soft or cowardly. When the challenge was given there was instant response. For the second time a Nation sprang to arms. For a second time the appeal was to the arbitrament of the sword.

CHAPTER XIX

THE EFFECT OF THE CIVIL WAR ON NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

THE Civil War is a momentous epoch in American development, and produced lasting psychological, political, and social consequences. Prior to the war the confederacy that politically was known as the United States was loosely jointed, and the bonds that held it were so tenuous that the danger of a rupture was always imminent. For more than fifty years the life of the nation hung by a thread. War cut that thread and the Union was bound with ropes of steel. The house whose foundation stones were laid in blood was cemented anew in blood. Before Sumter the national spirit was feebly developed; since Appomattox the spirit of nationality is one of the most striking characteristics of the American people. It was the Revolution and the victory over Great Britain that gave the Americans such supreme confidence in themselves and made them go forward, but that confidence lessened as they approached the time when the future of the Republic was to be decided by war. Since then no man has lost confidence. There has never been a doubt. The Republic is perpetual.

It has already been pointed out that the chief

cause of the war was the economic differences between North and South, but men are rarely influenced by a single motive. A critical analysis will show that four causes operated to bring on the

war.

1. Political. The North and West believed that the Union was one and indivisible and to preserve it no sacrifice was too great; the South held that the right of separation was inherent, and to deny that right was a denial of liberty and freedom of action that was opposed to the spirit of American institutions and the political compact on which the American Republic was founded.

2. Selfishness. The South believed that without slavery its agriculture could not be properly carried on; slavery was not only necessary but absolutely vital to its existence. A free labor market would revolutionize industrial conditions and bring about great confusion in the social system. The North could not fail to see that either there would be an expansion of slavery in the new states of the West and South or slavery would be penned up in the original slave states, which would lead to the creation of an independent slaveholding republic. That spelled ruin to the North, which saw the great wealth of the South flowing east,—that is, to Europe, instead of North, that is, to the Atlantic seaboard; it feared a tariff laid by the Republic of the South on all Northern manufactures; possibly an export tax on cotton so as to cripple North

ern cotton mills for the advantage of European rivals.1 Cotton was King in the South, and the patient beast of burden that carried the North on its back. The whirring spindles of New England fed thousands of people and daily added to their wealth; stoppage of the mills meant starvation and ruin. There were Southern men like Calhoun,2 for instance, who believed that the natural alliance of the South was with the West, and that it was possible to divert the Western commercial stream to Southern rather than to Northern ports; and the North feared this diversion. A Southern Republic would be followed in all probability by a Republic of the West, and even if the West remained part of the original Union, Southern competition must destroy the Northern monopoly of the Western market.

3. Altruism. As the climax approached, the economics and politics of slavery were submerged by the moral wave that overran the North. To the leaders in the movement for abolition, to nearly all those earnest men and women who helped the cause by money and services, the fine-spun theories of the rights of the state or the powers of the federal government meant little if anything; whether

1 In the last decade before the war the business men of Mobile urged patriotic citizens not to purchase Northern goods, but to import direct from Europe so as to make the South independent of the North and ultimately to destroy their manufacturing interests. — Coman: The Industrial History of the United States, pp. 252-54.

2 Cf. Calhoun's letter to some citizens of Athens, Georgia, August 5, 1836.

the freedom of the slave would destroy the agricultural system of the South was a thing of small consequence. They were possessed by an almost religious exaltation. God had called them to liberate the oppressed, and to redeem America from an infamy that was as destructive to the body and soul of the master as to those of the slave. The same spirit that drove the colonists to revolt, because there was a great injustice to be redressed, was now again called into life. Slavery was unjust, immoral, cruel. It must be driven out, as the English were driven forth when their rule was harmful and morally wrong.

Finally, it was the culmination of the long smouldering jealousy between North and South; that antagonism that began with the beginning of American history and grew with the growth of the nation.

I have referred in a previous chapter to the effect of war on the character of a people, especially when a people are in the plastic stage of their national development. War does not soften or make men tender or teach them a love of the beautiful. It does, perhaps, produce a rude sort of chivalry, respect for courage and suffering uncomplainingly borne, but its great and lasting effects are the admiration aroused by physical bravery and the success that comes from men offered up as a sacrifice to victory. War marks the cheapness of human life, for cost is never counted, and no commander hesitates at sac