INTRODUCTION HISTORY is the story of race development. It might almost be said to be race tendencies worked out, for leaders are themselves the product of the times, guiding best when they are most representative. Leaders have their main usefulness at the beginning, or at some other crisis in the nation's history; but so far as they do not represent and guide the tendencies of their country they are themselves soon eliminated and thrown off. At the formative period of American history Washington was the most striking figure, but it was the equipoise of Washington which gave him his commanding position. The tendencies of the day were more truly represented by Hamilton on the one side and Jefferson on the other-one standing for the national aspiration, the other for that of local selfgovernment. The Constitution as framed was a compromise, but the government as first administered received a national tendency to some extent perpetuated by the commanding and weighty judicial influence of Chief Justice Marshall, despite the reaction in the other direction under the administrations of Jefferson and his successors. The history of a country is somewhat like that of an individual. The instruction and guidance given in youth by teachers may have a moulding power, and yet the period of adolescence, of growth, is apt to be one of Sturm und Drang, when one is rather trying his powers in different directions than resting under fixed moral or intellectual guards. With maturity, more intellectual questions come to the front, and one's relation to his fellows becomes important and controlling. Thus, the individual communities, which were called States, were interested at first in the development of material resources, in peopling their wastes. In such times all means previously known would be recognized and utilized, and slavery, an institution known at one time or another among all races, civilized or uncivilized, would create no question where it was useful. The intellectual and moral horizon was limited. On the other hand, with the growth of manufactures and commerce, which came first in New England, there would be some with whom mere material considerations would have less weight. Moral and intellectual matters, particularly if one's own material resources were not involved, would come more to the fore. And thus it was that the discovery that slavery was a moral evil, if not peculiar to New England, was original with that section. Meantime, the West and South kept on in their material evolution without much regard for such matters, and it was only as the West, increased from time to time from States created out of common territories, reached maturity that it took much interest in the question. During this period the anomaly was presented that the political party representing decentralization was that which was expanding the geographical bounds of the Union, as shown particularly in the Mexican War. The domestic policy, however, still was to look on the country as a federation of States, which, if not independent, were only restrained by a compact between them. This was the interpretation given by the Supreme Court under Roger B. Taney, a great and pure man, who from 1836 filled the seat of Marshall and kept the judicial department in harmony with the Democratic tendencies of the executive and legislature. It can hardly be doubted that if nothing had arisen to divide the country into sections, nevertheless the filling up of the States and the better communication caused by modern inventions would have produced of themselves a more perfect Union. In its original form, the Constitution was adapted rather to loose communities than to a compact country. It so happened, however, that the institution of slavery, driven from the North by climatic conditions, had found a congenial home in the South. For economic reasons it must either have a free course or it would be hemmed in and ultimately extinguished. At first there was a Missouri Compromise, drawing an arbitrary line across the continent, but ultimately the South was interested in having the common territory opened to its peculiar institution. A Free Soil Convention of 1854 declared that the Union could no more make a slave than it could make a king, but the Dred Scott decision three years later sustained the contention of the slaveholders that the Constitution already recognized slaves as property and that therefore Congress could not prohibit owners from going into the Territories with their property. On the one side it was thought that this case would settle the question and pacify the Union, but, as with attempts which will meet us later, it produced the contrary effect. The States, or at least some of them, had reached that point in their material evolution which enabled men to look at questions from a moral point of view. It were useless to inquire which is the original tendency of mankind. While the sex attraction is primeval, founding the family and so a race necessity, it has always been essential that man should do some labor in order to supply his bodily wants, and worship of the unseen world is one of the earliest intellectual efforts. The family and industry supply individual yearnings and antedate social organization; nevertheless it is in society, political and religious, that man fulfills his tendencies and effects his true advance. In early times church and state have been united, either in one or in coördinate hands, and then in the Middle Ages we find the civilized world convulsed over their contest for supremacy. The Reformation might have been only a |