BEGINNINGS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

BY

CARL LOTUS BECKER

PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CARL LOTUS BECKER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.

THE RIVERSIDE HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In the following volumes the authors seek to present a brief account of the beginnings, development, and final unity of the people of the United States. There are many histories of the country, many biographies which are in large measure histories; but these are exhaustive works traversing minutely certain periods, like Rhodes's History of the United States from 1850 to 1877, or Nicolay and Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History; or they are shorter "patriotic" accounts which seek to prove something, or which fail to tell the whole story. Important as these classes of historical literature are, they hardly suffice for the teachers of advanced college classes, or for business and professional men who would like to know how the isolated European plantations or corporations in North America became in so short a time the great and wealthy nation of to-day.

To meet these needs, that is, to describe in proper proportion and with due emphasis, but in the brief space of four short volumes, the forces, influences, and masterful personalities which have made the country what it is, has not been an easy task. For, contrary to the view of European students, American history is not simple. The hostile camps of Puritans and Church of England men, the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the Catholics of Maryland, could hardly be expected to merge into a single state without violent struggle. Nor could the hundreds of thousands of Scotch Calvinists, militant enemies of England and all her ways, who seized and held the fertile highlands of the Middle and Southern colonies, submit quietly to any program not of their own making. And again, in the thirties and fifties of the nineteenth century, millions of people speaking a strange tongue sought asylum in the Mississippi Valley—an isolated region whose early inhabitants, of whatsoever national strain, were strongly inclined to secession or revolt against the older Eastern communities. Never was a nation composed of more diverse ethnic groups and elements.

And the geographical environments of these groups and segments of older civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nations of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no more resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes of Prussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographical differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan and Cavalier, one wonders how the East and the South of the United States ever became integral parts of one great social unit. Adding to this apparent impossibility the new antagonism of the West toward the East as a whole, the historian wonders at the statecraft that could hold the diverse elements together till certain economic and social factors became powerful enough to conquer in a long and bloody war. Or was it the influence of new inventions, railways, and the tightening bonds of commerce that did the work?

Leaving the reader to answer this question for himself, it remains for the Editor to set forth in as few words as possible the method, the emphasis, and the interpretations of the authors of these volumes.

Professor Becker approaches his work, the discovery of the New World, the rise of the plantations, the slow growth of an American culture, and finally the Revolution of 1776, from the standpoint of a student of modern European history. The infant colonies are to him disjected particles of ancient Europe. Their changes under the new environment, their tendency to isolation and petty quarrels during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the days of steam and electricity, and their defensive alliance against the new, imperialistic England of George III, are the special themes of his study. But here, as elsewhere in our coöperative undertaking, the object has 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