It is of course impossible to understand the life of a politician in
another country without study of its conditions and its past. In the
case of America this study is especially necessary, not only because the
many points of comparison between that country and our own are apt to
conceal profound differences of customs and institutions, but because the
broader difference between a new country and an old is in many respects
more important than we conceive. But in the case of Lincoln there is
peculiar reason for carrying such a study far back. He himself appealed
unceasingly to a tradition of the past. In tracing the causes which up
to his time had tended to conjoin the United States more closely and the
cause which more recently had begun to threaten them with disruption, we
shall be examining the elements of the problem with which it was his work
in life to deal.

The "Thirteen United States of America" which in 1776 declared their
independence of Great Britain were so many distinct Colonies distributed
unevenly along 1,300 miles of the Atlantic coast. These thirteen
Colonies can easily be identified on the map when it is explained that
Maine in the extreme north was then an unsettled forest tract claimed by
the Colony of Massachusetts, that Florida in the extreme south belonged
to Spain, and that Vermont, which soon after asserted its separate
existence, was a part of the State of New York. Almost every one of
these Colonies had its marked peculiarities and its points of antagonism
as against its nearest neighbours; but they fell into three groups. We
may broadly contrast the five southernmost, which included those which
were the richest and of which in many ways the leading State was
Virginia, with the four (or later six) northernmost States known
collectively as New England. Both groups had at first been colonised by
the same class, the smaller landed gentry of England with a sprinkling of
well-to-do traders, though the South received later a larger number of