XX. SOLDIER, STATESMAN, DESPOT
Questionings -- The Industrious Burgher -- The Industrious Sovereign -- End of the Marvelous -- Public Virtue and Private Weakness -- The Man and The Age -- Latin and German -- First Struggles -- Usurpation of Power -- Political Theories -- The Napoleonic System -- Its Foundation -- Stimulus to Despotism -- The Surrender of France -- The Master Soldier.
[Sidenote: Review]
The tomb of Erasmus in Basel is marked by a stone slab on which are an epitaph, an effigy, and then the pathetic word "Terminus." Should these fateful syllables be written over the mortal remains of Napoleon Bonaparte? No. Beyond his death there was more, far more than the work he wrought during his life. Men ever love a seeming mystery, and while they do, a favorite theme of speculation will be the career of the great Corsican in its historical aspect. Before our long study can be brought to a close, two questions must be considered, or rather two sides of one question must be viewed. Why did he rise, and what did he accomplish? The answers will be as various as the investigators who give them. But the man as seen in the preceding pages certainly displays these recognizable characteristics: he was a man of the people, he had a transcendent military genius, he was indefatigable, and he had unsurpassed energy.
No mere man, even the most remarkable, can climb without supports of some kind, however unstable they may be. Napoleon Bonaparte did not soar, he rose on the ladder of power by stages easily traceable: first by the protection of the Robespierres; then by the necessities and velleities of Barras and the Directory; afterward by the encouragement of all France, which was sick of the inefficient Directory; and still later by the army, which adored a leader who frankly repaid devotion in the hard cash of booty, and bravery in the splendid rewards of that glory which was a national passion. With such opportunities, Bonaparte unfolded what was certainly his supereminent quality--the quality which endeared him to the French masses as did no other, the quality which above all others distinguished him from the hated tyrants under whom they had so long suffered, the quality which even the meanest intellect could mark as distinctively middle-class, in opposition to its negation in the upper class--the quality, namely, of untiring industry; laborious, self-initiated, self-guided, self-improving industry. This burgher quality Napoleon possessed as no burgher ever did. It was no exaggeration, but the simple truth, when he said to Roederer: "I am always working. I think much. If I appear always ready to meet every emergency, to confront every problem, it is because, before undertaking any enterprise, I have long considered it, and have thus foreseen what could possibly occur. It is no genius which suddenly and secretly reveals to me what I have to say or do in some circumstance unforeseen by others: it is my own meditation and reflection. I am always working--when dining, when at the theater; I waken at night in order to work." How profoundly this was impressed upon those intimately associated with Napoleon can be traced in their memoirs on many a page. It was Soult who said, most sapiently: "What we call an inspiration is nothing but a calculation made with rapidity."
Generally there is no mystery in the power of domination: he rules who is indispensable. The Jacobins needed a man, they found him in the unscrupulous Bonaparte; the Directory needed a man, they found him in the expert artillerist; France needed a man, she found him in the conqueror of Italy. And having risen, he did not intermit his industry for a moment. Rehearsing his coronation by means of puppets, or studying with painful care the complicated accounts of his fiscal officers, or absorbing himself in whatever else it might be, he was always the man who knew more about everything than any one else. Throughout his reign he was the fountainhead of every governmental activity: the council of state sharpened not their own, but his thoughts; his secretaries were his pocket note-book; his ministers were the executors of his personal designs; pensions and presents were given by him to his friends, and not to those who served the state as they themselves thought best; every French community received his personal attention, and every Frenchman who came to his general receptions was treated with rude jocularity. In all this he was perfectly natural. At times, however, he felt compelled to attitudinize; perhaps, in the theatrical poses which he assumed for self-protection or for the sake of representing a personified, unapproachable imperial majesty, he copied Talma, with whom he cultivated a sort of intimacy. Possibly, too, his violent sallies were considered dramatic by himself. "Otherwise," he once said, "they would have slapped me on the shoulder every day." "It is sad," remarked Roederer, apropos of a certain event. "Yes, like greatness," was Napoleon's rejoinder.
Napoleon's preeminence lasted just as long as this effective personal supremacy continued. When his faculties refused to perform their continuous, unceasing task, he began to decline; when the material of his calculations transcended all human power, even his own, the descent grew swifter; and the crash came when his abilities worked either intermittently or not at all. Ruin was the consequence of feebleness; the imagination of the world had clothed him with demoniac qualities, but it ceased so to do just in proportion as his superiority to others in plan and execution began to diminish. "There is no empire not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is the truth." These were the words of Talleyrand, addressed to the First Consul on June twenty-first, 1800, just after the news of Marengo had reached Paris. The marvel of the absolute monarchy was the divine right of kings: when men ceased to hold the doctrine, the days of absolutism were numbered. The marvel of Napoleon was his unquestioned human supremacy: when that declined his empire fell.
In the truest sense of that word so dear to modern times, Napoleon was a self-made man. By his extraordinary energy he made a deficient education do double duty; and those of his natural gifts which in a sluggish man would have been mediocre, he paraded so often, and in such swift succession, that they appeared miraculous. This fiery energy, it cannot too often be repeated, was the man's most distinctive characteristic; when it failed he was undone. Was consistency, as generally understood, to be expected in this personage; is it, indeed, found in most great men? Nowhere does the theory of evolution writhe to sustain itself more than in psychology; nowhere does it discover a greater complexity--a complexity which makes doubtful its sufficiency. Admitting that Napoleon was selfish; that he was lustful; that once, at least, he was criminal; that at various times--yes, even frequently--he was unpopular, and dared not in extremity call for a national uprising to sustain his cause; that he had pitiful limitations in dealing with religion, politics, and finance; supposing him to have displayed on occasion the qualities of a resurrected medieval free-lance, or of the Borgias, or of other historical monsters; confessing that he was launched upon the fiery lake of revolution by the madness of extreme Jacobinism; sustaining the awful indictment in each detail--was there no reverse to the medal, no light to the shadow, no general result except negations? Was the work of Alexander the Great worthless because of his debaucheries? Was Catharine II of Russia a mere damned soul because of her harlotries? Did Talleyrand's duplicity and meanness render less valuable or permanent the work he did in thwarting the coalition at Vienna? The answer of history is plain: what the great of the earth have wrought for others or against them is to be recorded and judged with impartiality; how they sinned against themselves is to be told as an awful warning, and then to be left for the decision of the Great Tribunal. Modern philosophy requires such complicated and yet such minute knowledge in every department of science that the specialist has supplanted the general scholar and the system-maker; the man who aspires to create a plan displaying the unity of either the objective or the subjective world, or any harmony of one with the other, is generally regarded as either an antiquated imbecile or a charlatan. Yet in the examination of historical characters a symmetrical consistency capable of being grasped by the meanest intellect is imperiously demanded by all readers and critics. This is natural, but not altogether reasonable: symmetry cannot be found in the commonest human being on our globe, much less in those who rise supereminent. The greater the man, the more impossible to connect in a mathematical diagram the different phases of his conduct. The search for mediocre consistency in the character of Napoleon is like the Cynic philosopher's quest for a man.
This personage strove, and with considerable success, to think and act for an entire nation--ay, more, for western Europe. In order to render this conceivable, he first took command of his own body--sleeping at will, and never more than six hours; eating when and what he would, but always with extreme moderation; waking from profound slumber and rousing his mind instantaneously to the highest pitch, so that he then composed as incisively as in the midst of active ratiocination. He was able to train his secretaries and servants into instruments destitute of personal volition--even his great generals, who were taught to act for themselves within certain limits, never transcended the fixed boundary, and grew inefficient when deprived of his impulse. He never failed to reward merit or to gratify ambition for the sake of securing an able lieutenant, and nascent devotion he quickened into passion by the display of suitable familiarity. A thoughtful, self-contained, self-sufficient worker, he was sometimes a trifle uneasy in social intercourse, perhaps always so beneath his mask of good breeding, when he wore one; but he played his various roles in public with consummate skill, except that he made nervous movements with his eyes, hands, and ears. His little tricks of rolling his right shoulder, tugging at his cuffs, and the like; his inability to write, and his generally clumsy movements when irritated, were due to deficient training in early childhood. Forbidding in his intercourse with ambitious women and other self-seekers, he was considerate with the suffering, and found it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse the petitions of the needy. Loving rough and ready ways in those busied about his person,--as, for instance, when his valet rubbed him down in the morning with a coarse towel,--he was yet so sensitive that he had to have his hats worn by others before he could set them on his own head. It is useless to seek even homely physical consistency in a man thus constituted.
It is equally useless to ask whether Napoleon could have been as great a man in another epoch as he was in his own. In any epoch of warfare he would have been great; it is likely that in any epoch of peace he would have reached eminence as a legislator and administrator. The real historical question is this: How did he, being what he was, and his age, being what it was, interact one upon the other; and what was the resultant? There was as little consistency in his age as in himself; the sinuosities of each fitted strangely into those of the other, and the result was a period of twenty years on which common consent fixes the name of the Napoleonic age. Does his personality throw any light on the antecedent period--does his career influence the succeeding years?
The age of the Revolution has such intimate connection with the movements of French society that it is very generally called in other countries the French Revolution. But while the movement developed itself more easily and took more radical forms in France than elsewhere, it was due to the condition of civilization the world around. France has been in a peculiar sense the teacher of Europe; for in language, literature, laws, and institutions she is the heir of Rome. In spite of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps in consequence of the Roman hierarchy, her inheritance has been pagan rather than Christian; her ethics have been Hellenic, her literature Augustan, her laws imperial, her temperament a combination of the Stoic and Epicurean which is essentially Latin, her language elegant, elliptical, and precise like that of Livy or Tacitus. The Teuton in general, the Anglo-Saxon in particular, may give his days and nights to classical studies: he is never so imbued with their spirit as the Gaul. "It is with his Bible in one pocket and his Shakspere in another," said an eminent Frenchman not long since, "that the Anglo-Saxon goes forth to reduce the world in the interests of his commerce, his civilization, and his religion. The most enlightened has neither the cold worldliness of Horace nor the calculating zeal of Caesar, but he has the persistency of faith in himself and his nation which, whatever may be his personal belief, is a constituent element in his blood, or, better still, the controlling member of that complex organism to which he belongs." I venture to believe, on the other hand, that the Frenchman espouses his cause from an unselfish impulse begotten of pure reason, an ethereal ichor percolating through society by channels of sympathy, which diminishes the historic pressure for continuous national consistency and natural unity, but emphasizes the great uplifting movements of society. The French armies of the Revolution went forth to scour Europe for its deliverance from feudalism, absolutism, and ecclesiasticism, because the French people had renewed their youthful and pristine vigor in their enthusiasm for pure principle without regard to experience or expediency. Napoleon Bonaparte had all their doctrine, with something more: a consuming ardor unconscious of any physical limitations to the nervous strength of himself or others, and a readiness for any fate which would transmute his dull, unsuccessful, commonplace existence into excitement. When he found his opportunity to heap Pelion upon Ossa, to supplement himself by the splendors of French devotion, he did indeed come near to transcending even the Olympians and storming the seat of Kronos.
It was a long, discouraging, heartbreaking struggle by which he gained his first vantage-ground. This was no exceptional experience; for every adventurer knows that it is more troublesome to make the start than to continue the advance. It is harder to save the first small capital than to conduct a prosperous business. It is more difficult, apparently, in human life to overcome the inertia of immobility than that of motion; at least psychological laws seem in this respect to contravene those of physics. It is not true that the armies of the Republic were those of the Bourbons: the transition may have been gradual, but it was radical. It is also untrue that the armies of Napoleon were those of the Revolution: they differed as the zenith from the nadir, being recruited on a new principle, animated by new motives, and led by an entirely different class of men. A supreme command having been attained by means curiously compounded of chivalric romance and base scheming, the man of action did not hesitate a moment to put every power in motion. Throwing off all superior control, he set himself to every task in the revolution of Italy--conquest, political and religious; constructive politics and administration; social and financial transformation. Winning the devotion of his troops by intoxicating successes, as a leveler he was permanently successful; but this typical burgher had no permanent success in building up a democratic-imperial society out of the royal, princely, and aristocratic elements which had so long monopolized the ability of the peninsula; what he wrought outlasted his time, but the country had to undergo another revolution before its middle classes were ready for the heavy burden of independence and self-government. Yet the struggle for what was accomplished appears to have created a climacteric in the doer. Before the days of Italy his ambitions were petty enough: employment in the service of Russia or England, supremacy in Corsica or military promotion in France; but afterward they enlarged by leaps and bounds: Italian principalities, Austrian dukedoms, Lombard confederations, the primacy of France in some form, Oriental dominion--one such concept took form in the morning, to be swept away at night and replaced by ever more luxurious growths of fantasy. The realization of these dreams was still more amazing than their misty formation. The Revolutionary doctrines of the passing age had stimulated France to over-exertion; her leaders were discredited, her people exhausted. The same agitation had stupefied the Italians; but whatever their political disintegration may have been, the Roman chair and throne retained its moral influence as the bond and mainspring of society throughout the whole peninsula; and now the successor of St. Peter was humbled to the dust, willing to escape with the mere semblance of either secular or ecclesiastical independence. It was an exceptional moment, a vacillating, retrogressive hour in the history of Austria, of France, and of Italy. The exceptional man, the vigorous citizen of a new political epoch, the inspired strategist of a new military epoch, the unscrupulous doubter of a new religious epoch--this typical personage was at hand to take advantage of the situation; and he did so, hastening the disintegrating processes already at work, seizing every advantage revealed by the crumbling of old systems, and reaping the harvest of French heedlessness. The opportunity gave the man his chance, but the chance once seized, the man enlarged his sphere with each successive year.
This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who devised them--and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient institution of parliaments. It will be clear to the careful student of the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each had been more worthless than the one before. Almost any kind of a constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France, excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them. Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all the powers of government, befooling the people more or less completely by the specious formalities of various kinds through which the popular will was supposed to find expression. No one understood this fact better than Napoleon Bonaparte; and since it seemed that the supreme power had to be in the hands of some one man or clique, he was easily tempted to grasp it for himself when it became clear that the profligate and dishonest Directory had run its course. He did not make the situation, but he used it. History does not record that the French nation was shocked or discouraged by the events of the eighteenth of Brumaire; on the contrary, the occurrences in Paris and at St. Cloud seemed commonplace to a storm-tossed people, and the results were welcomed by the majority in every class.
The reasons for this general satisfaction varied, of course; for the conservative and progressive royalists, the conservative and radical republicans of every stripe, had widely different expectations as to the next act in the drama. But the chief actor was concerned only for himself and the nation; partizans he neither honored nor feared, except as he was anxious not to be identified with them. To him, as a man of the people, it seemed that in the Revolution the third estate had asserted itself; that the third estate must be pacified; that the third estate must be prosperous; that the third estate, for all these purposes, needed only to be confirmed in their simple theory of government, which was that the power could be delegated by them to any one fit to wield it, and this once done, the delegate might without harm to the state be left undisturbed to manage the public business, while the people should give their undivided attention to their private affairs. How successful the Consulate was in this respect is universally known and admitted. With consummate cleverness the First Consul summoned to his assistance all the giants of his time, whether they were scholars with their theories and knowledge, administrators with their tact and experience, political managers with their easy consciences and oiled feathers, or skilful demagogues with their greedy followers and insatiate self-interest. These he either enticed or bullied into his service, according as he read their characters; a few--a very few--like Barere, he found obdurate, and drove into provincial exile. At no time did he make a finer display of his astounding capacity for molding strong men by his still stronger will than during the early days of the Consulate; and the manifest reason for his success was that he had a fine instinct for character and for putting the right man in the right place.
What he thus accomplished has been told. The foundations he then laid rest solid to-day; the now antiquated edifice he erected on them, though altered and repaired, still retains its identity. The Revolution had overthrown the old regime completely, and the ruins of society were without form and void. From this chaos Napoleon painfully gathered the substantial materials of a new structure, and out of these reconstructed the family, the state, and the church. He revived the domestic spirit, made marriage a solid institution, and reestablished parental authority while destroying parental despotism. In civil society he restored the right of property and fixed the sanctity of contract, thus assuring respect for the individual and the ascendancy of the law. The finances he reformed by an equitable system of taxation, and by the establishment of an ingenious treasury system comparable to that devised by Alexander Hamilton for the United States. In the Concordat he went as far, probably, as France could then go in emancipating religion and the church; Protestantism has prospered under the regulations he laid down, and by his treatment of the Jews they have been changed from despised and down-trodden social freebooters into prosperous and patriotic citizens. Upon every class of men then living he imposed by an iron will a system of his own. The leading survivors of Jacobinism, extreme royalists, moderate republicans, proscribers and proscribed, men of the bourgeoisie--all bowed to his sway and accepted his rewards. It is said that they yielded to the superior force of his police and his pretorians. Be it so. The fivefold police system he established was a system of checks and counter-checks within itself, within the administration, and even within the army--a body without which, as he firmly believed, the beginnings of social transformation could not be made. He professed, and no doubt honestly, that he would divest himself of this police service as opportunity served, and deluded both himself and his followers into the belief that the process was almost complete before the close of his era. Through the perspective of a century we can see the faults of Napoleon's plan. The Gallic Church is still Roman, in spite of his intention that the Roman Church should become French; the extreme centralization of his administrative system still throttles local free government and makes both oligarchic rule and political revolution easier in France than in any other free land; the educational scheme which he formed, although more fully changed than any other of his institutions, and but recently embarked, let us hope, on a course for ultimate independence, nevertheless suffers in its present complete dependence on state support, and in the consequent absence of private personal enthusiasm which might make its separate universities and schools rich in opportunities and strong in the loyalty of their sons. But we must remember that the Consulate was a hundred years since, and that for its day it wrought so beneficently that Bonaparte, First Consul, remains one of the foremost among all lawgivers and statesmen. And that, too, precisely for the reasons which some cite as condemning him. He took the revolutionary ideas of political, civil, and religious emancipation: with these he commingled both his own sound sense and the experience of advisers from every class, realizing as much of civil liberty and good order as appears to have been practical at the moment.
But in one respect he failed miserably, and that failure vitiated much of the substantial gain which seemed to have been made. He failed in curbing his own ambition. The majestic ridge of his achievement was the verge of the precipice over which he fell. In the first place, his signal success as a lawgiver was due entirely to the dazzling splendors of his victories. Marengo was the climax to a series of such achievements as had not so far been wrought on the tented field within the bounds of French history. It is easy to assert that the French were intoxicated because they were French: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that any other nation under similar circumstances would have behaved differently. The Seven Years' War turned the heads of the English people completely, and they lost their American colonies in consequence; Rome lost her political liberty when she became mistress not only of the Latin, but of the Greek and Oriental shores of the Mediterranean; the distant military expeditions of Alexander the Great prepared the fall of his ill-assorted empire. In each case the careful student will admit that social exaltation was the forerunner of division and of subsequent despotism in some form. Even in the little states of Greece and southern Italy the tyrants always arose from the disintegration of legal government, and by the assertion of some form of power--mind, money, or military force.
It was, therefore, as a military despot that the First Consul promulgated beneficent codes, founded an enduring jurisprudence, created an efficient magistracy, and established social order. In this process he completed the work of the Revolution by exalting the third estate to ascendancy in the nation. The whole work, therefore, was not only recognized as his in the house of every French burgher: he was considered at every fireside to be the consummator of the Revolution for which France had so long suffered in an agony of bloody sweat. Was it therefore any wonder that not only he himself, but even the most enlightened leaders of European thought, considered the safety and renovation of European society to depend upon the extension of his work? It is hard for us to appreciate this, because in France Napoleon's institutions have remained almost as he left them, and well-nigh stationary, while for a century the processes of ruthless reform have been continuously working in other European lands, and some neighboring peoples have outstripped the French in the matter of a national unity consistent with local freedom. The First Consul felt that in order to become great he had been forced to become strong; we can understand that he could easily deceive himself into concluding that in order to be greater he must become stronger. It was in these days that he exclaimed, in the intimacy of familiar intercourse: "I feel the infinite in me." Thereafter democracy in any form, even the mildest, was offensive. Such men as Roederer were sent to Naples, Berg--anywhere out of France. The times were not far removed from those of the beneficent despots, except that this one ruled, not by hereditary divine right, but by military force. Bonaparte's imperfect training in politics and history made it possible for such visions as those which now arose to haunt his brain. The beneficence he had displayed already; for despotism he had had the finest conceivable training, first among the sluggish populations of the Italian states which he had reorganized, then in the myth of Egyptian conquest which he had created and felt bound to maintain, and lastly in the national disorders of a France shuddering at the possibility of a return either to the hideous excesses of the Terror or to the intolerable abuses of ecclesiasticism and absolute monarchy.
Among other dreadful curses incident to revolution and civil war is the stimulation of fanaticism. In his seizure of the supreme power the purpose of the First Consul was justified to himself, and his procedure was rendered tolerable to the nation at large by the scandalous intrigues and complots which were hatched like cockatrices' eggs in every foul cranny of the land. The conspirators stopped at nothing: bad faith, subornation, murder of every variety, from the dagger to the bowl. This gave the First Consul his chance to become himself the arch-intriguer, and as such he overmatched all his opponents, ultramontanes, radicals, and royalists. Finally only a few unreconstructed reactionaries were left from each of these classes, who, though exhausted and panting, still had the strength to be noisy, and occasionally to make a feint of activity. But in the various localities and classes of France each of the factions had numerous silent and inactive sympathizers who had surrendered only as they felt unable to keep up the uneven conflict. The flames of the volcano were quenched, and the gulf of the crater was bridged by a crust, but the lava of sedition boiled and seethed below. It is a well-known nostrum for civil dissension to stir up foreign conflict, and then to call upon the patriotism of men from all parties. To this the First Consul dared not openly resort. In fact, the indications are that if his enemies in France and his foes abroad had consented peaceably to the fulfilment of his now manifest ambitions, he would himself have been glad enough to secure without further fighting what he had gained by war, and to extend the influence of a Bonapartist France by steady encroachments rather than by exhausting hostilities. The word of every man has exactly the value which his character gives it, and treaties are worth the good faith of those who make them, not a tittle more. Neither of the parties to the general peace was exhausted, neither was really earnest. It was a bellicose age: war was then in the air, as peace is now. The rupture of the treaty made at Amiens was quite as much the work of George III as it was of Bonaparte the First Consul, and the two nations over which they ruled were easily led to renew the struggle. Nothing goes to prove that there was long premeditation on the part of either; but at the time and since, were it not for the widespread distrust in Bonaparte's character, popular opinion would have put the blame of renewed war more upon his opponent than on him. Thus far the angel and the devil which struggle for possession of every man had waged a fairly even conflict, and the blame and praise of what is stigmatized as Bonaparte's conduct must be meted out to his foes in even measure. He and his times had interacted one upon the other to a remarkably even degree. But once launched on the career of personal aggrandizement, every hindrance to consuming ambition was ruthlessly cast aside. Until 1812 the responsibility for inordinate bloodshed is all his own.
It is needless to dwell upon the period of the Empire in order to study Napoleon's character. It shines forth effulgent, but noxious. He remained personally what he had always been--imperious, laborious, unprincipled; but, on the other hand, kindly, generous, sensitive to the popular movements. His thirst for power became predominant; his lavish contempt for men and money displayed the recklessness of a desperate parvenu; his passion for war burst all its bounds. Personal ambition eclipsed principle, expediency, shrewdness--in short, every quality which makes for self-preservation. The reason was not conscious despair, but unconscious desperation. Politically he had fought and won an easy but a decisive battle. Imperialism was firmly seated. The behavior of the French people was natural enough, but they lent themselves to his purposes with complete surrender. In this the world learned a lesson which should never be forgotten: that democracy is an excellent workhorse, but a poor charger; a good hack, but an untrustworthy racer. The interest of the plain man is in his daily life, his family, his business, his advancement. He cannot be an expert in foreign or domestic politics, in public law, or in warfare; expertness requires the exclusive devotion of a lifetime. Make the common person a theorist, and he is an ardent democrat, but a poor administrator. Hence the necessity in transition epochs for a wise constitution. It was not difficult to convince the French burgher that, all other forms of democratic administration having had a chance and having failed in times of war, the only one so far untried--that of delegating power to a single superior man--should have a fair trial, the more as the excellent man was at hand. Even in times of peace the hard-worked citizen either neglects his political duties altogether, or, performing them in a thoughtless routine, longs for some one he can trust to do his thinking and acting: in war, as far as we have had the opportunity to observe in ancient and modern times, his imperialism is avowed, and he demands a dictator. We have no reason to suppose that there is any democracy which could outlast twenty years of a herculean struggle for national life or death, and such the Franco-English wars which introduced the last century seemed to the Frenchman of that time to be.
From the soldier's point of view, Napoleon had likewise such an easy triumph as has fallen to the lot of few commanders. His opponents were so conservative that their ideas were antiquated, his own strategy was so new and revolutionary that it dumfounded them. A favorite method of detraction is illustrated by the familiar story of Columbus's egg. What is once done, anybody can do. The strategic reputation of Frederick the Great is in our day first attacked by the so-called comparative method--that is, by comparing it with the achievements and system, not of his contemporaries, but of Napoleon, his successor; and then the strategic reputation of Napoleon is diminished by sneering at that of Frederick, with whose antiquated method the new one came into comparison and contact, to the complete disaster of the former. This vicious circle may be dismissed with contempt. Napoleon's strategic genius was, unlike any other talent he possessed, constructive and original. No doubt he studied Caesar; no doubt he studied Maillebois; no doubt he studied the work of Turenne and of the great Frederick; no doubt he was a pupil of the giant soldiers who inaugurated and carried on the wars of the Revolution; but while others had pursued the same studies, it remained for him to devise and put into operation a strategy based upon past experience, but subversive of accepted dogmas, new, adapted to its ends, and founded on theories which, though modified in practice by the discoveries of an intervening century, have, when properly understood, never, not even to-day, been shaken in principle. His triumphs as a soldier, therefore, are his own; and it was not until all Europe had learned the lessons which he taught her generals by a series of object demonstrations lasting twenty years, that the teacher began to diminish in success and splendor. The persistent critics of Frederick have been asking and reiterating questions such as these: Why did not the king begin early in July, 1756? Why did he not storm the camp of Pirna? Why did he not continue the war in October? Why did he not renew hostilities the following year until forced to it? And so on, and so on. By this method they have shrunk the horizon to their own dimensions, and have imprisoned their victim within the pale of his faults; but a wider view and the historic background display his strategy in large outline, as illuminated by the light of his age; and thus the defeats of Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as the victories of Leuthen, Rossbach, Zorndorf, and Torgau, exhibit the Prussian general as the great genius which he was. It was not until Napoleon had taught his rivals what fighting ought to be that men could also pick and nag at him by asking why Waterloo did not begin four hours earlier, why more explicit directions were not given to Grouchy, why in 1814 the desperate man chose to cut off the line of his enemies' communications rather than withdraw into Paris and call the nation to arms; and so on to infinity. Judged either historically or theoretically, the strategy of Napoleon is original, unique, and unexcelled. It is his greatest achievement, because his most creative.
XXI. NAPOLEON AND THE UNITED STATES
A Decisive Epoch -- Britain Dominates the Sea -- Napoleon's Policy -- Trade and Western Empire -- To the West Indies -- Needs of the Empire -- Great Britain's Sea Rival -- The Imperial Policy Revealed -- Tempestuous Times in the United States -- Party Government -- Livingston's Efforts -- Louisiana Purchased -- Effect on American Life -- Change in Constitutional Attitude -- The Kaleidoscope of Party Politics -- Preponderance of the South and West -- The Louisiana Purchase and the Nation.
A decisive epoch was that of the eighteenth-century revolutions, a crisis reached after long, slow preparation, precipitated by social and religious bigotry, dizzy in its consummation, wild and headlong in its flight, precipitous in its crash. Of this important time the results have been so permanent that they are the commonplaces of contemporary history; in what Carlyle called the revolutionary loom the warp and woof were spun from the past, and the fabric is that from which our working-clothes are cut. Within those years appeared the great dominating soul of modern humanity, who displayed first and last every weakness and every sordid meanness of mankind, but in such giant dimensions that even his depravity inspires awe. His virtues were equally portentous because they worked on the grand scale, with materials that had been threshed and winnowed in the theory and experience of five generations of mankind. It was well within this stupendous age and by the act of this representative man that Louisiana was redeemed from Spanish misrule and incorporated with the territories of the United States. Nor was this all. A careful examination of the general political situation at that time will exhibit the elemental and almost ultimate fact that the sale of Louisiana was coincident with the turn of the age.
The substance of the treaty of Amiens was that Great Britain ostensibly abandoned all concern with the continent of Europe, and that France, ostensibly too, should strictly mind her own affairs in her colonies and the remoter quarters of the globe. George III removed from his escutcheon the fleur-de-lis, and from his ceremonial title the style of king of France. Events narrated in another connection proved the whole negotiation to have been on both sides purely diplomatic, an exchange of public and hollow courtesies in order to gain time for the realities in the struggle for supremacy between the world powers of the period, a struggle begun with modern history, renewed in 1688, and destined to last until the exhaustion of one of the contestants in 1815. Neither party to the treaty had the slightest intention of observing either its spirit or its letter. While the paper was in process of negotiation Bonaparte was consolidating French empire on the Continent, and after its signature he did not pause for a single instant to show even a formal respect for his obligations. The reorganization of Holland in preparation for its incorporation into the French system, the annexation of Piedmont and the defiance to Russia in the matter of her Italian proteges, the Act of Moderation in Switzerland, and finally, the contemptuous rearrangement of Germany, were successive steps which reduced England to despair for her continental trade. To her it seemed as if there could be no question about two things: first, that the old order must be restored, in order to safeguard her commerce; and second, that her colonial policy must be more aggressive than ever.
It was Samuel Adams who first sneered at his fatherland as a people of shopkeepers. The winged word soon became a commonplace to all outsiders, but as it flew every nation that used the gibe girded itself to enter the struggle for the same goal. France above all was determined to be a nation of shopkeepers, and the First Consul of what was still a shaky experiment in government knew well that rather than abandon that ambition, he must sacrifice every other. After all, a colonial empire has value only as the home nation has accessible ports, manufactories for colonial products, and wares to exchange with the producers. France had neither factories nor manufactures, and was destitute of nearly the whole machinery of exchange. Her merchant vessels sailed only by grace of the British fleet. Her home market was dependent on British traders even in times of war. Bonaparte's foremost thought, therefore, was for concentration of energy. The sea-power of the world was Britain's, and her tyranny of the seas without a real check; even the United States could only spit out defiant and revengeful threats when her merchantmen were treated with contempt on the high seas by British men-of-war. Therefore with swift and comprehensive grasp he framed and announced a new policy. The French envoy in London was informed that France was now forced to the conquest of Europe--this of course for the stimulating of French industries--and to the restoration of her Occidental empire. This was most adroit. The embers of French patriotism could be fanned into a white heat by these well-worn but never exhausted expedients--a blast against perfidious Albion and a sentimental passion for the New France beyond the Atlantic. The motions were a feint against England by the formation of a second camp at Boulogne, where a force really destined for Austria was assembled, and the wresting of Louisiana from the weak Spanish hands which held it. As an incident of the agitation it seemed best that the French democracy should have an imperial rather than a republican title, and the style of emperor and empire was exhumed from the garbage heap of the Terror for use in the pageantry of a court.
In Europe thus, as in the neighboring continents, the rearrangement of politics, territorial boundaries, social, economic, and diplomatic relations, a change which has made possible the modern system, was really dependent on the events which led to the adoption of the policy just described. But this policy involved a reversal of every sound historical principle in Bonaparte's plans. For twelve years longer he was to commit blunder upon blunder; to trample on national pride; to elevate a false system of political economy into a fetish; to conduct, as in the Moscow campaign, great migrations to the eastward in defiance of nature's laws; to launch his plain, not to say vulgar and weak, family on an enterprise of monarchical alliances for which they had no capacity; to undo, in short, as far as in him lay, every beneficent and well-conceived piece of statesmanship with which he had so far been concerned. It has been well said that had he died in midsummer, 1802, his glory would have been immaculate and there would have been no spots on his sun. The Napoleonic work in Europe was destined to have its far-reaching and permanent results, but the man was ere long almost entirely eliminated from control over them. The very last of his great constructions was the sale of Louisiana. He needed the purchase-money, he selected his purchaser and forced it on him, with a view to upbuilding a giant rival to the gigantic power of Great Britain.
When we turn therefore to America, we shall at once observe on how slender a thread a great event may depend, how great a fire may be kindled by a spark adroitly placed. While yet other matters were hanging in the balance, he selected his own brother-in-law, General Leclerc, such was his deep concern, to conduct an expedition to the West Indies. There were embarked 35,000 men, and these the very flower of the republican armies, superb fighters, but a possible thorn in the side of a budding emperor at home. Their goal was San Domingo, where a wonderful negro, Toussaint Louverture, noting the attractive example of the benevolent despots in Europe, had, under republican forms, not only abolished slavery, but had made himself a beneficent dictator. The fine but delicate structure of his negro state was easily crushed to the earth, but the fighting was fierce and prolonged, the climate and the pest were enabled to inaugurate and complete a work of slaughter more baleful than that of war, and two-thirds of the French invaders, including the commander and fifteen of his generals, fell victims to the yellow fever. The French were utterly routed, the sorry remnant sailed away, and the blacks fell into the hands of the worthless tyrant Dessalines, whose misrule killed the germs of order planted by Toussaint. One of our historians thinks this check of France by black soldiers to have been a determinative factor in American history, for thereafter there could be no question of a Gulf and Caribbean empire for France. Louisiana, he indicates, became at once a superfluous dependency, costly and annoying. This is a far-fetched contention: great as have been the services of the negro to the United States since he first fought on the battle-field of Monmouth under Washington, the failure of France in San Domingo was not through the sword of the blacks, but was an act of God through pestilence.
The circumstances that forced Louisiana upon the United States, then a petty power with revenues and expenditures less than those of many among the single states which now compose the federation, arose from Napoleon's European necessities. The cession from Spain included all that Spain had received from France, the whole Gulf coast from St. Mary's to the Rio Grande, and the French pretensions not only northwestward to the Rockies but even to the Pacific. The return made to Spain was the insignificant kingdom of Etruria and a solemn pledge that, should the First Consul fail in his promise, Louisiana in its fullest extent was to be restored to Spain. France therefore might not otherwise alienate it to any power whatever. The exacting and suspicious spirit shown both by Charles IV and his contemptible minister Godoy, Prince of the Peace, had exasperated Bonaparte beyond endurance. The Spanish Bourbons were doomed by him to the fate of their kinsfolk in France; a pledge to a vanishing phantom of royalty was of small account. It was during the delay created by the punctilio of Godoy that the failure of the San Domingo expedition extinguished all hope of making Louisiana the sole entrepot and staple of supplies for the West Indies. And simultaneously it grew evident that the truce negotiated at Amiens as a treaty could not last much longer, that either France must endure the humiliation of seeing her profits therefrom utterly withheld, or herself declare war, or goad Great Britain into a renewal of hostilities. This last, as is well known, was the alternative chosen by Napoleon.
Our government had been in despair. The establishment of French empire in the West Indies would have destroyed our lucrative trade with the islands. It was trying enough that a feeble power like Spain should command the outlet of the Mississippi basin, but intolerable that such a mastery of the continent should fall into the hands of a strong and magisterial power like France. We were in dismay, even after the departure of the French from San Domingo. Bonaparte, however, was scarcely less disturbed; for Jefferson, despite his avowed Gallicism, spiritedly declared both to the First Consul and to Livingston, our minister to Paris, that the occupation of Louisiana by the great French force organized to that end could only result in an alliance of the two English-speaking nations which would utterly banish the French flag from the high seas. Bonaparte preserved an outward calm for those about him and went his way apparently unperturbed. But inwardly his mind seethed, and without long delay he took his choice between the courses open to him. It was the first exhibition to himself and his family of the imperial despot soon to be known as Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. If Britain was the tyrant of the seas, he would be despot of the land. To French empire he would reduce Germany, Italy, and Spain in subjection, and with all the maritime resources of the Continent at his back he would first shut every important port to English commerce, and then with allied and dependent fleets at his disposal try conclusions with the British Behemoth for liberty of the seas and a new colonial empire. By the second camp at Boulogne and the occupation of Hanover, Napoleon threw England into panic, while simultaneously he began the creation of his grand imperial army and thereby menaced Austria, the greatest German power, in her coalition with Russia, Sweden, Naples, and Great Britain. The latter, he was well aware, could face a hostile demonstration on her front with courage, if not with equanimity; and he determined to add a double stroke--to gain a harvest of gold and on her rear to strengthen her exasperated transatlantic sea rival by selling Louisiana to the United States.
That determination was the turning-point in his career, just as the sudden wheel and about-face of the splendid force at Boulogne, when he hurled it across Europe at Vienna, displayed at last the turning-point in his policy. His brother Lucien had been an influential negotiator with Spain and plumed himself on the acquisition of the great domain which had been for long the brightest jewel in the crown of France. His brother Joseph had negotiated the treaty of Amiens as a step preparatory to regaining a magnificent colonial empire for his country, an empire of which an old and splendid French possession was to be the corner-stone. Both were stunned and then infuriated when they learned their brother's resolution, sensations which were intensified to fury when they heard him announce that he would work his will in spite of all constitutional checks and balances. There is no historic scene more grotesque than that depicted by Lucien in his memoirs when he and Joseph undertook to oppose Napoleon. The latter was luxuriating in his morning bath on April seventh, 1803, in the Tuileries when the brothers were admitted. After a long and intimate talk on general politics the fateful subject was finally broached by Napoleon, as he turned from side to side and wallowed in the perfumed water. Neither of the brothers could control his feelings, and the controversy grew hot and furious from minute to minute until Joseph, leaning over the tub, roared threats of opposition and words of denunciation. Brother Napoleon, lifting himself half-way to the top, suddenly fell back and clenched his arguments by splashing a full flood in the face and over the body of Joseph, drenching him to the skin. A valet was summoned, entered, and, paralyzed by the fury of the scene, fell in a dead faint. New aid was called and, the fires of passion being quenched for the time, the conflict ended until Napoleon and Joseph were decently clothed, when it was renewed in the office of the secretary Bourrienne. Ere long hot words were again spoken, violent language was succeeded by violent gestures, until at last Napoleon in a theatrical rage dashed his snuff-box on the floor, and the contestants separated. Disjointed and fierce as was the stormy argument, it revealed the whole of the imperial policy.
Meanwhile events in America, if not so picturesque and majestic, were equally tempestuous. The peace policy of Jefferson was rapidly going to pieces in the face of a westward menace, the Federalists were jubilant, and in the Senate James Ross, of Pennsylvania, called for war. When the intendant of Spain at New Orleans denied Americans the storage rights they had enjoyed in that city since 1795, the French politics of the President fell into general disrepute and contempt, for men reasoned a fortiori, if such things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? It mattered not that Spain's highest official, the governor, disavowed the act, the fire was in the stubble. The intendant was stubborn and the fighting temper waxed hot. Both the governor and the Spanish envoy at Washington disavowed the act again and rebuked the subordinate. Congress was soothed, but not so the people of the West and South. They were fully aware, as have been all our frontiersmen and pioneers from the beginning, that the Mississippi and all the lands it waters are the organic structure of unity and successful settlement on this continent. The Pacific and Atlantic coast strips, even the great but bleak valley of the St. Lawrence, are mere incidents of territorial unity and political control when compared with the great alluvion of the Mississippi. This was unknown, utterly unknown, and worse yet, entirely indifferent to our statesmen. Madison certainly, and possibly Jefferson, believed that western immigration would pause and end on the east bank of the Father of Waters.
Yet party government was a necessity under the American system, and Jefferson's ladder, the Republican party, would be knocked into its component parts should the West and South, noisy, exacting, and turbulent, desert and go over to the expiring faction of the Federalists; nay, worse, it might be forced into almost complete negation of its own existence by a forced adoption of the Federalist policy, alliance with Great Britain--monarchic and aristocratic--rather than with radical and democratic France. What could a distracted partizan do? Jefferson was adroit and inventive. He sent James Monroe to negotiate with Bonaparte for the purchase of New Orleans and both Floridas at the price of two millions, or upward to ten, for all or part, whatever he could get; he was not even to disdain the deposit or storage right, if nothing else could be had, and if he could get nothing, he was to await instructions. With such credentials he sailed on March eighth, 1803. A peace-lover must sometimes speak low and small, even as cowards sometimes do. Three weeks later appeared in New Orleans Laussat, the advance agent of French occupation; Victor and his troops were to follow. It is not possible to conceive that a foreign policy could be more perplexing, confused, or uncertain than that of the philosophic theorist who is the hero of the strict-constructionist party in these United States.
Robert R. Livingston, the regular American envoy at Paris, had, under his instructions from home, worked with skill and zeal on the spoliation claims and incidentally on the question of the Mississippi and the Floridas. While the colonization schemes of Bonaparte seemed feasible, Livingston made no headway whatever, except to extort an admission that the spoliation claims were just. Neither Talleyrand nor Livingston was much concerned about the great Northwest. The American was clear that the importance of any control lay in the possession of New Orleans, and on April eleventh, 1803, he said so to the French minister, vigorously and squarely declaring further that a persistent refusal of our request would unite us with Great Britain to the serious discomfiture of France in her colonial aspirations. This was said with some asperity, for Livingston had been aware that the First Consul wanted all negotiation transferred to Washington under the guidance of a special envoy, the wilful Bernadotte, sent for the purpose; and now, worse yet, he himself was to be superseded by Monroe. He had been a diligent and even importunate negotiator; it was a ray of comfort in later days to recall that the first suggestion for the sale of all Louisiana was made to him in that momentous interview.
What had occurred Livingston could not know. It was this. On the morning of that very day there reached the Tuileries despatches giving in full detail an account of the tremendous preparations making in England for the renewal of war both by land and sea. Bonaparte's impatience knew no bounds. Hitherto he had concealed his true policy of sale behind a scheme to spend the purchase-money on internal improvements in France, and he had on his work-table map-outlines for five great canals. Now, at daybreak, he summoned Barbe-Marbois, sometime French consul-general in the United States, an official of state with a thorough knowledge of our affairs, and ordered that a negotiation for the sale, not of the Floridas and New Orleans, but of all Louisiana, should immediately be opened with Livingston. He fixed the price at fifty million francs. The envoy could of course do nothing, but he thought thirty millions enough. Next day Monroe arrived at Havre, and reaching Paris on the thirteenth, that very same day Barbe-Marbois and our two great statesmen began to treat. Upon Monroe and Livingston devolved a momentous responsibility. To Monroe by a most indefinite implication was left a certain liberty, for under no circumstances whatsoever was he to end a negotiation if once it was begun. And here, instead of minimizing terms, was, so to speak, a great universe of land tender. But we had not so easily thrown off the bright and glistening garment of righteousness as had Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the minds of both Americans was the question, non-existent for the First Consul, as he himself squarely said, of whether the inhabitants of the district, men and women, human souls, could be dealt in as chattels are.
Livingston had already seen darkly as in a glass what possession of the west might do for the United States. Bonaparte's contributions to the discussion were terse and trenchant. If he did not transfer the title right speedily, a British fleet would take possession almost in a twinkling; the transfer, he said, might in three centuries make America the rival of Europe; why not? it was a long way ahead; but, on the other hand, there never had been an enduring confederation, and this one in America was unlikely to begin the series; finally, he wanted the cash, as the United States wanted the land. Let there be no delay. And there was none. The terms of the sale and the facts of the transfer do not concern us here. In Bonaparte the United States had no friend; but what the ancient regime began in helping to establish American independence, the First Consul completed; for, thanks to him, the war of 1812 was fought for commercial liberty, while the exploitation of Louisiana has made the nation what it is to-day. The great territory, with all its responsibilities and possibilities, made the United States a world power; a puny enough power at first, but it has grown. Jefferson and his agents were primarily statesmen for the purpose of existing conditions, and in Monroe's mission desired a remedy solely and entirely for party evils. They had, however, the courage to accept the fortune forced upon them, even though in their case, as in that of Bonaparte, it entailed, we repeat, a complete reversal of all the political and party principles of the platform on which they had hitherto stood.
The change wrought by the Louisiana purchase in American life and culture was simply revolutionary. Hitherto in our weakness we had faced backward, varying between two ideas of European alliance. We virtually had British and French parties. Jefferson, who represented the latter, thought of no other alternative in his trouble than to strike hands with England. With Louisiana on our hands, we turned our faces to our own front door. The Louisiana we bought had no Pacific outlet in reality, but the Lewis and Clark expedition gave it one, and that we have broadened by war and by purchase until we control the western shore of the continent. Under such engrossing cares we ceased to think of either French or British ties, except as exasperating, and became not merely Americans, but, realizing Washington's aspirations, turned into real continentals, with a scorn of all entanglements whatever. In the occupation and settlement of Louisiana the slavery question became acute, and the struggle to expand that system over Louisiana soil precipitated the Civil War.
But if the change in national outlook was radical, that in constitutional attitude was even more so. The constitutions of our original states were the expression of political habits in a community, the Federal Constitution was in the main a transcript of those elements which were common in some degree to all the British colonies. It was an age of written constitutions, because the flux of institutions was so rapid that men needed a mooring for the substantial gains they had made. The past was so recent that statesmen were timid, and they wanted their metes and bounds to be fixed by a monument. Nothing was more natural than to pause and fall back on the record thus made permanent, and strict construction was and long continued to be a political fetish. The Louisiana purchase was a circumstance of the first importance in party struggle. Yet neither Federalist nor Republican dared, after mature deliberation, to urge the question of constitutional amendment as essential to meet the crisis thus precipitated. The enormous price entailed what was felt to be an intolerable burden of taxation, and in the uproar of spoken and printed debate played no small part. But the vital question was whether the adjustment of new relations was constitutional.
Never did the kaleidoscope of politics display a more surprising reversal of effect. The loose-construction party lost its wits entirely, while the strict constructionists suddenly became the apostles not of verbal but of logical construction. Jefferson violated his principles in signing the treaty, but he was easily persuaded that amendment was not necessary, that on the contrary the treaty-making power covered the case completely. This was not conquest, which would have been covered by the war power, but purchase, which is covered by the treaty power, surrendered, like the other, by the states to the federal government. The Federalists were represented in the House by Gaylord Griswold; in the Senate by Ross and Pickering. Their resistance was identical in both factious to the highest degree. They contended that the executive had usurped the powers of Congress by regulating commerce with foreign powers and by incorporating foreign soil and foreign people with the United States, this last being a power which it was doubtful whether Congress possessed. Supposing, however, that New Orleans became American, how could a treaty be valid which gave preferential treatment to that single port in admitting French and Spanish ships on equal terms with those owned by Americans? The treaty, they asseverated, was therefore unconstitutional and, even worse, impolitic, because we were unfitted and did not desire to incorporate into our delicately balanced system peoples different in speech, faith, and customs from ourselves. They were, however, only mildly opposed to expansion; they were determined and captious in the interpretation of the Constitution. The party in power were avowedly expansionist; their retort was equally dialectic and vapid. The whole discussion would have been empty except for Pickering's contention that there existed no power to incorporate foreign territory into the United States, as was stipulated by the treaty. The House had resolved, ninety to twenty-five, to provide the money and had appointed a committee on provisional government; the Senate ratified the treaty, twenty-six to five.
What made the debates and action of Congress epochal was the Federalist contention that Thomas Jefferson as provisional and interim governor was nothing more or less than an American despot in succession to a Spanish tyrant. Where was the Constitution now; where would it be when in appointing the necessary officials--executive, judicial, and legislative--he would usurp not merely Spanish despotism but the powers of both the other branches of the federal government? The Republicans quibbled, too; to appoint these three classes of officials was not to exercise their powers. But they confirmed in unanswerable logic a distinction thus far only mooted in our political history--that between states and territories. Already presidential appointees were exercising all three powers in Mississippi and Indiana. This clenched the contentions of the Republicans, and the bill for provisional government passed by an overwhelming vote on October thirty-first. Both parties throughout the struggle had tacitly abandoned the position that Congress possessed merely delegated powers and nothing further except the ability to carry them into effect. Both therefore admitted the possible interpretation of the Constitution under stress of necessity, and the Federalists in their quibbling contentions lost hold everywhere except in New England. That section saw its influence eclipsed by the preponderance of Southern and Western power and ere long was ripe for secession.
Volumes have been written and more will be on the romance of the Louisiana purchase; Josiah Quincy threatened the dismemberment of the Union when the present state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812; but for Jefferson's wisdom in exploration it might have remained a wilderness long after settlement began; Great Britain coveted it in 1815 when Jackson saved it; Aaron Burr probably coveted an empire within it; Napoleon III had dreams of its return to the new France he was to found in Mexico. Excluding the Floridas, which Spain would not concede as a part of it, and the Oregon country, the territory thus acquired was greater than that of Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined. Its agricultural and mineral resources were, humanly speaking, inexhaustible. No wonder it excited the cupidity as it stirred the imagination of mankind; no wonder if men avid to retain their power were dismayed at the preponderance it was sure to exert eventually in a federal union of states. At the present moment fourteen of our commonwealths, with a population of about sixteen millions and a taxable wealth of seven billions, occupy its soil. By the time we are fifty years older, at the present rate of settlement, these will contain about a third of the power in the Union as determined by numbers and prosperity. All of them, however, were from the first administrative districts, never states, and by the retroactive influence of this fact state sovereignty has thus been made an empty phrase.
And this leads us to remember that, if the Louisiana purchase revolutionized our national outlook, our constitutional attitude, and our sectional control, it quite as radically changed our national texture. From that hour to this we have called to the masses of Europe for help to develop the wilderness, and they have come by millions, until now the men and women of Revolutionary stock probably number less than fifteen millions in the entire country. These later Americans have, like the migrations of the Norsemen in central and southern Europe, proved so conservative in their Americanism that they outrun their predecessors in loyalty to its essentials. They made the Union as it now is, in a very high sense, and there is no question that in the throes of civil war it was their blood which flowed at least as freely as ours in its defense. It is they who have kept us from developing on colonial lines and have made us a nation separate and apart. This it is which has prevented the powerful influence of Great Britain from inundating us, while simultaneously two English-speaking peoples have reacted one upon the other in their radical differences to keep aflame the zeal for exploration, beneficent occupation, and general exploitation of the globe in the interests of a high civilization. The localities of the Union have been stimulated into such activities that manufactures and agriculture have run a mighty race; commerce alone lags, and no wonder, for Louisiana gave us a land world of our own, a home market more valuable than both the Indies or the continental mass of the Far East.