JOSEPH HOPKINSON
The War of 1812 was perceived by many Americans as a kind of second war of independence from Britain—though in fact, it may have been American territorial ambitions along the Gulf Coast and in Canada that actually sparked the hostilities. Particularly in New England, opposition to the war was strong—even to the point of threatening secession. Nevertheless, the people rallied for the most part to the patriotic cause. This verse exemplifies the resigned determination that accompanied the conflict.
Farewell, Peace! Another crisis
Calls us to “the last appeal,”
Made when monarchs and their vices
Leave no argument but steel.
When injustice and oppression
Dare avow the tyrant’s plea.
Who would recommend submission?
Virtue bids us to be free.
History spreads her page before us,
Time unrolls his ample scroll;
Truth unfolds them, to assure us,
States, united, ne’er can fall.
See, in annals Greek and Roman,
What immortal deeds we find;
When those gallant sons of woman
In their country’s cause combined.
Sons of Freedom! Brave descendants
From a race of heroes tried,
To preserve our independence
Let all Europe be defied.
Let not all the world, united,
Rob us of one sacred right:
Every patriot heart’s delighted
In his country’s cause to fight.
Come then, War! With hearts elated
To thy standard we will fly;
Every bosom animated
Either to live free or die.
May the wretch that shrinks from duty,
Or deserts the glorious strife,
Never know the smile of beauty,
Nor the blessing of a wife.
* * *
WALLACE RICE
To a large degree, the War of 1812 was a naval war. Though out-gunned and out-manned, America’s small fleet of converted merchant vessels and their commanders made a strong showing for themselves and initiated a great naval tradition. This popular poem vividly recaptures the import of the conflict.
What is that a-billowing there
Like a thunderhead in air?
Why should such a sight be whitening the seas;
That’s a Yankee man-o’-war,
And three things she’s seeking for:
For a prize, and for a battle, and a breeze.
When the war blew o’er the sea
Out went Hull and out went we
In the Constitution, looking for the foe;
But five British ships came down-
And we got to Boston-town
By a mighty narrow margin, you must know!
Captain Hull can’t fight their fleet,
But he fairly aches to meet
Quite the prettiest British ship of all there were;
So he stands again to sea
In the hope that on his lee
He’ll catch Dacres and his pretty Guerriere.
’Tis an August afternoon
Not a day too late or soon,
When we raise a ship whose lettered mainsail reads:
All who meet me have a care,
I am England’s Guerriere;
So Hull gaily clears for action as he speeds.
Cheery bells had chanted five
On the happiest day alive
When we Yankees dance to quarters at his call;
While the British bang away
With their broadsides’ screech and bray;
But the Constitution never fires a ball.
We send up three times to ask
If we sha’n’t begin our task?
Captain Hull sends back each time the answer No;
Till to half a pistol-shot
The two frigates he had brought,
Then he whispers, Lay along! And we let go.
Twice our broadside lights and lifts,
And the Briton, crippled, drifts
With her mizzen dangling hopeless at her poop:
Laughs a Yankee, She’s a brig!
Says our Captain, “That’s too big;
Try another, so we’ll have her for a sloop!”
We huzzah, and fire again,
Lay aboard of her like men,
And, like men, they beat us off, and try in turn;
But we drive bold Dacres back
With our muskets’ snap and crack
All the while our crashing broadsides boom and burn.
’Tis but half an hour, bare,
When that pretty Guerriere
Not a stick calls hers aloft or hers alow,
Save the mizzen’s shattered mast,
Where her “meteor flag” is nailed fast
Till, a fallen star, we quench its ruddy glow.
Dacres, injured, o’er our side
Slowly bears his sword of pride,
Holds it out, as Hull stands there in his renown:
No, no! Says th’ American,
Never, from so brave a man:
But I see you’re wounded, let me help you down.
All that night we work in vain
Keeping her upon the main,
But we’ve hulled her far too often, and at last
In a blaze of fire there
Dies the pretty Guerriere;
While away we cheerly sail upon the blast.
Oh, the breeze that blows so free!
Oh, the prize beneath the sea!
Oh, the battle! Was there ever better won?
Still the happy Yankee cheers
Are a-ringing in our ears
From old Boston, glorying in what we’ve done.
What is that a-billowing there
Like a thunderhead in air?
Why should such a sight be whitening the seas?
That’s Old Ir’nsides, trim and taut,
And she’s found the things she sought:
Found a prize, a bully battle, and a breeze!
* * *
FRANCIS SCOTT KEY
During the night of September 13, 1814, a Washington attorney was sent to the British command to secure the release of a prisoner when the fleet began to bombard the placements of American fortifications in Baltimore at Fort McHenry. Though the battle raged through the night, the defenses stood firm. The sight of the flag still flying over the fort the next morning inspired the young lawyer to pen these words. Set to a popular English song, “Anacreon in Heaven,” it was officially declared to be the national anthem more than a hundred years later, just before the First World War.
O! say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming:
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming,
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
O! say, does the star-spangled banner still wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam—
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
’Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And where is the band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country would leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave!
And the star-spangled banner in triumph cloth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the foe’s desolation;
Bless’d with victory and peace, may our heaven rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just—
And this be our motto—“In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
* * *
HENRY CLAY
With the question of the admission of Maine and Missouri as states in 1818 came the first major clash over the issue of slavery in American national politics. Henry Clay, a perennial contender for the presidency, and Jesse Thomas of Illinois hammered out a compromise that they hoped would preserve the Union in perpetuity. In the end it only delayed the inevitable. The bill was passed on March 6, 1820.
An act to authorize the people of the Missouri Territory to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, and to prohibit slavery in certain territories.
Be it enacted, That the inhabitants of that portion of the Missouri Territory included within the boundaries hereinafter designated, be, and they are hereby authorized to form for themselves a constitution and state government, and to assume such name as they shall deem proper; and the said state, when formed, shall be admitted into the Union, upon an equal footing with the original states, in all respects whatsoever.
That the said state shall consist of all the territory included within the following boundaries, to wit: Beginning in the middle of the Mississippi River, on the parallel of thirty-six degrees of north latitude; thence west, along that parallel of latitude, to the St. Francois River; thence up, and following the course of that river, in the middle of the main channel thereof, to the parallel of latitude of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes; thence west, along the same, to a point where the said parallel is intersected by a meridian line passing through the middle of the mouth of the Kansas River, where the same empties into the Missouri River, thence, from the point aforesaid north, along the said meridian line, to the intersection of the parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the river Des Moines, making the said line to correspond with the Indian boundary line; thence east, from the point of intersection last aforesaid, along the said parallel of latitude, to the middle of the channel of the main fork of the said river Des Moines; thence down and along the middle of the main channel of the said river Des Moines, to the mouth of the same, where it empties into the Mississippi River; thence, due east, to the middle of the main channel of the Mississippi River; thence down, and following the course of the Mississippi River, in the middle of the main channel thereof, to the place of beginning.…
That all free white male citizens of the United States, who shall have arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and have resided in said territory three months previous to the day of election, and all other persons qualified to vote for representatives to the general assembly of the said territory, shall be qualified to be elected, and they are hereby qualified and authorized to vote, and choose representatives to form a convention.
That in all that territory ceded by France to the United States, under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, not included within the limits of the state contemplated by this act, slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the parties shall have been duly convicted, shall be, and is hereby, forever prohibited: Provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed, in any state or territory of the United States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.
* * *
JAMES MONROE AND JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
The Monroe Doctrine, excerpted from the president’s message to Congress on December 2, 1823, was largely formulated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Its design was to head off the colonial intentions of both the Russians—who claimed the coastal lands from the Bering Straits south to an undetermined line in the American Northwest—and the Spanish—who were determined to put down a rash of rebellions in their American colonies. Though rarely enforced until the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, the statement quickly was recognized as the clearest enunciation of American foreign policy—and has remained so to this day.
At the proposal of the Russian imperial government, made through the minister of the Emperor residing here, a full power and instructions have been transmitted to the Minister of the United States at St. Petersburg, to arrange, by amicable negotiation, the respective rights and interests of the two nations on the northwest coast of this continent. A similar proposal has been made by his Imperial Majesty to the government of Great Britain, which has likewise been acceded to. The government of the United States has been desirous, by this friendly proceeding, of manifesting the great value which they have invariably attached to the friendship of the emperor, and their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding with his government. In the discussions to which this interest has given rise, and in the arrangements by which they may terminate, the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
It was stated at the commencement of the last session, that a great effort was then making in Spain and Portugal, to improve the condition of the people of those countries; and that it appeared to be conducted with extraordinary moderation. It need scarcely be remarked, that the result has been, so far, very different from what was then anticipated. Of events in that quarter of the globe, with which we have so much intercourse, and from which we derive our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators. The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly, in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow men on that side of the Atlantic. In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded, or seriously menaced, that we resent injuries, or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere, we are, of necessity, more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different, in this respect, from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. And to the defence of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers, to declare, that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere, as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But, with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose in dependence we have, on great consideration, and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling, in any other manner, their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States. In the war between these new governments and Spain, we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur, which, in the judgment of the competent authorities of this government, shall make a corresponding change, on the part of the United States, indispensable to their security.
The late events in Spain and Portugal, shew that Europe is still unsettled. Of this important fact, no stronger proof can be adduced than that the allied powers should have thought it proper, on any principle satisfactory to themselves, to have interposed, by force, in the internal concerns of Spain. To what extent such interposition may be carried, on the same principle, is a question, in which all independent powers, whose governments differ from theirs, are interested; even those most remote, and surely none more so than the United States. Our policy, in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting, in all instances, the just claims of every power; submitting to injuries from none. But, in regard to those continents, circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different.
It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent, without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can any one believe that our Southern Brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition, in any form, with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States, to leave the parties to themselves, in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course.
* * *
JOAQUIN MILLER
On February 23, 1836, while garrisoned in a little Franciscan mission church at San Antonio de Valero, a beleaguered group of 183 Texan freedom fighters and American volunteers were attacked by the full force of the Mexican national army. Despite all odds, the small force was able to hold off the swarming assaults of the well-equipped Mexicans until March 6. Defying the demands of Santa Anna, the Mexican dictator, to surrender, they fought to the last man—in the end resorting to hand-to-hand combat. The news of their courageous defense inspired and reinvigorated the Texan bid for independence. “Remember the Alamo” became their battle cry.
Santa Ana came storming, as a storm might come;
There was rumble of cannon; there was rattle of blade;
There was cavalry, infantry, bugle, and drum,
Full seven thousand in pomp and parade.
The chivalry, flower of Mexico;
And a gaunt two hundred in the Alamo!
And thirty lay sick, and some were shot through;
For the siege had been bitter, and bloody, and long.
“Surrender, or die!”—“Men, what will you do?”
And Travis, great Travis, drew sword, quick and strong;
Drew a line at his feet.…“Will you come? Will you go?
I die with my wounded, in the Alamo.”
Then Bowie gasped, “Lead me over that lines!”
Then Crockett, one hand to the sick, one hand to his gun,
Crossed with him; then never a word or a sign
Till all, sick or well, all, all save but one,
One man. Then a woman stepped, praying, and slow
Across; to die at her post in the Alamo.
Then that one coward fled, in the night, in that night
When all men silently prayed and thought
Of home; of tomorrow; of God and the right,
Till dawn; and with dawn came Travis’s cannon-shot,
In answer to insolent Mexico,
From the old bell-tower of the Alamo.
Then came Santa Ana; a crescent of flame!
Then the red escalade; then the fight hand to hand;
Such an unequal fight as never had name
Since the Persian hordes butchered that doomed Spartan band.
All day—all day and all night; and the morning? so slow,
Through the battle smoke mantling the Alamo.
Now silence! Such silence! Two thousand lay dead
In a crescent outside! And within? Not a breath
Save the gasp of a woman, with gory gashed head,
All alone, all alone there, waiting for death;
And she but a nurse. Yet when shall we know
Another like this of the Alamo?
Shout, “Victory, victory, victory ho!”
I say ’tis not always to the hosts that win!
I say that the victory, high or low,
Is given the hero who grapples with sin,
Or legion or single; just asking to know
When duty fronts death in his Alamo.
* * *
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
A poorly educated, failed journalist and publisher, William Lloyd Garrison found his cause and calling in the abolitionist movement. In 1831 he began publishing a rather radical antislavery paper, The Liberator. Though it never attracted a circulation over three thousand, it became the foremost force for the immediate abolition of the peculiar institution of chattel servitude. This poem, which attracted a wide popular following, became a clarion call for the freedom of African slaves throughout New England.
They tell me, Liberty! that in thy name
I may not plead for all the human race;
That some are born to bondage and disgrace,
Some to a heritage of woe and shame,
And some to power supreme, and glorious fame:
With my whole soul I spurn the doctrine base,
And, as an equal brotherhood, embrace
All people, and for all fair freedom claim!
Know this, O man! whate’er thy earthly fate,
God never made a tyrant nor a slave:
Woe, then, to those who dare to desecrate
His glorious image!—for to all He gave
Eternal rights, which none may violate;
And, by a mighty hand, the oppressed He yet shall save!
* * *
ROGER B. TANEY
Deciding the case of a fugitive slave in 1857, the Supreme Court argued in very careful terms that the common law and constitutional definitions of citizenship and personhood excluded fugitive slaves and their families. Written by the chief justice, the decision outraged abolitionists and their more moderate antislavery allies. Eventually, it became the legal wedge driven between North and South.
There are two leading questions presented by the record:
First, had the Circuit Court of the United States jurisdiction to hear and determine the case between these parties? And,
Second, if it had jurisdiction, is the judgment it has given erroneous or not?
The plaintiff in error was, with his wife and children, held as slaves by the defendant, in the State of Missouri, and he brought this action in the Circuit Court of the United States for that district, to assert the title of himself and his family to freedom.
The declaration is…that he and the defendant are citizens of different States; that is, that he is a citizen of Missouri, and the defendant a citizen of New York.
The defendant pleaded in abatement to the jurisdiction of the court, that the plaintiff was not a citizen of the State of Missouri as alleged in his declaration, being a Negro of African descent whose ancestors were of pure African blood, and who were brought into this country and sold as slaves.
Before we speak of the pleas in bar, it will be proper to dispose of the questions which have arisen on the plea in abatement.
That plea denies the right of the plaintiff to sue in a court of the United States, for the reasons therein stated.
If the question raised by it is legally before us, and the court should be of opinion that the facts stated in it disqualify the plaintiff from becoming a citizen, in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution of the United States, then the judgment of the Circuit Court is erroneous, and must be reversed.
The question to be decided is, whether the plaintiff is not entitled to sue as a citizen in a court of the United States.
The question is simply this: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.
It will be observed, that the plea applies to that class of persons only whose ancestors were Negroes of the African race, and imported into this country, and sold and held as slaves. The only matter in issue before the court, therefore, is whether the descendants of such slaves, when they shall be emancipated, or who are born of parents who had be come free before their birth, are citizens of a State, in the sense in which the word citizen is used in the Constitution of the United States.
The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the “sovereign people,” and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can, therefore, claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of being, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.
In discussing this question, we must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States. He may have all of the rights and privileges of the citizen of a State, and yet not be entitled to the rights and privileges of a citizen in any other State. For, previous to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, every State had the undoubted right to confer on whomsoever it pleased the character of a citizen, and to endow him with all its rights. But this character, of course, was confined to the boundaries of the State, and gave him no rights or privileges in other States beyond those secured to him by the laws of nations and the comity of States. Nor have the several States surrendered the power of conferring these rights and privileges by adopting the Constitution of the United States. Each State may still confer them upon an alien, or any one it thinks proper, or upon any class or description of persons; yet he would not be a citizen in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution of the United States, nor entitled to sue as such in one of its courts, nor to the privileges and immunities of a citizen in the other States. The rights which he would acquire would be restricted to the State which gave them.
It is very clear, therefore, that no State can, by any Act or law of its own, passed since the adoption of the Constitution, introduce a new member into the political community created by the Constitution of the United States. It cannot make him a member of this community by making him a member of its own. And for the same reason it cannot introduce any person, or description of persons, who were not intended to be embraced in this new political family, which the Constitution brought into existence, but were intended to be excluded from it.
The question then arises, whether the provisions of the Constitution, in relation to the personal rights and privileges to which the citizen of a State should be entitled, embraced the Negro African race, at that time in this country, or who might afterwards be imported, who had then or should afterwards be made free in any State, and to put it in the power of a single State to make him a citizen of the United States, and endue him with the full rights of citizenship in every other State without their consent. Does the Constitution of the United States act upon him whenever he shall be made free under the laws of a State, and raised there to the rank of a citizen, and immediately clothe him with all the privileges of a citizen in every other State, and in its own courts?
The court think the affirmative of these propositions cannot be maintained. And if it cannot, the plaintiff in error could not be a citizen of the State of Missouri, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and, consequently, was not entitled to sue in its courts.
It is true, every person, and every class and description of persons, who were at the time of the adoption of the Constitution recognized as citizens in the several States, became also citizens of this new political body; but none other; it was formed by them, and for them and their posterity, but for no one else. And the personal rights and privileges guaranteed to citizens of this new sovereignty were intended to embrace those only who were then members of the several state communities, or who should afterwards, by birthright or otherwise, become members, according to the provisions of the Constitution and the principles on which it was founded.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to determine who were citizens of the several States when the Constitution was adopted. And in order to do this, we must recur to the governments and institutions of the thirteen Colonies, when they separated from Great Britain and formed new sovereignties. We must inquire who, at that time, were recognized as the people or citizens of a State.
In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language wed in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.
It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted.
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
A Negro of the African race was regarded as an article of property and held and bought and sold as such in every one of the thirteen Colonies which united in the Declaration of Independence and afterward formed the Constitution of the United States. The slaves were more or less numerous in the different Colonies, as slave labor was found more or less profitable. But no one seems to have doubted the correctness of the prevailing opinion of the time.
The legislation of the different Colonies furnished positive and indisputable proof of this fact.
The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive:
It begins by declaring that “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
It then proceeds to say: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.
Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements—high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the Negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized governments and the family of nations and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrine and principles and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.
This state of public opinion had undergone no change when the Constitution was adopted, as is equally evident from its provisions and language.
The brief preamble sets forth by whom it was formed, for what purposes, and for whose benefit and protection. It declares that it is formed by the people of the United States; that is to say, by those who were members of the different political communities in the several states; and its great object is declared to be to secure the blessing of liberty to themselves and their posterity. It speaks in general terms of the people of the United States, and of citizens of the several states, when it is providing for the exercise of the powers granted or the privileges secured to the citizen. It does not define what description of persons are intended to be included under these terms, or who shall be regarded as a citizen and one of the people. It uses them as terms so well understood that no further description or definition was necessary.
But there are two clauses in the Constitution which point directly and specifically to the Negro race as a separate class of persons, and show clearly that they were not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government then formed.
One of these clauses reserves to each of the thirteen States the right to import slaves until the year 1808, if it thinks it proper. And the importation which it thus sanctions was unquestionably of persons of the race of which we are speaking, as the traffic in slaves in the United States had always been confined to them. And by the other provision the States pledge themselves to each other to maintain the right of property of the master, by delivering up to him any slave who may have escaped from his service, and be found within their respective territories.… And these two provisions show, conclusively, that neither the description of persons therein referred to, nor their descendants, were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution; for certainly these two clauses were not intended to confer on them or their posterity the blessings of liberty, or any of the personal rights so carefully provided for the citizen.
Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them.
The legislation of the States therefore shows, in a manner not to be mistaken, the inferior and subject condition of that race at the time the Constitution was adopted, and long afterwards, throughout the thirteen States by which that instrument was framed, and it is hardly consistent with the respect due to these States, to suppose that they regarded at that time, as fellow-citizens and members of the sovereignty, a class of beings whom they had thus stigmatized. More especially, it cannot be believed that the large slave-holding States regarded them as included in the word “citizens,” or would have consented to a constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
Upon a full and careful consideration of the subject, the court is of opinion that, upon the facts stated in the plea in abatement, Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and not entitled as such to sue in its courts; and, consequently, that the Circuit Court had no jurisdiction of the case, and that the judgment on the plea in abatement is erroneous.
We proceed, therefore, to inquire whether the facts relied on by the plaintiff entitled him to his freedom.
In considering this part of the controversy, two questions arise: Was he, together with his family, free in Missouri by reason of the stay in the territory of the United States hereinbefore mentioned? If they were not, is Scott himself free by reason of his removal to Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, as stated in the above admissions?
We proceed to examine the first question.
The Act of Congress, upon which the plaintiff relies, declares that slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall be forever prohibited in all that part of the territory ceded by France, under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude, and not included within the limits of Missouri. And the difficulty which meets us at the threshold of this part of the inquiry is, whether Congress was authorized to pass this law under any of the powers granted to it by the Constitution; for if the authority is not given by that instrument, it is the duty of this court to declare it void and inoperative, and incapable of conferring freedom upon any one who is held as a slave under the laws of any one of the States.
The counsel for the plaintiff has laid much stress upon that article in the Constitution which confers on Congress the power “to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States,” but, in the judgment of the court, that provision has no bearing on the present controversy, and the power there given, whatever it may be, is confined, and was intended to be confined, to the territory which at that time belonged to, or was claimed by, the United States, and was within their boundaries as settled by the treaty with Great Britain, and can have no influence upon a territory afterwards acquired from a foreign Government. It was a special provision for a known and particular territory, and to meet a present emergency, and nothing more.
If this clause is construed to extend to territory acquired by the present Government from a foreign nation, outside of the limits of any charter from the British Government to a colony, it would be difficult to say, why it was deemed necessary to give the Government the power to sell any vacant lands belonging to the sovereignty which might be found within it; and if this was necessary, why the grant of this power should precede the power to legislate over it and establish a Government there; and still more difficult to say, why it was deemed necessary so specially and particularly to grant the power to make needful rules and regulations in relation to any personal or movable property it might acquire there. For the words, other property necessarily, by every known rule of interpretation, must mean property of a different description from territory or land. And the difficulty would perhaps be insurmountable in endeavoring to account for the last member of the sentence, which provides that “nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States or any particular State,” or to say how any particular State could have claims in or to a territory ceded by a foreign Government, or to account for associating this provision with the preceding provisions of the clause, with which it would appear to have no connection.
But the power of Congress over the person or property of a citizen can never be a mere discretionary power under our Constitution and form of Government. The powers of the Government and the rights and privileges of the citizen are regulated and plainly defined by the Constitution itself. And when the Territory becomes a part of the United States, the Federal Government enters into possession in the character impressed upon it by those who created it. It enters upon it with its powers over the citizen strictly defined, and limited by the Constitution, from which it derives its own existence, and by virtue of which alone it continues to exist and act as a government and sovereignty. It has no power of any kind beyond it; and it cannot, when it enters a Territory of the United States, put off its character, and assume discretionary or despotic powers which the Constitution has denied to it. It cannot create for itself a new character separated from the citizens of the United States, and the duties it owes them under the provisions of the Constitution. The Territory being a part of the United States, the Government and the citizen both enter it under the authority of the Constitution, with their respective rights defined and marked out; and the Federal Government can exercise no power over his person or property, beyond what that instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which it has reserved.
The rights of private property have been guarded with equal care. Thus the rights of property are united with the rights of person, and placed on the same ground by the fifth amendment to the Constitution. An Act of Congress which deprives a person of the United States of his liberty or property merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offense against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.
And this prohibition is not confined to the States, but the words are general, and extend to the whole territory over which the Constitution gives it power to legislate, including those portions of it remaining under territorial government, as well as that covered by States. It is a total absence of power everywhere within the dominion of the United States, and places the citizens of a territory, so far as these rights are concerned, on the same footing with citizens of the States, and guards them as firmly and plainly against any inroads which the general government might attempt, under the plea of implied or incidental powers. And if Congress itself cannot do this—if it is beyond the powers conferred on the Federal Government—it will be admitted, we presume, that it could not authorize a territorial government to exercise them. It could confer no power on any local government, established by its authority, to violate the provisions of the Constitution.
It seems, however, to be supposed, that there is a difference between property in a slave and other property, and that different rules may be applied to it in expounding the Constitution of the United States.
But if the Constitution recognizes the right of property of the master in a slave, and makes no distinction between that description of property and other property owned by a citizen, no tribunal, acting under the authority of the United States, whether it be legislative, executive, or judicial, has a right to draw such a distinction, or deny to it the benefit of the provisions and guarantees which have been provided for the protection of private property against the encroachments of the Government.
Now the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of the United States, in every State that might desire it, for twenty years. And the Government in express terms is pledged to protect it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner. And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.
Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the Act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becoming a permanent resident.
Upon the whole, therefore, it is the judgment of this court, that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen of Missouri, in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States, for that reason, had no jurisdiction in the case, and could give no judgment in it.
Its judgment for the defendant must, consequently, be reversed, and a mandate issued directing the suit to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction.
* * *
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
At the Illinois state Republican convention on June 7, 1858, a somewhat obscure Springfield attorney and failed politician made a startling speech that ultimately electrified the nation. Decrying the halfhearted attempts at compromise over the slave issue—and particularly the infamous Dred Scott case—he made an incendiary case for enforced unity on the issue. It was this speech more than anything else that ultimately provoked the secession of the Southern states two years later.
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention: If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shell rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let anyone who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery, so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision. Let him consider not only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and how well adapted, but also let him study, the history of its construction, and trace, if he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design, and concert of action, among its chief architects, from the beginning.
The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from more than half the states by state constitutions, and from most of the national territory by congressional prohibition. Four days later commenced the struggle which ended in repealing that congressional prohibition. This opened all the national territory to slavery and was the first point gained.…
While the Nebraska Bill was passing through Congress, a law case, involving the question of a Negro’s freedom, by reason of his owner having voluntarily taken him first into a free state, and then into a territory covered by the congressional prohibition, and held him as a slave for a long time in each, was passing through the United States Circuit Court for the District of Missouri; and both Nebraska Bill and lawsuit were brought to a decision in the same month of May 1854. The Negro’s name was Dred Scott, which name now designates the decision finally made in the case. Before the then next presidential election, the law case came to, and was argued in, the Supreme Court of the United States; but the decision of it was deferred until after the election.
The election came. Mr. Buchanan was elected, and the endorsement, such as it was, secured. That was the second point gained.
The reputed author of the Nebraska Bill finds an early occasion to make a speech at this capital endorsing the Dred Scott decision, and vehemently denouncing all opposition to it. The new president, too, seizes the early occasion of the Silliman letter to endorse and strongly construe that decision, and to express his astonishment that any different view had ever been entertained!
The several points of the Dred Scott decision, in connection with Senator Douglas’s “care not” policy, constitute the piece of machinery, in its present state of advancement. This was the third point gained. The working points of that machinery are:
Firstly, That no Negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be a citizen of any state, in the sense of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States. This point is made in order to deprive the Negro, in every possible event, of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution which declares that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.”
Secondly, That, “subject to the Constitution of the United States,” neither Congress nor a territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States territory. This point is made in order that individual men may fill up the territories with slaves, without danger of losing them as property, and thus to enhance the chances of permanency to the institution through all the future.
Thirdly, That whether the holding a Negro in actual slavery in a free state makes him free, as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave state the Negro may be forced into by the master. This point is made, not to be pressed immediately; but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently endorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott’s master might lawfully do with Dred Scott in the free state of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free state.
It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.” What the Constitution had to do with it outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche for the Dred Scott decision afterward to come in and declare that perfect freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude slavery voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision. Why was the court decision held up? Why even a senator’s individual opinion withheld till after the presidential election? Plainly enough now, the speaking out then would have damaged the “perfectly free” argument upon which the election was to be carried. Why the outgoing president’s felicitation on the endorsement? Why the delay of a re-argument? Why the incoming president’s advance exhortation in favor of the decision?
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in—in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
While the opinion of the court, by Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case, and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a state, or the people of a state, to exclude it. We may, ere long, see another Supreme Court decision declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits. And this may especially be expected if the doctrine of “care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up” shall gain upon the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a decision can be maintained when made.
Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the states. Welcome, or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown. We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state. To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. That is what we have to do. How can we best do it?
There are those who denounce us openly to their own friends, and yet whisper us softly that Senator Douglas is the aptest instrument there is with which to effect that object. They do not tell us, nor has he told us, that he wishes any such object to be effected. They wish us to infer all from the facts that he now has a little quarrel with the present head of the dynasty; and that he has regularly voted with us on a single point upon which he and we have never differed. They remind us that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But “a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one.
Our cause, then, must be entrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now? Now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.
* * *
JEFFERSON DAVIS
Upon news of the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina, claiming strong constitutional warrant, seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. Six other states followed—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—and together they formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861. The constitutional convention at Montgomery, Alabama, chose Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s first president, and he took the oath of office on February 18. The cumulative haste of these events undermined the efforts of the Confederacy to create a fully functioning government prior to Lincoln’s inauguration. The Confederate Congress soon adopted a permanent constitution, which allowed for presidential election by popular vote. On February 22, 1862, Davis took a second oath of office, at Richmond, Virginia, and gave this inaugural address.
Fellow Citizens: On this the birthday of the man most identified with the establishment of American independence, and beneath the monument erected to commemorate his heroic virtues and those of his compatriots, we have assembled to usher into existence the permanent government of the Confederate States. Through this instrumentality, under the favor of Divine Providence, we hope to perpetuate the principles of our Revolutionary fathers. The day, the memory, and the purpose seem fitly associated.
It is with mingled feelings of humility and pride that I appear to take, in the presence of the people and before high heaven, the oath prescribed as a qualification for the exalted station to which the unanimous voice of the people has called me. Deeply sensible of all that is implied by this manifestation of the people’s confidence, I am yet more profoundly impressed by the vast responsibility of the office and humbly feel my own unworthiness.
When a long course of class legislation, directed not to the general welfare but to the aggrandizement of the Northern section of the Union, culminated in a warfare on the domestic institutions of the Southern states—when the dogmas of a sectional party, substituted for the provisions of the constitutional compact, threatened to destroy the sovereign rights of the states—six of those states, withdrawing from the Union, confederated together to exercise the right and perform the duty of instituting a government which would better secure the liberties for the preservation of which that Union was established.
Whatever of hope some may have entertained that a returning sense of justice would remove the danger with which our rights were threatened, and render it possible to preserve the Union of the Constitution, must have been dispelled by the malignity and barbarity of the Northern states in the prosecution of the existing war. The confidence of the most hopeful among us must have been destroyed by the disregard they have recently exhibited for all the time-honored bulwarks of civil and religious liberty.
Bastilles filled with prisoners, arrested without civil process or indictment duly found; the writ of habeas corpus suspended by executive mandate; a state legislature controlled by the imprisonment of members whose avowed principles suggested to the federal executive that there might be another added to the list of seceded states; elections held under threats of a military power; civil officers, peaceful citizens, and gentlewomen incarcerated for opinion’s sake—proclaimed the incapacity of our late associates to administer a government as free, liberal, and humane as that established for our common use.
For proof of the sincerity of our purpose to maintain our ancient institutions, we may point to the Constitution of the Confederacy and the laws enacted under it, as well as to the fact that through all the necessities of an unequal struggle there has been no act on our part to impair personal liberty or the freedom of speech, of thought, or of the press. The courts have been open, the judicial functions fully executed, and every right of the peaceful citizen maintained as securely as if a war of invasion had not disturbed the land.
The people of the states now confederated became convinced the government of the United States had fallen into the hands of a sectional majority, who would pervert that most sacred of all trusts to the destruction of the rights which it was pledged to protect. They believed that to remain longer in the Union would subject them to a continuance of a disparaging discrimination, submission to which would be inconsistent with their welfare and intolerable to a proud people. They therefore determined to sever its bonds and establish a new confederacy for themselves.
The first year in our history has been the most eventful in the annals of this continent. A new government has been established, and its machinery put in operation over an area exceeding seven hundred thousand square miles. The great principles upon which we have been willing to hazard everything that is dear to man have made conquests for us which could never have been achieved by the sword. Our Confederacy has grown from six to thirteen states; and Maryland, already united to us by hallowed memories and material interests, will, I believe, when able to speak with unstifled voice, connect her destiny with the South.
Our people have rallied with unexampled unanimity to the support of the great principles of constitutional government, with firm resolve to perpetuate by arms the right which they could not peacefully secure. A million of men, it is estimated, are now standing in hostile array and waging war along a frontier of thousands of miles. Battles have been fought, sieges have been conducted, and although the contest is not ended, and the tide for the moment is against us, the final result in our favor is not doubtful.
This great strife has awakened in the people the highest emotions and qualities of the human soul. It is cultivating feelings of patriotism, virtue, and courage. Instances of self-sacrifice and of generous devotion to the noble cause for which we are contending are rife throughout the land. Never has a people evinced a more determined spirit than that now animating men, women, and children in every part of our country. Upon the first call, the men fly to arms; and wives and mothers send their husbands and sons to battle without a murmur of regret.
It is a satisfaction that we have maintained the war by our unaided exertions. We have neither asked nor received assistance from any quarter. Yet the interest involved is not wholly our own. The world at large is concerned in opening our markets to its commerce. When the independence of the Confederate States is recognized by the nations of the earth, and we are free to follow our interests and inclinations by cultivating foreign trade, the Southern states will offer to manufacturing nations the most favorable markets which ever invited their commerce. Cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, provisions, timber, and naval stores will furnish attractive exchanges.
The tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism, has denied us both the rights and the remedy. Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty. At the darkest hour of our struggle the provisional gives place to the permanent government. After a series of successes and victories, which covered our arms with glory, we have recently met with serious disasters. But in the heart of a people resolved to be free, these disasters tend but to stimulate to increased resistance.
To show ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the patriots of the Revolution, we must emulate that heroic devotion which made reverse to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.
With confidence in the wisdom and virtue of those who will share with me the responsibility and aid me in the conduct of public affairs; securely relying on the patriotism and courage of the people, of which the present war has furnished so many examples, I deeply feel the weight of the responsibilities I now, with unaffected diffidence, am about to assume; and fully realizing the inequality of human power to guide and to sustain, my hope is reverently fixed on Him whose favor is ever vouchsafed to the cause which is just. With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the Providence which has so visibly protected the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, to Thee, O God! I trustingly commit myself, and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and its cause.
* * *
JULIA WARD HOWE
First published in the February 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, this famous Unitarian hymn quickly became a popular anthem for the most radical forces in Northern politics during the War Between the States. Though utilizing Christian imagery, its purpose is to exalt a kind of messianic state and the coercive force of military adventurism. Written by an avid antagonist to traditional faith and politics, it was a reflection of her enmity with the American system. Nevertheless, following the war it was slowly absorbed into the canon of acceptable patriotic musicology.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
* * *
ELBRIDGE JEFFERSON CUTLER
The War Between the States was brutal and devastating. It was among the first of the modern conflicts in which professional armies did not bear the brunt of the suffering. The soldiers were for the most part conscripts or volunteers—more often than not, barely out of adolescence. This poignant poem coveys the weight of misery that such a war naturally entails.
“At dawn,” he said, “I bid them all farewell,
To go where bugles call and rifles gleam.”
And with the restless thought asleep he fell,
And glided into dream.
A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread,
Through it a level river slowly drawn:
He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head
Streamed banners like the dawn.
There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,
And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay;
Blood trickled down the river’s reedy shore,
And with the dead he lay.
The morn broke in upon his solemn dream,
And still, with steady pulse and deepening eye,
“Where bugles call,” he said, “and rifles gleam,
I follow, though I die!”
* * *
JOHN WILLIAMSON PALMER
Virginia bred and West Point trained, Thomas Jackson turned out to be the South’s most versatile—and unbeatable—military commander. Nicknamed “Stonewall,” his quirky habits, sincere piety, and brilliant battlefield maneuvers made him a legend on both sides of the battlefield. This verse was set to music and became a favorite marching tune among the Southern troops.
Come, stack arms, men! pile on the rails,
Stir up the camp-fire bright;
No growling if the canteen fails,
We’ll make a roaring night.
Here Shenandoah brawls along,
There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong,
To swell the Brigade’s rousing song
Of “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”
We see him now—the queer slouched hat
Cocked o’er his eye askew;
The shrewd, dry smile; the speech so pat,
So calm, so blunt, so true.
The “Blue-light Elder” knows ’em well;
Says he, “That’s Banks—he’s fond of shell;
Lord save his soul! We’ll give him—” well!
That’s “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”
Silence! Ground arms! Kneel all! Caps off!
Old Massa’s goin’ to pray.
Strangle the fool that dares to scoff!
Attention! It’s his way.
Appealing from his native sod
In forma pauperis to God:
“Lay bare Thine arm; stretch forth Thy rod!
Amen! “That’s “Stonewall’s way.”
He’s in the saddle now. Fall in!
Steady! The whole brigade!
Hill’s at the ford, cut off; we’ll win
His way out, ball and blade!
What matter if our shoes are worn?
What matter if our feet are torn?
“Quick step! we’re with him before morn!”
That’s “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”
The sun’s bright lances rout the mists
Of morning, and, by George!
Here’s Longstreet, struggling in the lists,
Hemmed in an ugly gorge.
Pope and his Dutchmen, whipped before;
“Bay’nets and grape!” Hear Stonewall roar;
“Charge, Stuart! Pay off Ashby’s score!”
In “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”
Ah, Maiden! wait and watch and yearn
For news of Stonewall’s band.
Ah, Widow! Read, with eyes that burn,
That ring upon thy hand.
Ah, Wife! sew on, pray on, hope on;
Thy life shall not be all forlorn;
The foe had better ne’er been born
That gets in “Stonewall’s way.
* * *
SIDNEY LANIER
At the Battle of Chancelorsville in 1863, Jackson was accidentally struck by the fire of his own men and mortally wounded. It was one of the severest blows to the cause of the South. Robert E. Lee lamented that he had in fact, lost his “own right arm.”
The stars of Night contain the glittering Day
And rain his glory down with sweeter grace
Upon the dark World’s grand, enchanted face
All loth to turn away.
And so the Day, about to yield his breath,
Utters the stars unto the listening Night,
To stand for burning fare-thee-wells of light
Said on the verge of death.
O hero-life that lit us like the sun!
O hero-words that glittered like the stars
And stood and shone above the gloomy wars
When the hero-life was done!
The phantoms of a battle came to dwell
In the fitful vision of his dying eyes
Yet even in battle-dreams, he sends supplies
To those he loved so well.
His army stands in battle-line arrayed:
His couriers fly: all’s done: now God decide!
And not till then saw he the Other Side
Or would accept the shade.
Thou land whose sun is gone, thy stars remain!
Still shine the words that miniature his deeds.
O thrice-beloved, where’er thy great heart bleeds,
Solace hast thou for pain!
* * *
WILLIAM GORDON MCCABE
In the trenches thoughts inevitably turn toward home. Reading the correspondence of soldiers wearing both the blue and the gray is a heartrending experience. This poem was actually drawn from that correspondence, and it well conveys the timeless tragedy of war.
I picture her there in the quaint old room,
Where the fading fire-light starts and falls
Alone in the twilight’s tender gloom
With the shadows that dance on the dim-lit walls.
Alone, while those faces look silently down
From their antique frames in a grim repose
Slight scholarly Ralph in his Oxford gown,
And stanch Sir Alan, who died for Montrose.
There are gallants gay in crimson and gold,
There are smiling beauties with powdered hair,
But she sits there, fairer a thousand-fold,
Leaning dreamily back in her low arm-chair.
And the roseate shadows of fading light
Softly clear steal over the sweet young face,
Where a woman’s tenderness blends tonight
With the guileless pride of a knightly race.
Her hands lie clasped in a listless wave
On the old Romance—which she holds on her knee
Of Tristram, the bravest of knights in the fray,
And Iseult, who waits by the sounding sea.
And her proud, dark eyes wear a softened look
As she watches the dying embers fall:
Perhaps she dreams of the knight in the book,
Perhaps of the pictures that smile on the wall.
What fancies I wonder are thronging her brain,
For her cheeks flush warm with a crimson glow
Perhaps—Ah! me, how foolish and vain!
But I’d give my life to believe it so!
Well, whether I ever march home again
To offer my love and a stainless name,
Or whether I die at the head of my men,
I’ll be true to the end all the same.
* * *
WILLIAM GORDON MCCABE
Almost any soldier will tell you that the most difficult time to be away from home is during the holidays. Again, drawn from the actual personal correspondence of soldiers in the field, this poem is a poignant reminder of the hellish agonies of wartime.
The wintry blast goes wailing by,
The snow is falling overhead;
I hear the lonely sentry’s tread,
And distant watch-fires light the sky.
Dim forms go flitting through the gloom;
The soldiers cluster round the blaze
To talk of other Christmas days,
And softly speak of home and home.
My sabre swinging overhead
Gleams in the watch-fire’s fitful glow,
While fiercely drives the blinding snow,
And memory leads me to the dead.
My thoughts go wandering to and fro,
Vibrating ’twixt the Now and Then;
I see the low-browed home again,
The old hall wreathed with mistletoe.
And sweetly from the far-off years
Comes borne the laughter faint and low,
The voices of the Long Ago!
My eyes are wet with tender tears.
I feel again the mother-kiss,
I see again the glad surprise
That lightened up the tranquil eyes
And brimmed them o’er with tears of bliss,
As, rushing from the old hall-door,
She fondly clasped her wayward boy
Her face all radiant with the joy
She felt to see him home once more.
My sabre swinging on the bough
Gleams in the watch-fire’s fitful glow,
While fiercely drives the blinding snow
Aslant upon my saddened brow.
Those cherished faces all are gone!
Asleep within the quiet graves
Where lies the snow in drifting waves.
And I am sitting here alone.
There’s not a comrade here tonight
But knows that loved ones far away
On bended knees this night will pray:
“God bring our darling from the fight.”
But there are none to wish me back,
For me no yearning prayers arise.
The lips are mute and closed the eyes
My home is in the bivouac.
* * *
BRET HARTE
The decisive Battle of Gettysburg quickly became fertile ground for legend and lore. This tale, told by one of America’s best and most humorous writers, captures the sense of irony that surrounded the war for many of the combatants.
Have you heard the story that gossips tell
Of Burns of Gettysburg? No? Ah, well:
Brief is the glory that hero earns,
Briefer the story of poor John Burns:
He was the fellow who won renown,
The only man who didn’t back down
When the rebels rode through his native town;
But held his own in the fight next day,
When all his townsfolk ran away.
That was in July, sixty-three
The very day that General Lee,
Flower of Southern chivalry,
Baffled and beaten, backward reeled
From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.
I might tell how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage door,
Looking down the village street,
Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell like a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood!
Or how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.
But all such fanciful thoughts as these
Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,
Troubled no more by fancies fine
Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine,
Quite old-fashioned and matter-of-fact,
Slow to argue, but quick to act.
That was the reason, as some folks say,
He fought so well on that terrible day.
And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heady fight,
Thundered the battery’s double bass,
Difficult music for men to face;
While on the left—where now the graves
Undulate like the living waves
That all that day unceasing swept
Up to the pits the rebels kept,
Round-shot ploughed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
Shattered fences here and there
Tossed their splinters in the air;
The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
The cattle bellowed on the plain,
The turkeys screamed with might and main,
The brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.
Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old John Burns.
How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron—but his best;
And, buttoned over his manly breast,
Was a bright blue coat, with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons—size of a dollar,
With tails that the country-folk called “swaller.”
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen
For forty years on the village green,
Since old John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the “quiltings” long ago.
Close at his elbows all that day,
Veterans of the Peninsula,
Sunburnt and bearded, charged away;
And striplings, downy of lip and chin,
Clerks that the Home-Guard mustered in,
Glanced, as they passed, at the hat he wore,
Then at the rifle his right hand bore;
And hailed him, from out their youthful lore,
With scraps of a slangy repertoire:
“How are you, White Hat?” “Put her through!”
“Your head’s level!” and “Bully for you!”
Called him “Daddy”—begged he’d disclose
The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
And what was the value he set on those;
While Burns, unmindful of jeer or scoff,
Stood there picking the rebels off,
With his long brown rifle, and bell-crowned hat,
And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.
’Twas but a moment, for that respect
Which clothes all courage their voices checked;
And something the wildest could understand
Spake in the old man’s strong right hand,
And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
Of his eyebrows under his old bell-crown;
Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe
Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
In the antique vestments and long white hair,
The past of the nation in battle there;
And some of the soldiers since declare
That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
That day was their oriflamme of war.
So raged the battle. You know the rest:
How the rebels, beaten and backward pressed,
Broke at the final charge and ran.
At which John Burns—a practical man,
Shouldered his rifle, unbent his brows,
And then went back to his bees and cows.
That is the story of old John Burns;
This is the moral the reader learns:
In fighting the battle, the question’s whether
You’ll show a hat that’s white, or a feather!
* * *
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Though he was not even the main speaker at the dedication of a cemetery on the site of the bloody Gettysburg battlefield, the tantalizingly short speech Abraham Lincoln gave on November 19, 1863, is a masterpiece of both penetrating rhetoric and moral politics. These words, though few, have proven to be immortal. Carl Sandburg in 1946 hailed the address as one of the great American poems. “One may delve deeply into its unfolded meanings,” he wrote, “but its poetic significance carries it far beyond the limits of a state paper. It curiously incarnates the claims, assurances, and pretenses of republican institutions, of democratic procedure, of the rule of the people. It is a timeless psalm in the name of those who fight and do in behalf of great human causes rather than talk, in a belief that men can ‘highly resolve’ themselves, and can mutually ‘dedicate’ their lives to a cause.”
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
* * *
JOHN REUBEN THOMPSON
The human dimensions of a war that pit brother against brother remain the most arresting aspects of the War Between the States. In this popular lament the full impact of the human dimensions of the war are grippingly brought to life.
Two armies covered hill and plain,
Where Rappahannock’s waters
Ran deeply crimsoned with the stain
Of battle’s recent slaughters.
The summer clouds lay pitched like tents
In meads of heavenly azure;
And each dread gun of the elements
Slept in its hid embrasure.
The breeze so softly blew it made
No forest leaf to quiver,
And the smoke of the random carmonade
Rolled slowly from the river.
And now, where circling hills looked down
With cannon grimly planted,
O’er listless camp and silent town
The golden sunset slanted.
When on the fervid air there came
A strain—now rich, now tender;
The music seemed itself aflame
With day’s departing splendor.
A Federal band, which, eve and morn,
Played measures brave and nimble,
Had just struck up, with flute and horn
And lively clash of cymbal.
Down flocked the soldiers to the banks,
Till, margined with its pebbles,
One wooded shore was blue with “Yanks,”
And one was gray with “Rebels.”
Then all was still, and then the band,
With movement light and tricksy,
Made stream and forest, hill and strand,
Reverberate with “Dixie.”
The conscious stream with burnished glow
Went proudly o’er its pebbles,
But thrilled throughout its deepest flow
With yelling of the Rebels.
Again a pause, and then again
The trumpets pealed sonorous,
And “Yankee Doodle” was the strain
To which the shore gave chorus.
The laughing ripple shoreward flew,
To kiss the shining pebbles;
Loud shrieked the swarming Boys in
Blue Defiance to the Rebels.
And yet once more the bugles sang
Above the stormy riot;
No shout upon the evening rang—
There reigned a holy quiet.
The sad, slow stream its noiseless flood
Poured o’er the glistening pebbles;
All silent now the Yankees stood,
And silent stood the Rebels.
No unresponsive soul had heard
That plaintive note’s appealing,
So deeply “Home, Sweet Home” had stirred
The hidden founts of feeling.
Or Blue or Gray, the soldier sees,
As by the wand of fairy,
The cottage ’neath the live-oak trees,
The cabin by the prairie.
Or cold or warm his native skies
Bend in their beauty o’er him;
Seen through the tear-mist in his eyes,
His loved ones stand before him.
As fades the iris after rain
In April’s tearful weather,
The vision vanished, as the strain
And daylight died together.
But memory, waked by music’s art,
Expressed in simplest numbers,
Subdued the sternest Yankee’s heart,
Made light the Rebel’s slumbers.
And fair the form of music shines,
That bright, celestial creature,
Who still, ’mid war’s embattled lines,
Gave this one touch of Nature.
* * *
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Despite the fact that much of the conflict between North and South revolved around the slavery issue, the North never adopted an abolitionist stance during the lifetime of Abraham Lincoln. In his first inaugural speech he admitted that in his view the freeing of the slaves was not only inexpedient and impolitic but perhaps even unconstitutional as well. To reinforce that position, several of the states that remained in the Northern Union were slave states—including Delaware, Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, East Tennessee, and Northern Kentucky. Thus, when the administration finally did act on the issue of chattel slavery on January 1, 1863, it did not actually free any slaves within the jurisdiction of its governmental authority. This document was essentially symbolic, designed to placate certain sectors within the Republican’s abolitionist constituency and to provide certain strategic wartime advantages. Nevertheless, the decree did lay the groundwork for freedom for the slaves, which would come with the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
January 1, 1863, by the President of the United States of America: A proclamation: Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following to wit:
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me invested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following towit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. Johns, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin; and Orleans, including the City of New-Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South-Carolina, North-Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth-City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, and which excepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued).
And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.
* * *
WALT WHITMAN
In death Abraham Lincoln was far more popular than he was in life. Partly it was a matter of contrasts—the men who came to power following his tragic assassination were more extreme and susceptible to the pressure of special interests. But whatever the reasons, the aftermath of his death brought adulation where there had been only grudging acceptance before. This poem, by one of the era’s finest verse stylists, was instrumental in helping to create the aura of Lincoln’s almost ethereal saintliness.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won.
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores acrowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here, Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
* * *
ALAN TATE
Lament for the lost cause, the lost sons, and lost innocence of antebellum America haunted writers from both North and South well into the twentieth century. In this poignant tribute one of the South’s most gifted poets expresses the great tragedy that the war wrought on the whole fabric of the culture.
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumor of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.
Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge
We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing;
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?
Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
* * *
SAMUEL SMITH
Actually written prior to the war, this hymn-like patriotic song became an anthem of healing in the years immediately following the conflict. In fact, it very nearly became the national anthem during the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century due to its universal popularity. It seemed to express both an appreciation of the past and an optimism for the future.
My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty:
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died
Land of the Pilgrims’ pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring.
My native country thee
Land of the noble free
Thy name I love;
love thy rocks and rills
Thy woods and templed hills
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.
Let music swell the breeze
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song
Let all that breathe partake
Let mortal tongues awake
Let rocks their silence break
The sound prolong.
Our fathers’ God to thee
Author of liberty
To thee we sing
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light
Protect us by thy might
Great God, our King.
* * *
Almost immediately, the new government found discrepancies or omissions in its constitutional framework. As a result, a series of amendments were proposed. Between 1798 and 1870 five were ratified. The first two rectified omissions in the original charter concerning legal actions and the orderly election of the chief executive. The other three were rather more dramatic adjustments of the charter wrought as a result of the War Between the States and Reconstruction. Amendment XI was ratified in 1798. Amendment XII was ratified in 1804. Amendment XIII was ratified in 1865. Amendment XIV was ratified in 1868. And Amendment XV was ratified in 1870.
AMENDMENT XI
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
AMENDMENT XII
The Electors shall meet in their respective States and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;—The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
AMENDMENT XIV
Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
AMENDMENT XV
Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
* * *
The men who served in the presidency just after the Founding Era up to the advent of modernity had the awesome task of directing the gangling young American republic toward its manifest destiny. Sadly, that task was disrupted by the greatest conflict in our nation’s history: the terrible War Between the States that was anything but civil. Their story reflects both the tenacity and the fragility of this great experiment in liberty.
JAMES MONROE (1758–1831)
The first extended period of peace came to the young nation with Monroe’s administration, the serene years known as the Era of Good Feeling. The European nations, exhausted by the Napoleonic wars, let the new nation develop in peace, and Monroe—and the United States—made the most of it: the United States persuaded Britain to agree to disarm forever along the Canadian border, purchased Florida from Spain, and asserted its growing authority by proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine—the warning to European nations against further conquest or colonization in the Western Hemisphere. At home the problem of slavery was temporarily solved by the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state but prohibited slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line. Before reaching the presidency, Monroe served in a variety of posts: he began as an eighteen-year-old lieutenant in the Revolution; forty years later he held the unusual cabinet position of secretary of state and war. His long career was punctuated with controversy: as Washington’s minister to France he earned Federalist disapproval and, finally, removal by his sympathy for the French cause; as Jefferson’s minister to England, he concluded a treaty on naval problems that failed to uphold American rights and was, therefore, rejected by Jefferson. However, as Jefferson’s minister extraordinary in France, he won a share of the credit for the purchase of Louisiana by signing the treaty that concluded the greatest of real estate transactions. Monroe’s administration brought to an end almost a quarter century of rule by the close friends that the Federalists called the Virginia Dynasty—Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. Like his friends, Monroe almost exhausted his fortune in a lifetime of public service; with them he helped block the Federalists’ drift toward class rule and furthered the establishment of the government according to Jeffersonian principles of democracy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (1767–1848)
Monroe was the last of the southern aristocrats of the Virginia Dynasty. The man who succeeded him was the last of the northern aristocrats of the Massachusetts Dynasty—the Adams family of Braintree. For Adams, though not born to the purple, was born to the red, white, and blue. He literally grew up with the country—as a boy he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from a hill near home; at fourteen he served as secretary to the minister to Russia; at sixteen, secretary at the treaty ending the Revolution; and he later held more offices than any earlier president. The only son of a president ever to reach that office, Adams followed a career that closely resembled his father’s—both attended Harvard, studied law, and were successful ministers and peace commissioners in Europe; both were elected president for only one term; both became involved in party conflicts and spent their least successful years in the White House. Studious and crotchety, Adams was more successful as a diplomat and statesman than as a politician. As Monroe’s secretary of state he negotiated with the Spanish for Florida and was largely responsible for the document that became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In the unusual election of 1824, four Democrat-Republicans contended for the presidency. Andrew Jackson received almost fifty thousand votes more than Adams, but less than the required majority. The decision thus rested with the House of Representatives, and when Henry Clay threw his support to Adams, the House elected Adams. Jackson felt cheated. The strong feeling that developed between Jackson and Adams ruined Adams’s administration and finally drove the two men into separate parties—Adams the National Republicans, Jackson the Democrats. Adams was more successful in Congress, where he served for his last seventeen years. There he distinguished himself by his dedicated fight to remove the “gag rule,” which prevented Congress from considering any antislavery petitions. After fourteen years of struggle he finally won. But his service did not end until he collapsed on the floor of Congress in 1848, sixty-six years after he first served his country at his father’s side.
ANDREW JACKSON (1767–1845)
The first man of the people to become president; Jackson’s election in 1828 stands in American history as a great divide between government by aristocrats—the rich and well-born, as Hamilton described them—and government by leaders who were drawn from, and identified themselves with, the people. Under Jackson, Jefferson’s democratic principles became more of a political reality, but Jackson had to reconcile those principles of political equality with the economic problems of an expanding industrial economy in a growing country. His election, like Jefferson’s, marked a revolution in American democracy. A child of the western frontier, Jackson was as rough-hewn as the log walls of his birthplace. From the time, at fourteen, when he fought in the Revolution, his life was largely one of struggle. On the frontier he studied law and gradually rose in Tennessee politics, representing the new state in Congress before he became state supreme court judge. But he gained fame not as a politician, but as a military hero. In the War of 1812 he commanded the American forces that roundly defeated the British at New Orleans. Tall, with a commanding presence, Jackson had a large, devoted personal following. And his stunning victory over John Quincy Adams in 1828 helped convince him that he was the champion of the people. With such a mandate he exercised his authority with a firm, and sometimes reckless, hand: he asserted the supremacy of the federal government when South Carolina tried to nullify tariff laws, and, in his most dramatic act, he boldly vetoed the recharter of the Bank of the United States, the half-private bank that had become powerful enough to threaten the government itself. Jackson proclaimed that the government should not “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful” at the expense of the rest of society. The man who had been elected by a great popular majority—and had himself risen from the people—proved thirty years before Lincoln that American democracy could achieve government not only of and for the people, but by the people as well.
MARTIN VAN BUREN (1782–1862)
Martin Van Buren was America’s first political boss. Elegant in dress, amiable and courteous in manner, “Little Van” early demonstrated such political skill that he rapidly rose to prominence in New York state politics: he became one of the leaders of the “Albany Regency,” a political machine that developed a spoils system on a large scale and gained control of state politics in the 1820s. A masterful organizer, he welded diverse regional interests into the first effective national political party—the new Democrat party, which, in 1828, supported Andrew Jackson for the presidency. Coming to the presidency after the fiery general, Van Buren inherited thorny financial problems; shortly after he took office, there were bread riots and banks failed—the country was caught up in the Panic of 1837. The skilled politician who had earned such names as “The Little Magician” and “The American Talleyrand” was unable to avert the financial upheaval, but he courageously attempted to improve matters. He established what later became the Treasury Department, independent of any bank. But his administration was generally held responsible for the Panic. He never regained his earlier popularity and was defeated by William Harrison in 1840. No more was the charming little gentleman in a snuff-colored coat seen gliding through the streets of Washington in an elegantly fitted coach attended by liveried footmen. Although he remained a national figure for many years, and was an unsuccessful presidential candidate for the Free Soil Party in 1848, he spent most of his time in retirement at Lindenwald, his estate at Kinderhook, the quiet little village on the Hudson where he was born.
WILLIAM H. HARRISON (1773–1841)
In 1840 the Whigs took the gamble of nominating the oldest man ever to run for president, sixty-eight-year-old William H. Harrison, and they won the election but lost the gamble, for Harrison lived only one month after his inauguration—he had made a three-hour inaugural speech in a drenching rain and caught pneumonia. He served the shortest term of any president, but his election ended the Jacksonian reign and brought the growing Whigs to power, even though John Tyler, the vice president who succeeded Harrison, was an ex-Democrat with rather watery Whig convictions. The election of 1840 marked the beginning of elaborate national campaigns—by then the Whigs had become established as a second party, a development which helped to institutionalize the party system as the country’s method of selecting candidates. Smarting from their defeat in 1836, when they were new and poorly organized, the Whigs met almost a year before the election for their first national convention. They then proceeded to build an elaborate campaign around everything but the issues: Harrison’s military exploits against the Indians—especially the battle of Tippecanoe; and his service as a simple man of the West—the Ohio and Indiana Territories where he served as a civil and military leader. Campaign posters pictured Harrison as “The Hero of Tippecanoe” or “The Farmer of North Bend,” hand to the plow in front of a log cabin. The catchy slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” rang out at the largest political rallies and mass meetings ever held in America. And it is one of the ironies of politics that the log cabin developed into a potent campaign symbol for Harrison, a man who was born in a white-pillared mansion into one of the aristocratic families of Tidewater Virginia. His father, Benjamin Harrison, was one of the Founding Fathers of the nation, a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
JOHN TYLER (1790–1862)
A tall Virginia gentleman, Tyler was the first vice president to complete the unexpired term of a president, but it is almost certain that the Whigs would never have chosen him as their vice presidential candidate had they known he was to serve all but a month of Harrison’s term. For by 1840 “Honest John” had clearly demonstrated that he was not a party man. During his years in Washington as a nominally Democratic congressman and senator he had followed such an independent course—fighting the Missouri Compromise, fighting high tariffs, fighting Jackson—that it finally led him, by 1833, out of the Democratic party altogether; yet his views on states’ rights and on strict construction of the Constitution would never permit him to be at home with the Whigs. But the Whigs had nominated him, and, after Harrison’s death, they had to live with him—as their chief executive. It is not surprising that Tyler’s years in the White House were tempestuous ones. When his stand on states’ rights led him to veto a bill for a Bank of the United States, every member of Harrison’s original cabinet except Webster promptly resigned, and Webster, as secretary of state, was at the time deeply involved in settling the northeastern boundary dispute with Great Britain. Tyler further alienated the Whigs by repudiating the spoils system and refusing to replace some Democratic ministers abroad. Throughout his term he was unable to work in harmony with the Whig majority in Congress, who were led by Henry Clay, the actual political leader of the party. They did agree with Tyler, however, on the annexation of Texas, which was accomplished in the final days of Tyler’s term. But in the election of 1844 only an irregular Democratic convention nominated Tyler, and he withdrew before election. At a time when political parties were emerging as powers on the national political scene, John Tyler left the White House, a president without a party. He served in the Confederate Congress at the end of his life, and was a strong supporter of Southern nullification and secession.
JAMES K. POLK (1795–1849)
An expansionist mood dominated the country in the mid-1840s, and the man who caught the spirit of the times and came from nowhere to lead the country through the period of its greatest expansion was the Tennessean, Polk. In spite of this distinction, Polk has been one of the most neglected of our presidents. Emerging from comparative oblivion to become president, he has somehow managed to return there—in spite of a successful administration, one called by several leading historians “the one bright spot in the dull void between Jackson and Lincoln.” When the delegates to the Democratic convention met in Baltimore in 1844, Polk was not even considered for the presidency; before the convention was over he had become the first dark-horse candidate. And, in the election, when the Whigs made “Who Is Polk?” their battle cry, he answered them by soundly defeating their candidate Henry Clay, who was running in his third presidential race. As president the little-known Polk was a strong, though not radical, expansionist. During his administration the nation acquired the vast lands in the Southwest and Far West that extended the borders of the country almost to the present continental limits. He proved to be a forceful president in his direction of the Mexican War and in settling the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain; yet he did not yield to the extremists who wanted all of Mexico, nor to those who cried “Fifty-four forty or fight!” and claimed the Oregon Territory clear to the Alaskan border. But the man who successfully led the country through its period of expansion strangely faded away when his work was done. Still popular at the end of his term but exhausted from overwork, Polk declined to be a candidate and returned to his home in Nashville, where he died only three months after leaving the White House—at the age of fifty-three.
ZACHARY TAYLOR (1784–1850)
Tobacco-chewing General Taylor was the first regular army man to become president. It was solely on the strength of his popularity as a military hero that the Whigs chose him in 1848; never had a candidate known less about government, law, or politics. “Old Rough and Ready” had practically no formal education, had spent his entire life moving from one army post to another, and had never voted in an election in his life. Although earlier presidents had distinguished themselves in military service, none had made the regular army a career as Taylor did. Commissioned a first lieutenant in the infantry in 1808, he served in almost every war and skirmish for the next forty years. As a young captain in the War of 1812 he showed himself a cool and courageous leader; he won further recognition in the wars with the Black Hawks and Seminoles in later years. But it was his dramatic success in leading the American forces against the Mexican army in 1846–47 that caught the imagination of the American people and made him a national hero. In battle after battle he defeated the Mexicans—at Palo Alto, Reseca de la Palma, and Monterrey—and then on February 22, 1847, he won his greatest victory at Buena Vista when his troops routed a large army led by General Santa Anna. In the White House, Taylor saw his job as the civilian counterpart of a military commander; untutored in politics, he tried to remain nonpartisan, to leave legislative matters to Congress and simply execute the laws himself. But running the government proved more complex: before long he became embroiled in the issue that haunted the country—slavery. Although unskilled in politics, he was a forthright and determined leader: when Southern Congressmen threatened trouble over the admission of California as a free state, Taylor, who owned slaves himself, warned that he would lead the army against them and hang any who resisted as traitors. Thus the hero of the Mexican War, who died unexpectedly in July 1850, proved that, for all his lack of skill, he yet was able to take a stand on the issue the country dreaded facing. No successor until Lincoln was to show such courage.
MILLARD FILLMORE (1800–1874)
When Vice President Fillmore succeeded to the presidency upon the death of Zachary Taylor, he became one of the select group of presidents who have made the American myth “from a log cabin to the White House” a reality. But Fillmore’s rise from humble apprentice to the highest office in the land was more inspiring than his performance in that office. When the short, stocky Taylor was still in the White House, Washingtonians observed that the tall, dignified Fillmore looked more like a president than the president himself. Born in a log cabin in Cayuga County, New York, Fillmore overcame extreme handicaps—he had little formal education, worked on his father’s farm, and at fifteen was apprenticed to a wool carder. While serving his apprenticeship he belatedly began his studies and gradually learned enough to teach school himself, so that he could afford to study law. At twenty-three he was admitted to the bar; by the time he was thirty he had established himself in Buffalo and won a seat in the New York State Assembly. In politics Fillmore generally followed a moderate course, although in Congress he did espouse an unpopular cause by supporting John Quincy Adams in his fight against the “gag rule” against antislavery bills. But as president he accepted Henry Clay’s compromise measures on slavery and signed away his political life when he signed the Fugitive Slave Act. Part of the Compromise of 1850, the act permitted slave owners to seize Negroes in the North as fugitives without process of law. The act aroused extreme bitterness in the North; instead of improving conditions, it drove North and South ever farther apart. Although Fillmore could not then have realized it, his political career was practically over. The man who looked the part of a president was not even nominated by his own party to play the role again—though he continued to be a third-party threat for nearly another quarter century.
FRANKLIN PIERCE (1804–1869)
“I would rather be right than President,” Henry Clay said, and he was often right but never president. But Franklin Pierce, a genial New Hampshire lawyer who said that the presidency would be “utterly repugnant” to him, became president in spite of himself—without ever making a single campaign speech. Like Polk, Pierce had not even been considered a candidate before the Democratic convention, but he was reluctantly pushed into the role of compromise candidate when the convention reached a stalemate at the thirty-fifth ballot. Although he served honorably in his state legislature and in the House and Senate, Pierce gradually developed a marked distaste for politics—in 1842 he resigned from the Senate to return to private practice, and later he refused several opportunities to return to office. Handsome, friendly Pierce had retired from politics for life until he was caught up in the swirl of events that suddenly put him in the White House. In 1853 slavery was still a dominating issue. Pierce took office with the belief that he should support the Compromise of 1850, and like Fillmore, he alienated the North by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created new territories in 1854, simply provided a new arena for the great struggle. In these new territories nothing was settled as abolitionists and pro-slavery groups resorted to force and bloodshed: “Bleeding Kansas” became an open wound. On other fronts Pierce fared little better. Part of his expansionist policy was a plan to purchase Cuba, but he was forced to denounce three of his ministers—one of them was his successor, James Buchanan—when they declared in the Ostend Manifesto that America should take Cuba, if Spain refused to sell it. However, Pierce was able to purchase land from Mexico, which gave us our present southwest border, completing our expansion in the West. Pierce was probably grateful when his party neglected to nominate him for another term. At last he could have his privacy.
JAMES BUCHANAN (1791–1868)
Having the distinction of being our only bachelor president, Buchanan did little else to distinguish his administration. Like Fillmore and Pierce he futilely tried to satisfy both North and South in their intensifying conflict. It is one of the ironies of fate—and of politics—that Buchanan, who was a brilliant young lawyer in the 1820s and a promising political figure in the 1830s, should have been passed over when he first sought the presidential nomination in the 1840s and finally selected to run only when he had become a tired, indecisive old man—until then, the second oldest president ever elected. History has not dealt kindly with “Old Buck,” whose record might have looked far better had he never reached the White House. His career as congressman and senator, as minister to Russia and Great Britain, and especially as secretary of state under Polk, earned him a respectable, though far from outstanding, place in history. But he had the misfortune of reaching the nation’s highest office well past his prime, at a time of impending crisis. And it was his further misfortune that the remedy of compromise that had in the past at least maintained a surface calm, was no longer sufficient; the problem had outgrown this kind of “solution”: the test the nation had been avoiding almost since its beginning was upon it, and the old nostrums simply wouldn’t work. Unsure of himself, engrossed in legalistic details, Buchanan pursued a course that history has most dramatically demonstrated to be the wrong one. And it is his unhappy fate to be forever thrust into the shadows by the towering figure of his successor, the man who proved him wrong.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809–1865)
A villain to some, a hero to others, Lincoln has undoubtedly attained greatness—but only in retrospect. In all history there is no more dramatic example of the times making a man rather than a man making the times than the legendary rise of Abraham Lincoln from obscurity to the presidency of the shattered Union. Every conceivable obstacle was there before him: humble birth, ignorance, poverty, and life in the wilderness of the frontier; he was completely without advantages or connections; he was too human to be a favorite of the professional politicians; and he was too enigmatic, too philosophical, too humorous to be a great popular figure. But somehow Lincoln was nominated for the presidency—as the second choice of many—and with less than a majority of the popular vote he managed to be elected in 1860. Out of those early years of poverty and trial emerged a man uniquely prepared to wage a devastating war against many of his former friends and colleagues—a man of haunting transparency, a man with a probing conscience and a penetrating intellect, a man of deep humanity. After the first ineffectual and indecisive eighteen months in office Lincoln became a strong, effective leader who was firm, unrelenting, and brutal in the prosecution of both war and politics. But, above all, he proved to be a man of vision. He saw the United States in its largest dimension—as a noble experiment in self-determination that had to be preserved even if that meant violating the principles of selfdetermination. In the long history of tyranny and oppression, he believed that the American democracy was man’s great hope and that it must be saved even if resort had to be made to non-democratic coercion. To him the great ideal of democracy overshadowed the practical realities of democracy. Lincoln’s profound conviction of the enduring value of this experiment in a unified government sustained him throughout the long years of war. On the battlefield at Gettysburg, it moved him to give the world a glimpse of his vision of the country’s true greatness: “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And it moved him to enunciate his ultimate reason for striving to preserve the Union: that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” One of the truly great political and human statements of all time, the Gettysburg Address reveals both the ironic complexity and the coarse nobility that mark Lincoln as a legendary figure in American life and culture.
ANDREW JOHNSON (1808–1875)
Few men who have reached the presidency have been less prepared for that high office than was Johnson. It is reported that he never spent a single day in a schoolroom. Bound as apprentice to a tailor when only a boy of ten, Johnson spent his youth working long hours in the shop. Only after he had established himself as a tailor in the mountain town of Greenville, Tennessee, and married did he—with the help of his wife—make progress with his education. But, determined as he was, he never achieved the polish of the formally educated. Unfortunately, he also lacked the complex human qualities of his predecessor. Nevertheless, this rough-hewn politician who was plagued with political handicaps of background and personality left his mark on history, for through all his faults and failings shone the kind of integrity and courage that command universal respect. Never in sympathy with the Southern aristocracy, Johnson alone of the twentytwo Southern senators refused to leave his Senate seat in 1861 when his state seceded from the Union. Firm in his resolve, he served the Union as military governor of Tennessee until he was elected vice president in 1864. And after Lincoln’s death, the presidency provided him with further occasions for courageous action. Fighting the radical Republicans who wanted to grind the war-torn South under the Northern boot, Johnson fearlessly brought the wrath of the Republican Congress on his own head and narrowly missed impeachment—the only president ever to be involved in impeachment proceedings. But he survived that ordeal and, six years after leaving office, he had the pleasure of being elected once again to the Senate, where he had the opportunity to fight against the crushing tyranny of Reconstruction policies put into effect after his tenure in the White House.
ULYSSES S. GRANT (1822–1885)
General Grant was one of the nation’s greatest military heroes but one of its most unsuccessful presidents. Decisive and masterful on the battlefield, a dynamic leader and a horseman of great prowess, he proved to be ingenuous in the political arena. Raised on a farm, he early developed a love of horses and seemed always at his best on horseback. As leader of the victorious forces of the North, Grant was considered one of the saviors of the Union. After Johnson’s unhappy term, Republicans turned readily to Grant—even though he knew nothing about politics. Innocent and sincere, Grant committed errors of judgment from the beginning: He appointed two unknowns from his hometown in Illinois to cabinet positions. Later he allowed himself to be entertained by two stock manipulators—Jay Gould and Jim Fisk—who tried to corner the gold market, a mistake that left him open to charges of incompetence and corruption. As the years passed, the evidence of corruption in his administration was such that Grant lost much of the popularity that first brought him into office. However, he managed to be reelected to another term, one tarnished by even more corruption and more scandal. In spite of the scandals, Grant scored a few victories. Passage of the Amnesty Bill in 1872 restored civil rights to many Southerners, relieving some of the harsh conditions of Reconstruction. And, against considerable opposition, Grant took courageous steps to fight the growing threat of inflation. But the battle-torn country was still in distress; the general who had brought the great uncivil war to a successful close was not the man to bind up the nation’s wounds.