SKETCH

OF THE

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, FROM

INDEPENDENCE TO SECESSION.

In undertaking to lecture to you on the history of the United States of America, my chief object has been to enable you to understand better the nature and drift of the present crisis. It is for this reason that I leave on one side not only the colonial history of the United States, but the War of Independence, and although starting from the Declaration of Independence in a political point of view, do not mean to chronicle the subsequent events of the war, the most momentous, in a military point of view, of all. My task would have been far easier as well as far more interesting, had I chosen to dwell on that earlier history. Documents respecting it abound. The Americans are never tired of telling and retelling the story of both their colonial and revolutionary periods. But there is absolutely no standard work

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THE VARIOUS ELEMENTS

for the later period, and the unexpected difficulty I have found in my task has painfully convinced me of its utility.

But without dwelling on the colonial history of the United States, there are certain broad facts which it is necessary for us to bear in mind in reference to the settlement of the country. Whatever other elements may have been mixed up in forming the American people, there is no doubt that the so-called Anglo-Saxon one has remained the largely and unquestionably predominant one; that the great republic of the west is in the main an English colony separated from the mothercountry. But we should never overlook how vast a portion of the area over which it extends was originally settled, or at least more or less ruled and overrun, by other European races. The dominion of the Spanish race has extended from ocean to ocean,-from the extreme East of Florida and Carolina to the shores of the Pacific, and the dislodgment of that race by the Anglo-Saxon one belongs entirely to the present century, and has been in the main accomplished within the last twenty-five years (independence of Texas, 1836). Where that dominion was broken, it was broken by that of the French race, which almost cut in two the whole present area of the United States. Through the great colonies of Canada and Louisiana (then a single province, now a whole congeries of states), it had command of the basin of the St. Lawrence, and that of the Mississippi and its affluents,-its hunters and trappers, who easily amalgamated with the Indian

IN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

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tribes, venturing already even into the wilderness of the west, and seemed likely to hem the Anglo-Saxon race within limits which would embrace only a fraction of its present area of habitation. The presence of these widely-spread foreign elements, in blood, in legislation, in religion, in habits, should always be borne in mind, however they may have been overgrown by the AngloSaxon one. Nor should we forget that, when a man leaves his country for one subject to a foreign rule, it must in general be either that he does not care for it, or that it does not care for him; it must either be that he is so little attached to the institutions of his own country that he is willing to submit to those of another, or that he despises the latter sufficiently to look forward to replacing them by those of his own. Wherever, therefore, the soil of the United States was once occupied by Spain or France, we may be sure that a set of bold and hardy adventurers,-often mere outlaws,-formed at least a large portion of the first representatives within it of the now dominant AngloSaxon element, and have left more or less impressed upon the community the stamp of their own character. And this overgrowth of the Anglo-Saxon element, we must also bear in mind, has in the main taken place at second-hand from the mother-country; not always, indeed, at second-hand in blood, but always in point of political influence. The whole West of America, however many Englishmen may have settled there, is yet an American colony, not an English one; for the English settler has gone there, not as the citizen of an

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DIFFERENCE AMONG THE SETTLERS

English colony, but as the citizen, actual or prospective, of the United States.

Again, if we confine our attention to the genuinely English portion of the United States territory, or, say to the thirteen states that originally formed the Union (although even here we must recollect that there are in several places substrata of foreign blood, as the Dutch in New York and New Jersey, the Swedes in New Jersey and Delaware), we must distinguish between two widely different currents of immigration, in the North and in the South. Speaking broadly, the North was settled by religion,-the South by adventure and cupidity. The desire to worship God in freedom in such form as they deemed most acceptable to God, led the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth harbour, and planted the group of New England states in the most ungenial portion of the present American territory. Rhode Island was founded on the principle of absolute religious toleration; Pennsylvania (in the grant of which was originally included Delaware, whilst New Jersey was also purchased by the "Friends") represents the most important contribution by Quakerism to the history of the world. If, in the midst of these communities founded upon the religious principle, New York stands upon a less exalted footing, it represents to the present day emphatically the commercial element in the republic, and its city, the great fitter-out of slavers in modern times, has always been marked by its sympathies with the slave-owners of the South.

With the exception of Georgia, whose early history