gifts of counsel were of the sort so happily imparted to us with our
English blood at the first planting of the States which formed the
Union. A grave and prudent man, and yet brave withal when new counsel
was to be taken, he stands at the beginning of our national history,
even in his young manhood, as he faced and led the constitutional
convention, a type of the slow and thoughtful English genius for
affairs. He held old and tested convictions of the uses of liberty;
he was competently read in the history of government; processes of
revolution were in his thought no more than processes of adaptation:
exigencies were to be met by modification, not by experiment. His
reasonable spirit runs through all the proceedings of the great
convention that gave us the Constitution, and that noble instrument
seems the product of character like his. For all it is so American
in its content, it is in its method a thoroughly English production,
so full is it of old principles, so conservative of experience, so
carefully compounded of compromises, of concessions made and accepted.
Such men are of a stock so fine as to need no titles to make it noble,
and yet so old and so distinguished as actually to bear the chief
titles of English liberty. Madison came of the long line of English
constitutional statesmen.
There is a type of genius which closely approaches this in character,
but which is, nevertheless, distinctively American. It is to be seen
in John Marshall and in Daniel Webster. In these men a new set of
ideas find expression, ideas which all the world has received as
American. Webster was not an English but an American constitutional
statesman. For the English statesman constitutional issues are issues
of policy rather than issues of law. He constantly handles questions
of change: his constitution is always a-making. He must at every
turn construct, and he is deemed conservative if only his rule be
consistency and continuity with the past. He will search diligently
for precedent, but he is content if the precedent contain only a germ
of the policy he proposes. His standards are set him, not by law, but
by opinion: his constitution is an ideal of cautious and orderly
change. Its fixed element is the conception of political liberty: a
conception which, though steeped in history, must ever be added to
and altered by social change. The American constitutional statesman,
on the contrary, constructs policies like a lawyer. The standard with
which he must square his conduct is set him by a document upon whose
definite sentences the whole structure of the government directly
rests. That document, moreover, is the concrete embodiment of a
peculiar theory of government. That theory is, that definitive laws,
selected by a power outside the government, are the structural iron
of the entire fabric of politics, and that nothing which cannot be
constructed upon this stiff framework is a safe or legitimate part of
policy. Law is, in his conception, creative of states, and they live
only by such permissions as they can extract from it. The functions
of the judge and the functions of the man of affairs have, therefore,
been very closely related in our history, and John Marshall, scarcely
less than Daniel Webster, was a constitutional statesman. With all
Madison’s conservative temper and wide-eyed prudence in counsel, the
subject-matter of thought for both of these men was not English liberty
or the experience of men everywhere in self-government, but the
meaning stored up in the explicit sentences of a written fundamental
law. They taught men the new--the American--art of extracting life
out of the letter, not of statutes merely (that art was not new), but
of statute-built institutions and documented governments: the art of
saturating politics with law without grossly discoloring law with
politics. Other nations have had written constitutions, but no other
nation has ever filled a written constitution with this singularly
compounded content, of a sound legal conscience and a strong national
purpose. It would have been easy to deal with our Constitution like
subtle dialecticians; but Webster and Marshall did much more and
much better than that. They viewed the fundamental law as a great
organic product, a vehicle of life as well as a charter of authority;
in disclosing its life they did not damage its tissue; and in thus
expanding the law without impairing its structure or authority they
made great contributions alike to statesmanship and to jurisprudence.
Our notable literature of decision and commentary in the field of
constitutional law is America’s distinctive gift to the history and
the science of law. John Marshall wrought out much of its substance;
Webster diffused its great body of principles throughout national
policy, mediating between the law and affairs. The figures of the two
men must hold the eye of the world as the figures of two great national
representatives, as the figures of two great Americans.
The representative national greatness and function of these men appear
more clearly still when they are contrasted with men like John Adams
and John C. Calhoun, whose greatness was not national. John Adams
represented one element of our national character, and represented it
nobly, with a singular force and greatness. He was an eminent Puritan
statesman, and the Puritan ingredient has colored all our national
life. We have got strength and persistency and some part of our steady
moral purpose from it. But in the quick growth and exuberant expansion
of the nation it has been only one element among many. The Puritan
blood has mixed with many another strain. The stiff Puritan character
has been mellowed by many a transfusion of gentler and more hopeful
elements. So soon as the Adams fashion of man became more narrow,
intense, acidulous, intractable, according to the tendencies of its
nature, in the person of John Quincy Adams, it lost the sympathy, lost
even the tolerance, of the country, and the national choice took its
reckless leap from a Puritan President to Andrew Jackson, a man cast
in the rough original pattern of American life at the heart of the
continent. John Adams had not himself been a very acceptable President.
He had none of the national optimism, and could not understand those
who did have it. He had none of the characteristic adaptability of the
delocalized American, and was just a bit ridiculous in his stiffness at
the Court of St. James, for all he was so honorable and so imposing.
His type,--be it said without disrespect,--was provincial. Unmistakably
a great man, his greatness was of the commonwealth, not of the empire.
Calhoun, too, was a great provincial. Although a giant, he had no heart
to use his great strength for national purposes. In his youth, it is
true, he did catch some of the generous ardor for national enterprise
which filled the air in his day; and all his life through, with a truly
pathetic earnestness, he retained his affection for his first ideal.
But when the rights and interests of his section were made to appear
incompatible with a liberal and boldly constructive interpretation of
the Constitution, he fell out of national counsels and devoted all the
strength of his extraordinary mind to holding the nation’s thought and
power back within the strait limits of a literal construction of the
law. In powers of reasoning his mind deserves to rank with Webster’s
and Marshall’s: he handled questions of law like a master, as they did.
He had, moreover, a keen insight into the essential principles and
character of liberty. His thought moved eloquently along some of the
oldest and safest lines of English thought in the field of government.
He made substantive contributions to the permanent philosophy of
politics. His reasoning has been discredited, not so much because it
was not theoretically sound within its limits, as because its practical
outcome was a negation which embarrassed the whole movement of national
affairs. He would have held the nation still, in an old equipoise,
at one time normal enough, but impossible to maintain. Webster and
Marshall gave leave to the energy of change inherent in all the
national life, making law a rule, but not an interdict; a living guide,
but not a blind and rigid discipline. Calhoun sought to fix law as a
barrier across the path of policy, commanding the life of the nation
to stand still. The strength displayed in the effort, the intellectual
power and address, abundantly entitle him to be called great; but his
purpose was not national. It regarded only a section of the country,
and marked him,--again be it said with all respect,--a great provincial.
Jefferson was not a thorough American because of the strain of French
philosophy that permeated and weakened all his thought. Benton was
altogether American so far as the natural strain of his blood was
concerned, but he had encumbered his natural parts and inclinations
with a mass of undigested and shapeless learning. Bred in the West,
where everything was new, he had filled his head with the thought
of books (evidently very poor books) which exhibited the ideals of
communities in which everything was old. He thought of the Roman Senate
when he sat in the Senate of the United States. He paraded classical
figures whenever he spoke, upon a stage where both their costume and
their action seemed grotesque. A pedantic frontiersman, he was a living
and a pompous antinomy. Meant by nature to be an American, he spoiled
the plan by applying a most unsuitable gloss of shallow and irrelevant
learning. Jefferson was of course an almost immeasurably greater man
than Benton, but he was un-American in somewhat the same way. He
brought a foreign product of thought to a market where no natural or
wholesome demand for it could exist. There were not two incompatible
parts in him, as in Benton’s case: he was a philosophical radical by
nature as well as by acquirement; his reading and his temperament went
suitably together. The man is homogeneous throughout. The American
shows in him very plainly, too, notwithstanding the strong and inherent
dash of what was foreign in his make-up. He was a natural leader and
manager of men, not because he was imperative or masterful, but because
of a native shrewdness, tact, and sagacity, an inborn art and aptness
for combination, such as no Frenchman ever displayed in the management
of common men. Jefferson had just a touch of rusticity about him,
besides; and it was not pretense on his part or merely a love of power
that made him democratic. His indiscriminate hospitality, his almost
passionate love for the simple equality of country life, his steady
devotion to what he deemed to be the cause of the people, all mark him
a genuine democrat, a nature native to America. It is his speculative
philosophy that is exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial
note through all his thought. It was un-American in being abstract,
sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical. That he held it
sincerely need not be doubted; but the more sincerely he accepted it so
much the more thoroughly was he un-American. His writings lack hard and
practical sense. Liberty, among us, is not a sentiment, but a product
of experience; its derivation is not rationalistic, but practical.
It is a hard-headed spirit of independence, not the conclusion of a
syllogism. The very aërated quality of Jefferson’s principles gives
them an air of insincerity, which attaches to them rather because they
do not suit the climate of the country and the practical aspect of
affairs than because they do not suit the character of Jefferson’s mind
and the atmosphere of abstract philosophy. It is because both they and
the philosophical system of which they form a part do seem suitable to
his mind and character, that we must pronounce him, though a great man,
not a great American.
It is by the frank consideration of such concrete cases that we
may construct, both negatively and affirmatively, our canons of
Americanism. The American spirit is something more than the old, the
immemorial Saxon spirit of liberty from which it sprung. It has been
bred by the conditions attending the great task which we have all the
century been carrying forward: the task, at once material and ideal,
of subduing a wilderness and covering all the wide stretches of a vast
continent with a single free and stable polity. It is, accordingly,
above all things, a hopeful and confident spirit. It is progressive,
optimistically progressive, and ambitious of objects of national
scope and advantage. It is unpedantic, unprovincial, unspeculative,
unfastidious; regardful of law, but as using it, not as being used
by it or dominated by any formalism whatever; in a sense unrefined,
because full of rude force; but prompted by large and generous motives,
and often as tolerant as it is resolute. No one man, unless it be
Lincoln, has ever proved big or various enough to embody this active
and full-hearted spirit in all its qualities; and the men who have been
too narrow or too speculative or too pedantic to represent it have,
nevertheless, added to the strong and stirring variety of our national
life, making it fuller and richer in motive and energy; but its several
aspects are none the less noteworthy as they separately appear in
different men.
One of the first men to exhibit this American spirit with an
unmistakable touch of greatness and distinction was Benjamin Franklin.
It was characteristic of America that this self-made man should become
a philosopher, a founder of philosophical societies, an authoritative
man of science; that his philosophy of life should be so homely and so
practical in its maxims, and uttered with so shrewd a wit; that one
region should be his birthplace and another his home; that he should
favor effective political union among the colonies from the first, and
should play a sage and active part in the establishment of national
independence and the planning of a national organization; and that
he should represent his countrymen in diplomacy abroad. They could
have had no spokesman who represented more sides of their character.
Franklin was a sort of multiple American. He was versatile without
lacking solidity; he was a practical statesman without ceasing to be a
sagacious philosopher. He came of the people, and was democratic; but
he had raised himself out of the general mass of unnamed men, and so
stood for the democratic law, not of equality, but of self-selection
in endeavor. One can feel sure that Franklin would have succeeded
in any part of the national life that it might have fallen to his
lot to take part in. He will stand the final and characteristic
test of Americanism: he would unquestionably have made a successful
frontiersman, capable at once of wielding the axe and of administering
justice from the fallen trunk.
Washington hardly seems an American, as most of his biographers depict
him. He is too colorless, too cold, too prudent. He seems more like
a wise and dispassionate Mr. Alworthy, advising a nation as he would
a parish, than like a man building states and marshaling a nation in
a wilderness. But the real Washington was as thoroughly an American
as Jackson or Lincoln. What we take for lack of passion in him was
but the reserve and self-mastery natural to a man of his class and
breeding in Virginia. He was no parlor politician, either. He had seen
the frontier, and far beyond it where the French forts lay. He knew
the rough life of the country as few other men could. His thoughts
did not live at Mount Vernon. He knew difficulty as intimately and
faced it always with as quiet a mastery as William the Silent. This
calm, straightforward, high-spirited man, making charts of the western
country, noting the natural land and water routes into the heart of
the continent, marking how the French power lay, conceiving the policy
which should dispossess it, and the engineering achievements which
should make the utmost resources of the land our own; counseling
Braddock how to enter the forest, but not deserting him because he
would not take advice; planning step by step, by patient correspondence
with influential men everywhere, the meetings, conferences, common
resolves which were finally to bring the great constitutional
convention together; planning, too, always for the country as well
as for Virginia; and presiding at last over the establishment and
organization of the government of the Union: he certainly--the most
suitable instrument of the national life at every moment of crisis--is
a great American. Those noble words which he uttered amidst the first
doubtings of the constitutional convention might serve as a motto for
the best efforts of liberty wherever free men strive: “Let us raise a
standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the
hand of God.”
In Henry Clay we have an American of a most authentic pattern. There
was no man of his generation who represented more of America than
he did. The singular, almost irresistible attraction he had for men
of every class and every temperament came, not from the arts of
the politician, but from the instant sympathy established between
him and every fellow-countryman of his. He does not seem to have
exercised the same fascination upon foreigners. They felt toward him
as some New Englanders did: he seemed to them plausible merely, too
indiscriminately open and cordial to be sincere,--a bit of a charlatan.
No man who really takes the trouble to understand Henry Clay, or who
has quick enough parts to sympathize with him, can deem him false. It
is the odd combination of two different elements in him that makes
him seem irregular and inconstant. His nature was of the West, blown
through with quick winds of ardor and aggression, a bit reckless and
defiant; but his art was of the East, ready with soft and placating
phrases, reminiscent of old and reverenced ideals, thoughtful of
compromise and accommodation. He had all the address of the trained
and sophisticated politician, bred in an old and sensitive society;
but his purposes ran free of cautious restraints, and his real ideals
were those of the somewhat bumptious Americanism which was pushing
the frontier forward in the West, which believed itself capable
of doing anything it might put its hand to, despised conventional
restraints, and followed a vague but resplendent “manifest destiny”
with lusty hurrahs. His purposes were sincere, even if often crude
and uninstructed; it was only because the subtle arts of politics
seemed inconsistent with the direct dash and bold spirit of the man
that they sat upon him like an insincerity. He thoroughly, and by mere
unconscious sympathy, represented the double America of his day, made
up of a West which hurried and gave bold strokes, and of an East which
held back, fearing the pace, thoughtful and mindful of the instructive
past. The one part had to be served without offending the other: and
that was Clay’s mediatorial function.
Andrew Jackson was altogether of the West. Of his sincerity nobody
has ever had any real doubt; and his Americanism is now at any rate
equally unimpeachable. He was like Clay with the social imagination of
the orator and the art and sophistication of the Eastern politician
left out. He came into our national politics like a cyclone from off
the Western prairies. Americans of the present day perceptibly shudder
at the very recollection of Jackson. He seems to them a great Vandal,
playing fast and loose alike with institutions and with tested and
established policy, debauching politics like a modern spoilsman.
But whether we would accept him as a type of ourselves or not, the
men of his own day accepted him with enthusiasm. He did not need to
be explained to them. They crowded to his standard like men free at
last, after long and tedious restraint, to make their own choice,
follow their own man. There can be no mistaking the spontaneity of the
thoroughgoing support he received. His was the new type of energy and
self-confidence bred by life outside the States that had been colonies.
It was a terrible energy, threatening sheer destruction to many a
carefully wrought arrangement handed on to us from the past; it was
a perilous self-confidence, founded in sheer strength rather than in
wisdom. The government did not pass through the throes of that signal
awakening of the new national spirit without serious rack and damage.
But it was no disease. It was only an incautious, abounding, madcap
strength which proved so dangerous in its readiness for every rash
endeavor. It was necessary that the West should be let into the play:
it was even necessary that she should assert her right to the leading
rôle. It was done without good taste, but that does not condemn it. We
have no doubt refined and schooled the hoyden influences of that crude
time, and they are vastly safer now than then, when they first came
bounding in; but they mightily stirred and enriched our blood from the
first. Now that we have thoroughly suffered this Jackson change and it
is over, we are ready to recognize it as quite as radically American as
anything in all our history.
Lincoln, nevertheless, rather than Jackson, was the supreme American
of our history. In Clay, East and West were mixed without being fused
or harmonized: he seems like two men. In Jackson there was not even
a mixture; he was all of a piece, and altogether unacceptable to
some parts of the country,--a frontier statesman. But in Lincoln the
elements were combined and harmonized. The most singular thing about
the wonderful career of the man is the way in which he steadily grew
into a national stature. He began an amorphous, unlicked cub, bred
in the rudest of human lairs; but, as he grew, everything formed,
informed, transformed him. The process was slow but unbroken. He was
not fit to be President until he actually became President. He was fit
then because, learning everything as he went, he had found out how much
there was to learn, and had still an infinite capacity for learning.
The quiet voices of sentiment and murmurs of resolution that went
whispering through the land, his ear always caught, when others could
hear nothing but their own words. He never ceased to be a common man:
that was his source of strength. But he was a common man with genius,
a genius for things American, for insight into the common thought, for
mastery of the fundamental things of politics that inhere in human
nature and cast hardly more than their shadows on constitutions; for
the practical niceties of affairs; for judging men and assessing
arguments. Jackson had no social imagination: no unfamiliar community
made any impression on him. His whole fibre stiffened young, and
nothing afterward could modify or even deeply affect it. But Lincoln
was always a-making; he would have died unfinished if the terrible
storms of the war had not stung him to learn in those four years
what no other twenty could have taught him. And, as he stands there
in his complete manhood, at the most perilous helm in Christendom,
what a marvelous composite figure he is! The whole country is summed
up in him: the rude Western strength, tempered with shrewdness and a
broad and humane wit; the Eastern conservatism, regardful of law and
devoted to fixed standards of duty. He even understood the South, as
no other Northern man of his generation did. He respected, because he
comprehended, though he could not hold, its view of the Constitution;
he appreciated the inexorable compulsions of its past in respect of
slavery; he would have secured it once more, and speedily if possible,
in its right to self-government, when the fight was fought out. To the
Eastern politicians he seemed like an accident; but to history he must
seem like a providence.
Grant was Lincoln’s suitable instrument, a great American general,
the appropriate product of West Point. A Western man, he had no
thought of commonwealths politically separate, and was instinctively
for the Union; a man of the common people, he deemed himself always
an instrument, never a master, and did his work, though ruthlessly,
without malice; a sturdy, hard-willed, taciturn man, a sort of
Lincoln the Silent in thought and spirit. He does not appeal to the
imagination very deeply; there is a sort of common greatness about
him, great gifts combined singularly with a great mediocrity; but such
peculiarities seem to make him all the more American,--national in
spirit, thoroughgoing in method, masterful in purpose.