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CHAPTER XIII.

AMERICA.

FTER the establishment of the United States of America as an independent power, they for many years confined their attention to their internal affairs, and, under a succession of able rulers, made great advances in commercial prosperity. By their original constitution the head of the government is a President, who holds his power for four years, but is capable of re-election; and Washington, who naturally was the object of their first choice, was reelected several times, till in 1796 he resigned the office as one which the decay of his strength had disabled him from executing any longer. He saw the necessity of peace for a new nation, and his successors for some years followed in his steps, though on many occasions, during the great French revolutionary war, they showed their sympathy with the French, and towards the end of it a succession of trifling circumstances induced them to join them. Napoleon having endeavoured to annihilate our commerce by the measures known as the Berlin decrees, we were compelled in our own defence to retaliate by placing restrictions on the trade with neutral powers, which greatly diminished the profit which the Americans had hoped to derive from such a position of affairs; and they were still more irritated by our claim to search their vessels for deserters from our navy. For it was well known that, by giving liberal bounties and far higher wages than could be obtained in the British service, they had tempted great numbers of our sailors to take service with them. At last, in 1812, they declared war against England. On the whole, it was an unfortunate war for them. They hoped to have been able to conquer Canada, and invaded it more than once; but they were in every instance repelled with considerable loss, though in the warfare on the lakes they at last obtained the superiority, being beaten indeed on Lake Ontario, but annihilating our force on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. On the open sea, too, at first they gained great advantages. They had but few men-of-war, but those which they possessed were of a class to which we had nothing to correspond. They called them frigates, and such they were as being only single-decked ships; but they were in size, in power of armament, and in the numbers of their crew, nearly equal to a

British seventy-four, and half as strong again as the largest frigate in the king's service. The consequence was, that at first they took two or three of the British frigates. But by the time the war had lasted a year, our captains, by careful training of their gunners, had learnt to counterbalance the superiority given to the enemy by their stouter scantling and heavier guns; and the last naval actions of the war were invariably in our favour. On land, the Americans were even less fortunate. General Jackson, indeed, repelled Sir Edward Pakenham, who, with a force far smaller than his, attacked New Orleans; but General Ross wholly defeated their army at Bladensburg, and took Washington, their capital, though his victory was sullied by the destruction of the public buildings of the city, which he burnt in compliance with the express orders of the British government. In December 1814, peace was restored; and since that time there has been no interruption to the friendly relations between the two countries, though there has more than once been a degree of uneasiness that threatened a rupture on one occasion, as has been elsewhere mentioned, from the sympathy of a portion of the United States with the Canadian malcontents; on another, from disputes about the precise boundaries which separate our settlements from their dominions, and about the British protectorate in parts of central America. But all these questions were ultimately settled in an amicable manner by negotiation or arbitration. And the States continued their career of unchecked prosperity till the union was for a time torn asunder by civil war.

During the three-quarters of a century which followed the peace of Versailles, the territories and population of the United States had become vastly augmented by the incessant influx of emigrants from Europe; by the consequent and natural cultivation of the territories on the western border, previously occupied only by scanty tribes of native savages; and by the acquisition of one or two tracts already civilised, either voluntarily ceded to them, or appropriated by force; till at last, instead of thirteen States which composed the Union in 1782, it consisted in 1859 of thirtyfour. And the population, which at the former date had probably scarcely amounted to three millions, at the latter period was ascertained to exceed thirty-one millions, of whom about one-eighth were slaves. The existence of this element in the population, which was chiefly confined to the Southern States, had long been a source of angry feeling between them and the Northern States, which recognised only free labour. The irritation had been from time to time exasperated by the question whether the new States which were incorporated with the Union were to be compelled to enter it as slaveholding or freesoil communities, according to their

position to the north or south of a geographical line which, by an act of Congress passed in 1820 when Missouri was admitted, had been fixed as the boundary of the two classes of States, or whether their future character was to depend on their previous constitution. And this latter view, which, independently of any such law, was the most natural arrangement, was at last adopted. But in 1860 Mr. Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the Republic, and, as he was chiefly known as a most determined enemy of slavery, his election was looked on by the Southern States as indicative of a fixed resolution on the part of the Northern States to trample down their rights, and to deprive them of what they regarded as a most valuable property, and one indispensable to their deriving any benefit from the rest, since without slaves they could not cultivate their lands. It is possible that their apprehensions on this point may have exaggerated the danger, since at a subsequent period Mr. Lincoln emphatically disavowed any intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. But the truth was that the real cause of disunion between the North and South was not limited to this one point. They were further separated by a great difference of origin and blood, and also of pursuits. The South were an agricultural, the North a commercial people; and this diversity of occupation engendered a difference of interests and feelings in other matters besides the one more prominent question of slavery.

The extent to which these other springs of action influenced the people of the Southern States is shown by the fact that, even before Mr. Lincoln entered on his office, they began to secede from the Union. South Carolina set the example towards the end of 1860; in the first month of 1861 her example was followed by Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana; and the first blows of war were struck while Mr. Buchanan was still president. In the course of the next four months Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina joined the movement. But even before the Southern union was complete, the States which first constituted it elected a president, Mr. Jefferson Davis, formally declaring themselves a confederacy on very much the same principles and with very nearly the same constitution as that which they had previously acknowledged. And Richmond, in Virginia, was selected as the capital of the new confederacy. The legality of their act was of course a subject of vehement dispute. The doctrine of the seceding States was, that each of them was an independent State, joining with the ancient federation so long as union with it was conducive to its own interests, and free to secede whenever it ceased to be so. The government at Washington, on the other hand, contended that the association of all the

States was a mutual contract which could not be dissolved without the consent of all. But it was clear that the question was of far too vital importance to both parties to be decided by argument; and both sides prepared for war, which broke out formally in the middle of April, only five weeks after Mr. Lincoln's assumption of the government. It began favourably for the South, or the Confederates as they were usually called; the Northern being known as the Federal government. They took Fort Sumter, a small but strong fortress near Charlestown; they defeated a small Federal army on the banks of an inconsiderable stream known as Bull's Run; again at Springfield; and before the end of the year they were encamped in force on the Potomac, and were threatening Washington.

At one moment they had apparently a well-founded hope of procuring the aid of England. The moment the war broke out, the queen issued a proclamation enjoining to all her subjects a strict neutrality between the belligerents; the French emperor followed her example; and the Confederacy, encouraged by this acknowledgment that they were belligerents, and not, as the Federal government proclaimed them, rebels, despatched two envoys, Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, across the Atlantic as envoys to the two powers that had thus pronounced their opinion. They took their passage in the Trent, an unarmed British packet ship, which was stepped on her way by a Federal man-of-war, and Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell were taken from her by force, and carried back to New York as prisoners. The British government instantly claimed their liberation, and prepared for immediate war in the event of her demand being refused. But France supported her demand with such vigour, and it was so evidently in accordance with every rule of international law, that Mr. Lincoln set his prisoners at liberty. And during the rest of the war the neutrality proclaimed by England and France was respected by both the contending parties.

For upwards of three years more the war was continued with unabated energy, occasionally with great ferocity, and on a scale of magnitude of which the history of the Old World scarcely afforded an example. In the amount of expenditure none ever approached it. The most enormous loans were raised by each-the obligations contracted by the Federals, however, infinitely exceeding those incurred by their antagonists-till, by the beginning of 1865, the Federal debt equalled nearly half the national debt of Great Britain in amount, and the whole in the interest payable on it. But though burdening themselves less heavily, and being manifestly far inferior in population, the Confederates for the first three years of the struggle,seemed to have decidedly the advantage. They

suffered, indeed, one great disaster in the loss of New Orleans, which was taken by Admiral Farragut; but their General Johnston defeated the Federal General Grant at Pittsburg; General Beauregard outmanoeuvred General Halleck at Corinth; and the Federal General Mc Clellan, who with nearly 200,000 men was marching against Richmond, was beaten in several engagements. Two Confederate generals, Lee and Jackson, showed a great superiority of military talent to any Federal officers; Lee even compelling a division of 12,000 men to surrender at a place called Harper's ferry, and thus obtaining possession of a vast quantity of artillery and stores. And the common belief in Europe was that, though the Confederates would never be able to make acquisitions—which, indeed, was not their object-they were too strong to be subjugated. As the war went on, the North endeavoured to crush their enemies by other means than those of war.

On the first day of 1863 President Lincoln proclaimed the freedom of all slaves in the Southern States, and offered to receive them into the Federal service, to garrison forts or to man the fleets. But the proclamation had not the effect which he expected, as the black population showed no inclination to take advantage of it. Meantime the chief European powers were greatly inconvenienced by the interruption to commerce which was caused by the war, and shocked at the ferocity with which it was carried on, and France endeavoured to mediate between the two parties; but the Federal ministers refused to enter into any discussion which involved the admission of the equality of the Southern States and their right of secession, though many of the independent statesmen of the country openly expressed their alarm at the vastness of the expenditure, and consequently of the liabilities which the government was incurring. Their chief efforts, in 1863, were directed against Charleston, and against Vicksburg, on the Mississippi. Against Charleston every attack failed; but Vicksburg was taken after a stout and protracted resistance, and the Federals became masters of the river, which was of great importance. Nearer to Washington the events of the war were chiefly favourable to the Confederates. In a series of battles at Chancellorsville General Lee defeated General Hooker with prodigious loss; though the advantage was counterbalanced to the conqueror by the death of General Jackson, who, having gone some way in advance, was accidentally shot in the dusk by some of his own troops. Hooker was superseded by General Meade; but Lee defeated him also, and drove him back on Washington. In other battles success was, more evenly balanced, though in scarcely any were the Confederates decisively beaten. But by the