Southern scholars are pretty well agreed that the ablest defender

of the doctrine of secession was Alexander H. Stephens, the Georgia

commoner. He was sprung from the plain people. Brought up in severe

poverty, self-taught, the friend of the poor, he was no child of an

exclusive planter aristocracy, and was never quite trusted by them.

The victim of a slight, ramshackly physique, never weighing a hundred

pounds, never knowing a well day, fearfully handicapped in the everyday

matter of living, it is amazing that soul and body held together for

seventy-one years and more amazing that he accomplished what he did.

“Throughout life,” says one of his biographers, “he was practically

a brain without a body.” Temperamentally despondent, he was driven

into restless activity to forget self. His will was fine-tempered

steel and ill health never broke his courage even when it laid him on

his back. He feared nothing, but took a position and argued a cause

without regard to personal consequences. He never flinched from the

personal encounters which the lawless code of Georgia politics invited.

A morbid consciousness of his feeble physique sometimes drove him

into truculence, and on one occasion he was stabbed eighteen times by

a certain ornament of the Georgia bench, and saved his life only by

grasping the blade that was driven at his throat. But such encounters

can be explained on the ground of overcorrection; the real Stephens was

gentle, peace-loving, hating all swaggerers military or civilian, “a

man of generous sympathies, of broad humanity, a democrat of democrats,

a friend of all the world” (Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_,

p. 253). The words _Non sibi sed aliis_, cut in his tombstone at

Crawfordville, come nearer the truth than epitaphs usually do. He was

never selfishly ambitious and he could justly say after the fall of the

Confederacy, “I am old and weak in bodily infirmity, but I have done

my duty to God and my country, and I am ready for whatever fate may be

assigned me” (_ibid._, p. 393).

Stephens was a lifelong student of politics, regarding it as “one

of the most intricate, as well as interesting subjects that can

engage the attention of reflecting minds.” He was not a political

philosopher like Calhoun, concerned with principle and theory, but a

constitutional historian concerned to trace the genesis and development

of the fundamental law of the land. He was probably more widely read

in the early literature of the Constitution than any other man of his

generation. He had thumbed and dog-eared Elliot’s _Debates_, and could

cite dates and explain circumstances for the elucidation of doubtful

points or the correcting of an unhistorical interpretation. He knew the

genesis of every article, of almost every word in the Constitution, and

the reasons which determined the special form which each assumed; and

this exact knowledge equipped him for the task of critical commentator

on earlier commentators. Unfortunate was the theorizer who fell into

his hands. Federalist expositors like Story and Motley, given to rash

generalization from inadequate data, suffered disaster under his

critical inspection. With his fund of historical knowledge he was amply

prepared for the labor of love to which he turned after the war, and in

his _Constitutional View of the War between the States_ he produced

one of the most notable studies in the origin of the Constitution that

we have.

Certain deep personal needs, taking form in passionate conviction,

determined the bias of Stephens’ political philosophy, which was

quite simple, consistent and inflexible, from his first entry into

public life until his death. There was no subtlety in his intellectual

processes, no balancing uncertainly between diverse appeals, but

a clear faith which he expounded to the common voter in confident

expectation that it would awaken sympathetic response. His extensive

reading was not so much a disinterested search for light on the

ideal relations of men in society, as for confirmation of certain

prepossessions. That those prepossessions were shared by his fellow

Georgians, that they were the natural product of existing social

conditions, gave to them an added sanction. The creative source of

his philosophy was a passionate love of freedom; and his meditations

convinced him that the only freedom worth a tuppence is civil liberty

under civil law--that the test of any civilization is the concern it

manifests for the safeguarding of such liberty by exact and adequate

constitutional provisions. His reverence for law was a religion with

him, and his love of the Constitution as the fostering mother of the

law was only this side idolatry. “No stronger or more ardent Union man

ever lived than I was,” he asserted late in life. Intense loyalty was

almost commonplace amongst the people from whom he sprang. Love of the

Union, and of the Constitution as a guarantee of that Union, was far

stronger in the South before the Civil War than in the North. But it

was the Constitution of the fathers, not a newfangled consolidating

instrument that drew all power to Washington, that they loved. Pride

of locality--naïve though it might be and provincial--the spontaneous

pride of a simple untraveled people--was rooted in the southern

heart. It was nourished by a deep love of homestead and neighborhood,

natural to an agrarian society; and it came to political expression

in the doctrine that the commonwealth must be free to manage its own

affairs in its own way. The theory of states rights, amongst such

a people, was not an abstract principle but an expression of the

psychology of localism created by everyday habit. This explains the

intensity of conviction which colors the thought of Stephens. The

principle of local sovereignty was inbred. He rarely deigns to argue

the question. He never concerned himself with abstract argument--as

Jefferson had done--to prove the superior excellence of local home

rule. This failure, indeed, may perhaps be accounted his greatest

weakness as a political thinker. Rather he was concerned to prove that

state sovereignty existed prior to the Union, that it was jealously

guarded at the making of the Constitution, that it had never been

surrendered, and hence was the constitutional order until destroyed by

the Civil War. But if he refrained from abstract argument touching the

desirability of localizing political power, he exhibited a Jeffersonian

fear of unregulated power which consolidation makes possible.

This passionate love of freedom he exemplified in his own career. He

followed his convictions and spoke his own mind, regardless of occasion

or circumstance. He was no man’s tool. He hated a demagogue and never

curried favor with his constituents or calculated popular response. In

his public life he considered himself a representative of the people

of Georgia, and the one object of his labors was the preservation of

that constitutional liberty in which they had grown up. In furtherance

of this policy he found himself not infrequently at odds with other

southern leaders. He vigorously opposed his party in its Mexican war

policy, looking upon it as no other than imperialistic vandalism aimed

at a weaker neighbor for the purpose of extending slave territory.

There was no glamor for him in military victories; he would not concede

that a republic might plead manifest destiny in extenuation of armed

aggression, or that the ends of civilization may be furthered by war.

In a speech opposing the policy of his fellow Whigs, he thus expressed

his conception of national progress:

I am no enemy to the extension of our domain, or the enlargement

of the boundaries of the republic. I trust the day is coming,

and not far distant, when the whole continent will be ours; when

our institutions shall be diffused and cherished, and republican

government enjoyed, throughout the length and breadth of this

land.... That this is our ultimate destiny, if wise counsels

prevail, I confidently believe. But it is not to be accomplished

by the sword.... Republics never spread by arms. We can properly

enlarge only by voluntary accessions....

There is much said in this country of the party of progress. I

profess to be of that party; but I am far from advocating that kind

of progress which many of those who seem anxious to appropriate

the term exclusively to themselves are using their exertions to

push forward. Theirs, in my opinion, is a downward progress. It

is a progress of party, of excitement, of lust of power; a spirit

of war, aggression, violence and licentiousness. It is a progress

which, if indulged in, would soon sweep over all law, all order,

and the Constitution itself.... It is to progress in _these_

essential attributes of national greatness that I would look: the

improvement of mind, the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among

men,” the erection of schools, colleges and temples of learning;

the progress of intellect over matter; the triumph of mind over the

animal propensities; the advancement of kind feeling and good will

among the nations of the earth; the cultivation of virtue and the

pursuits of industry; the bringing into subjection and subservience

to the use of man of all the elements of nature around us; in a

word, the progress of civilization, and everything that elevates

and ennobles man. This ... is not to be done by wars, whether

foreign or domestic. Fields of blood and carnage may make men brave

and heroic, but seldom tend to make nations either virtuous or

great. (Quoted in Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, pp. 79-80.)

A man of peace, Stephens was greatly agitated over the movement of

secession. He fought the Fire Eaters to the bitter end in his native

state, but like other high-minded Southerners he went out with his

commonwealth. Loyalty to Georgia was stronger than loyalty to the

nation. But in the new order he preserved his old principles. The

Jeffersonian democrat could not forget his teachings. When the

Confederacy was discussing its proposed Constitution, he took alarm

at some loose talk about the desirability of setting up a monarchy.

His old friend Bob Toombs, one of the ablest of the southern leaders,

quite frankly preferred the English system to the American.[404] There

seems to have been considerable comment to like effect amongst the Tory

hot-heads; but the wind was not blowing in that direction and such

straws were only the stirrings of vagrant eddies. The Constitution as

adopted was more democratic than the older instrument--an outcome to

which Stephens contributed greatly.

As Vice President of the Confederacy he constituted himself the special

guardian of constitutional liberty, and his jealous concern at what

he regarded as administrative usurpations of power brought on grave

differences with President Davis. Even in the urgent crises of war he

would not sanction the use of extra-constitutional powers. He knew

better than most that power grows by what it feeds on, that too often

war destroys the liberty it professes to be serving. To win the war

and lose the peace, to secede in defense of constitutional rights and

then tamely yield them up, seemed to him a pitiful ending, and when

President Davis suspended the right of _habeas corpus_ and his generals

proclaimed martial law, he took alarm. “All such orders,” he said,

“are palpable and dangerous usurpations, and if permitted to continue

will end in military despotism.... Better in my judgment that Richmond

should fall, and that the enemy’s armies should sweep our whole country

from the Potomac to the Gulf than that our people should submissively

yield obedience to one of these edicts of our own generals” (Pendleton,

_Alexander H. Stephens_, p. 292). Freedom of speech he would not have

interfered with under any excuse. The suspension of civil law he

considered a threat aimed at every citizen of the South. He had heard,

he said, that one purpose of the act was “to control certain elections

and certain expected assemblages in North Carolina”--where there was a

good deal of disaffection--“to put a muzzle upon certain presses, and

a bit in the mouth of certain speakers of that State. If this be so, I

regard it as the more dangerous to public liberty” (_ibid._, p. 313).

To the question, “Can you not trust the President?” he replied in words

that deserve to be remembered:

To the question of whether I would not or cannot trust him with

these high powers not conferred by the Constitution, my answer is:

I am utterly opposed to everything looking to or tending toward

dictatorship in this country. There is no man living and not one of

the illustrious dead, whom, if now living, I would so trust.... I

would not turn on my heel to choose between masters. I was not born

to acknowledge a master from either the North or the South. I shall

never choose between candidates for that office. I have no wish

or desire to live after the degradation of my country, and have

no intention to survive its liberties, if life be the necessary

sacrifice of their maintenance to the utmost of my abilities.

(_Ibid._, pp. 313-314.)

No argument of expediency, no appeal to military necessity ever moved

him from the belief that the sole justification of government is the

maintenance of liberty, and that the sole guarantee of such liberty is

the orderly process of civil law. He was harassed by the encroachment

upon individual freedom demanded by war, north as well as south. “The

North to-day,” he said, “presents the spectacle of a free people having

gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet

attained is to make slaves of themselves” (_ibid._, p. 293). Perhaps no

other public man in America kept his head amidst the passions of the

time so completely as Stephens. He was utterly beyond reach of jingo

appeal, and he suffered what the individual must expect to suffer who

pits his single conscience against the mass will. He was branded as a

traitor, and only his extraordinary hold on the affections of the plain

people of Georgia saved him from the bitterest experience.

During the black period following the southern collapse, when he

was disfranchised, broken in health past mending, and hated by the

followers of President Davis, Stephens sought distraction in writing

American history. Three and a half years, from 1867 to 1870, he devoted

to his _Constitutional View of the Late War between the States_. The

case for states rights has never been more convincingly put than in

this monumental study. The first volume in particular, which deals

with the history of the Constitution, is an acute and able work. The

thesis on which it rests is the doctrine which Paine and Jefferson

derived from the French school, namely, that a constitutional compact

is terminable. Elaborated by Stephens and applied to the case in

question, the doctrine becomes this: that the right of secession is

a civil as well as a revolutionary right; that it is implied in the

compact originally entered into by the several states; that any state

may rightfully take back what it had peacefully granted, when such

action shall seem to it desirable. The sovereign commonwealth has

never abrogated its sovereignty; the Constitution is a Federal compact

amongst equals; the United States is a federated Union, not an organic

nation. To conceive of the organic law as a consolidating instrument

binding the individual citizen immediately to the central government,

as Webster and Judge Story had done, was not only unhistorical but

contrary to every fact and every tradition. To arrive at the principle

of consolidation, and hold that the right of secession is only a

revolutionary right, one must deliberately shut one’s eyes to the early

history of the Constitution.

Not content to prove the original compact nature of the

Constitution--an argument that runs through fourteen hundred pages,

buttressed by a mass of citations from all sources and wholly

convincing in its evidence--Stephens undertakes to prove the wisdom of

the fathers in establishing the federal union in compact. In respecting

existing loyalties to the several commonwealths, they not only

preserved the local democracies--which, as a Jeffersonian, Stephens

believed were the foundation of good government--but they established

the federal state on a strong and enduring foundation. The Hamiltonian

consolidationists had asserted that a strong state must rest on the

principle of coercive sovereignty, that it can he held together only

through the exercise of authority. Stephens replied by laying down the

counter principle that the secret of a strong and enduring state is to

be discovered in the spontaneous loyalty of its citizens, and that in

consequence a democracy which rests on the good will of the people as a

whole is the most enduring of all forms.

A Government, to be worth anything, ... must be strong. Its parts

and members must be held together by force of some sort. This I

cordially admit. We do not differ as to the force or its extent; we

differ only as to its nature and character. Should it be a physical

or moral force? In my judgment, the strongest force that can hold

the parts or constituent elements of any Government together is the

affection of the people towards it. (_Constitutional View, etc._,

Vol. I, p. 526.)

Affection, he reasoned, cannot be coerced. It must spring spontaneously

from the recognition that government is useful, that it is just, that

it treats all its parts and members equally, that it is an agency

erected by a free people to serve the ends of freedom. Allegiance is

an individual compact between the citizen and government. Destroy the

principle of voluntary allegiance, seek to coerce the citizen, impose

upon minorities the ruthless will of majorities, subjugate individual

commonwealths, and the federal Union which Jefferson believed to be

“the strongest Government on Earth,” would indeed become what Hamilton

in his blindness to the secret of power believed that it was--“a frail

and worthless fabric.” “But the indissoluble union between the several

states of this Confederated Nation is, after all, not in the _right_,

but in the _heart_” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 527). So long as the rights of

all are respected, the common interest and common loyalty will preserve

the union. Injustice alone is to be feared, for no political bonds can

long resist the action of this most potent of social dissolvents.

Modern as Stephens was in the assertion of the principle of good will

as the source of sovereignty in democratic government, he belonged to

his own generation in his blindness to economic motives. He thought

exclusively in legal and constitutional terms; he remained wholly a

lawyer. It is hard to understand how one so profoundly read in our

political history should have failed to discover the workings of

economic forces beneath the surface of politics. Calhoun, bred in

the same Jeffersonian school, had found his way through the mist of

equalitarianism to the solid realism of an earlier day; but to the last

of his fourteen hundred pages of exposition Stephens retained the

illusion that the political state is something apart from economics and

superior to it. He conceived of government as an end in itself, and

this lends an air of unreality to his thinking. An ardent Jeffersonian,

he reduced the philosophy of his master to the compact theory of

government. The economic basis of Jefferson’s philosophy, his love of

an agrarian order and hatred of capitalistic exploitation--motives

which serve to explain and justify his theory of local self

government--Stephens wholly ignores. The result is a grotesque

perversion of a philosophy which John Taylor had elaborated clearly.

Jefferson was a much greater political thinker than Stephens conceived,

although he called him the “greatest philosophical statesman” America

has produced. In his estimate of Andrew Jackson he falls into the same

mistake. He attempts to reduce the confused career of Jackson--half

middle-class in his earlier years and later returning to agrarian

principles--to the same narrow compass of the compact theory. Even

Webster, for whom he entertained “the highest esteem and admiration,”

and in praise of whose moral qualities he is almost fulsome,[405] he

quite failed to understand. Webster’s theory of the Constitution, he

clearly demonstrated, was utterly unhistorical; but Webster’s economic

alliances he ignored. What havoc was wrought in current politics by

suffering political theory to obscure economic reality is suggested by

the fact that Stephens, a Jeffersonian in every instinct, turned Whig

and voted for Webster in 1852--after the latter’s death. Politics makes

strange bedfellows, yet it must have been an ample bed that could sleep

the spokesman of an agrarian economy and the spokesman of capitalism

side by side.

In his attitude towards slavery Stephens was a product of his Georgia

environment. His views were ready-made, out of the common southern

storehouse. The economic determinism which he ignored in politics had

its revenge, and the man who often differed with his constituents on

political issues fell victim to the subtle power of economics. As the

South Carolina philosophy took form, issuing finally in the romantic

conception of a Greek democracy, it imposed itself imperiously on the

southern mind, on the commoner equally with the aristocrat. It was

impossible to escape, unless, like Moncure Conway, one were of an

idealistic temper far different from the common run. For Stephens it

proved impossible. In this matter of slavery he had no individual

opinion; his mind was molded by the common psychology and became a

repository of the common prejudice. He followed his fire-eating friend

Bob Toombs into the camp of Calhoun, and talked about a Greek democracy

in true Charleston style. In a speech delivered on March 21, 1861,

shortly after he was chosen Vice President of the Confederacy, he gave

expression to the new philosophy in these words:

The prevailing ideas entertained by ... most of the leading

statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution

were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the

laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally,

and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal

with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that,

somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution

would be evanescent and pass away.... Those ideas, however,

were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of

the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is

founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid,

its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not

equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior

race--is his natural and normal condition ... in conformity with

the ordinance of the Creator.... Our Confederacy is founded upon

principles in strict conformity with these [Divine] laws. This

stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the

chief of the corner”--the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice.

(Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, pp. 251-254.)

To the end of his life Stephens saw no reason to change his opinion

on negro slavery. He regarded it as more humane than wage slavery

because of the patriarchal responsibility devolving upon the master.

The institution was not founded, he said, on “the erroneous dogma of

the greatest good to the greatest number,” but on the broader principle

of securing “the greatest good possible, morally, intellectually, and

politically, to all classes of persons ... without necessary wrong or

detriment to any” (_Constitutional View, etc._, Vol. I, pp. 539-542).

In his relations with his own slaves he followed the best traditions

of the South. His kindness won their loyalty and affection. “Ef he

ain’t in heaven,” said a house servant after his death, “’tain’t no

use for anybody else to try to git dere” (Pendleton, _Alexander H.

Stephens_, p. 100). To the argument of Hinton Helper that the system

was economically ruinous to the poor white, he seems to have given no

consideration; but to the argument of the Abolitionist that it was

immoral, he replied with deep conviction. On that point he would not

yield an inch. After quoting a miscellany of Biblical texts from the

earliest Hebraic times down to Paul, he comments naïvely:

To maintain that Slavery is _in itself sinful_, in the face of all

that is said and written in the Bible upon the subject, with so

many sanctions of the relation by the Deity himself, does seem to

me to be little short of blasphemous! It is a direct imputation

upon the wisdom and justice, as well as the declared ordinances of

God, as they are written in the inspired oracles, to say nothing of

their manifestation in the universe around us. (_Ibid._, Vol. II,

p. 83.)

It is doubtful wisdom for the layman to meddle with Scripture. Stephens

was a sounder interpreter of the writings of the constitutional fathers

than of the will of God.

A careful historian devoted to a single idea rather than a creative

political thinker; a thorough democrat of the Jeffersonian school,

humanitarian, liberty-loving, courageous; a man who devoted his life

to the preservation of constitutional liberty as it had taken shape

before the industrial revolution unsettled the basis of modern life,

Alexander H. Stephens was an honest gentleman who bravely defended

the traditions of the South in the face of a new order. He was of

an earlier generation, instinctively hostile to all consolidation,

which, under the impulse of economic evolution, was obliterating state

lines, gathering financial power in great reservoirs, and creating a

new alignment between labor and capital. With such evolution it was

axiomatic that political practice should follow economic fact; that

a consolidating wealth should create a consolidated political state.

Great enterprises with ramifications in every section would not long

tolerate a multitude of state sovereignties; sovereignty must be

centralized at Washington where it could be guided and controlled.

The war only hastened what in the nature of things was inevitable.

Stephens rightly insisted that slavery was only the immediate _casus

belli_. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory

and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic

economic systems. That the principle of local self-government should

have been committed to the cause of slavery, that it was loaded with

an incubus certain to alienate the liberalism of the North, may be

accounted one of the tragedies of American history. It was disastrous

to American democracy, for it removed the last brake on the movement

of consolidation, submerging the democratic individualism of the

South in an unwieldy mass will, and surrendering the country to the

principle of capitalistic exploitation. Stephens never seems to have

realized this grave mistake in strategy. He never realized that the

principle of democracy, in the cause of which he believed that he was

faithful to the end, received a staggering blow from the enlistment of

northern liberalism under the banners of a consolidating nationalism.

He remained to the last an unreconstructed Jeffersonian, convinced that

the lost cause was the cause of liberal democracy.

IV • Francis Lieber • A New-Modeled Federalism

To turn from Calhoun and Stephens to Francis Lieber is to pass from the

South to the North, from an obsolescent political theory to a prophetic

conception, from the doctrine of states rights to the principle of an

evolving state that draws all lesser sovereignties into its orbit by

the law of attraction. Joseph Story had educed the legal conception

of the organic nature of the federal union from the terms of the

Constitution; Francis Lieber provided a philosophical background

that justified the same conclusion; and under the combined legal

and philosophical attack the compact theory found its philosophical

breastworks leveled, its natural-rights theory undermined, and its

commanding position effectively turned.

The figure of our first academic political philosopher appears oddly

out of place in the midst of South Carolina politicians, yet fate

set the studious German in the thick of the Fire Eaters, to cogitate

a philosophy of freedom in the land of slavery, and to justify the

spirit of nationalism amongst the advocates of particularism. For

twenty-one years he lived quietly in his southern classroom and study,

disregarding the passions that buzzed about him, elaborating ideas

that in later years came to exercise a determining influence upon

our academic political thinkers, and publishing ponderous volumes

that marked the beginning of the swing away from the natural-rights

philosophy and towards the conception of an engrossing political

state. Applying German liberalism to American constitutionalism, he

succeeded in new-modeling the Federalism of Hamilton and sending it

forth to meet the needs of an imperializing generation. He agreed

with Calhoun in the latter’s attack on French romantic theories; he

agreed with Webster in the conception of the organic nature of the

federal compact; but he went further and elaborated a theory of the

state as an historical development that receives its form and spirit

from the impress of social needs. Building on a foundation provided by

Montesquieu and Burke, guided by Hamilton and Marshall, he set about

erecting a structure that in the hands of Theodore Woolsey and John W.

Burgess came to overtop all local and state sovereignties--an imperial

authority that, in the words of Burgess, must become “the organ of

interpretation in last instance of the order of life for its subjects”

(Merriam, _American Political Theories_, p. 299). In that subtle shift

of vocabulary from citizen to subject appears the final result of the

speculations begun by Lieber, which in rejecting the natural-rights

philosophy overthrew the defenses erected by the eighteenth century

against an engrossing political state, and set the individual citizen

at the mercy of a new divine-right sovereignty. “Really the state

cannot be conceived,” according to Burgess, “without sovereignty,

_i.e._ without unlimited power over its subjects; that is its very

essence” (Merriam, _American Political Ideas: 1865-1917_, p. 380).

Between the democratic Stephens and the imperializing Burgess stands

the work of Francis Lieber. Born in Germany in the year 1800, son of

a well-to-do Berlin family, Lieber’s youth and young manhood fell in

stirring times. When only fifteen he served in the Waterloo campaign

under Blücher, was wounded, stricken with typhus, and nearly lost his

life. From those perilous experiences he emerged a pronounced liberal.

During the Metternich reaction he fell under suspicion, served a

prison term for his political opinions, graduated from the University

of Jena, and in 1822 went to Greece with a group of young German

idealists to serve the cause of revolution. Disgusted with the Greek

character he made his way to Italy, fell in with the historian Niebuhr,

became tutor to the latter’s son for a year, continued his university

studies, was a second time imprisoned, and finally in 1826 quitted

a hopelessly reactionary Germany, spent a year in England, and then

emigrated to America, following the example of Prof. Charles Follen.

In Boston he taught gymnastics for a time, edited the _Encyclopedia

Americana_, and in 1835 was appointed to the professorship of history

and political economy in South Carolina College. Here he remained

till 1856, teaching, writing, and acquiring academic fame. In 1855

he aspired to the presidency of the college, a post then vacant, but

his political theories were in disrepute with the legislature, and his

views on slavery were under general suspicion. Becoming embroiled with

the politicians, he lost the post, resigned his professorship, and went

to New York City, and in 1857 he was called to the new chair of history

and political science at Columbia, where he remained till his death in

1872.

The two books on which rests his reputation, _Political Ethics_

(1838-1839) and _Civil Liberty and Self-Government_ (1853), are

substantial volumes quite lacking the genial note that marks his

_Stranger in America_ (1834), a series of sketchy letters that

among other things contains an extraordinarily vivid account of his

experiences at Waterloo (_Letters VI, VII_). To a casual reader these

excursions into the philosophy of politics are as soberly respectable

as a judge’s wig, as studiously conventional as a professor’s gown.

He went about the business of blowing up the accepted Jeffersonian

philosophy decently, in the name of the law and under the high sanction

of liberty. There can be no doubt that this German liberal was a

passionate lover of liberty, and no doubt of his conviction that

freedom is possible only in a society under the reign of law. Like

Hamilton, he had no local ties or state loyalties to circumscribe his

political allegiance. It was natural for him to think in terms of

nationality. His bitter experience in Germany had laid open to him the

fatal weakness of petty states, and he was loath to see repeated in

America the history of warring antagonisms that disrupted the German

people. He was a profound admirer of the British constitution, more

English than German in his conception of liberty.

The nationalism of Lieber was identical with that of John Adams. It

was, in a phrase, government by law. But this government by law was

both political and legal. The former, he believed, was admirably

provided for by the federal Constitution; the latter was equally

provided for by the body of the Common Law; with these twin safeguards,

he was convinced, the liberty of the citizen was assured. In his

interpretation of the Constitution Lieber added little that was new.

He followed the older Federalists back to Montesquieu, and accepted

the existing system of constitutional checks as the final word of

political wisdom. In _Civil Liberty and Self-Government_ he glorifies

the federal system as the apotheosis of representative republicanism,

quite unconcerned at its undemocratic features. The sufficiency of

the Common Law to all social needs and the implicit sovereignty of

the judiciary, he regards as equally axiomatic. “The law,” he says,

“must be the lord and our ‘earthly god,’ and not a man, a set of men,

or the multitude” (_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_, p. 208). Yet

with the common blindness of the legalist, he proceeds to erect a

profession above society, and exalts a group of judges, appointive and

not elective, preferably holding office for life, as the embodiment of

impartial justice. That it is a presumption contrary to fact seems not

to have entered his mind. That judicial interpretation implies judicial

legislation, and that judicial legislation implies the sovereignty

of lawyers, are logical deductions of which his philosophy made no

account. Unfriendly to a democracy, he was content to yield authority

into the hands of the judiciary.

But if in his exaltation of the Common Law he was as extreme a legalist

as Hugh Legaré, in his doctrine of historical evolution he discovered

the seeds of freedom in what he calls institutions. By these he means

the organic expressions of daily life, or the customs of society which

take spontaneous form from its needs. It is no other than the social

fabric that Tom Paine was fond of contrasting, in its pervasive and

beneficent coöperation, with the repressive tyrannies of the political

state. Where liberty reposes thus in the social fabric, Lieber argues,

the sovereign power is held in check; and where institutional freedom

has not taken root, the political state will run into absolutism.

“Liberty,” he argues, “is a thing that grows, and institutions are its

very garden beds. There is no liberty which as a national blessing has

leaped into existence in full armor like Minerva from the head of Jove.

Liberty is crescive in its nature. It takes time, and is difficult,

like all noble things.... It must be defended, developed, conquered,

and bled for. It can never be added, like a mere capital on a column;

it must pervade the whole body” (_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_,

pp. 334-335, third edition). “Liberty stands in need of character,” and

this character is received from social institutions. He then proceeds:

... An institution is a system or body of usages, laws, or

regulations of extensive and recurring operation, containing within

itself an organism by which it effects its own independent action,

continuance, and generally its own farther development. Its object

is to generate, effect, regulate, or sanction a succession of

acts, transactions, or productions of a peculiar class or kind.

The idea of an institution implies a degree of self-government.

Laws act through human agents, and these are, in the case of

institutions, their officers or members. (_Ibid._, p. 300.)

It was the deep-rooted _civisme anglais_, he believed, that had

developed the orderly liberty of the English race; and it is this same

institutional spirit that provides the surest check upon the augmenting

power of the political state. There can be no tyranny where society is

trained and disciplined in liberty.

The creative source and origin of this excellent _civisme anglais_

Lieber discovered in the principle of local self-government; in

the exercise of local control of local interests; the enjoyment of

innumerable lesser sovereignties within the larger national organism.

These lesser sovereignties are both civil and social, and the amount

of liberty enjoyed in a given society is measured by the independent

vigor with which they function. The exercise of definite rights by the

several states is clearly one of the important institutional functions

of self-government, but it is only one. The New England town-meeting,

county and city governments, are even more important, while outside

these civil organisms are innumerable social organisms, exercising

their common right of establishing by-laws for their own governance,

and spreading the spirit of liberty through all the practices of

society.

According to the Anglican view, institutional self-government

consists in the fact that all the elementary parts of the

government, as well as the highest and most powerful branches,

consist in real institutions ... [but it] consists, farther,

in the unstinted freedom and fair protection which are granted

to institutions of all sorts, commercial, religious, cultural,

scientific, charitable, and industrial, to germinate and to

grow--provided they are moral and do not invade the equal rights

of others. It receives its aliment from a pervading spirit of

self-reliance and self-respect--the real afflatus of liberty.

(_Ibid._, p. 320.)

This, quite evidently, is the spirit of _laissez faire_ applied

to political philosophy. A people thus used to order their social

affairs, as the English people have long done, will prove competent

to manage their political affairs; and the widespread spirit of

individual independence will prevent the drift towards unregulated

centralism with its corollary of tyrannical power. The conception of

institutional liberty embodies much of the spirit of Jeffersonianism,

and it goes back in its origins as far as Roger Williams. The

states-rights advocates, Lieber implies, were mistaken in seeking

the principle of liberty through particularism. In magnifying the

individual commonwealth they overlooked the more vital units of

self-government. To erect the state above the nation was no lasting

solution of the most difficult problem in political philosophy, namely,

the coördination of sovereign power with individual liberty; it was

only to substitute one sovereignty for another, whereas to encourage

the spread of self-governing bodies through society was to provide the

necessary countercheck to centralizing power and coördinate liberty and

sovereignty under the reign of law.

A stimulating thinker was this German liberal with his historical

method and his conception of an evolutionary freedom rooted in the

institutions of the English people. He gave a new turn to speculation

on the origin and nature of the political state, the immediate

consequence of which was the repudiation of the compact theory and

natural-rights philosophy by our academic political scientists. The

organic conception of the political state fell in with the centralizing

movement that followed the Civil War, a movement which the forces of

institutional self-government have been powerless to prevent. On the

whole the influence of Lieber has been rather against than for that

liberty which was so dear to him, and the explanation is to be found

in the tragic divorce, in his thinking, of politics and economics. His

inveterate legalism and his failure to investigate the economics of

politics proved in the end the undoing of his liberalism.

Footnotes

[402] See Merriam, _American Political Theories_, p. 231; Gaillard

Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 64.

[403] See “A Disquisition on Government” in Calhoun’s _Works_, Vol. I,

pp. 41-42.

[404] See Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, p. 231, note.

[405] See _A Constitutional View, etc._, Vol. I, pp. 406-408.

Chapter III • The Dream of a Greek Democracy

I

The pronounced drift of southern thought, in the years immediately

preceding the Civil War, towards the ideal of the Greek democracy, has

been too carelessly forgotten by later times. It was no vagrant eddy

but a broadening current of tendency. In its blend of romanticism and

realism it fitted exactly the temper of the plantation mind, imparting

a fine idealism to shiftless realities and setting a generous goal to

be achieved by somewhat inadequate agencies. A humane and cultivated

democracy, set free from the narrow exactions of economics to engage

in the higher work of civilization, was a conception worthy of the

generous southern mind, a conception that does not suffer by contrast

with the northern dream of an exploitative industrialism. That it was

an impossible dream does not lessen its significance as an expression

of the best southern aspiration in the days when slavery was on the

defensive.

It is plain enough now that this drift of thought resulted from the

need of clarifying the logic of the situation, by bringing into harmony

two seemingly irreconcilable facts, the system of negro slavery and the

rising spirit of white democracy. The feudal principle, which lurks in

the background of all slave systems and which was peculiarly congenial

to the plantation temper, was confronted on every side by the stubborn

democracy of the yeomanry. A hundred miles beyond Charleston the feudal

spirit encountered the leveling individualism of the frontier; and this

passion for equality, that grew fiercer with every remove westward,

was a stumbling-block in the way of the planter aristocracy. Caught

thus between the two forces of a Jeffersonian democracy and a slave

economy, southern thought found in the Greek ideal the most natural

compromise. Since manual labor was black, a white skin was a guarantee

against serfdom, and the common race prejudice was accounted sufficient

to draw even the poor whites to the support of slavery. The sharp

cleavage between the races provided the basis for the conception of

a common white democracy of the master class, every member of which

shared in the supremacy of the race and was free to enjoy the profits

of negro exploitation. The enterprising small farmer might rise to

be a gentlemanly planter, providing his children with leisure to fit

themselves for citizenship in the commonwealth and assist in the great

work of creating a southern civilization. The Greek ideal, in short,

met the double need of southern economics and southern prejudices, and

made its appeal even to the frontier spirit of equalitarianism.

A native growth and rooted deep in southern realities, the new

conception emerged in response to the changing times. It may be

considered the plantation counterpart of northern industrialism,

marking the reaction of the southern mind to the economic revolution

in western civilization. With their diverse economics, North and South

were facing in different directions, and the Greek ideal was as natural

in Charleston as industrial feudalism was natural in Lowell. Created

in part as an ingenious measure of defense, it provided an excellent

counter offensive against alien critics by turning the light of

inquiry upon the bases of capitalism and thrusting upon the attention

of godly Puritans the dependence of culture upon exploitation. The

new industrialism was creating a new philosophy of labor, and this

philosophy the southern apologists seized upon and turned to their

special ends. They accepted certain of the capitalistic premises,

but they interpreted those premises in a spirit of drastic realism,

deducing conclusions disconcerting to the apologists of industrialism.

In defending the plantation system they attacked the factory system; in

upholding black slavery they attacked wage slavery; and in this game

of the pot and the kettle the exploitative root of both systems was

nakedly exposed.

The major premise of the new southern philosophy was identical with

that of northern capitalism, namely, that every civilization rests

on labor exploitation. However quaintly they might embroider this

fact with romantic patterns, they saw it clearly and deduced from

it the conclusion that the North was indulging in a vicious fallacy

in confusing wage labor with free labor. In every industrialized

society, they pointed out, free labor is an anachronism; where it

exists it is a hold-over from a simpler social order. The development

of industrialism tends to draw all labor into its capacious maw, and

the labor surplus that results from evicting the peasant from the

land creates a competitive labor market that speedily reduces the

laborer to the status of a wage-slave. Since slavery, then, in some

form is the inevitable counterpart of modern civilization, the question

that presses on the conscience of every enlightened and generous

observer is the question of the relative well-being of the slave under

the different systems. Upon this question the southern apologists

turned their shrewdest analysis. They examined the condition of the

proletariat in the English mill towns; they commented on the callous

exploitation of the textile workers in Massachusetts; they assessed the

waste in the labor turnover under the factory system; they considered

the seeds of class war sown by industrialism and pointed out the

insecurity of society under a system of capitalistic irresponsibility.

In their estimate of the social evils of industrialism they concurred

in the findings of Carlyle and antedated much of the criticism of

Ruskin. The huge mass of unpalatable fact which they uncovered was the

same mass that inspired George Ripley and Albert Brisbane and Horace

Greeley to seek a way out by the path of coöperative commonwealths.

But in the hands of these apologists the argument was turned to the

narrower end of proving that the southern field-hand fared better than

the northern mill-hand. They recognized both systems as capitalistic,

established in labor exploitation; but they proved to their own

satisfaction that the southern was far humaner, more truly social. In

the South, they pointed out, there was no waste in the labor turnover,

no ugly labor scrap-heap, no ruthless efficiency in using up the human

material. The master was responsible to society for the treatment and

conduct of his slaves, and the southern conscience was far tenderer

in the matter than the northern. The workers were never troubled by

uncertain means of subsistence. The young were free from care, the

old and infirm were adequately provided for. Living conditions were

commonly pleasant, and the personal relations between master and

slave kindly and loyal. When every argument against slavery had been

urged it still remained true that the patriarchal tie that existed

on the plantation was more humane than the cash-nexus of capitalism.

In this fundamental matter Carlyle was right; and right also in his

insistence on the need of capable masters. The South was fortunate in

its system. On the self-sufficient plantations there was many an Abbot

Sampson directing his little world wisely and humanely; collectively

these Abbot Sampsons formed a capable and socially responsible ruling

class worthy of their trust. The economic returns of a wage-slave

industrialism might be greater, but the returns in civilization were

far less.[406]

Such, in brief, was the reaction of the southern mind in the early

fifties to the challenge of an industrializing generation. It was not

till the publication of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ in 1851 that southern

apologists were fully aroused to the need of counter propaganda. They

had been moving slowly towards the conception of a Greek democracy

under the leadership of Calhoun, but now under the sharp prod of

Abolitionism they turned militant. Facts were collected and arguments

clarified, and the war was carried home to New England. In three

years following _Uncle Tom_, according to a recent student, fourteen

pro-slavery novels appeared together with other matter.[407] Much of

the material made use of in these stories was conveniently assembled

in a work entitled _Pro-Slavery Argument_, published in 1852, a

collaboration by Professor Dew of William and Mary College, Chancellor

Harper of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, Governor Hammond of

South Carolina, and Gilmore Simms. The first reviewed the Scriptural

authority for slavery; Chancellor Harper drew from Hobbes the familiar

argument that “a state of nature is a state of war”; Simms elaborated

the patriarchal theory; but Governor Hammond developed the more

significant argument of the degradation of the wage-slave, an argument

elaborated at considerable length in another work entitled _Letters

on Slavery_, in which he presented the results of his investigation

of English factory conditions. The novels that Miss Tandy comments

upon have been pretty much forgotten, but the titles of some of them

sufficiently reveal the lines of attack. L. B. Chase’s _English Serfdom

and American Slavery_ (1854), J. W. Page’s _Uncle Robin in His Cabin

in Virginia and Tom without One in Boston_ (1855), and S. H. Elliott’s

_New England Chattels_ (1858) quite evidently reflect the new southern

philosophy. If the South were attacked, it was not without weapons to

defend itself.

II • William J. Grayson

Of this very considerable literature of defense, _The Hireling and

the Slave_ presents in convenient compass the most telling southern

arguments, and reveals in its sharp contrast of realism and romanticism

the common southern temper. Its author, William J. Grayson, was a

cultivated South Carolinian who had served two terms in Congress and

for years was collector of the Port of Charleston. He was widely

read, was familiar with contemporary English writers on economics,

and possessed a fluent pen. He had published “an elaborate heroic

poem entitled _The Country_,” in which he had sung “the praises of

rural life and agricultural pursuits” (Introduction to Grayson’s

_Life of James L. Petigru_), and a volume entitled _Chicora and other

Poems_, the title work of which was a romantic poem celebrating the

primitive virtues of the Indian. Politically he was affiliated with

the anti-Calhoun party of Unionists. His closest friend was James L.

Petigru, a sketch of whose life he wrote as a last labor of love,

during the unhappy days of the Charleston siege. He did not go so far

as Petigru in refusing to have any part in a war that he opposed, but

the tragedy of it cut him to the quick. He was no Fire Eater, but a

southern moderate--a gentleman of old-fashioned tastes whose views

may be taken as those of the cultivated Charleston group to which he

belonged, of Petigru, of Legaré, of Alfred Huger.

_The Hireling and the Slave_, published in 1856 when Grayson was

sixty-eight and dedicated to Petigru, is a poem in heroic couplets of

approximately 1600 lines, divided into two parts. The first part draws

a realistic picture of the life of the wage-slave, the second paints an

idyllic picture of the life of the bond-slave. In this second part the

spirit of romance holds high carnival; the descriptions are done with

gusto and the rural pleasures that fall to the lot of the negro provide

a striking contrast to the mean environment of the factory worker.

About this contrast are grouped the lesser arguments: the hypocrisy of

the Yankee Abolitionist, the sentimentalism of English humanitarians,

the wisdom of providence in providing masters to protect the negro from

destruction by a superior race and train him through apprenticeship

in slavery to carry the blessings of civilization to Africa. The

heroic couplet was deliberately adopted to offer “some variety to

the poetic forms that are almost universally prevalent.” “The poetry

of the day is, for the most part,” Grayson remarked, “subtile and

transcendental in its character”; yet “the school of Dryden and Pope is

not entirely forgotten,” and “the most fastidious appetite may tolerate

an occasional change of diet, and exchange dainties now and then for

plainer fare” (_The Hireling and the Slave_, Preface, pp. xiv-xv). The

poem seems to have been popular in the South, and a southern reviewer

declared that “it ought to be on every man’s mantel” (_Life of James L.

Petigru_, p. vii).

In the preface Grayson discusses the subject of slavery with a

candor somewhat unusual, acknowledging its evils, yet discovering

compensations. As an expression of intelligent southern opinion on a

question in which the passions of the country were becoming deeply

engaged, his views deserve quotation. Slavery, he says,

... is that system of labor which exchanges subsistence for work,

which secures a life-maintenance from the master to the slave, and

gives a life-labor from the slave to the master. The slave is an

apprentice for life, and owes his labor to his master; the master

owes support, during life, to the slave. Slavery is the Negro

system of work. He is lazy and improvident. Slavery makes all work,

and it insures homes, food, and clothing for all. It permits no

idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy, and old age. It

allows no tramping or skulking, and it knows no pauperism.

This is the whole system substantially. All cruelty is an abuse;

does not belong to the institution; is now punished, and may be in

time prevented. The abuses of slavery are as open to all reforming

influences as those of any civil, social, or political condition.

The improvement in the treatment of the slave is as marked as in

that of any other laboring class in the world.... If slavery is

subject to abuses, it has its advantages also. It establishes

more permanent, and, therefore, kinder relations between capital

and labor. It removes what Stuart Mill calls ‘the widening and

imbittering feud between the class of labor and the class of

capital.’ It draws the relation closer between master and servant.

It is not an engagement for days or weeks, but for life. There

is no such thing with slavery as a laborer for whom nobody cares

or provides. The most wretched feature in hireling labor is the

isolated, miserable creature who has no home, no food, and in whom

no one is particularly interested. _This is seen among hirelings

only._ (_Ibid._, Preface, pp. vii-viii.)

The principle on which Grayson bases his argument is the principle that

civilization rests on labor exploitation, but as a good churchman he

attributes the evil to God and discovers the children of Adam to be

suffering from the primeval curse--“Slave, hireling, help--the curse

pursues him still.” More specifically the thesis which he defends

is this, “The state of the hireling and the slave [is] the same

substantially--the condition hard labor, the reward subsistence;” and

the conclusion which he draws is that the slave obtains a larger return

for his labor than the factory hand. The picture he paints of the

condition of the wage slave of England is Hogarthian in its details:

There, unconcerned, the philanthropic eye

Beholds each phase of human misery;

Sees the worn child compelled in mines to slave

Through narrow seams of coal, a living grave,

Driven from the breezy hill, the sunny glade,

By ruthless hearts, the drudge of labor made,

Unknown the boyish sport, the hours of play,

Stripped of the common boon, the light of day,

Harnessed like brutes, like brutes to tug, and strain,

And drag, on hands and knees, the loaded wain:

There crammed in huts, in reeking masses thrown,

All moral sense and decency unknown,

With no restraint but what the felon knows,

With the sole joy that beer or gin bestows,

To gross excess and brutalizing strife,

The drunken hireling dedicates his life:

Starved else, by infamy’s sad wages fed,

There women prostitute themselves for bread,

And mothers, rioting with savage glee,

For murder’d infants spend the funeral fee;

Childhood bestows no childish sports or toys,

Age neither reverence nor repose enjoys,

Labor with hunger wages ceaseless strife,

And want and suffering only end with life;

In crowded huts contagious ills prevail,

Dull typhus lurks, and deadlier plagues assail,

Gaunt Famine prowls around his pauper prey,

And daily sweeps his ghastly hosts away;

Unburied corses taint the summer air,

And crime and outrage revel with despair.

(_Ibid._, pp. 24-25.)

Grayson does not stint his facts but traces the wretchedness of the

wage-slave through all the phases of his misery to provide a background

for the happier lot of the bond-slave. It is an unlovely picture, done

with considerable vigor, from which one turns gladly to contemplate

life on the southern plantation.

And yet the life, so unassailed by care,

So blessed with moderate work, with ample fare,

With all the good the starving pauper needs,

The happier slave on each plantation leads;

Safe from harassing doubts and annual fears,

He dreads no famine in unfruitful years;

If harvests fail from inauspicious skies,

The master’s providence his food supplies;

No paupers perish here for want of bread,

Or lingering live, by foreign bounty fed;

No exiled trains of homeless peasants go,

In distant climes, to tell their tales of woe:

Far other fortune, free from care and strife,

For work, or bread, attends the Negro’s life,

And Christian slaves may challenge as their own,

The blessings claimed in fabled states alone--

The cabin home, not comfortless, though rude,

Light daily labor, and abundant food,

The sturdy health that temperate habits yield,

The cheerful song that rings in every field,

The long, loud laugh, that freemen seldom share,

Heaven’s boon to bosoms unapproached by care,

And boisterous jest and humor unrefined,

That leave, though rough, no painful sting behind;

While, nestling near, to bless their humble lot,

Warm social joys surround the Negro’s cot,

The evening dance its merriment imparts,

Love, with its rapture, fills their youthful hearts,

And placid age, the task of labor done,

Enjoys the summer shade, the winter sun,

And, as through life no pauper want he knows,

Laments no poor-house penance at its close.

(_Ibid._, pp. 50-51.)

Convinced of the righteousness and humanity of slavery Grayson turns

with scorn upon the Abolitionists and their meddlesome interference

with the beneficent ways of Providence. With a few dexterous turns

of the spit he browns each one nicely like a roasted goose. His

descriptions strip off the gay plumage and reveal the naked fowl. He

makes a good job of it, as witness these bits:

There supple Sumner, with the Negro cause,

Plays the sly game for office and applause;

What boots it if the Negro sink or swim?

He wins the Senate--’tis enough for him....

He heeds nor court’s decree nor Gospel light,

What Sumner thinks is right alone is right....

There Greeley, grieving at a brother’s woe,

Spits with impartial spite on friend and foe....

To each fanatical delusion prone,

He damns all creeds and parties but his own,

Brawls, with hot zeal, for every fool and knave,

The foreign felon and the skulking slave; ...

And faction’s fiercest rabble always find

A kindred nature in the Tribune’s mind;

Ready each furious impulse to obey,

He raves and ravens like a beast of prey....

There Seward smiles the sweet perennial smile,

Skilled in the tricks of subtlety and guile;

The slyest schemer that the world e’er saw;

Peddler of sentiment and patent law;

Ready for fee or faction to display

His skill in either, if the practice pay....

(_Ibid._, pp. 38-40.)

As he contemplates Mrs. Stowe his full wrath is stirred. He does not

spare her sex. Southern chivalry serves the pure and good in lovely

woman, not the malignant and selfish. An unsexed woman is hateful to

it, and after extolling the true womanliness of Florence Nightingale,

angel of mercy, Grayson pays his compliments to the Yankee propagandist

thus:

Not such with Stowe, the wish or power to please,

She finds no joy in gentle deeds like these;

A moral scavenger, with greedy eye,

In social ills her coarser labors lie;

On fields where vice eludes the light of day,

She hunts up crimes as beagles hunt their prey;

Gleans every dirty nook--the felon’s jail,

And hangman’s mem’ry, for detraction’s tale,

Snuffs up pollution with a pious air,

Collects a rumor here, a slander there;

With hatred’s ardor gathers Newgate spoils,

And trades for gold the garbage of her toils.

In sink and sewer thus, with searching eye,

Through mud and slime unhappy wretches pry;

In fetid puddles dabble with delight,

Search every filthy gathering of the night;

Fish from its depths, and to the spacious bag

Convey with care the black, polluted rag;

With reeking waifs secure the nightly bed,

And turn their noisome stores to daily bread.

(_Ibid._, pp. 42-43.)

_The Hireling and the Slave_, is vigorous propaganda, carefully

documented and pointed with modern instances, the work of an

intelligent and humane writer who might be blind to certain evils in

slavery but whose eyes were open to the social ills that grew rankly

in the muck of industrialism. Outside of the South few in America had

as yet come to understand so much--a handful of New England idealists,

Parker and William Henry Channing and Emerson and Wendell Phillips,

and Orestes Brownson, and a handful of Utopians, Albert Brisbane and

George Ripley and Horace Greeley. The inadequacy of southern thought

was identical with that of northern: blinded by sectional economic

interests, they saw only half the truth. They beheld the mote in a

brother’s eye, but considered not the beam that was in their own.

Footnotes

[406] The same argument was made use of by northern supporters of

slavery. Gordon Bennett’s _New York Herald_, for example, “printed a

description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the

English laborer, ‘the slave lived like a prince.’ He had his cabin,

neat, clean, and weather-proof: he had his own garden patch, over which

he was lord paramount; he was well fed, well lodged, well clothed, and

rarely over-worked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays

with gusto, he lived to a great age” (quoted in Allan Nevins, _The

Evening Post: A Century of Journalism_, p. 271).

[407] See Jeannette Reid Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American

Fiction in the Fifties,” _South Atlantic Quarterly_, January-March,

1922. See also Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The Southern Plantation_,

Chapter III.

Chapter IV • Adventures in Belles Lettres

I • Old Charleston

In the year 1825 the little city of Charleston, with its fourteen

thousand whites and more than fourteen thousand blacks, was perhaps the

most delightful spot in America. The Mecca of plantation fashion and

the capital of plantation politics, it prided itself on its genial and

distinguished society. It was the last stronghold in America of the

older pride of aristocracy. The tone of society still remained pretty

much what it had been before the schism of ’76. Social lines were rigid

and an old-fashioned conservatism of temper marked the upper class.

Despite the large admixture of French Huguenot blood the manners and

prejudices of the aristocracy retained the pronounced British cast

that came down from pre-Revolutionary times, and if Dr. Johnson could

have stepped from the Fleet Street of 1780 to the Charleston of 1825

he would have felt almost at home. “We are decidedly more English than

any other city of the United States,” said Hugh Legaré, whose love of

the English character was second only to his love of Charleston. It was

a gay world with its country squires and their horses and racing, its

Madeira drinking, its promenades and dancing and assemblies; one to win

the affection of all who liked lighthearted ways.

But underneath this gay life was a more serious Charleston, which in

certain of its aspects was not unlike Boston. From both the Huguenot

and Scotch-Irish strains came a sobering Puritanism that gave a serious

cast to thoughtful natures and disciplined them in a strict morality.

Calhoun was far more Puritan than Fisher Ames, and Hugh Legaré than

Edward Everett. Life was likely to be a serious business to these

southern Puritans, filled with weighty responsibilities, to be lived,

like Milton’s, as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye. Aristocrat though

he was, young Hugh Legaré was no gay cavalier treading the primrose

path, but as serious-minded as any Roundhead. Victorian in manners, he

would have found the bluff speech of the old revolutionary, General

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney--“more pregnant with meaning than prudish

in dress”--somewhat too “salt” for refined ears. It was this note of

Puritanism that marked the finest characters in Charleston and gave its

tone to society; but it was a Puritanism of conduct rather than dogma.

Charleston gentlemen were of the English church, and their Puritanism,

unwarped by Calvinism, assumed a moral rather than a theological cast.

The lawyer came to assume the position of intellectual leadership

taken by the minister in New England. A profound respect for law

dominated the Charleston mind. Blackstone was the Charleston Bible,

and the lawyer who was master of dignified oratory was looked upon

with high regard. The aristocracy opened its doors to young James

Louis Petigru, an Irish-Huguenot lawyer with his own way to make, but

it closed them tightly against young Gilmore Simms, apprentice to an

apothecary and unread in the classics. Ambitious youths therefore

turned to the law as a congenial career, for there reputations lay,

and political influence. A pronounced cult of the law, and regard for

orderly procedure, went hand in hand with the old English respect for

individual rights. Charleston gentlemen could not be coerced, even by

their own politicians, and Legaré was bitter against the Nullifiers

because the spirit of dictation was “alien to our old habitudes, to the

gentle courage, the courteous hostility, the mild and merciful justice,

the proud submission to _law_ and respect for right, which once

distinguished our low country society from and above all other American

society” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 211).

Politically Charleston was of the old Federalist tradition, as that

Federalism was embodied in the picturesque figure of General Pinckney.

Outside the narrow circle of the aristocracy, Federalism had long since

given way to a democratic faith with its background of states-rights

Jeffersonianism; but it lingered amongst the gentry and provided the

nucleus of the later Union party. Grayson tells a story of Petigru

that suggests the bitterness of the back-country democracy towards the

old Federalism. The latter one day was being abused by a swamp-sucker

“who lavished on him all the foul epithets and appellations he could

remember or invent, of which rogue and scoundrel were among the most

moderate.” At last he hit upon a term of reproach “which at that day

comprised everything hateful--he called him a ‘damned Federal,’” and

was promptly knocked down for the insult (William J. Grayson, _James

Louis Petigru_, pp. 83-84). But the Charleston vintage of Federalism

was little more than a stout conservatism that idealized the Union

and preached the sufficiency and sacredness of the law. It was social

rather than political or economic--the assertion of the prescriptive

right of gentlemen to govern the state. Jeffersonianism never took

possession of the first circles of Charleston as it did in Virginia,

and French revolutionary philosophy found there an uncongenial soil.

The profound conservatism of the aristocracy is sufficiently expressed

in a comment of Hugh Legaré--“The politics of the immortal Jefferson!

Pish!” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 207.) Physiocratic agrarianism found

few advocates amongst Carolina gentlemen. The Charleston mind was

political and legal rather than economic in its interests, and as a

commercial port Charleston was more sympathetic with capitalism than

with agrarianism. Its politics, in which it found much diversion, it

preferred highly seasoned, and when Nullification divided the state

into hostile camps, the Nullifiers and Unionists brought Charleston

to the verge of civil war. Respect for law and the amenities vanished

before the hot demands of partisanship.

The culture of Charleston was as conservatively old-fashioned as

its politics. Such a renaissance as it enjoyed before the Civil War

wrought its destruction was delayed by its rejection of French romantic

thought until the beginning of the thirties, and synchronized with the

renaissance of New England. When the romantic spirit appeared about

1825, it was primarily English, of the school of Tom Moore. There had

never been any literature in Charleston worthy of the name, except

such as had come from London, bound in calfskin and tooled morocco.

Those who affected a love of letters were still enamored of the heroic

couplet and the Addisonian essay. Not until he went to Brussels in

1832 did Legaré, the most brilliant southern linguist, take up the

study of German. The classics still dominated education, and literary

taste inclined to a mingling of wit and sentiment. Young and Ossian

and Mrs. Radcliffe held honored places on Charleston bookshelves. The

young poets were deep in Byron, and Sir Walter was in high repute.

But Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats were scarcely mentioned, and

Carlyle could not hope to gain a hearing. Nevertheless by the year

1828 the example of the _North American Review_ proved so stimulating

an incentive that the scholarship of Charleston collaborated to

establish the _Southern Review_, which ran a sober course for four

years, providing a medium for learned articles on law, letters and

politics. It was a serious venture that concerned itself little with

_belles lettres_, but the intellectual resources were inadequate, and

on Legaré’s departure for Europe _The Review_ came to an end. Later,

Gilmore Simms labored to the same purpose, but even his enormous

energy was insufficient to sustain a magazine esteemed worthy of

southern genius, and the work languished. Facile writers were fewer in

Charleston than in Boston.

But despite any shortcomings in the way of letters, to members of its

polite circles Charleston was the most delightful of American cities,

and its society the most distinguished. “I have never, since I could

form an opinion on such matters,” wrote Legaré from Brussels, where

he mingled with the most cultivated society, “doubted of the immense

superiority of Carolina society over all others on that continent, and

now feel it more than ever” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 218). It was a

common opinion of southern gentlemen, who, with their English notions

of a landed aristocracy, believed that “fixed landed property is of

the essence of civil society, properly so called.” It embodied the

planter ideal of a social capital, uncorrupted by a vulgar plutocracy.

Its highways ran out to the plantations; the free citizen of the Greek

democracy drew his wealth from the soil; the slave labored while the

master rode to and fro from the city. Law and politics were regarded

as respectable vocations for sons of gentlemen, but the ideal life was

acknowledged to be that of the planter, with his three thousand acres,

his three hundred negroes, his ricks of rice and bales of tobacco and

cotton. The profits that came from the law were certain to be invested

in land, and the young attorney dreamed of retiring in middle life to a

well-stocked plantation. To become a member of the ruling squirearchy

was an ambition that filled and satisfied the Charleston imagination.

II • William Crafts • Charleston Wit

The slightness of literary achievement in the Charleston of 1825 is

sufficiently attested by the considerable local fame that rewarded the

efforts of the volatile William Crafts. Born in Charleston in 1789,

the son of a well-to-do Yankee father and a southern mother, he was

sent to Harvard to complete his education, distinguished himself in the

classics and in declamation, achieved a gownsman’s fame for the brisk

informality of a Latin oration, and carried back to Charleston a great

reputation as a wit and scholar. He went into the law but burnt too few

candles at the shrine of Blackstone; was seized with political ambition

and proposed to make a great name for himself as a statesman, but his

politics were not agreeable to his constituents and his career failed

to arrive. He was a graceful orator in the florid southern style, an

agreeable fellow with a pleasant wit, who loved society, dabbled in

prose and verse, but proved to be unstable. He spread too much canvas

to the uncertain winds and his unballasted bark came to grief. He died

at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his writings to be gathered up and

published by his family--a miscellany that brought down upon it the

severe judgment of Hugh Legaré.

William Crafts was a transplanted Bostonian who essayed to domesticate

Harvard culture among the polite circles of Charleston. As an

undergraduate he admired the graceful preaching of Buckminster and the

acrid eloquence of Fisher Ames. The latter he seems to have adopted as

his political godfather, and from him he accepted a decadent Federalism

that got him into trouble when later he entered politics. But the chief

model on whom he shaped his life seems to have been Robert Treat Paine,

in the declining sun of whose fame the young Harvard undergraduate

warmed himself. With a less pregnant wit, a less trenchant prose style,

a less masculine oratory, he succeeded in becoming a smaller edition of

a petty master. The parallelism in the lives of the two apostles of wit

is striking. They were both dabblers, but Crafts possessed less skill

and dabbled less felicitously. They both broke with the rigid decorum

of their circles, but Paine achieved a more tragic shipwreck. They both

marked the last ebbing of the eighteenth century before the wit ideal

was submerged by the incoming tide of romanticism, and the reputations

of both have been forgotten.

In Crafts’ case, certainly, no injustice has been done. Such literary

wealth as he displayed would seem notable only in an indigent society.

His prose is vapid and feeble in the essay, and stilted and artificial

in the oration. His verse is insignificant in quantity--two formal

poems and a handful of occasional pieces--and wanting in distinction

of phrase or imagery. It is the work of a graceful imitator of doubtful

models. He wrote at the moment when the long supremacy of Pope was

yielding to the popularity of Moore, and his verse wavered between

the old loyalty and the new love. _Sullivan’s Island_, a carefully

elaborated descriptive poem, applies the structure and method of

_Windsor Forest_ to a local theme, following the original so closely as

to imitate the detail. His skill in the grand manner may be judged by a

single passage that phrases feebly what Pope had done vigorously:

When cooler gales foretell departing day,

The plaintive curlew homeward wings his way--

Now stoops, then soars, and fearing danger nigh,

To guardian heaven pours forth its piteous cry.

Alas! in vain. The fowler’s fond reply,

Still deemed its own, but tells it where to die.

_The Raciad_ is less crudely imitative. It is a brisk and rather

amusing account of the outpouring of Charleston society to the races,

the great event of the year in the gay southern capital. It is done

with some sprightliness, it is an amiable historical document, but it

is not important. When Crafts died in 1826 Charleston had done little

in the way of creative literature, but the stirring of the waters was

beginning. The following year a young apothecary just admitted to the

bar published a volume entitled _Lyrical and Other Poems_, first fruits

of the colossal labors of Gilmore Simms. In 1828 Hugh Legaré got _The

Southern Review_ on its feet, a substantial magazine that aspired to be

the mouthpiece of southern culture. With the beginning of the thirties

the Charleston renaissance was under way.

III • Hugh Swinton Legaré • Charleston Intellectual

A far solider nature than the ebullient Crafts was Hugh Swinton Legaré.

Of distinguished social position, the most cultivated mind in the South

before the Civil War, and one of the most cultivated in America, he was

an embodiment of the serious Charleston that served as counterweight

to the gayer. In Legaré the moral earnestness of the South came to its

most attractive expression. The repository of two streams of ethical

idealism, he was as Puritan as Calhoun. Natively aristocratic,

with a high sense of personal integrity and civic responsibility, a

profound student of law and letters, with the Charleston parochialism

brushed away by wide travel and intimate acquaintance with old-world

civilizations and classical cultures, he represented the excellent

seriousness that came to flower on the Carolina plantation as well as

in the New England meetinghouse. Southern Puritanism might be less

ungainly than that of Massachusetts, but it was equally introspective,

given to melancholy; and Hugh Legaré found his life as serious an

affair, and as laborious, as any New England Calvinist discovered his

to be. It is no holiday business to serve righteousness; wisdom does

not flower in the primrose path of dalliance; and this Charleston

gentleman emerged from a prolonged and arduous self-discipline as

complete a Puritan as Theodore Parker.

Descended in the fifth generation from a Huguenot ancestor who settled

in Charleston about 1695, he was French in name and by cherished family

tradition, but in little else. Through successive intermarriages,

the original French strain was pretty much diluted by the Scotch and

English, and few Gallic traits came down to him. In temperament and

sympathies he was the child of his mother, Mary Swinton, of Scotch

Covenanter blood. The native seriousness that came to him by right

of inheritance was intensified by fate. Inoculated for the smallpox

in his fourth year, the poison lingered in his system, keeping him

sickly for years and permanently stunting the lower half of his body.

Thus set apart from active life, he turned to books and entered upon

the career of a scholar. At the time of his death in 1842, at the

age of forty-five, he was perhaps the best linguist and the most

widely read man in America. A mature student of the classics, he

was intimately acquainted with French, Spanish, Italian and German,

and had added Romaic as a help to his Greek. This may seem a meager

list in comparison with Theodore Parker’s nineteen languages, but

the substantial acquisitions he gathered from the several bodies of

literature were far from meager.

Yet immense as were those acquisitions they were only supplementary to

his professional studies. The Charleston Puritan gave to the study of

law the same intensity that the Boston Puritan gave to theology. Not

content with a three years’ reading course in a law office, he went to

Europe to pursue his studies more comprehensively. At the University

of Edinburgh he plunged into an investigation of the Roman and Civil

Law, which henceforth was to be his major intellectual interest.

He found in the continental systems, he believed, a body of legal

principles more comprehensive and philosophical than the English Common

Law, and the ambition grew upon him to ingraft certain features of the

Civil Law upon American practice. After two years’ intense study he

came home, engaged in active practice of his profession, and ten years

later, at the age of thirty-five, was appointed _chargé d’affaires_ at

Brussels, where he spent four rich years. His diplomatic and social

life was subordinated to his studies, into which he threw himself

with the keenest zest, enlarging his knowledge of modern letters and

adding to his encyclopedic knowledge of legal systems. In 1841 he was

appointed Attorney-General of the United States in the cabinet of

President Tyler, and upon Webster’s retirement was given the additional

portfolio of Secretary of State _ad interim_. While on a visit to

Boston with President Tyler to assist in the Bunker Hill Monument

celebration, he was taken suddenly ill and died at the home of his

friend Professor Ticknor.

The man thus prematurely cut down was a nature of vast solidity.

Profoundly serious, inclined to the blackest melancholy, as pessimistic

as Fisher Ames, with no leaven of humor, no romance, no careless

idling, he was a hard taskmaster to his days. He toiled prodigiously at

his self-appointed tasks. His standards were severe, whether in letters

or law or politics or morals. As a critic he dealt with substantial

subjects: _The Constitutional History of Greece_; _The Origin,

History and Influence of Roman Legislation_; _Early Spanish Ballads_;

_Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians_; _Lord Byron’s Character and

Writings_--solid dissertations done with German thoroughness--reviews

of huge compass that provided opportunity for independent treatises.

As a lawyer he was rather a philosophical historian than a special

pleader. He was far more given to exploring the labyrinths of ancient

codes than to arguing cases. His legal erudition appalls the layman.

He had sat at the feet of black-letter philosophers; he had been

instructed by sages long since forgotten. His mind was an ample

storehouse of archaic legal maxims. He delighted in the crabbed law

Latin--its sententious phrases worn to the quick, the residuum and

repository of the wisdom bequeathed by past generations. Richer in

poetry than any verses of Byron were the Latin words _habeas corpus_

to one who, like this scholar, understood how packed they were with

English history, how rich in suggestion to all who love English

freedom. From this immense erudition came his love for old books and

venerable authorities. Blackstone he looked upon as a modern--“a

gentleman’s law book, clear, but not deep”; and the wisdom of my Lord

Coke seemed to him not so mellow as that drawn from the more capacious

vats of earlier days. He quoted Grotius and Vattel and Pufendorf and

Bourlamaqui more readily than the South Carolina Digest, and the names

of Papinian and Ulpian and Modestinus and Voet and Cujacius, of the

_Corpus Alaricianum_, of the Justinian, Gregorian, Hermogenian, and

Theodosian codes, slipped familiarly from his pen. How many outlandish

authorities were contained in the huge inkwell on his desk it is

idle to conjecture. Probably not three men in America comprehended

the significance of half the references that he offered for the

consideration of his fellow lawyers, or were competent to question his

deductions. Even the learned Judge Story and Chancellor Kent seem mere

dabblers in comparison with this philosophical historian.

Such learning must inevitably mold one’s thinking in kindred fields,

and he came naturally to espouse what for want of an exacter term

may be called the Common Law theory of politics. It is a conception

of law as an organic growth, the result of man’s laborious search

for a rational freedom in the social body, the single and avowed

end of which is justice. It has taken form not by the decrees of

legislatures, but by decisions of the judiciary, tested and reëxamined

and reargued generation after generation; built up code by code through

slow evolution, the wisdom of the past serving as counselor to the

present; continuously expanding its jurisdiction from the community

to the nation, and from the nation to a world society; the one

guarantee of a sober and rational progress. Theorists and philosophers

come and go; revolutions succeed and fail; foolish statutes and

temporary constitutions have their day; but the organic body of the

law survives all surface change, building into the fabric of society

what experience proves to be good, sloughing off what experience has

outgrown--the tempered rule of social justice; the exact measure of

every civilization compared with which the majority will is a crude and

inadequate makeshift.

From such a conception it follows that government is little more than

ancillary to the law, and political principles are sound in the measure

that they are founded on legal principles. Thus by following the musty

path of jurisprudence Legaré arrived at the same goal that John Cotton

had reached two hundred years before--the apotheosis of magistracy.

With the older Puritan he could assert, _Scripturae plenitudinem

adoro_. The sufficiency of the law to social justice was axiomatic in

his thinking. But the scriptures which he adored were the words of

the judges, whose decisions were above the authority of legislator

or governor and little concerned with a transient majority will. The

old theocrat had set up his theocracy; the modern lexolater would set

up his lexocracy; but the end was pretty much the same. Very likely

Legaré, like the present-day lexolater, would deny the conclusion, yet

it was implicit in his premises, and his scorn of political theory was

sufficient proof. Practical politics he regarded as rather a trumpery

business that achieves no solid results.[408] The political philosopher

he was profoundly suspicious of. The flood of speculation let loose

upon the world by the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries seemed to him to have invited disaster, and the political

classics of those revolutions he cared little for. He distrusted the

“era of illumination” that sacrificed use and wont to abstract theory.

“We have not too much faith in the ‘march of intellect,’” he remarked

dryly, “and would not ... pitch our anticipations in too high a key”

(_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 264). But his greatest contempt he reserved for

the intellectual revolutionaries--“hair-brained metaphysicians and

empirical demagogues” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 216), who would upset the

nice balance of the law. To this matter he returned again and again,

with the scorn of the legal mind for ambitious political systems.

“Innovators or Revolutionists, who go only for an imaginary abstract

rectitude and symmetry of government,” he said, “are always dangerous,

and sometimes the greatest curse with which heaven in its wrath can

visit an offending people” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 286).

I have no faith at all in speculative politics. A theorist in

government is as dangerous as a theorist in medicine, or in

agriculture, and for precisely the same reasons--the subjects

are too complicated and too obscure for simple and decisive

experiments. I go for undisputed results in the long run. (_Ibid._,

Vol. I, p. 303.)

Man begins a revolution, but its issues are with God alone. The

voluntary revolutions of man have always been abrupt, violent and

for the worse: so that the wisdom of antiquity laid it down, as a

maxim, that every fundamental change in the State must needs be

bloody and deadly. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 297.)

This inherent conservatism of the legal mind explains Legaré’s

intellectual sympathy with Federalism and his contempt for Jefferson.

The latter to him was the prince of demagogues, and his ink was vitriol

when he wrote of him, as thus in one of his letters: “The immortal

sayings and doings of the holy father in democracy--the servant of the

servants of Demos (whose nose of wax he knew better than anybody how to

shape to his own convenience,)--the infallible, though ever-changing,

St. Thomas of _Canting_-bury. And here, you may be sure, I _cross_

myself devoutly and cry out, with an all-fervent benediction to that

canonized worthy, _pax tecum_ (pronounced, you know, _Scottice, pox

tacum_)” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 208). Modern political theories seemed

to him mere upstart doctrines compared with the venerable principles of

the law, and he came to look with suspicion on all political liberalism

not sponsored by lawyers and supported by briefs. A passionate lover

of liberty, he was as distrustful of democracy as John Adams, and

his condemnation was as frank--“that scene of wild impulse, and

tyrannical misrule--a pure democracy” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 271). No

state, Beverley Tucker pointed out, was so little democratic as South

Carolina, and Legaré shared the common Charleston distrust of it. As he

watched England and France during the tumultuous thirties, and saw the

struggle over Nullification at home, his concern for the future became

acute and his pessimism as black as Fisher Ames’. In a letter from

Brussels, in the year 1833, shortly after the passage of the English

Reform Bill, he wrote:

Mankind have too little sense to maintain, for any length of time,

a well-tempered democracy, and a great deal too much to bear an

unlimited one--the most dreadful form of “State sovereignty,”

beyond all doubt, in which the descendants of the father of the

first murderer have ever given loose to their ruffian instinct

of violence and oppression. If they have a moderate policy of

the kind, which happens (as all complicated machines will) to be

occasionally a little out of order, their only idea of a remedy

is to pull it down, and along with it every thing that makes a

civil society worthy of its name. Who could ever have dreamed

that the law of brute force which now crushes Europe ... should

be deliberately adopted in America, instead of the really sublime

institutions of a federal jurisdiction, (fallible, of course, but

generally right) and that this relapse into downright barbarism

should be vaunted, by the most enlightened men in the Southern

States, as a _grand_ improvement and the only thing wanting to

make our government as perfect as we have been swearing it was all

along. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 210.)

Back of this ingrained conservatism was a tender Puritan conscience

that must twist his legal studies to ideal ends. After all it was no

other than a juridical romanticism that Hugh Legaré discovered in the

bottom of his scholar’s cup. As medieval as Sir Walter, he sought his

romance in old law-courts rather than in feudal castles, in black-robed

advocates rather than in knights and ladies; and he persuaded himself

that those old litigations, preserved in scraps of Latin and law

French, were dramatic episodes in the ceaseless battle for human

rights, whereof the single objective was justice. Slowly, stone upon

stone, the lawyers were erecting an impregnable citadel, within which

justice kept her inviolable court. It is a pleasant fiction still

believed in by lawyers of the old school, and to Legaré in his study

it bore the very semblance of truth. He had read too many law books;

he had speculated too little on politics; immersed in his codes, he

had forgotten to inquire into the hidden springs of sovereignty.

In his contempt for practical politics he had neglected to study

even the primer of economic determinism. To the economic historian,

Legaré’s boundless faith in the sufficiency of legal processes is

incomprehensible. A few lessons from the wiser Jefferson would have

taught him much that he needed to know concerning the economic sources

of power. In his attitude towards the law Jefferson was a suspicious

realist. He had no faith in legal codes that had grown up under

monarchical and aristocratic systems, and he put no trust in government

by lawyers. He could not understand how the Common Law, interpreted

by the Tory Blackstone, and applied by Federalist lawyers, should

serve the needs of a democracy. Democratic America, he was convinced,

must create a new democratic law, and hold its judiciary in strict

subjection to its will; to surrender sovereignty to an aristocracy of

the bench would mean the abdication of democracy. But Legaré refused

to go to school to Jefferson. He clung to his romantic conception of

the law with the same passionate conviction that Calhoun clung to

his romantic dream of a Greek democracy; and with the ebbing of the

romantic tide they were both left stranded.

But if Legaré was unsympathetic towards the new political theory

that came from the French intellectuals, and frankly hostile to the

new political practice that came in with the Jacksonians, he warmly

approved the new economics that came with the Industrial Revolution. In

his whole-hearted acceptance of Adam Smith he seems not a Carolinian

at all, but an English liberal of the Cobden-Bright school. He adopted

the principle of _laissez faire_, the gospel of progress, the attitude

of optimism. He accepted the theory of the beneficence of commerce as

a universal civilizing agency, and he looked forward confidently to an

eventual parliament of man, a future federation of the world. Commerce

in the end must outlaw war, and peace with freedom would spread the

blessings of civilization to the ends of the earth.[409]

A convincing object-lesson in the sufficiency of the principle of

_laissez faire_, he discovered in the amazing progress of America. The

mainspring of that progress he found in economic freedom--freedom “from

those undue restraints and that impertinent interference of government

in the interests properly belonging to individuals.” “I know,” he said,

“that the cardinal spring and source of our success is freedom--freedom

of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of commerce”

(_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 306). The greatest of these was free trade

between the states. His travels in England and the contrast between

English progress and continental backwardness confirmed him in this

belief. “The doctrine of Free Trade,” he asserted, “is a great

fundamental doctrine of civilization. The world must come to it at

last, if the visions of improvement in which we love to indulge are

ever to be realized” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 272). He went further and

accepted the Industrial Revolution with its division of labor as a

necessary agency of social amelioration. “It is evidently in the order

of nature, and we must take it with all its good and all its evils

together.” In forecasting the effect of that revolution he was troubled

by no fears.

Sir, it is a favorite phrase of those who boast of what is called

“the march of intellect,” that things are thus changed because

the “schoolmaster is abroad.” But I tell you that something far

more effective than the schoolmaster, a mightier than Solomon, is

abroad. It is the +STEAM-ENGINE+--in its twofold capacity of a

means of production and a means of transport--the most powerful

instrument by far of pacification and commerce, and therefore of

improvement and happiness that the world has ever seen; which,

while it increases capital, and multiplies beyond all imagination

the products of industry, brings the most distant people into

contact with one another ... effaces all peculiarities of national

character, and promises, at no distant period, to make the whole

Christian world, at least, one great family....

A people well clad and well housed will be sure to provide

themselves with all the other comforts of life; and it is the

diffusion of these comforts, and the growing taste for them, among

all classes of society in Europe--it is the desire of riches as

it is commonly called, that is gradually putting an end to the

destructive and bloody game of war, and reserving all the resources

hitherto wasted by it, for enterprises of industry and commerce,

prosecuted with the fiery spirit which once vented itself in scenes

of peril and carnage. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 285-286.)

Remembering how dependent were southern cotton interests on English

industrialism and commerce, one can understand Legaré’s acceptance

of _laissez faire_ economics. His idealism, his local pride, his

romanticism, were all enlisted in its behalf, and he painted in glowing

colors. But his frank advocacy of capitalism is harder to understand,

except perhaps on the ground that Charleston was a considerable

shipping port and his clients were engaged in commerce. In the bitter

dispute with Jackson over the Bank, Legaré adopted northern views on

national finance. Although nominally a Democrat, he had never been an

agrarian, and he went with Webster and Clay against the subtreasury

scheme and a metallic currency. His thoughtful speech on _The Spirit of

the Sub-Treasury_, delivered in 1837, was thoroughgoing Whig doctrine,

asserting the excellence of the modern banking system and extolling the

economic fruitfulness of credit. He repudiated every principle of John

Taylor; denied every dogma of agrarian economics; and eulogized the

English financial system as the germinal source of English greatness.

Applying the principle of credit to American conditions, he discovered

the secret of American expansion in the principle of speculative

borrowing, and expanded his doctrine of economic freedom by asserting

that freedom to borrow was a necessary preliminary to freedom to work.

“A people have been enriched by debt,” he argued, overlooking the

possible fallacy of a _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, “and ‘by owing,

owe not.’” As he contemplated the amazing progress of the nation, his

lyric enthusiasm becomes prologue to a somewhat lame conclusion that

enthrones the banker as the fairy godmother of the hardy pioneer.

There is a grandeur and a majesty in this irresistible onward

march of a race, created, as I believe, and elected to possess and

people a continent.... We may become so much accustomed to such

things that they shall make as little impression upon our minds as

the glories of the Heavens above us; but, looking on them, lately,

as with the eyes of the stranger, I felt, what a recent English

traveller is said to have remarked, that far from being without

poetry, as some have vainly alleged, our whole country is one

great poem. Sir, it is so; and if there be a man that can think of

what is doing, in all parts of this most blessed of all lands, to

embellish and advance it, who can contemplate that living mass of

intelligence, activity and improvement as it rolls on, in its sure

and steady progress, to the uttermost extremities of the west; who

can see scenes of savage desolation transformed, almost with the

suddenness of enchantment, into those of fruitfulness and beauty;

crowned with flourishing cities, filled with the noblest of all

populations; if there be a man, I say, that can witness all this

passing under his very eyes, without feeling his heart beat high,

and his imagination warmed and transported by it, be sure, sir,

that the raptures of song exist not for him....

But of this rational, diffusive liberty, among a people so

intelligent as ours, the credit system is the natural fruit, the

inseparable companion, the necessary means and instrument. It is

part and parcel of our existence. Who ever heard of +CREDIT+ in

a despotism, or an anarchy? It implies _confidence_--confidence

in yourself, confidence in your neighbor, confidence in your

government, confidence in the administration of the laws,

confidence, in a word, in your destiny, and your fortune, in the

destinies and the fortunes of the country to which you belong;

as, for instance, in the case of a great national debt. It is the

fruit, I say, of all that is most precious in civilized life, and

to quarrel with it is to be ungrateful to God for some of the

greatest blessings he has vouchsafed to man. (_Writings_, Vol. I,

pp. 306-307.)

Such ebullient rhetoric fits the mouth of the politician rather than

the scholar, and such careless logic comes oddly from a southern

intellectual. In his ignorance of the economics of John Taylor, Legaré

was unprovided with principles to reply to his own arguments, and

unaware of the lameness of his confident conclusions. But though he

might glow with optimism as he contemplated the westward expansion, for

the future of the South and of his own beloved state he was deep in

pessimism. From the first he had dissented vigorously from the program

of Nullification. An ardent Union man, he believed with his friend

James Petigru that secession meant ruin for South Carolina. Calhoun

seemed to him a monomaniac, consumed by a single idea. He feared the

hot passion of the states-rights party and he was troubled over

slavery. His travels abroad had acquainted him with European views on

the subject; he watched the spread of English humanitarianism and he

had come to recognize the institution as an anachronism. It seemed to

him impossible for the South to withstand much longer the augmenting

pressure of civilized opinion. He could justify slavery in his own eyes

both by ancient law--_servitus est constitutio juris gentium_--and by

comparison of the condition of the negro with that of the English wage

worker. The ideal of a Greek democracy was vastly congenial to his

aristocratic temperament, but he knew that it was a romantic dream, and

he was oppressed by the shadow of impending ruin. Writing from Brussels

on April 8, 1833, he concluded an anxious letter thus:

It ends in my not knowing what to think, except that dangers are

around and above and below and within our poor little State,--which

may God preserve us from! I ask of heaven only that the little

circle I am intimate with in Charleston should be kept together

while I live,--in health, harmony and competence; and that, on my

return, I may myself be enabled to enjoy the same happiness, in my

intercourse with it, with which I have been hitherto blessed. _We_

are (I am quite sure) the _last_ of the _race_ of South-Carolina;

I see nothing before us but decay and downfall,--but on that very

account, I cherish its precious relics the more.... Yet my heart

sinks within me often when I think of what may too soon be, and I

say, in those touching words, “Why should not my countenance be

sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lieth

waste, and her gates are burnt with fire.” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p.

215.)

Thus like old John Winthrop two hundred years before, this descendant

of southern Pilgrims, this Charleston lawyer and intellectual, found

the words of the Hebrew Scriptures rising to his lips in moments of

deep emotion. In spite of travel and many books and ripe culture and

catholic sympathies, Hugh Legaré remained Puritan at heart, sorely

puzzled with life, the burden of his days heavy upon him, walking

soberly in the way of duty. North or south, the Puritan was still

Puritan, whether he were Theodore Parker, the Boston radical, or Hugh

Swinton Legaré, the Charleston conservative.

IV • William Gilmore Simms • Charleston Romancer

From the background of old Charleston emerged, about the year 1825,

the figure of Gilmore Simms, lately a drug clerk but now come to the

dignity of admission to the bar; a tall, vigorous young fellow, with

little formal schooling, no Latin or Greek, without land or slaves, but

heavily involved in Byronic odes and like unprofitable investments;

a social nobody soon to be married at the age of twenty to a girl of

no better station than his own, who offered himself as candidate for

the poet laureateship of the South. A somewhat presumptuous proceeding

on the part of a plebeian quite outside the cultivated circle of the

Petigrus and Grimkés and Hugers and Legarés, who were the accepted

custodians of Charleston culture and who did not take kindly to

ambitious newcomers. They regarded literature as a polite art that

could flourish only in polite circles, and they turned a cold shoulder

upon a young man whose ways suggested the Carolina buckra.

After all these years one may well cherish a grudge against the amiable

little city for its shabby treatment of Gilmore Simms. The most richly

endowed of any son she ever gave birth to, he was snubbed for years

by the social oligarchy and suffered keenly from the ostracism. His

extreme parochialism made him the more sensitive to the slight. An

ardent Southerner, loyal to all the Carolinian totems and taboos, he

accepted the Charleston judgment in literature and politics as the very

law and the prophets. He loved the soil of South Carolina, he loved the

people and the way of life, and he was steeped as no other Carolinian

in local history and tradition. He could perceive no shortcomings

in a society he warmly admired, and he accepted the Charleston

provincialisms as the lover accepts the mole on his mistress’ cheek.

The more Charleston snubbed him, the more admirable he professed

to believe was an aristocracy that so jealously guarded its fine

exclusiveness. His lifelong ambition was to receive recognition from

his native city, and when after the death of his first wife and his

marriage to the daughter of a prosperous planter, he gained admission

into the ranks of the lesser gentry, he eagerly made common cause

with them. He accepted the Carolinian standards and conventions; he

advocated social caste: he honored the southern gentleman as God’s best

handiwork; he unconsciously reflected an aristocratic arrogance towards

all social inferiors. He abandoned the Jeffersonian philosophy of his

youth and adopted the revised gospel of Calhoun. He became, in short,

a Carolina Fire Eater. He set up as a militant defender of slavery and

collaborated with other eminent Carolinians to develop the pro-slavery

argument.[410] He could have escaped the subtle compulsions of the

southern system only by emptying his mind of his dearest prejudices,

and this he had neither the will nor the wish to do. And so in spite

of the fact that his every instinct was democratic, and every natural

impulse generous and manly, he fought the battles of the peculiar

institution as stoutly as if he had been born to his three hundred

slaves; and he suffered in consequence the loss of pretty nearly

everything, including his art. After his death, his friend Paul Hayne

wrote of him: “Simms’s genius _never had fair play!_ Circumstances

hampered him!” The judgment is just. Parochial Charleston brought about

his literary undoing.

In taste and temperament Simms was a pronounced realist, but his

career took shape from a generation given to every romantic excess.

His genius, in consequence, was always at cross purposes with the

popular taste. His realism turned naturally to low-life adventure;

his upper-class romance became stilted and posturing, and his love

of action degenerated into swashbuckling. That he survived such

mishaps at all, suggests the enormous vitality of the man. If there

had only been a little more of the intellectual in him, if he could

have detached himself as an artist from the immediate and present,

he might have risen superior to his unfortunate environment. But he

was constitutionally incapable of aloofness, and hence incapable of

criticism. To analyze, compare and judge was impossible to so ardent a

nature. He must be partisan to a people and a cause, rather than to his

art. The South that he loved was romantic, and he would appeal to the

world as a Southerner. He wore his sectional prejudices as the southern

politician wears his rumpled Prince Albert coat, broad-brimmed hat and

black string tie. He never realized what a clutter of useless luggage

he carried into his study. It is a pity that he constricted himself to

the shell of an outworn order, instead of realizing that social orders

and institutions are significant to the novelist only as he stands

apart from them, observing their ways and considering their interplay

in the lives of men and women. It was a major loss to American letters

that he should not have striven to be an artist first, and a southern

romantic only at a later and more convenient season. If he had served

his art more jealously, if he had learned from Poe to refuse the

demands of inconsequential things, he would have viewed his beloved

Charleston with keener eyes and portrayed it more adequately.

But he would not serve his art alone. Unhappily he conceived that

he owed an imperative duty to his native commonwealth, and in

fulfillment of that duty he frittered away his enormous vitality in

delivering patriotic orations and occasional addresses, serving in

the Legislature, pottering over politics, lecturing upon literature,

founding and editing magazines and essaying to bring culture to

Charleston by fiery impetuosity of appeal. He struggled as few other

Americans have done to further the cause of letters in a desperate

environment; but creative literature could neither be cajoled nor

coerced to take up an abode in the indolent little city, and Simms wore

himself out in a fruitless undertaking. Our literature has suffered

few greater losses than this wasting of the genius of Gilmore Simms

in trumpery fields that belong to the literary dray horse. It was the

inevitable outcome of the conflict between the creative artist and the

citizen of South Carolina.

Little as he is known to later readers Simms is by far the most virile

and interesting figure of the Old South. He was built on a generous

plan. He was endowed with a rich and prodigal nature, vigorous,

spontaneous, creative. There was in him much of Whitman’s largeness

and coarseness, much of his delight in the good things of earth. He

wrote with extraordinary gusto, and his fine strong face suggests that

he lived with equal gusto. As a professional man of letters he turned

out an incredible amount of work, by ordinary two tales a year--solid

works of five hundred pages each--together with poems and plays and

pot-boiling stuff to tax the capacity of two or three hack writers. He

poured out his material copiously, lavishly, with overrunning measure.

His stories flow as generously as his Jamaica rum. He is a veritable

geyser of invention, an abundant sea of salty speech. He has no sense

of restraint; he does not stop to prune the tangle of his imagination;

he refuses to strip the plot of extraneous incident to hasten its

action. He is as episodic as Dickens at his worst, piling up action

and multiplying threads till the story bogs down. The major plot is

always struggling from hummock to hummock in the endless swamp where

his characters slip in and out, rarely getting to firm ground, yet

never quite submerged. Prodigal of adventure and loving action, clumsy

as the natural man when confronted with sentiment, he is an American

Fielding with a dash of Smollett. He is at ease only out of doors, in

the fields and swamps and highways; there his speech becomes racy, and

there the rich poetry of his nature, which somehow rarely got into his

verse, comes to abundant and spontaneous expression. When he enters the

drawing-room his stilted language betrays his lack of ease. He writes

with his pen and not with his heart. The plantation tradition has him

in its grip and his fine ladies and gentlemen are done up with much

literary starch. But let him come upon a happy-go-lucky blackguard

and he loves him as Fielding would have loved him. The amusing scene

in which Lieutenant Porgy heaves a pot of hot hominy in the face of a

Scotch dragoon is quite evidently reminiscent of Parson Adams’ recourse

to a dish of hog’s blood in a certain tavern brawl.[411] Like Fielding

also is his criterion of morality. A frank and generous nature is his

infallible test of worth, and if his patriotism led him to bestow a

large share of generosity on the patriots, and a correspondingly meager

share on the Loyalists and British, he was but exercising an ancient

prerogative of the romancer.

Contemporary romanticism engrafted on a nature fundamentally realistic

developed a pronounced strain in his work which, for lack of an exacter

word, we may call picaresque. This comes out at its worst in the crude

border tales of _Richard Hurdis_ and _Border Beagles_, stories marked

by the coarseness of the eighteenth century, backwoods versions of

_Jonathan Wild_. At its best it created a goodly company of blackguards

that are an asset to American literature. Simms dearly loved a rogue,

and the more picturesque the latter’s knavery the more he loved him. A

gentleman villain turns to a thing of wood in his hands, but a low-born

rascal he creates out of living flesh and blood. A surprising number

of low figures, both rogues and honest men, enliven his cluttered

pages, individual, racy, often poetic. Realistic in speech and action,

they are men of special gifts, nimble of wit and rich in imagination,

sometimes fallen to base uses and sometimes ennobled by affection for

their superiors. Thumbscrew, Supple Jack Bannister, and Joe Ballou, the

partisan scouts; Isaac Muggs, mine host of the Black Riders; Goggle

the half-breed; Hell Fire Dick of Tophet, the blackguard converted by

_Pilgrim’s Progress_; Sam Bostwick the Squatter--these are admirable

figures, done with inimitable spirit, the choicest collection of

homespun in American literature. They impart life and drama to Simms’s

tales. Remove them, and his romances are only a welter of stilted

language and starchy situations. The scene, for example, between Jack

Bannister and Isaac Muggs, in which the latter is converted to true

republican principles by appeal to a backwoods ordeal by battle, is

magnificent in its broad humor, and it is a pity that Simms did not

give freer rein to his genius for such work. It is incomprehensible

that a man who could put into the mouth of Thumbscrew such language as

the following could have stooped to scribble the love scenes between

Ernest Mellichampe and Janet Berkeley:

When it so happens that the things a man’s got to love gits fewer

and smaller, they gits more valuable, Airnest, in his sight; for

he knows mighty well, if he loses them, that he’s jist like an old

bird that comes back to the tree when the blossoms and the flowers

have all dropped off, and are rotting under it. It’s mighty nigh to

winter in his heart then, Airnest--mighty nigh--and the sooner he

begins to look out a place to sleep in, the wiser man you may take

him to be. (_Mellichampe_, Chapter IX.)

But Simms was too inveterately episodical to construct a pretty plot,

and too careless in his generous southern hospitality to discriminate

between guests at his board. He throws a huge miscellany on the table

from which each may choose what pleases his taste.

Here again romanticism did him an evil turn. Southern taste was too

aristocratic to like coarse fare. Gentlemen must dine like gentlemen

even though black rascals served as waiters. Common fellows were well

enough in the background, but they must not presume to crowd their

betters from the table. In such matters Simms was constrained to follow

the orthodox literary tradition. From Shakespeare to Scott the notion

prevailed that legitimate romance must be conceived of as a flitch of

bacon, the lean of vulgarity alternating with the fat of gentility.

Hence Simms was forced to keep a weather eye on the popular taste

lest it be offended by too free an offering of the low. His negroes,

such as Scipio and Bram and Benny Bowlegs, are more worth while than

their masters, and his swamp-suckers are done with more gusto than

the officers; but when the plot demands the appearance of the gentry

he sends his black-bottle rapscallions about their business. Except

in occasional instances, as in the case of old Colonel Sinclair,

the Carolinian baron--a testy old gentleman done in the best gouty

manner--Simms does the “quality” badly and the canny reader soon learns

to skip the genteel passages in order to visit with Lieutenant Porgy or

follow the adventures of Hell Fire Dick or Supple Jack Bannister. There

is ample fare at his generous board, but one must pick and choose.

The critics have made quite too much of the Gothic extravagancies

that mar so many of his pages. It is true that Simms was a generous

purveyor of “blood-pudding” romance with its gory exploitation of

crime and mystery. Nothing can excuse or extenuate such folly in

the abstract; but it is easily comprehensible. It was a part of the

price which the professional man of letters had to pay as caterer to

a provincial reading public. After the surprising success of _Guy

Rivers_, Simms deliberately tested the taste of his readers by sending

forth _Richard Hurdis_ under a pen name; and the equal success of the

latter convinced him that American readers liked such fare. He had a

living to make; the market was limited, and he resolved to give the

public what it wanted. This accounts for his major sins. An enormous

number of chapters, together with whole volumes such as _Charlemont_

and _Beauchampe_--preposterous accounts of a notorious murder case in

Kentucky--deserve no better fate than the rubbish heap. They are in no

sense literature; yet unfortunately the very great powers of Simms are

too commonly measured by such trash, instead of by his Revolutionary

tales.

Simms was a loving student of older English literature and drew much

of his water from excellent wells. A happy instinct led him back to

the robust time of Elizabeth and those masculine playwrights whose

ample natures were so like his own. Shakespeare may be reckoned his

particular master--especially the prose of Shakespeare with its

Cheapside colloquialisms and racy idiomatic rhythms. No better training

school could be desired, and his loving apprenticeship to the older

vernacular serves to explain the source of Simms’s greatest literary

virtue. From long familiarity with the Elizabethans he derived his

mastery of English idiom that sets him widely apart from most other

contemporary Americans. In easy outpouring of picturesque speech, of

the lithe and muscular idiom of the older literature, he was without

a rival in his generation. Many an old Elizabethan phrase lingered

in the southern backwoods, and many an indigenous turn of speech had

sprung from homely new-world experience. All such Simms seized upon

with the relish of a gourmand, stirring them into the great pot from

which he ladled such generous spoonfuls. Later critics have been

singularly obtuse in their failure to do justice to his rich linguistic

equipment. Quite too much comment has been devoted to his careless

slips in rhetorical construction, and quite too little to his command

of masculine English prose. It is absurd to couple him with Cooper in

sinning against good writing. They are as unlike as two men could well

be. Simms is incomparably the greater master of racy prose, as he is

much the richer nature. The only contemporary indeed who approaches him

is Melville in _Moby Dick_. He is careless and slovenly enough in all

conscience; when he goes on a rampage he mouths his lines like any town

crier. But though he keeps a sharp eye on the groundlings, though he is

often preposterous, he is rarely wooden, never feeble.

The Elizabethan influence comes out strikingly in the character of

Lieutenant Porgy, the spoilt child of his imagination, who runs through

the Revolutionary romances as a sort of comic chorus. Despite Professor

Trent’s opinion to the contrary, Porgy is a South Carolinian Falstaff,

quite evidently done with a close eye to the original. He is a very

mountain of a fellow, with huge paunch and spindling shanks from too

much sitting at the table and in the saddle--the most amusing and

substantial comic character in our early fiction. As a South Carolina

gentleman, Porgy of course was no liar or coward or woman cheater. In

battle he is an avalanche of patriotic valor, and in his deference to

the weak and dependent, in his free-handed generosity that encumbers

him with penniless hangers-on, he is model of southern chivalry. But

in the far greater matters of the belly, he is strikingly Falstaffian.

He is not so much a valiant trencherman, as an artist in food and

drink. He lived to eat and he ate to speculate on the virtues of a

good dinner. “He took philosophy with him to the table, and grew wise

over his wine” (_Woodcraft_, Chapter XVIII). He is an epicure in

words, a gourmand of wit. The copious stream of his speech runs on in

an endless flow, sometimes roily but never stagnant. A pat aphorism

or a picturesque phrase is as succulent to him as Carolina terrapin.

When philosophy fails he stoops to horseplay, but his practical jokes

are carried off with theatrical splendor, with colossal assurance.

Like Falstaff he is fond of practicing his wit on his followers. His

Bardolph is a certain Geordie Dennison, the swamp poet of the troop;

and Porgy honors him as one artist honors the craft of another.

But the most satisfying comradeship lies between Porgy and Black Tom,

fellow practitioners of the gentle art of cookery, sworn liegemen to

roasts and soups and stews. Together they make the swamp commissariat

bloom like a Covent Garden market. They are master foragers untroubled

by an overnice conscience. “Do as much stealing in an honest way as

you can,” the lieutenant remarks to Tom. “D--n the patriotism that

can’t eat stolen fruit!” At a pinch the native resources of the swamp

are boldly commandeered. The creative masterpiece of the valiant Porgy

was a notable banquet which he proffered General Greene and his staff

in their swamp quarters. His infinite resourcefulness in this great

affair, his huge inventiveness, elevate the dinner to the rank of a

culinary epic. The swamp frogs that he speared by moonlight, and the

young alligators that he took by subtle stratagem, were transmogrified

into delectable dishes served to his guests under the alluring names

of _alerta_ and _lagarta_.[412] The scene is done with a gusto that

only the worshiper of fleshpots could achieve. Simms delighted in

Porgy because he was himself something of a Porgy. There is good fare

for those who sit at table with the fat humorist of _The Forayers_;

the ready talk does not lack the salt of wit. The later Porgy of

_Woodcraft_ scarcely comes up to the earlier. His debts weigh too

heavily on his spirits for the easy play of his fancy; he is less

redoubtable as a wooer than as a warrior; nevertheless there is

excellent humor to be enjoyed at Glen Eberle, and some extraordinary

pranks.

The two major themes with which his romances deal, as has been

often pointed out, are the frontier and the Revolution; but the

intimate connection between them has not been so commonly remarked.

In much of his better work the two themes blend into one. The

conditions of civil war in the South thrust into sharp relief the

cultural and psychological frontier that clung to the outskirts of

the plantations--the ragged edges of a society that kept the poor

whites submerged and bred a numerous progeny of coarse and primitive

creatures, little better than social outcasts. Not the least of the

curses of slavery--as Helper pointed out--was its blighting effect

on the less prosperous whites who environed every plantation with

its special frontier. With his strong bias towards realism Simms

refused to romanticize what was inherently unlovely. Like Baldwin

in his _Flush Times of Mississippi and Alabama_, he discovered an

ample supply of blackguards and sharpers in the no man’s land beyond

the settlements. The log cabins of the swamp country harbored their

motley crew in no wise different from their fellows of the farther

frontier along the Mississippi; and these precious rascals he drags

from their lurking-places to exhibit in the light of day. The frontier

in consequence is rarely absent from his stories, and it is this

picaresque interpretation that sets him so sharply off from Cooper.

A recent student, in commenting on the contrast between the frontier

of Cooper and Simms, suggests that “perhaps the earlier frontier had

been intrinsically more dignified than that which Simms had observed;

perhaps the difference is that Cooper’s had lain deeper under the

softening shadow of the past” (Van Doren, _The American Novel_, p.

65). But this is quite to miss the point, both of Cooper and Simms.

The real explanation is to be sought in the different interpretations

of the romantic and the realist. Cooper’s frontier existed only in his

imagination. When he came face to face with the reality, as in the

case of old Aaron Thousandacres and his lawless brood, he hated it

too frankly to portray it justly. The stern Puritan squatter and his

fiercer wife are magnificent caricatures, drawn to serve a partisan

purpose. They provide a romantic contrast to the honest Chainbearer,

spokesman of the psychology of the settlements; but set beside Simon

Suggs, master of the frontier technic of easy money, as depicted by

Joseph Baldwin, they are as romantic as Cooper’s Indians.

The picaresque note is frankly emphasized in Simms’ Revolutionary

tales. All the swamp-suckers and rapscallions found their heaven-sent

opportunity in the disorders of civil war. No realist could write about

the Revolution in South Carolina without noting the flocks of buzzards

gathering to fall upon the carrion. War is not a heroic thing in

these stirring pages. It invites debauchery and encourages brutality.

Blackguards put a black stain on military glory. In the preface to _The

Scout_, Simms remarks:

To burn and slay were not the simple performances of this reckless

period and ravaged country. To burn in wantonness and to murder

in cold blood, and by the cruellest tortures, were the familiar

achievements of the time: ... The face of the country was overrun

by outlaws. Detached bands of ruffians, formed upon the frontiers

of Georgia, and in the wilds of Florida--refugees from all the

colonies--availed themselves of the absence of civil authority to

effect a lodgment in the swamps, the forests, and the mountains.

These, mounted on swift horses, traversed the state with the wind;

now here, now there; one moment operating on the Savannah, the next

on the Peedee; sometimes descending within sight of the smokes of

the metropolis; and anon, building their own fires on the lofty

summits of the Appalachian ridge.

Now and then in his pages war flashes out in romantic or heroic

episodes, but for the most part it is mean and degrading, a thing to

be hated. Simms loved action too keenly not to make the most of the

countless onsets and forays, the ambushing of Hessians and the cutting

off of wagon trains; he found in them material for many a brisk page

and stirring adventure; but in the end it is the brutality of it all,

the unhappy loosing of evil passions, that gives him most concern. It

was a hard world, and the soft-hearted Jack Bannister, speaking with

the tongue of Simms, could find comfort only in stoicism. “A man ought

not to be too soft about the heart, in a world like this, so full of

rascals that need the knockings of a hard and heavy hand.”

It is this strong seasoning of the picaresque, perhaps, that accounts

for the neglect that has befallen the work of Simms. Many blackguards

and generous potations of Jamaica rum consorted ill with the genteel

tradition in letters that grew up in the days following the Civil

War; and romantic memories of a lost cause threw an idyllic haze over

earlier times. The Revolutionary War lay too far in the past for a

generation suffering from a great tragedy to concern itself with, and

the vivid and vital work of Simms scarcely outlived its creator. The

Revolutionary tales have been largely forgotten, and from his abundant

work only _The Yemassee_ has survived in popular affection, and this

partly from the vogue of Cooper. The winnowing has been severe and

scarcely just. The best of Simms is not in _The Yemassee_, but in those

stirring tales of Marion’s men who carried on a bushwhacking campaign

under the hot sun of the dog days. _The Partisan_ and _The Forayers_

and _Woodcraft_ deserve a better fate than has befallen them. The ghost

of Cooper does not haunt their pages to challenge comparison, as it

does _The Yemassee_, and bring into question their relative merits.

There Simms is at home, in the swamps and fields and villages, with men

whose ways he knew and loved, and his generous nature followed its own

impulses.