CONCLUSION
To the ebullient romanticisms with which the foregoing
pages have dealt, the Civil War brought diverse fortunes; and from the
titanic conflict emerged an America rid of one of the feculent sources of
domestic schism. The romantic imperialisms of the slave economy were gone
forever. So much at least was cleared from the path of its destiny, and
the field of potential conflict was narrowed to the rival imperialisms of
eastern capitalism and western agrarianism. Both had been vastly
strengthened by the war. In the eastern centers was a greatly stimulated
industrialism, fed from the reservoirs of liquid capital gathered in the
process of financing the northern armies, ready to turn to
transcontinental railway-building, large-scale manufacture, and a gigantic
exploitation of the raw materials of mine and forest and field. Along the
Middle Border the old romance of the settlement came to new life as the
flood of homesteaders, augmented by disbanded soldiers, poured over the
prairie spaces beyond the Mississippi, to repeat there the story of
commonwealth building. East and West would eventually clash, for their
diverse economic needs were driving towards a collision; but that would
not come for a generation till the conflict of interests was thrust into
sharper relief.
In the meantime many familiar things were becoming anachronisms
over night, though they might linger on for years. As the romantic
revolution began with the laying aside of the small-clothes and tie-wig of
eighteenth-century aristocratic conservatism, so the new age began with
the putting away of the outworn dress of eighteenth-century romantic
liberalism. In the hurrying new days there was no time or place for
abstract theories of natural rights, for equalitarian democracy, for local
home rule - these relics of the past were thrust aside in the scramble for
wealth and power. The old philosophies were swept out on the rubbish heap
- Jefferson and Lincoln with Calhoun and Stephens - and Hamilton and
Marshall came to their own again. The lost cause carried down to defeat
much more than slavery, it carried down the old ideal of centralized
democracies, of individual liberty; and with the overthrow of the
traditional principles in their last refuge, the nation hurried forward
along the path of an unquestioning and uncritical consolidation, that was
to throw the coercive powers of a centralizing state into the hands of the
new industrialism. Here was a revolution that was to engulf the older
romantic America, its dignified literary ideals as well as its democratic
political theory. In the world of Jay Cooke and Commodore Vanderbilt, the
transcendental dream was as hopelessly a lost cause as the plantation
dream; it was in even worse plight, for it left no tragic memories to
weave a new romance about the fallen hopes. Emerson in Concord was as much
out of date as Lowell in Cambridge, or Gilmore Simms in Charleston. A new
age had come and other dreams-the age and the dreams of a middle-class
sovereignty, that was busily surveying the fields of its future conquests.
From the crude and vast romanticisms of that vigorous sovereignty emerged
eventually a spirit of realistic criticism, seeking to evaluate the worth
of this new America, and discover if possible other philosophies to take
the place of those which had gone down in the fierce battles of the Civil
War. What form this critical spirit assumed, and what replies it returned
to the strident challenge of the time, are questions not to be answer
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