Beginnings of the American People | Page 2

been to portray only those things which seem to have counted in the final make-up of the Confederacy of 1783, and of the United States of to-day. Moreover, the daily life of the people, amusements, manners, religious predilections, and the everyday occupations of men and women have been accorded some of the space which, from another view-point, might have been devoted to an account of government and the arguments of jurists.
Thus Professor Becker has presented a true and entertaining picture of the purposes of European capitalists interested in the plantations, of the poor people who were packed off to America to serve the ends of commerce, and of the energetic men of the eighteenth century who slowly worked out for England the conquest of North America. The reading of chapters III and V of the Beginnings of the American People can hardly fail to give one a new view of, and a new interest in, colonial history.
Nor has Professor Johnson approached his theme, Union and Democracy, in a different spirit. He is neither a champion of the wholesome nationalism which gave the Federalists their place in history nor a defender of the radical idealism which Professor Becker has shown to be the mainspring of the Revolution of 1776, and which Jefferson called to life again in his struggle to win control of the national machinery, 1796 to 1800. In treating the period 1783 to 1828, Professor Johnson had the difficult task of tracing the important influences which culminated in the Constitution of 1789, the Jeffersonian revolt of 1800, the foreign complications of 1803 to 1815, and the so-called Era of Good Feelings. Here again the popular prejudices, if one desires so to term them, land speculations, and sectional likes, and dislikes receive attention; but the formation of the Constitution, the organization of the Federal Government, international quarrels about the rights of neutral commerce, and finally the War of 1812 are naturally the main topics.
The chapters which treat of the results of the second war with England, the westward movement, and the national awakening, and especially the one which analyzes the problems which underlay the great decisions of Chief Justice Marshall, will probably prove most instructive to the reader. The author has made his narrative much clearer and the factors which entered into the political struggles of the time more intelligible by resort to many black-and-white maps; for example, those which show the popular attitude toward the Constitution in 1787-89 and the alignment of parties in the contest of 1800.
From 1829 to 1865 was the stormy period of our national history--a period in which the nationality planned by the "Fathers" was being forged from the discordant elements of East, South, and West,--from the economic interests of cotton and tobacco planters; of the owners of the industrial plants of the Middle States and the East; and of the necessities of the isolated West striving always for markets. What made the process so doubtful and so long drawn out was the unfortunate fact that the great industrial and agricultural interests coincided so exactly with the older social and political antagonisms. The leadership of the times was, therefore, sectional in a very vital way; so much was this the case that the most popular and captivating of all the public men of the time, Henry Clay, was defeated again and again for the Presidency because no common understanding between New England and the South, or between New England and the West, could be found.
Twice during the period a permanent modus vivendi seemed to have been agreed upon, in the Jacksonian Democracy of 1828, and in the Pierce organization of 1852, combinations of South and West which rested on the big plantation system with slavery underlying, and on the small farmer vote of the West charged always with the potential revolt which democracy connotes. While these subjects receive the careful attention of the author, the "way out," and the national expansion of the Polk Administration, are none the less carefully studied. But aside from the sharp and challenging problems of the time, an earnest effort has been made to describe the cultural life of the people, the pastimes, the religious revivals, the literary and artistic output of the exuberant America of 1830 to 1860. The Civil War and its attendant ills are compressed into relatively small space, though here, too, the effort is made to include all that is vital.
In like manner Professor Paxson gives much space to the "interests" which came to dominate the country soon after the cessation of hostilities in 1865. The business and the greater social tendencies of the post-bellum period had become evident during the decade just preceding the war. For this reason, the author reaches back into the midst of the conflict to take up the thread of his