tion of pioneering by black folk from the South should not
escape us; nor the rare fortune that they bring with them cultural talents long buried and only half revealed in the cotton
lands from which they come.
In a way, two great modes of impulse have been at work in the settlement of the United States, other than the material one of bettering one's lot.
In no small part, ours has been the history of the under-dog —of common people rising against kings and overlords, of Pilgrims and Puritans and Catholics working loose from religious intolerance, of rebels seeking a new freedom, of adventurers breaking away from the fixity of things. This tradition we share with England and Western Europe; the impulse became a dominant force in New England and was at flood throughout the tidewater colonies when in the Revolution they threw off the Georges. We may trace its re-emergence in a new form even in the part which the South took in the Civil War. This may be put in terms of its idealists, as resistance to imposed authority by men who sought the governance of their own lives, however much they might deny it to their slaves.
We have another tradition—or, at least, another mode of the same impulse. Not alone rebellion against what has been, but opportunity for what may be, shaped its course. Set off by three thousand miles of sea, settled on a continent which had been kept in reserve ten thousand years, the spirit of our people has been molded by the frontiers we cleared. It drew and grew from the open spaces, from wildernesses giving way to settlements, from the building processes of countryside and commonwealth and nation. Its like is not known in the older countries of the world, still in the process of shaking loose from old tyrannies. We may abuse this heritage, but it is ours, a broader and more dynamic, more creative conception of liberty. Spiritually we are rebels. But we are also pioneers.
The Civil War may be interpreted in its final outcome, as the clash between these two great streams of impulse in American life and the triumph of this newer native embodiment of the thing that has stirred and molded the American soul.
