HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.* BY the publication of Vols.
VII., VIII., and IX., Mr. Henry Adams brings to a close his very remarkable history of the United States during the first fifteen years of the present century. Mr. Adams's choice of period may seem arbitrary to those who are not well acquainted with American history. Why, they will ask, should he have troubled to isolate these fifteen years, and to treat them with such minuteness of detail P The answer is this. The end of the fratricidal war of 1812 left the Republic in a far stronger position than she had ever occupied before. Daring and before the war, it seemed more than likely that she would split into three or four different nationalities. After the war, that risk had, for the time at least, completely disappeared. She went into the war a jarring cluster of disconnected communities ; she emerged from it a conscious State. She began the war a heterogeneous political entity; she made peace, a homo- geneous nation. Hence .1815 marks the close of a great epoch in American history. What Mr. Adams has done is to note the importance of this epoch-making peace, and to go back to the date at which the forces which produced the war first began to operate. To do this, he has to go back to Jefferson's first Administration, which, since it began in 1801, practically takes him to the beginning of the century. Here, then, we have, broadly speaking, Mr. Adams's reasons for putting the period between 1800 and 1815 under the microscope. The manner in which Mr. Adams has carried out his scheme is, on the whole, excellent. Though his style is not picturesque enough to make his book read like one of Macaulay's essays, it is one which the serious students of history will admire. Quiet, polished, scholarly, and always perfectly clear and intelligible, it will be the envy and admiration of all who know how difficult it is to reduce a confused mass of histori- cal facts to an even narrative. But Mr. Adams's style has more than the negative virtues of good-taste and perspicuity. There runs through it a silver thread of irony, which, while never forced and never falling into mere caricature, keeps it from degenerating on the one hand into rhetoric, or on the other into flatness. One effect of Mr. Adams's Olympian gift of irony is to prevent his book being filled with either angels or devils. There are no heroic figures and no villains. Some men, of course, come out better than others ; but there is neither a shouting either of pans over the Americans, or a calling down of curses on the English. Mr. Adams has far too keen a sense of humour to be unfair.
It is natural that an Englishman should turn, in any account of the war of 1812, first to the great naval duel between the Shannon' and the Chesapeake,' then to the privateering by the American schooners, which made not only the China seas, but even the Channel, unsafe for English merchantmen ; next, to the burning of the Capitol and the White House at Washington by the English ; and lastly, to the defeat of some seven thousand English veterans at New Orleans by a force which, in a military sense; was far inferior to them. Though Mr. Adams, of course, tells the story of the Shannon' and the Chesapeake' somewhat from the American point of view, ho tells it very fairly. He is inclined to think that the luck was dead against the Chesapeake,' and also that her crew was an inferior one. But even if this was so, we must set against it the fact that the ' Chesapeake' was the better ship, and carried the prestige of victory. The truth is, that the odds were as nearly equal as they could be, and that the fortune of war alone gave us, rather than the Americans, the victory. It was quite a " toss up " which would win. The success of the American privateers will cause no feeling of shame to Englishmen, but rather one of pride, for it shows the extraordinary natural gift of seamanship which belongs to the race. While we had to fight only with foreigners, we found not the slightest difficulty in driving off the sea the fleets of France and her subject allies,—that is, the fleets of all Europe. The moment, however, we engaged in naval war with a com- munity of Englishmen, the task we had found so easy be- came impossible. A weak, badly organised State, with but • History of the United Staten of America, daring the Second Administration of Jame, Madison. By rIeu,:y /Warm Vole. VII., VIII,, and IX. London t P. Putnam's Sane. New York : (Marla Seances Bone, 1892. some six million people, did what Europe could not do,—shook our naval supremacy, and turned the ocean from an English lake into a place of difficulty and danger. The following gives some account of the doings of the privateers :— " Tho list of privateers that hung about Great Britain and Ireland might be made long if the number were necessary to the story, but the character of the blockade was proved by other evidence than that of numbers. A few details were enough to satisfy even the English. The Siren,' a schooner of less than two hundred tons, with seven guns and seventy-five men, had an engagement with her Majesty's cutter Landrail,' of four guns, WI the cutter was crossing the British Channel with despatches. The Landrail ' was captured after a somewhat sharp action, and sent to America, but was recaptured on the way. The victory was not remarkable, but the place of capture was very significant ; and it happened July 12th, only a fortnight after Blakeley captured the Reindeer' farther westward. The Siren ' was but one of many privateers in those waters. The Governor Tompkins' burned fourteen vessels successively in the British Channel. The' Young Wasp' of Philadelphia cruised nearly six months about the coasts of England and Spain and iu the course of West India commerce. The Harpy' of Baltimore, another large vessel of some three hundred and fifty tons and fourteen guns, cruised nearly three months off the coast of Ireland, in the British Channel and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned safely to Boston filled with plunder, including, as was said, upwards of £100,000 in British Treasury notes and bills of exchange. The Leo,' a Boston schooner of about two hundred tons, was famous for its exploits in these waters, but was captured at last by the frigate "fiber' after a chase of eleven hours. The Mammoth,' a Baltimore schooner of nearly four hundred tons, was seventeen days off Cape Clear, the southernmost point of Ireland. The most mischievous of all was the Prince of Neufchatel' of New York, which chose the Irish Channel as its favourite haunt, where during the summer it made ordinary coasting traffic impossible. The most impudent was probably the ' Chasseur,' commanded by Captain Boyle, who cruised three months, and amused himself, when off the British coast, by sending to be posted at Lloyd's a Proclamation of Blockade' of all the ports, harbours, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands, and sea-coast of the United Kingdom.' The jest at that moment was too sardonic to amuse the British public.'
That this is no exaggeration can be shown by the resolution of the merchants of Glasgow :— "That the number of American privateers with which our channels have boon infested, the audacity with which they have approached our coasts, and the success with which their enter- prise has boon attended, have proved injurious to our commerce, humbling to our pride, and discreditable to the directors of the naval power of the British nation, whose flag till of late waved over every sea and triumphed o/er 'every rival. That there is reason to believe, in the short space of twenty-four months, above eight hundred vossels have been captured by the Power whose maritime strength we have hitherto impolitically held in con- tempt."
It is difficult for an Englishman to read Mr. Adams's tem- perate account of the burning of the Capitol and the White House without indignation. Even granted that the action of the Americans in burning certain flour-mills on the Canadian frontier gave us a valid excuse for our destruction of pro- perty at Washington, that,action was most barbarous and foolish. The officer in command of the English troops ought to have had the sense to see that he was committing a wanton outrage on the national sentiment of the Americans which would produce ill-feeling capable of lasting for generations. No doubt he was acting under orders, but he would have been perfectly within his rights had he contented himself with burning the Navy Yard. Space does not allow us to quote Mr Adams's account of the English victory at Bladensberg or the English defeat at New Orleans. We must, however, point out one curious fact in connection with the latter event. It is always said that in actual battle well-disciplined veterans must beat raw levies and Militia, led not by regular officers, but by amateurs. But if this is so, how are we to account for the failure at New Orleans of the very flower of the Peninsular Army when opposed to Jackson's very mixed forces P That is a problem which we should much like to see discussed, and we recommend it to Lord Wolseley, who is always specially strong upon the impossibility of resistance by what are virtually armed mobs, to veteran troops who really know what discipline and common action means. A study of the defeat at New Orleans and its causes by such an authority as Lord Wolseley would be of extraordinary interest.
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