Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 5

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We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected by the war was manifest from the first. The widespread destruction of property, the collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the social régime founded on negro slavery, had been so dramatic and so revolutionary in their results that they had created everywhere a feeling that the ultimate effects of the war were confined to the conquered territory. Grady's phrase, "the new South," and later the phrase, "the end of an era," passing everywhere current, served to strengthen the impression. That the North had been equally affected, that there also an old régime had perished and a new era been inaugurated, was not so quickly realized. The change there had been undramatic; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompaniments that had been so romantic and even sensational in the South; but with the perspective of half a century we can see now that it had been no less thoroughgoing and revolutionary.

The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments. The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were insufficient to handle the burden.

The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in the North that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in the harvest fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and the reaper and the mowing machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; the strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and capital to bear upon the problem of transportation, and it was swiftly solved. Great meat-packing houses arose to meet the new conditions; shoes had to be sent to the front in enormous numbers and to produce them a new and marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in hitherto unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily, and to make it Howe's sewing machine was evolved. It was a period of giant tasks thrust suddenly upon a people seemingly unprepared. The vision of the country became all at once enlarged. Companies were organized for colossal undertakings. Values and wealth arose by leaps and bounds. Nothing seemed impossible.

The war educated America. It educated first the millions of men who were enrolled in the armies. With few exceptions the soldiers were boys who had never before left their native neighborhoods. From the provincial little round of the farm or the shop, all in a moment they plunged into regions that to them were veritable foreign lands to live in a world of excitement and stress, with ever-shifting scenes and ever-deepening responsibilities, for three and four and even five years. Whole armies of young men came from the remote hills of New England. Massachusetts alone sent 159,000. The diffident country lad was trained harshly in the roughest of classrooms. He was forced to measure himself with men.

The whole nation was in the classroom of war. The imperious call for leaders of every grade and in all ranks of activity developed everywhere out of raw material captains of men, engineers, organizers, business directors, financiers, inventors, directors of activities, on a scale before undreamed of in America. It was a college course in which were developed efficiency and self-reliance and wideness of vision and courage and restless activity, and it produced a most remarkable generation of men.

The armies in the field and those other armies that handled the railroads and the mills and the finances and supplies, were sons all of them of a race that had been doubly picked in the generations before, for only the bravest and most virile in body and soul had dared to break from their old-world surroundings and plunge into the untracked West, and only the fittest of these had survived the rigors of pioneer days. And the war schooled this remnant and widened their vision and ground out of them the provincialism that had held them so long to narrow horizons. It was not until 1865 that Emerson could write, "We shall not again disparage America now we have seen what men it will bear." But the chief difference between these men and the early men that had so filled him with apprehension in the thirties and the forties, was in the schooling which had come from the five years of tension when the very life of the nation was in danger.

The disbanding of the armies was followed by a period of restlessness such as America had never before known. The whole population was restless. "War," says Emerson, "passes the power of all chemical solvents, breaking up the old adhesions and allowing the atoms of society to take a new order." The war had set in motion mighty forces that did not stop when peace was declared. Men who had been trained by the war for the organizing and directing of vast activities turned quickly to new fields of effort. The railroads, which had been vastly enlarged and enriched by the war, pushed everywhere now with marvelous rapidity; great industries, like the new oil industry, sprang into wealth and power. The West, lying vast and unbroken almost from the farther bank of the Mississippi, burst into eager life, and the tide of migration which even before the war had turned strongly toward this empire of the plains quickly became a flood. Railroads were pushed along the wild trails and over the Rocky Mountains. The first transcontinental road was completed in 1868. The great buffalo herds were exterminated in the late sixties and early seventies; millions of acres of rich land were preëmpted and turned over to agriculture; the greatest wheat and corn belts the world has ever known were brought into production almost in a moment; bridges were flung over rivers and cañons; vast cities of the plain arose as by magic. Everywhere a new thrill was in the air. The Civil War had shaken America into eager, restless life. Mark Twain, who was a part of it all, could say in later days: "The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations."[1]

To-day we can begin to see the effect which the mighty exodus that followed the war had upon the East. It was little short of revolution. New England had taken the leading place in precipitating the struggle between the States, and she had done it for conscience' sake, and now, though she had won all she had asked, by a curious turn of fate she was repaid for her moral stand by the loss of her leadership and later almost of her identity, for the westward movement that followed the war was in New England a veritable exodus. There had always been emigration from the older States and it had gradually increased during the gold rush period and the Kansas-Nebraska excitement, but the tide had never been large enough to excite apprehension. Now, however, all in a moment the stream became a torrent which took away, as does all emigration from older lands, the most active and fearless and progressive spirits. Whole districts of farming land were deserted with all their buildings and improvements. New Hampshire in 1860 had a population of 326,073; in 1870 the population had shrunk to 318,300, and that despite the fact that all the cities and manufacturing towns in the State had grown greatly during the ten years, the increase consisting almost wholly of foreigners. According to Sanborn, "more than a million acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and woodland in 1900."[2] All growth since the war has been confined to the cities and the larger manufacturing towns, and this growth and the supplying of the deficit caused by the emigration of the old stock have come from an ever-increasing influx of foreigners. Boston has all but lost its old identity. In Massachusetts in 1900 nearly one-half of the population was born of foreign parentage. New England in a single generation lost its scepter of power in the North, and that scepter gradually has been moving toward the new West.