Abraham Lincoln and the Union | Page 5

of the word
national. We must not forget, however, that all sorts of people talked of
national institutions, and that the term, until we look closely into the
mind of, the person using it, signifies nothing. Because the Northern
capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it does not follow that he
set up any other in its place. Instead of accomplishing anything so
positive, he remained for the most part a negative quantity.
Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, he made it his
chief purpose to regulate the outflow of manufactures from that
industrial region and the inflow of agricultural produce. The movement
of the latter eastward and northward, and the former westward and
southward, represents roughly but graphically the movement of the
business of that time. The Easterner lived in fear of losing the money
which was owed him in the South. As the political and economic
conditions of the day made unlikely any serious clash of interest
between the East and the West, he had little solicitude about his
accounts beyond the Alleghanies. But a gradually developing hostility
between North and South was accompanied by a parallel anxiety on the
part of Northern capital for its Southern investments and debts. When
the war eventually became inevitable, $200,000,000 were owed by
Southerners to Northerners. For those days this was an indebtedness of
no inconsiderable magnitude. The Northern capitalists, preoccupied
with their desire to secure this account, were naturally eager to
repudiate sectionalism, and talked about national interests with a zeal
that has sometimes been misinterpreted. Throughout the entire period
from 1850 to 1865, capital in American politics played for the most
part a negative role, and not until after the war did it become
independent of its Southern interests.

For the real North of that day we must turn to those Northerners who
felt sufficient unto themselves and whose political convictions were
unbiased by personal interests which were involved in other parts of the
country. We must listen to the distinct voices that gave utterance to
their views, and we must observe the definite schemes of their political
leaders. Directly we do this, the fact stares us in the face that the North
had become a democracy. The rich man no longer played the role of
grandee, for by this time there had arisen those two groups which,
between them, are the ruin of aristocracy--the class of prosperous
laborers and the group of well-to-do intellectuals. Of these, the latter
gave utterance, first, to their faith in democracy, and then, with all the
intensity of partisan zeal, to their sense of the North as the agent of
democracy. The prosperous laborers applauded this expression of
anopinion in which they thoroughly believed and at the same time gave
their willing support to a land policy that was typically Northern.
American economic history in the middle third of the century is
essentially the record of a struggle to gain possession of public land.
The opposing forces were the South, which strove to perpetuate by this
means a social system that was fundamentally aristocratic, and the
North, which sought by the same means to foster its ideal of democracy.
Though the South, with the aid of its economic vassal, the Northern
capitalist class, was for some time able to check the land-hunger of the
Northern democrats, it was never able entirely to secure the control
which it desired, but was always faced with the steady and continued
opposition of the real North. On one occasion in Congress, the heart of
the whole matter was clearly shown, for at the very moment when the
Northerners of the democratic class were pressing one of their frequent
schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympathetic Northern
henchmen were furthering a scheme that aimed at the purchase of Cuba.
From the impatient sneer of a Southerner that the Northerners sought to
give "land to the landless" and the retort that the Southerners seemed
equally anxious to supply "niggers to the niggerless," it can be seen that
American history is sometimes better summed up by angry politicians
than by historians.
We must be on our guard, however, against ascribing to either side too

precise a consciousness of its own motives. The old days when the
American Civil War was conceived as a clear-cut issue are as a watch
in the night that has passed, and we now realize that historical
movements are almost without exception the resultants of many
motives. We have come to recognize that men have always
misapprehended themselves, contradicted themselves, obeyed primal
impulses, and then deluded themselves with sophistications upon the
springs of action. In a word, unaware of what they are doing, men
allow their aesthetic and dramatic senses to shape their conceptions of
their own lives.
That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold