



Produced by Ron Swanson





THE MIDDLE PERIOD




_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
