Reconstruction and Progress

The close of the Civil War added many new and complex problems to the sufficiently difficult questions under national consideration. Some of these problems have found a lasting solution, others remain for judicious treatment by a generation better able by lapse of time to view with dispassionate judgment events that racked the hearts of all who shared the trials of that great convulsion. Reserving certain of those events for fuller notice, we give now the following summary of general affairs during the first years of peace from the pen of Charles Morris.

TERRIBLE as was the war into which the United States had been plunged, and immense as was the loss of life and treasure it involved, it did not end without some compensation for its cost and its horrors. The two disturbing questions which gave rise to the conflict were definitely settled by the triumph of the government. Slavery was abolished; that most fruitful source of sectional dispute no longer existed to vex the minds of legislators and people. The doctrine of State rights, also, had been laid at rest. The country had entered the war as a not very strongly united or clearly defined confederation of States. It emerged as a powerful and much more homogeneous nation. The theory of the right of secession was not likely to be advanced again for many years to come. Other benefits had resulted from the conflict. The national banking system may be named as one of these. The finances of the country were placed on such a solid and secure basis as they had never before occupied.

During the four years of the war the United States had performed an extraordinary labor. Beginning with the merest nucleus of an army had a navy, and with its arsenals bare of war-material, it had in that time created an army of more than a million disciplined men, as thorough soldiers as ever trod the surface of this planet, and completely supplied it with war-material of the most approved kind. It had revolutionized naval warfare, with its fleet of powerful ironclads, and had brought into action guns of much greater calibre and longer range than had ever before been employed. Its feats of transportation, of rail-road-building and destruction, of bridge-building, etc., were unprecedented in magnitude. "The Etowah bridge, six hundred and twenty-five feet long and seventy-five feet high, was built in six days; the Chattahoochee bridge, seven hundred and forty feet long and ninety feet high, was built in four and a half days."

The task of the government had been no light one. It had an immense country to reduce to obedience. From the beginning to the end of the war its armies were constantly on the enemy's soil, and opposed to men as brave as themselves, fighting for their homes and what they deemed their rights, with all the advantages of a posture of defence, and of the natural breastworks of rivers, mountain-chains, forests, and other checks to an invading army. It was not an open country, traversed by practicable roads, like the battle-grounds of Europe, but in great part a wild and difficult region, of vast extent, and so strongly defended by nature as greatly to reduce the necessity of defence by art. History presents no parallel instance of a country of such dimensions and such character, defended by a brave and patriotic population, conquered within an equally brief period of time.

There is one important incident of American history which demands attention at this point. The outbreak of the Civil War was taken advantage of by France, England, and Spain, to send an allied expedition to Vera Cruz, with the ostensible purpose of enforcing the payment of the Mexican debt to those countries. But, as it soon appeared that France had other aims, her allies withdrew. In July, 1863, the French entered the city of Mexico, and at once threw off the mask they had worn, proposing Maximilian, an Austrian prince, as a candidate for an imperial throne. The Mexican leaders who had aided the enterprise with the expectation of gaining power for themselves, found that they had been tricked by their astute ally, and that an empire with a foreign ruler was established in their country.

This empire was destined to be of short duration. The American war ended in the triumph of the North, to the dismay and confusion of the French invaders, and at once the voice of the United States was heard, bidding, in no uncertain phrase, the French to withdraw from the land. Napoleon III. prevaricated and delayed, but he dared not resist. It was the alternative of war or withdrawal, and war with the United States just then was no desirable undertaking. The French troops were withdrawn, but Maximilian madly remained. The necessary consequence followed. The Mexicans rose, besieged him, and captured him on May 15, 1867. He was tried by court-martial, was condemned to execution, and was shot on June 19. Thus disastrously ended the only attempt of European powers to control and to establish monarchy in a republican country of America. The Monroe doctrine had been proved to be more than an empty phrase.