The New Penguin History of the World (146 page)

This was already too much for some Southerners. Although the Democrats were divided, the country voted on strictly sectional grounds in 1860; the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, who was to prove the greatest of American presidents, was elected by northern states, together with the two Pacific coast ones. This was the end of the line for many Southerners. South Carolina formally seceded from the Union as a protest against the election. In February 1861 it was joined by six other states, and the Confederate States of America, which they set up, had its provisional government and president installed a month before President Lincoln was inaugurated in Washington.

Each side accused the other of revolutionary designs and behaviour. It is very difficult not to agree with both of them. The heart of the Northern position, as Lincoln saw, was that democracy should prevail, a claim assuredly of potentially limitless revolutionary implication. In the end, what the North achieved was indeed a social revolution in the South. On the other side, what the South was asserting in 1861 (and three more states joined the Confederacy after the first shots were fired) was that it had the same
right to organize its life as had, say, revolutionary Poles or Italians in Europe. It is unfortunate, but generally true, that the coincidence of nationalist claims with liberal institutions is rarely exact, or even close, and never complete, but the defence of slavery was also a defence of self-determination. At the same time, though such great issues of principle were certainly at stake, they presented themselves in concrete, personal and local terms which make it very difficult to state clearly the actual lines along which the Republic divided for the great crisis of its history and identity. They ran through families, towns and villages, religions, and sometimes around groups of different colours. It is the tragedy of civil wars to be like that.

Once under way, war has a revolutionary potential of its own. Much of the particular impact of what one side called ‘the Rebellion’ and the other side ‘the War between the States’ grew out of the necessities of the struggle. It took four years for the Union forces to beat the Confederacy and in that time an important change had occurred in Lincoln’s aims. At the beginning of the war he had spoken only of restoring the proper order of affairs: there were things happening in the Southern states, he told the people, ‘too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings’ and they would require military operations. This view broadened into a consistent reiteration that the war was fundamentally about preserving the Union; Lincoln’s aim in fighting was to reunite the states which composed it. For a long time this meant that he failed to satisfy those who sought from the war the abolition of slavery. But in the end he came round to it. In 1862 he could still say in a public letter that: ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that’, but he did so at a moment when he had already decided that he must proclaim the emancipation of slaves in the rebel states. That became effective on New Year’s Day 1863; thus the nightmare of Southern politicians was reality at last, though only because of the war they had courted. It transformed the nature of the struggle, though not at once very obviously. In 1865 the final step was taken in an amendment to the constitution which prohibited slavery anywhere in the United States. By that time the Confederacy was defeated, Lincoln had been murdered and the cause which he had imperishably summed up as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ was safe.

In the aftermath of its military victory that cause could hardly appear as an unequivocally noble or righteous one to all Americans, but its triumph was pregnant with importance not only for America but for mankind. It
was the only political event of the century whose implications were as far-reaching as, say, the Industrial Revolution. The war settled the future of the continent; one great power would continue to dominate the Americas and exploit the resources of the richest untapped domain yet known to be open to man. That fact in due course settled the outcome of two world wars and therefore the history of the world. The Union armies also decided that the system which would prevail in American politics would be the democratic one; this was not, perhaps, always true in the sense of Lincoln’s words but the political institutions which in principle provided for the rule of the majority were henceforth secure from direct challenge. This was to have the incidental effect of linking democracy and material well-being closely in the minds of Americans; industrial capitalism in the United States would have a great pool of ideological commitment to draw upon when it faced its later critics.

There were other domestic consequences, too. The most obvious was the creation of a new colour problem. In a sense there had been no colour problem while slavery existed. Servile status was the barrier separating the overwhelming majority of blacks (there had always been a few free among them) from whites, and it was upheld by legal sanctions. Emancipation swept away the framework of legal inferiority and replaced this with the framework, or myth, of democratic equality when very few Americans were ready to give this social reality. Millions of blacks in the South were suddenly free. They were also for the most part uneducated, largely untrained except for field labour, and virtually without leadership of their own race. For a little while in the Southern states they leant for support on the occupying armies of the Union; when this prop was removed blacks disappeared from the legislatures and public offices of the Southern states to which they had briefly aspired. In some places they disappeared from the polling-booths, too. Legal disabilities were replaced by a social and physical coercion which was sometimes harsher than had been the old regime of slavery. The slave at least had the value to his master of being an investment of capital; he was protected like other property and was usually ensured a minimum security and maintenance. Competition in a free labour market at a moment when the economy of large areas of the South was in ruins, with impoverished whites struggling for subsistence, was disastrous for the black. By the end of the century he had been driven by a poor white population bitterly resentful of defeat and emancipation into social subordination and economic deprivation. From this was to stem emigration to the North and new racial problems in the twentieth century.

As another consequence of the war the United States retained a two-party system. Between them, Republicans and Democrats have continued to
divide the presidency to this day, not often threatened by third parties. There was nothing to make this probable before 1861. Many parties had come and gone, reflecting different movements in American society. But the war was to rivet upon the Democratic party a commitment to the Southern cause which at first was a grave handicap because it carried the stigma of disloyalty (no Democrat was president until 1885). Correspondingly, it won for the Republicans the loyalty of Northern states and the hopes of radicals who saw in them the saviours of the Union and democracy, and the liberators of the slave. Before the inadequacy of these stereotypes was clear, the parties were so deeply rooted in certain states that their predominance in them, let alone survival, was unchallengeable. Twentieth-century American politics would proceed by internal transformation of the two great parties, which long reflected their primitive origins.

For the moment the Republicans of 1865 had it all their own way. Perhaps they would have found a way to reconcile the South if Lincoln had lived. As it was, the impact of their policies upon a defeated and devastated South made the ‘Reconstruction’ years bitter ones. Many Republicans strove honestly to use the power they had to ensure democratic rights for the blacks; thus they ensured the future hegemony of the Democrats in the South. But they did not do too badly. Soon the economic tide was with them as the great expansion interrupted briefly by the war was resumed.

This expansion had been going on for seventy years and was already prodigious. Its most striking manifestation had been territorial; it was about to become economic. The phase of America’s advance to the point at which her citizens would have the highest per capita income in the world was just opening in the 1870s. In the euphoria of this huge blossoming of confidence and expectation, all political problems seemed for a while to have been solved. Under Republican administrations Americans turned, not for the last time, to the assurance that the business of America was not political debate but business. The South remained largely untouched by the new prosperity and slipped even further behind the North; it had no political leverage until an issue capable of bringing support to the Democrats in other sections turned up.

Meanwhile, the North and West could look back with confidence that the astonishing changes of the previous seventy years promised even better times ahead. Foreigners could feel this, too; that is why they were coming to the United States in growing numbers – two and a half million in the 1850s alone. They fed a population which had grown from just over five and a quarter million in 1800 to nearly forty million in 1870. About half of them by then lived west of the Alleghenies and the vast majority of
them in rural areas. The building of railroads was opening the Great Plains to settlement and exploitation which had not yet really begun. In 1869 the golden spike was driven which marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad link. In the new West the United States would find its greatest agricultural expansion; already, thanks to the shortage of labour experienced in the war years, machines were being used in numbers which pointed to a quite new scale of farming, the way to a new phase of the world’s agricultural revolution which would make North America a granary for Europe (and, one day, for Asia, too). There were a quarter of a million mechanical reapers alone at work by the end of the war. Industrially, too, great years lay ahead; the United States was not yet an industrial power to compare with Great Britain (in 1870 there were still less than two million Americans employed in manufacturing), but the groundwork was done. With a large, increasingly well-off domestic market the prospects for American industry were bright.

Poised on the brink of their most confident and successful era, Americans were not being hypocritical in forgetting the losers. They understandably found it easy to do so in the general sense that the American system worked well. The blacks and the poor whites of the South now joined the Indian, who had been a loser steadily for two centuries and a half, as the forgotten failures. The new poor of the growing Northern cities should probably not be regarded, comparatively, as losers; they were at least as well off, and probably better, than the poor of Andalusia or Naples. Their willingness to come to the United States showed that it was already a magnet of great power. Nor was that power only material. Besides the ‘wretched refuse’, there were the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. The United States was in 1870 still a political inspiration to political radicals elsewhere, though perhaps her political practice and forms had more impact in Great Britain – where people linked (both approvingly and disapprovingly) democracy with the ‘Americanization’ of British politics – than in continental Europe.

Such transatlantic influences and connections were aspects of the curious, fitful, but tenacious relations between the two Anglo-Saxon countries. They both underwent revolutionary change though in wholly different ways. Yet here, perhaps, the achievement of Great Britain in the early nineteenth century is even more remarkable than the transformation of the United States. At a time of unprecedented and potentially dislocating social upheaval, which turned her within a single lifetime into the first industrialized and urbanized society of modern times, Great Britain managed to maintain an astonishing constitutional and political continuity. At the same time, she was acting as a world and European power as the United
States never had to, and ruled a great empire. In this setting she began the democratization of her institutions while retaining most of her buttresses of individual liberty.

Socially the United Kingdom was far less democratic than the United States in 1870 (if the blacks are set aside as a special case). Social hierarchy (conferred by birth and land if possible, but if not, money would often do) stratified the United Kingdom; every observer was struck by the assured confidence of the English ruling classes that they were meant to rule. There was no American West to offset the deep swell of deference with the breeze of frontier democracy; Canada and Australia attracted restless emigrants, but in so doing removed the possibility of their changing the tone of English society. Political democracy developed faster than social, on the other hand, even if the universal male suffrage already long-established in the United States would not be introduced until 1918; the democratization of English politics was already past the point of reversibility by 1870.

This great change had come about within a few decades. Though it had deeply libertarian institutions – equality at law, effective personal liberty, a representative system – the English constitution of 1800 had not rested on democratic principles. Its basis was the representation of certain individual and historic rights and the sovereignty of the Crown in parliament. The accidents of the past produced from these elements an electorate large by contemporary European standards, but as late as 1832, the word ‘democratic’ was a pejorative one and few thought it indicated a desirable goal. To most Englishmen, democracy meant the French Revolution and military despotism. Yet the most important step towards democracy in the English political history of the century was taken in 1832. This was the passing of a Reform Act which was not itself democratic and was, indeed, intended by many of those who supported it to act as a barrier to democracy. It carried out a great revision of the representative system, removing anomalies (such as the tiny constituencies which had been effectively controlled by patrons), to provide parliamentary constituencies which better (though still far from perfectly) reflected the needs of a country of growing industrial cities, and above all to change and make more orderly the franchise. It had been based on a jumble of different principles in different places; now, the main categories of persons given the vote were freeholders in the rural areas, and householders who owned or paid rent for their house at a middle-class level in the towns. The model elector was the man with a stake in the country, although dispute about the precise terms of the franchise still left some oddities. The immediate result was an electorate of about 650,000 and a House of Commons which did not look very different from its predecessor. None the less, dominated by the aristocracy as it still was, it
marked the beginning of nearly a century during which British politics were to be completely democratized, because once the constitution had been changed in this way, then it could be changed again and the House of Commons more and more claimed the right to say what should be done. In 1867, another Act produced an electorate of about two million and in 1872 the decision that voting should take place by secret ballot followed: a great step.