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The last expedient before the final breaking away was then attempted. The Missouri Compromise Line of 1820, which had been placed across the Louisiana purchase, was repealed (annulled, the Democrats said, by the Compromise measures of 1850, which had failed to apply the Line), and the test of "popular sovereignty" with the attempt to supervise the type of settler to be given sovereignty was inaugurated in Kansas and Nebraska-the regions thus opened. Civic-minded Southern gentlemen funded societies for the emigration of slave-holders and settlers in general who would promise to hold Kansas, the immediate territory in question, for slavery. But it was a precarious matter, bringing slave-property to a region unstable in its protection of it. The best that could be done was the pouring in of transients for a day who would do their duty at the polling booths and then return to their homes.

Here the North obviously had the advantage. On its part emigrant aid societies were formed which sent in bona-fide settlers by the thousands, whose property lay secure in their own labour and who came to claim the land for themselves and not for a class. The test of "popular sovereignty" was a test between the classes, and the people won. For two years civil war reigned in Kansas. Troops were sent in by the Administration to take the side of the Southern democracy, blood was spilled, but Kansas came forth from the clash of interests a free state.

The South felt itself too strong and vital to be beaten. It snapped its Democratic Party in two with its hedging theories of "popular sovereignty," and came out boldly for the recognition of slavery in the

territories and the protection of it by the Federal Government. Upon the sea of this divided Democracy the Republican Party rode into power, and Abraham Lincoln, its candidate for president, was elected as the executive of the people's will. The course of the Republic was again to flow along the ideals and doctrines which first animated it. The meaning of the framers of the Constitution was studied. The principle of economic opportunity for all was again asserted and in the name of the fundamental laws of the country the new President entered upon his duties.

But the South, unable to control the government constitutionally, made a desperate attempt to control it by force. A union of fifteen slave states was formed, secession proclaimed and a new Republic based on landlord and slave established. "The irrepressible conflict" had begun, for by virtue of the territories won, and the development of industries and transportation the United States of America by 1860 was a nation. For four bitter years the conflict raged over a battlefield colossal in size. It was a revolution, a struggle of the people for the maintenance of their rights against vested interests. And, strange as it may sound to history, it was the vested interests that hard-pressed on the defensive turned and proved aggressor. To such menacing strength had the people waxed in the New World! And this people sent forth their own hero, created in their own image, and stand now abashed before his greatness. "How was it that we found an Abraham Lincoln?" they ask. Out of their great will they created him and out of their great need they sent him forth. They wrought better than they knew, for it

was an hour when their onward march was to lead them farther than they knew.

For four "years of battle-days" he served them. Unswerving and clear-headed he directed his forces and let himself be directed with that masterful genius which can only come to a hero of the New Order. In his life is written all of America. Through a vision of the people can be seen the figure of him who like that Someone" walks fast on the white, to calm all things back again."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I

CHAPTER I

LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

T was the year 1809. In Europe one man, short of stature and rather wide of girdle, was overthrowing

age-old dynasties and creating new coalitions of peoples, new institutions and new orders, where serf and lord were to be no more, and property was to receive the special privilege heretofore given to blood. In America, a republic, based on the rights of man to the goods of nature, had already been established for twenty-two years. The questions of government and of world-policy which troubled the men at her head, and the problems as to whose lead in the Old World she should follow, were being now brushed aside by a stream of backwoodsmen, fiercely self-centred and democratic. They were the creators of the real America, the true builders of the nation. At this time they had already broken through the mountains of the Alleghenies, and were winning to themselves Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. Men of the Western Waters, or men of the Western World, they called themselves, who in another decade were to wrench the nation entirely away from the Mother World and build an America unique and selfreliant, patterned after their own desire.

In that year 1809, when America was being created

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