Each year that the conflict was delayed would have found the States which remained in the old Union stronger and whiter, sickling the seceded States with railroads and quite possibly drawing Canada into their orbit; for as Sir Charles Dilke has pointed out in his Problems of Greater Britain, published when the annexation of Canada was still a debatable question—
“a fact often overlooked in England is that hitherto the western centres of population of British North America have been more intimately connected with districts lying South of them across the American frontier than with places East and West of them, within the Canadian border.”[391]
The days of the “Little Englanders” were only then passing, when the colonies had almost been considered a nuisance.
But whether the region mapped out now as Winnipeg, Alberta and the other wheat areas of the Canadian West might have been attached to the great white Union in the sixties, if undisturbed by war and moving with continuingly accelerated industrial development or not, the Union would have become whiter, as the Lower South darkened; and Calhoun’s “substratum” theory would have there been tested to the fullest extent and risk.
From this Lincoln’s adroit political play induced the Lower South, by firing on the flag, to save itself, unknowingly. By the invasion of Virginia he forced that State, as well as North Carolina and Tennessee, into the Confederacy, against which, in 1862, he drew the weapon of emancipation without the least idea as to how deep it must cut. For it has proven to be a two edged sword.
Nothing more clearly reveals Lincoln’s ignorance of the inevitable consequences of emancipation, than his message to Congress in December, 1862:
“But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth and cover the whole land. Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country and there would be but one colored to seven whites. Could the one in any way disturb the seven?... But why should emancipation South send the free people North? People of any color seldom run unless there be something to run from. Heretofore to some extent they have fled North from bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted they will have neither to flee from.... And in any event cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?”[392]
If this was the Great Emancipator’s view of emancipation, what wonder that the “Southern color psychosis” should spread like measles, from contact alone.
The Congressional Reconstructionists thought that they had won in the war between the States what has since been styled euphoniously, “a sphere of influence,” a subject people to sell goods to. But the mass of Northern and Western whites, true Americans, sickened of the excesses of Congressional Reconstruction. The Federal troops were withdrawn on the order of a true patriot, Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, and not of a section.
Chastened and disciplined by their fall from power, the most energetic and industrious, the boldest and most assertive Negroes have, since 1876, been steadily moving into the mammoth cities of the North and West, to there build up in the segregated districts, groups of New Negroes, as the Report of the Chicago riot shows “more perfect thro suffering.”