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MR. LUDLOW AND MR. HUGHES ON TIM HISTORY OF THE UNION.* Tam History of the United States from Independence to Secession is like the history of that measure of meal in which the woman hid a lump of leaven till the whole was leavened. The single word" Yeast" would describe the political history of the Union at least as well as it describes, in Mr. Kingsley's hands, the fermenting elements in a young man's social principles. That history can boast of no great features, no commanding minds, no distinct aims. To a casual glance it is dull, it is confined, it is often vulgar. Of fo- reign affairs, in which national character comes out so distinctly as to give history some of the profound interest of biography, there are next to none. All that you see at first sight in the history of the American Union is the seething and bubbling up of various confused and uncongenial social gases which you scarcely understand, resulting in all kinds of extraordinary political combinations and precipitates, which confound the reason. The national character is, in fact, in process of forming.. There is no distinctness in its outline, nothing to attract the gaze as the outline of even the least distinct of European national characters, the German, will attract it. And what is true of the nation as a whole is also true of the political parties that compose it. Till the recent crisis, the forms that ap- peared and vanished in the fiery element of political strife were about as clearly defined as the burning coals in which fancy traces at twi- light imaginary figures, so that there was nothing to any ordinary spectator to account for the apparent heat and fury of the blaze. Hence, till the present day, to write the history of the 'Union needed the faculty rather of the Blue-book compiler than of the historian; for the only national crisis in it has been. the periodical decennial census, on which the reader's mind dwells gratefully, just as it does on some broad and solid piece of completed masonry amid the desolate bricky preparations of "building lease" ground as yet only propos- ing to become a town.
Now, however, he who looks back may see much more than this, and for the first time the history of the United States has been written with a distinct intellectual clue to the predominant meaning evolved out of that confused history. In Mr. Ludlow's hands we see the two principles which have worked together, ever since the declaration of independence, gradually leavening the whole nation, coming into conflict with each other, causing fermentation and counter-fermentation, trying mutually to expel each other, until at last they lead to a real separation, conflict, and conscious war. Those principles are the popular love and respect for freedom, in the sense of political self-government, which nerved the nation to so high a point of fortitude in the war of independence, on the one hand, and, on the other, the selfish dogma that nations, classes, and in- dividuals should be at liberty to do "what they will with their own"—in other words the principle of political self-will which was so often confounded i with it, which really began to grow at the same era, and almost at the same rate, and of which slavery, and a reckless foreign policy, is the natural fruit. it is the merit of Mr. Ludlow's history that he does not pretend to divide these principles by either geographical or political limits. He recognizes the tendency to self-glorification and self-will in the North as well as in the South, though he does not think that it has struck so deep a root or taken such gigantic strides there. He recognizes the patriotic feeling, the sense of national duty, the reverence for a real self- government in the Southern as often as in the Northern politicians, though he recognizes also the still more potent evils to which the latter are especially exposed. From the date of the war of inde- pendence, the spurious worship of liberty which would sacrifice the order and liberty of the whole to the anarchy of individual self-will, has struggled hard, and advanced almost pan i passu with the true love of order and of the common national liberty. In the South • A Sketch of the History of the United States from Independence to Secession. By J. M. Ludlow. To which is added, The Straggle for Lamas, by Thomas Hughes. Macmillan.
the permanent feeder of this degraded form of popular feeling has been, of course, the selfish and jealous passions which slavery introduces; in the North it has been the cupidity and corruption by which a commercial people, rapidly achieving wealth, are necessarily beset. The true national conscience has been scarcely harder bead, till of very late years, by the former than by the latter. Mr. Ludlow's narrative is very impartial, tracing the germs of the national or self-restraining and self-honouring, and the disunion or selfish feeling in both sections of the Union alike. It was unfortunate for the Americans that even the War of Independence left them with something far short of the spirit of a united nation. The loose league of States which was thought sufficient in 1777 was not, indeed, found sufficient when the war was over, but it was only jealously, bit by bit, and with the most reluctant spirit, that the States con- sented to merge themselves partially in a nation. The work was never more than half done. Even in 1787, when the nation's head and heart sprang into existence, the jealous State organization was still retained, so far as it was possible, in all the lower limbs and functions of government, and with it the distinctive pride in all the discriminating features of different States. In the South this gradually took the form of an active hostility to all attempts to merge the pecu- liar self-will of the State polity in the good of the nation,—in the North the negative form of complete unscrupulousness in subordi- nating the national organization to the private advantages of special localities. The South has habitually demanded absolute licence in doing what it wills with its own, the North, less afraid of encroach- ments on its local interests, has endeavoured to use the national credit as a new instrument of profitable municipal investment.
Mr. Ludlow has brought out very clearly these opposite dangers in his thoughtful and accurate sketch of the last seventy-five years, and, also, the higher sense of national unity and duty which has coun- tervailed them now in one section and now in the other. Of course the contest on the slavery question, which has just culminated, divides the Union geographically, but even here the North has had much to answer for. And in the earlier part of this history the fermentation which went on between the national principle and that of wilful selfishness by no means limited itself to the ground of slavery, often touching very different ground common to all the States alike. In the Federal treatment of the Indian tribes especially—sometimes striving to be humane and condescending, seldom succeeding in any- thing beyond the marking out of moderate limits to the spirit of peremptory and exclusive caste—Mr. Ludlow traces the earliest strife of the two principles. And here, naturally enough, the slavery principles of the South brought out the spirit of insub- ordinate insolence more distinctly and earlier than in the North. Mr. Ludlow has omitted to give us that Georgian threat of secession on occasion merely of the interference of the Federal Government in their "Indian" affairs in 1825, which anticipated so exactly the attitude actually assumed by the South in 1861. On the other hand, in tariff questions, in monetary questions, in questions of local public works, Mr. Ludlow shows Southern statesmen, though not the South, taking on the whole higher and purer ground than the Northern,—more anxious to keep the nation's welfare singly in view, more jealous of crippling the free action of the public mind by sinister influences, more unwilling to make the nation the instrument of a needy muni- cipality. Generals Monroe and Jackson, pure Southern presidents, veto all "local improvement bills" which are not really of national im- portance, and this at greater risk to their popularity in the South (which needs such aid most) than Northern statesmen would have incurred for their popularity in the North. In tariff-matters, though neither party can claim to be otherwise than selfish and self-regarding in its policy, the North has certainly not been the least so. In the great United States Bank question of General Jackson's administra- tion, that unscrupulous, but able and (in a broad and vulgar way) pa- triotic statesman, probably saved the North from one of the greatest of its impending dangers. He thought, and as events proved, very justly, that the monopoly of the power of the purse by a great private corporation would tend, and was tending, to transfer political power from the hands of the nation to that of a few great money-lenders, who would have had it in their power to undermine the last remains of political integrity at Washington, and rule by that worst of all vulgar instruments, a narrow moneyed oligarchy. The prostitution of political honour to the love of gain is precisely the temptation to the commercial North which has balanced the evil influence of slavery at the South; and General Jackson, in saving the North from the triumph of this temptation, has probably rendered it a greater service than the greatest of its own statesmen.
As the struggle between the national and the selfish principle develops itself, in the South at least, into the struggle between the arrogant slave-power and the respect for the common Government, the interest of Mr. Ludlow's narrative grows deeper and deeper. He takes a line which we should be disposed to consider ultra- constitutional, in censuring Massachusetts for its open repadiation of the (certainly constitutional) Fugitive Slave Law—a line in which we find it impossible to concur—when he says (p. 198) : "Nationality is a greater and a holier thing than even the restoration to their just rights of a portion of the nation itself." In this Mr. Ludlow seems to us to confound the visible with the invisible national bond. Genuine national feeling and unity cannot cease to exist with the mere formal dissolution of obsolete and unrighteous condi- tions, even if this involves a temporary break-up of all written traditions—and we apprehend that there are crises in human history when the only path to this true national unity is through the violent rupture of the formal bond. Mr. Ludlow, if we understand him rightly, would have every nation work on with its old constitution, however radically false, so long as any hope exists of its ultimate reformation, rather than throw it aside to create a new one more true to the highest spirit of the nation. To us this seems a practical question. If the injustice involved in the delay is grievous and irremediable, — greater than that great danger of self-will always involved in the breaking away from old precedents,—we say revolution is then holier than tra- dition, and to renew the national spirit the great risk of shattering national forms and precedents must be incurred. We confess we think we see such crises oftener in the American history of slavery, past and present, than Mr. Ludlow, though we yield to few in our preference for using constitutional weapons for promoting constitu- tional reforms. Yet Mr. Ludlow's bias in this respect renders his narrative perhaps more statesmanlike than it would otherwise be. There is a very subordinate point on which, while substantially agreeing with him, we cannot acquiesce in his language. He has some odd sentences, in which he appears to imply that the poverty of the South is partly due to its importing manufactures which it would otherwise produce at home. It is not because the South imports what it cannot produce with so much advantage as cotton and sugar, and pays for its imports in the cotton and sugar which it can produce with far greater advantage than the North, that it is poor,—but be- cause there is no sufficient opportunity for that kind of productive ex- penditure which no one can import at any price,—the expenditure on education, spiritual and intellectual, and on all the finer arts of social life. These are things which no one can import,—they must be in the immediate atmosphere, or they are not at all. And when there is no considerable population allowed to enjoy these things, of course the productive expenditure which creates and stimulates them migrates elsewhere. This, probably, is what Mr. Ludlow means, but his illus- trations (pp. 152-4) would appear to imply—though we do not believe it was so meant,—a censure on an agricultural country, for instance, for importing all its manufactures when it can buy them much more cheaply in exchange for its grain than it. could create them for itself.
The narrative of the struggle between the slavery-principle, in its coarsest form, and the principle of orderly law-loving freedom, becomes most stirring in the Kansas episode of the American history where the light and darkness are as nearly separated as in any known page of human destiny. This story is told by Mr. Hughes in a final lecture of the most vivid interest, which winds up Mx. Ludlow's masterly discussion of principles with an episode of military politics that seems to paint in miniature the whole struggle. Again we find ourselves less scrupulous as to the forms of external law than the historian. We could have joined, heart, soul, and conscience, in John Brown's righteous retributive raid into Missouri, which Mr. Hughes by implication condemns, without doubting that in a country so wholly abandoned by the semblance of human justice it was the truest execution of divine law. The book is by far the ablest and most interesting sketch of American history we have ever met with,—and, as far as we have the means of verifying it, both accurate and impartial. It enters into the leading constitutional questions involved without being dull, and follows the outline of all the more important facts without being discursive. It is but a sketch, of course,—yet a very masterly sketch of a very perplexed subject.
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