XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864

XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



CHAPTER I

THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC


"There is really no Union now between the North and the South....
No two nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter
rancor toward each other than these two nations of the Republic."

This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of
Ohio, provides the key to American politics in the decade
following the Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of the
people to its ultimate source, one would have to go far back into
colonial times. There was a process of natural selection at work,
in the intellectual and economic conditions of the eighteenth
century, which inevitably drew together certain types and
generated certain forces. This process manifested itself in one
form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in another in
those of the South. As early as the opening of the nineteenth
century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so
far alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely
admit of reconciliation. It is a truism to say that these