A History of the United States of America. Intended for students, etc

Preface

. "THIS work is intended not only for studious boys and girls in schools and academies and for young people in colleges and universities, but for general readers at home and for all who desire intelligently to study the history of the United States and to profit thereby. Its preparation has followed the careful reading and study of a large amount of historical material, printed and in manuscript, purporting to give United States history, or special parts thereof. This material em braced the school histories of Goodrich, Scott, Stephens, Holmes, McGill, McCabe, Thalheimer, Quackenbos, Ridpath, Derry, Blackburn & Mc- Donald, Steele, Barnes & Co., Ellis, Anderson, Venable, Eggleston, Swin ton, Scudder, John Pym Carter, and the ingenious " History of the United States in Words of One Syllable," by Mrs. Helen W. Pierson, and also the more elaborate works of Bancroft, Hildreth, Draper, A. H. Stephens, Alex ander Johnston, Henry Adams, Edward D. Neill, Charles Deane, Thomas H. Benton, Jefferson Davis, Raphael Semmes, the " Household United States " of Edward Eggleston, the "Centennial" of C. B.Taylor, the two thoughtful works, entitled " The Lost Principle " and " The Republic as a Form of Gov ernment," by John Scott, of Fauquier, Va. ; the compilation and sketches en titled "The Genesis of the United States," by Alexander Brown ; the " Nar rative and Critical History of America," by Justin Winsor ; the " Letters and Times of the Tylers," by Lyon G. Tyler, and many encyclopædic articles and other works furnishing material for American history.

Numerous and varied as are the excellencies of these works, they all aided in producing a conviction that a space was left unfilled, and that another work wa,s needed differing in some important respects from each and all of them ; hence, came the preparation and offering to the public of this " Stu dent's History of the United States." The elements in which it is believed to differ from one, or more, or all, of its predecessors in this field, may be briefly summed up as follows. The objects sought herein have been — (i) To embrace in one volume a minute and comprehensive statement and view of all the really important facts of our history. (2) To put into the text of the work whatever is important to the student or reader, and not to distract his attention by throwing into notes and appendices matter often the most interesting and impressive. [ 5 Preface.

(3) To give full and accurate references to authorities, so as to enable the student to explore the sources of the evidence, and to expand his researches, if he be so inclined. (4) To trace carefully the origin and progress in the "Old World" of the principles, institutions, usages and errors which most deeply affected the colonists in North America. (5) To narrate colonial periods, not in those dry forms which ordinarily chronicle the coming of Spaniards, French, English, Dutch, and other Europeans, and which have been so heavy a tax on the patience and powers of attention of voung students, but in the forms of fresh reality, which finally crystallized into thirteen separate colonies, republics and sovereign States. (6) To give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as far as obtainable, on all the subjects which make up the soul and body of the history of the United States.

Errors, omissions, and falsehoods in his tory generally originate in prepossession or prejudice, rather than in igno rance or want of evidence. Truth has always been a bitter and unwelcome medicine to people diseased with partisanship or sectionalism ; but it is the only medicine that will cure. (7) To demonstrate that the civilization of the United States is based on the principles of democracy; not the democracy of party politics, but the elemental principle, existing in all ages and illumined by all experience, that monarchy and oligarchy are unsafe and oppressive modes of government ; and that, when properly controlled by morality, the people of any country can govern themselves by their chosen representatives. (8) To set forth clearly the causes which have led to the extermination of a large part of the Indian tribes of North America, and to indicate the only conditions which will preserve those remaining from a similar fate.

(9) To discriminate definitely between the Revolution itself, which was effected in North America during the eighteenth century, and the events of the War of 1775-1783, which made the Revolution successful. (10) To prove, from established or universally admitted facts, that the doctrine of the separate sovereignty and rights of the States underlies the whole structure of the government of the United States, and that if this foundation be destroyed the structure will fall into hopeless ruin. (11) But to prove also that although the right of each State to secede, for sufficient cause, from the Union existed, yet a compact or treaty of union also existed, and all the States had sovereign right to judge concerning the sufficiency of the cause. (12) To recognize and give full place and power to the supernatural ele ment in the history of the United States.

Under these twelve heads will be found the elements in which this work differs from its predecessors in the same field. Some minor points also re quire notice. Preface. 7 Except in the case of the third day's battle of Gettysburg, all de tailed narratives of the battles in the " War between the States " are studi ously avoided. The reason for this will commend itself to any fair mind. The works and reports on the battles and movements of that war already amount to some hundreds of thousands of pages of printed matter ; and their conflicts of statement are hopelessly irreconcilable. Nevertheless, some facts are proved. The student will find in this work a record of every battle and every military movement of sufficient importance to affect the result. Enough is given to show that brilliant successes may do nothing more than prolong a war, and that the cause in which they are gained may be finally overthrown ; and that a series of defeats may be the agents which finally bring triumph to the cause of the belligerent sustaining them.

Every war in this world has been a war of ideas, and a Divine Power has been "shaping their ends." This work has no maps nor parts of maps of any kind. It is a work on history and not on geography. Whenever relative localities become impor tant in history it is best to describe them in words. Some general knowledge of geography, and of maps illustrating it, is a necessary preliminary to the intelligent study of any history, and especially of American history ; but the maps ought not to be in the book of history. Very few pictorial illustrations will be found in this work. This has been a matter into which some thought and principle have entered. Our age is emphatically the age of object lessons and pictures. They swarm around us and crowd us everywhere — in works of fiction, science, philosophy, his tory, geography, in magazines, periodicals, and in metropolitan and local newspapers; and probably no one source of influence has contributed more efficiently to lower the standard of thought and erudition than this.

Object lessons are suited to children of infantile powers, and to the lower animals, because the ideas they convey are simple and uncombined. But language has a higher mission. It is a Divine endowment given to man, because man is capable of abstract thought. He is capable of forming general ideas and of expressing them by a single word, which often holds in its embrace hun dreds of separate elements. Language, therefore, and not "object lessons " and "pictorial illustrations" must be relied on as the instrument for educat ing human beings when they pass out of childhood. Several lovers of history have aided this work by furnishing rare books and interesting manuscripts. To Hon. Robert P. Porter, Superintendent of the last United States Census, special acknowledgments are due for promptly forwarding, for use in this work, the successive " Census Bulletins."

With this presentation of its object and nature, this work is respectfully offered to all who desire to study or review the history of the United States. Braehead, near Fredericksburg, Va., 1892. CONTENTS. PACES.

Chapter I

America before Colonization from Europe. THE United States of North America embrace at this time forty-four states and seven territories, including Alaska and the District of Columbia. They cover an area of more than three million six hundred thousand square miles — larger than any single sovereignty in the world, except the empire of Russia and that of Great Britain. They held, on the first of June, 1890, a population of about sixty-three millions of souls.1 They have more wealth in lands, houses, factories, ships, mines, stocks, merchandise and money than any other people. They have uni versities and colleges numbering nearly four hundred, and academies and schools, public and private, sufficient to educate all the children of the land. They have a government based upon the principle that man, when properly controlled by morality and religion, is capable of governing himself.

They have perfect freedom in religion. They have Christianity. They have all the elements of happiness and progress that can be possessed in this world. This cannot be said of any of the nations of the Old World. Neither can it be truthfully said of any other people of the American continent. When we look at their condition, we soon discover the want of some element, without which they cannot have as full a measure of happiness, and as energetic a stimulant to progress, as a nation ought to have. This makes it very important that we should know the his tory — the past life — of the people of the United States, so that we may see from what genesis they have come, what difficulties 1 Compare census bulletin from United States Department of Interior, October 30, 1890. with Washington letter in Dispatch December 12, 1890, and statement of G. D. Tillman, M. C, Philadelphia, Penn., December 22, 1890. [ » ] they have surmounted, what obstacles to their happiness and progress they have swept away, what wrongs they have resisted, what rights they have asserted and maintained.

To know all this we must inquire, first, what was the condition of that part of North America now occupied by the United States when European settlements began? Second, what were the conditions as to government, public law, usages and religion prevailing among the nations of the Old World and most strongly affecting the settlers who came to this country? We know that the American continent was not an unin habited desert when it was discovered by Europeans. From the polar regions of the North to the rocky islands of Cape Horn, it was occupied by a population, not numerous indeed, yet varied and active in its modes of life. And all these people were human. They belonged to the great family of man, and gave strong evidences of a common descent. All the shades of color, form and habit found among them proved nothing to contradict the revealed truth of a primitive pair — a man and a woman, united in marriage, and transmitting their blood and their traits of soul and body, original and acquired, to the millions coming from them.1 Therefore, these aborigines of America came, primarily, from the Old World.

When and how they came are questions which history has not answered. Their own traditions and legends on the subject are vague and puerile.2 " One account brought then ancestors from the east, another from the west ; the majority, however, concurred in asserting that the Indians were the aborigines, and sprang from the bowels of the earth." s There was no insurmountable physical obstacle to prevent their passage from the Old World to the New. A tradition yet existing in China says that in the year 217 B. C, a company of seamen, driven off shore by heavy and persistent winds, sailed many weeks and came to a great continent where grew the aloe and other plants, strangers to them, but which we recognize as natives of Mexico.' At Behring Strait the great continent of Asia approaches within sixty miles of America.

This was a passage easily made in good weather and under favoring conditions. But, in truth, neither the Atlantic nor the Pacific Ocean was impassable by the ships of ancient days. We read in Hebrew history of a land of Ophir, known even in the days of the 1 Pritehard and Prof. Cabell. ' Thalheimer's Eelec. U. S., 9 • Blackburn & McDonald's New II. S., 2. ' Thalheimer, 10. Times, Va., September 12, 1890. America before Colonization from Europe. 13 patriarch Job, and where gold was so abundant that the two kings, Solomon, of Judah and Israel, and Hiram, of Tyre, sent ships with the roughly trained ship-men "who had knowledge of the sea," and they came to Ophir and brought thence a treasure of gold amounting in value to more than eleven millions of dollars.1 Gold, in that age, had a purchasing power probably thirty times greater than it has now.

We have no historic light as to any land in the Old World capable of yielding such a sum in gold within a reasonable time. Peru and Mexico might possibly have d/>ne it. Columbus believed that Hispan iola was the ancient Ophir. The conjecture that Ophir was a region of Southern Africa is inconsistent with the scriptural statement that the voyage thither and back required three years.2 Probably the ships of Solomon and Hiram visited both hemispheres in those long voyages. We know, moreover, that within a century past, fifteen sailing vessels have been driven by storms, against the wishes of the navigators, across the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean from Asia to America. How often such accidents may have occurred during the period of more than three thousand years from the flood to the discovery of America, we have no means of know ing.

It is quite certain that a comparatively small number of men and women thus driven, or voluntarily coming, to this con tinent in ancient times would, under the ordinary laws of in crease, have furnished all the population of America existing here at the end of the fifteenth century.3 Seventy-six Hebrews coming into Egypt about the year 1700 B. C. had, in a period of two hundred and thirty years, increased to more than two millions of souls. And we know as history that the earlier races inhabiting America were not savages. The crude theory that the people of the earth were all originally savages, and that they have developed themselves into civilized beings by their own instincts and necessities, has been overthrown by experience and science. It was the theory of atheists and materialists in ancient times, and is held by few except their followers in our day.4 The great German historian Niebuhr denies any such theory, and holds " that all savages are the degenerate remnants of more civilized races, which had been overpowered by enemies and driven to take refuge in the woods, there to wander, seeking a precarious existence till they had forgotten most of the arts of 1 First Kings ix. 27, 28 : Job xxii. 24. ' First Kings x. 22. s Art.

Cain : a speculation, So. Pres. Review, July, 1878, pp. 475-489. * Lucretius, De Rer Natura. Dr. Edward B. Tylor's Prim. Culture. settled life and sunk into a wild state." ' In this view Arch bishop Whately and the Duke of Argyll concur,2 and all as certained facts tend to prove its truth. Among these facts none are stronger than those known or in ferred from the evidences as to the ancient races inhabiting America. Coming as they did, either of their own accord or by irresistible casualties, from the ancient civilized people of the Old World, they brought civilization with them. In Yucatan, within a radius of one hundred miles from the present town of Merida, are the ruins of more than sixty cities once magnificent, the grandest of which was Uxmal, which con tained a lofty palace on a terrace five hundred and seventy-five feet long, and ofwhich the stone remnants show high art and civilization.3 The Aztecs, whom Cortez, the Spanish conqueror, found in Mexico, and the Incas, who were overcome and almost annihilated by Pizarro and his successors in Peru, were populous nations, possessing splendid cities, great wealth, and a very high, though entirely unchristian, civilization.

Cortez, writing to the Emperor Charles V., from Cholula, in Mexico, says : " The inhabitants are better clothed than any we have hitherto seen. People in easy circumstances wear cloaks above their dresses. These cloaks differ from those of Africa, for they have pockets, though the cut, cloth and fringes are the same. The environs of the city are very fertile and well cul tivated. Almost all the fields may be watered, and the city is much more beautiful than all those in Spain, for it is well fortified and built on level ground. I can assure your Highness that, from the top of a mosque I reckoned more than four hundred towers, all of mosques. The number of inhabitants is so great that there is not an inch of ground uncultivated." * And the civilization of the Peruvians in South America was higher than that of the Aztecs.

The people were milder and gentler in their manners, and their religion did not have the sav age feature of offering human sacrifices to idols, as that of the Mexicans did. Yet the very gentleness of these civilized races, their wealth and ease and comfort, had gradually worked to soften and enervate them, and to unfit them to overcome the small bands of mounted and mail-clad Spanish warriors who conquered them. The inhuman and unchristian cruelties practiced on them will forever cast a cloud over the fame of Spain. 1 Niebuhr's Romiscbe Gesch., Parti., p. 88. 2 Whately's Orig. ot Civil. Argyll's Prim. Man, 34-50. 3 Narrative in St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Dispatch, January 9 1891 • From Prescott. A. H. Stephens' Comp. U. S., America before Colonization from Europe. 15 Prior to the savage races inhabiting North America there was' a civilized race known, in monumental history, as the " Mound Builders."

The remains of their homes are found in Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and other parts of the West and South. They show distinct evidences of civilization, such as earthenware, pot tery, urns, agricultural tools, knives, chisels, axes both of flint and copper, fortifications, wells and covered springs, which might avail for a besieged garrison. Some of these works are of great extent.1 But in North America these civilized races faded away and disappeared, leaving only their few and scattered mounds and manufactures to speak for them. Evidently, war and the fierce passions which kindle -war, and are kindled by war, were con stantly at work. And so, when Europeans began to settle North America, they found no human inhabitants save tribes of savages. These were found in every part of the country, existing under various names, such as the Algonquins, the Iroquois or Five Nations (to whom the Tuscaroras afterwards joined themselves, making the Six Nations), the Hurons, the Lenni Lenape, or Delawares, of whom the Mohicans were a tribe, the Cherokees and Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Yemassees, the Seminoles, the Natchez tribe, the Sioux, the Pawnees and others, all of whom we shall meet, from time to time, in the progress of this history.

They differed in many traits from each other, and were en gaged in almost constant war, tribe against tribe, and sometimes confederacy against confederacy. But they -were all alike in some very important respects. They had no civilization worth the name. They cultivated, by the labor of their women, just so much open soil as would supply Indian corn and vegetables enough to supplement the fish, deer, bears and game-birds killed by the male hunters. The men despised honest labor, and con sidered war and hunting as the only pursuits worthy of men. They had no domestic animals or fowls — no herds, flocks, milch cows, tamed horses or swine. It has been claimed by some historians that they had such virtues as hospitality and faithfulness to their promises, but these virtues were seldom exercised as facts.

They were idle, re vengeful, cruel, lying, treacherous and merciless. They de lighted in torturing the weak and helpless. They were, with few exceptions, callous to the motives and appeals of the Chris tian faith. 1 Blackburn & McDonald, 5, 6. Prof. Steele, Barnes' Brief U. S., 9-12. There were not more than two hundred thousand of them in all the vast region bounded by the Atlantic, the Mississippi river, the Northern lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. That they had rights which the European settlers were bound to respect, cannot be denied. But, by the principles of international law and sound morality, they had no right to exclude agriculture and civilized settlement for the purpose of continuing the savage mode of living by hunting and war.1 If willing to adopt Christianity, even in her lower forms, as a civilizer, they would have been preserved.' But, as a fact, with few exceptions, they have resisted the claims of Christ and of humanity, and have thus, by inexorable law, brought extermination on them selves. ' Vattel's Law of Nations, ed. 1849, pp. 98-101

Chapter II

The Discovery of America. IT cannot be now affirmed as history that Christopher Columbus, supposed to be a native of Genoa, in Italy, was the first European who discovered America. If Ophir was in Mexico or Peru, some knowledge of the great Western Continent was pos sessed even by the sea-faring people of ancient Judea, Tyre and Sidon. About the year 300 B. O, Hanno, of Carthage, is said to have left the shores of Africa behind him, and sailed westward for thirty days. An undiscovered country, filled with mighty mountains and rivers, and peopled with a race of giants, was be lieved in by some of the deep thinkers of antiquity.1 There is a tradition that Madoc, son of Owen Guyneth, Prince of North Wales, quarreled with his brothers concerning the di vision of their patrimony, and sailed west about the year A. D. 1 170, " leaving the west of Ireland so far north that he came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things." 2 And it has been asserted that a dialect of the Welsh language has been detected by skilled linguists among the Indians of North Caro lina ; 3 and Robert Southey, the English poet, has wrought this tradition into a long poem.

Yet it has in it more of poetry than of truth. But adequate historical evidence proves that Iceland, " the island of frost and flame," had been occupied for at least a hun dred years by a hardy sea-race from Norway, when, in A. D. 985, Eric the Red, an Icelandic chief, discovered Greenland, and planted a colony of his countrymen on its southwestern shore. One of Eric's comrades, driven by adverse winds, descried the main-land of North America stretching far away to the south west. The weather-beaten settlers of Greenland opened a trade with the Esquimaux, who occupied the coast and islands of America north of Labrador. The trade grew so prosperous that these Greenlanders paid a yearly tribute of two thousand six hun dred pounds of walrus teeth to the Pontiff of Rome.* 1 Blackburn * McDonald, 3. ' Hakluyt's Voyages, edit. 1600, III. 1.

Belknap's Am. Biog., 1. 129. aBurk's Hist, of Va., III. 84-87. «Thalheimer's Eclec. U. S., 10. 2 [ 17 ] In 1002 A. D., Lief, the son of Eric the Red, fitted out a ship in Norway, manned her with a crew of thirty-five bold seamen, and, after visiting his father at the Greenland settlement, sailed away southward and westward, discovered a region which he called Helluland (meaning Slateland), and which is now supposed to have been either Newfoundland or a part of Labrador, and ad vanced farther southward until he discovered the coasts of a country into which entrance seemed invited by the waters of a wide bay.1 Here at the head of the bay his crew landed and built houses for shelter during the winter. But they landed in the autumn season, and such were the abundance and the rich ness of the wild grapes that hung in clusters everywhere from the vines clambering among the trees of the forests, that Lief gave the name " Vinland the Good " to the country.

It was probably Rhode Island, though a careful student of all the visible land and water marks given believes it to have been a part of Nova Scotia.2 And even prior to Lief, the bold Icelandic navigators had discovered and explored the coast of North America. The Norse men, inhabiting the region now covered by Norway, Sweden, (including Lapland), Denmark and Iceland, with her dependency Greenland, and designated in modern times by the name of " Scandinavia," were a strong, earnest, courageous and free race pf mankind. The best elements of freedom, civil and religious, now possessed in some parts of Europe, in England, and in the United States, came from them. Their minds were active and inquiring. During the times known as the " dark ages," when the literature of Southern Europe consisted of nothing higher than monkish legends and fabulous lives of the saints, these Norsemen had, in their historical sagas, or written accounts of past events, a depository of truth, since collected and arranged, and entitled to as high credit as any of the earlier narratives of civilized nations.3 These Norsemen did not wait for ships to be furnished by their government.

Between the years 985 and 1002 A. D., Bjarni Her julf, in his own vessel and with his own brave crew, set out from Iceland, went first to Greenland, and thence entered the boister ous seas west of that great island, and explored the coasts of New foundland, Nova- Scotia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecti cut, and Long Island, and probably coasted as far south as Florida.* 1 Antiquitates Amer. A. H. Stephens' Comp. U. S., 17, 18. ' Prof. Gustav. Storm, Aarborger, 1887. The Nation, N. Y., January, 1891. 3 Prof. Ch. Christian Rafn's Antiquitates Amer., Copenhagen, 1837. Humboldt's Cosmos Malte Brun. Geog. * Codex Flatoiensis, Rain's Antiquitates Amer. Icelandic Discoveries, Marie A. Brown 1888, pp. 9, 151, 153. ■9 After he returned to Iceland and told of his discoveries, Lief, the son of Eric the Red, went to him and bought his ship from him, and with thirty-five men set out on the voyage of 1002, which we have narrated first because it was followed by an actual building of houses and wintering in America.

Christopher Columbus is entitled to the credit of having deeply meditated on the question of the form of the earth, of having studied Plato and Aristotle, and all that was then known of the navigation of the seas and of the possibility of reaching land by sailing westward from Europe. But he is not entitled to the glory of being the discoverer of America in 1492, or at any other time. And from the false glory that has so long been ascribed to him, modern historical researches have taken away nearly all the brightest beams. We are now compelled by discovered truth to look on him as one so influenced by inherited religious beliefs, and so dominated by personal ambition and avarice, that he was will ing deliberately to claim as his own the discovery of America, which, he knew, had been made nearly five hundred years before he sailed from Palos.

It is now known that the Norsemen had unwillingly accepted Christianity, in her perverted doctrines and forms, before Bjarni and Lief, son of Eric the Red, and a third navigator, Thorfinn Karlsefne, made their discoveries of the coast of North America and planted settlements there. These settlements had a life of at least three years. During this time some of the ruder forms of Christianity had been established among the settlers in " Vinland the Good." The Roman church had learned of this discovery and settlement, and had appointed a bishop for Greenland and also one for Vin land. And Gudrid, the wife of Thorfinn Karlsefne, lived for three years in Vinland, and knew all about its discovery and settle ment. She was a baptized Christian, and seems to have been a loving adherent of the Roman church.

After her return from Vinland she visited Rome, and conversed with the Pontiff John XVIL and the holy fathers of the church there resident. To suppose that she did not make adequate statements as to this new land and all she had learned of it, is preposterous.1 Moreover, in 1076 A. D. lived Adam Von Bramen, who left a written statement as to these discoveries, published with other historical narratives in 1579, in the city of Copenhagen, Den mark.2 The policy of the church of Rome has ever been to pre- 1 Historia Ecclesiastica, in Brown's Icelandic Discoveries, 69, 209. 3 Ibid., 69, 209. serve in her archives all that could be used for the extension of her influence, both temporal and spiritual. We have definite evidence that Columbus visited fceland in the early spring of 1477. He was a navigator and had no difficulty in finding a ship wherein to make this voyage.1 We have facts enough to justify the belief that he learned of these voyages to Vinland. fn truth, a full account of them had been condensed from the historical sagas and committed to writing eighty years before his visit to fceland.2 To examine these records was in all human probability the definite object of his visit to Iceland.