Abraham Lincoln and the Union | Page 7

who were to hear from afar the horrible indictment of all their
motives by the Abolitionists and who were to react in a growing
bitterness and distrust toward everything Northern.
But of these Southern people the average Northerner knew nothing. He
knew the South only on its least attractive side of professional politics.
For there was a group of powerful magnates, rich planters or "slave
barons," who easily made their way into Congress, and who played into
the hands of the Northern capitalists, for a purpose similar to theirs. It
was these men who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned the
common people of the North to mind their own business; and for doing
so they were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class. It was
therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized
capital that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the Northern
hammer"--as Sumner put it, in one of his most furious speeches--in
their aim to destroy a section where, intuitively, they felt their
democratic ideal could not be realized.
And what was that ideal? Merely to answer democracy is to dodge the
fundamental question. The North was too complex in its social
structure and too multitudinous in its interests to confine itself to one
type of life. It included all sorts and conditions of men--from the most
gracious of scholars who lived in romantic ease among his German and
Spanish books, and whose lovely house in Cambridge is forever

associated with the noble presence of Washington, to the hardy
frontiersman, breaking the new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at
sunset shaded her tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she
stood on the threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her
man across the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued. Far
apart as were Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet felt
themselves to be one in purpose.
They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner of
the democrats at the opening of the century. In the North, there had
come to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had touched democracy
with mysticism and had added to it a vague but genuine romance. This
new vision of the destiny of the country had the practical effect of
making the Northerners identify themselves in their imaginations with
all mankind and in creating in them an enthusiastic desire, not only to
give to every American a home of his own, but also to throw open the
gates of the nation and to share the wealth of America with the poor of
all the world. In very truth, it was their dominating passion to give
"land to the landless." Here was the clue to much of their attitude
toward the South. Most of these Northern dreamers gave little or no
thought to slavery itself; but they felt that the section which maintained
such a system so committed to aristocracy that any real friendship with
it was impossible.
We are thus forced to conceive the American Republic in the years
immediately following the Compromise of 1850 as, in effect, a dual
nation, without a common loyalty between the two parts. Before long
the most significant of the great Northerners of the time was to describe
this impossible condition by the appropriate metaphor of a house
divided against itself. It was not, however, until eight years after the
division of the country had been acknowledged in 1850 that these
words were uttered. In those eight years both sections awoke to the
seriousness of the differences that they had admitted. Both perceived
that, instead of solving their problem in 1850, they had merely drawn
sharply the lines of future conflict. In every thoughtful mind there arose
the same alternative questions: Is there no solution but fighting it out
until one side destroys the other, or we end as two nations confessedly

independent? Or is there some conceivable new outlet for this
opposition of energy on the part of the sections, some new mode of
permanent adjustment?
It was at the moment when thinking men were asking these questions
that one of the nimblest of politicians took the center of the stage.
Stephen A. Douglas was far-sighted enough to understand the
land-hunger of the time. One is tempted to add that his ear was to the
ground. The statement will not, however, go unchallenged, for able
apologists have their good word to say for Douglas. Though in the
main, the traditional view of him as the prince of political jugglers still
holds its own, let us admit that his bold, rough spirit, filled as it was
with political daring, was not without its strange vein of idealism. And
then let us repeat that his ear was to