THE ALLIANCE OF NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN PRODUCERS.
In the foregoing chapter it has been shown how “slavery,” or the
presence of the negro element in our midst, has given origin to the
American idea of democracy—to more expanded and truthful conceptions of
our true relations to each other—to mental habits which led Mr.
Jefferson to promulgate the grand idea of equality in 1776—to make that
great movement a revolution of ideas as well as a war of independence—to
render the latter a mere preliminary for ushering in a new political
system based on the equal rights of citizenship and the starting-point
of a new civilization widely and radically different in its fundamental
idea from anything ever before known in the political experience of
mankind. It has been shown that Hamilton and Jefferson, the respective
leaders and exponents of the opposing ideas and tendencies of the time,
merely reflected the mental habits that belonged to the different social
conditions then existing, or of the different constituencies which they
represented, and after the great contest for independence which they
passed through harmoniously was closed and a new system of government
was to be created, that the ideas of Jefferson generally prevailed and
the present government embodying these ideas was established.
It has been shown, moreover, that both of these great men and those who
acted with them were equally honest and equally patriotic; that neither,
nor any of them could rise above the level of opinion in their
respective sections, for then they would no longer have been
representative men or able to influence the people; that the opinions of
Hamilton reflected the mental habits of the North which clung to the
forms and spirit of the British system founded on artificial
distinctions, while Jefferson, reflecting with equal fidelity the mental
habits that originate in a different social condition—where a
subordinate race is in juxtaposition—advocated a democratic system
resting on the fixed and indestructible laws of nature. And in view of
all these historical facts and inductive facts the conclusion was deemed
irresistible that the presence of the negro element in our midst, the
existence of a natural substratum in the social elements which thus
secured the liberty of our own race—the legal and political equality of
white men—was the happiest event or conjunction of circumstances that
has ever happened in the history of mankind. But while the great
northern leaders thus consented to the establishment of a democratic
system they were driven on by their own tendencies as well as the mental
habits of their people to neutralize its forces and to pervert its
spirit. At that period suffrage was extremely limited, while the
agricultural class in the Northern States—compared with the present—may
be said to have been extremely ignorant.
The northern or federal party were thus enabled to get possession of the
new government and to give it such direction as their opinions and
interests doubtless seemed to demand. The President himself—the
illustrious Washington—was without decided political convictions. His
instincts and his family traditions, it is believed, inclined him in the
direction of the northern party, while the local tendencies of
opinion—the general mental habits of the Virginians to regard the
distinctions of race as the legitimate basis of political
order—generally restrained him, and in the mighty conflict of opinion
kept him in a neutral position. He formed his cabinet out of wholly
incongruous materials, made Jefferson Secretary of State, and Hamilton
Secretary of the Treasury, and selecting other exponents of the
conflicting opinions, sought to neutralize the contending forces by an
equal selection of subordinates from the hostile camps.
The public credit, the restoration of commercial confidence was the
first and most pressing want of the country as well as of the new
government, and in this Hamilton found a pretext for adopting the
British system of finance which he foresaw would enable his party to
recover to a great extent the ground lost in the creation of the
government, and in practice, whatever might be the theory entertained,
restore it or closely approximate it to his darling model—that favorite
British system which he and his associates believed to be an embodiment
of political wisdom. The idea of the British aristocracy that government
is an instrument designed for their benefit was deeply implanted in the
northern mind, and is so still.
In England it is a practice which the idea has simply originated in.
Official employments, pensions and special legislation or monopolies in
England, embrace all or nearly all the ruling class, and therefore, the
idea that government is established for their benefit necessarily
follows. This idea of government is generally embraced by the northern
mind even in our own times, and the habit of looking to this vast and
beneficent power as the source of pecuniary benefits to the people, if
not to a class, is almost universal among the northern people.
Hamilton, brought up under the British system, was deeply imbued with
it, and, placed in power, it was natural enough that he and his
associates should construe the Constitution in a way to give it effect.
The state debts that were contracted for carrying on the war were
assumed by the new government and formed a basis for a national bank
which was soon established, and the rapid restoration of public credit
that followed the restoration of public order and a settled society in a
young and vigorous country was claimed by the federal writers as a proof
of the wisdom of their policy and the extraordinary ability of their
leader.
Mr. Jefferson opposed this policy from the beginning in all its
aspects—the adoption of the British system of finance, the assumption of
state debts, the creation of a national bank, in short, the entire
programme of federal policy. He held with the state-rights democracy of
our day, that the central government was a factitious and limited
government, whose powers were derived, not from the collective people
but from the people of the several or _United States_, that the
Constitution should be literally construed, and the practice under it
strictly confined to the plainly enumerated objects, and, therefore,
that the creation of a national bank, assumption of state debts, etc.,
were unconstitutional in principle and dangerous in practice.
Hamilton and his party, on the contrary, held that the financial policy
they adopted was not only the wisest that was possible under the
circumstances, but that the consequences likely to follow—the
consolidation of power and prestige of the central government—would be
of the greatest possible value to the people. Indeed, the old contest
between Massachusetts and Virginia—the conflict of ideas—the warfare of
widely different mental habits which preceded and ushered in the
government were renewed and accompanied by a bitterness of spirit quite
unknown in the former case. Hamilton, impelled by the opinions of the
North, assumed in practice, if not in theory always, that the central
government sprung from the collective or the American people instead of
the people of the States, and was almost unlimited in its powers, and he
doubtless believed that the more extended its powers, the safer and more
stable would become the country and the more prosperous the people. He
had failed to obtain such a government as he especially desired—a
government after the English model—republican in form but aristocratic
in fact, a government based on those artificial distinctions which the
mental habits of the North were accustomed to regard as the only safe
foundation, and now in power, with the prestige of the great name of
Washington to support his policy, he doubtless believed himself a
patriot, and as performing vital service to his country and to
posterity, when he thus construed the Constitution and consolidated the
powers of the federal system.
Indeed, the fear of the people—of a reckless and disorderly
multitude—was the abiding sentiment of the great northern leaders, and
the consolidation, power, and grandeur of a central government that
should restrain them was the object of all their efforts. Thus, the very
objects the federalists aimed at—doubtless from patriotic motives, for
there being no laws of primogeniture there was no permanent class to be
benefited by their policy—were the very things that Mr. Jefferson and
his friends contemplated as the greatest danger to the country. Hamilton
desired to construe the Constitution in a way to build up an enormous
central power that should hold in check the tendencies to disruption and
disorder, while Jefferson believed that the greater the assumption and
the consolidation of power in the federal system the greater the danger
to the freedom of the States and to the people.
Or, in other words, the federalists believed that the more the central
power was enlarged the greater the scope and strength of the federal
government—the more certain were the States to be kept from disunion and
the restless multitudes from anarchy, while Jefferson and his party
believed that this assumption of power in the central government would
result in the overthrow of the government itself if there was no other
way of obtaining redress and of preserving on the part of the States and
the people of the States the liberties which they fought for in 1776.
Such was the great civil contest that sprung up under the administration
of Washington, but which was constantly restrained by the presence of
that great man, who, without any very decided leanings as regarded the
parties to it, was, moreover, eminently practical and earnestly disposed
to favor conciliation and peace rather than commit himself to the
abstract opinions of either side. It was only, therefore, during the
succeeding administration of Adams that this fundamental conflict of
ideas—this conflict which involved the very foundations of government
itself, and which, back of the immediate actors that figured in the
scene, originated in the different mental habits that spring of
necessity from different social conditions, reached its culmination and
prepared the way for that final solution which the great civil
revolution of 1800 afterwards accomplished.
The federalists, or, more properly, the centralists, had construed the
Constitution in a way to make the government in practice substantially
what they believed it should have been in theory. They had adopted the
British system of finance, had created a national debt and a national
bank, which, as in England, was to be the agency for the deposit and
disbursement of the public revenue, and, from the necessities of the
case, a vast and overshadowing monopoly which was to hold the credit of
the States, and of every individual in the States, at its mercy. In
fact, the States were rapidly sinking into mere dependencies and subject
provinces of the vast and overshadowing power of the central government,
which, not content with its usurpations over the States—tending, in
practice, to almost obliterate the lines of State sovereignty—even
sought to strike down the liberty of the individual citizen, and in its
alien and sedition laws to exercise absolute powers. These laws
authorized the president to imprison and punish citizens and others as
his fears or caprices might dictate, with few, if any, greater
safeguards for the citizen than in absolute governments of the Old
World.
The federal party embodied the British idea of government, and their
notions of liberty differed little, if any, from those of the mother
country. _Liberty_ in England consists in the equal protection of person
and property in an ordinary sense, but, as liberty, in fact, consists in
an equal citizenship or an equal voice in the creation of laws that all
are called on to obey, of course those who have no vote or voice in
these laws are, to that extent, slaves. It was the policy of the
federalists to limit this great natural right of suffrage, and in all
the States where they were in the ascendency they sought to do so, as
indeed was legitimate and consistent with their fundamental idea of
government. Equally consistent and legitimate was their habit of
expecting pecuniary benefits from government, for this, as has been
said, was the practice in England, and the idea or theory that sprung
from it was deeply engraved on the northern mind. While the federalists,
therefore, sought to consolidate power in the hands of the federal
government and to weaken the States, all the selfish and mercenary
interests of the day were naturally attracted to a party whose public
policy thus favored and invited their coöperation.
The conflict of labor and capital—the frightful antagonism between those
whose labor produces all wealth and those who own the wealth produced by
past generations of laborers—is at the bottom of all the revolutions and
civil commotions of modern times, for it involves the whole subject of
government, as well as all those mighty social evils which so disfigure
and deform European society. In England this conflict has, in one sense,
reached its utmost limit—while in another respect it may be said to be
least active or less palpable than anywhere else.
The few who own the wealth produced by past generations are the
wealthiest in the world, while the many who produce all the wealth of
the present are undoubtedly the poorest!
_Those who produce every thing enjoy nothing, while those who produce
nothing enjoy every thing!_ A political economist of great eminence has
made an estimate of the present wealth of England, and declared that, if
equally divided, every man, woman, and child in England would have ten
thousand pounds, or fifty thousand dollars, and yet supposes that there
are ten millions of people who never own a dollar beyond their daily
support! The land is owned by some thirty-five thousand proprietors,
many of whom have large parks containing many thousand acres, filled
with game and left untilled, while millions of men and women of their
own race—their own kind—are without a single foot of that which God
designed for the common sustenance and comfort of all! Education, moral
development, and happiness must go hand in hand with these things, of
course; indeed, it is a truth that should always be recognized when
estimating the well-being of masses of men, that their moral and
physical well-being are necessarily inseparable.
No one, however ignorant or prejudiced in favor of Britishism, or
“British liberty,” can suppose for a moment that such stupendous results
as these, or that such a social condition as that of England, could ever
be brought about by natural causes. They are all of the same race, with
the same natural capacities as well as wants, and if there be any
difference, or any natural inferiority, it is within the governing
class, whose intermarriage among the landed aristocracy has deteriorated
their blood, and reduced them below the normal standard.
It is the government, therefore—the contrivance or political machine
which has worked out these tremendous results—that has dug this mighty
chasm between beings whom the Almighty has created alike, and therefore
forbidden any governmental distinction.
The notion that government should benefit their condition,
therefore—should make them richer and happier—originates in the fact
itself in England, and those who, like the federalists, formed all their
ideas of government after the British model, sought naturally enough to
wield it for these supposed beneficent purposes. There was the same
social conflict, in a degree, at the North as in England. It was the
interest of the capitalist or employer to get all the labor possible
with as little expense as might be, while the laborer would naturally
seek to get as high wages as possible, and in return give as little
labor as possible.
The capitalists, the men of wealth, the professional classes, merchants,
indeed all classes of Northern society, except the agricultural class,
were attracted to the federal party, and, in addition, speculators and
projectors of every kind were naturally drawn in the same direction.
These classes, embracing all the wealth, and cultivation, and social
influence of the day, rallied in support of the federal party, which,
with the government in its hands, with the prestige of power, and nearly
all of the intellectual men of the time on its side, was irresistible,
so far as the North was concerned. The producing classes, the farmers
and laborers—those only that were naturally opposed to its policy, or
whose real interests were in conflict with its policy—were then
comparatively helpless. The right of suffrage was exceedingly limited,
and though the agricultural class largely outnumbered the others, they
were ignorant, without guides, and indeed quite helpless in the grasp of
the federal leaders. The federal party, as has been stated, had, by so
construing the constitution, usurped power that rendered the government
substantially such as they originally desired to establish, and the
masses, without intelligent leaders, were powerless to resist. And any
one intelligently contemplating the condition of things in the Northern
States during the administration of the elder Adams, must be
irresistibly forced to the conclusion that the masses—the laboring and
producing classes—were wholly unable to relieve themselves from the
oppressions of this party, short of a physical revolution and an appeal
to arms. They were largely in the majority, but the right of suffrage
being mainly confined to property-holders, laborers, mechanics,
artisans, etc., were, as in England, disfranchised; while the
agricultural classes, though greatly advanced, no doubt, beyond the same
classes in the Old World, were yet extremely illiterate and ignorant,
and therefore powerless. The policy of the federalists was absolutely
the same as in England—that is, the government was a machine or
instrument through which the few who produce nothing were to enjoy every
thing, and the many, who produce every thing, were to enjoy nothing. In
a new country, with cheap lands and virgin soils, it might be many
centuries before the awful results now manifested in England could be
worked out, but the process was the same—the same causes were in
operation, and the same results would surely follow—differing only in
degree.
Nor, had the Union been confined to the Northern States, was there any
reasonable prospect before the masses of overthrowing the oppression
foisted on them, by a resort to revolution and physical force. They were
the immense majority, it is true, but without leaders, without education
or intelligence, or prestige of any kind, their doom was sealed, their
subjection certain, their slavery inevitable. It would have been the old
story over again—the revolt of the people against their oppressors in
1776 to be again subjected to other oppressions in 1796—a change from
one master to another; though, doubtless, as all the efforts of the race
have been in the direction of progress, a certain advance towards a
better condition. But, fortunately for mankind and the cause of free
institutions, a widely different state of things existed in Virginia and
other States in the South.
As fully considered in another place, the negro element was here
stationary, and in numbers so considerable that rules and regulations
were necessary in regard to it. It had to be provided for; its
capacities, its wants, its necessities, in short, harmonized with the
wants and well-being of the dominant race. The colonial legislatures, as
the State legislatures of the present day, were constantly called on to
enact laws and establish regulations for this subordinate social
element, as well as for themselves, and therefore habits of thought grew
up that gave them widely different notions of government from those of
the people in the North.
There was no social conflict; all had the same interests, and if one man
inherited wealth, and another had nothing but his labor to depend on,
they never came in conflict, for the former never sought the aid of the
government to benefit himself at the expense of his less fortunate
neighbor. In the North, if a citizen inherited ten thousand dollars, he
invested it in some special corporation—a bank, a manufacturing company,
or something else—that had its origin in special legislation, and
perhaps doubly increased his income, which, of course, was drawn from
the laborer, the producer, the class that creates all wealth.
In Virginia, on the contrary, if a citizen inherited ten thousand
dollars, he invested it in lands, in the industrial capacities of
negroes, in short, in labor; and though he may never have labored an
hour with his own hands himself, he became of necessity a producer, with
the same common, universal, and indivisible interests of all other
producers and laborers, and therefore never sought the aid of
government. Indeed, the government could not nor can not at this time
legislate for the benefit—special benefit—of the planter of the South,
or the farmer or producer at the North; and from the day it was created
to this moment, there has never been an act of Congress or of the
federal government that specifically benefited the South. Congress
_might_, it is true, “protect” cotton or wheat, or other of the great
staples which the producers of both sections furnish, but it would be a
“protection” quite as useless to the parties interested as it would be
harmless in its results to other classes and interests among us.
The clear mind of Jefferson grasped these bonds of industrial interest
between the southern planter and northern farmer—the slaveholder of the
South and the laborer of the North—at a very early period, and declared
them “natural allies” in the great conflict then pending. The planter or
“slaveholder” of the South asked nothing from government but its
protection. He had grown up under a condition of things where there was
no social conflict of any kind. There were no opposing interests—no
class distinctions—nothing to appeal to his selfishness or to blind his
judgment. Society was _naturally_ divided, not into the rich and poor as
elsewhere, but into whites and negroes, and, as the latter was owned by
the former there was no contradiction, no motive or possible inducement
to employ the government as an instrument for the special benefit of any
body. The old European notion of government, therefore, that clung and
still clings to the northern mind, that government should regulate the
religion, the commerce, the industry, etc., of the country, was
exploded, and the modern and true American idea that it should simply
protect all alike and give favor to none became the general idea of the
populations of the South; and, indeed, of the great agricultural
populations of the Central States so far as it then could find
expression. And, when this was the general notion of Virginia and other
States at the South as regards their own legitimate government, of
course they would not permit the federal and factitious government
resting on delegated and strictly defined limitations of power, to be
perverted in its spirit and transformed by its practice into a machine,
as in England, to benefit others at their expense. The Southern States,
therefore, especially Virginia and Kentucky, met in their legislatures,
consulted with other States, and, in the celebrated Kentucky and
Virginia resolutions of 1798, made a declaration of principles, and
pledged themselves to a policy that will always serve as the true
landmarks of our State and federative systems so long as the republic,
or, indeed, American freedom itself lasts to bless the world and
illuminate mankind.
These resolutions offered a common platform for the agricultural
States—for the producing classes of all sections—for the masses, the
millions, in short, for all men who believed in the American idea of
government and demanded equal rights for all and favors for none.
Thus the Middle States, the great agricultural populations of the North,
who, unaided and alone were powerless in the grasp of the federal party,
led as that party was by the intellect, and sustained by the wealth and
social prestige of the North, found themselves naturally allied with the
agricultural populations of the South who were led by men quite the
equals in general attainments, and vastly the superiors in political
knowledge, of the great northern leaders. These men—Jefferson, Madison,
George Clinton, and their associates—had already conquered in the great
intellectual contest that had preceded the creation of the government,
and though in the great battle now pending, the centralists occupied
vantage ground, for their banks, state debts, and consolidated federal
powers, attracted to their standards all the selfish interests and
mercenary influences in the country, the former again carried the day,
and in the great civil revolution of 1800 restored the government, as
Mr. Jefferson expressed it, to “the republican tack.” This restoration
of the federal government to its original purposes was surely second
only to the revolution of 1776 in importance, and without it it is
obvious that the fruits of the former must measurably have been lost. As
has been seen, the northern masses were at that time wholly unable to
contend with the opposing minority which embraced within its ranks the
wealth, talent, education, and social influence of the day. And though
largely in the majority as regards numbers, it was powerless even as
regards physical force, for it was without leaders to direct its
energies or to cope successfully with that brilliant array of able and
accomplished civilians and soldiers that gathered about the
administration and directed the councils of the federal party. If the
rule of the federalists in the course of time became personally
oppressive—if that personal “freedom” which in England permits the
_subject_ to enjoy locomotion as he pleases and protects his person from
violence were stricken down, then it may be supposed that the northern
masses would have resisted, and, perhaps, in the progress of the future
have overthrown such government.
But the government actually established by the federalists—by the false
construction of the Constitution, and the usurpations in practice which
would have kept the producing classes—the toiling millions—in the same
or similar subjection to a ruling oligarchy, as is now witnessed in
England, and which, in the course of time, would render them equally
abject, poverty-stricken, ignorant, and miserable, would seem to be, in
view of all the circumstances then existing, beyond their power to
change or reform by a civil revolution like that which did occur in
1800, or to overthrow by the strong hand of physical force. The great
civil revolution, therefore, when able and accomplished statesmen of the
South, the equals in talent, and vastly superior to any class in
Christendom in political knowledge, led the northern producing classes
through the great conflict then pending, and overthrowing the
centralists restored the government to its original purity and
simplicity, must be deemed, as has been said, only second in importance
to the great event of 1776.
And the social condition in the South, the so-called slavery, which
invariably renders the southern planter the natural ally of the northern
farmer, must be considered, as it obviously is in fact, the sole, or at
all events the leading cause for the successful working of democratic
institutions, as it was originally the sole and unquestionable cause
that originated the great American idea of government embodied in the
Declaration of Independence. Nor are the consequences of that condition
of so-called slavery—the existence of a subordinate social element at
the South which has thus, with more or less directness, worked out the
equality, freedom, and happiness of the laboring classes of the
North—limited to our own land or to our own people. As has been
observed, the conflict of capital and labor is the great question of the
day—the question that is at the bottom of all the European revolutions
of modern times, and its solution must, of necessity, involve the
destruction of every government now in existence except our own.
_Capital_ in the old world has the education and intelligence as well as
the government on its side against the people, and the simple fact that,
in half of the American States, capital and labor are united,
inseparable, and indissoluble, is of transcendent importance to the
future liberation of the laboring millions of Europe.
Here—for the first time in the experience of the race—wealth,
cultivation, and intellectual power are arrayed on the side of
production and in defence of the rights of labor, not by a warfare on
northern capital, as it is sometimes charged, but by demanding that
government shall not legislate for the latter at the expense of the
former. Nor is the subordinate element—the inferior race in our midst,
which, in the providence of God has thus been made the mediate or
immediate cause of such vast and boundless benefit to the freedom,
progress, and well-being of the superior race—without participation in
these benefits. God has designed all His creatures for happiness, and
this happiness is always secured when they are in their true position,
and in natural relations to each other; and when the condition of the
negro is compared with his African state—the existing population with
their African progenitors—then it is seen that the progress and
happiness of the inferior has matched _pari passu_ with those of the
superior race.