Reading, Writing, And History (June 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 4)

Reading, Writing, And History

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4


Setting the Pattern

The first half of the nineteenth century in America sometimes appears to have been little more than an eventful and confusing prelude to the great trial by fire which was to be the American Civil War. It began with the first bright triumph of Jeffersonian democracy, and it ended with the development of sectional feelings so intense that the country narrowly escaped being fragmented; here perhaps was simply a time of preparation, in which nothing had been finally settled, a time that could do no more than germinate a conflict whose outcome could not be foretold. America was still in a process of becoming, not yet sure that it was a nation or that it could develop a genuinely national significance.

Yet some sort of pattern was being set. The familiar statement that the country would ultimately be shaped by its “continental destiny” may be nothing more than a half-mystical catch phrase born out of later knowledge, but something was working. By the time of the Mexican War the weight of the future was exerting its effect; the storied lost cause was possibly lost more than a decade before it was born.

This, in any case, is the judgment of Charles M. Wiltse, a man well qualified to have an opinion on the matter. As the distinguished biographer of John C. Calhoun, Mr. Wiltse has studied this period in much detail and with a discerning eye; and in his most recent book, The New Nation , he argues that between 1800 and 1845 America did in fact attain nationhood. The Civil War, at frightful cost, merely ratified a decision that had already been made.

When the century began nothing had been settled. The ordinary American in 1800, as Mr. Wiltse says, was “proud of his country but not quite sure whether his country was the United States or only that one of them in which he happened to live.” The end of the strange and apparently pointless War of 1812 did indeed leave most Americans feeling that at last they were on their way, but nobody was quite sure where they might actually be going. Aaron Burr, General James Wilkinson, and the Essex Junto had shown that the paths might be various and divergent. The exuberant nationalism of the immediate postwar years gave way, in less than a decade, to intense contention.

The debate over the Missouri Compromise in 1820 brought this contention to a head. It was the permanence of the Union itself that was at stake here; the cultural and economic division between slave-state South and free-state North had already become of critical importance. Even this early, as Mr. Wiltse sees it, the South had developed “a social and political unity that could not tolerate change”; at the same time the free states, caught up by industrial growth, were becoming more and more diversified and hence more and more