The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864

OUR PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENCE

It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of time, the United States of America shall become to England what England has become to Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, that the mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see the full maturity of her gigantic offspring. We have no right to assume it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history. But England, forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest, has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the master-power of the planet.

The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted in its recollections. Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad auras,—if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of Leo.

Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the least, does not love us.

An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States" could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A Te Deum in Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.

If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of: England in alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom, education, and the dignity of labor. If the silent masses of the British people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts might have led the proud haters of popular government.

Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which has met with the usual success of compromises. The aristocracy, which very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not force herself into our quarrel. That portion of the middling classes which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have been so long the boast of British patriots. The people of the Union, who expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended. The Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions, have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness. Western Europe failed us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.

The recent action of the British Government, under the persuasive influence of Mr. Seward's polite representation, that instant hostilities would be sure to follow, if England did not keep her iron pirates at home, has improved somewhat the tone of Northern feeling towards her. The late neighborly office of the Canadian Government, in warning us of the conspiracy to free our prisoners, has produced a very favorable impression, so far as the effect of a single act is felt in striking the balance of a long account.

We can, therefore, examine some of our relations with Great Britain in a better temper now than we could do some months ago, when we never went to sleep without thinking that before morning we might be shelled out of our beds by a fleet of British iron-clad steamers. But though we have been soothed, and in some measure conciliated, by the change referred to, there is no such thing possible as returning to the status quo ante bellum. We can never feel in all respects to England as we felt of old. This is a fact which finds expression in so many forms that it is natural to wish to see how deep it lies: whether it is an effect of accidental misunderstanding and collision of interests, or whether it is because the events of the last few years have served to bring to light the organic, inherent, and irreconcilable antagonism of the two countries.

We are all of us in the habit of using words so carelessly, that it will help us to limit their vagueness as here employed. We speak of "England" for Great Britain, for the simple reason that Ireland is but a reluctant alien she drags after her, and Scotland only her most thriving province. We are not surprised, for instance, when "Blackwood" echoes the abusive language of the metropolitan journals, for it is only as a village-cur joins the hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves into an image having very much the look of representing the nation,—certainly much more the look of it than the sum of all those manifestations which indicate sympathy with the cause of the North.

The attitude of England, then, has been such, since the Rebellion began, as to alienate much of the affection still remaining among us for the mother-country. It has gone far towards finishing that process of separation of the child from the parent which two centuries of exile and two long wars had failed to complete. But, looking at the matter more clearly, we shall find that our causes of complaint must be very unequally distributed among the different classes of the British people.

The Government has carefully measured out to us, in most cases certainly, strict, technical justice. It could not well do otherwise, for it knows the force of precedents. But we have an unpleasing sense that our due, as an ally and a Christian nation, striving against an openly proclaimed heathen conspiracy, has been paid us grudgingly, tardily, sparingly, while our debt, as in the case of the Rebel emissaries, has been extorted fiercely, swiftly, and to the last farthing. We have recognized a change, it is true, ever since Earl Russell gave the hint that our cause was more popular in England than that of the South. We have gratefully accepted the friendly acts already alluded to. Better late than not at all. But the past cannot be undone. British "neutrality" has strengthened the arms that have been raised against our national life, and winged the bloody messengers that have desolated our households. Still, every act of justice which has even a show of good-will in it is received only too graciously by a people which has known what it is to be deserted by its friends in the hour of need. Whatever be the motives of the altered course of the British Government,—an awakened conscience, or a series of "Federal" successes,—Mr. Sumner's arguments, or General Gillmore's long-range practice,—a more careful study of the statistics of Slavery, or of the lists of American iron-clad steamers,—we welcome it at once; we take the offered hand, if not with warm pressure, at least with decent courtesy. We only regret that forbearance and good offices, and that moral influence which would have been almost as important as an offensive and defensive alliance, had not come before the flower of our youth was cut down in the battle-field, and mourning and misery had entered half the families of the land.

The British aristocracy, with all its dependent followers, cannot help being against us. The bearing which our success would have on its interests is obvious enough, and we cannot wonder that the instinct of self-preservation opens its eyes to the remote consequences which will be likely to flow from the continued and prosperous existence of the regenerated, self-governing Union. The privileged classes feel to our labor- and money-saving political machinery just as the hand-weavers felt to the inventor and introducers of the power-loom. The simple fact is, that, if a great nation like ours can govern itself, they are not needed, and Nobility has a nightmare of Jews going about the streets with half a dozen coronets on their heads, one over another, like so many old beavers. What can we expect of the law-spinning heir-loom owners, but that they should wish to break this new-fangled machine, and exterminate its contrivers? The right to defend its life is the claim of everything that lives, and we must not lose our temper because the representatives of an hereditary ruling class wish to preserve those privileges which are their very existence, nor because they have foresight enough to know, that, if the Western Continent remains the seat of a vast, thriving, irresistible, united republic, the days of their life, as an order, are numbered.

"The people," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters, "everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people, for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.

The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been like that of harsh treatment upon children generally. It chills their affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the family-mansion. But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the recollections of the past. It cannot deprive the "old home" of its charm. If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grateful memories will cluster about that one, though the hearts of the rest were hard as the nether millstone.

The soil of England will always be dearer to us of English descent than any except our own. The Englishman will always be more like one of ourselves than any "foreigner" can be. We shall never cease to feel the tenderest regard for those Englishmen who have stood by us like brothers in the day of trial. They have hardly guessed in our old home how sacred to us is the little island from which our fathers were driven into the wilderness,—not saying, with the Separatists, "Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!" but "Farewell, dear England!" At that fearful thought of the invasion of her shores,—a thought which rises among the spectral possibilities of the future,—we seem to feel a dull aching in the bones of our forefathers that lie beneath her green turf, as old soldiers feel pain in the limbs they have left long years ago on the battle-field.

But hard treatment often proves the most useful kind of discipline. One good effect, so far as we are concerned, that will arise from the harsh conduct of England, will be the promotion of our intellectual and moral independence. We declared our political independence a good while ago, but this was as a small dividend is declared on a great debt. We owed a great deal more to posterity than to insure its freedom from political shackles. The American republic was to be emancipated from every Old-World prejudice that might stand in the way of its entire fulness of development according to its own law, which is in many ways different from any precedent furnished by the earlier forms of civilization. There were numerous difficulties in the way. The American talked the language of England, and found a literature ready-made to his hands. He brought his religion with him, shaped under English influences, whether he called himself Dissenter or not. He dispensed justice according to the common law of England. His public assemblies were guided by Parliamentary usage. His commerce and industry had been so long in tutelage that both required long exercise before they could know their own capacities.

The mother-country held her American colonies as bound to labor for her profit, not their own, just as an artisan claims the whole time of his apprentice. If we think the policy of England towards America in the year 1863 has been purely selfish, looking solely to her own interest, without any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663. If her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to have learned our lesson.

Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its preamble stated, "of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and commodities," etc. This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the mother-country for most of the products of industry. But in an infant community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it required another century before an extension of the same system was publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent. To show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved, short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the disposition of the Colonists.

One hundred years ago, on the tenth of February, 1763, a treaty of peace between England and France, as the leading powers, was signed at Paris. This was no sooner arranged than the Ministry began that system of Colonial taxation which the Massachusetts House of Representatives denounced as tending to give the Crown and Ministers "an absolute and uncontrollable power of raising money upon the people, which by the wise Constitution of Great Britain is and can be only lodged with safety in the legislature." Part and parcel of this system was that comprehensive scheme of tyranny by means of which England attempted to secure the perpetual industrial dependence of the American Colonies, the principle of which we have already seen openly avowed in the Act of Parliament of 1663, a hundred years earlier.

It was her fixed policy, as is well known, to keep her skilled artisans at home, and to discourage as far as possible all manufactures in the Colonies. By different statutes, passed in successive reigns, persons enticing artificers into foreign countries incur the penalty of five hundred pounds and twelve months' imprisonment for the first offence, and of one thousand pounds and two years' imprisonment for the second offence. If the workmen did not return within six months after warning, they were to be deemed aliens, forfeit all their lands and goods, and be incapable of receiving any legacy or gift. A similar penalty was laid so late as the reign of George III. upon any person contracting with or endeavoring to persuade any artificer concerned in printing calicoes, cottons, muslins, or linens, or preparing any tools for such manufacture, to go out of the kingdom.

The same jealousy of the Colonies, lest they should by their success in the different branches of industry interfere with the home monopoly, shows itself in various other forms. There was, naturally enough, a special sensitiveness to the practice of the art of printing. Sir Edmund Andros, when he came out as Governor of the Northern Colonies, was instructed "to allow of no printing-press"; and Lord Effingham, on his appointment to the government of Virginia, was directed "to allow no person to use a printing-press on any occasion whatever."

The Board of Trade and Plantations made a report, in 1731, to the British Parliament concerning the "trades carried on, and manufactures set up, in the Colonies," in which it is recommended that "some expedient be fallen upon to direct the thoughts of the Colonists from undertakings of this kind; so much the rather, because these manufactures in process of time may be carried on in a greater degree, unless an early stop be put to their progress."

In one of Franklin's papers, published in London in 1768, are enumerated some instances of the way in which the Colonists were actually interfered with by legislation.

"Iron is to be found everywhere in America, and beaver are the natural produce of that country: hats and nails and steel are wanted there as well as here. It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire whether a subject of the king gets his living by making hats on this or on that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favor restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation. In the same manner have a few nail-makers, and a still smaller body of steel-makers, (perhaps there are not half a dozen of these in England,) prevailed totally to forbid, by an Act of Parliament, the erecting of slitting-mills or steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all their nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these artificers," etc.

"It is an idle argument in the Americans," said Governor Pownall, "when they talk of setting up manufactures for trade; but it would be equally injudicious in Government here to force any measure that may render the manufacturing for home consumption an object of prudence, or even of pique, in the Americans."

The maternal Government pressed this matter a little too fast and too far. The Colonists became piqued at last, and resolved, in 1764, not to purchase English stuffs for clothing, but to use articles of domestic manufacture as far as possible. Boston, always a ringleader in these mischiefs, diminished her consumption of British merchandise ten thousand pounds and more in this one year. The Harvard-College youth rivalled the neighboring town in their patriotic self-sacrifice, and the whole graduating class of 1770, with the names of Hutchinson, Saltonstall, and Winthrop at the head of the list, appeared at Commencement in black cloth of home-manufacture. This act of defiance only illustrates more forcibly the almost complete dependence of Colonial industry at the time of its occurrence, the effect of a policy which looked upon the Colonies with no reference to any other consideration than the immediate profit to be derived from them.

In spite, however, of the hard measures employed by England to cripple the development of the Colonies in every direction, except such as might be profitable to herself, it was a very difficult matter to root out their affection for the mother-country. Pownall, who was in this country from 1753 to 1761, successively Governor of Massachusetts, Lieutenant-Governor of New Jersey, and Governor of South Carolina, gives us the most ample testimony on this point. His words are so strong that none can fail to be impressed with the picture he draws of a people who ten years later were in open revolt against the home authorities.

"The duty of a colony is affection for the mother-country: here I may affirm, that, in whatever form and temper this affection can lie in the human breast, in that form, by the deepest and most permanent impression, it ever did lie in the breast of the American people. They have no other idea of this country [England] than as their home; they have no other word by which to express it, and, till of late, it has constantly been expressed by the name of home. That powerful affection, the love of our native country, which operates in every heart, operates in this people towards England, which they consider as their native country; nor is this a mere passive impression, a mere opinion in speculation,—it has been wrought up in them to a vigilant and active zeal for the service of this country."

And Franklin's testimony confirms that of the English Governor.

"The true loyalists," he says, "were the people of America against whom the royalists of England acted. No people were ever known more truly loyal, and universally so, to their sovereigns.... They were affectionate to the people of England, zealous and forward to assist in her wars, by voluntary contributions of men and money, even beyond their proportion."

Such was the people whose love and obedience the greedy and grasping policy of the British Government threw away, never to be regained. The Revolution came at last, and the people reckoned up the long arrears of oppression. "In the short space of two years," says a contemporary writer, "nearly three millions of people passed over from the love and duty of loyal subjects to the hatred and resentment of enemies."

We have seen that our cautious parent had taken good care not to let her American children learn the use of her tools any farther or faster than she thought good for them—and herself. They no sooner got their hands free than they set them at work on various new contrivances. One of the first was the nail-cutting machinery which has been in use ever since. All our old houses—the old gambrel-roofed Cambridge mansions, for instance—are built with wrought nails, no doubt every one of them imported from England. Many persons do not know the fact that the screw-auger is another native American invention, having been first manufactured for sale at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1776, or a little earlier. Eli Whitney contrived the cotton-gin in 1792, and some years later the machinery for the manufacture of fire-arms, involving the principle of absolute uniformity in the pattern of each part, so that any injured or missing portion of a gun may be instantly supplied without special fitting.