coercion or violence, questioned anxiously what they should do, and hesitated as their government did. INTERIOR OF FORT SUMTER AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT, DECEMBER, 1863 Mr. Seward, of the President's own household, made the amazing suggestion that the slavery question be ignored and the country drawn together to support some ag- gressive stroke of foreign policy, which should rekindle the national feeling and fill all sections alike with the old temper of patriotism, the South with the rest. It was the sound of war and the call for men that changed the very atmosphere, north and south alike, and set all thoughts in a new channel. Richmond was made 209 IV. — 14 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the capital of the Confederacy, instead of Montgomery, as if to put the officers of its government at the front, the northern and southern capitals face to face. Mr. Davis called for volunteers in the South, as Mr. Lincoln did in the North; and the call was responded to eagerly and at once, in the one section as in the other. Even then men were slow to realize the awful business in hand; expected the fighting to be brief, accommodation or surrender to come at once. In the South men flocked to the rallying places and set out with their regiments in blithe spirits, as if for a holiday excursion, not know- ing the grip of fate that had closed upon them. But a little while, and these hallucinations had passed away. The war which ensued disclosed its real nature soon enough. For a year it lingered and was desultory, without plan, speed, or vigor, as if both sides waited, as indeed they did, to muster their resources, contrive a proper organization for the struggle, and discover each beyond a peradventure the temper and purpose of the other. But after that there was neither doubt nor pause in the desperate business, and all the world saw how the flames of civil war had enveloped a whole continent. It was a noteworthy thing how prompt and decisive the grapple of the sections was, for all there had been at first long months of doubt and hope, of confused preparation and all the slow processes by which conservative men adjust themselves to the exigencies of a revolutionary crisis. In the South there was a government to make, as well as an army; in the North a government to remake, a civil service to reconstitute. A year was needed to supply adminis- trative means and make men and methods ready, on the one side as on the other. But a year sufficed. 210 ARMED DIVISION FORT SUMTER, AS REBUILT Actual fighting, no less than strenuous efforts to be ready for it, had added its sharp definition to all else that the year disclosed. In July (1861) General Mc- Dowell had moved with the new federal levies from Washington southward, for a stroke at Richmond. At Bull Run, on the 2 1st, he had met the confederate forces under Generals Beauregard and Joseph E. John- ston, and after a stubborn and sanguinary battle had been thrown back in utter rout, his regiments not to be kept together because of the panic and confusion of their flight. But it had been a battle and nothing more. The troops on the one side as on the other were raw volunteers; both governments had hoped until the other day to see the conflict ended by a mere show of force or by some sudden stroke, and the confederate commanders were as little prepared to follow up an advantage as their opponents would have been. For a moment the South thought that this battle was all; the confederate troops themselves believed that it was, and incontinently set out in crowds for their 211 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE homes, without leave taken. In fact it had only shown that there must be set campaigns and a war of conquest. Down all the long border between North and South which followed the river Ohio to the Mississippi, the lines had been made clear, the while, which were to be the boundaries of the Confederacy, its outer lines of defence. The western counties of Virginia, beyond the long southwestern line of the Blue Ridge, sympa- thized, in this issue between slavery and the Union, with the men of the North, not with the men who had carried their State out of the Union, and federal troops, operating there out of Ohio under General McClellan, drove the detachments of confederate volunteers sent against them back over the mountains. In Kentucky also and Missouri slowly gathering armies out of the North pressed the frontier of secession in ; and kept the great stream of the Ohio open beyond its junction with the Cumberland and the Tennessee, flowing southward, all the way to the Mississippi itself. Missouri, though at first it had seemed as if the other faction would control her, was held off from co-operation with the Confederacy by the sentiment of her own people. Kentucky, too, slave State though she was from of old, refused to cast in her lot with the seceding States about her; and con- federate forces, though they operated for a little while within her territory and found many sympathizers and partisans there, and many men willing to swell their ranks, operated almost as if upon alien ground and kept their lines at constant hazard. These, then, it presently appeared, were the long extended frontiers, from the Potomac, upon which the national capital lay, through the far Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi at Columbus 212 SERGEANT HART NAILING THE COLORS TO THE FLAG-STAFF, FORT SUMTER A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE in Kentucky, from which the northern armies, growing in strength with every month, must strike in at the defences of the South. Mr. Lincoln called Congress to assemble in extra ses- sion on July 4, 1861 ; and it addressed itself very heart- ily to the task of supplying the government with means of mastery. It voted the moneys asked for by the Executive, and the loan necessary to supply them; authorized the President to call for five hundred thou- sand volunteers; declared a blockade of the southern ports; gave explicit statutory definition to conspiracy against the government; and provided for the confisca- tion of all property used against it. In the regular ses- sion which presently followed, in December, it set out at once, in systematic wise, upon the policy of aid and taxa- tion by which it meant at one and the same time to in- crease the resources of the country and put them at the service of the government. By midsummer, 1862, its programme was complete and enacted into law. Tariff duties were increased at every point at which domestic producers could be protected against foreign competition, and direct taxes were laid upon the products thus favored : specific taxes on iron, steel, paper, coal oil, leather, and a few other manufactures put upon a special list, and on other manufactures a general tax ad valorem. A liberal charter was given for a Union Pacific Railway which was to bind the two coasts of the continent to- gether and give an eastern outlet to the produce of the West, and with it were given immense grants of public land along its route in aid of its construction. " Home- stead " plots of the public land were offered at a nominal price to heads of families who would settle upon them in the West; and large sections of the public domain 214 ARMED DIVISION were voted to the western States in aid of the establish- ment of agricultural colleges, — in order that the spread DAVID DIXON PORTER of population and of productive industry might be more than ever quickened and the accumulation of wealth forced on apace; while at the same time a general in- come tax was established, railway, steamboat, and 215 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN* PEOPLE express companies were required to pay to the govern- ment a percentage of their gross receipts, and various occupations were closed except to those who would take out federal licenses. It was a policy of nurse and use which could not fail to yield the sinews of war. It meant that the resources of the North were to be added to and diversified at the very time they were being spent. It had already become evident that the federal gov- ernment must look for no sympathy from abroad in its effort to prevent secession. The sympathy of foreign governments, it was plain, if the events of the first year of the anxious business were to be read as evidence, was with the South, not with the North. It was likely they would observe very complacently any process of war or disintegration which promised to break the power of the huge republic growing up in the west, ere its rivalry in trade and influence should menace them. The blockade of the southern ports was, moreover, a direct blow at a lucrative trade in which more than one of them was interested. Immediately upon receiving news of Mr. Lincoln's proclamation of the blockade and of Mr. Davis's answering offer to grant letters of marque and reprisal against the commerce of the United States both France and England had issued proclama- tions of neutrality which gave to the confederate govern- ment international standing as a belligerent ; and before the year was out an ugly incident seemed for a moment to threaten war with England. The most influential classes in England were known to sympathize with the South; hundreds of English factories must stand idle and thousands of working- men be brought to the verge of starvation, if the South, the great cotton field of the world, was to be shut against 216 ARMED DIVISION commerce; and the southern leaders were prompt to seek England's active countenance. They sent com- missioners over sea both to England and to France, to ask recognition : to England Mr. James M. Mason, of Virginia, a grandson of George Mason, the states- / &£-G^CA**~0 & S f * SIGNATURES OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY man of the Revolution ; to France Mr. John Slidell, of Louisiana. Leaving Charleston for the West Indies, they took passage at Havana on the English steamer Trent for England. On the 8th of November the steamer was overhauled in the Bahama channel by a United States man-of-war, and the commissioners were taken from her and carried prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston 217 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE harbor. It was a gross breach of international law, and of principles which the United States government had itself always been forward to insist upon; and England made instant protest, significantly accompa- nied by preparations for war. The act was disavowed and the prisoners released so soon as the matter was looked into. Mr. Lincoln had no mind to take any false step or cast any doubt on the principles of his government at such a juncture. But the unpleasant feelings provoked by the unfortunate affair were not so easily put by. War between the two nations had come close enough to give both a very disturbing glimpse of possible fatal antagonisms. The spring of 1862 saw armies upon all the long borders of the Confederacy and fleets upon the coasts and on the western rivers. The area of the war was defined. Before the end of the year its whole scope and character were determined. In the West stroke after stroke of the federal arms forced the confederate lines southward. The accumulating northern armies and flotillas broke their way down the valleys of the western rivers like an irresistible, crushing weight. In the East, on the contrary, all things hung doubtful. The federal commanders there had not the gifts of the men in the West and fought against antagonists who outplayed them at every move. They found no way to concentrate their force upon the southern armies; were puzzled how to take the best way of attack and yet keep Washington covered; and Richmond seemed more inaccessible than the heart of Alabama. Men who had the character and the capacity to suc- ceed in the field made their way one by one to federal command in the West at the very outset: conspicuous 218 ARMED DIVISION among them Ulysses Grant, a quiet soldier whose quali- ties only a day of action could bring out. He had won a first lieutenancy at twenty-five in the Mexican war; but few except his immediate superiors had noticed how his capacity had shown itself upon occasion in that fighting. He came of plain stock in which there was small impulse of achievement; his faculties fell dull in all ordinary seasons; there was a rustic sim- plicity about him which made him pass unnoticed among THE OSAGE, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER strangers, a lack of self-assertion which rendered him disinclined to quarrel with obscurity. He had with- drawn from the army at thirty-two because the empty routine of a soldier's life worked a deep demoralization upon his easy-going nature when no action of conse- quence was in hand; but at the outbreak of the war he had enlisted again, as a volunteer, and had been given command of southeastern Missouri with the rank of general of brigade in the volunteer service. Then it was that the qualities which had slept in him, save for a few glimpses of the day amidst the fight- 219 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE CHICKASAW, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER ing in Mexico, began to be shaken wide awake by what was to be done, and the responsibility which lay upon him to do it. It was he who, in the early autumn of 1 86 1 (September 4th and September 6th), occupied Cairo and Paducah, the keys to the rivers at his front. The one lay at the junction of the Ohio and the Mis- sissippi, the other at the junction of the Ohio and the Tennessee. From Cairo the Mississippi flowed down to the Gulf through the very heart of the Confederacy ; at Paducah the Tennessee found its outlet, coming all the long way round about Tennessee out of the northern counties of Alabama; and near at hand, scarcely ten miles away, came down the Cumberland from its six hundred mile journey through Kentucky and northern Tennessee. In February, 1862, the movement of the federal troops southward began, up the valleys of the rivers, under General Pope, General Buell, General Thomas, and General Grant, supported at each advance by gunboats on the rivers, and by midsummer a great wedge of armed men and boats had been driven into the con- federate territory. General Grant, supported by a 220 ARMED DIVISION fleet of gunboats under Commodore Foote, moved up the Tennessee River and took Fort Henry on Feb- ruary 6th; and on the i6th crossed to the Cumber- land and took Fort Donelson. Following his move- ment, a force under General Pope, similarly supported by an armed flotilla, with infinite difficulty cleared the Mississippi of the confederate blockades at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, lying like outposts at the northern boundary lines of Arkansas and Tennessee. General Grant, with that grim thoroughness which all men presently saw in him when once he was afoot, pressed forward, beyond the forts on the Tennessee and the Cumberland, to strike at Corinth, a railway centre in northern Mississippi. It was his principle to be moving always, forcing the fighting. He knew the men against whom he acted, he thought; most of them had been his comrades in Mexico. He thought he knew what mistakes they would make. But they THE DE KALB, TYPE OF IRON-CLAD USED ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER 221 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE checked him very sharply whenever he blundered or exposed himself without force enough to crush them. 