what followed. All the public
buildings of Washington were deliberately burnt. For this outrage the
Home Government was solely responsible. The general in command received
direct and specific orders, which he obeyed unwillingly. No pretence of
military necessity, or even of military advantage, can be pleaded. The
act, besides being a gross violation of the law of nations, was an
exhibition of sheer brutal spite, such as civilized war seldom witnessed
until Prussia took a hand in it. It had its reward. It burnt deep into
the soul of America; and from that incident far more than from anything
that happened in the War of Independence dates that ineradicable hatred
of England which was for generations almost synonymous with patriotism
in most Americans, and which almost to the hour of President Wilson's
intervention made many in that country doubt whether, even as against
Prussia, England could really be the champion of justice and humanity.

Things never looked blacker for the Republic than in those hours when
the English troops held what was left of Washington. Troubles came
thicker and thicker upon her. The Creek Nation, the most powerful of the
independent Indian tribes, instigated partly by English agents, partly
by the mysterious native prophet Tecumseh, suddenly descended with fire
and tomahawk on the scattered settlements of the South-West, while at
the same time a British fleet appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, apparently
meditating either an attack on New Orleans or an invasion through the
Spanish territory of Western Florida, and in that darkest hour when it
seemed that only the utmost exertions of every American could save the
United States from disaster, treason threatened to detach an important
section of the Federation from its allegiance.

The discontent of New England is intelligible enough. No part of the
Union had suffered so terribly from the war, and the suffering was the
bitterer for being incurred in a contest which was none of her making,
which she had desired to avoid, and which had been forced on her by
other sections which had suffered far less. Her commerce, by which she
largely lived, had been swept from the seas. Her people, deeply
distressed, demanded an immediate peace. Taking ground as discontented
sections, North and South, always did before 1864, on the doctrine of
State Sovereignty, one at least, and that the greatest of the New
England States, began a movement which seemed to point straig