Such is, in brief, the diplomatic history of the intervention of the
United States in the Great War. Yet there is another angle from which it
can be viewed, whereby it seems not only inevitable but strangely
symbolic. The same century that saw across the Atlantic the birth of the
young Republic, saw in the very centre of Europe the rise of another new
Power. Remote as the two were, and unlikely as it must have seemed at
the time that they could ever cross each other's paths, they were in a
strange fashion at once parallel and antipodean. Neither has grown in
the ordinary complex yet unconscious fashion of nations. Both were, in a
sense, artificial products. Both were founded on a creed. And the creeds
were exactly and mathematically opposed. According to the creed of
Thomas Jefferson, all men were endowed by their Creator with equal
rights. According to the creed of Frederick Hohenzollern there was no
Creator, and no one possessed any rights save the right of the
strongest. Through more than a century the history of the two nations is
the development of the two ideas. It would have seemed unnatural if the
great Atheist State, in its final bid for the imposition of its creed on
all nations, had not found Jefferson's Republic among its enemies. That
anomaly was not to be. That flag which, decked only with thirteen stars
representing the original revolted colonies, had first waved over
Washington's raw levies, which, as the cluster grew, had disputed on
equal terms with the Cross of St. George its ancient lordship of the
sea, which Jackson had kept flying over New Orleans, which Scott and
Taylor had carried triumphantly to Monterey, which on a memorable
afternoon had been lowered over Sumter, and on a yet more memorable
morning raised once again over Richmond, which now bore its full
complement of forty-eight stars, symbolizing great and free States
stretching from ocean to ocean, appeared for the first time on a
European battlefield, and received there as its new baptism of fire a
salute from all the arsenals of Hell.
INDEX
Aberdeen, Lord, Calhoun's reply to, 118
Abolitionists, Southern, no attempt to suppress, 132;
hold Congress in Baltimore, 132;
Northern, different attitudes of, 132;
their hostility to the Union, 133;
their sectional character, 133;
Southern Abolitionism killed by, 133;
anger of South against, 134;
unpopularity of, in North, 135;
acquiesce in Secession, 164
Adams, Francis, American Minister in London, 192;
protests against the sailing of the _Alabama_, 192
Adams, John, opposed by Democrats for Vice-President, 57;
chosen President by Electoral College, 62;
his character and policy, 62-63;
defeated by Jefferson, 63;
refuses to receive Jefferson at the White House, 67;
fills offices with Federalists, 67
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