BETWEEN Pennsylvania and Virginia stretched no barrier of mountains or
deserts. Nature seemed to mean that the northern State should reach
toward the Chesapeake, and embrace its wide system of coasts and
rivers. The Susquehanna, crossing Pennsylvania from north to south,
rolled down wealth which in a few years built the city of Baltimore by
the surplus of Pennsylvania’s resources. Any part of Chesapeake Bay,
or of the streams which flowed into it, was more easily accessible to
Baltimore than any part of Massachusetts or Pennsylvania to New York.
Every geographical reason argued that the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and
the James should support one homogeneous people; yet the intellectual
difference between Pennsylvania and Virginia was already more sharply
marked than that between New England and the Middle States.
The old Virginia society was still erect, priding itself on its
resemblance to the society of England, which had produced Hampden and
Chatham. The Virginia gentleman, wherever met, was a country gentleman
or a lawyer among a society of planters. The absence of city life was
the sharpest characteristic of Virginia, even compared with South
Carolina. In the best and greatest of Virginians, the virtues which
always stood in most prominence were those of the field and farm,--the
simple and straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth,
the absence of mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and
open-handed hospitality, which could exist only where the struggle for
life was hardly a struggle at all. No visitor could resist the charm of
kindly sympathy which softened the asperities of Virginian ambition.
Whether young Albert Gallatin went there, hesitating between Europe and
America, or the still younger William Ellery Channing, with all New
England on his active conscience, the effect was the same:--
“I blush for my own people,” wrote Channing from Richmond in 1799,
“when I compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous
confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater
virtues than I left behind me. There is one single trait which
attaches me to the people I live with more than all the virtues
of New England,--they _love money less_ than we do; they are more
disinterested; their patriotism is not tied to their purse-strings.
Could I only take from the Virginians their sensuality and their
slaves, I should think them the greatest people in the world. As it
is, with a few great virtues, they have innumerable vices.”
Even forty years afterward, so typical a New Englander as the poet
Bryant acknowledged that “whatever may be the comparison in other
respects, the South certainly has the advantage over us in point of
manners.” Manners were not all their charm; for the Virginians at the
close of the eighteenth century were inferior to no class of Americans
in the sort of education then supposed to make refinement. The Duc de
Liancourt bore witness:--
“In spite of the Virginian love for dissipation, the taste for reading
is commoner there among men of the first class than in any other part
of America; but the populace is perhaps more ignorant there than
elsewhere.”
Those whom Liancourt called “men of the first class” were equal to any
standard of excellence known to history. Their range was narrow, but
within it they were supreme. The traditions of high breeding were still
maintained, and a small England, much as it existed in the time of the
Commonwealth, was perpetuated in the Virginia of 1800. Social position
was a birthright, not merely of the well born, but of the highly
gifted. Nearly all the great lawyers of Virginia were of the same
social stock as in New England,--poor and gifted men, welcomed into a
landed aristocracy simple in tastes and genial in temper. Chief-Justice
Marshall was such a man, commanding respect and regard wherever he
was seen,--perhaps most of all from New Englanders, who were least
familiar with the type. George Mason was an ideal republican,--a
character as strong in its way as Washington or Marshall. George Wythe
the Chancellor stood in the same universal esteem; and even his young
clerk Henry Clay, “the mill-boy of the slashes,” who had lately left
Chancellor Wythe’s office to set up one of his own at Lexington in
Kentucky, inherited that Virginia geniality which, as it ripened with
his years, made him an idol among Northern and Western multitudes who
knew neither the source nor secret of his charm. Law and politics
were the only objects of Virginian thought; but within these bounds
the Virginians achieved triumphs. What could America offer in legal
literature that rivalled the judicial opinions of Chief-Justice
Marshall? What political essay equalled the severe beauty of George
Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights? What single production of an American
pen reached the fame of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence?
“The Virginians are the best orators I ever heard,” wrote the young
Channing: although Patrick Henry, the greatest of them all, was no
longer alive.
Every one admitted that Virginia society was ill at ease. In colonial
days it rested on a few great props, the strongest being its close
connection with England; and after this had been cut away by the
Revolutionary War, primogeniture, the Church, exemption of land from
seizure for debt, and negro slavery remained to support the oligarchy
of planters. The momentum given by the Declaration of Independence
enabled Jefferson and George Wythe to sweep primogeniture from the
statute book. After an interval of several years, Madison carried the
law which severed Church from State. There the movement ended. All the
great Virginians would gladly have gone on, but the current began to
flow against them. They suggested a bill for emancipation, but could
find no one to father it in the legislature, and they shrank from the
storm it would excite.
President Washington, in 1796, in a letter already quoted, admitted
that land in Virginia was lower in price than land of the same quality
in Pennsylvania. For this inferiority he suggested, among other
reasons, the explanation that Pennsylvania had made laws for the
gradual abolition of slavery, and he declared nothing more certain than
that Virginia must adopt similar laws at a period not remote. Had the
Virginians seen a sure prospect that such a step would improve their
situation, they would probably have taken it; but the slave-owners
were little pleased at the results of reforms already effected, and
they were in no humor for abolishing more of their old institutions.
The effects of disestablishing the Church were calculated to disgust
them with all reform. From early times the colony had been divided
into parishes, and each parish owned a church building. The system was
the counterpart of that established in New England. The church lands,
glebes, and endowments were administered by the clergyman, wardens,
and vestry. Good society in Virginia recognized no other religion than
was taught in this branch of English episcopacy. “Sure I am of one
thing,” was the remark in the Virginia legislature of an old-fashioned
Federalist, with powdered hair, three-cornered hat, long queue, and
white top-boots,--“Sure I am of one thing, that no _gentleman_ would
choose any road to heaven but the Episcopal.” Every plantation was
attached to a parish, and the earliest associations of every well-bred
man and woman in Virginia were connected with the Church service. In
spite of all this, no sooner had Madison and his friends taken away the
support of the State than the Church perished. They argued that freedom
of religion worked well in Pennsylvania, and therefore must succeed in
Virginia; but they were wrong. The Virginia gentry stood by and saw
their churches closed, the roofs rot, the aisles and pews become a
refuge for sheep and foxes, the tombstones of their ancestry built into
strange walls or turned into flagging to be worn by the feet of slaves.
By the year 1800, Bishop Madison found his diocese left so nearly
bare of clergy and communicants that after a few feeble efforts to
revive interest he abandoned the struggle, and contented himself with
the humbler task of educating boys at the ancient College of William
and Mary in the deserted colonial capital of Williamsburg. There the
English traveller Weld visited him about the year 1797, and gave a
curious picture of his establishment:--
“The Bishop,” he said, “is president of the college, and has
apartments in the buildings. Half-a-dozen or more of the students,
the eldest about twelve years old, dined at his table one day that
I was there. Some were without shoes or stockings, others without
coats. During dinner they constantly rose to help themselves at the
sideboard. A couple of dishes of salted meat and some oyster-soup
formed the whole of the dinner.”
Such a state of society was picturesque, but not encouraging. An
aristocracy so lacking in energy and self-confidence was a mere
shell, to be crushed, as one might think, by a single vigorous blow.
Nevertheless, Jefferson and Madison, after striking it again and again
with the full force of Revolutionary violence, were obliged to desist,
and turned their reforming axes against the Church and hierarchy of New
England. There they could do nothing but good, for the society of New
England was sound, whatever became of the Church or of slavery; but in
Virginia the gap which divided gentry from populace was enormous; and
another gap, which seemed impassable, divided the populace from the
slaves. Jefferson’s reforms crippled and impoverished the gentry, but
did little for the people, and for the slaves nothing.
Nowhere in America existed better human material than in the
middle and lower classes of Virginians. As explorers, adventurers,
fighters,--wherever courage, activity, and force were wanted,--they had
no equals; but they had never known discipline, and were beyond measure
jealous of restraint. With all their natural virtues and indefinite
capacities for good, they were rough and uneducated to a degree that
shocked their own native leaders. Jefferson tried in vain to persuade
them that they needed schools. Their character was stereotyped, and
development impossible; for even Jefferson, with all his liberality
of ideas, was Virginian enough to discourage the introduction of
manufactures and the gathering of masses in cities, without which no
new life could grow. Among the common people, intellectual activity was
confined to hereditary commonplaces of politics, resting on the axiom
that Virginia was the typical society of a future Arcadian America. To
escape the tyranny of Cæsar by perpetuating the simple and isolated
lives of their fathers was the sum of their political philosophy;
to fix upon the national government the stamp of their own idyllic
conservatism was the height of their ambition.
Debarred from manufactures, possessed of no shipping, and enjoying no
domestic market, Virginian energies necessarily knew no other resource
than agriculture. Without church, university, schools, or literature in
any form that required or fostered intellectual life, the Virginians
concentrated their thoughts almost exclusively upon politics; and
this concentration produced a result so distinct and lasting, and in
character so respectable, that American history would lose no small
part of its interest in losing the Virginia school.
No one denied that Virginia, like Massachusetts, in the War of
Independence, believed herself competent to follow independently of
other provinces whatever path seemed good. The Constitution of Virginia
did not, like that of Massachusetts, authorize the governor to “be
the commander-in-chief of the army and navy,” in order “to take and
surprise, by all ways and means whatsoever, all and every such person
or persons (with their ships, arms, ammunition, and other goods) as
shall in a hostile manner invade or attempt the invading, conquering,
or annoying this Commonwealth;” but although Massachusetts expressed
the power in language more detailed, Virginia held to its essence with
equal tenacity. When experience showed the necessity of “creating a
more perfect union,” none of the great States were unanimous for the
change. Massachusetts and New York were with difficulty induced to
accept the Constitution of 1787. Their final assent was wrung from
them by the influence of the cities and of the commercial class;
but Virginia contained no cities and few merchants. The majority by
which the State Convention of Virginia, after an obstinate contest,
adopted the Constitution, was influenced by pure patriotism as far
as any political influence could be called pure; but the popular
majority was probably hostile to the Constitution, and certainly
remained hostile to the exercise of its powers. From the first the
State took an attitude of opposition to the national government, which
became more and more decided, until in 1798 it found expression in a
formal announcement, through the legislature and governor, that the
limit of further obedience was at hand. The General Assembly adopted
Resolutions promising support to the government of the United States
in all measures warranted by the Constitution, but declaring the
powers of the federal government “no further valid than they are
authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case
of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not
granted by said compact, the States who are parties thereto have the
right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress
of the evil and for maintaining within their respective limits the
authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.”
Acting immediately on this view, the General Assembly did interpose
by declaring certain laws, known as the Alien and Sedition Laws,
unconstitutional, and by inviting the other States to concur, in
confidence “that the necessary and proper measures will be taken by
each for co-operating with this State in maintaining unimpaired the
authorities, rights, and liberties reserved to the States respectively
or to the people.”
These Virginia Resolutions, which were drawn by Madison, seemed strong
enough to meet any possible aggression from the national government;
but Jefferson, as though not quite satisfied with these, recommended
the Kentucky legislature to adopt still stronger. The draft of the
Kentucky Resolutions, whether originally composed or only approved by
him, representing certainly his own convictions, declared that “where
powers are assumed which have not been delegated a nullification of the
Act is the rightful remedy,” and “that every State has a natural right,
in cases not within the compact, to nullify of their own authority
all assumptions of power by others within their limits.” Jefferson
did not doubt “that the co-States, recurring to their natural right
in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these acts void
and of no force, and will each take measures of its own for providing
that neither these acts, nor any others of the federal government not
plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be
exercised within their respective territories.”
In the history of Virginia thought, the personal opinions of Jefferson
and Madison were more interesting, if not more important, than the
official opinion of State legislatures. Kentucky shrank from using
language which seemed unnecessarily violent, but still declared,
with all the emphasis needed, that the national government was not
“the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated
to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the
Constitution, the measure of its powers,” but that each party had an
equal right to judge for itself as to an infraction of the compact, and
the proper redress; that in the case of the Alien and Sedition Laws the
compact had been infringed, and that these Acts, being unconstitutional
and therefore void, “may tend to drive these States into revolution
and blood;” finally, the State of Kentucky called for an expression
of sentiment from other States, like Virginia not doubting “that the
co-States, recurring to their natural right in cases not made federal,
will concur in declaring these Acts void and of no force.”
These famous Resolutions of Virginia and Kentucky, historically the
most interesting of all the intellectual products of the Virginia
school, were adopted in 1798 and 1799. In 1800, Jefferson their chief
author was chosen President of the United States, and Madison became
his Secretary of State. Much discussion then and afterward arose over
the Constitutional theory laid down by Virginia and Kentucky, and thus
apparently adopted by the Union; but in such cases of disputed powers
that theory was soundest which was backed by the strongest force, for
the sanction of force was the most necessary part of law. The United
States government was at that time powerless to enforce its theories;
while, on the other hand, Virginia had all the power necessary for
the object desired. The Republican leaders believed that the State
was at liberty to withdraw from the Union if it should think that
an infraction of the Constitution had taken place; and Jefferson in
1798 preferred to go on by way of Resolution rather than by way of
Secession, not because of any doubt as to the right, but because, “if
we now reduce our Union to Virginia and North Carolina, immediately
the conflict will be established between those two States, and they
will end by breaking into their simple units.” In other letters he
explained that the Kentucky Resolutions were intended “to leave the
matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to
push the matter to extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as
events will render prudent.” Union was a question of expediency, not
of obligation. This was the conviction of the true Virginia school, and
of Jefferson’s opponents as well as his supporters; of Patrick Henry,
as well as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke.
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, giving form to ideas that
had not till then been so well expressed, left a permanent mark in
history, and fixed for an indefinite time the direction and bounds of
Virginia politics; but if New England could go no further in the lines
of thought pursued by Fisher Ames and Timothy Dwight, Virginia could
certainly expect no better results from those defined by Jefferson
and Madison. The science of politics, if limited by the Resolutions
of Virginia and Kentucky, must degenerate into an enumeration of
powers reserved from exercise. Thought could find little room for free
development where it confined its action to narrowing its own field.
This tendency of the Virginia school was the more remarkable because
it seemed little suited to the tastes and instincts of the two men who
gave it expression and guided its course. By common consent Thomas
Jefferson was its intellectual leader. According to the admitted
standards of greatness, Jefferson was a great man. After all deductions
on which his enemies might choose to insist, his character could not
be denied elevation, versatility, breadth, insight, and delicacy;
but neither as a politician nor as a political philosopher did he
seem at ease in the atmosphere which surrounded him. As a leader of
democracy he appeared singularly out of place. As reserved as President
Washington in the face of popular familiarities, he never showed
himself in crowds. During the last thirty years of his life he was not
seen in a Northern city, even during his Presidency; nor indeed was
he seen at all except on horseback, or by his friends and visitors in
his own house. With manners apparently popular and informal, he led
a life of his own, and allowed few persons to share it. His tastes
were for that day excessively refined. His instincts were those of a
liberal European nobleman, like the Duc de Liancourt, and he built for
himself at Monticello a château above contact with man. The rawness of
political life was an incessant torture to him, and personal attacks
made him keenly unhappy. His true delight was in an intellectual life
of science and art. To read, write, speculate in new lines of thought,
to keep abreast of the intellect of Europe, and to feed upon Homer
and Horace, were pleasures more to his mind than any to be found in a
public assembly. He had some knowledge of mathematics, and a little
acquaintance with classical art; but he fairly revelled in what he
believed to be beautiful, and his writings often betrayed subtile
feeling for artistic form,--a sure mark of intellectual sensuousness.
He shrank from whatever was rough or coarse, and his yearning for
sympathy was almost feminine. That such a man should have ventured
upon the stormy ocean of politics was surprising, the more because
he was no orator, and owed nothing to any magnetic influence of voice
or person. Never effective in debate, for seventeen years before his
Presidency he had not appeared in a legislative body except in the
chair of the Senate. He felt a nervous horror for the contentiousness
of such assemblies, and even among his own friends he sometimes
abandoned for the moment his strongest convictions rather than support
them by an effort of authority.
If Jefferson appeared ill at ease in the position of a popular leader,
he seemed equally awkward in the intellectual restraints of his own
political principles. His mind shared little in common with the
provincialism on which the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were
founded. His instincts led him to widen rather than to narrow the
bounds of every intellectual exercise; and if vested with political
authority, he could no more resist the temptation to stretch his powers
than he could abstain from using his mind on any subject merely because
he might be drawn upon ground supposed to be dangerous. He was a deist,
believing that men could manage their own salvation without the help of
a state church. Prone to innovation, he sometimes generalized without
careful analysis. He was a theorist, prepared to risk the fate of
mankind on the chance of reasoning far from certain in its details.
His temperament was sunny and sanguine, and the atrabilious philosophy
of New England was intolerable to him. He was curiously vulnerable,
for he seldom wrote a page without exposing himself to attack. He
was superficial in his knowledge, and a martyr to the disease of
omniscience. Ridicule of his opinions and of himself was an easy task,
in which his Federalist opponents delighted, for his English was often
confused, his assertions inaccurate, and at times of excitement he
was apt to talk with indiscretion; while with all his extraordinary
versatility of character and opinions, he seemed during his entire life
to breathe with perfect satisfaction nowhere except in the liberal,
literary, and scientific air of Paris in 1789.
Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in
his view the whole future of man. That the United States should become
a nation like France, England, or Russia, should conquer the world
like Rome, or develop a typical race like the Chinese, was no part of
his scheme. He wished to begin a new era. Hoping for a time when the
world’s ruling interests should cease to be local and should become
universal; when questions of boundary and nationality should become
insignificant; when armies and navies should be reduced to the work of
police, and politics should consist only in non-intervention,--he set
himself to the task of governing, with this golden age in view. Few
men have dared to legislate as though eternal peace were at hand, in a
world torn by wars and convulsions and drowned in blood; but this was
what Jefferson aspired to do. Even in such dangers, he believed that
Americans might safely set an example which the Christian world should
be led by interest to respect and at length to imitate. As he conceived
a true American policy, war was a blunder, an unnecessary risk; and
even in case of robbery and aggression the United States, he believed,
had only to stand on the defensive in order to obtain justice in the
end. He would not consent to build up a new nationality merely to
create more navies and armies, to perpetuate the crimes and follies of
Europe; the central government at Washington should not be permitted to
indulge in the miserable ambitions that had made the Old World a hell,
and frustrated the hopes of humanity.
With these humanitarian ideas which passed beyond the bounds of
nationality, Jefferson held other views which seemed narrower than
ordinary provincialism. Cities, manufactures, mines, shipping, and
accumulation of capital led, in his opinion, to corruption and tyranny.
“Generally speaking,” said he, in his only elaborate work, the Notes
on Virginia, “the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes
of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen is the
proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough
barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.... Those who
labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a
chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for
substantial and genuine virtue.”
This doctrine was not original with Jefferson, but its application to
national affairs on a great scale was something new in the world, and
the theory itself clashed with his intellectual instincts of liberality
and innovation.
A school of political thought, starting with postulates like these,
was an interesting study, and would have been more interesting had
Jefferson’s friends undertaken to develop his ideas in the extent
he held them. Perhaps this was impossible. At all events, Madison,
although author of the Virginia Resolutions, showed little earnestness
in carrying out their principles either as a political or as a literary
task; and John Taylor of Caroline, the only consistent representative
of the school, began his writings only when political power had
established precedents inconsistent with their object.
With such simple conceptions as their experience gave them in politics,
law, and agriculture, the Virginians appeared to be satisfied; and
whether satisfied or not, they were for the time helpless to produce
other literature, science, or art. From the three States lying farther
south, no greater intellectual variety could be expected. In some
respects North Carolina, though modest in ambition and backward in
thought, was still the healthiest community south of the Potomac.
Neither aristocratic like Virginia and South Carolina, nor turbulent
like Georgia, nor troubled by a sense of social importance, but above
all thoroughly democratic, North Carolina tolerated more freedom of
political action and showed less family and social influence, fewer
vested rights in political power, and less tyranny of slaveholding
interests and terrors than were common elsewhere in the South. Neither
cultivated nor brilliant in intellect, nor great in thought, industry,
energy, or organization, North Carolina was still interesting and
respectable. The best qualities of the State were typified in its
favorite representative, Nathaniel Macon.
The small society of rice and cotton planters at Charleston, with
their cultivated tastes and hospitable habits, delighted in whatever
reminded them of European civilization. They were travellers, readers,
and scholars; the society of Charleston compared well in refinement
with that of any city of its size in the world, and English visitors
long thought it the most agreeable in America. In the southern
wilderness which stretched from the Appomattox to the St. Mary’s,
Charleston was the only oasis. The South Carolinians were ambitious
for other distinctions than those which could be earned at the bar
or on the plantation. From there Washington Allston went to study at
Harvard College, and after taking his degree in the same class with
young Buckminster, sailed in the same year, 1800, for Europe with his
friend Malbone, to learn to express in color and form the grace and
dignity of his imagination. In South Carolina were felt the instincts
of city life. During two or three weeks of the winter, the succession
of dinners, balls, and races at Charleston rivalled the gayety of
Philadelphia itself; and although the city was dull during the rest
of the year, it was not deserted even in the heat of summer, for
the sea-breeze made it a watering-place, like Boston, and the deadly
fevers sure to kill the white man who should pass a night on one bank
of the Ashley River were almost unknown on the other. In the summer,
therefore, the residents remained or returned; the children got their
schooling, and business continued. For this reason South Carolina knew
less of the country hospitality which made Virginia famous; city life
had the larger share in existence, although in the hot weather torpor
and languor took the place of gayety. In certain respects Charleston
was more Northern in habits than any town of the North. In other warm
countries, the summer evening was commonly the moment when life was
best worth living; music, love-making, laughter, and talk turned night
into day; but Charleston was Puritanic in discipline. Every night at
ten o’clock the slamming of window-blinds and locking of doors warned
strangers and visitors to go not only to their houses, but to their
beds. The citizens looked with contempt on the gayety of Spanish or
Italian temper. Beneath all other thoughts, the care of the huge slave
population remained constant. The streets were abandoned at an early
hour to the patrol, and no New England village was more silent.
Confident as the Carolinian was in the strength of the slave-system,
and careless as he seemed and thought himself to be on that account,
the recent fate of St. Domingo gave him cause for constant anxiety;
but even without anxiety, he would have been grave. The gentry of the
lower country belonged to the same English class which produced the
gentry of Virginia and Massachusetts. The austerity of the Puritan may
have been an exaggerated trait, but among the Middletons, Pinckneys,
Rutledges, and Lowndeses the seriousness of the original English stock
was also not without effect in the habit of their minds. They showed it
in their treatment of the slave-system, but equally in their churches
and houses, their occupations and prejudices, their races and sports,
the character of their entertainments, the books they read, and the
talk at their tables. No gentleman belonged to any church but the
Anglican, or connected himself with trade. No court departed from the
practice and precedents of English law, however anomalous they might
be. Before the Revolution large numbers of young men had been educated
in England, and their influence was still strong in the society of
Charleston. The younger generation inherited similar tastes. Of this
class the best-known name which will appear in this narrative was that
of William Lowndes; and no better example could be offered of the
serious temper which marked Carolinian thought, than was given by the
career of this refined and highly educated gentleman, almost the last
of his school.
Charleston was more cosmopolitan than any part of Virginia, and enjoyed
also a certain literary reputation on account of David Ramsay, whose
works were widely read; and of Governor Drayton, whose “Letters written
during a Tour through the Northern and Eastern States,” and “View of
South Carolina,” gave an idea of the author as well as of the countries
he described. Charleston also possessed a library of three or four
thousand well-selected books, and maintained a well-managed theatre.
The churches were almost as strictly attended as those in Boston. The
fashionable wine-party was even more common, and perhaps the guests
took pride in drinking deeper than they would have been required to do
in New York or Philadelphia.
Politics had not mastered the thought of South Carolina so completely
as that of Virginia, and the natural instincts of Carolinian society
should have led the gentry to make common cause with the gentry of
New England and the Middle States against democratic innovations. The
conservative side in politics seemed to be that which no Carolinian
gentleman could fail to support. The oligarchy of South Carolina,
in defiance of democratic principles, held the political power of
the State, and its interests could never harmonize with those of a
theoretic democracy, or safely consent to trust the national government
in the hands of Jefferson and his friends, who had founded their power
by breaking down in Virginia an oligarchy closely resembling that of
the Carolinian rice-planters. Yet in 1800 enough of these gentlemen,
under the lead of Charles Pinckney, deserted their Northern friends, to
secure the defeat of the Federalist candidates, and to elect Jefferson
as President. For this action, no satisfactory reason was ever given.
Of all States in the Union, South Carolina, under its actual system
of politics, was the last which could be suspected of democratic
tendencies.
Such want of consistency seemed to show some peculiarity of character.
Not every educated and privileged class has sacrificed itself to a
social sentiment, least of all without understanding its object. The
eccentricity was complicated by another peculiar element of society.
In South Carolina the interesting union between English tastes and
provincial prejudices, which characterized the wealthy planters of
the coast, was made more striking by contrast with the character of
the poor and hardy yeomanry of the upper country. The seriousness
of Charleston society changed to severity in the mountains. Rude,
ignorant, and in some of its habits half barbarous, this population,
in the stiffness of its religious and social expression, resembled
the New England of a century before rather than the liberality of the
Union. Largely settled by Scotch and Irish emigrants, with the rigid
Presbyterian doctrine and conservatism of their class, they were
democratic in practice beyond all American democrats, and were more
conservative in thought than the most aristocratic Europeans. Though
sharply divided both socially and by interest from the sea-coast
planters, these up-country farmers had one intellectual sympathy with
their fellow-citizens in Charleston,--a sympathy resting on their
common dislike for change, on the serious element which lay at the
root of their common characters; and this marriage of two widely
divergent minds produced one of the most extraordinary statesmen of
America. In the year 1800 John Caldwell Calhoun, a boy of eighteen,
went from the upper country to his brother-in-law’s academy in Georgia.
Grown nearly to manhood without contact with the world, his modes of
thought were those of a Connecticut Calvinist; his mind was cold,
stern, and metaphysical; but he had the energy and ambition of youth,
the political fervor of Jeffersonian democracy, and little sympathy
with slavery or slave-owners. At this early age he, like many other
Republicans, looked on slavery as a “scaffolding,” to be taken down
when the building should be complete. A radical democrat, less liberal,
less cultivated, and much less genial than Jefferson, Calhoun was the
true heir to his intellectual succession; stronger in logic, bolder
in action. Upon him was to fall the duty of attempting to find for
Carolina an escape from the logical conclusions of those democratic
principles which Jefferson in 1800 claimed for his own, but which in
the full swing of his power, and to the last day of his life, he shrank
from pressing to their results.
Viewed from every side by which it could be approached, the society
of South Carolina, more than that of any other portion of the Union,
seemed to bristle with contradictions. The elements of intellectual
life existed without a sufficient intellectual atmosphere. Society,
colonial by origin and dependent by the conditions of its existence,
was striving to exist without external support. Whether it would stand
or fall, and whether, either standing or falling, it could contribute
any new element to American thought, were riddles which, with so many
others, American history was to answer.