Horace Greeley has suffered far more disastrously than Bryant the

common fate of journalists, yet his place in nineteenth-century America

was too important and his influence on current democratic ideals

too great, to be carelessly ignored. A Yankee radical transported

to New York, he was the spokesman of the common sense and practical

intelligence of the plain people of the North, seeking to understand

the revolutionary upheaval then going forward, and bring it if possible

to some issue in elementary justice. Far from being the visionary he

was so often accounted, he was the most practical of men, accepting

fact and seeking to square theory with reality; as ready to adopt

new social machinery as the mill-owner to adopt a new invention. If

there were social maladjustments, why should they not be set right?

The patent confusions of the times seemed to him a challenge to the

common intelligence. If civilization meant anything it ought to mean a

generous life for the producing mass, and with the abundant resources

of America the common well-being would never lie in jeopardy if simple

justice prevailed. America had not yet fulfilled its promise; it had

not yet become the haven for the poor and outcast its potential means

allowed; nor with its growing cities where poverty found a congenial

home, and its patrimony of raw lands flung to speculators, was it

likely to become so unless greater ingenuity were applied to the

problem. The industrial revolution was driving western civilization

into uncharted seas; clearly, it was only common sense to take bearings

and lay as fair a course as possible. To accomplish this Greeley was

ready to entertain any promising suggestion. Intellectually curious,

he had the wit to understand that the older agrarian America was being

destroyed by forces that could not be stopped; they could only be

guided. His eyes were wide open to what was taking place. He foresaw

certain consequences implicit in the industrial revolution that his

fellows were blind to. If it brought material advancement and the

multiplication of conveniences--things excellent in themselves--it

brought as well a sinister exploitation of the producers, as England

with her Manchester slums had learned to her sorrow. If America were

driving straight toward such dead-seas of wretchedness, surely only a

conscienceless fool would refuse to help trim the sails.

No more admirable Yankee than Horace Greeley ever went West to make his

fortune. With his Yankee capacity for hard work, his daring enterprise,

his vigorous independence, he embodied an extremely sensitive social

conscience, keen sympathy for those who do the work of the world,

and a transparent honesty of mind and purpose. Bred up in the narrow

poverty of the Vermont hills, remote from the culture of Boston and

Cambridge, he retained the angularities that marked his frontier

origin. His ungainly and shabby exterior was the outward, visible

sign of a niggardly youth; yet underneath the uncouth exterior was

as warm a heart as ever beat in Yankee bosom. His early life was a

bitter struggle, aggravated by the succession of economic depressions

that from 1819 to 1838 repeatedly brought hardship upon the country.

Cradled thus in the anxieties attending the transition from an agrarian

to a capitalistic order, nurtured in the harassing uncertainties that

followed the break-up of the old static economy, he longed for a more

rational social system, unsoiled by the heart-breaking wreckages that

drifted into the new slums, unembittered by the lonely tragedies that

laid a blight on the frontier. He believed that the honest worker,

whether in the factory or on the farm, deserved a better fate than

commonly fell to his lot. It was a scandal that poverty should dog his

footsteps in a land potentially so rich as America; that those who did

the necessary work of society should find themselves reduced to the

status of the slave, whether black or white; and he early determined to

explore the reasons why the workingman received so small an increment

of the augmenting wealth of the industrial revolution. His struggles

to gain a foothold in New York set him upon thinking, and before he

was thirty he began those speculations on ways and means of returning

to the producer a fair reward for his work, that were to occupy his

mind to the last. The farmer and the wage-earner he took to his heart,

and the furtherance of their well-being--despite the persistent and

vindictive opposition he encountered--became a major objective of _The

Tribune_.

Greeley’s mind was as homespun as his clothes, and he never quite

outgrew certain Vermont parochialisms that retarded his intellectual

development. The environment in which he was bred was staunchly

Federalist-Whig, marked by the exuberantly nationalistic spirit that

sprang from the War of 1812; and the seeds of his national economy

were sown in those years when to become nationally self-sufficient

was the great ideal of America. It was natural for him to accept the

leadership of Clay, whom he idolized, and to look to the Federal

government for an adequate policy of internal improvements and national

development. “We Vermonters were all Protectionists,” he said in

his _Recollections_. In 1828 the village of Poultney, where he was

serving his apprenticeship, gave 334 votes for John Quincy Adams

and only four for Jackson. Starting with this back-country faith in

a benevolent paternalism, Greeley early began his speculations on

an ideal national economy; and the conclusion to which he came, and

which he never saw reason to question later, was that government

must impose an intelligent wardship upon economic forces, that, left

to themselves, tend always to the anarchy of individualism. He had

suffered in his own person from the inadequacy and uncertainty of the

financial and industrial machinery of the times; he was impatient of

all purposeless floundering; the more he read the more rational it

seemed that statesmanship must be judged by its intelligent concern to

lessen the social waste and reduce the social friction. _Laissez faire_

he pronounced a “suicidal” policy; it was an invitation to anarchy; it

had impoverished India, and must impoverish America. From a critical

study of the teachings of the Manchester school he came to two major

conclusions: that agriculture and manufacturing are complementary

industries, and the closer they are drawn together the better for the

nation; and that a wide national economy can result only from investing

the state with adequate regulatory powers. Hence his approval of Clay’s

American System. The judicious intervention of government by means of a

protective tariff to foster the “infant industries,” would secure them

a domestic market that would--he allowed himself to hope--be regulated

by domestic competition, would do away with the waste represented by

transportation charges, and would return to the farmer an increase in

price represented by those charges. In his opinion, however, protection

was a temporary expedient, necessary only until American industries

should get on their legs. “Protection is the shortest way to get free

trade,” he said in 1851 (_The Tribune_, January 23).

Greeley was never the tool of capitalistic interests that such an

argument might seem to imply. All his mature life he persistently

fought the aggressions of capitalism; yet in this crucial matter

of protection his influence was thrown powerfully on its side, and

the ingenious argument he expounded was at once taken over by the

industrialists and used with telling effect. What particular turn he

gave to the older Whig statement, adapting it to the prejudices of a

more democratic electorate, a present-day economist has thus summarized:

The protective tariff, favored by the Whigs, was something

different in his hands. The tariff arguments of his boyhood had

been capitalistic arguments. Protect capital, their spokesman said,

because wages are too high in this country. Eventually wages will

come towards the European level and we shall not need protection.

Greeley revised this plea; protect the wage earner, he said, in

order that he may rise from this present condition of slavery. The

only way to protect him against the foreign pauper is to protect

the price of his product. But since capital owns and sells his

product, we must needs protect capital. We know right well, he

says, that a protective tariff cannot redress all wrongs.... The

extent of its power to benefit the laborer is limited by the force

and pressure of domestic competition, for which Political Economy

has as yet devised no remedy. (John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley

and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” _Political

Science Quarterly_, Vol. XXIV, pp. 468-488.)

The argument for protection has been little improved since it came

from Greeley’s hands in the late forties and early fifties.[427]

Nor, it must be added, has political economy devised the remedy for

the evils of competition, that Greeley was concerned about, unless

monopolistic control be regarded as such. Considering his extraordinary

influence with the mass of farmers north and west, it must be accounted

a calamity to agrarian prospects that _The Tribune_--a paper that

Professor Commons characterized as “the first and only great vehicle

this country has known for the ideas and experiments of constructive

democracy”--should have thrown its influence on the side of artificial

industrial expansion. That the mind of the northern farmer became so

deeply inoculated with protectionist views, and has since persistently

remained so, was due to Horace Greeley far more than to any other man.

The irony of it becomes apparent when the deeper spirit of Greeley’s

life is probed. Though he called himself a Whig, he was in all

fundamental interests and conceptions a Jeffersonian, seeking in the

spirit of the great Virginian to fashion a new philosophy to suit

the new times, more like him in free speculation than any other

northern thinker of the day. It needed years for him to throw off

the Federalist-Whig prepossessions of his youth, and work back to

Jeffersonian fundamentals; but in the end he did work back, and in the

end--always excepting this one matter of protection with its corollary

of state paternalism--he came by his own path to the major conclusions

Jefferson had reached a half century before. He was a spokesman of the

older America seeking a way out of the confusions the middle class

was bringing on the later America. In his social-mindedness that

set justice above exploitation; in his readiness to change existing

institutions in order to achieve justice; in his strong preference for

an agrarian order as more wholesome than an industrial; in his trust in

the good will of the plain people and faith in the local democracies;

in his acceptance of the principle of states rights that during the

struggle over slavery led him to advocate that the South be suffered

to depart in peace:--in such conceptions he was a Neo-Jeffersonian,

seeking to adapt the old principles to the needs of a different order.

Greeley had never read the works of the French Physiocrats; he was

unacquainted with their doctrine of the _produit net_; very likely he

would not have accepted their teachings to the extent that Jefferson

did. Nevertheless from his own experience he had come to agree with

them in the exaltation of agriculture over other forms of labor, as he

had come to agree with them in their social-mindedness. Greeley may be

accounted a stepson, at least, of the old French school.

That for so long a time he should have turned aside from the path

of Jeffersonianism to immerse himself in Utopian speculations and

adventures may appear strange; and yet for so eager and hopeful a

temperament it was the most natural thing in the world. It marked a

step in the speculations through which he passed in pursuit of that

remedy for domestic competition which the political economists had

not provided. He was twenty-nine when Albert Brisbane’s _The Social

Destiny of Mankind_ appeared in 1840, and on October 21, 1841, the

first comment on Fourier socialism was printed in _The Tribune_,

then only six months old. Thereafter for years _The Tribune_ was the

chief organ for the spread of collectivistic principles in the United

States, Brisbane expounding Fourierism in the fifties, and Karl Marx

contributing a weekly letter on European movements in the sixties,

while lesser men contributed freely according to their special Utopian

lights. With all this Greeley was in profound sympathy. Much of the

theory he did not agree with; many of the plans and specifications

seemed to him ill conceived; but convinced of the gross evils of

civilization he welcomed free speculation as promising the only hope

for their cure. Like Jefferson and William Ellery Channing, he put

his trust in the unshackled mind, for like them he believed in the

essential excellence of human nature when unperverted by vicious

institutions.

It was this romantic faith that induced him to invest heavily in time,

thought and money, in the Fourieristic foundations of the forties,

the North American Phalanx in particular offering an opportunity for

experiment on a considerable scale. In his deep concern over the

selfishness of the competitive struggle, he was willing to turn from

the bankrupt political economists to consider the plans of the “social

architects.” From Plato down those architects had been engaged on plans

of ideal commonwealths, wherein the principle of brotherhood should

supersede the principle of competition, and he believed the time had

come when the great experiment might be tried with some reasonable hope

of success. If the principle of collectivism could be successfully

substituted for a chaotic individualism, the solution of the ancient

problem of social injustice might be in a way to be achieved. This in

itself, he believed, “would do for domestic competition what protection

would do for foreign competition” (John R. Commons, _Horace Greeley,

etc._). When associationism failed, Greeley turned his thoughts eagerly

to coöperation as a promising means of eliminating the waste of the

middleman and destroying the wage system.[428] Somehow the middleman

must be got rid of, he believed, if labor were to reap an adequate

reward from its work. If one method did not achieve the result, another

must be tried. To leave off seeking a solution was to acknowledge that

society must remain a pigsty, with the strongest hogs appropriating the

swill.

Such persistent venturing into Utopian experiment made Greeley the

laughing-stock of more practical men who accepted the acquisitive

instinct as the voice of God and were busily engaged in exploitation

for their individual advantage; more important, it reveals how tenuous

were the ties that held him to the Whiggery he still professed.

Stalwart Whigs of the Webster school, middle-class bankers and

industrialists, grew impatient with such pestilent heresies as exuded

from _The Tribune_, and denied that Greeley was a Whig. In 1847 _The

Courier and Enquirer_ angrily protested:

There can be no peace in the Whig ranks while the old New York

Tribune is continued to be called Whig.... The _principles_ of the

Whig party are well defined; they are _conservative_ and inculcate

a regard for the laws and support of all established institutions

of the country. They eschew _radicalism_ in every form; they

sustain the constitution and the laws; they foster a spirit of

_patriotism_.... The better way for the Tribune would be at once

to admit that it is only Whig on the subject of the Tariff ...

and then devote itself to the advocacy of Anti-Rent, Abolition,

Fourierite, and Vote Yourself a Farm doctrines. (_The Weekly

Tribune_, August 21, 1847; quoted in Commons, _Horace Greeley,

etc._, p. 473.)

The real animus of the middle-class dislike of Greeley is to be sought

in his active championship of the great exploited classes, the farmer

and wage-earner. He was always sowing the seeds of discontent amongst

them. The betterment of their condition, he believed, was fundamental

to any sound social progress. He was convinced that their well-being

was interrelated; that whatever affected the one must affect the other.

If the city proletariat were prosperous, the farmer’s produce sold at

better prices; and if the farmers were prosperous, the country would

draw off the surplus labor from the towns and thereby sustain the wage

scale. The key to the situation, he came to believe, lay in the land

situation. The application of science to farm processes was a necessary

preliminary to agrarian improvement, and he put the great influence

of _The Tribune_ behind the movement for scientific instruction in

crop handling. But far more fundamental and immediate was the need of

a drastic change in the Federal laws governing land sales. Believing

that the wild lands of the West were a natural refuge for those who

fled from the exploitation of the factory, he was concerned that those

lands should be made available to the poorest settler. Greeley very

well knew that the ruthless exploitation of the English proletariat was

an inevitable consequence of the enclosure movement. Dispossessed of

their land and lacking means to emigrate, the peasant had been thrown

like sheep to the industrial wolves. Sunk in a hopeless wage-slavery,

the Manchester factory-hand was an object-lesson in the fate that

awaits the landless, too striking for a shrewd observer like Greeley to

miss; and his agrarian program was proof that he had taken Goldsmith’s

warning to heart:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

The freeholder, whatever the hardships of his lot, was still a free man

and a free citizen, no fodder to fling to a huge-bellied industrialism.

To keep him thus free and independent, Greeley put himself vigorously

into the great agrarian movement of the forties and fifties--the

movement to democratize the national land policy that eventuated in

the Homestead Act of 1862. The conception of the strategic usefulness

of the western lands as a refuge for the city proletariat he derived

from George Henry Evans, who in 1828 had established _The Working Man’s

Advocate_, was active in organization work with the mechanics of New

York City, and contributed to the cause numerous pamphlets, one of

which, issued in 1844, was entitled _Vote Yourself a Farm_. The pioneer

work had been well done when, in 1845, Greeley joined the movement,

accepted the arguments, and thenceforth was tireless in spreading the

doctrine. The principle on which he should work he laid down in _The

Tribune_:

The freedom of the public lands to actual settlers and the

limitation of future acquisitions of land to some reasonable

amount, are ... measures which seem to us vitally necessary to the

ultimate emancipation from thraldom and misery. What is mainly

wanted is that each man should have an assured chance to earn and

then an assurance of the just fruits of his labors. (Quoted in

Commons, _Horace Greeley, etc._, p. 482.)

To accomplish this result Greeley introduced into Congress the first

Homestead bill, according to the proposed terms of which any _bona

fide_ settler might file on one hundred and sixty acres of public

land, to be paid for within seven years at the rate of $1.25 an acre;

all public lands not thus filed on by actual settlers were to be

listed at $5.00 an acre.[429] Greeley’s bill was aimed directly at

the old scandal of favoring wealthy speculators at the expense of the

small man, a scandal that ran far back into the past. The traditional

argument had been that the government could not go into the retail land

business, but should sell in great blocks to responsible men who should

in turn put settlers on the land. The policy had bred huge corruption,

it had aroused bitter opposition, and had roiled the politics of

more than one state holding western lands. In the early years of the

century the province of Maine had repudiated Massachusetts Federalism

and turned to the Republican party by reason of discontent with the

old system[430] and the fierce Anti-Rent riots in New York State were

of recent occurrence. It was against this policy of favoritism that

Greeley protested, thereby bringing on his head sharp criticism from

the respectable class, who declaimed bitterly against the demagoguery

of a man who openly advocated a “vote yourself a farm” policy. To pay

a middleman’s price for public land, after that land had been wheedled

from Congress in the dark of the moon, seemed to many gentlemen the

only honest and patriotic way; but Greeley was unconvinced by such

reasoning, and his concern over the problem became acute when the

railroads began to appropriate huge tracts of the public domain. The

policy of subsidizing them thus seemed to him wasteful and vicious; it

ran directly counter to his fundamental principle of limitation of land

holdings; it was repeating on a vast scale the ominous landlordism of

the past.

Man has a _natural right_ to produce and acquire property [he

wrote], and therefore, I condemn a system of Land Monopoly, which

robs the producer of one-half to seven-eighths of the fruits of his

toil; and often dooms him to absolute starvation on the soil which

he has faithfully and effectively tilled! The right of owning land

is one thing: the right to own thousands and even millions of acres

of land is another. The problem is learning to distinguish the one

from the other. (_The Tribune_, April 24, 1849.)

“Settle the lands compactly and railroads will be constructed through

them rapidly and abundantly,” he said later. “The grants do essentially

interfere with the true policy of granting lands in limited allotment

to actual settlers” (_ibid._, March 16, 1852). His proposed policy was

far-sighted and socially just, but it was repudiated by a speculative

middle class that would not have its unearned increment curtailed by

visionaries.

Thoughtful as was Greeley’s concern for the farmer, his concern for the

city worker was even greater. The wretchedness of the New York slums

was daily under his eye, and his honest heart was troubled at what he

saw. That he should have sympathized with the emerging labor movement

was inevitable; his conscience dictated his stand, but his eager mind

drove him to intelligent inquiry and vigorous support. He was the first

American of wide reputation and influence to give serious consideration

to the effects on the working class of the industrial revolution with

its gospel of exploitation. The exploitation of natural resources

was well enough; but the exploitation of human life was a different

matter. A material prosperity based on social injustice, a civilization

founded on slavery, he would have none of. That this great matter of

slavery was inadequately understood and too narrowly interpreted by the

Abolitionists, he was early convinced. He agreed with William Grayson

and the southern apologists, that slavery existed in New York as well

as in Charleston. “The worker of the Nineteenth Century,” he said in

_The Emancipation of Labor_, “stands a sad and care-worn man”; in

America as well as in Europe he is falling into “that train of thought

which is beginning to encircle the globe, and of which the burden may

be freely rendered thus--‘_Why should those by whose toil ALL comforts

and luxuries are produced or made available enjoy so scanty a share

of them?_’” If Theodore Parker could have lived a few years longer he

must have shared Greeley’s concern; but amongst the Abolitionists only

Wendell Phillips joined with him in espousing the cause of the working

class. Others held aloof. When appealed to in the middle-seventies to

aid the labor movement, William Lloyd Garrison denied the existence of

wage-slavery in America, and indignantly declined to take part in the

proletarian agitation.[431]

Greeley’s views would be reckoned advanced even today; before the

Civil War they were regarded as incendiary, calculated to awaken class

prejudice in a country where, as all patriotic Americans knew, classes

did not exist. What, for example, could simple-minded Abolitionists

make of a letter he wrote declining to attend an anti-slavery

convention in Cincinnati in 1845?

You will readily understand that, if I regard your enterprise with

less absorbing interest than you do, it is not that I deem Slavery

a less but a greater evil. If I am less troubled concerning the

Slavery prevalent in Charleston and New-Orleans, it is because

I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my

first efforts.... [I would not] undertake to say that the Slavery

of the South is not more hideous in kind and degree than that

which prevails at the North. The fact that it is more flagrant

and palpable renders opposition to it comparatively easy and its

speedy downfall certain. But how can I devote myself to a crusade

against distant servitude, when I discern its essence pervading my

immediate community and neighborhood?

_I understand by Slavery, that condition in which one human being

exists mainly as a convenience for other human beings_--in which

the time, the exertions, the faculties of a part of the Human

Family are made to subserve, not their own development, physical,

intellectual, and moral, but the comfort, advantage, or caprices of

others.... In short, wherever service is rendered from one human

being to another ... where the relation ... is one not of affection

and reciprocal good offices, but of authority, social ascendency

and power over subsistence on the one hand, and of necessity,

servility, and degradation on the other--there, in my view, is

Slavery. (“Slavery at Home,” in _Hints toward Reforms_.)

Here is a definition that may well be considered Utopian; but however

transcendental his general conception, Greeley was far too practical to

pursue abstractions. Having diagnosed the common disease that infects

all modern civilization, he was willing to use remedies that came to

hand. Before 1845 he opposed labor legislation, on the ground that the

evil was social; but later he supported the movement to limit the legal

working day by statute. More and more, however, he came to believe

that any lasting betterment must come from effective organization of

the workers; that the salvation of labor lay in its own hands; and the

great end towards which he looked was coöperation. The stumbling-block

that stood in the way of coöperative effort was the common distrust and

suspicion that poisoned the minds of working men; until they emptied

their hearts of that evil, the path that labor must follow would be

flinty and its life meager and hard.

An incorrigible idealist, clearly, was this Yankee plebeian whom Cooper

believed a vulgarian, Godkin held in contempt, and Bryant turned his

back on and would not speak to--a strange, child-like figure, with

his round moon-face, eyes blinking through spectacles and a fringe

of whiskers that invited the pencil of the cartoonist--yet carrying

the sorrows of the world in his heart and vexing his soul with all

the problems of society; an idealist who in the most sordid place in

America, and after years of fruitless experiment, could still stand

before his fellow Americans and thus sum up his social philosophy--“the

avocations of Life, and the usages and structure of Society, the

relations of Power to Humility, of Wealth to Poverty, of served to

servant, must all be fused in the crucible of Human Brotherhood, and

whatever abides not the test, rejected” (_Hints toward Reforms_, p.

400). In this faith--foolish it may be accounted by practical men, and

futile, but certainly not mean, not ignoble--Horace Greeley lived and

worked; to it he gave such strength and powers as were his, and he died

at sixty-one of a broken heart. He foolishly wished to be President,

but the American electorate that read his paper refused its votes, and

his hopes were destroyed by the careless many who were untroubled about

industrial pigstys.

III • Herman Melville • Pessimist

Set down beside the austere Bryant and the plebeian Greeley, Herman

Melville seems grotesquely out of company; and yet such proximities may

suggest, better perhaps than words, an explanation of the futility of

his dreams and the irony of the bitter penance of his days. Lifelong

he was lacerated by the coldly moral in his environment, and harassed

by the crudely practical; and without forcing the comparison, one may

feel that Bryant and Greeley embodied in nobler form the twin forces

that seized upon his bold and rich nature, and bound it to the rocks to

be fed on by eagles. Like Jacob he wrestled all night with an angel,

yet got no blessing from the touched thigh. Instead, his free spirit

was tormented and his adventurous heart seared with fire. Far more

truly than of De Quincey might one say of Melville: _Eccovi_, this

little child has been in hell! All the powers of darkness fought over

him, all the devils plagued him. They drove him down into the gloom of

his tormented soul, and if they did not conquer, they left him maimed

and stricken. The golden dreams of transcendental faith, that buoyed

up Emerson and gave hope to Thoreau, turned to ashes in his mouth;

the white gleams of mysticism that now and then lighted up his path

died out and left him in darkness. Life could not meet the demands he

made on it, certainly not life in America in the eighteen-fifties; the

malady lay deeper than Greeley thought--it lay in the futility of life

itself; and so after pursuing his vain dreams to the ends of the seas,

the rebellious transcendentalist withdrew within himself while awaiting

annihilation. There is no other tragedy in American letters comparable

to the tragedy of Herman Melville. Bryant’s melancholy is only the

gentle pensiveness of twilight compared to the midnight of his

pessimism. Hawthorne’s gloom is no more than the skeptical questioning

of life by a nature that knew no fierce storms; Poe’s is only the

atrabilious wretchedness of a dipsomaniac.

In the presence of a nature so tempestuous and fiercely honest, it

is a rash critic who will dogmatize. There is no simple clue to his

mystery, no common pass-key to unlock his mind. Raymond Weaver in

his brilliantly creative study has perhaps done all that the critic

can to light up the darkness, and later commentators can only follow

in his footsteps. In so far as a simple explanation may suffice, the

biographer finds it in certain frustrations that curdled the milk of

his romance and turned it sour. Like Mark Twain in later years, he

recoiled savagely from the smug conventions of society; but when he

spoke out his views--instead of discreetly locking them up in his

safe--and found himself fiercely assailed for unorthodoxy, he bade the

world go to the devil and would have nothing more to do with its praise

or blame. A proud sensitive nature, he took the world’s contumely _au

tragique_, and suffered it to mortify him. Or perhaps he was more

like James Branch Cabell than Mark Twain. An arch romantic, he vainly

sought to erect his romantic dreams as a defense against reality, and

suffered disaster. In love with the ideal, and pursuing it in a wild

adventure into the South Seas--his magic realm of Poictesme--yet “not

so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern,”

he found there only disenchantment. Seeking his satisfactions in love

of mother and wife, he came upon utter disillusion. The austerely prim

and coldly correct Maria Gansevoort, to whom his boyish heart yielded

itself passionately, was clearly no woman to satisfy his need of

intelligent sympathy, and he fled moodily from the pale negations of

a stifling environment. Even the finely loyal Elizabeth Shaw whom he

married seems only to have completed his disillusion, and he withdrew

into his study, and falling into “Plato’s honied head,” like Tashtego

into the whale’s head, “sweetly,” or wretchedly, “perished there.” It

is the plague of the idealizing mind that is forever comparing a wife

in her morning kimono with the Helen of his dreams. It is the curse of

possession that plays havoc with romance; and because Melville’s dreams

were passionately beautiful, because he made heavy demands on life, his

disillusion was bitter. And so like Felix Kennaston in Cabell’s _Cream

of the Jest_, and like Shelley in _Epipsychidion_, Melville fashioned

his dream-figure to love. The elusive figure of Yillah in _Mardi_,

whom he loves and loses and seeks, in a madly grotesque and satirical

pursuit through all the civilizations of his land of Poictesme, is so

suggestive of Cabell’s _Domnei_, that it perhaps may be accounted the

latter’s prototype.

Remembering the mingled strains of Melville’s ancestry, the critic

is tempted to discover in his New England blood the source of his

transcendental visions. Yet the influence is not easy to trace. Half

Dutch and half Yankee, he certainly got his vigorous physique and hot

temper from the former. His maternal grandfather, Major General Peter

Gansevoort, was a huge bulk of a man who achieved high distinction in

the Revolutionary War, and whose traditional prowess filled the boy’s

heart with pride. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, whom the son closely

resembled in physique, was crossed in blood with that of the Van

Rensselaers, the Ten Broecks, the Van Schaicks--the proudest families

of the old Dutch _régime_--and was deeply imbued with the distinction

of her patroon ancestry--“a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense

of her name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears” (Weaver,

_Herman Melville_, p. 34). His debt to the New England strain is not so

easily appraised. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville of

Boston, a graduate of Princeton and wealthy in his own name and through

his wife Priscilla Scollay, was not without his flashes of enthusiasm

in early life, taking part with Joseph Story’s father in the Boston

Tea Party. But his incipient radicalism was soon washed out of him; he

turned rigidly conservative, and to his death in 1832 he lingered in

the twilight of the eighteenth century. As Federal naval officer of the

port of Boston, he was a familiar figure in his cocked hat and knee

breeches; and it was of him that Holmes wrote the verses, _The Last

Leaf_.

He was of Scotch descent, and Melville’s father traced the family

line back to the thirteenth century, Herman Melville being twentieth

in direct descent from Sir Richard Melvill, who in 1296 was forced

to swear allegiance to Edward I of England. The blood seems to have

run somewhat thin in Allan Melville, a conventional, pragmatic soul,

who after making five trips to Europe, at the age of thirty-two,

having carefully weighed the advantages, fixed his affections on Maria

Gansevoort whom he met at Albany, and wooed with more propriety than

passion. He entered business in New York city as an importer of French

goods; but hard times descended on “the greatest universal mart in

the world,” and in 1832, when Herman was thirteen, Allan Melville

died leaving Maria Gansevoort and her eight children pretty nearly

penniless. The struggle with poverty set its mark on the cold, proud

woman whose ambitions centered about the success of affluence; and it

left a mark of quite another sort on the son who was soon to measure

her ideals with devastatingly critical eyes. The ways of mother and son

were at the parting.

The volcanic passions pent up in Herman Melville’s heart, the ardent

imagination that sent him forth on long quests and brought him home

empty-handed, can scarcely be traced to any source in Maria Gansevoort

or Allan Melville. A strange, incomprehensible child he seemed to his

mother, and strange and incomprehensible he remained in the eyes of

the family--an ugly duckling of another breed than theirs. A bitter

sense of aloofness and alienation from the intimacies of family

sympathy seems early to have taken possession of him, and he felt

himself quietly thrust out of the circle of respectable contacts.

Melville’s writings are filled with thinly veiled autobiography, and

it is a careless reader who does not see in _Pierre_ and _Moby Dick_

confessions as frank as Rousseau’s. “Call me Ishmael,” is the opening

injunction of the latter, and the book closes with a glimpse of “the

devious cruising _Rachel_, that in retracing search after her missing

children, only found another orphan” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_, p.

62). An Ishmael Melville unhappily conceived himself to be, an outcast

and wanderer on the earth because man is an outcast and wanderer,

to whom Nirvana is the only comfort and hope; and when he returned

disillusioned from the South Seas, when he found no home by his own

fireside, when he discovered his transcendental craftsmanship driving

on the rocks of economic necessity, when the public rejected his

mystical dreams and he was inexorably “damned by dollars,” he perforce

turned in upon his own broodings and sought solace in Plato. Driven by

need from his hill farm in the Berkshires, he buried himself in the

“Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” to pass long years pottering about

the customhouse. It was the vast futility of life as he experienced it,

that sent him to his study to find there such compensation as he might.

The stages in Melville’s progress towards Nirvana are sufficiently

marked by the four books, _Typee_, _Mardi_, _Moby Dick_, and _Pierre_.

The first is his answer to the French romantic Utopia of man in a

state of nature. That the rankling wounds in man’s heart are poisoned,

if not originally inflicted, by social institutions, he was partly

convinced, and he felt a lively concern lest western civilization

should bring its futile restlessness to the simple island people.

The kindliness and simplicity of life in the valley of Typee, the

compensating virtues of the unsophisticated primitive, he found

lovable; but as the unhappy heir of centuries of Christian conscience,

as a child of Hebraic ideals of righteousness, he could not eradicate

the deep roots of ethical unrest. With Fayaway it was different.

“Civilization had given her no veils; Christianity had given her

no compunctions. She was neither a mystery nor a sin” (_ibid._, p.

260). But he could not become a simple child of nature had he wanted

to. He could never find his Nirvana in mere sensuousness; he could

not sink into the mud of animal existence. Even while he bathed in

the languorous calm of Typee, floating idly with Fayaway on the

stream of being, his heart was beyond the narrow hills, and a cosmic

nostalgia seized upon him. That chapter of his life ended in futility,

and so he made his way back once more to the familiar places, with

expectation still undaunted. Certain of his experiences on that return

journey he has recorded in _White Jacket_, the story of his cruise

on a man-of-war; and how near it brought him to oblivion is told in

the episode of the threatened flogging before the mast, when fate

intervened to save Melville from flinging himself overboard, carrying

with him the brutal captain of the _Neversink_.

Amidst the constrictions of the old world to which he had come back, a

fresh vision of happiness opened to him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw,

and he made a desperate plunge into marriage. The post-thalamion of

that thwarted romance was _Mardi_--a far-ranging “pilgrimage for a lost

glamour,” “a quest after some total and undivined possession of that

holy and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his

courtship” (_ibid._, p. 279). _Mardi_ is a vast welter of satire and

idealism, formless and wild, which in turn was no more than prologue

to _Moby Dick_. This colossal book, fierce as _Gulliver_, broad as

Rabelais, with its _saeva indignatio_ that laughs as it rends life, is

the great confession of his defeat. “It is good to laugh,” he says in

_Mardi_, “though the laugh be hollow. Women sob, and are rid of their

grief; men laugh and retain it. Ha! ha! how demoniacs shout; how all

skeletons grin; we all die with a rattle. Humor, thy laugh is divine.”

And the conclusion to which the philosopher comes is this: “Beatitude

there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from

great woes--no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love. Sadness

makes the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal

and eternal” (_ibid._, p. 279).

After _Moby Dick_, what remained but to put the external world of

experience aside and turn in upon his own thwarted hopes to analyze

them? _Pierre, or the Ambiguities_ is his spiritual autobiography,

the confession of a stricken soul. In the inconsequential matter of

plot, a story of incest and murder and suicide, in its deeper purpose,

it is a wild fierce tale of mortal passions, that traces the _élan_

of mystical idealism to the buried depths of procreative instinct.

It is the last bewildering attempt to understand the sources of the

dream that had ridden him, and it is discovered in the passionate

struggles of Enceladus, titanic offspring of the incestuous union

between Heaven and Earth, to regain the kingdom from which he has been

thrust. In _Mardi_ the search for Yillah had been carried on under the

watchful eye of Hautia, the temptress, whom “his whole heart abhorred,”

yet to whom at last he went in her bower of Flozella-a-Nina--“The

Last-Verse-of-the-Song”; for in “some mysterious way seemed Hautia and

Yillah connected.” In _Pierre_ Hautia reappears as Isabel, likewise

a child of Heaven and Earth, who is set over against Lucy--the pure

daughter of Heaven alone; and this dark Isabel robed in the midnight

of her hair, by appealing unconsciously to Pierre’s noblest impulses,

draws him from the safe orbit of the Gansevoort moralities, and makes

of him “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.”

Isabel is wild, unquestioning, mysterious passion, untouched by any

Hebraisms; and this half-sister of his blood, this lovely embodiment of

his star-crossed dreams, drives him unwittingly to destruction. Pierre

learns at last that the vision brings poison in its kisses, for the

divine in the heart of Enceladus is mingled with the clay of earth. The

dream is man’s final ironical curse; Yillah and Hautia and Lucy and

Isabel--changing embodiments of the same mystical idealism--bring death

to their lovers--this is the conclusion of _Pierre_, a conclusion that

Mr. Cabell would not take kindly to. It was a black and bitter book,

like _Moby Dick_ “broiled in hell-fire,” to fling at an easy-going

public that cherished its Gansevoort conventions. With its fierce

disillusions _Pierre_ is the apogee and Nirvana of the spiritual

romanticisms of the day.

That Melville was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques, that the

consuming nostalgia he suffered from was mortal, the most casual

acquaintance with his passionate rebellions should make clear; and

that his pessimism was a natural end and outcome of his transcendental

speculations, once those speculations had come to intimate contact with

life, is perhaps equally clear. Transcendentalism in Concord village

and at Walden pond, was one thing. Emerson’s infrequent anger at the

folly of men was soothed by the perfect art with which he phrased it,

and never seriously ruffled his temperamental placidity. Thoreau’s

mystical communings were with the young god Pan; he was too wise to

seek to domesticate a woodland nymph, and he was fortunate in escaping

the dun twilight that gathers about the slow years of physical decay.

But transcendentalism in the forecastle of the whaler _Acushnet_,

transcendentalism that drove fiercely into the blood-red sunsets of

dwarfing seas, transcendentalism in the hot and passionate heart of

a man whose vast dreams outran his feet--this was something very

different from the gentle mysticism of cooler natures and unembittered

hearts where no Promethean fires were raging.

For Herman Melville, amidst the nameless obscenities of an alien

environment, to keep his faith in the goodness of life strong and

sweet, would have needed the boundless charity and simple paganism

of Walt Whitman. But unfortunately for his peace of mind, though he

might immerse himself in Plato, Melville was no Greek; he was Hebraic

rather, out of Ecclesiastes, and Solomon and Jesus. “Away,” he cries

in _Pierre_, “ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato,

who once did all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a

tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot. Tell me

not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe cannot

spare thee and thy immortality.... Already the universe gets on without

thee.... Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo!

I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from

which the meat hath been sucked” (Chapter XXII--3). From the lips of

the ancient Preacher he had learned that all is vanity--even Pan. “The

truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “and the truest of all

books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of

woe. All is vanity. +ALL+.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,

Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free

lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not

that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green damp

mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_,

pp. 151-152). After _Pierre_ came _Clarel_--years later--in which the

theological doubts and religious unrest that mark the poetry of Arnold

and Clough in England came to expression in a world that was untouched

by them.[432] The abyss that lay between Melville and America had

become deeper and wider.

Like all the transcendentalists Melville was a democrat, but his

democracy sprang rather from his sympathies than from his philosophy.

It was a democracy learned rather from Ecclesiastes than from Emerson;

it sprang from his pessimism rather than from any transcendental faith

in the divinity of man. He knew only too well how weak and foolish

are the children of Adam; but in presence of the common fate to which

the indifferent years hurry us, how stupid and callous are the social

distinctions that society erects! Why should not life be a leveler, as

well as death? His experience before the mast had taught him sympathy

for the common man; he regarded quizzically the ways of the exploiting

few and the sufferings of the exploited many; and he smiled ironically

at the neat little classification that divides the human animal into

sinners and saints. He was as comprehensive a democrat as Whitman, of

the same all-embracing school that denied the common social and ethical

categories of excellence; but alienated from his fellows, not drawn to

them as Whitman was. It was not a sense of social aloofness that held

him apart, but the isolation of loneliness. “When you see or hear of

my ruthless democracy on all sides,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “you may

possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but

nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail

is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.... It seems an

inconsistency to assert unconditioned democracy in all things, and yet

confess a dislike to all mankind--in the mass. But not so” (_ibid._,

pp. 320-321). He then goes on: “But truth is the silliest thing under

the sun,” and does not deign to explain. “Believe me,” he says of

_Pierre_, “you will pronounce Pierre a thoroughgoing Democrat in time;

perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy” (_ibid._, p. 37).

Such a man would not so much turn critic as embody criticism. His

life--even more than Emerson’s--laid upon America, was a yardstick to

measure the shortcomings of a professed civilization. Cooper was a

critic whom America could understand, and America hated him for his

unpleasant frankness. Melville it could not understand, and it turned

away and ignored him. Perhaps it was well enough that his generation

could not comprehend his devastating speculations, and called him mad;

or it would have cried out to crucify this maligner of all the tribal

fetishes. He would level every barrier against the unpleasant that his

age was erecting. He outran Thoreau in contempt for current material

ideals. To turn scornfully away from the triumphs of his fellows--from

the fruits of the industrial revolution and the romantic gospel of

progress--this was incomprehensible blasphemy! Yet what had Herman

Melville in common with middle-class America? Its hopes and fears were

not his. He was troubled about life, and not about things. He was not

concerned about politics or the political state. He was not concerned

with trade, or money-getting, or romantic imperialisms. He was not even

greatly concerned with political democracy, although in his time he had

been as hot a republican as the best of them. The shoddy democracy of

his time made his gorge rise; and to this shoddy democracy that shrilly

proclaimed its excellence he paid his respects in words that suggest

Lowell’s _Cathedral_, but with a depth of significance that Lowell was

incapable of. In the poem _Clarel_, into which Melville crowded so much

of his later speculations, he comments thus:

This world clean fails me: still I yearn....

This side the dark and hollow bound

Lies there no unexplored rich ground?

_Some other world_: well, there’s the New--

Ah, joyless and ironic too!

Ay, Democracy

Lops, lops; and where’s her planted bed?

The future, what is that to her

Who vaunts she’s no inheritor?

’Tis in her mouth, not in her heart.

The past she spurns, though ’tis the past

From which she gets her saving part--

That Good which lets her evil last.

Behold her whom the panders crown,

Harlot on horseback, riding down

The very Ephesians who acclaim

This great Diana of ill fame!

Arch strumpet of an impious age,

Upstart from ranker villeinage:

Asia shall stop her at the least

That old inertness of the East....

But in the New World things make haste:

Not only things, the _state_ lives fast--

Fast breed the pregnant eggs and shells,

The slumberous combustibles,

Sure to explode. ’Twill come, ’twill come!

One demagogue can trouble much:

How of a hundred thousand such?...

Indeed, those germs one now may view:

Myriads playing pigmy parts--

Debased into equality:

Dead level of rank commonplace:

An Anglo-Saxon China, see,

May on your vast plains shame the race

In the Dark Ages of Democracy....

Your arts advance in faith’s decay:

You are but drilling the new Hun

Whose growl even now can some dismay;

Vindictive in his heart of hearts.

He schools him in your mines and marts

A skilled destroyer....

Old ballads sing

Fair Christian children crucified

By impious Jews: you’ve heard the thing:

Yes, fable; but there’s truth hard by:

How many Hughs of Lincoln, say,

Does Mammon, in his mills, to-day,

Crook, if he does not crucify?

The impieties of ‘Progress’ speak;

What say _these_, in effect to God?

‘How profits it? And who art Thou

That we should serve Thee? Of Thy ways

No knowledge we desire; _new_ ways

We have found out, and better. Go--

Depart from us!’ And if He do?

Is aught betwixt us and the hells?...

For Herman Melville, at least, the barriers betwixt him and the hells

had long been gone, and only Nirvana awaited him.

Footnotes

[426] See his satire on Fanny Wright in _The Evening Post_, January 29,

1829, quoted by Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, pp. 126-127.

[427] For his statement, see “Labor’s Political Economy,” in _Hints

toward Reforms_.

[428] See “The Organization of Labor,” in _Hints toward Reforms_.

[429] See Charles Sotheran, _Horace Greeley_, p. 255.

[430] See William A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_,

pp. 43-45.

[431] Garrison, _Life of Garrison_, Vol. IV, p. 248.

[432] See Weaver, p. 365.

Book Three • The Mind of New England

The New England renaissance was tardy in appearing and of brief

duration, yet in the few years of its extraordinary vigor it imparted

a stimulus to American life that its historians have not greatly

exaggerated. We are now far enough from it to see that it was the last

flowering of a tree that was dying at the roots, but in the tumultuous

thirties it seemed to be a new birth of the native New England mind,

opening on new worlds and great adventures. Though its prophecies might

be little heeded at its own fireside, and unheard in the vast stretches

of the West where men were clearing and building after quite different

plans than the Concord architects were drawing, its significance in the

development of American idealism--the ethical imprint it stamped on

American culture--endured long after it had spent its force. It was the

last and in certain aspects the most brilliant of the several attempts

to domesticate in America the romantic thought of revolutionary Europe;

and with its passing, civilization in this western world fell into the

hands of another breed of men to fashion as they saw fit.

The revolutions in thought that lie between the eighteenth century

with its aristocratic rationalism that conceived of human nature as

evil, and the nineteenth century with its middle-class economics that

conceived of human nature as acquisitive, are more clearly defined

in New England and more sharply differentiated, than elsewhere in

America. The flood of romantic speculation with its humanitarian

emphasis on the potential excellence of man and the equality of human

rights, that in Europe had diffused itself widely, in Massachusetts

flowed into narrow channels prepared by Puritan discipline, and swept

away habits of thought that had dominated New England for two hundred

years. The intensity of the Puritan nature, once it embraced the new

conceptions, imparted to them an intellectual and emotional unity that

serves to explain the creativeness of the New England renaissance, as

it serves to explain its failure to spread widely beyond the confines

of Massachusetts. Appearing a generation later than in Virginia, it

drew its inspiration more largely from Germany than from France; it was

intellectual and ethical rather than political and economic; and in

consequence it held little in common with the Physiocratic agrarianism

of Jefferson. The latter was sufficiently native to American economics

to appeal to the common man from Maine to Georgia; the former was

native only to New England Puritanism. Its idealism appealed only to

rare souls, disciplined by speculation and trained in ethical values,

men of strong character and fine distinction who counted for much more

than numbers.

After all it is the ethical note that marks the Puritan. That New

England has run so different a course from other parts of America has

been due chiefly to its desire to serve God even though it might be

serving self. Its material life has always been plentifully seasoned

with the salt of religion. It sat under the teachings of an austere

ethics, as it lived under the compulsions of a narrow economics; and

the result was the development of a middle class distinct from that of

the West where the desire to get on was less hampered by the desire

to get to heaven. The outstanding social figures in early New England

were the minister and the merchant; and these twin authorities--joined

after the Revolution by the rising profession of the law--ruled in

patriarchal fashion the inarticulate mass of the yeomanry. From these

traditional leaders the policy of New England received a twofold bent:

a bent to the ethical and a bent to the practical. The two have rarely

fused in a harmonious and fruitful life, but for the most part have

dwelt side by side under a covenant of noninterference, the character

of current social ideals taking its impress from one or the other as

it gained a temporary ascendency. In the three hundred years of New

England history the minister has enjoyed two periods of intellectual

ascendency: the first during the early days of the theocracy, when

the commonwealth was ruled by the laws of God and John Calvin; and

the second, between the years 1830 and 1850, when John Calvin was

finally put aside and New England was in the way of being remodeled in

accordance with the plans of God alone. Between these brief periods of

ethical enthusiasm lies the main history of New England, a history that

counts for little in our intellectual and aesthetic development, but

that meant much and ill to the cramped minds of her sons.

This long stretch, arid and unlovely, was dominated wholly by the

merchant. Its parsimonious thrift, relieved by few generous impulses,

was hostile to all change and to the romance that is bred of change.

There was no rapid inflow of settlers to bring fresh energy and

expansion. The exuberant growth of other parts of America was never

shared by rural New England, and in consequence the harvest of

unearned increment was rarely reaped from her sterile acres. Except

in the shipping towns there was little economic development. On its

secluded little farms New England was living a narrow parochial life,

cooping up its mind in a rigid theological system and disciplining its

character by a self-denying ordinance. Public affairs were managed

by the squire, for the minister was too busy defending John Calvin

against the Arminians to have a care for much except morality and

dogma. The renaissance became of necessity, therefore, a movement of

liberalism--a vehement protest against the torpor of the dogmatist

whose mind was shut up in a dead system. It was a sudden reawakening

of the ethical passion of Puritanism that had slept for two centuries;

a vision of a new heaven and a new earth that it proposed to take by

storm. It proposed to rid the mind of New England of its decadent

loyalties--the nightmare dreams of Calvinism that debased human

nature, and the counting-house dreams of Federalism that conceived of

man as an exploitative animal. It had discovered anew the beauty of

righteousness, and in the name of righteousness it proposed to throw

off the old tyrannies and create a society wherein the mind should be

free and the soul enjoy its religion. The battle against Calvinism was

only preliminary to greater battles which constituted the intellectual

revolution that marked the renaissance.

It was the New England minister, and the spiritual heirs of the

minister--a group of intellectuals and reformers more notable than

New England had before bred--that gave to the movement its pronounced

ethical quality. It was freedom for individual righteousness that they

sought; not freedom for intellectual epicureanism, for romance, for

aesthetic or pagan beauty. The transcendentalists and reformers had

little time to amuse themselves with such things. They were too eager

for the coming of the kingdom to dawdle over fiction or patronize the

playhouse. They had been bred from their youth up on printer’s ink;

they came of a race that had long respected the printed page. Literary

men by inheritance, they esteemed themselves stewards of a great

cause. In rejecting their fathers’ hell they became the more zealous

to make a heaven of this world; and although the more practical Yankee

was skeptical of their plans and would not suffer them to turn Boston

into a transcendental Utopia, they succeeded in making such a stir as

New England had never before known. For a brief time, at least, liberal

ideas found a welcome in homes where they had hitherto been strangers;

for a brief time the intellectual and not the merchant dominated New

England.

Part One: the Twilight of Federalism

Chapter I • The Passing of the Tie-Wig School

I • Old Boston

The year 1815, that brought to a close the unfortunate American

venture into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic wars, may be conveniently

taken to mark for New England the transition to the nineteenth

century. With the rise of Unitarianism and the development of the new

industrialism, a ruder and more vigorous age entered Boston. It met

with a somewhat chilly reception. The patriarchal eighteenth century

still clung to its warm chimney corner, not liking to be dispossessed

by heirs of whom it testily disapproved. The old order stood on

its dignity, tenacious of its habitual authority. It lived quietly

in an aristocratic past, unregardful of the vigorous commonwealths

rising beyond the Appalachian mountains, and contemptuous of the new

political philosophy that preached the rights of man. A persistent

continuity of temper marked the ruling class, a continuity little

disturbed by the tumultuous revolutions of the past two generations.

Although nearly half the voters of Massachusetts, in the year 1800,

were Jeffersonian republicans, the knowledge of that fact only

stiffened the backbones of the regnant caste. It colored their minds

with a virtuous pessimism, but it edged their temper with the zeal of

righteousness. The Boston mobsters, it would appear, were republican,

and when the present custodians of the ark of decency were gathered

to their fathers, very likely evil days would come upon the land; but

while the righteous lived they would be faithful to their stewardship.

Their own households, at least, they would keep clean of all democratic

pollution; and so Boston and New Haven and Hartford--the capitals

of New England culture--drew about them the garments of Federalist

righteousness. Since the Revolution of ’76 a new authority had risen

on the ruins of the old Tory authority, but in spite of the change

of personnel and outward political forms, the spirit of respectable

New England remained pretty much what it had always been. John Quincy

Adams and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy were little different in

character and aims from Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Sewall and Daniel

Leonard--they were common chips from the tough old New England oak.

High-minded yet narrow; devout yet not emotionally religious; thrifty

yet generous in approved causes; engaged in overseas commerce yet

oddly parochial--they were men fashioned by a rugged environment into

vigorous stock, that would hold tenaciously to what they had got and

would tolerate no insubordination on the part of their social inferiors.

With its twenty-five thousand inhabitants Boston ranked fourth in size

among American cities. Philadelphia, the social capital of America,

was nearly three times as large; New York nearly two and a half times;

and even Baltimore had lately come to exceed her in population. The

economic forces that make for liberalism had become largely impotent.

Free land had long since been exhausted in Massachusetts and social

lines were fixed. The northern frontier of Maine and New Hampshire

was rugged and uninviting, and York State lay to the West. Except in

the Connecticut valley the soil was thin and farming unproductive,

and in consequence the more ambitious turned to commerce and

manufacture which the physical conditions of the country invited. The

dominant interest of Boston was commercial, and the ruling coterie of

merchants and lawyers was narrowly Whiggish. They had modified their

pre-Revolutionary political philosophy no further than to substitute

the word republican for monarchical. The aristocratic temper dominated

the town meetings, and the principle of property rule was commonly

accepted as the essence of political wisdom. In substituting Federalism

for Toryism there was no easing of the restrictions on rebellious

plebeians. Quite repudiated were the rude leveling ways of the great

Revolutionary adventure. Boston gentlemen had come to understand too

well the danger of encouraging the mob, for as Fisher Ames pointed out

in 1787, “The people have turned against their teachers the doctrines,

which were inculcated to effect the late revolution” (_Works_, p.

11). Boston had had enough of revolutions since Daniel Shays had got

up one of his own aimed at the Boston purse, and French Jacobins had

let loose their devastating ideas upon a gullible world. Revolutions

that were not made in Boston, by Boston gentlemen, were quite certain

to be wicked and seditious; and Boston had definitely gone out of the

revolution business. It wanted above all things to undo the mischief

that had already been done, and take back into safe hands the political

power which in the days of revolutionary enthusiasm had been seized by

the agrarian democracy.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century the intellectual isolation

of New England was sharply accentuated and the consequent intellectual

stagnation became more disastrous. In other portions of America French

revolutionary theories of man and society were spreading widely and

shouldering aside the outworn past. A romantic equalitarianism,

based on the doctrine of human perfectibility, was displacing the

traditional economic realism, established on the dogma of total

depravity. The leveling movement, in consequence, was provided with

a persuasive idealism that awakened troublesome aspirations in the

disfranchised majority and gave a strong impetus to the democratic

movement. But New England leaders stood resolutely apart, accounting

all equalitarianism sheer romantic folly. The old stubborn realism held

its ground, interpreting political principles in terms of economics,

and dogmatically maintaining the sacred rights of property. Boston

Federalism refused to have anything to do with “atheistic France,” the

fruitful mother of Jacobin follies. Pollution, it was convinced, must

result from any commerce with infidel and innovating ideas. Gunpowder

that was played with might explode, and New England wanted no blowing

up of her excellent society. Virginia had lent credulous ears to the

voice of France, and the result was the atheist Jefferson and the

rabble of his licentious followers. Massachusetts was not gullible

and it would tolerate no Jeffersonian atheisms. And so instead of

adapting French romantic philosophy to new world needs, seizing upon

its social idealism to leaven the crude American lump--as Jefferson

and Colonel Mason and John Taylor and many another Virginia gentleman

had done--Boston Federalism rejected French ideas in the mass, dubbed

French idealism Jacobinism, and turned back upon a stubborn reaction.

The disastrous consequences of that rejection upon the mind of New

England cannot easily be measured. It is clear enough, nevertheless,

that the renaissance was delayed a full generation, and when it

came it assumed certain provincialisms that greatly lessened its

permanent influence upon the rest of America. The impress of its

contribution upon our national thought has been far less permanent than

that of Virginia, that came a generation earlier and was primarily

economic and political. It is a suggestive fact that in the work

of adapting the new Federal Constitution to democratic ends, New

England contributed no creative leader, none in any way comparable to

Jefferson; but on the contrary her most representative leaders--and

in particular Webster--followed the eighteenth-century tradition in

combating the equalitarian advance in the interest of economic groups.

Some explanation of this fact may be found, perhaps, in the selfish

isolation of New England Federalism, that closed the door on the

liberal thought of France.

In consequence of such isolation Boston became the recognized home of

the philosophy of a stake-in-society. If it clung tenaciously to an

old-fashioned Federalism after it had been abandoned elsewhere, it

was because Boston was more middle-class than Charleston, and had not

learned from experience with Jacksonianism how easily the majority will

may be shaped and controlled to particular ends. It inherited the old

Tory contempt for democracy and relied on the old stock arguments to

combat it. Its habitual tone was one of virtuous arrogance. The one

great and ever-present fear that haunted the pillows of worthy Boston

merchants and turned their dreams to nightmares, was fear of the mob

getting out of hand; and democracy, for them, was only a euphemism

for the mob--the ever-present menace to sober and decent government.

In the judgment of Theodore Dwight, brother of Timothy, “there could

be nothing more dreadful this side of hell.” Nowhere else in America

did the reaction against the democratic ideal carry so far as in

Boston. The church and the merchant associations joined with polite

society to cry it down, and upon the head of the democrat fell the

most extravagant vituperation. For a generation few respectable New

Englanders raised their voices in defense of democracy, but gentlemen

of principle and property followed the lead of the little clique that

was driving straight towards the Hartford Convention--blind sailors

navigating the Dead Sea of Federalist pessimism.

All this was before the reputed time of plain living and high thinking.

Intellectual Boston was as parochial as political Boston. The lights

whom Bostonians regarded as the torch-bearers of New England culture

have long since been extinguished and their names forgotten even in

Beacon Street. Amongst the literati of the little Boston of 1800 the

historian need concern himself with no more than two or three: Fisher

Ames (1758-1808), the Federalist lawyer-wit, and Robert Treat Paine

(1773-1811), esteemed the ninth wonder of the Boston world. Other

figures there were, of course, in addition to the literati: Harrison

Gray Otis, the eloquent voice of Faneuil Hall, and Josiah Quincy, whom

Lowell likened to an old Roman of the elder virtuous days, and who

during a long life of ninety-two years was an example of stalwart and

antiquated Federalism. Old Boston bred dignified figures in plenty,

men admirably equipped to be college presidents, ambassadors, orators

on formal occasions, purveyors of cultivated inutilities and polished

commonplace--men like Edward Everett, whom all Boston praised while

they lived and forgot when they were dead; but it bred no thinkers or

men of letters who count in the larger history of America. Boston was

still parochial, content with little things.

II • Fisher Ames • The Oracle of the Tie-Wig School

Of this testy little world that clung to its smallclothes and tie-wig,

refusing to adopt the Jacobin innovation in dress and manners and

politics, declining to temper its prejudices to the gusty whims of a

leveling age, Fisher Ames was the universal counselor and oracle. A

vivacious little gentleman to whom politics was the breath of life,

he achieved so tremendous a reputation in his short lifetime that all

New England looked to him for leadership and Harvard College wanted to

make him its president. He came of vigorous stock, prone to consult

its own will and speak its opinions with no squeamish concern for a

neighbor’s views. His brother, Dr. Nathaniel Ames, was as violent a

Republican as Fisher was a Federalist, a hater of all lawyers whom

he accounted the “pettifogging interest”; and when the two members

of the family came together at dinner the talk must have been worth

hearing. Diverse worlds and hostile philosophies faced each other over

the roast, and the sauce no doubt was well spiced. Dr. Nathaniel had

a pretty gift himself in the way of pungent speech, and Fisher’s wit

was the admiration of all New England. When Gouverneur Morris--reputed

the greatest wit in America--visited Massachusetts, Fisher Ames was

pitted against him, and Boston believed that the honor of the Bay

State was worthily upheld. His pet hobby was the inherent tyranny of

all democracies, and when he once got astride his wooden horse and dug

in the spurs, the onset was tremendous. The letters that have come

down to us are a gold mine of picturesque vituperation, from which

one may dig a wallet of choice nuggets. The vivacity of his anathemas

is delightful, and one would give much to have heard Dr. Nathaniel’s

retort militant.

There are the solidest grounds for regarding Fisher Ames as the

representative citizen of Boston in the year 1800. He was the cleverest

and most intelligent spokesman of a social and political circle quite

untouched by the new French liberalisms, content with the habitual and

familiar, and mightily concerned that the future should be as like

the past as one generation of oysters is like another. A lawyer who

shared the strong property consciousness of the Boston merchant, and a

churchman who accepted the moral leadership of the Calvinist clergy, he

offered stout and uncompromising resistance to innovation. “A change,

though for the better, is always to be deplored by the generation in

which it is effected,” he said. “Much is lost and more is hazarded”

(_Works_, p. 15, edition of 1809). The new gospel of progress that came

in with French romanticisms, he would have none of. In the face of a

noisy Jacobinism that threatened to carry all before it, he fought a

spirited fight, turning pamphleteer when his broken health removed him

from Congress, counseling and scolding his fellow Federalists with his

last breath. Others might truckle and compromise, but not Fisher Ames.

His faith was founded on the solid granite of Yankee prejudice.

The very solidity of that prejudice made him the trenchant spokesman

of the older Boston conservatisms--that and the vivacity of his prose

style which is approved Augustan, uncorrupted by what he dubbed

“pompous Johnsonian affectation.” His contemporary reputation was

enormous. Accounted a great orator, he was accounted an even greater

political philosopher, and his pamphlets were appraised by President

Kirkland of Harvard as “the light of genius and wisdom darted athwart

the gloom of our political chaos.” “In the character of Mr. Ames,”

said the Harvard president, “the circle of the virtues seemed to be

complete, and each virtue in its proper place” (_Works_, Introduction,

p. xxviii). Yet in spite of so authoritative a pronouncement, Fisher

Ames does not seem today so great a man as he seemed to his own

generation. From the data collected in a stout volume published soon

after his death as “a voice of instruction and warning to his country,”

and from the letters published by his son in 1854, it is plain enough

that this “powerful and original genius” was a retailer of somewhat

shopworn goods, a complete Federalist Tory after the current Boston

fashion. To Fisher Ames Federalism, as understood in New England, was a

religion. He defended it with the ardor of the moralist, convinced that

it included all the political virtues, and that whoever rejected it was

a child of the devil. Whenever he considered the unpromising state of

the country--which luxury he often indulged--whether in the midst of

Shays’s Rebellion or of the Jeffersonian revolution, he fell into black

pessimism. He grew hot from fires of his own kindling, and the gloomier

he became the more vigorously he blew the bellows.

To the sinful publican self-conscious virtue is peculiarly irritating,

and since Fisher Ames accounted most of his generation political

publicans, he was at odds with all but a scant remnant of Federalist

saints. From this isolation, from the defeat that overwhelmed his party

in the great election of 1800, and from aggravating ill health, which

beginning when he was thirty-seven incapacitated him three years later

for public life, he fell into a state of chronic political despondency

that extracted a grim pleasure from the contemplation of democratic

follies and the anarchy towards which the country was hastening. During

his last years his wit became acid; his letters are filled with caustic

comment to sharpen the temper of those on the fighting line. Of these

racy comments, so characteristic of Federalist spleen, a few examples

must serve to convey the spirit: “Our country is too big for union,

too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.” “We are in the

hands of the philosophers of Lilliput.” “I have as loyal and respectful

an opinion as possible of the sincerity in folly of our rulers.” “As

to liberty, we are to have none--democracy will kindle its own hell,

and consume in it.” “Democracy is a troubled spirit, fated never to

rest, and whose dreams, if it sleeps, present only visions of hell.” In

his last years Fisher Ames had become a shrill Jeremiah crying in the

gates of an Israel that mocked the old prophets.

His political philosophy was simple, yet so native to Calvinist-Yankee

New England, and historically so characteristic, that it provides

a useful candle to throw light into the old New England garrets.

In certain aspects it is close kin to the Whiggery of Locke and

Pitt, particularly in its concern for the sacred right of property

rule--a principle that he casually recognizes in his frequent

assertion that “the mass of the federalists are the owners of the

commercial and monied wealth of the nation” (_Works_, p. 426).

But in post-Revolutionary Boston, suffering from the acute fright

inflicted by Daniel Shays, this English Whiggery had come to assume

a particular native form that differentiated it from its original.

In the primitive Calvinist-Yankee world political theory had been

shaped by the theocratic conception of stewardship, by which was

meant an authoritative leadership reposing in the best and wisest,

yet subject to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Minister

and magistrate, therefore, professed to justify their acts, not by

expediency or interest, but by absolute ethical standards. From this

early practice developed the pronounced ethical temper of New England

political thought that set it apart from the Virginia school, a temper

that persisted after the transfer of authority from Puritan minister

and magistrate to Tory merchant and lawyer. With the growth of the

aristocratic spirit in the middle eighteenth century, the squirearchy

assumed unchallenged political leadership, and it was from the remnant

of the old gentry remaining after the expulsion of the Loyalists,

strengthened by a new generation of merchants and lawyers, that Boston

Federalism drew its personnel. It professed republicanism, but it was

instinctively aristocratic. It was true to its Puritan origins in

expounding its political philosophy in terms of an absolute morality,

and true to its aristocratic origins in assuming to be the special

custodians of law and order. It no more questioned its special right

to rulership in the state than it questioned its social position; and

in both politics and society it professed the ancient doctrine of

stewardship.

The kinship between the political philosophy of Fisher Ames and John

Adams is quite evident. They are cut out of the same Puritan-Yankee

cloth, but the former is a more careless tailor. Founded on less

adequate analysis and lacking the wide historical appeal of Adams,

assuming rather than proving the fact of a universal property

aristocracy, and the economic origins of political power, the

philosophy of Ames postulates the same ideal of justice as the end of

government, discovers in faction the dragon to be slain, and concludes

that only a static division of powers can insure political stability.

Nevertheless the difference between the two men is enormous. John Adams

was a philosopher, and Fisher Ames was only a lawyer-politician. The

ideal of justice which the former postulated was fundamentally noble,

whereas the ideal of justice which the latter assumed was narrowly

legal. Both accepted the Puritan doctrine of human wickedness--a

doctrine derived from medieval Toryism--and from it deduced the

necessity of a coercive sovereignty; but Fisher Ames went further and

assumed that the Puritan doctrine of the elect and the Yankee doctrine

of the successful were one and the same, and that God’s remnant in

Israel was no other than the prosperous merchants and lawyers of

Boston. All the great multitude of the unprosperous, by the same

doctrine, were the mass of the unregenerate, condemned for the good of

society to be ruled by a rod of iron.

The noble doctrine of justice, therefore, became for Fisher Ames

little more than the divine right of the minority to coerce the

majority, in the name and through the agency of laws and statutes. In

his view justice was little more than a drab realist in a lawyer’s

wig, adjudicating title deeds, and delivering its findings out of law

books. Its one concern was to safeguard what had been got, rather than

to secure just and equal rights. It dreaded all rude and tumultuary

innovation, and would tolerate no change that was not implicit in

legal principles. Its golden rule was due process of law. Love of

one’s neighbors was, no doubt, an excellent private virtue, but it was

impractical, if not immoral, in the state. Concern for the improvident

sinners must not influence government to impair the rights of the

thrifty saints; for government was instituted and exists to safeguard

established things. “The chief duty and care of all governments,” he

argued, “is to protect the rights of property and the tranquillity of

society” (_Works_, p. 125). Hence to Fisher Ames government was the

common policeman and judge, whose function was to arrest the turbulent

and bring them to the bar of the Common Law. Its beginning and end

was the Tory principle of coercion. Its sovereignty was arrogant

and domineering, taking no account of the democratic principle of

good will. “The motives to refuse obedience to government are many

and strong,” he explained; “impunity will multiply and enforce them.

Many men would rebel, rather than be ruined; but they would rather

not rebel, than be hanged” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius Brutus”). With

government thus conceived of, naturally he desired that it should be

strong; that it should impose its will ruthlessly upon the rebellious.

Naturally also he regarded every idealist, the Rousseaus and Paines and

Jeffersons--all the mischievous hosts of “democratick babblers”--as

a dangerous enemy of law and order, desperately bent on overturning

the rights of vested interests and the tranquillity of society. This

is sufficient to explain the vindictiveness of his assault upon Shays

and his followers, as “bankrupts and sots, who have gambled or slept

away their estates”--while in the Revolutionary army--and were now

engaged in the business of treason against the commonwealth, and the

characteristic conclusion that he draws--“the certainty of punishment

is the truest security against crimes” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius

Brutus,” p. 3). To Fisher Ames and Daniel Shays, justice seems to have

had very different aspects.

To the uncritical there is a certain persuasive dignity in the

philosophy of Boston Federalism. Gentlemen like Fisher Ames were

careful to appear well in public; they liked to be regarded as

faithful stewards of the common weal. Concern for the _res publica_

they professed so heartily that it seems ungracious to question their

motives. How excellently they could make out a case for themselves will

appear from the following exposition of Fisher Ames’ philosophy, as it

was understood by a Harvard president:

Mr. Ames was emphatically a republican. He saw that many persons

confounded a republick with a democracy. He considered them as

essentially distinct and really opposite. According to his creed,

a republick is that structure of an elective government, in

which the administration necessarily prescribe to themselves the

general good as the object of all their measures; a democracy is

that, in which the present popular passions, independent of the

publick good, become a guide to the rulers. In the first, the

reason and interests of the society govern; in the second, their

prejudices and passions. The frame of the American constitution

supposes the dangers of democracy.... [The constitutional checks]

are contrivances and devices voluntarily adopted by the people

to restrain themselves from obstructing, by their own mistakes

or perversity, the attainment of the publick welfare. They are

professed means of insuring to the nation rulers, who will prefer

the durable good of the whole to the transient advantage of the

whole or a part. When these provisions become ineffectual, and

the legislator, the executive magistrate, and the judge become

the instruments of the passions of a people, or of the governing

majority, the government, whatever may be its form, is a democracy,

and the public liberty is no longer safe. True republican rulers

are bound to act, not simply as those who appoint them _would_,

but, as they _ought_; democratick leaders will act in subordination

to those very passions which it is the object of government to

control.... Then it is, that men, not laws, govern. (_Works_,

Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv.)

“The durable good of the whole” is an excellent phrase; but when the

skeptical critic asks for more exact plans and specifications, the only

answer is a request for a vote of confidence. The representative is

presumed to be wiser and more patriotic than his constituents--quite

above passion or interest--and may safely be intrusted with “the

publick good.” “The love of country,” Fisher Ames was fond of

insisting, “is the morality of politics,” and the Federal Constitution

he believed to be so happily balanced that partisan selfishness must

transmute itself into patriotism. But when we dismiss these amiable

generalities--which reveal to what straits gentlemen were reduced in

their contest with democracy--and examine the political principles that

lie behind them, they do not appear so amiable. They imply as necessary

corollaries a continuous aggrandizement of the political state, the

principle of coercion, and the psychology of fear. It is no other than

the old Tory arrogance, new-modeled to suit republican taste. Fisher

Ames seems to have had no faith in the principle of good will or the

expediency of compromise; his contempt for the opposition was as frank

as Hamilton’s.

Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reasons

or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power

of the community compelling the obedience of individuals. If that

is not done, who will seek its protection, or fear its vengeance.

(“Lucius Junius Brutus,” _Works_, p. 5.)

For let it be remarked, that a feeble government produces more

factions than an oppressive one; the want of power first makes

individuals legislators, and then rebels. Where parents want

authority, children are wanting in duty. It is not possible to

advance further in the same path; the one will conduct us first

to anarchy, and next to foreign or domestick tyranny; the other,

by the wise and vigorous exertion of lawful authority, will lead

to permanent power, and general prosperity. I am no advocate for

despotism; but I believe the probability to be much less of its

being introduced by the corruption of our rulers, than by the

delusion of the people. (“Camillus,” _Works_, p. 17.)

A weak, government, Ames argues insistently, is no other than a

hotbed of faction, and faction is the fruitful mother of democratic

anarchy. Again and again he returns to an exposition of the familiar

eighteenth-century dogma that found its classic exposition in the

tenth number of _The Federalist_; and his argument takes on darker

colors from the Calvinist background of his mind. To those who have

been reared on the sour doctrines of reprobation and election, the

children of Adam become a major political concern. If God has cast

off and denied the mass of the unregenerate, how shall the political

philosopher hope to redeem them? If divine wisdom has granted them no

part in the congregation of the righteous, what rights have they in

the republic of the patriotic? To Fisher Ames town and village and

farm showed plentiful examples of those whom the devil had marked for

his own, and if they were gathered into a numerical democracy with the

saints, how should the minority of the latter safeguard the Ark of

the Sanctuary? How should the durable good of the whole be provided

for? Thrift and godliness were not exactly synonymous terms to the

Calvinist-Yankee, but it was clear that the godly will practice thrift,

and those who have thriven, have _ipso facto_ made out a case for their

godliness. In this uncertain world two things seemed reasonably clear:

that the poor are in a more doubtful state than the rich; and that in

a moral world only the elect may be expected to serve the cause of

morality. The wicked incline to democratic faction, but the prosperous

serve the durable good of the whole.

To one cradled in such prejudices, the current phrase, “gentlemen of

principle and property”--a phrase that provides the chorus to his

thought--lacked the savor of cynicism that it suggests to modern ears.

It was compounded of the ideals of Puritan and Yankee, and Fisher Ames

seems never to have questioned its adequacy, or doubted its finality.

To gentlemen of principle and property he looked to provide a bulwark

against the immoral multitude; they were the stewards of society, on

whom devolved the duty of protecting the whole from democratic faction.

They had erected the Federal Constitution, which Jacobins were seeking

to destroy; and in defense of that Constitution he brought forth his

heaviest artillery. He contributed nothing new to the discussion; but

he repeated the familiar arguments with the gusto of a dogmatist.

“Simple governments,” he asserted, “are despotisms; and of all

despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent”

(_Works_, “American Liberty,” p. 382). The mortal weakness of all

democracies he discovered in their immorality. A democracy will make

every people “thoroughly licentious and corrupt.” “The known propensity

of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the

ignorant believe to be liberty.”

The great object, then, of political wisdom in framing our

constitution, was to guard against licentiousness, that inbred

malady of democracies, that deforms their infancy with grey hairs

and decrepitude. (_Ibid._, p. 384.)

There is universally a presumption in democracy that promises

everything; and at the same time an imbecility that can accomplish

nothing, not even preserve itself. (_Works_, “Falkland,” p. 151.)

“Politics should have no passions,” this caustic old Federalist

professed to believe, yet his bitterness against the Jeffersonians who

threatened to overturn the funding law, the national bank, the midnight

judicial appointments, and other measures of the best Federalist minds,

was almost unseemly. It would appear that “the durable good of the

whole” flew out at the window, when danger to commercial interests came

in at the door. To erect a strong government and then lose control of

it was a disaster indeed. With the political state in the hands of

atheistic democrats, Fisher Ames was prepared to welcome the coming of

anarchy, and his pessimism throve on the prospect. But that no warning

might be lacking he laid down the whole theory of government in plain

terms, that even Jefferson might understand:

But the essence, and almost the quintessence, of good government

is, to protect property and its rights. When these are protected,

there is scarcely any booty left for oppression to seize; the

objects and the motives to usurpation and tyranny are removed. By

securing property, life and liberty can scarcely fail of being

secured: where property is safe by rules and principles, there is

liberty. (_Works_, “Phocion,” p. 181.)

This is pure Federalism, stripped of all cant, speaking out frankly.

It is the philosophy of John Locke brought in to serve the rising

capitalism of New England, threatened by a Physiocratic agrarianism.

The dogma of political morality has yielded to economic realism. The

stake-in-society principle is the reply of the Puritan-Yankee to the

democratic romanticism of Jefferson and Madison--a principle which,

fortunately, “these apostles from the race-ground and the cock-pit”

paid little heed to.

To a sophisticated generation, long familiar with the political ways of

gentlemen of principle and property, Fisher Ames appears as a caustic

little gentleman, vivacious and intolerant, who nodded his tie-wig

dogmatically, and spoke his opinions oracularly. He quite evidently

relished his ample store of old-fashioned prejudices, cherished them

carefully, and prided himself on the wit with which he set them forth.

If he was not the repository of all political wisdom that he believed

himself to be, he was at least no demagogue, and in honoring him the

Boston of the year 1800 was but painting its own portrait. It would be

ungracious, perhaps, to add that Fisher Ames and Boston Federalism,

defeated in their cherished projects, were both suffering from an

extraordinarily aggravated case of the political spleen.

III • Robert Treat Paine, Jr. • Wit

Young Tom Paine, who took his brother’s and his father’s name--partly

because a certain other Tom Paine had achieved a fame that Boston did

not regard as enviable--shared with Fisher Ames the literary renown

of the New England capital, a renown so great that Boston paid him

quite astonishing sums for such couplets as his indolence suffered him

to turn off. The popularity of his wares was a notable instance of

the working of the law of supply and demand. The patriotism of Boston

preferred domestic to imported goods, and he offered his verses to a

public not very critical of quality. Boston had never had a poet of her

own, while Connecticut with her Hartford Wits was the envy of all New

England. Certain poetesses to be sure, had tried with “hallowed hands”

to “attune Columbia’s lyre”--to quote Paine’s eulogy of Mrs. Sarah

Wentworth Morton, “blest Philenia, noblest of the choir” (_Works_,

“Menander to Philenia,” p. 129)--but their sentimentality was a bit

cloying, and when genius appeared in the person of a Harvard graduate,

graced with wit and adorned with all the learning of the schools,

Boston was quick to acclaim him as her own.

The young man thus seized upon, and as it were raped by fame, was

the last of the eighteenth-century wits, the most dashing product of

a generation that patched its verse with tags of the classics and

called it lisping in numbers. In temper and manners he belonged wholly

to the tie-wig school that swaggered till the War of 1812 and then

became obsolete overnight. As a young man about town he displayed

the latest London clothes and set himself up as the very glass of

fashion. Although he wore his own hair, he clung to smallclothes and

like an honest Federalist refused to adopt Jacobin trousers. He was

indisputably clever and he cultivated a pretty wit as assiduously

as any Augustan. He talked in epigrams, and a convivial evening--of

which he was quite too fond for his own good--was a failure that did

not produce a _bon mot_ to run through the town. His biographer has

preserved a number of such for the amusement of posterity, and one

at least deserves to be remembered by our younger critics. When the

prohibition against the theater was repealed in 1793, he remarked, “The

Vandal spirit of puritanism is prostrate in New-England.” In cleaving

to wit and abandoning Puritanism, Paine broke with sober Boston

convention, and soon all respectable folk began to shake their heads.

A thriftless fellow, he played with the devil openly in the eyes of

all Boston. He drank too much, he gambled, he haunted the theater and

was a favorite of the greenroom, he became the first dramatic critic

born and bred in New England, and when he married the daughter of an

English actor, his father disowned him. Quite naturally he came to

poverty, dissipated his strength, suffered many a humiliation, and died

at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his widow and young children to be

provided for by a public benefit at his beloved Federal Street theater.

Little of his wit, unfortunately, found its way into his verse, which,

modeled ostensibly on Dryden and Pope, lacks their vigorous common

sense, and laboring to be sublime succeeds in being heavy. His couplets

swell sonorously, but his thought does not keep pace with his rhetoric.

He follows his recipe carefully; adjectives duly support the nouns;

the caesuras are justly spaced and the balance of the parts is as nice

as if weighed in an apothecary’s scales. He seasons the whole with

the staples of personification and poetic diction; everything has

been provided for, and yet the cake is fallen that he takes from the

oven. Something is lacking to lighten the sodden mass. A contemporary

critic, viewing the finished product, expressed his judgment thus:

Of Mr. Paine, as an author, we cannot speak in terms of unmingled

praise. His verse, indeed, seldom loiters into prose; but it

must be confessed, that his prose is here and there “tricked and

frounced, till it outmantles all the pride of verse.” His numbers

are, perhaps, never feeble or faultering, but a wild and frolic

imagination, occasionally, wantons through his periods, and

sometimes displays itself in contemning the chaster elegancies,

and sometimes in neglecting the severer decencies of thought and

diction. (_Works_, Introduction, p. lxxviii.)

It is certainly a partial eye that discovers a wild and frolic

imagination in these lumbering imitations of Pope, or in the occasional

excursions into the languorous fields of Della Cruscan sentiment.

When Paine ceases to be a wit he becomes an offense. To his admiring

contemporaries his poetry seemed to be pure metal, but to later

generations it is only plate, with the brass showing through the worn

spots. _The Ruling Passion_, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa

Society in 1797, is perhaps the first poem of Paine’s that is much more

than vacuous and turgid rhetoric; and this is redeemed, in spite of

liberal helpings from Pope, by a certain vivacity of satire, phrased

with Augustan smartness. Such couplets as these still preserve a jaunty

literary swagger for later ears; how they tickled the more susceptible

ears of our grandfathers must be imagined:

Where you send genius, send a fortune too;

Dunces by instinct thrive, as oysters woo!

For ne’er were veins of ore by chymist found,

Except, like Hebrew roots, in barren ground!

Paine early grew old, and before he had reached his thirties his mind

had taken a rigid conservative bent. His affections were fixed upon a

past that was visibly falling into decay, and its ways were endeared

to him in the measure that they decayed. It was a matter of personal

pride with him to embody in his own manners the aristocratic bearing of

pre-Revolutionary times.

Mr. Paine [says his biographer] attached great consequence to

_manners_.... He was modelled upon the _old school_. Without being

familiar, he was easy among friends, and courtly to strangers.

In colloquial discussions, he rigidly adhered to the law of

politeness; and in mixed society, he neither courted the _high_,

nor avoided the _low_.... He frequently deplored a supposed decay

of _manners_. With concern, he used to inquire “_In manners,

where is the successor of Gen. Knox to be found?_” It was with

him a constant topick of complaint, that “_The old, genteel, town

families, had been elbowed out of house and home, by newcomers_;”

that “_instead of the polished manners of a city, we should soon

exhibit that growth of gentility, which is produced by ingrafting

dollars upon village habits and low employments_.” (_Works_,

Introduction, p. lxix.)

Affecting an aristocratic bearing, Paine was as complete a Tory as

the republican environment permitted. If he despised the new, pushing

middle class that had risen since the Revolution, he held in contempt

the numerous company of those he dubbed the yokel, the peasant, the

hind, or the plow-tail. Under the circumstances the best that he

could do politically was to turn Federalist, and he embraced the

principles of Fisher Ames with genteel conviction. “In politics,”

says his biographer, “Mr. Paine was a disciple of the old federal

school. He understood the constitution, as Washington administered,

and as Hamilton had expounded it” (_ibid._, p. lxxvii). During his

undergraduate days he had dabbled in French revolutionary philosophy,

and “the fanatic Atheism of France, decorated in all the meretricious

charms of eloquence and philosophy, took a transient possession of his

mind” (_ibid._, p. lxxviii). At graduation in 1792, he read a poem

entitled _The Nature and Progress of Liberty_, in which he eulogized

“liberal thought,” proposed to follow “Reason,” declared that “the

rights of man” are a gift from heaven, proffered the hand of fellowship

to France--

May struggling France her ancient freedom gain,

May Europe’s sword oppose her rights in vain--

and launched a devastating couplet at the great English opponent of the

Revolution--

The fame of Burke, in dark oblivion rust,

His pen a meteor--and his page the dust.

Three years later, on proceeding Master of Arts, he presented a poem in

very different vein. Three years were a generation in those stirring

times, and by 1795 the penetrating vision of this genius of twenty-two

had discovered the atheist poison in the cup of French democracy. _The

Invention of Letters_ rises to a climax in a satirical elaboration

of a line from the poem of 1792--“Licentious morals breed disease of

state.” Having learned his lesson from Fisher Ames, the sapient young

Federalist announces that democracy is the mother of faction, and

faction leads on to anarchy. In this poem for the first time Paine’s

wit runs freely, and certain lines are as jaunty as he ever penned.

For place or power, while demagogues contend,

Whirled in their vortex, sinks each humbler friend.

See Crispin quit his stall, in Faction’s cause,

To cobble government, and soal the laws!

See Frisseur scent his dust, his razor set,

To shave the treaty, or to puff Genet!

In doubtful mood, see Mulciber debate,

To mend a horse-shoe, or to weld the state!

The whip’s bold knight, in barn, his truck is laid,

To spout in favour of the carrying trade!

While Staytape runs, from hissing goose, too hot,

To measure Congress for another coat;

And still, by rule of shop, intent on pelf,

Eyes the spare cloth, to cabbage for himself!

Envy, that fiend, who haunts the great and good,

Not Cato shunned, nor Hercules subdued.

On Fame’s wide field, where’er a covert lies,

The rustling serpent to the thicket flies;

The foe of Glory, Merit is her prey;

The dunce she leaves, to plod his drowsy way.

Of birth amphibious, and of Protean skill,

This green-eyed monster changes shape at will;

Like snakes of smaller breed, she sheds her skin;

Strips off the serpent, and turns--Jacobin.

In view of the fact that Governor Samuel Adams, chief of the New

England Jacobins, was to occupy the stage, President Willard had

diplomatically struck from the manuscript the ten lines last quoted;

but Paine had the audacity to re-insert them in speaking, and the

tumultuous applause was sufficient proof that it was not from a Harvard

audience that Sam Adams got the votes that annually returned him

governor.

Verse imposed some slight restraint on Paine’s rhetoric, but in prose

when he was in full career--as in the grotesque eulogy of Washington

which stirred the patriotism of Boston Federalists--the reins are

on the neck of his eloquence, and he takes all barriers with fiery

abandon. Fact troubles his wild and frolic imagination not at all, but

like any plebeian demagogue--whose factional appeals he so furiously

condemned--he blew the bellows of Federalist partisanship with

extraordinary vigor, stoking his fire with rumor and misrepresentation

and party spleen. No slander was too gross, no lie too palpable to

serve his end. He baited the democrats quite shamelessly, and aroused

the mob of Boston gentlemen like a true Tory. One of his political

orations has been preserved by his editor in the collected edition of

his works, for the enlightenment of posterity--an oration delivered

in 1799, “at the request of the young men of Boston,” on the theme of

France and democracy. In this extraordinary composition Paine seems

to have been quite ravished by his own rhetoric, that flashes in many

a feint and parry before it impales its victim. It is a Federalist

philippic, designed to destroy the good name of all who have quitted

the sacred Federalist tribe. Words could hardly go further; disregard

for truth could scarcely be more brazen. Paine’s delight in clever

antitheses overweighs any scruples in regard to just statement. “The

French Republick,” he asserted, “has exhibited all the vices of

civilization, without one of the virtues of barbarism.” One or two bits

from this tremendous oration, that in “the glow of feeling, the swell

of language, and the brilliancy of sentiments” has “very seldom been

surpassed,” and that was “received with rapturous and enthusiastic

applause,” must suffice to illustrate the justice of the Federalist

claim to the custodianship of political good manners. “Politics should

have no passions,” Fisher Ames asserted--which excellent principle

young Robert Treat Paine exemplified thus:

Political Empiricism has never attained, in any age or nation, so

universal an ascendency, as at the present day in the “Illuminated

Republick.” Unfettered by the fear of innovation, and unshackled by

the prejudice of ages, the modern Frenchman is educated in a system

of moral and religious chimeras, which dazzle by their novelty

those volatile intellects, which prescriptive wisdom could never

impress with veneration. Every Frenchman, who has read a little is

a pedant; and the whole race of these horn-book Philosophers is

content with the atheism of Mirabeau ... the absurd philanthropy of

Condorcet, and the visionary politics of Rousseau. These are the

boundaries of their literary ambition, of their political science.

Hence it is, that they pretend to be too enlightened for belief,

too virtuous for government.

The feculence of party is not yet drained of its rankest sediment.

The worshippers of democracy, though their altars are thrown down,

are not yet converted from their devotions. The frozen snake has

still some sparks of animation; and, if placed by compassion near

your hospitable fires, he will revive with exasperated venom, and

sting the hardy fool that fostered him. Deal therefore with these

ferocious demoralizers, as our crafty mariners trade with the

savages of the Indian ocean--with your men at their posts, your

guns loaded, and your slow matches burning. (_Works_, p. 319.)

For all democrats Paine had the hearty contempt of an honest man for

a rogue, but for the intellectuals who expounded the new romantic

philosophy his indignation was measureless. “The legitimate plebeian

democrat,” he asserted, is “an enemy to all government, under which

he holds no office”; but fling him a bone from the public table and

“he becomes the very scavenger of administration.” The “Illuminated

Jacobin,” on the other hand, “never changes his principles.”

His whole science is directed to unhinge society, his whole

ambition to plunder it. He is too ravenous to be content with a

system of order himself; and too selfish to permit its enjoyment

by others. Like a hog in a flower-garden, he sets no value on the

variegated foliage he destroys, and seems only desirous to root out

every twig of vegetation, that can satiate his voracity. (_Ibid._,

p. 321.)

To such fustian was he reduced when his wit left him. That a

gentleman could talk like that, and other gentlemen applaud, is a

sad commentary on the intellectual honesty of partisanship, even

amongst decent Federalists. Fustian was the order of the day, and

Paine was merely baying with his pack. If only he had not professed

such virtues his extravagance might be forgiven; but extravagance

ill becomes a distinguished repository of political wisdom. Once,

indeed, his vivacity got him into a nasty mess. While editor of _The

Federal Orrery_, he accepted in 1795 a political poem entitled _The

Jacobiniad_, the satire of which Paine “new-pointed and new-edged”

before printing. The democrats, at whom it was directed, were vastly

incensed, and a mob gathered before his lodging but was dispersed.

Later the son of one of the victims challenged him to a duel. Paine

declined but armed himself with an unloaded pistol. Accidentally

meeting his challenger in the street, he drew his weapon, but the

young fellow, standing in no awe of a favorite of the muses, struck

the pistol down and proceeded to give Paine a sound drubbing. To such

base treatment may genius come, when wit forgets that a sally of the

tongue may invite a counter sally of the fists. And so we leave him in

the dust of the street, ignobly laid low by the strength of that vulgar

democracy which was to bring down so many things held dear by Boston

Tories. His was, very largely, a wasted life--wasted by sheer indolence

and feeble will. He was a fellow of some parts, and a sentence from one

of his dramatic criticisms may not inaptly apply to him: “The character

is not a sot, but his humor has a mellower tilth for having been

husbanded and manured by ‘the excellent endeavor of drinking.’”

Chapter II • Winds of Political Doctrine

I

Into the complacent little Boston of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine

came the Embargo, the War of 1812, and the industrial revolution to

upset its static order and destroy its snug provincialism. The old

Federalism with its Hartford Convention and plans for New England

secession went the way of mortality, carrying with it to the grave the

old pessimism and the old spleen. The jealous isolationist policy was

quietly forgotten in Boston; the gospel of secession was preached no

more; George Cabot and Timothy Pickering gave way to other leaders; and

provincial Boston joined with Kentucky and Tennessee in extolling a

romantic nationalism. It sent to Washington a new spokesman, who joined

with Henry Clay in a paternalistic program of national expansion, and

took command of the forces combating the rising separatism of the South

Carolina school. By the year 1830 Boston had traveled far from the

times of the Hartford Convention.

The sufficient explanation of so striking a change is to be found,

of course, in the changing economics of Massachusetts. The Embargo

had proved a major disaster to New England shipping; and the Boston

merchants, counting their losses from idle and dismasted ships,

water-logging at the wharves, found just cause for hating the policy of

the administration. But if the shipping business was brought face to

face with tragedy, the manufacturing interests stumbled upon unexpected

prosperity. With British imports cut off, the home market offered a

tempting opportunity to Yankee enterprise. The familiar story of the

swift rise of New England industrialism need not be recounted here. It

is enough to remark that with the growth of domestic manufactures a

new group of economic leaders appeared, and the policy of New England

shifted from pro-mercantilism to pro-industrialism. It was a difficult

choice at first between the antagonistic claims of the Boston merchant

and the Lowell manufacturer; between the carriers of foreign goods who

demanded free trade, and the makers of domestic goods who demanded a

protective tariff. The traditional view of New England was strongly

for free trade. In 1807 a Federalist lawyer asserted it to be “an

unalienable right,” and in 1820 Judge Story asked, “Why should the

laboring classes be taxed for the necessaries of life?”[433] The tariff

bill of 1824 got only one vote from Massachusetts; but in the four

years between the passage of that act and the “Tariff of Abominations”

of 1828, Massachusetts went over definitely to industrialism.

Thenceforth she was to be the leader in the movement looking to

governmental paternalism, substituting the expansive Federalism of

Hamilton for the restrictive Federalism of Fisher Ames, and becoming in

consequence whole-heartedly nationalistic.

Equally significant, though less observed, was the changed attitude of

Massachusetts towards the great republican experiment. Gone was the

older generation, with its face turned to the past and its heart bound

up with the patriarchal ideals of a decadent squirearchy. Gone also

were the disturbant fears of democracy. The menace of Daniel Shays,

that had put the old Federalists in a rage at democracy, was long since

forgotten; and the nervous panic over French Jacobinism, that had

upset New England for a decade, had subsided. In the light of longer

experience with its ways democracy was seen to be far from terrifying.

The hobgoblin of faction that had benightmared the dreams of Fisher

Ames was discovered to be only a bogey to frighten naughty boys.

Massachusetts had kept off the agrarian reef, despite war and economic

unrest, and with her new constitution of 1820 property interests

were as secure as any old Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of

principle and property were still in control of the state; and if less

emphasis was laid on principle and more on property--if less regard

seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and more to

assertive self-seeking--business was no less secure than in the good

old days, and its profits were greater. And so, master of its looms and

a growing home market, New England industrialism regarded genially the

great western movement, fostered by a benevolent paternalism, confident

of extending its markets with every mile of westward expansion. To

encourage the development of the West and South by a Federal policy

of internal improvement became, therefore, common business foresight,

provided of course that the Constitution should follow population and

safeguard business interests against local agrarianism and the menace

of particularism.

By the year 1830 both dangers lay black against the political horizon.

The triumph of Jackson had enthroned the agrarian menace at Washington

and produced such a scrambling of frightened interests--such a rattling

among the old bones of Federalism and scurrying among the young limbs

of industrialism--as the country had not seen for many a year. Henry

Clay appealed to his followers in the West, and Webster marshaled his

adherents of the East, and from the coalescing of these incongruous

elements emerged the Whig party to do battle with Old Hickory. It was

a patchwork army at best. In the hour of peril, principles go by the

board. The Whig party was lineal heir of the old Federalism, but it

denied its philosophical patrimony. It substituted expediency for the

old economic realism, and began and ended intellectually bankrupt. Its

bitter and unseemly squabbles over the Bank and tariff, its platitudes

of patriotism and its pose of disinterestedness, the venom of its

personal attack upon Jackson, were the earmarks of a policy of shallow

opportunism that failed to make use of such victories as fell to its

lot, for the simple reason that it could never agree on what to do.

Such cohesive power as held it together--aside from petty antagonism to

Jackson--was the vague assumption that the well-being of the American

people was dependent on governmental patronage; the belief that each

economic group and section must receive its special favor, and that

through tariffs and bonuses and internal improvements the country as a

whole must prosper. Of this principle of special favors--a return to

the seventeenth century from which eighteenth-century liberalism was a

reaction--the American System of Henry Clay was the chief expression,

and it remains the most significant bequest of the Whig party to our

political history.

The Whig party was the first attempt of our rising middle class to

erect a political platform in accordance with middle-class ideals,

and its failure was due to the fact that the time was not ripe for

undisputed middle-class control. The merchant aristocracy of the North

was overthrown, but the planter aristocracy of the South was still to

be reckoned with; and its particularistic ambitions in the end wrecked

the Whig coalition of the West and East. By 1820 a revolutionary change

had taken place in the political philosophy of the plantation school.

From an ardent nationalism Calhoun was leading his followers back to

the earlier doctrine of states rights; and New England industrialism

found itself confronted with the doctrine which the Hartford junto

had played with, but now with far more drive behind it. The slave

economy was entertaining imperialistic dreams, and to effect its ends

was building up a new constitutional philosophy. Southern writers

had long been at work, and the weight of their authority was behind

the new particularism. _Rawle on the Constitution_, a states-rights

exposition, was the official textbook on civics at the United States

Military Academy, and from it, while a student at West Point, Jefferson

Davis declared that he first imbibed states-rights principles. Other

authoritative southern works that were widely read were John Taylor’s

two studies: _Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_

(1820), and _New Views of the Constitution of the United States_

(1823); some years later came Henry St. George Tucker’s _Lectures

on Constitutional Law_ (1843); and these were only preliminary to

Calhoun’s searching exposition in his _Disquisition on Government_ and

_An Inquiry into the Nature of the Constitution of the United States_.

To meet this theory of particularism there was need of a resurgent

Federalism, with a new nationalistic interpretation of the

Constitution. The compact theory of the Federal state must be refuted

by the organic theory; the conception of federated commonwealths must

yield to the conception of a coalescing sovereignty. The old battle

must be fought over again with fresh arguments. The sanctity of the

Constitution must be asserted, but that sanctity must be thrown over

a nationalistic rather than a particularistic interpretation. It must

be shown that despite the vehement protestations of southern loyalty,

a particularistic Constitution was a denial of loyalty and must end

in the destruction of the national union. For this difficult business

New England was as yet unprepared. The old Federalist arguments were

obsolete, and many of those Federalists had been deep in the Hartford

Convention. The new industrialism must provide its own theory, and

it was fortunate in discovering two men whose combined learning and

eloquence proved equal to the task.

II

The name of Webster has been so closely associated with the movement

of constitutional nationalism as to overshadow the just fame of one

who has many claims to be regarded as the intellectual leader of the

school. Joseph Story was a Salem lawyer whose reputation, considerable

as it is, is scarcely commensurate with his influence on our later

constitutional development. Of the same Harvard class with William

Ellery Channing, he dabbled in polite letters as a young man, but

went into the law, entered politics, became Associate Justice of the

Supreme Court, and for a time was Dane professor of law at Harvard.

He came of radical stock. His father, a physician at Boston till he

removed to Marblehead, was a militant Revolutionary Whig, one of

the score or so of Indians who made up the Boston Tea Party, and a

leader amongst the group of Sons of Liberty who seized and gagged the

sentinels and carried off two brass fieldpieces from the Common where

the British commander had posted them to overawe the town. The son grew

up an ardent republican. As a very young man he became an outstanding

leader of the unfashionable party, then in the minority, and suffered

certain humiliations on account of his political opinions; on one

occasion, according to Theodore Parker, being “knocked down in the

street, beaten, and forced to take shelter in the house of a friend,

whither he fled, bleeding, and covered with the mud of the street”

(_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 178). Of these youthful heresies

few indications appeared in his later life. Republican though he might

be, he was utterly devoid of any radical tendencies, and when he took

his seat on the Supreme Court bench he was speedily drawn into the

powerful orbit of John Marshall, shared the latter’s views on all major

constitutional questions, and turned Whig. He became a close friend

of Webster and from 1816 to 1842 he was his chief adviser on knotty

legal, constitutional, and international questions. “From that deep and

copious well of legal knowledge,” Parker asserts, Webster drew freely

“whenever his own bucket was dry” (_ibid._, p. 170).

This shift from Republican to Whig came about quite naturally. New

England liberalism, it must be remembered, produced no intellectual

leaders till late, and no clear-cut political philosophy. Though it

nominally accepted the leadership of Jefferson it never was won over to

the Physiocratic economics or states-rights principles of the Virginia

school. Story was at no time a Jeffersonian, but rather an eager and

avowed disciple of Washington, “little infected with Virginia notions,

as to men or measures.” In his _Autobiography_ he wrote:

The republican party then and at all other times embraced men of

very different views on many subjects. Nay, a Virginia republican

of that day, was very different from a Massachusetts republican,

and the anti-federal doctrines of the former state then had and

still have very little support or influence in the latter state,

notwithstanding a concurrence in political action upon general

subjects. I was at all times a firm believer in the doctrines of

General Washington, and an admirer of his conduct, measures and

principles.... I read and examined his principles, and have made

them in a great measure the rule and guide of my life. I was and

always have been a lover, devoted lover, of the constitution of the

United States, and a friend to the union of the states. I never

wished to bring the government to a mere confederacy of states; but

to preserve the power of the general government given by all the

states, in full exercise and sovereignty for the protection and

preservation of all the states. (Story, _Life and Letters of Joseph

Story_, Vol. I, p. 128.)

That he had as little sympathy with the Physiocratic economics of

Jefferson is apparent from his early activities in furthering the new

paper system. While a member of the Massachusetts legislature, as a

young man, he was active in pressing for bank franchises, and upon the

establishment of the Merchants’ Bank of Salem he became its president.

Like Washington and Marshall he espoused the new gospel of capitalism,

with none of the agrarian prejudices of the landed gentry to hold him

back. He was the political twin of the great Chief Justice, and a Whig

in spirit long before Webster. “I seem to myself,” he remarked late in

life, “simply to have stood still in my political belief, while parties

revolved about me; so that, although of the same opinions now as ever,

I find my name changed from Democrat to Whig, but I know not how or

why” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 546). Though somewhat naïve the comment is

just. Anti-federalism in Massachusetts would seem to have been largely

a capitalistic protest against the narrow tie-wig Federalism; and

while Joseph Story sat upon the Supreme Court bench, adapting legal

principles to the new needs of business, the country was moving forward

to the middle-class philosophy that he had early come to hold.

In the year 1833 he published his _Commentaries on the Constitution_,

the fruit of long labors, which was at once accepted throughout

the North as a classical authority, and which has held its ground

pretty well since. In method and temper, as well as objective, the

exposition of Story stands in sharp contrast to that of the southern

school. In its particularism the latter appealed to the history of the

Constitution in the making, and to French romantic philosophy; whereas

the former followed English constitutional theories to nationalistic

ends. Story was steeped in the Common Law and his thinking reveals the

strong influence of Blackstone. In passing through the mind of the

great Tory commentator, English constitutional theory had received a

pronounced Tory bias, and something of this remains after filtering

through the mind of Story. The ideal of a strong and efficient

political state, with its corollaries of a coercive sovereignty, of the

duties of a subject rather than the rights of a citizen, of loyalty

to government rather than concern for political justice, derives

immediately from English theory and practice. Much likewise he took

from the older Federalists: their fear of an encroaching legislative

power; their concern at faction; their faith in checks and balances

to restrain the majority will. But his chief inspiration came from

the spirit of the Common Law--that subtle influence that Jefferson so

greatly feared. His legalism was inveterate; the final, authoritative

answer to all questions he discovered in the decision of the courts.

Against such a mind, deeply read in the law and with scanty knowledge

of economics and political theory, the waves of liberal and romantic

thought broke impotently. His reasoning may be convincing to a lawyer,

but to the historian his exposition is often weak, his data inadequate,

and his conclusions not infrequently contrary to fact.

In building his argument Story drew his materials freely from _The

Federalist_, from the writings and decisions of Marshall, and from

Blackstone. The backbone of the work is Hamilton and Marshall, from

whom he quotes constantly, supplemented by a host of decisions by

Federalist judges. With its pronounced bias _The Commentaries_ must

be regarded as a partisan document, which like _The Federalist_ has

grown in authoritativeness with the triumph of its party principles.

Its surprising weakness on the historical side has come to be

overlooked since the downfall of southern particularism, but during

the debates that preceded the Civil War the work was sharply handled

by southern historians, and in his _Constitutional View of the War

between the States_ Stephens quite demolished Story’s feeble attempt

at an historical justification of the anti-compact theory. The weight

of historical evidence, to present-day students, would seem to be on

the side of the states-rights argument, although in certain aspects

both sides were innovators: Story in overleaping the period of French

ascendency when the Constitution took shape, and going back to the

older English tradition; and the compact school in reasserting the

compact theory at a time when the spirit of nationalism was undermining

it. Story seems to have been conscious of his weakness, for he

expressly repudiates the method of interpreting the work in the light

of contemporary testimony at the time of its formulation. In so doing

he not only violates the principle that a document is to be construed

in the light of the common understanding when it was drawn; but with

naïve inconsistency, he constantly appeals to _The Federalist_, pretty

much ignoring the opposition pamphlets, and interprets the Constitution

in accord with its commentary. But for the most part he clings to the

strict letter of the document. He lightly brushes aside the whole

compact argument by asserting dogmatically that the phrase, “We the

people of the United States,” must be understood in its simple literal

sense, and that thus interpreted, the Constitution is seen to derive

immediately from the individual citizens acting in their sovereign

capacity without the intermediation of the state governments. The

dispute long waged furiously about this point and Story’s analysis

touches only the fringe of the argument.

Very likely it is presumptuous for one who is not a lawyer to express

an opinion, yet these celebrated _Commentaries_ seem today very little

more than a new-modeled Federalism, adapted to changing conditions.

Underneath the somewhat crabbed and narrow legalism is a common-sense

realistic political philosophy, an embodiment of English constitutional

tradition as it grew up under a Tory régime, that reveals scant

sympathy with French romantic theories. The work is an unconscious

testimony to the tenacious hold of the English Common Law on the legal

mind of America, as well as to the rising spirit of nationalism. It

did much to strengthen both. It was a triumph of the lawyer over the

historian and political philosopher, and it marks the beginning of the

lawyer’s custodianship of the fundamental law. In spite of its somewhat

petty legalism and prosaic common sense, a note of veneration for the

great document runs through the tedious pages, constituting the work at

once both a commentary and a eulogy.

III • Daniel Webster • Realist and Constitutionalist