Читать книгу The American Eloquence - Various Author - Страница 28

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In spite of execrable financial management, of the criminal blunders of political army officers, and of consequent defeats on land, and quite apart from brilliant sea-fights and the New Orleans victory, the war of 1812 was of incalculable benefit to the United States. It marks more particularly the point at which the already established democracy began to shade off into a real nationality.

The Democratic party began its career as a States-rights party. Possession of national power had so far modified the practical operation of its tenets that it had not hesitated to carry out a national policy, and even wage a desperate war, in flat opposition to the will of one section of the Union, comprising five of its most influential States; and, when the Hartford Convention was suspected of a design to put the New England opposition to the war into a forcible veto, there were many indications that the dominant party was fully prepared to answer by a forcible materialization of the national will. In the North and West, at least, the old States-rights formulas never carried a real vitality beyond the war of 1812. Men still spoke of "sovereign States," and prided themselves on the difference between the "voluntary union of States" and the effete despotisms of Europe; but the ghost of the Hartford Convention had laid very many more dangerous ghosts in the section in which it had appeared.

The theatre of the war, now filled with comfortable farms and populous cities, was then less known than any of our Territories in 1896. There were no roads, and the transportation of provisions for the troops, of guns, ammunition, and stores for the lake navies, was one of the most difficult of the problems which the National Government was called upon to solve. It cannot be said that the solution was successfully reached, for the blunders in transportation were among the most costly, exasperating, and dangerous of the war. But the efforts to reach it provided the impulse which soon after resulted in the settlement of Western New York, the appearance of the germs of such flourishing cities as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, the opening up of the Southwest Territory, between Tennessee and New Orleans, and the rapid admission of the new States of Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri. But the impulse did not stop here. The inconveniences and dangers arising from the possession of a vast territory with utterly inadequate means of communication had been brought so plainly to public view by the war that the question of communication influenced politics in every direction. In New York it took shape in the construction of the Erie Canal (finished in 1825). In States farther west and south, the loaning of the public credit to enterprises of the nature of the Erie Canal increased until the panic of 1837 introduced "repudiation" into American politics. In national politics, the necessity of a general system of canals and roads, as a means of military defence, was at first admitted by all, even by Calhoun, was gradually rejected by the stricter constructionists of the Constitution, and finally became a tenet of the National Republican party, headed by John Quincy Adams and Clay (1825–29), and of its greater successor the Whig party, headed by Clay. This idea of Internal Improvements at national expense, though suggested by Gallatin and Clay in 1806–08, only became a political question when the war had forced it upon public attention; and it has not yet entirely disappeared.

The maintenance of such a system required money, and a high tariff of duties on imports was a necessary concomitant to Internal Improvements. The germ of this system was also a product of the war of 1812. Hamilton had proposed it twenty years before; and the first American tariff act had declared that its object was the encouragement of American manufactures. But the system had never been effectively introduced until the war and the blockade had forced American manufactures into existence. Peace brought competition with British manufacturers, and the American manufacturers began to call for protection. The tariff of 1816 contained the principle of Protection, but only carried it into practice far enough to induce the manufacturers to rely on the dominant party for more of it. This expectation, rather than the Federalist opposition to the war, is the explanation of the immediate and rapid decline of the Federal party in New England. Continued effort brought about the tariff of 1824, which was more protective; the tariff of 1828, which was still more protective; and the tariff of 1830, which reduced the protective element to a system.

The two sections, North and South, had been very much alike until the war called the principle of growth into activity. The slave system of labor, which had fallen in the North and had survived and been made still more profitable in the South by Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793, shut the South off from almost all share in the new life. That section had a monopoly of the cotton culture, and the present profit of slave labor blinded it to the ultimate consequences of it. The slave was fit for rude agriculture alone; he could not be employed in manufactures, or in any labor which required intelligence; and the slave-owner, while he desired manufactures, did not dare to cultivate the necessary intelligence in his own slaves. The South could therefore find no profit in protection, and yet it could not with dignity admit that its slave system precluded it from the advantages of protection, or base its opposition to protection wholly on economic grounds. Its only recourse was the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798–9. Calhoun, with pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional Nullification. Under his lead,

South Carolina, in 1832, declared through her State Convention that the protective tariff acts were no law, nor binding on the State, its officers or citizens. President Jackson, while he was ready and willing to suppress any such rebellion by force, was not sorry to see his adherents in Congress make use of it to overthrow protection; and a "compromise tariff," to which the protectionists agreed, was passed in 1833. It reduced the duties by an annual percentage for ten years. The nullifiers claimed this as a triumph, and formally repealed the ordinance of nullification, as if it had accomplished its object. But, in its real intent, it had failed wretchedly. It had asserted State sovereignty through the State's proper voice of a convention. When the time fixed for the execution of the ordinance arrived, Jackson's intention of taking the State's sovereignty by the throat had become so evident that an unofficial meeting of nullifiers suspended the ordinance until the passage of the compromise tariff had made it unnecessary. For the first time, the force of a State and the national force had approached threateningly near collision, and no State ever tried it again. When the tariff of 1842 reintroduced the principle of protection, no one thought of taking the broken weapon of nullification from its resting-place; and secession was finally attempted only as a sectional movement, not as the expression of the will of a State, but as a concerted revolution by a number of States. It seems certain that nationality had attained force enough, even in 1833, to have put State sovereignty forever under its feet; and that but for the cohesive sectional force of slavery and its interests, the development of nationality would have been undisputed for the future.

New conditions were increasing the growth of the North and West, and their separation from the South in national life, even when nullification was in its death struggle. The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 had been followed in 1807 by Fulton's invention of the steamboat, the most important factor in carrying immigration into the new territories and opening them up to settlement. But the steamboat could not quite bridge over the gap between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Internal improvements, canals, and improved roads were not quite the instrument that was needed. It was found at last in the introduction of the railway into the United States in 1830–32. This proved to be an agent which could solve every difficulty except its own. It could bridge over every gap; it could make profit of its own, and make profitable that which had before been unprofitable. It placed immigrants where the steamboat, canal, and road could at last be of the highest utility to them; it developed the great West with startling rapidity; it increased the sale of government lands so rapidly that in a few years the debt of the United States was paid off, and the surplus became, for the first time, a source of political embarrassment. In a few years further, aided by revolutionary troubles in Europe, immigration became a great stream, which poured into and altered the conditions of every part of the North and West. The stream was altogether nationalizing in its nature. The immigrant came to the United States, not to a particular State. To him, the country was greater than any State; even that of his adoption. Labor conditions excluded the South from this element of progress also. Not only were the railroads of the South hampered in every point by the old difficulty of slave labor; immigration and free labor shunned slave soil as if the plague were there prevalent. Year after year the North and West became more national in their prejudices and modes of thought and action; while the South remained little changed, except by a natural reactionary drift toward a more extreme colonialism. The natural result, in the next period was the development of a quasi nationality in the South itself.

The introduction of the railway had brought its own difficulties, though these were not felt severely until after years. In the continent of Europe, the governments carefully retained their powers of eminent domain when the new system was introduced. The necessary land was loaned to the railways for a term of years, at the expiration of which the railway was to revert to the State; and railway troubles were non-existent, or comparatively tractable. In the United States, as in Great Britain, free right of incorporation was supplemented by what was really a gift of the power of eminent domain. The necessary land became the property of the corporations in fee, and it has been found almost equally difficult to revoke the gift or to introduce a railway control.

Democracy took a new and extreme line of development under its alliance with nationality. As the dominant party, about 1827–8, became divided into two parties, the new parties felt the democratic influence as neither of their predecessors had felt it. Nominations, which had been made by cliques of legislators or Congressmen, began to be made by popular delegate conventions about 1825. Before 1835, national, State, and local conventions had been united into parties of the modern type. With them came the pseudo-democratic idea of "rotation in office," introduced into national politics by President Jackson, in 1829, and adopted by succeeding administrations. There were also some attempts to do away with the electoral system, and to make the federal judiciary elective, or to impose on it some other term of office than good behavior; but these had neither success nor encouragement.

The financial errors of the war of 1812 had fairly compelled the re-establishment of the Bank of the United States in 1816, with a charter for twenty years, and the control of the deposits of national revenue. Soon after Jackson's inauguration, the managers of the new democratic party came into collision with the bank on the appointment of a subordinate agent. It very soon became evident that the bank could not exist in the new political atmosphere. It was driven into politics; a new charter was vetoed in 1832; and after one of the bitterest struggles of our history, the bank ceased to exist as a government institution in 1836. The reason for its fall, however disguised by attendant circumstances, was really its lack of harmony with the national-democratic environment which had overtaken it. Benton's speech presents a review of this bank struggle and of accompanying political controversies.

The anti-slavery agitation, which began in 1830, was as evidently a product of the new phase of democracy, but will fall more naturally under the next period.

Webster's reply to Hayne has been taken as the best illustration of that thoroughly national feeling which was impossible before the war of 1812, and increasingly more common after it. It has been necessary to preface it with Hayne's speech, in order to have a clear understanding of parts of Webster's; but it has not been possible to omit Calhoun's speech, as a defence of his scheme of nullification, and as an exemplification of the reaction toward colonialism with which the South met the national development. It has not seemed necessary to include other examples of the orations called forth by the temporary political issues of the time.