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III

AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1800

MR. HENRY ADAMS shows how amid the constant growth of democracy, amid practical assertion of the power which resides in the uneducated classes, and which our Constitution made conscious, our national life began with bewildering confusion. To the better classes, embodied in the old Federalist party, this seemed anarchical; the election of Mr. Jefferson they honestly believed to portend the final overthrow of law and order. Instead of that, one can see now, it really started our permanent progress. Among the early incidents of this progress was the purchase of Louisiana, which finally established the fact that the United States were to dominate the North American continent. So complete, indeed, has our occupation of this continent become that it is hard to remember how in 1800 the United States, at least so far as they were settled, were almost comprised between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. In less than one hundred years we have colonised, and to a considerable degree civilised, the vast territory now under our undisputed control; and the fact that the regions which we have colonised have chanced to be contiguous to the regions which were first under our sovereignty has only concealed without altering the truth that the United States have proved themselves the most successful colonising power in modern history.1

Our colonial growth, or expansion,

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call it what you will,

- began with the purchase of Louisiana. Nine years later,

1 See an article by Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell in the "Atlantic" for February, 1899.

under President Madison, came that second war with England which, while unimportant in English history, was very important in ours. The War of 1812 asserted our independent nationality, our ability to maintain ourselves against a foreign enemy, and, above all, our fighting power on the sea, of which fresh evidence was given during the brief but crucial war with Spain in 1898. The War of 1812, besides, the only foreign war in our history except this recent Spanish one, did much to revive and strengthen the Revolutionary conviction of our essential alienation from England. Before that war broke out there were times when it seemed almost as likely to arise with France. It was an incident, we can now see, of that death-grapple wherein England was maintaining against continental Europe incarnate in Napoleon those traditions of Common Law which we share with her. America had felt the arbitrary insolence of Napoleon, as well as that of England; neutrality proved impossible. We chanced to take the French side. Thereby, whatever we gained,—and surely our strengthened national integrity is no small blessing, we certainly emphasised and prolonged that misunderstanding with the mother country which still keeps disunited the two peoples who preserve the Common Law.

The next critical fact in our history was the assertion in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine. In brief, this declares that the American continent is no longer a region where foreign powers may freely colonise; that from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn American soil is as fully controlled by established governments as is Europe itself; that the chief political power in America is the United States; and that any attempt on the part of a foreign power to establish colonies in America, or to interfere with the governments already established there, will be regarded by the United States as an unfriendly This virtual declaration of imperial dominance in a whole hemisphere has generally been respected. Except for the transitory empire of Maximilian in Mexico, established

act.

during the most troublous period of our Civil War by that filibustering French emperor who deliberately embodied continental as distinguished from English ideals, the integrity of the American continent has remained unthreatened since President Monroe's famous message.

During the next thirty-five years developed that inevitable national disunion which culminated in the Civil War of 1861. The economic and social systems of North and of South were radically different: generation by generation they naturally bred men less and less able to understand each other. As we shall see later, the Southern temper lagged behind the Northern somewhat as for two centuries the native temper of America lagged behind that of England. The Southerners of the fifties were far more like their revolutionary ancestors than were the Northerners. General Washington and General Lee, for example, have many more points of resemblance than have President Washington and President Lincoln; and Lee was really as typically Southern in his time as Lincoln in those same days was typically Northern. The Civil War involved deep moral questions, concerning the institution of slavery and national union; but at last we can begin to see that it was a moral struggle on both sides. So the generation now in its prime, to whom the Civil War is a matter not of experience but of history, is coming to understand that what ultimately makes it so superbly heroic a tradition is the fact that on both sides men ardently gave their lives for what they believed to be the truth. The conflict was truly irrepressible; social and economic conditions had developed the different parts of our country in ways so different that nothing but force could prevent disunion.

Disunion did not ensue. Instead of it, after a troubled interval, has come a union constantly stronger. Our history since the Civil War is too recent for confident generalisation. Two or three of its features, however, are growing salient. Long before the Civil War certain phases of material pros

perity had begun to develop in this country, the great cottongrowing of the South, for one thing, and for another, the manufactures of New England. Since the Civil War some similar economic facts have produced marked changes in our national equilibrium. One has been the opening of the great lines of transcontinental railway. Along with these has developed the enormous growth of bread-stuffs throughout the West, together with incalculable increase of our mineral wealth. These causes have effected the complete settlement of our national territory. At the close of the Civil War a great part of the country between the Mississippi and California remained virtually unappropriated. At present almost every available acre of it is in private ownership. The Spanish War of 1898, then, indicates something more than the political accidents or intrigues which superficially seemed to cause it. Just as truly as the Revolution or the Civil War, the Spanish War probably marked a critical fact in American history. Our continent is finally settled. Such freedom as our more adventurous spirits used to find in going West they must now find, if at all, in emigrating, like our English cousins, to regions not politically under our control. There they must face a serious question. Shall they submit themselves, in the regions where their active lives must pass, to legal and political systems foreign to their own; or shall they assert in those regions the legal and political principles which, for all the superficial materialism of their lives, the fact of their ancestral language makes them believe ideal? There is an aspect, which future years may prove profoundly true, wherein what we call imperialism seems a blundering awaken ing to the consciousness that if our language and our law are to survive, they must survive by unwelcome force of conquest.

So for the first time since the settlement of Virginia and New England we come to a point where the history of England and that of America assume similar aspects. For nearly

three centuries the national experience of England and the national inexperience of America have tended steadily to diverge. Our inexperience is fast fading. At the close of our first century of independent existence we find ourselves. as a nation unexpectedly and regretfully face to face with the question which during the reign of her present Majesty has been the most important before the mother country. The growth of population during the nineteenth century, the incredible improvement of intercommunication by steam and electricity, and the immense consequent development of trade, are placing before us an unavoidable dilemma. Shall our language, with its ideals of law and of conduct, dominate; or shall it recede and yield to others? This same question presses on England, too. In this final historical fact of common experience there appears some chance of such future union of our ancestral language and ideals as the disuniting influence of three hundred years long placed almost beyond the range of hope.

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