The closer you look the plainer you will see that the United States held within itself two nationalities so inveterately hostile to each other that gemination was long imminent before it actually occurred. The hostility between the statesmen of Virginia and her daughter States and those of the north, and especially New England,—Jefferson on one side and Hamilton and Adams on the other,—the party following the former calling itself republican and that following the latter calling itself federalist, was really rooted in the hostility of the two nationalities; and a survival of this hostility is now unpleasantly vigorous between many northern and southern writers and lecturers, each class claiming too much of the good in our past history for its own section and ascribing too much of the bad to the other. As a lady friend, a native of Michigan who has lived in the south some years, remarked to me not long since, as soon as one going north crosses the Ohio he feels that he has entered another country; behind him is a land of corn-pone, biscuit, three cooked meals a day, and houses tended untidily by darkey servants; before him is a land of bakers’ bread of wheat, where there is hardly more than one warm meal a day, and the houses are kept as neat as a pin by the mothers and daughters of the family. Greater public activity of the county while there is hardly any at all of its subdivisions, the representative system almost everywhere in the municipalities, no government by town-meeting and no direct legislation except occasionally, a most crude and feeble rural common school system, distinguish and characterize the south; buoyant energy of the township in public affairs, government by town-meeting instead of by representatives, a common-school system energetically improving, distinguish and characterize the north. The manners and customs of southerners are peculiar. To use an expressive cant word, they “gush” more than northeners. In cars and public meetings they give their seats to ladies, while northerners do not. Southerners are quick to return a blow for insulting words, and in the consequent rencounter they are prone to use deadly weapons; while northerners are generally as averse to personal violence as were the Greeks and Romans in their palmiest time. The battle-cry of the confederates was a wild cheering—a fox-hunt yell, as we called it; that of the union soldiers was huzza! huzza! huzza! From the beginning to the end, even at Franklin and Bentonville, and at Farmville, just two days before I was surrendered at Appomattox, the confederates always, if possible, took the offensive; the union soldiers were like the sturdy Englishmen, whose tactics from Hastings to Waterloo have generally been defensive.
This battle yell, this impetuous charge after charge until the field is won, marks the fighting of the Americans at King’s Mountain—all of them southerners; and it is another weighty proof of the early coalescence of the south as a community on its way to independence.
Many other contrasts could be suggested. Think over the foregoing. They are the respective effects of two different causes,—a free-labor nationalization above, and a slave-labor nationalization below, Mason and Dixon’s line. The latter—its origin and course—is the especial subject of this chapter. I believe that the proofs marshalled above demonstrate to the fair and unprejudiced reader that southern nationalization commenced before the making of the federal constitution, and afterwards went directly on, gathering force and power all the while, until it culminated in
“A storm-cradled nation that fell.”
CHAPTER V
AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER
Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world to come the Achæan league, the first historical example of full-grown federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: “Its perfect form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture.”[27] This historian thus summarizes its essentials:
“Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common power in those matters which concern the whole body of members collectively.”[28]