The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 Book

THE ROAD TO REUNION THE ROAD TO REUNION 1865 - IpOO BY PAUL H. BUCK LITTLE, BHOWN AND COMPANY BOSTON TORONTO PREFACE WHEN the colors of the Confederacy were furled in sur render at Appomattox the United States confronted a prob lem new to American statecraft. For the first time in its his tory the country was called upon to deal with a disaffected people who had aspired to independence and failed. The situa tion was a perplexing one. The restored Union rested frankly upon force. The North was arrogant in victory and inclined to be assertive in the realization of newly found power. The South lay spent and exhausted, yet ready to offer stolid re sistance to the unfriendly gestures of its assailant. Certainly he who essayed to rejoin the disrupted fabric of national life would learn in full measure how strong and unyielding is the hatred of brothers. Victors in a civil strife are prone to consider themselves as constituting the nation. The defeated tend as readily to resent the implied inferiority of their humiliating position. The misunderstanding of the Reconstruction period arose nat urally from these conditions. For twelve years the North en deavored to build a policy upon force. The South in resistance rejected good and bad indiscriminately. In the process the sectional division persisted and perhaps intensified. And yet the central theme of American life after the war, even in the years of political radicalism, is not to be found in a narrative of sectional divergence. It was national integra tion which triumphed at Appomattox. It was national integra tion which marked every important development in the years that followed. The period of Reconstruction, as usually defined, it is true, gave rise to an abnormal political condition which in its divisive influence ran counter to the basic theme. But viii PREFACE political Reconstruction was not fundamental. Seemingly re gardless of the political clamor that so filled the public ear, the formation of American character continued. The sturdy barriers of sectional antipathy and distrust crumbled one by one. Not all the misunderstanding disappeared. And certainly as should be expected the normal differences in economic and sociological regionalism persisted and will persist. But within a generation after the close of the Civil War the particular istic aspirations of North and South had lost their bitter edge and an American nationalism existed which derived its ele ments indiscriminately from both the erstwhile foes. A union of sentiment based upon integrated interests had become a fact. This speedy reconciliation was a striking illustration of the dynamic force exerted by nationalism in the Nineteenth Cen tury. There had been a distinctive American character as early as dwellers in a new world had interests and ways of looking at things peculiar to themselves. It had developed rapidly in the common work of the Revolution until the Constitution of 1787 gave it perfected form by establishing an effective central government. But no sooner had the early republic entered upon its career than the bases of national life shifted pro foundly. The energies of new forces found an easy lodgment in the fluid state of an unformed society and made of America a laboratory of contending currents. In time the pattern of a new and stronger nationalism emerged. It was in the North that the potent influence of this new agency was first introduced...Read More