History of the United States Volume Iii Part 17

Birthplace of S. F. B. Morse, at Charlestown, Ma.s.s. Built 1775.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

S. F. B. Morse.

We now come to an improvement of which the preceding period knew nothing, the magnetic telegraph, introduced by Professor Morse in 1844.

In this year Morse secured a congressional appropriation of $30,000 for a line from Washington to Baltimore. The wires were at first encased in tubes underground. In spite of the success of the project, further governmental patronage was refused, the Postmaster-General advising against it under the conviction that the invention could not become practically valuable. Morse appealed for aid from private capitalists.

Ezra Cornell, of New York, soon opened a short line in Boston for exhibition, following this with a similar enterprise in New York City.

The admission fee was twelve and a half cents. Few cared to pay even this trifle, so that the undertaking was hardly a success in either city.

Amos Kendall then engaged as Morse's agent, and by dint of great effort secured subscriptions for a line from New York to Philadelphia, being obliged to sell the shares for one-half their face value. Incorporation was secured from the Maryland Legislature, under the first American charter, for the telegraph business. The line was completed in 1845 to the Hudson opposite the upper end of Manhattan Island, and an effort made to insulate the wire and connect with the city along the bottom of the river. This failed, and for some time messages had to be taken over in boats. In 1846 the wire was carried on to Baltimore. In the same year Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were connected by telegraph, New York and Albany, New York and Boston, Boston and Buffalo. The first line in California was erected in 1853.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The First Telegraphic Instrument, as exhibited in 1837 by Morse.]

In 1850 Hiram Sibley embarked in the telegraph business. He bought the House patent, and next year organized the New York and Mississippi Valley Telegraph Company. By 1853 or 1854, some twenty companies had started, with a capital of $7,000,000--too many for good management or high profits. Accordingly, Sibley and Cornell united in buying them up, and thus formed, in 1856, the Western Union, which Sibley's energy extended all over the country east of the Rocky Mountains. In 1860 he went to Washington with a scheme for a transcontinental telegraph line, and secured from Congress a subsidy of $40,000 for ten years. Just then the Overland Telegraph Company was started in San Francisco. It and Sibley united, breaking ground July 1, 1861, and proceeding at the rate of nearly ten miles of wire per day. On October 25th, telegraph wire stretched all the way between the two oceans. In 1864 this line was amalgamated with the Western Union.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Machine with three rollers about 2 feet in diameter and 5 feet long, connected with large gears.]

Calenders heated internally by Steam, for spreading India Rubber into Sheets or upon Cloth, called the "Chaffee Machine."

Still more wonderful, ocean telegraphy was broached and made successful during these years. Tentative efforts to operate the current under water were made between Governor's Island and New York City so early as 1842.

A copper wire was used, insulated with hemp string coated with India rubber and pitch. In 1846 a similar arrangement was encased in lead pipe. This device failed, and sub-aqueous telegraphy seems to have been for the time given up.

In 1854 Mr. Cyrus W. Field, of New York, with Peter Cooper and other capitalists of that city, organized the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, stock a million and a half dollars, and began plans to connect New York with St. Johns, Newfoundland, by a cable under the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Little progress was made, however, till 1857, when it was attempted to lay a cable across the Atlantic from Newfoundland. The paying out was begun at Queenstown and proceeded successfully until three hundred and thirty-five miles had been laid, when the cable parted. Nothing more was done till the next year in June.

Then, in 1858, after several more unsuccessful efforts, the two continents were successfully joined. The two ships containing the cable met in mid-ocean, where it was spliced and the paying out begun in each direction. The one reached Newfoundland the same day, August 5th, on which the other reached Valencia, Ireland. No break had occurred, and after the necessary arrangements had been effected, the first message was transmitted on August 16th. It was from the Queen of Great Britain to the President of the United States, and read, "Glory to G.o.d in the highest, peace on earth and good will to men." A monster celebration of the event was had in New York next day.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Large steam ship with side paddles.]

The Great Eastern Laying the Atlantic Cable.

Although inter-continental communication had been actually opened, the cable did not work, nor did ocean cabling become a successful and regular business till 1866, when a new cable was laid. This event attracted the more attention from the fact that the largest ship ever built was used in paying out the cable. It was the Great Eastern, 680 feet long and 83 broad, with 25,000 tons displacement.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Three men tending machinery.]

Sounding Machine used by a Cable Expedition.

Street railways became common in our largest cities before 1860, the first in New England, that between Boston and Cambridge, dating from 1856. Sleeping-cars began to be used in 1858. The express business went on developing, being opened westward from Buffalo first in 1845. A steam fire-engine was tried in New York in 1841, but the invention was successful only in 1853. Baltimore used one in 1858. Goodyear triumphantly vulcanized rubber in 1844, making serviceable a gum which had been used in various forms already but without ability to stand heat. Elias Howe took out his first patent for a sewing machine in 1846, being kept in vigorous fight against infringements for the next eight years. The anaesthetic power of ether was discovered in 1844.

Gutta-percha was first imported hither in 1847. The first application of the Bessemer steel process in this country was made in New Jersey in 1856, the manufacture of watches by machinery begun in 1857, photo-lithography in 1859. New York had a clearing house in 1853, Boston in 1855. The petroleum business may with propriety be dated from 1860, although the existence of oil in Northwestern Pennsylvania had been long known, and some use made of it since 1826. For several years experiments had been making in refining the oil. The excellence of the light from it now drew attention to the value of the product, wells began to be bored and oil land sold for fabulous prices.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

Cyrus W. Field.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Several men tending a large machine on the deck of a ship.]

Paying out Cable Gear. From Chart House.

We close this chapter with a word about the painful financial crisis that swept over the country in the autumn of 1857. Its causes are somewhat occult, but two appear to have been the chief, viz., the over-rapid building of railroads and the speculation induced by the prosperity and the rise of prices incident to the new output of gold.

Interest on the best securities rose to three, four, and five per cent.

a month. On ordinary securities no money at all could be had. Commercial houses of the highest repute went down. The climax was in September and October. The three leading banks in Philadelphia suspended specie payments, at once followed in this by all the banks of the Middle States, and upon the 13th of the next month by the New York banks.

Manufacturing was very largely abandoned for the time, at least thirty thousand operatives being thrown out of work in New York City alone.

Prices even of agricultural produce fell enormously. Tramps were to be met on every road. Easier times fortunately returned by spring, when business resumed pretty nearly its former prosperous march.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cross section of cable; central conductor is about .25 inches in diameter; it is surrounded by layers of insulation and twelve .5 inch wires for protection.]

Sh.o.r.e End of Cable-exact size.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Barnacles on Cable.]

PERIOD IV.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

1860-1868

CHAPTER I.

CAUSES OF THE WAR

[1861]

It were a mistake to refer the great Rebellion, for ultimate source, to ambiguity in the Const.i.tution or to the wickedness of politicians or of the people. It was simply the last resort in an "irrepressible conflict"

of principle--in the struggle for and against the genius of the world's advance. Economic, social, and moral evolution, resulting in two radically different civilizations, had enforced upon each section unfaithfulness to the spirit and even to the letter of its const.i.tutional covenant. The South was not to blame that slavery was at first profitable; and if it deemed it so too long and even thought of it as a good morally, these convictions, however big with ill consequences to the nation, were but errors of view, not strange considering the then status of slavery in the world.

The South's pride, holding it to the course once chosen, was also no indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime for its "higher law fanaticism," which was simply the spirit of the age; or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon the land. Much as was "nominated in the bond" of the Const.i.tution, neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase and being in the majority, they had gone on punctiliously heeding formal obligation against manifest national weal. And when, in 1854, the great sacred compact of 1820 was set aside by the authority of the South itself, the North felt free even from formal fetters. All talk of extra-legal negotiations and understandings touching slavery was now at an end. The northern majority was at last united to legislate upon slavery as it would, subject only to the Const.i.tution. The South too late saw this, and fearing that the peculiar inst.i.tution, shut up to its old home, would die, sought separation, with such chance of expansion as this might yield.

The South had come to love slavery too well, the Const.i.tution too little. Upon conserving slavery all parties there, however dissident as to modes, however hostile in other matters, were unconditionally bent.

The chief argument even of those opposing disunion was that it endangered slavery. Our new government, said Alexander H. Stephens, soon to be vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, is founded, its cornerstone rests, upon the great physical, philosophical, and moral truth, to which Jefferson and the men of his day were blind, that the negro, by nature or the curse of Canaan, is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is, by ordination of Providence, whose wisdom it is not for us to inquire into or question, his natural and normal condition. As the apostle of such a principle the South could not but abjure the old establishment, whose genius and working were inevitably in the contrary direction. Many confessed it to be the essential nature of our Government, and not unfair treatment under it, against which they rebelled.

Slavery had also bred hatred of the Union indirectly, by fostering anti-democratic habits of thought, feeling, and action. "The form of liberty existed, the press seemed to be free, the deliberations of legislative bodies were tumultuous, and every man boasted of his independence. But the spirit of true liberty, tolerance of the minority and respect for individual opinion, had departed, and those deceitful appearances concealed the despotism of an inexorable master, slavery, before whom the most powerful of slave-holders was himself but a slave, as abject as the meanest." Over wide sections, unt.i.tled manorial lords, "more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but overbearing," controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists, whom love for the "peculiar inst.i.tution" rendered callous to national interests.

The vigorous secession movements in the South at once after Lincoln's election, raised a question of the first magnitude, which few people at the North had reflected upon since 1833, viz., whether or not non-revolutionary secession was possible. Almost unanimously the North denied such possibility, the South affirmed it. This was at bottom manifestly nothing but the old question of state sovereignty over again.

The South held the Union to be a state compact, which the northern parties thereto had broken. To prove the compact theory no new proof was now adduced. Rather did the southern people take the a.s.sertion of it as an axiom, with a simplicity which spoke volumes for the influence of Calhoun and for the indoctrination which the South had received in 1832.

Not alone Calhoun but nearly every other southerner of great influence, at least from the day of the Missouri Compromise, had been inculcating the supreme authority of the State as compared with the Union. The southern States were all large, and, as travelling in or between them was difficult and little common, they retained far more than those at the North each its original separateness and peculiarities. Southern population was more fixed than northern; southern state traditions were held in far the deeper reverence. In a word, the colonial condition of things to a great extent persisted in the South down to the very days of the war. There was every reason why Alabama or North Carolina should, more than Connecticut, feel like a separate nation.

This intense state consciousness might gradually have subsided but for the deep prejudices and pa.s.sions begotten of slavery and of the opposition it encountered from the North. Their resolution, against emanc.i.p.ation led Southerners to cherish a view which made it seem possible for them as a last resort to sever their alliance with the North. It was this conjunction of influences, linking the slave-holder's jealousy and pride to a false but natural conception of state sovereignty, which created in southern men that love of State, intense and sincere as real patriotism, causing them to look upon northern men, with their different theory, as foes and foreigners.

A very imposing historical argument could of course have been built up for the Calhoun theory of the Union. The Union emerged from the preceding Confederacy without a shock. Most who voted for it were unaware how radical a change it embodied. The Const.i.tution, one may even admit, could not have been adopted had it then been understood to preclude the possibility of secession. Doubtless, too, the gradual change of view concerning it all over the North, sprung from the multiplication of social and economic ties between sections and States, rather than from study of const.i.tutional law. We believe that the untruth of the central-sovereignty theory in no wise follows from these admissions, and that its correctness might be made apparent from a plenitude of considerations.