The Making of Modern America ~ HY 14020
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Seminars
Seminar No. 1
The Making of American Politics
In reading the documents relating this topic and the
relevant section of The Penguin History of the United States, you should
consider the following questions. You
should jot down, either here or on a separate piece of paper your responses to
the questions and bring them along to the seminar.
The intention is that these questions will form at least a starting-point
for discussion, although they should not be allowed to confine it too narrowly.
If any other questions arise in your own reading of the texts, do not
hesitate to bring them forward. You
may be assigned other, more specific tasks in preparing for the seminar.
1. What were the main elements of Hamilton’s financial programme (do not worry too much about the details)?
2. What do you think he was trying to achieve by, for example, creating the Bank of the United States? What economic advantages did he expect his programme to bring (and to whom)? Did he also have certain political objectives?
3. How does he justify creating a national Bank in terms of the Constitution?
4. What do you think of Hamilton’s view of politics in general?
5. Why did Jefferson object to Hamilton’s programme? Were his objections essentially economic or political?
6. Why does Jefferson regard farmers as "the chosen people of God"? Why does he regard an agricultural way of life superior to one based on manufacturing? How is Jefferson's conception of the superiority of agriculture related to his view of republican government? How does that view differ from Hamilton's?
7. Who do you think had the better of the constitutional argument?
8. Whose policies do you think would have been better for the future of the United States? (Whose were actually followed?)
Compulsory
Reading
Hugh
Brogan, Penguin History of the
United States of America, chs. 11 and 13
Documents
(to be distributed)
Some
Additional Reading
Noble
Cunningham, ed., Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton
John
C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801
Morton
Borden, Parties and Politics in the Early Republic
Michael
Heale, The Making of American Politics
[Jefferson's
book is a detailed description of his native state written for the benefit of
European readers. In this passage
he gives voice to some of his fundamental beliefs about society and politics,
emphasising especially the importance of agriculture for a healthy society.]
The political
economists of Europe have established it as a principle that every state should
endeavor to manufacture for itself; and this principle, like many others, we
transfer to America, without calculating the difference of circumstance which
should often produce a difference of result.
In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the
cultivator. Manufacture must
therefore be resorted to of necessity, not of choice, to support the
surplus of their people. But
we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman.
Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its
improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise
manufacturers and handicraft arts for the other?
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if he ever had
a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial
and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire,
which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a
phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those who, not looking up to heaven, to
their own soil and industry, as does the husbandmen for their subsistence,
depend for it on the casualties and caprice of
customers. Dependence begets
subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools
for the design of ambition. This,
the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been
retarded by accidental circumstances; but, generally speaking, the proportion
which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that
of its husbandmen is the proportion if its unsound to its healthy parts, and is
a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.
While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens
occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff.
Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but, for the
general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe.
It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there than
bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and
principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic
will be made up in happiness and permanence of government.
The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure
government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.
It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in
vigor. A degeneracy in these is a
canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
Doc
2. Alexander Hamilton, "Report
on the Subject of Manufactures," 1791
[This is one of
a series of reports written by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington's Secretary
of the Treasury, in which he proposed an ambitious set of federal policies
regarding taxation, management of the national debt, the creation of a national
bank and the promotion of manufacturing by means of a mixture of tariffs and
subsidies. Here he explains the
advantages that he believes would arise from
the development of industry.]
The expediency of encouraging manufacturers in the United States appears at this time to be pretty generally admitted. The embarrassments which have obstructed the progress of our external trade, have led to serious reflections on the necessity of enlarging the sphere of our domestic commerce. The restrictive regulations, which, in foreign markets, abridge the vent of the increasing surplus of our agricultural produce . . . beget an earnest desire that a more extensive demand for that surplus may be created at home. . . .
It is now proper to proceed a step further, and to enumerate the principal circumstances from which it may be inferred that manufacturing establishments not only occasion a positive augmentation of the produce and revenue of the society, but that they contribute essentially to rendering them greater than they could possible be without such establishment. These circumstances are:
1. The division of labor.
2. An extension of the use of machinery.
3. Additional employment to classes of the community not ordinarily engaged in the business.
4. The promoting of emigration from foreign countries.
5. The furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions which discriminate men from each other.
6. The affording a more ample and various field for enterprise.
7. The creating, in some instances, a new, and securing in all a more certain and steady demand for the surplus produce of the soil.
Each of these circumstances has a considerable influence upon the total mass of industrious effort in a community; together they add to it a degree of energy and effect which is not easily conceived. . . .
Doc
3. Jefferson, Opinion on the
Constititutionality of the Bank, 1791
[One
of Hamilton's most important proposals was to establish a national bank.
At Washington's request, both Hamilton and Jefferson submitted opinions
on whether or not such a measure was consistent with the terms of the
Constitution. The Constitution did
not explicitly authorise Congress to charter a bank (see Article I, Section 8),
but could it be justified as a necessary extension of other powers that the
federal government clearly did possess? Also
at issue is the general approach that should be adopted in interpreting the
Constitution: whether liberally, as Hamilton proposes, or narrowly, confining
oneself closely to the actual language of the document, as Jefferson argues in
this extract.]
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on the ground—that all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.
The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution.
I. They are not among the
powers specially enumerated. For
these are,—
1. A power to lay taxes for the purpose of paying the debts of the United States. But no debt is paid by this bill, nor any tax laid. . . .
2. To "borrow money". But this bill neither borrows money nor insures the borrowing of it.
3. "To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the states, and with the Indian tribes." To erect a bank, and to regulate commerce, are very different acts. He who erects a bank creates a subject of commerce in its bills; so does he who makes a bushel of wheat, or digs a dollar out of the mines; yet neither of these persons regulates commerce thereby. To make a thing which may be bought and sold, is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling. . . .
Still less are these powers covered by any other of the special enumerations.
II. Nor are they within either of the general phrases, which are the two following
1. "To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States;" that is to say, "to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare;" for the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. Congress are not to lay taxes ad libitum, for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts, or provide for the welfare, of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please, to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase, not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase—that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States, and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they pleased. It is an established rule of construction, where a phrase will bear either of two meanings to give it that which will allow some meaning to the other parts of the instrument, and not that which will render all the others useless. . . .
2. The second general phrase is "to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the enumerated powers." But they can all be carried to execution without a bank. A bank, therefore, is not necessary, and consequently not authorised by this phrase.
It has
been much urged that a bank will give great facility or convenience in the
collection of taxes. Suppose this were true; yet the Constitution allows only
the means which are "necessary," not those which are merely
"convenient," for effecting the enumerated powers.
If such a latitude of construction be allowed to this phrase as to give
any non-enumerated power, it will go to every one; for there is no one which
ingenuity may not torture into a convenience,
in some way or other, to some one of so long a list of enumerated powers.
It would swallow up all the delegated powers and reduce he whole to one
phrase, as before observed. Therefore
it was that the Constitution restrained them to the necessary
means; that is to say, to those means without which the grant of the power would
be nugatory.
Doc. 4. Hamilton, Opinion on the Constititutionality of the Bank, 1791
Now it appears to the Secretary of the Treasury that this general principle is inherent in the very definition of government, and essential to every step of the progress to be made by that of the United States, namely: That every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power, and which are not precluded by restrictions and exceptions specified in the Constitution, or not immoral, or not contrary to the essential ends of political society. . . .
It is not denied that they are implied as well as express powers, and that the former are as effectually delegated as the latter. And for the sake of accuracy it shall be mentioned, that there is another class of powers, which may be properly denominated resulting powers. It will not be doubted, that if the United States should make a conquest of any of the territories of its neighbours, they would posses sovereign jurisdiction over the conquered territory. This would be rather a result from the whole mass of the powers of the government, and from the nature of political society, than a consequence of either of the powers specially enumerated. . . .
Through this mode of reasoning respecting the right of employing all the means requisite to the execution of the specified powers of the government, it is objected, that none but necessary and proper means are to be employed; and the Secretary of State [Jefferson] maintains, that no means are to be considered as necessary but those without which the grant of the power would be nugatory. . . .
It is essential to the being of the national government, that so erroneous a conception of the meaning of the word necessary should be exploded.
It is certain, that neither the grammatical nor popular sense of the term requires that construction. According to both, necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful or conducive to. . . . And it is the true one in which it is to be understood as used in the Constitution. The whole turn of the clause containing it indicates, that it was the intent of the Convention, by that clause, to give a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers. The expressions have peculiar comprehensiveness. They are "to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers, vested by the Constitution in the government of the United States or in any department or officer thereof."
To understand the word as the Secretary of State does, would be to depart from its obvious and popular sense, and to give it a restrictive operation, an idea never before entertained. It would be to give it the same force as if the word absolutely or indispensably had been prefixed to it. . . .
This restrictive interpretation of the word necessary is also contrary to this sound maxim of construction; namely, that the powers contained in a constitution of government, especially those which concern the general administration of the affairs of a country, its finances, trade, defence &c., ought to be construed liberally in advancement of the public good. The means by which national exigencies are to be provided for, national inconveniences obviated, national prosperity promoted, are of such infinite variety, extent, and complexity, that there must of necessity be great latitude of discretion in the selection and application of those means. Hence, consequently, the necessity and propriety of exercising the authorities intrusted to a government on principles of liberal construction.
It leaves, therefore, a criterion of what is constitutional and of what is not so. This criterion is the end, to which the measure relates as a mean. If the end be be clearly comprehended within any of the specified powers, and if the measure have an obvious relation to that end, and is not forbidden by any particular provision of the Constitution, it may safely be deemed to come within the compass of the national authority. . . .
[These are the sections of the Constitution that set out the powers of Congress.]
Art. 1, Sect. 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excise, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; . . .
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; . . .
To coin money, regulate the value thereof . . .
To establish post offices and post roads; . . .
To declare war . . .
To raise and support armies . . .
To provide and maintain a navy . . .
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and rperl invasions . . .
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers . . .
Amendments: Article X.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
THE CIVIL WAR AND EMANCIPATION - Seminar two
HY14020: The Making of the American Nation
Seminar No. 2
Slavery, Sectionalism and Civil War
In
reading the documents relating to this topic and the relevant section of The
Penguin History of the United States, you should consider the following
questions. You should jot down,
either here or on a separate piece of paper your responses to the questions and
bring them along to the seminar. The
intention is that these questions will form at least a starting-point for
discussion, although they should not be allowed to confine it too narrowly.
If any other questions arise in your own reading of the texts, do not
hesitate to bring them forward. You
may be assigned other, more specific tasks in preparing for the seminar.
1. What position does Lincoln take on slavery in his First Inaugural Address (Doc. 1)?
2. Why is Lincoln unwilling to countenance disunion? What does his First Inaugural tell us about the reasons why Northerners were willing to fight the Civil War?
3. How does Jefferson Davis justify secession (Doc. 2)? What do you think of his presentation of the slavery issue and his view of the rights of the states?
4. What can we learn from Lincoln's letter to Greeley (Doc. 3) about his policy in relation to slavery during the Civil War?
5.
How could emancipation be justified as "a fit and necessary war
measure" (Doc. 4)? What purposes did the Emancipation Proclamation serve?
6. How effectively does the Gettysburg Address (Doc. 5) state the issues involved in the Civil War? Why do you thing it has come to be regarded so highly as a historical document?
Compulsory
Reading
Hugh
Brogan, Penguin History of the
United States of America, chs. 14-15
Documents (see below)
S
Brian Holden Reid, Origins
of the American Civil War
Richard H. Sewell,
ed., A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War
James M. McPherson, Battle
Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Mark
E. Neely, Jr., The
Last Best Hope on Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America
Doc.
1. Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural
Address, 1861
[When
Abraham Lincoln entered the presidency on 4 March 1861 seven Southern states,
fearful of the consequences of the election of a Republican president, had
already seceded from the Union. While
no abolitionist, Lincoln refused to countenance any further extension of slavery
into the Western territories, and he was not deflected from this by the fact of
secession. His inaugural address
expresses clearly Lincoln's reluctance to antagonise the South, but you will also see clear evidence of his devotion to the Union
and his refusal to acquiesce in its destruction.
Six weeks later the Civil
War began.]
Apprehension
seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of
a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security
are to be endangered. There has
never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.
Indeed the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed
and been open to their inspection. It
is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you.
I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I
have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the States where it exists. I
believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do
so." . . .
I
now reiterate these sentiments, and, in doing so, I only press upon the public
attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible that the
property, peace and security of no section are to be any wise endangered by the
now incoming administration. I add
too that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the
laws, can be given will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully
demanded, for whatever cause, as cheerfully to one section as to another. . .
A
disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably
attempted.
I
hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union
of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity
is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national
governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a
provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all
the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure
forever—it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided
for in the instrument itself.
Again,
if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in
the nature of a contract merely, can it as a contract be peaceably unmade by
less than all the parties who made it?
One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak; but does
it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending
from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal
contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union
itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It
was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774.
It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then
thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by
the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And,
finally in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the
Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But
if the destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be
lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution,
having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It
follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get
out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void;
and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of
the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to
circumstances.
I
therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is
unbroken, and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution
itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully
executed in all the States. . . .
Before
entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with
all its benefits, its memories and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain
precisely why we do it? Will you
hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of
the ills you fly from have no real existence?
Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real
ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?
All
profess to be content in the Union if all constitutional rights can be
maintained. Is it true, then, that
any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has been denied?
I think not. Happily the
human mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing
this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written
provision of the Constitution has ever been denied.
If by the mere force of
number a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written
constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly
would if such a right were a vital one. But
such is not our case. All the vital
rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by
affirmations and negations, guarantees and prohibitions, in the Constitution,
that Controversies never arise concerning them.
But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically
applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. No
foresight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length contain, express
provision for all possible questions. Shall
fugitives from labor be surrendered by nation or by State authority?
The Constitution does not expressly say.
May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories?
The Constitution does not expressly say.
Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories?
The Constitution does not expressly say.
From
questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we
divide upon them into majorities and minorities.
If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government
must cease. There is no other
alternative; for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the
other.
If
a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent
which in turn will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede
from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.
For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two
hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now
claim to secede from it? . . .
Plainly,
the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.
A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations,
and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and
sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.
Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent
arrangement, is wholly inadmissible, so that, rejecting the majority principle,
anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left. . . .
One
section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended,
while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.
This is the only substantial dispute.
The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the
suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as
any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people
imperfectly supports the law itself. The
great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a
few break over in each. This,
I think, cannot be perfectly cured; and it would be worse in both cases after
the separation of the sections than before.
The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately
revived, without restriction, in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only
partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.
Physically
speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each
other, nor build an impassable wall between them.
A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond
the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this.
They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or
hostile, must continue between them. Is
it possible, then to make that intercourse more advantageous or more
satisfactory after separation than before?
Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws?
Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can
among friends? Suppose you go to
war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no
gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of
intercourse are again upon you. . . .
My
countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject.
Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to
hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately,
that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be
frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old
Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive points, the laws of your own
framing under it; while the new administration will he no immediate power, if it
would, to change either. If it were
admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there
still is no single good reason to precipitate action.
Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who
has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the
best way all our present difficulty.
In
your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous
issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict
without being yourselves the aggressors. You
have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have
the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend" it.
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Doc. 2.
Jefferson Davis, Message to Congress, 1861
[In
this his first statement to the Confederate Congress, the President of the
Confederate States of America justifies secession and gives his reason for the
breakdown of the Union.]
. . . The people
of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive concern was agriculture, early
perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government
subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a
protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests . . . . By degrees, as
the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest
taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their
right as a majority to govern the minority without control.
They learned to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any
constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the
principles of the Constitution been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the
inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, he as an axiom .
. . that the theory of the Constitution requires that in all cases the majority
shall govern . . .
As soon . . . as the
Northern states that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached
a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the
Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the
rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and
gradually extended. . . . Emboldened by success, the theatre of agitation and
aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern
States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent
to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction
consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra-fanaticism, and whose business was
not “to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,” but to
awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States, by violent
denunciation of their institutions . . . Finally a great party was organized for
the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed
object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all
participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in
common . . . of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be
prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be
comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth
thousands of millions of dollars. This
party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last, in the election
of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
In the meantime, the African slaves had augmented in number from about
600,000 at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of
4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from
brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers,
and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious
instruction. Under the supervision
of a superior race, their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a
gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds
of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered
with a prosperous people; . . . and the productions in the South of cotton,
rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the
labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which
formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had
become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man.
With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of
the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of
some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. .
. .
. . . In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well-established, and so
necessary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States . . .
determined that the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they
were menaced required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the
Federal Government . . . The consequently passed ordinances resuming all their
rights as sovereign and independent States and dissolved their connection with
the other States of the Union. . . . and but for the interference of the
Government of the United States in this legitimate exercise of the right of a
people to self-government, peace, happiness, and prosperity would now smile on
our land. . . .
Doc.
3. Lincoln-Greeley Correspondence,
1862
[On
19 August 1862, Horace Greeley, the editor of the influential New York Tribune,
published an open letter to President Lincoln, extravagantly entitled "The
Prayer of Twenty Millions," in which he pleaded for a definite commitment
to emancipation as a Union war aim. Greeley
certainly spoke for a great many Northerners, though probably not "twenty
million." In his reply,
Lincoln firmly restates his fundamental objective of restoring the Union, with
or without slavery. But note that
the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was to come only a month later, indeed
had already been drafted when he penned his reply to Greeley.]
Executive Mansion
Washington,
August 22, 1862.
Hon.
Horace Greeley
Dear Sir: I have just read yours of the nineteenth, addressed to
myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact which
I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them.
If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn,
I do not now and here argue against them. If
there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in
deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
As
to the policy I "seem to be pursuing," as you say, I have not meant to
leave any one in doubt.
I
would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The
sooner the National authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be
"the Union as it was." If
there be those who would not save the
Union unless they could at the same time
destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them.
My paramount object in this struggle is
to save the Union, and is not either
to save or destroy Slavery. If I
could save the Union without freeing any
slave, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing all
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving
others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored
race, I do because it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear
because I not believe it would help to save the Union.
I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I
shall do more whenever I shall believe
doing more will help the cause. I
shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views
as fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official
duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal
wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln
Doc.
4. The Emancipation Proclamation,
1863
[In
September 1862 Lincoln issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declaring
that all slaves in states still in rebellion against the authority of the United
States on 1 January 1863 would be legally free.
On 1 January he issued the formal proclamation as promised.
It applied only to territory under Confederate control; it did not apply
to either loyal or federally-controlled slave territory.
Therefore, in effect it freed nobody.
But it marked a clear intention on the part of the government to get rid
of slavery, which was actually realised by the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution (see above) and the process of
Reconstruction. Lincoln
defends his action by reference to military necessity and finds legal
justification for it in the emergency powers vested in the President during
times of war.]
By
the President of the United States of America:
A
Proclamation
Whereas on the
22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of
the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That
on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863 all persons held as slaves within any State
or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion
against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and
the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval
authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and
will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts
they may make for their actual freedom.
"That
the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation,
designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof,
respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States . . ."
Now,
therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the
power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United
States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of
the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said
rebellion, do on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my
purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days
from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts
of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion
against the United States the following to wit: . . . [There follows a list of
states still in rebellion, but explicitly excluding sections under federal
control.]
And
by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I order and declare that
all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States
are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the
United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And
I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all
violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all
cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known
that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service
of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places,
and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And
upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the
Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of
mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.
Doc.
5. Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg
Address, 1863
[This short speech was delivered by
Lincoln in November 1863 at the consecration of a military cemetery on the site
of the Battle of Gettysburg in July of that year.
In it he restates, with great economy and elegance, many of the general
principles for which he believed the war was being fought.]
Four score and
seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.
Now
we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting
place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dediated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
IMMIGRATION
AND ETHNICITY - Seminar three
Seminar No. 3
Immigration and Ethnicity
In
reading the documents relating this topic and the relevant section of The
Penguin History of the United States, you should consider the following
questions. You should jot down,
either here or on a separate piece of paper your responses to the questions and
bring them along to the seminar. The intention is that these questions will form at least a
starting-point for discussion, although they should not be allowed to confine it
too narrowly. If any other
questions arise in your own reading of the texts, do not hesitate to bring them
forward. You may be assigned other,
more specific tasks in preparing for the seminar.
1. Zangwill (Doc. 2) describes the process of the assimilation of immigrants to the United States to the operation of a "melting pot." What are the implications of this model for our understanding of the process?
2. Explain and consider the implications of Bourne’s conception of a “trans-national America” (Doc. 3). Do you consider it to be a desirable goal?
3. Which model in your view best corresponds to American experience since the late nineteenth century? In thinking about this you should consider the following questions, noting concrete examples where possible: Who were the immigrants, and what was their background? What were their motives in going to America? What sorts of work did they find? How did this affect their adjustment to American life? Where did they live, in what kind of districts? Did they form separate ethnic neighbourhoods (“ghettos”?)? What institutions did they create to help them to cope with American life? How successful were they in keeping Old World cultures alive? In ways did the experience of the second (American-born) generation differ from that of the first? What role did education play in the assimilation of immigrants? What happened when immigrants and their descendants secured better jobs and homes? What do you understand by “ethnicity”? What does “ethnicity” mean for the descendants of the immigrants today? How did Anglo-Americans react to large-scale European immigration?
Compulsory
Reading
Hugh
Brogan, Penguin History of the
United States of America, ch. 17
Documents
(see below)
Some
Additional Reading
Carl Degler, Out of Our Past,
ch. x
Maldwyn Jones,
American Immigration
Leonard Dinnerstein
and David Reimers, Ethnic
Americans
Leonard Dinnerstein et
al., Natives and Strangers
[This poem was engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, donated by the French Government to the people of the United States in and erected in 1886. It offers a highly optimistic view of the reception of immigrants to America.]
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From
her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The
air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give
me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Doc. 2. Israel
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 1909
[This
is an extract from a play written by an English Jew the title of which provided
an appealing metaphor for the process by which immigrants from all over Europe
were supposedly converted into Americans.]
America is God's crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with all of you! God is making the American. . . . .
There
she lies, the great melting-pot. Listen!
Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling?
There gapes her mouth, the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come
from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight.
Ah, what a stirring and seething! Celt
and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow. . . . East and
West and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the
Crescent and the Cross, how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with His
purging flame.
[Randolph Bourne was a radical journalist who was, among
other things strongly critical of US intervention in the First World War.
In this essay he argued that the “melting pot” had failed to work,
that immigrant communities retained their distinctive identities and cultures,
and that this was a good thing because it produced a more diverse and
interesting society than one which conformed to one cultural template.
This is an early statement of what would now be termed “multiculturalism.”]
No reverbatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting pot.” The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. . . .
We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they become more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish. . . .
With the exception of the South and that New England which . . . seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctly American culture. It appears our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain.
The failure of the melting pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world that has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have been all unawares that we have been building up the first international nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From the ideal, however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have moved us further away. What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun.
HY14020: The Making of the American Nation
Seminar No. 4 Civil Rights
In
reading the documents relating this topic and the relevant section of The
Penguin History of the United States, you should consider the following
questions. You should jot down,
either here or on a separate piece of paper your responses to the questions and
bring them along to the seminar. The intention is that these questions will form at least a
starting-point for discussion, although they should not be allowed to confine it
too narrowly. If any other
questions arise in your own reading of the texts, do not hesitate to bring them
forward. You may be assigned other,
more specific tasks in preparing for the seminar.
1. The civil rights movement enjoyed its greatest success in the early 1960s and then found further progress difficult. Why was this?
2. What is the "dream" that Martin Luther King refers to in his speech to the March on Washington (Heath, 2530-3)? What does he mean by "freedom" for African-Americans?
3. How does King try to gain the assent of white Americans for the objectives of the civil rights movement? How successful do you think he would be?
4. What does the speech reveal about King's effectiveness as an orator?
5. Why does Malcolm X (Heath, 2542-56) suggest that the nonviolent civil rights movement is bound to fail? Does he offer a viable alternative strategy?
6. What does Malcolm X mean by "black nationalism"? What else might it mean?
7. What elements in the black community would be most responsive to the messages conveyed by Malcolm X?
Compulsory
Reading
Hugh
Brogan, Penguin History of the
United States of America, chs. 25-26
Martin
Luther King, Jr., “I Have a
Dream,” Speech at the March on Washington, August 1963
Malcolm
X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
(1964)
For
copyright reasons we cannot photocopy these speeches.
However, they may be found in the Heath Anthology of American
Literature, II, pp., 2530-3, 2542-56; alternatively at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speechesFrame.htm
(King)
http://www.indiana.edu/~rterrill/Text-BorB.html
(Malcolm X)
Some
Additional Reading
William Chafe,
The
Unfinished Journey, ch. 6
Harvard Sitkoff,
The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980
Robert Cook,
Sweet Land of Liberty
Robert Weisbrot,
Freedom Bound: A History of the American Civil Rights Movement
Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom