I
THE DEMOCRATS AND THE WHIGS
The first phase of American political history was characterized by the
conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in
the complete triumph of the latter. The second period was characterized
by an almost equally bitter contest between the Democrats and the Whigs
in which the Democrats represented a new version of the earlier
Republican tradition and the Whigs a resurrected Federalism. The
Democracy of Jackson differed in many important respects from the
Republicanism of Jefferson, and the Whig doctrine of Henry Clay was far
removed from the Federalism of Alexander Hamilton. Nevertheless, from
1825 to 1850, the most important fact in American political development
continued to be a fight between an inadequate conception of democracy,
represented by Jackson and his followers, and a feeble conception of
American nationality, represented best by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster;
and in this second fight the victory still rested, on the whole, with
the Democrats. The Whigs were not annihilated as the Federalists had
been. In the end they perished as a party, but not because of the
assaults of their opponents, but because of their impotence in the face
of a grave national crisis. Nevertheless, they were on all essential
issues beaten by the Democrats; and on the few occasions on which they
were victorious, their victories were both meaningless and fruitless.
The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our
domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer
Democracy in power and self-consciousness. It was one of the gravest
errors of Hamilton and the Federalists that they misunderstood and
suspected the pioneer Democracy, just as it was one of the greatest
merits of Jefferson that he early appreciated its importance and used
his influence and power to advance its interests. The consequence was
that the pioneers became enthusiastic and radical supporters of the
Republican party. They repeated and celebrated the Jeffersonian
catchwords with the utmost conviction. They became imbued with the
spirit of the true Jeffersonian faith. They were, indeed, in many
respects more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself, and sought to realize
some of his ideas with more energy and consistency. These ideas
expressed and served their practical needs marvelously well, and if the
formulas had not already been provided by Jefferson, they would most
assuredly have been crystallized by the pioneer politicians of the day.
The Jeffersonian creed has exercised a profound influence upon the
thought of the American people, not because Jefferson was an original
and profound thinker, but because of his ability to formulate popular
opinions, prejudices, and interests.
It is none the less true that the pioneer Democracy soon came to differ
with Jefferson about some important questions of public policy. They
early showed, for instance, a lively disapproval of Jefferson's
management of the crisis in foreign affairs, which preceded the War of
1812. Jefferson's policy of commercial embargo seemed pusillanimous to
Jackson and the other Western Democrats. They did not believe in
peaceful warfare; and their different conception of the effective way of
fighting a foreign enemy was symptomatic of a profound difference of
opinion and temper. The Western Democracy did not share Jefferson's
amiable cosmopolitanism. It was, on the contrary, aggressively resolved
to assert the rights and the interests of the United States against any
suspicion of European aggrandizement. However much it preferred a
let-alone policy in respect to the domestic affairs, all its instincts
revolted against a weak foreign policy; and its instincts were outraged
by the administration's policy of peaceful warfare, which injured
ourselves so much more than it injured England, not only because the
pioneers were fighting men by conviction and habit, but because they
were much more genuinely national in their feelings than were Jefferson
and Madison.
The Western Democrats finally forced Madison and the official Republican
leaders to declare war against England, because Madison preferred even a
foreign war to the loss of popularity; but Madison, although he accepted
the necessity of war, was wholly incompetent to conduct it efficiently.
The inadequacy of our national organization and our lack of national
cohesion was immediately and painfully exhibited. The Republican
superstition about militarism had prevented the formation of a regular
army at all adequate to the demands of our national policy, and the
American navy, while efficient so far as it went, was very much too
small to constitute an effective engine of naval warfare. Moreover, the
very Congress that clearly announced an intention of declaring war on
Great Britain failed to make any sufficient provision for its energetic
prosecution. The consequence of this short-sighted view of our national
responsibilities is that the history of the War of 1812 makes painful
reading for a patriotic American. The little American navy earned
distinction, but it was so small that its successes did not prevent it
from being shut off eventually from the high seas. The military
operations were a succession of blunders both in strategy and in
performance. On the northern frontier a series of incompetent generals
led little armies of half-hearted soldiers to unnecessary defeats or at
best to ineffectual victories; and the most conspicuous military success
was won at New Orleans by the Western pioneers, who had no
constitutional scruples about fighting outside of their own states, and
who were animated by lively patriotic feelings. On the whole, however,
the story makes humiliating reading, not because the national Capital
was captured almost without resistance, or because we were so frequently
beaten, but because our disorganization, the incompetence of the
national government, and the disloyalty of so many Americans made us
deserve both a less successful war and a more humiliating peace.
The chief interest of the second English war for the purpose of this
book is, however, its clear indication of the abiding-place at that time
of the American national spirit. That spirit was not found along the
Atlantic coast, whose inhabitants were embittered and blinded by party
and sectional prejudices. It was resident in the newer states of the
West and the Southwest. A genuine American national democracy was coming
into existence in that part of the country--a democracy which was as
democratic as it knew how to be, while at the same time loyal and
devoted to the national government. The pioneers had in a measure
outgrown the colonialism of the thirteen original commonwealths. They
occupied a territory which had in the beginning been part of the
national domain. Their local commonwealths had not antedated the
Federal Union, but were in a way children of the central government; and
they felt that they belonged to the Union in a way that was rarely
shared by an inhabitant of Massachusetts or South Carolina. Their
national feeling did not prevent them from being in some respects
extremely local and provincial in their point of view. It did not
prevent them from resenting with the utmost energy any interference of
the Federal government in what they believed to be their local affairs.
But they were none the less, first and foremost, loyal citizens of the
American Federal state.
II
THE NEW NATIONAL DEMOCRACY
We must consider carefully this earliest combination of the national
with the democratic idea. The Western Democracy is important, not only
because it played the leading part in our political history down to
1850, but precisely because it does offer, in a primitive but
significant form, a combination of the two ideas, which, when united,
constitute the formative principle in American political and social
development. The way had been prepared for this combination by the
Republican acceptance of the Federal organization, after that party had
assumed power; but the Western Democrats took this alliance much more
innocently than the older Republican leaders. They insisted, as we have
seen, on a declaration of war against Great Britain; and humiliating as
were the results of that war, this vigorous assertion of the national
point of view, both exposed in clear relief the sectional disloyalty of
the Federalists of New England and resulted later in an attempted
revival of a national constructive policy. It is true that the
regeneration of the Hamiltonian spirit belongs rather to the history of
the Whigs than to the history of the Democrats. It is true, also, that
the attempted revival at once brought out the inadequacy of the
pioneer's conceptions both of the national and the democratic ideas.
Nevertheless, it was their assertion of the national interest against a
foreign enemy which provoked its renewed vitality in relation to our
domestic affairs. Whatever the alliance between nationality and
democracy, represented by the pioneers, lacked in fruitful understanding
of the correlative ideas, at least it was solid alliance. The Western
Democrats were suspicious of any increase of the national organization
in power and scope, but they were even more determined that it should be
neither shattered nor vitally injured. Although they were unable to
grasp the meaning of their own convictions, the Federal Union really
meant to them something more than an indissoluble legal contract. It was
rooted in their life. It was one of those things for which they were
willing to fight; and their readiness to fight for the national idea was
the great salutary fact. Our country was thereby saved from the
consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy,
and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the
followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was
preserved.
Be it immediately remarked, however, that the pioneer Democrats were
obliged to fight for the Union, just because they were not interested in
its progressive consummation. They willed at one and the same time that
the Union _should_ be preserved, but that it _should not_ be increased
and strengthened. They were national in feeling, but local and
individualistic in their ideas; and these limited ideas were associated
with a false and inadequate conception of democracy. Jefferson had
taught them to believe that any increase of the national organization
was inimical to democracy. The limitations of their own economic and
social experience and of their practical needs confirmed them in this
belief. Their manner of life made them at once thoroughly loyal and
extremely insubordinate. They combined the sincerest patriotism with an
energetic and selfish individualism; and they failed wholly to realize
any discrepancy between these two dominant elements in their life. They
were to love their country, but they were to work for themselves; and
nothing wrong could happen to their country, provided they preserved its
institutions and continued to enjoy its opportunities. Their failure to
grasp the idea that the Federal Union would not take care of itself,
prevented them from taking disunionist ideas seriously, and encouraged
them to provoke a crisis, which, subsequently, their fundamental loyalty
to the Union prevented from becoming disastrous. They expected their
country to drift to a safe harbor in the Promised Land, whereas the
inexorable end of a drifting ship is either the rocks or the shoals.
In their opposition to the consolidation of the national organization,
the pioneers believed that they were defending the citadel of their
democratic creed. Democracy meant to them, not only equal opportunities
secured by law, but an approximately equal standing among individual
citizens, and an approximately equal division of the social and economic
fruits. They realized vaguely that national consolidation brought with
it organization, and organization depended for its efficiency upon a
classification of individual citizens according to ability, knowledge,
and competence. In a nationalized state, it is the man of exceptional
position, power, responsibility, and training who is most likely to be
representative and efficient, whereas in a thoroughly democratic state,
as they conceived it, the average man was the representative citizen and
the fruitful type. Nationalization looked towards the introduction and
perpetuation of a political, social, and financial hierarchy. They
opposed it consequently, on behalf of the "plain people"; and they even
reached the conclusion that the contemporary political system was to
some extent organized for the benefit of special interests. They
discovered in the fiscal and administrative organization the presence of
discrimination against the average man. The National Bank was an example
of special economic privileges. The office-holding clique was an example
of special political privileges. Jackson and his followers declared war
on these sacrilegious anomalies in the temple of democracy. Thus the
only innovations which the pioneers sought to impose on our national
political system were by way of being destructive. They uprooted a
national institution which had existed, with but one brief interruption,
for more than forty years; and they entirely altered the tradition of
appointment in the American civil service. Both of these destructive
achievements throw a great deal of light upon their unconscious
tendencies and upon their explicit convictions, and will help us to
understand the value and the limitation of the positive contribution
which the pioneers made to the fullness of the American democratic idea.
The National Bank was the institution by virtue of which Hamilton sought
to secure a stable national currency and an efficient national fiscal
agent; and the Bank, particularly under its second charter, had
undoubtedly been a useful and economical piece of financial machinery.
The Republicans had protested against it in the beginning, but they had
later come to believe in its necessity; and at the time Benton and
Jackson declared war upon it, the Bank was, on the whole, and in spite
of certain minor and local grievances, a popular institution. If the
question of the re-charter of the National Bank had been submitted to
popular vote in 1832, a popular majority would probably have declared in
its favor. Jackson's victory was due partly to his personal popularity,
partly to the unwise manner in which the Bank was defended, but chiefly
to his success in convincing public opinion that the Bank was an
institution whose legal privileges were used to the detriment of the
American people. As a matter of fact, such was not the case. The Bank
was a semi-public corporation, upon which certain exceptional privileges
had been conferred, because the enjoyment of such privileges was
inseparable from the services it performed and the responsibilities it
assumed. When we consider how important those services were, and how
difficult it has since been to substitute any arrangement, which
provides as well both a flexible and a stable currency and for the
articulation of the financial operations of the Federal Treasury with
those of the business of the country, it does not look as if the
emoluments and privileges of the Bank were disproportionate to its
services. But Jackson and his followers never even considered whether
its services and responsibilities were proportionate to its legal
privileges. The fact that any such privilege existed, the fact that any
legal association of individuals should enjoy such exceptional
opportunities, was to their minds a violation of democratic principles.
It must consequently be destroyed, no matter how much the country needed
its services, and no matter how difficult it was to establish in its
place any equally efficient institution.
The important point is, however, that the campaign against the National
Bank uncovered a latent socialism, which lay concealed behind the
rampant individualism of the pioneer Democracy. The ostensible grievance
against the Bank was the possession by a semi-public corporation of
special economic privileges; but the anti-Bank literature of the time
was filled half unconsciously with a far more fundamental complaint.
What the Western Democrats disliked and feared most of all was the
possession of any special power by men of wealth. Their crusade against
the "Money Power" meant that in their opinion money must not become a
power in a democratic state. They had no objection, of course, to
certain inequalities in the distribution of wealth; but they fiercely
resented the idea that such inequalities should give a group of men any
special advantages which were inaccessible to their fellow-countrymen.
The full meaning of their complaint against the Bank was left vague and
ambiguous, because the Bank itself possessed special legal privileges;
and the inference was that when these privileges were withdrawn, the
"Money Power" would disappear with them. The Western Democrat devoutly
believed that an approximately equal division of the good things of life
would result from the possession by all American citizens of equal legal
rights and similar economic opportunities. But the importance of this
result in their whole point of view was concealed by the fact that they
expected to reach it by wholly negative means--that is, by leaving the
individual alone. The substantially equal distribution of wealth, which
was characteristic of the American society of their own day, was far
more fundamental in their system of political and social ideas than was
the machinery of liberty whereby it was to be secured. And just as soon
as it becomes apparent that the proposed machinery does as a matter of
fact accomplish a radically unequal result, their whole political and
economic creed cries loudly for revision.
The introduction of the spoils system was due to the perverted
application of kindred ideas. The emoluments of office loomed large
among the good things of life to the pioneer Democrat; and such
emoluments differed from other economic rewards, in that they were
necessarily at the disposal of the political organization. The public
offices constituted the tangible political patrimony of the American
people. It was not enough that they were open to everybody. They must
actually be shared by almost everybody. The terms of all elected
officials must be short, so that as many good democrats as possible
could occupy an easy chair in the house of government; and officials
must for similar reasons be appointed for only short terms. Traditional
practice at Washington disregarded these obvious inferences from the
principles of true democracy. Until the beginning of Jackson's first
administration the offices in the government departments had been
appropriated by a few bureaucrats who had grown old at their posts; and
how could such a permanent appropriation be justified? The pioneer
Democrat believed that he was as competent to do the work as any member
of an office-holding clique, so that when he came into power, he
corrected what seemed to him to be a genuine abuse in the traditional
way of distributing the American political patrimony. He could not
understand that training, special ability, or long experience
constituted any special claim upon a public office, or upon any other
particular opportunity or salary. One democrat was as good as another,
and deserved his share of the rewards of public service. The state could
not undertake to secure a good living to all good democrats, but, when
properly administered, it could prevent any appropriation by a few
people of the public pay-roll.
In the long run the effect of the spoils system was, of course, just the
opposite of that anticipated by the early Jacksonian Democrats. It
merely substituted one kind of office-holding privilege for another. It
helped to build up a group of professional politicians who became in
their turn an office-holding clique--the only difference being that one
man in his political life held, not one, but many offices. Yet the
Jacksonian Democrat undoubtedly believed, when he introduced the system
into the Federal civil service, that he was carrying out a desirable
reform along strictly democratic lines. He was betrayed into such an
error by the narrowness of his own experience and of his intellectual
outlook. His experience had been chiefly that of frontier life, in which
the utmost freedom of economic and social movement was necessary; and he
attempted to apply the results of this limited experience to the
government of a complicated social organism whose different parts had
very different needs. The direct results of the attempt were very
mischievous. He fastened upon the American public service a system of
appointment which turned political office into the reward of partisan
service, which made it unnecessary for the public officials to be
competent and impossible for them to be properly experienced, and which
contributed finally to the creation of a class of office-holding
politicians. But the introduction of the spoils system had a meaning
superior to its results. It was, after all, an attempt to realize an
ideal, and the ideal was based on a genuine experience. The "Virginian
Oligarchy," although it was the work of Jefferson and his followers, was
an anachronism in a state governed in the spirit of Jeffersonian
Democratic principles. It was better for the Jacksonian Democrats to
sacrifice what they believed to be an obnoxious precedent to their
principles than to sacrifice their principles to mere precedent. If in
so doing they were making a mistake, that was because their principles
were wrong. The benefit which they were temporarily conferring on
themselves, as a class in the community, was sanctioned by the letter
and the spirit of their creed.
Closely connected with their perverted ideas and their narrow view of
life, we may discern a leaven of new and useful democratic experience.
The new and useful experience which they contributed to our national
stock was that of homogeneous social intercourse. I have already
remarked that the Western pioneers were the first large body of
Americans who were genuinely national in feeling. They were also the
first large body of Americans who were genuinely democratic in feeling.
Consequently they imparted a certain emotional consistency to the
American democracy, and they thereby performed a social service which
was in its way quite as valuable as their political service. Democracy
has always been stronger as a political than it has as a social force.
When adopted as a political ideal of the American people, it was very
far from possessing any effective social vitality; and until the present
day it has been a much more active force in political than in social
life. But whatever traditional social force it has obtained, can be
traced directly to the Western pioneer Democrat. His democracy was based
on genuine good-fellowship. Unlike the French Fraternity, it was the
product neither of abstract theories nor of a disembodied
humanitarianism. It was the natural issue of their interests, their
occupations, and their manner of life. They felt kindly towards one
another and communicated freely with one another because they were not
divided by radical differences in class, standards, point of view, and
wealth. The social aspect of their democracy may, in fact, be compared
to the sense of good-fellowship which pervades the rooms of a properly
constituted club.
Their community of feeling and their ease of communication had come
about as the result of pioneer life in a self-governing community. The
Western Americans were confronted by a gigantic task of overwhelming
practical importance,--the task of subduing to the needs of complicated
and civilized society a rich but virgin wilderness. This task was one
which united a desirable social purpose with a profitable individual
interest. The country was undeveloped, and its inhabitants were poor.
They were to enrich themselves by the development of the country, and
the two different aspects of their task were scarcely distinguished.
They felt themselves authorized by social necessity to pursue their own
interests energetically and unscrupulously, and they were not either
hampered or helped in so doing by the interference of the local or the
national authorities. While the only people the pioneer was obliged to
consult were his neighbors, all his surroundings tended to make his
neighbors like himself--to bind them together by common interests,
feelings, and ideas. These surroundings called for practical, able,
flexible, alert, energetic, and resolute men, and men of a different
type had no opportunity of coming to the surface. The successful pioneer
Democrat was not a pleasant type in many respects, but he was saved from
many of the worst aspects of his limited experience and ideas by a
certain innocence, generosity, and kindliness of spirit. With all his
willful aggressiveness he was a companionable person who meant much
better towards his fellows than he himself knew.
We need to guard scrupulously against the under-valuation of the advance
which the pioneers made towards a genuine social democracy. The freedom
of intercourse and the consistency of feeling which they succeeded in
attaining is an indispensable characteristic of a democratic society.
The unity of such a state must lie deeper than any bond established by
obedience to a single political authority, or by the acceptance of
common precedents and ideas. It must be based in some measure upon an
instinctive familiarity of association, upon a quick communicability of
sympathy, upon the easy and effortless sense of companionship. Such
familiar intercourse is impossible, not only in a society with
aristocratic institutions, but it can with difficulty be attained in a
society that has once had aristocratic institutions. A century more or
less of political democracy has not introduced it into France, and in
1830 it did not exist along the Atlantic seaboard at all to the same
extent that it did in the newer states of the West. In those states the
people, in a sense, really lived together. They were divided by fewer
barriers than have been any similarly numerous body of people in the
history of the world; and it was this characteristic which made them so
efficient and so easily directed by their natural leaders. No doubt it
would be neither possible nor desirable to reproduce a precisely similar
consistency of feeling over a social area in which there was a greater
diversity of manners, standards, and occupations; but it remains true
that the American democracy will lose its most valuable and promising
characteristic in case it loses the homogeneity of feeling which the
pioneers were the first to embody.
It is equally important to remember, however, that the social
consistency of the pioneer communities should under different conditions
undergo a radical transformation. Neither the pioneers themselves nor
their admirers and their critics have sufficiently understood how much
individual independence was sacrificed in order to obtain this
consistency of feeling, or how completely it was the product, in the
form it assumed, of temporary economic conditions. If we study the
Western Democrats as a body of men who, on the whole, responded
admirably to the conditions and opportunities of their time, but who
were also very much victimized and impoverished by the limited nature of
these conditions and opportunities--if we study the Western Democrat
from that point of view, we shall find him to be the most significant
economic and social type in American history. On the other hand, if we
regard him in the way that he and his subsequent prototypes wish to be
regarded, as the example of all that is permanently excellent and
formative in American democracy, he will be, not only entirely
misunderstood, but transformed from an edifying into a mischievous type.
Their peculiar social homogeneity, and their conviction that one man was
as good as another, was the natural and legitimate product of
contemporary economic conditions. The average man, without any special
bent or qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In
that country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or
exclusive devotion. The cheaply and easily made instrument was the
efficient instrument, because it was adapted to a year or two of use and
then for supersession by a better instrument; and for the service of
such tools one man was as likely to be good as another. No special
equipment was required. The farmer was obliged to be all kinds of a
rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and
storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number
of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly
large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter,
merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of
these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who
persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting
standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His
finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than
did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and
peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of
his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which
naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and
uncritically to current standards.
It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with
distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards
of achievement. Such a man did insist upon being in certain respects
better than the average; and under the prevalent economic social
conditions he did impair the consistency of feeling upon which the
pioneers rightly placed such a high value. Consequently they half
unconsciously sought to suppress men with special vocations. For the
most part this suppression was easily accomplished by the action of
ordinary social and economic motives. All the industrial, political, and
social rewards went to the man who pursued his business, professional,
or political career along regular lines; and in this way an ordinary
task and an interested motive were often imposed on men who were better
qualified for special tasks undertaken from disinterested motives. But
it was not enough to suppress the man with a special vocation by
depriving him of social and pecuniary rewards. Public opinion must be
taught to approve of the average man as the representative type of the
American democracy, so that the man with a special vocation may be
deprived of any interest or share in the American democratic tradition;
and this attempt to make the average man the representative American
democrat has persisted to the present day--that is, to a time when the
average man is no longer, as in 1830, the dominant economic factor.
It is in this way, most unfortunately, that one of the leading articles
in the American popular creed has tended to impair American moral and
intellectual integrity. If the man with special standards and a special
vocation interfered with democratic consistency of feeling, it was
chiefly because this consistency of feeling had been obtained at too
great a sacrifice--at the sacrifice of a higher to a lower type of
individuality. In all civilized communities the great individualizing
force is the resolute, efficient, and intense pursuit of special ideals,
standards, and occupations; and the country which discourages such
pursuits must necessarily put up with an inferior quality and a less
varied assortment of desirable individual types. But whatever the loss
our country has been and is suffering from this cause, our popular
philosophers welcome rather than deplore it. We adapt our ideals of
individuality to its local examples. When orators of the Jacksonian
Democratic tradition begin to glorify the superlative individuals
developed by the freedom of American life, what they mean by
individuality is an unusual amount of individual energy successfully
spent in popular and remunerative occupations. Of the individuality
which may reside in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some
disinterested, and perhaps unpopular moral, intellectual, or technical
purpose, they have not the remotest conception; and yet it is this kind
of individuality which is indispensable to the fullness and intensity of
American national life.
III
THE WHIG FAILURE
The Jacksonian Democrats were not, of course, absolutely dominant during
the Middle Period of American history. They were persistently, and on a
few occasions successfully, opposed by the Whigs. The latter naturally
represented the political, social, and economic ideas which the
Democrats under-valued or disparaged. They were strong in those Northern
and border states, which had reached a higher stage of economic and
social development, and which contained the mansions of contemporary
American culture, wealth, and intelligence. It is a significant fact
that the majority of Americans of intelligence during the Jacksonian
epoch were opponents of Jackson, just as the majority of educated
Americans of intelligence have always protested against the national
political irresponsibility and the social equalitarianism characteristic
of our democratic tradition; but unfortunately they have always failed
to make their protests effective. The spirit of the times was against
them. The Whigs represented the higher standards, the more definite
organization, and the social inequalities of the older states, but when
they attempted to make their ideas good, they were faced by a dilemma
either horn of which was disastrous to their interests. They were
compelled either to sacrifice their standards to the conditions of
popular efficiency or the chance of success to the integrity of their
standards. In point of fact they pursued precisely the worst course of
all. They abandoned their standards, and yet they failed to achieve
success. Down to the Civil War the fruits of victory and the prestige of
popularity were appropriated by the Democrats.
The Whigs, like their predecessors, the Federalists, were ostensibly the
party of national ideas. Their association began with a group of
Jeffersonian Republicans who, after the second English war, sought to
resume the interrupted work of national consolidation. The results of
that war had clearly exposed certain grave deficiencies in the American
national organization; and these deficiencies a group of progressive
young men, under the lead of Calhoun and Clay, proposed to remedy. One
of the greatest handicaps from which the military conduct of the war had
suffered was the lack of any sufficient means of internal communication;
and the construction of a system of national roads and waterways became
an important plank in their platform. There was also proposed a policy
of industrial protection which Calhoun supported by arguments so
national in import and scope that they might well have been derived
from Hamilton's report. Under the influence of similar ideas the
National Bank was rechartered; and as the correlative of this
constructive policy, a liberal nationalistic interpretation of the
Constitution was explicitly advocated. As one reads the speeches
delivered by some of these men, particularly by Calhoun, during the
first session of Congress after the conclusion of peace, it seems as if
a genuine revival had taken place of Hamiltonian nationalism, and that
this revival was both by way of escaping Hamilton's fatal distrust of
democracy and of avoiding the factious and embittered opposition of the
earlier period.
The Whigs made a fair start, but unfortunately they ran a poor race and
came to a bad end. No doubt they were in a way an improvement on the
Federalists, in that they, like their opponents, the Democrats, stood
for a combination between democracy and nationalism. They believed that
the consolidation and the development of the national organization was
contributory rather than antagonistic to the purpose of the American
political system. Yet they made no conquests on behalf of their
convictions. The Federalists really accomplished a great and necessary
task of national organization and founded a tradition of constructive
national achievement. The Whigs at best kept this tradition alive. They
were on the defensive throughout, and they accomplished nothing at all
in the way of permanent constructive legislation. Their successes were
merely electioneering raids, whereas their defeats were wholly
disastrous in that they lost, not only all of their strongholds, but
most of their military reputation and good name. Their final
disappearance was wholly the result of their own incapacity. They were
condemned somehow to inefficiency, defeat, and dishonor.
Every important article in their programme went astray. The policy of
internal improvements in the national interest and at the national
expense was thwarted by the Constitutional scruples of such Presidents
as Monroe and Jackson, and for that reason it could never be discussed
on its merits. The Cumberland Road was the only great national highway
constructed, and remains to this day a striking symbol of what the
Federal government might have accomplished towards the establishment of
an efficient system of inter-state communication. The re-charter of the
National Bank which was one of the first fruits of the new national
movement, proved in the end to be the occasion of its most flagrant
failure. The Bank was the national institution for the perpetuation of
which the Whig leaders fought most persistently and loyally. They began
the fight with the support of public opinion, and with the prestige of
an established and useful institution in their favor; but the campaign
was conducted with such little skill that in the end they were utterly
beaten. Far from being able to advance the policy of national
consolidation, they were unable even to preserve existing national
institutions, and their conspicuous failure in this crucial instance was
due to their inability to keep public opinion convinced of the truth
that the Bank was really organized and maintained in the national
interest. Their policy of protection met in the long run with a similar
fate. In the first place, the tariff schedules which they successively
placed upon the statute books were not drawn up in Hamilton's wise and
moderate national spirit. They were practically dictated by the special
interests which profited from the increases in duties. The Whig leaders
accepted a retainer from the manufacturers of the North, and by
legislating exclusively in their favor almost drove South Carolina to
secession. Then after accomplishing this admirable feat, they agreed to
placate the disaffected state by the gradual reduction in the scale of
duties until there was very little protection left. In short, they first
perverted the protectionist system until it ceased to be a national
policy; and then compromised it until it ceased to be any policy at all.
Perhaps the Whigs failed and blundered most completely in the fight
which they made against the Federal executive and in the interest of the
Federal legislature. They were forced into this position, because for
many years the Democrats, impersonated by Jackson, occupied the
Presidential chair, while the Whigs controlled one or both of the
Congressional bodies; but the attitude of the two opposing parties in
respect to the issue corresponded to an essential difference of
organization and personnel. The Whigs were led by a group of brilliant
orators and lawyers, while the Democrats were dominated by one powerful
man, who held the Presidential office. Consequently the Whigs
proclaimed a Constitutional doctrine which practically amounted to
Congressional omnipotence, and for many years assailed Jackson as a
military dictator who was undermining the representative institutions of
his country. The American people, however, appraised these fulminations
at their true value. While continuing for twelve years to elect to the
Presidency Jackson or his nominee, they finally dispossessed the Whigs
from the control of Congress; and they were right. The American people
have much more to fear from Congressional usurpation than they have from
executive usurpation. Both Jackson and Lincoln somewhat strained their
powers, but for good purposes, and in essentially a moderate and candid
spirit; but when Congress attempts to dominate the executive, its
objects are generally bad and its methods furtive and dangerous. Our
legislatures were and still are the strongholds of special and local
interests, and anything which undermines executive authority in this
country seriously threatens our national integrity and balance. It is to
the credit of the American people that they have instinctively
recognized this fact, and have estimated at their true value the tirades
which men no better than Henry Clay level against men no worse than
Andrew Jackson.
The reason for the failure of the Whigs was that their opponents
embodied more completely the living forces of contemporary American
life. Jackson and his followers prevailed because they were simple,
energetic, efficient, and strong. Their consistency of feeling and their
mutual loyalty enabled them to form a much more effective partisan
organization than that of the Whigs. It is one of those interesting
paradoxes, not uncommon in American history, that the party which
represented official organization and leadership was loosely organized
and unwisely led, while the party which distrusted official organization
and surrounded official leadership with rigid restraints was most
efficiently organized and was for many years absolutely dominated by a
single man. At bottom, of course, the difference between the two parties
was a difference in vitality. All the contemporary conditions worked in
favor of the strong narrow man with prodigious force of will like Andrew
Jackson, and against men like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster who had more
intelligence, but were deficient in force of character and singleness
of purpose. The former had behind him the impulse of a great popular
movement which was sweeping irresistibly towards wholly unexpected
results; and the latter, while ostensibly trying to stem the tide, were
in reality carried noisily along on its flood.
Daniel Webster and Henry Clay were in fact faced by an alternative
similar to that which sterilized the lives of almost all their
contemporaries who represented an intellectual interest. They were men
of national ideas but of something less than national feeling. Their
interests, temperament, and manner of life prevented them from
instinctively sympathizing with the most vital social and political
movement of their day. If they wanted popularity, they had to purchase
it by compromises, whereas Andrew Jackson obtained a much larger popular
following by acting strictly in accordance with the dictates of his
temperament and ideas. He was effective and succeeded because his
personality was representative of the American national democracy,
whereas they failed, on the whole, because the constituency they
represented concealed limited sympathies and special interests under
words of national import. Jackson, who in theory was the servant and
mouthpiece of his followers, played the part of a genuine leader in his
campaign against the National Bank; while the Whigs, who should have
been able to look ahead and educate their fellow-countrymen up to the
level of their presumably better insight, straggled along in the rear of
the procession.
The truth is that the Democrats, under the lead of Jackson, were
temporarily the national party, although they used their genuinely
national standing to impose in certain respects a group of anti-national
ideas on their country. The Whigs, on the other hand, national as they
might be in ideas and aspirations, were in effect not much better than a
faction. Finding that they could not rally behind their ideas an
effective popular following, they were obliged to seek support, partly
at the hands of special interests and partly by means of the sacrifice
of their convictions. Under their guidance the national policy became a
policy of conciliation and compromise at any cost, and the national idea
was deprived of consistency and dignity. It became equivalent to a
hodge-podge of policies and purposes, the incompatibility of whose
ingredients was concealed behind a smooth crust of constitutional
legality and popular acquiescence. The national idea and interest, that
is, was not merely disarmed and ignored, as it had been by Jefferson. It
was mutilated and distorted in obedience to an erroneous democratic
theory; and its friends, the Whigs, deluded themselves with the belief
that in draining the national idea of its vitality they were prolonging
its life. But if its life was saved, its safety was chiefly due to its
ostensible enemies. While the Whigs were less national in feeling and
purpose than their ideas demanded, the Democrats were more national than
they knew. From 1830 to 1850 American nationality was being attenuated
as a conscious idea, but the great unconscious forces of American life
were working powerfully and decisively in its favor.
Most assuredly the failure of the Whigs is susceptible of abundant
explanation. Prevailing conditions were inimical to men whose strength
lay more in their intelligence than in their will. It was a period of
big phrases, of personal motives and altercations, of intellectual
attenuation, and of narrow, moral commonplaces,--all of which made it
very difficult for any statesman to see beyond his nose, or in case he
did, to act upon his knowledge. Yet in spite of all this, it does seem
as if some Whig might have worked out the logic of the national idea
with as much power and consistency as Calhoun worked out the logic of
his sectional idea. That no Whig rose to the occasion is an indication
that in sacrificing their ideas they were sacrificing also their
personal integrity. Intellectual insincerity and irresponsibility was in
the case of the Democrats the outcome of their lives and their point of
view; but on the part of the Whigs it was equivalent to sheer
self-prostitution. Jefferson's work had been done only too well. The
country had become so entirely possessed by a system of individual
aggrandizement, national drift, and mental torpor that the men who for
their own moral and intellectual welfare should have opposed it, were
reduced to the position of hangers-on; and the dangers of the situation
were most strikingly revealed by the attitude which contemporary
statesmen assumed towards the critical national problem of the
period,--the problem of the existence of legalized slavery in a
democratic state.