THE AMERICAN TEN YEARS' CONFLICT.* " My design," says the
author of these two remarkable volumes, in a passage at the commencement of the first which recalls the well-known aspiration of Macaulay, "is to write the history of the United States from the introduction of the Compromise measures of 1850 down to the inauguration of Grover Cleveland thirty-five years later. This period, the brief space of a generation, was an era big with fate for our country, and for the American must remain fraught with the same interest that the war of the Peloponnesus had for the ancient Greek, or the struggle between the Cavalier and the Puritan has for their descendants. It ranks next in im- portance to the formative period,—to the declaration and conquest of independence and the adoption of the Constitu- tion ; and Lincoln and his age are as closely identified with the preservation of the Government, as Washington and the events which he, more than any other man, con- trolled, are associated with the establishment of the nation." Here we have a strain of genuine patriotic eloquence, undis- figured by anything that savours of spread-eagleism. And the impression which abides with the reader after he has com- pleted the perusal of these volumes (which, by-the-way, only bring down Mr. Rhodes's story to the eve of the war between North and South), and has mentally compared them with other works he has read on the same subject, is that of the maintenance of this strain. A great number of the American politicians who took part in the fight which culminated in the abolition of slavery throughout the Union are little better• than phantoms. Webster stands forth indeed as an American Danton. But then he had the good fortune to be photographed by Carlyle. What man, even though he has, or fancies he has, a grip of American politics, could tell off-hand anything about Calhoun, except that he has attained a not specially enviable immortality in the verse of Lowell P And yet Calhoun's last speech in the Senate was delivered under cir- cumstances almost as melodramatic as those which attended the death of Chatham. "Long battle with disease had wasted his frame, but, swathed in flannels, he crawled to the Senate Chamber to utter his last word of warning to the North, and to make his last appeal for what he considered justice to his own beloved South." Sumner is remembered, no doubt,— though mainly, perhaps, because of the savage personal attack which was made upon him, by way of retaliation for the occa- sionally worse than strong language which he used against the champions of the South. But who in England remembers aught of Stephen Douglas (who must not be confounded with * History of the United States from the Compromise of 18130 to ma, By James Ford Rhodos. 2 vols. London; BlaemilLeauu.d. C/o. 1153.
Frederick Douglass, the Negro advocate of Abolition), except that he was the Democratic rival of Abraham Lincoln in that memorable struggle for the Presidency which precipitated the Civil War P Yet of this man, nicknamed " The Little Giant," Mr. Rhodes is able with truth to write that, when he became the leader of the Democratic Party, " since Andrew Jackson no man has possessed the influence, received the confidence, and had the support that it was the lot of Douglas to enjoy from the Democrats in the northern half of the Union." These volumes are something more and better than a gallery of political portraits. Bat the portraits will, from their being so well executed, remain longer in the memory than anything else.
Mr. Rhodes's present volumes cover the period between the Compromise measures of 1850—" the last of those settlements that well-meaning and patriotic men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were wont to devise when the slavery question made unwelcome intrusion "—and the period when it was finally demonstrated that compromise was no longer possible, and that there was nothing for it but civil war. This story has been often told before, but never with greater lucidity, or with more emphasising of the really salient points, than by Mr. Rhodes. The most notable portion of the first of his two volumes is that in which he attempts to describe the institution of slavery, "as it actually appeared before the war to a fair-minded man." Mr. Rhodes holds confessedly with Clay, that "slavery is a curse to the master and a. wrong to the slave," but he is also conscious that, as " in such an inquiry it is quite easy for one of Northern birth and breeding to extenuate nothing, more care must be taken to set down naught in malice." As an instance of his fairness, take the style in which be writes of slave-auctions, over which so much emotion was at one time expended, both in the Northern States and in this country. He allows that the heartrending scenes that used to be depicted in abolitionist literature represented a phase of life in the South, and not the universal rule, He accepts the celebrated and minute account of an auction at Richmond, given by William Chambers, the Edinburgh publisher, as a fair example of what many times occurred. Yet Chambers testified that there was not "a tear or an emotion visible" in the whole of a party of ten Negroes offered for sale in hie presence. "Everything seemed to be considered a matter of course, and the change of owners was possibly looked forward to with as much indifference as [that with which] ordinary hired servants anticipate a removal from one employer to another." One of the women in the party professed to be heart-broken because she had parted with her husband two days before. Yet "while wait. ing for the commencement of the sale, one of the gentlemen pre- sent amused himself with a pointer-dog which, at command, stood on its hind legs and took pieces of bread from his pocket. These tricks greatly entertained the row of Negroes, old and young ; and the poor woman whose heart three minutes before was almost broken now laughed as heartily as any one." Mr. Rhodes, after quoting Jefferson, who "hated slavery, and who studied Negroes with the eye of the planter and philosopher," says that "the earnest and educated women of the North uncon- sciously invested the Negroes with their own fine feelings, and estimated the African's grief at separation from her family by what would be their own at a like fate." Mr. Rhodes also dwells upon the "entire lack of chastity among the Negro women, and the entire lack of honesty among the men," which, never- theless, as he puts it, with almost Scotch humour, "did not prevent their joining the Church and becoming, in the esti- mation of their fellow-slaves, exemplary Christians." At the same time, the weight of the opinions which Mr. Rhodes has collected—and he has collected them from all sources— is decidedly against slavery as an institution. It was good neither for Blacks nor for Whites. A great deal has been said of, and for, the Southern slave-owning aristocracy. But Mr. Rhodes points out—if not for the first time, certainly with unprecedented force and point—that "it was only in law and politics that the South was eminent. She did not give birth to a poet nor to a philosopher after Jefferson, and his philosophy she rejected. She could lay claim only to an occasional scientist, but to no great historian; none of her novelists or essayists who wrote before the War has the next generation cared to read. Whoever, thinking of the oppor- tunities for culture in the ancient world given by the exist- ence of slavery, seeks in the Southern community a trace even of that intellectual and artistic development which was the glory of Athens, will look in vain."
Mr. Rhodes's first volume deals mainly with slavery as an institution in the Southern States, and the various political compromises by which it was sought to pre- vent that institution from being the cause—or at least the excuse — for disintegration and civil war. In the second we seem to drift helplessly towards the inevit- able conflict. Mr. Rhodes retells, and with admirable lucidity and perfect impartiality, the old story of Kansas, of the Dred Scott case, of the assault on Charles Sumner, of John Brown, and finally, of that fateful Presidential contest which ended in the election of Abraham Lincoln, by a popular vote of 1,857,610, which, however, was 930,170 less than the total oast for his three opponents combined— Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell. We have indicated that one of Mr. Rhodes's chief excellences as a literary artist is his power of characterisation. This is admirably illustrated by his sketches of Charles Sumner and John Brown. If the one does not in these pages appear as the martyr, and the other as the hero, of popular belief, both have an unmistakeable flesh-and-blood look. Although Sumner is allowed to have been " one of nature's noblemen," and to have been "endowed with a vigorous brain, a great soul, and a pure heart," it is also conceded that he was "vain, conceited, fond of flattery, and overbearing in manner," and that "he was a profound student of words, but be studied them too much in the lifeless pages of dictionaries, and too little in the living discourse of his fellow-men, so that he failed to get an exact impression of their force and colour." The historical fact which stands out most prominently from the second of Mr. Rhodes's volumes is the fatal dispute in the Democratic ranks before that conflict for the Presidency which ought to have found them absolutely united. Had Douglas and the Northern Democrats seen eye-to-eye with Jefferson Davis and the more uncompromising spirits of the South, the Civil War might have been postponed for some years.
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