CHAPTER XVII

THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA

When the United States of America had once acquired the extensive territory known at the beginning of the century as Louisiana there was no effective bar to their extension westward until they came to the shore of the Pacific. There were hostile Indians, and deserts difficult to traverse in the slow-going wagons, but the westward progress of the pioneers went on with no serious sets-back and at a pace which was very wonderful considering the conditions. When the railway era came--we may date its beginning approximately at 1830--the progress was much accelerated.

The population of the States grew very fast, both by the increase of the old settlers and by immigration, especially from Ireland. Ireland never had been happy in her Union with England, and her people were discontented and very ready to try their fortunes under the American flag. Just before the middle of the century the potato, on which the Irish people chiefly live, had failed almost entirely, and there had been cruel famine and distress, which further encouraged them to emigrate.

Thus America grew great. We have seen that as early as 1823 she had put forth that announcement known as the Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed that she deemed the whole of the vast South American Continent, as well as the whole of the North which lay {209} south of the Canadian border, to be her concern, and hers alone. She would allow no European nation to interfere there.

[Sidenote: The South American states]

That did not imply that she herself would seek to upset arrangements already made. What did happen in that South American section was that it was divided into a number of States, which never became united, as did the States of the North. Most of them, very soon after their settlement, had become self-governing, their mother countries in Europe being too war-weary to make very serious efforts to retain them. Spanish was the language of the majority, but in the State which had by far the largest territory of all, that of Brazil, which had rather unexpectedly fallen to the share of Portugal under the dispensation sanctioned by the famous Bull of Pope Alexander, the common language was Portuguese. The population in all of them varied from pure European to pure Indian, with every possible degree of mixture between. Side by side, on the north-east shoulder of the Continent, were, and are, the three Guianas, the British, French, and Dutch.

But whereas these three still are European possessions, over all the rest of the Continent the settlers soon threw off all allegiance to their mother lands, as also did Mexico, once known as New Spain, at the southern end of the Northern Continent.

Both Mexico and Brazil started their independent careers with governors of the style of Emperor, but in Mexico he was very soon ousted and a republican government instituted. In all the Spanish States of South America, too, the form of government was republican; but there was an Emperor of Brazil, of the royal family of Portugal, though quite independent of the Portuguese Government, throughout most of the century, until she too elected to become republican. The Continent is for the greater part exceedingly {210} rich and fertile, and supplies to Europe a great deal of its surplus products of very many kinds. Were it not for the frequent revolutions and changes of government, which make property insecure and distract the people from productive work, all these States might be far more prosperous even than they are. Naturally enough they always have had many immigrants of the Latin race. Italians especially have been going out to the States of that Southern Continent in very large numbers. The United States have attracted the peoples of more Northern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavia. Of Canada the population has been swelled by English, Irish and, largely, by Scottish immigration. The French have not gone there in great numbers, but we must always remember that there is a considerable population, in certain parts of Canada, that is French in race and in speech--the descendants of the original French settlers.

Even after they had acquired Louisiana, the people of the United States did not find themselves with an entirely unimpeded course to the West, for Mexico, independent since 1822, possessed all or most of that territory which you may now see marked on the map as Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, all of which passed, by conquest or by arrangement, into the hands of the United States shortly before the middle of the century. The transfer of California was immediately followed by a violent rush of Eastern Americans to the West, where gold, in great quantities, had just been found.

Thus, or somewhat thus, the general political boundaries of the United States and of the other countries of the two American Continents came to be as they are; but there was at least one moment when the Union of the States itself was in grievous danger of breaking up.

[Sidenote: The slavery question]

Between the States in the North and those in the {211} South there were certain differences in interests and outlook which were very likely to lead to a quarrel. There had been some difference even in their original settlers. As already noticed, those who went to New England and the Northern States generally were for the most part of the Puritan persuasion, of a humbler social rank, and with more rigid religious views than those who settled in Virginia and other States of the South. The latter were largely of the landowning class at home, and when they came to America formed large estates and worked them by slave labour--negro slaves brought from America, or the descendants of those Africans.

When Louisiana was taken over from the French, slavery was in use all over its then vast extent. In the Northern section, soon to be known as the State of Missouri, slavery was abolished. It was retained in the South.

The idea of the slavery of the black races was not repugnant to the conscience of men of that day. It was not until later, and only after the great English philanthropist Wilberforce had devoted his whole life to the cause, that slavery was abolished in the British and French West Indies. The condition of the slaves, once they had arrived, was not, generally, so very bad, but the horrors that they suffered in the passage from Africa to America were unspeakable; the death-rate was terribly heavy; and the slave raids in Africa itself made the lives of the wretched negroes in their native country miserably anxious even if they evaded capture.

But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the industrial system on many who worked under it. When consciences did begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be uttered by the people of the {212} Northern States, who were not owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were cultivated by slave labour.

Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in which it was not. Now and again a slave would escape, and the right claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise slavery.

So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question, between the Abolitionists, as they were called--that is, those who favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade in particular--and the anti-Abolitionists. Nearly all the North was of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.

And this divergence about slavery was but one point of difference among several. The question of tariff--the duties to be paid on goods entering American ports--was another. There were Protectionists and Free-traders then and there, as there are here and now. There were States in the South that claimed the right to "nullify," as it was called, in respect of goods brought to their ports, the Act of Congress which imposed the duties. The nullifaction claim--the claim to "make nothing of" the Act--was disallowed; and thence arose more bitterness.

[Sidenote: The War of Secession]

So the embers of discontent went smouldering until active war broke out between the two sections in 1861; and it broke out over a difference, which was not actually a difference over slaves or tariffs although it originated in those questions. The point on which it broke out was this: that the Southern States claimed for themselves the right to secede, to cut themselves off, from the Union. That is why the war is called {213} the War of Secession. They even called themselves by a distinctive name, not the "United," but the "Confederate" States. The North resisted, and refused them the right to break away and govern themselves as they wished. It was, perhaps we may think, a singular position to be taken by those United States which had lately fought so well and triumphantly to gain their own independent right to self-governance, but almost certainly it is a good thing for mankind that they did take that attitude. Had the attempted "secession" succeeded, the States of North America might have been as disunited as the States of South America; and so might never have stood, as they do, a strong force for peace in the world.

The War of Secession was waged with varying fortune, at first rather favouring the South, though always it was the South which, as the chief battlefield, had to endure the worst of the misery. It was a particularly cruel war in the divisions that it caused between friends and even between families. There were moments when the cause of the North was in great danger; but the North was able to dispose of rather larger forces and perhaps of a tougher type of soldiery, although the endurance and the aptitude for strategy and fighting seem to have been remarkable on both sides among armies of which only a small minority were soldiers by profession and training. The Northern advantages were compensated by the very remarkable military ability for war of the Southern leaders.

The sympathies of Europe and of England generally were rather with the South than with the North, and England gave some just cause of offence to the North by allowing the South to fit out privateering vessels in British ports.

It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in 1865, that the end came with the surrender {214} of General Lee's Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in Virginia. That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were agreed very shortly afterwards. The claim of any State or collection of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole Union.

The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished. Their fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides, their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to repair the losses. All the money that they might have spent in hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were scarcely less difficult than those of the war.

It was very many years before the South recovered, and it has scarcely recovered now. Nor has the bitter feeling of the South towards the North, which arose from the war and from the many differences of which it was the outcome, even yet wholly died away. As lately as 1924 a member of one of the old Virginian families told me that the Great War, of 1914-1918, by summoning Americans from North, South, East, and West to serve in the same regiments and in a common cause, had done more to bring them together and create a sense of unity, and dispel the misunderstandings, than anything that had happened in all the years between the American War of Secession and the Great War.

[Sidenote: Maximilian in Mexico]

While the United States were thus in the agonies of their Civil contest, an attempt was made to interfere with the affairs of Mexico which was in direct defiance of that Monroe Doctrine already mentioned. Just as there is now, at this time of writing, so were there then, Europeans and European property in Mexico which the Government of the country was not able to make {215} tolerably secure. It did not seem to be putting out much effort to secure them. Europe thought then, as she is perhaps justified in thinking now, that if the United States forbade any foreign interference with the American Continents it was their business to see that the States of those Continents behaved themselves in a reasonable manner. At that moment the United States were obviously unable to undertake any such responsibility. Europeans in Mexico therefore appealed to Europe, and especially to Napoleon III., to enforce a better government on the country. It was the sort of appeal to which the character of Napoleon, made him peculiarly ready to respond, and under his promise of support Maximilian, brother of Francis Joseph of Austria, went out to take over the government of Mexico, with the title of Emperor. His reception was by no means as warm as he had expected. On the contrary, he found his own partisans inferior in force to those of the opposing faction. For a brief while he held a nominal rule over some two-thirds of the country. The French troops supporting him were quite insufficient to put down the native republican bands. His position was very shaky even at its best.

Then in 1865 the United States, freed from their Civil War, reasserted the Monroe Doctrine, and made some demonstrations under arms which clearly indicated that they were ready to give active effect to it. Upon that, Napoleon recalled his French troops, and the already shaky position of the Mexican Emperor at once became desperate. He was captured, tried by a court martial, condemned, and shot.

So, tragically and ingloriously, ended what really was Europe's one and only attempt at action opposed to the doctrine enunciated by Monroe.

A certain implication, or what has been considered an implication, of that doctrine, namely, that the {216} United States shall abstain from any interference with affairs foreign to her own two Continents, even as she has forbidden the foreigner to interfere with them--this implication she violated, most happily for Europe, in the Great War. But she had already violated it in her own Spanish war, of 1898, which followed on Spain's ineffective attempts to restore reasonably good government in Cuba, that island which lies in a position to guard the Gulf of Mexico and the Panama Canal. Spain was unable to enforce respect for the lives and property of Americans in the island, and, not unjustifiably, the United States, after some years of long-suffering, resolved that the Spanish rule must be overthrown. Even America herself shared in the general surprise that the complete defeat of Spain was so easy; and she was genuinely surprised also to find the sympathy of Great Britain cordially with her in the short war.

And as its results, not only Cuba itself, but also the far-off Philippines, those Spanish-owned islands where Portuguese going East and Spaniards going West had unexpectedly met a few centuries before, were given over to the United States.

Nearly at the same time certain Samoan Islands and the Hawaiian group of islands were annexed to the United States. Therefore she too must now shoulder her portion of what Kipling has well called "the white man's burden."

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