The Ifs of History Part 6

All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing the _chateau_ gates! Yet more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and insidious radicalisms. La.s.salle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier, Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of Repression's jail.

The course of events in Europe would have been far otherwise indeed if Napoleon's veterans, forcing their way into Hugomont and splitting the British strength in two, had prepared the way for a long lease of the power of that adroit and calculating master, who knew so well how to meet popular demands and still hold his personal sway. In its practical expression, his system was liberal. Every peasant proprietor in France to-day holds his acres by virtue of Napoleonic legislation.

That does not mean that all would have been good in France; far from that. A strange falsity, a theatric insincerity, lay beneath all the Napoleonic sentiments and ideals. These qualities color the thought of France still. Will she ever be able to escape them? These tendencies would have been many times more powerful if Napoleon had entrenched himself upon the throne. More than that, they must have pa.s.sed to other countries. The shadow of his eagles might lie athwart even our America, his insidious ideas expressing themselves in our politics and our intellectual and moral life, if that moment's vast contingency had gone Napoleon's way at Waterloo.

CHAPTER XVII

IF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER HAD MOVED SOUTHWARD, NOT NORTHWARD

The two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky, and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, in the same State.

Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin, and the families were originally of virtually the same cla.s.s, though Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana.

That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius, the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part.

Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate Thomas Lincoln was credited by his immortal son with the intention, in emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or convenience--for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "s.h.i.+ftless"

man--impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."

What if Thomas Lincoln had possessed a little more energy, and a few more s.h.i.+llings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi never produced an anti-slavery man.

In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the saving of the Union, for the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, no Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to the sum of the statesmans.h.i.+p which was enlisted on the Southern side.

It is even conceivable that Lincoln, rather than Davis, would have been the president of the Southern Confederacy. Only a combination of the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances made him the nominee of the Republican party for the presidency in 1860. If he had been the leading statesman and politician of Mississippi, his path to the Confederate presidency, as the success of Davis proved, would have been comparatively easy.

Without Lincoln, the anti-slavery agitation would have gone on just the same. The Republican party would have been const.i.tuted just the same.

Everything up to the 18th day of May, 1860, when Lincoln was nominated for president at the Wigwam in Chicago, would have gone on just the same. But lacking Lincoln, what a world of things afterward would have happened differently!

In the first place, it is probable that Seward would have been nominated for president. Very likely he would not have been elected; and as it was Lincoln who "smoked out" Douglas, it is probable that Douglas would have prevailed over all other Democratic candidates and been nominated at Charleston and elected president.

In which case there would have been no secession, and very likely no war, either at that time or later. Slavery would have become intrenched, to yield, perhaps, in the end only to economic influences, the operation of which had already doomed it.

But if Seward had been nominated and elected, secession would have taken place and war would have resulted. The sort of leader that the Union would have had in Seward may be inferred with perfect certainty from the famous, or rather infamous, proposition ent.i.tled, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration," which Seward solemnly laid before Lincoln less than a month after his inauguration. This extraordinary doc.u.ment, one of the most senseless and wicked programmes ever prepared by a man of state, advocated a change of the national issue from slavery to a foreign war; it advised that war be at once declared against France and Spain, and "explanations demanded" from Great Britain and Russia! In order that this brilliant programme might be carried out successfully, Seward suggested that he himself be made Dictator!

This scheme, I repeat, ill.u.s.trated the sort of alternative material that we should have had, lacking Lincoln. Chase, indeed, who was also a leading candidate for the presidency, would have been wiser. But in no position that he ever held, after 1860, did Chase bring forth any of the fruits of genius. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was a greater man, but did not command general support. Neither did Edward Bates, of Missouri, also a western candidate for the presidency.

The great soldiers who finally triumphed in the field as the instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the Union--Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan--would have been ranged on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding men. But he put forward no general because that general was _his man_.

He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved great were his discoveries.

The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of negative circ.u.mstances. It did not rise because things were not just so and so. It was a positive thing--the result of the active operations of a powerful genius, which the people recognized before the politicians and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war.

It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it, but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He carried out his plans.

The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original creation--as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds,

And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of G.o.d, and true.

Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and inheritance was of the South, not the West, might have turned his strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood?

CHAPTER XVIII

IF SKIPPER JENNINGS HAD NOT RESCUED CERTAIN s.h.i.+PWRECKED j.a.pANESE

Toward the end of the year 1850, Captain Jennings, of the American bark _Auckland_, trading in Asiatic waters, picked up the s.h.i.+pwrecked crew of a j.a.panese fis.h.i.+ng vessel, somewhere off the coast of j.a.pan. The captain was then bound for the new port of San Francisco, which the California gold-diggings had already made an important city. He continued on his course, and in due time--that is to say, very early in the year 1851--landed at San Francisco with his party of refugees.

Here the bright little Orientals were more than a nine days' wonder.

Few Americans had ever before seen a j.a.panese. That country was at the time more a "hermit nation" than Korea herself. Whalers and other sailors who had been wrecked on the j.a.panese coast had been put to cruel deaths. No white men except the Dutch had been permitted to trade with any of the j.a.panese cities, and the Dutch trade had fallen into decay.

j.a.pan seemed as far from our lives as is the planet Mars.

But the j.a.panese whom Captain Jennings had humanely rescued were kindly treated by him, and on the homeward voyage they had endeared themselves to him and his crew. He landed them at San Francisco with very favorable reports of their character, conduct and intelligence. The free-handed miners of that town wanted nothing better than somebody or something to lionize. So for a considerable time the s.h.i.+pwrecked j.a.panese had the best of everything in San Francisco, until an opportunity arose to send them, fat and happy, back to their own country.

A full account of the incident and of the refugees was published in one of the San Francisco papers. It fell into the hands of just one man who was capable of perceiving the momentous possibilities that lay in the occurrence. This man was a commodore in the United States navy; and his name was not Perry, as the reader may at first surmise, but John H.

Aulick. He was a Virginian, then in his sixty-second year; he had had a long and very honorable service, and was keen and statesmanlike in his ideas.

What Commodore Aulick saw in the incident was this: The kind and friendly reception of the j.a.panese waifs in America, contrasted with the ordinary treatment of white refugees in j.a.pan, might be taken advantage of to open friendly relations with j.a.pan. To effect this result, a naval expedition should be sent to j.a.pan. If properly conducted, the expedition not only might secure friendly treatment of American whalers on the j.a.panese coasts, but might open up trade relations with the country which would be highly profitable.

Filled with his idea, which was really a great one, Commodore Aulick obtained permission to lay it before the secretary of state, who was none other than Daniel Webster. He had an interview with Mr. Webster at Was.h.i.+ngton on the 9th day of May, 1851.

Webster saw the point at once. At his instance, President Fillmore ordered the navy department to prepare a small expedition for the voyage to j.a.pan; and when the s.h.i.+ps were ready--they were headed by the sloop of war _Mississippi_--Commodore Aulick was put in command. He actually sailed on the voyage; but he was entrusted with the task of taking the Brazilian minister as far as Rio Janeiro on the way, and some trouble having arisen with this functionary for which Commodore Aulick was blamed, he was superseded in command of the expedition by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, in command of the _Hartford_.

It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up j.a.pan." His name will be a.s.sociated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the luck which those j.a.panese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian"

wanderers as San Francisco was--then!

If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster--"too zealous," according to their view--sent the United States s.h.i.+ps on their way. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government would have been slow in making such an infinitely clever move as the Perry expedition const.i.tuted. Yet if the United States had not taken the step, Russia would have stood next in the line of logical inheritance to the idea. And if j.a.pan had been opened under Russian auspices, its doors, instead of standing open toward the East, and consequently toward _our_ West, would have opened toward the Asiatic continental West, which would have meant toward St. Petersburg.

If the j.a.panese had, under Russian initiative, adopted the material adjuncts of western civilization, as they finally did under ours, that civilization would have taken on a distinctly Muscovite color. The j.a.panese would never, indeed, have been able, under such auspices, to organize an effective resistance to Russian arms, for long before they had acquired the requisite training they must have been held firmly in the grip of the Russian military system.

That is to say, j.a.pan would have been, step by step, annexed to the Russian empire. The Russo-j.a.panese war would never have been, since there would have been neither hope nor occasion for it. Most of the rich fruits of j.a.panese art and industry would have drifted toward Russia.

The Russian empire would have been enormously enriched by the j.a.panese trade, and the importance of that empire immensely magnified in the history of our epoch. A reflex orientalizing influence would have rolled over Russia itself, and the course of Russian internal development altered in a degree now almost incalculable.

If Russia had not been reasonably prompt to take the step, the eyes of British statesmen must sooner or later have been opened to the opportunity. The method by which British intervention proceeds in Asiatic countries is well known. It has always had but slight regard for native sovereignty, no matter how high the state of social or artistic or intellectual development on the part of the native races affected.

British administrators, or, if j.a.pan had retained its nominal sovereignty, British "residents" or agents, would really have governed the country through the Tyc.o.o.n or the Mikado, or both--preferably the Tyc.o.o.n, for he was a military ruler, and affairs could have been handled more readily through him.

Events in j.a.pan must have antic.i.p.ated the subsequent history of Egypt, on a much more magnificent scale. Again, though there would have been a readier entrance for American and European trade than in the case of Russian intervention, the best of everything j.a.panese would certainly have gone to England. And once again, the free, independent, powerful, masterful j.a.panese empire of the present day, thrilling with a new life in which all the civilization of the Occident is made the handmaid of an ancient and undaunted Asiatic people, would not have been.

In the unlikely event that the j.a.panese, in default of Perry's expedition, had been left quite alone for another generation or two, their case would not have been better in the long run. They would simply have missed the chance they got. Left a "hermit nation," they would sooner or later have fallen under the influence of one Western country or another, and been so seriously r.e.t.a.r.ded in the race of civilization that they could never have caught up.

America was the only country that could have opened to them the wonderful career that they have had. The high noon of the nineteenth century was the golden moment for the commencement of their development along the line of Western civilization. If the hour had not struck then for them it would not have struck at all. Time, the helping hand, the protecting influence of an unselfish friend among the nations, and the golden gift of destiny, were all represented for j.a.pan in the rescuing sails of Skipper Jennings's bark, that lucky day in the wide Pacific.

CHAPTER XIX