THE movement of thought, more interesting than the movement
of population or of wealth, was equally well defined. In the midst of
political dissension and economical struggles, religion still took
precedence; and the religious movement claimed notice not merely for
its depth or for its universality, but also and especially for its
direction. Religious interest and even excitement were seen almost
everywhere, both in the older and in the newer parts of the country;
and every such movement offered some means of studying or illustrating
the development of national character. For the most part the tendency
seemed emotional rather than intellectual; but in New England the old
intellectual pre-eminence, which once marked the Congregational clergy,
developed a quality both new and distinctive.
The Congregational clergy, battling with the innate vices of human
nature, thought themselves obliged to press on their hearers the
consequences of God’s infinite wrath rather than those of his infinite
love. They admitted that in a worldly sense they erred, and they did
not deny that their preaching sometimes leaned to severity; but they
would have been false to their charge and undeserving of their high
character had they lost sight of their radical doctrine that every man
was by nature personally depraved, and unless born again could not hope
to see the kingdom of God. Many intellectual efforts had been made by
many ages of men to escape the logic of this doctrine, but without
success. The dogma and its consequences could not be abandoned without
abandoning the Church.
From this painful dilemma a group of young Boston clergymen made a new
attempt to find a path of escape. Their movement drew its inspiration
from Harvard College, and was simultaneous with the sway of Jefferson’s
political ideas; but the relationship which existed between religious
and political innovation was remote and wholly intellectual. Harvard
College seemed to entertain no feeling toward Jefferson but antipathy,
when in 1805 the corporation appointed Henry Ware, whose Unitarian
tendencies were well known, to be Hollis Professor of Theology. The
Unitarianism of Henry Ware and his supporters implied at that time
no well-defined idea beyond a qualified rejection of the Trinity,
and a suggestion of what they thought a more comprehensible view of
Christ’s divine character; but it still subverted an essential dogma
of the Church, and opened the way to heresy. The Calvinists could no
longer regard Harvard College as a school proper for the training of
clergy; and they were obliged to establish a new theological seminary,
which they attached to a previously existing Academy at Andover,
in Essex County, Massachusetts. The two branches of the New England
Calvinists--known then as old Calvinism and Hopkinsianism--united
in framing for the instructors of the Andover school a creed on the
general foundation of the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism,
and thus provided for the future education of their clergy in express
opposition to Unitarians and Universalists.
Thenceforward the theological school of Harvard College became more
and more Unitarian. The Massachusetts parishes, divided between the
two schools of theology, selected, as pleased a majority of their
church-members, either Orthodox or Unitarian pastors; and while
the larger number remained Calvinistic, though commonly preferring
ministers who avoided controversy, the Boston parishes followed the
Unitarian movement, and gradually filled their pulpits with young men.
The Unitarian clergy soon won for themselves and for their city a name
beyond proportion with their numbers.
Joseph Stevens Buckminster, the first, and while he lived the most
influential, of these preachers, began his career in 1805 by accepting
a call from one of the old Boston churches. He died in 1812 at the
close of his twenty-eighth year. His influence was rather social and
literary than theological or controversial. During his lifetime the
Unitarian movement took no definite shape, except as a centre of
revived interest in all that was then supposed to be best and purest
in religious, literary, and artistic feeling. After his death,
Unitarians learned to regard William Ellery Channing as their most
promising leader. Channing had accepted the charge of a Boston church
as early as 1803, and was about four years older than Buckminster. A
third active member of the Boston clergy was Samuel Cooper Thacher,
who took charge of a Boston parish in 1811, and was five years younger
than Channing. In all, some seven or eight churches were then called
Unitarian; but they professed no uniform creed, and probably no two
clergymen or parishes agreed in their understanding of the precise
difference between them and the Orthodox church. Shades of difference
distinguished each Unitarian parish from every other, and the degree
of their divergence from the old creed was a subject of constant
interest and private discussion, although the whole body of churches,
Congregational as well as Unitarian, remained in external repose.
The calm was not broken until the close of the war relieved New England
from a political anxiety which for fifteen years had restrained
internal dissensions. No sooner did peace restore to New England the
natural course of its intellectual movement than the inevitable schism
broke out. In June, 1815, the “Panoplist,” the mouthpiece of the
Congregational clergy, published an article charging the Unitarians
with pursuing an unavowed propaganda, and calling upon the Church to
refuse them communion. Channing and his friends thought the attack
to require reply, and, after consultation, Channing published a
“Letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher,” which began a discussion and a
theological movement of no slight interest to American history.
Channing’s theology at that time claimed no merit for originality. His
letter to Thacher betrayed more temper than he would afterward have
shown; but in no particular was he more earnest than in repelling the
idea that he or his brethren were innovators. In whatever points they
disagreed, they were most nearly unanimous in repudiating connection
with the English Unitarians who denied the divinity of Christ. Channing
declared “that a majority of our brethren believe that Jesus Christ
is more than man; that he existed before the world; that he literally
came from heaven to save our race; that he sustains other offices than
those of a teacher and witness to the truth; and that he still acts
for our benefit, and is our intercessor with the Father.” So far was
Channing from wishing to preach a new theology that he would gladly
have accepted the old had he thought it intelligible:
“It is from deep conviction that I have stated once and again
that the differences between Unitarians and Trinitarians lie
more in sounds than in ideas; that a barbarous phraseology is
the chief wall of partition between these classes of Christians;
and that could Trinitarians tell us what they mean, their system
would generally be found little else than a mystical form of the
Unitarian doctrine.”
Calvinists could not be blamed for thinking that their venerable creed,
the painful outcome of the closest and most strenuous reasoning
known in the Christian world, was entitled to more respect than to be
called “little else than a mystical form of the Unitarian doctrine.”
The Unitarians themselves scarcely attempted to make the infinite
more intelligible to the finite by any new phraseology. They avowed
a dislike for dogma as their merit. During these early years they
systematically avoided controversy; in the pulpit they never assailed
and seldom mentioned other forms of Christian faith, or even the scheme
of Trinity which caused their schism.
“So deeply are we convinced,” said Channing’s letter, “that
the great end of preaching is to promote a spirit of love,
a sober, righteous, and godly life, and that every doctrine
is to be urged simply and exclusively for this end, that we
have sacrificed our ease, and have chosen to be less striking
preachers rather than to enter the lists of controversy.”
Yet the popular dislike of Calvinistic severity could not wholly make
good the want of doctrinal theology. The Unitarian clergy, however
unwilling to widen the breach between themselves and the old Church,
were ill at ease under the challenges of Orthodox critics, and could
not escape the necessity of defining their belief.
“According to your own concession,” rejoined Dr. Samuel
Worcester to Channing’s letter, “the party in whose behalf you
plead generally deny the essential divinity of the Saviour, and
hold him to be a being entirely ‘distinct from God,’ entirely
‘dependent,’--in other words, a mere creature.... You doubtless
do not suppose that by any mere creature atonement could be made
for the sins of an apostate world of sufficient merit for the
pardon, sanctification, and eternal salvation of all who should
trust in him; therefore if you hold to atonement in any sense,
yet unquestionably not in the sense of a proper propitiatory
sacrifice. Upon this denial of atonement must follow of course
the denial of pardon procured by the blood of Christ, of
justification through faith in him, of redemption from eternal
death unto everlasting life by him. Connected, and generally if
not invariably concomitant, with the denial of these doctrines
is a denial of the Holy Spirit in his personal character and
offices, and of the renewal of mankind unto holiness by his
sovereign agency, as held by Orthodox Christians. Now, sir, are
these small and trivial points of difference between you and us?”
Channing protested against these inferences; but he did not
deny--indeed, he affirmed--that Unitarians regarded dogma as
unnecessary to salvation. “In our judgment of professed Christians,”
he replied, “we are guided more by their temper and lives than by any
peculiarities of opinion. We lay it down as a great and indisputable
opinion, clear as the sun at noonday, that the great end for which
Christian truth is revealed is the sanctification of the soul, the
formation of the Christian character; and wherever we see the marks of
this character displayed in a professed disciple of Jesus, we hope, and
rejoice to hope, that he has received all the truth which is necessary
to his salvation.” The hope might help to soothe anxiety and distress,
but it defied conclusions reached by the most anxious and often renewed
labors of churchmen for eighteen hundred years. Something more than a
hope was necessary as the foundation of a faith.
Not until the year 1819, did Channing quit the cautious attitude he
at first assumed. Then, in his “Sermon on the Ordination of Jared
Sparks” at Baltimore, he accepted the obligation to define his relation
to Christian doctrine, and with the support of Andrews Norton, Henry
Ware, and other Unitarian clergymen gave a doctrinal character to
the movement. With this phase of his influence the present story has
nothing to do. In the intellectual development of the country, the
earlier stage of Unitarianism was more interesting than the later,
for it marked a general tendency of national thought. At a time when
Boston grew little in population and but moderately in wealth, and
when it was regarded with antipathy, both political and religious, by
a vast majority of the American people, its society had never been so
agreeable or so fecund. No such display of fresh and winning genius
had yet been seen in America as was offered by the genial outburst
of intellectual activity in the early days of the Unitarian schism.
No more was heard of the Westminster doctrine that man had lost all
ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation, but was
dead in sin. So strong was the reaction against old dogmas that for
thirty years society seemed less likely to resume the ancient faith
in the Christian Trinity than to establish a new Trinity, in which a
deified humanity should have place. Under the influence of Channing and
his friends, human nature was adorned with virtues hardly suspected
before, and with hopes of perfection on earth altogether strange to
theology. The Church then charmed. The worth of man became under
Channing’s teachings a source of pride and joy, with such insistence as
to cause his hearers at last to recall, almost with a sense of relief,
that the Saviour himself had been content to regard them only as of
more value than many sparrows.
The most remarkable quality of Unitarianism was its high social and
intellectual character. The other more popular religious movements
followed for the most part a less ambitious path, but were marked by
the same humanitarian tendency. In contrast with old stringency of
thought, the religious activity of the epoch showed warmth of emotion.
The elder Buckminster, a consistent Calvinist clergyman, settled at
Portsmouth in New Hampshire, while greatly distressed by his son’s
leanings toward loose theology, was at the same time obliged to witness
the success of other opinions, which he thought monstrous, preached by
Hosea Ballou, an active minister in the same town. This new doctrine,
which took the name of Universalism, held as an article of faith “that
there is one God, whose nature is love, revealed in one Lord Jesus
Christ, by one Holy Spirit of grace, who will finally restore the
whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.” In former times
any one who had publicly professed belief in universal salvation would
not have been regarded as a Christian. With equal propriety he might
have preached the divinity of Ammon or Diana. To the old theology
one god was as strange as the other; and so deeply impressed was Dr.
Buckminster with this conviction, that he felt himself constrained in
the year 1809 to warn Hosea Ballou of his error, in a letter pathetic
for its conscientious self-restraint. Yet the Universalists steadily
grew in numbers and respectability, spreading from State to State
under Ballou’s guidance, until they became as well-established and as
respectable a church as that to which Buckminster belonged.
A phenomenon still more curious was seen in the same year, 1809, in
western Pennsylvania. Near the banks of the Monongahela, in Washington
County, a divergent branch of Scotch Presbyterianism established a
small church, and under the guidance of Thomas Campbell, a recent
emigrant from Scotland, issued, Sept. 7, 1809, a Declaration:
“Being well aware from sad experience of the heinous nature and
pernicious tendency of religious controversy among Christians,
tired and sick of the bitter jarrings and janglings of a party
spirit, we would desire to be at rest; and were it possible,
would also desire to adopt and recommend such measures as would
give rest to our brethren throughout all the churches, as would
restore unity, peace, and purity to the whole Church of God.
This desirable rest, however, we utterly despair either to find
for ourselves, or to be able to recommend to our brethren, by
continuing amid the diversity and rancor of party contentions
the varying uncertainty and clashings of human opinions;
nor indeed can we reasonably expect to find it anywhere but
in Christ and his simple word, which is the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever. Our desire, therefore, for ourselves and
our brethren would be that rejecting human opinions and the
inventions of men as of any authority, or as having any place
in the Church of God, we might forever cease from further
contentions about such things, returning to and holding fast by
the original standard.”
Campbell’s Declaration expressed so wide a popular want that his
church, in a few years, became one of the largest branches of the
great Baptist persuasion. Perhaps in these instances of rapid popular
grouping, love of peace was to some extent supplemented by jealousy
of learning, and showed as much spirit of social independence as of
religious instinct. The growth of vast popular sects in a democratic
community might testify to intellectual stagnation as well as to
religious or social earnestness; but whatever was the amount of thought
involved in such movements, one character was common to them all, as
well as to the Unitarians,--they agreed in relaxing the strictness of
theological reasoning. Channing united with Campbell in suggesting that
the Church should ignore what it could not comprehend. In a popular and
voluntary form they proposed self-restraints which should have the same
effect as the formal restraints of the hierarchies. “Rejecting,” like
Campbell, “human opinions and the inventions of men,”--preaching, like
Channing and Ballou, “that there is one God, whose nature is love,” and
that doctrine was useless except to promote a spirit of love,--they
founded new churches on what seemed to resemble an argument that the
intellectual difficulties in their path must be unessential because
they were insuperable.
Wide as the impulse was to escape the rigor of bonds and relax the
severity of thought, organizations so deeply founded as the old
churches were not capable of destruction. They had seen many similar
human efforts, and felt certain that sooner or later such experiments
must end in a return to the old standards. Even the Congregational
Church of New England, though reduced in Boston to a shadow of its
old authority, maintained itself at large against its swarm of
enemies,--Unitarian, Universalist, Baptist, Methodist,--resisting,
with force of character and reasoning, the looseness of doctrine and
vagueness of thought which marked the time. Yale College remained true
to it. Most of the parishes maintained their old relations. If the
congregations in some instances crumbled away or failed to increase,
the Church could still stand erect, and might reflect with astonishment
on its own strength, which survived so long a series of shocks
apparently fatal. For half a century the Congregational clergy had
struggled to prevent innovation, while the people emigrated by hundreds
of thousands in order to innovate. Obliged to insist on the infinite
justice rather than on the infinite mercy of God, they shocked the
instincts of the new generation, which wanted to enjoy worldly
blessings without fear of future reckoning. Driven to bay by the
deistic and utilitarian principles of Jefferson’s democracy, they fell
into the worldly error of defying the national instinct, pressing their
resistance to the war until it amounted to treasonable conspiracy. The
sudden peace swept away much that was respectable in the old society
of America, but perhaps its noblest victim was the unity of the New
England Church.
The Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, Lutheran or Calvinistic,
always rested in the conviction that every divergence from the great
highways of religious thought must be temporary, and that no permanent
church was possible except on foundations already established; but the
State stood in a position less self-confident. The old principles of
government were less carefully developed, and Democrats in politics
were more certain than Unitarians or Universalists in theology that
their intellectual conclusions made a stride in the progress of
thought. Yet the sixteen years with which the century opened were
singularly barren of new political ideas. Apparently the extreme
activity which marked the political speculations of the period between
1775 and 1800, both in America and in Europe, had exhausted the energy
of society, for Americans showed interest only in the practical
working of their experiments, and added nothing to the ideas that
underlay them. With such political thought as society produced,
these pages have been chiefly filled; the result has been told. The
same tendency which in religion led to reaction against dogma, was
shown in politics by general acquiescence in practices which left
unsettled the disputed principles of government. No one could say with
confidence what theory of the Constitution had prevailed. Neither
party was satisfied, although both acquiesced. While the Legislative
and Executive branches of the government acted on no fixed principle,
but established precedents at variance with any consistent theory,
the Judiciary rendered so few decisions that Constitutional law stood
nearly still. Only at a later time did Chief-Justice Marshall begin
his great series of judicial opinions,--McCulloch against the State of
Maryland in 1819; Dartmouth College in the same year; Cohens against
the State of Virginia in 1821. No sooner were these decisive rulings
announced, than they roused the last combative energies of Jefferson
against his old enemy the Judiciary: “That body, like gravity, ever
acting, with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground
step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the
special governments.”
Marshall had few occasions to decide Constitutional points during the
Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, but the opinions he gave
were emphatic. When Pennsylvania in 1809 resisted, in the case of
Gideon Olmstead, a process of the Supreme Court, the chief-justice,
without unnecessary words, declared that “if the legislatures of the
several States may at will annul the judgments of the courts of the
United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments,
the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery, and the nation is
deprived of the means of enforcing its laws by the instrumentality
of its own tribunals.” Pennsylvania yielded; and Marshall, in the
following year, carried a step further the authority of his court. He
overthrew the favorite dogma of John Randolph and the party of States
rights, so long and vehemently maintained in the Yazoo dispute.
The Yazoo claims came before the court in the case of Fletcher against
Peck, argued first in 1809 by Luther Martin, J. Q. Adams, and Robert
G. Harper; and again in 1810 by Martin, Harper, and Joseph Story.
March 16, 1810, the chief-justice delivered the opinion. Declining,
as “indecent in the extreme,” to enter into an inquiry as to the
corruption of “the sovereign power of a State,” he dealt with the issue
whether a legislature could annul rights vested in an individual by a
law in its nature a contract.
“It may well be doubted,” he argued, “whether the nature of
society and government does not prescribe some limits to the
legislative power; and if any are to be prescribed, where are
they to be found if the property of an individual, fairly and
honestly acquired, may be seized without compensation? To the
legislature all legislative power is granted; but the question
whether the act of transferring the property of an individual to
the public be in the nature of the legislative power, is well
worthy of serious reflection. It is the peculiar province of
the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government
of society: the application of those rules to individuals in
society would seem to be the duty of other departments. How
far the power of giving the law may involve every other power,
in cases where the Constitution is silent, never has been and
perhaps never can be definitely stated.”
In the case under consideration, Marshall held that the Constitution
was not silent. The provision that no State could pass any law
impairing the obligation of contracts, as well as “the general
principles which are common to our free institutions,” restrained the
State of Georgia from passing a law whereby the previous contract
could be rendered void. His decision settled, as far as concerned the
Judiciary, a point regarded as vital by the States-rights school.
Four years afterward Congress gave the required compensation for the
contract broken by Georgia.
The chief-justice rendered no more leading Constitutional decisions
during Madison’s term of office; but his influence was seen in a
celebrated opinion delivered by Justice Story in 1816, in the case of
Martin against Hunter’s Lessee. There the court came in conflict with
the State of Virginia. The Court of Appeals of that State refused to
obey a mandate of the Supreme Court, alleging that the proceedings
of the Supreme Court were _coram non judice_, or beyond its
jurisdiction, being founded on section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789,
which was unconstitutional in extending the appellate jurisdiction of
the Supreme Court over the State courts.
The Court of Appeals was unfortunate in the moment of its resistance
to the authority of the national courts. While the case was passing
through its last stage peace was declared, and the national authority
sprang into vigor unknown before. The chief-justice would not with
his own hand humiliate the pride of the Court of Appeals, for which
as a Virginian and a lawyer he could feel only deep respect. He
devolved the unpleasant duty on young Justice Story, whose own State
of Massachusetts was then far from being an object of jealousy to
Virginia, and who, a Republican in politics, could not be prejudiced
by party feeling against the Virginia doctrine. Much of the opinion
bore the stamp of Marshall’s mind; much showed the turn of Story’s
intelligence; yet the same principle lay beneath the whole, and no
one could detect a divergence between the Federalism of the Virginia
chief-justice and the Democracy of the Massachusetts lawyer.
“It has been argued,” said the court, “that such an appellate
jurisdiction over State courts is inconsistent with the genius
of our governments and the spirit of the Constitution; that
the latter was never designed to act upon State sovereignties,
but only upon the people; and that if the power exists, it
will materially impair the sovereignty of the States and the
independence of their courts. We cannot yield to the force of
this reasoning; it assumes principles which we cannot admit,
and draws conclusions to which we do not yield our assent. It
is a mistake that the Constitution was not designed to operate
upon States in their corporate capacity. It is crowded with
provisions which restrain or annul the sovereignty of the States
in some of the highest branches of their prerogatives.... When,
therefore, the States are stripped of some of the highest
attributes of sovereignty, and the same are given to the United
States; when the legislatures of the States are in some respects
under the control of Congress, and in every case are, under the
Constitution, bound by the paramount authority of the United
States,--it is certainly difficult to support the argument
that the appellate power over the decisions of State courts is
contrary to the genius of our institutions.”
So far were the political principles of the people from having united
in a common understanding, that while the Supreme Court of the United
States thus differed from the Virginia Court of Appeals in regard
to the genius of the government and the spirit of the Constitution,
Jefferson still publicly maintained that the national and state
governments were “as independent, in fact, as different nations,” and
that the function of one was foreign, while that of the other was
domestic. Madison still declared that Congress could not build a road
or clear a watercourse; while Congress believed itself authorized to do
both, and in that belief passed a law which Madison vetoed. In politics
as in theology, the practical system which resulted from sixteen years
of experience seemed to rest on the agreement not to press principles
to a conclusion.
No new idea was brought forward, and the old ideas, though apparently
incapable of existing together, continued to exist in rivalry like
that of the dogmas which perplexed the theological world; but between
the political and religious movement a distinct difference could
be seen. The Church showed no tendency to unite in any creed or
dogma,--indeed, religious society rather tended to more divisions;
but in politics public opinion slowly moved in a fixed direction. The
movement could not easily be measured, and was subject to reaction;
but its reality was shown by the protests of Jefferson, the veto of
Madison, and the decisions of the Supreme Court. No one doubted that
a change had occurred since 1798. The favorite States-rights dogma
of that time had suffered irreparable injury. For sixteen years the
national government in all its branches had acted, without listening
to remonstrance, on the rule that it was the rightful interpreter of
its own powers. In this assumption the Executive, the Legislature, and
the Judiciary had agreed. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as well as
Virginia and Georgia, yielded. Louisiana had been bought and admitted
into the Union; the Embargo had been enforced; one National Bank had
been destroyed and another established; every essential function of a
sovereignty had been performed, without an instance of failure, though
not without question. However unwilling the minority might be to admit
in theory the overthrow of their principles, every citizen assented
in daily practice to the rule that the national government alone
interpreted its own powers in the last resort. From the moment the
whole people learned to accept the practice, the dispute over theory
lost importance, and the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 marked only a
stage in the development of a sovereignty.
The nature of the sovereignty that was to be the result of American
political experiment, the amount of originality which could be infused
into an idea so old, was a matter for future history to settle. Many
years were likely to elapse before the admitted practice of the
government and people could be fully adopted into the substance of
their law, but the process thus far had been rapid. In the brief space
of thirty years, between 1787 and 1817,--a short generation,--the Union
had passed through astonishing stages. Probably no great people ever
grew more rapidly and became more mature in so short a time. The ideas
of 1787 were antiquated in 1815, and lingered only in districts remote
from active movement. The subsidence of interest in political theories
was a measure of the change, marking the general drift of society
toward practical devices for popular use, within popular intelligence.
The only work that could be said to represent a school of thought in
politics was written by John Taylor of Caroline, and was probably never
read,--or if read, certainly never understood,--north of Baltimore by
any but curious and somewhat deep students, although to them it had
value.
John Taylor of Caroline might without irreverence be described as a
_vox clamantis_,--the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by Jefferson, Monroe,
John Randolph, and the Virginia school, he admitted, with the geniality
of the class to which he belonged, that his disciples invariably
deserted in practice the rules they praised in his teaching; but he
continued to teach, and the further his scholars drifted from him the
more publicly and profusely he wrote. His first large volume, “An
Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United
States,” published in 1814, during the war, was in form an answer
to John Adams’s “Defence of the Constitutions” published in London
twenty-five years before. In 1787 John Adams, like Jefferson, Hamilton,
Madison, Jay, and other constitution-makers, might, without losing the
interest of readers, indulge in speculations more or less visionary in
regard to the future character of a nation yet in its cradle; but in
1814 the character of people and government was formed; the lines of
their activity were fixed. A people which had in 1787 been indifferent
or hostile to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality, had become in
1815 habituated to ideas and machinery of the sort on a great scale.
Monarchy or aristocracy no longer entered into the public mind as
factors in future development. Yet Taylor resumed the discussions of
1787 as though the interval were a blank; and his only conclusion from
the experience of thirty years was that both political parties were
equally moving in a wrong direction.
“The two parties, called Republican and Federal,” he concluded,
“have hitherto undergone but one revolution. Yet each when
in power preached Filmer’s old doctrine of passive obedience
in a new form, with considerable success; and each, out of
power, strenuously controverted it. The party in power asserted
that however absurd or slavish this doctrine was under other
forms of the numerical analysis, the people under ours were
_identified_ (the new term to cog this old doctrine upon
the United States) with the government; and that therefore an
opposition to the government was an opposition to the nation
itself.... This identifying doctrine ... puts an end to the
idea of a responsibility of the government to the nation; ...
it renders useless the freedom of speech and of the press; it
converts the representative into the principal; it destroys the
division of power between the people and the government, as
being themselves indivisible; and in short it is inconsistent
with every principle by which politicians and philosophers have
hitherto defined a free government.”
The principle to which Taylor so strenuously objected was nevertheless
the chief political result of national experience. Somewhere or another
a point was always reached where opposition became treasonable,--as
Virginia, like Massachusetts, had learned both when in power and when
out. Taylor’s speculations ended only in an admission of their own
practical sterility, and his suggestions for restraining the growth
of authority assumed the possibility of returning to the conditions of
1787. Banks were his horror. Stocks and bonds, or paper evidences of
indebtedness in any form, he thought destructive to sound principles of
government. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were his best
resource for the preservation of civil liberty. However wellfounded his
fears might be, his correctives could no longer be applied. Political
philosophers of all ages were fond of devising systems for imaginary
Republics, Utopias, and Oceanas, where practical difficulties could
not stand in their way. Taylor was a political philosopher of the
same school, and his Oceana on the banks of the Rappahannock was a
reflection of his own virtues.