fold, by his first imperial nod, the area of the United States. In the whole history of the Mississippi Valley, there is nothing more startling than the way in which this Olympian figure touched momentarily, but so momentously, the course of its development. The great new West beyond the river, thus acquired, and immediately after explored by the stout pathbreakers Lewis and Clark, fell early into danger of being cut off from the nation to which it had come. What, precisely, Aaron Burr had planned has not been definitely ascertained; but Spain was to be robbed and the United States to be dismembered that Aaron Burr might sit exalted. That he was foiled was due, possibly, in the main, to the action of a person the most characteristic type of the frontiersman, perhaps, that the border has ever furnished; though the importance of the man, and of the stand he then took, did not appear until later. When Burr, pursuing his scheme, had reached Tennessee, he encountered there a spare, fiery, impetuous figure, of Scotch-Irish blood, major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson. To win Jack son would have been for Burr a great, it may be a decisive thing; for already Jackson showed a most masterful spirit. He felt strongly the fascination of the conspirator; but when, in Burr's talk, there fell out a hint at disunion, the glamour vanished; the frontiersman could not be moved, blocking thus early in his career the course of separatism. Suppose that, in those uncertain days, Jackson had taken the other turn. What he could do at the head of a body of frontier riflemen he was before long to show. But Jackson was to go far higher. Napoleon fell at last from his high estate, and languished in Elba. Was the Mississippi Valley really to escape the clutch of England? England put on shipboard nearly twenty thousand fighting men, soldiers and sailors, and, in the lull of European conflict, sent the expedition to the mouths of the Mississippi. The captains of Nelson marshaled the ships; the veterans of Wellington stood ready for the shore work. Civil officials were provided; for, when the easy victory had been gained, the land possessed and newly organized was to become a Canada of the South, balancing the Canada of the North. It was a motley crowd that confronted the great army before New Orleans, January 8, 1815: pirates from Barataria, French and Spaniards from the ancient Creole city, now and then among them an old soldier from the Napoleonic wars, negroes and Indians, waifs and strays from everywhere; but among them stood a body of Tennessee and Kentucky riflemen. That day, Andrew Jackson, as leader, showed a power of command quite extraordinary. Through personal force he welded these fragments, so ill assorted, into an effective army; so that after the English line had charged, three generals, — the commander among them, seven colonels, and the rank and file by thousands lay prostrate, and there was nothing for it but retreat. Andrew Jackson became the leading man in the country, an extraordinary force both for evil and for good in the shaping of American destinies. Raised to the highest place, he was the main promoter of the spoils system; in finance he was a bull in a china shop; in dealing with foreign nations a bully, always with a chip on his shoulder. But, on the other hand, in spite of ignorant violence, he set an example of character always honest, chivalric, and nobly virile; and from him more than from any other American, with the possible exception of Daniel Webster, proceeded the influence which made it possible for Abraham Lincoln to hold us together as a nation. The landscape of our past would indeed be lacking, if, looking backward, we failed to encounter there the great ScotchIrish frontiersman, in the high places by force of his grit and genius. new. merous South as North. At the close of Lacking a thread on which may be to emancipate their slaves, were as nustrung, in a convenient order, the details of the development of the Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century, nothing better can be done than to trace the consequences flowing from the introduction of two machines, the steam engine as applied to traffic and communication, and the cotton gin. These potent devices have shaped our ends almost as if they were divinities instead of mere constructions of matter. The steamboat in the West dates from the moment when, through Jackson's arm, we became secure from foreign attack; the Enterprise and Ætna - one of which had carried down a cargo of ammunition for the army which had defeated Pakenham being the first craft to make their way upstream from New Orleans to the Ohio. But deferring until later a consideration of the debt of our valley to the power of steam, the influence of the other invention, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, is even more noteworthy; for the cotton gin, besides affecting vastly material well-being, changed men's ways of looking at life, and caused to be set up new standards of right and wrong. From that early time when the captive in war, instead of being put to death, was preserved, made a servus, down through all the ages, human slavery has existed, and even in the eighteenth century, up to near the end, there were few indeed disposed to question the right of it. Merchants of Boston and Newport used their ships in the slave trade without scruple; and if a doctor of divinity, wanting a servant, shipped a hogshead of rum to the West Coast, to be exchanged there for a kidnapped boy, such a transaction, far from being held discreditable, was not accounted even eccentric. The South favored slavery no more than the North the anti-slavery clause of the Northwest Ordinance was introduced by Southern representatives; humane spirits like Washington and Jefferson, inclined Sundered thus as the North and South became in their interests and moral conceptions, a conflict was inevitable, and it was first joined in the Mississippi Valley. Before 1820, the streams of immigration, coming into the Northwest Territory up through Kentucky from the south, through Ohio and along the Lakes from the northeast, were jarring sharply, as they met in Indiana and Illinois, over slavery; and now, under the especial leadership of Henry Clay, the Missouri Compromise, the first effort to adjust the difficulty, was put through the federal Congress. Slavery being admitted into Missouri, it was ordained by Congress that all the territory north of Missouri should remain forever free; and with this settlement the country went on in a somewhat troubled peace for a full generation. But the black shadow was far enough from being removed. Pro-slavery feeling in the South grew constantly more intense, the institution coming to stand as the very corner stone of the social structure; in the North abolitionism became constantly more earnest, and increasing numbers fell under the spell of its great advocates. When, in 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, declared in the Senate that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, that Congress had no right to declare territory slave or free, that only the people on the territory had that right, — in a word, the doctrine of squatter sovereignty," it was the forerunner of a cyclone. 66 At once Douglas embodied the doctrine of squatter sovereignty in the Nebraska Bill, the whole valley north and west of Missouri being called Nebraska, - and the great war of words began which was the prelude to the actual clash of arms. In Congress, Seward, Chase, Sumner, Giddings, Wade, as leaders of the Free-Soilers, ranged themselves against Douglas, who rallied to his side champions especially from the South. Kansas, which had been set off from Nebraska, became a seat of tumult, the Northern immigrants coming in such numbers as to arouse in the South the fear that squatter sovereignty would be disastrous to it: incursions of border ruffians were encouraged, to prevent such a catastrophe. The moment when the crisis became tinged with the hue of blood was marked by the starting forth of that most ominous of apparitions, John Brown of Ossawatomie. "Without shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins!" he cried, as he smote; and when, flitting to the valley of the Potomac, he appeared on the border of the South, his fateful voice summoning the slaves to rise against their masters, all chance for peace was over. The old man's body might lie mouldering in its far Northern grave, but his soul marched on in trooping armies. Douglas, meantime, had been confronted in his own state by a champion he could not vanquish. They wrestled in field after field, - on the hillside, on the prairie, in the forest, by the shores of great rivers; the people gathering by many thousands to listen, till the blue canopy alone furnished an adequate auditorium. Abraham Lincoln came off victor; and now, while the South, state by state, ranged itself in rebellion, he stood opposed for the saving of the Union. While in all this preliminary struggle between slavery and freedom it was the Mississippi Valley mainly which formed the arena, that gloomy distinction can hardly be claimed for it after the cannon began to thunder. The focus and centre of the Civil War was on the soil of Virginia, where the largest armies, and as far as the South was concerned the ablest generals, fought for four years, back and forth: on the one hand to seize Washington, on the other hand to seize Richmond. The operations of the Civil War in the Mississippi Valley are to be regarded as a vast subsidiary movement by which ultimately the flank of Lee was turned. But if the war in the Mississippi Valley was in a sense subsidiary, it was by no means of small account. Military energy did its utmost. Rarely have armies been more vast, and only Borodino and Leipsic surpass in appalling grandeur the greater battles. The Army of Virginia, at the end of four years, lay surrounded and helpless, an isolated nucleus of warlike energy from which every supporting connection and attachment had been knocked away. On one side was the sea, in the hands of its foes; on the other Thomas lowered, about to pour through the passes of the Alleghanies. Sherman, charged with lightnings, rolled up from the south, a tempest gathering fury as it sped, while on the north Grant smote implacably. Not till then was Lee beaten. Appomattox came inevitably, and for the Confederacy all was 'over. Slavery was destroyed, and the Union was made secure. Strange indeed was the development which sprang from the cotton gin; scarcely less momentous has been the influence of the steam engine as applied to traffic and communication. The locomotive has succeeded, and often superseded, the steamboat, with results that are modifying all the continents. The new West, which has come to pass in the old Louisiana of the Purchase, was before the war in a most incipient stage, and as it stands to-day may properly be called the child of the locomotive. While that extraordinary machine in the eastern half of the valley has been a powerful modifier, in the western half it has worked almost as a creator. made possible a reclaiming and populating more rapid than has ever before been seen when new lands were occupied. The unknown wilderness of Jefferson's day has become filled throughout with fully organized commonwealths, and is about, with the admission of Oklahoma, to become, so to speak, politically mature. Whether such a rapid exploitation of the national domain will be for the ultimate benefit of our country, or otherwise, may well be questioned. Our well be questioned. Our grandchildren may wish their forefathers had gone more slowly. It has There are in the Mississippi Valley pleasant signs that, although heretofore railroads and the country tributary to them have often jarred, the expediency of harmony is beginning to be recognized, with most happy results. That the road may flourish, the country through which it passes must be prosperous. What better than for the road to help the country prosper? It has helped; and in this way: Some proper official, - the general freight agent, it may be,-studying his districts to find out for what they were best fitted, using the helps which in his high place he could easily command, has discovered, perhaps, that tomatoes can well be raised here, potatoes here; that here there is a fine opportunity for creameries, and here again a good field for poultry and eggs. Straightway he enters upon a campaign of education. To each village, hamlet, crossroads, teachers are sent to convert the farmers from their bad methods or unprofitable crops. They are instructed as to the better ways and the more marketable products. Finally, the road engages to find a sale for what is raised, and to carry it to market at a rate which will make sure the farmers' profit. When all is done, the country, from being poverty - stricken, has become a scene of plenty; while the beneficent road — beneficent not from a philanthropic impulse, but simply because it pays to be so -reaps a vast advantage from having tributary a body of rich and contented communities, instead of a population depressed and struggling. In many places of the Mississippi Valley these methods have found trial, and the invariable happy result makes it not doubtful that it will influence the policy of the future. That we suffer at present is largely due to the fact that, in the immense complexities which modern life develops, we do not at first grasp the right handle. We may hope it will be better some day as regards the problems the railroad gives rise to; as regards the problems, also, which the cotton gin has given rise to; for, though slavery has vanished, the black shadow has not ceased to hang heavily over the Mississippi Valley as well as elsewhere. So, too, as regards our problems in general, — but a few have been hinted at, - the manful heart will not consider any of them hopeless, and never before since the world began have so many good hands and brains as now been ready to work to remove the difficulties. The Mississippi Valley organized, — a basin of unexampled resources, occupied by thirty-five million English-speaking men possessed of the ancient, well-ordered Anglo-Saxon freedom! With the admission of Oklahoma to statehood, the Mississippi Valley may be said to be politically complete. The constitutional framework will be all in place in twenty-three commonwealths. As a vine expands over its supporting trellis, so the life of these millions will be upheld and guided in future years by these constructions, begun before Alfred's day, but confirmed and perfected, during many centuries, by liberty-loving peoples. With their life so braced and directed. the states of the Mississippi Valley possess the most favorable conditions for a perfect evolution. While their history in the past is full of interest, they can face the future with high hope. James K. Hosmer. REMINISCENCES OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC. IV. MIDWAY of the quinquennium mirabile to which most of my reminiscences appear to be related, to wit, on the evening of Monday, November 24, 1873, Tommaso Salvini acted for the first time in Boston, appearing at the Boston Theatre as Samson, in Ippolito d' Aste's tragedy of that name. During the engagements of his first year in America he was supported by a company who spoke only Italian. Afterward, beginning with the season of 1880-81, he played frequently in this country, and was the "star of troupes otherwise composed of English-speaking actors. This bilingual arrangement was a monstrosity, and nothing short of Salvini's genius could have made the combination tolerable. During the season of 1882-83 Miss Clara Morris was his leading lady; in other years, Miss Prescott, Miss Wainwright, Mrs. Bowers, and other reputable performers belonged to his supporting companies. In the spring of 1886 he appeared in Othello and Hamlet with Edwin Booth, who played Iago and Hamlet to Salvini's Othello and the Ghost. For many of the most finely discriminating connoisseurs of acting, in this region, Salvini became the first and foremost of the histrionic artists of our day, and with nearly all "the judicious" he took, held, and holds a highly exalted position. His personality was the most combined to overpower the observer and listener. As was said of Edmund Kean, "he dominated stage and audience completely." His training in the Continental school had been thorough, and, in temperamental force, I doubt if he was surpassed by any player at any period of the world. His acting was of the Latin order, not of the Teutonic or Anglo-Teutonic; it was, however, though always vital and strong, never extravagant; in gesture, though exuberant, it was not excessive; in its general method, it belonged to what, in choice from a poverty of terms, must be called the exhaustive rather than the suggestive school of art; there was in it not so high a solution of pure intellectuality as in Edwin Booth's, but in its mastery, in the largest way and to the smallest detail, of the symbols of histrionic expression, it ranked, I think, above that of every other player whom the stage of America has known within the past fifty years. Salvini was Charles Fechter carried up to the second power of all the Frenchman's virtues, with scarcely a hint of his limi tations. |