Abraham Lincoln and the Union | Page 4

POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY
IV. THE CRISIS
V. SECESSION
VI. WAR
VII. LINCOLN
VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN
IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER
X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
XI. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR
XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE
XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864
XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


CHAPTER I
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
"There is really no Union now between the North and the South.... No
two nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor toward
each other than these two nations of the Republic."
This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio,
provides the key to American politics in the decade following the
Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of the people to its ultimate
source, one would have to go far back into colonial times. There was a
process of natural selection at work, in the intellectual and economic
conditions of the eighteenth century, which inevitably drew together
certain types and generated certain forces. This process manifested
itself in one form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in
another in those of the South. As early as the opening of the nineteenth
century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so far
alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely admit of
reconciliation. It is a truism to say that these differences gradually were
concentrated around fundamentally different conceptions of labor--of
slave labor in the South, of free labor in the North.
Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that this
growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose in either
part of the country. It was apparently necessary that this Republic in its
evolution should proceed from confederation to nationality through an
intermediate and apparently reactionary period of sectionalism. In this
stage of American history, slavery was without doubt one of the prime
factors involved, but sectional consciousness, with all its emotional and
psychological implications, was the fundamental impulse of the stern
events which occurred between 1850 and 1865.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential
Southerners had come generally to regard their section of the country as
a distinct social unit. The next step was inevitable. The South began to
regard itself as a separate political unit. It is the distinction of Calhoun
that he showed himself toward the end sufficiently flexible to become
the exponent of this new political impulse. With all his earlier fire he
encouraged the Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national
parties, Whig and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern
party, and to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single
concerted policy for the entire South.
At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern point of
view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battle was fought at the polls between
the two Southern ideas--the old one which upheld separate state
independence, and the new one which virtually acknowledged Southern
nationality. The issue at stake was the acceptance or the rejection of a
compromise which could bring no permanent settlement of
fundamental differences.
Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina, for it
brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who ten years
later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert Barnwell Rhett. In
1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea of state independence and
to carry South Carolina as a separate state out of the Union.
Accordingly it is significant of the progress that the consolidation of
the South had made at this date that on this issue Rhett encountered
general opposition. This difference of opinion as to policy was not
inspired, as some historians have too hastily concluded, by national
feeling. Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
Federal Government supreme over the State Government. They
opposed Rhett because they felt secession to be at that moment bad
policy. They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the Union in 1851,
she would go alone and the solidarity of the South would be broken.
They were not lacking in sectional patriotism, but their conception of
the best solution of the complex problem differed from that advocated
by Rhett. Their position was summed up by Langdon Cheves when he
said, "To secede now is to secede from the South as well as from the

Union." On the basis of this belief they defeated Rhett and put off
secession for ten years.
There is no analogous single event in the history of the North, previous
to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a sectional
consciousness. On the surface the life of the people seemed, indeed, to
belie the existence of any such feeling. The Northern capitalist class
aimed steadily at being non-sectional, and it made free use