[399] For an excellent discussion see Beveridge, _Life of John
Marshall_, Vol. III, Chap. III.
Chapter IV • The Older Plantation Mind
I • Plantation Backgrounds
The literary renaissance of Virginia began in the late twenties when
the English romantic movement reached the quiet plantations. Till
then the Virginia mind had lingered pleasantly in the twilight of the
liberal eighteenth century, following ways of thought it had learned
of revolutionary France, and writing with a leisurely finish it had
learned of Augustan England. In that older Virginia dignified sentiment
was accepted as the hall-mark of breeding--a sentiment somewhat ornate
and consciously elegant, that recognized its obligations to a strict
morality, and laid its nosegay at the feet of the pure and beautiful
and good. When the Virginian essayed somewhat infrequently to commit
his thoughts to paper, he wrote as an old-fashioned gentleman,
conscious of his social responsibility, consulting classic standards
of taste, and embellishing his sentences with bits of choice Latin.
But after the year 1830 sentiment gave place to romance, and dignity
to exuberance of fancy. A new generation, trained in the school of Sir
Walter Scott, fell to the pleasant task of portraying the familiar
plantation life in glowing colors and investing it with romantic charm.
The plantation tradition, it will be remembered, first took shape in
the Old Dominion and assumed its salient features at the hands of
Virginia romantics. Its development was contemporary with the New
England transcendental movement, and in origin and spirit it was
as native to Virginia as the philosophy of idealism was native to
Massachusetts. Inspired by an over-seas romanticism, it accepted the
materials it found at hand and transmuted the easy-going plantation
life into enduring romance. The work was begun by Kennedy in his
idyllic _Swallow Barn_. The picture thus slightly sketched was given
stronger colors by Caruthers, and received completer form from John
Esten Cooke. From their hands Thomas Nelson Page took his materials
to refashion to suit the taste of a later day. No realism added its
sobering touches to the romantic picture thus early drawn, and none has
since been added. A golden light still lingers upon the old plantation.
Memories are still too dear to the Virginian to suffer any lessening
of the reputed splendors of _ante bellum_ days. The tragedy of a lost
cause has woven itself into the older romance and endowed the tradition
with an added sanction. It has long since spread beyond the confines of
Virginia and become a national possession. North as well as South is
so firmly convinced of its authenticity that realism has never had the
temerity to meddle with it.[400]
It was a romanticizing age, and in Virginia congenial materials were
ready to hand. The distinction of a plantation aristocracy set in the
midst of a bucolic republican society, with its genial hospitality,
its individuality, its sharp contrasts of whites and blacks, its
clutter of cabins for background to the pillared mansion, its wide
neighborhood interests, its outdoor life, its patriarchal spirit, was
a distinction that no romantic could overlook, the most individual and
native picturesque in all America. Life on the plantation was uncramped
by the drab routine and skimpy meanness of the New England farm; it was
unsoiled by the coarseness and vulgarity of the frontier; it had none
of the sordidness of the middle-class town. It might be wasteful, but
it was good material for literature; and hence the Virginia romantic
had no need to seek the picturesque in England and Spain, as Irving
had done. He had only to pick and choose from the familiar stuff lying
all about him, emphasizing the agreeable, overlooking the unpleasant,
fashioning his figures and action to suit the ideal of a golden age
of plantation society. Yet the result, it must be confessed, is not
wholly adequate. Virginia has suffered gravely from the want of a sober
realism. It is not so much that the worst did not get into the romantic
tradition--shortcomings in Virginia life which even Wirt hints at--as
that the best did not get in. The plantation master of the romantics
falls grossly short of the reality that Virginia provided. The simple
dignity of John Taylor, the ingrained Puritanism of Lee and Jackson,
the catholic culture and fine integrity of George Wythe, have been
left out of the tradition. The Virginian created by the romantics is
absurdly inferior to such men, who by any standard were as admirable a
group of gentlemen as America has ever bred. A little honest realism
would have corrected the picture, to the advantage of the Old Dominion.
At the time when the romantics were beginning their work of
constructing the plantation tradition the intellectual renaissance
of Virginia was passing. With the fading of the French influence
after 1820 came increasing isolation and a conscious sectionalism.
Intellectual discipline and catholic tastes became rarer. Virginia
had no share in the revolutionary enthusiasms of the Utopian thirties
and forties, when New England expected the Promised Land to appear at
the next turn in the road; it received no stimulus from the expansive
systems of thought that were setting all Europe in ferment. The new
Germany seems to have made no impression on the Virginia mind, neither
its philosophical idealism nor its provocative higher criticism.
The new interest in social speculation and experiment that arose in
Massachusetts with the beginnings of industrialism awakened no response
in Virginia. Plantation society was static, and social speculation was
unwelcome. The theories of Comte, of Fourier, of Owen were unknown;
Utopian experiments were untried. If Virginia escaped the curse of
industrialism it lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to New
England with the rise of the textile mills. Social unrest bred no
protests against the plantation order. The revolutionary mood was gone,
and after 1820 the stimulus to intellectual life grew weaker. English
romanticism as exemplified in the work of Scott and Tom Moore was the
single foreign influence that spread amongst the plantations, and the
new literature accepted the cult of the picturesque romantic. With the
passing of the great age of Virginia the tradition of her greatness
remained to be gathered up and preserved.
II • William Wirt
To Virginia gentlemen of the old school it must have seemed a bit
ironical that William Wirt should have come to be accepted as the
literary representative of the Old Dominion in the days of John
Randolph of Roanoke. Born in Maryland in 1772 of Swiss parentage,
Wirt belonged to Virginia only by adoption, and although on terms of
intimacy with the plantation gentry he embodied few of the traits that
went to the making of the plantation tradition. In temperament he was
far removed from the easy-going planter. A certain canny thrift marked
him, a pronounced desire to rise in the world and cut a distinguished
figure. He was careful to make a good investment of his talents,
attentive to profitable undertakings, whether in law or eloquence or
speculation. His mature life ran a singularly prosperous and dignified
course. He gathered property and reputation and office, and in every
position he acquitted himself honorably. To do less than well in any
undertaking he would have accounted a stain upon his reputation. In
every company he made himself liked. There was none of the aggressive
individualism of John Randolph, in wait for an opportunity to send
home a shaft of rankling wit, but always a studious concern to please.
He was troubled that anyone should think his criticism severe in _The
British Spy_, and he hesitated long before publishing his _Patrick
Henry_ for fear offense would be taken at the few blemishes he
discovered in his hero. An honest man and a capable, sterling after
his kind but not notably intellectual, not creative, he owed his
advancement to very practical qualities: an engaging personality and
genial wit, a knack at formal oratory, a graceful pen, a persevering
pursuit of his profession, the cultivation of desirable friendships.
An excellent lawyer, he never turned aside from the law to meddle with
politics; yet he was on good terms with the politicians, and he reached
the top of his ambition by appointment to the Attorney-Generalship of
the United States, a post which he held for upwards of twelve years.
In training and culture Wirt was of the sound eighteenth-century
tradition. He was bred in the classics, English literature, and the
common law. When he set up in his profession his library consisted
of Blackstone, _Don Quixote_, and _Tristram Shandy_. His literary
taste was formed by the later writers of the eighteenth century, by
Gray, Hervey, Young, Ossian, Burke, Sterne, rather than by Pope and
Dryden. In _The British Spy_ he praises Bacon highly and lavishes
commendation upon Addison, regretting that the _Spectator_ “should be
thrown by, and almost entirely forgotten, while the gilded blasphemies
of infidels, and the ‘noontide trances’ of pernicious theorists, are
hailed with rapture, and echoed around the world” (_Letter X_). Yet the
determining influence in his own writings, it is clear, came from the
sentimentalists and from Burke. From the former he caught the note of
polite emotion, and from the latter the strain of sonorous eloquence.
His well-bred sensibilities were constantly in the service of his pen
or tongue, to lend pathos to an affecting bit of description or to
transport his hearers by a melting appeal. A look, a gesture, a pose,
was nicely calculated to bring sympathetic tears to the eyes of his
auditors. To touch the emotions he considered the triumph of art,
and to conduct through the emotions to a sound morality, its sole
justification.
As a member of the Virginia bar Wirt took pride in the tradition
of sober culture that had grown up amongst its distinguished
practitioners. The members of that bar were gentlemen as well as
lawyers, who would rather go wrong in their legal authorities than in
their classical embellishments; they were orators as well, careful of
their diction and meticulous in rounding a period. In these excellent
qualities Wirt early distinguished himself. He had read more than
most, and apposite quotations from the classics came easily to his
pen to grace the pellucid flow of his English. One of the signal
triumphs of his life was when in an elaborate legal argument before
the Supreme Court at Washington, he retorted a passage of the _Aeneid_
upon his opponent, to provide a text for a burst of the exuberant
rhetoric that so delighted his generation (_The British Spy_, 1855, pp.
88-90). His love of ornate speech seems to us curiously old-fashioned,
yet it was the manner of the times, and he gave himself to it with
enthusiasm--_vivo gurgite exundans_, as he would have chosen to
say. The chief interest of his life was oratory, and how skillful a
practitioner he was adjudged by his own generation is revealed in the
comment of a contemporary who often admired “the blaze of his reasoning
and declamation”:
The march of his mind is direct to its object, the evolutions by
which he attains it, are so new and beautiful, and apparently
necessary to the occasion, that your admiration is kept alive, your
fancy delighted, and your judgment convinced, through every stage
of the process.... There is no weak point in his array, no chink
in the whole line of his extended works. Then the sweet melody
of voice, the beautiful decorations of fancy, the easy play of
a powerful reason, by which all this is accomplished, amaze and
delight. His pathos is natural and impressive; there is a pastoral
simplicity and tenderness in his pictures of distress, when he
describes female innocence, helplessness, and beauty, which the
husband on whom she smiled should have guarded from even the winds
of heaven which might visit it too roughly, “shivering at midnight
on the winter banks of the Ohio, and mingling her tears with the
torrent, which froze as they fell;” it is not a theatrical trick,
to move a fleeting pity, but a deep and impressive appeal to the
dignified charities of our nature. (_Ibid._, pp. 84-85.)
Wirt’s literary reputation rests chiefly upon _The British Spy_
and _Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry_, both of
which may be characterized in the admirable phrase above quoted,
as studies in “the dignified charities of our nature.” The former
was done hastily at the age of thirty, the latter was toiled over
for years and appeared when he was forty-five. They were received
with vast approval and set him quite in the front rank of American
literary fame. Yet the contemporary popularity of _The British Spy_
is inexplicable to us today. It is astonishing that so slight a thing
should have achieved so great a reputation, and it suggests the depths
of literary poverty in which the Virginia of 1803 was sunk. The work
is a miscellany--hodgepodge perhaps is a juster term--of character
sketches, geology, description, rhapsody, moralizing, with the faintest
suggestion of criticism. The sketch which achieved the greatest
celebrity, the description of the blind preacher (_Letter VII_,
pp. 195-202), is elaborately artificial and sentimental, done from
Sterne. The sketches of contemporary politicians, and in particular
that of Jefferson, contributed much to current appeal, and the casual
criticism aroused a mild remonstrance. There is a certain grace of
style after the late eighteenth-century manner, abundant sentiment and
little wit. Perhaps the happiest touch is the title; only a British
spy could discover material for criticism in the excellent life and
ideal institutions of Virginia, or insinuate that the commonwealth was
lacking in public spirit--that its roads were as bad as its schools,
and that the “one object throughout the state” was “to grow rich.” But
it was a very moral spy who was troubled that “the noxious weed of
infidelity had struck a deep, a fatal root, and spread its pestilential
branches far around”; and who lamented that “our eccentric and fanciful
countryman, Godwin, had contributed not a little to water and cherish
this pernicious exotic” (_Letter VII_, p. 203).
The demands made upon the dignified charities of our nature Wirt found
more insistent when he came to write the life of Patrick Henry. He was
troubled by his materials, as well as by the want of them. He complains
repeatedly in his letters of the difficulties of the task. There were
blemishes in the character of his god, spots that marred his divinity;
yet how to clean them away and not spoil the natural appearance was a
problem. He could not tell Virginians that Patrick Henry in his old
age was grasping and vain, that he changed his politics as he grew
rich. The idea was too repugnant to his own good nature, and to the
taste of the times. The age was sentimental and romantic even in its
eulogy. It took seriously the motto, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; it
was patriotically engaged in making a myth out of the figures and
events of the Revolution; and sober truth is not to be expected from
the stately biographies that emerged from this period of excessive
patriotism. The writers were too much in awe of their subjects, too
much concerned to present them in full dress with wig and cloak and
sword, and see to it that they acted a proper part. It was in this
attitude that Wirt first approached his theme, but failing to achieve
the desired result, he turned the work into eulogy of Henry’s oratory.
This was the most congenial of tasks to one so deeply interested in the
art of the orator. The fragmentary records that had come down were a
challenge to his inventiveness, and he set himself to recreate the lost
speeches, from scanty notes. How admirably he succeeded is shown in
the celebrated “give me liberty, or give me death” speech, that became
at once an American classic. One could forgive him much for such a
masterpiece.
The leaders of that older Virginia society were lawyers rather than
planters, and Wirt’s excursions into the field of _belles lettres_
were only pleasant outings from the court-room. His intellectual
interests were narrow. Though bred in an atmosphere of politics, he
cared nothing for political theory, was wholly unread in the political
classics, and untouched by the flood of social speculation that came
with the French Revolution. He drifted politically with the stream
of his generation, taking color from the changing waters. Brought
up a Jeffersonian Republican, he remained curiously ignorant of the
economic and political philosophy of agrarianism. He was little given
to abstract speculation on the rights of man, and was never partisan
to a cause. He was a genial embodiment of those colorless times when
the enthusiasms of eighteenth-century liberalism were dead and the
romanticisms of nineteenth-century exploitation were not yet risen,
known in the history books as the era of good feeling. Fundamentally
conservative and somewhat conventional, he would not look with approval
upon the new men and new ways that came in with the western democracy.
Upon the accession of Jackson he went over to the Whig party. He
supported Clay, yet for some reason, perhaps a harmless vanity, he
accepted a nomination for the presidency by the Anti-Masons in 1832
and went down before the hosts of the Jacksonians. Two years later his
blameless life was brought to a close. A kindly and honorable gentleman
of old-fashioned tastes, with a culture founded in Blackstone,
embellished by Addison and Sterne, and given a classic dignity by Livy,
he filled the measure of the excellencies as they were understood in
the Old Dominion in the days before romance had created the plantation
tradition.
III • Nathaniel Beverley Tucker • A Virginia Fire Eater
In striking contrast to the amiable Attorney-General was another
Virginia lawyer and judge who ventured into literature and whose one
important novel created a mighty stir in its day. Beverley Tucker
was twelve years younger than Wirt. Half brother of John Randolph of
Roanoke, for some years on the bench in Missouri, and long professor
of law at William and Mary College, he was a well-known figure in the
Old Dominion, and his vigorous speech was much applauded at conventions
where southern gentlemen met to talk over their grievances. In him
were richly embodied all the picturesque parochialisms that plantation
life encouraged. He was so completely and exclusively Virginian as
to deserve the epithet “Virginianissimus.” He never traveled, never
compared diverse civilizations, never questioned the excellence of
that in which he had been bred. His loyalty to his native commonwealth
was a consuming jealousy for its honor, and he tucked the horizons
of Virginia about him like a Hudson’s Bay blanket and defied the
cold winds of the North. Beyond Mason and Dixon’s line lay a foreign
country, and he judged all foreign countries by their size and color
on his wall map. He was the arch-romantic of his generation and his
_Partisan Leader_ is the repository of the curious political and
economic romanticisms of the ardent southern mind.
Over his after-dinner bottle of Madeira, Beverley Tucker may well
have been the raciest and most delightful of companions. Like Samuel
Johnson, he found his pleasure in a mind well stocked with robust
prejudices and a wit to phrase them tellingly. He never spared his
epithets nor hesitated to damn an opponent. Like Fisher Ames, he
coddled an aggravated case of political spleen and luxuriated in
a picturesque pessimism. The clouds hung low over his mind, and
the future of Virginia appeared as black to him as the future of
Massachusetts appeared desperate to the Boston Federalist. His
pessimism no doubt was a solace to his old age and provided a sauce
for his dinner. Temperamentally he was curiously like the New England
Jeremiah. He followed Calhoun with the unreasoning and passionate
conviction with which Fisher Ames followed Hamilton. He foresaw a
future laid waste by the ravenings of democracy, and like Ames he
took pleasure in sketching the dark picture. It would be no fault of
his if the easy-going planters remained indifferent to the political
monster that in the guise of Jacksonian democracy had made his den
at Washington and was preparing to devour the liberties of sovereign
commonwealths. He would make haste, while the shadows of those
liberties remained, to arouse Virginia to its peril before the jaws
closed upon it.
It was to this end that he wrote _The Partisan Leader_, an obvious
attempt to dramatize the political philosophy of Calhoun and breathe
into it a war psychology. Its single purpose was to popularize the
doctrine of secession and encourage Virginia to act upon it. The
book was printed at Washington by the notorious Duff Green, who had
quitted Jackson and gone over to Calhoun, and appeared under the pen
name of Edward William Sidney. Written in the last years of Jackson’s
second term, it prophesied Van Buren’s succession and his setting up a
dictatorship. The beginning of the action is projected thirteen years
into the future. Van Buren is assumed to be in his third term and is
seeking election a fourth time. He is in secure and insolent possession
of “the presidential throne.” He has surrounded himself with a horde
of democratic sycophants; his political machine is well oiled and the
army and navy are at his bidding. Virginia has been split asunder by
factions. Mercenaries in Van Buren’s pay occupy the public stations,
and supported by Federal bayonets they carry things with a high hand.
The lower South, under the leadership of South Carolina, has already
seceded, and freed from the exploitation of northern tariffs is
economically rejuvenated. The Virginia patriots are biding their time,
working under cover and making detailed plans to carry the commonwealth
over to the new Confederacy when the hour shall strike. The hand of
fate is no other than economic pressure. The free South has provided
an eloquent object lesson to Virginia planters. By reason of a trade
treaty with England, by the terms of which each country exports to
the other its natural wares unvexed by artificial restrictions--an
industrial economy and an agricultural mutually benefiting by the
exchange--the cotton and tobacco growers to the south of Virginia are
enjoying a prosperity unshared by the exploited planters of the Old
Dominion. When economic depression shall have finally opened the eyes
of Virginians to the folly of a federal union that sacrifices southern
interests to fatten northern manufacturers, the commonwealth must drop
into the lap of the Confederacy like a ripe persimmon. In the meantime
a mysterious Mr. B.--presumably Calhoun--moves adroitly behind the
scenes, shaping matters for the great event--a super-statesman, a man
of godlike sagacity and divine benevolence, a heroic embodiment of all
the magnanimous southern virtues, compared with whom Webster and Clay
are common political mercenaries and Jackson a paltry charlatan.
It is a romantically extravagant book, quite the absurdest in the
library of the old South. It possesses no savor of humor or pleasantry
of satire. Tucker was too deadly in earnest to play with his theme. He
had so long and bitterly brooded over the supposed wrongs of Virginia
that he had lost all sense of proportion. He lacks a cool skill in
dissection; he has not learned the gentlemanly art of flaying his
victim; he defends Virginia with a matchlock instead of a rapier.
Gilmore Simms credited him with one of the most finished prose styles
of the day, and a very recent critic remarks that “no other American
of the time wrote with such classical restraint and pride as Tucker”
(_Cambridge History of American Literature_, Vol. I, p. 312). But there
is little evidence of such mastery in _The Partisan Leader_. It is the
work of an unpracticed writer, with a command of rhetoric to furnish
forth a southern stump-speaker, but quite inadequate to the needs of
a competent novelist. Compared with Simms or Kennedy he is a mere
bungler. His characters are as wooden as Cooper’s females, and his plot
is grossly distorted by his polemics. The drama sags under the weight
of the sacred cause. There is inadvertent comedy in the picture of Van
Buren as the man on horseback--the sleek, well-groomed politician of
history rises somewhat inadequately to the rôle. In comparison with
Kennedy’s _Quodlibet_ his attack upon Jackson is only caricature.
Beverley Tucker was a patriotic Virginian whose craftsmanship proved
inadequate to the serious business in hand.
The backgrounds of his thought are clearly Jeffersonian. His prejudices
run strongly for eighteenth-century _laissez faire_. He is a confirmed
agrarian and his hatred of industrialism amounts to an obsession. He
will have nothing to do with protective tariffs that lay a tax upon
the planter to aid the manufacturer. In his advocacy of political
decentralization he is a disciple of Calhoun, but more pessimistic
than his master. Southern interests can be adequately protected, he
is convinced, only by a jealous insistence on the sovereign powers
of Virginia, and so long as Virginia remains within the centralizing
federal Union those sovereign powers will suffer a subtle diminution.
The simple-minded and magnanimous southern planter was no match in
the political game with unscrupulous and ambitious Northerners. But
in certain significant aspects of his political philosophy, Beverley
Tucker broke with the Jeffersonian tradition. Two current developments
had quite destroyed his faith in the democracy of Jefferson. The
rise of Jacksonianism had seated the rabble in power, and the spread
of Abolitionism was threatening to infect that triumphant rabble
with its poison. The very life of Virginia was at the mercy of a
hostile democracy, and to protect themselves and their slaves from
the encroachments of a democratized federal government seemed to him
the urgent business of the southern planters. Unless a move were made
speedily it would be too late, for the power of the northern democracy
was fast outstripping the confederate power of the South.
Tucker’s intense prejudices color every judgment, and in consequence
his misunderstanding of the North was colossal. He imagined a
profit-mongering clown whom he dubbed Yankee, and solemnly assured
himself that it was an authentic likeness. The Abolitionist was a
Yankee with an added Puritan malignancy. In his defense of slavery
Tucker has corrected the sentimental mistake of Jefferson in assuming
the extinction of slavery to be desirable, but he professes an equally
humanitarian spirit. His benevolence toward the negro is so warmly
generous that one is ready to weep at the sad fate of the faithful
slave who is in danger of being turned out into the cold world by the
wicked Abolitionists. The loyal attachment between master and servant,
he argues, is too finely generous to be understood by the mercenary
North. The Yankees “have not the qualities which would enable them to
comprehend the negro character. Their calculating selfishness can never
understand his disinterested devotion. Their artificial benevolence is
no interpreter of the unsophisticated heart.... They know no more of
the feelings of our slaves, than their fathers could comprehend of the
loyalty of the gallant cavaliers from whom we spring; and for the same
reason. The generous and self-renouncing must ever be a riddle to the
selfish” (p. 205, edition of 1861). Hence it is the clear duty of the
magnanimous planter to keep his generous and self-renouncing slaves out
of the clutches of the selfish Abolitionists.
Something of the ardency of Beverley Tucker’s convictions is revealed
in certain fragments of his letters to Gilmore Simms, to whom he
poured out his heart in uncensored words, and whose magazine, _The
Southern Quarterly Review_, he made use of to further the cause. In
those letters he writes himself down a frank and whole-hearted Tory.
There is an inveterate and ingrained aristocracy of temperament that
will not mince words when it comes to dealing with democracy. In his
comment on the growing democratic spirit he is virulent. He has lost
all hope for Virginia in the year of grace 1851. “She is sunk in the
slough of democracy, which has no sense of honor, no foresight, and is
never valiant but against its own instruments” (W. P. Trent, _William
Gilmore Simms_, p. 186). Georgia is in an even worse way. His spleen
at the commonwealth of Stephens and Toombs--“filled as that State is
with Yankee traders”--spits out venom: “She has been bought, and her
price is in the pockets of those she trusted.” He quotes sardonically
the comment of a Georgia senator: “The State of Georgia is a damned
rascal. I bought and sold her, and will buy her and sell her again
when I please” (_ibid._, p. 182). His only hope is in South Carolina,
and he pleads with Simms for decisive action. Calhoun’s kingdom is
singularly blessed, for no base democracy there sullies the purity of
manly councils. As early as 1820 Tucker had come to realize that the
Union was a curse to the South. “I vowed then, and I have repeated
the vow, _de die in diem_, that I will never give rest to my eyes nor
slumber to my eyelids until it is shattered into fragments.... Time
was when I might have been less desperate, because I could have sought
refuge under some emperor or king. But all such refuges are broken up,
and there is now no escape from the many-headed despotism of numbers,
but by a strong and bold stand on the banks of the Potomac.... If we
will not _have_ slaves, we must _be_ slaves.” He then makes his great
appeal:
And what are our democracies but mobs? South Carolina alone can
act, because she is the only State in which the gentleman retains
his place and influence, and in which the statesman has not been
degraded from his post. You are fast coming to that hopeless and
irreclaimable condition; and then all hope of action is gone. Work
now.... The twilight is already upon you, and hence I fear you will
not act even _now_. And if not now--never, never, never! (_Ibid._,
p. 187.)
It was not granted to Beverley Tucker to know what harvests were to be
gathered from his sowings. He did not live to see the fields of his
beloved commonwealth drenched in the blood that he had done more than
his share to let. In that bitter struggle it is certain that he would
have borne his part valiantly. He had sown to the wind, and he would
have welcomed the whirlwind. But the outcome must have broken his proud
heart, and it is well that he was not spared to see his hopes turn to
ashes in his mouth.
Footnotes
[400] For an excellent study, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_, 1925.
Chapter V • Adventures in Romance
I • William Alexander Caruthers • A Virginia Liberal
In the early thirties came the transition in Virginia from the
essay-sketch that had prevailed since the appearance of _The British
Spy_, to the full blown romance of love and adventure. The older
type had been a blend of nature description, social observation,
character sketches, with somewhat injudicious portions of sentiment
and moralizing, and with frequent resort to the old letter-form of
fiction that lingered out a surprising old age. Not only is the
transition revealed in the work of John P. Kennedy, whose _Swallow
Barn_, written in 1832, was followed in 1835 by _Horseshoe Robinson_,
but quite as strikingly in the work of Dr. William Alexander Caruthers,
whose _Kentuckian in New York, or, the Adventures of Three Southerns_,
published in 1834, was followed at once by _The Cavaliers of Virginia_,
1834-35.
Dr. Caruthers was a genial and cultivated Virginian from the Piedmont
region, with a ready wit and a clever pen, who had pretty well rid
himself of the intense and narrow parochialisms that restricted the
sympathies of Beverley Tucker. He was a Virginia liberal of the older
school, before the renaissance of the slave cause transferred southern
leadership to the South Carolina group, and he shared none of Tucker’s
partisanship for Calhoun. He had traveled widely both south and north,
and had discovered that human nature was much the same on both sides
of Mason and Dixon’s line. This experience qualified him to become a
shrewd and kindly interpreter of both sections of the country, and his
_Kentuckian in New York_ was an excellent contribution to the cause of
intersectional good-will. He sends two young South Carolinians just out
of college on a trip north, who fall in with a Kentuckian on the way,
and together they enjoy life in New York City, lose their hearts and
meet with divers romantic and amusing adventures. A fourth character,
a young Virginian, he sends to South Carolina, likewise to lose his
heart and encounter adventures; and the copious letters that travel
between them are filled with intelligent comment on unfamiliar ways.
The writers are generous-minded young liberals with keen eyes, and
their observations still make excellent reading after nearly a hundred
years.
The South Carolinian who falls romantically in love with a New York
girl is far from a Calhoun Fire Eater. He can see good even in the
Yankee, whom he defends against the common southern prejudice by
arguing that Yankee chicanery has resulted from a niggardly environment
and the competition that comes with overpopulation, a competition that
Virginia has been spared by the draining off of her population west;
and as for the Yankee “canting and sniveling,” “tell me,” he remarks,
“if you have not, in the very bosom of your great valley, as genuine
Presbyterians and Roundheads as ever graced the Rump Parliament, or
sung a psalm on horseback? And to give the devil his due, these same
Presbyterians are no bad citizens of a popular government” (Vol. I, p.
72). Virginia has judged the North out of her prejudices rather than
knowledge, and the advice Caruthers gives his Virginia neighbors, as an
antidote to the suspicions of Beverley Tucker, is to travel beyond the
boundaries of the Old Dominion.
Every southern should visit New-York. It would allay provincial
prejudices, and calm his excitement against his northern
countrymen. The people here are warm-hearted, generous,
and enthusiastic, in a degree scarcely inferior to our own
southerns.... Many of these Yorkers are above local prejudices, and
truly consider this as the commercial metropolis of the Union, and
all the people of the land as their customers, friends, patrons,
and countrymen. Nor is trade the only thing that flourishes.
The arts of polished and refined life, refined literature, and
the profounder studies of the schoolmen, all have here their
distinguished votaries,--I say distinguished, with reference to the
standard of science in our country. (Vol. I, p. 181.)
The material prosperity of the North contrasts painfully in his mind
with the condition of his native Carolina, and there is a note of
apprehension in his comment:
The more I see of these northern states, the more I am convinced
that some great revolution awaits our own cherished communities.
Revolutions, whether sudden or gradual, are fearful things; we
learn to feel attachments to those things which they tear up, as
a poor cripple feels attached to the mortified limb, that must be
amputated to save his life. A line of demarkation in such a case is
distinctly drawn between the diseased and the healthy flesh. Such a
line is now drawing between the slave and free states, I fear. God
send that the disease may be cured without amputation, and before
mortification takes place. I know that this latter is your own
belief. What think you now, since you have seen the greater extent
of the disease? (Vol. I, p. 165.)
The question is addressed to another young man on his travels, a young
Virginian who has gone south, and who is even more troubled at what he
finds. He cannot bring himself to think well of the sacred institution
as he sees it in South Carolina. There it is laid bare in all its naked
exploitation. The humaner relations between the races that he has known
in Virginia have been destroyed by the absentee system with its drivers
and overseers--“to these animals,” he says, “I have always had an utter
aversion.” The evils of the large-scale system have carried farther;
slavery in the Carolinas has destroyed the middle class of yeomen,
unduly exalted the aristocracy and utterly debased the poor white. The
single spot he heartily approves in the two commonwealths is Salem,
a Moravian settlement where no slavery exists, where all work, and
where education is thought so well of that the daughters of the first
southern families go there for their schooling. In Salem he found an
answer to the southern problem far more competent than Nullification.
_Here_, then, is a triumphant answer--an answer in deeds, instead
of words--in the happiness, and the substantial wealth of these
simple and primitive Moravians. Here ... is an industrious,
intelligent, and healthy community, in the very heart of all the
misery I have described. Let us then improve by the lesson, seek
out the sources of their prosperity, find the point where their
plans diverge from ours, and, my word for it ... we become a great,
a flourishing, and a happy people. (Vol. I, p. 80.)
To the problem of slavery he returns constantly, and his views may
perhaps be sufficiently understood from the following passages:
The poor of a slave-country are the most miserable and the most
wretched of all the human family. The grades of society in this
state are even farther apart than in Virginia. Here, there is one
immense chasm from the rich to the abject poor. In the valley
of Virginia, or in the country where you are, there are regular
gradations. The very happiest, most useful, and most industrious
class of a well-regulated community, is here wanting. Their place
is filled up by negroes; in consequence of which, your aristocrats
are more aristocratic, and your poor still poorer. The slaves
create an immeasurable distance between these two classes, which
can never be brought together until this separating cause be
removed. You know I am no _abolitionist_, in the incendiary meaning
of the term; yet I cannot deny from you and myself, that they
are an incubus upon our prosperity. This we would boldly deny,
if a Yankee uttered it in our hearing; but to ourselves, we must
e’en confess it. If I am, therefore, an abolitionist, it is not
for conscience-sake, but from policy and patriotism. (Vol. I, pp.
76-77.)
With us [in Virginia] slavery is tolerable, and has something
soothing about it to the heart of the philanthropist; the slaves
are more in the condition of tenants to their landlords--they are
viewed as rational creatures, and with more kindly feelings....
_Here_ slavery is intolerable; a single individual owning a hundred
or more, and often not knowing them when he sees them.... The
slaves here are plantation live-stock; not domestic and attached
family servants, who have served around the person of the master
from the childhood of both.... Here, besides your white overseers,
you have your black _drivers_;--an odious animal, almost peculiar
to the far south. It is horrible to see one slave following another
at his work, with a cow-skin dangling at his arm, and occasionally
tying him up and flogging him when he does not get through his two
tasks a day.... I do not observe much difference between the North
and South Carolinians, except in the case of those who inhabit the
most southern portions of the latter state. There your rich are
more princely and aristocratic, and your poor more wretched and
degraded; but to tell you the plain truth, many of your little
slaveholders are miserably poor and ignorant; and what must be the
condition of that negro who is a slave to one of these miserable
wretches? (Vol. II, pp. 115-119.)
To the solution of the difficult problem Caruthers offers no easy
plan. He cannot go with the northern “enthusiasts” who propose
immediate emancipation. They do not comprehend the complexity of the
problem. “We cannot set slaves free among us. Such a course would
dissolve the social compact. It would set at defiance all laws for the
protection of life, liberty, and property, either among them or the
whites.” He foresaw clearly what happened during the unhappy days of
reconstruction. “Would it be any reparation of an hereditary wrong, to
plunge the subjects of that wrong, with ourselves, into irretrievable
ruin, to attain nominal justice?” The free negroes would constitute a
menace more serious than the northern city mobs, which latter Caruthers
had no liking for. “These city mobocracies, composed as they are,
principally of wild Irish, are terrible things”; how much worse would
be a negro mobocracy? A confirmed agrarian, he finds his chief hope in
a vigorous yeomanry, and until the South shall develop that, matters
must go ill with it. In the midst of the Carolina system his thoughts
return fondly to his native state. He is under no illusion in regard
to the tide-water region of Virginia. It has lived a generous life,
but spendthrift and wasteful, and has come to evil days. But in the
West, beyond the mountains, a newer and more vigorous age is rising
that “will sweep away the melancholy vestiges of a former and more
chivalrous and generous age.”
Poor, exhausted eastern Virginia! she is in her dotage. Her
impassable roads protect her alike from the pity and contempt
of foreign travellers; but with all her weakness, with all the
imbecilities of premature age upon her, I love her still. (Vol. II,
p. 194.)
Of this more vigorous age the prototype is the title-hero of the
volume, the stalwart Kentuckian whose native intelligence and racy
speech delight the Carolinian. This free son of the untamed West is
portrayed with bold strokes, and if his talk leans somewhat heavily
on the current convention of frontier humor, if Montgomery Damon in
his picturesque exaggerations suggests Davy Crockett, the result is
none the less salty. Caruthers does not descend to caricature, but
writes with gusto, and the Kentuckian’s single letter is a little
masterpiece in the vein of the free frontier humor that was competing
with the cavalier romantic for popular approval. His whimsicalities,
Caruthers tells us, he hopes will encourage “a smile of good-humor”
so that this maiden product of the author’s pen may find its way into
the good graces of the reader--a course reckoned “the more necessary
by a southern aspirant, as there is evidently a current in American
literature, the fountainhead of which lies north of the Potomac, and in
which a southern is compelled to navigate up the stream if he jumps in
too far south” (Vol. II, p. 218.)
_The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown_, announced
in the postscript to the _Kentuckian in New York_, and published
soon afterwards, is a full-fledged historical romance, with Bacon’s
Rebellion for a background and a somewhat melodramatic figure of
a recluse warrior for its romantic hero. There is brisk action,
dramatic Indian fights, much ruffling of young cavaliers, and a fine
aristocratic swagger, but Caruthers’ sympathies seem to incline to the
more democratic elements and in the end his rebellious hero proves
himself a match for the brisk young blades. There is excellent reading
in it, as there is in his last work, _The Knights of the Horse-Shoe;
a Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion_,
published in 1845, and reissued as late as 1909; a genial story of
Governor Spotswood’s time. Caruthers deserved a better fate than fell
to his lot. In spite of his excellent work surprisingly little is known
about him; even the spelling of his name and the date of his death
are matters about which there is disagreement. From a slight sketch
contributed to _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ for July, 1838, _Climbing
the Natural Bridge_, it is known that he was a student at Washington
College, now Washington and Lee, at Lexington, Virginia, in the year
1818, and the signature affixed carries only one “r.” He seems to
have removed later to Savannah, Georgia, an enthusiastic description
of which he gives in the _Kentuckian in New York_. No doubt he there
practiced medicine and died in his prime, perhaps in the year 1846.
Virginia historians have inconsiderately neglected a cultivated and
open-minded writer who embodied the finer spirit of the Old Dominion
and whose stories have contributed their portion to the plantation
tradition.
II • John Pendleton Kennedy • A Southern Whig
A far more prosperous course was run by John P. Kennedy, whose
sympathies drew him north rather than south, and who early learned
that it is better to serve a rising than a decaying order. Very like
Caruthers in temperament and gifts, a liberal in all his sympathies, he
found the ties that bound him to the Old Dominion more fragile, and the
drift of circumstance carrying him with the stronger current. It was a
kindly fate that took him in charge, bringing him abundant prosperity
and contemporary fame.
One of the most attractive figures of his generation was this son
of a Maryland father and a Virginia mother. A gentleman of much
personal distinction, high-minded and of wide culture, endowed with
a pleasant wit, easy manners and generous nature, he is an agreeable
representative of the _ante bellum_ Southerns, an American Victorian of
the Cobden-Bright school, standing midway between the northern radical
and the southern Fire Eater. Like Henry Clay, he was a Whig engrafted
on a Jeffersonian root. Born and educated in Baltimore, he was a son of
the borderland, with strong ties of kinship and love that drew him to
the Old Dominion, and even stronger ties of intellectual, social and
financial interests that drew him towards Philadelphia and New York,
Saratoga and Newport. As a young man he found his inspiration in the
life of William Wirt, whose biography he afterwards wrote. Like Wirt,
he dreamed of combining law and letters and adopting the life of a
southern gentleman; but he discovered little that was congenial in the
exactions of the law, and in spite of considerable success as attorney
for certain Baltimore interests, he largely abandoned the profession.
He loved his Chaucer and Shakespeare more than his Coke and Blackstone:
he was more interested in Dickens and Thackeray and Carlyle and Irving
and Scott than in John Marshall’s decisions, and he followed the more
congenial path. He tried his hand likewise at politics. He was a member
of Congress for six years, was Secretary of the Navy during the last
months of President Fillmore’s administration, and was of service to
the Whig party as spokesman on dignified occasions. But he was never
a practical politician, and the rough and tumble of political life
he found utterly distasteful. As he grew older he unconsciously drew
further away from his southern antecedents. In his later years there
was little to distinguish him from Irving and Robert C. Winthrop and
other northern friends. He had left the world of Beverley Tucker far
behind him. He had severed all ties with Virginia and South Carolina,
and during the Civil War he was a militant Unionist, though it cost him
much grief and the loss of old friendships.
Kennedy’s life ran an usually placid and prosperous course, greatly
unlike that of Gilmore Simms. His father was a Scotch-Irish merchant
of Baltimore who married Nancy Pendleton, daughter of an excellent
Virginia family with many honorable connections. His early years
were not unlike Irving’s--a little Latin and Greek and much outdoor
life, with a desultory education got from vagrant books. The course
of study at the local college afforded far less intellectual stimulus
than _Tristram Shandy_, over which he pored of evenings, dissecting
the prose style to discover the secret of its charm, and filling his
notebooks with elaborately colloquial sentences, highly seasoned with
dashes and exclamation points. Graduating at eighteen, he enlisted in a
Baltimore regiment to fight the British, who were preparing their raid
on Washington. He went through the campaign as a summer lark, emerging
unscathed from the single skirmish. The field was lost, but whether the
honor of the crack Fifth was left on the battle ground may be judged
from Kennedy’s humorous comment. “Soon we had the famous ‘trial of
souls’--the battle of Bladensburg. The drafted militia ran away at the
first fire, and the Fifth Regiment was driven off the field with the
bayonet. We made a fine scamper of it. I lost my musket in the mêlée
while bearing off a comrade” (Tuckerman, _Life of Kennedy_, p. 79).
Throughout his twenties Kennedy was a studious dilettante in letters
and politics and law. He married but lost his wife and son within the
year; with his friend Peter Hoffman Cruse he published a series of
Baltimore sketches in two volumes entitled _The Red Book_; and at the
age of thirty-four married again. His second wife was the daughter
of Edward Gray, a wealthy Baltimore cotton-spinner who at the age of
eighteen had emigrated from northern Ireland to Philadelphia, became
a bank clerk and a Federalist simultaneously, adopted Washington and
Hamilton--whom he occasionally met in a professional way--as his
particular heroes, prospered greatly, purchased the Ellicott Mills a
few miles out of Baltimore, and set up a half feudal estate vastly
attractive to discriminating visitors like Irving.
Kennedy’s marriage to Elizabeth Gray in 1829 seems to have been the
turning-point of his life. Before this he had been a disinterested
liberal in his views, concerning himself in a political way with such
humanitarian issues as the repeal of the brutal debtor laws. He had
never been an avowed Jeffersonian like William Wirt and many of his
Virginia connections, but the Jeffersonian idealism must have appealed
to the generous sympathies of the young man. Immediately upon being
taken into the Gray family he adopted its ample scale of living, its
genial hospitality, its social and political philosophy. The influence
of the masterful Edward Gray was thenceforth a dominant creative factor
in Kennedy’s life, and he followed faithfully in the footsteps of his
father-in-law. The profits of the Ellicott Mills had been greatly
increased by the tariff act of 1824. Naturally Edward Gray was an
ardent protectionist, and Kennedy frankly espoused the same policy. He
accepted Henry Clay as his political leader, was sent to Congress on a
protectionist platform, lectured before Workingmen’s Institutes on the
advantages of industrial development, and gained a very considerable
reputation as an expounder of the American Plan. After the war he
became a Republican, voted for Grant, and adopted extreme nationalist
views. That the family income was dependent on tariff favors is a
detail which only a more realistic generation would suggest in
explanation of his political course; the fact remains, nevertheless,
that the youthful disciple of William Wirt adopted the new philosophy
of prosperity, became president of the board of directors of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railway, invested in West Virginia coal lands,
and was by way of becoming a captain of industry. The break with his
southern antecedents was complete and final; he went with his native
city in preferring the industrial to the plantation economy.
Baltimore in Kennedy’s day was a thriving port with a growing trade
to the West Indies and Europe. It had long been a convenient market
for the tobacco of Virginia, and with the development of the clipper
service its over-sea commerce expanded greatly. Unlike Charleston,
the mercantile interests predominated over the planter. Middle-class
ideals, to be sure, were still tempered by the dignified decorum that
lingered on from the eighteenth century. Merchants still emulated the
gentry and strove for personal distinction. They professed benevolent
ideals and their talk was much of public spirit and the progress of the
town. They adopted the romantic faith of their class in the beneficent
processes of trade and industry in furthering social well-being,
and they endowed Mechanics Institutes and founded public libraries
and museums with all the ardor of converts. In this agreeable work
of expounding the gospel of progress, Kennedy joined heartily. It
satisfied the latent idealism of his nature and recompensed him for
the loss of his Virginia heritage. Intellectually he was too honest to
pervert the gospel of progress to selfish class interest and seek to
hide the perversion behind sonorous platitudes, as his friend Robert C.
Winthrop of Boston was guilty of doing. He had too much love for the
English language to misuse it even in defense of the family income.
He could not contract his mind to the compass of a Whig politician’s.
His defense of industrialism, in consequence, embodies the spirit of
the best English liberalism as that liberalism was interpreted by
Victorian Englishmen. He seems to have been honestly convinced that the
future well-being of America was dependent upon the development of an
industrialism to provide an economic balance between manufactures and
agriculture.
Like his friend Irving, Kennedy was a devout romantic, with a love of
the old-time picturesque; but as a consistent Whig he would spin and
weave his romance out of domestic materials, refusing to import. He
was a child of the effervescent days following 1812, when the static
eighteenth century was breaking up and an ebullient romanticism was
permeating the land. Of this youthful period his thought reveals the
clear impress. Washington Irving from long pottering over the old-world
picturesque had become English romantic, with an inveterate dislike of
all innovation. The vulgar nineteenth century was destroying for him
the charm of the eighteenth; he would have had the world remain as it
was before the American and French revolutions had despoiled life of
picturesque feudal ways. Whereas Kennedy, sharing in a romanticism that
was economic and social--that was creating a wonderful America of the
future out of the raw materials of life--was content to remain native,
at home in the land of his birth. He might turn to the past for the
figures and scenes of his stories, but he discovered in the activities
of the present materials for romance quite as fascinating. He was
wholly Victorian in his genial optimism. He was receptive to new ideas
and promising ventures. He listened sympathetically to inventors and
scientists and promoters. He was instrumental in securing Congressional
aid to erect Morse’s telegraph line between Washington and his native
city. As Secretary of the Navy he provided for Commodore Perry’s
expedition to Japan, and the expedition to search for Dr. Kane in the
Arctic regions. But unfortunately his economic romanticism gradually
undermined his literary romanticism; he outgrew his earlier literary
ambitions, and the romances of his later life never got written. In the
end the gospel of progress was his undoing.
That the generous comfort in which he lived afforded him leisure, means
of travel, contact with distinguished people, goes without saying; but
that it was favorable to letters is far from clear. Divided interests
consumed his energies and kept him an amateur to the last. His literary
development was an evolution from a sketchy and humorous Addisonian,
with its echoes of the eighteenth century, to the full Victorian
romantic. The foreign elements from an earlier time slowly settled
to the bottom of the vat and left the pure wine of romance. But it
took time. Like other amateurs he was influenced by current literary
successes, and was much given to following the changing fashions. His
three best-known books, written between the ages of thirty-six and
forty-five, are unlike enough to have been written by different men.
_Swallow Barn_, like the youthful sketches of _The Red Book_, is
Irvingesque, and the Irving influence crops out again in a late book
_Quodlibet_; but _Horseshoe Robinson_ is substantial Revolutionary
romance, done in sober narrative with touches of realism; and _Rob of
the Bowl_ is light and whimsical cavalier romance, all atmosphere and
small talk, utterly unlike Irving. It is in this latter book, perhaps,
written in 1838 at the age of forty-two, that Kennedy really found
himself; he seems to move through the scenes more easily and with
greater delight than in any other of his pages.
That the leisurely sketches of _Swallow Barn_ belong to the school of
Irving is a fact as obvious as Kennedy’s love for the idling plantation
life. Quite too much, however, has been made of this imitativeness--it
is an imitativeness rather of method than of theme or style. If it was
not quite a pioneer work in the field of local description, it was
amongst the earliest. Paulding had dealt with Dutch colonial life,
and Timothy Flint and James Hall had begun the descriptive literature
of the West; but little else had been done at the time _Swallow Barn_
appeared. Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ came out two years later.
Intrinsically as well as historically the work is curiously suggestive.
Nowhere else does the plantation life of the Old Dominion in the days
before its decline appear so vividly as in these discursive pages: “the
mellow, bland, and sunny luxuriance of her old-time society--its good
fellowship, its hearty and constitutional _companionableness_, the
thriftless gaiety of the people, their dogged but amiable invincibility
of opinion, and that overflowing hospitality which knows no ebb.”
Like Irving, Kennedy went back to the old home, but that old home was
Virginia and not England; and there he found still lingering on the
great plantations charmingly romantic anachronisms that had disappeared
elsewhere--a spontaneous romanticism of temperament that gave color and
zest to the daily routine. The aloofness of plantation life had bred in
the Virginia gentry a piquant individuality, a distinction as of old
morocco or calfskin. Philly Wart, the shrewdly humorous fox-hunting
lawyer; old Mr. Tracy of The Brakes, “turning a little sour with age”
and resembling “that waterish, gravelly soil that you see sometimes
around a spring, where nothing grows but sheep-sorrel,” who cherishes a
hereditary boundary dispute, pursuing his hypothetical rights through
all the law courts and discovering, when the matter has been amicably
settled by arbitration, that much of the zest has gone out of his
life; the heroine Bel Tracy, a frank wholesome girl with a dash of Di
Vernon in her romantic affectations that lead her to play at hawking:
such figures fit as naturally into the background as the pampered house
servants, the horseback riding, the constant visiting, the abundant
dinners. Especially the dinners, when the neighborhood is invited in.
The table spread with opulent hospitality and careless profusion--the
baked ham at one end and the saddle of roast mutton at the other, with
fried chicken, oysters, crabs, sweet potatoes, jellies, custards--a
prodigal feast that only outdoor stomachs could manage, and all by way
of preliminary to the dusty wine-bottles and easy stories that hold the
men long after the ladies have withdrawn. Surely the romance of Old
Virginia, preserved in these light-hearted discursive pages, is worth
remembering by later generations who have forgotten how to live so
genially.
In 1832 when _Swallow Barn_ was written, the southern mind was just
at the turn in its attitude towards slavery, and Frank Meriwether, a
Virginian Sir Roger de Coverley, bred in the humanitarianism of the
older liberals, accepts the institution as a present evil that is in
a way of natural extinction. Slavery in _Swallow Barn_ is kept in the
background. There are slaves, of course, on the plantation, many of
them; but they are in the tobacco fields or the quarters, far from the
mansion; and not till near the end of the book does Kennedy’s curiosity
induce him to visit the cabins and draw out Frank Meriwether in talk
on slavery. The result is what one could have foreseen. The plantation
master was the victim of a benevolent romanticism that vaguely looks
for a solution to colonization schemes that will return the negro to
Africa; but like other southern gentlemen he is somewhat testy at the
suggestion of outside interference. Slavery he regards as an exclusive
southern problem, to be solved by those who understand its complex
domestic implications. It would be better for everybody if Abolition
busybodies would mind their own affairs and cease stirring up feelings
where no good can come of it. To prove that Virginia gentlemen are
aware of their responsibility, Meriwether offers a half humorous
suggestion that negro emancipation might well follow the example of
English villeinage, with a slow break-up of the system, the emancipated
negro to remain in a protective feudal relation to his master. It was
an amiable notion to play with, and it fitted the feudal psychology of
the plantation.
In these early sketches Kennedy revealed an easy knack at writing
that gave promise of excellent work later. He has lightness, grace,
refinement, an eye sensitive to picturesque effects, delight in line
and texture and color, an agreeable wit and playful sentiment, a relish
for English idiom and the literary colloquial. In _Horseshoe Robinson_,
written three years later, he abandoned the essay-sketch and turned
to the school of historical romance then in full swing. The story is
done in the orthodox manner of the thirties; it is compounded of equal
parts gentry and commoners, the former providing respectability and the
latter dramatic interest, the whole garnished with a few historical
figures. There is quite obvious concern for authentic reality. The
title-hero, a shrewd homespun scout, is carefully drawn from life; the
background of bushwhackings and forays and onsets, and the numerous
company of blackguards and honest folk, are painted in skillfully;
and the whole conducts to a dramatic finale in the battle of King’s
Mountain. It is an excellent tale, quite worth reading today, but
scarcely comparable in vividness and brisk action--in picaresque
realism which any true war story must embody--with _The Partisan_
of Gilmore Simms, written in the same year of 1835. Realism was not
Kennedy’s forte and after _Horseshoe Robinson_ he abandoned the field
of the Revolution which offered so rich an opportunity for the robuster
genius of the Charleston romancer.
In _Rob of the Bowl_ Kennedy opened a promising vein that he never
adequately explored--the vein of the cavalier romantic. Temperamentally
he was ill fitted to deal with rollicking action or picaresque
adventure; he preferred the leisurely, discursive romantic, subdued
to gentle raillery or humorous tenderness. One trembles to think what
Simms would have made of the materials that Kennedy brought together
in this tale of old St. Mary’s in the days of Charles II. Here is the
raw stuff of a true bloody-bones thriller: a gentlemanly blackguard
with the stumps of his legs bound in a huge rocking trencher and moving
about with the help of crutches, who is deep in the contraband trade;
a swaggering young pirate, a Brother of the Bloody Coast, who falls
in love with the daughter of the Collector of the Port and kidnaps
her from her father’s house; a romantic lover, slender and clerkly,
but skillful with the rapier, who turns out to be the son of Rob; a
haunted house that covers the smuggling operations of Rob and Captain
Cocklescraft; and all this set against a background of partisan
struggle between Roundhead and Cavalier, Protestant and Catholic, in
the early days of the Maryland settlement.
But in the handling the story is far removed from a bloody-bones tale.
The action is deliberately subdued to the humoresque; atmosphere is
studiously created; adventure is held in strict subjection to the
whimsical; and a mellow old-time flavor is imprisoned in the leisurely
pages. Kennedy had an appreciative eye for picturesque characters, and
in _Rob of the Bowl_ he has gathered a choice group, limned--as he
would choose to say--with a partial hand. Garret Weasel, the garrulous
pot-valiant innkeeper, and Dorothy his termagant spouse; Captain Jasper
Dauntless, the cogging, wheedling swordsman who twists Dame Dorothy
about his fingers and inveigles his host into undue commerce with
his cups--these to be sure are stock characters, but they are done
with excellent vivacity. Their abundant talk is well seasoned, and
if the action sometimes drags, the company is good and the drinking
is a sufficient end in itself. All the while he is writing Kennedy
keeps half an eye on Elizabethan literature to assure himself of the
exact turn of phrase. His vocabulary is saturated with the homely old
speech, and his characters talk as if they had culled all the simples
of English cottage gardens to garnish the staple of their wit. He has a
keener delight than Simms in the picturesque archaic. He far surpasses
Irving in easy mastery of the old-fashioned colloquial, as indeed he
surpasses all our early novelists. He delights in the courtly wit of
the Cavalier equally with the humors of Dogberry and Falstaff and
Captain Bobadil, and he quite evidently is seeking to cross the sparkle
of Congreve with the robustness of the Elizabethans. The result may
sometimes appear a bit self-conscious; his phrases too often seem to
be on dress parade; but he can plead his precedents in justification.
In its fondness for the literary colloquial his prose style almost
suggests Thackeray, and it is this suggestion, perhaps, that gave rise
to the tradition that Kennedy wrote for the former a certain chapter
of _The Virginians_. That he supplied Thackeray with materials for his
Virginia backgrounds may be accepted as true, but the indebtedness
probably went no further.
_Rob of the Bowl_ is certainly Kennedy’s best work, as it is one of
the most finished and delightful of our earlier romances. Although it
ran to six editions, the latest in 1907, it has scarcely received the
recognition its lightness of touch deserves. But instead of opening
the vein further he turned away to venture in new fields. _Quodlibet_,
written in 1840,[401] is a surprising successor to _Rob_--a satire on
Jacksonian democracy, done with a light touch and great good humor.
In those acrimonious days when Old Hickory’s attack on the Bank so
embittered its Whig partisans, Kennedy kept his temper, tipped his
shafts with laughter and sent them neatly between the joints of the
Democratic armor. Against such amusing satire fustian is helpless.
The book is keen, vivacious, sparkling. The supposed follies of
Jacksonianism--its deification of the majority vote, its cant of the
sovereign people, its hatred of all aristocrats, its demagoguery and
bluster and sheer buncombe--are hit off with exuberant raillery. The
story professes to be an account of the rise to prosperity of the
Borough of Quodlibet, under the beneficent smile of Democratic finance.
Mean and insignificant before the coming of Jackson, with the removal
of the “Deposites,” “like Jeshurun, it waxed fat,” with its rows
of brick shops built on speculation and its Patriotic Copper-Plate
Bank that issued an unlimited supply of beautifully engraved notes
as a stimulus to enterprise. To be sure the bank broke and the
cashier absconded with his family to Europe, but its untoward end was
attributed by all Jacksonian New Lights to the vile machinations of the
Whigs. It was certainly Nick Biddle and the Barings, with their hatred
of Old Bullion Benton’s democratic gold coinage, that were the devil in
the pot to spill the people’s porridge.
Yet even in its laughter Kennedy’s political bias is sharply and
narrowly partisan. The satire is a capitalistic counter to the agrarian
attack on the rising money power, and it is colored by the chagrin of
gentlemen who find themselves displaced by plebeians. Something of the
old aristocratic contempt for the plain man functioning as a political
animal lingers in its pages, which the bubbling humor does not wholly
conceal. In Jackson’s onslaught on the Bank, Kennedy discovers only an
impudent demagoguery; it is selfish and stupid, turmoiling the country
for partisan ends and seeking to cover its petty spite with the mantle
of patriotism. The Old Hero cuts a sorry figure in these brisk pages,
and Van Buren a still sorrier one. The satire sparkles amusingly, but
it is drawn from the old Federalist vintage and it preserves the flavor
of a time when gentlemen frankly resented the rule of the unwashed
majority. For that very reason _Quodlibet_ is an unusually interesting
document. It is the most vivacious criticism of Jacksonianism in our
political library, one of our few distinguished political satires, and
it deserves a better fate than to gather dust on old shelves.
After _Quodlibet_ Kennedy did little else. The last twenty years of his
life were largely wasted. His dignified life of William Wirt, published
in 1849, seems to have met with approval, for it ran to six editions.
Our grandfathers liked stately narrative that portrayed their subjects
in full dress; and Kennedy gave them an impeccably respectable work in
which all the rugosities of character were ironed out neatly and a fine
starchy effect achieved. It is hard to understand how a writer so keen
to detect the whimsical should have drawn so lifeless a picture of the
genial Attorney-General. Perhaps the memory of Wirt’s reputed greatness
rested too heavily upon him; or it may have been that a lawyer in
old Virginia lived as colorless a life as the narrative suggests; at
any rate the novelist who never had failed to breathe life into the
characters of his fiction, somehow failed in depicting this excellent
gentleman of the old school. During the Civil War Kennedy contributed
to the northern cause his _Letters of Mr. Paul Ambrose on the Great
Rebellion in the United States_, in which he again showed that he
could keep his temper and argue calmly. It was a difficult theme for
which he was inadequately equipped. His constitutional argument is not
impressive and it makes an ill showing when set over against Alexander
H. Stephens’ _Constitutional View of the War between the States_. He
was a man of letters rather than a lawyer, and if he had eschewed
politics and law and stuck to his pen our literature would have been
greatly in his debt. Few Americans of his day were so generously
gifted; none possessed a lighter touch. He has been somewhat carelessly
forgotten even by our literary historians who can plead no excuse for
so grave a blunder.
III • Edgar Allan Poe • Romantic
It is from this slovenly background of aristocratic Virginia, with
its liberalisms and conservatisms running at cross purposes, that the
enigmatical figure of Poe emerged to vex the northern critics. In so
far as any particular environment determined his highly individual and
creative nature, it was the indolent life of the planter gentry, shot
through with a pugnacious pride of locality, with a strong dislike of
alien ways, with haughtiness, dissipation, wastefulness, chivalry.
In his proud, irascible individualism that went out of its way to
pick a quarrel, there is something of the spirit of John Randolph of
Roanoke, but pied and streaked with unfortunate qualities that to
many observers seemed the marks of the mere charlatan. As a southern
gentleman he imbibed the common dislike of New England, and this
dislike was aggravated by its diverse conception of the functions of
art, and by the misfortunes that attended his literary career. An
aesthete and a craftsman, the first American writer to be concerned
with beauty alone, his ideals ran counter to every major interest
of the New England renaissance: the mystical, optimistic element in
transcendentalism; the social conscience that would make the world
over in accordance with French idealism, and that meddled with its
neighbor’s affairs in applying its equalitarianism to the negro; the
pervasive moralism that would accept no other criteria by which to
judge life and letters--these things could not fail to irritate a
nature too easily ruffled. The Yankee parochialisms rubbed across his
Virginia parochialisms; and when to these was added a Yankee preëmption
of the field of literary criticism, when a little clique engaged in the
business of mutual admiration puffed New England mediocrities at his
expense, the provocation was enough to arouse in a sensitive southern
mind an antagonism that rivaled Beverley Tucker’s. In his unhappy
pilgrimage through life Poe was his own worst enemy, but he took
comfort in charging his ill fortune upon the malignancy of others.
Southern though he was in the deep prejudices of a suspicious nature,
his aloofness from his own Virginia world was complete. Aside from his
art he had no philosophy and no programs and no causes. He got from
Virginia what was bad rather than good, and his alienation from the
more generous southern ideals did him harm. It was perhaps harder to be
an artist in that slack southern society than in New England--harder
to be a romantic concerned only with twilight melancholy. It would
have been hard enough anywhere in Jacksonian America. His romanticisms
were of quite another kind than those his countrymen were pursuing;
and the planter sympathized with them no more than did the New York
literati, or the western men of letters. In a world given over to
bumptious middle-class enthusiasms, there would be scant sympathy for
the craftsman and dreamer. There was no unearned increment to be got
from investments in “the misty mid-region of Weir,” which Poe threw
on the market. The technician concerned with the values of long and
short syllables would find few congenial spirits in a world of more
substantial things; and the purveyors of shoddy tales would not take
it kindly if their shortcomings were pointed out and a more competent
craftsmanship insisted upon. And so, like Herman Melville, Poe came to
shipwreck on the reef of American materialisms. The day of the artist
had not dawned in America.
So much only need be said. The problem of Poe, fascinating as it is,
lies quite outside the main current of American thought, and it may be
left with the psychologist and the belletrist with whom it belongs.
It is for abnormal psychology to explain his “neural instability
amounting almost to a dissociated or split personality,” his irritable
pride, his quarrelsomeness, his unhappy persecution complex, his
absurd pretentions to a learning he did not possess, his deliberate
fabrications about his life and methods of work, his oscillations
between abstinence and dissipation, between the morbidly grotesque and
the lucidly rational, his haunting fear of insanity that drove him to
demonstrate his sanity by pursuing complex problems of ratiocination.
Such problems are personal to Poe and do not concern us here. And it is
for the belletrist to evaluate his theory and practice of art: his debt
to Coleridge and Schlegel; the influence of the contemporary magazine
on his conception of the length of a work of the imagination; the
value of his theory of the tyrannizing unity of mood in the poem and
short story; the provocation to the craftsman of the pretentiousness
of contemporary American literature, joined to a flabby and crude
technique; the grossness of the popular taste and the validity of his
critical judgments. Whatever may be the final verdict it is clear that
as an aesthete and a craftsman he made a stir in the world that has
not lessened in the years since his death, but has steadily widened.
Others of greater repute in his day have fared less prosperously in
later reputation. He was the first of our artists and the first of our
critics; and the surprising thing is that such a man should have made
his appearance in an America given over to hostile ideals. He suffered
much from his aloofness, but he gained much also. In the midst of gross
and tawdry romanticisms he refused to be swallowed up, but went his own
way, a rebel in the cause of beauty, discovering in consequence a finer
romanticism than was before known in America.
Footnotes
[401] The characteristic title is _Quodlibet: Containing some Annals
thereof, with an Authentic Account of the Origin and Growth of the
Borough and the Sayings and Doings of Sundry Townspeople: Interspersed
with Sketches of the Most Remarkable and Distinguished Characters
of that Place and its Vicinity. Edited by Solomon Secondthoughts,
Schoolmaster, from original MSS. Indited by him, and now made Public at
the Request and under the Patronage of the Great New Light Democratic
Central Committee of Quodlibet._
Part Two: The Renaissance of Slavery
Chapter I • Southern Imperialism
I
By the year 1824 a change was becoming evident in the South that was
to affect profoundly the course of southern thought in regard to
her peculiar institution. The passing of the long Virginia hegemony
was a sign that southern opinion was undergoing a revolutionary
overturn, and that leadership henceforth would rest with men of a
different philosophy. The humanitarian spirit that marked the thought
of the preceding generation was dying out, to be replaced by a frank
recognition of local economic interests. Expectation that slavery was
on the way to natural extinction was yielding to the conviction that
the system was too profitable to the South to permit its extinction,
and this in turn bred an imperious desire to spread it westward to
the Pacific. With this significant shift from apology to imperialism,
it became clear to ardent pro-slavery men that lukewarm Virginians of
the old tradition were not the spokesmen to entrust with the fortunes
of the South, and leadership passed to the South Carolina school. In
that momentous shift much was implied. It was more than a shift from
Jefferson to Calhoun, from humanitarian idealism to economic realism.
It marked the complete ascendancy of a small minority of gentleman
planters over the inarticulate mass of southern yeomanry, and the
assertion of the aristocratic ideal as the goal of southern society.
It denied the principle of democracy as that principle was understood
in the North and West, and it rejected the new humanitarian spirit of
western civilization. It abandoned the Jeffersonian equalitarianism
that was so deeply rooted in the southern mind from Kentucky to
Georgia; it cast aside the agrarianism of John Taylor and the older
Virginians; and it set up in place of these congenial conceptions the
alien ideal of a Greek democracy. More momentous still, it threw down
the gauntlet to the ideals of the middle class, then in the first
flush of a triumphant career, and in the armed clash that eventually
resulted, it was destroyed by that class.
The intellectual capital of southern imperialism was Charleston, but
its numerical strength lay in the Black Belt, with South Carolina to
the east and Texas to the west, a compact territory the heart of which
was Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In this new South that
was rapidly passing through its frontier development, the patriarchal
system of Virginia gave way to a system of negro exploitation, more
naked as it passed further westward. It was here that the proportion
of slaves to whites was greatest; it was here that slave labor was
most profitable; and it was here in consequence that the slave economy
was most militant. The Black Belt became the native habitat of the
southern Fire Eater. In the late twenties and early thirties South
Carolina provided the outstanding leaders of the new school; but the
philosophy of imperialism spread rapidly and western men came more and
more to the front. George McDuffie and Bob Toombs, perhaps the boldest
of the loquacious tribe of Fire Eaters, came from Georgia; Alexander
H. Stephens was bred in the same turbulent state; L. Q. C. Lamar and
Jefferson Davis were from Mississippi. For the most part self-made,
products of a frontier environment, these western extremists had got
from Jefferson little more than an assertive individualism that easily
espoused the states-rights philosophy and prompted them to defend their
immediate interests. It was this vigorous group that largely created
the new southern psychology and prodded the southern mind along the
path marked out for it to travel. Democratic in their attitude towards
the white voter, middle class in their love of exploitation, they
retained little of the spirit of the Virginia school.
The expansion of the South to the Gulf region came a generation later
than the settlement of the Ohio valley. The Creek Indians who clung
tenaciously to the rich lands of Mississippi were long an obstacle to
the white advance, and the settlers filtered in slowly. Moreover the
slave economy was ill fitted to the business of pioneering. It was
difficult to transport negroes and establish great plantations in a
wilderness; there was too little security in a region that offered
every temptation to the slave to run away. The plantation system could
prosper only after a considerable degree of development had been
effected and sufficient negroes provided. On the other hand, the rich
soil, virgin and productive, offered every inducement for large-scale
production of cotton, tobacco and sugar. Here the economics of slavery
could be fairly tested, and if the system were found to be profitable
it would spread of its own impulse beyond the Mississippi, becoming
more imperialistic with every extension, ambitious to seize Texas with
its filibusters, looking as far as California and the Oregon territory
for future expansion. But while planning for such expansion it must
secure its strategic front at Washington, making certain that no rival
economy should control the central government to its disadvantage. It
was an ambitious program, but it was all implicit in the evident fact
that slavery in the Black Belt proved to be profitable.
The explanation of this sudden prosperity of the Black Belt is a
matter of familiar knowledge. Coincident with the first westward
expansion of slavery came a revolution in the technique of the English
cotton industry that brought about corresponding changes in southern
agriculture. The production of cotton textiles in England had long
been held back by the difficulty of spinning a fine and even thread.
When this problem was solved at the beginning of the century by the
invention of new machines, the cotton industry at once developed
amazingly, making heavy demands upon the supply of American raw
materials. This supply in turn was greatly increased by the invention
of the cotton gin, and the combined result of these inventions was
an upheaval in southern agriculture. In the eighteenth century the
southern staples were tobacco, rice and indigo; by 1825 the staples
had become cotton, tobacco and sugar. Almost in a decade cotton had
become king. In 1791, three years after Andrew Jackson settled in
Nashville, the total export of cotton was only 200,000 pounds. In 1803
it had risen to 40,000,000 pounds, and by 1860 the export for the
year was of the value of nearly two hundred millions of dollars. Such
figures provide a sufficient explanation of the militant spirit of the
slave economy after 1820. Here was an enormous vested interest, the
economic life of the South, that could not suffer its present or future
profits to be put in jeopardy by any political party on any pretext.
Its well-being and its prestige were both at stake. The peculiar
institution, which a generation before was commonly believed to be in
the way of natural extinction, had the South by the throat.
It was the strategic weakness of the South that the spirit of
exploitation, which following the peace of 1783 had spread through
America like the itch, should there have assumed its most hateful
form, far more revolting to the humanitarian sense and far less
justifiable to uneasy consciences than wage slavery. With every
extension the system became necessarily more brutal in exploitation.
As new plantations were opened the natural increase of negroes was
inadequate to meet the pressing demands for slaves. Since the abolition
of the traffic with Africa the occasional smuggling by venturesome
runners--many of whom were respectable New England church members--had
provided a totally inadequate supply of raw material; the price of
slaves rose steadily, and this in turn led to increasing speculation
in negroes. Buying and selling by middlemen went on briskly, to the
horror of northern humanitarians and the concern of southern. So
brutal and open was the exploitation that Alexander H. Stephens--the
kindest-hearted of men--went so far as to advocate the reopening of the
slave trade with Africa, as the lesser of the two evils. The better
South hated what it could not help. Although the slave trader remained
a social pariah with whom no gentleman would associate, his business
was a necessary evil of the system and could not be eradicated.
The reaction of the slave system upon the southern people, both
plantation masters and poor whites, was wholly evil. The generous
culture of Virginia failed to take root in the Black Belt. The
development of the plantation system under hired overseers infected
the masters, few in numbers and absolute in power, with an exaggerated
sense of their own greatness. The aristocratic spirit of the Old
Dominion had been tempered by a feeling of patriarchal responsibility
that humanized the relations between master and slave, and more
generous social contacts had created an admirable republican
squirearchy. But in the frontier Gulf states the rapid expansion of
the plantation system created an aristocracy given to swaggering,
_bourgeois_ in spirit, arrogant in manners. Republican simplicity was
losing vogue and there was much loose talk about the superiority of
the classes. It is said that when Alexander H. Stephens was appointed
a delegate to the Confederate Convention at Montgomery, he refused
to attend till he was assured that the jingoes would make no attempt
to set up a monarchy. Gideon Welles is authority for the story that
when news came to Washington of the secession of South Carolina,
Mrs. Jefferson Davis was all aflutter: “She said she wanted to get
rid of the old government; that they would have a monarchy South, and
gentlemen to fill official positions” (_Diary_, Vol. II, p. 256). Such
stories were probably the result of war hysteria; nevertheless they
suggest a bias in the southern temper that reveals how far the new
South had drifted from its Jeffersonian moorings.
Of this new South with its grandiose dreams of slave imperialism, fate
selected Jefferson Davis to be the political leader and spokesman. The
choice may have proved unfortunate, but it was logical. Much calumny
has been heaped upon his name, but that is the common fate of partisans
of lost causes. The real Jefferson Davis is to be sought in some mean
between the extravagant adulation of his friends and the slanders of
his enemies. Not a great man certainly; in no sense comparable to Lee
or Stonewall Jackson or Alexander H. Stephens; he was very far from a
petty or time-serving nature. As time softens the old animosities it
reveals the features of a high-minded southern gentleman who possessed
the virtues and the weaknesses of his race. Simple and austere in
tastes, he was the product of a crossing of the southern Puritan with
the aristocratic tradition of the Old Dominion. If he was not of
the old cavalier stock he was a gentleman by instinct and training.
His father was half Welsh, half English; his mother Scotch-Irish.
He came of Revolutionary stock. After the war his father settled in
Georgia and later removed to Kentucky, where the son was born in Todd
County in 1808. While still a small child he was taken to Wilkinson
County, Mississippi, where he was brought up on a plantation. Educated
at Lexington, Kentucky, and at West Point, he proved a serious,
capable student, who loved reading but possessed little intellectual
curiosity. His ideas were few, but those he embraced he clung to with
the tenacity of a strong nature. Resigning from the army after a few
years of honorable service, he settled down as a plantation master.
He was summoned from his isolation by the call for troops to serve
in the Mexican campaign, went through several battles with unusual
distinction, and proved himself an extremely able officer. With
his military fame the path to political preferment was open and he
demonstrated his ability in Congress. At the outbreak of the secession
movement he was eager to receive the appointment as commander of
the southern armies, but fate called him to the presidency of the
Confederacy and he devoted his best strength unselfishly to the cause,
only to find the accumulated bitterness of the North heaped upon his
single head. It was an unhappy lot, but there was iron in him, and he
bore it like a man.
Jefferson Davis was cut out of the same tough oak that fashioned John
C. Calhoun. Hard and unyielding, tenacious of opinion, dictatorial,
somewhat inclined to arrogance, he might break, but he would not
bend. The Scotch-Irish stock was rarely genial or tolerant, and Davis
possessed none of the seeming pliability of Lincoln that yielded the
non-essentials to secure the essentials. Utterly lacking in humor and
easy-going good nature, he offended by his very virtues. Profoundly
Puritan, he was narrow and rigid, a legalist in temperament, proud and
jealous of authority. Meticulously honest, he could not get on well
with men; he quarreled with his generals and wore himself out trying
to do everything himself. Politically he was a strict constructionist
of the most rigid views. He refused to follow Calhoun into the camp
of Nullification. His patriotism was extreme, and only a greater
loyalty to his state made him an advocate of secession. At bottom he
was a Jeffersonian and to the end of his life he was faithful to the
principles of his party. Kindly and humane, he treated his dependents
with singular consideration. He set up a curious little democracy
amongst the slaves of his plantation, and his negroes were devoted to
him with rare loyalty. There was in his nature not the slightest trace
of the exploiter; he was a patriarchal master after the old Virginia
ideal, with no hint of the speculator or middleman. The background of
his thought was agrarian and he shared with Jefferson a dislike for
capitalistic industrialism. The President of the Confederacy may have
been an unfortunate civil leader, but the slanders that so long clung
to his name are only worthy of the gutter. The sin that he was led into
was not counted a sin in his southern decalogue; it was the sin, not
of secession, but of imperialism--a sin common to all America in those
drunken times when the great West invited exploitation.
Chapter II • Winds of Political Doctrine
I
An economic revolution so widespread and profound could not fail to
impress its ideals on current political thought. In the year 1825 three
streams of tendency were flowing through the southern mind, rising from
different sources, incompatible in spirit and purpose, strong in their
diverse appeals; and in the end the major current was certain to engulf
the lesser. The humanitarianism of Virginia, the individualism of the
new West, and the imperialism of the Black Belt might seem to mingle
their waters for a time, but there would be confusions of thought and
diversity of counsels until one or another had worn a deeper channel
through which the dominant opinion might run. There could be no more
fascinating study in the economics of political theory than the
changing mind of the South during the critical decades from 1820 to
1850, as it followed the course determined by its peculiar institution.
Political thought passed under the jurisdiction of slavery, and
every southern writer took his daily bearings from that polar fact.
It is unintelligent to charge upon southern politicians a lack of
consistency--to point out that after 1820 Calhoun reversed himself on
every major political principle. It was true of Calhoun, as it was
true of Webster and true of Clay. In a rapidly changing America, with
economics in a state of flux, men were no longer free political agents,
guiding themselves by the fixed stars of accepted theory; they were
borne like corks on the current of the times, and their inconsistency
is the surest evidence that they spoke for their constituents. The
North and the South were at the parting of the ways, and if southern
imperialism created for its needs a philosophy of particularism, it
was met by a counter philosophy of nationalism created for its needs
by northern capitalism, which likewise was following the path of its
manifest destiny. The charge of innovation, indeed, lies more justly
against northern theory than southern; it was Webster rather than
Calhoun who ignored the teachings of the fathers.
Of these three streams of tendency it was the new imperialism of the
Black Belt that wore the deepest channel, gathering its tributaries
till it was swollen to an overwhelming flood that drew in every lesser
current. Every other interest was eventually sacrificed to slavery,
every ambition was laid upon that consuming altar. Southern political
thought, in consequence, came to be an ingenious study in the strategy
of defense. From the somewhat vague doctrine of states rights as struck
off by the Virginia school was elaborated a complete philosophy of
particularism with its principle of a protective state veto. Tremendous
as was the stir created by the doctrine of Nullification, that doctrine
was little more than a warning gesture, a militant expression of the
southern temper. The time was not ripe for the critical issue, the
philosophy of the new South was not yet clarified; the objective was
clearly seen, but the defenses were incomplete, the line of campaign
not yet laid down. That great work was in the skillful hands of
Calhoun, and much was yet to be done. The deeper purpose that lay
behind the gesture of Nullification was the purpose of erecting in the
slave states a civilization founded on a landed aristocracy that should
serve as a sufficient counterweight to the mercantile and industrial
civilization of the North; and in the event that the institution of
slavery were not assured of peaceful extension through the new West,
to secede and establish a southern Confederacy wherein a generous
civilization might develop, modeled after the Greek democracy. Such at
least was the dream of the noblest minds of the South.
Thrown early upon the defensive, southern political thought found too
little time to examine fundamental principles. The necessities of the
situation entailed a meticulous constitutional debate, in which the
terms of the Constitution were examined with microscopic care, and
interpreted in the light of their historical origin. Something of the
sterility of the lawyer’s mind marked the long debate; and little
of the suggestiveness of the philosopher’s. Acute as was Calhoun’s
reasoning, it reveals the weakness of contemporary political thought,
northern as well as southern. It concerned itself too exclusively
with government under the Constitution--its origin, the just
interpretation of the terms of the fundamental law, the potentialities
of consolidation inherent in the principle of loose construction. To
the broader problems of the nature and functions of the political
state--questions that had so deeply interested the speculative minds of
the French school--quite inadequate consideration was given. The drift
of circumstance was in the way of creating a leviathan state. Southern
orators railed at consolidation in abundant and florid language,
but they concerned themselves little with the deeper problem of the
relation of the political state to the well-being of the citizen.
This common weakness is strikingly evident in the work of Calhoun’s
successor, Alexander H. Stephens, whose interest was so exclusively
historical and constitutional as almost to exclude him from a place
among political philosophers.
II • John C. Calhoun • Realist
The greatest figure in that long controversy was certainly John C.
Calhoun, a man who set his face like flint against every northern
middle-class ambition, and with his dream of a Greek democracy steered
his beloved South upon the rocks. A truly notable figure was this
ascetic Carolinian. In the passionate debates over slavery he daily
matched powers with Webster and Clay and proved himself intellectually
the greatest of the three. He is the one outstanding political thinker
in a period singularly barren and uncreative. His influence was
commanding. Tall, lean, eager, with no humor, no playfulness, lacking
the magnetic personality of Clay and the ornate rhetoric of Webster,
speaking plainly and following his logic tenaciously, this gaunt
Scotch-Irishman became by virtue of intellect and character, driven by
an apostolic zeal, the master political mind of the South, an uncrowned
king who carried his native Carolina in his pocket like a rotten
borough. Long before his death he had expanded a political philosophy
into a school of thought. What he planned a hundred disciples hastened
to execute. Like Jefferson he was a pervasive influence in shaping
men’s opinions. It was impossible to ignore him or to escape the
admonitory finger that pointed at every weak and shuffling compromiser.
Whatever road one travels one comes at last upon the austere figure of
Calhoun, commanding every highway of the southern mind. He subjected
the philosophy of the fathers to critical analysis; pointed out
wherein he conceived it to be faulty; cast aside some of its most
sacred doctrines; provided another foundation for the democratic
faith which he professed. And when he had finished the great work of
reconstruction, the old Jeffersonianism that had satisfied the mind of
Virginia was reduced to a thing of shreds and patches, acknowledged
by his followers to have been a mistaken philosophy, blinded by
romantic idealism and led astray by French humanitarianism. To
substitute realism for idealism, to set class economics above abstract
humanitarianism, was the mission to which Calhoun devoted himself. He
undid for the plantation South the work of his old master. Speaking
in the name of democracy, he attacked the foundations on which the
democratic movement in America had rested, substituting for its
libertarian and equalitarian doctrines conceptions wholly alien and
antagonistic to western democracy, wholly Greek in their underlying
spirit.
Calhoun’s career was linked indissolubly with slavery. He was the
advocate and philosopher of southern imperialism, and in defense of
that imperialism he elaborated those particularist theories which
prepared the way for the movement of secession. Born and bred in
South Carolina, he was enveloped from infancy in the mesh of southern
provincialisms. Except for two years at Yale, where he graduated in the
class of 1804, and eighteen months reading law in Connecticut, his life
was spent between Washington and his plantation. He was in temperament
a Puritan, of that Scotch-Irish strain which, scattered along the
wide American frontier, greatly modified the American character and
gave to the South such different leaders as Stonewall Jackson and
Jefferson Davis. It was a hard, stern race--that Scotch-Irish--little
responsive to humanitarian appeal; and Calhoun was harder and sterner
than most. He held his emotions in strict subjection to his reason.
Intent on thinking every problem through from premise to conclusion,
concerned always with fundamental principles, he would have become,
in an environment congenial to humanistic thought, a distinguished
intellectual. His mind would have lost its rigidity and become pliable
from contact with diverse streams of theory, and his speculations would
have found new horizons from more generous intellectual acquisitions.
But unhappily there was nothing either at Washington or in South
Carolina that tended to liberalize his thinking. He had not gone to
school, as Jefferson had done, to the great thinkers of Europe; he
had not found an intellectual stimulus in revolutionary systems of
philosophy. He dwelt all his life in the arid world of politicians.
His two years at Yale may even be accounted a calamity. Timothy Dwight
and Calhoun were cut out of the same cloth. The South Carolina Puritan
would only be confirmed in his dogmatisms by the most dogmatic of
Yankee Puritans; and in consequence his career, like Jonathan Edwards’,
suffered from a narrow, ingrowing intellectualism. He was a potential
intellectual whose mind was unfertilized by contact with a generous
social culture.
Calhoun’s public life covered the forty years from 1810 to 1850,
from the first administration of Madison to that of Zachary Taylor.
For nearly half of the total period, up to the year 1828, he was a
politician of ability but without distinction. He entered Congress at a
time when the young men from the South and West were becoming impatient
with the cautious policy of the old Republicans led by Jefferson and
Madison. The war psychology was mounting under British pin-pricks,
and the young nationalists, forgetful that bayonets and cannon and
ships are not easily defeated by rhetoric, were eager to teach the
Mistress of the Seas some much-needed international manners. In those
early years Calhoun joined with Clay in driving through Congress a war
policy. In this he seems to have represented his constituents, whose
patriotism was always somewhat bellicose. During the shameful war
experience, the cool analytical Calhoun came near to exhibiting the
tawdry marks of the jingo; and thereafter for years there was little to
distinguish him from a Hamiltonian Federalist. He was a throughgoing
nationalist of the school of loose construction. He advocated a
protective tariff on the ground that “it would form a new and most
powerful cement, far outweighing any political objections that might be
urged against the system” (Gaillard Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 29). As
yet he had discovered no constitutional scruples against the exercise
of this or other implied powers. He was, he said, “no advocate for
refined arguments on the Constitution. The instrument is not intended
as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to
be construed with plain, good sense; and what can be more express than
the Constitution on this point?” (_ibid._, p. 30). As Secretary for War
in Monroe’s cabinet he was an advocate of internal improvements, and he
submitted to Congress an elaborate report on a proposed system of roads
and canals. Until the critical year 1828 there was little in Calhoun’s
career to distinguish him from Clay. The tide of national expansion was
running strong; the growth of exploitation was creating a middle-class
psychology; and Calhoun in these earlier years was as unconsciously
middle class as afterwards he became consciously aristocratic. He
sprang from an acquisitive race, and to the end of his life some
remnants of the old instincts clung to him despite his repudiation of
the middle-class political philosophy.
The year 1828, marked by a fierce discussion in South Carolina of
the Tariff of Abominations, proved the turning-point of his career.
As Vice President he had been little more than a spectator of the
growing discontent in his native state at the contrast between the
industrial prosperity of New England and the agricultural depression of
the South. But he could no longer remain an idle spectator. Pamphlets
and newspaper articles were appearing that sharply challenged his
position. Capitalistic Federalism and democratic equalitarianism were
equally under fire. The celebrated Dr. Cooper, an Englishman long
resident in South Carolina, who had suffered under the Alien and
Sedition law, had vigorously attacked the natural-rights dogma, and was
active in arousing the public mind against Calhoun’s consolidationist
tendencies.[402] The publication in 1821 of Yates’s _Minutes of Debates
of the Constitutional Convention_ had awakened widespread interest in
an historical interpretation of the Constitution, and the time was
ripe for a new period of constitutional debate. The tariff act of 1828
provided the immediate occasion. It opened the flood gates, and the
waters of states-rights doctrine that had long been gathering rushed
forth in a torrent. Calhoun hesitated no longer. The problem and the
solution had both clarified themselves in his mind, and he at once took
the lead in directing the unrest to achieve a definite end.
Calhoun’s contribution to political theory--a contribution that
elevates him to a distinguished place among American political
thinkers--was the child of necessity, and received its particularist
bias from the exigencies of sectional partisanship. With the rapid
expansion of the nation westward, and the consequent augmenting of a
potentially hostile free-soil power, the South was doomed to become
increasingly a minority voice in the councils of government; and if it
were to preserve its peculiar institution it must find more adequate
means of self-protection than it had enjoyed hitherto. The tendencies
most to be feared, in his judgment, were the spontaneous drift towards
consolidation, and an uncritical faith in numerical majorities.
He was convinced that America had too thoughtlessly accepted the
principle of political democracy as a sufficient safeguard against
the danger of arbitrary government. Soon or late it must discover,
what the South already was discovering, that numerical democracy,
unrestrained by constitutional limitations on its will, is no friend
to political justice. The critical test of every government is the
measure of protection afforded its weakest citizen; and judged by this
test a democratic state, when power has come to be centralized in few
hands, may prove to be no other than a tyrant. Irresponsible in its
unrestraint, the majority vote may easily outdo an Oriental despot
in arbitrary rule, and the more power it wields the more ruthless
will be its disregard of minority opinion. The political philosopher
who proposes to formulate an ideal democratic system of government,
therefore, must deal critically with this fundamental problem of
political justice, for upon the solution will turn the excellence and
permanence of every democracy. It was to this baffling problem that
Calhoun addressed himself.
In seeking a constitutional defense for the threatened southern
interests, he drew from the two great reservoirs of American
constitutional theory. From the Jeffersonian Republicans he derived his
familiar doctrine of states rights in opposition to the consolidating
principle; from the Federalists of the Montesquieu school he drew his
theory of static government, resulting from exactly balanced powers;
and from the amalgamation of these diverse theories he formulated a new
principle. Both schools of earlier thought, he had come to believe, had
been sound in their major premises, but both had gone astray in certain
important deductions. The experience of forty years, with the democracy
constantly augmenting its powers, had demonstrated to Calhoun’s
satisfaction both the grave danger that lay in the principle of
consolidation, and the insufficiency of existing checks on the Federal
government. The prime mistake of the Jeffersonians, he conceived, was
their belief that the democratic majority will necessarily serve the
cause of political justice; and the miscalculation of the Federalists
resulted from the belief that the division of powers provided in the
Constitution was adequate to prevent arbitrary government. He now
proposed to correct these two mistakes by providing an additional
check through the simple expedient--as logical as it was efficacious,
granted his premises--of recognizing the veto power of the individual
commonwealth upon an act of the Federal government. Stripped of its
states-rights limitation, this was in germ the principle of the
referendum, modified, however, by certain suggestive provisions.
The veto-power as a protective principle Calhoun regarded as the
hallmark of constitutional government. Granted that sovereignty
under the Constitution inheres in the people, and that all authority
is delegated, it follows that government is no more than an agent
with strictly defined fiduciary powers, all the acts of which are
subject to review by the principal. Whether such review shall be
immediate and plenary, or at more or less remove and limited,
becomes therefore a fundamental question of constitutional polity.
Unfortunately much confusion has resulted from an intentional
vagueness, contributed by interested groups to further particular ends,
in the common understanding of the terms, the people and government.
The former is rarely, as is usually assumed, a homogeneous body
with common interests, but a congeries of individuals and groups
and classes with diverse and often antagonistic interests; and the
latter--in a republic--is never a sacred entity, the residuary
legatee of sovereignty, to criticize which is to commit the crime
of _lèse-majesté_, but a group of officials invested with temporary
authority and actuated by motives common to all men. A necessary
preliminary, therefore, to an intelligent understanding of the
principle of veto is a critical analysis of these much misunderstood
terms.
Calhoun was far too honest a realist to be under any hallucinations in
regard to political government. He estimated at its full significance
“the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” Power he knew to be the
most insidious of poisons; every government is liable to the disease of
auto-intoxication. Seated securely in office the agent assumes all the
prerogatives of the principal and clothes his acts with the sanctity
of sovereignty. Armed with the taxing power, he distributes penalties
and benefits with partial hand, and unless an adequate defense
protects the weaker interests they will suffer a legal exploitation.
Every government justly rests under suspicion, and only the most
critical scrutiny of its conduct can keep it decently honest. Popular
government, from which the Republicans hoped too much, changes only
the outward form of the selfish struggle for power by substituting
party rule for class rule. With its disciplined party machine the
lure of political spoil encourages the most shameless exploitation of
the weaker groups, who have no recourse.[403] Hence, the more popular
the government, the more ruthless becomes the majority rule; and any
system of checks and balances that does not adequately restrain this
inherent tendency of party rule must prove a failure. However carefully
the political philosopher may provide for a division of powers among
executive, legislature and judiciary, he must fail of his object, for
a regnant majority will control all three branches of government, and
thus intrenched will defy the protests of the minority. The Montesquieu
theory had proved a failure in practice.
An even greater danger, in Calhoun’s judgment, lay in the current
misinterpretation of the term “the people,” the result of which was
the obscuring of the economic basis of society and the befuddling
of the whole problem of government. To this disastrous result, he
believed, both schools of political thought had contributed. The early
Republicans had oversimplified the political problem by assuming a
clear division between ruler and subject. The conception was a heritage
from European experience, where it had taken form as a strategic
move to align the unthinking mass against a despotic monarchy. The
Jeffersonians had used it to like purpose in their struggle against
consolidation, appealing to a common democracy against the aristocracy.
The early Federalists were even more blameworthy, for, understanding
clearly the economic origins of political power and the economic
ends served by the political state, they made their knowledge serve
their interests and concealed their designs by deceptive appeals to
patriotism. Every realist knows that “the people” is a political
fiction. Society is made up of individuals, each with his particular
interest. The total interests of the subject-citizens are necessarily
complex. Group and classify them as he may, the political philosopher
can never merge the parts in a coalescing whole, but must recognize
that the problem remains one of adjustments and compromises. It follows
therefore that any facile assumption that government represents the
people or rests on the will of the people is a disastrous fallacy.
Popular government rests on the will of the majority; aristocratic
government rests on the will of the aristocracy; and despotic
government rests on the will of the despot. It is an axiom that the
political state is partisan to those who administer it. The stakes of
rulership are high; the game of politics never lacks its devotees; the
business of deceiving the people in order to pluck the goose has long
been one of the respectable professions.
The perennial problem of constitutional government, then, in Calhoun’s
philosophy, remains what it was seen to be by the Federalist followers
of Montesquieu--the problem of restraining government by constitutional
checks to the end that it be kept just. Existing machinery having
demonstrated its inadequacy, it remained to provide more effective.
Freedom Calhoun regarded as the crown jewel of civilization, hardly
won, easily lost. But freedom was not to be measured by _habeas corpus_
acts and similar legal restraints on tyranny; it was freedom from legal
exploitation and statutory dictatorship. “The abuse of delegated power,
and the tyranny of the stronger over the weaker interests, are the two
dangers, and the only two to be guarded against; and if this be done
effectually, liberty must be eternal. Of the two, the latter is the
greater and most difficult to resist” (_Works_, Vol. VI, p. 32). In
more definite terms the problem is thus stated:
Two powers are necessary to the existence and preservation of
free States: a power on the part of the ruled to prevent rulers
from abusing their authority, by compelling them to be faithful
to their constituents, and which is effected through the right of
suffrage; and a power to compel the parts of society to be just to
one another, by compelling them to consult the interest of each
other--which can only be effected ... by requiring the concurring
assent of all the great and distinct interests of the community to
the measures of the Government. This result is the sum-total of all
the contrivances adopted by free States to preserve their liberty,
by preventing the conflicts between the several classes or parts of
the community. (_Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 189-190.)
In elaboration of the second phase of the problem Calhoun contributed
the principle on which his reputation as a political thinker must
rest--the doctrine of a concurrent majority. He found his solution
in an expansion of the principle of democracy--recovering the
true principle, he was fond of insisting--by superimposing upon
the consolidated, indiscriminate numerical majority the will of
a geographical majority; or in other words, by a special form of
sectional referendum.
It results, from what has been said, that there are two different
modes in which the sense of the community may be taken: one,
simply, by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the
right through a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the
majority. But one regards numbers only, and considers the whole
community one unit, having but one common interest throughout; and
collects the sense of the greater number of the whole, as that
of the community. The other, on the contrary, regards interests
as well as numbers;--considering the community as made up of
different and conflicting interests as far as the action of the
government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through its
majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as
the sense of the entire community. The former of these I call the
numerical, or absolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent,
or constitutional majority. (“A Disquisition on Government,” in
_Works_, Vol. I, p. 28.)
In such speculation on the possibility of achieving political justice
by the machinery of representation, Calhoun was face to face with a
revolutionary conception--the conception of proportional economic
representation. The idea was implicit in his assumption of an
existing economic sectionalism that must find adequate expression
through political agencies. He had come to understand the futility
of a miscellaneous numerical majority; he had only to go back to
eighteenth-century philosophy and substitute economic classes for
economic sectionalism, finding his social cleavages in economic
groups instead of geographical divisions, to have recast the whole
theory of representation. Clearly, he had made enormous strides in
his thinking. He had long since put behind him the philosophy of
Jefferson. He had subjected the principle of democracy to critical
scrutiny. But instead of rejecting it as an unworkable hypothesis, as
the Hamiltonian Federalists had done, he proposed to establish it on a
sound and permanent basis. The ideal of democracy he conceived to be
the noblest in the whole field of political thought, but misunderstood
and misapplied as it had been in America, it had become the mother of
every mischief. This betrayal of democracy he laid at the door of the
Jeffersonians. They had accepted too carelessly the romantic dogmas
of the French school, and had come to believe that democracy was
synonymous with political equalitarianism.
It was this false notion that had debased the noble ideal, and
delivered it over to the hands of the mob. To assert that men are
created free and equal is to fly in the face of every biological and
social fact. The first business of the true democrat, therefore,
was to reëxamine the nature of democracy and strip away the false
assumptions and vicious conclusions that had done it incalculable
injury. The Greeks, he pointed out, understood its essential nature
better than the moderns. Democracy assumes a co-partnership among
equals. Its only rational foundation is good will, and it can function
only through compromise. From this it follows that in a society
composed of high and low, capable and weak, worthy and unworthy--as
every historical society has been composed--a universal democracy is
impractical. The numerous body of social incompetents will suffer one
of two fates: they will be exploited by the capable minority under the
guise of free labor, or they will be accepted as the wards of society
and protected by the free citizens--they must inevitably become either
wage slaves or bond slaves, in either case incapable of maintaining
the rights of free members of the commonwealth. Democracy is possible
only in a society that recognizes inequality as a law of nature, but in
which the virtuous and capable enter into a voluntary co-partnership
for the common good, accepting wardship of the incompetent in the
interests of society. This was the Greek ideal and this ideal had
created Greek civilization.
Calhoun was thus brought face to face with the natural-rights theory,
which the glowing rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence had
disseminated throughout America, and which lay as a virus at the heart
of Jacksonianism. To destroy that theory, he believed, was a necessary
preliminary to any rational theory of democracy, and he turned to the
business with characteristic frankness. Upon the venerable dogmas he
threw the light of his realism, subjecting them to critical analysis.
The origin of government in compact was only a myth. The amiable being
known as man in a state of nature, whose portrait had been drawn by
the French romantics, he discovered in neither social nor biological
history. The true origin of government, he asserted in common with John
Adams, is to be found in practical necessity; government arises, as
Hobbes had pointed out, from the universal fact of human selfishness.
It has always been found necessary to lodge coercive powers in certain
hands as a social protection against individual aggression; and since
all men are impelled by self-interest, political systems are determined
in form and scope by this universal instinct. Without government there
is anarchy; with government there is potential tyranny. The crucial
problem to be solved by the political philosopher, hence, is to
determine the just delimitation between sovereign power and individual
liberty; the one protecting the rights of the whole, the other keeping
open fresh opportunity to advance.
Having thus established government on the firm basis of social
necessity, he proceeded to examine the romantic dogmas of liberty and
equality.
It follows, from what has been stated, that it is a great and
dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled
to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be
gratuitously lavished on all alike;--a reward reserved for the
intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving;--and not
a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and
vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying
it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is, and
ought to be the case. On the contrary its greatest praise,--its
proudest distinction is, that an all-wise Providence has reserved
it, as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our
faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than
liberty could not be conferred on the deserving;--nor a punishment
inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to
lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result
of some fixed law;--and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by
attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the
point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive,
and end in disappointment....
There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually
associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer
to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately
united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality.
That they are united to a certain extent,--and that equality of
citizens, in the eyes of the law, is essential to liberty in a
popular government, is conceded. But to go further, and make
equality of _condition_ essential to liberty, would be to destroy
both liberty and progress. The reason is, that inequality of
condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at
the same time, indispensable to progress.... It is, indeed, this
inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the
march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former
to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward
into their files. This gives to progress its greatest impulse. To
force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward
the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the
government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest
the march of progress. (“A Disquisition on Government,” in _Works_,
Vol. I, pp. 55-56.)
It was the persuasive ideal of a Greek democracy in the plantation
states that lay back of Calhoun’s defense of slavery--a defense that
thrusts into sharp relief the change of southern attitude in the
decade of the thirties. The earlier Jeffersonian attitude had been
fairly expressed by a Georgia representative in the debate on the
Missouri question:
Believe me, sir, I am not a panegyrist of slavery. It is an
unnatural state; a dark cloud which obscures half the lustre of our
free institutions!... Would it be fair; would it be manly; would
it be generous; would it be just, to offer contumely and contempt
to the unfortunate man who wears a cancer in his bosom, because he
will not submit to cautery at the hazard of his existence? (Quoted
in Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 53.)
But with slavery put upon its defense, the southern spokesmen passed
from apology to praise. From the first, Calhoun accepted the system
implicitly, but now he subjected it to critical analysis in the light
of his theory of a Greek democracy. Over against it he set the northern
system of wage labor, and he came to the conclusion that the latter
was more brutal and inhumane than the former. He was convinced that
heretofore the South had made a serious mistake in apologizing for its
peculiar institution, and in expecting its eventual extinction. In
this matter the fathers had been wrong. No serious-minded Southerner
any longer believed that slavery was on the way to natural extinction.
It was spreading daily and must be permitted to spread. The hopes of
southern civilization were bound up with it. The North must be brought
to recognize it as a beneficent institution, necessary to a free,
cultivated democracy, the only alternative to those fierce conflicts
between wage labor and capital which already in the manufacturing
states were threatening the permanence of American institutions. In
a speech delivered in 1838, Calhoun thus sketched the new southern
conception:
Many in the South once believed that it [slavery] was a moral and
political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in
its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis
for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us that
the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes
it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in
all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions
as ours do not exist. The Southern States are an aggregate, in
fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a
little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates
in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he
is the common representative. These small communities aggregated
make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally
represented and perfectly harmonized. Hence the harmony, the union,
the stability of that section, which is rarely disturbed, except
through the action of this Government. The blessing of this state
of things extends beyond the limits of the South. It makes that
section the balance of the system; the great conservative power,
which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted,
from rushing into conflict.... Such are the institutions which
these deluded madmen are stirring heaven and earth to destroy,
and which we are called on to defend by the highest and most
solemn obligations that can be imposed on us as men and patriots.
(“Remarks on the State Rights Resolutions in Regard to Abolition.
January 12, 1838,” in _Works_, Vol. III, p. 180.)
Thus in the end the political philosopher turns partisan to a cause.
His fruitful speculations on the theory of representation, his
inquiry into the economic basis of politics, remained incomplete, the
larger reaches only half explored. Espousing the ideal of democracy,
he yielded to the seductions of a Greek republic. Beginning as a
Jeffersonian, he ended as the philosopher of a slave aristocracy, from
whose principles men like Governor McDuffie of South Carolina deduced
the dictum that “the laboring population of no nation on earth are
entitled to liberty, or capable of enjoying it.” It was a curious
dream, yet no more curious than his faith in an obsolete article in
the Constitution to withstand the advance of a hostile economy. There
is something almost tragic in the self-deception of this clear-minded
realist in his appeal to a paper defense against economic forces.
“The Constitution--no interference--no discrimination,” he cried
passionately in repudiating the right of Abolition petition. “These are
the grounds on which the battle may be safely fought.... You must tell
these deluded fanatics, you have no right to intermeddle in any form or
shape.... Expediency, justice, plighted faith, and the Constitution:
these, and these only, can be relied on to avert conflict” (_Works_,
Vol. III, p. 190).
Lost faiths and repudiated prophets go down to a common grave. The
living have little inclination to learn from the dead. The political
principles of Calhoun have had scant justice done them by later
generations who incline to accept the easy opinion that the cause which
triumphs is altogether the better cause. What Calhoun so greatly feared
has since come about. He erected a last barrier against the progress of
middle-class ideals--consolidation in politics and standardization in
society; against a universal cash-register evaluation of life: and the
barrier was blown to pieces by the guns of the Civil War. Historically
he was the last spokesman of the great school of the eighteenth
century, the intellectual descendant of John Adams. The two men were
much alike in the broad principles of their political philosophy, and
identical necessities brought them to identical conclusions. They
agreed in the fundamental principle that property will rule by reason
of its inherent power, and that political justice is attainable only by
a nicely calculated system of checks and balances, which provides each
important group with a defensive veto. But in the social experience on
which Adams founded his doctrine, political antagonism was potential
in rival classes, and justified a division of powers on the model
of the British constitution. In the intervening years, however, the
economic alignment had become sectional, the rise of party government
had created a new problem, and the earlier division of powers seemed
to demand a supplementary veto if the nice balance contemplated in
the Constitution were to be maintained. This was the kernel of the
states-rights doctrine which Calhoun elaborated with such skill. That
he should have associated the principle with a cause that was doomed
was disastrous to the just fame of Calhoun. More, it was disastrous to
the vital democratic principle of decentralized powers. In championing
a Greek democracy Calhoun affronted the latent idealism of America, and
the harm he did to agrarian democracy was incalculable.
III • Alexander H. Stephens • Constitutionalist