CHAPTER I THE LAND AND THE people THE American Civil War was the result of differences and antagonisms which had long been intensifying and accumulating. Though originally of homogeneous stock-the slight intermixture of other than English stock not being sufficient to give a distinctive character to our early institutions-the Thirteen Colonies founded along the Atlantic seaboard developed in the course of two and a half centuries heterogeneous elements which in 1861 separated into mutually hostile sections, the South and the North. Much has been written about that separation: before it occurred its approach was heralded by discerning minds; the course of affairs during the conflict over separation was recorded by participants, military and civil, of the rank and of the file, and of every degree of insight, candor, accuracy and interest. Eminent foreigners described the conflict as they saw it, and others, no less eminent, discussed it as they understood it. Never before in the history of the world was there made so complete, so various, so contemporaneous a record of a great war. And to the conscious and unconscious record of the rank and of the file, of civilians who directly or indirectly participated, at the South or at the North, in helping or in hindering the struggle, there was added the voluminous official record of the government itself-constituting in all a mass of evidence long since too great for the most industrious man to read and digest, were his life prolonged many years beyond the limit of the psalmist. And yet as time goes on, of the making of books about the Civil War there is no end. A glance at the character of the books about the War discloses almost as much as the books themselves. Before 1861 a few heralds and prophets of unrest spoke of an "impending crisis"; of an "irrepressible conflict"; of a "house divided against itself." During the course of the war and the years immediately following, men wrote of battles, sieges and the fortunes of war; of the heroism of soldiers and sailors; of the tactics and strategy of generals, and the victory or defeat of armies. A few years passed and men were writing about the immediate results of the War; of the problems of "restoration" and of "reconstruction," and the present and future of that "unabsorbed and unabsorbable element" in America-the negro. Yet a few years later men began seriously discussing the causes and consequences of the War; not merely political causes and consequences --but social, economic, industrial causes and consequences. Strictly military and naval histories by experts began to appear: the Civil War began to disclose in perspective its enormous proportions and meaning. Men wrote with less passion and keener insight; mutual recrimination fell under the ban of justice, and students and writers and reflecting people, north and south, and in foreign lands, gradually began a rational interpretation of events which culminated in the terrible conflict and of events which followed it. In truth, the Civil War of 1861 passed into history and became the subject of investigation as other mighty conflicts have become. And out of the vast library on the War men now, more than forty years after its close, select those interpretations of its causes, its course and its consequences which appeal to the considerate judgment of mankind. Yet to the end of time, men who presume to write seriously on the American Civil War will continue to write of its causes, its course and its consequences. Of its causes there is less and less conflict of opinion as the years pass; of its course |