NORTH AND SOUTH.—ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN IDEA OF GOVERNMENT.
Although the progenitors of our so-called slaves were mainly imported at
Northern ports, and all of the Northern and Middle States have had, at
times, considerable negro populations, the process of transition
southward has been so rapid that the Northern communities, or the people
of the Northern States, have been but little impressed by them or
influenced in their ideas and mental habits by the presence of this
widely different and subordinate element of our general population. But
when they became a fixed population, when Virginia, especially, had
acquired what, by comparison, may be called a large negro element, then
the actual presence of these negroes called into existence new ideas,
and gave development to new modes of thought or mental habitudes. All
our ideas and mental habits are, in a sense, accidental, the result of
circumstances, just as language, which is the outward expression of our
ideas, becomes changed by time and circumstances. The English of the
tenth century were widely different, of course, in their ideas and
mental habits from the English of the fourteenth century, under the rule
of the Normans; and this difference was widely varied from anything that
mere time or ordinary circumstances could have produced.
And the different mental habits of the people of America generally, when
contrasted with those of Europe, show sufficiently that all our ideas
are accidental, the result of local circumstances, though, of course,
all are in subordination to those fixed and fundamental laws of mind
that are specific with the race. The presence, therefore, of the
negro—of a widely different and subordinate element of the population of
Virginia, and other States, when it became stationary and had to be
provided for by the local legislatures, its specific wants as well as
those of the citizenship looked after, and its social adaptations
rendered harmonious with the welfare of the former—naturally developed
new ideas of government and new modes of thought in the dominant and
governing race. Except, possibly, some of the Spanish colonies south of
us, there was no portion of the New World where so many of those who
could claim connection with European aristocracy originally settled as
in the province of Virginia.
In the earlier days of Massachusetts a great number of the most
respectable of the middle classes of English society, and some few
instances of the old hereditary nobility, found new homes in the colony,
but in the latter case they had abandoned the old Norman traditions, and
to enjoy their religion and “freedom of conscience,” identified
themselves with Puritanism. In the Dutch province of New York, there
was, perhaps, a somewhat larger infusion of the aristocratic element,
but as Holland itself was essentially republican, and the Dutch really
the originators of modern liberty in Europe, and, moreover, had a very
limited landed aristocracy compared with England, France, etc., but few
persons identified by tradition and association with the hereditary
aristocracy of the Old World found their way into the Dutch settlements
of the New.
But Virginia was originally settled—to a very large extent—by the
offspring of the old Norman chivalry, by the cavaliers—the descendants
of the proudest, most warlike, most chivalrous, heroic, and
enterprising, and, at the same time, most tyrannical and oppressive
aristocracy the world has ever seen. Those who belong to the race—the
same species—of course will, under the same circumstances, manifest the
same qualities, and therefore, if at any time the child of the princely
Plantagenet or lordly Warwick had been exchanged in its cradle with the
“base” progeny of some Saxon churl, who fed and kenneled with their
hounds, the latter would have grown up with all the pride and chivalry,
and princely bravery common to the former. Nevertheless, a class, an
aristocracy, a privileged order, forms sentiments, ideas, etc., and
transmits its traditions, rules, etc., to its descendants, that may, for
centuries perhaps, preserve their integrity. Even in our social
every-day life, and changing society, we often see families transmitting
their family usages, habitudes, modes of thought as well as action, for
several generations, and with only slight departures from the family
model left by some original or venerated ancestor. Aristocracies,
however, usually destroy themselves by the very means they resort to to
preserve their ascendency over the great body of the people. In order to
preserve the respect, the awe, the continued belief of the vulgar mass
in their seeming superiority, they must avoid the populace and
intermarry with their order, and the more completely this is done, the
more they become a close corporation as it were, and violate the laws of
consanguinity, the more rapidly they are deteriorated and fall below the
general average of the people. The Northmen, the robust and enterprising
fishermen of the Baltic, the fillibusters and pirates of the Northern
Seas, invaded France and conquered Normandy, and Rolla and his roving
horde of followers threatened to overrun Paris, and indeed the whole
kingdom. They finally settled down in Normandy, from which, at a later
date, they emerged into Italy, conquered Naples, the island of Sicily,
and for a long time threatened an invasion of the Oriental World, which
could hardly have resisted such an indomitable race of men. A Duke—a
bastard Duke of Normandy, at that time laid claim to the crown of
England, and with forty thousand followers landed in that country, and
in a single battle so completely demolished the “Anglo-Saxons” and
Anglo-Saxonism, so much boasted of in these days, that the former have
remained slaves ever since, and the latter was so utterly annihilated
that it disappeared for ever on that fatal day at Hastings. Then, for
the first time, the Normans assumed the distinct form of an aristocracy
or privileged order.
Though they had long since cast off the rude habits and uncouth manners
of adventurers and conquerors, and when they invaded England were,
perhaps, as intelligent and refined as any similar number of European
people, and a great deal more so than those they conquered in England,
they had never assumed the form, enacted laws, or established rules and
regulations as an aristocracy or governing class. From this time forth,
however, the Norman aristocracy ruled England with an iron hand, and
though the wars of the Roses, and the still more fatal conflict with the
Puritans or middle class, exterminated or drove out the remains of the
Norman blood, and there is little, if any, in England at this time, the
country is still governed by the traditions, the habits, in short, the
system established by the old Norman aristocracy. Most of the great
families became extinct, while the younger sons and others of broken
fortunes emigrated to Virginia, and with the establishment of the
commonwealth, very many of the Norman ancestry abandoned England. So
many and so strong were the remnants of the old Norman families in
Virginia, that they refused to recognize the commonwealth, and actually
set at defiance the formidable power and iron will of Cromwell.
But these remains of the old Norman aristocracy—that aristocracy which
for several centuries governed England—that have left their impress,
their habits, their laws of primogeniture, their feudalistic customs, so
deeply engraven on the English mind, that the aristocracy of the day,
though entirely modern, and with scarcely any family connection with it,
are able to govern the masses, through these habitudes, as absolutely as
the Normans once did by the sword and the strong hand of arbitrary
power, these descendants of the old Norman race in Virginia have changed
completely about, and though their ancestors were the main supporters of
kingly despotism, they are the originators and champions of democracy in
America.
In all the changes and mutations of human society, there is scarcely any
parallel to this change of ideas in Virginia, or to this extraordinary
transformation which has changed the descendants of the old Norman
aristocracy into the firmest and most reliable defenders of democracy.
Of course, the early colonists of Virginia were of all classes and
conditions of English society; not a few of them, perhaps, were
kidnapped young peasants, without friends or relatives to protect them
or to punish the base wretches who carried them over the sea and sold
them here, as elsewhere, in the American colonies. But it is undoubtedly
true that a larger, vastly larger body of “gentlemen” emigrated to
Virginia than to any other colony, and as these were all cadets, or
younger branches of the great houses in England, nearly all of which
were Norman in descent, and nearly all of which in the direct line
afterward perished in the wars of the commonwealth, it would seem
equally certain that if there be any Norman blood anywhere, it must now
be found, or mainly found, in Virginia.
The cause of this transformation, this radical and extraordinary change
of opinion, which has made the descendants of the proudest and most
despotic aristocracy ever known the authors and main supporters of
democracy, must be a potent one, and as far removed from the ordinary
causes which, in the progress of time, modify men’s opinions and habits,
as the results themselves are extraordinary and without parallel. As has
been remarked, all our ideas and mental habits are the result of
circumstances, the external influences that surround us, the changed
conditions of our existence, which give origin to new thoughts and new
modes of mental action. And when we take these things into view and
contemplate the changed conditions, the new and altogether different
circumstances that surrounded these Virginia descendants of the
cavaliers and gentlemen of England, then the causes are obvious—the new
ideas that sprung up in men’s minds, legitimate and consistent with the
extraordinary and indeed unparalleled circumstances under which they
lived. They were in juxtaposition with negroes, with an inferior race,
with widely different and subordinate social elements, and new thoughts,
new ideas, as well as altogether different habits, naturally and
necessarily followed. They saw these negroes were different beings from
themselves, not in color alone, or in other physical characteristics,
but in their mental qualities, their affections, their wants, in short,
in their _nature_ and the necessities of their social life, their
welfare and happiness, and indeed the welfare of this subordinate
element, demanded corresponding action, with, of course, corresponding
ideas and modes of thought. They saw that this negro was not
artificially or accidentally, but naturally different from themselves,
that God himself had made him different and given him different
faculties and different wants, and therefore designed him for different
purposes, and that it was an imperative and unavoidable duty as well as
necessity to adapt their social habits and legal and political
institutions to this state or condition of fixed and unalterable _fact_.
But this was not all, nor the limit to the new ideas that thus
originated in the changed conditions under which they were living. Their
traditions, the mental habits of their old cavalier ancestry, the ideas
they carried from the mother country, taught them to regard the person
of a king as something quite sacred, and to whom an absolute and
unquestioning obedience was always due, while the class of gentlemen,
the nobility, or aristocracy, that more immediately surrounded royalty
was deemed to be altogether superior and different from the vulgar
multitudes that made up the people. The celebrated formula of Archbishop
Laud, that “passive obedience and non-resistance” was the absolute and
universal duty of the people to the will of the king, expressed with
brevity and accuracy the prevalent sentiment of the cavaliers, and they
demanded from their special retainers the same unquestioning submission
which they themselves accorded to royalty. The ignorance of the great
mass of the people on one hand, and the actual power and tyranny of the
nobles on the other, sunk so deep into the common mind of England and
other European people during the middle ages, that though many
generations have passed since, the sentiment of superiority in one class
and of inferiority in the other, remains yet, and in England at this day
is nearly as potent as ever.
But the descendants of the cavaliers in Virginia were placed face to
face with _facts_ that utterly exploded those factitious sentiments that
had their origin in a certain condition of society, and not in nature or
in the natural relations of men. They were in juxtaposition with
negroes, with different and subordinate beings, human, it is true, like
themselves, but different human beings, just as pigeons, while birds
equally with robins, are different _birds_, or as hounds, though _dogs_,
were different dogs from spaniels or bull-dogs. This was a great,
starting, fixed _fact_, that no amount or extent of sentiment, theory,
or mental habit could explain away or modify, or avoid in any respect.
They saw this fact daily staring them in the face; they were compelled
to recognize it, to legislate for it, or for these people, to adapt
their social customs to it, in short, to conform to it, and therefore
were forced to cast aside their preconceived notions, the traditions and
mental habits of their ancestors, all their ideas of loyalty to a
creature like themselves and of their own class-superiority which they
had brought from the Old World. What was their fancied superiority over
their own humbler brethren, when contrasted with this _natural_
inferiority of the negro? What was the accident of education, of wealth,
of refinement of manners, or any other factitious, temporary, or
accidental thing worth, which separated them from their less fortunate
neighbors, when compared with the handiwork of nature, with the fixed
and impassable barriers that separated them both from negroes? What, in
short, were the petty distinctions of human pride, vanity, and accident,
in comparison with the ordinances of the Eternal?
Such were the facts that confronted them, such the external
circumstances that developed new ideas and new modes of thought in the
colonists of Virginia, such the potent _causes_ that changed the
descendants of English cavaliers into the earliest, most consistent, and
most reliable champions of democracy in America. The same causes, to a
certain extent, influenced the inhabitants of other colonies, and it
will be found that in precise proportion to the amount and the fixedness
of this negro element in any locality, there were clear, corresponding
views of liberty and equality among white men. Indeed, this is as true
now as ever before, and almost invariably there are sound and rational
views of liberty and of democratic institutions in precise proportion to
the presence, or imperfect and unsound notions in proportion to the
absence, of this negro element. Those States like Mississippi, Texas,
Arkansas, and Alabama, that have relatively the largest negro
population, are the most decidedly and consistently democratic, while
Massachusetts, Vermont, etc., with the fewest negroes among them, are
the most unsound in these respects, and however intelligent in regard to
other things, are certainly behind most of the great American
communities in political knowledge.
South Carolina, and perhaps some others, may seem exceptions to this
very general truth, but if so in reality, it is owing to peculiar
causes, such as the education of many of its people abroad, in Europe,
and at the North, etc., but even as regards that State, so exceptional
in many respects, land is more equally divided than in any other State,
and where such a fact obtains, the general tendency to equality in
citizenship must be strikingly manifested.
The great revolutionary movement of 1776 gave full expression to the new
modes of thought, the grand ideas, the glorious truths thus developed in
the mind of Virginia, and relatively in the other colonies, where this
_cause_, this negro element had anything like a stationary existence. It
was no accident or chance that made Mr. Jefferson the author of the
great idea, or rather the exponent of the idea embodied in the
Declaration of Independence, the grand and immortal truth, that all
white men are created equal, and therefore entitled to equal rights, or,
as he expressed it, to “life, liberty, and happiness.” True, some other
Virginian might have done this, and possibly some mind in the Middle
Provinces, New Jersey, or New York, might have formed a tolerably clear
conception of this great fixed and unchangeable truth that underlies the
whole superstructure of our political society; but no man in the
Northern Provinces could have risen to this mental elevation at that
period in our history; indeed comparatively few are even now capable of
it. Massachusetts and the neighboring colonies grasped the idea of
independence with great clearness, and urged it with an earnestness,
bravery, and indomitable perseverance certainly unsurpassed, if equalled
elsewhere, but it was independence of a foreign dominion, and not
independence of foreign ideas or of a hostile system. They were without
negroes, without any natural substratum in the social elements, without
any test or standard to determine men’s natural relations to each other,
and clinging to the mental habits of their British ancestors, they were
therefore incapable of forming those grand and truthful conceptions of
equality which Mr. Jefferson, and Virginians generally, under the
influences that have been stated, so clearly apprehended. The accidental
and artificial distinctions of society—family influence, wealth,
education, etc., were as in England, though, of course, not to the same
extent—the standards, the tests, the landmarks of the political as well
as the social order, and the phrase often used by New England writers of
our own day, that “representation was inseparable from taxation,” fully
expressed the mental habits and imperfect political conceptions of the
Northern mind. In England, except the titled aristocracy, the House of
Lords or Peerage, which pretends to rest on blood or birth (?), wealth
alone gives rights. The _man_ is nowhere, no part or portion, or element
even of the political system. In every county where he happens to have
property, he has a vote, but if without property, he has no voice
whatever, and, as observed, is not even an element of representation, as
are the negroes of the South. Taxation and representation, therefore,
are inseparable, so far as forms are concerned, in the British system,
though, as a fact, it is the working classes, who are not represented at
all, that must pay all the taxes in the end. The mental habits of the
North, in 1776, were fashioned on this model; they saw only those
accidental things that separate classes in England, as, wealth,
education, etc., and though they had an earnest desire for liberty, this
liberty was a vague, undefined, shadowy sentiment, rather than any
precise idea resting on fact as in Virginia. The immediate want and
common impulse of independence, however, impelled all parties to act
harmoniously for its accomplishment, and though the grand truths
presented by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence were far above
the then intellectual standard of the North, it did not conflict with
the mental habits of the Northern people sufficiently to interfere with
the common object. But when that object was accomplished—when the
foreign dominion was overthrown and the common independence secured, and
a new political system was to be created, then a conflict of ideas was
developed that was found to be so grave, that many good and patriotic
men for some time feared it could not be compromised. The leading men of
the North—the representative men—the men who desired independence from
foreign domination, but with, at best, vague notions of liberty, or of a
new political system—Hamilton, Adams, Morris, etc.—now came into serious
conflict with the democratic ideas of Virginia. They desired a monarchy
without a king, or a republic without the rule of the masses. The
general notion was, the British model without its defects, or the
British system without its corruptions, and so entirely were some wedded
to this, that they declared it, with all its corruptions, the best
government in the world.
The leaders very generally assumed, as they often expressed it, that
society was _naturally_ divided into the few and the many—the educated
minority, and the laboring majority—and as such was the actual social
condition of the population as well as the mental habits of the leaders,
it is not at all surprising that they sought to found a government on
such a basis. The agricultural population of the Northern and Middle
States were then very ignorant indeed, when compared with the present.
Feudalism had not been long overthrown in England or Europe, and the
serf transformed into the peasant, and though the American farmer of
1776 was a great advance over the latter, he still largely partook of
that general apathy, stolidity, and ignorance which in all times, until
now, in our own favored land, have distinguished the tillers of the
soil. The large population at the North otherwise employed, the
mechanics, artisans, shop-keepers, laborers, etc., were generally, as in
the mother country, without representation in the provincial
legislatures, and as the interests of the educated classes, the
capitalists, merchants, lawyers, divines, etc., were supposed to be, and
were in fact, in conflict with those of the former, they always desired
strong governments to hold them in order. Indeed, the idea of mob
ascendency, of anarchy, the wild rule of the rabble, was the constant
terror of the Northern leaders, and in all the arguments of Hamilton,
the Adamses, etc., this was put prominently forward. Their rhetorical
formula was always the same—“the rule of the uneducated mass will
degenerate into license and anarchy, from which the country can only be
saved by the strong hand of some military chief, who, first a dictator,
will finally don the purple, and the _rôle_ so often played in the Old
World will be repeated in the New.” This notion and this reasoning was
legitimate—the consistent result of the social condition as well as the
offspring of the inherited traditions of the Northern mind. The
capitalists, all those who inherited wealth, the “well-born” and
educated class, in short, the few who had the power in their hands,
naturally sought, to preserve it and to build up a strong government;
which, while it specially benefited themselves, should always be able to
“preserve order”—that is, while founded on existing social distinctions,
was sufficiently strong to repress the efforts of the multitude to
change the social condition. They had no negroes, no natural substratum
in the social elements or natural distinctions of society. They had
nothing before their eyes but the results of chance, of the accidents of
life—nothing but wealth and education—nothing, in short, but the
_débris_ of the old societies—those class distinctions which in the Old
World constitute the basis of the political and social order, and their
mental habits, their opinions, their notions of government and its uses,
were, of course, in accord with these things, and their minds were
incapable of rising above the existing condition, of over-leaping the
barriers and escaping from the external circumstances that surrounded
them. There were, doubtless, individual exceptions—some men who were
deeply imbued with the grand idea promulgated by Jefferson in the
Declaration of Independence. There were many in the Middle States who
had an imperfect but advancing conception of this glorious truth, and
there was still a larger number, perhaps, who were groping in darkness
with a vague but earnest desire to embrace it. But the dominant thought,
the prevalent opinion, the general mental habit, was reflected by the
representative men, the great Northern leaders, Hamilton, Adams, Otis,
and their companions, who desired to found a government on the British
model, which, though it should be a great improvement over the former,
was to be based on the same foundation—for, to _their_ minds, their
mental habits, there was no other, or, at all events, no other _safe_
basis for government. They were honest and patriotic men—men of gifted
minds and large attainments—men sorely tried and tested by the hardships
and sufferings of a seven years’ war, through which they walked with
their lives in their hands, and the scaffold always frowning on them in
the distance, and the purity of intentions, the unselfish and patriotic
desires of such men, should never be questioned. They could not rise
above the circumstances that surrounded them; they could not comprehend
the grand idea of Mr. Jefferson; they saw before them only class
distinctions, the rich and the poor, the educated few and the toiling
many, and they desired to build the government on the _status quo_, and
therefore demanded a strong government, that should always be able to
restrain the multitude and keep them in subjection to their “rulers.”
On the contrary, as has been stated, Virginia had cast off the mental
habits of the Old World, the offspring had long since outgrown the
traditions of their ancestors; the descendants of English cavaliers had
changed entirely about in their opinions, and the children of those who
held to the doctrine of “passive obedience” and “non-resistance”
declared that “resistance to tyrants was obedience to God.” The cause or
the causes of this wonderful transformation of opinion, this radical
change in mental habitudes, which has made the descendants of the
supporters of royalty the originators and special champions of democracy
in America, have been already considered.
The presence of the negro, the existence in their midst of a different
race, was and is, and always must be, a test that shows us the
insignificance and indeed nothingness of those artificial distinctions
which elsewhere govern the world, and constitute the basis of the
political as well as the social order.
The importance of education, of cultivation, the refinement of mind and
manners, the possession of wealth, of family influence and social
distinction, may all be duly appreciated, as all have their value or
social consideration, but where there is a _natural_ substratum of
society, where a different and subordinate race are in juxtaposition,
where negroes exist in any considerable number and in natural relation
to the whites, then it naturally follows that the great natural
distinctions fixed forever by the hand of the Almighty become the
dividing lines and the fixed landmarks of the social order.
This radical change in the mental habits of all brought face to face
with the negro; this instinctive consciousness of their own natural
equality that accompanied their perception of the negro’s inferiority;
in short, this development of the democratic idea to which Mr. Jefferson
gave such grand expression in the Declaration of Independence, was and
is accompanied by corresponding uniformity or harmony of interests.
Agriculture, labor, production, was and is the one great dominating
interest of Virginia and of all other communities made up of these
diverse social elements. It is impossible to divide the interests of
“master” and “slave”—of the white man and negro—when placed in natural
relation to each other. It is the utmost interest of the master to treat
his “slave” kindly, to care for him in sickness, to feed him well, and
not to overwork or abuse him, and it is the utmost interest of the
latter to be faithful to the former. It is a sort of partnership, a
species of socialism, when the brain of one being and the hands of fifty
other beings labor for the common good, for the general welfare; and
though possible exceptions are found where a brutal master beats and
abuses his people, or a worthless “slave” runs off and hides in the
swamp, both alike injure themselves, the master gets less work from his
“slave,” and the “slave” brings upon himself a corresponding evil. The
so-called “non-slaveholder,” if an agriculturist, has the same interest;
he is also a producer, and can not separate his interests from the
“slaveholder,” which, perhaps, he was himself yesterday, and may be
again to-morrow. If he be a mechanic, a lawyer, physician, or merchant,
then, though not identified as a producer with the “slaveholder” or
“non-slaveholder,” and in a sense may be said to have different
interests, these interests do not and can not conflict with the former,
unless, as in the Northern States, government is called on to “protect
labor.” But as government is confined to its legitimate sphere in
Virginia and most other Southern States, and protects all, without
favors to any, there is then no conflict of interests, even when some
are engaged in widely different pursuits from the one great common
interest of production. There is, therefore, universal harmony in
Southern society; the interests of master and “slave” are entirely
indivisible, while those of the “non-slaveholder,” if engaged in
production, are similar, and as to all others, when they do not involve
the government, though the pursuits or interests be widely different,
there can be no social conflict.
The ideas of Jefferson, Madison, and their cotemporaries were naturally
formed by these circumstances, and after the revolutionary contest was
over and a common government was to be created, they naturally proposed
a system in harmony with the condition they represented. The North, as
has been said, with no social substratum or natural distinctions,
desired a government based on artificial distinctions, those separating
classes, the same substantially as in England, though, of course,
dispensing with a titled class, a king, and laws of primogeniture. It is
true all the States had a few negroes, and they were all in their normal
condition of so-called slavery, but their numbers were so inconsiderable
that they did not influence society or modify the mental habits of the
Northern people. All over, and especially in the New England States, the
same ideas were reflected by the representative men; they wanted a
government based on the _status quo_, on wealth, that should keep power
in the hands of the few who then exercised it, and with sufficient force
to hold the multitude in subjection. They proposed an executive for
life, who should also appoint the governors of the States, that senators
should serve ten years, and various other projects of similar
character—all ending in or embodying the same common idea, that is, a
government for the few at the expense of the many.
The Southern men, on the contrary, proposed a government embodying
_their_ idea—the idea of democracy, and that should reflect the advanced
opinion and living spirit of their own society, rather than a thing
based on the model of Britishism, and involving substantially the
principles of the old European order. While they duly appreciated
education, cultivation, and other accidental social distinctions, those
whose ideas were advanced by juxtaposition with negroes, or with this
natural line of demarcation, would not listen to the creation of a
central government that tended in any respect to place power in the
hands of a class, or that enabled the few, however indirectly it might
be, to govern the many. The contest, both in the convention and before
the people, assumed the form of a contest for a strong or a weak
government—a government that should be supreme, like the British
Parliament, or a government of delegated powers, which, while carefully
defined, should be extremely limited in its functions or scope of
action. But back of all this were the fundamental ideas—the British and
the American—the spirit of the old societies and the spirit of the new
order—of British oligarchy and of American democracy.
Massachusetts and Virginia were respectively the head-quarters and
embodiments of this conflict, this struggling of ideas, these tendencies
to return to the past or to advance into the future, and it is as
remarkable, perhaps, to find the former arrayed on the side of power and
privilege, as that the descendants of the cavaliers should now be the
champions of democracy, and the advocates of the broadest liberty. But,
as has been observed, our ideas are the results of accident, our
opinions originate in the circumstances that surround us, and therefore
while the mental habits of the North were only slightly modified from
those of the mother country, those of the South, under wholly different
conditions—conditions, in fact, utterly unknown to the English mind—were
radically different.
The Northern masses, as has been remarked, were then ignorant and
helpless, and the agricultural class, though advanced considerably
beyond the same class in England, as the tillers of the soil had then
barely escaped from the old feudal slavery or serfdom, were utterly
powerless and without defenders in the great civil contest that
succeeded the revolution. As against the advocates of strong
government—those who represented the governing class—they could make no
resistance whatever, except a physical and revolutionary one. The right
of suffrage was very limited, and, indeed, as in England at this time,
property and not population was the basis of representation, and
therefore the vast majority had no voice nor representation whatever.
Under such circumstances, it is obvious and beyond question that if a
similar state of things had existed at the South, a government would
have been formed on the British model—a republic, doubtless, but a
bastard one—with powers so extensive and absolute that, as we now
witness in Europe, nothing but revolution and physical force could ever
enable the masses to overthrow it or to regain their natural liberty.
But the planters of the South, unlike the farmers of the North, were an
educated class, and fully competent to compete with the great leaders of
the Northern oligarchy. Their ideas were widely advanced beyond those of
the Northern farmer, but their _interests_ were identical—those of
agriculture, of production, of labor, of democracy, of manhood against
privilege, and therefore they naturally fought the battle against strong
government and class distinctions. The government actually adopted was,
with the exception of a life tenure in its judicial department,
substantially that which was originally advised by the leading minds of
the South, and which, instead of being supreme and absolute over the
States, as desired by the Northern leaders, was, with certain
well-defined exceptions, as utterly powerless and indeed disconnected
with the States as the government of England, or any other foreign
power. And perhaps no higher or more patriotic example can be found in
all history than that of the graceful assent and acceptance of the
Northern leaders, when they consented to adopt the present system. As
has been said, it was no selfish or base spirit that prompted their
desire for a strong government. They saw that the great body of the
people were ignorant; all history and all experience warranted them, as
they believed, in retaining power in the hands of the few who then
possessed it—in a word, they could not rise above the circumstances that
surrounded them, or act otherwise than in conformity with their mental
habits. But when fairly beaten in the convention and the great forum of
popular discussion—for when the ideas of Jefferson and other Southern
leaders were brought before the Northern masses, thousands of earnest
and enthusiastic apostles of these new and glorious truths sprung up in
every direction—then Hamilton and his associates generously assented to
the adoption of the present system, and became its warmest advocates.
They in no respect changed their views of government, but they became
convinced that these views were then impracticable, and however
unquestioned their ascendency at the North, that the Southern States
would never consent to any union on such basis, and as a federal union
on almost any terms was essential to the maritime States, they had the
magnanimity to accede to the Southern or democratic view embodied in the
present government, and to become, as has been said, the warmest
advocates for its adoption before the people. But if this patriotic and
high-minded course of Hamilton and the great leaders of Northern
opinion, which thus, it may be said, secured to the country and to the
world the noblest government ever known in human annals, is worthy of
the esteem and admiration of posterity, what a stupendous and boundless
benefit Jefferson, Madison, George Mason, and their associates, who not
alone assented to, but who originated this government, have conferred
upon posterity, and indeed the race itself!
For the first time in human history the grand idea of equality, of an
equal freedom or of equal rights, was declared to be the sole foundation
of government, and made the vital principle of the political order, the
starting-point of a new and more glorious civilization than was ever
before dreamed of in the annals of mankind. Christ had promulgated the
Divine command, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or
recognize in all other men the same rights that you claim for
yourselves; but however faithful some may have been to this command in a
religious sense, all the “Christian” governments that have ever existed,
or that exist now, are in utter conflict with it, and therefore the
government created in 1776, which embodied this glorious truth and
clothed it with the flesh and blood and body and bones of material
power, is unquestionably the most important worldly event that has ever
happened in human affairs. The revolt against England, its success, the
subsequent independence, the creation of a new government, the beginning
of an independent national existence, might all occur without any
radical change of principles or any revolution of ideas, as indeed it is
certain would have been the case if the views of Hamilton and other
Northern leaders had been embodied in the new government. But the grand
idea of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards
embodied in the federal government, was the starting-point of a
revolution the greatest, most beneficent, most radical, and most
important, that has ever happened in the history of the race—a
revolution, moreover, that has gone on ever since, and must continue
until all the governments of the Old World are overthrown, and society
reorganized on the basis of the great, indestructible, and immortal
truth that underlies our own—that fixed, natural, and unchangeable
equality which God has stamped forever on the organism of the race. If,
therefore, we compare the services of Jefferson, Madison, and their
associates with those of other men in other times or other lands, it
will be seen that they rise to a dignity and importance immeasurably
greater than even the most elevated and most glorious among the
benefactors of mankind. How paltry, in comparison, the Barons of
Runymede, who overthrew a tyrant king that had oppressed their order!
How mean and selfish Brutus and his follow-conspirators, when slaying
the man they envied as well as feared! How insignificant even Hampden
and the great leaders of revolution in England, who fought to defend
themselves from the increasing oppression of a ruling class, when
compared with Jefferson and his associates, who proclaimed an idea and
organized a basis for the freedom of the race—for the equal rights of
all whom God had made equal!
But great, and, when compared with what others may have done, immense as
may be the benefits conferred by Jefferson and his associates on
mankind, they only did their duty, and honestly represented the ideas
and desires of their constituencies. Or, in other words, they merely
expressed the opinions and reflected the mental habits that had their
origin in the social condition, and followed as a necessary consequence
of juxtaposition with negroes. If there had been no negroes in
Virginia—no widely different race with its different capacities and
different wants to provide for, in short, if there had been no natural
distinctions, then those accidental and artificial things—wealth,
education, family pride, etc.—which separate classes would have remained
as elsewhere, the basis of political as well as social order. The
descendants of English cavaliers, with their traditions and mental
habits, would, perhaps, be somewhat liberalized, for their condition was
widely changed from that of their ancestors, but without negroes,
without the presence of natural distinctions, without those lines of
demarcation fixed forever by the hand of God for society to repose upon,
they would have remained the most aristocratic community in America.
Neither Thomas Jefferson, nor any of the great controlling minds of the
day, would have been heard of; or, at all events, would not have figured
in that grand _rôle_ where history has always placed them—the authors of
a new idea and the founders of a new political system.
They _might_ have had, as Sir Thomas Moore and Algernon Sidney, and,
indeed, men of all ages have had, feeble glimmerings of the great truth
promulgated in 1776. All who belong to the race or species are created
equal; and this great, fixed, and eternal fact, embedded in the physical
and mental organism of the race, has always been dimly perceived, but
without juxtaposition with a different race, without the actual presence
of the negro, without the constant daily perception of those natural
distinctions that separate races, in contrast with the artificial
distinctions of classes of their own race, neither Jefferson nor any one
else could have risen to the level of the grand truth embodied in the
Declaration of Independence. They _might_ have been distinguished actors
in the great drama of independence, but that, as an historical event,
would not have differed from a score of similar events where one people
or portion of a people have separated and set up an independent
government. The overthrow of the Moorish dominion in Spain—of the rule
of the Spaniards in Holland—and the recent independence of Belgium, are
parallel events, and many others might be named where foreign dominion
has been overthrown and new governments set up without resulting in any
change or progress of ideas, or without working out any fundamental
revolution in human affairs. And if Jefferson, Madison, and their
associates had had the same mental habits as Hamilton, Adams, and others
of the North, it is obvious that independence would not have been
accompanied by a revolution in ideas. As has been said, a more liberal
system than that of the mother country would have been established, but
a new system, a radical and fundamental change in the political order—a
new starting-point in the progress of the race—a government founded on
the universal equality of the citizenship as actually established, it is
obvious would have been impossible. And as the public men of a country
can never rise above the level of the average opinion or the ordinary
mental habits of the people, it is equally obvious that Jefferson and
his associates would never have done so, and therefore, if there had not
been a condition of things that gave origin to new ideas and new habits
of thought in the people of Virginia and elsewhere where these widely
different social elements were in juxtaposition, then it is equally
obvious that the world would never have heard of them in 1776, and
whatever time and circumstances might have brought about in the future,
no _revolution_ at that time would have been possible.
In conclusion, therefore, that is repeated in direct terms which has
been rather inferred than directly stated. The presence of the _negro on
this continent, our juxtaposition with a widely different and inferior
race, and the existence of natural distinctions or natural lines of
demarcation in human society, originating of necessity new ideas and
modes of thought, has been the happiest conjunction that has ever
occurred in human affairs, and has led directly to the establishment of
a new system and a new civilization based on foundations of everlasting
truth—the legal and political equality of the race, or of all those whom
the Almighty Creator has Himself made equal_.