Spinoza, 152
_State Trials_, 119 n
_Statesmen of the Old South_, 345 n
Stoddard, Rev. Solomon, 153, 249
Stone, Rev. Samuel, 57
Stoughton, Lieut. Governor, 85
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 13, 153
Strafford, Earl of, 269
_Summary View of the Rights of British America, A_, 244 n
Sumner, William Graham, 294
_Supreme Court and the Constitution, The_, 276 n
_Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, A_, 54, 60-62
Swift, Jonathan, 333
Tailor, Colonel, 113
_Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder, Democrat_, 55 n, 58 n, 59 n
Thompson, General, 284
Tippet, Mehetabel, 141
_To all the Great Folks in a Lump_, 375
_To all True-hearted Christians_, 96
_To Atlas_, 375
_To Duncan Doolittle_, 375 n
Tooke, Horne, 339, 383
_To a Select Body of Great Men_, 375
Townshend, Charles Viscount, 240
_To a Would Be Great Man_, 375
_Travels in New England and New York_, 362 n, 363
_Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America in the Years
1759 and 1760_, 276 n
_Treatise on Christian Liberty_, 12
_Treatise on Taxes_, 171
_Treatises on Civil Government, Two_, 189, 237, 270 n
_Two Letters on the Tea Tax_, 228
_Triumph of Infidelity, The_, 363
Trumbull, Rev. Benjamin, 248
----, John, 248-252, 254, 359, 362
----, John (the painter), 248
----, Governor Jonathan, 248, 360
Tyler, Moses Coit, 89 n, 123, 207 n, 220, 226 n, 256, 371, 372, 381
_United States Gazette, The_, 379
Vane, Sir Harry, 10, 12, 38, 59, 66, 72, 73-74
Van Schaak, Peter, 192
Van Tyne, C. H., 179 n, 182 n, 184 n, 188 n, 189 n, 203 n
_Various Prospects_, 280
Varnum, General, 276
Vattel, Emrich von, 236, 239, 280
Vauban, Sébastien de, 171
_View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, A_,
215-218
_Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches, A_, 119
n, 120, 122 n, 123
_Vision of Columbus, The_, 387
Voltaire, 324, 363
_Walker, G. L._, 55 n, 56 n, 58 n, 59 n
---- Williston, 23 n, 24, 100 n, 101 n, 148 n
Wallace, Robert, 280, 319
Walley, Major, 119
Walpole, Horace, 203
Walsh, C. M., 319 n, 334 n
Ward, Nathaniel, 21, 33, 55, 76-81, 84
Warren, Mrs. Mercy, 207
Warwick, Earl of, 29
Washington, George, 184, 258, 259, 276, 277, 292, 295, 305, 323, 349,
360, 368, 369, 380, 393
Watson, Bishop, of Llandaff, 324, 337
_Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared, The_, 35
_Wealth of Nations, The_, 171, 173, 271, 296
Webster, Daniel, 25
----, Noah, 291, 299, 382
----, Peletiah, 291
Wedderburn, Alexander, 164
Wendell, Barrett, 107, 114 n, 116, 150 n, 284 n, 370
Whately, George, 173
_When the Wicked shall have Filled up the Measure of their Sins,
Wrath will come upon them to the Uttermost_, 159 n
Whitfield, Rev. George, 160, 373
Whittier, John G., 89
Wigglesworth, Rev. Michael, 85
Wilkes, John, 251
Willard, Rev. Samuel, 87
William III, King, 91 n
Williams, Roger, iv, vi, 6, 10, 12, 24, 25, 28, 35-36, 37, 49, 50,
53, 54, 57 n, 59, 62-75, 77, 79, 94, 100, 103, 105, 121, 333,
341, 386
Willing, Thomas, 221
Wilson, James, 254, 291, 292
----, Rev. John, 59
----, Wood row, 306
_Wingate on the Common Law_, 93
Winthrop, Adam, 41
----, John, 17, 18, 19, 30, 32, 38-50, 51, 55, 57, 58, 71, 80, 88,
92, 97, 105
----, Margaret, 39
_Wisdom and Goodness of God, In having Made both Rich and Poor, The_,
337
Wise, Rev. John, 94, 101, 118-125, 162
_Witchcraft, Then and Now_, 86 n
_Wonders of the Invisible World, The_, 86 n, 108, 115-116, 116 n
Worcester, Bishop of, 253
_Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country, A; Or the Bank of Credit_,
124
_Word of Congress, The_, 257
_Works_ of John Adams, 207 n, 309 n, 311 n, 312 n, 313 n, 314 n, 315
n, 316 n, 317 n, 318 n
_Works_ of Samuel Adams, 199 n, 234 n, 236 n, 237 n, 238 n, 239 n,
240 n, 241 n, 242 n, 244 n, 245 n, 246 n
_Works_ of John Dickinson, 226 n, 227 n, 228 n
_Works_ of Jonathan Edwards, 156 n, 158 n, 159 n
_Works_ of Benjamin Franklin, 168 n, 169 n, 170 n, 171 n, 173 n, 174
n, 176 n, 177 n
_Works_ of Alexander Hamilton, 298 n, 301 n, 304 n, 306 n
_Works_ of Martin Luther, 12 n
_Works_ of Thomas Paine, 177 n, 335 n, 338 n, 339 n, 341 n
_Works_ of Daniel Webster, 26 n
_Writings_ of John Quincy Adams, 326 n
_Writings of Col. William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esq., The_,
138 n
_Writings_ of Thomas Jefferson, 303 n, 347 n, 348 n, 350 n, 351 n,
353 n, 355 n
_Wyoming Massacre, The_, 146 n
Yates, Robert, 285
The Romantic Revolution in America [Volume Two]
Foreword
In justification of the choice of writers and allotment of space in
the following pages, let it be said frankly that I have been guided
by what I conceived to be the historical significance of the several
documents. With aesthetic judgments I have not been greatly concerned.
I have not wished to evaluate reputations or weigh literary merits, but
rather to understand what our fathers thought, and why they wrote as
they did. This will serve to explain the considerable number of pages
devoted to southern letters, as well as to certain well-nigh forgotten
figures. For the purpose I had in view such a method was inevitable.
Lost causes have a way of shrinking in importance in the memory of
later generations, and the historian must go back to the days before
their overthrow, and view them in the light of their hopes. Time is
not always a just winnower; it is partial to success and its verdict
too often inclines to the side of the biggest cannon or the noisiest
_claque_. The exhuming of buried reputations and the revivifying of
dead causes is the familiar business of the historian, in whose eyes
forgotten men may assume as great significance as others with whom
posterity has dealt more generously. Communing with ghosts is not
unprofitable to one who listens to their tales. To our fathers John
Taylor and Beverley Tucker and Fisher Ames were living figures; they
spoke for their generation, and they may have something still to say to
a later generation. For dealing at length with such men as Hugh Legaré
and Gilmore Simms and John P. Kennedy and Herman Melville, no apologies
need be offered. They have too long been slighted. Walt Whitman I have
chosen to regard as the forerunner of a later school, and have reserved
the consideration of his work for another study. Certain other men I
have omitted regretfully out of regard to space--diverse figures such
as Orestes Brownson, Albert Brisbane, and John Esten Cooke, together
with a group of poets and essayists, who though they have long been
reckoned ghosts are nevertheless well worth knowing. Even echoes imply
substance somewhere.
V. L. P.
_Seattle, February 22, 1926._
Introduction
The present volume is the second in a proposed study of the main
tendencies of American thought as expressed in our literature. In
the preceding volume I have considered the incoming into America of
certain old-world ideals and institutions, and the subjection of
those ideals and institutions to the pressure of a new environment,
from which resulted the overthrow of the principles of monarchy and
aristocracy, and the setting up of the principle of republicanism.
In the present study I purpose considering certain new growths that
sprang up in the land thus cleared--what particular forms they assumed
and why they assumed such forms. The delimitations of the period
to be treated of are fixed by two wars that disturbed the normal
unfolding of national experience: the War of 1812 that hastened the
development of nineteenth-century ideals, and the Civil War that
uprooted certain of the crasser growths of those vigorous years. The
half century that lay between these dramatic episodes was a period of
extravagant youth, given over to a cult of romanticism that wrought as
many marvels as Aaron’s rod. In the South, in New England, and on the
western frontier, it laid hold of men’s minds, consuming the stubble
of eighteenth-century harvests, sweeping away the drab realisms of
a cautious past, and offering in their stead more alluring ideals.
Revolutions, greater and lesser, trod on each other’s heels; the common
adventure led into unexplored paths; and the final outcome for which it
was all preparing was the emergence of a new middle class that in the
succeeding half century was to subdue America to middle-class ends.
Such drastic overturnings of the customary and familiar, such swift
ruptures with the past, quite evidently do not come from trivial
causes. Men do not put off the old before the new is ready; and if in
those credulous years they turned romantic and refused to heed the
counsels of experience, it was because the soil had been new-plowed for
the growing of such crops as their fathers had not known. The grapes
from which the wine of romance is vinted, it must not be forgotten, are
rooted in the common earth. The loveliest romantic dreams spring from
a parentage that is humbly prosaic. There is no more fruitful source
of romantic hope than a fluid economics that overflows all narrow
preëmptions and sweeps away the restrictions that hamper free endeavor.
With fresh economic realms to conquer, the dullest plodder discovers
a stimulus in anticipation that sets him upon creating a Utopia. The
breaking up of the static, the bold adventuring upon new worlds, is the
fertile soil in which romance springs most luxuriantly. It needs no
uncommon eyes, surely, to discover in the swift changes that came to
America in the wake of the second English war, the seed-bed of those
ebullient romanticisms which in politics and economics, in theology
and literature, turned away so contemptuously from the homespun past.
Of a sudden America was becoming a new world with potentialities
before undreamed of; and this new America was no longer content with
the narrow ways of a more cautious generation. The older America of
colonial days had been static, rationalistic, inclined to pessimism,
fearful of innovation, tenacious of the customary. It conceived of
human nature as evil, and accounting men incurably wicked, it opened no
doors to Utopian dreams of a golden future. The round of daily life was
confined within a narrow domestic economy, with few and rare changes in
social status. Growth in population came mainly from natural increase.
Exploitation was laborious, and such wealth as was laid by was gained
in shop and field, in fisheries and shipping. With its expectations
cramped by a drab agrarianism, it was content to remain primitively
self-sufficient, not given to seeking riches by speculative short-cuts,
clinging to the habitual, distrustful of change.
During the thirty-odd years between the Peace of Paris and the end
of the War of 1812 that older America was dying. The America that
succeeded was a shifting, restless world, youthfully optimistic,
eager to better itself, bent on finding easier roads to wealth
than the plodding path of natural increase. It conceived of human
nature as acquisitive, and accounting acquisitiveness a cardinal
virtue, it set out to inquire what opportunities awaited it in the
unexploited resources of the continent. The cautious ways of earlier
generations were become as much out of date as last year’s almanac. New
commonwealths were rising in the wilderness; immigration from war-torn
Europe was pouring in; wild lands were daily coming on the market.
Money was to be made by the enterprising, and the multitude of the
enterprising was augmenting with the expansion of the settlements. The
ideal of a static society having been put away, progress was assumed
to be the first law of nature, and innovation was accepted as the sign
and seal of progress. It was our first great period of exploitation,
and from it emerged, as naturally as the cock from the mother egg, the
spirit of romance, gross and tawdry in vulgar minds, dainty and refined
in the more cultivated. But always romance. The days of realism were
past, and it was quietly laid away with the wig and smallclothes of an
outgrown generation.
Unfortunately economic romance is more imperious in its demands than
literary romance. Its dreams follow objective desires, and in America
of those days of new beginnings the desires of diverse economic groups
conducted straight to antagonistic imperialisms. The major interests
of the three great sections of the country differentiated more and
more sharply. The East was discovering its Utopia in an industrial
capitalistic order. With the flocking of immigrants to the factories
began the extraordinary expansion of the cities and the movement of
centralization that was eventually to transform America from a rural
to an urban society, supplanting the farmer by the business man and
disintegrating the traditional psychology. The new manufacturing and
the new finance were subjecting an agrarian people to the dislocations
and readjustments implied in the industrial revolution, the outcome of
which no man could foresee. The reaction of this new industrialism upon
the South was immediate. With the improvements in textile manufacturing
came greater demands upon the new southern staple, and an agriculture
that had long been static with its traditional crops of indigo, rice,
and tobacco, began to look forward confidently to a Utopia founded on
cotton, and conceived an imperialistic dream of expanding fields of
white bolls and black slaves, reaching into Mexico and embracing the
West Indies. The new South left off apologizing for slavery and hoping
for its ultimate extinction. Slavery had become enormously profitable
and it proposed to exploit the negro as frankly as New England was
exploiting the Irish immigrant, but more humanely if possible, in
something of the patriarchal spirit.
Meanwhile in the Inland Empire was arising an economics that looked
with little favor on the imperialisms of eastern capitalism or southern
slavery; an economics equalitarian in temper, decentralizing in
impulse; nourished on the idealism of the Declaration of Independence,
but interpreting it to mean the natural right of every free citizen to
satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the national resources
in the measure of his shrewdness. Democratic in professions, it was
middle-class in spirit and purpose. Discovering the inflowing tide of
immigration to be favorable to speculation, it sought its Utopia in
county-seat towns where land holdings mounted in value with every new
wave. No narrow horizons bounded a realm that stretched to the Pacific
and into the remote Northwest, and no stodgy ways of money-getting
could satisfy men whose imaginations ranged through such spaces. This
country was theirs to do with as they chose, and if eastern capitalism
or southern slavery interfered with their inalienable rights, their
Sharp’s rifles were at hand for defense. In the vast territory drained
by the Mississippi--the “Valley of Democracy,” a recent writer has
chosen to call it--was conceived what may be accounted the most
romantic dream that ever visited the native mind of America. It
impressed de Tocqueville, who discovered the poetry of America in this
romance of a moving frontier, in the vision that led the pioneer on his
conquering way westward, hewing at an interminable wilderness that was
matched only by his ambitions.
Such swift expansions, such mounting romanticisms of temper, must
inevitably provide themselves with correspondent philosophies to phrase
the new aspirations. The nineteenth century was not content to think in
the narrower terms of the eighteenth, but must refashion its thought to
suit the romantic style. The modes which it came to accept were for the
most part of European origin, adapted to new-world needs. From France
and England, and later from Germany, came variant schools of romantic
theory that at bottom were a common glorification of the ideal of
individualism; and this very diversity of interpretation made possible
in America an appeal to different classes and diverse interests, the
sum total of which was a many-sided contribution to social theory, but
a contribution which carried within it the seeds of later conflict.
The first stage in the romanticization of American thought resulted
from the naturalization of French revolutionary theory. Its devious
progress through the country can be traced fairly accurately. Landing
first in Virginia in the early seventeen-seventies, it met with a
hospitable reception from the generous planter society and spread
widely there the fashion of Physiocratic agrarianism. Traveling thence
westward into the Inland Empire it domesticated itself in frontier log
cabins under the guise of an assertive individualism, to issue later
as the coonskin democracy of the Jacksonian revolution. Eventually
reaching New England, the last haven and refuge of eighteenth-century
realism, it disarmed Yankee antagonism by assuming the dress of
Unitarianism and preached the doctrine of human perfectibility with
such conviction as to arouse the conscience of New England to an
extraordinary enthusiasm for reforming man and society. And coming
finally to New York it inoculated the mind of the emerging proletariat
with its doctrine of the rights of man, with Fourieristic and other
Utopias, and turmoiled contemporary politics with equalitarian Locofoco
programs. No other philosophy assumed so many and such attractive
disguises, or wrought such changes in American ideals, as this French
romanticism with its generous humanitarian impulses. The ground was
ready for the seed it was to sow, and if in the judgment of a hostile
philosophy the crop turned out to be tares, increasing thousands
believed it to be excellent wheat, to the growing of which America was
to be dedicated henceforth.
The rival philosophy, which came to view with increasing dislike the
doctrines of French romanticism, was of English middle class origin
and sprang from the long struggle of that class to loose the hands of
the landed gentry from control of the state. Phrased persuasively by
Adam Smith, it embodied the principle of liberalism as that principle
was understood by men of affairs. It conceived of a social Utopia that
must result if economic forces were given free play; if governmental
restrictions on trade were done away with and individual enterprise
were free to buy and sell in the open market. Springing from the
same root of individualism that brought forth French romanticism, it
flowered in an economics that denied the aspirations of the French
school. Assuming as its determining principle the common instinct of
acquisitiveness, it set up the economic man as the criterion of conduct
and proposed to reorder society to the single end of trade. Thus
sanctioned and given free rein, the principle of acquisitiveness set
forth on its triumphant march through western civilization. Accepted by
the English middle class as the ultimate social philosophy sufficient
to all needs, it presented to willing eyes the ideal of exploitation as
the goal of social progress.
But transported to America, the new philosophy soon discovered
unforeseen obstacles in its path. The acquisitive instinct was here
enormously strengthened by the vast unpreëmpted resources lying
all about, but unfortunately those resources were too great or too
speculative to be exploited by individual effort. Capital was wanting,
and unless collective funds were available, exploitation must be
slow and inadequate. There was need of the state to further the
opening up of western lands and to throw its guardianship about an
infant industrialism. Roads and canals could not wait on individual
enterprise; tariffs and subsidies could flow only from the government.
Hence arose a modification of _laissez faire_, from which resulted
the theory that a democratic state stands _in loco parentis_ to
the economic interests of its citizens, and should guarantee the
progressive well-being of strategic groups on whose prosperity
depended the common well-being. It was this modification of the
English philosophy that the Whig party came to embody in its platform,
and which by pooling the interests of western speculators, eastern
financiers and New England industrialists, sponsored the “American
Plan,” a curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow and divide the milk
among those who superintended the milking.
Meanwhile in the imperialistic South was arising a distinctive
philosophy, native to the special conditions imposed by slavery, that
was to set it apart from both eastern and western economics and draw it
inevitably into a narrowing isolation. Frankly defensive in purpose,
rejecting alike French equalitarianism and English individualism, it
sought to justify the institution of slavery by an appeal to realism
and square it to the theory of democracy by analogy with northern
industrialism. The conception of a Greek democracy, which was the
last citadel of the southern mind, was a skillful compromise between
the antagonistic principles of aristocracy and democracy, the most
romantic ideal brought forth by our golden age of romance. Assuming
the middle-class principle of exploitation as the creative source of
every civilization, it proposed to erect a free state on the basis of
a slave proletariat after the model of ancient Athens. A democracy,
it argued, is possible only among equals. In every society hitherto
the inevitable inequality between economic classes has nullified every
democratic program. Master and man, exploiter and exploited, are
necessarily opposed in vital economic interests; and this potential
clash, this fundamental antagonism of classes, has been intensified
by the rise of industrialism. Exploitation has been brutalized by the
impersonal wage-system, and the proletariat has been reduced to sodden
and embittered beasts. If now as honest realists we recognize frankly
that equality cannot exist between inferior and superior races, if
we accept the inevitable proletarian status of the negro, if finally
we concede the truism that the lifelong relations between master and
slave are more humane than the temporary relations between wage-giver
and wage-earner, we shall concern ourselves less with a romantic
equalitarianism and more with a rational conception of a democracy of
equals that may conceivably erect a civilization worthy of the name.
It was an ingenious theory, but unfortunately it left out of account
the ambitions of the middle class, and it was this class that in the
end destroyed it. Whether they will it or not, imperialisms have a
way of clashing with rival imperialisms. Reality persists though
romance may deny it, and in their several programs the three diverse
sections of America were driving blindly to a collision. In that bitter
collision the dream of the South was destroyed. With the overthrow of
the aristocratic principle in its final refuge the ground was cleared
of the last vestiges of the eighteenth century. Thenceforth America was
to become wholly middle class, and such romance as it might bring forth
was to be of another sort.
The literature of this extraordinarily vigorous period we are now
to deal with, not in the narrow field of _belles lettres_ alone but
in the outlying fields of social and political philosophies. The
difficulties in the way are many. To endeavor to penetrate critically
to the intellectual core of a period, to weigh this romance in
realistic scales, to take off the outer wrappings and lay bare the
inner truth, is no May-day undertaking. The critic finds himself at
every turn confronted by reputations distorted by contemporary praise
or censure. In the formal biographies written in that golden age of
myth-making, criticism too often gave way to eulogy. Our fathers wrote
like gentlemen, but unfortunately too often they believed that in
preparing a biography a gentleman was under obligation to speak well of
the dead. No blemishes were to be recognized, no disagreeable truths
to find a place in their immaculate pages. In consequence scarcely a
single commentary of the times is to be trusted, and the critic is
reduced to patching together his account out of scanty odds and ends,
or else settling down to do a series of full-length portraits, in which
work, quite evidently, he will not get far. The inadequacies of the
present study I am painfully conscious of: its omissions, its doubtful
interpretations, its hasty generalizations, its downright guesses;
but in the present lack of exact knowledge of the history of American
letters, I do not see how such inadequacies can be avoided.
Contents [Volume Two]
Introduction: Delimitations of period; romance and economic
change; differentiating imperialisms of East, South, West; romantic
philosophies: Physiocratic agrarianism, French equalitarianism,
English _laissez faire_; a counter-philosophy--slavery and a
Greek democracy iii
Book I: The Mind of the South
The mind of the South old-fashioned. Two germinal sources: Virginia,
from which derived Kentucky and Tennessee; South Carolina,
from which derived the Black Belt 3
Part I
The Virginia Renaissance
I. The Old Dominion: The mother of the agrarian West.
Transition from middle-class to plantation ideals.
Increasingly libertarian 5
II. The Heritage of Jeffersonianism
I. Jeffersonianism an expression of native conditions.
Interpreted in terms of Physiocratic agrarianism,
natural rights. Terminable nature of compact the
source of states-rights doctrine. Struggle between
capitalistic and agrarian economics. Virginia the
leader of the latter movement 10
II. John Taylor--Agrarian Economist: Leader of the
young Republicans. His works. Theory founded
in Physiocratic doctrine. Aristocratic origins of the
political state. Examination of the principles of John
Adams, Hamilton--social classes derive from exploitation.
Danger of a paper aristocracy. His philosophy
summarized 14
III. John Marshall--Last of the Virginia Federalists:
His strategic position. Middle-class sympathies;
intellectual qualities. A politician on the bench.
Two fixed ideas: sovereignty of the federal state;
sanctity of private property. His decisions Federalistic.
Two main groups: sovereignty of the judiciary;
irrevocable nature of contract. The Yazoo Fraud
case. An arch conservative 20
IV. The Older Plantation Mind
I. Plantation backgrounds: The literary renaissance
followed English romantic movement. Kennedy’s
_Swallow Barn_ and the rise of the plantation tradition 28
II. William Wirt: The man--embodiment of eighteenth-century
culture. _The British Spy_--characteristics.
_Life of Patrick Henry_--solution of the problem.
Later shift in political sympathies 30
III. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker--A Virginia Fire-eater.
His parochialism; his pessimism. _The Partisan
Leader_--a dramatization of Calhoun’s philosophy;
the note of romantic extravagance. Hatred of democracy--appeal
to South Carolina 35
V. Adventures in Romance
I. William Alexander Caruthers and the transition to
romance. _The Kentuckian in New York_, a contribution
to intersectional good will. An appreciation of
northern qualities; a criticism of slavery. _The Cavaliers
of Virginia_, the new spirit of romance. His slight
reputation 41
II. John Pendleton Kennedy--A southern Whig: The
man--Jeffersonian backgrounds; influence of Edward
Gray. Turned protectionist, accepted the doctrine
of progress. A romantic; an amateur. _Swallow
Barn_--an idyl of plantation life--slavery. _Horse-Shoe
Robinson; Rob of the Bowl_--cavalier romance. _Quodlibet_--a
Whig satire of Jacksonianism. His later
career 46
III. Edgar Allan Poe: Relations to southern environment--his
prejudices against New England. Aloofness from
Virginia ideals. A problem for abnormal psychology
and belletristic criticism. An artist and a critic 57
Part II
The Renaissance of Slavery
I. Southern Imperialism: Shift in attitude towards
slavery--consequences to Jeffersonian democracy. The Black
Belt--reasons why cotton became king. Reaction of
the South to imperialism. Jefferson Davis--his
character 61
II. Winds of Political Doctrine
I. Three streams of thought: Virginia humanitarianism,
western individualism, Carolina imperialism. Increasing
dominance of the third. Rise of a defensive
strategy; appeal to the Constitution 67
II. John C. Calhoun--Realist. His influence--destroyed
Jeffersonianism for the new South. A southern Puritan.
His early career--a nationalist. The year 1828
a turning-point--recognition of the danger of democracy
to slavery. Two lines of defense: states rights,
constitutional checks. Amplification of the second by
extension of the principle of the veto. Failure of
existing checks to protect minorities. Fallacy in the
conception of democratic majorities--an obscuring
of the economic basis of politics. Doctrine of the
concurrent majority. Conception of democracy--an
attack on theory of natural rights. His objective a
Greek democracy. Likeness to John Adams 69
III. Alexander H. Stephens--Constitutionalist: The man--passion
for freedom under law. His localism expressed
in states rights. A confirmed liberal--fear of extra-legal
powers. His _Constitutional View of the War
between the States_. Theory of the terminable nature of
compact--doctrine of good will. A political thinker,
rather than economic. Position on slavery 82
IV. Francis Lieber--A New-Modeled Federalism: A German
liberal influenced by English constitutional
practice and the common law. His doctrine of historical
evolution. Liberty founded in institutional self-government.
A _laissez-faire_ conception of the political state 93
III. The Dream of a Greek Democracy
I. Difficulty of the southern position. A reply to northern
industrialism--civilization and labor exploitation.
Contrast between wage-slavery and black slavery--certain
advantages of the latter. Southern replies to
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ 99
II. William J. Grayson: _The Hireling and the Slave_ as a
southern document. A contrast: the wretchedness
of the wage-slave in industrial centers; the contentment
of the black slave on the plantation. His attack
on Abolitionists 103
IV. Adventures in _Belles-Lettres_
I. Old Charleston: The capital of the planters--aristocratic,
Puritan, Victorian. Traditional home of Federalism.
Culture old-fashioned. A distinguished
society 109
II. William Crafts--Charleston Wit: A southern Robert
Treat Paine, seeking to domesticate Boston culture
in Charleston. His work 112
III. Hugh Swinton Legaré--Intellectual: A southern
Puritan. His career. A legal scholar, interpreting
politics in terms of the common law. A lexolater,
contemptuous of political philosophers. A juridical
romantic. Accepted the economics of _laissez faire_
and capitalism. Pessimistic in regard to the South.
Hostile to Nullification and Calhoun. The weakness
of slavery 114
IV. William Gilmore Simms: A plebeian snubbed by
Charleston, yet loyal to the Charleston parochialisms.
A realist hampered by the current romanticisms.
The most virile figure of the old South. A rich
and generous nature--likeness to Fielding. The
picaresque note in his work. Reasons for his exploitation
of “blood-pudding.” Lieutenant Porgy. His
two major themes: his special frontier compared with
Cooper’s; his revolutionary tales. His treatment of
the Indian. _The Yemassee_, compared with Cooper.
Later life 125
Part III
The Romance of the West
I. New Worlds
I. The Inland Empire and Jeffersonianism. Romance and
social change. Rise of the middle class, and clash of
philosophies. Economic origins of western Whiggery 137
II. Henry Clay: The embodiment of Whiggery. Reason
for his shift from Jeffersonianism. His theory of
paternalism 141
II. Two Spokesmen of the West
I. Andrew Jackson--Agrarian Liberal: The rise of western
equalitarianism. Federalist contempt for a Democrat.
Jackson our first great popular leader. Characteristics.
Early drift towards middle-class position;
reaction to agrarianism. Repudiation of Whiggery.
Hatred of aristocracy. His attitude toward the Bank
a return to the economics of John Taylor. His attitude
towards the state a modified Jeffersonianism. His
influence on American democracy. Effect on later
Whig strategy 145
II. Lincoln--Free-Soil Liberal: Liberalism and the Declaration
of Independence. A Jeffersonian who came to
the defense of natural rights. Equalitarianism and
_laissez faire_. The problem of free soil--a realist
seeking to reconcile them. His “divided house”
position an appeal to political realism. Good will
versus coercive sovereignty. The prose of his speeches.
Lincoln and the myth-makers 152
III. The Frontier in Letters: Romance and the Inland
Empire. Two main conceptions: Boone and the
Dark and Bloody Ground; Crockett and frontier
humor 161
I. The Romantic Frontier 162
II. The Realistic Frontier
(1) Augustus Longstreet and the Georgia Frontier:
The native realism of Georgia life. A frontier
plebeian who developed middle-class qualities.
A follower of Calhoun, but at bottom a Jeffersonian
agrarian. With the rise of Abolitionism abandoned
natural-rights philosophy. _Georgia Scenes_--the
note of realism 166
(2) The Davy Crockett Myth: The popular appeal of
the _Narrative_ and the rise of the Crockett myth.
Origin at Washington. Three stages: frontier
waggery; anti-Jackson spleen; the Alamo adventure.
A Whig attempt to catch the coonskin
vote--a by-product of Jacksonian methods. The
beginnings in _Sketches and Eccentricities_. Effect
on Davy. _The Tour_ and the _Life of Martin
Van Buren_. Conjectural authorship. How Davy
was made a Whig. The _Exploits and Adventures_.
_The Narrative_--the real Davy a wastrel 172
Book II: The Mind of the Middle East
A product of two centers: Philadelphia, New York. Lack of
intellectual backgrounds 183
I. The Old Capital
I. Philadelphia the capital of the older American culture.
Its contributions to the Revolutionary debates. Its
economic prospects curtailed by topography. Its
decline with the removal of the national capital 185
II. Brockden Brown and French liberalisms--influence
of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Explanation
of their appeal. _Alcuin; A Dialogue._ _Arthur Mervyn_,
a study in Godwinianism. _Wieland_ and the “blood-pudding”
school. Influence on later fiction in America 188
III. Robert Montgomery Bird: His contributions to the
romantic drama. _Nick of the Woods_--a realistic
treatment of the Indian. A contribution to the myth
of western humor 190
II. The New Capital
I. New York an economic rather than a cultural capital.
Reasons for its rise. The older Knickerbocker world
disintegrating. Stephen Van Rensselaer and John
Jacob Astor 193
II. Intellectual backgrounds: Lack of creativeness. Political
divisions. Emergence of the boss--Martin Van
Buren and Thurlow Weed 195
III. James Kent: The last of the old Federalist school.
His political theory--a disciple of Fisher Ames. His
_Commentaries on American Law_ 197
IV. Beginnings of the renaissance: _Salmagundi_; _The Croaker
Papers_. Fitz-Greene Halleck. His views--attitude
towards the proletariat. _Connecticut_; _Fanny_. The
last of the Wits 199
III. Two Knickerbocker Romantics
I. Washington Irving: His detachment. A _flâneur_. His
years abroad. Reaction to the Reform Bill. An
incipient liberal. Rediscovery of America. The
mission to Madrid. Contrast with Cooper. Political
principles--drift towards the middle class. _A Tour
of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, _Life of Washington_. His early
and late work contrasted 203
II. James Kirke Paulding: His origins--a son of the
people, distrustful of the middle class. Defense of
America against the English critics. His idealism.
_The Backwoodsman_; _The Puritan and his Daughter_.
His rejection of English “blood-pudding” romantic.
A Jeffersonian: _Letters from the South_ an echo of John
Taylor’s agrarianism; opposed Clay’s American Plan;
satirized Clay in _Koningsmarke_. _Westward Ho!; The
Dutchman’s Fireside._ An amateur in letters 212
IV. James Fenimore Cooper--Critic: The problem of
Cooper. A barometer of his generation. Troubled by
the transition from an aristocratic to a capitalistic
order--lingered between worlds. His Tory origins--Judge
William Cooper. Abandoned Federalism yet
ill content with Democracy. Effect of his European
travels. Likeness to John Adams--hated all cant.
Two phases of his criticism: the older Federalist
theories; the fallacies of capitalism. _The Monikins_--an
attack on the stake-in-society theory. _The Redskins_--an
attack on capitalistic exploitation. A
romanticized eighteenth century his refuge against
the vulgarities of Jacksonianism and capitalism.
_Home as Found_ and _The Redskins_ as studies in social
criticism. His love of the wilderness and hatred of
the frontier. The anti-rent trilogy. Picture of the
squatter. His growing realism--_Wyandotté_. His
later political philosophy--an ethical interpretation
of sovereignty. Failure of the critics to understand
Cooper 222
V. Some Contributions of New England
I. William Cullen Bryant--Puritan Liberal: Injustice
done him by neglect of his journalistic work. An
original mind. Transition from Federalist to Democrat.
Influence of the English economists--an
English liberal. Never a Jeffersonian, but anti-Whig.
Influence of William Leggett and Parke Godwin.
Attitude towards the labor movement. Defense of
free speech. A critic of the rising capitalism 238
II. Horace Greeley--Yankee Radical: A practical man
seeking a way out of the confusions of the times. His
early life; defense of protectionism. His working
back to Jeffersonianism. Interest in Fourierism.
Champion of the farmer and the wage-earner. His
“Vote Yourself a Farm” policy. Interest in the
proletariat--interpretation
of slavery. Coöperation. An idealist 247
III. Herman Melville--Pessimist: The source of his pessimism
in life itself--effect of frustrations. His ancestry:
the Gansevoort strain; the Melville strain. Contrast
between mother and son; effect of his marriage.
Stages toward pessimism marked by _Typee_, _Mardi_,
_Moby Dick_, _Pierre_. Transcendentalism and reality.
His democracy. A critic of America. Spiritual
dissatisfactions--_Clarel_ 258
Book III: The Mind of New England
The New England renaissance the last expression in America of
eighteenth-century revolutionary thought. Given a native ethical
bias. Twin tendencies of earlier New England. Static conditions
of life--the renaissance a movement of liberalism, shaped
by the Puritan strain 271
Part I
The Twilight of Federalism
I. The Passing of the Tie-Wig School
I. Old Boston: Conservatism of temper--a reaction from
the revolutionary enthusiasm of ’76. Emphasized by
refusal to entertain French romantic theories. The
renaissance delayed a generation. The home of the
stake-in-society principle; opposition to democracy 275
II. Fisher Ames and the Tie-Wig School: The spokesman
of Boston Federalism. A conservative, given to pessimism.
His political philosophy an adaptation of
English Whiggery to the Calvinistic conception of
stewardship; based on an absolute morality. Prosperity
and the Saints--the end of government to protect
property; hence it must be strong and coercive. Fear
of faction. A repository of aristocratic prejudice 279
III. Robert Treat Paine, Jr.--Wit: The last of the
eighteenth-century Wits. His verse. A Tory--attitude
towards the French Revolution. His prose. Contempt
for Jacobin doctrine 288
II. Winds of Political Doctrine
I. Changing economics after 1812--rise of industrialism.
A new spirit of nationalism. Danger of agrarianism,
particularism. Rise of the Whig party--middle-class
capitalistic. Menace of the new southern school of
states rights. Need of a new nationalistic theory of
the Constitution 296
II. Work begun by Joseph Story: A Massachusetts Republican.
Characteristics of New England Republicanism.
His shift to Whiggery. His _Commentaries
on the Constitution_: derived from the common law and
_The Federalist_. His view of the compact--interpretation
of “We the people” 299
III. Daniel Webster--Realist and Constitutionalist: Contrasted
with Emerson--English in temperament.
Two periods of intellectual development: an eighteenth-century
realist before 1825; a legalist afterwards.
A disciple of Harrington. Two early speeches:
_The Basis of the Senate, The First Settlement of New
England_--an elaboration of the economic basis of
politics. His economic theory--_laissez faire_. Shift
to protectionism due to changing economics of his constituents.
His reply to Hayne. His constitutional
theory in _The Constitution not a Compact_--his debt to
Story. His position on slavery--_The Seventh of
March Speech_. Effect on his reputation. Comment
of liberals. The Dartmouth College case. His failure 304
Part II
The Rise of Liberalism
I. The Renaissance: The movement of liberalism more
pronounced in New England because long restrained.
Ethical rather than economic; German rather than
French. Many-sided but rebellious 317
II. Liberalism and Calvinism
I. The stir in the church. French romanticism and
Unitarianism. The conservative reaction. The
dilemma of Calvinism--efforts to escape the horns of
dogma. The growth of rationalism. The philosophy
of Unitarianism--a recovery of the principle of primitive
Congregationalism. Elements of conservatism 321
II. William Ellery Channing: A spiritual nature, concerned
with two cardinal ideas: God’s love, man’s excellence.
Slow clarification of his thought. Major
tenets derived from Rousseau and the English Arians.
Attitude toward slavery. Theory of the political
state--approximation to the position of Jefferson. On
freedom of speech--the vital principle of Unitarianism 328
III. Liberalism and the Social Conscience
I. The Social Mind: The Puritan conscience individual
rather than social. Influence of Unitarianism in
awakening a sense of social responsibility. Beginnings
of reform 339
II. Perfectionism: An extreme expression of ethical
radicalism. John Humphrey Noyes, a Yankee Fifth
Monarchy man. His doctrines--expression in Conventions 342
III. Brook Farm: An attempt at an economic solution of
social maladjustments. Influence of transcendentalism.
Attitude of certain transcendentalists. Hostility
to Fourierism 346
IV. Abolitionism: The awakening of the New England
conscience to the evil of slavery. The Abolitionists a
remnant in Israel--their characteristics 350
IV. Certain Militants
I. William Lloyd Garrison: A flinty character. His early
life. _The Liberator._ A primitive Hebraist--his antagonisms.
His political theory founded on the Declaration
of Independence. A Perfectionist. Nullified the
Constitution. The strength and weakness of his
methods 352
II. John G. Whittier--Puritan-Quaker: The religion of
the Inner Light. A primitive Christian--a Come-outer.
Significance of _Leaves from Margaret Smith’s
Journal_. The politician amongst the Abolitionists.
Reasons for his break with Garrison. Not a political
thinker. His Abolitionist verse. His later verse. An
anachronism in industrial New England 361
III. Harriet Beecher Stowe--A Daughter of Puritanism:
Her Calvinist heredity. A sympathetic student of
New England psychology. Intellectual antecedents.
_Old-Town Folks_; _Poganuc People_. _The Minister’s
Wooing_ a defense of the Calvinist clergy. Her contact
with slavery--_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; _Dred_ 371
Part III
The Transcendental Mind
I. The Genesis of Transcendentalism: An expression
of metaphysical Utopianism. Idealism long starved in
New England. Derived from Unitarian doctrine of
the open mind. German idealism and native impulses.
A glorification of conscience and will--romantic.
The note of mysticism. The outcome a
movement of criticism 379
II. Ralph Waldo Emerson--Transcendental Critic: His
theory of transcendental criticism. The early Emerson--an
ascetic. Influence of first trip abroad--_Nature_.
The gist of Emersonianism. Reasons for the
contrast between the real and ideal. Estimate of
democracy; theory of the political state--the ethical
absolute--a transcendental Jeffersonianism. Theory
of economics--bias towards Physiocratic conception.
A critic of contemporary America--its materialisms.
Attitude towards reform 386
III. Henry Thoreau--Transcendental Economist: His life-business
to explore the meaning of wealth. His life an
experiment in values. A Concord man who “signed
off.” A Hellenist interpreting spiritual values. The
problem of economics stated. Significance of _Walden_--suggestions
of William Morris. The challenge of
slavery: _Civil Disobedience_. Compared with Godwin’s
_Political Justice_--doctrine of individual syndicalism.
Admiration for John Brown. The extremest expression
of eighteenth-century individualism 400
IV. Theodore Parker--Transcendental Minister: His characteristics:
a fighting man, a revolutionary. Sermon
on _The Transient and Permanent in Christianity_--marks
the second stage of Unitarianism. His studies
in higher criticism; his doctrine. His conception of
human perfectibility--evolutionary. A primitive
democrat; a political critic. Attack on current
materialisms--criticism of Webster. A modern 414
V. Margaret Fuller--Rebel: An embodiment of transcendental
rebellions. The contradictions in her
character as explained by Freudian psychology. Her
training--a victim of sex. Contemporary analysis of
her character. An intellectual child of eighteenth-century
romanticisms--influence of Goethe. Transcendentalism--Brook
Farm. _Woman in the Nineteenth
Century_ and feminism. Work as a critic.
Career in Europe. Influence of Jean Jacques. The
price of her rebellions 426
Part IV
Other Aspects of the New England Mind
I. The Reign of the Genteel
I. Brahminism and the genteel in letters--a refined
ethicism. Dislike of realistic methods. Lowell’s
position 435
II. Brahminism and history: The New England school:
Ticknor, Jared Sparks--methods of the latter. Bancroft’s
_History of the United States_--an attempt at a
democratic interpretation. Prescott, Motley, Parkman--followers
of the romantic school. Parkman
considered 437
III. Longfellow: Influence of Germany. A poet of the
library--his aloofness--his translations. The slavery
poems. Characteristics 439
II. Nathaniel Hawthorne--Skeptic: A temperament detached,
rationalistic, unhopeful, skeptical about
Utopias. Neither transcendental nor Unitarian in
philosophy, but curious concerning evil. Intellectually
unlocalized--his aloofness from romantic Salem. Like
Jonathan Edwards in probing the psychology of sin.
Tendency to symbolism and allegory. His intellectual
poverty--revealed in _American Notes_. Brook
Farm and _The Blithedale Romance_--reasons for his
interpretation of Hollingsworth and Margaret Fuller.
The sterility of his later years 442
III. The Authentic Brahmin
I. Oliver Wendell Holmes--Beacon Street Wit: Decline
of his reputation. Holmes and Paine as wits. A child
of the eighteenth century turned romantic. A
rationalist--hatred of Calvinism. Defense of Boston--a
Brahmin rebel defending free thought. Attack on
equalitarianism--dislike of the plutocracy--indifferent
to proletarian problems. His heroes respectable.
An amateur--a minor figure 451
II. James Russell Lowell--Cambridge Brahmin: Of
the true Brahmin line. His intellectual confusions.
Influence of his Tory heritage--the Lowells. His
course determined by environment and certain dominant
personalities. Three periods of his intellectual
life: the Maria White period and his immersion in current
radicalisms--reflections in his verse and prose;
the professorial period--immersion in scholarship--his
shortcomings as a critic--as a political writer; the
ambassadorial period--influence of Godkin--resurgence
of Brahmin conservatism--fear of democracy--of
agrarian and proletarian movements--concern at
political corruption--failure to understand its causes--faith
in civil service reform. His escape to London--the
final Lowell an English liberal 460
Conclusion: Effects of the Civil War on earlier
romanticisms--destruction of the slave economy; strengthening of
the rival agrarian and capitalistic economies. Certain
anachronisms--eighteenth-century liberalism--local home
rule--submerged by movement of consolidation. Romantic literary
schools became obsolete. The sovereignty of the middle class
and the emergence of realistic criticism 473
Bibliography 475
Index 483
Book One • The Mind of the South
To those who follow the main-traveled road of American experience, as
we know it today, the mind of the old South seems curiously remote.
It is so archaic, so wholly apart from all present-day ambitions, as
to appear singular. Yet the continental highways we now travel so
familiarly, it must be remembered, were not the highways of an earlier
America. It is the North that has changed, and not the South, and the
nationality that sits so easily upon us would have seemed ominous to
the simpler world that determined the ideals of the Old Dominion. The
southern mind has grown old-fashioned, but it is native and of long
and honorable descent. It derived its singularity from the eighteenth
century in which it took shape; and it retained the clear impress of
its origins long after the eighteenth century had become an anachronism
in America. It was primarily political, of the French rather than
the English school; but it was economic also, out of Quesnay and Du
Pont de Nemours rather than Adam Smith, with a frank bias towards the
Physiocratic agrarianism that was so congenial to the needs and temper
of a plantation society; and this political agrarianism, parochial in
its outlook rather than national, suffices to explain the singularity
of the southern mind in the eyes of a later industrialized America.
Simple and homogeneous in the early years of the nineteenth century,
it nevertheless carried the seeds of disruption within it. Beneath the
surface of this common political agrarianism disintegrating forces
were at work, that were to produce broad cleavages of thought and lead
to sharp differences of outlook and polity. An old South and a new
South dwelt side by side, and to the West lay a frontier that took
particular form as it came under the determining influence of one
or the other. Virginia and South Carolina were the germinal centers
of southern culture, from which issued the creative ideas that gave
special forms to the brood of frontier states. Kentucky and Tennessee
were the intellectual heirs of Virginia; Alabama and Mississippi were
the intellectual heirs of South Carolina. Of these two schools of
thought that looked in different directions and sought different ends,
Jefferson and Calhoun were the intellectual leaders; and the contrasts
in their philosophies--the rejection by the latter of equalitarian
idealism, and the substitution of economic realism--mark the diverse
tendencies which in the end disrupted the South. Jackson and Lincoln
were followers of the Jeffersonian school; Jefferson Davis finally
went with Calhoun; and Henry Clay, lacking an adequate philosophy,
wavered between them. The differences between these men were open
and patent, and any analysis of the mind of the South, any attempt
to understand the conflict of tendencies that marked the development
of southern thought between 1800 and 1860, must give due weight to
such differences. The problem, therefore, instead of being single is
threefold, and involves an examination of the mind of Virginia, the
mind of South Carolina, and the mind of the new West from the Ohio
River to the Gulf.
Part One: The Virginia Renaissance
Chapter I • The Old Dominion
The history of the Old Dominion is an easy chapter in the textbook of
economic determinism. It is a modern instance that exemplifies the
law of land distribution and political control as laid down by James
Harrington; it is another Oceana seated by the James River, that
would not suffer a king to rule because gentlemen held the land and
acknowledged no feudal dues or royal prerogatives. On the surface its
history seems little more than a bundle of paradoxes. From the raw
materials of English middle-class stock it created a distinguished
and capable aristocracy, that was restrained from feudal tyranny by
a vigorous yeomanry that held its land in fee simple and stoutly
maintained its rights. Established on a slave economy, it adopted an
agrarian economy, espoused a republic, and accepted the doctrine of
democratic equalitarianism. It was generous, humanitarian, independent;
parochial in its jealousies, yet farsighted in outlook; tenacious of
its authority and quick to defend it, yet never mean or grasping.
During the noonday of its power its influence was always on the side
of local democratic freedom and the common well-being. It opposed the
encroachments of the centralizing state and the spirit of capitalistic
exploitation; yet its domestic economy rested on the most primitive of
all exploitation.
But these paradoxes disappear when the history of Virginia is
interpreted in the light of its land economy. By force of circumstances
the Old Dominion became broadly American in its social philosophy, the
interpreter of America to herself. Native conditions created there a
native psychology, and this native psychology spread widely through
the frontier states where a like economics provided suitable breeding
places. Virginia was the mother of the agrarian West, as New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston were the progenitors of the mercantile and
industrial East; and in the frequent clashes between country and
town, between agrarianism and capitalism, the ideas of Virginia have
commonly opposed the ideas of the northern cities. Between the older
colonial America and later industrial America, stand the ideals of
the Old Dominion, more humane and generous than either, disseminating
the principles of French romantic philosophy, and instilling into the
provincial American mind, static and stagnant in the grip of English
colonialism, the ideal of democratic equalitarianism and the hope of
humane progress. The nineteenth century first entered America by way of
the James River.
The renaissance in Virginia began with the transition from middle-class
to plantation ideals that marked the last half of the eighteenth
century; and it was given intellectual stimulus by the libertarian
natural-rights philosophy that in England and France was undermining
the old order. There were no cities either mercantile or social, in
the Old Dominion, and no industrialism. Life everywhere centered in
the plantation. The navigable rivers of the tide-water region were
favorable to the development of a decentralized economics, and in
spite of royal commands to create adequate seaports, and heavy taxes
by the commonwealth, trading towns did not prosper. For two hundred
years Virginia refused to create a native middleman group to handle
its staples, but preferred to deal through British factors and ship
directly, preferably in Dutch bottoms. Each planter insisted on putting
his hogsheads of tobacco aboard ship at his own wharf, and receiving
his merchandise direct from London. The system was wasteful, and
Madison was active in an attempt to limit by law the ports of entry to
two, in order to build up a middleman machinery; but the plan broke on
the fixed prejudices of plantation masters who had come to share the
old English dislike of tradesmen. Virginia stubbornly refused to adopt
middle-class methods, even though refusal cost her dear. She preferred
to be exploited by British factors rather than create a domestic class
to devour her resources.
The system had grown up in earlier times when the merchant spirit was
strong in Virginia. It is often assumed that the Virginia aristocracy
was descended from emigrant Cavaliers who fled from England during the
commonwealth period; but the facts of history do not bear out such a
theory. It was descended largely from vigorous middle-class stock--from
men who had been merchants in England and in turning planters brought
to the business qualities that had been developed in mercantile
pursuits. In the seventeenth century Virginia society exhibited few of
the usual characteristics of the Cavalier. It was frankly _bourgeois_,
pushing, avaricious, keen in driving hard bargains, with no high sense
of honor, canny rather than impulsive, preferring the law to the duel,
hating war and only half-hearted in defense against the Indians--a
little world of London burgesses new seated on the banks of the James
and the Rappahannock. “Beyond doubt,” concludes a recent student,
“the most numerous section of the Virginia aristocracy was derived
from the English merchant class” (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, _Patrician
and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 28), pretty much the same class that
settled Boston and Philadelphia. For a hundred and fifty years these
merchant ideals characterized Virginia society. Speculation in land
was universal; exploitation was open and shameless; the highest
officials took advantage of their positions to loot the public domain,
resorting to divers sharp practices from tax dodging to outright theft.
One gentleman added a cipher to a grant for two thousand acres, and
although the fraud was commonly known, so great was his influence that
no one disputed his title to twenty thousand acres. While governor,
Alexander Spotswood issued patents for sixty thousand acres to
dummy holders, who deeded the land to him after he had retired from
office.[397]
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century such practices came
to an end. The merchant spirit died out among the Virginia planters,
and the Cavalier spirit took its place. A high sense of personal
and civic honor became the hall-mark of the landed aristocracy, and
for upwards of a hundred years this common code gave to Virginia an
enviable distinction. Both in national and commonwealth politics her
representatives were clean-handed and jealous to deserve the public
faith reposed in them. Among the planters were good business men, of
course, notably Washington, who under his stately manners concealed
a capable mind for speculative affairs. He engaged in various
enterprises; speculated heavily in western lands; was president of
the Potomac Company, organized to improve navigation and connect his
holdings with salt water; and at his death was one of the wealthiest
men in America. But such a career was very unusual in Virginia after
the Revolutionary War. Washington, indeed, may properly be regarded
as the last of the eighteenth-century gentlemen, who like Colonel
William Byrd was interested in accumulating vast holdings as well as
cultivating his plantation. Even more characteristic of an earlier day
was John Marshall, the last of the great Virginia Federalists, who was
nearer akin to Robert Morris, with whom he had business dealings, than
with Jefferson or John Randolph of Roanoke.
The opportunity for such careers in Virginia was passing. Population
was draining off into the West and few immigrants came to settle.
With no rapidly growing cities the incentive to speculate in unearned
increment was lacking and liquid capital was inadequate. The economics
of plantation life developed agrarian rather than capitalistic
interests. In the midst of a rapidly changing America, a world given
over to exploitation, increasingly middle class and contemptuous of
the older aristocratic order, the Old Dominion remained static and
unchanging. The plantation aristocracy was marooned by the rising tide.
It repudiated the ways of trade and industry and sharply criticised the
North for its plebeian spirit. “Commerce is certainly beneficial to
society in a secondary degree,” said Governor Tyler in 1810, addressing
the Virginia legislature, “but it produces also what is called citizens
of the world--the worst citizens in the world” (quoted in Wertenbaker,
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 102). Enterprising young
men who a generation before would have been strong Federalists and
supported the new capitalism, found such an atmosphere stifling and
migrated to the new South--to Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, or
farther West still, where greater opportunity awaited them. Virginia
produced no more Washingtons or Marshalls, but turned whole-heartedly
to the school of Jefferson, providing the leaders of states-rights
agrarianism. She broke off all intellectual alliances with the
mercantile and industrial North, and withdrew within her own plantation
world.
Purged thus of its Federalist remnant Virginia became increasingly
libertarian in its social and political philosophy. Its mind had
taken form at the time when French humanitarianism was in the air,
and it discovered much in the new philosophy that appealed to its
romantic spirit. A quick and jealous concern for personal liberty
and the rights of man was a common passion. The gentlemen of the Old
Dominion were bound together by caste solidarity, but they remained
strikingly individual, never amenable to group coercion, expressing
their convictions freely and ready to uphold their views by the code of
the duel. “No people ever lived,” said Alexander H. Stephens in 1867,
“more devoted to the principles of liberty, secured by free democratic
institutions, than the people of the South” (_Constitutional View_,
etc., Vol. I, p. 539). The right of dissent from majority opinion was
the imprescriptible right of every gentleman. In no other part of
America could the career of John Randolph be paralleled--a free-lance
critic of politicians and political measures, who turned his caustic
wit against whom he would, an arch individualist in opinions as other
Americans were in acquisitiveness. Politics was an absorbing game in
Virginia. Debarred from commercial pursuits, ambitious young Virginians
went in for law and politics, with an eye upon a congenial career at
Washington. This serves to explain the long predominance of southern
leadership in the national government. For two generations the South
provided a surprising number of first-class men whose influence was
commanding. Until the problem of slavery became acute, and leadership
passed from moderate Virginians to Fire Eaters from further south,
the influence of Virginia at Washington was thrown on the side of
republican simplicity, low taxes and the decentralization of power. The
armed clash over slavery very probably might have been averted if the
spirit of the Old Dominion had prevailed.
Footnotes
[397] For these and other facts, see Wertenbaker’s book (mentioned
above), pp. 95-99.
Chapter II • The Heritage of Jeffersonianism
I
To the young Virginia Republicans of the year 1800, Jeffersonianism
seemed to be a comprehensive social philosophy peculiarly adapted to
their needs. It offered a practical and humane program of national
development in harmony with existing fact and native genius. It had
not yet been distorted by the caprice of circumstance into a somewhat
nebulous idealism, nor confined within the narrower limits of political
equalitarianism and states-rights theory. By later generations
Jefferson has been interpreted too exclusively in terms of the
Declaration of Independence, the glowing idealism of which has proved
curiously elastic and has been stretched by later libertarian movements
to meet their special and particular ends: by the Jacksonian democracy
in their struggle for manhood suffrage; by the Abolitionists in their
attack upon a slave-sanctioning Constitution; by other idealists in
their various crusades. The great name of Jefferson, in consequence,
has come to be commonly associated with the conception of democracy and
the ideal of social justice. But to his young Virginia followers in the
morning of the Republican movement, the perennial suggestiveness of
their leader lay in the fact that he embodied for them the many-sided
liberalism of French revolutionary thought, its economic and social
idealisms equally with political. They interpreted him more adequately,
for they understood, as later interpreters frequently have not, how
deeply the roots of his natural-rights philosophy went down into
current economics. Of the different French writers who gave shape
and substance to his thinking, the strongest creative influence on
the mature Jefferson came from the Physiocratic group, from Quesnay,
Condorcet, Mirabeau, Du Pont de Nemours, the brilliant founders of an
economy that was primarily social rather than narrowly industrial or
financial. Historically the Physiocratic school is as sharply aligned
with idealistic agrarianism as the Manchester school is aligned with
capitalistic industrialism. The conception that agriculture is the
single productive form of labor, that from it alone comes the _produit
net_ or ultimate net labor increment, and that bankers, manufacturers
and middlemen belong to the class of sterile workers, profoundly
impressed the Virginia mind, bred up in a plantation economy and
concerned for the welfare and dignity of agriculture.
Franklin had first given currency to the Physiocratic theory in America
a generation earlier, but it was Jefferson who spread it widely among
the Virginia planters. He did more; he provided the new agrarianism
with a politics and a sociology. From the wealth of French writers
he formulated a complete libertarian philosophy. His receptive mind
was saturated with romantic idealism which assumed native, congenial
form in precipitation. From Rousseau, Godwin and Paine, as well as
from Quesnay and Condorcet, came the idea of political justice and the
conception of a minimized political state, assuming slightly different
forms from filtering through different minds. The early doctrine of
_laissez faire, laissez passer_--a phrase given currency by Gournay,
the godfather of the Physiocratic school--proved to be curiously
fruitful in the field of political speculation, as in economic. From
it issued a sanction for natural rights, the theory of progress, the
law of justice, and the principle of freedom. The right of coercion was
restricted by it to the narrowest limits, and the political state was
shorn of all arbitrary power. “Authority,” the Physiocratic thinkers
concluded, “should only employ the force of the community to compel
madmen and depraved men to make their conduct conform to the principles
of justice.”
So far Jefferson went gladly with the Physiocrats, but in their
acceptance of a benevolent despotism he discovered a denial of their
first principles, and turned to the more congenial democratic group.
With the political principles of Godwin and Paine he was in hearty
accord. With them he accepted as an historical fact the principle that
government is everywhere and always at war with natural freedom, and
from this he deduced the characteristic doctrine that the lover of
freedom will be jealous of delegated power, and will seek to hold the
political state to strict account. From this same principle, following
Paine, he deduced the doctrine of the terminable nature of compact,
which he set over against the legal doctrine of inviolability. In this
matter French liberalism and English legalism were at opposite poles.
Replying to Burke’s doctrine of irrevocable compact, Paine had written
_The Rights of Man_, which Jefferson did much to popularize in America,
and with the broad principles of which he was in complete accord.
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” Paine had argued, and
the dead possess no rights over it. Government from the grave is a
negation of the inalienable rights of the newborn; hence social justice
demands that a time limit should automatically revoke all compacts.
Since no generation can rightly deed away the heritage of the unborn,
the natural limit of every compact is the lifetime of the generation
ratifying it. “No society,” Jefferson said, “can make a perpetual
Constitution, or even a perpetual law.”
In this suggestive theory of the terminable nature of compact is to be
found the philosophical origin of the later doctrine of states rights.
However deeply it might be covered over by constitutional lawyers and
historians who defended the right of secession, the doctrine was there
implicitly, and the southern cause would have been more effectively
served if legal refinements had been subordinated to philosophical
justification of this fundamental doctrine. With a frank contempt for
all legalists Jefferson believed that social well-being was not to be
bounded by constitutional limitations or statutory enactments; that
political action should be governed by reason rather than by historical
precedent. He had discovered that the political state does not remain
static, but gathers power by the law of physical attraction; with
increasing power it becomes increasingly dangerous to natural freedom;
hence a long-established and venerable constitution may become, by
reason of its hold upon the popular affection, the most useful of
agencies to cloak aggressions on the rights of the people. The love
of profits is always seeking to overthrow the rule of justice. Human
selfishness persistently distorts civic conduct, warping it from ideal
ends. But the shortcomings of existing political states cannot abrogate
the law of justice or destroy the love of freedom. To safeguard freedom
from encroachment by the political state, and to establish the rule of
justice, were always the great and difficult ends that Jefferson aimed
at, and as a follower of the Physiocratic school and a Virginia planter
he turned naturally to a _laissez faire_ agrarianism in opposition to a
centralizing capitalism.
But he was much too sound a political thinker and too sagacious a
party leader to rest his case upon abstract theory. In all his later
writings and counsels he kept his mind close to economic fact, and
the Jeffersonian movement was a long and effective training school in
the economic basis of politics. It habituated the motley rank and file
of the electorate to think in economic terms and to regard political
parties as the instruments of economic groups. This was in keeping
with the soundest eighteenth-century tradition, before romantic dogma
had divorced politics and realism; and in so far Jefferson agreed
with his Federalist opponents, Hamilton and John Adams. A decade of
acrimonious debate had made it plain to the common voter that the real
struggle in America lay between the rival capitalist and agrarian
interests, of which the Federalist and Republican parties were the
political instruments. The Congressional enactments of the first twelve
years had further clarified the issue. The funding plan had visibly
increased the number and wealth of the rising capitalist group. The
first banks were being erected and the complex machinery of modern
credit--the hated “paper system” that had driven out the traditional
metallic currency--was being rapidly built up. A small financial group
in the northern cities was growing powerful from discounting and
money-brokerage. The truth was slowly coming home to the farmers and
small men that war is profitable to the few at the cost of the many;
that from the egg of war-financing was hatched a brood of middlemen
who exploited the post-war hardships and grew rich from the debts that
impoverished the producing farmers. This ambitious class, hitherto
negligible in America, was provided with the means to make a vigorous
fight; it invoked the political state as an ally, and under Hamilton’s
leadership used the administration to serve its financial interests.
It looked with open hostility upon every agrarian program, was cynical
towards French romantic theories, and was restrained by no scruples. To
loose the hands of this capable class from the helm of government, to
keep America agricultural, and the Federal state secondary in all but
necessary police powers to the several commonwealths, was the avowed
and logical purpose of the Jeffersonian Republicans.[398]
The leaders of the movement were men who in capacity and training were
worthy opponents of the capable Federalists. In surprising number
they were from the Old Dominion, gentlemen of the best Virginia
stock, who in the last decades of the eighteenth century engrafted
upon a generous plantation tradition the Physiocratic doctrines of
France. A finer race of gentlemen America has never produced, and it
was fortunate for the Jacksonian movement, which produced no notable
thinkers and contributed little to political and economic theory, that
the preceding generation had given adequate form to the philosophy of
agrarianism. That theory took definite shape between 1800 and 1820.
In the days of Hamilton’s control of the Treasury Department, the
agrarian opposition was weakened by the lack of such a theory; but the
necessities of the situation were a prod to the young Republicans,
and the philosophy of agrarianism rapidly crystallized. In its final
form it was an extraordinarily interesting and native expression of
two hundred years’ experience of a society founded on agriculture--a
reasoned defense of an older America against the ambitions of a younger
and more vigorous.
II • John Taylor • An Agrarian Economist
The intellectual leader of the young Republicans in the great attack
on the economics of Federalism was a thinker too little recognized by
later Americans. His just fame has been obscured with the cause for
which he labored, and his reputation lies buried with the old agrarian
_régime_. Nevertheless John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, “the
philosopher and statesman of agrarianism,” was the most penetrating
critic of Hamiltonian finance and the most original economist of his
generation. Unambitious, simple, honest, calm and dignified in bearing,
he embodied the heroic virtues of the great age of Virginia. In his
_Thirty Years’ View_, Thomas H. Benton describes him thus:
I can hardly figure to myself the ideal of a republican statesman
more perfect and complete than he was in reality:--plain and
solid, a wise counsellor, a ready and vigorous debater, acute and
comprehensive, ripe in all historical and political knowledge,
innately republican--modest, courteous, benevolent, hospitable,--a
skilful, practical farmer, giving his time to his farm and his
books, when not called by an emergency to the public service--and
returning to his books and his farm when the emergency was over....
He belonged to that constellation of great men which shone so
brightly in Virginia in his day, and the light of which was not
limited to Virginia, or our America, but spread through the bounds
of the civilized world. (Chapter XVIII.)
Taylor was a member of Congress at the time of the funding operations
and contributed two notable pamphlets to the public discussion: the
first, issued in 1793, entitled _An Examination of the Late Proceedings
in Congress Respecting the Official Conduct of the Secretary of the
Treasury_; the second, issued the following year, entitled _An Inquiry
into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures_. Twenty
years later, in 1814, he embodied his matured convictions in a stout
volume, printed at Fredericksburg, entitled _An Inquiry into the
Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States_. The
work is tediously prolix--dressed, according to Benton, “in a quaint
Sir Edward Coke style”--even more tediously moralistic; but in spite
of very evident stylistic shortcomings, it deserves, in the opinion
of Professor Beard, “to rank among the two or three really historic
contributions to political science which have been produced in the
United States” (_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 323).
It was the last of the eighteenth-century works, solidly reasoned,
keeping a main eye upon economics and refusing to wander off into
the bog of constitutionalism, concerned rather with the springs and
sources of political action and the objectives of political parties. It
summed up adequately the agrarian argument against capitalism, analyzed
the current tendencies, and provided a convenient handbook for the
Jacksonian movement, from which the latter drew freely in the dispute
over the Bank.
Like Jefferson’s, the agrarianism of Taylor was founded in the
Physiocratic economy. He was convinced that the tiller of the soil
was the only true economist, and that if republican America were to
retain its republican virtues it must guard against every system of
exploitation, for in exploitation lay the origin of social caste.
America had rid itself of the feudal principle of a landed aristocracy,
which in the past had provided the machinery of exploitation, by the
abolition of the law of primogeniture and entail, only to be confronted
by a graver danger, the new aristocracy of liquid wealth. His main
purpose, therefore, was an examination of the sources of power of the
capitalistic order, and the successive steps by which it had risen to
power. His analysis is acute and reveals a mind concerned with the
realities that lie beneath outward appearances. It is the economics
of history that concern him most, for as fully as John Adams he was
convinced that economics determine the form of the political state.
In his analysis of the origins of government, he discovers in every
society a master class that becomes the beneficiary of sovereign
power: the political state is first erected and thereafter used to
safeguard the past acquisitions and to further the present ambitions
of a dominant economic group which calls itself an aristocracy; and
such an aristocracy imposes its will upon the exploited mass, crudely
by the sword and purse, and subtly by the skillful use of psychology.
Once in control of the political state it intrenches itself behind
certain fictions which profess to carry moral sanction. This political
jugglery plays many tricks to catch the gullible; arrayed in the garb
of patriotism, loyalty, obedience to authority, law and order, divine
right, it carries a weighty appeal. When these moral fictions fail,
the fictions of the law step in, and such doctrines as the sacredness
of contract translate the stealings of the master class into vested
interests which the state is bound to protect. There is a fine irony
in Taylor’s implied references to Burke’s doctrine of a changeless
constitution based on a nonrevocable compact, and Hamilton’s doctrine
of the public faith, which, he argues, were clearly designed to
sacrifice the common good to the interests of a class:
Law enacted for the benefit of a nation, is repealable; but law
enacted for the benefit of individuals, though oppressive to
a nation, is a charter, and irrepealable.... Posterity, being
bound by the contracts of its ancestry, in every case which
diminishes its rights, man is daily growing less free by a
doctrine which never increases them. A government intrusted with
the administration of publick affairs for the good of a nation,
has a right to deed away that nation for the good of itself or
its partisans, by law charters for monopolies or sinecures; and
posterity is bound by these deeds. But although an existing
generation can never reassume the liberty or property held by its
ancestors, it may recompense itself by abridging, or abolishing the
right of its descendants. (Page 61.)
The two theories to which he devotes chief attention are the natural
aristocracy theory of John Adams, and the capitalistic aristocracy
theory of Hamilton. The first of these takes its bias from stressing
the inequality inherent in the nature of men; individuals are
biologically unequal; and from this fact Adams deduces that the thrifty
rise to opulence and the thriftless sink into poverty by reason of
individual qualities. Society can neither keep a strong man down nor
thrust a weak man up. Between the rich and the poor, the capable and
incapable, a state of war exists, held in check by the strong hand
in feudal and monarchical societies, but necessarily open and bitter
in a democracy. Hence the inevitable failure of democracy wherever it
is tried, and the necessity of nicely calculated checks in a republic
to prevent the equal tyranny of an aristocracy and a mob. The second
theory, the Hamiltonian, justifies itself by the same theory of
human nature. It accepts the fact of social inequality as inherent
in men, but it sees no reason to pursue Utopian dreams. Recognizing
the universal fact of economic control, it erects the state upon
exploitation as preferable to anarchy. This capitalistic state it
defends before a gullible public by eloquent appeals to the national
faith, the security of property, the fear of lawlessness.
Having thus analyzed the two theories Taylor seeks to cut the ground
from under both by arguing that social classes cannot be historically
explained by the fact of biological inequality amongst individuals, but
rather by accidental opportunity, unscrupulousness, and brute force.
All aristocracies, whether feudal, natural, or capitalistic, take their
origin and uphold their dominion, not from superior excellence or
capacity, but from exploitation, that beginning in a small way grows
by what it feeds on till it assumes the proportions of a colossus.
Exploitation breeds a continually augmenting exploitation that conducts
inevitably to caste regimentation. All aristocracies are founded in
social theft. They are not established in the morality of nature, but
exist as parasites on the social wealth; they levy upon the producer;
and the only preventive is to destroy the foundations on which they
rest by taking from them the means of exploitation.
In conjuring up phantom dangers of feudal aristocracies, Taylor pointed
out, John Adams was fighting dead issues. No feudal aristocracy could
arise in America; land was too plentiful and the quick jealousy of the
people would strike it down. The danger to republican institutions
was closer at hand; it was the poison of the new capitalism that was
spreading its virus through all the veins of the national life. And
in order that the American people might know something of the history
of this innovating force which they must reckon with, John Taylor
proceeded to open to them a page in the economics of capitalism. The
aristocracy of credit, founded on “monopoly and incorporation,” he
pointed out, had arisen first in England with the growing power of
the middle class; it had gone forward swiftly in consequence of the
Napoleonic wars, and through the agencies of the Bank of England and
the Consolidated Debt, it had secured control of the public credit. It
had arisen first in America in consequence of the financial disturbance
resulting from the Revolutionary War, and had further strengthened its
position by the War of 1812. Ambitious men had taken advantage of the
national necessities to create an artificial paper system identical
with that of England. They had profited immensely from the funding
operations and the National Bank; they were setting up their private
banks in every city and town, and through the manipulation of credit
were taking heavy toll of the national production. A money monopoly was
the most dangerous of all monopolies, and the master of all.
Taylor had grown up under the traditional domestic economy. He was
habituated to think of production in terms of consumption, and of
money as a stable measure of exchange. He could not adjust his mind
to the theory of production for profit, of middleman speculation, as
socially legitimate; and when that speculation extended to the national
currency, and exacted its profits from the medium of exchange, he took
alarm. Gold and silver are fairly stable commodities that allow of no
sudden increase or diminution, and in consequence a specie currency
does not readily lend itself to speculative juggling. But a paper
system has no natural limitations. Expanded and contracted at the
will of speculators, it subjects the business of the country to the
exploitation of money brokers. Vast sums had thus been taken from the
people by the funding operations. Gold and silver had been driven out
of circulation, and with their disappearance a riot of speculation
had begun by which only the brokers had profited. Such was the origin
of the new money aristocracy that had already taken possession of
the state and was using it for the sole end of exploitation. America
must make choice between agrarianism and capitalism; the two were
incompatible, John Taylor was convinced, and unless the ambitions of
the paper-money aristocracy were held in check, the American producer
would come under the heel of middle-class exploitation.
So suggestive was the reasoning of Taylor, so interesting for the light
it throws on the agrarian mind of the Virginia Republicans, that it
will be well to set down his theses in compact form. As summarized
admirably by Professor Beard, his argument runs thus:
1. The masses have always been exploited by ruling classes, royal,
ecclesiastical, or feudal, which have been genuine economic castes
sustaining their power by psychological devices such as “loyalty to
the throne and altar.”
2. Within recent times a new class, capitalistic in character,
has sprung up, based on exploitation through inflated public
paper, bank stock, and a protective tariff, likewise with its
psychological devices, “public faith, national integrity, and
sacred credit.”
3. In the United States, this class was built up by Hamilton’s
fiscal system, the bank, and protective tariff, all of which
are schemes designed to filch wealth from productive labor,
particularly labor upon the land.
4. Thus was created a fundamental conflict between the capitalistic
and agrarian interests which was the origin of parties in the
United States.
5. Having no political principles, capitalism could fraternize with
any party that promised protection, and in fact after the victory
of the Republicans successfully entrenched itself in power under
the new cover.
6. The only remedy is to follow the confiscatory examples of
other classes and destroy special privilege without compensation.
(_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 351.)
In the great battle of ideas that followed the conflict of interests,
the Virginia agrarians armed themselves with trenchant weapons.
In intellectual equipment they were a match for the ablest of
the Federalists; in social idealism, in generous concern for the
_res publica_, or common public business, in sober and practical
humanitarianism, they were far superior. Between John Taylor of
Virginia, spokesman of planter agrarianism, and Fisher Ames of
Massachusetts, spokesman of Boston Federalism, the contrast could
scarcely be greater. It is a contrast in social culture, in humane
ideals, in interpretations of the native genius of America; and in the
comparison it is not the Virginia Republican who suffers.
Footnotes
[398] See Charles A. Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian
Democracy_, Chapter XIII.
Chapter III • John Marshall • Last of the Virginia Federalists
Unlike John Taylor of Caroline, whose fame lies buried with his cause,
the reputation of John Marshall has taken on immense proportions with
the later triumph of his principles. There is abundant reason for the
veneration in which he has come to be held by present-day disciples of
Hamilton. More than any other man he saved the future for Federalism.
During the critical years of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian assaults
upon the outworks of nationalism, he held the inner keep of the law,
and prepared for the larger victories that came long after he was in
his grave. His strategic judicial decisions served as a causeway over
which passed the eighteenth-century doctrine of the sovereignty of the
law, to unite with the new philosophy of capitalistic exploitation. The
turbid waters of frontier leveling and states-rights democracy washed
fiercely about him, but he went on quietly with his self-appointed
work. He was one man who would not bow his neck to the majority yoke,
would not worship the democratic Baal. He profoundly distrusted the
principle of confederation. Convinced that the “continental belt”
must be buckled tightly, he gave unstinted service to the cause of
consolidation. The imperative need of a sovereign political state
to curb the disintegrating forces of America was axiomatic in his
thinking. Looking upon all democratic aspirations as calculated to
destroy federal sovereignty, and convinced that the principle of
equalitarianism was a bow strung to wield against society, he stoutly
upheld the principle of minority rule as the only practical agency of
stable and orderly government. Holding such views it was a matter of
high and patriotic duty with Marshall to use his official position
to prevent the majority will from endangering interests which were
far more sacred in his eyes than any natural rights propagated in the
hothouse of French philosophy. He was the last of the old school of
Federalists and the first of the new.
That John Marshall should have come out of Virginia is perhaps the
most ironical fact in the political history of the Old Dominion. Quite
unrepresentative of the dominant planter group that had gone over
to Jefferson, bitterly hostile to the agrarian interests that spoke
through John Taylor, he was the leader of a small remnant of Virginians
who followed Washington through the fierce extremes of party conflict.
He was the last and ablest representative of that older middle-class
Virginia, given to speculation and intent on money-making, that was
being superseded by a cavalier Virginia concerned about quite other
things than financial interests. He belonged rather to Boston than to
Richmond. His intense prejudices were primarily property prejudices.
He was the Fisher Ames of the South, embodying every principle of
the dogmatic tie-wig school of New England Federalists. Profoundly
influenced by Hamilton and Robert Morris, he seems to have found the
Boston group more congenial in temper and outlook. The explanation
of his strong property-consciousness is to be discovered both in
his material ambitions and his professional interests. He was a
business man rather than a planter. He was heavily involved in land
speculation and held stock in numerous corporations launched to exploit
the resources of the state. Robert Morris, whose daughter married
Marshall’s younger brother, was his financial adviser and advanced
money with which to purchase the Fairfax estate, an investment that
cost the buyers the very considerable sum of fourteen thousand pounds
and numerous lawsuits. He was a director in banks and a legal adviser
in important cases involving property rights. His financial interests
overran state boundaries and his political principles followed easily
in their train, washing away all local and sectional loyalties.
Like his kinsman Jefferson, Marshall was bred on the Virginia
frontier, and to the end of his life he retained the easy and careless
democracy of dress and manners that marked his early environment. In
his deportment he was far removed from the prim respectability of
the Boston Federalists. A friendly, likable man, fond of pitching
horseshoes and sitting in a game of cards, he was outwardly a genial
member of the crude little Richmond world where politics and law and
speculation engrossed the common attention. An easy-going nature, he
was wholly wanting in intellectual interests. Strangely ill-read in the
law, he was even more ignorant of history and economics and political
theory. His mind took an early set, and hardened into rigidity during
the reactionary years that lay between Shays’s Rebellion and the
rise of Napoleon. Of social and humanitarian interests he was utterly
devoid. One might as well look for the sap of idealism in a last year’s
stump as in John Marshall. French romantic philosophy he regarded as
the mother of all vicious leveling. There is no indication that he
had ever heard of the Physiocratic school of economics, or had looked
into the writings of Rousseau or Godwin or Paine. The blind sides of
his mind were many; his intellectual contacts were few; yet what he
saw and understood he grasped firmly. The narrowness of his outlook
intensified the rigidity with which he held to his fixed opinions; and
his extraordinary courage coupled with a dominant personality clothed
his strategic position as Chief Justice with fateful influence on the
later institutional development of America.
Although Marshall’s later fame is the fame of a lawyer, he was in
reality a politician whom fate in the person of John Adams placed on
the Supreme Court bench at a critical moment, where his political
opinions translated themselves into the organic law of the land, and
shaped the constitution to special and particular ends. Masterful,
tenacious, manipulating his fellow judges like putty, he was a judicial
sovereign who for thirty-five years molded the plastic constitution
to such form as pleased him, and when he died the work was so
thoroughly done that later generations have not been able to undo
it. His political opinions, therefore, become a matter of very great
importance to the historian, for they help to explain the peculiar
direction taken by our constitutional development. Materials for a
just estimate of his remarkable career were long wanting, but with the
appearance of Beveridge’s able and explicit _Life of John Marshall_
it is now possible to view him in exact historical perspective.
Carefully documented, the work is a genial and readable interpretation
that will go far to revivify the fame of the great Federalist. And
yet in spite of its abundant documentation--drawn perhaps somewhat
overmuch from Federalist sources--it is essentially a _biographie à
thèse_ that is careful to magnify the nationalism of its hero and to
minify the property consciousness. It provides a picturesque setting,
but it is a bit careless in its evaluation of the rival philosophies
then struggling for supremacy. Concerning the economics of the great
contest between Federalism and Republicanism it offers very inadequate
information, with the result that Jefferson is reduced to the status
of a master politician set over against the constructive statesman. The
intellectual limitations of the lawyer have reacted in these pages upon
his political enemy. Certain of the old Federalist prejudices have come
to life again in these entertaining pages.
The two fixed conceptions which dominated Marshall throughout his long
career on the bench were the sovereignty of the federal state and the
sanctity of private property; and these found their justification in
the virulence of his hatred of democracy. No man in America was less
democratic in his political convictions. Underneath the free and easy
exterior of the Chief Justice was as stalwart a reactionary as ever
sat on the Supreme Court bench. He was utterly indifferent to popular
views, and he calmly overturned the electoral verdicts of his fellow
Americans with the deliberateness of a born autocrat. Not only were
his important decisions political opinions, but they were Federalist
opinions. America had made definite choice between the Federalist
and Republican theories of government. It had repudiated the rule of
“gentlemen of principle and property” and set up a very different
rule. But to this mandate of the supposedly sovereign people Marshall
declined to yield. Defeated at the polls, no longer in control of the
executive and legislative branches of the government, Federalism found
itself reintrenched in the prejudices of John Marshall. He boldly
threw down the gage to the majority will, and when the long fierce
struggle was over, he had effectively written into the fundamental law
of the land the major tenets of the repudiated philosophy. “Judicial
statesmanship,” Mr. Beveridge calls these political decisions, and bids
us admire statesmanship on the bench; yet the phrase runs so far as to
merge the judge in the politician--an honest but somewhat indiscreet
admission that the law may be twisted to partisan ends. The frankly
political nature of Marshall’s decisions was universally recognized at
the time, and this explains the intense partisanship they evoked, the
fury of the Republicans and the extravagant praise of the Federalists.
The so-called Jeffersonian assault on the judiciary, of which so much
has been made by the orthodox historians, and which came near to
wrecking the system, was not primarily an attack upon the courts but
upon political judges who used their places to serve party ends. It is
a dangerous thing for the bench to twist the law to partisan or class
purposes, yet to this very thing John Marshall was notoriously given.
As a judicial statesman, then, rather than a lawyer, Marshall is to
be judged, and to such a business the political historian is more
competent than the legalist. His important decisions fall into two main
groups: those like Marbury _vs._ Madison that assert the supremacy of
the judiciary over the legislature--that is, the power of the Supreme
Court to nullify an act of Congress; and those like the Yazoo Fraud
case and the Dartmouth College case, that assert the irrevocable nature
of contracts. The first was an official pronouncement of the principle
that Hamilton had elaborated in _The Federalist_, namely, that the
constitution is a law and as such lies within the field of judicial
interpretation. This was sound Federalist doctrine, and Marshall
welcomed the opportunity to engraft it upon the fundamental law of
the land, going far out of his way to bring it within the judicial
purview.[399] It was a bold and skillful move, and as Beveridge
remarks, it announced a principle that “is wholly and exclusively
American. It is America’s contribution to the science of the law”
(Beveridge, _Life of John Marshall_, p. 142). A contribution, it should
be added, which with the multiplying of republican constitutions in the
later nineteenth century was pretty generally rejected.
Even more partisanly Federalist were the decisions touching the nature
of contract. These reached to the heart of the bitter opposition
of the commercial and financial interests to the legislative acts
of populistic majorities. Suffering heavily from the post-war
confusions, those majorities had struck blindly at the profiteers whose
well-feathered nests were securely protected by the law. The revolt
was natural and human; a rough sense of social justice lay behind it;
but because it struck at the most prosperous and capable members of
society, who held the professional classes in retainer and dominated
the agencies of publicity, it aroused an extraordinarily vindictive
opposition. Dip into the literature of the seventeen-eighties and
nineties anywhere, in the _Anarchiad_ and the _Echo_ of the Hartford
Wits, or the private letters of indignant gentlemen, and the animus
of the respectable classes is clamorously revealed. At bottom it was
no other than this, that the law of business must be made the law of
the land, and that any populistic tampering with such law was wicked
and anarchistic. How determining was this spirit in the matter of
the Constitutional Convention is sufficiently well known. In the
new constitution certain practices of populistic majorities were
estopped--the emission of bills of credit and paper money, and laws
impairing the obligation of contracts; but such provisions, strictly
interpreted, did not reach to all cases. There were still gaps in the
law of business through which populistic majorities might force their
bills. To stop those gaps and complete the great work of rendering
business secure was the problem to which Marshall addressed himself;
and in the Yazoo Fraud case and the Dartmouth College case, he brought
the long Federalistic struggle to a triumphant issue.
An examination of the first of these two celebrated cases will suffice
to reveal the spirit of his judicial statesmanship. The state of
Georgia, through its Legislature, had contracted to sell thirty-five
million acres of land--the great part of the territory now comprising
the states of Alabama and Mississippi--to certain speculative companies
“at less than one and one-half cents an acre.” The passage of the bill
was marked by more than the usual jobbery, so common with a generation
fond of looting the public domain. The fraud was so gross that the
state of Georgia was thrown into a fury that visited itself upon the
corrupt legislators. A new legislature repealed the law and rescinded
the contract; but some of the land had already been resold to investors
in Boston and Philadelphia, who brought their claims before the Supreme
Court. The state of mind in which the chief justice heard the argument
is thus suggested by Beveridge: “Marshall was profoundly interested in
the stability of contractual obligations. The repudiation of these by
the legislature of Virginia had powerfully and permanently influenced
his views upon this subject. Also Marshall’s own title to part of the
Fairfax estate had more than once been in jeopardy. At that very moment
a suit affecting the title of his brother’s to certain Fairfax lands
was pending in Virginia courts” (Vol. III, p. 584). To suggest that a
nicer judicial honor would have inhibited Marshall from sitting in the
case is perhaps going too far if one accepts the principle of judicial
statesmanship. Certainly Marshall discovered none of the scruples that
must have troubled George Wythe. In awarding claims for compensation
to the investors he held that the act of the Georgia legislature was a
contract and as such was inviolable. The crux of the decision, however,
lay in the pronouncement that the courts cannot examine the motives
that induce legislators to enact a law, that the people are bound
by their agents and must suffer the penalties of choosing unwise or
corrupt agents. The upshot of the verdict, in plain language, was that
a legislative contract is sacred no matter how corruptly got. A curious
decision, surely, for one who professed to venerate the common law. A
Virginian of the type of John Randolph would never have reasoned thus
to a conclusion that laid open the public domain to the deals of clever
lobbyists and encouraged the betrayal of official stewardship. He would
scarcely have sacrificed the public interests to the law of business.
The bitter hostility which Marshall’s decisions aroused in his native
commonwealth reveals how far the Virginia of Jefferson had traveled
from the Federalism of the commercial North. The states-rights
philosophy and the philosophy of consolidation were at swords’ points;
the agrarian and capitalistic economies were engaged in a mortal
duel; that it should have been a Virginian who saved the day for the
Hamiltonians, erecting the old Federalism into the law of the land,
and conducting by his decisions straight to an augmented, consolidated
state, under the shadow of whose power the development of corporate
finance might go forward without agrarian let or hindrance, was a
bitter brew for the Jeffersonian planters to drink. As Marshall grew
old he drew farther away from his fellow Virginians. In his last years
he was perhaps the most reactionary man in America. “Should Jackson
be elected,” he wrote in 1828, “I shall look upon the government as
virtually dissolved” (Beveridge, Vol. IV, p. 463). His last hatreds
he divided between Old Hickory and the rising democratic movement. He
bitterly resisted the spread of manhood suffrage; he would make no
change even in the antiquated judicial system of Virginia; he would
have no overturning of anything established. A stubborn autocrat he
remained to the end, and there was a certain ironic fitness in his last
encounter with the executive power. The autocratic lawyer met his match
in the autocratic soldier who grimly remarked, “John Marshall has made
his decision, now let him enforce it.”
Nearly a century has passed since these happenings [concludes
Beveridge] and Marshall’s attitude now appears to have been that
of cold reaction; but he was as honest as he was outspoken in his
resistance to democratic reforms. He wanted good government, safe
government. He was not in the least concerned in the rule of the
people as such. Indeed, he believed that the more they directly
controlled public affairs the worse the business of government
would be conducted. He feared that sheer majorities would be
unjust, intolerant, tyrannical, and he was certain that they would
be untrustworthy and freakishly changeable. (Vol. IV, p. 507.)
A strong, resourceful, honest, capable man was John Marshall. In so far
there is pretty common agreement. Beyond this, comes in the sundering
blade of political theory. Concerning the wisdom of his judicial
statesmanship it is idle to expect Federalist and Democrat to agree.