APPENDIX No. I. AMERICAN IDEAS: THE KEYS TO THE HISTORY OF THE WAR. I. Political Iconoclasm in America.-The two idols of "the Constitution" and "the Union."-Extravagant praises of the Constitution.-Its true value.-It contained a noble principle and glaring defects.-Character of the founders of the Constitution. -Hamilton.-Franklin.-His cookery-book philosophy.-His absurdities in the Convention. The call for the Convention that formed the Constitution.-Three parties in the Convention.-The idea of a "national" government.-Conflict between the small and large States.-The result of this, the distinguishing feature of the Constitution.-That feature au accident, and not an a priori discovery.-Euumeration of defects in the Constitution.-The weakness and ignorance of its framers. -Its one conspicuous virtue and original principle.--Combination of State-rights with a common authority.-How involved in the construction of the Senate.--How made more precise in the Amendments.-Particulars in which the element of the States was recognized.-A new rule of construction applied to the American Union. -The necessity which originated it.-The Constitution of the United States not a political revolution.-The creature of the States.-True interpretation of its moral grandeur.-The bond of the Union a voluntary one.-No mission apart from the States. Why coercion of the States was not necessary.-How the Union stood for an American nationality.-Its power to reach individuals.-The Union, in practice, rather a rough companionship than a national identity.-Right of secession. Not necessary to discuss it.-The development of the Union a North and South, and not disintegrated States.-Profound invention of Calhoun of South Carolina.-How it was a Union measure, and not "Nullification." AN effect of great civil commotions in the history of a people is to liberate reason, and to give to intelligence the opportunity to assert itself against the traditions and political idolatries of the past. Such a period is essentially one of political iconoclasm-the breaking of idols which we find we have heretofore unduly cherished, and with it the recovery from the delusions of an unworthy and traditional worship. When there is little in the present to interest men, and their lives are passed in an established routine, it is natural for them to exaggerate and to adorn the past. But when the present has its own historical convulsion, it is then that men find new standards with which to judge the past, and a period in which rightly to estimate it,-destroying or dwarfing, it is true, much that before claimed their admiration or enchained their worship; but, on the other hand, ofttimes exalting what before had had an obscure and degraded place in popular estimation. It is in such periods that the native historian of his country finds the justest time for determining the correct value of the past, and distinguishing between what were its mere idols, and what should have been its true aspirations. It is thus, from the stand-point of the recent great war in America, that one may justly contemplate the true value of its past history, measure correctly its great men of a former period, and master the delusions of an old political idolatry. The world knows how before this war the people of North America had, for nearly three-quarters of a century, worshipped, as its two political idols, the Federal constitution and the Union of States formed under it. Looking back at these from the present period in American history, which has freed us from the restraints of mere sentiment and tradition, he who thus makes the calm and intelligent retrospect is astonished to find what extravagance and delusion were in the minds of these worshippers, and what acts of devotion were made to what were ofttimes but gilded images of clay. For two generations of men, the almost miraculous wisdom of the Federal constitution of America has been preached and exclaimed, until it was thought to be political blasphemy to impugn it. Its praises were hymned by poets. The public orator was listened to with impatience who had not some exaggerated tribute to pay to the sacred virtues of what Daniel Webster called the consti-tew-tion, and the almost angelic excellence of "the forefathers" who had framed it. It was seriously asserted, that in this instrument had been combined the political wisdom of all ages, and that it was the epitome of the human science of government. The insolent heights to which this extravagance arose were astounding. The world's last hopes of good government were said to be contained in these dozen pages of printed matter. Unhappily for such hopes, or for such boasts, we are now at period when we may estimate the right value of this wonderful constitution, and take the severe judgment of history upon it. We may now dare to state that judgment briefly: it is, that never did a political instrument contain, from the necessity of its circumstances, a nobler principle, or present the folly and ignorance of men in more glaring defects, than did the Federal constitution of the United States. It is no longer required, by the political fashion of the times, for an American to say, that the men who formed this constitution were either intellectual giants or wonderful scholars. Beyond a few names-such as Randolph and Patrick Henry, "the forest-born Demosthenes," of Virginia, Pinckney and Luther Martin, of Maryland, Hamilton, of New York, and Franklin, of Pennsylvania-the Convention which formed this instrument may be described as a company of very plain men, but little instructed in political science, who, in their debates, showed sometimes the crudities and chimeras of ignorant reform, and exhibited more frequently a loose ransacking of history for precedents and lessons, such as rather might have been expected in a club of college sophomores than in a council of statesmen. The two last names mentioned on the list of distinction in the Convention-Hamilton and Franklin-may be taken as examples of the American exaggeration of their public men, which, indeed, more peculiarly belonged to the people of the Northern States-that division of the American people which after-events have classified as Yankees. Hamilton, who had a school of his own in the Convention, was readily exalted as an idol by the party which he so early begot in the history of his country. The man who was honored by pageants and processions in the streets of New York, at the close of the Convention, must be declared, by the just and unimpassioned historian, to have been superficial as a statesman, and defective as a scholar. He had, indeed, neither the intuition of genius, nor the power of analysis. He was a man of little mind. But he had studied a peculiar style in writing, which Washington was weak enough to take for a model, and, it is said, sometimes appropriated. There was no point or sharp edges in the style either of Alexander Hamilton or George Washington. Both |